Palimpsest city

Where the image of a city comes from, and I am ardently convinced of this, the main thing is in which of them you happened to fall in love and be in love. Leaving aside the insidious question “who?”, the ideal places for playing giveaway with Cupid seem to me to be, of course, Paris, any seaside cities and towns - St. Petersburg, Venice, New York, the French Riviera, Crimea - woven from one’s own or other people’s memories or films, or maybe some provincial exotic town with the smell of fruit, buffalo milk, Asian musk or sequoia, and maybe even a wild village, where any event can be freely painted with colors of any brightness. The point here is not the usual latitude and longitude, but the length of the lines written about this place and the longitude of the stories told about it. Especially those told by a heated heart. So, if you happen to fall in love in Moscow, created for merchants to scold from high bell towers made of glass and concrete, you have to invent romance anew.

Moscow is a Varangian in fashionable horn-rimmed glasses. In this city, Asia has already fallen into slumber, and Europe has not yet opened its eyes from a lingering sleep.

So I had to invent churches in Chinese city courtyards, connected by cramped, curved streets, not at all designed for walking. You squeeze through them as if wearing a fur coat on a packed tram, tearing off the Soviet gray plaster and brushing the corners of the white stone chambers like a boyar’s beard.

All around are the facades of houses with lines that have lost their evenness over time and unfolding before us the history of all their restorations and a palette of shades of gray and red. Bizarre stripes of cracks and chips of Chinese city houses are sometimes assembled into entire compositions. You are especially susceptible to this in childhood, when the landmark or distinctive feature is more likely to be a whitewash that has fallen away in the shape of a continent or a protruding brick of a difficult to describe color than a sign or inscription. There are plenty of these artifacts preserved here, and all adults are grateful to their Moscow childhood. In general, in childhood, beauty, especially external beauty, is more a property of imagination than of emotions or, especially, taste. Fantasy gains experience and becomes taste.

Here is the evolution of human thought: from fantasy through facts to an interwoven picture, a mechanism. And on this seemingly almost scientific path - from hypothesis to law - stories unfold. Falling in love has become love, passing through delight and inspiration. This is the cheerful babble of a child, the impressions of a strict person about the first evening in an unknown city, or what a more frivolous person would call “it seemed to me.” Language runs ahead of thoughts and, as it were, slightly grabs meanings that are far from each other. We, ashamed of our words, begin to only grasp that part of the picture that they allow us. It is necessary to reveal or release the aura of things and allow it, through language, that tireless architect, to take possession of the imagination. After all, the churches of China Town are ancient Buddhist pagodas, aren’t they?

It is they, these churches, if not with the black and gold glitter of the domes and the ringing of inverted ringing bells, then with a subtle hint of the famous Orthodox meekness, that set lovers in such a simple, but sometimes so difficult to find way.

And so, “in the sadeh,” as the name of one of the local temples says, she appeared. Curly or not doesn't matter anymore. All that is remembered is the eyelash on the left cheekbone, which fell off from the orderly row on the breathtaking eyes, and other nonsense. He talks as if about uninteresting things - entrance exams, floor-length pleated skirts, some unknown Italian surnames. But the scientists were right when they called love a disease - the ear tries to catch the rhythm of the ringing of bells and the rumble of wheels, the nose, having made its way through its sugary perfume, is excited by the incense coming from where the ploughshare, shining after the rain, seems to wink, saying that everything is okay, and things so far from each other begin to come closer.

The word “ploughshare” itself contains a play. The French article, which is inconvenient for Moscow, complements the coarse “fur” that shelters drowsy Asia in this city. Something similar sways in the word “love”.

And now the story about the city, which she wants to present in the palm of her hand as a gift, begins to take shape like smoke. Now we need to learn to breathe it.

The nose suggests that something was not incense, for today is Saturday, but a multi-voiced chorus of flowers, smelling as if they were trying to smell. A gardener with unkempt dog stubble appears and silently with a smile begins to wield water from a hose, looking first down at China Town and then at the hydrangeas. And while the silence is filled with his funny swarming against the backdrop of the historical center of Moscow, you are looking for words for everything you see.

