I have always found shopping for food in France an almost sensuous delight, particularly when buying fruit and vegetables. I don’t know how they manage to make their salad leaves so bright-green and their tomatoes so unabashedly red.
While on holiday in Normandy last summer, I couldn’t tear my gaze away from a graceful plywood basket of tomatoes in a huge hangar-like Carrefour supermarket. So different was its shape and design to the packaging of its British equivalents that I felt compelled to acquire it and bring it back home to the UK. Emptied of the tomatoes, the minibasket is standing on my desk as I write these lines. I think I now know the secret of its attraction: it reminds me of the last day of my life, 35 years ago.
Before you call a mental health responder, let me briefly take you back to the snow-ridden Moscow of 31st January 1990—my last ever day in the USSR and, as looks increasingly likely now, in Russia too. It was on this night that I set to clandestinely leave the country, never to return—a deed that, according to the Soviet Criminal Code, was punishable by a long prison sentence, even death. As the Soviet Union’s first investigative journalist who had found himself and his family under the unbearable pressure of the authorities, I had no other option.
Shortly before midday, I took a Metro train from the suburb, where we lived, to the Union of Journalists building in the city centre to pick up the badge and diploma which went with my newly won Ilf and Petrov Award for satirical journalism. This was the schizophrenic reality of Moscow in the late 1980s to the 1990s. A maverick hack could receive awards while still being persecuted and spied upon.
In Pushkin Square, a long line of about 8,000 people—cordoned by police and enclosed with turnstiles—was snaking along the snow towards the country’s first ever McDonald’s restaurant, which had opened just that morning. I calculated that it would take a five- to seven-hour wait in the freezing cold to get inside. The happy ones, who had already managed to get the taste of a Big Mac and survived, would emerge clutching freebies. These included “western-looking” disposable cups, plates and bowls, which they would take home and use for years to come as tableware, or even as flowerpots!
A resilient and empathetic granny, pressing half a dozen empty plastic containers from chips and burgers to her chest, handed one over to me graciously: “Here you go, young man. Take it home!”
The bowl looked nice and thoroughly un-Soviet (at least in my “Soviet” eyes), not dissimilar in shape to the Carrefour minibasket of tomatoes, an unexpected and unasked-for reminder of my previous, Soviet, life. Just like a timid trickle at the source of a major river, small and seemingly unimportant details can trigger a strong flow of memories.
Yes, having spent 36 years in a grotesque and cruel totalitarian state, I am now in the 35th year of my “second life” (not to be confused with the eponymous virtual-reality online game) in a thoroughly different environment. I now live in an alternative universe of sorts: a new society with new friends, new values. And although I was fluent in English long before my defection, it took me some time to be able to call it my “second mother tongue”, the language in which I now talk, write, think, teach and even dream.
The man in that first life was born in the now war-torn Ukrainian city of Kharkiv and spent his childhood in an unmapped “closed town” outside Moscow, where both my parents worked at a top-secret military facility. His youth was spent in the Soviet Ukraine and adulthood in Moscow. That “first life” ended with a peaceful, sudden death at the age of 36, the moment he crossed the border by train near Brest on 1st February 1990.
I had to start my new western life from scratch: from the first rented flat in Highgate, where my son went to school and where I still occasionally visit to indulge in nostalgia. I view it as my true place of birth; my first life’s birthplace in Kharkiv has been bombed out of existence.
My second life’s “childhood” was spent in Australia, where, as a successful columnist and writer, I faced—for the first time—both the bright and the dark side of western freedoms. The second adulthood spanned over the UK, Europe, the United States and elsewhere. The main lesson learned from this period was that excessive travel can do more harm than good, and that you are in danger of losing more than you find when constantly on the road.
My second life has now become more settled and happier. As for the second death, it has not yet happened, as you might have guessed, meaning I still have the time to write about my second life as it goes on, every month, in this column.
An extended food-warning label for the columns to come: my writing will contain flashbacks to my previous life. This is simply unavoidable for somebody called Vitali Vitaliev. I have two “vitae”—lives—in my very name!
To use another metaphor: you can replace the wallpaper and rearrange furniture in the imaginary house of your childhood, but you can never alter the view from its windows.
