Moskva:
Sandpaper

“Moscow in February is sandpaper,” she said. Like when the wind kicks up and your fingers go dead and your lips freeze till you can’t speak Russian and even your English falters, and your nose cracks and bleeds and the blood freezes. So cold the battery starts to die after a couple of shots outside, and you wrap yourself around yourself, and no one says hello. And the dogs turn to leather and the old ladies need help and the only safe place is the old church where I sit in the half-light and try to wake up from a bad dream.

Gregory breathes heavily in his slick purple robe, panting through a haze of cognac and icons, while the snow drifts through the open doorway into the little wooden church that the fascists tried to burn down.

In the Nineties, while Russia turned itself inside-out, while things went so beyond chaos they invented a new word that cannot fully be translated into English, when people either lost everything or got everything, Gregory got very rich on the novie Russkie, the new Russians who stepped into the vacuum and made palaces for themselves. And Gregory made the kitschy moulding that wrapped itself along the interiors of the palaces.

“But I blew it up like this,” he says, wheezing, spreading his hands from one end of the little log-lined room to the other, where candles I had lit for the dead flickered as he dumped make-believe rubles over everything. “What was it all for?”

And that was around when the Polozhenia Rizi Gospodnei Xram at Donskaya street got broken into and its religious treasures stolen. They fired the guard and needed someone else. And Gregory needed God.

So he gave up business, kept his long hair and alcoholic habits and became a priest, rising to the second level but knowing he’d never get to the third because he’d accumulated too many sins along the way.

But it’s getting late and though the candles burn with a warm glow the church is cold. There’s a green bottle of something interesting on his desk but he offers me a tea instead.

Gregory is tiring of me. A man walks in but he isn’t there for God either. He’s got a tattoo on his hand, like the kind you get in prison. Whispered Russian from the reception: “I don’t have money today.” “It doesn’t matter,” says the priest. They seem to be talking about alcohol.

Gregory gives me a good, hard Russian kiss on the cheeks as I make my way out.

Somewhere outside, past the thousands of trees and the villa that cannot be demolished because the owner has a paper signed by Lenin, past the Black River where Pushkin was killed, the metro station done in blue neon but named after Gorky, we had walked high over the frozen Neva where it passed through a city of such magnificent architecture it makes Paris look like a shanty town. And that’s when I understood what the old composer had told me on the train, on the way to Piter, in his black pants and maroon shirt and green blazer and carved walking stick, and thick white hair and heavy face like Brezhnev and wife who shared her Ferrero Rochers with me for breakfast: “Moskva,” he wheezed, “is a village.”

But we are in a little hole of a flat in an area the Jews left behind, surrounded by parks and frozen ponds and stories, and prints of icons stuck on the faded wallpaper, and an old battered piano and layers of books, and a table of cabbage pies, and rice and mushroom pies, and potato pies and apple pies and tea with lemon wedges, and salads with wild berries, listening to a man who almost became a priest.

“The Soviets forgot God, but He didn’t forget them,” insists Kostya. “And there was never a moment where there were no believers. Someone always believed. And we got saints out of this suffering: 1,600 of them officially. And many, many more. Only God knows how many.”

We had walked past the graves the day before, near the walls with bullet holes, where we had bumped into the old lady who cleaned the snow off the tombs in return for food. “No one cares about this place,” she had moaned, clutching at Konstantin Kalashnikov and repeating a Russian favourite: “There is only you, and me, and we are together.”

“But the Soviets knew that when you tell yourself that there is no God you have no rules, and you can live any way you want. You do not have a conscience.”

“In the end,” he sighs, “we have what we have.”

But what do we have, and what have we lost?

And the 700-year-old dream sounds cruel: “And now, I say unto them: take care and take heed, pious tsar; all the empires of Christendom are united in thine, the two Romes have fallen and the third exists and there will not be a fourth.” Constantinople was the second, and Russia was supposed to inherit the future, be the third.

