by A. D. Miller
On Ostozhenka we pulled up outside an elitny restaurant/club. Absinthe, I think it was called. The blue light was switched off. There was a line of would-be oligarchesses shivering in the pavement slush, hoping to be smiled on by the resident feis kontrol supremo. The crowd parted for the Cossack as the traffic had made way for his flashing light. He was carrying one of the leather man-bags, just big enough to hold a small semiautomatic, that were then all the rage among the muscled and moneyed classes in Moscow—accessories so camp they were somehow threatening, like they were daring someone to try to steal them. He pulled something out of the bag, waved it at the bouncers, and entered the promised land. We strode in behind him and gave our coats to the pretty cloakroom attendant.
“What was that?” I asked after we sat down.
“What?” said the Cossack, summoning a waiter with a commandingly lazy finger gesture. The air was thick with smoke, Russian techno, and the aroma of deluxe women.
“What did you show the bouncers?”
He opened his bag and took out a card with a double-headed eagle on one side and on the other a photo ID. It stated that he worked for the economic affairs secretariat in the Kremlin. He twirled his contraband card between his fingers. “Forbidden,” he said, “only means expensive.”
We ordered cocktails, and when they came the Cossack stood up to make a toast, then another and another: “To our friendship … To our cooperation … May your families prosper … May our countries always be at peace … May you come to visit us in the north.” A Russian toast is a liquid dream of a different life.
“There is something I wanted to ask you,” I said.
“Anything,” said the Cossack, spreading his arms wide and making innocent eyes.
“Have you heard of a company called MosStroiInvest?” I was curious.
“MosStroiInvest? MosStroiInvest … No, I think no. Maybe, yes, maybe. Why?”
“I have a friend who is buying something from them. An apartment. I want to know if they are reliable.”
“I understand,” the Cossack said. “I will make inquiries, okay? I will ask my friends in the construction business and let you know. Next week probably. Okay?”
“Thank you.”
“Now,” said the Cossack, “there is something I want to ask you, my friend. About those girls.” He wagged a finger at me.
“Which girls?” said Paolo.
“Have you had one,” the Cossack said, “or both? Maybe both together?”
“They are sisters,” I said.
“That makes it more interesting,” said the Cossack. I think they were trained to do this, the Russian spooks: to find out something about you, to pick up some little snatch of nothing, then to use it against you, so you wondered how they knew, what else they might know, who they might tell, and you worried.
“Are they good girls, Nicholas?”
“I think so, yes.”
“Be careful,” said the Cossack. “Sometimes, in our Russia, people can be less kind than they seem. You get me?”
The Cossack’s phone rang (his ringtone was “The Final Countdown”). He answered it, mumbled something, then made one last toast, the Moscow flatheads’ favourite: “May the dick be hard, and may there be money!” He gave his credit card to the waiter, kissed us both on both cheeks, said “ciao” to Paolo and left.
I never saw or spoke to him again, not counting a couple of times, months afterwards, on the TV news—during the latest war in the Caucasus, after he’d become deputy defence minister—when I thought I glimpsed him smirking in the background as the president addressed the wrathful Russian nation.
“Barbarian,” I said under my breath, or maybe it was something less polite. Whether it was because he thought I was wrong, or because he secretly felt I was right, or because his wife was bullying him for a new-model BMW or a face-lift, or for some other reason that I couldn’t fathom, Paolo flipped.
“You think you’re so different to him, Nicholas?” He bared his teeth and looked suddenly old in the mauve restaurant light. His grammar seemed to buckle. “Mr. English Gentleman, you think they do things so much differently in London? Yes, they are more subtle, ecco, more nice, more clean”—here he mimed washing his bony hands—“but it is the same. In Italy also. In everywhere the same. Strong and weak, power and no power, money money money. It isn’t because of Russia. This is life. My life, Nicholas, and your life also.”
Maybe I was thinking about what I hadn’t said to Tatiana Vladimirovna earlier. Part of me may have needed to pretend—still, that night more than ever—that I was better than I was. Better than I am. I told him I thought he was wrong. I said we weren’t the same. We had rules, we had limits. I said I wasn’t the same.
“No?” said Paolo. “So I tell you one more thing, Mr. English Gentleman. This Cossack is how we make our bonus, understand? No Cossack, no bonus. You are sure you are different? You are sure? You and me, we are the fleas on the Cossack’s arse.”
There was more. Paolo had a drop of brown blood in the yellowy white of his eye. After a while I couldn’t argue anymore. I looked away and out of the window towards the cathedral’s ridiculous dome. Teenagers were smoking and kissing in the slush around the statue of some forgotten revolutionary.
That was the lesson, the same lesson, really, as I learned at Tatiana Vladimirovna’s: that we were no different. I was no different. Perhaps I was worse.
I raised my almost-empty cocktail glass and said, “To putting lipstick on a pig!”
“Okay,” said Paolo. “To the pig’s lipstick!”
We clinked.
