Back to Moscow

by Guillermo Erades

  I entered the building through one of the southern entrances next to the Udarnik cinema, passed the okhrannik and went through a metal detector which I suspected hadn’t worked for years. I took the lift to the first floor.

  The doors opened and I stepped into the fresh, artificially cooled air. Soothing lounge music played in the background. The waiter, probably Kazakh or Uzbek – most waiters in Japanese restaurants were of Central Asian origin – was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt with a white collar. He led me along the central aisle, passing by the open kitchen and sushi belt, to a small table by the huge floor to ceiling window. I found the smell of boiled rice comforting. The window overlooked the road, the park, the river. I ordered green tea and waited for Tatyana.

  Built in the early 1930s as a residence for the soviet nomenklatura, the Dom na Naberezhnoy had also hosted distinguished academics, war heroes and pretty much everybody who had been elitni back then. Other than ample apartments and the sushi restaurant, the residential complex boasted a cinema, a clinic, shops, a stolovaya, common spaces. But what made it a legendary building in Moscow was not just the social standing of its former inhabitants, but the fact that many of them had vanished during their stay. I had been told that the building contained an elaborate system of secret passages connected to the luxurious flats and that, at the peak of Stalin’s repression, these corridors were used by the secret services to spy on the building’s notorious inhabitants and snatch them in the middle of the night.

  Tatyana arrived a few minutes after me and was escorted to my table by the same waiter. She was wearing a white top with a scooped neckline, almost see-through. I could see the lacework of her bra. Her face was flushed from the heat, her eyes greener than ever, her blonde curls untied and airy. I served her tea and we ordered two lunch menus – mine with salmon sushi, hers with chicken teriyaki.

  I asked Tatyana if she had ever shown any apartments in the Dom na Neberezhnoy.

  ‘I showed a three-room apartment a few months ago,’ she said. ‘So expensive. This is one of the most exclusive buildings in Moscow. The views are very beautiful, you can see the churches inside the Kremlin.’

  ‘Beautiful indeed,’ I said, glancing out of the window.

  ‘Most available flats are now rented by foreigners though. Russians don’t want to live here.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  Tatyana tried to take a sip of tea, but it was too hot. She placed the cup back on the table. ‘Because of the ghosts.’

  ‘Ghosts?’

  ‘You know, the spirits of dead people. The building is haunted.’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Ghosts.’

  ‘The building’s residents were killed here during Stalin,’ Tatyana said. ‘Their spirits remain in the building.’

  ‘And people believe in these things?’

  ‘I wouldn’t want to live in this building,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’ She tried to smile, but I could see something was bothering her.

  The waiter brought us bowls of miso soup. I held mine with two hands and looked out the window. I could see the traffic thickening, cars crawling across the bridge with their windows open, then the river, dark and silent. The glass was thick and I could not hear the traffic or feel the heat. Like watching a silent movie.

  ‘We need to talk,’ Tatyana said.

  This was unusual. Tatyana and I never needed to talk, at least not the kind of talk that needed to be announced. It had crossed my mind, walking in the heat on my way to Ris i Ryba, that she might want to discuss something in particular. Why hadn’t she suggested lunch before she left for work that morning? In fact, I had felt a slight distancing in the last few days, a small drop in the temperature of our relationship, as if she were holding something against me. Nothing dramatic, just the tone of her voice or the way she wouldn’t follow up on a conversation I initiated.

  Perhaps Tatyana was about to suggest moving into my apartment on weekends as well, fully taking over what was once my separate life. I wasn’t sure I was ready to give it up. I took a sip of miso soup and I prepared myself to defend the nature of our arrangement, to repel any threats to the status quo.

  Tatyana left her bowl of soup on the table and held my hand. Her hand was warm from the soup.

  ‘Martin, I’m temporarily,’ she said, with a shaky voice, then stopped and looked at me, waiting for a reaction.

  ‘In what sense?’

  ‘You heard me.’

  ‘I don’t think I understood.’

  Tatyana tried to smile. ‘You did.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ I said, a bit irritated. ‘Temporarily what?’

