‘There you go again,’ says David.
Well. Her feet are planted far apart on the floor and she wears white clogs. She talks to Stephanie Powers and ignores the rest of us. Stephanie is careful and acquiescent, which is strange because most of what this woman is saying is a pack of lies. Her pearls of Russian wisdom are strung into English by a weird activist queen who runs an outpatients group and also works for the Elton John Foundation. He has a red face with a handlebar moustache and wears camouflage pants. Translating the woman’s lies, he looks at us intensely, daring us to confront her. She insists that it is mostly drug users who are being infected with HIV in Russia, and that the epidemic began only in 1997. She says that medication is available to all. She says that there are hardly any homosexuals with HIV.
‘But that can’t be true,’ I say.
‘It isn’t!’ says the translator, under his breath.
‘Da!’ she clucks defensively.
‘But surely one in ten people all over the world are gay?’
‘Not in Russia.’
‘Is that because they are forced to live in secret?’
‘Certainly not. ’
The meeting quickly freezes over. Hart to Hart are hell-bent on diplomacy and begin to wind things up. The translator winks and gestures for us to follow him out of the room. David and I slip out after him.
‘I show you the Aids Department,’ he whispers, and leads us down a warren of back staircases and narrow corridors.
With every step the hospital gets shabbier and hotter. Gone is the pristine spaceship of the third-floor consulting room. Soon we are rushing down a subterranean passage towards a large pair of double doors. Any minute now red lights are going to start flashing and a klaxon will go off and we shall be dragged back up to the Einstein dyke on the third floor. You need a card to get through the double doors. The translator produces one with a flourish.
‘Da-dah!’ He swipes triumphantly and the doors click open. Now the cameraman materialises at the end of the passage along with the photographer and journalist from Russian Vogue who are covering the trip.
The translator swears under his breath. ‘Quick. They are following us.’
We rush through the door which closes mechanically although the others manage to squeeze through as it clicks shut.
Here finally is the situation with Russian Aids.
Rows of empty metal beds stand in wards of peeling green walls off a wide gloomy corridor. Naked light bulbs hang from the ceiling. There is a rancid dusty smell of floors washed with dirty water. Mosfilm was cleaner than this. The place is deserted.
Finally we discover a solitary man in a dressing gown and three sweaters. He is sitting on a bed in an empty dormitory at the end of the corridor, startled and upset by the sudden invasion of TV crew and photographer, celebrity and journalist. He comes to the door and tries to shut us out but our (Russian) cameraman stands in the way, engaging him all the while through the lens. He has no sympathy. The patient’s eyes bulge with impotent fury as he tries to tuck his head into his dressing gown and escape across the corridor but the cameraman follows. A weird, slow-motion, split-second scuffle ensues. The cameraman holds onto the patient with his free hand, trying to turn him round, but the patient keeps on going, charging down the corridor towards the sanctuary of the toilets, while the translator, horrified, grabs the cameraman’s arm, trying to pull him away. The cameraman, still filming, loses his balance. The camera falls from his shoulder and smashes onto the stone floor.
During the moment of stunned silence that follows, the photographer from Vogue takes my picture. Flash! With a howl the patient makes a final dash and locks himself into the loo.
It is a tragic scene with comic undertones, another masterclass in Chekhov, and not unlike a wildlife documentary in which some poor wildebeest escapes a crocodile while trying to cross a river. We have completely violated this poor man’s space, and we have observed his humiliation in our UN high heels, and the translator is – quite rightly – livid. Emotionally and physically. He is now a purple gargoyle. He shrieks at the cameraman, who bellows right back, while the couple from Vogue have a half-hearted nervous breakdown that ‘all this could be happening in their country’. The translator and the cameraman shout and point and tap their heads, more animal than human as they lumber round each other, while the two fashionistas swoon in shawls and patent-leather shoes in this curious drama in the diabolical corridor of the Aids wing.
Mariangela appears from a door far away, giggling as usual.
‘There you are. What’s going on?’
