Here Sasha and I are on our way, on the road, walking along a strip of asphalt through the woods. Around us it is May, the first green leaves, the first butterflies. After the winter we crawl out of Moscow into the big wide world as blind as moles, crusted with fungus and mildew. We can’t think straight, we blink in the light, dizzy in the fresh air. When you see that first butterfly, friend, you know you’ve survived another winter. “Hey, Sasha, have you brought anything to eat?” “They’ll have food.” “I’ve got bread, and water.” “Great. We’re sorted then. They should have something.”
We have a tent and a couple of blankets. “Did you arrange where we’re going to meet up?” “Nah. Reckon we’ll find them?” I nod. Something in me clicks, and I try to see everything, looking down from above – us, the lake, the guys we are looking for. “I’ll be right back. You get thumbing,” Sasha says, dropping his rucksack and jogging over to the ditch. I put mine beside his and look into the empty distance. “Sure,” I say. “Someone’s bound to stop for me now, a chick with two bags.”
“Eh? What chick with two bags?” Sasha asks from the bushes. “Nothing. I’m just talking about myself. Hey, hurry up, a lift!” He jumps out, buttoning himself, and we raise our thumbs. A saloon car with rounded contours, foreign, like a shiny golden pie, stops. Sasha leans down, speaking in his polite, breathy voice. Being polite always makes his voice go like that. The driver is a woman and she lets us in the back, along with our packs.
Lenka told us that back home, up in the north, she would drink nothing other than vodka. In Moscow she learned to drink beer. I saw a gap in her education and on her first day, to celebrate her moving in, we bought a bottle of champagne and a coconut, sawed it open with a rasp, quaffed it and by the time Roma and Tolya came back in the evening, were lying on the piano watching the shadows flitting over the ceiling. We thought all the shadows looked like elephants. “The girls have been partying,” Tolya said, turning on the lights and instantly banishing the elephants.
It wasn’t that night I saw the demon but a few days later. I decided not to get drunk with Lenka again, because if the elephants were enough to keep me happy, they weren’t enough for her and it took her just fifteen minutes to run to the shop with Tolya for more booze, so that in no time at all the whole kitchen knew who had descended on us.
“She’s just getting to know people,” Tolya said at the time. “I grew up in this village,” the woman at the wheel tells us. She looks like the owner of the travel agency for which I run errands, not old but tired. She asks where we want to go and Sasha says something vague about the pier. “There are two,” she tells us. Shortly after, she brakes and sends him to buildings about a hundred metres from the road to ask about the people we’re supposed to be meeting. “This is the first pier,” she says.
Sasha runs over and comes back with the news that they aren’t there. We drive on through the village, which has high fenced cottages which look like holiday dachas. The woman lets us out and points to some buildings far away. “That’s the second one.” As she drives off. I appreciate just how warm it was in the car. “Hey, Sasha let’s pretend we’re detectives on someone’s trail.”
At the boat station dogs come running at the sound of our boots and the sight of our humped figures. They bark and wag their tails. “Yes, your friends were here but they’ve taken a boat. Where to? The islands.” “After them!” Sasha says. We count our money. We need 200 roubles to hire a boat and between us have just 230.
“How are we going to get back home, Sasha?”
“They’ve got money.”
Lenka was good at playing the guitar and singing the songs of rock legend Alexander Bashlachov with deep, not to say hysterical, emotion. She could talk about herself for hours on end without boring anyone, and could wear totally incongruous, oversized, weird clothes and make it look like this was the younger generation rebelling against society. Her greatest talent, however, was for falling in, and being in, love. “Look and learn, Titch,” Tolya told me. “Look and learn. You’re really stuck in that infantilism of yours.”
He was in raptures over Lenka and it was mutual. For the first few days she lived with him under his piano until, mutually fulfilled, they parted amicably and Lenka moved her talent on, causing turbulence in our commune.
Her dazzling, ditzy personality induced a state of intoxication or mild nervous tension in men. Even those who avoided looking directly were forever stealing glances at her. Their women became more attentive and loving, a little jumpy, and nearly all lost weight. Lenka taught everyone to play games and the commune became a fevered place.
“We tried it a hundred times but each was like the first,” Julia was to say later. I think she was talking about surgical spirit, although she could equally well have been speaking of Lenka. I realised she was contagious when, out of the blue, Sergey from the room next to mine sent a text message one morning declaring, in Latin script, “Ya teba lublu”, which reduced me to fits of hysterical laughter. I suddenly realised why I kept running into Sergey, why he was always coming into our room, sitting silently by the locker and gazing up at the gallery. He was a violinist at the Bolshoy Theatre, with the broad face of a peasant in a medieval tapestry and small, sharp teeth. His teeth put me off me. They struck me as unhealthy, and I could never think what to talk to him about. When I got his text I realised that his misspelled ‘lublu’ must have cost him a great deal. I laughed uproariously, until Roma Jah told me Sergey had asked him the day before if he could move to another room which had access to my gallery. I took a hammer and nailed the offending door shut.
