I will be going out. Well aware of the fact that are usually strolling without the cause of women is perceived not as strolling men-writers, I finally decided. In these four weeks I will be walking too. And I will do it in Moscow. In the cold.
Two pairs of wool tights under the rain pants I go outside and headed for the Kremlin. Despite the fact that these streets are reminiscent of a large modern highway, on cute Walhallow street in Central Stockholm or on the scenic County highway in Iceland, I still find myself in a dreamlike world.
Never in my life have I seen so many darling Christmas decorations, glitter and garlands, facades, covered with Golden carpet of lights, and blue drops falling from the trees. I walk through a tunnel of pink light, among the shining Golden spires and fairy-tale castles of ice, and I feel like I was back in the little girl’s room. I know it’s tasteless. But still I think it’s beautiful.
As I deliberately walk, you remain in full control of himself and not be forgotten like all the other bums in this otraslyam the outside world, I feel the nose start to grow little stalactites.
Blow the icy wind. And not just here on the street. The Russian Ambassador recently shot for the exhibition in Istanbul. A week later a disaster happened to the plane with the Russian military and one of the best choirs of Russia on Board.
He sings from the speakers “Kalinka” and “Katyusha”. Kalinka is a small berry. What do you mean the second, I don’t know. I was the worst. When I studied in Uppsala, was the cold war, and some genius decided that we at the Department of political science should study Russian language with a social science bias.
We didn’t say “hi, my name is Lotta, I walk, can I have one beer, please.” We went to look for a hydropower plant at the Caspian sea.
My apprenticeship has passed. But now once again it got cold. So cold that almost a war. Talking about hybrid war, its fifth phase.
When the writer Arkady Babchenko says in a Facebook that he doesn’t feel sorry for the members of the choir were probably killed deliberately, he poured a torrent of hatred. People want to see his death. I want to return the death penalty. His door daubed in faeces. No, not the police. It is not needed. Citizens will perfectly do everything for her.
You might think that he is engaged in provocations needlessly asking for trouble, that it is the same tasteless, like Christmas decorations, but you can read between the lines. What happens in a police state, not always lies on the surface.
Why assume that you can afford to have all sorts of expensive point of view, when you can sit quietly and do their own house? You need to go clearly on the case, watch in the land, and on this earth every 200 meters is a pair of police officers, and they have the right to stop anyone to ask that question.
Sign up is necessary, even if you come just to walk. If you want to stay in the country longer than seven days, you need four hours sweating at the post office or if you’re a masochist — go to the police and fill out 14 forms, undergoing all sorts of abuse. It is very important to know who arrived in the country, where he would be and for how long.
It doesn’t sound so unusual. You only need to cross Karelia and enter to mother Sweden to see the same aspiration. More control. Give the police more powers. Separate the wheat from the chaff.
Indeed, how many steps from democracy to dictatorship? No wonder they have such a gloomy view. Even the evil. Or they are simply in this his famous cocoon. The charm, which I saved a hundred times in my life in Moscow is completely useless. Smile only mentally ill, children or crazy tourists. What I like this your smile? Do not break my personal space. Smile only familiar.
I remember last new year’s eve in Cologne. Pinching someone in the ass and generally in contact with someone’s body is possible only with prior consent. Otherwise you’ll report it to the police. In Moscow smile to a stranger, it seems, is punishable by the same logic. Don’t push it. We do not know each other. This is my space. It took me two weeks to stop feeling and start to stare angrily in response. Adamant. When I get tired of being cold and throwing hostile looks, I walk into a room.
Tretyakov gallery, like most galleries, begins with a series of stiff portraits of the ruling elites. But once in the XIX century, you are involved in the flow: people in the paintings, to his own Affairs, alive. Around the forest, fairy tales, hunger, flowing skirts, curly carpet, morality, and battle-fields. The sky above the prison. A weak sign of rebellion — two fingers or three? Death and icons.
Four hundred years of Russian history flows from the headphones. And I don’t remember when I last been so moved. Charmed. In this shining moment I decide that I’m never going to be interested in contemporary art. Why watch stupid videos at home in Berlin’s basement, when I can be here near naked, real man in his continuous close Association with love and death? On the stunning art Nouveau I give up: thoroughly bred squiggles make me consider, not to feel. So it’s time once again to pull ski pants and a scarf. I face smeared with goose fat. I don’t want it cracked. After all, I’m going to walk.
On the dirty highway, where there is much less Shine, is the human rights organization “memorial”. She was recently kicked out of the apartment: she sleeps on a cot at a friend’s. “I are unable to extend the lease because they are working with “Memorial”. Human rights organizations have been classified as foreign agents, traitors,” she says.
