I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia

by John Mole

  I have mixed feelings about the tutu. When I was 15 the church youth club had a fancy dress party. I persuaded my bal-letomanic sister to lend me her outfit. Although I am three years older and my nickname at school was Fatty, my sister, now svelte and elegant, was also on the tubby side. Whenever I see Walt Disney’s ballet-dancing hippopotamuses I am transported to languid summer afternoons and her performances on the lawn. So the tutu fitted, sort of. I can still feel the frisson of an itchy one-piece satin body stocking and its nylon frills, the pink tights, the bodice, the Dunlop tennis pumps, the powder and lipstick, the wand with a silver star. At a different school from the rest of the club and a loner, I didn’t know that all the others had chickened out of fancy dress. I made a triumphant and excruciating entrance. The club was only ten minutes from my house and I could have run home and changed into Norwegian sweater and twill trousers, but I am proud that I stuck it out for the whole evening, sod them.

  The Pope died that night. Radio Luxembourg interrupted the Top 20 countdown to announce that he was in extremis. Father Raymund broke up the jiving and we all gathered round in a circle to pray, a Franciscan in a habit, fifty youths and the Sugar Plum Fairy. From that night on the recurrent nightmare of walking round in public wearing nothing but a vest too short to pull down was replaced forever by appearing on stage in a knickerless tutu whose rigid disk rises at the back when you push it down at the front and vice versa. So the ballet has a special resonance for me. I come to it with heightened sensitivity, all the shame and anger and sexual ambivalence of that night heaped on the performance.

  Anna had been a dancer with the Bolshoi and now worked in an office. She was in her early 40s and although plump and round, still had the poise and scraped-back hair of a ballerina. She also had lovely brown eyes and a jolly smile. I went to her on Wednesday evenings for conversation without dancing.

  We hit it off at our first meeting. She ushered me into her living room and on the sideboard next to the samovar was a black-and-white photograph of a corps de ballet doing its thing. I peered at it.

  “Oh, it’s Giselle,” I said, “and that’s you leading the Wilis. Don’t you look marvellous?”

  Did she blossom? I could have swept her into a Lukom lift if the ceiling had been high enough.

  Despite my negative attitude to ballet in general, I am an expert on Giselle. I had been only three times to live ballet, all in the space of a week. When I first arrived in Moscow Misha got tickets for Giselle at the Bolshoi. In St Petersburg we were treated to Giselle at the Mariinsky, to crackly recorded music. Back in Moscow we were invited to a Sunday-night gala performance of Giselle at the Kremlin Theatre. I couldn’t get the damn tunes out of my head for weeks. The plot is based on the idea that girls who die on their wedding day become wicked fairies called Wilis. There is an unforgettable bit in the second act when the Wilis stand in Indian file on one leg, bend into an arabesque and do a sort of hop and shuffle forward, like the Egyptian sand dance that Flanagan and Allan did in the music hall. I used to look forward to it as a bit of light relief, but everyone else took it seriously and applauded and I learned not to giggle. And lo, on the sideboard was Anna leading the charge of the Wilis, a seraphic smile on her face.

  From then on I was her favourite pupil. I hid my ignorance of the rest of the repertoire behind my impoverished Russian and although she gave me strange looks from time to time, for example when I mixed up La Sylphide and Les Sylphides or Swanilda and the Black Swan, she gave me the benefit of the doubt.

  Anna’s husband Pavel worked at the Patent Office. He was younger than her. On the evidence of a colour photograph on the other side of the samovar from the sand-dancing Wilis, he was a martial arts expert. He struck a fearsome pose, a bald man in white pyjamas about to break an invisible brick in half. Was it my imagination or did I see evidence of practice on the fixtures and fittings, a cracked Formica table top, a splintered cupboard door, dents in the walls? He was her second husband. The first had something to do with set design, but whether on the artistic or the arti-sanal side my vocabulary was not good enough to tell.

  Yuri, their 18-year old son, lived with his father in a flat in the Bolshoi complex behind the theatre, a self-contained village for a thousand people.

  “Does Yuri dance?”

