Back to Moscow
First published in Great Britain by Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2016
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Copyright © Guillermo Erades 2016
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Olga: (. . .) I feel how every day my strength and my youth are leaving me, drop by drop. Only one dream grows and gets stronger . . .
Irina: To go back to Moscow. To sell the house, to finish everything here, and – to Moscow . . .
Olga: Yes! As soon as possible, to Moscow.
Anton Chekhov, Three Sisters
Contents
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
PART TWO
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
PART THREE
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
PART FOUR
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
PART FIVE
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
PART SIX
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
FIRST I NOTICED THE cockroaches. Smaller, quicker. Every time the lights went on, I glimpsed their glossy mahogany shells darting across the floor. They were called tarakany and, perhaps because I liked the word, I felt no hostility towards them. They roamed freely around my room, enjoying the darkness beneath the rusty cot, crawling up the cracked walls, onto the desk – totally unconcerned by my presence.
Other than the cockroaches, Sektor E was deserted. On my first night I’d ventured into the maze of corridors hoping to bump into other international students. To my disappointment, I’d heard nothing but the creaking of the wooden floors under my feet. I’d located the communal kitchen, strewn with empty vodka bottles and crushed beer cans. The fridges were stocked with a wide selection of used ketchup and rancid milk, courtesy of the language students who had fled the university at the end of summer, just before my arrival.
With nothing else to do, every night I would go for dinner at the sixth-floor bufet. The bufet was always empty and smelled, like the rest of the university building, of rotten wood and disinfectant. I would sit at the corner table, trying to read a bit of Chekhov, the greasy plastic tablecloth sticking to my elbows. On each table stood a glass bud vase with a single red flower. They were made of plastic, these flowers, but for some reason the vases always contained water.
As soon as I opened my book, a chubby lady with bleached hair and heavy make-up would storm in from the kitchen, slap the menu on the table and wait, hands on hips, for my order – her beefy body exuding a kind of impatience and irritation I was, in those early days, unaccustomed to.
The menu in front of me, a simple sheet of paper, bore a short list of dishes handwritten in Cyrillic. To my despair, I was unable to identify the different letters, let alone understand the meaning of the words. Nor could I rely on the lady’s assistance – she had made it clear during our first encounter that it was not her job to make any particular effort to communicate with me, her only evening customer and yet a stupid nekulturniy foreigner.
Undeterred, I would stare for a few seconds at the menu, nodding slightly, as if to indicate that I somehow understood what was written on the paper, that I was indeed considering the different choices.
‘Soup,’ I would say, every night, but I’d pronounce the word in a guttural way, making it sound, at least to my ears, more local.
So it was soup every night, with Chekhov as my dinner companion.
Now, when I look back at those uneventful nights, I feel a soft wave of nostalgia washing through my chest. So treacherous is the nature of memory that I can’t fully evoke the boredom, sadness and disappointment I surely felt back then. What I recall when I picture my younger self reading the short stories of Anton Pavlovich in an empty canteen, is a sweet sense of tranquillity which, in truth, I might have not felt at the time. I’m aware that it’s only from the vantage point of years passed that I now see those days as the calm prelude to the life I was sucked into – and to the tragic events that ended it.
One Tuesday night, two weeks after my arrival, I went for dinner later than usual and found two other international students at the bufet. They were chatting in English over the remains of dinner and cups of instant coffee. By their accents I guessed that the one who did most of the talking was American – the other one Latin American, perhaps Spanish. They wore well-ironed shirts, hair gel, cologne.
I pretended to read my Chekhov book, excited but unsure about how best to approach them, not wanting to look desperate or lonely. I waited patiently for a pause in their conversation and, adopting as casual a tone as I could muster, I jumped in.
‘You guys going out tonight?’
‘Sure,’ the American said. ‘Tuesday. Ladies’ night at the Duck.’
‘The Duck?’
‘Man, you don’t know the Hungry Duck?’
‘I’m afraid not,’ I said.
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Two weeks.’
And that’s how I met Colin.
I put Chekhov aside and joined their table.
An hour later, the three of us were heading towards the city centre in a battered zhiguli we’d hailed outside the university. Colin sat in the
front seat, chatting to the driver, giving directions. I couldn’t understand what he was saying but I could see he knew his way around. Diego, who turned out to be Mexican, sat in the back, telling me how he had arrived in town, just a few months earlier, to study engineering. He had managed to score a little-known scholarship for Latin American students, he was saying, not too generous but enough to get by as long as he lived in the university residence. ‘Awesome place,’ Diego said, pointing to the dark city. ‘You’re going to love it.’