Hart to Hart are frosty when we regroup outside the hospital and in the car give us a talking-to about going off piste, and that things are very delicate here in Russia at the moment, and that they have worked so hard to get this far, and that we all have to be very careful. The translator, who is with us in the car, rolls his eyes.
‘But it’s good for them to see what’s really going on,’ he says. ‘The truth is that gay people are afraid to go to the doctor.’
‘Why?’
‘Because the doctors normally report them to the police. Most gay people with Aids pretend they are drug addicts.’
‘There you go,’ sneers David. ‘Its better to be a junkie than a queer. This place is disgusting.’
It seems impossible that the world goes on as usual after a day like today, but here we are, listless or anxious, laughing or smoking, bumper to bumper, oblivious to everything outside the four walls of our own world. Dr Veronin’s orphanage, the speechless boy on his stool, the man in the three sweaters, are just the undertow of the great suffering wave upon which the rest of us mindlessly surf, desperate to keep afloat, beeping and swearing, inching along on a belch of exhaust. The rain pours down now, and the palaces and pepper pots by the side of the road melt in the deluge like wedding cakes. Similarly the lost boys and the solitary patient, bathed perhaps in tears tonight, will pass by and disappear, stretched by time into thin shadows. This is the terrible truth and I plunge into the usual field-trip depression – it always happens: that raw feeling of utter futility that makes one want to curl up and die. There’s a lull in the conversation, as if the same void has struck us all.
‘It still amazes me,’ muses David, thinking aloud, ‘that one disease can inspire so much hate.’
‘Or apathy.’
Or love.
Now it is evening. We are in one of St Petersburg’s few gay bars. It’s rather like Joe Allen’s. Brick walls, low lights and checked tablecloths. We are here to meet Andrei, a doctor from Siberia, and his cohort of twenty young activists. They have come from all over Russia and are determined to educate Russia’s homosexual community about the threat of HIV. As Andrei says, whether we like it or not, about ten per cent of all Russians are gay.
‘See!’ says David.
In a completely hostile environment most of them are forced to live secretly, adding greatly to the danger posed by HIV.
‘Remember,’ Andrei says, ‘this is a country where every other person is still an informer.’
The fact is that most gay people have little or no idea about the disease. How could they have? The government more or less refuses to accept that homosexuals exist, so naturally there is no state funding to inform them about safe sex.
I am standing with Andrei on a podium, looking down at the innocent, upturned faces of his army in the half-light of the bar: the blunt noses, the deep-set eyes, the high cheekbones, the Nureyev lips over broad jaws and, in one case, a delicious pair of cauliflower ears (my favourite), but mostly what is striking about them is their sober attention. The liberated queen of the West has none of this inner grace as she flings herself from the dance floor to the dark room, high on lavatory cleaner. These boys are giving their time to help others, putting themselves on the line just by being here tonight. And yet on the evolutionary ladder of this cruel cloud cuckoo land they are only a rung above murderers and not as good as junkies.
I ask them how many of them have ‘come out�
� to their parents. Only two put up their hands. It’s not a surprise. After all, even men working at Vogue prefer to stay in the closet.
‘If you can’t be gay in Vogue, then where can you?’ asks David, and I agree, but no one sees the funny side.
After the meeting we rush to Moskovsky Station, another crumbling, blue-and-white wedding cake. We are taking the night train to Moscow. It is a trip I used to make with my dog at weekends to get away from Moscow in the old days, and I loved it. Through the nineteenth-century halls of the terminal building, the station itself is a Stalinist shoebox, similar in scale and style to the fascist stations of Italy. The place is crowded and it could be 1950. Men still wear astrakhan hats and moustaches. They jostle with small wide women in shawls and scarves. Occasionally a New Russian strides through the crowd like a superimposed cartoon figure – a gazelle in furs with a bodyguard, but mostly the station is still in the hands of the poor. Their world hasn’t much changed since those pre-neon days of red flags and military caps, and tonight there are still women sitting on their haunches selling pickled gorchik. Thank God, two of the activist boys are with us and take us to the platform, or we would never find the train. The fierce-looking couchette girl studies our tickets for clues to a murder, then grudgingly lets us on board. The whistle blows and the boys wave us off.
