by A. D. Miller
“I’m sure you told me Russia was like polonium.”
“Did I?”
He’d stopped listening again. His eyes were focussed on the pole, around which a blonde in a Stetson and leather chaps and nothing else was lassoing a small herd of brunettes in cowhide bikinis. Steve waved at a waitress, tapping his empty glass for another hit of Moldovan Merlot.
11
Tatiana Vladimirovna went out to Butovo again, with Katya I think, sometime in the middle of February. I saw them all soon afterwards when we went skiing in the park at Kolomenskoe, down across the solid Moscow River. You didn’t think I could ski, did you? You were right.
We left Tatiana Vladimirovna in a muddy little café by the entrance to the park, waving us away and ordering tea and blinis for herself. Masha and Katya brought their own skis, longer and thinner than the ones I remembered from my week of downhill when I was at university (drinking games, pissing in the chalet sink, a sprained ankle). I hired my skis from a kiosk beyond the gates, plus some felt boots that looked like they might first have been worn when the Russians invaded Finland. By then, the snow packed against the churchyard fence on my street had begun to resemble that multilayered Italian dessert you like: whitish on top, creamy underneath, then a sort of stained yellow like leaked battery fluid, then a layer studded with rubbish (broken bottles and crisp packets and lonely discarded shoes, suspended in a gritty white lava), and beneath that, at the bottom, a base of sinister black slime. But at Kolomenskoe the snow was still white, stupidly white. It was hard and compacted beneath the top inch, and painful when you fell in it, which I did every time I went up or down an incline, once or twice losing my glasses and scrabbling around in the powder with my fat gloves to find them.
Masha and Katya seemed to be able to ski naturally, as naturally as they could walk on stilettos and dance. They laughed at me when I fell but went slowly ’til I caught up. In the park there was a wooden cabin in a grove of oak trees that was supposed to have been built by Peter the Great, and an old church, dedicated—as they always are—to some mythic victory over the Poles. The church was closed, and covered with scaffolding for renovations, but long pure icicles hung from the horizontal scaffold boards like necklaces of tusks. There was a man with a sledge, covered in bells and drawn by three white horses, offering people rides between the trees. The girls were wearing skiing kit, thin waterproof trousers and aerodynamic jackets. I wasn’t, and I got hot and wet at the same time. But when we came out onto a ridge above a lake, frozen down below in the middle of a leafless forest, it didn’t matter. It was stunning.
When we arrived back at the café, they went one at a time, I remember, to change into their jeans and see to their hair in the toilets, while I thawed out with Tatiana Vladimirovna.
“Well done, Kolya,” she said when we were all sitting down. “Soon you will be one of us. A proper Russian.”
“Maybe,” said Masha. “He can’t ski at all, but he loves the banya.” She looked at me, smiling with one corner of her mouth, a smirk of carnal triumph. I blushed.
Tatiana Vladimirovna told us about her trip to Butovo. It didn’t seem as if much work had been done on the apartment, she said. But Stepan Mikhailovich had explained that they’d been busy fixing the wiring, and the main thing, Tatiana Vladimirovna said, was that it was nice there in the snow, so nice, with the trails made by winter boots running between the trees and around the pond in the forest opposite her new building.
When she was a girl, Tatiana Vladimirovna went on, before they moved to Leningrad, they’d made their own skis out of bark. They’d laid down big bottles of pickles for the winter, cabbages and beetroot and tomatoes, and killed a pig in November that they lived off almost ’til the thaw. Her family had been poor, she told us, but they didn’t know they were poor. I noticed a little blond moustache on her upper lip that I hadn’t spotted before. I think she may have bleached it.
“You know,” she said, “it is possible to see a church from the window of the apartment in Butovo. Do you know which church it is, Kolya?”
I’d seen the church she meant—the one with white walls and gold domes—but I didn’t know which saint or tsar it commemorated.