“Memorial” is trying to preserve the memory of the Gulag and its consequences. No money, uncomfortable in the small space housed the exhibition dedicated to those who survived the Stalin era. It is important to understand the worldview and the criminal and the victim, says Light. Infinitely easier to do evil than good. To do evil is often to do so, as all fawning to the authorities. Good requires thought. Good requires courage.
Painstakingly assembled archive tells the stories of incredible cruelty of Stalin. This fragile treasure cave can burn from a single match. I touch the documents, without which the global memory will turn into a dangerous chasm of ignorance.
At the prison on Lubyanka square, opposite the main building of the KGB, the human rights organization “memorial” every year on October 29 sets the microphone. Any Muscovite can say one name. People stand in line for hours to say one name. Sometimes someone goes back to the end of the line and worth several hours. The name of the grandfather should be heard. It is not forgotten.
“Memorial” is a meeting place. Here, there are those who are just curious, and critics of the regime, are reading the reports and organize training courses. Courageous teachers bringing their students.
“Nemtsov was killed, came 150 people,” says Light. I don’t know she’s proud or upset. 150 in a city where lives more than 12 million.
“Aren’t you afraid?” — I ask.
“I’m afraid. But while none of us arrested,” says Light.
What it is possible to answer? Who owns history, owns the future. Slowly shade and forget Stalin is to make Russia great again. For someone wondering what Putin will do with the centenary of the 1917 revolution, a more clear answer and can not be. Before leaving, I tell the world that she can always stay with me in Berlin.
I look like I’m from the free world. Or decadent, if you want. Coarse boots and idiotic smile I give.
But a spy I? The agent who wants to discredit everything he sees? No, I’m just walking around, I’m newbie, Amateur embankments and pavements. Although, of course, I am.
The Russian news Agency FAN (Federal news Agency) cooks a lot of interesting news about us. For example, “Sweden runs a very black power” (Kunka, Alice Bah Alice Bah Kunke). She, along with decadent homosexuals decided to ban “Cinderella” and “Sleeping beauty” in Swedish kindergartens, as they considered the promotion of heterosexuality.
Was also banned Christmas decorations and fairy tale “Three little pigs”. In order not to offend Muslims. And at the doors of shops sits “repelling evil with plastic cups in hand.” Journalist Volodymyr Tulin said björn Ekström (Ekström Björn), who allegedly takes part in the activities of the Swedish Democrats. “Perhaps the descendants of the Vikings will be able to protect their traditions and culture, but it is obvious that the path of liberation from the dictatorship of perverts will be long and difficult.”
Invented by Swedish academics talk about how we get from the museums of blunderbuss to protect themselves from the Russians. Our hysterical panic likeda actively in social networks. And if someone is enough misinformation, let’s see the TV channel “Star” to learn that Sweden and the U.S. hold joint espionage operations on objects in Western Russia.
I rarely have anything to fear due to the fact that I’m Swedish. But then the harder I pull the hat over his ears, knowing that freedom from alliances and in a good mood now I’m not much help. It is likely that here in his apartment I’m not alone. Every day before you go out, I talk with microphones. And now I’ll go outside and take a walk, I exclaim. For some strange reason I am saying this in the ceiling, as if they were hidden there. Will be back around five.
By tapping you have formed a special relationship. Get used to it, I’m trying to convince myself, when, like a rogue Astrid Lindgren, emit your first morning fart. If I suddenly had a desire for someone to pee, I would say, is not began to do it in Moscow. And certainly not in the “Ritz-Carlton”. Maybe trump and uneducated, but he is certainly not stupid. And if I were Putin, I’d be a little parochial on their laurels, and the pressure would begin to provide a more favorable moment. But rather waste energy and place in a newspaper column on these paranoid thoughts. Go into a store on the way home, I tell the microphone before to close the door.
At the Bolshoi theater is “the Nutcracker”, in a Small monologue, Oleg Mikhailov on Bok. She is a tyrant from which you want to release the Kid and Karlsson headed the revolt.
In Soviet terms Karlsson — party, Baby — proletariat, and household maniac — repressive system. In a modern interpretation uses the Commutativity sister, Frida, who loses her baby, because it take a brutal power: it is a dark time in the Swedish history of forced sterilization and paternalism. And it’s not misinformation. It’s theater with amazing prospects. I would like to invited him on tour, and strengthened some relationships.
