Moscow Time

After nocturnal and grey toned perspectives, my first arrival at the main station is recollected with a peculiar dizziness after witnessing the long journey. As the passengers left the wagon – just a singular one that has been pushed over the course of the journey by different engines, or perhaps pulled them, so that the last hours of non-sleep were regulated by the comings and goings of trains and stations – music intoned through speakers. I do not remember the exact tune of the music, but after appreciating the engineering marvel of the station that lost its sense of scale decades ago, I imagine it now, as a massive and portentous tune, carrying the passengers and the station into a voyage back in times, welcoming and promising them.
The station itself was an accumulation of tracks and platforms, alike earlier impressionist stations depicted in the outbreaks of industrialisation. The tracks did not seem to extent further than where a set of stairs started; behind which was hiding a city I did not know anything of, and actually did not expect much about. I arrived unprepared. Down the stairs, I took a turn to my right. I still had the music in my ears, even though it was certainly not audible anymore, and arrived so into a glorious hall that contained numerous ornaments embedded onto the edges of the ceiling. Golden leaves covered those, while a marble floor reflected into a chandelier three times bigger than the couchette I had just spent the night in. The hall was gold and white; as well as burgundy, and deep green. However the dominant sentiment was of grey and beige.
On one side: some wooden doors from which soldiers arrived. They were tall and wore a warm long coat of sombre colour, with a belt that adjusted at their waist. The one that looked at me also had a chapka; and I wondered if it was that cold outside, or if the uniforms were set alike for winter. Opposite this hallway and the wooden doors, in a prominent stature and height was the display panel for arrivals and departures. The symbols mixed up. The dates seemed to include the past days as well as the coming ones, so that it appeared like an upset of visits and journeys made from that city to others. In fact as it happens, not many train journeys could be made from this station; and once I had the symbols deciphered, I understood that the major flow took place from the main city to the second of the region: MNV.
Acoustically I lost the music, as I got interested in the murmur of the nearby persons. Whether passengers, railway personnel, peasants, passer-bys or hosts waiting for their guests; it was impossible to say. The voices were neither loud nor quiet, but affected me as I tried to recognise these new tunes as coded partitions of a language I have never really learnt, but mostly guessed at.
I switched the paroling voices off, in order to concentrate into that very precise moment, where the schedule panel would announce a newly arriving train. Around the shadow of the chandelier, next to the benches and the central fountain, all seemed now sealed in a silence of anticipation. However, the panel did not change. The soldiers pushed other wooden doors or made for the reception, while some persons wearing black coats and carrying plastic bags sidled into smaller passages.
My temporal memory seemed to be lost – again – in the aftermath of all the journeying I took over night, or I accumulated over a night, a day and several countries. Neither did the velocity I had just experienced really corresponded with the clock next to the arrival panel, and looking for confirmation I could not tell if the other clocks in the reception office provided real time information or were actually decorative devices.
I stood under what seemed to me the stereotyped image of Russia – pompous, old, overblown, traditional and unexpected; even though by looking more precisely, everything seemed filtered from the very first moment: from the unrecognisable music to the written symbols – I could not temperate myself on the station’s rhythm: a sort of standby situation.
My tools were simple. Both arrival time and journey’s duration were written on my ticket. They did not correspond, even when I added the necessary hour for the time zone. Only later in that day I recognised that the arrival time has been set up on Moscow Time under the very simple logistical thought to simplify railway works in this geographical immensity; or enabling all stray minds to configure themselves onto the political capital that was stiflingly reigning from Caucasus to Siberia.
During my stay in the city, I came several times back to the station; as if this time gap created by the Moscow Time in use in the station held me definite; an enjoyably secure time gap in an urban environment I found hard to follow. There were standing relics of a Russia I had heard of, or that I had maybe created through dozens of images fixed in my mind. Innocently and perhaps naively I have been looking for the samovar and the vodka, but not only have I stayed a foreigner, I became a passive observer.

