Restaurant
If I am going to have any hope of fitting in and not being taken for an 'anglichanka', I will have to buy a black leather jacket. Everybody seems to wear them, men and women alike. Look, there goes another dyed dried and stitched piece of secondhand skin, attached to the person walking past the gated driveway of my building. The kind of driveway you imagine the black KGB cars slinking through when they made their silent final visits. But I'm lapsing into false assumptions again: this apartment block was only completed in 1953, the year the Great Purger left the people fatherless. It's strange to think that I am dwelling in what was perhaps the final monument to his regime. Unlike Stalin's faltering legacy however, sealed with a surprisingly damning pronouncement by President Medvedev last month, the building has been undergoing a major renovation, kapitalny remont, for the past two years. Down in the courtyard, I can see a man applying concrete patches with hypnotic slowness, pausing to stir and smoke before smoothing a single stroke of pale mixture over the dark red curve at the base of the outside wall. I am not sure whether to call him a builder or just a contract labourer, they don't wear any protective clothing on construction sites here, sometimes not even shoes. Over the next few days I become aware of how the work seems to progress haphazardly; the steps at the back entrance are an unfinished pile of loosely mortared bricks. I wonder if they will be done before I leave. In the apartment, too, small oversights gradually come to light, the bathroom door not quite shutting because the hole for the latch hasn't been cut deep enough.
In the evening I walk to the restaurant where we are all congregating for the welcome dinner. This part of Moscow – like all of Moscow, really – is a potluck of architectural styles and eras. The wide six-lane roads add to the inchoate impression, making it difficult to grasp the city as a whole, rather as parts perceived from a distance. Passing ice-cream stalls, I notice again that the names of familiar brands have undergone subtle cultural shifts. It is hard to envision a less dessert-appropriate name than Magnum, with its phallic wild West connotations, but at least there is some vague sense in the Latin meaning, along the lines of 'premium' I suppose. For the Russian market however, it has moved still further into unlikely metaphor to become Magnat (magnate)– your personal oligarch on a stick. Not to be outdone, the common-or-garden variety chocolate-covered cone insists on being known as the Monarkh.
The restaurant, on several levels, is laid out entirely in rough-hewn wooden logs, meant to replicate the interior of an old mill. A colleague mentions being perplexed by the sound of someone repeatedly flushing the toilet, until he realised that there was a water-wheel running in the corner of the room. Two shimmering pheasants swish their fine tails across the sawdust floor of a large cage, glancing skeptically at the hungry diners – though the Maitre d' assures me that they will not be eaten. We sit at a long rustic table laid with a panoply of traditional salads and cold meats. The waiters, dressed like peasants, carry round caviar and blini (crepes), followed by sizzling main courses and finally light cream and fruit-filled pastries. It feels like the closing scene from a Russian fairytale, where the happy protagonists invariably enjoy pir na ves mir, a feast big enough for the whole world.
