‘Maybe a dull life is not such a bad thing,’ I say. ‘Maybe a dull life allows you to appreciate the beauty of it all.’
‘You’ll always have time for a quieter life down the road,’ Colin says. ‘When you leave Russia.’
‘Maybe I don’t need to leave Russia. I could stick around here. Make more money, buy a dacha. Grow vegetables, read, write. Live in touch with nature, like Tolstoy. Be happy.’
‘Tolstoy wasn’t happy,’ Stepanov says. ‘He was tormented. And he fucked his maids and peasants all the time.’
‘You know what I mean,’ I say.
‘Nobody is happy all of the time,’ Colin says, as the first drops of rain pepper our table. ‘Life is like a big ocean of boredom and then you bump into little islands of happiness. Total happiness doesn’t exist. Imagine that you marry your dyev, move to a dacha in Siberia and build yourself a quiet life. You’ll be going deeper into the ocean, with no happy islands in sight. Man, stop fucking with your head and enjoy what Moscow has to offer.’
‘So when does it stop?’ I say.
Colin raises his arms. ‘Stop what?’
‘The chase,’ I say. ‘The fucking around.’
‘Your dick will tell you when,’ Colin says. ‘He’ll know when you’re done.’
51
FIRST I SEE A PAIR of black leather boots. Spiny high heels, shiny leather. I’ve never seen her wear that kind of footwear before. I’m at the bar, ordering a round of drinks for the brothers. She’s on the dance floor. Not even sure it’s her. Not just the boots. The way she dances, elbows in the air, breasts pushed out.
It’s been a while since I last came to the Boarhouse. We used to come often during my first year, usually on Wednesdays, to enjoy the Countdown, back then the best happy hour deal in town. But today is Saturday, there’s no happy hour and we shouldn’t be at the Boarhouse.
These days the place is trashy. For some reason it’s maintained its two fuckies in The Exile. The Boarhouse remains a popular place among white-haired expats, those who don’t care about trendy clubs or are too old and too ugly to make it through face control. But earlier in the night we were at the Bavarian Brewery, drinking large jugs of beer with a bunch of expat football buddies and someone had suggested we go for drinks at the Boarhouse. And here we are. Wasted.
I pay for the drinks, ship them back to the brothers. I’m holding my shot of vodka in one hand, bottle of beer in the other. I drain the vodka at once, leave the empty glass on the table, take a sip of beer to wash it down. With the bottle of beer in my hand, I stumble out of the bar area and thread my way between the people, towards the dance floor.
Up close the boots look more plastic than leather. She’s wearing heavy make-up, bright red lipstick, thick eyeliner, her face more aggressive and hostile than I remember. Lost in the dancing, she doesn’t notice me. Deep inside, I still hope it’s not her. She’s dancing in a group of four, with another dyev and two older guys, clearly expats. They seem to be coupled up. Her girlfriend dances next to a tall guy with glasses, late forties. She – now I’m sure it’s her – is dancing with the older man, fifty-something, fat and bald, wearing a white short-sleeved shirt, sweaty around the armpits.
Old disco hits from the 1980s blast through the loudspeakers. Dyevs in the club seem to love the music and are dancing with their arms up in the air, twisting their bodies in inelegant ways.
I tap her shoulder. She turns round, looks at me for a couple of seconds and smiles.
‘Privet, Martin, kak dela?’ She doesn’t seem surprised to see me.
‘Privet, Lena. I wasn’t sure it was you.’
‘It’s me.’
Her breasts are pushed up, look enormous. I’ve never seen Lena wear anything like this before. I can almost see her nipples. I notice that she’s not wearing her golden chain with the cross.
Here she is. Lena. My long-disappeared Lena.
I find myself thinking of the days we spent together, just after my arrival, when I had plenty of energy and Moscow was a white canvas. The Propaganda era. I picture Lena lying on her kommunalka bed. Or sitting on the floor of my balcony, her legs dangling through the bars, gazing over the city.
‘It’s been a long time,’ I say.
She nods.
‘Oh Bozhe, Lenushka, you look so different.’ My eyes can’t help going from her face to her breasts and down to her mini-miniskirt.
‘Thanks for the compliment.’
‘I sent you so many messages,’ I say. ‘You never called me back.’
