Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  ‘It’ll only take you a few hours a week,’ Stepanov said. Then, with a smirk, he added, ‘I’m sure it won’t distract you from your research.’

  That was how I started working for Stepanov.

  My job description: show up at business meetings wearing a suit, mutter a few words in English, hand out business cards with a smile and a strong handshake. Nothing else, really. Director of Marketing, Insight Investments International, my business card said, good old Latin letters on one side, flashy Cyrillic on the other.

  Other than Stepanov and me, Insight Investments International had two staff members, Pavel and Vova, Stepanov’s schoolmates. I was the third ‘I’ of the firm, the International, a Western face investors could trust. But Stepanov was always the one to talk the talk.

  I never fully grasped the intricacies of the business but, as far as I gathered from the meetings I was asked to attend, Insight Investments International sold Russian companies, or parts of them, to foreign investors.

  In business mode, Stepanov would try to hide his boyish face behind three-day stubble and sunglasses. He always wore a dark suit and a black shirt, a popular look among Russian men at the time, inspired by TV series and movies where the protagonists were always Russian criminals.

  ‘I think the sunglasses might put some investors off,’ I told him once. We had just met a group of French businessmen who wanted to buy a dairy factory and produce brie and camembert for the Russian market. The conversation had somehow drifted – the French businessmen seemed more interested in nightclubs than in Stepanov’s exposé of Russian cheeses.

  ‘Bullshit,’ Stepanov said. ‘They love the sunglasses. That’s how they know that I’m well connected, that I really understand business in Russia.’

  Every time a deal went through, Stepanov handed me an envelope stuffed with dollars. I was never told how my salary was calculated but, with time, Stepanov’s envelopes got thicker, and I ended up with plenty of cash to spend.

  15

  ‘HERE’S A QUESTION,’ COLIN SAYS. ‘If you had to choose only one club to go to for the rest of your time in Moscow, the one place you’re allowed to visit, which one would you choose?’

  ‘Only one?’ I ask.

  ‘Only one. You could not get into any other club. The only place for you to get drunk and meet dyevs.’

  ‘Propaganda.’

  Colin takes a long sip and finishes his Long Island iced tea. His eyes are shiny, his half-smile wider than usual. ‘Come on, you must be kidding.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I say. ‘You know I like Propaganda.’

  It’s Friday night and the Real McCoy is packed. The air is hot, shirts are sweaty. The windows by the entrance are coated in a layer of condensation. We are on our third Long Island iced tea, in good spirits.

  ‘Sure,’ Colin says, ‘we all like Propaganda, but, come on, before McCoy? Be serious, man. We’ve met so many nice dyevs in here.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ I say. ‘I really like the McCoy. What the fuck, I love the McCoy. Moscow wouldn’t be the same without it. But the McCoy would probably be my second choice. Or my third, after Karma. If you ask for one single club, for me it’s Propaganda.’

  Colin points up at two dyevs dancing on top of the bar, their high heels pounding away next to my drink. ‘You don’t get this atmosphere in Propaganda, the McCoy is always a feast. This is the real Moscow, man. Wild and fucking honest!’

  At that moment, as if to prove Colin’s point, the two dyevs, who are wearing short skirts and leather boots, start kissing each other. People around us raise their arms and cheer.

  ‘There’re plenty of hot dyevs in Propaganda,’ Colin says, ‘I give you that. The difference is, dyevs go to Propaganda to be seen, the Real McCoy they come to to get laid.’

  ‘For an easy score,’ I say, ‘the Real McCoy is unbeatable. It totally deserves its three fuckies. But think of all the great nights we had in Propaganda. Propaganda’s a Moscow legend.’

  Colin is now ogling the dyevs dancing on the bar. ‘We had great nights in Propaganda,’ he says. ‘Not any more. Now it’s going all pafosni and exclusivni like the rest of the city. These days you walk in and you could be in any club in the world. It’s been sanitised, Westernised. If that’s the type of club you enjoy, you may as well go back home. Propaganda has lost the wildness of the real Moscow. If you think about it, how many Prop dyevs have you fucked lately?’

  ‘I met Lena in Propaganda.’

  ‘Yeah, all right, but how many new dyevs? You met Lena Propaganda ages ago, soon after you arrived. She doesn’t count. There is nothing like McCoy, man.’

