Sergey began refilling the glasses with more vodka. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘let him eat whatever he wants.’
‘So,’ I asked, ‘the statue in the Moskva river is not Peter the Great but Christopher Columbus?’
‘Exactly,’ Sergey said. He wiped his eyebrows, seemed puzzled to find sour cream on his fingers. ‘If you look closely you’ll see he is standing on an old vessel, from Columbus times, not from the times of Peter the Great.’
‘It’s a botch job,’ Ira said.
Aleksandra Olegovna stood up, started to clear some plates. ‘I can hardly recognise the city any more.’
‘This is Moscow today,’ Sergey said, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘We are losing our soul and nobody gives a shit.’
12
LENA LIVED IN AN old kommunalka not far from Chistye Prudy, sharing the communal bathroom with three families and her bedroom with a girl from Tula. They had some kind of arrangement, I imagined, as the Tula dyev was never around when I visited and Lena and I could always enjoy a couple of hours of privacy.
Lena’s bedroom was a total bardak, a mess. The bedside tables, like every flat surface in the room, were completely covered in piles of books, old magazines, food leftovers, make-up paraphernalia, old cups of tea. The room always smelled of incense, which Lena kept burning in my presence – whether for some spiritual purpose or to mask other smells, I couldn’t tell.
One cold evening in late December we were lying on Lena’s bed, naked, listening to music from an Asian lounge compilation she liked to play when I was around. I had picked up a book from the pile on her bedside table, a cheap paperback on compassion, written, according to the back cover, by his holiness the Dalai Lama. I thumbed through the pages, many of which were dog-eared, reading the bits that Lena had underlined and trying to decipher the comments she had scribbled in the margins. It struck me that the Russian word for compassion, sostradaniye, derived from the word suffering, stradaniye, and literally meant co-suffering. A compassionate person was, in Russian, a co-sufferer. Considering this a valuable insight, I jumped out of bed and grabbed the red notebook I was carrying in my backpack.
I lay on the bed writing about the word compassion. Lena was staring at the ceiling in silence – her fingers fiddling with her golden chain, her perfect breasts swelling and ebbing with each breath, like waves in the ocean.
We hadn’t had sex. At least not sex sex. We had never talked about this but, as far as I understood, Lena didn’t enjoy the most primal aspects of human sexuality. For her, it wasn’t about gathering momentum and losing control. Lena approached sexual intimacy as a flat sensory experience, as a slow succession of caresses and kisses, which often remained at the level of touching. It wasn’t shyness or prudishness. Lena felt comfortable with her body. As soon as we were alone in her bedroom, she would often take her clothes off and go about her tasks in complete nakedness – making tea, lighting incense, moving piles of clothes from one bed to the other, fully aware of the powerful effect her naked body had on me. But once my own clothes came off, she would immediately apply herself to me, with precision, without pause, as if deactivating a ticking bomb. On the rare occasions when she had allowed me to get inside her, she had insisted on keeping the lights on and staying beneath me, her blue eyes fixed on my face. A few times, at the beginning, in the heat of the moment, I had tried to wrestle her on top of me, to give her more control, to fully appreciate the weight of her breasts, but she had always climbed off right away; and once, when I’d tried to stay beneath her body for a few seconds, she had abruptly jumped out of bed and run off to the bathroom – to return a few minutes later, her eyes red from crying. On that occasion I’d asked her what was wrong. Nothing, she’d said. But ever since that day, I always followed Lena’s lead, her tempo, her moves, adapting my own expectations to whatever she was in the mood for – afraid to cross a line that, I suspected, originated in some obscure episode of her life.
I circled the word compassion in my notebook and dropped the pen. I turned to Lena, grabbed her golden cross. ‘What’s this?’
‘From grandmother.’
‘Beautiful.’ I found Orthodox crosses aesthetically interesting, the slanted lower crossbeam breaking the symmetry of the design.
‘Do you believe in God?’ Lena asked, staring at the ceiling.
