Ck

Sleep is for the weak.

I don’t have the heart to tell people that this move is going wrong - I keep reading the unread messages in my inbox and looking blankly. Maybe this is quite pathetic, but only a couple of people read this anyway. 

I should have listened to the coin when I flipped it and it told me to stay in Moscow. 

In fact, I’m going to write about this Russian who moved to Berlin as he was referenced a lot in the books I studied for my dissertation on Russian rock music (which I actually somehow got a good mark for). 

I remember reading about Vladimir Kaminer when I was reading about Russian rock music after the collapse of the Soviet Union and found it amusing to discover that this guy had moved to Berlin and had set-up Russian discos there. The German guy who I was seeing at the time was horrified that I hadn’t read anything in German, so bought me Kaminer’s book, Russendisko, in German in order to force me to read in German. He bought it by chance and I got quite excited about how I had already read about this guy and how he had the same birthday as me.

So last night I had a relatively unique experience, as it turns out that Kaminer was coming to give a speech in Heidelberg and so I forced the German to buy us tickets. It was strange being an English girl, who feels more affinity to Russians, watching this Russian guy talking on stage and making jokes in German that I swear to God only Germans would find funny (ie. my dacha near Berlin is so disorganised - cue the German laughter). I was honestly just laughing at what the Germans found funny as it was all jokes about the disorganisation of Russians and him reminiscing about the Soviet Union and noise. In fact, I found the joke about noise quite funny considering Moscow is so horrendously loud in comparison to Germany. Someone was telling me the other night that birds have different dialects and I thought to myself that this could be why the Muscovite birds sound so fucking aggressive in the morning. Kaminer then proceeded to start to have a disko and, at first, there was one Russian rocking out in classic Russian-style dancing. If you’ve ever seen Pulp Fiction with John Travolta and Uma Therman; this isn’t far off Russian dancing (as I remember Aleksei courteously leaving me laugh in the background whilst some drunk Russian guy swung me around and shimmied down to the floor to Prodigy’s Firestarter). We went outside to have a beer with the German’s German friend and I was just bopping along to Leningrad songs that were playing inside and thinking what the hell has happened to my life. I found Kaminer’s accent amusing when he spoke German and Dominik just turned around and said “yeah - he sounds like you when you speak German.” 

Trying to get myself together here is the hardest thing - I feel like I’ve entered the world of efficiency and pure anal-ness and then there’s me who doesn’t really understand the concept of being efficient or on time for anything. 

I spent tonight in the most bizarre situation - I was outside a Russian disko club listening to Russian rock music and I felt almost like I was in Moscow again before the wave of German hit me and I realised that I am far away from everything. I went to a talk by a Russian who lives in Berlin and has made a career simply by being Russian and telling amusing stories - it was really bizarre.

I regret coming here so much already. In my head I know this can change, but in my heart I know otherwise. I wish I’d stayed in Moscow and now I have to forget about it. I just don’t know what to do any more.

You would think that saying goodbye gets easier the more you do it, but it really doesn’t seem to - especially last night with those awkward conversations. I promised to come back, I just couldn’t promise when. Tomorrow I will start a new life and will have to change again and try to forget these memories and events. I woke up in the middle of the night thinking about this situation, of how much I will miss him. Time to move yet again - since early 2011 I have lived in 3 different countries and am now moving to a fourth. Well, I give myself a few more years and then I’m going to come back here to Moscow, settle down and drink bubble tea every day ^^ 

We stood by the train and they went to leave and everything felt torn in two pieces but in a way which created a feeling I can only seem to decribe sadness mixed with hope and energy. I think for the first time I understood the term bittersweet. 

Recollections of the night before of dancing and teapots of beer around a collection of bouncing figures in a club, running down the streets holding hands and laughing, bubbles everywhere and waking up in the morning hands over the other with our names being called from outside in the street. A haze that I wish I could forget, but at the same time is so precious it hurts.  It’s all wrong but it has evened out the hurt I felt these past few months.

A few months ago a guy called Egor one night asked me and Aleksei what the difference between hope and faith was, and it has been something I have been debating for a long time. Faith is blind I always thought, but then I started to realise that faith is really a strong driving force which keeps us going. This isn’t faith in a religious sense, but faith in the hope that things will eventually subside and the hope in the nature of others and yourself. Some days I can not see this, these days they are there.

This weekend I truly learned that concept of the unbearable lightness of being. 

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There was a storm when I was on the bus in the Russian countryside and I saw the lightening illuminate vast expanses of fields and nothingness - it evoked memories of times in Romania when we were sat in the back of a random couple’s car and he was trying to get photographs of the lightening as we were hurtling through the rain at two in the morning. I was sat on my own this time and my phone was not working - I was alone with my thoughts and my music and I felt in a certain harmony to things around me and laughed to myself as there was a beauty I could connect to - this nothingness can consume us or leave us in awe I guess. Maybe both.

The storm disintegrated the cardboard box the guitar was in. I sat on a bench in village hundreds of miles from civilisation playing the guitar whilst kids and dogs ran around in front of me in curiosity. A taxi driver picked me up and talked to me for ages about how to brew my own Russian vodka - he dropped me off in the place where this all began and the memories came flooding back.

We walked over the fields, the same place we went over two years ago. It felt like anything was possible and things could change. Every time I have been in Russia I can feel myself changing for the positive - these sudden realisations that occur every day. The compassion and the will to understand. 

I sat in the same kitchen in the house in the forest as I did two years ago with Zhenya. I looked at Valentin and he was just the same, only this time I could understand him better. He said it was better to be an observer than to follow the masses. We bonded in Nietzsche and in our love to explore. I remembered those times I was there previously with Zhenya in the early hours of the morning talking and drinking homemade spirits  Something felt ok that day - my panic subsided. I spoke to Nelly, I have missed her, she’s much smaller than I remember. Maybe I’ve become bigger. I know I have - and I do feel shame.

I closed my eyes on the metro today and cried in front of many people because I was too tired to keep my emotion inside. When James asked how I was I blew out my cigarette smoke and laughed and told him it was fine. We’re all fine here. I put too much faith into human relationships. Recognition - a fear of rejection. 

Slumber.

Yesterday I sat with Artem on a field in centre of Moscow and I let everything out that I had to say. I sat with a cigarette on the grass staring at the street lamps and he had a suggestion - we went to a cafe which reduces its pastries at about 10 or 11 at night. We went before, the last night I broke down. The cashier recognised us and we came out with a bag full of pastries and Rosie called me and I went to meet her. I sat in an expensive club with a glass of wine looking at the main church of Moscow across the river and realised I had a bag full of pastries and English books and couldn’t help but laugh a bit. Things are ok somehow.

I met another English girl who had studied in Nottingham at the other university there. I realised then that I am in no way typically British, but not that it is a bad things. She was a nice girl - pleasant and open, working as a tailor in London. She said she was jealous of the people she met who travel so much as she feels like she would not be able to leave home and to leave her family. I realised then that, although oscillating between Russia and German-speaking countries seems somewhat romantic, it’s quite empty really when all you really are looking for is that solidarity at the centre and I feel like I’m swinging in limbo with an array of shifting and varying faces that fall through my fingers like dry sand.