But there was never a third, and if Russia inherited anything it lost it, and just in case you thought there could ever be one they banned religion and killed the priests. And they killed the tsar who liberated the slaves and liberated the Balkans, and were defeated by the Japanese and lost 20 million to Stalin, and another 20 million to the Germans. And only three of Peter the Great’s 14 children ever made it to adulthood, and he tortured one, and put a tax on beards and changed the week. And don’t forget Rasputin and the KGB and the FSB, the nuclear stockpiles and the Bolsheviks and the Soviets, and AK-47s and Afghanistan and the schoolgirls who became prostitutes for a handful of rubles during lunch breaks and the two bottles of vodka consumed per week by seemingly everybody when they invented the word bespredel for something so beyond chaos it cannot be translated, and Grozny, and Yeltsin clambering on to the tank and Putin taking off his shirt.

But Russians believe that the colour of the heavenly kingdom is gold, and it’s on the Orthodox cross with the three horizontal lines, and it is on the insides of the church, gold leaf pressed into the wood of the icons to create infinite depth in the darkness.

And that’s the most we could hope for, because Lenin got embalmed, and Dostoyevsky got onto the bookshelves.

But the real symbol of the Soviets should never have been the hammer and sickle on the flag stained with the blood of the people, or the stars or factory workers or farmers. The real symbol of that ideology is the babushka, the old lady you will see everywhere. That’s what they have to show for the past, and they’re all that’s left. Them and the Ladas.

And in Russia there is a babushka for everything. You will find the old ladies struggling impossibly outside with groceries in the cold, wool socks hitched up high, in the corners of the metro begging quietly, in the little glass compartments keeping a watch on 4 screens of people getting onto the subway escalators. There is even a babushka in the print museum in Sankt-Peterburg who will open the back door where Lenin edited the Pravda, and another who will appear just to wave you through the next. They were selling verba branches before Russian Easter outside the stations, and walking grandchildren in the parks as the snows of March melted. They crowded the churches for five o’clock mass and shouted at men smoking on the train to Podolsk. A babushka with gold teeth told me she’d seen the Taj Mahal. I wonder how many babushkas died when they bombed the metro as I slept after too much wine too close to the Kremlin.

And then there’s the babushka who I shared an apartment with in St Petersburg, along with two cats, a giant poodle and half a bottle of vodka. We’re working on the second half, sitting at the table where they operated on Yasha after he got bitten by the stray, while the old classic by Nikolai Noskov played on the radio: “I’m a guest in this world, one that no one invited, and it’s cold here. But there is one thing that makes it better: I love you, and this is cool…”

And the girl who had gone a lifetime without ever kissing anyone had a dream once that she was lying on the couch with a man and he held her and the universe stopped, and she woke up with the faint recollection that it must’ve been love.

And all those years she had pretended she wasn’t interested, those years she immersed herself into work instead, frightened that if she let go she’d lose herself and lose everything. But in the end what really frightened her was that she wanted to be that picture on the back of the Lubyatovo cornflake package, that family sitting in the corn field, the papa handsome and self-assured, the wife beautiful, the smiling girl with a teddy bear and the son with a book and everyone blonde.

And everyone is blonde, and the girls do have skin like smetana, so clear you could follow their veins over their eyelids until you gasp. But it is cold and grey and there are no fields — only cornflakes — and all the young ones are leaving Russia.

Even the Russians are leaving. Something has changed. Generations had thrived on an identity based on suffering and had elevated it to literature and religion and beauty. “The Russians are very patient,” I was assured. “They will suffer hundreds of years till they do something.” But we were sitting in a French café on Kamergerski pereulok and tearing into bread so rich it tasted like chocolate. “It is some sort of Russian character trait that makes you wait till the last moment till you do something.”

That wait is over. But no one knows if it was worth it.

Underneath us the corridors of the metro, done in marble and Soviet art and revolutionary murals echo as a lone violinist plays at an exit in an ill fitting suit. The theme song from a movie about gangsters in St Petersburg from the Nineties fills the subway, drowning out everything for a couple of turns.

But Yulia isn’t leaving.

“The problem is that it’s easier to break down houses and start from zero than to restore them,” she says, before her eight-hour shift at the French café so she can help her mother with the money.

Yulia is 18 and while most Russians her age dream of escaping west she will head to evening university from the café, studying six years of architecture and then, if she has her way, will restore half of Moskva.

She grew up close to the centre, in Ostankino, with its palace and 17th century church and TV tower, listening to sailor jokes from her father who had travelled around the world for eight months at a time on a container ship before she was born.

The Russians have a saying about good early years: ‘Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our happy childhood.’ And it was good, especially the bits where her parents would take her through the old parts of the city.

