Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  The cathedral was newly completed when I arrived in town, so, as I walk towards the golden dome with my bouquet of yellow roses I think, we have this in common, we’re both newcomers to Moscow, Christ the Saviour and me, and it’s a bizarre name, and I’d never thought much about Christ, whom I’d always considered a mythological figure, at least until I read Bulgakov and saw Yeshua pleading with Pontius Pilate for his life and then it occurred to me that maybe Christ had been, after all, a real man.

  As I arrive at the esplanade in front of Christ the Saviour I feel ridiculous. Who the fuck am I kidding with such a big bouquet of flowers. The twenty-five yellow roses feel heavy and treacherous.

  I turn towards the river and throw the bouquet of flowers into the air, over the balustrade, with all the strength and anger I can muster, and I try to project them far into the river, but the bouquet spins clumsily, loses one rose in the air, and drops into the water, making a pitiful splash, like an injured bird. The water is black and the yellow roses floating on the Moskva river make me think of death.

  PART SIX

  Sonya’s Faith

  53

  WHILE OLYA, MASHA AND Irina, Chekhov’s three sisters, spend their idle existence hoping for things to get better, Sonya Marmeladova holds no such illusions. Forced into prostitution as a teenager, living in misery at the very bottom of Peter society, she knows her life is, and will always be, nothing but shit.

  In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Sonya stands as a powerful symbol of universal suffering. With Christian resignation, she has accepted that her existence will be a long road of martyrdom. If she expects any reward, an end to her suffering, it’s not something that will come in this life. For Sonya, it’s not a choice between happiness and meaning – it’s all sudba, God’s will. Put on Earth to suffer for others, she leaves it up to her creator to judge after death.

  With Sonya, Fyodor Mikhailovich created the antithesis of Raskolnikov. Although she is – like Raskolnikov – a sinner, her sins do serve a purpose and, in the end, hurt no one but herself. Sonya sostradaet, co-suffers. She’s a whore because she needs to feed her family. She endures pain for the sake of others. It’s part of the cross she bears – the burden of humanity. Yet, Sonya – the whore, the social outcast – is, from a moral point of view, the purest and most honest character in the novel.

  We find out, early in the story, that Sonya’s occupation is not a temporary thing; she holds a yellow ticket, which makes her an official prostitute. She has crossed a threshold of sin and social stigma with no return. Unlike the three sisters, who can still dream about a better future – if only they could go back to Moscow – for Sonya, becoming a whore is not something that can be undone.

  For Sonya Marmeladova there is no Moscow to go back to.

  Still, she finds purpose in life. When Sonya meets Raskolnikov, soon after he has committed his crime, she becomes his maternal whore, the figure who will nurse him and wrestle him onto the path of salvation. In a famous scene, Sonya opens her New Testament and reads aloud to Raskolnikov. What she reads is the story of Lazarus, from the Gospel of John. Lazarus’s resurrection, four days after his death, is proof of Christ’s divinity. In a similar manner, Sonya aims to resurrect Raskolnikov’s soul, which, in her eyes, has been dead ever since his crime.

  When Raskolnikov, who’s now losing it with the psychological burden of his crime, confesses the murders to Sonya, the first thing she says is, you’ve done this to yourself. For her, Raskolnikov’s crime is not a question of man’s law and order. It amounts to spiritual suicide.

  Sonya will be able to forgive Raskolnikov though, because all men are equal before God – and God forgives.

  Knowing that redemption must start with repentance, Sonya asks Raskolnikov to confess his crime to the authorities. Carrying her New Testament, she pesters Raskolnikov with ideas about God and forgiveness. Raskolnikov challenges her religious convictions and goes as far as questioning the very existence of God. Sonya does not consider it necessary to argue. All she says: I believe in God. Sonya’s faith is unshakeable, the source of her strength.