  “Like an elephant. He builds computers. He is a good boy. He prefers to be with me but he gets a better schooling over there. He comes to see me if he doesn’t have too much homework. He works very hard.”

  She sounded so brave and her brown eyes were so sad that I wanted to put my arm round her and give her a hug, but she might have misinterpreted the gesture.

  One evening after our lesson she invited me to stay for supper and meet Pavel. She would not let me help her lay the low table in the overstuffed living room, saying I should try to behave like a Russian. There were pilchards and ten different vegetables, including potatoes fried in goose fat and some succulent home-preserved mushrooms, diluted fruit juice of course and half a bottle of Stolichnaya from the back of the sideboard cupboard. Anna fussed and fluttered and was full of apologies that she had no caviar or sturgeon or meat or wine to offer me, but Pavel said they couldn’t afford it. I was rescued from embarrassment by the clanking of the lift and the clunking of the steel door that announced his arrival. We sat straight down to eat.

  Pavel was careworn but put on a brave face. He was not totally bald, although his very fair hair and pale skin made him seem so. He had deep-set black eyes, which I imagined could be intimidating on the other side of a fighting mat. He took the offensive with an explanation of the differences between Russian and British patent law and then between the various types of martial art. I fought back with potato varieties of the world.

  In a lull, while we picked our teeth, Anna brightly announced to Pavel that she had managed to get two tickets for the Bolshoi the following Thursday night. Back of the stalls, no less.

  “Excellent,” he mumbled, still working on a back molar, “I can get forty dollars for them outside”

  “No, Pavel, it’s the Gala. If they see you I will never get tickets again. And I want to go. You know I always go.”

  “I can’t go,” he said, “there’s a tournament up at Dynamo.”

  “You never come these days.”

  “I can’t. I just said. That’s enough.” He pointed a morsel of impaled pilchard at me. “Take Ivan. It will get his mind off Maris Pipers.”

  Anna raised her immaculately plucked eyebrows at me. “Will you come?”

  “Is it Giselle?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I know it’s your favourite. No, it’s the Gala. It is a concert given by the final year of the ballet school. They are so wonderful.”

  I’d have preferred to go with Pavel to Dynamo, but her pleading brown eyes were irresistible.

  I picked Anna up at her apartment on the Thursday. She seemed pleased that I was sporting a dark suit and tie. She wore a black skirt, a low-cut blouse and a short jacket made of fluffy white feathers. It was only her dancer’s poise and grooming that saved her from looking like a Muppet. To avoid squashing the jacket under her overcoat she put it into a plastic bag with her high heels. She was made up for the stage in yellow-orange foundation and bright red lipstick and I sensed this was a special occasion, so I was glad I had kept the taxi.

  It was a nice change to have an audience of Russians in the Bolshoi instead of boorish foreign tourists like me. Even I couldn’t match the remark I heard at my first Giselle from an American to his wife: “Gee, the hang time on the jumps was piss-poor stacked up against them Mongols at the circus.” A third of the audience were related to the performers and a third were former pupils and dancers like Anna. The rest were connected in some way to the company or the industry, so it was a festive atmosphere that infected even me. Best of all were the dancers. Their training had not yet squeezed out their enthusiasm, their pleasure in dancing, their sheer exuberance. They did the old favourites, but you had the feeling that this was a First Nigh
t, that anything could happen, unlike professional performances that are as spontaneous as Trooping the Colour.

  Anna was on her feet with the rest at the end of every act, clapping until her hands were red raw, smiling her crinkly smile, her lovely brown eyes moist with emotion. Of course she was cheering on the new generation, but I suspected she was also applauding herself as she was then, the stage and life immense before her. I imagined her up there dancing for the woman she would become in her chicken-feather outfit and bright red lipstick. Once again I wanted to give her a hug, but she might have misinterpreted the gesture.

  At the interval we bustled off to the main bar where she met old dancing partners. With advancing years dancers either turn into death’s heads with sunken eyes and flesh-less bones or into fairies who have overdone the sugar plums. They gathered under the giant chandelier, elegant little women with scraped-back hair, feet in the turned-out position, arms in the first or, for those with handbags, in the third, and one or two sur le cou-de-pied, for all the world as if they were rhubarbing in a crowd scene twenty-five years before. I bought them champagne and canapés, which they sipped and nibbled like little birds.

