Stepanov, Diego and I sit in the back seat. The car drops us outside Karma and we add a fifty-ruble tip to the agreed price. The driver wishes us a good night and we walk into the club.
Two hours in Karma. That’s four rounds of drinks. Colin doesn’t like wasting time. With the first drink in his hand, and while the rest of us stand at the bar, he carries out a complete inspection of the premises, scanning, taking mental notes. Then he returns and says, ‘Guys, let’s move to the back of the dance floor, between the Buddha and the small bar. That’s the spot tonight.’
We leave Karma and take another car, this one a zhiguli with a cracked windscreen and a chatty Georgian driver. Now we have Oksana and Irina squeezed into the back seat. Colin’s gone – it happens sometimes, a brother leaves the group, only to be met hours later for breakfast at Starlite Diner or the American Bar and Grill. Oksana is clearly Stepanov’s, but, at this point of the night, Irina remains up for grabs.
Our nights begin at Stepanov’s place, a high-ceilinged apartment on a side street off the Old Arbat, lavishly decorated in the late soviet style: piano in the living room, tapestries on the walls, a hand-coloured portrait of Brezhnev – chest covered in military medals. The tapestry above the couch depicts a popular Russian painting I’ve seen in one of my language books – three knights on horses, wearing pointy metal helmets. The knight in the middle, seemingly the leader, is riding a black horse, his hand shielding his eyes, gazing into the horizon.
Stepanov’s flat is his grandfather’s flat. Stepanov’s grandfather had been important in the Communist party, a proud member of the nomenklatura, Stepanov tells us, but he passed away in the early 1990s, together with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. We often toast in his honour because, Stepanov says, his grandfather remains our host. At Stepanov’s place we do vodka shots, play old vinyl records, decide which clubs to visit, talk shit.
To make sure we are not missing out on the best party, Colin makes us spend a great part of the night on the road, moving across the city, following rumours, searching for the finest crowd. It’s an endless journey, from club to club to bar to café, back to a club, exploring the hundreds of establishments that stay open all night, buying drinks, talking to dyevs, collecting phone numbers.
Colin says, in Moscow you don’t hunt, you gather.
The problem comes at the end of the night. Visitors are not allowed into the university residence, so, if it turns out to be a good night and a girl I’ve met in a club wants to come home for a cup of tea, I have to take her to Stepanov’s place, where we’ll spend the rest of the night on his couch, next to the grandfather’s piano, under the strict vigilance of comrade Brezhnev.
Stepanov says, you’re welcome to fuck anyone in my grandfather’s flat.
But it’s not ideal. Next morning I’ll have to wake up early, walk the girl to the ring road, put her in a car before I take the long metro ride to Universitet for my three-hour language class.
Exhausting.
8
IT WAS KATYA WHO suggested that I should add Moscow to my application form. ‘You’ll increase your chances,’ she said. ‘Nobody wants to go to Russia. People are scared, with all these awful things they show on the news all the time. There’ll be no competition.’
I didn’t particularly care about academic life. But I was about to finish my degree in languages and literature and I didn’t know what to do next. A friend told me that a PhD was nothing more than the usual academic assignment, just with a very long deadline. It sounded like something I could do.
Moscow. Why not. After all, I had taken an interest in Russian books. During my studies I’d read Dostoyevsky, Gogol and even a couple of chapters of War and Peace. Then, for my birthday, Katya had bought me an old English edition of selected short stories by Chekhov – the only book I later took to Moscow – and for a couple of weeks we had read the stories to each other in bed.
As Katya had predicted – and despite my mediocre grades – a few weeks after sending in my application I found myself facing a panel in the literature department of the University of Amsterdam. It was never really explained to me why I wasn’t being considered for other universities which were top of my list – when they had asked me to submit a developed research proposal, I was told it was Russia or nothing.
At the interview I was invited to elucidate how my proposed research topic – the evolution of the female character in Russian literature – would contribute to the West’s understanding of modern Russia. Following Katya’s advice, I’d taken two shots of vodka before the interview – a trick Russians always use to speak in public, she’d told me. I felt confident and eloquent. I will certainly define the research topic further, sir, of course I think there is room for a fresh look at the subject, yes, a twenty-first-century view of Russian literature. I’m planning to expand my sources, indeed, will definitely take into account these latest gender-sensitive theories you mention, madam, I mean professor, I will use them all. Russian language? Da, da, I’m looking forward to learning Russian, certainly. I would be immensely grateful, I said at the end – trying to conclude my interview as solemnly as I could – if I were awarded this prestigious scholarship to study at MGU, the famous Moscow State University.
By the time I was offered the scholarship, another few weeks after the interview, I had no reason to stay in Amsterdam. In fact, I was desperate to get out.
All friendly break-ups are alike; each painful break-up is painful in its own way. Katya certainly made sure of that. At first I was shocked, the entire thing had caught me off guard. The days passed and I saw no improvement in my heart’s condition. I couldn’t understand where the pain was coming from. Had I really cared that much about her? Then, in the middle of this unexplored emotional territory, confused and disoriented as I was, I received The Letter. Dear applicant, we have the pleasure of informing you that, and so on.