Our commune’s hammer is inscribed “Use appropriately”. That really is very sound advice.
We take a boat and push off from the shore. The white cat which followed us from the office leaps on to the rock furthest from the shore and sits there staring after us. We are already far out and the land and the cottages merge with the darkness until only the white cat is still visible on its rock, alone, in the night.
The kind of heavy silence you get over water plugs our ears. It is the first time I have ever been in a boat but I don’t want to let on. I can’t swim. I look down into the water. It is black. Nightfall rapidly swallows up objects, warmth, and any desire to talk. It is a large lake with a lot of islands. It would be good to know which is the one we are looking for.
“There’s a campfire,” I say quietly. Nightfall has also swallowed up my ability to feel pleased. We row over to the island where a fire is such a flickering, venomous red you can’t believe it is natural. We don’t see any people but sounds travel readily over water and we hear music. It is not the kind of music the friends we are looking for could be listening to.
“I can hear an axe,” I say even more quietly, and we head for a different island and the distinct sound of someone confidently chopping logs. I picture Producer at it, raising his skinny arms above his head, the full weight of his body behind the axe, the body of a top student of Bauman Technical University, a clever boy in glasses.
“Julia!” Sasha calls into the darkness, facing the island, very loudly so as not be scared. “Julia!” “What’s Producer’s real name?” “No idea.” “Pro-du-cer!” I shout. Somebody is chopping wood in the forest. “Let’s go closer.” We do. We can already make out reeds by the shore, dry and yellow, that have survived the winter. “Pro-du-cer!”
It is so cold the water seems like black ice. The moon is bright and there are stars in the sky and the water. Our boat bobs on a surface between two abysses. We listen intently, for a long time, to the silence and the cold. “You know what, Sasha, I think this must be how people die.” “We’ll moor the boat, get a night’s sleep, and go look for them in the morning.”
The boat gets stuck in the reeds. Our legs disappear into cold water. I have no idea which direction we are going in through the bare stems surrounding us on all sides. We get to the shore and walk towards trees. They have branches, we will have a campfire and be warm. May the forces of light be with us.
The bacillus proved highly contagious and Sergey was not the last to succumb to it. The symptoms of infection were not always immediately evident, as I had realised after I brought Sasha to the commune.
He was a courier too, for a firm in the entry next to my travel agency. I had seen him many times before, but it was inevitable that we should meet up during the fever. He was drunk and reciting poetry. He was standing in the archway between our two entrance halls, stooped and as thin as a reed and swathed from head to toe in a lurid scarf. His eyes blazed with the fire of inspiration and he swayed to and fro as he recited early Mayakovsky. It turned out he was the courier with a poetry magazine. His audience was two friends with a bottle of brandy, an alley cat, and me. After his pals had made off with the remains of the brandy, the cat disappeared and I dragged Sasha back to Yakimanka.
“The Soviet generation of engineers has been replaced by a generation of couriers!” Tolya pronounced when he caught sight of Sasha. “You will shortly have a statue erected to you in our courtyard. We live in gone times, friend. What more could you ask?”
The commune turned out to be just what Sasha needed. He was from a distant Moscow suburb and only went home at weekends, staying with friends during the week. Relations with his friends got strained, and on what he got paid the commune was the right place for him. A more suitable berth was not immediately available, so Sasha was accommodated in the bathroom.
He was skinny and drained by alcoholism was Sasha. His knobbly knees were like shrivelled pumpkins and brought tears to my eyes. He had huge thick glasses which concealed the withered face of a man who has been dumped by three wives in succession. He had some innate logical deficit, which meant that listening to simple stories about his life entailed plunging into impenetrable thickets of personal and world history until you were totally disorientated. Nevertheless, I listened to them. We started off in our room when we got back from work and finished in the kitchen at dawn. Still there was no end in sight. We skipped college, and soon every aspect of reality began to fuse in my mind into total nonsense.
Sasha had a ridiculous, endearing, blind vulnerability, and an ability to get on with absolutely anyone. He was kind and undemanding, so I listened to him and hung out with him while he was living in the bathroom. If there was any suggestion of infatuation in my feverishness, then only because I had caught it from Lenka, like ‘flu. It was, nevertheless, a relief to see my temptation terminate one evening when Sasha and Lenka went off together to the nearest drink kiosk, returned after midnight and ended up together in Lenka’s bed.
That was the night I saw the imp on her pillow.