She stops dancing, steps aside. ‘Call you? What for?’
‘To talk, to see each other. I thought a lot about you. Lena, I’ve missed you.’
Behind Lena, the two older expats are looking at me, impatient. Lena steps back as if to go back to dance.
‘Would you like a drink?’ I ask.
‘No thanks, I’m OK.’
‘I didn’t know you came here.’
‘I’ve come a few times,’ she says. ‘I like the music.’
I can hardly hear her, I step closer. She’s wearing the same perfume she wore back then, and, as I inhale as much of the sweet aroma as I can, I feel a shudder through my body, and now I’m seeing Lena in Propaganda, the first night we met, when she was the most beautiful dyev in the club and I whispered a few Pushkin verses in her ear.
‘Where are you working now?’ I say. ‘I went to the restaurant. They told me you don’t work there any more.’
‘I quit work. I’m taking a break now.’ She comes closer. ‘Listen, I can’t talk right now.’
Her girlfriend comes over, talks in her ear.
‘I really need to go,’ Lena says. ‘It was nice seeing you.’
She turns round but I grab her arm and pull her aside.
‘I’ve been wanting to see you for ages. Lena, you look great. I’ve missed you so much.’
‘Martin, you are drunk.’
‘I really miss you, Lena. I miss what we had.’
‘What did we have?’ She shakes me off. ‘You only wanted me for sex.’
‘That’s not true, Lenushka.’
‘Martin, I need to go now, let’s talk another day.’
‘What are you doing later tonight?’
Lena puts her hand to her neck, as if to grab the necklace she is not wearing. ‘Martin, you are drunk. Go back to your friends.’
The old fat expat comes to me. ‘Listen, man,’ he says, ‘tonight these two ladies are with us. Move on and look for another one.’ He is American.
‘Don’t worry,’ I say, ‘she’s just an old friend.’
‘Tonight she’s our friend.’
‘Whatever.’ I turn to Lena. ‘See you later. Don’t leave without saying goodbye.’
I go back to the brothers, who have gathered in a corner next to the entrance.
‘I see you’re relaxing your policy,’ Colin says.
‘What do you mean?’
Colin smiles and points his bottle of beer at the dance floor. ‘I just saw you over there,’ he says, ‘trying to pick up a whore.’
I look back at the dance floor, where Lena is dancing. The shiny boots. The push-up bra. The miniskirt. The make-up. I should have realised sooner. Of course Lena can’t possibly like the fat American. Of course Lena has not come to the Boarhouse for the music.
I leave my beer on the floor, rush outside the club to get some fresh air. I sit on the kerb. Maybe everything is a misunderstanding. Sure, there are plenty of prostitutes at the Boarhouse. It’s a trashy place and that’s why we don’t like it. But not Lena, I tell myself, not my Lenushka. I need to talk to her, clarify things. I need to hear her tell me what’s going on. I need to go back into the club. I try to get up on my feet but I realise I’m too drunk, I can hardly stand.
The image of the fat American flashes in my head, the hollow feeling in my stomach grows. I feel a spasm, as if I were about to cry, but I hold back my tears and, instead of crying, I puke. Beer. Pieces of mashed Bavarian sausage.
; I feel a bit better. I breathe deeply, find some chewing gum, go back into the club.
The air is steamy. I find Lena next to the bar, drinking a cocktail with her girlfriend and the two old guys.
I approach her. ‘I need to talk to you,’ I say.
‘You are drunk, Martin.’
‘I’m OK, Lena, I just don’t know what’s going on. Let’s go out for just five minutes.’
The fat American guy now steps in between Lena and me, puts his hand on my chest. ‘Back off, asshole.’
‘Be cool, man,’ I say. ‘I only want to talk to her.’
Then he pushes me and, pissed as I am, I fall to the floor, which is dirty and wet. I get to my knees, and I feel I’m about to puke again. I breathe deeply, trying to gather my thoughts, and then someone grabs me and pulls me up. It’s Diego.
I see the American guy smiling, now putting an arm around Lena, and I find myself punching him with all my strength, except that what I hit is not his face as I had intended, but his neck. It doesn’t feel like a clean punch, not that I really know how a clean punch feels. Somebody pushes me. A soft slap lands on the back of my head. Now Stepanov steps in, shouting in Russian. Diego is holding me and I’m confused. I never get into fights.