THEY MET ON the Metro, Tatiana Vladimirovna had told me, just as Masha and I had. She said she’d been at Dorogomilovskaya market buying carp—which, I remember her mentioning, she would bring back alive and keep in her bath—and the girls had helped her with her bags at Kievskaya station. I imagined them flanking her in the hall between the platforms, beneath the misleading mosaics that portray Russian-Ukrainian friendship. It happened in June, Tatiana Vladimirovna said, and I could picture the two of them in summer frocks and open smiles, charming and strong, and Tatiana Vladimirovna sweating in a short-sleeved summer blouse and a too-heavy skirt.
She said that they had truly come to feel like family, even in this little time. But no, she said, she wasn’t actually their aunt. I sat there, kneading my hands, and said nothing. My hands looked like somebody else’s hands. I guess they figured an aunt would sound more plausible, less incriminating, and that if they were careful they could keep it from coming out.
“Don’t worry,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said, smiling, “it’s not important.” Looking back I wonder whether maybe she was trying to say, Don’t worry about any of it.
I was drifting towards forty. I’d drifted to Moscow and to Masha and into this. It was only another drift—to pass over this lie and live with it. It wasn’t even such a difficult one, to tell you the truth. Probably the truth—the truth about me, I mean, and how far I could go—was there all along, very close, waiting for me to find it.
I changed the subject. I drank my tea. I said I was very glad the winter was nearly over. I said that we were thinking of going to Odessa. When the girls arrived, neither of us said a word about what Tatiana Vladimirovna had told me. She evidently chose to forget about it too. She gave us cake and chocolate. She signed the forms she needed to sign.
Later I withdrew twenty-five thousand dollars from the bank, and Masha and I met Stepan Mikhailovich at an empty jazz club near the Conservatory, with dark private rooms, to hand the money over (he theatrically declined to count it). I told Olga the Tatar not to worry about collecting the papers for the Butovo apartment. We had those, I told her. I took her to the fancy bar in the hotel next to the Bolshoi like I’d promised.
14
In my experience, you could roughly gauge the level of depravity in a Slavic city by the time it took, after you arrived, for someone to offer you women. In Odessa, I didn’t make it out of the airport. As we were walking to
his car from the Soviet arrivals terminal, the taxi driver asked me whether I wanted to meet some girls. The fact that I already had two girls with me didn’t seem to deter him.
It was, I think, the first weekend in June. Just before we flew out of Moscow it snowed again—the end-of-May, fuck-you snow by which God lets the Russians know that he hasn’t finished with them yet. But, inside, the Flintstones plane baked like a banya. Somewhere very close to my ear a high-pitched engine whine got steadily louder and made it seem inevitable that, in the end, we must crash. I sat across the aisle from a mad, fat, Hungarian businessman, who for the first half hour of the flight stared at me and cursed in four or five languages like he was looking for a fight. Then he calmed down, wiped his forehead, and complained about the changes in Ukraine since the new president took over (maybe you saw him on the news—the guy with the ruined face, from when the Russians tried to poison him). Ukraine, according to the Hungarian, just wasn’t corrupt enough anymore. “Six months ago,” he said plan-gently, “I knew who, when, how much everything took. Now it is impossible to get anything done.”
The plane smelled of sweat and cognac. A stewardess stationed herself outside the toilet at the back, ready to turn off the smoke alarm for a small consideration. Two drunk Russians danced a jig in the aisle as we came in to land, while the passengers around them clapped.
The early summer Black Sea warmth licked at my skin as we stumbled down the steps and across the cracked tarmac. It wasn’t properly hot, not yet, but it felt like paradise. I got an old childish sensation of out-of-placeness, a feeling I remembered from our two or three family trips to the Costa Brava—a glow of forgiven naughtiness at having made it to a place that wasn’t really mine, at having somehow got away with something.
I had. I was in Odessa: technically in Ukraine, but for Russians still a fairy-tale nirvana of debauchery and escape. Masha and Katya were strolling in front of me in minidresses and strappy high-heeled sandals that they’d put on while we were in the air. They were wheeling knockoff Louis Vuitton cabin luggage, wearing film-star sunglasses, willing smiles, and, I was almost sure, no knickers. Masha put up a bright red sun umbrella that wiggled in synchrony with her arse.
They looked like they were celebrating. They had almost done it. Or we had almost done it. By the time we went to Odessa, there were just a couple of visits to a bank before it was all over.
The Ukrainian border guard had trouble deciphering my exotic passport. An old woman standing behind me in the queue tapped me on the shoulder and asked long-sufferingly, “Do you have to pay him, young man?” In the end the guard brandished his stamps and I went through customs to catch up with the girls. I found them in the arrivals hall, negotiating with the taxi driver (gold incisors, year-round leather jacket, shiny shoes that looked pointy enough to pick locks with).
We were heading for the car park when he asked me. “Do you want to meet some girls?”
I laughed like a nervous foreigner. Katya laughed too.
“Do you?” said Masha, in a voice I didn’t recognise—ironic but also somehow angry and mocking and final. “Do you want to meet some girls, Kolya?”