But the communists had died, and Lenin lay pickled a long time before Yulia was born. The best things the Soviets might have left behind for her, after the last bits of ideology had been trashed and swept up by the babushkas at the metro, was their architecture.

The Soviet style, the incredible Stalinsky Empire, connected ideology with design like classical Rome did, showing off the power of the state. And it really is awe-inspiring. Even the onion domes plopped over the Red Square outside the Kremlin are passé. For real style head underground, down into the depths of the metro, and ogle at the art deco fonts, the light fixtures, the stucco and the murals and the statues. But most of all, the fact that the Soviets put their best art into the earth, for the common man. And that’s a beautiful idea, even if they managed to muck it up.

But the Soviets were just a continuation of a fatal character flaw that the Russians have cried about forever. And why not? Let them have it. The Russians have earned it. They’ve made two thousand years of mistakes and after that I guess you have to make crying a thing of beauty or else you’re really sunk.

But to understand Russia you have to understand the weather, and what it can do to the earth, and how it can sandpaper the berezki white and sandpaper the people raw and put the fear of God, or the czar, or the Soviets, into you. And what it does with the landscape. That godforsaken landscape, like an old wound that never healed. It was so devoid of joy the Russians had devoured it at a rate greater than any country’s expansion in human history, right up to the point where they bloodied themselves over 11 time zones until they got to the end of the world, and stared at Alaska.

“One day in November you’ll be awakened by the silence,” whispers Masha. “This is how the first snow comes. And the winter has caught you unexpectedly.”

The winter caught the French unexpectedly too, in 1812, when Napoleon rushed into Russia. Autumn rain made the roads impassable, and the country was a swamp that sucked in the French. “A swamp,” Masha interrupts, seriously. “This is a metaphor.” And the army started dying of the cold. In the end, the remnants of the troops desperately put on as many clothes as they had or could find. So now in the coldest days of winter the Russians say that they put on clothes “like the French in 1812.”

And the snow can be cruel too, and while we’re tearing into pig hearts before Paskha in the little kitchen Andrushka was on a surface like polished glass, and then everything turned upside down on the way to the corner shop for more smetana. And the ice cut through the gloves and he was bleeding into them, and he didn’t know if it hurt so much because of the cold or because of the wound. And the voice from behind: “Are you alright?” And he wasn’t sure, while he sat there stupidly in the snow, near the hockey pitch, and then, in a voice so soft he loved it, “No, you’re not…”

And even the Pahra turned to slush and slowed to a crawl, and we cram ourselves into the smallest kitchen in Russia, sipping dry, homemade wine between bites of cake layered with apples from the family gardens, while outside the little window it dripped a mix of snow and rain as insistent and sickly as a runny nose, and when that was over the fog moved in until even the berezka branches were only silhouettes and Podolsk turned dreamy. Tanya turns to me and says, “The weather is whispering: sit and drink.”

So we dig the vodka out of the freezer and grope into the murky, salted water of the massive jar for cucumbers left soaking a week, and smear murderous mustard called gorchitza over dark, heavy borodinsky. And Tanya is slapping slices of sala over everything: it sounds like hell but the Ukrainian national dish of peppered pig fat tastes as innocent as butter. For the taste of vodka is really the aftertaste that you share with something else, and that’s a Russian secret.

And there’s another one: the importance of the walk to get another bottle once the first is over in a series of shots, toasts (the third always to the parents), sliced pickled cucumber, meat and some form of grease. “The journey for another bottle of vodka is a very important part of the evening. Almost as important as drinking the vodka. So after you’re back the next session is a completely different one altogether. Or the journey might take so long or change the mood to such an extent that you might not even end up drinking the bottle you bought.”

But the fog has moved in so thick everything is disappearing, and we’re sinking into the slush and the snow towards the little supermarket, slipping over open ground and stopping under a berezka for a smoke — Tanya doesn’t walk while she smokes — and then we’re running across the road and into the puddles and back into the snow, and Tanya’s jeans rip down the middle and we’re laughing past the Ladas and the dull red buildings and the dog who wags his tail outside the supermarket, or magazine as the Russians say.

And that’s about all you can do in Podolsk now, because up ahead is the school and then there’re the two factories and then there’s the Pahra that snakes its way across the landscape, where the tsarina got her skirt wet and named the town after the lowest part of her dress, the podol.