Following Colin’s instructions, the driver pulled over by a small produkty shop where we bought a bottle of Stolichnaya and a few plastic glasses. Then the zhiguli drove through avenues five or six lanes wide, crossed the river, and passed beneath hanging traffic lights, which seemed to work but were largely ignored by the driver.
The zhiguli dropped us next to a metro stop. By foot we continued through a covered alley into a dark parking lot. We arrived at a poorly lit door and joined a group of young guys waiting in the cold.
‘Vodka time!’ Colin opened the Stolichnaya bottle and filled our plastic goblets. ‘To the Duck,’ he said, half smiling, ‘best club on Earth.’
Colin’s half-smile, I later learned, was a permanent facial feature, not meant to convey any particular emotion; every time he talked, the half-smile made him look as if he knew more than he was willing to share.
We drank up. The vodka warmed my throat. My stomach burned and shivered: the thirsty little Cossack inside me, expecting another quiet Chekhov night, had been caught by surprise.
More people arrived and joined the queue, bouncing on their feet to keep warm. As far as I could tell, they were all guys, all expats, all about our age.
After pouring more vodka into our plastic glasses, Colin grabbed my shoulder and said, ‘Believe me, man, there is no better place to be young, foreign and male.’ I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the club or the city, but I agreed with a wide smile.
I glanced at other guys in the queue. They were drinking, smoking, chatting. I couldn’t stop smiling and they returned the smile, with little nods. By the time we were done with the bottle of vodka, I felt an unspoken but strong connection among all of us in the queue – a sense of camaraderie and shared anticipation.
Suddenly I was no longer thinking about Katya or Amsterdam. The thirsty little Cossack was cheerful: up on his horse, rattling his sabre, ready for battle.
At eleven sharp the door of the club was opened from the inside and I found myself carried through the entrance by an all-male stampede. I was pushed into a corridor lined with mirrors, where some of the guys hurriedly retouched their hair, and there was a booth where we paid the cover and a cloakroom where we dropped our jackets.
At the far end of the bright corridor, a black metal door throbbed with loud music. As we approached, my heart pumping fast, I was taken aback by the stench of spilt beer and vomit. I held my breath.
Colin pulled the door and beckoned me in. ‘Welcome to the Duck.’
Stepping into the main room, I was slapped by a wave of wet heat. It was balmy and smoky and dark, and at first I saw only the colours of the disco lights – laser reds and greens and purples – but as my eyes adapted to darkness, I started to discern what, I later learned, The Exile was describing as the wildest clubbing scene in the Northern Hemisphere.
Hundreds of dyevs dancing under the strobe lights. On the chairs. On the tables. Singing, screaming, their eyes red and watery, their clothes drenched in sweat. A bunch of them danced topless on the bar, bouncing their shiny young breasts, waving their bras over the all-female crowd.
They had arrived at the Duck hours earlier, from all over the city, from the most remote metro stations and trashy suburbs, and by the time we guys were allowed to enter – Tuesday night, eleven sharp – they had drunk themselves into submission.
These were the same dyevs who just a few months later would wear fake designer clothes with glittering logos to make it into Zeppelin or Shambala, and would only talk to us if we bought them overpriced cocktails and glasses of champagne; but back then, at the Hungry Duck, they gulped down tons of free beer, vomited on the carpets, stumbled among the tables and, when they were so wasted they could no longer stand on their cheap high heels, they threw themselves into the arms of those of us blessed with the chance to live, at such a turbulent moment of its history, in the wonderful city of Moscow.
PART ONE
Tatyana’s Lesson
1
ON 8 JUNE 1880, shortly before he died, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky walked onto a stage in central Moscow and, in front of a cheering crowd, delivered a long and emotional speech to celebrate the unveiling of Pushkin’s statue. According to several accounts of the event, which were captured in the diaries and journals of the time, the atmosphere was electrifying. Fyodor Mikhailovich himself wrote later that day that the crowd kept interrupting him, applauding enthusiastically every few sentences, standing up in ovation.
At the very end of the speech, the audience completely lost it when Dostoyevsky made his impassioned call to follow Pushkin’s example and embrace both the uniqueness of Mother Russia and the oneness of humanity.