  Colin leaves the glass on the bar and – grabbing the leather boot of one of the dyevs – points at it so that she is careful not to kick it. The dyev looks down at us and smiles.

  The music is now deafening.

  ‘Remember that dyev I met last week in Zeppelin?’ Colin asks. He’s sweating, rolling up the sleeves of his silky blue shirt.

  ‘The one with the big nose?’

  ‘But great legs, right?’

  ‘If you say so.’

  I wave at the waiter and point at our empty glasses. He looks up and acknowledges my order.

  ‘So I met her on Tuesday. What a bitch!’

  ‘She did look bitchy,’ I say.

  ‘We’d agreed to meet in Teatralnaya, outside the Bolshoi. I came straight from the gym, so I was carrying my sports bag, and guess what the first thing this bitch said when she saw me was, before hello or anything? “You are not bringing that ugly bag with us, are you?”’

  ‘Your sports bag?’

  ‘Yeah, my fucking sports bag.’

  ‘Why would she give a shit?’

  ‘Fuck knows,’ Colin says.

  The waiter places two new glasses between the leather boots of the dancing dyevs, fills them with crushed ice and various shots. He then tops up the glasses with coke from a hose and a splash of lime juice. I pay for the round, clink my glass with Colin’s and take a sip. The air feels balmier now, lacking oxygen. I welcome the freshness of the drink.

  ‘These drinks are loaded,’ I say.

  ‘Try getting a Long Island like this in Propaganda. These are the best drinks in town, I tell you. Anyway, so the dyev told me something about how carrying a sports bag around is so working class, not kulturno in Moscow.’

  ‘What the fuck.’

  ‘I know,’ Colin says. ‘I told her I’d just been to the gym and I had nowhere to leave the bag. So we walked up Petrovka and I took her to this new café on the corner with Stoleshnikov, you know, the new place with white tables and white chandeliers and the hot waitresses dressed in black. All pafosni and nice, right?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say. ‘I like it.’

  ‘This bitch didn’t. She asked me why I’m taking her to a café and not to a restaurant when I had promised to take her to a restaurant.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘Fuck knows. I told her, “Listen, there’s nice food in here and a good atmosphere,” but she was all whiny because of my working-class bag and because I wasn’t taking her to a real restaurant. Then we get the menu and the bitch starts complaining about the food. She orders a glass of French champagne, which was of course the most expensive item she could find on the menu.’

  ‘Classic,’ I say. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Wait.’ Colin drinks from his Long Island. ‘I told her I’d go home quickly to drop my bag and get changed, and be back in fifteen minutes to take her to a proper restaurant. She seemed happy with that. So I go outside, take a taxi and, when I’m on my way home, I write her a text telling her to go fuck herself because I’m not coming back and I don’t want to see her ever again.’

  ‘Well done, man, that’s great.’ I slap Colin’s back. ‘You made her pay for her own champagne.’

  ‘Not really,’ Colin says, shaking his head. ‘I did pay the bill on the way out. She was probably not carrying any cash. Anyway, you should write about this in your PhD, or
if you ever write your book about Moscow. I think it’s very representative of the new Russia.’

  A popular Russian song from the 1980s comes on. Everyone in the club is now singing along and dancing. People gather, forming a circle, arms around each other, revolving around the dance floor.

  ‘The city is changing fast,’ Colin shouts in my ear. ‘Not what it used to be. Remember when you could take a dyev to McDonald’s and expect to get laid in return?’

  ‘Come on, it was never like that.’

  ‘It was, maybe before you arrived. Things are no longer the same, the good times will soon be over. One day we’ll look back on this time and realise that we got to live in this special historical moment. We’re witnessing the disintegration of an entire society. We’re in the midst of a social and sexual revolution. Moscow is a jungle, man. People just care about getting rich and getting laid. Money and sex. It’s all new to them.’

  I take a sip of my drink. ‘Money, perhaps. But they must have fucked during soviet times.’

  The ring of bouncing people, reaching critical mass, surges towards the bar, a human tornado razing everything in its path. To avoid a collision, Colin and I have to step back. A drunk girl is now on the floor, her skirt halfway up her waist, a long rip in her tights. Colin helps her to her feet. She laughs, says spasibo and, singing along, rejoins the crowd.