“Can you imagine what it was like growing up here?” Katya is in disguise behind massive sunglasses so no one from the past will recognise her. We’re standing in a seemingly endless landscape of birch tree branches that haven’t yet recovered from the winter and Soviet-era housing that covers Podolsk, near what the girls half-hopefully call the swimming pool: a wretched artificial pond covered in grey ice.

That’s as good as it gets, in a town that owes its existence to two factories and its name to an accident. And while everyone in Podolsk is looking for a way to leave, there used to be a time when things were so bad that people actually came here to start a new life.

“I am Pavel the old man,” the great-grandfather says proudly, and although he can barely walk his handshake is rock-solid. He speaks occasionally, his voice booming in the little room off the shiny wallpaper, but it is Ekaterina who starts to tell their story: “We’re very simple people…” she apologises as she lays out the wine and homemade apple juice, fried slices of potato, and salami and cheese and chicken and salad, and Easter eggs, and starts talking of the old days. She puts a plastic cover over the tablecloth because Pavel’s hands shake and he’s going to spill something. He’s got his walking stick in one hand and a chicken leg in the other.

“Pavel was born in 1927 in a village called Teremetz in the Tverskaya area, and was soon put to work on the winter felt boots we call valenki. I was born in 1933, in Tambov, but my parents worked in the kolkhoz, the Soviet collective farms. After the war, after the cities had been destroyed, they were calling the people to help rebuild them, and I enlisted.”

It was 1952, and Pavel had just got out of the army. Those days things were so bad there would be five families living in an apartment like this. But Russia thought it had emerged victorious from the Second World War, and things were going to be better.

“Of course we fell in love!” says Ekaterina when I ask. By 1954 they were married, and they’ve stayed together and stayed in Podolsk ever since. And they started a family, and had a son named Alexander, or Sasha, and a daughter called Galina, or Galya. And Sasha always took care of his sister when Ekaterina had to go to the shops, shops and times when you had to stand in queue for a couple of hours to buy eggs. And when she’d come back she’d swear Sasha was exactly as she’d left him. And Sasha grew up and studied hard, and met another Galya and married her, and left Russia during the chaos of the Nineties so he could earn money for the family. He’d work in the oil companies and when he came back he’d drive or take the train to Moskva every day. And if you don’t believe that Sasha wasn’t the nicest papa (I know because I met him at Yalki Palki) you could ever meet there he is, on the wall with the kitschy wallpaper, standing next to Galya in her yellow dress, with Pavel standing proudly besides them, and a Lada in-between.

And Sasha and Galya lived with his parents for three years until they got an apartment in Podolsk, and they had two children: Alexandra and Maria. And Alexandra got married and now has two children, and a job in London doing something complicated with insurance. And Maria lives in the flat in Moskva her papa bought for Alexandra, and Sasha and Galya eventually sold their flat in Podolsk and bought an apartment in Moscow so they could be closer to their daughter, and Maria sits at the table smelling faintly of the perfume she bought in Abu Dhabi, and that’s where this story is now, more than a half century after Ekaterina and Pavel fell in love after the war. I reach for more Crimean wine, sweet and yellow, and spill some over the plastic tablecloth, like the dyadushka.

“How the time has passed,” echoes Pavel. “It used to be difficult to make a phone call in those days.” And Ekaterina lets out a sob as she says she sometimes wakes up at night worrying about the grandchildren. But she points to the photos on the wall, to the Sashas and Galyas, Maria and Andrushka and his sister Katya around the tree. And Katya grew up and went to faraway places, although they told the babushka she was in Kazakhstan so she wouldn’t worry too much. “This is the wall of the proud: no one has such cool children and grandchildren!” And she’s right.

But Pavel dadyushka had a stroke, and he can barely walk now, and the furthest he ever gets is to the balcony where he spends the second half of the day because the first is too sunny. “I like to see the people walking by. And how the drunks walk.” And that’s half a day, that and the lace curtains and the bare berezkas.

“Grow up strong, and don’t harm the little ones!” he yells at me as I leave. And he’s out on the balcony already, waving goodbye. And all the while my stomach is burning from the vodka we drank after Easter mass the previous night, and the slivers of pig hearts, and the weight of the story, and the homemade apple juice and homemade wine I had for breakfast, and it’s all the good and the bad squeezed so tight my head hurts.

