Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  Colin said, in the end, we were all searching for the perfect girl, the Export Quality Dyev, as he put it – the perfect woman to take home with us the day we had to leave Moscow.

  Maybe he was right. Perhaps all the going out was, after all, just a protracted search for someone we could keep. A futile search, I now understand, because, ever since Katya had left me in Amsterdam, I couldn’t bring myself to define what I was looking for and, had I encountered it, I would not have known. What I craved was a particular thrill, a wave of euphoria, a resonance in my soul, which was becoming harder to feel with each new girl I met.

  I lost contact with Ira. A couple of times we’d agreed to meet for coffee at the university but, for different reasons, I’d had to cancel at the last minute. We’d talked on the phone, and she told me she was considering leaving her American lover and getting back with Sergey. We agreed to go out for dinner to catch up, but I kept postponing, never finding the right time, until the plan faded away. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to see Ira, and at times I missed her company, but I found it hard to fit her into my life. We were out of sync, Ira and I. She lived at a slower pace, with her modest salary, going to Project OGI with her old friends, torn between Sergey and her one lover.

  Stepanov’s car dealership, which he had set up in just a couple of months, was booming. He imported luxury vehicles from Finland, where he bought them for almost half their Moscow market price. He managed to avoid customs duties by profiting from a mix of bizarre legislative loopholes and good old Russian bribery. The cars were exhibited in a spacious salon in Prospekt Mira, which Stepanov had named Miller & Stevenson Luxury Vehicles, suggesting foreign ownership. To emphasise the non-Russian nature of the business – which, according to Stepanov, allowed for the cars to be marked up at least ten per cent above their price in Russian-owned dealerships – I was asked to show up often, particularly when serious buyers were expected. Oligarchs, flooded with enormous amounts of cash at the time, couldn’t get enough of the cars, and, by June, Stepanov was selling about a dozen luxury vehicles a month.

  He kept a black BMW for himself – a bumer, he called it – which gave him much to talk about but rarely left its parking place in Stepanov’s courtyard. To the chagrin of those Muscovites who could now afford decent cars, it remained much easier to navigate the city by public transport or the large and very efficient fleet of unofficial taxis permanently cruising the streets.

  We had a great summer that year. Truth be told, I don’t remember much of the legendary nights of the summer of 2001. It’s not that I forgot them – it’s more that they never registered in my vodka-soaked mind. I only know what happened because I recall Colin, Diego, Stepanov telling and retelling our stories in Starlite, or at Stepanov’s place, and the stories that weren’t told back then were for ever lost, and, in the end, my memories of those great nights are not my own memories, but those I borrowed from the brothers.

  38

  IN SEPTEMBER RUSSIA changed again.

  A week after the attacks in New York and Washington, in the midst of worldwide soul-searching and hysteria – as the Western media talked about the war against civilisation, or ‘the day that changed the world’ – The Exile came out with an article that caused a stir among expats. Under the heading ‘Be Cool, America’, the article said, more or less, that America had it coming.

  Russians also seemed to have mixed feelings about these historical events, brought up as they were to hate their Cold War foe. Russian leaders, including the president, rushed to publicly offer condolences and assistance but, if you looked carefully at the TV while they spoke, you could detect a trace of a smirk on their faces.

  These are the kind of people we have to deal with in today’s world, Russian politicians said, referring in the same breath to the war in Chechnya. But Russia went ahead and allowed America to use its air space to attack terrorist bases in Central Asia. Russia also shared intelligence from the soviet experience in Afghanistan. All of this was unprecedented, historical in fact, and, in the few weeks after 9/11, Moscow expats had the feeling that Russia was warming to the West. Russian leaders sounded more obliging, helpful and understanding than ever before, perhaps thinking that, if the world was to be split along a new Iron Curtain, they wished to be, this time, on the right side of history.

  This geopolitical rapprochement cascaded down to our everyday Moscow lives, where we all perceived a small post 9/11 shift. Expats were in vogue again, and for a few weeks, we – the ambassadors of Western civilisation – were the recipients of kind words of support.

  It didn’t last long though. By the end of the year, as the images of the planes crashing into the towers lost part of their power to shock, things went back to normal. Russia redirected its course away from the West, disappointed perhaps that its friendly gestures had not been taken seriously. And, in Moscow, expats no longer deserved any particular sympathy.

  Stepanov said the Americans had done this to themselves; not by provoking others, as The Exile had suggested, but by actually planning and carrying out the attack on their own soil. He maintained it was all a CIA conspiracy. This theory was widely held in Moscow at that time. It was a bizarre hypothesis which I couldn’t understand until, at some point, after long drunken discussions on the topic, it dawned on me why Russians didn’t know how to deal with 9/11. Russians were envious of Americans and regretted that 9/11 hadn’t happened to them instead. They couldn’t bear the fact that an event so full of suffering and historical meaning, an event that was to mark the fate of the new century, had happened to undeserving Americans instead of Russians – hungry and ready as they were for national tragedies.

