That Old Russian Rhyme

Sensitive Content: Homophobia, Swearing

One, two, three, four, five,

A hare went out for a walk.

Suddenly a hunter appeared

And shot the hare.

Bang bang oh oh oh,

My hare is going to die.

Those were the words of an old Russian nursery rhyme that my 4 year old niece Zemfira insisted on singing to herself at the top of her lungs as she danced around the drab lounge. You will have to trust me that it rhymes in Russian. Its melodic charm is lost in translation. On a normal night, grandfather Novel would have swiftly ordered silence from her. But tonight, while nobody said it aloud, the light innocence of childish singing was a welcome tonic. It eased the weight of history that would soon bare down on us from the TV screen.

The vision of mamo and papa’s apartment in central Moscow rests behind my eyelids each night as I drift off to sleep. That mundanity and uniformity is imprinted on me. The brutalist blocks were, then, depressing. Now, in my minds’ eye, they are comforting. The simple layout. The basic furniture. The 70s carpet and curtains. It all felt so normal then, now it feels so distant, in time and space. But this is not the story of 1990s Russian interior design, but of why their home resembled more a sardine can than a home in the winter of 1991.

We were waiting for the end of the world as we knew it. There was no sense of celebration, not in that apartment. Not openly - God forbid. That wasn’t to say that we weren’t happy. Mamo was. My younger sister, Janina, was too. It was impossible to tell what grandpa Mstislav and grandma Alevtina, mamo’s parents, were thinking. The brow of my brother Yegor was induced with a river of sweat by the threat posed to his business by the coming change. He was a “spiv,” illegally selling American goods on the Moscow streets. His wife did not particularly care for politics, nor for her “pathetic” husband these days. She had eyes only for her precious Zemfira.

Any enthusiasm was corked by the fear of the two Novels - father and son, my father and grandfather. They were conservative communists to the hilt, and cursed with the same explosive barrel of a temper. I loved nothing more in those days than arguing with my cantankerous cretin of a grandfather, whose shrivelled little face looked as though it had been submerged in a deep lake for several weeks. In old war pictures he was a strapping young man, but by December 25 1991 he was a shrunken gremlin. I do not usually speak ill of the dead, but one’s demon’s never truly pass on.

Zemfira giggled as papa brought the television to life and filled the room with an image of the midwife of our nation’s armageddon. Now grandfather Novel screamed his hateful demands for perfect quiet. Lovely Zemfira’s carefree singing faded into tears, followed by my furious chiding of my grandfather as I embraced the sobbing child. I held her tight, and led her to her mother, as my father abusively demanded that I show my grandfather nothing but sycophancy. Grandfather Novel filled my resulting silence with his venomous heckles of Chairman Gorbachev, who now stared out into his icy heart and hardened soul.

“Please Novel,” mamo beseeched. Her words were filled with nothing but warmth for a man we all knew she despised from the highest follicle of silver hanging from her sweet head to the end of her longest toe nail. I often asked her how she could stand him and she always told me “I do not make my problem with your grandfather anyone else’s problem. Positivity, Seraphim honey, always.” I did not understand then. I carry those words with me always now. Despite that, the whole room stretched like a rubber band ready to break beneath the terse looks being traded between mamo and her father in law.

Everyone gathered around the TV, huddled like Antarctic foul against the harshness, not of the cold, but of history. Gorbachev’s tone was calm and dry, in contrast with the directness of his words. He wasted no time in doing the deed. “Dear compatriots, fellow citizens,” he said, “as a result of the newly formed situation, creation of the Commonwealth of Independent States, I cease my activities in the post of the U.S.S.R. president.”

It was no shock - the end had been rumbling towards us in a slow motion of particularly gratuitous excess. It rumbled out of the spring. It tore through the summer. It simmered into Autumn. And now the end was upon us. I refused to contain myself for the sake of upholding misguided misery. I cheered and clapped. I embraced Janina and Mamo with all of my love. Grandfather Novel spat at us as he tore out into the corridor, singing the national anthem as he went and cursing Gorbachev.

“The Empire is dead, long live a free Russia,” I cried after him, catapulting a shot glass of vodka sat on a shelf aloft above my head before tossing its fiery contents down my neck. Grandfather, so used to the old order, was now living among the rubble of all that he once loved. I revelled in it. Until I noticed mamo’s parents, ashen faced and silent. Zemfira had returned to skipping laps around the kitchen, her feet slapping the tiled floor like a heavy bass, as she sang.

One, two, three, four, five,

A hare went out for a walk.

Suddenly a hunter appeared

And shot the hare.

Bang bang oh oh oh,

My hare is going to die.

“What’s wrong mamo, papa?” my own mamo asked them.

