by A. D. Miller
“She loves me too, I think. Or she could. She likes me at least.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“No.”
“Listen,” he said, “if she does, she’ll mean it. She’ll mean it at the moment she says it. But twenty minutes later she’ll mean it when she nicks your credit card. They mean everything.”
“Have you ever been in love, Steve?”
“You know what you need, Nick? You need to lose your moral bearings. Otherwise you’re done for.”
I changed the subject. I’d decided to ask Steve if he could help me to help my neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich find his friend. I’d been to the police myself, as I said I would, but I hadn’t got anywhere. Masha had come with me: at the last minute Oleg Nikolaevich himself said he had an urgent appointment and couldn’t go, though I think he may just have been put off by an ingrained fear of uniforms. The pimply adolescent detective we saw was wearing jeans and listening to gangsta rap. Above his desk he had a sign that said “I cannot drink flowers or chocolates,” plus black-and-white portraits of Russia’s weasel president and Erwin Rommel. He’d given us the special look that, like their womenfolk, some Russian men have—a commercial version of a pass, a sort of cash-hither smile. “You need to pay,” Masha whispered to me in English. I refused, and the detective told me there was no evidence of a crime and therefore there was nothing he could do. As we were leaving, he said that if ever I was in a hurry to get to a meeting or the airport he could loan me a couple of motorcycle outriders. (“Well,” said Oleg Nikolaevich when I told him what had happened at the police station, “as long as we are alive, it is possible that one day we will be happy.”)
I thought maybe Steve might know a friendly policeman, or a tame spook, or a housebreaker, someone who might be able to make some inquiries, jog a few memories or consciences.
Steve said he was sorry, but the policemen he knew weren’t that sort of policemen. He told me not to waste my time, because Konstantin Andreyevich was probably dead—fallen into the river or under a car, or maybe he had drunk the wrong moonshine and keeled over in a forest.
“Don’t get too attached,” Steve said. “They only live to sixty. Stay here long enough and people you know are gonna die. You know two Russians over sixty, chances are one of them’s gonna snuff it. Especially the men. They drink themselves into the ground before they get to see their pensions. You’re bored in the Metro, there’s a game you can play: try to spot an old man. Russian I spy.”
“Any other ideas, Steve? I mean, to help find him. Seriously. He’s a nice old geezer, my neighbour. But no money or krisha or anything. I think I’m his best hope.”
“This is Russia,” said Steve. “Pray.”
I gave up and asked him whether he knew anything about my new business acquaintance, the Cossack. He found the Cossack much more interesting.
“Little guy?” said Steve. “Pale, slimy eyes?”
Yes, I said. That was him.
“He’s not an oilman,” Steve said. “He works for the FSB.” In case you don’t recognize the initials, the FSB is the new-model KGB, minus the communism and the rules. “The story goes that he was done for murder, somewhere in the Urals in the early nineties. The FSB signed him up in prison, got him out, and sent him over to the Far East to help with their poaching scams. I’ve never actually met him, but I was in a bar on Sakhalin Island once and a Scottish helicopter pilot pointed him out to me. He’d been up in Kamchatka running the caviar racket, I think the pilot said, until they’d moved him on to salmon. He was being lined up for deputy governor of the island, but then they shipped him out. I haven’t heard of him since. I guess he did so well in fish that they promoted him to the oil team. Crime, business, politics, spookery—the usual Russian merry-go-round.”
“Maybe he quit the FSB and went into business,” I said.
“They’re all in business,” Steve said, “but they never quit. There are no ex-KGB men, just like the president says.”
I asked him whether he knew anything about the oil terminal scheme in the north that our loan was financing. The deal seemed to be going smoothly: the Cossack was on course to get the first tranche of his money soon. The banks that were lending it to him had cash-flow models and feasibility studies for the project, drawn up by the usual swarm of consultants, and a hundred pages of waivers and indemnities drawn up by us. As a matter of form we were seeking guarantees of cooperation from the governor of the region where the terminal was being built, from Narodneft about the amount of oil they’d pump through it after it was constructed, and from the Cossack about the revenue that would be set aside for repayments in an escrow account. All of these were on their way, we were assured. Everything was on track on the site, the Cossack told us: he was sure that the terminal would be pumping its first oil cargoes into the tankers that would dock with it by the end of the following summer. The only glitch was that when Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor had been getting ready to visit, the Cossack’s people said there had been a small fire and that he’d better hang on for a few weeks.
“Sounds plausible,” Steve said. “The Russians have more or less run out of pipeline capacity, so they’re desperate for new export routes. The president was on about it in his last television phone-in—‘This is one of the great challenges for Russia’s economy. We welcome help and investment from our foreign partners,’ the usual claptrap. And seaborne oil is supposed to be the next big thing. Gets it out to the European market without relying on the bolshy neighbours who the Russkis keep falling out with. They’ve got an ice-free bay up there somewhere—I think it’s on the Gulf Stream—that must be what they’re using. Who are the partners?”