  39

  READING WAR AND PEACE IN Russian was an ambitious project I had tackled several times but never managed to carry through. I knew I was no real expert in Russian literature – and, clearly, I lacked the intellectual focus to become one. But if I could at least claim to have read War and Peace in its original language, word by word as Lev Nikolaevich had written it, I thought I would somehow feel less of a fraud.

  For the last few days, I had been going every morning to Coffee Beans. I would sit by the large front window and carefully arrange the two volumes of my 1944 edition on the table, next to a dictionary and one of my notebooks. I would ritually spend a few minutes holding my hot mug of coffee, observing how Muscovites fought winter in the street. For some reason, I took pleasure in the contrast between the two sides of the glass wall – the world of high ceilings, gilded mirrors and fresh coffee, and the world of crawling traffic, red noses, teary eyes and thick scarves. From the warm interior of Coffee Beans, listening to cool jazz, people in the street appeared to me as fictional characters.

  I would take my time with every page, sipping coffee, flipping through the dictionary, struggling with bizarre Russian words I had never encountered before and, I suspected, I would never encounter again. I would take notes, my work occasionally slowed by my having to exchange looks with a dyev at a nearby table.

  Every now and then, the thick double doors of Coffee Beans would open to let a new customer in, coat peppered with snowflakes, shoes caked with ice and mud. The floor of the café was constantly being mopped by diligent waitresses in a Sisyphean effort to keep winter outside, so, after passing through the door, newcomers would hesitate for a few seconds before defiling the shiny floors. To me it felt as if each newcomer were an intruder who had, for some reason, less right to be in the café than me.

  A few days into my latest War and Peace attempt I realised that I wasn’t making significant progress, that at this pace it would take me months, if not years, to finish Lev Nikolaevich’s book. I decided to recalibrate my objectives. After all, I told myself, it’s not that I had to read the entire book in Russian. A taste of the original language was all I needed, as long as I knew the story well enough to form some original opinions of my own. So, one morning, before entering Coffee Beans, I walked into the Moskva Bookshop and, overcoming a vague sense of guilt, I bought an Engl
ish translation.

  Now I would flip through the pages of the cheap Penguin Classics translation – which I kept half-hidden under the table – identifying interesting passages that I could later read in Russian in my beautiful soviet edition. I couldn’t be bothered with the war bits. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had told me that Tolstoy’s battle scenes were masterpieces in their own right, the best depictions of violence in world literature, she said, so realistic and vivid. But when I tried to read them I would soon lose interest. I always ended up skipping those sections and looking for the passages about the lives of the characters in times of peace, analysing Lev Nikolaevich’s take on his female characters.

  One morning I sat by the window of Coffee Beans observing how snowflakes floated among the cables and banners of Tverskaya. They didn’t seem to reach the ground, the snowflakes – they glided peacefully towards the street’s surface, then hovered above it for a moment, weightless, as if having second thoughts, and were briskly swept away by the breeze, sideways and upwards, back into the sky. Of course the snowflakes had to reach the ground at some point, I thought – Tverskaya was covered in white.

  I was reading the scenes in which Natalya Rostova made an appearance. At the beginning of the book Natalya is only twelve, but she already shows the features of a full dyevushka in the making. She’s lovely, Natalya, and gracious – the pure embodiment of youth. I had read somewhere that Tolstoy had fallen in love with Natalya’s character and I could see where that theory came from. Although she was not described as being particularly attractive, she was depicted in a special light. Was she Tolstoy’s ideal woman? Unlike Pushkin’s Tatyana, who was too good to be true, Tolstoy’s Natalya felt real, alive. Natalya Rostova was capricious, coquettish and, in her own early nineteenth-century way, a bit of a tease. She would certainly fit in modern-day Moscow.

  I was absorbed by these thoughts, taking some notes, when Colin walked in, holding a copy of The Exile that he had picked up at the entrance. He shook the snow off his coat.

  ‘Beautiful morning,’ he said as he placed the newspaper on my table and his coat on the nearby rack. He was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. ‘Saw you through the window. Another cup of coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’

  When he came back with two mugs of fresh coffee, I shared my thoughts about Natalya Rostova.

  Colin listened attentively, stirred his coffee and took a sip. His face was as red as a beetroot. ‘If you had to choose between Natalya Rostova and Anna Karenina,’ he said, ‘who would you rather fuck?’

  ‘Do you mean who’s my favourite among Tolstoy’s female characters?’

  ‘I mean, who would you take to bed.’

  I thought about Colin’s question, trying to picture both Anna and Natalya as sexual partners.

  ‘Natalya,’ I said, ‘towards the end of the book.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s more lovable than Karenina.’

  ‘I think Anna Karenina would be a better fuck,’ Colin said.

  ‘How could you possibly know?’ I said, for some reason annoyed by Colin’s disdain for Natalya. ‘You’ve never read War and Peace. What do you know about Natalya?’

  ‘Who’s read the entire book? True, I don’t really know Natalya Rostova, but I feel Karenina is more my type of woman.’

  ‘Unfaithful? Suicidal?’

  Colin thought about it for a few seconds. ‘Strong, determined.’

  ‘Natalya is more unpredictable,’ I said. ‘More fun.’

  Colin took a sip of coffee. ‘Is Natalya honest? Faithful?’

