Home is where the heart stops

I’m thrown by how much Moscow is home: I hadn’t noticed that happening until I got back from America. Returning to England doesn’t feel that way, for England is home too: my time there is mainly spent in the house I grew up in.

 But walking out into Sheremetevo Airport, with its shiny new terminals and customs officers who still don’t actually smile but look as though they might just know how to, and seeing the Cyrillic script and those Cyrillic faces everywhere evoked the feeling that landing in London gave me 10 years back: that sense of: “Right, this is my world.” What was more unexpected was that it felt like Europe, which it is after America, very much Europe. Compare Moscow to London and the latter seems like the capital of Medieval Elsewhereistan, yet after a fortnight of New York’s siren drenched, glittery self regard seeing quiet people quietly doing stuff is like a soothing bath. No one asks me how I’m doing when I buy a train ticket into the city, the guy who sits in the next seat is clearly not going to start a conversation, and after I half return his curt nod, he is assured that I won’t either. As I leave the train the steward doesn’t tell me to have a great day, and the metro is not a white tiled public toilet with large people singing bad A cappella soul songs in the wagons. Here the metro has exactly the same aura of marbled grandeur as the NY Public Library’s main building. Bolsheviks are startlingly good at metros.

 And then the green, I look from this window and I count …one second… fifty three full grown trees in glorious summer dress, and about two acres of grass. In Midtown Manhattan if you drop a few cabbage leaves into a box it will fill up with self-conscious people using Macbooks before you have reached the next stoplight.

 And there is a stop light every minute: they took a concrete and brick chessboard and filled it with traffic and sirens. Then, having burned all the green stuff, and half blocked most of the sidewalks with scaffolding, and every corner with people trying to make you get on an overpriced bus tour, they made every junction into a waiting game. All the time there I was looking for the quiet courtyard that is rarely more than a minute away here and I never found it, is grass socialist too? Green too Islamic?

 I loved the place, a spectacular city, and endlessly fascinating, but I get back here and this absurd and ravenous monster of a city feels like an ocean of calm.

Moscow, the sultry coquette, has sneaked up on me yet again.