Red Square

                                          

“Andrey, I’m leaving, I’m going home to Moscow.” 

After many years in the U.S. Sasha Nova still spoke with that soft Russian sound, like a zephyr in summer swishing through a Birch forest, like the sound of her name Sasha Nova. 

“Andrey, my father found me an apartment and I’ll be in Red Square for May Day.” 

Sasha Nova left home when she turned twenty-one. She’d fallen in love with a Russian woman ten years older who’d migrated to America and soon she would follow. Sasha’s not really Russian, she’s Ukrainian, born on the Black Sea in Crimea in the capitol, Simferopol. She was an only child and her parents were intellectuals, art critics and university teachers versed in classical Russian history. They were not members of the Communist Party so walked a tightrope between intellectual honesty and supine Party politics. They were Russian realists. 

Crimea, like Constantinople, was on the great trade routes between east and west and saw many wars. During the Russian Civil War early in the last century, Crimea was a stronghold of the anti-Bolshevik White Army. The White Russians supported the czar and made their last stand against the Red Army here in 1920. 

My paternal great grandparents, Lithuanians, were in the Jewish merchant class when Russia dominated Lithuania and they tended toward expediency in their politics. Like President Putin and perhaps Sasha Nova, some in my family sided with the Tzar. They abandoned Russia, escaped to England, South Africa and Australia as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics spread and congealed in revolution; blood and bone and smokey union halls, cafes and students in Paris and Mexico City and Greenwich Village, even in my home town, Melbourne Australia, drank coffee, smoked cigarettes and discussed the utopian New Man. 

Goths and Huns, Bulgars and Khazars, the state of Kievan Rus, the Byzantine Empire, Kipchaks and Mongols; invasions and turmoil in Crimea go back longer than the time of Christ. And in 2014, unmarked soldiers in green fatigues invaded and took it for Putin and Russia. By then Sasha had already left and was in America.

 

Sasha’s parents separated long ago. Her mother was deeded the family home on the Black Sea. Her grandfather’s garden was filled with vegetables and lavender. He was a sub-mariner captain in the Soviet navy in the Second World War. Sasha adored her grandfather and carried pictures of his medals. Sasha’s mother sold the apartment to get money to send her only child to America. She knew nothing of the dark-haired older woman with whom Sasha had fallen in love.

As a young girl, Sasha was encouraged to read widely and she developed a taste for all kinds of literature. She read the great writers, Russian and Western and stepped into the pages of Hemingway, Melville, Faulkner and Dostoevsky. She loved to bury herself in these books and read deep into the night. She was seldom in bed before midnight.

One day Sasha Nova left Russia and flew to Chicago pursuing her lover. She dressed in a conservative, plain black business suit and donned secretarial spectacles to make her appear older for she was petite and child-like with sea green eyes.

She flew into O’Hare, passed through customs and stepped into the streets of Chicago knowing nobody. She found a phone, rustled through her papers, dropped a dime and made the call to connect with her lover and found the number had been disconnected. Now there was no lover at all. She was truly alone. 

She found a room with a family in the immigrant Russian part of Chicago with the smell of borscht and garlic and sausage, cigarette smoke and vodka shots and it was not long before she headed for New York City.

She needed a green card, official permission to stay and with that in mind, seduced a street performing clown she saw one day near Washington Square, gateway to Greenwich Village and New York University. They went back to the clown’s East Village apartment that day. She liked his pot and the dark Lower East Side dive bars and the music and the downtown life. The relationship didn’t last. There was no green card and soon she was on the prowl again. 

The night Sasha Nova came to my Vanderbilt Avenue storefront in Brooklyn, I was making dinner for friends. We had a couple of dime-bags of marijuana, a block of sharp cheddar, some bread and a large bottle of cheap red wine. it was late fall and it was cold and snow scuttled along the sidewalk. We huddled around the electric heater because the steam heat didn’t work. And in she comes with an old mate of mine from radio days. 

The Vanderbilt Avenue storefront was a large empty space with aluminum framed sheet glass store windows and a heavy glass front door. The pressed tin ceiling was high and there were no side windows so it was dark inside like a cave. But it was ideal for my stone and garden business and a place to live in a part of Brooklyn I knew. 

It was the late nineties and I was a gardener specializing in stone. I was two marriages down and living alone. I laid a sleeping futon in a corner and constructed a simple wooden bench for a two-ring electric stove and kitchen sink and to square things off, my recently gleaned full size claw foot enamel and cast iron bath tub with a Shoji screen for minimal privacy. My books and audio tapes and my beloved Nagra tape recorder filled the rough wood book shelves that ran along a wall. The rear windows were broken and I covered them with a double layer of plastic sheeting to keep some of the cold out. 