  After innumerable curtain calls and tears and bravos and showers of flowers, kisses and lingering farewells while the ushers and cleaners tried to empty the place, Anna took my arm in the queue for coats. It was still early. I would have liked to take her out to dinner, but it would have been obscene to spend the equivalent of Pavel’s monthly salary or more and might have been misinterpreted. Instead, I stopped the taxi at a roadside kiosk on the way to her apartment and bought a couple of bottles of champagne and delicacies like Frito-Lay chips and corned beef.

  Pavel was not yet home. Anna put her chicken suit back on, I opened the champagne and we toasted the Bolshoi, the Big One.

  “Tell me what it was like when you joined. How did it feel?”

  “I was six years old. That morning is like yesterday, it was snowing, and my mother said it was the last time I would wear felt boots, from now on they would give me leather for my feet. It was not true, of course. I was scared, but no more than going to a birthday party. And it was a party for twenty years, although we worked very hard.”

  She took a scrapbook down from the top shelf and sat next to me on the narrow sofa. The chicken feathers smelled of camphor and tickled my nose, but it was not unpleasant to have her pressed up next to me, balancing the book on our knees and clinking our glasses every now and then, flicking through programmes and cuttings and photographs. She pointed out children who had defected to the West or died, and some I had just met at the theatre.

  “Why did you leave?”

  “I was divorced. I could have stayed and worked in the administration, but I didn’t want to. My husband was an attractive man. There are many pretty young girls in the Bolshoi. One of the little rats got her teeth into him. I know it’s normal, but I didn’t want to stay.”

  “Where did you met Pavel?”

  “In the metro. He had nothing to do with ballet. It was my defection.”

  “Martial arts is a kind of ballet, isn’t it?”

  “Don’t let Pavel hear you say that. For him it is war. He only took it up when things got worse. He used to be a gentle person when he had a good job. Now he is angry.”

  “How did he lose his job?”

  “He didn’t. It’s the same job. Good jobs became bad jobs. He thinks that when he is a martial arts master he will get a job as a bodyguard. But what good are hands and sticks against guns? He should buy an Uzi and go and practise in the forest.”

  “How does he get on with Yuri?”

  “He never sees him. I would have liked a child with Pavel, but who can afford children these days?”

  This was getting too melancholy. “Show me how you dance. Show me the positions.”

  “Oh John, I can’t. I am not a dancer any more”.

  “In here you are a prima ballerina assoluta. Come on.”

  We pushed the low table back and she kicked off her high heels. She ran through the five classical positions and their variations, then the ecarté, the effacé, the croisé and more. She was still very supple and altogether transformed. It was getting very hot and I removed my jacket and tie. Anna took off her feather jacket.

  “Can you hold your foot and lift your leg up straight?”

  “You mean the détiré? Oh John, not in these clothes. In English you call this shouldering the leg.” Her eyes blazed for a moment and then she giggled.

  “What clothes do you need?”

  “The tutu”.

  “Do you still have your old tutus?”

  “Of course.”

  “Let me see them. Please.”

  Leading straight off the dining room was a small room, big enough for a narrow single bed, a fitted cupboard and a desk. The bed was kept made up for Yuri. On the wall hung a Tae Kwon Do stick. I followed her inside. She burrowed in the cupboard and came out with parcels wrapped in tissue paper. We sat side by side on the bed and she carefully unwrapped each one.

  “This is the Romantic tutu, like we wear in your favourite Giselle. See, it flows down to the calf. And this is the Classical tutu I wore in Swan Lake. The frill is separate now but you sew it onto the bodice.”

  “Will you put it on?”

  “Oh, I was a young girl then. Here, I’ll put on the headdress.”

  She picked up the confection of tulle and ribbon, the white now faded to yellow, and put it on. Suddenly her eyes welled with tears and she sobbed, her hands folded on her breast, head turned aside, in the classical mime for love. We heard the clanking of the lift and the clunking of the steel door and she went back into the living room to open the door.

