Rory MacLean - Pravda Ha Ha: True Travels to the End of Europe

PRAVDA HA HA

PRAVDA HA HA

True Travels to the End of Europe

RORY MACLEAN

BLOOMSBURY PUBLISHING

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First published in Great Britain 2019

This electronic edition published 2019

Copyright Rory MacLean, 2019

Map ML Design, 2019

Czesaw Mioszs A Book in the Ruins from New and Collected Poems 19312001 Estate of Czesaw Miosz, 1941. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Books

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell George Orwell, 1949. Reprinted by permission of Bill Hamilton as the Literary Executor of the Estate of the Late Sonia Brownell Orwell

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns Nobel Prize Lecture reprinted with permission The Nobel Foundation, 1970

Dmitry Glukhovsky quoted with permission from his 2016 Im Dmitry Glukhovsky reddit.com/r/books posts

Kocham wolno Estate of Bogdan yszkiewicz, 1990. Reprinted with permission of Anna yszkiewicz

Parts of the Transnistria chapters first appeared in The Times and Back in the USSR: Heroic Adventures in Transnistria by Rory MacLean

Rory MacLean has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work

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BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Stalins Nose

The Oatmeal Ark

Under the Dragon

Next Exit Magic Kingdom

Falling for Icarus

Magic Bus

Missing Lives

Gift of Time

Back in the USSR

Berlin: Imagine a City

In North Korea

Wunderkind

Pictures of You

www.rorymaclean.com

Pravda () n .. Truth.. Disposition to speak or act truly or without deceit; truthfulness, veracity, sincerity [- Russ. ? Is it true?] . Russian broadsheet newspaper, formerly the official newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [f. Proto-Slavic pravda , from prav = right, correct]

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

Contents

Underground there was no horizon. Underground the people moved in halting steps, moved as one, moved four abreast to ride down, deep down beneath the city. The earth swallowed them, corralled them, unnamed them as the metallic shriek rose up to strike them dumb. No one talked above the whine of the motors. No one stood out. Once or twice the odd traveller dared to shout, leaning towards his fellows, his warm breath brushing their ears. Otherwise the mass ten million souls every day moved through the deafening noise, unable or unwilling to be heard.

I stepped among them, shuffled with them down the banks of escalators to the platform. In the pale milky light waited office clerks and stallholders, weary shop cleaners and crisp police recruits, pedlars with sacks of tourist tat and widows in frumpy Soviet dresses whod seen their sons shot dead in the chaos after capitalisms triumph. Two hundred feet below ground the surging crowd elbowed aside a frightened, almond-eyed Yakut woman. Three white policemen approached her, backed her against the wall, demanded identity papers with a gesture that needed no words. Another traveller, a sharp-nosed Uzbek with his furious moustache, shepherded his young son around them without a look. The boy carried a plastic Russian flag. The scream of brakes echoed off the cold Crimean marble.

At peak times the trains arrived every minute at every one of Moscows 224 underground stations, grating to a stop, flinging open their gaping doors, sucking in the bydlo . Thats what Moscows elite call the common people, the countless commuting offspring of provincial peasants, the rabble from the citys margins wholl never stand tall, never escape the shadows. Bydlo . Proles. Cattle. Scum.

At Taganskaya the throng heaved itself off the platform, carrying me with it into the metal carriage, crushing me against three identikit blondes. The women slender and curvy with violet nails and long straightened hair batted me away with their lashes. A buffed twentysomething in T-shirt and jeans carried his crumpled security guard uniform in a plastic bag. Beside him a grey-haired, grey-skinned academic noted his earnings in a diary, a leaky biro stain on his threadbare pinstripe. On a seat behind them a bricklayer at the end of his shift squinted at two ancient Nokias nestled like matchboxes in his big hands, his sausage fingers punching out the wrong number on one of them again and again.

Then I saw the bird.

It came out of nowhere, flying in through a closing door, inches above our heads. It was starling-sized and short-tailed with buff-grey plumage. As the train accelerated out of the station, I guessed that it had flown down into the underground above the escalators deep rolling rumble and become trapped. Two men tried to grab it. The identikit blondes shrieked and ducked their heads. A stocky youth in bow tie began to swat at it with a folded newspaper. Other passengers held his arm, started to laugh, to yell, gazing in awe at the beautiful, frightened creature as it swept back and forth through the snaking carriages, shitting on the head of the failed academic in its terror.

Next the strangest thing happened.

After half a dozen fast flights, somewhere between Taganskaya and Kurskaya, the bird realised that there was no escape. Quite suddenly it stopped flying, and perched on a young mans shoulder by the door. He seemed to be a random choice, not distinctive at first glance, neither handsome nor bad-looking either: slight build, tracksuit top and high, chiselled cheekbones under deep brown eyes. Not exceptional at all, apart from his stack of hair, his unruffled calm, and being black in Moscow.

The mans stillness, and the frailty of the birds trembling chestnut breast, brought a sudden serenity to the carriage. Commuters stared at the astonishing sight, met each others glances, took hardly a breath so as not to break the spell, oblivious to the rising squeal of the brakes as the train slowed to pull into the next station. When the doors opened no one moved, until the man jerked backwards out of the carriage and onto the platform. Then the bird took off, its long flight feathers flashing with red and yellow tips.