As the night deepened Sasha Nova drank and smoked and presumptuously crawled under my duvet. When the party was over my friend tried to rouse her. She refused to move and told him to go catch the subway by himself and eventually he slinked out into the snow and she and I were alone. That’s how my chapter with Sasha Nova began. 

She’d been trained in cine camera operation, had studied film and knew the Russian classics. A few years earlier she’d garnered a camera job with a top-notch filmmaker who made documentaries for mainstream television. One day she strode into his studio, stared him in the eye and told him she needed her and he agreed. A few weeks later she was sucking his cock before jumping on the back of his motorcycle, nursing an expensive video camera headed for The Bronx to rub shoulders with the Crips and the Bloods. They became an item, undercover so to speak. This infatuation passed. But not before he sponsored her and she finally struck gold and a green-card. She was in. 

Sasha Nova; beautiful, imperious, demanding, potentially criminal. I relished the fact she was sexually promiscuous. She said so from the start. It was an objective and it became mine.  She enjoyed both yin and yang and we visited lesbian bars and strip joints, taxi cabs and back rooms. I’d fallen in lust and a little in love with a wild child and was on the roller coaster. It was inevitable it would come off the rails and when it did I was broken. 

                                                   _____ 

It’s ten years later and and I’ve purchased a modest farm house in a small upstate New York village. Sasha Nova took the bus and here she is coming down the steps with that smile that melts old men’s hearts. 

“Hey there, Andrey, you lookin great,” and she hugs me and looks into my face and puts her hand on my heart and asks again, with that soft breeze in her voice: 

“Andrey, how are you, really?’’. 

I take her bag. She was traveling light. We crossed the road and walked towards the railway tracks. The old house is not far and it was not her first visit. She knew the drill. I liked the symmetry of it, the modesty of it, the wonder of a bus from New York City three hours to Hancock and walking past the gas station and the auto accessory store, the movie theater they turned into a church and the industrial laundry, and now paralleling the railway tracks and the old white two-story farm house with the green roof comes into view. 

That night we sat at the wood stove and talked and laughed about the old days. I told her about a Russian poet I’d heard about who lived not far away at the Lordville railway crossing overlooking the Delaware river where it narrows and flows faster under the Lordville Bridge.

Konstantin Kuzminsky emigrated from St. Petersburg in the mid seventies and finished up in Lordville on the Delaware not ten miles from my home. Like Joseph Brodsky and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Kuzminsky escaped the Soviet Union, his ideas challenged the status quo. He published a nine volume anthology of Russian dissident poetry called The Blue Lagoon. This was underground poetry the Russians called Samizdat. 

As we drove across the Lordville Bridge that day we saw an old Russian jeep with mannequins sitting behind the wheel and a sign painted and peeling on a plank nailed on a tree: “Petticoat Junction”.

Two men are talking and remonstrating on the roadside. One wears no shirt and a black mane of hair tumbles to his shoulders framing his face. His broad chest is exposed to the chill air. His friend is a skinny bearded fellow with deep-set dark eyes, visiting from New York City where he drives a yellow cab. He translated Allen Ginsburg's Howl into Russian and met Ginsburg. He is a writer and intellectual from the Crimea near where Sasha Nova was born. 

We parked nearby and approached. They invited us to share lunch and we sat at a long wooden table outside beside the road, under the maple trees which were now shedding their technicolor leaves in great numbers. The wind scattered them hither and yon as we pulled chicken off the bone, fed scraps to the dogs and chomped into the fresh lemon cucumbers our host gathered from his garden. We drank wine, smoked cigarettes and the conversation tracing an outline of books and geography, science and the atomic bomb, quite unlike any hitherto encountered in these realms. Then we walked across the road to visit Kusminsky. 

Many times I’d driven past the shack shaded by maples. Opposite are the remains of Lordville which used to be a thriving hamlet. Water offers opportunity and in the past, lumber and blue stone, lashed and chained on log rafts, floated downstream. Today there are abandoned wooden buildings beside the river. One hundred and fifty years ago they were bustling with river men who’d stay overnight on their way downstream. It was almost  a ghost town now and the tarpaulins that protected the leaking roofs of the grand old buildings were tattered plastic shrouds. 

