Day X

Systema

I've decided that I'm going to attempt to learn Systema, an obscure Russian martial art, which I first discovered in a small city where by rights no such thing should have existed, were it not for the persistence of a bulletproof instructor whose thickset neck spoke volumes. Fascinated though I was by the potential to learn how to kill an opponent in 30 seconds or less, I abandoned the class after one lesson, not relishing being groped, even in the name of self-defense, by the bearded misfits in attendance. Apologies for putting it so bluntly.

But the cachet of acquiring secret powers of destruction – or less reprehensibly, of building unflinching resistance to life's vagaries – simmered in the back of my mind. The chance, now, to study with the originator of the System, Ryabko, holds undeniable appeal.

The school is near Belorussky vokzal, and as usual with Moscow train stations, the area is derelict, inhabited by vagrants. I walk down a side alley, reaching a dead end. An old Soviet-era truck idles in the background, the driver leans out to flick a cigarette. This should be the right address, but the only visible door has been riveted shut with a metal bar. Reassuring.

As I continue along the eerily quiet street, trying not to look lost, three men materialise beside me. Three beasts of pumped-up muscle. The leader of the pack asks if I'm lost. “Er, I...” I'm such a useless liar, especially in a foreign language. “I'm looking for a women's...ah...Systema class. Is it nearby?”

“What a coincidence, I happen to be a teacher there!” Mr Alpha Muscle glibly responds. I don't believe him for a moment, but all I can produce is an insipid “Oh, really?”

“Really. There's no class today, but why don't you give me your number, I'll let you know.” Again, blatantly a ploy to get my number. I know this. Yet the conditioning to comply kicks in, and I catch myself giving out digits. This is absurd. I stop and raise a skeptical eyebrow. He confesses that he doesn't work for the school and laughs, without malice. Nonetheless, my sense of foreboding grows.

“Don't call me, there's no point in calling me.”

“Why?”

“Because I'm married.”

“Does your husband know Systema?”

“No.”

“Then, nyet problem!”

He laughs again, a simple laugh that makes him seem so much like an innocent peasant youth. He would really be very good-looking, if it wasn't for his small yellowing teeth. I'm aware that, in a stupid superficial way, I would trust him more if his teeth were white.

“Let me show you the way to the class.”

I don't want to follow him, but am somehow hypnotised into submission. There is an entrance at the other end of the building. We go through a turnstile, the kind they have in jails, heavy metal rails rotating floor-to-ceiling. It locks shut behind us. He starts to lead me across a courtyard overgrown with weeds and sickly trees, an unlikely headquarters for the guru of Russian self-defense. I note the irony of the situation for future reference, when I'm capable of appreciating it. Just as I resign myself to certain martyrdom, my guide points at a gold plaque on the wall which reads “Systema Ryabko”.

While we wait in the hallway, Alpha continues his aggressive flirtation, reaching over to remove my glasses. I wave his hand away. Then, feeling perversely grateful that he has turned out to be a decent human being after all, I take them off and smile. He blinks admiringly, announcing with customary hilarity: “Tvoyi glaza...oni...ryzhye!” Your eyes...they're ginger!

Ginger. At least he didn't say brown. Finally, he departs.

Meanwhile, I'm asked for my name, and ushered in hushed reverence to the office of the master himself. Short and broad, he presides in a leather chair like a mafia don, resplendent amid dark wooden furniture. To my surprise, every inch of wall space is covered with icons and photographs of prominent Church figures: the Patriarch makes another appearance, arm-in-arm with our hero. The window-ledge overflows with icons, still more lean against the desk. It becomes almost comical, the place is practically a monastyrskaya lavochka, a monastery gift-shop. Ryabko, however, assures me that religion is an individual choice, and that Systema is guided by a philosophy of self-knowledge. He chats with me in a benevolent way while we wait for the female instructor to arrive. She is a classic mushroom-gathering Russian blonde, give her braids and a sheaf of wheat and she could advertise communism – no, not from a colourful poster, but as one of those massive statues with upraised arms, the concrete call of the motherland, 82 meters high over Volgograd. She leaves the scent of steel in her wake.

“Go and change.”

The apprenticeship has begun.

Days 26-27

Valaam and Konovets

The tour operator's website advertised a fleet of rickety vessels from the 1970s, built in Czechoslovakia and Germany. I have been keeping fingers crossed for reliable German construction, and as soon as I see the bathroom in my cabin, I know that my wish has been granted. Not because it is particularly pleasant – it has been quite the opposite for twenty years at least – but because of the dire efficiency with which the toilet, sink and shower have been crammed into one small space. In fact, the whole bathroom is essentially the shower: close the toilet, turn on the water, and enjoy.