“What are you celebrating?” grandma Alevtina sighed. “You should know the Old Russian Rhyme by now,” she lamented.

Grandpa Mstislav sat up from his reclined position, his gaunt, sickness plagued face close to caving in upon itself. “We’ve seen this before, and you will see it again. The old regime is dead. Long live the next, and the next after that. Hope is a fool’s gold,” he croaked, slumping back down. Then he seemed like a pessimist, now he takes the status of Nostradamus.

“You had your liberation with Gorbachev,” grandma Alevtina continued, “there is nothing better to follow.”

“Liberation,” I scoffed. Liberation for them, perhaps. Not for me. Their stomachs were empty of food and filled instead by the groaning pangs of hunger. But my heart, along with my stomach, was starved of what it craved and my body felt heavier for carrying that dual burden of deprivation that they could never understand. They lacked money, and freedom. But I also lacked the right to be me. Gorbachev’s policy of liberation was not for me, or my imprisoned love. I still lived under the fear and hate of Russian injustice.

“And what do you know?” papa jeered from the comfort of his skin, not the armour in which I was forced to live. “Of what value are you, boy?”

“Novel!” mamo cried.

“A writer, hah! You hope there will be space in your new Russia for poetry and prose? You’ll be too poor to buy a pen and too weak to steal one.”

“We are hungry now, papa. We are poor now. We are beaten and starved and desperate. I choose to believe that we deserve better than this.. No, in fact, I choose to believe we can have better than this.”

“We all just need to calm down,” mamo said softly, laying a soothing hand upon my arm.

“I need to get out, actually,” I said, resigned.

“Oh, meeting someone?” papa sneered. He had cast his cackling reel and laid out his poisonous bait, hoping I would be foolish enough to bite the rotten hook. He knew very well the answer to that question. Mamo insisted I should not hide my secrets from him.

“I’ll come with you,” Janina said. That girl was at the time possessed of just seventeen years of life, and yet always displayed infinite wells of maturity and compassion. Only she, mamo, and, regretfully, papa knew the secret of who I loved, for which I could then have gone to prison. Janina was my guardian, mamo was my blanket, and papa was my tormentor. 

In the apartment’s hallway, where rows of fur coats and hats hung from hooks, we poured ourselves beneath layers of cuddling warmth and I checked carefully that the handwritten note I needed to deliver was in the pocket. Janina gripped my hand with hers, soft and tender and full of heart, as we left the cold hostility of home behind for the relative warmth of the Moscow streets wrapped in the clasp of minus ten degrees. The crisp dark skies were speckled with stars and the snowy streets beneath our feet cracked and crunched as we headed towards Red Square from where we would watch the end of history.

Red Square and the surrounding streets were surprisingly quiet that evening. There were no great parties or rallies. There were just a few out for an evening walk across their nation’s cadaver. There was no spectacle or drama, just a population sheltering against the hurricane of events that had enveloped it. Janina and I stopped and looked up beyond the heavens to the scarlet red, hammer-and-chisel adorned banner of a nation now consigned to the grave. Her arm rested in mine as it descended to hell below, taking its final lap of glory down the flagpole. The white-blue-and-red ensign of an old, and a new, Russia was raised to take its place.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had fallen. That Old Russian Rhyme rang in my ears as it did:

One, two, three, four, five,

A hare went out for a walk.

Suddenly a hunter appeared

And shot the hare.

Bang bang oh oh oh,

My hare is going to die.

It was an empire that fell not under the thunderous blare of guns and cannonade, nor to the soundtrack of cheering crowds dancing on its corpse. Never before in history had the funeral elegy of a superpower's demise been no more than the fluttering of a tricolour flag in the unfeeling icy winds of winter and a smattering of sheepish applause from a wary Russia watching from below.

It was hard to feel the winds of change gusting across Red Square into the dark and crumbling corners of the Chairman's office in the Kremlin that night. There was just the machete blade of winter's sharpened breeze. Yet I let my mind soar into whatever struggling whisper of hope I could sense in the air, and I pictured it bursting through to Gorbachev's erstwhile office, clearing the cobwebs of Stalinism and the corpse of Breschnev’s stagnation like a disinfectant. 

While It looked no different in the yellowish glow of street lights on crisp snow, that night I hoped that this was a new Russia. As it was in 1917, and 1922, and 1953, and 1964, and 1985, here in 1991, and again in 1999. Seven new Russias. And each of the seven looked in the mirror at the end of their time and saw, glaring back, the reflection of the old Russia that it was supposed to have buried.