Up the hill, the wood framed clap board Lordville Presbyterian Church still stands with windows that shine like jewelry in sunlight. On the Fourth of July, the Lord family return to celebrate and they gather on the road outside the church and read the Declaration of Independence.  And there are homes hidden in the trees and the steep valley that traces the railway tracks south. Like many river hamlets people drifted to Lordville, all kinds of people. Konstantin Kuzminsky and his wife retired by the river, beside the bridge and the railway tracks.

His wife Misha, a stout gray woman with glasses that made her face look like a cat, greeted us and beckoned for Sasha to leave the gift of wine on the table near the front door. Kusminsky is a binge alcoholic and was currently in recovery so no alcohol was permitted in the house. Walking into his house was walking into a museum.

He collects weapons and African and Sepik art and the walls were covered in carvings, and masks and a machine gun that looked like a World War One Gatling gun with an ammo-belt draped over the barrels; a display of daggers and curved knives, and a huge plastic blow-up globe of Earth hanging from the ceiling near a wide desk covered in books and an ashtray, still smoking. Two cats watched us and Misha invited us deeper into their home, to the back, behind a bookcase where Kusminsky lay naked. Misha leaned down to throw a blanket over his nakedness as we approached. 

He was laying on pillows, like a Roman Emperor, his full white beard flowing down his chest, a long white cigarette smoking between his well manicured fingers and he grunted quietly as Sasha Nova leaned over the poet to kiss his cheek, like kissing an icon. 

She introduced me and when I told him I was Australian and had spent seven years in Papua New Guinea and began explaining where the island was as I have so often in America, he stopped me. He knew it well and told of early Russian explorers who had ventured there, names I'd never heard and he pointed to a Papua New Guinea flag on the wall. 

Behind the pillows were books and I noticed The Blue Lagoon, his anthology of more than one hundred Russian poets, photographers and artists who were persona non grata in the Soviet system. This was Samizdat going back more than sixty years. Later I learned he'd carried the poems in his head when he crossed the border to escape the U.S.S.R thirty years before and transcribed them, tapped them out on his typewriter. At least that was the story. He'd been a professor in Austin, Texas but now spent his life here by the Delaware, reading, drinking, providing audiences to wandering acolytes. 

When we walked outside into daylight after our audience, everything felt surreal; the tall empty buildings filled with ghosts, the leaves scuttling and the men still talking loudly at the table on the roadside. We approached and before I could say a word they invited us to join them on another journey and we drove through the mountains about ten miles to a dacha that resembled a small castle; huge stones and concrete balustrades on both sides and carved wooded posts supported the verandah and stairs that led to the front door. 

Once again we entered a kind of theater, art displayed and scattered in every direction. A woman poured tea from a samovar and another brought food. The table cloth patterned with wild flowers, there were thin slices of lemon on a plate. Sugar in a bowl. Cups ready and waiting. One of the women stoked the fire. 

This was another émigré artist who talked about death and immortality, about Lenin and pointed to the amazing Soviet Era renderings on the wall. He showed videos and played radio programs in Russian from his laptop computer and we sipped tea and he sat quietly smoking and nodding his head as I spoke about my life. 

By now Sasha Nova was infused with sweet port wine and the conversation grew more animated and the temperature rose and she stripped down to a tank top and she stood over the men, leaning in, gesturing aggressively, challenging and goading as we argued, cut and thrust and parried until the wine bottle sat empty on the table. 

Before we departed we ventured up the dark stairway up three flights to the sleeping quarters. Everywhere there were more objets d’art, hanging on the walls and an antique wrought iron bird cage hung from the ceiling. We reached the top floor and entered the bedroom. 

On the bed was an AK 47 Kalashnikov machine gun and Sasha eagerly grabbed it and settled the butt firmly into her shoulder, her cheek on the butt and squinted down the barrel like a guerrilla fighter. I reached across and took the AK from her and placed it back on the bed. Sasha swore muttering something in Russian and we went back downstairs. 

                                                       _____ 

The phone rang and I picked up: “Andrey, I’m going home next week. My father got me an apartment and I’ll be with him and his artists friends again.”  

Sasha Nova was going home to Putin’s Russia, to Moscow. She would turn fifty this year and she said she’d be in Red Square for the May Day Parade. 

“Andrey, I am starting again for the third time in my life." 

I told her: “Start writing in an exercise book. Write what happened." I told her I’d started another life when I learned I had prostate cancer at fifty-three and had some of the best and most important years of my life. 

“Andrey, I love you.” And there was a long pause, and she hung up.