by A. D. Miller
THE OLD PART of the Moscow Metro, in the city centre, is the sort of subway system you get if you give a tyrannical maniac all the marble, onyx, and disposable human beings he can dream of. But the network gives up on its malachite and stained glass and fancy bas-reliefs, and pushes up above ground, long before it gets out to Butovo, which is about as far as it goes. When we came out of the Metro station there were new high-rise apartment buildings all around, white and peach and not as ugly as the Soviet ones, with stubbly patches of lawn between them.
We flagged down a car, and on the way to the building, I remember, the driver gave us a rapid-fire lament for his lost youth and lost motherland. He was an engineer in Soviet times, he told us. “These days,” he said, “the Chinese are too cunning for us … We are giving away all our natural resources … Everyone over forty is finished in Russia.” We drove out towards where the high-rises stopped and turned left.
The building we arrived at marked the end of Moscow. On one side was all city and stress, but on the other side of the road was the sort of Butovo that Tatiana Vladimirovna remembered from many years before, a wonky Russian idyll of sloping wooden houses and little orchards alongside and behind them. Beyond the houses, with their ornamental window frames, rickety fences, and rusty roofs, was a grove of silver birch trees, and beyond that a greener forest—a forest that looked like you could still hunt for mushrooms there.
It was about ten thirty or eleven in the morning. We stood outside the building’s entrance, stamping our feet and waiting for Stepan Mikhailovich to arrive. It was cold, but I’d graduated to my ultimate winter coat, a black Michelin-man ski number with a thermonuclear lining, which kept my blood flowing even down at Napoleonic temperatures. The air was less acrid than in the city centre. We could taste the pine trees.
Masha made a phone call. Then she said, “He is coming. Stepan Mikhailovich is coming.”
Stepan Mikhailovich arrived after about five minutes. He was a thin man with a little ponytail and a nervous smile. He can’t have been over twenty-five, but since lots of high-flying Russian businessmen were virtually pubescent, I wasn’t too surprised. He shook hands with Masha, Katya, and me, and bowed to Tatiana Vladimirovna. We went inside, Stepan Mikhailovich last, groping for a light switch. The building wasn’t finished: the walls were unpainted, the floor in the vestibule was uncovered, and the heating didn’t seem to work. It was at least as cold as it was in the street. The lift hadn’t been installed yet, so we walked up the concrete steps to the seventh floor and the apartment that might soon be Tatiana Vladimirovna’s, brushing aside rogue electrical wires that had escaped from their brackets on the ceiling. Tatiana Vladimirovna wouldn’t take the arm I offered her, but stopped twice to bend over, gasp, and clutch her knees. The building smelled of paint and glue.
On the seventh floor Stepan Mikhailovich opened the stubborn door to an apartment with a key and his shoulder. The apartment wasn’t ready either, everything was bare and plaster-coloured, but you could see how it was supposed to be—a little IKEAn paradise, with big windows and highish ceilings, two large boxy bedrooms, and a kitchen built into the living room. There were two balconies, one looking back towards Moscow from a bedroom and the other, off the living room, facing the forest.
“You see, Tatiana Vladimirovna,” said Masha as we stood in the living room, “you will no longer have to carry your food through from the kitchen like you have to now.”
Tatiana Vladimirovna didn’t answer but went out onto the balcony. I followed her, making sure I’d be able to spring back inside if it collapsed. From above you could see the chaos of entangled plots on the other side of the road, and a couple of tough tethered goats, and the glint of a frozen pond somewhere in the trees. Above them the sun was shining vaguely through the milky November sky, old but strong. In April—between the thaw and the jungly green explosion of the summer—or in raw mid-October, I bet the same view would have been barren and depressing. But when we stood there, all the bits of old tractors and discarded refrigerators, the shoals of empty vodka bottles and dead animals that tend to litter the Russian countryside were invisible, smothered by the annual oblivion of the snow. The snow let you forget the scars and blemishes, like temporary amnesia for a bad conscience.
Tatiana Vladimirovna breathed in deeply, and sighed. I thought I could see her anticipating the rest of her life, a lucky unexpected coda spent making the gooey fruit compotes that old Russian women like to ferment, talking to other babushkas in their head scarves, pretending the last seventy years had never happened.
