by A. D. Miller
“I am sober,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna.
The psychologist wrinkled his nose. He wrote something down. He looked disappointed.
“Drugs?” he said hopefully.
Tatiana Vladimirovna laughed.
“Who are you?” he said to me, suddenly prickly with propriety.
“I’m her lawyer,” I said.
“Lawyer? I see.”
The psychologist shuffled his papers. He moved on to the sanity test.
“What is your name?” he asked Tatiana Vladimirovna, leaning forward across his desk.
“Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. She held her poker face—or maybe it was her interrogation face from the old days—long enough for the psychologist to perk up, thinking he might have a pretext to up his fee. Then she said, “That was a joke.”
She gave her real name, her date of birth, the name of the weasel president, and one or two other answers that most genuine lunatics could well have come up with. We paid four hundred roubles, plus another three hundred for (according to the psychologist) the secretarial work. We took Tatiana Vladimirovna’s certificate of sound mind and left.
After that, I only saw her once more before we went to Odessa. This time I am sure of the date. It was the ninth of May: Victory Day.
I INVITED THEM over to my place—Masha, Katya, and Tatiana Vladimirovna. We would watch the parade of tanks and missiles in Red Square on television, then stroll up the Bulvar to Pushkin Square to watch the commemorative fireworks shooting over the Kremlin.
It was a lovely afternoon. Masha and I laid on blinis, smoked salmon, and the rest. That day she let me feel that we were like other couples, couples who have you round to dinner and show you how happy and speechlessly effective they can be together, how competently in love, how bickeringly at ease. After the parade, the radio played patriotic songs, and Tatiana Vladimirovna taught us some wartime dances, a waltz I think it was, and another one I can’t remember. First she danced with me, while Masha clapped and Katya laughed, next she showed each of the girls in turn. Then we moved the IKEA coffee table in my lounge to the side of the room and we all danced together, mostly me paired with Masha in her light green summer dress, and Tatiana Vladimirovna with Katya. Tatiana Vladimirovna was sweating and smiling and flinging Katya around like she was a teenager, and once or twice she let out a high, strange peasant shriek, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere in the back of her throat and deep in her memory or her genes.
Finally she bent over, panting, as the three of us flopped onto the sofa. “Bravo, kids,” she said. “Bravo. And thank you.”
I’d always thought it was a bit sick-making, the obsession the Russians have with the war. But that afternoon I could see that Tatiana Vladimirovna’s friskiness was nothing to do with Stalin and the Eastern Front or anything like that. It was about lost loves and youth, and defiance, and going to Yalta in 1956.
After the dancing, Masha brought out the documents.
“Tatiana Vladimirovna,” she said, “I wanted to let you know. Kolya has gathered all the papers for your new home in Butovo. The statement of ownership, the technical certificate—everything necessary to prove the sale will be legal and without any problems. Here.” She held up and spread out a sheaf of papers like a St. Petersburg duchess with a fan. “And we also have all the documents for your flat, which Stepan Mikhailovich will need to see.” She held up the file Olga the Tatar had put together and that I’d given to her earlier.
“Show them to her, Kolya,” Katya said, smiling.
“Yes, please, Nikolai,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. “I am sure they are all in order, but I would like you to explain them. Then I will be absolutely comfortable.”
“Here you are, Kolya,” said Masha, and she held out her fan of papers and the file.
The document that you cannot buy in Russia has yet to be invented. At Paveletskaya, in the underpass that leads from the Metro to the silly tower where I worked, you can buy college diplomas, residence permits, and certificates that declare you are a qualified brain surgeon. Sometimes the fakes are actually real, in the sense that they are drafted by corrupt officials of real universities or in the mayor’s office or the Kremlin administration (there is a lively market in blank paper left over from the nineties, on which backdated contracts can be made up with period watermarks). Some of them are glaring counterfeits. I don’t know where Masha got the documents for Butovo that I saw for the first time that afternoon. They were convincing enough, with all the right insignias and a rash of plausible stamps. There was something funny about the signatures maybe, and the shadow that a photocopier sometimes leaves in one or two off-white corners, but nothing too obvious or alarming.