  And so, Raskolnikov, whose soul can no longer bear the anguish of his guilt, finally decides to give himself up. Sonya hands him her small wooden cross, the cross that she had been wearing all along, the cross of Christ, the Saviour. On the way to the police station, where he is to confess his crime, Raskolnikov follows Sonya’s advice and stops at the Hay Market, where – in the pivotal scene of the novel – he kisses the ground and asks the world for forgiveness.

  Facing a final test, Raskolnikov finds out at the police station that he could easily get away with the murders. But, thanks to Sonya’s spiritual guidance, he knows that, even if he is never caught by men, in the eyes of God he will not get away with his crime. Raskolnikov has understood that in order to be saved he needs to pay: he must endure his punishment. He must carry the cross.

  In the epilogue, we see Raskolnikov a year and a half later, serving his sentence in a prison in Siberia. Sonya has moved to the city nearby and visits him often. It’s only in Siberia that Raskolnikov’s spiritual resurrection can take place, in the vastness of nature, under God, far from the infested streets of the city.

  For Dostoyevsky, our existence is a lifelong struggle. In a life with no bright future, Sonya embraces spirituality as a way to cope with suffering. Without that blind acceptance of her own destiny, without her unwavering faith – without the existence of God, really – Sonya’s life would have no meaning whatsoever.

  54

  ‘WHERE WOULD YOU LIKE to be in five years?’ I asked.

  It was a warm summer day and Tatyana and I were strolling along the shaded alleys of Novodevichy cemetery. We had spent the morning visiting the adjacent convent, an impressive citadel with ancient churches that Tatyana had been wanting to see. Now we were wandering among trees and tombstones – map in hand – searching for the VIPs of recent Russian history.

  ‘Five years,’ Tatyana said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like, if you could choose your dream life, your perfect job, the best city to live in, everything. Where would you like to be?’

  ‘Why five years?’

  ‘Just because.’

  ‘What’s happening in five years?’ Tatyana was wearing bright red lipstick and a silvery top that sparkled every time we crossed a sunny patch.

  ‘Forget about the five years,’ I said as we stepped onto a gravel path. ‘That’s not the point. What I’m asking is where do you want to be in the future? What do you want to do with your life?’

  ‘That’s a serious question,’ she said. ‘If we keep going in circles, in five years we might be stuck in Novodevichy, still looking for Chekhov’s grave.’ She laughed and took hold of my arm. A fresh breeze shook the trees above our heads, releasing a snowfall of white blossom.

  ‘In five years I’ll be almost thirty,’ Tatyana said. ‘I want to have children before I’m thirty.’

  ‘What about work?’

  ‘I don’t care about work. That’s less important.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Family is the most important thing,’ she said, brushing the little flowers off her shoulders. ‘A woman cannot be a woman without children.’

  ‘But professionally,’ I said, ‘would you continue to work in real estate or would you rather do something else?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t care, really. You know work is not the most important thing for me. I’m not a man.’

  I picked some petals from Tatyana’s curls, then brushed my hand over my own hair. ‘Women also care about work,’ I said.

  We walked in silence for a couple of minutes, then came across a large memorial of someone who must have been a famous soviet pilot, an aviation pioneer perhaps, a life-size statue of the man resting his hand on an aeroplane propeller. A group of older Russians – tourists from the provinces, I guessed – were taking pictures of each other in front of the memorial.

  ‘But imagine you have it all,’ I s
aid to Tatyana. ‘A beautiful family and a great man who would take care of you. What would you do?’

  ‘Well,’ Tatyana said with a smile, ‘if I have a great man to take care of me I won’t have to work. I’ll stay at home and raise my children. I work now because I need the money. I don’t want a career. I’m not a modern Western woman. You know that.’

  ‘You don’t have to be modern or Western, some women just want to have an interesting career. We are in the twenty-first century, you can have both: a job and a family.’

  ‘I’m Russian,’ she said as we moved towards a sunnier alley lined with little chapels. ‘I don’t believe in this equality thing between men and women. We are not equal, you and me, we want different things in life. I don’t want to be like a man any more than you want to be like a woman.’

  ‘Would you like to live abroad?’