Still, it's a small price to pay for the pleasure of lolling on deck in the clear sunshine, stretched out on a chaise-longue. An unidentifiable stratum of Russian society, perhaps lower-middle class, sighing with relief, lies back with a handkerchief over its face. Large solid bellies swing over small swimming briefs as Rammstein grunts inexplicably from the speakers. I close my eyes and drift with the rumbling ship.

After several hours we reach Valaam, an island on Lake Ladoga, not far from Finland, which houses an historic monastery. The moment of glory has arrived for my improvised nun's habit. To cover my head and shoulders, I've chosen a culturally appropriate leopard-print shawl. The final touch is a pair of ostentatious sunglasses. The general effect is more 'nun with a habit', but I'm optimistic that I'll pass the censors who hover at the entrance to the religious site, on the lookout for lustful female flesh.

Approaching the dock, we notice a black yacht emblazoned with a bicephalic eagle, which we presume means that an oligarch has come to atone for his Courcherevels; but rumour spreads that it is the Patriarch of the Orthodox church, who, complete with retinue of SUVs and helicopters, has arrived to open a local hospital. I don't need to see the souvenir stalls hawking salvation and self-flagellation, to conclude that the church has invited the money-lenders back to break bread in modern Russia.

The monastery itself offers the usual combination of low arched ceilings and gilded icons, penitents and petitioners. I light a candle for no one in particular, for the sake of ritual.

One of the Americans is pulled into the entertainment that evening. The show is led by a middle-aged woman in a sailor suit that squeezes her hefty hindquarters like a lecherous drunk. She leads unwilling volunteers in anachronistic proletarian contests: who will bandage a child's head fastest? who will be first to tie a man up with a rope? It feels like a scene from a Soviet summer camp.

Towards midnight, we lay out a Scrabble board on green plastic table, blankets round our shoulders. The low immobile sun bleeds into the lake, making it shift and shimmer like crimson silk. The game ends in argument over the correct spelling of “coraled” (it's “coralled”, by the way). My fault ofcourse, I'm far too competitive. I had been in the lead, until an unscrupulous opponent, turned vengeful by my goading remarks, decided to set up another team with a winning triple letter score, on which they proceeded to play the offending word. Hubris indeed. While I pretend not to sulk, someone tells the story of how, back in Moscow, a friendly security guard recently suggested they share a prostitute. This fails to lighten the mood.

At the next stop, Konovets, I forego the tourist sites, and sit instead on the shore, letting the water nibble at my bare feet. Nature here overwhelms human attempts at divinity. The great Russian landscape artist Nikolai Rerikh knew this: his 1917 painting of Valaam, Holy Island, shows a wild rocky mass leaning against the northern summer’s eternal sunset, and as an afterthought, a tiny boat in the corner carrying two timid pilgrims.

Trailing my fingers through the sand, I can see the cruise ship bobbing toylike in the distance, keeping time with the hunchback playing the French horn by the pier. His surreal brass band of invalids creaks out a Soviet tune, whose lyrics echo faintly from my exiled childhood: “The river begins as a little blue stream, and friendship begins with a smile…”

Day 24

Porcelain coke bottle

Agonisingly, I retrace my steps to the apartment, running all the way, discovering reluctant reserves of stamina, heartbeats clinging to my ribs in irregular clumps. The passport, naturally, is carefully stowed in the bag I had planned to take with me on the trip, but replaced at the last minute with a different one. Muscles leaking lactic acid, I make it back to Leningradsky just as boarding begins.

The kupe is inoffensively modern: patterned orange upholstery on comfortable bunks, a fold-down table in the middle carrying small bags with toiletries, snacks in clear plastic cases with children's drink boxes, bread, the usual mucusy yogurt and vacuum-packed slices of sausage. I make lazy conversation with fellow travellers, trying not to seem like all I want is to wade into clouds of luxurious sleep. Through the open sliding door of the kupe, uniformed young women offer tea and coffee, heels catching in the folds of the long cloth that covers the carpet in the aisle. I had earlier confronted this object with perplexed resentment as it curdled round the wheels of my suitcase; it lay there obstinate like a towel that someone had accidentally pulled all the way out of the dispenser in a public washroom.

In the morning, we stumble weak-eyed from the train, onto a platform whose coffered concrete roof hovers in monumental tension, stretching towards a distant horizon of unrealised Soviet futurism. A bus takes us to a canape reception across from Kazan cathedral. Its mottled black columns submerge me momentarily in the ocean, Neptune's palace encrusted with molluscs, as the guests pop tiny amber embryos on their tongues.

