Daniela lived in 532 and I lived in 533. Our hostel apartments had faced each other on the fifth floor of the Pushkin Institute of Russian Language and Literature. Way back in 1986-87.
Pushkin Institute was part of the Soviet propaganda machine. The concept was simple. They picked up from each country young Russian language students (the best from each country I would like to think), trained them in Moscow for a year and sent them home as teachers to further spread the Russian language.
Unique is often a loosely used word. But in the case of Pushkin institute it was apt. Apart from the United Nations headquarters in New York, this was the planet’s only building where you could find people from each country in the world. The tall Afghan boys were publicly reprimanded for a brawl over Polish girls. In the institute’s corridors, the North Korean boys always wore blue suits with the image of Kim II-sung on their lapels. The West Germans and the East Germans, despite having a common language, kept distance. Americans were normally the worst Russian speakers. Some of them were invited only because they were members of the communist party of the USA. Egyptians, Angolans, Brazilians and Madagascans were part of our group when we travelled around the USSR.
There were two distinct groups. The “Cap-countries” and the “Soc-countries”. House of Friendhship was the inviter and sponsor of the Cap-countries. At least for this purpose, India was considered Capitalist. So I shared my class with students from France, Austria, Germany, Italy, Denmark, and Japan. The “soc-countries” sent large groups, which studied separately. The Poles, Hungarians, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, Vietnamese, Afghans, and North Koreans had their own syllabi and classrooms. Each group of “Soc-country” was accompanied by a “group leader”, whose task was to monitor and control. To make sure they were no undesirable alliances. Or disappearances. At a particular hour in the evening, the Polish or the Chinese or the Afghan leader had a right to knock on the rooms of their wards to make sure the boy or the girl was in their own room– and without an outsider. This was not always enforced. A bottle of vodka could fix anything. Or the group leader would get entangled in a romance himself and forget his duties.
We, the Cap students, were fearless. Nobody monitored us, nobody bothered us. The two bottom floors of the institute were lecture halls, and the students lived on the upper floors. The building was self–contained, it had canteens and cafes. One elderly Indian lady, phobic about the Russian winter, indeed closeted herself in the institute during the whole year.
Not so long since we had left puberty behind. Testosterone and estradiol were in full flow. At Pushkin, you didn’t need an excuse for introductions. When queued up for breakfast, you could start talking to the girl in front of you and then join the table where she went. (It was important to loiter before finding the right person to stand behind). Each floor had a television room. You could also press your clothes there. This was another place for introductions.
If you had managed to buy two tickets to the theatre, you could easily ask the girl for a date five minutes after introductions. If she was a “cap-girl” she invariably agreed. (And if she didn’t agree, there were so many others.) “Soc-girls” preferred to go with a chaperone. (I had to book three tickets when taking out Polish or Yugoslavian girls). While watching a cinema, if you put your arm around the girl, there was no twitching of muscles or a stare of surprise. Holding hands when walking under the snow was a norm. Human warmth was essential in the freezing Moscow winters. On 31 December 1986, we had a mass kissing celebration. We walked up and down the staircases, the boys hugging and kissing every girl in sight. (There were some 900 girls, from a hundred odd countries).
The more advanced ones could take the relationships to their logical (bio-logical) conclusion. AIDS had not yet entered the dictionaries. We knew at least one room in the hostel with three beds, where six people slept. A super tall Austrian guy changed his partner every night. He even slept with a Russian floor administrator (дежурная). Pushkin institute was the Brave New World. Everyone wanted to make the most of the one year we would spend there.
It was exotic to make friends from so many different countries, and continents and races. Pushkin was our way to travel around the world. A single citizen may be the smallest and most unscientific sample for judging a country. But that’s how we formed opinions about countries we had never seen – based on one or two friends. After living for a year with my flatmates - Albert, Isao, Esa and Mark- I knew how people in Austria, Japan, Finland and France talked, gestured, looked and behaved.
Antonio, Annalucia, Laura and Daniela had formed the picture of Italy in my mind then. After leaving Pushkin we all scattered. The world did not know Internet yet. We wrote letters for a couple of years. But writing letters by hand and posting them internationally was not a business many were fond of. We gradually lost one another- for the next twenty years.
***
Two years ago, my French friend Carole found my 20-year old Indian address, and on an impulse wrote a greeting card. We have sold that flat years ago, but the Indian postman- being an Indian postman- knew where to deliver the greeting card. That triggered a massive web search from me. Many of my Pushkin friends were by now PhDs and had written academic books. We had a reunion in Paris last year (and Helsinki this year). Reunion of the Russian-speaking-United Nations. Antonio and Annalucia were found in the www, but not Daniela. Daniela was soft-spoken and gentle. She lived in 532 and I lived in 533. I knew she was from Florence.
In May 2010, as my train reached Florence, I thought I should try to locate Daniela. It was twenty-three years since we had said goodbye to each other.
***
What do you need to find a person? Name, address and telephone. I knew Daniela’s name and maiden surname. Some girls change surnames after marriage and vanish from the search engines. That must have happened with her. I had the address of Daniela’s parents. Taken 23 years ago. And a phone number which had so few digits that no Italian I asked could decipher it.