And through it all, through the sandpaperish beginnings of March and the gradual thaw, through dinners and lunches and dinners, chopped cucumbers and tomatoes and boiled potatoes and pelmeni and omelettes, there was smetana. It was the cream that held us together, a cream that soothed the soul and calmed even the Russian winter. We had it with everything, and if it didn’t fit something we had a variation of it.

Russian food, like Gorky’s Childhood that I bought on the footpaths of Bombay after college, requires a degree of empathy for the human condition not often found, and will never have enough flair to make it into restaurants around the world. Because people just want to go out and be entertained. But Russian food is more like something you come home to instead, and it is all that you need in an earthy sort of way, and if it can keep you alive through a winter here it is good enough for anyone, anywhere, anytime.

And so while we went out and gorged ourselves on sushi at Arbat and crepes filled with walnut paste at Kitaiski letchik Dzhao Da and yogurt with honey and berries at Le Pain Quotidien what we really treasured was the ever-present kartoshka stall outside every metro station, where there was always a large middle-aged woman who’d slap a potato grilled in foil down on the counter, slip on a plastic glove, slice into the slightly burnt skin, mash around within, add a generous amount of butter, slap the knife around a bit more, throw a handful of grated cheese in, and add your favourite filling: ham with onion, or sausage with mustard, or fish or goat cheese or salads. And then we’d stand outside in the cold, trying not to get too much melting cheese on our scarves, scooping up forkfuls of steaming potato and wishing there was something better than Nescafe to go with it. So instead we slurped on a can of Fruitings, ignoring the sweet and concentrating on the bits of mushy grape that you could swallow in-between.

And that wasn’t enough, so we’d rush into the metro, and emerge at Kashirskaya, and run home to shee that Galya made, a mild, wholesome soup of cabbage and potato that is better after days sitting in the jar or, best of all, borsch, with beetroot slivers at the bottom and a spoonful of smetana slowly drowning in the hot purple. Or we’d meet the parents at Yalki Palki and eat cutlets and mashed potato and crepes with caviar, and drink Kvas like they did in Pushkin’s novels until he got shot on the Black River.

And afterwards there was black tea, always tea, though never in a samovar like Gorky wrote. But the tea on the trains was best, served with a slice of lemon and in massive, old-fashioned glasses, with metal holders and handles. And I’m on my way to Piter, and the wagon-master — there’s something wrong with her because she’s always smiling at everybody no matter what they say, and no one smiles like that in Russia — is mumbling her story, about how she got into the trains and how she studied something else, but I didn’t write it down and that’s what I have left.

And we’d nibble on dark Babaevski chocolate or shattered Russian halwa as we sat with our limited edition cups from Osobaya Keramika and that was as close to perfection as you can get, with the radio tuned to Silver Rain and the faint hint of pelmeni in the air. That was before Sasha looked up at me and said, “You’ve shattered all my dreams on this plate.”

And we loved pelmeni almost as much as we hated it, for we ate much too much, and much too often. But pelmeni is indestructible, and it has survived generations just as it used to survive expeditions through the Siberian winter and an evolution from amongst the Tatars and the Chinese and the Tibetans, the Uzbeks and the Ukrainians, and the final insult: to be mass produced in Italian pasta machines, scooped up by the babushka and sold for a handful of worthless rubles in Kashirskaya.

And mornings meant Lubyatovo cornflakes soaked in Domik v Derevne moloko, the one with the babushka and the dacha and the berezka on the carton. That’s what Andrushka was being served when she turned to him and said, “It’s seven o’clock, and I love you.” And he never forgot it, and never forgot that voice as he sat there bleeding in the snow, and everything in between, all those little bits and pieces, that soft laugh so innocent you could never reproduce it. And he often thought of these things when eating his cornflakes with milk from the carton with the babushka looking at him through the large glasses. He had thought of it when they had their first fight, when he ate his breakfast alone and she pretended to be asleep, and knew he would regret it later. And then one morning he was eating his Lubyatovo, thinking of his regret, but she was gone.

“You have to add vodka to the cucumbers,” said the babushka in Sankt-Peterburg, “Because of the yksus sauce, which is so strong. The vodka balances it out.” So for six months a year she retreats to her dacha (the dacha, like the babushka, is another Russian staple, because everyone is supposed to have one), growing her cucumbers and adding vodka to those simmering, walking her fourth poodle and making jam from wild berries. “The thing about wild berries is that you don’t need to add sugar, unlike strawberries grown in the garden, which need it for preservation.”

