Episode 18
As part of the ‘post Matisse’ calming down, the prospect of a good dinner was a fine distraction. Esmeralda WAS sulking, she needed the help of some very willing and good natured Russians to give her a push start. We eventually got our petrol but the notion of sauntering down to Moscow the following day was cause for anxiety.
Anyway, suitably attired, (including my old friend, the linen suit) we went off to the restaurant. AND what a restaurant!
Here was our ageing dowager incarnate. Loads of chandeliers, plenty of rich brocade, furniture not quite right, but pretty ornate as were the table settings. The whole was redolent of a glorious imperial past. As we sat down, we would not be surprised if Prince Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova stepped out of the pages of War and Peace and wondered if they could join us for a couple of aperitifs. Our company was more mundane but agreeable enough and slightly bemused by their antipodean table sharers. A combination of fractured words and descriptive gestures sort of communicated. Somewhere between the main course and the sturdy Russian pudding the world changed.
Some ten years earlier, at the dreaded secondary school, we were lucky enough to have dancing lessons. One would keep this fact Sub Rosa, in that, if you bumped into a bunch of your well built rustic contemporaries, you would not announce how well your Scottish Country Dancing was coming along. Added to that, for some reason, I was quite stoked on the big band American music of the twenties and thirties. That fascination is no longer with me but it did crop up with our dancing teacher.
One day she happened to be playing this stuff at full tilt and I said how much I loved it. ‘Why don’t we dance to this stuff?’ I asked. ‘People do,’ came the reply, ‘let me show you the Charleston.’ Five minutes later, I was hooked. Her comment was ‘whether you like it or not, you are a natural with this dance. Be a devil, you clearly love it’. I did and I was good. Amazing turn of events.
Back to our restaurant…
Out of nowhere, a splendid big band roared into life. They had it all, classy trumpet, tenor and alto sax and clarinet soloists, a rhythm section that drove things along at a pace which would have given any American band a run for their money.
I got on the dance floor and re- entered this magic world, oblivious of time or space.
This was my own Russian Sputnik, a self-contained satellite that had its bum on fire and put on such a show. Poor Ronda was a bit upstaged by all this, the dining audience couldn’t get enough of it. Eat your hearts out, Fred and Ginger. I was in the grip of something else, transposed and transported. Talk about dancing all night…but after the third set, the band took a breather, and so did I. Magic, will live forever. My linen suit creaked at the seams but held together.
Later, normal life abruptly returned with my new best Russian friends. This took the form of a little chat between a Ukrainian and Georgian, conducted along pugilistic lines. It seems one of our heavily henna’d darlings had been playing both ends against the middle and the boys would settle the matter as to who would prevail. The bouncers determined the resolution would be decided somewhere along the Nevsky Prospect.
Next day, the drain of ballroom euphoria was accelerated by Esmeralda and her mega-sulk. No amount of cajoling or push starting or even the threat of Siberian exile had the slightest effect. Suddenly Moscow seemed a hell of a long way away. There would be more chance in Leningrad of finding a capitalist advice centre than there would be of coming across a VW garage.
We needed the services of a highly skilled mechanic, or there was me.
Dropped in mid-story? Read the beginning of our road trip here, or start from the beginning of my memoirs, way back in Tasmania…
David Armitage 