I was aware of Lena’s spiritual side, but it had never occurred to me to raise the question myself.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘You?’
She thought about it for a few moments, as if she were considering God’s existence for the first time. Then she turned to me. ‘I believe there is good and there is evil.’
‘What about God?’ I said. ‘You know, the all-powerful creator.’ I extended my arm and grabbed the New Testament from the pile of books on her bedside table. ‘The God from your Bible.’
‘There is no God,’ Lena said. ‘The Bible is a beautiful fairy tale – a skazka.’
‘Why do you wear the cross then?’
‘You don’t need to believe in God to be a good Christian.’
I dropped the New Testament next to the pillow, leaned over Lena’s body, kissed her stomach, then her breasts. ‘A good Christian?’ I said.
Lena burrowed her fingers in my hair. ‘I believe in the values of Christianity as preserved by the Russian Orthodox Church. I believe in forgiveness, in compassion, in resurrection.’
My tongue was now toying with her nipples. ‘If you ask me,’ I said, looking up, ‘I find resurrection the weakest part of the Gospels. You know, coming back from the dead. Bit of a stretch, don’t you think?’
‘You shouldn’t mock this,’ Lena said, now placing her hand over the New Testament. Like most of her books, the volume was encrusted with plenty of bookmarks. ‘It gives my life a sense of direction. Trying to be good is a daily struggle.’
I kept playing with her breasts.
‘Resurrection,’ she continued, ‘is of course a metaphor. Flesh is flesh, when it dies, it dies. But a dead soul can return to life. Bad deeds can be redeemed.’
My lips caressing her skin, I glanced up at her face. ‘What about Yeshua?’
‘Yeshua?’ she said.
‘Christ, you know, Jesus. Yeshua, like in The Master and Margarita.’
‘I think the Gospels are beautiful.’
‘But you can’t believe they actually happened.’
‘I don’t. The New Testament was written by men. But I think Christ, the historical figure, must have been an incredible man who walked the Earth with a beautiful message. I believe in the message.’
Trying to keep her exact words in my head, I turned over and reached for my red notebook. These were the kind of thoughts I could find a use for in my research.
‘Leave your notebook,’ Lena said. ‘Please.’
Lena didn’t like my notebooks. When I began carrying them around, I’d tried to explain how it was important for me to understand her way of seeing the world so that I could compare her views with those of literary heroines. I’d thought she would feel proud to be useful, to take part in my research. But instead, she had developed an unexplained aversion towards my notebooks, and I could feel, every time I took one of them out of my backpack, that she didn’t appreciate my taking notes.
‘I just want to write something quickly,’ I said, looking for a blank page.
With sudden violence, Lena ripped the notebook from my hands, and threw it into the air. The red notebook flew across the room, hit the wall, and landed on the other bed, next to a pile of dirty clothes.
I didn’t know what to say.
‘Martin, right now you are with me.’
It was often the case that I couldn’t make much sense of Lena’s actions. I decided to let it go and move on. I kissed her lips, caressed her hair, and tried to continue with our conversation.
‘I don’t think you need any bible to tell you what’s good and what’s bad,’ I said. ‘If you are a good person, you don’t need religion.’
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��And how do I know I’m a good person?’
‘You are,’ I smiled. ‘Trust me.’
‘I don’t know if I’m a good person, really. That’s why I need to search.’
‘Search for what?’
She didn’t answer.
I pushed my body against hers, kissed her neck, her ear. She didn’t react. Her eyes were moist.
‘For chrissake, Lena, why can’t you just enjoy life as it is?’
‘Because,’ she said softly, ‘without the search, life is a lonely and meaningless thing.’
Those were her exact words – a lonely and meaningless thing. I know because, later that night, I wrote them down in my mistreated notebook.