Next thing I know I’m outside the club, sitting on the pavement, next to what I suspect is my own vomit. Colin sits on my other side with a bottle of water.
‘Drink some cold water, man.’
I feel pain in my hand and in my knees. For a few seconds I don’t remember Lena or the guy or how I ended up here and during these seconds I’m puzzled but unhurt. Then the image comes back into my head, the shiny boots, the red lipstick, the push-up bra, the American man with sweat patches under his armpits, and it hurts like hell and, with embarrassment, I notice tears in my eyes.
‘Where is she?’ I say.
‘Who?’
‘Lena. Where is she? I need to talk to her,’ I say, trying hard to hold back my tears in front of Colin.
‘They’re all gone, man.’
‘Where to?’
‘Fuck knows. We’ve all been kicked out. Congratulations, our first time. Now we know what it takes to get kicked out of a trashy club in Moscow.’
‘Where did they go?’ I ask.
‘Forget about them,’ Colin says. ‘Come on, throw up a bit more before you get in a car. We need to get you home.’
52
I WAKE UP AROUND NOON. I open the balcony door, step outside. I glance at the grey roofs and the grey sky, trying to gather my memories of the night and, as soon as a coherent sequence of events forms in my head, I feel my lungs shrink. Back inside, the flat feels small, claustrophobic, as if during the night the ceiling has lowered and the walls have moved closer to each other. I need to get out. I shower quickly, dress, rush down the stairs and out onto the street.
I turn the corner into the Boulevard, my pace faster than usual, my mind bombarded with images of the Boarhouse: the boots, the cleavage, the miniskirt, the fat American. My right hand is swollen, my entire body aches. As I instinctively turn left at Bolshaya Nikitskaya, I start to recall the Amsterdam moment, now three years ago, when I found out about Katya’s affair. I remember how the entire university knew by then, everybody except me, and how the thought of Katya with her law professor sparked a physical ache, a painful emptiness in my chest, not unlike what I now feel thinking of Lena and her Boarhouse companion.
At the end of the street I turn right and walk until I reach the Russian State Library, still known as Biblioteka Imeni Lenina, with its enormous neoclassical columns, and I approach Dostoyevsky’s statue, a mournful Fyodor Mikhailovich facing the street, far from the entrance, his back to the library like a punished schoolboy. The soul is the depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil, he says to me, and I walk towards Okhotny Ryad and then Red Square, following the tourists – the guests of the capital, as they are called in metro announcements. As I cross the cobblestones of Red Square, which, it being a Sunday, is crowded, I find some comfort in seeing myself surrounded by other people. The fact that all these strangers don’t know about Lena, that they go on with their business as if nothing had happened, enjoying their morning stroll through the heart of Moscow – unperturbed by the thoughts in my head – makes me feel somehow lighter, less oppressed. I pass by the fairy-tale towers of St Basil’s Cathedral, which always strikes me as smaller and less impressive than in postcards and books, and I see tourists taking pictures of each other, dyevs from the provinces posing like models, one hand on the hip, the other behind the head, walking away from the camera to fit the entire cathedral and the Kremlin into one single frame. I walk past, knowing from my own experience that it’s impossible to take a good photo of Red Square, that the ploschad is too three-dimensional to be captured in a single image and that, whatever the chosen angle, the person in the picture will look small and insignificant.
I cross the bridges, over the dark waters, onto the southern bank, then wander into Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa, which feels like ancient Moscow, with its low buildings and pastel-coloured façades.
Around the metro station there is an explosion of life, Muscovites emerging from the subterranean stairways like disciplined ants, couples holding hands, a stand selling honey and soap, a babushka selling flowers, and for the first time I feel like buying flowers, a nice bouquet for Tatyana, I think, that will make her happy. I approach the babushka, and choose the biggest bouquet. Yellow roses. Twenty-five yellow roses, the babushka says.
I walk towards the river, retracing my steps, and I feel awkward with the flowers, wondering if I should carry the bouquet upright in front of me or if it’s fine to clasp it by the stems with the flowers pointing at the ground, and people are looking at me, the muzhik who’s bringing flowers to his woman, and, in the midst of my pain, the idea provokes – I think – a smile on my face.
