Not long before Vladimir Putin was first
crowned president in the Kremlin cathedral
where the Romanovs had been coronated
Tzars, we were lunching in a self-service
restaurant near Red Square – with vodka shots
for a rouble by the till. As we finished eating
a young man on his own at the next table
leaned over and spoke: ‘May I speak English
to practise, please?’ He was a Japanese
political science graduate student,
he said. He had flown from his home city,
Kyoto, to Vladivostok, and taken
the Trans-Siberian Railway to Moscow
(via Lake Baikal and Omsk) to study
the decline and fall of Boris Yeltsin –
and had stayed on temping as a translator.
He asked where we were from, and, when we told him,
“Chester”, expressed delight. He had visited
our ‘home city’ on a tour of Europe
with his parents. He remembered its central
thoroughfares following the pattern
of the Roman camp it was named for –
and described the first floor Victorian
shopping arcades, which line parts of those streets,
and which the last Kaiser had much admired.
The three of us shared our wonder at the world’s
smallness – and then were silent, thinking, no doubt,
of vastnesses travelled, and imperial
mishaps. This student of politics
exuded loneliness, but we had appointments
to keep at Lenin’s Mausoleum,
and so we wished him well.
By David Selzer