Transient gift of repartee saved me from ladies’ scrum

I’ve never been very good at thinking of the right thing to say at the right time except once, and that, I am convinced, had nothing to do with any newly found gift of repartee, but rather with a huge dollop of perfectly timed divine intervention

It all started on a business trip to Russia shortly after communism collapsed in the early 1990s. I checked into the Mesdurodnaya Hotel in Moscow and wandered into the cocktail bar. This was jam-packed with dozens of strikingly beautiful women.

I thought I had wandered into a cocktail party for the Miss Russia finals or a Vogue magazine cover-girl convention.

The barman filled me in. They’re prostitutes, he said. All local women housewives, secretaries, doctors, lawyers all respectable, and all desperately trying to earn some foreign currency to get themselves and their families out of Russia. A desperate state of affairs indeed.

They soon advanced. They had got a whiff of my foreign accent as I spoke to the barman and even greater whiff of the 50 or so US dollars I had in my wallet. Over their heads I spotted one of them walking off to the lifts arm in arm with a hairy Neanderthal who must have been turfed out of Mongolia because of his sheer ugliness and the fact that his entire demeanour screamed ownership of every sexually transmittable disease east of the Urals.

And if that was not enough reason to dive behind the bar counter and hide in a fridge, I had a vivid flashback of my days at CBC in Pretoria where we were told, in no uncertain terms, that kissing one of the girls at the Loreto Convent next door even in a brotherly fashion would result in hellfire and damnation.

I shuddered to think what fate lay in store for anyone who skipped kissing a convent girl and moved straight into consorting with a post-communist sex workers.

And while many of my peers might regard this scenario as a dream come true, in real life, having a statuesque Russian prostitute put her arms round you and whisper sweet Cyrillic nothings in your ear is just plain terrifying.

I am not ashamed to say that I started to panic when first one, then two or three others in the front rank of the advancing scrum put their arms around me, whispering proposed business dealings involving half an hour of their time and the $50 in my back pocket.

It was at that point that I received some timely divine intervention. Ladies, ladies, please, I said, spreading my arms and turning my palms up in what I hoped was ecumenical supplication. I regret that I cannot accommodate your whims, fantasies or sales pitches because I am an emissary from the Vatican.

The barman translated, and not only was I instantly surrounded by empty space, but for the next two days I was greeted with dignity, albeit at a distance, by everyone in the hotel; prostitutes, staff and other guests with the Russian equivalent of Father, a few times as Your Grace, and once even as holiness.

And having been given that wonderful, if transient, gift of repartee from God, I felt it only fair not to push my luck and restrain myself from blessing everyone and handing out indulgences.

That weekend in Moscow was one of the most interesting of my entire life. It is a fascinating place, particularly in winter when the sun comes up at about 10:30 am, casts a watery eye over a city that is made up entirely of four storey buildings interspersed with half a dozen fearsome Gothic structures Stalin stuck up in a fit of town planning pique. Then that sad old sun doesn’t really like what it sees and sets at about quarter to three in the afternoon.

However, the Kremlin itself is worth all the travel and hardship required to actually get to Moscow. The immense wealth in the museums, the churches of bygone Tsarist eras, not to mention the grandeur and history of Red Square, are overwhelming.

I was also fortunate enough to get out of Moscow and visit Zargorsk, centre of the Russian Orthodox Church  – their Vatican, if you will.

Once again the grandeur and splendour were quite breathtaking. And equally breathtaking is the recent history of a people who refused to be denied their God.

It is a miracle that the churches survived communism, and with them millions upon millions of faithful who went underground and clung to their faith in the face of one the mightiest of onslaughts against the Christian faith.