Pushkin is our everything, Russians say. It rang so true on Friday in New Zealand’s second-biggest city of Christchurch, where the Russian community gathered to watch Little Tragedies.
Only two minutes before a performance of these poetic plays by Alexander Pushkin was to begin, a 5.8 earthquake struck – the same in strength that scared Washington in August.
Everyone rushed outside. Building and cars alarms went on and the electricity went off. Two elderly people were so shocked they refused to go back inside. Others prayed for the power to come back on so the performance could proceed. It took 25 minutes.
Quakes of various sizes have continued for 16 months. The first of those occurred at 4:35 am, on September 4, 2010. My husband, Robin, was driving me to the airport. I was supposed to fly to Moscow. Suddenly, the car started to rock like a boat in a storm. We thought our tires had blown out. The quake was 7.1 on the Richter scale with the epicenter 30 kilometers from Christchurch.
I could not fly. On the way home we saw collapsed buildings, but the real shock was to see the damage done to our once attractive suburb of Avonside. The well thought-out front gardens were disfigured. Large cracks criss-crossed the roads. Fences and lamp-posts tilted. Lawns were covered with something gray.
Our house survived. But we soon found out what the gray material was. Liquefaction was a new word for Christchurch residents. If you squeeze wet sand in your hand it becomes runny – this is what liquefaction is. So when the soil underneath Christchurch, a city built on what was a swamp is squeezed by a powerful jolt, it becomes runny and cannot support the upper crust. The soil sinks into the sand, which comes to the surface in volcano-like eruptions. Small ‘volcanoes’ and wet sand covered our lawn and the veggie patch.
Christchurch has had bad liquefaction three more times since then, including on Friday. The worst quake was on February 22 after a 6.3 magnitude quake close to the city. No one had died in September. The February shake killed 182 people. Hundreds of buildings in the central business district were damaged beyond repair. The spire of our beautiful neogothic Christ Church Cathedral, crashed to the ground. Downtown is still cordoned off.
Five days before February 22 I had passed my doctoral thesis examination and was looking forward to having my life back. A day before the quake Robin and I went to the Court Theater to celebrate. The theater performed a drama about a spy in the New Zealand embassy in Moscow, who in 1947 was leaking nuclear secrets to Russians. The surrealism of the play was exacerbated by it featuring the author of Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak, as having a lover with whom one of the embassy staff was having an affair.
The next day the theater and the whole historic Arts Center it was part of, were destroyed by the quake.
We already knew what would happen next: No power, no television, no newspapers, no water, no internet, no telephone, no working toilet. Roads were destroyed, bridges closed. Liquefaction was covering properties, this time mixed with the smelly sewage from broken pipes. On our lawn, a gooey smelly layer of silt was about half a meter deep.
We helped our neighbors and friends, and they helped us. Some had portable power generators, and took food from others’ freezers. We had a gas-powered stove, and people came to cook and have tea with us. At nights, we lit candles with the neighbors, chatted, drank beer, and sang songs. Russian folk songs were popular.
Two quakes of magnitude 6.4 and 5.9 struck on June 13. Believe it or not, I was at the airport about to fly to Russia … We had to return home. This time our house gave up. It cracked in the middle, its piles bent. A few weeks later our suburb was put in the red zone, meaning we need to move out by April, 2013. About 7,000 other households have also been told to relocate.
By last Friday, we had an encouraging 6-month period with no big quakes. Businesses relocated from downtown to suburbs and life essentially got back to normal.
The day before Friday’s earthquake, Robin and I were at the relocated Court Theater. The play was about a Russian music and dancing teacher – a shapely and beautiful blonde with bad English. She was shouting at her students for being late, embarrassing women for dressing badly and criticizing New Zealand for its cold homes. In the end she married a local man with other characters reasoning she did so only to stay in New Zealand.
The theater performance of Pushkin’s play on Friday was meant to be a nice break in the grim reality of anti-Russian Court Theater performances and ongoing problems with our insurer who wants to replace our nice house with cheap package accommodation. Instead, we got another quake. Avonside was not affected much, but TV showed flooded streets, piles of liquefaction in other suburbs and stressed people saying they can’t stand any more quakes.
Russians who had gathered to see Pushkin did not complain after calling on their mobile phones to make sure their families were alive. The tragedies were in full swing and the actors steamed on, ignoring a dozen aftershocks after the quake that had disrupted the beginning of the performance. A magnitude 6 jolt struck when Don Juan was dueling with Don Carlos over Laura. We rushed outside.
In town, people were evacuated from their offices, supermarkets and malls. They did not reopen.
But for us in the Russian theater, the power and the support of Pushkin’s magic poetry was so strong that after power was restored in about 15 minutes, everyone returned to catch the end of the show.
We don’t know what will happen next in our embattled Christchurch. But we know that Pushkin is indeed our everything.
Yevgenia Borisova reported for The St. Petersburg Times and The Moscow Times from 1993 to 2003.
