Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’re building new dachas.’

  ‘These are not dachas,’ Tatyana said. ‘They are cottages. For New Russians. They are big and ugly.’

  For a few seconds I pictured Tatyana and myself in one of these cottages, taking up gardening, having friends over for beers and shashliks.

  We retraced our steps back into the forest.

  ‘Maybe we can pick mushrooms,’ I suggested.

  Tatyana laughed. ‘It’s not the season, stupid.’

  We stopped by a tree and kissed. I grabbed her ass and moved up to her breasts. She closed her eyes. We hadn’t had sex in a few days. We kissed with increased intensity and, to my surprise, she unzipped her jeans and pulled them down, together with her underwear.

  ‘I adore you,’ she whispered in my ear.

  She was now wearing a T-shirt but naked from the waist down. She dropped to her knees and unbuttoned my jeans. I grabbed her mass of blonde curls and looked around, worried someone would see us. Only trees and rubbish. When I was hard, she pulled me to the ground.

  ‘Hold on,’ I said. I was now sitting with my back against the tree.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. I’ve just had my period.’

  Then, she positioned herself on top of me, her apple green eyes bursting with life.

  When we returned to the dacha, Marina was making tea in the kitchen.

  ‘Where have you been, love birds?’ she said.

  Tatyana blushed.

  We all sat at the outdoor wooden table with steaming cups of tea, pecking at a plate of bread and cheese. Above the cherry tree, the sky was blue and clear and immense.

  It wasn’t a lake, really, but a large pond with stagnant water. By the shore, the ashes of old campfires were surrounded by broken glass and rubbish. I hid my disappointment, but couldn’t help comparing the muddy waterhole to the lake I’d pictured in my mind, something like the beautiful lake Pavel and Marina visited with their friends in lesson six of Russian As We Speak It.

  The better spots around the shore had been taken by other dachnikis, so we had to set our blankets on a sandy slope a few metres from the water. We all changed into swimming clothes. There were six of us now. Diana had arrived earlier in the morning with her boyfriend, coincidentally also called Anton. Tall, freckled, ginger-haired, Diana was wearing a red bikini a size too small.

  After swimming we lay in the sun drinking beer with bread and kolbasa. I put my head on Tatyana’s lap and closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my face. Tatyana stroked my hair and I found myself thinking of Lena, when she came to watch me play football in Kazakova and we lay in the sun. I wondered where Lena might be now, and why she hadn’t answered any of my messages after our encounter at the Boarhouse. I finished my beer. With the sun warming my skin and the sound of Russian chatter in the background, I fell asleep.

  Back at the dacha, the Antons started to prepare the mangal to cook the shashliks. I went into the kitchen and offered to help the girls with the salads.

  ‘Go help the men with the meat,’ Tatyana ordered, mock-threatening me with a large knife.

  Dinner. Vodka. Toasts. We were sitting around the table, eating grilled meat, which I found delicious, and I wasn’t sure if Diana was looking at me or if it was just the vodka clouding my head. I was haunted by the image of her red bikini. She was now wearing a white skirt and a white shirt – the milkiness of which accentuated her fiery red hair. I felt Tatyana squeezing my hand. Tatyana was listening attentively to one of the Antons, who was sharing his secret recipe for the shashlik marinade. I didn’t know if Tatyana was squeezing my hand because she’d noticed my attention drifting towards Diana or if she meant it as a spontaneous act of affection. I tried to focus on what Anton was saying, something about yoghurt and herbs, but I was missing most of it – he was speaking in drunken chubak slang, and I wasn’t used to Russian spoken by men.

  We drank and drank, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My brain shut down, my stomach lurched. I stood up, staggered down to the toilet hut, closed the door behind me and vomited. I made an effort to keep it a silent puke, which I managed to place entirely into the shitting hole, and then I threw a few twigs and a bit of soil on it, as I had been instructed. When I came back to the table I felt better.

  I forced myself to drink water, and then Marina made tea, but I was too wasted to put anything other than water down my throat. I needed to lie down.