“Do you like it, Tatiana Vladimirovna?” Masha called out.
Again Tatiana Vladimirovna didn’t answer but came back inside and walked around the living room. She paused by a window at the side of the building that took in both the end of the town and the beginning of the countryside. Through it you could see the white towers of a church hunkering in the forest, with little gold domes and silver Orthodox crosses riding on top of them.
“I think,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, “that this is where I will put Pyotr Arkadyevich’s desk. What do you think, Nikolai?”
“I think that would be very nice,” I said. I did truly think it was nice and right for her, I’m sure I did. But I didn’t think enough. I wanted to get back to the city and out to the dacha, and the banya, and the night.
“Yes,” Katya said, smiling her inscrutable smile, her sweet nose pink from the chill, “it is very pleasant, Tatiana Vladimirovna. Very beautiful. And such fresh air!”
“Stepan Mikhailovich,” said Masha, pacing up to him over the cold floor in her red duvet coat and touching him on the arm, “when do you think this building will be ready?”
“I think in a month,” said Stepan Mikhailovich. A month seemed optimistic, though in Russia you never knew. They could wallow in mud and vodka for a decade, then conjure up a skyscraper or execute a royal family in an afternoon, if they put their minds to it and the incentives were right.
Stepan Mikhailovich paused and then said, “I think Tatiana Vladimirovna will be very happy here. It is clean, and there are not too many cars or immigrants.”
Tatiana Vladimirovna smiled and went out onto the balcony again, alone. I saw her lift a gloved hand to her eyes. I thought she might be crying, but I was standing behind her and I couldn’t say for sure.
I hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, had I? Anything you could hold against me? Not really. Not yet.
WE OFFERED TO walk Tatiana Vladimirovna home but she waved us away. Instead we said good-bye and left her on the Metro when we got off to change onto the red line for the two stops to Pushkinskaya. We walked down Bolshaya Bronnaya to the supermarket around the corner from my building. At the butcher’s counter I made another hand gesture that, like the flick of the neck and the tap of invisible epaulettes that Masha had taught me that evening in Dream of the East, seemed to be understood by every Russian. I held out my hands in front of me and twisted my wrists, as if I was twirling two imaginary knobs. The man behind the counter understood the sign for shashlik, and wrapped up a kilo of marinated lamb. We caught a commuter train from frilly Belorussky station, out of the other end of the city from Butovo and towards the promised dacha.
For an hour on the rattling train, I remember, the three of us were jostled by a kind of shabby cabaret—a chain of beggars and hawkers chasing each other through the carriages, selling beer, pens, cigarettes, roasted sunflower seeds, bootleg DVDs, all-purpose perfume (for wearing or drinking). Or they were playing the accordion or explaining how they’d lost a leg or a husband in Chechnya. There were prostitutes, runaways, assorted human sacrifices. I gave a hundred roubles to an old woman with a lopsided face and a thin coat. At about three o’clock, I think, we got off.
Already it was beautiful. The station was just a single wooden platform on stilts, with an old-fashioned sign that said “Orekhovo” or “Polinkovo” or something, one of the cutesy prerevolutionary Russian country names that got changed when they collectivised everythin
g, then brought back again after the wall came down. We stood alone on the platform, mingling our breaths and cutting deep shadows into the snow. There was forest all around us, the branches of the trees covered in snow like they’d been outlined in icing sugar. We shuffled along to the steps at the end of the platform, and crossed over the rails and the wooden slats between them, Masha and Katya attached to my elbows. We went up a vague path through a clump of silver birches, their branches too cunningly angular for the snow to have really settled on, in the direction of what looked like human activity.
It’s a strange country, Russia, with its talented sinners and occasional saint, bona fide saints that only a place of such accomplished cruelty could produce, a crazy mix of filth and glory. It was the same combination that afternoon. It turned out to be the sort of Russian village where it looks like a war’s just ended, even though it hasn’t: the kind that anybody sober and able-bodied has fled, leaving behind only the lunatics, criminals, and policemen. There was one shop. A pair of ruined bearded men stood outside, possibly waiting for a third to turn up and share a bottle of vodka with them. We went in to buy drinking water and charcoal.