And now, so many years later, the smell of incense still brings me back to Lena’s room in the kommunalka – the piles of clothes, the old bed, the worn books – and I feel an emptiness in my chest because life since hasn’t been anything like so complete, so full of promise, so void of pain, and, even if I didn’t know it, back then I could extend my arms, reach out, and almost touch happiness.
PART TWO
Irina’s Dreams
13
IN 1900, ANTON PAVLOVICH Chekhov, by that time very sick and living in Yalta, wrote a play about three sisters who were stuck in a provincial shithole and spent their days dreaming about moving back to Moscow. Three Sisters: A Drama in Four Acts is not a story of sweeping mad love or tragedy. It’s about boredom and dullness and the futility of pursuing happiness.
Olya, Masha and Irina live in a small town, absorbed in the insignificant tasks of daily life, watching time pass by, reminiscing about a happier past and dreaming about a brighter future. For the three sisters, who feel they don’t belong in the provinces, there is only one way out of their dull existence: Moscow.
Moscow is the place where they could be happy again.
The three sisters, each in their twenties, had left Moscow eleven years earlier, when their father – a general, now dead – had been awarded the command of a regiment in the provinces. They have a brother, Andrey Sergeyevich, who plans to return to Moscow to become a university professor, taking his sisters with him.
At the beginning of the play, Irina, the youngest, is radiant and hopeful. While her older sisters can’t help being moody, Irina’s dreams infuse her naive soul with endless optimism. It’s in Moscow, she believes, that she will find true love and they will all be happy.
To the great disappointment of the three sisters, their Moscow plans never seem to take off. As the play advances and the sisters begin to understand that they might be stuck in the provinces, Moscow becomes less real, more ethereal. A spiritual aspiration.
Moscow represents where they want to be, both the past and the future. Moscow is everywhere, except here and now.
In Three Sisters, Anton Pavlovich exposes the very human weakness of believing that both the past and the future are better places to be. And holding on to the illusion that things will get better is our way of coping with life’s dullness.
A series of visitors, mostly military officers from the battalion in town, come to see the three sisters. Among them is Vershinin, a colonel, who at the beginning of the play has just arrived from Moscow and impresses the sisters with his sophistication.
Masha, the second sister, married at eighteen, is now bored of her husband. Whining about her life, she says that if only she lived in Moscow she would not even care about the weather. In response, Vershinin tells her the story of a French political prisoner who writes with passion about the birds he sees from the window of his cell, the same birds he never noticed when he was a free man. In the same way, Vershinin tells Masha, you will not notice Moscow once you live there again. We want happiness, he concludes, but we are not happy and we cannot be happy.
Masha, deeply impressed, starts an affair with Vershinin.
Irina talks about finding meaning in life through labour. But when she starts work at the local telegraph office she realises her life has no more meaning than before. Time goes by and Irina, too, loses her spark, drifting into ennui. As the dream of Moscow evaporates, she accepts her sudba and agrees to marry an officer she doesn’t love.
At one point, Masha realises that she can hardly remember the face of her dead mother. Their own mother, who died young and is buried in Moscow, is being forgotten. And we will all be forgotten one day, Masha says. Yes, Vershinin replies, they will forget us. That’s our destiny, our sudba: things that we believe serious, meaningful, very important, there will come a time when they will be forgotten or will seem unimportant.
At the end of the play the local battalion moves out of town and Vershinin has to leave with the other officers. Masha returns to her husband, who accepts her back despite his knowledge of the affair. This being Chekhov, there is no judgement, no punishment.
The sisters realise they will never go back to Moscow. They will grow old in the provinces. And they accept their destiny – settling for less than they had hoped for.
If life has meaning, it’s not something within the grasp of Chekhov’s characters. They are imperfectly human, shortsighted, and yet fully aware of their own insignificance. Life is a succession of dull moments, sometimes interrupted by short bursts of joy, always full of irrelevant thoughts that keep us distracted as we get older, dreaming of better lives but gradually accepting the unimportance of our own existence.
Then, one day, we die and everything is forgotten.