It was just the logistics firm and Narodneft, I said.
“Interesting. Listen, I’m sure your banks will be okay. The Russians have got the oil and they need to sell it. They know the rules: they can keep ripping their own people off, so long as they play nice with the foreigners. But there’s always an angle in it for them somewhere, Nick. I’m guessing they’ll use the logistics outfit to cream off some of the takings, when they start making money, so Narodneft doesn’t have to share it all with the public. You know what Narodneft means?”
“Yes.”
“ ‘People’s oil.’ Fucking joke.”
Steve had once been summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to be screamed at for going down to Chechnya without permission, then writing up the chats he’d had with self-confessed Russian war criminals for his newspapers. The ministry had threatened to revoke his visa, and in reply, so legend had it, he’d told them to go ahead, throw him out, make his day. If that really happened, he’d been bluffing, because like all the journalists I ever met in Moscow, Steve loved Russia. It had all the plush restaurants and imported beer that they could wish for, but it had preserved enough old-school bad habits to keep the hacks in column inches and on the other side of the world from whatever it was they were running away from. Most of them, Steve especially, disguised their love with a sort of moral machismo. It was as if he had a contractual obligation to see the worst in everyone and everything, or pretend to. For a degenerate he could sometimes be a real pious asshole.
“I don’t know, Steve,” I said. “It’s standard practice for oil majors, you know that—they set up a separate company for new investments to keep the debts off the balance sheet. It isn’t just Narodneft, the big Western firms do it too.” That was true: it was a normal accounting manoeuvre. Though probably I only tried to defend the Cossack because Steve had needled me over me and Masha.
“It’s not a Western firm, Nick. Listen,” he said, swigging, “you have to understand, the Soviet Union produced the opposite of what it was meant to. They were all supposed to love each other, but it ended with no one giving a shit about anyone else. Not the public. Not shareholders. Not even you.”
I knew where his spiel went from there: communism didn’t ruin Russia, it was the other way round, and after three more glasses, the rise of the KGB state, the
legacy of Ivan the Terrible, and the comparative advantages of women from St. Petersburg. Looking at his dead, flecked eyes, I decided that Steve was jealous—of me and Masha, of anyone who had the hope and the ambition to be happy. His meandering Russian history lecture was just getting onto the long-term impact of the Mongol yoke when I interrupted him.
“I feel like shit,” I said, lying as I pushed away my plate. “Big night with Masha last night. I think I should go. Sorry, Steve. Let’s do it again soon, okay?”
“We all feel like shit,” said Steve, raising an eyebrow at a waiter and tapping his glass. “It’s fucking Russia. The booze. The pollution. The shit food. The fucking airplanes. The crap that falls out of the sky when it rains, you don’t even want to think about. Russia is like polonium. It attacks all your organs at once.”
“What are you working on now?” I asked him as I put on my scarf.
“Big energy story,” he said. “Much bigger than your little oil terminal.”
“What’s the angle this time? Business or politics?”
“In Russia,” Steve said, “there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories.”
6
There were times in every Russian winter when I thought I might not make it. Times when I might have headed straight for the airport, if I hadn’t known the traffic would be so terrible. Walking became an obstacle course, with mounds of snow to swerve around and narrow runs of passable pavement that you battled over with people coming the other way. You know that thing that happens in London, when you run into someone on the pavement, and when you try to get around them they move in the same direction as you, and you’re still in each other’s way—but in the end you work it out, smile at the accidental intimacy and harmless bad luck, and carry on? That doesn’t happen in Moscow. Once a month or so I forgot to curl my toes inside my fur-lined boots, my feet went cycling upwards, my arse downwards, and I lived through a long, long second of flailing helpless terror as I waited to hit the ice.
Then there are the orange men. Every year, after the first proper snowfall, someone in the mayor’s office pushes a button, and an army of men in orange overalls—new-age serfs from Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Whereverstan—emerge like placid invading aliens from under the earth or the other side of the city’s outer ring road. They drive around in prehistoric trucks, shovelling snow into piles and taking out stubborn patches of ice with WMD-grade chemicals. In the street where I lived they piled all the snow on one side, burying any cars that had been carelessly left there, which that winter included the rusting Zhiguli. And every night, at about four in the morning, the orange men come with shovels to hack the ice off the pavements, making a noise that only the dead could sleep through—a noise somewhere between the screech of fingernails on glass, the banging of a shipyard, and the yowling of randy cats. The worst part was my own bastard ingratitude. I resented them, but at the same time I knew it was only stupid chance that meant I was warm and inside, sometimes with a woman beside me, while they were outside breaking their backs.
One grumpy evening, around the end of November, instead of running to the airport I fled to Masha and the mobile phone shop where she worked, down near Novokuznetskaya Metro station. She wasn’t expecting me. I turned right up towards the Tretyakov Gallery, past a derelict church and opposite it a subterranean café I’d been to once, where privileged Russian kids listen to angry music and pretend to be dissidents. Just after that was Masha’s shop. I peered in through the window.