“It is a very special church,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said. “It was built as a memorial to the people killed by Stalin. They say that twenty thousand victims were shot near this church. Maybe more. Nobody knows exactly … I am not a religious person like my mother was, we lost all that in Leningrad. But I think it is good that I will be able to see this church from my window.”
I didn’t know what to say. Masha and Katya were quiet too. The condensation on the inside of the café’s windows was thick and streaked.
In the end Tatiana Vladimirovna asked, “So, Kolya, will you have children?”
I’m not sure why—something to do with life going on, or needing to believe that it does—but the question seemed to follow naturally from the Stalin church and the mass graves. I tried not to look at Masha but I could sense her concentrating on her tea, turning away from me.
“I don’t know, Tatiana Vladimirovna,” I said. “I would like to.”
It wasn’t really true. I’d always looked at acquaintances who’d become fathers with a mixture of contempt and animal terror. I’d looked at the babies, with their crawling and grabbing, their purposeful yet random tortoise movements, with no feelings at all. Don’t worry, it’s different now. I know you want children, it’s settled.
That afternoon I just said what I thought Masha might want to hear, what most women want to hear. And if she’d told me then that she was pregnant, I might have wanted to keep it, I might even have been joyful—not because of the baby, but because it would have meant I was in with a shot at forever. Though at the same time I wonder whether I knew, deep down, that we couldn’t have a happy ending, whether in fact the nowness of it was what I liked about her most. I think I could see that there was something missing, or something extra, even if I was trying not to.
“I want children,” said Katya. “Maybe six. Maybe seven. But only when I have finished my studies.” She was a simple soul, I thought, an open book, a fairy tale.
“And Masha,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna affectionately, “I can see you as a mother.”
“I want children, yes,” Masha said in a low intense voice without looking up. “But not in Moscow.”
“Mashinka,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, taking one of my hands in one of hers, and one of Masha’s in her other one, “if I could change one thing in my life, this would be it. Pyotr Arkadyevich and I, we were unlucky, and of course he had his work, and we had a good life together, but in the end …”
“That’s enough,” said Masha, like she meant it, and took her hand away.
Tatiana Vladimirovna’s eyes bustled between us from beneath her grey bowl fringe. Under our feet the floor was slippery with dying snow.
We ordered some vodka and “herring in a fur coat” (marinated fish buried under a sludge of beetroot and mayonnaise). We talked about the arrangements for the apartment swap.
I said I was taking care of the property searches. I said I thought we’d have all the certificates we needed within a couple of weeks.
“Thank you, Nicholas,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. “Thank you very much.”
Then we talked about the money.
I think it was the first time they’d discussed the money in detail. Masha said that, because the new place in Butovo was worth less than Tatiana Vladimirovna’s old one, Stepan Mikhailovich was going to give her fifty thousand dollars. (People talked and thought and bribed in dollars in Moscow then, at least when serious money was involved, though, when it came to it, legitimate transactions were done in roubles.)
The truth is that fifty thousand wasn’t enough. Flats in the centre like Tatiana Vladimirovna’s were in demand from oil-drunk foreigners, as well as well-heeled Russians keen to set up their mistresses close to the office. There were bottles of wine in Moscow that cost almost as much as Stepan Mi
khailovich was offering, and human beings who cost a lot less. But to Tatiana Vladimirovna fifty thousand dollars must have sounded as amazing as the twenty thousand people buried on top of each other under the snow in Butovo.
At first she said no, she wouldn’t know what to do with so much money. Then she conceded that it was true, her pension wasn’t enough, nobody’s pension was enough—though, on the other hand, she had a little money saved from her job, and she got her special allowances from the state as a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, and a little bit more on account of her husband’s contribution to the lost Soviet cause. All the same, she said, it might be nice to be able to go back to St. Petersburg one day …
“Take it,” Masha said.
“Take it,” Katya said.
“Tatiana Vladimirovna,” I said, “I think you should take the money.”
