Is Journalism Worth Dying For?: Final Dispatches (52 page)

However, the imposing Robert Laffont was not until tomorrow morning. My first night in Paris was to be spent in a café. Where else? But how are you to pluck the very finest pearl from such a gleaming pile? In Paris, a city of freedom and a certain frivolity, the only way is to advance boldly and see what happens. The very first Parisian café we managed to select entirely at random (“Should we go in here?” “Oh no, much too crowded!” “OK, then, down the street there to the right?” “How about this one?” “Let’s find a seat”) was called by coincidence “Le Select.”

It was perfect. We found ourselves in the center of Montparnasse, both the district and the Boulevard, and accordingly in a haven where the artistic elite of the entire world came to alternate resuscitation with inspiration. As we soon found out.

If we had known where we were headed, we might have been more circumspect. At the next table was a boisterous party of stereotypical Parisians: quasi-actors, quasi-artists, of differing ages but all with a suggestion of the eternal student at their greying temples. They were having a great time, oblivious to the joys or sorrows of anyone around them. There was little space between the tables and the rooms were very narrow, the furniture ancient. The interiors were perfectly preserved from the early 1920s. It is wholly impermissible to make any changes to the historical appearance of Parisian cafés. They are museums of the spirit of Paris.

The atmosphere, too, had been preserved. A young girl-artist, very proud of herself – like all Parisian girls – and instantly tipsy, eager to find happiness with a young boy-artist sitting some distance away, headed rapidly towards him through a historic, narrow space and sent
a bottle on our table flying. There was water everywhere, in my handbag, on our clothes, in our shoes. So what did this select, impulsive fledgling of Montparnasse do about it?

Well, actually, nothing. Women in Paris are very proud indeed and have their noses in the air while managing simultaneously to seem entirely available. Our artistic mademoiselle politely, but not too politely, cooed “Pardon” and quickly found the joy she had fluttered in here to find, in the company of her Pierre, who was perhaps an as yet undiscovered Derain, or Matisse.

The names, of course, are deliberately selected. Derain, Matisse, and indeed Picasso, Cocteau, Max Jacob, Henry Miller, Scott Fitzgerald, and Hemingway himself had sat at these same little tables at which the early twenty-first-century Montparnasse avant-garde had given us a good soaking.

What more could a former Soviet citizen want in order to be happy? At this moment in life, nothing, unless to feel their backside in contact with the tattered armchair which had been scuffed by the threadbare trousers of the young Hemingway as he sipped the same cocktail as you. He was select, and you are select.

The waiters of Le Select, incidentally, are men of advancing years, if not just plain old. And yet, how proud they are, standing out even among the proud Parisian crowd. In vain will you seek to attract their attention, for you are no Picasso. Your predicament, however, is that you don’t want to rise irately from your seat and storm out, having lost patience with the arrogant
garçon
. For some reason you understand and forgive, for you are still only in the foothills.

The waiter eventually deigns to come over to you, a débutante here still far from conquering Montparnasse. He brings you the water you requested long ago, naturally in a 1920s tumbler. The glass is thick and coarse, without a hint of gentility, and openly proclaims its primary function as being not to get broken too soon. The clientele have always been a bit rowdy. Give them half-decent glasses and you would have been permanently in debt, even if some of them did go on to become Nobel Prize winners, the
crème de la crème
, champions of the world.

You have to sympathise with the glasses. As he bangs mine down
on the table, the waiter does not favor his non-regular customer with so much as a glance. The party next to us are “his.” He and they belong here, guffawing, flirting, twining themselves around each other, even though one brings the coffee and another pays for it. Naturally the
garçon
can only look down on me.

He is haughty, but not actually rude. He even appears partly to forgive me for being a nobody in Montparnasse. You get a strange feeling from your mute contemplation of this old Parisian professional’s game. You catch yourself trying to be noticed by him, supercilious though his glance will be, and are glad when you see he has forgiven you. You want to jump up straight away and pursue the bluebird, to stand out from the crowd, if only for an hour, but most certainly to be a hero. Such, they say, are the antics provoked by Montparnasse. We may not be the greatest on its slopes but neither are we going to be the least.