If you're a lover and a loquacious person, then you know that unsettling, unreliable feeling of searching for words and stories. You are also familiar with the strange science that grows from the depths of this anxiety of searching for interest in its mind-blowing eyes. And where is that technique that allows you, looking at things, to immediately see a plot in them that is suitable for entertaining a beauty?

And so, I seemed to let the things around us talk about each other. And their aura ceased to be transparent. The city was connected by thousands of semantic threads, so that later they would all tie up here, in the gardens of Ivanovo Hill, before these breathtaking eyes. I really want to please her!

You need to confront your ideas with other people in order to distinguish them from fantasies, just as you need to see the object of your love in front of you in order to fill it with meanings, from which, perhaps, a new true love will be born. An idea that remains only in the head is a deception. Like love without eyes looking at each other. I asked him: “Don’t you think that the Chinese city churches are ancient Buddhist temples?” The answer gave my story a new twist. Go out into the city, friends, talk to the gardeners.

He starts with her favorite poet. And this strangely changes the lighting around and moves my figure several fields forward.

Midnight in Moscow. Luxurious Buddhist summer.

With small noises the streets in narrow iron trunks diverge.

The rings of boulevards are blissful in the black pox...

I'm talking about the monument. Mandelstam, as always, seems to have arrogantly turned away from the monastery, raising his head, looking towards the synagogue. He was one of the most grateful visitors to Moscow, giving birth to many lines about it. The first meeting with Moscow coincided with his affair with Tsvetaeva. And its missing links were filled with her favorite dashes. Marina Mnishek, who first appeared to him in Tsvetaeva, turned all forty forties to the city of execution to the ringing of bells and the smell of freshly baked bread.

But if you find yourself on Khitrovka, you may find it strange that this simple square smells of vodka and you can hear obscene women’s cries, and the boarded up windows around hide unsightly revelry and fights, and children lost at cards. Here it’s as if someone is really asking you for cigarettes and you can hear singing:

We drink vodka, we drink rum,

Tomorrow we'll go around the world...

And indeed, brick facades, the names of alleys or some forgotten sign will remind others of something else.

Now this square is deserted, but once upon a time tavern passions boiled here and crime flourished. The very name of one of the taverns - “Katorga” - served not so much to attract customers as to scare away strangers. The market square, which once emerged from the ashes of Napoleonic fires, has received a new, stormy life with a taste of fusel and blood. And so, stepping over the puddle, as a waiter might once have stepped over with a bottle of vodka in the hands of a blood-spitting convict lying at the threshold, we find ourselves in an alley and climb one of the seven hills, where the church watches the Khitrov outrages like a decrepit sage. The decrepit sage managed to shelter both the jailers and the cartoon office before taking on a gingerbread appearance and quietly defending the title of an oasis among the old, rough houses of Kulishki.

It’s strange to remember the devil here, when nearby there is an almost toy popular print church with pot-bellied apses and a courtyard with a bench under the dull shine of wet domes. Unless, “damn me, how beautiful!”

But don't yawn, passerby. Some foreign car will drive past the narrow sidewalk, so narrow that three people will definitely not be able to pass each other, and generously splash you with puddles, of which there are quite enough here. An Asian janitor waiting out the bad weather in a nearby arch will grin at you and say:

-See! What wheels... But I don’t think it will reach Kazan...

But Maroseyka, house number 17, is pale emerald. When it rains, water drips from the caryatids under the roof, flows from their curled hair, and accumulates in the dimples at the collarbones. Slightly wincing from the rain and the light of shop windows, you can forever watch the beautiful scene with seven marble girls crying sobbing so that tears flow down their chests. And on the other side of the street stands the red church of Cosmas and Damian, a kind of observatory with golden telescopes aimed straight at God, above which rises the main building of the drug control service.

When the pavements trembled with trams, decapitated churches, which really looked like pagodas, sheltered the museums of Atezim, and under the old stucco here and there from houses shouted signs “Drink Van Houten’s cocoa!”, Mandelstam, hearing the noise of the present time, saw a lazy and clumsy history rotating, and with a thought that did not want to obey the flow of prepared phrases, he described Moscow as Buddhist.