  Colin is holding his glass up in the air, so as not to spill it over his silky shirt. ‘In soviet times they only fucked for reproduction purposes,’ he says. ‘Free sex is one of those things brought by the perestroika. That’s why Russians embraced the uncertainty of political change, because at least they were getting some. Hence the Duck.’

  ‘What has the Duck got to do with this?’

  ‘The Hungry Duck symbolised the social and political changes. Dyevs in the Duck were crazy sluts because sexuality was oppressed for seventy years by the old regime. Their sluttiness was a form of unconscious protest against oppression.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ I say. ‘Look at Chekhov’s plays, everybody fools around.’

  ‘That’s in books,’ Colin says. ‘Free sex in real life is something new.’

  At the end of the song, as the music quietens down, a table is knocked over at the back, glasses shattering on the floor. The crowd is silent for two seconds. Then someone screams vsyo khorosho, everything’s good, and there is laughter and the dancing goes on.

  ‘Some things never change,’ I say. ‘One day, we’ll be gone from Moscow, but other guys will come to this very bar to pick up dyevs, and new dyevs will come to get drunk and have fun. It’s the circle of life.’

  ‘No way,’ Colin says, undoing a button on his shiny blue shirt. ‘Come here in ten years and see. There might be a Real McCoy, but it won’t be like this. Look what happened to the Duck.’

  ‘That’s different,’ I say. ‘The Duck was too wild. It couldn’t last.’

  ‘Nothing good lasts, man. Life’s a short bitch and we have to enjoy every fucking bit of it.’

  I nod, taking a long sip of my drink.

  ‘This Moscow,’ Colin says, his arm hovering over the McCoy crowd, ‘our Moscow, will also disappear.’

  16

  WITH THE WARM WEATHER, the trees around the university campus, which had been bare all winter, turned lush and green. The city was flooded with a bizarre soft light that revealed a mesmerising range of faded colours, and you could now see pale pinks and greens and blues on the façades of old buildings. They were all turning into white, these colours, sun-bleached, and Moscow at this time of the year felt polaroid-faded, dreamlike. Walking the older streets of the centre I was often under the impression that my surroundings belonged to a discoloured guidebook.

  You could find plenty of dyevs strolling around Okhotny Ryad and Aleksandrovsky Sad, or manoeuvring their high heels across the cobblestones of Red Square. They wore impossibly short skirts and no bras, ate ice cream, and stared straight into your eyes for as long as you could hold their gaze.

  To combat the heat, terraces and kiosks across the city sold bottles of beer which men carried proudly in their hands as they strolled along the boulevards or sat on park benches. If you ventured under the archways of old buildings and into their courtyards, you would sometimes discover hidden cafés, temporary wooden structures that sold grilled shashliks and dried fish.

  In the months I had spent in Moscow, new coffee shops had sprouted around Tverskaya, Bolshaya Dmitrovka and Bolshaya Nikitskaya, and in the smaller streets around Kuznetsky Most and Kitay-gorod. They sold expensive cakes – eclairs, Napoleons, carrot cakes, brownies – and, for the first time in Russia, freshly brewed coffee. Dyevs sat in these trendy cafés for hours, stuffing themselves with sugar and caffeine, reading women’s magazines and Akunin books, redoing their make-up every twenty minutes with the help of pocket mirrors. But they were never fully focused on their reading, I realised. Even if seemingly absorbed in a book, dyevs were always attentive to their surroundings, ready to look up at any minor disturbance, like gazelles on the savannah who don’t let their guard down while drinking from a pond.

  On Saturdays I played football. Our team played in blue shirts and was called the Blues Brothers, which was why – I seem to recall – we had started referring to ourselves as the brothers. I’d met them through Colin at the beginning of my stay. We played an expat league but the rules allowed two Russian players per team. Stepanov was a solid midfielder. Colin played up front with me and Diego spent most of his time on the bench, happy to come out for ten minutes and then enjoy the drinks.

  We had played all winter on a covered pitch in Dinamo but now that it was warm and dry we played in Kazakova, a small park east of the ring road. The grass pitch was surrounded by woodland and the ruins of a pre-revolutionary palace. A green oasis – it didn’t feel like Moscow.