But now, farewell, proud Le Select! You may not have known it, but in fact we were not such nonentities. Tomorrow we too would begin our conquest of Paris. The “pre-publication marketing” of our book was about to begin. What in Russia we would call the hype. How was it? Bruising. Russian public relations firms have no idea: from an early breakfast to a late supper inclusive there were press conferences, interviews, parties, presentations, conversations. By evening I was hoarse, and the next morning everything began all over again. There was a whirl of journalists who for some reason were interested in the book, some of whom had even found time to read it. The timetable was rigorously adhered to: I was whisked from one interview to the next, with no deviations from the agreed program. Between meetings with journalists there was an orientation talk with my publisher Malcy Ozonna about things I must under no circumstances forget to say. Marie Gigault from
Le Monde
was to be told one thing, Thierry Brandt from the Franco-Swiss newspaper
Le Matin
something else, the magazine
Elle
something else again.

For all that, the frenetic pace did not dissipate the emotional charge. Everywhere kind words cascaded down, love, warmth, admiration, respect – a positive tsunami. Life was suddenly something to enjoy,
surrounded by interested people. These were feelings long unfamiliar in Russia where people do not love you for your articles. On the contrary, most hate you for them.

The French intellectuals involved in promoting the book were clearly puzzled by my increasingly obvious embarrassment as this carousel of kindness continued. “Isn’t it just the same in Russia when somebody has written and published a book?” “It is not at all the same in Russia.” “What do you mean? Has your book not been published in Russia?” “Of course not!”

They were amazed. They shrugged their shoulders. For the first time they looked at me uncertainly, unable to believe it. I did not try to explain. What would be the point? These were trivial details. I looked about me instead, taking in what really mattered – how the Parisiennes were dressed.

You have only to stand in the bustle of Place de la Madeleine for ten minutes to understand that there is no answer to this question. The essence of Paris is that the women dress as they please. The men too. And they think as they choose to, and put on their make-up in the morning as they see fit. This kind of life is called freedom. Liberty. You live as you please, however you like.

Moscow had been only a transit airport on my flight to Paris. The starting point of the journey which brought me to the capital of France was Ingushetia and Chechnya: refugee camps; foothills; forests; soldiers desperate to go home; hungry people crying; the routine horror of life in our homeland where everybody lives as best they can, just trying to survive. That is why “my” Paris seemed such a sweet, heavenly treat. It was like the taste in your mouth after wormwood, when a single chocolate has the impact of kilograms of honey.

“ ‘Why are you not sleeping?’ ‘Paris will not let me sleep.’ ” Sometimes we hum that song to ourselves as we struggle towards the light through the routine austerity of life in Russia. And do you know what? It wasn’t true! I slept very soundly in Paris, for the first time in all the months of the war, without sleeping pills, without shivering. Nobody was yelling at me, goading me, telling me I was a traitor. Everybody liked me. Everybody admired me. May you enjoy the same experience.

That was the joy of Paris, the private property of one Russian journalist who dares to testify to it. It was a joy all the more poignant because immediately before it I had to dare to do quite different things. My book will go on sale in the bookshops of Paris on June 4, 2000. Its publishers have decided to call it
Journey to Hell: A Chechen Diary. The Daring Testimony of a Russian Journalist
.

A Lighter Postscript

Simultaneously with the collection of articles from
Novaya gazeta
about Russia during the Chechen War, another book on the same topic will be published in France in early June.

It has the eye-catching title of
Chienne de Guerre, A Bitch of a War
. Its author is a Parisian journalist, Anne Nivat. Our books are not thought too similar, although they tell the same tale. But now, let’s consider some parallels. Is it mere chance that the books are appearing together? The French emotionally assured me that it was a complete coincidence. That might seem hard to believe, but to confirm it, here is a story.

Anne Nivat is not just a brave French journalist, she is also the daughter of Georges Nivat, today a professor at the University of Geneva, and a very famous Slavist in France. Georges Nivat is not just a famous Slavist, but the same person who came as an exchange student to Moscow in the early 1960s and very soon found himself in the house of none other than Olga Ivinskaya, the last love of Boris Pasternak. Georges did not merely drink cups of tea in her house, but fell in love with her daughter, Irina. He even moved in with them, and their impending marriage was blessed by Pasternak himself. More than that, Pasternak and Georges spent a lot of time together, talking. Pasternak helped him to make sense of Russian life, with all its trials. Later he was booted out of Russia thanks to the efforts of the relevant agencies. And Irina? She ended up in one of the labor camps in Mordovia.