14
RUSSIA CHANGED FAST DURING the first months of my stay. On the last day of the year, as the world prepared hysterical celebrations for the arrival of a new millennium, Russia’s president – widely regarded as an endearing old man with a drinking problem – went on national TV and, to everybody’s surprise, announced he was resigning from office. As successor, he appointed the latest of his many prime ministers, a relatively unknown politician with an obscure background in the secret services.
At first, Muscovites didn’t seem to give much significance to this. ‘Nothing will change,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna had told me when we resumed our language classes after the holiday break. ‘They are all thieves anyway.’
But things did change. In fact, it seemed to me that the country had entered a new era.
By early spring everyone had stopped talking about the economic crisis. TV news, which I watched often to exercise my comprehension skills, showed endless footage of the new president, looking young and sober. We could see him every night on the news, practising judo, riding a horse, reprimanding under-performing ministers or winning, pretty much single-handedly, a nasty war in the Caucasus. According to the national media, Russia was now doing great. Overnight, the country had become rich, confident and assertive.
These changes were quickly reflected in Moscow’s clubbing scene. The city entered the elitni era. A new club opened every weekend, each more select than the last. Nightlife was no longer the exclusive realm of dyevs and expats. Russian oligarchs began to show up at the doors of the latest elitni clubs, first in limousines with tinted windows, then in black humvees, always accompanied by an entourage of drivers, okhrannikis and whores.
The nightlife crowd became known as the tusovka, each of us a tusovschik. For some reason that was never explained to me, it was around this time that cafés and clubs began to serve sushi or, rather, a local version of the Japanese delicacy, which in Moscow included plenty of cream cheese, smetana and dill. To keep up with the trend, the tusovka had to learn to use chopsticks.
Elitni clubs came with their own elitni sections, cordoned-off VIP areas, which were only accessible if you spent a few hundred dollars on champagne. It soon became hard for us, humble expats, to get into these clubs. We would be turned away at the door by bouncers who spoke no English and didn’t care that we did.
But we didn’t give up. We, determined Westerners, who had won the Cold War by standing for decades against Russian bullying, were not about to accept defeat without putting up a fight. So now, when out with the brothers, we would always
try to make it into the latest of elitini clubs, many of which were no longer called clubs but ‘projects’. Sure, we had to adapt to our new status, make a few concessions, adopt a less prominent profile. We would now ask our taxi driver to drop us round the corner, as the sight of a crumbling zhiguli would instantly kill our chances of passing face control. We would approach the front door of the club in small groups, walking purposefully, radiating self-confidence, barely acknowledging the bouncer, looking as wealthy and as Russian as we could.
Sometimes it worked. And nothing compared to the feeling of gliding through face control, those first seconds after the bouncer has casually beckoned you in, and you step firmly onto the carpet, and you enter a pafosni universe prohibited to mere mortals, chosen because you are handsome, special, and you walk towards the boom-boom beats with your heart full of anticipation and excitement – feeling that you belong in Moscow and Moscow is the centre of the world.
When we were turned away, which was increasingly often, we would hail another car and move to one of the clubs whose prime had passed and which had been forced to adopt a more lenient door policy.
Colin said, you find the best dyevs in these clubs, hot enough to make it through a second-rate face control but not as demanding as in trendier places. But some nights, for reasons we never understood, even these démodé establishments would not let us in, so we would end up in safe old Real McCoy, or Karma Bar, which for years maintained an all-expats-welcome policy and were always packed with young students.
These nights didn’t come cheap. I had to buy rounds of drinks for the brothers when it was my turn, but also for pretty dyevs and their entourage of not-so-pretty friends. I also bought new clothes at the shopping mall in Okhotny Ryad, black shirts and shiny shoes, to fit in among the increasingly exclusive and well-uniformed tusovka.
I was blowing my stipend money fast, and it was meant to last the entire academic year, so, when Stepanov offered me a part-time job, I accepted it at once.
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