- – - -

Outside the station was a city rumbling with cars and traffic. I spent most of my time walking around from one street to another, from one Prospekt to the other, whose names absolutely remembered Russian Revolutionaries, Soviet chiefs and communist conglomerate, or sometimes referred to former East-Prussian names that did not seem to counteract or frustrate any attempt of Russian identity homogeneity, but indeed upheld territorial heritages.
In-between the several housing blocks, administration offices or military institutions, some monuments had been sprinkled, to remember fighting, victory, victims and heroes. Constructing the city urban heritage, as points of reference into the relatively young building fabric, as social tag within a former Soviet mythology of construction and self-accomplishment, the infinite network of monuments was present and lasting, and continued the first purpose of this architectural ornament: to be there for eternity. Counting them, there were so many, even more than the several inevitable shopping malls that populate the city panorama since the economic boom of the 1990’s.
Behind all those facades were several courtyards that delimited the boundaries of the traffic, the noise, the pollution and opened a haven of smaller streets and informal passages.
At that point I usually adopted an unreliable walk as I very often got lost within some no-man’s land of mud and tramway crossings. Those were meeting paths created by the inhabitants from one block to the other, or from the tramway stop to the kiosk, or simply following the most direct route from what seemed to be one sidewalk to another. I became able to decode them but still preferred to kindly follow older women hopping from one secured and often waterproof area to another.

The kiosk next to the tank commemorating a general – I forgot the name, was selling milk and bread. I never dared myself to buy there, too scared not to be understood, and preferred the anonymous supermarket nearby. However, one day I noticed on my way back that the kiosk was selling some gingerbread, and I suddenly starved for it. I decided to buy some, to speak out my few words that would have certainly tried to describe this other type of bread at the left-corner of the window display (I did not know the word gingerbread), to repeat them, and to excuse myself not to speak the language. The kiosk was closed. It closed everyday from two to three in the afternoon, and as I only passed-by and never really stopped, or because I mostly observed through my eyebath, I did not know about the afternoon break. Neither have I ever seen someone leaving that kiosk. The vendor, I imagine it now as a woman, seemed to disappear totally within this one hour.
This was all very real, and even though I had been seeing the city, the barrier felt constantly self-aggrandizing. My linguistic qualities have found early enough their endings while my peregrinations were deriving, and often landed into one of the tramways, as a recall perhaps of the station itself, as if I was seeking for the travel itself instead of the arriving. I had heard there that only women were driving the tramways, but I mostly became fascinated by the ribbon of tickets that the ticket collector – also a woman – was wearing on her wrist, and in her ability to recognise in a crowded wagon who already paid the fare and who did not. There was no transport map, and it took me a while to pinpoint myself the itinerary of the diverse tramways, not to talk about the diverse buses, mini-buses, vans and mini-vans.
It was obvious that the city I was moving in would require more time than I had primarily thought. Nevertheless I continued my drift and recorded sounds, passages and views. There are cities for which the first momentum spent on their geographies, already gives you a codex to follow; others offer a first impression never to be forgotten; here, it was more complex. Of course, streets and alleys, as well as buildings and infrastructures reminded me some other visited and experienced cities, but there was something incredibly sorrowful in that landscape. Neither beautiful, nor shapeless, it was dull and sullen. The rare colours were the one of the neon lights and of the window-displays in the very occidental shops or from some advertisement billboards that almost parasited this dullness.
One place however was source of expression. Behind the main square, that was offering all characteristics of a provincial city: church, city hall, school, bank, shopping mall and main university, stood the market. It actually started before the official walls: in a sort of compilation of unofficial stands. The few items to be sold were laid directly on the floor, or sometimes supported by a crate. The babuskhas were sitting behind their collections, proudly, silent, immobile. Some vegetables, prepared pickles, sometimes a few woollen socks, or a dozen of catkins; just sufficient to eventually sell enough and try their chances the next day.
But it was in the market itself that the city was at its climax. The language was quick, loud and precise; three words maximum. The goods were presented widely but simply; especially in the two buildings connected to each other, where the meat and the fish differentiated, an atmosphere of auction took its paroxysm. The smell was very strong and smoked, while the flesh was wide-open and varying all existing reds. Everyone seemed troubled, in the expectancy of being caught in a non-pretentious act.
From there I could scrutinise further than the facades of the buildings, the closed doors, the disguise of the faces and the general public image, all actors of that city – infrastructure and inhabitants – were constantly offering to me. I had from there another viewing point, like a peephole in the inhabitants’ behaviours. However I was still neglecting a lot; indeed this was more restrictive than a dead end itself.
It is so that I ended up in front of the North Station, one of the several stations that used to rhyme with either summery escapades to the sea or with regional rural retreats. The buildings stood as relics of a time when the zoo, the parks and the nearby seaside were fully part of the popular programme, while these obligatory passages to the surrounding region, were scanning a population eager for Sunday occupations. Even though this station actually stood under a state of frequent use, its white façade and green fences defended a stage framed by empty platforms and tracks – as if every time a passenger would wait there, he would have become the main actor of some earlier black and white films about a seasonal retreat from the industrial city to the hinterland.
My own encounter with the city’s hinterland distinguished in the monotony of tones, sometimes bustled by some constructivist concrete structures announcing the main city, monuments to victories, graveyards, or ecclesiastical buildings – deserted red brick churches and newly constructed golden cupolas.
Deriving in the Oblast as much as I had in the city, the ennui of the landscapes merged with the sky in an undifferentiated tone of grey. The roads were narrow, not necessarily designed as trunk ones, and almost immaculate of architecture; it seemed as if they were there more to fill in the territory than to actually connect the peripheral towns of the South and the North. Obligatory facing its own limits – marked by its instrumental borders or former military zones – it was in the seaside that the isolation, as well as the monotony of landscapes, softened into natural scenery or even etymology of the Mare Suebicum.
Back to town, at night, the doors seemed immaculate; the bars led to cellars or closed early. Only the supermarkets seemed to be open 24/7, their foyer became meeting points for young people who squatted the supermarket’s pizzeria, or for some older people collecting some items on their way to their private parties. Solely the cadence of the last tramways, with on board two women surely exhausted, comforted me in the idea it actually was night time.