The myth of a city on water is alien to Moscow. That's why she doesn't believe in tears. She is not given the opportunity to psychotherapeutically enjoy her own reflection in the river and, as it were, invent herself, even on paper. But if you still get attached to comparing water with time, Moscow seems more like a cast-iron cauldron into which rivers flow. Otherwise - memory. Under the centuries-old weight of fatal events and the dust of history, she does not care about the play of light and shadow on the muddy surface. Everything is already written here - watch and learn. And here only the sun is allowed to reflect on the domes.

Dostoevsky was in these gardens where we are sitting, but he did not leave any stories. But our gardener also has something in common with him. Another thing is Chekhov, who became infected with Moscow and “knowing nothing, uncultured, very smart and unusually important, askew with envy, with a huge liver, yellow, gray, bald, wandered around Moscow from house to house, everywhere bringing in something yellow, gray, bald...”.

The gardener, having become attached to our senses, asks us to give our nose a rest and listen to see if Tchaikovsky’s music is playing from Jurgenson’s music printing house. From the same building of the former chambers of the pre-Petrine figure, beards flew like a crooked elbow, standing at the knee of Khokhlovsky Lane, three hundred years ago. Today they would fall at the entrance to a barbershop with a pretentious name, which lived out its rented life in a basement with vaults on which you can even see the mark of a brick factory, which did not even suspect that its cheap products would last for three hundred years.

And she, the recipient of these stories, constantly quotes Mandelstam and gently, almost inaudibly, chews an apple.

But once upon a time, grand duchesses enjoyed the apples from these orchards that filled the heights of Chinatown and ordered their husbands to build temples here for any worthy occasion.

Now, indeed, somewhat bored with the prosphoras and chapels, these places housed a Lutheran church and a synagogue. In the church, for the sake of leisure, you can always listen to the organ, but the synagogue gathers around itself an outlandish contingent. I recommend watching it. And all this in the historical center of Moscow, breathing with antiquities. Indeed, it will not be surprising if one day a Buddhist king rules here - these vaults, roofs and people have gone through so many changes.

In the heat here, it’s true that thoughts are mainly about the south. But the white stone does not allow thoughts to dive into the Black Sea water, and the observation skills of some of us only allow us to see that the Historical Museum on the Trade Square, today proud of its redness, really resembles the carved wood of the house of the goddess Kumari in Nepal. But this is just a fantasy, a reason to talk about style. That is, how should a writer fill a city with fantastic angular characters and complex structures or boring, sometimes disgusting, but still people and buildings familiar to everyone.

Take, for example, the St. John the Baptist Monastery. Beautifully built by Italian craftsmen with the money of John IV, better known as the Terrible. The money of the king of the oprichnina, like a black cat, crossed the path of the fate of the monastery. Its thick and strong walls smoked the innocent here both during the turmoil and under Peter. There are few places in the world where you can find a place that tried on revival architecture in the midst of fur barbarism, and quickly learned to combine executions and liturgies.

In the legendary times of the hammer and sickle, there was even an institution here (a couple of buildings in chain mail are given to it today) dedicated to the study of effective methods of punishment. The picture could look like this: a priest in full finery with a shiny cross on a black cassock, humbly, with eyebrows parallel to the ground, looking at a carved trunk in the hands of a young embittered employee in greenish civilian clothes and a sparkling cockade on his cap. All this against the background of a vaulted dome like that of Santa Maria del Fiore. Florence in Moscow!

Buddhists have a practice, almost scientifically proven, in which specific vices can be converted into specific virtues. And so I repaint my detached observation of all these domes and random passers-by into a story. I give it to her, calling it my Moscow, unsolved and so strangely sounding like an echo, like a choir of books not yet read. Thank you Buddhist pagodas, boyar beards and Mandelstam. Tsvetaeva gave Moscow to you, and I gave it to these breathtaking eyes. And it starts to rain.

And as if observing what is happening at the very walls of the Kremlin on Ivanovskaya Hill, the Bolshoi Theater stands, holding a square with a fountain in front of it. White granite, richly flooded with light, antique columns. And high above everyone, naked Apollo rushes on his horses and, looking at Moscow, cries along with the caryatids.