For reasons known only to the gods of carbonated soda (fizz be upon them), we are taken on a tour of the Coca-Cola bottling plant outside St Petersburg. A study in red and white. The familiar curlicue letters coil around every available surface, from the cheap plastic wall-clock to the pens and notepads on the table. The vending machines, naturally, contain only Coke-derived fluids. Such Freudian levels of overcompensation recall the flags draped from coast to coast in the US of A. No object is too ignoble to be splashed proudly with the stars and stripes. And the dichrome world of the plant is the world that Coca-Cola would create, if it could, on the outside; and the endless bottles jostling down conveyor belts are nothing less than the exact equivalent, in terms of their value to the corporation, of each person who will consume them. Capitalism*, in equating the individual with the uniform product, tends towards totalitarianism, from which we are saved just as long as competing brands burn, bright enough that we can still see ourselves, even if we are nothing more than their reflection.

One bottle is different. It sits on the table while the Russian plant managers recite a standard-issue presentation, deadpan delivery of the jargon of corporate responsibility, as superfluous English text, neither understood nor relevant, slides across the screen behind. The bottle makes silent comment on this awkward coexistence of East and West. Made of white porcelain, its classic all-American curves painted with traditional Russian folk patterns, it teeters on the edge between beauty and kitsch, authenticity and corruption.

By chance, an hour or so later we are wandering through the Imperial Porcelain museum, attached to the factory that created the promotional bottle. Here too we are surrounded by Western forms taken to Russian extremes. Among giant rococco vases gilded with the faces of forgotten nobility, we wait for our cruise ship to come in.

*Capitalism here, before anyone objects, is meant as a shorthand for the current model of economic growth (advertising and mass production) rather than in the strict sense of a system of capital accumulation.

Day 23

Yoga

We are due to leave for St Petersburg at midnight from Leningradsky Vokzal. In the misguided spirit of productivity maximisation, I decide to use the time before our trip to attend a yoga class between 8 and 10pm. A pert female voice informs me over the telephone that it is an advanced group, but I am so thrilled at having discovered that there are lessons in my building that her warnings fall on deaf ears. My last experience of yoga, ten years prior, to counteract a series of inexplicable panic attacks, has left a dimly lit image in my mind of slow, calm movements and pleasant relaxation. I don't really want to use the word 'zen' in relation to yoga, it makes me seem like a victim of post-modern religious insensitivity, but essentially, I expect to feel very zen, perhaps even deliciously sleepy, ready to sushi roll myself into a gently rocking train berth, after a casual session of indulgent stretching.

Two hours later, glazed in sweat and coated in a light powdering of ever-present Moscow dust, like some kind of filthy salty human donut, I am dragging myself to the station in the midst of an argument with angry leg muscles, having discovered – too late – that Yoga Russian Style is more boot camp than spa experience. The only thing that kept me contorted in the strictures of an endless agonising stretch, was the fact that the instructor's musculature had been rather pleasantly refined. Cursing his pretty blue eyes, for whose tender approval I had forced myself into ever-more unseemly positions, I climb the escalators at Komsomolskaya, reflecting that it had hardly been worthwhile; at the end of the class, he had revealed a certain crassness... With seeming chivalry, he had asked whether I would like to sit at the front rather than the back, given my nearsightedness. Not relishing the embarrassment of demonstrating the Collapsing Warrior Pose before a live audience, I invented a silly joking excuse – that I would rather not show everyone my, to put it bluntly, ass. “They'd have something to look at”, he winked.

It is not obvious, once I emerge above ground, which of the three train stations surrounding me is Leningradsky. A confusing warren of kiosks cast an anaemic reddish light over the thick throngs of thieves and beggars attracted by easy pickings. For the first time, I feel intimidated, revulsed. The alleyways exhale stale urine mixed with that sharp vinegary smell, the stench of civilisation, the urban unwashed in their stiff clothes, a Hobbesean state of nature – not the naked, jungular one where bodies are purged by rain. This filthy, hopeless opportunism is the real measure of the city, and its hot breath feels deadeningly close, the distance from top floor to bottom rung only a greasy palm's breadth.

Turning on my own axis with slow uncertainty, awkward in a grey cotton tube dress that suddenly feels streetwalker-short, I intercept the leer of a gang of militsia boys. Their huge peaked caps slide back on their cropped blonde heads. They are always in groups, affecting casual banter to hide their adolescent discomfort; you hardly ever see a police officer alone. Reflexively, I check for my passport. It's not there. Which means I can't get on the train.

Day 22

Great lengths.

I need to find a long skirt. Well, strictly speaking I don't need to, but we will be touring a monastery where below-the-knee modesty is required, and it's a convenient excuse to buy new clothes. In the park near the Russian language school is a shop selling light cotton sarafany, maxi-dresses, they have a striking monochrome A-line piece I quite like, but the price is shocking: almost 3,000 roubles, about fifty quid, for quality that would be worth twenty pounds, maximum, in the UK. My Russian teacher recommends a mall at Okhotniy Ryad metro station.