What came to be known as the Pushkin Speech had an enormous impact on Russia’s intelligentsia at the time. It soon became one of the defining moments in the cultural history of the country – a new chapter in Russia’s endless debate between those in favour of a Western course for their country and those, such as Fyodor Mikhailovich himself, who saw Russia as a unique nation with a crucial role to play in the history of humanity.
By the time he delivered the speech, Fyodor Mikhailovich was an old man in poor health. He felt this was his last opportunity to set the record straight on Pushkin, to prove that, to Russians, Pushkin was much more than ‘just’ the national poet. In a letter he wrote to his wife a few days before the speech, Dostoyevsky had said his participation in the event would be essential, as ‘the others’ were not only determined to downplay the importance of Pushkin in Russia’s national identity, they were also ready to deny the very existence of this identity.
My voice will carry weight, Dostoyevsky wrote.
That day in June, Fyodor Mikhailovich talked about Pushkin’s prophetic existence, and his role in understanding and defining the Russian character. Dostoyevsky made it clear that, without Pushkin’s genius, there would be no Russian literature, at least not as the world knew it.
The speech was dedicated in great part to Pushkin’s masterpiece, Evgeny Onegin. Dostoyevsky focused on the character of Tatyana, after whom, he said, Pushkin’s verse novel should have been named. After all, Tatyana, not Onegin, is the central character of Russia’s most famous love story.
Tatyana Larina, an innocent girl living in the provinces, has a crush on Onegin, a sophisticated dandy visiting from the capital. She writes him a rather tacky love letter, but Onegin, who had somehow misled Tatyana, doesn’t write back as she’d expected. Instead, he rejects her in a cruel and condescending manner, causing her pain, humiliation and a lot of very Russian sorrow. There are some complications – and a duel, of course – and then Onegin splits.
The years go by and one day Onegin bumps into Tatyana in Peter, which back then was the capital of the empire and not the provincial backwater it is today. She’s all pafosni and elitni, Tatyana, because she’s managed to snag an aristocrat. Onegin now realises how hot Tatyana is and tells her he really really wants her. This time for real.
In spite of the years, Pushkin tells us, Tatyana remains in love with Onegin. Now, finally, she has a real chance to be with him. So, what does Tatyana do? Does she ditch her husband and elope with her true love?
Nyet, she doesn’t. In the culminating scenes of Pushkin’s long poem, Tatyana decides to stick with her husband and, in her own nineteenth-century way, tells Onegin to fuck off.
A simple love story which most Russians know by heart. Many are even able to recite entire chapters – ‘ya k vam pishu’, Tatyana’s letter, being an especially
popular passage.
The symbolism of the story should not be ignored. Tatyana, the pure girl from the countryside, embodies the essence of Russianness, while Onegin, the cosmopolitan bon vivant, is a cynical fucker corrupted by modern European values. Onegin’s life is about superficial pleasures. Tatyana’s is all about meaning.
Why does Tatyana reject Onegin? Dostoyevsky asks in his speech. Pushkin had made Tatyana’s feelings clear. Wouldn’t she be happier if she dumped her husband and took off with her true love? Fyodor Mikhailovich pushes his case further. What would have happened, he asks his Moscow audience, if Tatyana had been free when Onegin finally made a pass at her? If she had been a widow? She would still have rejected him, Fyodor Mikhailovich says.
Russian as she is, Tatyana knows that there is more to life than happiness.
2
‘TELL ME, MARTIN, WHAT impact has Aleksandr Sergeyevich had on your life?’
We were sitting in Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s office in the humanities faculty, a cramped room with ceiling-high bookshelves that lined every wall and partially covered the room’s only window. It was a couple of days after my arrival in Moscow, and we were meeting to discuss my research project. With her fleecy moustache and thick glasses, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna matched the preconceptions I had of Russian professors.
For her, asking about Aleksandr Sergeyevich was not a simple icebreaker – it was her way of testing my commitment to the research project and, in a wider sense, my devotion to the world of Russian literature. But I was newly arrived and unaware that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was on a first-name-patronymic basis with Russian authors, so it took me a while to realise she was not asking about a mutual acquaintance – she was talking about Pushkin.
You mean that Aleksandr Sergeyevich!
Once I understood the implications of Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s question I could not bring myself to tell her that I – a doctoral student in Russian literature, a scholarship laureate, a soon-to-be-called expert – had never read a single line by the national poet, the father of modern Russian language, the very incarnation of the Russian soul. She would be devastated and I would be uncovered as a fraud.
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