Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  ‘He has his moods. That’s true.’

  ‘I would like to have children one day. And I want a man who brings money home, a man who’s hard-working and resourceful.’

  ‘Sergey is going through a rough patch,’ I said, ‘but he’ll find a job. It’s not all about money.’

  ‘Of course it’s not all about money.’ Ira buttoned her cardigan all the way up. ‘The problem is not that Sergey doesn’t bring in money. The problem is that he doesn’t care about it. He’s happy living at his mother’s old flat, off my salary. He says we don’t need anything more. He has no ambition. I love Sergey very much but I can’t stand this situation any longer. I have to think about my own life.’

  ‘And where does the American guy fit in all this?’

  ‘Rob makes me feel good about myself.’

  The girl with the red lipstick stood up, smiled at me again, and walked towards the toilet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I said, getting to my feet, ‘I’m going to wash my hands.’

  Ira glanced behind her, at the table where now there was only one girl. She looked back at me, shaking her head.

  ‘Martin, I really like you. But you are such an asshole.’

  34

  POLINA LIVED WITH HER parents in the south of Moscow, half an hour away from the last metro stop on the red line. When she came to my place, she would tell her mother she was staying with a girlfriend of hers. In the morning she would leave early to go to school.

  She didn’t talk much, Polina, but she seemed to enjoy the time we spent together. She smiled a lot, which was unusual in Moscow, and listened carefully to everything I said, always in awe, as if I were a professor giving a lecture. Unlike Lena, Polina never corrected my Russian, and even looked embarrassed when I asked her for a clarification or to repeat something she’d said – as if it were unforgivable for her to have used a word or expression that I didn’t know. I attributed this to our difference in age.

  One day when I had nothing to do, I asked her to come over.

  Klassno, she texted back. I’ve missed you. Will be there in two hours.

  I hadn’t seen her for a week or so. I had spent the morning in Coffee Beans and, on the way back home, I had bought a pirate DVD at the perekhod, an American romantic comedy, the kind of film Polina liked.

  I took a shower, changed the bedsheets on the couch and started to prepare a salad for dinner. I was chopping vegetables when I heard my phone beep. Surely Polina, I thought, perhaps she was running late. Picking up the phone, I was shocked to see Lena’s name on the screen. It was the first time I’d heard from Lena since she’d left my flat on the first night of snow.

  Privet, can I come to your place tonight?

  My first thought was that it was an old message that, for some technical reason, got stuck somewhere. But I couldn’t help feeling anxious about the possibility of seeing Lena again. The image of Lena’s sensual body – so different from Polina’s – flashed into my head. My heart was beating fast.

  I replied: Sure, come over.

  Less than a minute later I received a text back. I’ll be at your place around eight.

  I immediately called Polina to cancel our date. But now Polina’s phone was out of reach, she was probably on the metro. Anxious, I kept calling every few minutes, hoping to catch her before she got to the centre. Her phone seemed to be switched off.

  At seven thirty, Polina showed up at my flat, with the pink backpack she always carried full of schoolbooks and clothes for the next day. In one hand she held a bottle of wine.

  She kissed me, smiled. ‘I’m so happy to see you. I bought Georgian wine at the corner shop. I’m starving, what are we having for dinner?’

  I didn’t know how to tell Polina that I needed her to go back home, that she couldn’t stay at my place.

  I decided to be honest. She deserved that.

  ‘Polina, a friend is coming to see me tonight,’ I said, regretting, not for the first time, the gender specificity that the Russian language required. Podruga meant female friend.

  Polina stared at me in silence.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I went on, ‘but I shouldn’t have asked you to come tonight.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach you. Your phone wasn’t working.’

  Polina looked confused, her smile was gone. She didn’t seem to understand what I was saying.

  ‘This friend,’ she finally said, ‘is she like a girlfriend?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, an old girlfriend. I haven’t seen her in a long time.’

  Polina’s lips started to tremble.

  ‘Polina, I’m really sorry.’

  I grabbed her little shoulders. Her cheeks were red. She stepped away from me, picked up her pink bag from the chair.

  ‘I really like you,’ I said, ‘but, you know, I have a thing for this other girl.’