And Tanya calls the cucumbers ogurez, but they’re really paisleys, and they’re all over her shawl as she sits in the basement café, all dark wallpaper and hanging lamps, with a guy at the next table who looks like Dostoyevsky but shatters his image as he drips vodka onto the floor. The first time she met Kolya they were at the French café with the black and white floor and the paper tablecloth you could scribble on with a caran d’ache, and she asked him why he looked so sad. But she’d later trace the outline of his fingers on the table, and he settled down with the wine and the warm bread and looked at her long and hard. Was she beautiful? He couldn’t quite make up his mind. But she was just so full of life it practically shone out of her, and he thought of something he had once written in another life: that men don’t really run after women, but chase happiness.

But girls in Moskva grow up too fast, and Tanya is only 23 (she should be a kid, he thought) and the first in two generations of her family to hold a real job. Her father builds the occasional home interior, the mother dabbles in a bit of work, the brother hides from mandatory military service at their dacha and the uncle used to look after an uninhabited island for a monastery. So Tanya supports the family. But given a chance she’d rather be diving around the Great Barrier Reef.

Tanya’s parents used to roam free across the wildernesses before they had children, and settled on a compromise after. “They wanted to give us as many opportunities as possible, but didn’t have enough money for this,” she says. “So they showed us nature instead, to make us open to the world.” Every year the family got to the Pirus lake, hopped into canoes, and paddled to an island called Kolski. There was nothing there, and that was the whole point. They’d spend a month living in tents, fishing, eating and drinking, totally cut off from civilisation.

In 1998, when Tanya took a break from school and joined the family for an entire summer on the Pirus, Russia buckled and collapsed in economic chaos. The ruble lost so much value that families that had enough savings to buy a three-bedroom apartment woke up one morning to find they could barely buy a pair of boots. Tanya’s family found out about it when they paddled to the nearest post-office to call her grandparents in Podolsk. Their money was worth so little they were scared they’d never be able to leave the island.

But, as Tanya puts it, “If you have nothing you lose nothing.”

But we’d already lost everything, lost it till we forgot what we had (if we ever had anything at all), and all that’s left is a lingering memory of what could have been. Tanya’s best friend quotes Pushkin in front of his statue in Sankt-Peterburg: ‘And, with repulsion, as I’m reading there my life,/ I tremble, cursing with rue awful,/ Complaining bitterly, with bitter tears I cry,/ Yet don’t wash off the lines so mournful.’

That evening, back in the babushka’s apartment, we’re sitting in the kitchen with two cats lazying around, Yasha the poodle rolling his eyes and a bottle of vodka in-between. We’re on the second half, and once we finish a plate of pelmeni soaked in smetana we start attacking the babushka’s forel from yesterday, with a bite of the cold, pink flesh of the fish after each shot. And I feel ashamed that I ever doubted she would talk to me, because she tells me everything — everything — as we sit in the little kitchen, with the three animals and the jars of fruit and the yellow fridge with the gremlin stuck over, and the photo of Katya and the two poodles on either side.

And the babushka Tamara Vasilievna studied at the Rail Station College, and then went through university, studying the science of selling. She worked at the Leningrazsky House of Selling her whole life, right until Katya, the granddaughter who would eventually buy her a book on cucumbers, was born.

“When I was working I formed relationships that I keep to this day, and that means something. It proves we were doing something right. When my son was buying a flat in Ribazkaya my friends contributed money. It was a hard time but people helped each other. A few days ago I saw on TV that some students had beaten their teacher almost to death. Something like that would never have happened during Soviet times.”

“But it is also true that in the old days your payment had nothing to do with your quality of output. There were plans, and we had something to sell according to this plan. And you couldn’t change anything in it, even if the plan did not reflect what the people really needed. It was just written by someone high up.”

But such problems were luxuries, because life could be a lot worse, and the Russians know this.

Tamara was born on October 19, 1937 in a town called Gatchina. Her parents worked in the railways, but her father volunteered for the army during the war, and was killed at Pulkovskiya Heights in 1942. At this time her mother was working in Sankt-Peterburg — then Leningrad — during the great siege they called the blokada. She crossed through the Russian lines, then through the Germans, and got to Gatchina to Tamara.