The State Duma, the lower legislative chamber, is near Okhotniy Ryad. If you go there, in front of the massive square-columned facade, you'll see row upon row of idling expensive German cars. In general luxury cars are ubiquitous, the bigger the better, never mind that most of the time they are stuck at a standstill in Moscow's traffic jams. A Hummer limo was parked by my apartment block the other day. I've seen a Lexus SUV on Prospect Mira with the ironic license plate number, “NA555CP”, which is so close to reading “in the USSR” that I can't believe it's just a coincidence. The cars outside the Duma, though equally ostentatious, differ in one significant detail: they have blue police lights on top – migalki – which give MPs and bureaucrats right of way on the choked up roads. The migalki have lately become controversial, as the population increasingly resents this privilege, particularly after a series of fatal accidents involving official vehicles. I recall that on the way to Ikea, when a flashy flashing Audi flashed past, the other drivers honked their horns in derision. I've also been told that some people attach upturned blue baskets to the roofs of their cars as a kind of protest. I want to interpret this a reassuring indication that Russians might be growing restive, that their capacity for revolution is still strong and that they may not agree to be ruled by an oily political monopoly much longer.

The vicinity of Okhotniy Ryad also hosts the famous Bolshoi Theatre, and a charming pedestrian street, Kuznetsky Most, lined with pretentious restaurants. I will definitely be coming back to the linen white terrace of the Cafe des Artistes, the perfect vantage point for people-watching.

I fail to find any malls however, and it's only when I reluctantly give up and head back underground to the metro that I notice an unassuming door marked “shopping centre”. Beyond this portal is a noisy shiny space packed with every imaginable store, including – oh horror! – British high street favourites Topshop, Miss Selfridge and New Look. My resolution not to spend money on clothes in Russia, due to the expected absence of suitable shops, instantly becomes futile. I purchase an eminently unsuitable floor-length slinky black dress fastened at the shoulders with gold chains. I can only hope it will pass the censors at the monastery. I try to convince myself that a nun might, at a stretch, wear this to a cocktail party.

Days 14-21

Illness

Like an abbreviated version of Latin America's lost decade, I fall into a week of stagnation and inaction. In my case, it's not foreign debt that is the culprit, but foreign bacterial culture, gross domestic byproduct. Yes: I develop gastroenteritis. Also known, less politely, as something less polite. I'm still not sure whether I should admit this publicly, however it makes for a good story. It also makes spending more than an hour in the company of other people unpleasantly awkward. Still, I keep going to classes, keep hoping that I'll be fine the next day. After four days I start to feel delusional from dehydration and go to a nearby pharmacy to get some electrolyte powder; they have none.

As I wobble down the street to another pharmacy, I can see two barely presentable young men with beer bottles coming towards me with unmistakeable purpose. My heart sinks. Somehow this inevitably happens when I'm at my very worst. What exactly is so attractive about the undead zombie look? I'll never understand men. When they speak to me, I act brusque and disinterested, which only seems to encourage them. They notice my slight accent, and ask where I'm from. This is exactly the scenario I was warned about by my mother: don't say Canada, they'll want to take advantage, say the Baltics. Say the Baltics. I say “Canada”.

“Ohhhhh we've never seen a Canadian before!”

It's strange to be treated like some kind of exotic creature when normally, with typical Canuck self-deprecation, I feel as though I come from the most boring country in the world, whose citizens' greatest claim to fame is that they are...inoffensive. And bleed trees to make maple syrup. My suitors offer to go for a beer, I answer that I'm sick.

“But beer is the best medicine!”

Thankfully, the fact that I don't believe in the curative benefits of alcohol finally convinces them that I'm a lost cause. They leave me alone, no doubt convinced that Canadians are the most boring people in the world. I shakily make it to the pharmacy, where I have the following exchange:

ME: Have you got any rehydration powder?

LADY: You mean Regidrom?

(Vigorous hopeful nodding on my part) Yes. Have you got it?

LADY: No. We have not.

ME: Have you got anything like it?

LADY: No.

After a few moments of awkward silence, yielding to my pathetic appearance, she condescends to elaborate:

"There is no Regidrom in ALL OF MOSCOW. There is a problem with the supply."

ME: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGGGHHHHHHHHHH!

So either everyone in Moscow has diar--gastroenteritis simultaneously and bought all the Regidrom, or there is some kind of hostile blockade by Finland and it's the beginning of World War III. You couldn't make it up if you tried.

Finally, on the sixth day, exhausted from having hardly eaten anything for a week, and out of consideration for the hapless colleague who would shortly be spending 48 hours sharing a tiny ship's cabin with me, I decide to go to a private clinic. There, an affable doctor spent all of two minutes palpating my stomach and taking my pulse, upon which he solemnly pronounced "you have gastroenteritis". This exercise in stating the obvious was mine for the bargain price of 120 Euros. However, in fairness, he did prescribe some medication which helped me return to normality within an hour.