  ‘Not entirely,’ I admitted. ‘When it comes to men, she’s rather fickle.’

  ‘All Russian women are,’ Colin said. He was sweating, pulling on the neck of his black sweater to let some air onto his chest. ‘In the end, if you look at it, they are all unfaithful. Anna Karenina, Natalya Rostova—’ Colin took another sip of coffee and looked out of the window, giving himself more time to think of the names of other unfaithful Russian characters. ‘You know,’ he said after a while, ‘all of them.’

  ‘Russian women are unfaithful. Is that your insight of the day?’

  Colin turned his head both ways, as if checking that nobody could hear us. ‘That’s what makes them more interesting and challenging. It’s their culture. They’re always looking for the next thing.’

  ‘That’s not true,’ I said. ‘Look at Pushkin’s Tatyana. She was a faithful and devoted wife.’

  ‘Pushkin is Pushkin,’ Colin said.

  A tall dyev with red boots walked into the café and glanced around, as if looking for a friend. Colin waved at her with a smile. He did that often with female strangers – as far as I could tell, with no results. She returned the smile politely, turned and walked back out to the street.

  Colin opened The Exile and started to flip the pages. He always went straight to the club reviews to check if there were any new ratings to disagree with.

  ‘Karenina’s infidelity is not her main feature,’ I said, recalling an article I’d read on Tolstoy’s work from a feminist point of view. ‘Her decision to abandon her husband is about escaping conventions, about breaking free from the choices society had made for her.’

  ‘Whatever,’ Colin said. ‘In the end, look at Moscow today. You meet a dyev and you know she’s already looking for someone else, better-looking, wealthier. They can’t stay put.’

  ‘Neither can we.’

  ‘That’s different. We’re males. Ours is a biological need. Theirs is a materialistic pursuit. That’s the thing, if you scratch the surface, Russian dyevs are incredibly materialistic. All they want is someone to provide for them, buy them expensive clothes, holidays abroad and all that shit. They expect men to open their doors, help them with their coats. They don’t believe in equality. Not there yet.’

  ‘That’s crap,’ I said. ‘They’re just a bit more traditional.’

  ‘You know why Russian wives are so popular back in the States? Because they’re the embodiment of the American dream of the 1960s, taking care of themselves and their husbands, always perfect make-up and hair. Both servile and sensual.’

  The snowflakes outside seemed to become smaller.

  ‘Look,’ Colin continued, ‘even when you take a dyev to a restaurant, she doesn’t give a fuck if the food is fine or cow dung, as long as it’s expensive.’

  ‘Maybe you meet the wrong dyevs,’ I said. ‘I know girls who search for romance.’

  ‘It’s not romance,’ Colin said, finishing his cup of coffee. ‘For Russian women, relationships are nothing but a transaction. They always expect something in return. That’s why it’s easy for them to become prostitutes, because they always feel you owe them something anyway. So they cross the line and ask for money.’

  ‘Four years in Moscow,’ I said, ‘and you still have such a stereotyped view of Russian women.’

  ‘I’m not doing a PhD on the subject,’ Colin said, tapping my red notebook, ‘but I’ve met my share. Believe me, sooner or later dyevs want something from you. That’s how they value how much you care, by figuring out how much you spend. Clothes, flowers, restaurant bills, they add up everything in their heads.’

  ‘I’ve met girls who just wanted to have fun,’ I said. ‘They didn’t expect anything in return.’

  ‘You don’t know what’s in their heads.’

  ‘I certainly don’t.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Colin said as he stood up. ‘I’ll leave you with your books, I need to go to a meeting. McCoy tonight?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Colin put on his coat, shook my hand and stepped out into the street. Through the glass I watched him walk away under the snow.

  40

  THEN, AT THE END OF winter, I met Tatyana.

  As temperatures rose, the roofs of Moscow began to drop enormous blocks of ice that crashed with force onto the pavement, shattering into a million ice cubes and killing – I was told – about a dozen unfortunate Muscovites every year. To stop this urban massacre, city workers
were sent up the buildings to poke at the ice, provoking controlled avalanches over the streets below, after they’d cut off pedestrian traffic with yellow plastic tape. When you saw the yellow tape, you knew spring was around the corner.

  ‘We’re meeting the real estate agent by the Chekhov statue,’ Colin said, as we walked down Tverskaya. ‘Outside the MKhAT theatre.’

  It was a bright morning. I was trying to focus on the pavement, avoiding the sludge and the slippery puddles that had frozen during the night. We turned left into Kamergersky. Anticipating the change of season, some restaurants had claimed chunks of the walkway and set up outdoor terraces – with mushroom gas-heaters and blankets draped over the chairs. All the tables were empty.

  ‘I hope it’s a nice flat,’ Colin said. ‘Would be great if I could move in around here.’

  We stood beneath Chekhov’s statue – Anton Pavlovich, up on a pedestal, looking sad and lonely. I noticed how, as the city defrosted, the remains of sweaty ice sparkled with more intensity, as if trying to resist the sun before melting, emitting thousands of tiny reflections and covering Moscow in glitter.