Free After Love by Subhash Jaireth

her, and not only because she played guitar and sang beautiful Georgian songs. During this party she saw that I was tired and bored and told me to pick up my parka and leave. ‘There is nothing as beautiful as Moscow in the early hours of the morning,’ she told me. ‘Go, you idiot, and don’t worry about Katya. She won’t be offended.’ Then she took an apple from the table, kissed it and shoved it into my pocket. So here I was, a solitary flaneur, ready for the city to reveal itself to me. I was dead tired and wanted to sleep but a voice inside told me to keep walking.
    It was still dark and the moon that would turn full later in the week moved along with me. Outside the Hotel Prague I saw a waiter sitting on the steps, smoking.
    â€˜Come and have a cigarette,’ he invited. ‘Talk to me.’
    I ignored his invitation, turned right onto Gogol Boulevard, and stopped at the famous writer’s statue. It stood with its back to one of the most beautiful boulevards in Moscow. On the granite plinth I spotted a dog trying to chew the plastic wrapper off a bouquet of flowers. On the other side an old woman slept under a filthy blanket.
    The week before at this very spot I had witnessed a protest by four dissidents: three men and a young woman in a bright yellow sweater. They held a long red banner with white letters, the top line in Russian with an English translation underneath. The English words ‘freedom’ and ‘travel’ were misspelt.
    A crowd of onlookers had gathered to the right of Gogol. Facing them stood three militiamen in uniforms and two men in caps and black leather jackets. Two vans were parked across the boulevard, with more militiamen inside. It was a silent protest and nothing much had happened. Then suddenly a man in the crowd pulled a camera out of his backpack and took some pictures. One of the leather-jackets rushed towards him and snatched the camera, opened it and ripped out the film. The three militiamen moved quickly towards the protestors to pull down the banner. Only the young woman resisted. A militiaman, who later revealed herself as a good-looking blonde, pulled hard at the banner and the woman in the yellow sweater slipped and fell. She scraped her nose, which bled, but she kept hold of the banner.
    None of her friends moved to help her. The banner was ripped apart and lay on the ground between them. The militiawoman pulled it again and was finally able to grab it. But as she pulled it in she also ripped the sweater off the young woman who had nothing on underneath, not even a bra.
    The crowd giggled at this spectacle and the militiawoman threw the sweater back at the protestor, who struggled to her feet and joined the other three.
    All four stood silently for a while and then merely walked away. Amazingly, no one was arrested.
    As I walked past Gogol, I tried to recall the name of the woman in the yellow sweater. ‘Galya,’ I told myself, ‘yes, her name was Galya.’ The older of the three men, I recalled, the one with a beard as thick as Marx’s, had asked: ‘Galya, are you OK?’
    From the statue the boulevard sloped down, slowly curving then taking a sharp turn before culminating in the impressive arched pavilion of the Metro station. The eastern side, along which a stream used to run, is raised. The water was channelled into a huge pipe when Moscow was rebuilt after the fires started by Napoleon’s army of occupation.
    During the day the place would be crowded with many chess players, their boards spread across the tables in front of a small three-storey building standing humbly next to a palatial house with five Ionic columns. The small building housed the headquarters of the Russian Chess Federation.
    As I reached the Metro station and stepped into the street to cross, I quickly retreated as two ambulances, followed by a militia-van and three Soviet ZiL limousines rushed past. They were no doubt carrying an