  At that moment the waiter brought our plates of salmon roll and chicken and two small bowls of seaweed salad. I took a pair of wooden chopsticks from their paper wrapping, split them and offered them to Tatyana. She accepted them with two hands, somewhat ceremoniously.

  ‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. In case I still didn’t understand, she added, ‘With a baby in my belly.’

  That’s when I really learned the difference between vremennaya, with a v, temporarily, and beremennaya, with a b, pregnant.

  I saw that the line of cars was now stuck on the bridge, inching towards the centre, their exhaust pipes expelling smoke into the hot Moscow air. Old soviet cars, Ladas and Volgas, and new German cars owned by rich Russians. I could now recognise luxury models, at least those sold at Stepanov’s dealership.

  ‘How do you know?’ I said, turning to Tatyana.

  ‘Women know these things.’

  ‘Have you been to a doctor?’

  Tatyana’s lips were shiny, the sunlight reflected on her lip-gloss. ‘I took a test. I’m probably five or six weeks pregnant.’

  ‘And you are sure it’s mine?’

  ‘Why do you even have to ask? You know you’re the only man in my life.’

  Giving myself time to think, I gazed at the river, focusing my eyes on the closest of the fountains. The water was pumped high into the air, with strength, and, in the cloud of falling drizzle, I could discern the timid shades of a rainbow.

  Gradually, Tatyana’s words started to become a reality, the concept of her pregnancy growing in my head, like a balloon inflating and occupying all the corners of my mind. But I wasn’t exactly thinking about the life-shattering implications of the news, or pondering our options. For some reason, I found my mind preoccupied with Tatyana’s teeth, the one imperfection on her face. It occurred to me that perhaps I should take Tatyana to the international medical centre and have her front teeth fixed.

  When I looked back, Tatyana’s face was red.

  I held her hand. ‘Everything will be OK,’ I said.

  She smiled.

  Sunlight illuminated her from behind, a halo of bright light forming around her loose golden hair. She looked prettier than ever.

  I kissed Tatyana across the table.

  ‘Who have you told about this?’ I asked.

  ‘Nobody, I only found out this weekend. My breasts hurt a bit, and I was late, so I bought the test.’

  ‘I thought we had been careful,’ I said.

  ‘Most of the time. These things happen. It must have been at the dacha, in the forest. Remember?’

  ‘But you said it was safe.’

  ‘Martin, I’m a grown woman. I want to have the baby.’

  ‘We didn’t plan this,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t plan everything in life.’

  A long-ago memory from a rainy day was now casting a shadow over my thoughts. ‘Sudba,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ Tatyana smiled. ‘It’s destiny.’

  The food remained on the table, untouched. The waiter came to ask if everything was OK.

  ‘Everything’s good,’ I said. Then, turning to Tatyana, I repeated, ‘Everything’s good.’

  I looked at my sushi roll, poked at it with my chopsticks, unable to eat. When I looked up, Tatyana was having a go at her chicken.

  58

  SATURDAY MORNING, THE RAIN is streaming
down the old windows of my Amsterdam flat. At the dining table, under the dim light of a shaky floor lamp, Katya and I are having breakfast. Moscow is, at this point, nothing but a remote possibility. We finish our omelette, discuss our plans for the weekend and, over a second cup of tea, Katya says, ‘Martin, I’m pregnant.’

  I remember the moment clearly because, later on, after she’d left me, I went back to it often, and the memory of that morning had a particular way of making me miserable. Katya is wearing a green Adidas T-shirt she used to borrow from me. We’ve placed a brick under the windowpane to lift the heavy wooden frame a little and let a fresh breeze into the flat. A few raindrops drip onto the carpet, but Katya says it’s OK, leave the window open for a while. We’re listening to Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, a CD from Katya’s small, classical-oriented music collection. She has just refilled our mugs with boiling water, not bothering to replace the used tea bags.

  It’s funny how the same episode of one’s own life, viewed from different moments in time, acquires a different significance. Later on, after she’d left, I saw that morning, and Katya’s pregnancy, not as a storm threatening to wreck my existence, but as a missed opportunity to start a new life.