The girls took the bags from Moscow and the charcoal, leaving me with just the water, the handles of the big plastic containers biting through my winter gloves. They steered me down a track that ran alongside a grey block of flats and led to a rusty little gate. Masha opened it with a big old key like a prison warden’s, and we were back in Christmas-card Russia, the birches alternating with still-lush pines, the ground between them a naïvely pure white. As we waded through the snow, the odd twig snapped with a sound like a cracked whip, which ricocheted off the trees around us. A hundred metres in, there was a half-frozen stream, rivulets racing between the mating slabs of ice, which we crossed on a stringy footbridge with missing boards and a fairground swing. I felt as if I was an extra in a Siberian Indiana Jones.
On the other side of the stream, spaced out between the trees, were the dachas—ramshackle wooden cottages poking out of the snow. I saw smoke coming from one of the chimneys, but the rest seemed deserted. Icicles like ornate daggers descended from the overhanging roofs. We didn’t see any other people.
Our place was about the fifth or sixth cottage along, set in a submerged garden, the snow disturbed only by the shallow geometric patterns left by birds’ feet. The building leaned at an ominous Pisan angle, and looked from the outside like one of those slapstick houses in a silent film, as if it was poised to collapse and leave us standing in a window frame amid the harmless wreckage. But inside it was much more spacious than seemed feasible. In the front room there was a stopped grandfather clock, photographs of dead ancestors in smudgy frames, and a bare electric bulb hanging from the ceiling. There was a sofa that must once have been someone’s treasure, with patched gold fabric and a motif of nustling storks carved into the panels below the armrests. In a small second room we found a gas ring and a canister, a table, and an unexpected staircase that led to a bedroom in the eaves. The bedroom had a made-up single bed and a frosted window that looked out into the forest.
Masha was immediately on her knees, stuffing lumps of wood from a basket by the door into the mouth of a stove—an old Russian stove that was built into the wall, the sort that the house serfs used to sleep on top of. Katya went out to start cooking the banya, a separate little hut with its own stove and chimney about twenty metres beyond the dacha, almost in the trees. Masha pointed out the barbecue, a functional tub of metal with detachable legs that was hiding under a table.
I unwrapped the meat we’d bought in Moscow and slid the chunks onto impressively crusty skewers. I went outside with the barbecue and the charcoal. I stood on my own, tending the fire in the winter silence. It started to snow again, the wide weightless flakes sizzling on the coals. Standing there, I remember, I experienced the blissful sense of well-being that expats sometimes enjoy. I was a long way from things and people that I didn’t want to think about—including myself, my old self, the so-what lawyer with the so-what life I’d left behind in London. The me that you know now. I was in a place where today, every day, almost anything might happen.
An hour or so later we were sitting abreast on the sofa in the warmed-up dacha, eating barbecued lamb with flat Armenian bread and a hot Georgian pomegranate sauce, drinking snow-chilled vodka from chipped shot glasses, chased down with beer. Masha’s hair was down over her shoulders. They both ate with the quiet intent opportunism that Russians seem to inherit.
“I like your friend,” Katya said.
“What friend?”
“At club. At Rasputin. Friend who help us.”
“He’s not my friend,” I said.
“Maybe he should be your friend,” Masha said. “He is useful person.”
She smiled, though I don’t think she was joking. I liked her frankness. But I didn’t want to talk about the Cossack.
“Who is Anya?” I asked them.
“Who?” said Katya.
“The girl whose grandfather owns this dacha.”
“Her grandfather has dacha from time he work for railway,” Katya explained. “Railway owned all this land and gave everybody piece. But he never come and Anya live now in Nizhny Novgorod. I think maybe grandfather is dead. She also is our sister.”
“You have another sister?”
They smiled. They thought about it.
“You know, Kolya,” said Masha, “in Russian this word ‘sister’ means not only daughter of your parents. It also can mean daughter of parents’ brother or sister. I think in English you have one other word for sister of this type?”
“Cousin,” I said. “I didn’t know that.”
“Da,” Masha said. “Cousin.”