She was sitting behind a desk with her hair in an Alice band, listening as a stone-washed young couple explained their telephonic needs. The shop had a reception area where you took a numbered ticket from a machine and waited to be called into the office, where Masha and the other sales staff sat. It was standing-room-only pandemonium, the atmosphere like I imagine the inside of the Ark. (There were more mobile phones than people in Moscow then, largely, it was said, because of all the men who had a separate number for speaking to their mistresses.) A woman in the far corner was whining as if she was giving birth. I wiped my steamed-up glasses and was elbowing my way through the crowd when the inner doors opened and Masha came out to meet me.
“Kolya,” she said in her amazing growl, that voice that reached into my insides, “go please to Raskolnikov’s on Pyatnitskaya and wait. I will be twenty minutes maybe.”
“Okay,” I said. I watched as she walked back to her desk, her lower half encased in tight black office-girl trousers, her upper curves softened by a racing-green company sweatshirt.
I did as I was told and waited by the window in Raskolnikov’s, a warm café that was buried in a little courtyard and not trying too hard to be found. Eventually Masha turned into the courtyard. She was wearing a coat that resembled a sort of red patchwork duvet, only sexier. She had three-inch heels that she’d put on after her shift, on which she somehow walked through the snow like Jesus on water. She had perfect winter suspension. She came in, took off her coat, and sat down opposite me.
“How was work?” I said.
“What is problem with you?”
I don’t know what I’m doing here, I wanted to say, and not just in Russia, either, I’m lonely, I love you.
I didn’t say that, you won’t be surprised to hear. I mumbled something English instead. I said I was feeling a bit low, a bit tired, that I wanted to see her, that I hoped she didn’t mind the intrusion.
“Listen,” she said. “On Saturday we go to dacha.”
“What dacha?”
The Russian dacha is a physical place, the most physical place, the earthy retreat where you grow potatoes, pickle onions, and go fishing. But it’s also a place in the imagination, the place that is not Moscow, where there are no traffic jams, no hustlers, and no police.
“It is dacha of my friend Anya’s grandfather. But he is never going there. There is banya, we will make shashlik. With Katya. You will feel better.”
“Okay,” I said. “Good.”
“But first in morning we go to Butovo.”
“Why will we go to Butovo?”
“We go with Tatiana Vladimirovna,” Masha said.
“Why is Tatiana Vladimirovna going to Butovo?”
Butovo is a suburb that clings to the monstrous city at its far southern rim, the kind of place that I guess used to be a separate village before Moscow bloated out to engulf it, like the ones in Middlesex sucked into London by the Tube.
“She maybe wants to live there, and on Saturday we go with her so she may decide.” I remembered them referring to their scheme, that afternoon when Masha and Katya introduced me to their aunt. I figured this must have been it.
Masha put her hand under the table and onto my knee, sliding her nails up the inside of my thigh. “Don’t worry, Kolya,” she said. “I love you.”
ON THE SATURDAY the three of us buzzed the crackly intercom outside Tatiana Vladimirovna’s building and asked her if she was ready. “Always ready,” she said, letting us in so we didn’t have to wait outside in the slush. “Always ready” was the slogan of the Pioneers, Masha told me—the old Soviet equivalent of the Scouts, who were taught how to unmask spies and denounce kulaks as well as to build campfires.
Tatiana Vladimirovna came down to meet us wearing a kind of reinforced winter tunic, brown and padded, a bright blue scarf, mittens, and what in Luton in the eighties were called moon boots. She was carrying a big plastic bag, inside which, it turned out, there was a Tupperware box of pickled herrings, some hard-boiled eggs, and a flask of sweet tea, which she began to press on us as soon as we’d changed Metro lines at Borovitskaya and settled in for the long ride out to Butovo. She’d wrapped up some salt in a piece of brown paper for us to put on the eggs.
“A long time ago,” Tatiana Vladimirovna whispered to me in Russian, “Pyotr Arkadyevich and I used to go out to Butovo to pick mushrooms in the forest and swim in the pond. But there was no Metro then. We took a bus and then we walked.”
It was a legacy of Soviet times, Masha told me, the idea of swapping apartments. You never owned your flat in the old days, she said—you never owned anything, except maybe your grave—but you could swap your right to live in it for someone else’s right to live somewhere else. Some people still went in for swaps, Masha said, partly because they didn’t trust themselves not to drink the proceeds if they got paid in cash for their properties. In this case, she said, Stepan Mikhailovich would probably give Tatiana Vladimirovna some money as well, because her flat in the centre was worth more than the new one in Butovo. They hadn’t agreed how much he would give her, they’d discuss the details later. That day we were going to meet him and look at the flat, then come back to Moscow, pick up supplies, and take another train out to the dacha.