  Polina was now covering her face and sobbing, like a child.

  ‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I met her before I met you.’ I thought this would somehow make things more understandable for Polina. ‘It’s mostly sexual attraction. Nothing serious, really. I like you, Polina.’

  Polina went to the entrance of the apartment and tried to open the first door, but her hands were shaking – she could not turn the key.

  ‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow?’ I said. ‘We can go to TGI Fridays, and then to the cinema.’

  Polina finally managed to open the door. She turned round.

  ‘You are cruel,’ she said.

  Then she left.

  Lena arrived an hour later. We hardly talked. After removing her hat, scarf, shoes and coat, Lena continued with the rest of her clothes, sweater, shirt, bra, jeans. She stood in the corridor, silent – wearing nothing but her necklace, her blonde hair uncombed, her breasts whiter than I remembered. Then she kissed me.

  Thirty minutes later we were lying on the couch in silence. I was staring at the tapestry on the wall – at Ganesh’s elephant head and his useless little brush. I didn’t know what to say. Somehow, despite all the anticipation and all the longing that had built up over the weeks, being with Lena didn’t feel as good as the thought of being with Lena. I could not understand why, but her body could not fill the emptiness inside me.

  Then Lena dressed, kissed me goodbye, left.

  I closed the doors and stepped into the kitchen. At the sight of Polina’s bottle of wine, a black void grew in my chest and sucked the air out of my lungs. I let myself fall onto a chair and covered my face, surprised to find a tear rolling down my cheek.

  35

  IN WINTER I WOULD OFTEN walk along Bolshaya Bronnaya, turning right into Malaya Bronnaya, keeping to the edge of the pavement where the snow was fresh and crunched under my feet. It was a beautiful walk along the quieter streets of the centre and I would focus my mind on the frozen air flooding my lungs, then steaming out my mouth in small white clouds. After fifteen minutes I would reach Patriarschiye Prudy.

  I would stroll around the frozen pond, where children played with sleds or hockey sticks. Then I would walk back through Mayakovskaya into Tverskaya, descending towards Pushkinskaya and, often, when the cold had seeped through my many layers of clothing and had reached my bones, I would enter the Revolution Museum, which was always empty but warm. I would leave my coat, scarf, gloves and hat in the cloakroom, get a hand-cut ticket from a babushka at the entrance and wander into the exhibition galleries.

  I passed through the initial halls, which contained old soviet flags, newspaper clippings and photos of Lenin, and walked straight into the rooms with soviet propaganda posters from the 1950s and 1960s, the wooden floors creaking under my feet. The museum had long lost its purpose, but there was a church-like tranquillity about it. I was usually the only visitor among the cleaning ladies and unsmiling dezhurnayas.

  One morning, a couple of days after Polina’s departure, I found myself standing in front of a poster depicting a blonde soviet woman. One hand shielding her impossibly bright
blue eyes, the woman was gazing into the distance, perhaps, I thought, at the prospect of a socialist paradise. For some reason, the image reminded me of the painting of the three knights in Stepanov’s place, who also gazed into the horizon, except that the knights were carrying swords and lances, while the beautiful soviet woman carried a basket of vegetables and potatoes.

  ‘Comrades,’ the poster said, ‘come to the kolkhoz. Let’s produce more potatoes and vegetables. Let’s build our nation.’

  I loved the naive and hopeful tone of the soviet posters – the way they portrayed a world based on work and sacrifice. I found it therapeutic to look at these images, at their beautifully faded colours, to see all those soviet men and women working together for a common goal. Women looked stunning in these posters, but not in a delicate dyevushka way – they were strong and maternal: you could not picture these women putting on make-up or complaining about the food in a café. These women were resilient, self-sufficient, forward-looking.

  Where are they now? I asked myself.

  I had read my share of Solzhenitsyn, and a couple of books on Russian history, and was aware of the darkest side of the soviet period. But, looking at these posters, I couldn’t help but feel both sadness and nostalgia. I felt sad and nostalgic for a past I’d never lived, a past that, as far as I knew, had never really existed, at least not as portrayed in these posters. But looking at these images full of symbolism infused me with a sense of hope.