  ‘Do you want to take me abroad? Martin, what is this? Are you going to propose? Here, in a cemetery?’ She turned to me and bent her knee ceremoniously, bowing her head, one hand up in the air, the other lifting an imaginary long skirt. She was laughing.

  ‘Stop it. I’m just curious, we’ve never talked about this.’ I glanced down at our map, trying to figure out if perhaps the pilot was on it and could help us find our way to Chekhov.

  Tatyana gripped my arm. ‘Let’s just walk around,’ she said, removing the map from my hand and sliding it into her handbag. ‘We’ll find it.’

  We strode in silence among the sea of graves. Rulers, generals, scientists, poets, writers, composers, actors, painters – an elitni crowd like no other, an impressive number of world-famous personalities who had undoubtedly made great contributions to humanity. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the scale of the cemetery, the big names were but a chosen few. The majority of the Novodevichy graves were occupied by people whose lives had not justified a mark on the visitors’ map. Lives that were already being forgotten.

  ‘I’d like to live in Russia,’ Tatyana said.

  We had stopped by a cluster of headstones with elaborate wrought-iron fences that formed garden-like plots. I wondered if it was all right to sit on the enclosed stone benches and picnic tables or if they were reserved for the relatives of the dead.

  ‘Look around,’ Tatyana said, sweeping her arm over the rows of graves. ‘So much greatness. Why would I want to live anywhere else? Russia is the best country in the world. Of course I’d love to travel and see other places. But, to live, I’ll always prefer Russia. This is my home, my rodina, where my friends and family live. I love the food. Everybody speaks Russian.’

  ‘In Moscow? Would you like to live always in Moscow?’

  ‘Martin, why are you asking me all these things?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, resuming our stroll. ‘Just wondering.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going back to Novosibirsk. Live closer to my family. Or somewhere else in Siberia, in Altai for example. Everything is much cheaper over there. You can buy property for next to nothing if you compare to Moscow prices. It’s very beautiful, there are lakes and mountains and the air is so fresh. A better place to raise children. And people are much friendlier than in Moscow.’

  The crunching sound of our shoes on the gravel made me think of fresh snow and, for a fleeting moment, I missed the feeling of winter. ‘Moscow has its advantages,’ I said.

  ‘Of course. Moscow is the cultural capital of the world. We don’t have that many theatres and museums in Siberia. I could always come to visit every now and then.’

  ‘What about the weather?’ I said. ‘Winters must be harsh in Siberia.’

  ‘As my grandma says, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.’ Tatyana stopped and took a deep breath. For a moment her bright gaze was lost above the graves. A tiny white flower remained trapped in her curls, just beneath her ear. ‘You know what?’ she said finally. ‘If I lived in Siberia, I would not care about the weather.’

  55

  IT WAS FRIDAY AFTERNOON and the entire city was fleeing to the dacha for the weekend. Dachinikis moved around the crowded platform of Kursky Vokzal, lugging overloaded plastic bags, beer crates, sacks of coal, birdcages, potted plants, metal buckets, grills, toolkits.

  Tatyana introduced me to Marina, who had dyed black hair and a sickly Goth-looking face, and Anton, Marina’s boyfriend, a tall lad with cropped blond hair and a crushing handshake. Anton was carrying a crate of Baltika. I was told that the third couple would join us at the dacha on Saturday morning.

  As the train arrived, Marina and Tatyana pushed themselves through the crowd, leaped into the wagon and claimed four seats facing each other. The elektrichka began to move and Anton opened four bottles of warm beer. It was hot inside the train and through the open windows I could hear the deafening metallic noise of the wheels grinding on the rails. Within a few minutes everybody on the train was drinking and eating – the entire wagon smelled of smoked sausage, dried fish and pickled cabbage.

  Tatyana had insisted that we spend the weekend at a dacha with her two girlfriends from work and their muzhiks. To overcome my initial resistance, Tatyana had argued that it was very important to her that I meet her friends, that she’d been accused of having an imaginary boyfriend.