It was only later, when I read Nest of the Gentry, that I recognised the dramatic potential of my situation. In Turgenev’s book, Lavretsky, too, finds himself in similar circumstances and ends up fleeing to Russia looking for solace. Of course, now, when I look back, I wouldn’t dare compare my Katya to Varvara Pavlovna. Despite her glamour and beauty, Katya lacked the old-school refinement of Turgenev’s femme fatale.
So it was that, with a few warm clothes, a Russian–English dictionary and my copy of Chekhov, I left Amsterdam for good. Sitting on an Aeroflot plane bound for Sheremetyevo, ready to start my post-Katya life, I found myself for the first time totally surrounded by real Russians. They looked like decent, honest people. I was glad to hear the unsmiling air hostess addressing me in Russian, obviously mistaking me for one of her own. Fish or meat? I’d been studying the language for a few weeks with a book Katya had bought me, but the air hostess’s question – which, granted, she’d posed while holding two trays of warm aeroplane food in her hands – was my first successful encounter with the Russian language in a non-textbook context.
My confidence boosted, I began to look forward to my life in Moscow, my self-imposed exile, where I’d be enjoying, I thought, a rich academic and intellectual life. In the mental rendition of this new chapter, I saw myself sitting for hours in the library, meeting other students, reading profound books. If I managed to make the right acquaintances, perhaps I’d also be invited to a real dacha, where I’d drink endless cups of tea from an authentic samovar, and I’d discuss the meaning of life with bearded intellectuals who looked like Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy. A peaceful life of study and contemplation, I thought, as I glanced through the window and observed our plane gliding above the clouds towards a vast darkening horizon.
9
I WAS TOLD INTERNATIONAL students had been assigned language classes in the morning so that we could spend our afternoons researching in the library and meeting our supervisors. I wasn’t quite keeping up with this arrangement.
Most days, after my language class with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, I would grab lunch at the main stolovaya with Diego, then walk
back to my room in Sektor E to catch a couple of hours’ sleep. In the afternoons I would typically take the metro to the centre, where I would have arranged to meet a dyev on the platform of some monumental metro station.
Walking around the streets of the centre, dyevs often insisted on holding hands and, as uncomfortable as this made me feel, I tried to oblige for as long as I could. They would take me to Red Square and the Old Arbat and other touristy places that I had, by now, visited several times. But I appreciated their efforts, and I would follow them obediently, showing interest, asking questions, saying how very interesno everything was. These walks were good for my Russian and, if the dyev I was meeting didn’t live with her family, after two or three encounters she would invite me over to her place for a cup of tea.
By mid-December, three months into my stay, I started to worry about my academic research. I could sense that Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, who I was meeting once a week to discuss my project, was disappointed by my performance.
‘Martin, you are a very slow reader,’ she said once, while we were drinking tea and discussing Gogol in her office. She had a point, I thought, as I reclined cautiously on the wobbly chair, careful not to spill any tea. I had read some of the articles she’d recommended. Three, perhaps two, from a list of twelve. I told her it was hard for me to read faster, as most of the articles were in Russian. This was not entirely untrue.
On another occasion, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna mentioned how this other research student she was supervising, a Pole or a Czech, was making so much progress. ‘He is so dedicated, such a hard worker,’ she said.
It was true that, as things turned out, I was dedicating less time to my research than I’d initially intended. Not that I didn’t appreciate the intellectual stimulation of academic life, or Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s mentorship. It was simply a question of scheduling. Free time was scarce in Moscow–my weeks came with a number of fixed appointments. Tuesday night was of course ladies’ night at the Duck. Wednesday night we were expected to attend the Moscow-famous Count down at the Boarhouse, where, if you arrived early enough, you could get up to four drinks for the price of one. Thursday night was Propaganda night. Unmissable. And then, come the weekend, we had new clubs to explore, but also the old ones, which we still had to keep up with: McCoy, Karma, Dirty Dancing, Beefeater, Papa Johns.
One day Lyudmila Aleksandrovna handed me a reading list on Lermontov, which we were supposed to discuss at our next meeting. A week later I showed up in her office apologising for not having read the articles.
‘But these articles were mostly in English,’ she said, gazing at me from behind her thick glasses. ‘You shouldn’t have any problem reading them.’
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I just didn’t have much time this week.’
‘Don’t worry, Martin, go back to the library right now and come back tomorrow.’
She was pissed off.
I decided not to go out that night and focus on Lermontov instead. After dinner, I sat in my room trying to read the articles, a selection of texts about the sociological and historical context of A Hero of Our Time. The articles were interesting but I found it hard to concentrate. As I lay on my bed, taking a break from the reading, trying to focus on Mikhail Yuryevich’s life and times, my head kept flashing up images of Propaganda. The dance floor, the chilled vodka, the pretty dyevs. It was Thursday night and, by now, the brothers were probably getting into the club. I thought about the night I met Lena, when we left Propaganda and she took me to the rooftop to show me the view. I recalled how, at some point, I put my arm around Lena, and, before we kissed for the first time, I had to listen to a long exposition on the importance of meditation and yoga in her life.