• • •
THEY’D TURNED OFF the central heating in Moscow about five weeks before we went to Odessa, sometime towards the end of April. I was at home with Masha—she was wearing my dressing gown and watching reality TV, I was enjoying some light foreplay with my new BlackBerry—when we heard the telltale snap in the heating pipes, short but distinct: the starting gun for the summer, for the urgent squeezing of life and lust into a few little warm months. The big melt was on, the snow and ice running off the roofs like low-altitude rain. Foreigners smiled at each other in restaurants, like speechlessly relieved survivors of a catastrophe. It was over: the back-and-forth between overcooked buildings and frigid streets, the endless putting on and taking off of clothes, the marathon Russian winter that no sane human being would voluntarily live through. It felt like a miracle.
We were having a warm, mellow period too, Masha and me. It wasn’t real, I can see that now, maybe I could even see it at the time. But in a way it was the most real time, the most honest. It was still love, though by then you could also have called it an addiction. I do need to tell you these things, I think. I’m sorry if they hurt.
We talked. She told me about the winters of her childhood, and the gangster warfare that had gripped her city in the early nineties—the mayor’s hoods on one side, she said, the governor’s thugs on the other. When one of the gangsters got killed, she recalled, his friends would put up a life-size statue in the cemetery of him holding his car keys: people called them “memorials to the victims of early capitalism.” She told me about how as a teenager she’d longed to get to Moscow or, if not Moscow, then St. Petersburg, and failing that maybe Volgograd or Samara or Nizhny Novgorod, somewhere civilised, she said, anywhere where they’d have jobs and proper nightclubs, somewhere else. I told her things too, stuff I’ve never talked to anyone else about, except maybe you. Not secrets, exactly, I didn’t have many of those then. More, you know, feelings and fears—about my job, my future, how I’d wound up alone.
We even talked again, but more like it was a script or a game, about her coming one day to live with me in England. Though it had started to seem doubtful that I would ever manage it myself: I’d begun to feel like one of those hopeless colonials you hear about who stay too long in Africa and can’t survive when they wind up back in Blighty. I no longer had a picture in my mind of what life in London would be like, with no snow, dachas, and drunk Armenian taxi drivers. I’d lost my idea of me. I had long-term expat syndrome, which is maybe, I think, just an extreme version of the unmooring that seems to dizzy some people in early middle age. Masha was adrift too, in her way, but she seemed to know where she was going.
Two or three times I went down to meet her after her shift in the shop, and we went for a stroll on the embankment or a drink in the Irish pub on Pyatnitskaya. Once we went to look at the icons in the Tretyakov Gallery, sliding around in those silly plastic slippers that they always make you wear in Russian museums, me feeling embarrassed until I registered that everyone else was wearing them too. Masha knew the names of all the saints, and which unlucky city it was that Ivan the Terrible or whoever was sacking in the pictures, but she wasn’t really interested, and I was only pretending. She seemed tender, sometimes at least, spooning with me afterwards and once or twice putting on one of my badly ironed shirts to bring me coffee in the morning.
Thanks to Olga we had almost all the papers for Tatiana Vladimirovna’s old flat. Just before Victory Day, Masha, Tatiana Vladimirovna, and I went to a psychiatric clinic to get the last one—an official declaration that she was of sound mind when she agreed to the deal (Katya was studying for her exams, Masha said, and didn’t come). A babushka, a hard beautiful gazelle, and a bespectacled foreigner: a suspicious combination, I imagine, to anyone who might have noticed us.
EVERY UNDERGROUND SYSTEM has its official and unofficial rules. In London, on the Tube, you must stand to the right on the escalators, let disembarking passengers off the trains first, never talk to strangers, and never kiss in the carriages before breakfast. In Moscow, after the stop before the one you’re getting off at, you must rise and stand motionless facing the doors, formed up with the other exiting passengers like soldiers waiting to go into battle, or Christians into a Roman arena. Then you force your way out onto the platform as the take-no-prisoners grannies elbow their way in.
The day we went to get the certificate we stood up at Krasnoselskaya and got off at Sokolniki. Outside, a few ridges of ice sheltered in the gutters, moulded against the crumbling curbs, and a few little black-grey lumps clung to the bases of streetlamps. The pavement looked like it had been doused in chilled gravy. But the girls were back in their short skirts. The streets smelled of beer and revolution.
The clinic we’d chosen crouched in a maze of shabby seven-storey Soviet apartment blocks. Fat unburied heating pipes snaked aroun
d and between the buildings, like the outside of that arts centre in Paris, but less colourful and padded with asbestos. We went in, past the smoking nurses in the lobby and up two flights of stairs to the psychology department. There was a faint smell of gas and a distinct sound of dripping. We saw two patients in hospital gowns, one of them also wearing a broad straw hat. The psychologist had a framed certificate on his wall, John Lennon glasses, and three-day stubble. On his desk he had a pile of loose papers, an old red telephone, and two plastic cups, one of them lying on its side. There was blood on his white coat.
“Does she drink?”
“No,” I said.
“No,” Masha said.
“Doctor,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, “I am not dead yet. I can answer your questions myself.”
“If she drinks,” the doctor said, “it is still possible to obtain the certificate. Only it will be a little more expensive.” He folded his hands on his desk and smiled.