  The elektrichka advanced through the outskirts of Moscow, snaking through large suburbs of identical buildings and industrial zones, until the landscape became greener.

  Every few minutes, someone would show up at the wagon door and, screaming above the noise, would address the crowd as respected passengers, thereafter touting a bewildering array of merchandise: out-of-date women’s magazines, sets of knives, dried fish, ice cream, potato peelers, pens, pads.

  Anton kept opening bottles of beer and, by the time we arrived at our destination, two hours later, we were done with what I’d thought were the drinks for the entire weekend. At the station’s produkty magazin we bought more beer, four bottles of Moldovan wine, three bottles of vodka and two bags of ice. Then, for only forty rubles, a zhiguli drove us down dirt roads, following Marina’s directions, until, after twenty minutes, we arrived at the dacha.

  Wooden walls, flaking paintwork, tin roof: a classic soviet dacha. The garden was overgrown but charming, scattered with flowers and vegetables. On one side of the plot, next to the fence, grew an enormous cherry tree. Marina insisted that Tatyana and I take the master bedroom, which was on the first floor, at the top of steep wooden stairs.

  While the girls opened the windows and dusted the house, Anton and I went to the nearby forest to gather soil and twigs for the outdoor toilet. Back in the dacha, Anton grabbed two bottles of beer from a tub of ice and handed one to me. We sat on plastic chairs in the garden.

  I took long sips of chilled beer, listened to the birds and to the chatter of people in neighbouring dachas. I could hear the girls in the kitchen chopping vegetables, Tatyana’s laughter rising above the sound of the knife hitting the wood. She was unusually chatty, full of energy, clearly enjoying herself. Soon – overwhelmed by the aromas of fresh dill and chopped cucumbers that hung in the air – I began to feel little currents of beer-induced joy sparking in my brain.

  ‘This is the life,’ Anton said.

  From a nearby dacha I heard the voice of an old lady teaching a boy to unearth potatoes. For some reason, perhaps because of the old lady’s didactic tone, it made me think of Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. If this was the kind of soviet life she longed for – a simple life, without the stress of modern Moscow – I could understand why Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was in a permanent state of nostalgia. Perhaps, it now occurred to me, she was right and the soviet system provided everything that people needed to enjoy life, the essential things, without the infinite choices that made our capitalist existence stressful and complicated.

  Tatyana and Marina set the outside table with candles. For dinner we had cucumber and tomato salad with dill, boiled potatoes with butter and dill, sliced kolbasa, cheese and black bread. There was an additional bowl of freshly cut dill on the table. We ha
d wine, but agreed not to open the vodka. After dinner we moved inside to avoid the mosquitoes and had tea with jam. We played a few rounds of a card game they taught me, and Tatyana and I lost, but she kept smiling. We opened another bottle of cheap Moldovan wine. Tatyana told a couple of anekdots – the narration interrupted by her own laughter – and I realised that it was the first time I’d seen her really drunk. We went to bed soon after midnight.

  ‘Thanks for coming to the dacha,’ Tatyana said, kissing me goodnight.

  ‘I’m glad we came,’ I said, just before falling asleep.

  The next morning Tatyana and I woke up early and decided to go to the forest for a walk. My head was aching from all the beer and wine. We walked down the creaking stairs, trying not to make too much noise, and stepped into the fresh air and the smell of wet grass. Following a dirt road, we wandered through the village. Most dachas were closed up, but a couple of neighbours were taking advantage of the morning chill to work on their gardens. We crossed a small meadow and reached a thick line of trees.

  Inside the forest, the air was cooler and moist and, as we walked, I started to forget about my headache.

  ‘So nice here,’ I said.

  I kissed Tatyana. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and her beautiful hair was all messy. Holding hands, we followed a path under the trees. I was a bit disappointed that the ground was scattered with beer cans, vodka bottles and plastic bags. Tatyana pointed at different trees and told me their names in Russian, but to me they all looked the same. After five minutes the forest ended abruptly. The trees had been cleared, we were facing a construction site.