Moscow #2 – The Beginning

Last week's dream about arriving in Moscow, pacing the streets at night with no map or dictionary and all of a sudden finding myself, via the marker of Vladimir Mayakovsky looming out of his boarded up square in the north-west part of the city comes partially true, as whilst I sit in the back seat of my taxi from the airport, drinking the driver's insanely sweet unwarm coffee from a plastic bottle wrapped round with a tea towel tied at the top with an elastic band for insulation, he gets lost on the road en route to my homestay which, though I don't yet know it houses the strangest man I'll probably ever meet – and suddenly, phallusing up to the left of us on a plinth, is Mayakovsky! - with luminous snow on his shoulders and head, between the black of the pre-dawn and the streetlights and the concert hall, looking all stony and lonely.

The next day, with the tops of my thighs saucepan-lidding with cold from my too-short coat, I walk there to see him in daylight. Last year's old woman who shouted at me for sacriligiously standing at his feet on the granite base for a photo when she had come to lay down red carnations is replaced today by a trench of snow that dogs have shat in and nobody clears away; stickers and a piece of either gum or tape mark the front and when I afterwards sit in the Coffee House two minutes' away, it is not to cry into the phone to Adam's ear, riddled with the loss with which stone representations of dead objects of academic-or-otherwise obsession force recognition; I am eating an orange, drinking coffee and eavesdropping the chat of the three men sitting in front of me.

Meanwhile, the hostess's husband, Sergei, smokes all day in the house and plays videogames that sound like Doctor Who's tardis, perpetually coming or going.