The Woman from Bratislava Read Free

The neatly pressed seams – the real and the imaginary – had to be there, though without being too obvious. Both sorts were, however, becoming more and more creased as time went on. The ability to fool oneself, to view oneself in the wrong light is, after all, only human. Too much self-awareness can lead to suicide. Another annoying side effect of drinking too much was, quite simply, the ease with which I succeeded in staining my clothes and making an unholy mess of my life. I had not wanted to get drunk, nor had I really wanted the Soviet Empire to collapse, and these two things were in a way connected.
    Not to put too fine a point on it: I was lying fully clothed on a bed in a spanking-new, ultra-modern hotel in Bratislava, in Europe’s youngest state, Slovakia, yearning for the cold war and the great Empire. I missed the dear old terminology: Politbureau, Central Committee, Satellite States, Iron Curtain, East-West, Rearmament, Middle-distance Rockets, Summit Meetings, Berlin Wall. Being one of the few capable of reading between the lines of Pravda and being invited onto television to do just that. I missed the hammer and sickle, the cobbles on Red Square in the days when the Kremlin was a power centre, and longed to see the snow on the frozen canals in the beautiful, ramshackle city once known as Leningrad. Back when life consisted of great existential questions and not, as now, when the three main topics of discussion in the media and among one’s own acquaintances were early retirement , pension schemes and the smoking ban – this last debated so hotly that you felt you had been transported back to a time when all the talk was of the necessity for revolution and the imminent triumph of the working class. The world no longer made any sense, and no one now was interested in the knowledge I possessed. I was like a sculptor who had once been awarded first prize for mysocialist ability to sculpt a splendid Lenin out of cold marble. The things I knew and could do were of no use today.
    Only those small groups at the university who could be bothered to study the history of the Soviet Union were still keen to know who Malenkov was, or Berija, or Breshnev. Who nowadays wants to read up on Gosplan’s abortive twenty-second Five Year Plan or is interested enough to pick my brains on the twenty-sixth Party Congress? Capitalism had won the battle. The triumphant progress of the free market was not conducive to Utopian scenarios or momentous decisions. And the fruits of victory were as bitter as a mouldy lemon on a dark November day in a bygone time in a Moscow which, with its Coca-Cola ads, Marlborough Men, an inane, babbling Yeltsin, nouveau riche mafiosi and small boys begging on the streets reminded me more of a Third World country. It could just as easily have been Brazil. Or Upper Volta. The only real difference were the nuclear weapons. Were it not for them it is unlikely that anyone would have taken much notice of Russia now. There was nothing special or ferocious about Moscow or the Russian bear. It was all just a big mess, one which really did not concern the rest of the world.
    I was sick of this new, melted-down order and I was sick of myself. I lay on a big bed in a modern hotel in Slovakia’s impoverished capital, knowing full well why I was feeling so bloody sorry for myself. Why, after dinner, I had stayed on in the bar to drink first cognac and later whisky. It was the meeting, two days earlier, with the former prime minister of the Czech Republic that had ruined the trip for me. My mood was not helped by the fact that I had toothache. One of my back teeth was giving me gyp. It acted as a constant reminder that this old bag of bones was very much the worse for wear. That I was, in every possible way, going downhill . Less hair, fewer brain cells, deteriorating teeth, shortness of breath on stairs, a waning libido. I had to admit, though, that it was the former Czech prime minister who had destroyed my last