We settle down in our bunks and make preliminary grunts and gestures at our new room-mates. One is a bald gentleman already in his pyjamas and the other is a sozzled young man with a round face who smells of booze. I feel like a student again, but David says he may be having one of his panic attacks and lies down facing the wall, doing breathing exercises.
‘Oh no! It’s not one of your acute paroxysmal positional vertigo attacks, is it?’ I ask wearily.
‘I think so.’
Serious panic attacks are not funny. Rooms expand and contract. Colours flare and blind you. You think you are having a heart attack, but actually you’re just panicking. I once went with David to an air show in Fort Lauderdale just as one was starting. As the latest jets screeched over our heads at the speed of a neutrino, David went from white to grey to green. His face visibly shrank and he clasped his chair with his hands, as the whole world turned upside down. But that’s another story.
For the time being our two new friends chat in Russian on the upper bunks, their legs swinging over the edge. The sozzled one’s feet are in smelly socks, with all the trimmings – bunions and giant hammer-head toes, which wiggle and stretch as he lays out a picnic above and offers us both an egg. He leans his head over the side of the bunk, his long hair trailing from his head, cheeks and lips flapping. David nearly pukes.
‘Do you want some of my lithium?’ I ask, trying to cheer him up.
‘Have you got any?’ He laughs half-heartedly, turning back to the wall, and I look out of the window. He may be having an attack but I am in heaven.
As the weight of the world is measured and debated in beautiful Russian on the top bunks, the train groans laboriously from the station through tunnels and sidings, on stilts at one moment, clattering above a shiny boulevard and diving underground at another, leaving the city behind. Buildings tower over the tracks, a collage of walls and windows under a jagged fringe of rooftops and chimneystacks. Life flashes by. An old woman washes plates. A man observes the train. A silhouette behind a curtain turns off a light. It is enchanting.
David rallies slightly and we decide to hit the restaurant car but when we open the pass door from our coach into the next, our way is blocked by the hippo attendant. It’s a Bond moment, and I half expect her to expose rows of metal teeth and sink them into David’s neck. We try to get past but she begins to shout in Russian. She shoves David quite hard in the chest.
‘Don’t you push me!’ he shrieks rather pathetically and she screams back, shoving him, bulldozing back into our carriage.
Our bald travelling companion’s head leans out from our berth, shouting over the noise of the train. ‘Lady say you must not go.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. Is like that. You must go in half an hour.’ He disappears again.
The woman locks the pass door with a key hanging from a chain around her waist before squeezing past us and barrelling down the narrow corridor to her lair at the end of the compartment. (I pass her little office later in the night and she is standing in a bra with the door open.)
I am now seriously worried that a full-blown panic attack is going to erupt from David at any moment, but actually the confrontation has cheered him up.
‘That was very Prisoner Cell Block H,’ is all he gasps, the colour returning to his cheeks.
‘I can’t believe she’s locked us in.’ I try the door. ‘Imagine if our carriage catches fire!’ Oops. David’s face twitches.
We weave our way back to the couchette and sit on our bunks. The two Russians have spread their picnics about them, and the smell of egg and coriander and feet makes quite a good eau de toilette. But now we’re both giggling, holding our hands over our noses, trying not to be seen or heard.
This is only the hors d’oeuvres. After lights out, the bald man grinds his teeth all night. He sounds like a whale calling his mate, while the sozzled one does death-rattle farts. As a result we both spend half the night in the corridor smoking and are still up when the flat white Russian dawn creeps over the plains. This is when we spy the attendant in her over-shoulder boulder-holder, also watching through her little window as the sun peeps over the horizon at another gruesome Russian day.
‘Krasyeeva,’ she says with a vulnerable smile, winking at the streaky sky.
Soon she is back proffering two elegant glasses of tea, with silver handles, on a tray. There is no trace on her big round cheese of a face of last night’s battle. That’s Russia for you. The fury comes and then it goes. (Another Chekhov masterclass.)