  My first contact with soviet imagery had come through Khavronina’s Russian As We Speak It, a language book Katya had given me as a present back in Amsterdam, a few weeks before we split up. It was a second-hand book with a faded blue cover that she had asked a friend to bring from Minsk.

  ‘I’ve been told,’ Katya said with the book in her hand, ‘this is the best manual for beginners.’ It was early in the morning and I was still in bed. Katya had already put on make-up and done her hair. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to learn Russian, not knowing whether I would get a scholarship, but I loved the drawings in the book, depicting the simple, happy, soviet lives of Pavel and Marina.

  Pavel was a chemist who worked in a factory outside Moscow and Marina a doctor who worked in a children’s hospital. In lesson three, they talked about their apartment, which was plain but cosy. In lesson nine, they went to a restaurant, ordered chicken Kiev and spring salad, drank borzhomi water and then went dancing. In other lessons they went to the post office, to the countryside, to the supermarket, to the theatre. On Sundays, Pavel and Marina went to the park, where, the book said, the sun shone and birds sang.

  Standing in the empty hall of the Revolution Museum, I now wondered if that was the Russia I craved – the simple and beautiful world of Pavel and Marina, and not the complicated Russia I had been thrown into.

  But, as I had discovered early on in my stay, the Russia of my language book was fictional. There were no singing birds in Moscow. The birds I saw were crows or ravens – vorony, they called them – perched on the electric cables of Pushkinskaya, screeching loudly, scavenging the rubbish bins in the square, going through the leftovers outside McDonald’s.

  Where had all the hope of the soviet years gone? Russians had been cheated, and, in a way, they had earned their right to be cynical. Poor old babushkas at the Revolution Museum, I thought, themselves a tragic part of the exhibits, working for a few rubles a month and then commuting to the outskirts of Moscow where they lived on a diet of beetroot, potato and mayonnaise. Poor cleaning ladies sweeping the metro, old Nadezhdas and Revmiras, whose hopes and ideals had been flushed away with the perestroika. Poor Sergey, a soviet man with no country. Poor Nadezhda Nikolaevna, scolded by a young waiter for not knowing the rules of the New Russia. Poor Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, who lived trapped in the 1970s, in her Sochi seminars, because she could not understand that, despite her admirable and firm denial, Russia was for ever changed.

  The woman in the poster looked ahead with her confident regard, carrying the promise of a brighter future. In that moment, I felt a strong urge to join her and her struggle. Come with me, she seemed to be saying, stop wasting your life. I wanted to answer her call, cross the line that divides reality from historical fiction and meet her at the kolkhoz, where I would kiss her, marry her, co-suffer with her, and I would pick potatoes and vegetables all day long until my hands bled. I would do it for her, for her cause. For something to believe in.

  PART FOUR

  Olga’s Soul

  36

  IN DUSHECHKA, THE DARLING, Chekhov tells the story of Olga Semyonovna, a loving and gentle soul, a person who – Anton Pavlovich tells us – lives to love. The short story is set in a provincial city, and begins with Olga Semyonovna – known as Dushechka, darling, or little soul – listening attentively to the angry ramblings of Kukin, a local businessman who manages an attraction park and theatre. Kukin is whining about how the public’s bad taste and the bad weather are ruining his business. Dushechka, deeply touched by Kukin’s despair, falls for him. Soon after, they get married.

  Dushechka starts helping her husband at the theatre. Now, at every social occasion, she talks at length about the theatre business, shamelessly adopting her husband’s opinions as her own. Soon, her life becomes one with that of her husband and, in her role as devoted wife, Dushechka finds purpose, perhaps even happiness.

  One night, while Kukin is in Moscow on a business trip, someone knocks at the gates of Dushechka’s house. A telegram. With trembling hands, Dushechka opens the telegram and reads with astonishment that her husband has died. She is shocked but also confused, because, in a very Chekhovian detail, the telegram contains bizarre spelling mistakes. Dushechka is in pain.

  Not for long though. Just three months later, while returning from church, Dushechka bumps into Pustovalov, a wood merchant, who offers her some words of consolation, death being the will of God and all that. We can see Pustovalov is hitting on the widow. Now Dushechka, always the sensitive soul, can’t stop thinking about Pustovalov. She can no longer sleep. She is in love. So they go and get married.