- – - -

On the day I left the city, a general impression of missing the time returned to me, and it is confused that I stepped again, and for the last time, into the station’s hall. It was the only train leaving that afternoon, and while I was worrying about the long journey again, a sense of evaluation of my observational stay in the city immured my thinking. Questioning to what extent I had really acknowledged the city, as I had been evolving in a mute landscape of grey housing blocks and non-ending alleys, I felt again that strong sense of time travel within the station’s main hall, stronger than ever.
My memory confused, and the authenticity of this event that occurred months ago has become the sideshow of gathered souvenirs, experienced moments, and memories collected and redistributed now and again, now and then.
Now and then, this actual moment, in which I convicted myself into a technique of reconstruction of this hour which seemed to disappear within the train schedule, or the hour the vendor had simply left the kiosk, or the hour the last tramway crossed the main square. Within all the back-and-forth of remembering and reconstructing, both my arrival and outset of the city, passing inevitably by this same station, seem to me as the most authentic. Or the most authentically reconstructed.
Neither copy of the event, nor exact transcription of my memory snippets, this reconstruction became an exact narration of fictional desire; with only a quest for the exact musical tune that resounded while I physically entered this in-between space of the station: the pompous music that tuned from the speakers as I quit the travelling wagon in order to arrive, but that I cannot remember of sounding when I entered the train again.

This essay was written on the invitation of photographers Elmar Bambach and Julia Marquardt, for inclusion in the forthcoming publication Kaliningrad (Berlin, 2009/10), alongside a text by Ciarán Walsh, and archived online here with their permission.
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