backstreets

The temperature is dropping now, minus 17 says the thermometer on the roof of the railway station over the road. Because the day is bright and glittery, and because the kids have been driving me insane since morning, I drag them out into the world. The little one is so wrapped up she looks like a little purple Michelin man, and the boy has gone all Assassins Creed on me: in black with only his eyes showing over his ninja scarf mask.  

   And we walk inwards from the garden ring to towards the centre, down quiet lanes and through the labyrinth of courtyards and alleys. Over the ice which is near black and as hard as cast iron on the asphalt, dull but lustrous, formed into fluid shapes, snow covers the lawns and roofs, crisp now and a week old: it has been too cold to snow for some time already. Windows are frosted white, the air is still and it is silent in these back streets full of nineteenth century houses, early 20^th Moderne buildings with their ceramic tiled frescoes and organic looking stucco reliefs of vines and leaves and faces, half gothic and half strangely Celtic.

   Above us the sky is blue, more so than it ever was in midsummer and the sun, just starting to think about setting, is an impossibly bright, pale, golden shimmer. Too bright to look at: it blinds us repeatedly, flashing suddenly into sight between houses or round corners. This part of Moscow is the most beautiful, competing even with the Kremlin’s golden domed brashness. Muscovites mourn the passing of the old Moscow, when what they should be mourning is the part of them that loved these quiet spaces. Much has been demolished and replaced with self consciously contemporary buildings, but still miles and miles of beautiful streets remain. Hidden away, traffic free, on a winter Saturday at least, and full of odd little archways, and courtyards, copses of frozen trees and snow covered playgrounds and now and then a church, white as the snow, or painted in naïve bright colours and topped off with golden crosses glittering against the blue skies.

  I’ve been walking in these same streets for fifteen years or more, between Kurskaya and Kitay Gorod, down to the Yauza river and up to Chistie Prudie and I know every short cut and every quiet corner now. I know it better than I have ever known any place in truth. I walked here the day after the hurricane in 98, climbing over fallen trees and crushed cars, broken glass glittering on the paths. I took the kids to schools and kindergartens in this quarter, morning and evening for years and it still enchants me.