  ‘I think I’m going to bed,’ I said as I got up from the table.

  Tatyana stood up, looked at me, laughed. ‘Let’s go, my little drunkard.’

  I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to let it all out – vodka, wine, shashlik, salad – but I didn’t have the strength to crawl out of bed and go all the way to the toilet. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on soothing thoughts but what I saw was the lake and Diana in the red bikini and the table strewn with food and vodka and the cherry tree, and it was only when I heard Lyudmila Aleksandrovna shouting that I was a superfluous man that I realised I was dreaming. I forced my consciousness to abandon the drunken dream and return to the room, where the air was now steamy. I was sweating. Tatyana was fast asleep, breathing rhythmically. I tried to keep my eyes open for a while. I threw one of my legs out of the bed, to the floor, but, after a couple of minutes, I felt I was about to be sick again and decided not to risk it any longer. I tumbled down the stairs, holding the walls, trying not to make too much noise, but the floorboards creaked all the same. As I crossed the garden towards the toilet, wearing nothing but my underwear, my stomach lurched once more, and I managed to reach the hut just in time. I knelt down over the hole, which smelled of fresh shit, and vomited at length.

  Feeling better, I spat in the hole, wiped my mouth with toilet paper and stepped into the fresh air. As I was about to go back inside the dacha, I saw Diana sitting on the grass.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.

  She was wearing the white shirt but her legs were now uncovered, extended in front of her. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘Everybody’s sleeping,’ she said. ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’ve been better.’ I sat next to her, keeping my breath away from her face. The ground felt wet.

  Diana drew in her long legs and embraced them, her head now resting on her knees. ‘You shouldn’t try to drink as much as Russian men.’

  ‘Do you know any stars?’ I asked.

  ‘Over there.’ She pointed above the cherry tree. ‘I think that’s the Great Bear.’

  I moved closer to her and with my eyes followed the direction in which she was pointing. I tried to swallow as much saliva as possible to kill the smell of puke on my breath.

  ‘That must be Orion,’ I said, pointing to the sky.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘There. I think.’ I grabbed her arm and directed it towards a place in the sky where Orion may or may not have been. When I dropped my arm I held her hand.

  ‘Here, zagorod, you forget about everything,’ she said, clutching my hand. ‘It’s like a different life. Moscow feels so far away.’

  A dog was barking in another dacha. I put my arm around Diana and she leaned her head on my shoulder. I swallowed more saliva. We remained in silence for a minute or so, our hands clasped. Then I kissed her. She kissed me back. We kissed for a couple of minutes. I could hardly breathe. I pushed her back on the ground, my left hand under her shirt. She rolled away and, just when I thought she was about to get up and leave, she took her shirt off. She was wearing no bra.

  ‘Let’s go to the forest,’ I said.

  ‘Ne nado. Everybody’s sleeping.’ Then she rolled her knickers down her long legs.

  All lights were off at the dacha. I took off my own underwear.

  I lay next to her, kissing her neck, holding her breasts, breathing heavily but realising in a panic that I wasn’t ready. I tried to calm down, focused on her elongated body, on her pretty freckled face. I rubbed my groin against her thighs for a minute or so but,
to my horror, my body was not reacting.

  Diana put her hand between my legs. ‘Relax,’ she said.

  ‘I really want you,’ I whispered, embarrassed.

  ‘I want you too.’

  We kissed, and she tried for a while, but down there nothing worked.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I drank too much.’

  ‘Don’t worry. Let’s go to sleep.’

  Back in bed, Tatyana remained in the same position I’d left her, face up. Her breathing was heavier now, with a hint of a snore.

  My head was flooded with dark, impenetrable thoughts that vanished as soon as they appeared, leaving traces of bitterness. A black hole was growing inside me.

  Tatyana remained peaceful in her sleep.

  I kissed her.

  She rolled over and dropped an arm over my chest. Her body exuded warmth and moisture.

  ‘I love you,’ I whispered.