It then occurs to me that I didn’t buy the flowers for Tatyana. For a split second my mind replaces the image of Tatyana receiving the yellow roses with that of Lena. I’m aware that I cannot give the flowers to Lena, that it’s Tatyana who will be coming home tonight after the weekend at her aunt’s, and I wonder if I want Lena because I know she won’t be there, and, maybe, if Tatyana were the one who had disappeared from my life, I would feel the same about her.
I cross the bridges back onto the northern bank, turn left and follow the southern wall of the Kremlin towards the cathedral of Christ the Saviour. I walk on the left pavement, by the river. I know Christ the Saviour is gigantic, an enormous building, and yet, as I look up at the distant golden dome under the lead-coloured sky, I’m surprised to see that it looks small and boxy, lacking the elongated elegance of European cathedrals, as if a small Russian country church had been artificially magnified and placed in the centre of Moscow.
There is a sad story about Christ the Saviour. When Sergey first told me about it, I was surprised to learn that it is in fact a brand new construction. Now, as I walk towards the cathedral with the yellow roses in my hand, I wonder where Sergey is, and I think of Ira and wonder if they got back together, and I regret having lost touch with them, because they were my real Russian friends, and back then, when we met, life was simpler and Moscow was such a great place.
Christ the Saviour was initially built to thank God for Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, Sergey had told me after a dinner in his apartment with Ira and Sergey’s mum, as he showed me a series of black and white photographs he had taken of the building. A couple of tsars worked on it but the whole construction wasn’t finished until the 1860s, when it stood as the largest Orthodox cathedral ever made. The cathedral was erected by the Moskva river, its golden dome within sight of the Kremlin. But the soviets, who dropped the capitalisation of the word God and wrote bog instead of Bog, had other plans for the site. In 1931, under Stalin’s orders, the cathedral was dynamited and reduced to rubble.
I walk along the naberezhnaya and cross under the Bolshoy Kammeny Bridge, and on my left a
cross the river I see the House on the Embankment, with its giant Mercedes-Benz logo, and I’m thinking that Tatyana can give me calm and security, but she can’t reach as deep into me as Lena. Lena hurts. And I wonder if perhaps it’s precisely the pain I’m attracted to, and pain is what people search for when they say they want love. Pain is what keeps us awake, what makes us feel alive. We need pain as a reference point, to recognise and measure happiness. Why, otherwise, would we choose to chase only those who can hurt us?
The depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil.
After the cathedral was destroyed, Sergey said, a grandiose project started to take shape, the construction of the Palace of the Soviets, which, Stalin hoped, would be the tallest building in the world. According to plans, the palace was to be crowned by a giant statue of Lenin, his arm raised to the sky, pointing at the horizon towards a better future. Construction of the palace began in the mid-1930s – the riverbank was dug, the foundations were laid for what was to be a monument to the workers’ paradise.
I know I can’t stop thinking about Lena because she’s no longer within my reach. I want the Lena of my first days in Moscow – not Boarhouse Lena, but Propaganda Lena – and suddenly it occurs to me that maybe back then she was already a whore. I want a Lena who no longer exists. I want a Lena who perhaps never existed.
The Palace of the Soviets was not meant to be. When Russia was attacked, this time by Hitler, construction had to stop. It never resumed. There were technical problems, the site kept flooding, and superstitious Muscovites believed it was a divine punishment for having destroyed the cathedral in the first place. For many years, the site of what was intended to be the tallest building in the world, the ultimate monument to the working class, was nothing more than an empty construction site, a monument to abandoned dreams.
It was in the late 1950s, under Khrushchev, that the site was turned into an immense swimming pool, the biggest open-air pool in the world. Muscovites loved the swimming pool, especially in summer months, Sergey had told me, and now I wish the site had remained a pool – a man-made lake, perfectly round, as I had seen in photos – in which I could take a dip and refresh my body, relieve my headache, purify my soul, but I’m heading not towards a public swimming pool but an enormous cathedral with a golden dome, because, after the perestroika, the mayor of Moscow and the Patriarch of all Russians decided to rebuild Christ the Saviour exactly as it had been before the soviet demolition.
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