I laid out the paperwork on my kitchen table and sat down at it with Tatiana Vladimirovna. We ran through the documents for her old flat first. Then I showed her the one that listed the amenities of the building in Butovo, and the one showing how nobody else was registered to live in the flat that was supposed to be hers. And the one that identified Stepan Mikhailovich as its current rightful owner.
It was a nice afternoon, and it would have been a shame to spoil it. We were going to Odessa and it would have been a shame to spoil that too. It would have been tricky to go back from where we’d already got to. But the reality was worse and simpler than any of those explanations. It felt like almost nothing, I have to tell you, when I took Tatiana Vladimirovna through those documents on Victory Day. It felt inevitable, almost natural. I know how it must sound, but there’s nothing else I can say.
“Excellent,” she said when we’d flipped through them. “Nikolai, you are like an angel.”
“Yes,” said Masha, “Kolya is our angel.” She ran her hand through my hair, very lightly, just once.
“You’re welcome,” I said.
“Let’s go,” said Katya, standing up and stretching. “It will soon be time for the fireworks.”
WE RAN INTO Oleg Nikolaevich on our way out that night. We took the lift down past his floor, but he was coming in through the building’s front door as I went to open it. He was wearing his black suit and a white dress shirt, like he was a jazz musician or an undertaker, and carrying a briefcase which, I was fairly sure, was empty. Masha and Katya were behind me, Tatiana Vladimirovna behind them.
I congratulated him on his country’s great victory, as the Russians do on Victory Day. He congratulated me on Great Britain’s victory too. “Glory to your grandfather!” he said. I’d told him once, when we used to talk more, about the convoys and my family’s Russian connection.
“Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said, “let me introduce my friends, Masha and Katya.”
“Yes, yes,” he said, as if he recognised them. “Your friends.”
“Happy Victory Day!” Katya said, and giggled. They were like cagey members of different civilisations, who just happened to speak the same language.
“Yes,” said Oleg Nikolaevich. “And to you too, girls.”
“So,” said Masha. “It’s time for us to go. Excuse us, please.”
Oleg Nikolaevich flattened his body against the wall to let the girls pass. They brushed past him and went out into the street. “All good things,” he said quietly.
Tatiana Vladimirovna was still inside and standing next to me. I couldn’t think of how to explain who she was, so I just said her name.
“Pleased to meet you,” Oleg Nikolaevich said.
“Me too,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna.
I saw the wariness in both pairs of eyes, felt them sizing each other up for background, education, the quantity of blood that might have been washed off their hands or their families’—the sort of instant epic calculations that older Russians make, a bit like the way English people weigh up each other’s shoes and accents and haircuts. Then their eyes softened, their shoulders relaxed, the guards dropped.
“And I congratulate you too, Tatiana Vladimirovna,” said Oleg Nikolaevich.
“Sixty years,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. “Is it sixt
y?”
“More or less,” he said.
I suppose she must have been six or seven years older than him, but they’d both lived through it all—the war, Stalin, the whole Russian nightmare. They were both old enough to have believed in something, even if the thing they’d believed in had turned out to be a sham. The younger ones, most of them, had nothing to believe in even if they had wanted to. No communism, no God. Even the memory of God had been forgotten.
“We went to Kazan,” Oleg Nikolaevich suddenly said. “On the Volga. My father was a technician in a physics laboratory. We were away from Moscow for two years.”
“Leningrad,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said, just the name of the city, nothing else.
Oleg Nikolaevich nodded.
We were moving away and out of the door when he said, “One minute, Nikolai Ivanovich. One minute alone, please.”
Tatiana Vladimirovna went out into the almost-warm dusk to join the girls, while he and I stood in the doorway. The women were a few metres away from us. I guess they could have heard what we were saying if they had strained and if they had wanted to.
Oleg Nikolaevich said, “They are putting in a Jacuzzi.”
“Where?”
“In Konstantin Andreyevich’s apartment. Someone has moved in.”
I hadn’t thought about Oleg Nikolaevich’s friend for a long time, and, if I’m honest, I didn’t much care to.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. A woman I know who lives in the building told me. She saw it.”