‘It’s probably poisoned,’ says David, sipping cheerfully.
‘Let’s hope so,’ I reply and we clink glasses between the beds. The train gives a wail of approval and we thunder on.
A kind of gallows humour engulfs us. Russia is simply too grim to take seriously. The policemen, the hotel staff, the stupid priests in their fancy hats all looking murderous, stagger around as though they have all been dealt a blow on the head by a giant hammer. They are thick and cruel and cunning. Six generations of alcohol poisoning have taken their toll, and the place looks horrible too. The countryside is a devastated mess and during the last two days I have become almost hysterical, like Uncle Albert in Mary Poppins. I just can’t stop laughing.
From the station we drive to a small town two hours from Moscow to visit a needle drop-off centre in action. It is in fact an old caravan at the edge of a park in the middle of a dreary town unchanged since Soviet days. The trees are leafless and it is beginning to snow. Lenin still presides over the flat central square – a black fairy on a Christmas cake. It is a town that would drive anyone to drugs.
In all this gloom – the place, the sky, the people on the street – the faces of today’s activists literally shine with radiance. They are two young men running a needle drop-off caravan. They look exhausted in their dirty white coats, but their eyes blaze. They drive to a different location every day, awaited in the usual place at the usual time – normally a discreet corner in the local park – by the faithful, their congregation, the poor junkies of Russia, who brave the elements in worn-out clothes under the naked trees, with their bags of used needles and their nerves in shreds.
Today a long line of strangely respectable folk wait obediently to climb on board. Some of them are skinheads and Goths and geeks, the characters one might imagine being there, but others are simple housewives and middle-aged men, conventional and polite. They stand in the falling snow and come to the caravan one at a time, into a kind of waiting room where some forms are filled out, then go through to the other section where they give up their old needles and are given new ones. It is a heartbreaking grind to watch, and as usual it feels sick to be
there.
One lady comes on board with black hair and a bird face, wearing an old coat with a fake fur collar. She is sitting quite happily with the doctor when suddenly she begins to scream and jump up and down. Everyone is shocked. The doctor tries to calm her down but she just screams more and now she is struggling out of her clothes. People leap in to help. It is a tiny space and it quickly turns into a scrum of arms and legs, and, in the middle of it all, this woman’s head, all veins and teeth and eyes as she screams. She has enormous strength for such a tiny thing and she elbows her way through the crowd, then pulls down her trousers and throws her coat on the floor. There is a moment of silence, then everyone starts to laugh. Including the lady herself. They become hysterical. Tears are now running down the woman’s cheeks. Is she laughing or crying? Who knows? The world is upside down. Someone shouts out of the bus to the line who are all looking up anxiously and they start to laugh as well.
‘What on earth is going on?’ I ask. ‘I nearly had a heart attack.’
The doctors are purple with laughing. One of them explains to Stephanie Powers in Russian, but she doesn’t find it the least bit amusing.
‘There was a cockroach in her clothes and it was crawling into her underwear,’ she says.
‘Oh I see. Yes. That is funny. It’s like the beginning of Victor Victoria.’
The little lady hugs the two doctors. The drama and the laughter have broken down an invisible wall and for a moment we are all normal people, unreserved, uncomplicated, and everyone hugs her and she hugs everyone. She gets her needles and leaves the caravan a star. Everyone in the line claps her on the back. She re-enacts some of the high points of the escapade to a couple of people and then totters off into the park, presumably to have a fix.
By the next afternoon it’s really snowing hard and we are all worried about our imminent escape. We still have a UN cocktail party to get through and more meetings with activists and NGOs. One of them is a stunning beauty of a girl who has started an information magazine for people living with HIV. She has HIV herself, although she appears to be the picture of effervescent health. She is tall and curvy with thick dark hair falling over her neck and shoulders. We go out into the nearby park to take some pictures for her magazine. She is incredibly vivid and there is enormous warmth in her regard. She is clearly a ball-breaker and would be a seducer if she could be bothered, but, like many Russian ladies, one gets the impression that she has little sympathy for the male sex.
Vanished Years Page 20