  But when she makes the announcement all I know is that Katya and I are not going to stay together much longer. Even if we haven’t worked out the details of our separation – or indeed spoken about it – we’re both aware that our cohabitation is a convenient and temporary arrangement, that, sooner or later, Amsterdam will come to an end. As far as I understand, we’re both fine with this.

  ‘This was not planned,’ I say, once I’ve realised the gravity of the situation.

  ‘So what?’ Katya says. ‘We can go ahead with it. I was planning to have children some day. It’s as good a moment as any.’ She’s sitting upright, holding the cup of tea with two hands, her long black hair cascading over the green T-shirt. Her tone is neutral,her voice and body language unchanged from our previous conversation.

  ‘But we hadn’t planned this,’ I insist.

  ‘You can’t plan everything in life,’ she says. ‘It’s destiny.’

  In the beginning, when Katya had just moved into my flat, she had mentioned a couple of times the possibility of a long-term relationship, even hinting at marriage. But I hadn’t shown much enthusiasm for the idea and she’d never raised the issue again. Until that rainy Saturday morning.

  ‘You can choose your own destiny,’ I reply. I stand up, overcome by an urge to clear breakfast leftovers from the table. ‘There are so many things I want to do.’

  ‘It’s not the end of your life,’ she says. ‘You can be a father and still do things.’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘What’s different?’ she says. ‘It’ll be me taking care of the baby.’

  ‘I’m too young.’

  ‘Too young for what? You are twenty-four, a perfect age to start your own family.’

  ‘Maybe in Minsk,’ I say. ‘Not in Europe.’

  We talk about it all day. To me, her refusal to acknowledge that we have a choice doesn’t seem the result of a moral dilemma. Uninitiated in the Russian notion of destiny, my feeling is that she just can’t be bothered.

  On Monday, I accompany Katya to a private clinic, where the medical procedure is explained to us. The best method, we’re told, consists of forcing a miscarriage with a load of hormone pills. Katya seems relieved that the procedure doesn’t require surgery.

  Then, the night before taking the pills, Katya asks me if I’m sure I don’t want to have the baby. Except she doesn’t say the baby – she says our baby. At first, this irritates me. Hadn’t we already taken a decision? But then I realise that, for Katya, asking me one last time is more of an obligation than genuine doubt.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I say, trying to make things easier for her.

  In the end Katya spends two days in bed with cramps, vomiting and crying. She drinks vodka. It hurts to see her like that – and I wish I could share some of her physical pain so that I’d stop feeling like the perpetrator of an unjust punishment. I stay next to her, trying to cheer her up, and, when everything’s over and she’s feeling better, I take her to an expensive Indonesian restaurant we’d always wanted to try, down on the main street. That night, over dinner, we don’t talk much. A week later the whole issue is, as far as I can tell, forgotten. She never mentions it again.

  A few months later, Katya is gone and I can’t stop thinking about that Saturday morning. Unable to go back, I’m on a plane to Moscow.

  59

  ABOUT A HUNDRED SOLDIERS had been killed. At first, the news said the helicopter had crashed after a technical failure. Then, as the hours passed, the story started to change and, by Wednesday night, two days after the crash, they were no longer talking about an accident – it was a terroristicheskiy akt.

  Tatyana and I were eating take-out pizza on the couch as we watched the news. The heavy transport helicopter, they were now saying, had been hit by surface-to-air missiles while carrying more than a hundred and forty Russian soldiers. The fatal missile had hit one of the engines as the helicopter was approaching a Russian military base near Grozny. The helicopter had then fallen onto the minefield that surrounded the base and, as a result, some of the survivors who had tried to escape had been blown up by the mines.

  ‘Oh Bozhe,’ Tatyana said. God. She was almost in tears.

  An expert was saying that, according to investigators, the doors of the helicopter had jammed after the crash and the soldiers had been trapped inside the burning wreckage. Only the crew and about thirty soldiers, who had managed to escape through a small hatch, had survived the attack. The news anchor was referring to the incident as the ‘new Kursk’, in reference to the sinking of the nuclear submarine two years earlier, in August 2000, during my first summer in Moscow. The Russian president, they said, had declared a day of mourning.

