I danced with the Tsar

Fellow-sufferers Gyppo Byard and Gadjo Dilo have recounted the horrors that mothers-in-law can always surprise you with, and I'm sure they have far more in store. I will recall the first meeting with my own mother-in-law, Bela, at a later date. Here I present the true story of Mikhas', quondam editor of Belarus magazine.

I spent a delightful couple of years prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union shuttling between London and Minsk in a quest to make money out of Belarus. "Guid tank country" was my Caledonian colleague "Shuggy" MacLeod's laconic account of that country, a radioactive swamp dotted with dazed peasants who bumble about in ill-fitting clothes and gas-fuelled buses waiting for the Russians to come back and make them miss the Poles all over again.

I frittered away the funds of my then employers while enjoying the company of ballerinas, models, artists and war veterans. Among the many random people whose homes I cuckooed in at uncertain hours of the evening was Mikhas'.

Soviet-era Belarus was as much of an enigma wrapped up in a waste of time as it is now. My then boss still gasps at the Belarusian Tourism Board's plan to market not their own malarial parade-ground but rather 1980s Cambodia as a holiday destination, with flights via Minsk's impenetrable airport. "Sun, sea and genocide?!?" he had yelled at the officials as I translated. "So, but perhaps not the last element," responded a turtle-faced berry-picker in a cardboard suit.

One evening we had dinner at home with Mikhas'. His wife Lyuda was an official interpreter, and between them they made up the entire Belarusian pro-Gorbachev camp. Most other intellectuals did nothing to counter one historian's remark that the entire Belarusian national movement in 1920 could have fitted on one modest sofa. The only change since that was that the latest generation of patriots could barely stay upright on any item of furniture for long enough to make their point.

Mikhas' edited Belarus, a magazine doomed from the start by being published in Belarusian - the cheeriest but least-spoken tongue in the whole country. It's difficult not to love a language that calls the railways "chyhunka", birds "ptushki" and your good lady wife a "zhonka".

The magazine was twice cursed by trying to promote the Third Way of Soviet reform in a country that either liked being kicked in the head while being lectured about The (Second) Great Patriotic War or else wanted to be an independent mini-Poland and top of the European Rickets League.

Mikhas' had just come back from a conference in Moscow, during which he had been received at the Kremlin by President Gorbachev himself. The Heir to Lenin was clearly a micro-manager, as he had found time to assure Mikhas' that his 60 unread monthly pages of articles about bison grass and how all the famous Poles were really just shy Belarusians was the key to promoting prudent financial management, local democracy and general sobriety on the western borders of the Unbreakable Union of Free Republics.

Our host was recounting this to our general bemusement when his mother-in-law walked in. She had been ferrying bowls of cabbage from the stove for half-an-hour with the eerie glide that old ladies perfect. Mikhas' decided she ought not to miss out on his good news, and declared "Did you hear that, Mama? I met the president yesterday!"

"That's very nice, Misha," she replied, bearing a tureen of spent offal back into the kitchen. "But then I danced with the Tsar."

We spent a good 10 minutes watching Mikhas's crest fall before the good lady rejoined us with a tray of traditional gunpowder nuts and turpentine schapps. She sat down and told us the story.

"I was a debutante in Mogilev in 1916, and we were all excited that the Tsar was coming to our New Year Ball. His military train had been based nearby for much of the War. He arrived, as promised, and I nearly fainted when he cut in and asked me to dance. I remember that his eyes were pale blue, watery and kind, and his beard smelled very strongly of tobacco. " He said nothing. At the end of the dance he bowed with a smile, and walked off."

Into history. Within weeks the February Revolution had cost Tsar Nicholas his throne, and in little over a year he and his family were murdered by their Bolshevik captors.

Mikhas's mother-in-law had kept her genteel origins quiet, and somehow survived civil war, Stalin, starvation and Hitler. Mikhas' may have felt upstaged, but her readiness to tell the story that evening was a tribute to the efforts that he and other Gorbachevians had made to let some light into the dank cellar of Soviet society.

And, like all mothers-in-law, she had the last word.

Going Off My Rocker in a Knocking Shop

Spain was created, it seems, in order to convince me that Jung and Sting were both right when they cracked on about synchronicity.

Apart my Orwellian nightbus nightmare, there was the strange case of the Chueca hotel.