Ominous footsteps across the snow, like a deer walking over crisps, approached. The harbinger of the other Janina in my life. While my sister Janina was a warming presence on my arms, the other Janina was a sorrowful enigma, sealed behind a high wall of hatred. But I depended upon her more than anyone else. I greeted her a good evening as I always did. She simply scowled and pulled a letter from within her knee-length black coat. I practically snatched it from her hands and tore the envelope in which it was cocooned asunder, desperate to see the words crafted with earnest care and in stunning cursive by the hand of my lost love:

My Dearest Love,

I miss you today as every day, as I know you miss me too. No prison in which they can hold me is as confining as my life without you in it. But I know that we will be together again, my love. I know brighter times are coming. No nation, no law, no system will keep us apart. I will be with you, whether in Moscow, or across the land and seas. I trust that you wait for me now, as ever.

Forever yours with love,

Roman

A single tear, tingling cold on my ice-seared skin, began to roll from my eye as I reached into my pocket to trade in my own letter. I held it out in front of me, waiting for the other Janina to silently take it from me and move on, as she always did, but her hands remained resting in her coat pockets as she shook her head remorselessly at me.

“This is the last letter that I am delivering,” she drawled, nodding her head towards the script that clasped between the fingers of my leather glove.

“What?” I said.

“This has gone on long enough. I will not play a part in this anymore.”

“A part in what?” my Janina said, outrage bubbling in her throat.

“This… perversion… is why my brother is in prison in the first place. I will encourage it no more, for his sakes, for mine, and for yours, Seraphim.”

“But I love him.”

“No you don’t. This sort of love is not real. It is rotten. It is gross. This is the last you will ever hear from my brother, or he from you. I will tell him that you want to cut things off because you are afraid of being arrested, and that will be the end of it.”

“You vile bitch,” Janina cried, her careful, gentle demeanour slipping as she stepped up for me. “Do you not love your brother?”

“I do. But I love him despite his flaws, without indulging in his self-destruction.”

“I love my brother because of who he is,” she said, looking towards me and seeming surprised at the smile that had stretched across my face, “not in spite of it. That is real love.”

“Who he is is a criminal. Should either of you contact myself or my brother again, I will report you to the authorities.”

“There will be a place for us…” I said assuredly and in defiance, “in the new Russia.”

“Roman says the same, but you must both wake up, now. There is no new Russia. Do you not remember the rhyme of our nation?”

With that, she took off into the cruel, brave night, leaving me with nothing but the last words I thought I would ever hear from my first love, my last love, the love of my life.

“How do you both do it?” my Janina asked me as we walked back to the apartment that night.

“Do what?” I asked in turn.

“Stay so hopeful? Stop yourselves from crumbling?”

I simply whispered back to her in response:

One, two, three, four, five,

A hare went out for a walk.

Suddenly a hunter appeared

And shot the hare.

Bang bang oh oh oh,

My hare is going to die.

People still ask me that thirty-odd years later, here in London, though not as directly as that. They express it through misguided praise and half-informed concern. I tell them that the Russia of my youth - my family, my home, my love - had been my prison then. Now it was my comfort blanket. But there was no rose tint over my memories. That was the Russia in which I was beaten, shot, and stabbed. The Russia that jailed me, poisoned me, and chased me away to the furthest, coldest, rainiest, and proudest corner of Europe, aside from my beloved Moscow itself.

There is, too, surprise when I lavish Moscow and my ice-kissed motherland with superlatives of adoration despite all of the disappointments it has visited upon me every single day since December 25 1991. For there was a section of that old Russian rhyme that Zemfira always forgot. Indeed, an ending seemingly lost to most adults too, but one that I made sure when I got home that night that she would never forget again. I sat her on my lap and I bounced her up and down dotingly as I ran her through it again and again, telling her she must always hold these words in her heart.

You see, there are two sorts of hope. There is hope that comes and goes on the breeze. Our hope to win a prize or for a smooth and happy day. And then there is the hope that we breed within ourselves, that burns brightest when things are at their most difficult, and that lasts beyond the concept of hope itself. That sort of hope never dies. True hope is like true love. It defies logic, withstands all obstacles, and endures all. It cannot be influenced by facts or old rhymes. That is the hope I felt then and feel now for my nation.

I hear the last words of that rhyme every night, as I picture that uniform flat made into a palace by mamo's special touch. I imagine Zemfira giggling with an innocent love for life unspoiled by its complexities as she repeated that last line back to me. I hung onto these words in my heart, right up until that day when my doorbell rang. And there he was on my doorstep: a face I could never forget, but lost beyond the very last words he had ever written to me. Yet, Roman Zubarev, older but as beautiful as he was on the day he was arrested, stood on my doorstep and spoke to me the last words of That Old Russian Rhyme:

He was brought home

And he turned out to be alive.