“We were refugees when we escaped from Gatchina. My mother was pregnant, my grandmother was 70, and there were three of us children. We fled on cart and on foot. One of my sisters died on the way, and my mother stayed behind to bury her. But we eventually got to the Skovskaya region, to a railway station called Dno, which translates into ‘bottom.’ It was an occupied area, but I didn’t see the fascists. There were a lot of partisans there. I saw fascists cut stars into the flesh of the partisans. But it was the Russians who betrayed each other.”

But the war was over and Russia had won, or that’s how they saw it. They didn’t have to scrounge around for cod liver oil instead of vitamins any more. And Gatchina was in ruins, but something struck Tamara as funny: the flowers were in bloom. And they got the German captives to rebuild some of the buildings, and these were of the best quality.

The Russians have a line that says “You are useful in the place you have been born.” And the babushka’s family had been there right from the beginning, when Gatchina was a little Finnish settlement. And her great grandfather was a hunter in the Orlovskie Groves, and Orlov was a favourite of the empress Catherine II. And that was passed down the generations, until repeated in a soft voice that night.

And we dug into the memories until even Yasha was asleep, and yet the babushka went on and on, and entire lives unravelled in that kitchen, under the Christmas decorations left hanging from long ago.

And lives were unravelling everywhere that winter, and mine was too, as I lived out the butt-ends of my days.

Outside the Uspienski Sobor of the Kremlin, the group of women huddled together. “I didn’t notice the winter is almost over,” said one. “What are you talking about? Half our life has already passed…” said the other. And that turned into a long discussion as the sun came out and the snow almost melted and the golden domes of the Assumption Cathedral shone down on us, and the icons from the most beautiful church in the world looked over the coffins of the tsars.

It almost turned me into a believer.

“Our church is all about suffering for others, and forgiveness. Read Dostoyevsky…”

And in Crime and Punishment, he said: ‘And He will judge and forgive all the good and the evil, the wise and the meek… And when He has done with all of them, then He will summon us. “You too come forth,” He will say. “Come forth, ye drunkards, come forth, ye weak ones, come forth ye children of shame!” And we shall all come forth, without shame and shall stand before Him. And He will say unto us: “Ye are swine, made in the image of the Beast and with his mark: but come ye also!” And the wise ones and those of understanding will say, “O Lord, why dost Thou receive these men?” And He will say: “This is why I receive them, O ye wise, this is why I receive them, O ye of understanding, that not one of them believed himself to be worthy of this.” And He will hold out his hands to us and we shall fall down before Him and we shall weep… and we shall understand all things. Then we shall understand all!… Lord, Thy kingdom come!”’

And it was Paskha, the Russian Orthodox Easter, and we were outside the church in Podolsk, the one on the hill from where you could see the little house where Lenin stayed for a bit — but it was midnight and we couldn’t see anything and we were secretly drunk anyway and we were all brothers and sisters and nothing mattered any more — and the priests went round the church, anti-clockwise — “To go against time,” whispered Tanya — and they cried: “Hristos voskres! Christ is risen!” And we all shouted: “Voistiny voskres! Risen indeed!” And we shouted till we got hoarse, and we got goose pimples, and then we went back home and forgot about God and got drunk just as we were getting sober, and even the neighbour was drunk, and we slammed into each other at the doorway, and then I was helping him up the stairs, and someone had a hand clenched into the back of his leather jacket, and I was steering him into what I presumed was his apartment and his face slammed into the doorpost, skin against metal painted that Soviet interior green and that’d be hell when he woke up.

And at the end of all my questions, about why the Orthodox cross has an extra bar on top, and a slanted one at the bottom, and why there is a crescent at the bottom of it just above the dome of the church, and after all the pies and salads and talk, Kostya turns to me and says, “And now I will answer the question you have not asked me: why did God create humans in spite of us having so many problems?

“God exists without time, and he is bliss. He created humans because he wanted us to share in his bliss. But you have to be free to share it, and to believe in God. And that’s what it’s all about.”

