I flew to Moscow via Aeroflot. I left JFK Aeroport in the morning and arrived in Moscow around 8 in the morning the next day. One of my relatives met me at Sheremetyevo Aeroport northeast of Moscow. I had packed lightly, carrying only two bags with me which I could put in the overhead and as a result got through customs and past the militsiya pretty quickly an with no problem. Tanya, my relative, and I left the aeroport, hoped a bus to a metro stop, and eventually made our way to her home near the Universitet metro station and near Leninsky Prospekt. I felt so good I didn’t need go to bed so me and my relative headed to a nearby park near the German Embassy.
I did finally go to bed, but at the normal time, and woke up feeling great the next morning. During my several months in Moscow I did the usual things. My bowels got messed up. I visited the museums. I went to the Kremlin. I went to Kolomenskoye, one of my favourite places in the city, lounging in the old orchard and watching the Moscow River flow. I went to Gorky Park via the embankment across from Luzhniki and did not have to pay as a result of going in the back way. I did the Mikhail Bulgakov tour visiting the Patriarch Ponds, Bulgakov’s model for Master’s house near the Arbat, the Sparrow or Lenin Hills, and the flat where Bulgakov lived which was covered with Master and Margarita graffiti from the bottom storey to the top. I visited the marvellous Mayakovsky Museum. I walked past the Lubyanka several times. I walked the French like boulevards of Moscow often making my way to Chistye Prudy to have a sit down, always making sure I went there by the street with Dunkin’ Donuts on it in just case I needed to use the wash room or water closet. I went to food and goods markets. I went to the USSR exhibition grounds. I saw the impotent’s dream. I went to Novodevichy and wondered about the cemetery finding Yesenstein’s, Oistrakh’s, and Bulgakov’s graves. I visited my relatives dacha east of Moscow near where the Soviet military stopped the German advance and picked fruit to put up for the fall. I went to hordes of churches which seemed to be on every block in the city. I visited the Choral Synagogue and went in after winding my way though those begging for alms out in front. And I went to bookstores, lots of bookstores.
There were some great English language bookstores in Moscow when I lived there. There was the famous one on Kuznetsky Most. There was Shakespeare and Company somewhere in, if memory serves, the south part of the capital. There was another one near Shakespeare and Company, if memory serves. There was one near the Arbat and the Master’s House. And there was one near the circle line in the south of the city.
One Saturday in July I decided to go to the bookstore near the circle line. It was a beautiful day in Moscow, sunny and somewhere in the 70s, a lot like many other summer days in the capital. Generally the usually busy circle line was not that busy on Saturdays. What I did not realise until I got off the subway at a metro station I recall as having frescoes or icons of Soviet glory days. As I was walking through the station I was fascinated by the fact that you could clearly see the indebtedness of Soviet era heroic art to Orthodox Christian heroic art of earlier day.
After I exited the stations it very quickly became clear that it was Navy Day. Soon I was “surrounded by Russian sailors clearly having a good time on leave in Moscow. At first I was a bit scared. Booze, the military, out having fun, hey what could go wrong with that? Very quickly, however, my fears were allayed. The sailors were, and in retrospect not surprisingly so, in a very good mood. One of them asked me what I was up to and I told them I was heading to a nearby bookstore. They split from me almost immediately feeling, I suppose, that they could find a much better time elsewhere than with boring old me who could barely speak Russian in the first place.
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