  It was the Dutch expats who managed the football league. They’d arrived in the mid-1990s, recruited by Russian oligarchs who didn’t trust local employees to run Moscow’s casinos. They were all a bit older than the rest of us and most had Russian wives and kids. The Dutch booked the pitch, paid the referees and brought local casino employees every Saturday to serve shashliks and salads and cold beers after our matches. So Saturdays were lovely, especially when it was sunny, and the players brought their wives, girlfriends and mistresses to watch our games.

  I would bring Lena and no one else. She would stand on the side of the pitch in her skimpy summer dress, her short blonde hair gleaming under the sun. She would pace on the grass, along the sideline, following the game with attention, but I never heard her shout or cheer, not even on the rare occasions when I scored a goal. After the match, I would grab a bottle of beer from the ice bucket, and lie on the grass to watch the next game with my head on Lena’s lap, feeling the sun warm my cheeks while she stroked my sweaty hair.

  By mid-June, the nights were so short that the sky was bright until midnight, when we entered the clubs, and bright again when we came out onto the street a few hours later. Clubs opened their own gardens and terraces, and it was around this time that the party boat started to run on Friday nights.

  The boat was an elitni affair, and the point and time of its departure one of Moscow’s best-kept secrets. It was Stepanov who would find out on Friday which embankment the party boat would depart from that night. After a few warm-up drinks in Stepanov’s place, we would get on board and, because we were in the know, we were always allowed in. There would be plenty of New Russians on the boat, models and actresses and TV people, some of whom even I recognised, and the boat would drift all night up and down the Moskva river, stopping every now and then to load and unload beautiful people.

  On board, we felt part of Moscow’s tusovka, the chosen ones, gathering to spend the nights in communion with the city. We drank, talked to dyevs, made best friends, and I would often meet the dawn dancing on the top deck, as the boat glided gently over the dark waters, blasting its mellow techno music under the enormous statue of Peter the Great or Christo
pher Columbus, and the chocolate factory, and the House on the Embankment, with its giant Mercedes-Benz star, and my heart would beat faster as the boat passed under the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge – where we would all duck for no reason – and emerge by the earthy walls and golden domes of the Kremlin as the city was brought to life by a warm orange sun rising over the east.

  Oh Bozhe, how I loved Moscow!

  17

  AT THE BEGINNING OF July, about ten months into my stay, I rented a studio on Tverskaya, on the top floor of an old soviet building. The landlady requested that I pay in cash, which suited me fine as all I had was the stack of dollars I was getting from Stepanov. Rents in the centre, which would skyrocket later, were quite reasonable at the time.

  My flat had no bedroom, just a living room, half of which was occupied by an enormous corner sofa that unfolded into a bed. Once I’d got the landlady to change the carpet, the place looked pretty decent. Above the couch, I hung an Indian tapestry that Lena had bought me for my birthday and had previously adorned my university room. The tapestry showed Lord Ganesh, in browns and yellows, surrounded by white dots. Handing me the present, Lena had told me the story of how the Hindu god had had his head chopped off and replaced by that of an elephant. She assured me that Lord Ganesh brought good luck, that he used the little broom in his hand to remove obstacles from the path of life.

  The kitchen, a separate room with wood-clad walls and a small dining table, was functional, warm and cosy. On top of the table, next to the wall, I placed an old electric samovar. Lena insisted that the samovar – a silvery soviet model I’d bought at Izmailovsky – made better tea than any modern kettle. I liked its polished look, which made me think of a well-deserved trophy, and the way the lid rattled furiously when the water reached boiling point.

  Both balconies, the kitchen one and the living-room one, faced not Tverskaya but the courtyard, which in warmer weather was half occupied by the tables and chairs of the summer terrace at Scandinavia. Because the other constructions around the courtyard were only two or three floors tall, the view from my sixth-floor balconies spanned all the way from Barrikadnaya to the buildings of the New Arbat, which may or may not have represented open books, but were, for some reason, loved by Muscovites and Christmas-lit all year round. If I stood on either of my balconies, I could gaze at a vast urban scape, an endless extension of rooftops, twisted antennae, old pipes and tangled cables and – if the day was clear – I could follow the sun setting on the horizon, behind the redbrick chimneys of the old soviet factories. Breathtaking.