“What?”
“The Jacuzzi.”
He waited for a reply, but I had nothing to say about the Jacuzzi or his friend. I think probably he just needed to tell someone. I’m sure he knew it was too late to expect much help from me anymore. Just as it was too late for his opinion to make a difference to me and the girls.
To end the silence, I told him that I was going to Odessa for a few days at the beginning of June.
Oleg Nikolaevich looked into my eyes, then out for a moment towards Masha and Katya in their strappy dresses. When he spoke he seemed to be addressing a point somewhere along my collarbone.
“Invite a pig to dinner,” he said, “and he’ll put his feet on the table.”
WE WATCHED THE fireworks from Pushkin Square, Tatiana Vladimirovna standing between me and Masha, our arms interlocked with hers. She liked being around lovers, I think, even if not much of the love was for her. Katya had a packet of sparklers that she handed out, and we waved them at each other. When the bangs started, we looked up into the sky above the Kremlin and said “oooh” and “hurrah.”
“Enjoy yourselves, kids,” Tatiana Vladimirovna said when she wished us good night, and blew us all kisses, and winked at me.
• • •
I TOOK ANOTHER day off work and we flew to Odessa on a Friday morning. In the end the place on the beach fell through, if it had ever existed, and we stayed in a hotel. I paid, naturally, and in return I got to act out the whole big-shot routine, checking in with the two of them, turning up for breakfast with them. The hotel was on a lovely lazy avenue, crowded with blossoming trees and statues of dead Odessans, above the grand old steps down to the seafront. It had a fine wooden staircase, a restaurant that must once have felt like the Ritz, and a beautiful view of the early summer sun swimming in the oil-dark sea. It brings it all back, telling you about it like this.
We took a room and a half—a big bedroom with a single-bed children’s annexe and a shared bathroom. Katya went out straightaway to stroll and flirt. I admit it, I asked Masha to drop her dress, open the wardrobe door, and stand in front of the mirror, like she did in the photo they showed me at the very beginning. Only now I was sitting behind her, looking at her back in front of me and her front in the mirror and myself in there with her. Our eyes met somewhere in the door, the images of us close in the glass but our real selves separating, already far apart.
I sat and she stood like that, only our eyes speaking, until Masha said to the me in the mirror, in the same violent voice that had come out of her at the airport, “Is it enough, Kolya?” In Odessa she was attentive, punctual, courteous to the needs she’d got to know. But it was as if she wasn’t really there, or maybe as if I was already not there, inside her head, and perhaps because I wasn’t there she could afford to be generous with me.
We got dressed. At the top of the steps down from the shady avenue to the sea we found a dwarf crocodile, a balding owl, and a nervous monkey, waiting to have their photos taken with suggestible tourists. It was warm in the sun but almost cold in the shadows. The Odessa cafés were opening up for the season, unfurling their umbrellas and letting down their awnings like animals stretching themselves after hibernation. Bashful American men chatted awkwardly about the menus with the online brides they’d flown in to meet. There were two girls circulating in knee-high PVC boots and suspenders, giving out leaflets for a strip club. I’d been wrong, maybe, to have thought their religion was dying, these flamboyantly sinful Slavs. Maybe to be this immoral you’ve got to have religion somewhere—some decrepit gods lurking at the back of your mind, gods you are determined to defy.
In the middle of the afternoon we took a taxi out to the beach.
I asked Katya, “How were the exams?”
“What exams?”
“Your exams at Moscow State University.”
“Yes,” she said. “Exams. They were excellent.”
We were sitting at a little bamboo beachside café. Lean teenage boys were hurtling into the cold sea water from rickety waterslides and the end of a broken-down pier. From a distance the sand looked like the kind I once saw on a volcanic beach in Tenerife (a long time ago, before you, before Russia). On closer inspection it appeared to be mostly cigarette ash. Katya was wearing a transparent dress with a red bikini underneath. Masha was twirling her sun umbrella. I couldn’t see her eyes behind her sunglasses.
“What subjects did you take, Katya?”