And Lev Tolstoy had his own thoughts about freedom: “Christ was free, and so was the Buddha, and both took upon themselves the sins of the world, they willingly entered into the prison of life on earth. And further than that no one has gone, no one. But you, but we — what of us? We’re all looking for freedom from our obligations to our fellow man, but that is precisely what makes us human beings, that sense of our obligations, and if it weren’t for that we would live like animals…”

And there was always sin, and suffering, and forgiveness, and I didn’t know why things had to be so sad to get better. And were they ever better?

And after all the churches, and wine, and blessings, and the candles I lit for the dead and the golden domes in the Kremlin that loomed overhead, and the silence of the tsars wrapped in their tombs, and the priest who kissed me, and the religious fervour of Dostoyevsky that smothered me, and the sickly-sweet sakharni-sopli verses of Pushkin, when my head had spun around itself with all that gold and frankincense and chanting, I joked that even I was turning into a believer. But it was the people who created the art, and the people who wrote the books, and believed the message, and the people who repeated it until they died. And when my head was spinning it wasn’t for God, it was for the people.

And what sort of people were these, to survive the blokada of Piter, the killing of a father, the death of a sister, all those years of bombings and bloodshed, and rationing of bread, and still, towards the end, to be able to sit down for a vodka and talk of ogurez, and four poodles?

It all began when a friend of Tamara’s son Kostya brought them a poodle. “His name was Artosha, and he liked music. He could walk alone without company, and then come to the door and start barking for someone to open it. He was very smart. Once we were walking together in the forest and I saw some chicks that had fallen out of the nest. I told Artosha to let them be, and he didn’t go close. Artosha lived till the age of 12. One day, when we were at the dacha, he left for a walk and never came back. Maybe the wolves got him.”

And then came Archik, who won so many prizes at dog shows that “he had an ikonostas of medals,” said the babushka, using the Russian word for the place in the church where the icons are kept. Masha interrupts her to tell me that this is a metaphor too.

And Archik was very courageous, which makes her come up with a Russian line: that ‘he would go and hunt a bear.’ “He was trained to protect people, and didn’t like when someone spoke loudly, even at home. He was beaten to death by someone in the village.” And then, enigmatically: “But God is not a dupe, and something bad later happened to this man.”

The third poodle was Shaynik, but “he spent very little time with us,” and then came Yasha, spilling himself all over the kitchen floor as we speak. “He can’t do anything, but he’s very affectionate, and he likes to eat curd.” And that just about sums it all up.

And always the little details: “My mother is from Blagodatnoya village in the Nikalayevskaya area in Ukraine. Blagodat means bliss, or God’s divine grace. Nikalayevskaya is named after Nikolai. But she had a Russian surname, and it was Bobrakova. Bobr means beaver, though I’m not sure there’s a connection.”

After the war, Tamara’s mother got back into the railways and wanted, above all, that her children study. But she was in a relatively higher income group than was in the plan drawn for students of the Nakhimov Naval School so they put him into the Syvorov Military School instead, “The one named after the famous commander,” she whispers.

“After the revolution Gatchina was named Troizk after Trotsky. In Soviet times all new films had to be shown first in Gatchina and then in Piter. Famous people in Gatchina included Molotov (his real surname was Skryabin). One day my babushka was standing in line for tickets to a movie, and she was standing behind Molotov. There was also Kuprin, the famous writer.” And I don’t know how I’m going to fit this in but I write it down anyway. And then it’s time to leave Piter and get on that train, as the last snows of the north slam against the restaurant wagon and the drunk is on the floor trying to pick up his rubles and clutching desperately at the tablecloth and no one helps him.

And time slips through our hands, and in Moskva the snows are melting and the Uzbeks, or Tajiks, or Kazakhs or whatever the hell they are — nobody cares — are on the pavement, digging up the last remnants of ice and muck and throwing the bits onto the street so the Ladas and BMWs will crush them into dirty water.

The underclass is on the sidelines everywhere, the other Russians, and if Russians had it so bad for so long what must these people have gone through? And will they too create a literature and religion of their suffering, and will the Russians read this and cry for them? Perhaps there will be time for this too. And I think of Andrushka, who read me the only thing she had left behind, their favourite, saddest poem: ‘There will be time, there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/ There will be time to murder and create,/ And time for all the works and days of hands/ That lift and drop a question on your plate;/ Time for you and time for me,/ And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/ And for a hundred visions and revisions,/ Before the taking of a toast and tea.’

Moscow, March 2010