Gradually everything fell apart between Georges and Irina. First he got married in France and began bringing up his children in the ascetic spirit of strict Protestantism. Little Anne Nivat crawled through the mountains with her Papa. That is how she was brought up, learning
to grit her teeth. Less than 30 years would pass before these lessons in survival came in very handy as Chechnya burned. She was to crawl through the mountains of Chechnya, well able to grit her teeth. But let us return to the story of that love in the middle of the last century. Learning that Georges had got married in France, Irina too fell in love with a prisoner in the neighbouring camp for men.

The marriage of Georges and Irina, to which Pasternak had given his blessing, never came to pass, but the love he had encouraged did flourish in a house in the very road where
Novaya gazeta
’s offices are situated. The house is still there, and so is their apartment.

We are all closer to each other than we know. Our world is a strange place and more intricately connected than we imagine in our wildest dreams. Paris and Moscow are almost the same.

COME WITH THE WIND: MOSCOW CHAMPIONS OF A BETTER RUSSIA MEET GEORGE W. BUSH (AT HIS REQUEST)

May 25, 2002

It is not only the Kremlin that gets to enjoy the Bushes’ company. Over 100 of us, officially classified as “Russian social, parliamentary, and religious opinion-formers” and highly diverse in terms of our socio-political make-up, also got invited to meet the US President. On May 24, 2002, from 2:15 p.m. Moscow time, immediately after a presidential lunch in one of the Kremlin dining halls. The venue was Spaso House on Old Arbat, the renowned residence of the American Ambassador.

A fashionable function is good because nobody is responsible to anybody for anything. It is pure entertainment. While the Bushes were being catastrophically late arriving from the Kremlin, the rest of us in Spaso House were also enjoying ourselves. First, everybody was entertained by Boris Nemtsov of the Union of Right Forces, who appeared sporting such an amazing milk-chocolate tan that he eclipsed even Valentina Matvienko. Madame Matvienko is a Deputy Prime Minister in the Russian Government, and has lately been making increasingly
strenuous efforts to mutate into a social lioness. Anyway, she was amazing too at the crush in Spaso House, displaying a tan worthy of the Caribbean and Seychelles.

“Well, I got mine in Sochi,” Nemtsov said defensively. “I always go there in the spring.”

An hour and a half passed in disputation and the consumption of aesthetically irreproachable canapés. Still Bush didn’t appear, but no nervous anticipation was observable among the guests.

Jewish administrators, eternally indebted to America, sauntered around and the Chief Muslims of Russia in exotic costumes smiled sweetly at them. The A-team from the Moscow Patriarchate’s Department of Foreign Relations, the whole lot of them, drifted in looking pleased with themselves. One of the last to appear was Gleb Pavlovsky, our principal Presidential Privy Counsellor, looking grumpy.

This provoked a minor stir. “What’s
he
doing here?” echoed around the room with its laden tables. Most of those present evidently felt that Bush’s definition of social, parliamentary and religious opinion-formers would not include, to put it mildly, supporters of Putin. “He probably bought the invitation,” the crowd decided, whispering this explanation from ear to ear. “How much for, do you think?” novices in these matters mouthed at the cognoscenti of the political netherworld. “About $5,000,” those versed in such matters muttered out of the side of their mouths.

Congregated around a large tray of fruit, Russia’s best-known civil rights activists, Oleg Orlov, Tatiana Kasatkina (“Memorial”) and Svetlana Gannushkina (“Citizens’ Aid”), modestly dressed, discussed the course of the Second Chechen Campaign in funereal tones. Not three steps away from them the same topic was being discussed by official “representatives of the Russian people” Mikhail Margelov and Dmitriy Rogozin, chairmen of the Foreign Relations Committees respectively of the Soviet of the Federation and of the Duma, resplendent in the latest Parisian male fashions. They were studiedly pretending not to have noticed the human rights activists, and were discussing when they would next be obliged to return to Strasbourg to defend Russia from another attack by the human rights camp.