  Dushechka is happy again, able to devote her life to her new husband. She now talks endlessly about types of wood, the price of logs and all things related to her husband’s business. Unlike her first husband Kukin, Pustovalov is a homely guy who doesn’t really like going out. When some friends suggest they go out to the theatre, Dushechka – who, as Kukin’s wife, had been the most ardent theatre devotee – now says, ‘What’s good about theatre anyway? We never go to the theatre, we are working people.’

  Dushechka is a new woman because she is with a new man.

  She lives happily for six years until one day in winter, after drinking hot tea, Pustovalov goes out without a hat, catches a nasty cold and, after four months of illness, dies.

  Poor Dushechka. She retreats into isolation, with only the company of her cat. There is also the local veterinarian, who’s separating from his wife and comes to visit Dushechka often. Although Chekhov doesn’t really go into the details, he seems to hint that Dushechka and the vet are more than friends. We know this partly because Dushechka now bores people talking about animal diseases.

  One day, to her despair, the veterinarian is posted far away and once more she is left on her own. With nobody to love, Dushechka falls into a depression. She grows old and grumpy. She no longer has any opinions. She doesn’t know what to talk about or what to think. Her heart, Chekhov tells us, is ‘as empty as her courtyard’.

  The years go by and Dushechka’s house grows shabby. She is now an old woman, who spends her summers sitting on the porch and her winters looking through the window at the snow.

  Then, one day, the vet, now an older man, shows up in town with his wife, with whom he had reconciled. Dushechka lets them stay at her place, and somehow ends up taking care of their nine-year-old boy. In the child, Dushechka finds someone to love, a new purpose in life. Now she cares about the school curriculum and other child-related issues. With something to whine about and occupy her days, Dushe
chka is happy again.

  As interesting as Chekhov’s story is Tolstoy’s interpretation, which gives us an original take on the mystery of Olga’s soul. In a review of Dushechka, Lev Nikolaevich says that Chekhov, intending to mock the unsophisticated woman, had accidentally created an endearing character. Tolstoy goes on to accuse Chekhov of being harsh on Dushechka, by judging her intellect and not her soul. Olga’s soul, according to Tolstoy, embodies the capacity of Russian women to love unconditionally, a virtue unknown to men. It is through this unconditional love, he suggests, that women achieve happiness.

  37

  YEARS LATER, I CAN SEE that the moment at the Revolution Museum, as I stood absorbed by the silent call of a woman in a poster, had the makings of a spiritual awakening – like the instant Raskolnikov finally realises he needs to confess his crime and move on with his life and his punishment.

  If my life in Moscow had been a Dostoyevsky novel, Polina’s tears at my apartment would have carried the seeds of my epiphany, and the dark feeling that accompanied me during the days that followed would have – perhaps at that very moment in the Revolution Museum – emerged at the surface of my conscience as clear regret.

  But back then I didn’t know. I couldn’t know, really, distracted as I was by the city. Despite the odd doubt about the purpose of my life – despite the fatigue, the sleepless hours in bed, the morning headaches – come the weekend, I would put on a well-ironed shirt, drink shots of vodka and go out with the brothers to nightclubs. And in this way we spent our weeks, our months, and never did I stop to think that all of this could, one day, come to an end.

  By late spring, Yulya Karma had stopped visiting me on a regular basis. We still saw each other for tea, but only every two or three weeks. It was nicer this way, because our bodies had time to get unaccustomed to each other, and we clashed with more zeal. One day, Yulya Karma told me she had decided to leave her boyfriend and proposed, in the same businesslike manner as when she’d first offered to be my lover, that she be my girlfriend. ‘I think we are very compatible,’ she said, ‘we would be very good together, as a real couple.’ I told her it wouldn’t really work because, even though I was quite fond of her, I would never be able to fully trust her. I think she understood. And it was a pity, I thought, because I liked her and she had a touch of pragmatism that made her different from the other girls; so practical and focused, Yulya Karma, and she could have made a good girlfriend, were it not for her natural talent for deceit.