NOTE #7 A SOVIET SLUM

 

It's best if I start at the very beginning. I owe my name to Gilbert Bécaud's song ‘Natalie’, about a young Russian woman with whom he falls madly in love on Red Square in Moscow. Perhaps it was a premonition on my mother's part, or something that goes back even further. Sometimes I wonder whether things that may have happened in another life influence the path we take in this one. In any case, I was drawn to Russia as a teenager, at a time when it was ‘in’ to spend an exchange year in the USA.

People tried to dissuade me from my crazy idea and, when that didn't work, to send me to Riga, at that time the most ‘European’ and therefore perhaps safest city in the Soviet Union. But then everything changed. A few weeks before my departure, the Soviet Union collapsed and instead of going to the safest city in the far west, I ended up with a Russian host family in Orekhovo-Suyevo, a Soviet slum far to the east of Moscow, the second most dangerous city in the entire Soviet Union.
 
But I knew nothing of the tragic statistics of this city when, at the age of 16, I wandered around, stunned and alone, between huge concrete barracks that all looked the same, searching in vain for a sign of urban humanity. Orekhovo-Suyevo was a huge shock and destroyed my teenage fantasies of a romantic Russia, shaped by my readings of Pushkin and Dostoevsky. Nothing in my life has influenced me as much as this city, whose name still gives me goose bumps.

But Orekhovo-Suyevo was also a huge gift, because it completely took away my fear of life and gave me the ultimate feeling of freedom. Orekhovo-Suyevo was the origin of all my later adventures.

I spent four months in this town, which was not a town and yet was home to half a million souls. Only then was I evacuated to Moscow, where a new host family was found for me, one that is still part of my life today. Four months in which, as an absolute ‘exotic’ creature, I attended a Russian secondary school and learned Russian from outdated Soviet history books that told a completely different version of recent European history. I think the truth of what really happened back then lies somewhere in the middle.

Four months in which I learned the true meaning of Russian hospitality and came to love the depth of the Russian soul. My host father, who was a long-distance lorry driver and spent his evenings telling me about his adventurous journeys through Siberia with a glass of vodka in his hand. My host grandparents, who owned a single cow on which their livelihood depended and which they treated like another member of the family. A friend who had to serve as a sailor on a nuclear submarine and only received his discharge papers when he had lost all his hair. Done for. For life. I met so many interesting people in Orekhovo-Suyevo, all of whom embody the Soviet fate for me.

The evacuation to Moscow was my salvation, and yet I felt like a failure. I never returned to Orekhovo-Suyevo. Instead, I tried to banish this town from my memory. But now, as I write these lines, I can see it clearly again, as if it were yesterday: grey concrete and clay-coloured earth, a poisoned brown river winding its way through the town like a deadly snake, toddlers swinging burning branches above their heads and playing with dead rats, an overgrown, rusty amusement park long out of service, and stray dogs. So many dogs. Orekhovo-Suyevo, what has become of you and your people? Sergei, my host brother: ‘Did Perestroika ever really reach you?’