  Suddenly, in the middle of the news bulletin, which I was watching attentively, Tatyana wiped her hands, took the remote control from my side of the coffee table and flicked through the channels, stopping at Kanal Kultura, which was showing Russian ballet. This was unusual. Tatyana rarely touched the remote control.

  ‘I want to know what happened,’ I protested.

  ‘We know what happened,’ she said. ‘I can’t watch it any more.’

  I could see in her face that she was deeply disturbed by the news. We had just been talking about the possibility of moving to Siberia, perhaps soon after the arrival of the baby. Maybe she felt the pain of those mothers who were mourning at that very moment across Russia.

  ‘Let’s watch something else,’ she said. ‘Please.’

  As we watched a bunch of ballerinas hopping across the stage to the sound of what I guessed was Tchaikovsky, I wondered how many people in Moscow had switched channels, or looked away from the horrifying images of the helicopter burning with its human cargo inside. Although – now that I think of it, so many years after that evening – I’m no longer sure if I saw the grainy images of the burning helicopter with Tatyana, or if I saw them later on, when I checked old footage on the Internet, trying to understand what had been going on in Chechnya during my time in Moscow.

  60

  THE METRO SPEEDS THROUGH the tunnels, crowded, rocking passengers from side to side. The windows are open, the noise deafening. It feels as if the wagon is about to derail, hit a wall. Then the train brakes with ferocity, an invisible force pushing passengers towards the front, and stops at once. Across the carriage, a woman is sitting on the bench, holding a little boy who stands between her knees. They are everywhere. Not only in the metro. In the streets, in shops, in restaurants. Children of all ages. Even during my morning walks, I see children’s playgrounds I hadn’t noticed before, with sandpits, swings and slides – hidden in the courtyards of central Moscow.

  As the train starts to move again, I grab the handrail. The metro clanks through the tunnels. Everybody is silent, reading books or magazines or gazing at the floor, min
ding their own business. It’s only a few weeks since Tatyana told me about the baby and I hardly recognise myself.

  In the days after Ris i Ryba I’d started to notice how my mind felt unexpectedly clearer, unclouded. Things I’d long held to be essential no longer seemed important. The thorn of Lena, for instance, which had been lodged inside my chest ever since the Boarhouse, disappeared at once; the pain of Lena turned into a memory of the pain. As if the person who had been crying outside the Boarhouse hadn’t been me, but rather a fictional character in a book I’d read.

  I hadn’t told the brothers about Tatyana’s pregnancy. Not yet. They would feel betrayed, I thought. Especially Colin. Only the week before, he had called me again, on Thursday night, trying to drag me to Propaganda. ‘For old times’ sake,’ he’d said. I told him I wasn’t feeling good, maybe next week. I didn’t really mean it, and he knew it. I could feel his disappointment. But what the fuck, I’d wasted so many nights in Propaganda.

  As the metro speeds up, I let go of the rail and I try to keep my balance, testing how long I can go without grabbing it again. I wonder if this mental transformation, the radical change of priorities in my life, is mostly a biological response to parenthood, an animal reaction over which I have little or no control.

  The metro brakes to cross the bridge. Now I can hear the wheels toc toc tap on the rails, in beautiful rhythm. Tatyana is right, I think, it was all meant to happen. Her pregnancy fills me with tranquillity. So what if her love is purer than mine. With her I can live a virtuous existence, stop being superfluous. Everything is easier, I think, when choice is replaced by destiny. It feels as if, after rushing through life, my soul is slowing down.

  I’ve been thinking about Siberia, the setting for a simpler life, where I could perhaps find the remnants of the real Russia. By starting a family with Tatyana, I think, I’m consciously stepping into the language-book universe of Russian As We Speak It – embracing not just the cultural and linguistic immersion, but also the simplification of my daily existence. One day, our lives will be nothing but a succession of daily routines, like the lives of Pavel and Marina: the post office, the supermarket, the restaurant, the park, the lake.