Back at my desk, I tried to channel my thoughts from Propaganda back to Lermontov and the articles I had spread in front of me. But my mind rebelled, fought back and drifted to Propaganda.
What was the point of coming all the way to Moscow if I was going to stay in my room reading articles?
I began to think about the ultimate purpose of my academic work. When I’d first discussed my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, she’d suggested that I also use non-literary sources. ‘If you are going to study the female characters in Russian literature,’ she’d said in our second meeting, ‘you could start by analysing the situation of women in Russia.’ She then suggested that I read demographic studies, opinion polls, media analyses, and use all this scientific data to extract a clear picture of the role of women in Russian society. ‘This could help you understand the real-life context in which literary heroines are born,’ she’d said.
I could certainly check those sources, I now thought. In fact, if Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s point was that I form a clear picture of Russian women, I might as well adopt a more direct approach. I could add, for instance, a primary source of qualitative data. It then occurred to me that meeting dyevs could well be considered, to some extent, part of my academic research.
I stood up and began pacing around the small dusty room, contemplating the possibility of leaving Lermontov aside for the night and joining the brothers in Propaganda. From an academic point of view, I told myself, it would be interesting to discern to what extent Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov – the whole bunch, really – were describing Russian women as they were in real life, and to what extent they were describing their own ideas about Russian women. The more dyevs I met, I told myself, the better I would understand the defining characteristics of real Russian women.
Thrilled with my breakthrough, I took a quick shower, put on a black shirt and a thick coat, and headed for the street. In the taxi I continued to think about my research. I was aware, of course, that my new methodology brought with it some technical difficulties. To begin with, I could anticipate a high degree of cross-contamination between the two populations of my study: heroines from Russian books and women from Moscow’s nightlife. While it was surely real women who had inspired the heroines of the Russian literary canon, the opposite was also true: Tatyana Larina, Anna Karenina, Natalya Rostova, they had all influenced the way Russian women saw themselves.
I paid the taxi fare and strode towards the queue outside Propaganda. I needed to start meeting dyevs in a more structured way. I needed to learn about their lives, their ambitions, their fears. In a later stage of my research I could merge the qualitative data obtained from these encounters with the quantitative data I could gather from scientific sources, such as sociological studies. That would give me a complete picture of Russian women that I could compare with the behaviour of heroines in Russian literature.
Of course, at this stage, I didn’t need to share these details of my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, I told myself as I walked past the bouncer and entered Propaganda – it would be my own methodology, my unique approach, my very personal path into the core of the Mysterious Russian Soul.
10
AN INITIAL MISTAKE I made was not taking notes on my encounters. This caused me a great deal of confusion. Dyevs had diverse and interesting stories and I could at first identify some Tatyanas and Kareninas, but soon their backgrounds began to merge into one single narrative in my head and my many meetings turned into a continuous conversation with a changing interlocutor.
I often found myself in the awkward position of asking a dyev about a friend or a job she’d never had. When I noticed their confusion, I blamed my faux pas on my poor Russian. They seemed happy to correct me but, to avoid further embarrassment, I began to carry notebooks so that I could keep track of my meetings. Now, on long metro journeys, or sitting alone in cafés, I would take one of the red notebooks I’d purchased at the university, and I would scribble thoughts and bits from my conversations. With time, these notes – my field observations, so to speak – became particularly useful, as they allowed me not only to quickly recall the background of each girl I met, but also to identify common features of the Russian woman, the kind of information that could become handy at a later stage of
my research.
I also wrote down the new words and phrases I encountered. Thanks to my regular meetings, my vocabulary was being expanded by intriguing concepts, such as sudba, a word that was used often, meaning fate or destiny, but in a distinctively Russian way. Events in life, I learned, were either ne sudba, when they didn’t happen and therefore were not meant to be, or sudba, which implied a supernatural predestination against which simple human will was powerless. Once I understood the importance of this concept, I tried to use it as much as I could. And so I often found myself walking along the Old Arbat or sitting in a café, holding a girl’s hand and telling her how I thought our meeting had been such a huge sudba. They liked that.
11
MIND THE CLOSING DOORS. Next stop: Chistye Prudy.
I was heading north on the red line, rocked from side to side, observing the other passengers, not thinking of anything in particular.
As the metro clanked through endless tunnels, I began to reflect upon the sheer size of the city, how nobody could tell me how many people lived in it. More than in Paris or London or New York, I was often told.
Every day, millions of unsmiling Muscovites navigated their way through the underground arteries of the city. Silent strangers in dark clothes, crammed into wagons yet trying to avoid human contact, staring at their newspapers, at their books, into the air. Not a smile. Every passenger in Moscow’s metro seemed deeply unhappy.
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