The best job I ever had was helping Belorussian ballerinas with their non-professional needs on a shambolic tour of Britain in 1990. I enjoyed it so much that I volunteered to continue my duties during their Madrid season in 1991, free of charge. I even bought my own airline ticket. Frankly, I'd have crawled there with Roy "Chubby" Brown chained to my nuts if need be.

As always I left travel arrangements to the last minute, and so boarded an Aerolineas Argentinas flying trolleybus at sometime near midnight with what looked like a convention of people who took their dogs with them to "no questions asked" country guest houses.

I won't detail the bizarre manner in which the airline wanted paying, as I suspect there's a squad of men in black from the International Atomic Energy Agency still engaged exclusively on unravelling that one.

My best efforts at Spanish earned me a bus ride to central Madrid before my fellow-passengers had even recovered their collars and leashes. I found a public phone and called Basque Artist IV who had kindly offered me lodgings during my stay.

Basque Artist IV was a stubbled lush whose name began and ended with "X". This had struck me as a good basis for friendship at a party in London some months earlier. "When you come to Madrid you stay with me, Xardox the Fourth Artist!" he rasped through a cloud of cachaça and Ducados, propped up by his modishly-Scottish girlfriend and Basque Artists I-III.

He scrawled a phone number on a fag packet. I got him to sign it in case he achieved Hockneyed fame or I forgot the order of consonants and ended up lost, alone and sober on the midnight streets of Madrid.

Which is of course exactly what happened.

His phone hadn't answered for days. I assumed he was painting a mural in, or possibly on, Bilbao and would be back any day. He wasn't. For all I know he was some sort of happening dreamt up by Basque Artists I-III in a moment of Situationist ennui. Perhaps they had all been members of the Federation of Conservative Students making some sort of over-subtle point about minority cultures. I just don't know.

The hours passed in gloomy contemplation of Franco's architectural legacy, enlivened by a dousing from the maniacs who hose the streets in the two-hour gap that allows the crowds of happy drunks to get home, shower and arrive at their bank/parade ground/air-traffic control tower in time for work.

The most welcome sign in the world is a large, plastic doner kebab outside a Pinner takeaway near where I first stayed in London. "In this sign shall ye conquer" it says to me. But for a moment a scrappy neon "Hotel" in a cramped Madrid backstreet nudged it into the salad bowl of oblivion.

I spilled into the lobby, and had an exchange in elementary Spanish with the oily clerk at reception that went like this (to my understanding):

Boyo: Good morning, sir, do you have a room free?

Clerk: A room?

Boyo. Please. For just one night. I am tired, but have money.

Clerk: Certainly. For one night?

Boyo: Please.

Clerk: OK. Random number of pesetas. Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Ta.

I spent a grateful few hours in the knackersack of Lethe, then called the partner of a friend due in Madrid that day in the hope he could put me up. He called me back soon after, and I checked out and moved into his pension round the corner.

It was owned by a couple who'd discovered that their modish support for the Republican cause did not go down well with General Franco's otherwise commendably multicultural Moroccan Regulares. They spent several grateful decades in France, and so I was able to explain in French my luck in finding such an accommodating establishment but relief at moving into their more distinguished rooms.

"That was not a hotel, but a maison d'assignation," explained our worldly host.

And so, on reflection, my exchange with the reception clerk probably went like this:

Boyo: Good God, Cavalry, do you have an open camera?

Clerk: You want a room?

Boyo. Colour me up. For just one night. I have a uniform and doublets.

Clerk: Whatever floats your Armada, son. You want the whole night on your own?

Boyo: Would you care to join me?

Clerk: I'm ok here. Random number of pesetas. Conchita is in Room 14.

Boyo: (handing random number of bills and swiftly rejected passport) Hail Mary.

The receptionist at a Madrid brothel was confronted in the middle of a dry and balmy night by a friendly yet sodden Englishman (how was he to know?), bearing a suitcase of Mediaeval jerkins and expressing no interest in the specialist staff. He handled it well, as I'm sure he did during every Conservative Future outing to Spain.

Many years later, I wandered past a work colleague engrossed in the Rough Guide to Madrid. We fell to talking, and I asked him where he was staying in that fine city.

"A boutique hotel in Chueca, the former red-light district. It used to be a brothel, akchooly," he honked fruitily, pointing at the address and description in the book.

As Bryan Ferry once remarked, you can guess the rest.