Never Go Back
Small World' The Carlow Nationalist, January 2009
The man on the bench sitting opposite me was trying not to sleep. Each time his head dropped too far forward towards the pillow of his chest some basic instinct would kick in and snap him back to the reality of his surroundings.
He looked familiar, but I knew I didn't know him. An anonymous, grey-faced man whose tight skin pinched his painfully sharp cheekbones. Late sixties, maybe older I guessed; a man who had known physical work. Between his mud-crusted boots a bucket contained the tools of a gardener; a flaking red-handled trowel; the business end of a spade – waiting patiently for its next day out; several paper packets of seeds whose labels I couldn't make out and an oversized red thermos of the type I remembered only too well.
"Sledushye stantsia, Arbat," the tannoy in the carriage announced in Russian – next stop Arbat. I stood up as the train shuddered and slowed, the tired man looked me in the face and for the first time I saw that one of his narrow, deep eyes was brown, the other was blue.
The doors of the carriage hissed into life then opened with a bang depositing me on the platform I once knew so well. It had been fourteen years but still I felt as if I knew the very air that flowed in from the Moscow streets above. I knew the smoothness of the marble floors and the yellow light cast by the gilded chandeliers which swayed in the draught of the departing train. I knew the groups of neatly-uniformed soldiers who stood pouring over a map – twenty-four hours was never time enough to see the whole city, decisions had to be made with care.
Left or right? I thought, trying to decipher the Cyrillic signage without being taken for a tourist. I chastised myself silently for not knowing. For God's sake, how many times had I arrived at this very station, day and night and made the decision without a second thought? I glanced up and down along the platform hoping for something to jog my memory – but nothing came.
Remember the rule: don't look like a tourist I warned myself and leaned easily against a pillar. He's just waiting for someone, they'll think, just waiting for someone. I tried to conjure up an image of myself arriving in this very spot, many years before. Think, what would I do back then, left or right? At that moment a couple of British tourists emerged from down the steps of the escalator to my left. Their arms were laden with gifts; Russian Matryushka dolls, bottles of vodka and the essential of every visitor to the city, the ubiquitous fur hats. "These Russkies certainly know how to charge," the man said in thick Cockney. She barely turned her head and gave him a hardened look, "yeah, well if you hadn't taken out that wad of notes they wouldn't have cost so bloody much. Did you see his bloody face light up, it was like the bloody Blackpool illuminations."
They had come from Old Arbat I decided; a street of tourist traps, dancing beers and balalaika bands waiting to strip every last penny of hard-currency from gullible tourists. I turned and went the opposite direction.
The escalator was still lined with advertising I was happy to see, but the theme had changed. Gone were the adverts for McDonalds and Pizza Hut, Moscow Zoo and The Pushkin Gallery, in their place curvaceous pouting models reclined on velvet sofas seducing the consumer with Gucci and Prada, Chanel and Hugo Boss. For a moment I wanted the old Moscow back.
Outside on the street, to anyone bothering to notice, I must have appeared like a country oaf dropped for the first time in the middle of the bursting city. I stood open-mouthed and said aloud, "My God, what have they done?" What was once a narrow city centre street was now a six-lane highway where unending lines of shining Western cars hugged each other bumper to bumper far along the Garden Ring. I used to sit on a bench here I remembered, on sunny Summer afternoons reading a book in the relative calm of the city centre. Now, the noise was too much; a constant mechanical groan of a city stuffed to bursting point. The air was thick and visible from the fumes of a million cars.
From the sides of every building digital screens the size of football fields screamed commercialism, leaving me feeling like a man awoken from suspended animation in some hideous future. I turned quickly and made my escape. Five minutes later I entered Frunze Street – which had now become Znamyenka – and passed the military headquarters where Generals in crisp uniforms would stand behind its great iron gates – plotting what? I could only guess. But now instead of Generals stood battalions of men with hundred-dollar hair-cuts and pin-striped suits; from the corner of the building a flag snapped in the breeze, 'Russ-Bank' it announced with each flick of its tail.
And then I was
there, my final destination. It had taken me fourteen years to return,
but now I was back and she would be waiting. I knew I would turn one
last corner and the fondly familiar facade of 'Rosy O'Grady's' bar, my
old workplace, would comfort me and welcome me home like a prodigal son.
But I was wrong and everything changes. The place of my pilgrimage was no longer; in its place an empty plot of debris-strewn land mocked my homecoming. On a hoarding in its centre an artist's impression of a gleaming high-rise tower, all glass and tubular steel, shouted the words, 'COMING SOON'. The words of a friend sprang to mind like daggers, "no regrets," he'd said, "...and never go back."