She scanned our faces again. “I’ll take it,” she said, clapping her hands. “Maybe I will go to New York! Or London,” she said, and winked at me.
We laughed and drank.
“To us!” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, sinking her vodka in one. She smiled, and her fine skin, still taut over her high Russian cheekbones, looked for a moment like the skin of that happy girl in the photo from the Crimea in 1956.
THAT FEBRUARY—ABOUT a fortnight before my mother was due to visit—I caught a killer Moscow cold. It introduced each of its symptoms to me in turn, like musicians doing solos before they all join in for the finale: first the runny nose, then the sore throat, then the headache, then the works. Masha prescribed honey and cognac and no blow jobs. I had two or three days in bed, halfheartedly watching DVD box sets of American dramas, listening through the window to the street scrapers and the prehistoric garbage trucks and, from downstairs, George’s occasional sad meowing.
When I got back to the office at Paveletskaya, Olga the Tatar perched on the edge of my desk and ran me through the paperwork we had so far for Tatiana Vladimirovna’s apartment. The privatisation had been legal, one of the forms attested. Another one showed that the mayor had no current plans to tear down the building. A third demonstrated that nobody else had the right to live there. Tatiana Vladimirovna’s husband was listed alongside her on one of the pieces of paper, but someone had crossed out his name and printed the word “deceased” above it. We had the technical certificate with the dimensions of the rooms and the floor plan and the details of the sewerage and the power supply. All the forms were splattered with stamps, like blotches across a modern work of art. All this paper, I thought, and you still didn’t own the place, not really. You never really own anything in Russia. The tsar or president or whoever is in charge can take it away, or take you away, any time he feels like it.
“What else do we need?” I asked Olga.
“Now you only need the transfer document from the property registration department. And the old lady needs to be examined by a doctor to prove she is not drunk or insane.”
This was necessary, Olga explained, because sometimes Russians sold their flats, but claimed a few months later that they’d been sozzled or high or deranged at the time of the transaction, and on that basis got the sale annulled and their apartment back. Or else some long-lost nephew turned up and claimed those things for them. In a Russian court you could prove anything for the right fee, but a certificate from a clinic would make it harder for anyone to try it on, she said.
I told Olga she was an angel.
“Not such an angel,” she said, but she sounded more sad than flirtatious.
“What about the Butovo flat?”
“For the other apartment,” she said, “there is also some progress. The building has been constructed legally on the territory of the Moscow city government. In the old lady’s unit, number twenty-three, no one else is registered to live. It is connected to the city drainage system and to the electricity network. The owner is a company called MosStroiInvest.”
I said I thought Stepan Mikhailovich owned the apartment.
“Maybe this MosStroiInvest is his company,” Olga said.
She held the forms above my head like bait. “So, when do we go for cocktails?”
I thought of something Paolo had said to me soon after I arrived in Moscow. He said he had some bad news to tell me about being a lawyer in Russia, but also some good news. The bad news was that there were a zillion pointless, unintelligible, and contradictory laws. The good news was that you weren’t expected to obey them. I was sure there would be a way around MosStroiInvest.
“Soon,” I said, reaching up to take the papers.
Sergei Borisovich the potato face had come back from his winter holiday in Thailand, I remember, and he made us all watch a PowerPoint presentation of his photos. We were feeling virtuous, businesswise at least: we’d signed off the second instalment of the Cossack’s loan and, according to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor, at the current rate of engineering progress he’d soon be entitled to the rest of it. The Cossack had sent us a crate of live crabs (from the sea around the new terminal, he said). When I looked out of my window in the tower I could see a flock of snow scrapers in orange overalls clearing the white rooftops on the other sides of the square, crawling along the inclines and reaching perilously into the gutters.
THE CENTRAL HEATING had baked my bedroom. I’d opened a window to let in some cold air and drawn the weird ruched curtains. Masha was on top, her fists scrunched into my chest, looking past my head and into the wall, breathing and concentrating like a middle-distance runner.
