Musta told you I met a number of cyclists on the Montenegrin Riviera on the last trip down from Italy and Switzerland. But the meeting that took the cake was with the young Frenchman Louis-Pierre or something, coming up around a bend. It was easy to tell the fellow was a foreigner: light skin tone, pointy features, unkempt bushy-hair. Almost a soft Genet-rogue footing along. No way he was a local. A stranger could walk 10-15 kms a day through a two month stay, but everyone could tell I somehow fitted. Odd, but not foreign. This kid? No way. Hey, fella. Hallo. Ya, Hallo. Hallo.... He'd walked from France. You what?!.. (Check the map if you must.) Why?! The question stumped the kid...Ah...Ah... Well Monsieur, I was trying to give up smoking. And, well... I thought this might help... Hope he didn't get run over by a lorry. Told the fellas today at the breakfast table how the Syrians were going to walk to Germany. They hadn't been following the news last few days (One of the chaps a visitor, Cambodian-Chinese, well-acquainted with flight)...1,000's of them along the highway heading north outta Hungry. Course they were going to walk. After the Mediterranean crossing, what was a walk in the park like that? It brought back Maria Popov from the neighbourhood in Spotty. Maria and her hubbie Stefan. (Son was Pavel born in the camps; daughter Lydia Australian soil.) Maria looked like Boris Yeltsin in drag—like a lotta Russian Marias and Borises interchangeably. Without ever raising her voice like our mob did, she managed to project strong force & spirit. Maria was a giant. We Montenegrins and Herzegovinians were tall, brick shit-house size. Dalmatians too. And then in our circle, in Bab's circle, we had Maria Popov as an add-on. It was a feature of our little colony. Bigger than Boris, Maria. A Holden or Datsun wasn't gunna fit Maria & Stefan when she had to pile him drunk into the back seat in order to get home. Maria P. had a Chevrole; pink with pointy fins. At that time, still pre-pubescent, pre-Beatles & pre-TeeV (at least in our house), there was no kinda word received of Americano fantasy wheels. There were few cars of any sort in our street and what there was matchbox scale. The JP Mr. Sheema had an Austin that rarely left his driveway. Mr. Broadway a Morris something. Cars were uncommon; many of the men rode bicycles with the front handle-bars turned up and the Gladstone bag nestled between. When Maria visited and parked her chariot in front of the house it stretched the width of the block and almost down to the bottom of the street. Pink inserts on white, fins behind mounted with a round dot indicator, if I recall. At least on one occasion I rode with Maria & Bab must have been there. The heavy door and the saloon-like roominess stick, and more still the wheel-turning rounding corners. Having to swing out wide for the long tail, Maria's thick forearms lapped over each other like in a workout. Turning the battleship would have been beyond many less well-equipped. Spotty, Yarraville, Williamstown, even the people on the other side of the river in the mid 60's could not have seen the like. God knows where she got the beast; maybe a Ruskie contact somewhere in Detroit. Maria was halfway through a course at Moscow U when the war broke out. Then the German retreat presented a chance to escape. Large numbers following in the wake of the departing Nazis. Footslogging of course, like the soldiers. Moskva to Berlin and the Free World in 4 – 5 - 6 months, Bab reported to our visitors. (She was proud of her new friend.) AustRA-lia, Spotswood, Kernot Street near Blackshaws corner. Like ours, the Popov place had a bungalow in back where boozy weekends Stefan & Maria entertained. Bab got by in the Slavic stream somehow; pretty amazing how the pair managed. With the Ruskies the local Poles mourned their fate too; they were welcome at Kernot Street. Think I only attended one boring/retrospectively fascinating gala supper—laden table, vodka, there might have been an accordion or record player. Old Pan Stefan sang a song. The Poles sang and cried in their cups, if not that night certainly on other occasions in our neighbourhood. The heaviness of spirit of Pan Stefan and some of the others sitting around the table was clearly projected. Maria herself had not succumbed. Maybe the women saw less horror than their husbands. Don't think Stefan lived long after they moved to the Gold Coast. Don't think he was ever completely sober. Maria might have been the wage earner. In the Chevvy Maria and Babi went see Ruskie movies at the kino. 1965 – 6 - 7 our Babi in darkened picture-theaters fixed on the big screen. At the time it was a bit hard to actually comprehend a kino—some kind of foreign arrangement for émigrés, one assumed. There was one cinema on the Western side of town, but that opened later. Maybe, just maybe the pair watched Tarkovsky & Eisenstein. (There is a vague memory of Babi once mentioning Ivan Grozny. Ten years later seeing the film with Veki at Valhalla in Victoria Street, Richmond there was some odd sense of replay or continuance; and more again twenty years later again when I took Georgi and his Babushka to see A. Rublev at Cinematheque. When Georgi's Babushka said after the screening that she knew in advance Rublev was mochni—powerful — the vibration echoed. Back in St. Petersburg there had been first-release Tarkovsky, but not Rublev.) The Moscow Circus—lions, trapeze artists, Cossack dancing, Bab reported back. From memory it was six months walking to Berlin. The Frenchie met five or six years ago on the hillside resembled the young ragamuffin Rublev who was given the responsibility of casting the great bell for the cathedral.
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