“And what kind of sister is Katya?” I asked.
“She is also cousin,” said Masha, after a pause.
“Yes,” said Katya, her cheeks flushed from the sauce and the vodka, “I am cousin.” She licked up the last traces from her hands.
“Are your family also in Murmansk? With Masha’s mother?”
“I think yes,” Katya said. “Yes, in Murmansk.”
Not sisters, then. Not quite everything I thought they were. For the first time, with them, I felt like I sometimes did when it dawned on me that a Moscow taxi driver was drunk or mad, and I sat fingering the door handle in the back of his car and contemplating when to leap out, all the time knowing that in fact I wouldn’t. I never did.
I might have asked more about their family, and how they were all related, but Masha put down her plate and said, “Let’s go, banya is ready.”
THE OUTHOUSE HAD a tiny greasy anteroom, about the size of a large wardrobe, with a couple of hooks on the wall and a hatch for the stove into which Katya fed a couple more logs. We stood there for a few seconds, like we were strangers thrust together in a refrigerated lift. Then we took off our clothes, arses and elbows bumping and rubbing. They were both wearing G-strings—my impression is that unmarried Russian women are obliged to wear them by law—frilly pink for Katya with a matching bra, I can’t remember Masha’s. They took those off too. I pulled off the posh boxer shorts I’d chosen with such care, and put my glasses into one of my winter boots. “Okay,” Masha said, “hurry!” and we darted into the heat before it could escape.
It had none of the amenities—the lemon tea, the savage masseurs, the hushed conversation of powerful hairy men—that you get in the upscale Moscow places I sometimes went to with Paolo. But this is definitely the banya that I remember best. There was a rough homemade bench, and one window that let in the fading light from outside. In the wall opposite the window was a metal plate that formed the back of the stove: to make steam you threw water from a little bucket against the metal. It was already impossibly hot. We sat down on the bench, trying to keep our feet off the roasting floor. I was in the hottest seat, nearest to the stove, Katya was in the half-lit spot by the window. It was one of those situations when you try not to look, and fail, and console yourself that probably you
were supposed to. She had mannequin-firm breasts, bigger than Masha’s, and she wasn’t a real blonde.
We sat skin to skin, our sweat running together and pooling on the floor.
“So, Kolya,” said Katya, “what do you think from Butovo? As home for Tatiana Vladimirovna.”
“I thought it was very nice.”
“I am not sure,” said Masha, her long legs just visible but her face in the dark. “It is far away. Maybe I like old apartment of Tatiana Vladimirovna more.”
“But if she want to go to Butovo,” said Katya, “maybe you help her, Kolya. I mean papers. Legal things. Papers for old apartment that Stepan Mikhailovich may need. She is old Soviet woman and does not understand.”
It was hard to talk, the hot air rushing in and scalding the back of my throat when I opened my mouth, and I just said, “Yes.”
We baked for maybe twenty minutes. I was already dizzy from the vodka and wanted to leave after about five, but I didn’t want to be the first to quit. Finally Masha said, “Now we wash.”
“How do we wash?”
“In snow,” said Katya.
“We jump in snow,” said Masha.
“Isn’t that dangerous? You know,” I gasped, gesturing at my chest in the murk, “for the heart.”
“Life is dangerous,” said Masha, dripping an arm around me. “No one survived it yet.”
We slipped out on the sweaty floor and closed the door. We went straight through the anteroom. Masha and Katya dived giggling and facedown into a patch of deep untouched snow by the back fence, under a heavy pine tree. I shivered for about three seconds and jumped after them.
It felt as if I’d been slapped all over, or stung by a thousand bees, but in a good way, the snow killing the heat of the banya in an arrested heartbeat. More than that, it felt as if I’d done something reckless, like a high dive or a train robbery, and lived through it. The tingly pain proved that I was alive, every inch of me was alive, more alive than ever.
That’s the truth about the Russians that I missed until it was too late. The Russians will do the impossible thing—the thing you think they can’t do, the thing you haven’t even thought of. They will set fire to Moscow when the French are coming or poison each other in foreign cities. They will do it, and afterwards they will behave as if nothing has happened at all. And if you stay in Russia long enough, so will you.