The address said Scandicci. Italian maps are peculiar. In my Venice chapter I talked about the small print. Furthermore, no map has an alphabetical index of the roads. You are expected to take the map and look all over it to locate a particular street. I abandoned the effort and asked the owner of our hotel. She said I should take the tram.
On Saturday, May 8, I decided to go on a mission to find Daniela’s parents, who should then lead me to her. When I left the hotel for my morning run, I took the address with me. Why would I need a tram? I started running parallel to the tram route, and every five minutes asked a passerby where this street Scandicci was.
“Scandicci? Lontano... lontano.” Said a woman wearing glasses.
I kept running. After fifteen minutes I went inside a shop.
“Scandicci? Lontano...lontano.” said the shopkeeper.
Ok, lontano. But how lontano? I thought.
“Quanti chilometri?” I asked.
“Lontano. Molto lontano.”
I must have spoken to about ten Italians. I had already run more than ten kilometres. (Which meant I must run them back as well.) This morning Daniela’s parents were not going to get surprised.
***
That afternoon, we visited Galleria dell’Accademia where I sat mesmerised in front of David. You read about him last week.
“If it’s ok with you, we’re going to look for Daniela.” I told Mena. “And we’re travelling by tram.” I said to Devyani.
At the tram stop, I showed the address once again. “Scandicci?” said that Italian driver and spoke at a speed that cannot be digested by someone who has studied Italian for four months.
“Potrebbe ripetere per favore?” I said, and he repeated everything once again as dramatically as before. This is the problem of little knowledge. You ask a question in the local language, and you are not treated as a foreigner any more.
Like search engines, linguistic minds match words even when approximately close. I thought the stop where I should get down was nenne-regali. And we got down when I saw Nenni-Torregalli. It looked pretty interesting. On one side was a hypermall. And on the other side... there was nothing. It was like a desert.
We went inside the hypermall. Used the toilets (more about this next week), Devyani immediately sat on the metal horse which moved only when it was fed one-euro coins. We also had to buy a few chocolates and Mena looked around the mall to see if it had any Italian souvenirs.
Outside, I asked for Scandicci to a gentleman coming out of the parking lot.
“Where is your car?” he asked.
“A piedi.” I replied.
“Lontano. Lontano.” He said and pointed to beyond the desert. “Walking?”
On the tram coming from the opposite direction, I sent Mena and Devyani back.
“I want to see if I can find the address.” I said. “Now that I’ve come so far. It may take time. Because even if I find it, Daniela’s parents may not be at home. Even if they are, Daniela may not be in Florence any more. Or in Italy for that matter.”
I started walking through the desert. To go to the other side, where this road Scandicci was.
***
After walking for about three kilometres I reached civilisation.
“I want to find the Scandicci road.” I asked the lady with a pram.
“This is Scandicci.” She said.
“Which?”
“Everything here is Scandicci.” She said and waved her arms in the air. She looked at my address book. “Scandicci is the name of this town. The street you have here is “via IV Agosto”, but I have never heard of it.”
“Which direction should I go to?”
“Since I don’t know the road, I don’t know the direction either.”
So I took one main road – at random, and kept walking. I must have asked twenty people before I met those two old men. They must be in their eighties.
“Via IV Agosto? Yes, there is a street by that name. But lontano... lontano.” They said. “You have a car?”
I said I would walk. And they gave me the directions which included two roundabouts, one garden, a fountain, two bridges, and a combination of rights and lefts.
To cut this dragging story severely short, I should go to a point where after another hour’s walk, I actually found the street. My Pushkin address book is naturally 23 years old. It has survived my moves from one country to another. On the house number in Daniela’s address, there was a large ink blotch. The number could have been 1, 11, 21, 71 or 91. I decided to try all of them. House no. 1 was shut. But in the balcony of house no.11 was an old man standing, with a stick in hand.
“Buonasera” I shouted from the street. It was already evening. “ I am looking for Daniela.”
“What?” he asked.
“Daniela. Is Daniela your daughter?”
Come inside, he gestured. I looked closely at his features. To see if they resembled Daniela’s.
“Where are you from?” He asked. I explained.
“My daughter has gone out.” He said. And then started a long discourse about his family. As I gathered, he had three daughters and a son. And the youngest daughter was about to have a baby. So his family had gone to the hospital.
“Daniela. Is Daniela your daughter? What is your surname?” I shouted in his ear.
Then he started describing the jobs he had done when young. If I understood correctly, he was an engineer by profession. And skiing was his hobby when he was young. And he watched football in the evenings. We were still standing at the gate. I thanked him for the Italian language lesson and left.
***
A man was working in the small garden outside house no.21. He looked at me questioningly. I looked at him. He was young, hopefully with excellent hearing faculty. Just as I wanted to open my mouth, a woman approached him. I looked at her. She looked at me.
“Daniela...” I said. No question marks any more.
She looked at me for about ten seconds and said,
“Ravi?”
Then she gave a smile that had not changed for the past twenty three years.
Ravi
P.S. That evening; Daniela, her husband, son and my family went out to dinner. Where I found her used to be her parents’ house, but only last year Daniela had moved there. Daniela works as Guida Turistica, so we learnt many new things about Firenze from her.
I can tell you that finding a friend in real life is far more thrilling than finding someone on Facebook.
R.