  “Oh my flower, what has happened to your face?”

  “I lost my bout. Who is here? What is all this? Have you had an orgy?” His voice was very loud and getting louder.

  “It’s only John.”

  I thought for a second it was a set-up. The misunderstood wife yearning for love, the violent husband, a honey trap like in the good old days of the Cold War. They had preyed on my innocence and now they would prey on my wallet. And what was worse, who could blame them, impoverished by the likes of me and our phony economics, our money seducing away their talent, filling their theatres with boors and their offices with charlatans?

  “My honey bear, sit down.”

  “Where is your poxy Westerner, then?” The word he used for Westerner was spidonosets, AIDS carrier.

  I made my entrance. Pavel was tussling with Anna, who was trying to bathe his face with champagne. There was a purple bruise down one side and the eye was half closed. I stood in the doorway in the fifth position, legs crossed, feet turned out as much as they would go, les bras en haut, the classical tutu tucked into my waistband, the ribbons of the headdress dangling over my face.

  “Darlings, how do I look?”

  They stared at me amazed, half in wonderment, half in fear. I had never seen Anna’s brown eyes nor Pavel’s good one so wide.

  “Hah,” he shouted, “I told you! Didn’t I tell you? These English are gay! Everybody knows.”

  “Actually it’s for the British Embassy Club fancy dress. Honestly.”

  “When a man says honestly he is not honest. But we are broad-minded. No wonder Anna likes you, she spent too long with ballet dancers. But for God’s sake take that stuff off before I throw up. Keep it for your English lover-boys.”

  It was a victory of sorts. Anna went unhappily to bed and Pavel put Bruce Lee on the video. We drank champagne with vodka chasers until I staggered out into the night in search of a taxi. I wrote to Anna the next day thanking her for a wonderful evening and enclosing forty dollars for Pavel.

  We swim in tide of history

  It was fine to trudge around the streets of Moscow incognito in skiing anorak and pixie hat, but I felt the outfit was beneath the dignity of an international development consultant and restaurateur. It was time for a wardrobe renewal. The obvious solutio
n was an overcoat and a shapka, a fur hat.

  I went shopping in GUM. It is pronounced Goom and stands for Gosudarstvenny Universalny Magazin, State Universal Store. Forming one side of Red Square opposite Lenin’s tomb, GUM was the first shopping mall of modern times, a magnificent nineteenth-century iron-and-glass conservatory on two floors with arcades and balconies and a fountain. When I first went there it was a wonderful bazaar, full of exotic pilgrims from all over the Soviet Union. Duty done by the corpse of Comrade Lenin, after hours of queuing often in the bitter cold, it was their reward to hurry across the square and join the scrum for household goods and fabrics and the latest Russian fashions. They agonized over two types of boots or two styles of dress, the white plates or the yellow plates, the red flowers or the blue. Far from being patronizing over the limited selection, I envied them the simplicity of choice.

  There were still some of the old stores left, on hard times now that the pilgrims no longer came and street traders undercut them. But the rest were being privatized and GUM had set up a real-estate office. A German supermarket sold clothes and Dior had a shop.

  My first purchase was easy. For a ridiculously low price I bought a dark-blue overcoat in thick wool, with a fake-fur detachable lining. It was the kind of coat that stood for hours on top of the Lenin mausoleum without feeling the chill as the rockets went by. When I took it off it was like the trick where several people press down on your head and shoulders - they take their hands away and you rise to the ceiling at the touch of a finger.

  The shapka was another matter. There was certainly a choice, from dyed rabbit to mink. But I have to report that despite appearances to the contrary, Russians do not have big heads. While fur hats create an illusion of the hydro-cephalic Slav, the bonce underneath is around size seven. This was a grievous disappointment to a size seven-and-three-quarters who had to have my school caps made to measure. When I was drafted into the school cadet force not even the British Army had a big enough beret. Throughout life I have had to go without baseball caps and panamas and cycling helmets and sombreros, and now I was to be denied a shapka.