  Tatyana didn’t react. She was sleeping.

  56

  THE LATE-AUGUST MORNING was fresh and lovely. I was sitting on the terrace of Coffee Mania, reading The Master and Margarita. I felt cheerful as I nibbled my slice of Napoleon cake and sipped my coffee, glancing occasionally at the square and the trees and the façade of the Tchaikovsky conservatory.

  Ever since Tatyana had moved into my flat for most of the week, I felt as if my body had more energy to face my Moscow days. This new vitality didn’t come so much from the novelty of sharing my flat with Tatyana, I thought, as from the fact that, coincidentally, I was sleeping better at night.

  Besides, things had changed since the draining weekend by the lake. In the days that had followed our trip to the dacha, I’d felt a gradual but definite change in my mental state – an unexpected re-set of my inner self. The thought of meeting a new girl – which had in the past motivated a large number of my daily actions – now made me feel exhausted. I couldn’t face the prospect of taking someone to Pyramida or Café Maki for the first time, of having to deal with all the misplaced expectations. After almost three years in Moscow, I realised, I couldn’t be bothered to meet more Russian women.

  I finished my coffee, raised my empty cup to order another one.

  These days, when Tatyana visited her aunt for the weekend, I would usually stay home in the evenings, enjoying the novelty of waking up fresh the next day. Cooking, walking, reading. These activities, which at present occupied the greater part of my day, felt somewhat meaningful. Even on the rare occasions when I’d gone clubbing, it had been mostly to catch up with the brothers. The time had come for me to do other things. Perhaps, I thought as I looked around the square, I could start writing my thesis. After all, I had collected enough material. My red notebooks were brimming with observations.

  The waitress brought my second cup of coffee with a smile. Unable to concentrate on The Master and Margarita, which I was reading in Russian for the first time, I closed the book. I looked at good old Tchaikovsky, who was sitting outside the conservatory, in the middle of the square, his right arm over a lectern, his left hand half raised, as if asking people in the street for silence. The muted notes of Swan Lake tried to emerge from a remote corner of my memory, carrying the forgotten sadness of another time, of another life, of Amsterdam.

  I glanced back at the book. The cover featured a black and white sketch of Margarita flying on a broomstick. I started to picture myself as Bulgakov’s Master. I’d gone through a similar mental exercise in the early days of Yulya Karma, but now I was considering the book from a different angle. I was wondering why, among all the women in Moscow, it was Margarita the Master was obsessed with. What was it that made Margarita irreplaceable?

  If you thought about it, it was a matter of chance that they’d met in the first place, Margarita and the Master, when she was carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. I began to think of how most relationships are based on a random encounter, a set of small interlinked events that lead to the fateful meeting. It was Margarita that the Master had met, but it could have been any other woman. Then, once things get complicated, with the Devil coming to Moscow and all, the Master could have decided to move on, to forget Margarita. He doesn’t. The way Tatyana doesn’t forget Onegin. Or Karenina doesn’t forget Vronsky. Or Liza doesn’t forget Lavretsky. Moving on is the easy way out, the path that’s never chosen, at least not in books. For some reason, in most novels, once you’ve made a romantic choice, even if it’s a random choice, you stick to it. And you accept all the suffering that comes with it. This is, after all, a fundamental premise in classic literature: a lover is irreplaceable.

  And yet, this kind of love, the maddening attraction we read about in books, is nothing but a literary device, I thought, an author’s trick to endow characters with strong motivations. In real life feelings are more malleable – suffering is optional. If things go wrong, you can move on and search for someone else.

  Take Dushechka, in Chekhov’s story, who’s happy as long as she has someone to love, to worry about, regardless of who the recipient of her affection is. Maybe Dushechka’s kind of love, a strong feeling whose object is replaceable, is the real kind of love.

  I thought about Tatyana. If she were taken from me by a Devil-like figure, or if she decided to leave me for someone else, should I suffer and fight for her? Couldn’t I just move on to the next girl?