“Business … economy … and many more.” She smiled. “I am very good student.”
“First in class,” said Masha, and they laughed. I laughed too.
The concrete path that ran behind the beach smelled of piss, but somehow not too objectionably. An old man was tending a punchball game, and a mournful old woman offered to weigh us on a set of old-fashioned scales. There was a pile of snoozing dogs. There seemed to be almost nothing to hide now. They weren’t sisters. Tatiana Vladimirovna wasn’t their aunt. Katya worked as a waitress in the Uzbek restaurant. Everything was coming out.
We sat on the beach (Masha and Katya spread out plastic bags beneath them to protect their clothes). We agreed that in the evening we’d go back to one of the beachfront nightclubs that we’d walked past. We bought three ice creams from a woman who seemed to me to look like Tatiana Vladimirovna, and licked at them in silence.
I found out about Seriozha at the hotel, when we were getting ready to go out again.
MASHA RETREATED TO the bathroom and locked the door. The taps ran. Katya fell asleep. I could see her lying on her front through the door of her room, with her arms straight by her sides like a corpse. After about a quarter of an hour I knocked and asked Masha whether she was all right, and after a long pause she said “da,” drawing the word out in a voice somewhere between an orgasm and a death rattle. I turned on the television: I found a weight-lifting contest, soft-core adverts for Italian chat lines, a scrum of men in tight suits attempting to throttle each other in what I think was the Ukrainian parliament, and a strange military ceremony, involving a brass band and some camels, transmitted live from Turkmenistan. I switched it off. From somewhere behind the hotel I heard what I amateurishly took to be two gunshots. Then I saw Masha’s pink-trimmed purse sitting on the side table by the bed, picked it up, and looked inside.
She had both passports, the international one plus the internal kind that Russians have to carry around with them. That’s how I can be sure of her surname. Afterwards I realised that I could h
ave found and written down her address. Perhaps I should have, but I was in a hurry and careless and I didn’t. She had a membership card for a gym and another for a nightclub in the Taganka district that I’d never heard of. She had a discount card for an accessory shop on the Novy Arbat, three stamps on a “buy six get one free” card from a coffee shop at Pushkin Square, a Metro pass, about two thousand roubles and fifty dollars. I found a scrap of paper with her phone number on it, which all practical Muscovites carry, so that anyone who stole the purse could get their granny to sell Masha’s identity documents back to her a couple of days later. She had a photograph.
He looked too innocent, the little boy in the photo. It was black-and-white, passport size, but I could make out a Tintin blond quiff, the hair curling out of a winter bonnet that was tied under his chin. I couldn’t tell for sure—the monthly stages and cute accomplishments that parents get so worked up about have always been beyond me—but I reckoned he was about a year old in the photo. You could only see his top half, but he seemed to be wearing a miniature sailor suit. He was half facing the camera, half glancing up at the woman whose lap he was sitting on. It was Masha.
I turned the photo over. Someone had written “With Seriozha” on the back, and a date. It was about five or six months before I’d met her. I calculated that at the time of Odessa he must have been about two years old, that little boy. I put the photo back in the purse and the purse back where I found it.
THEY BOTH WORE catsuits that night—Masha’s dark blue and Katya’s, I think, purple—and too much makeup. We went for dinner at a Ukrainian buffet. I piled my plate with dumplings, but ate almost nothing, just sat there thinking, Who is Seriozha? Who is Seriozha? Who is Seriozha? They talked about where they’d go on holiday if they could afford it (the Maldives, the Seychelles, Harrods). Afterwards we had a piña colada in a heaving bar, then took a taxi out to a nightclub on the beach. Rameses, I think it was called, or Pharaoh.
It was the first weekend of the season, early in the evening, maybe ten thirty, and cool. The place was half empty. There was a stage drowning in dry ice, a bereft dance floor, and around it tables climbing the sides of three plastic Egyptian pyramids. We sat down and waited for something to happen, not bothering to try to talk above the techno. Slowly, then all of a sudden as parties and nightclubs tend to, the place filled up. Masha and Katya went off to dance. I headed for the bar and stood there on my own, looking and drinking.