I hadn’t seen her for more than a week. I’d been ill, and I thought she might have been away for a few days—her phone had been switching straight to voice mail—though she denied it when I asked her. I suddenly remembered what Olga had told me and worried and wanted to find out.
“What is MosStroiInvest, Masha?”
“What?”
“What is MosStroiInvest?”
“What?” She stopped her rocking and arching but she was still panting. “I don’t know,” she said.
“It’s the company that owns the apartment in Butovo, Masha,” I said. “The one for Tatiana Vladimirovna.”
She rolled off. She lay on her back next to me, looking up with me at the hieroglyphic lines on my ceiling. No part of us was touching anymore.
“MosStroiInvest … I think it is company of Stepan Mikhailovich. Or of—how you say it?—the husband of one sister of Stepan Mikhailovich.”
“Brother-in-law.”
“Yes, company of his brother-in-law. Yes, I think this is name of company. Yes, MosStroiInvest.”
“It is better to be certain,” I said, “because otherwise there may be problems for Tatiana Vladimirovna.” There were lots of problems with Russian developers in those days. Sometimes they sold all the flats in a building, disappeared before it was finished, and the buyers built protest camps and set fire to themselves outside the government headquarters in the White House, up near the Hotel Ukraina.
Masha thought about it, her face turned away from me and into the pillow. Her neck was flushed. My fingers had made red imprints on her rib cage.
“There will be no problems,” she said. She rolled onto her side so she was facing me, took one of my hands in both of hers, above and below, and looked into my eyes. Her eyes were jungle green. Her skin looked young but her flesh was tough, taut and muscled like a dancer’s or a fighter’s. “And, Kolya,” she said, more cold than tender, “we ask you only to prepare papers for Tatiana Vladimirovna for selling her apartment. These other papers for Butovo, Stepan Mikhailovich will make. It is not needed for you to worry. We have all these papers already. For you it is necessary only to tell Tatiana Vladimirovna that all papers are in order. You must tell her this, Kolya.”
I said nothing. She touched me.
“Come back,” I said. That was all, but we both knew what it meant. I’d chosen to believe her. I’d taken her side.
“Okay,” she said, and she came back.
She is a special person, Masha. I have to tell
you that. All that focus and self-control. I’m sure she could have been a great surgeon. Or maybe, in a different century, a champion nun. Or an actress—she would have made a great actress. She was a great actress.
PEOPLE WERE SKATING on the deep-frozen pond the next time I went round the Bulvar to Chistie Prudy. There was a man leaving Tatiana Vladimirovna’s flat as I arrived, a man I didn’t recognise. He was fortyish, slick looking, wearing a top-notch suede coat. Banker, I thought immediately. He had a signet ring on one of his little fingers and looked like he’d recently had an expensive haircut. He smelled of money. Katya was flirting with him as he tried to leave, smiling and twisting and sticking out her tits. The man said “good evening” to me in Russian, turned up the collar of his coat, and left. He didn’t look to me like the sort of man who could have had a reason to visit Tatiana Vladimirovna.
“Who was that?” I asked as I took off my boots.
“I don’t know,” said Katya, and laughed.
Straightaway Masha slid across the parquet in her socks, grabbed us both by the hand, and said, “Guys, come to eat some blinis!”
The Russians were celebrating Maslenitsa, a half-pagan February festival, something to do with Lent, something allegedly to do with the end of winter, when the church bells ring and you eat pancakes. The three of us perched at the edges of Tatiana Vladimirovna’s kitchen, eating blinis with sour cream and red caviar. The kitchen windows were sealed against their frames with masking tape to keep out the chill—an old Siberian habit, I imagined, that she couldn’t quite shake off. There were toasts.
“I have almost all the documents for this flat,” I told Tatiana Vladimirovna.
“Huge thanks,” she said, and kissed me on both cheeks.
“And Kolya is also preparing all the papers for your new apartment in Butovo,” Masha added, talking to her but looking at me.