  All this was new to me. Had I understood these things earlier, before Moscow, I wouldn’t have had to go through the pain Katya had inflicted on me. Now, when I looked back at my time in Amsterdam, I wondered why I hadn’t just moved on, like Dushechka. Why had I decided to suffer, as if I were a character in a novel?

  After Katya came Lena and after Lena came Tatyana. In the end, in an unplanned manner, I had replaced the object of my affection. But what I felt now was not an endless capacity for love – as Tolstoy had said of Dushechka – but rather a comfortable degree of nonchalance. Like the Master with Margarita, my relationship with Tatyana had also evolved from a casual encounter: the moment she showed up at Kamergersky to show Colin an apartment. Our being together had been determined by a series of random actions without much individual meaning in themselves – random actions that, put together, marked the direction of my life.

  This bothered me. Maybe Colin was right and the one thing to do was to forget about relationships and fuck around. But then, if we accept this readiness to replace a lover, to care about nothing, life itself dissipates into Chekhovian lightness. With nothing to care about, how do we go about looking for happiness?

  Perhaps the antidote to this weightlessness is to endow life with a forced sense of gravity. Choose to care about things. Choose to consider our relationships as a matter of life or death.

  Once, when Lena had been crying in my flat – I no longer remember the reason – I asked her why she always made such a big drama about everything. Why couldn’t we just have a happy relationship, without the tears and the shouting? ‘If we don’t suffer for it,’ Lena had told me, ‘how do we know our love is real?’

  Buried in their mysterious soul, I thought, there is something that makes Russians avoid superficial joy and choose to pursue deeper, sadder feelings – something that makes them chase the resonance and aesthetic value of melancholy. Liza’s choice. And, perhaps, they got it right.

  I looked across the square at the statue of Tchaikovsky, thinking that I needed to care about Tatyana as if I were the protagonist of a Russian novel: without doubts. I must decide to be with her, I thought, and blindly take all the shit that comes with my decision. To relieve myself of the burden of choice, I now realised, I needed to believe in destiny. And accept pain. Like a Russian.

  57

  I HAD BEEN WANDERING around the centre for an hour. The morning heat was so unbearable that I decided to take refuge at the subterranean shopping centre in Okhotny Ryad. In the Internet café, I bought a cup of coffee and sat in front of a computer, enjoying the cooled air. I read a few international papers online, then responded to emails from family and old friends.

>   As I was walking out of the café, I received a text from Tatyana suggesting that we meet for lunch at Ris i Ryba, a sushi restaurant in the Dom na Naberezhnoy, the House on the Embankment. Sure, I texted back. I wandered among the shops, trying on clothes but buying nothing, and, when it was almost noon, I came up to the street.

  There was nowhere to hide from the sun. I walked past the fountain with the horses, where a bunch of children were messing around with the water, covering some nozzles in unison to increase the water pressure and catch distracted pedestrians by surprise. They seemed to be having a good time. I dragged my feet through the park, under the blasting sun, and reached the end of Aleksandrovsky Sad – my shirt, drenched in sweat, stuck to my back.

  On the other side of the asphalted esplanade, across the river, stood the Dom na Naberezhnoy, crowned with its enormous Mercedes-Benz logo against the blue sky. The encircled three-pointed star was not entirely aligned with the façade of the building and, every time I walked by, I wondered if perhaps the logo was meant to rotate around a central axis that no longer worked. As I walked over the bridge towards the building, it occurred to me that, maybe, at sunset, the Mercedes-Benz shadow would reach across the river, towards the walls of the Kremlin, a reminder to Russian rulers of their country’s defeat in its twentieth-century crusade against capitalism. The giant logo had probably been installed in the mid-1990s, when Russia, naively in love with the West, had embraced everything foreign with enthusiasm. I wondered if the country felt betrayed and, in my head, I imagined Russia as a woman writing a love letter – Tatyana’s letter to Onegin – to an unresponsive and arrogant West who had arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not so much to help with the reconstruction, but to oversee the country’s capitulation and collect the spoils of the Cold War.