We smoke in the car. I friends of my Berlin friends. From the speakers sounds Russian rock like that played by the Finnish monsters who won the Eurovision in 2006. Outside flying debris, bottles of Coca Cola and a piece of paper from the “Twix”. Russian irresponsible, says my Russian friend. And envious. They don’t want to be responsible for anything, when you lose faith that their voice can be heard. They are jealous when they have no chance to part of what others have. This is a Russian soul, she says. She was never merciful.
As I reflect on the Swedish soul. Spoiled and comfortable, I guess. Or an idle passer — hearted and daring. But when the summer rubber slip on bare ice, most of all, I think about the fact that my hour of death. Here at birch grove on the way to Yasnaya Polyana, the home and the source of the ideas of Leo Tolstoy. With the words of Pushkin is the last thought. “Storm sky mist conceals, snow spinning vortices, like a beast, it howl…”
How can snow when it’s -27 degrees? In my shoes — ten black small blackened fingers. I defrosted them under microphones, when you get home. If I do come back. I’m so not froze since when I was seven years old and I thought I would become an ice Princess. Before, I honestly don’t particularly spared a German soldier at Stalingrad. Or of Napoleon’s soldiers. I regret it now.
My buddies in the machine working in a munitions factory in Tula. And cry in the Church. The Christmas decorations here, and a tickle in my throat from Holy water. I usually like nuns, but this one is not particularly pleasant. However, it gives me a colorful “Granny” shawl that I can wrap. In the Russian tundra women do not wear pants. Then comes the time of Christmas of swimming. At the foot of the monastery there is a Holy spring. In water at a temperature of 2 degrees we will dip to purify themselves to be baptized. We will become like soldiers, hardened, healthy and strong.
© RIA Novosti, Alexander Kryazhev | go to fotobanka the Baptism of the Lord in the regions of Russia
Then we drive 10 more miles and go to the bath. I’ve been like a slice of lemon hanging out between the pieces of ice in a glass of gin and tonic. Bath is a small bath with a small pool of burning birch twigs, a large wooden table and a huge TV. So if almost every second apartment building, and it can remove anyone who have cold flat, leaking pipes and faulty electric stove. It can become a family entertainment or a place to party. We put on the table vodka and gummy candy.
When you do not know the language, you have to redo the game. Nuances disappear. We go through the pop groups and writers. First having fun like teenagers. Then I accidentally got to another area and pour salt on open wounds — those that continues to provoke hatred and split families. I list of Russian presidents. Stalin: thumbs up. Putin: thumbs up. Gorbachev: thumbs down, no doubt. With the rest is not so clear.
We also discuss what my friends are doing in this arms factory. “Kalashnikov”, motion I’m in my swimsuit like a real modesty blaze. The blunderbuss? They laugh. No, something more. And I guess act out their charade means “missiles”.
The seventh of January is Christmas Eve. We open four packets of crisps, a can of sardines, salami, pickled onions, a sweet cheese (the food embargo, which Russia introduced in response to sanctions in connection with the crisis in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, turned the cheese into hard currency), a couple vegetable salads and vodka, four bottles of vodka. But under the table I, in truth, do not want to walk, so after five drinks I turn to red wine, which is unthinkable for a Russian. Merry Christmas, dammit!
When I’m on the train back from Tula to Moscow, I’m happy. None of the evil conductors can not to scare me or freak out when they like a group of partisans from the movie about the 1940s (although stick I, of course, speculation) put me in my place and demanded the passport, documents, tickets. And then one more time, just to be sure.
I have made new friends, I think, once again taking off the clothes in a stuffy compartment. I took. We prayed and cried, laughed and drank, shivered and sang. And so far as they have, I have rarely seen. Tonight I don’t want to wash off their wet kisses. And so become an agent, I think before you fall asleep. You seduce.
Pushkin said that the illusion excites stronger than ten thousand truths. I was walking past his cafe many times. Once I bought tiny cake. Cost, as the iron bridge. Another time I ate cakes in a cafe “Margarita”. In the Park next to the bench, past which it rolled head on Bulgakov’s novel Margarita and the Master, skate. “Swan lake” flows from the speakers, and the breath comes out of mouths like smoke from the pipes.
On red square lead dances. Just as we are in Midsummer (Midsummer festival — approx. TRANS.) or Christmas. No, in fact, not as we do. We believe in ourselves. We say: look how we have fun. And now dad needs some fun to the baby and Pelle saw that adult men can also turn into frogs (I mean the Swedish dance-a game about little frogs — approx. TRANS.). And they are dancing without masks. All ages. Face glowing. Good. And smile. They dance like they have no one in the whole world is watching. I have in my throat.