“Hey, Sasha, let’s play Robinson Crusoe and imagine no one will ever come to rescue us.” The campfire dries us and we warm up. We cut bread into thin squares, sprinkle them with salt and toast them on twigs. Our tap water is sweeter than wine. Sasha has an old canvas tent. All night we keep warm by hugging each other, then lying back to back. The blankets are too thin for a May night on a lake.
I dream of Producer. He is sitting in a boat fishing. A wonderful new guitar is floating on the water, its strings gleaming. “Is this all for me?” happy Julia sings on the beach, jumping up and down and clapping her hands. Julia is a child, a girl with pigtails. She doesn’t yet know she will sing songs and rescue the underground rock music of Moscow from the ruins. Will everyone there be her friends?
I wake up hungry. Warmed by the sun, the tent has become as muggy as a swamp. We crawl out. “Sasha, do you really not have any food?” “We’ll meet up with them,” Sasha says. We strike the tent and get going, munching bread and salt.
“Look, we can see the whole island. It can’t be that big. See, it’s round. We’ll find them. “Julia!” Sasha yells towards the woods, although no sound is coming from that direction. I try again to see everything at once and from above: there we are, there are the woods, there is lots and lots of water. I see nobody else.
“Sasha, let’s play at being eagles catching gophers in the open.” The woods are still wet and bare and they haven’t warmed up. Nobody lives here. We walk through them like orphans. “Julia!” Sasha bellows like a moose. “Pro-du-cer!” I yell. “Hey, Sasha, why aren’t we shouting for Lenka?” Sasha’s face darkens. Even when there are three of them, what Lenka wants Lenka gets, and Sasha knows it. He says nothing. We finish the bread. That’s it, man, now there’s nothing left to fuel your jealousy.
“I still have some sugar,” Sasha says. Sugar and water are good, only we’ve finished the water. We come to a swamp. “Sasha, do you remember where the lake was?” “No. Hang on a minute.” He leans over and fills our bottle. We drink the water and eat the sugar. “That’s better,” Sasha says and stretches contentedly. “First time I’ve drunk swamp water!” “It’s pure,” he says. “There was a toad in it. Toads never sit in dirty water.”
They both changed suddenly. One mania fused with another and Sasha entered a state where he could not let Lenka out of his sight. Lenka liked that. They stuck to each other like differently coloured pieces of modelling clay on Tolya’s recycled picture boards. They had a long and happy life together. Really long by Lenka’s standards and really happy by those of the commune. When love becomes dependency, however, the children forget to play by the rules. As luck would have it, this was the moment Julia showed up.
You were not destined to live with us, Julia, but your songs, drunken, crazy, toxic, were about all of us, the waifs and strays of Yakimanka. That is why we loved you, Julia. That is why you were one of us, and in our hearts each of us would have followed you to the ends of the earth. Every age needs an idol, and as we don’t have one right now, why not you, Julia, star of the Moscow beer bars? We were at one with you when you were singing about us and for us. You didn’t sell out, and anyway, who would have bought you?
Sasha brought her to us. She started singing rap in the autumn, and by midwinter her Producer had materialised. It looked like her creative career was coming good. The commune as a whole, however, not yet back on an even keel, succumbed to a new bout of fever. Roma Jah hesitated for a moment, frowned like an old wise Indian and said, “It’s all over!”
His pronouncement came after Sasha, not sparing himself, had run all over Moscow sticking up posters for Julia’s concert, while Lenka tattooed on her arm from wrist to elbow the word ‘Producer’ in runic script.
We are playing associations. Tolya is leading and I am answering. Everybody listens, punctuating a fraught silence with laughter.
“Piano,” says Tolya. “Lame dog.”
“Alarm clock.” “Peevish schoolkid.”
“Lenka.” “Little girl lost.” (I see her laughing and biting Sasha’s ear with delight.)
“Sasha.” “Boy reading with a torch under the bedclothes at night.” (I see Sasha wants to say something, but he is too slow.)
“Julia,” Tolya says, getting the bit between his teeth. “Girl looking forward to New Year presents.” (What a pity you aren’t here with us, Julia.)
“Titch, all your associations follow the same lines. That’s questionable.” “They aren’t associations, they’re what I see.”
“Okay then. What about Producer?”
“Producer, erm, er… He is…” For the first time I am having to think. It is a pity he isn’t here either for me to glance at him. “No, I can’t see him. For some reason I can’t see anything.”
Producer was pale, thin, and wore jeans with holes in them, socks with holes in them and shirts with buttons missing, but he knew the right people at the right clubs, and seemed even to know people in higher and classier places too. He said nothing, though. He waited. He was good at waiting, was Producer, bluffing but with a Joker in his pocket. Or had he?
In the meantime, he showered advice on Julia. They would come back together, Julia would sing the way she always did, and then Producer would say what ideally she should be doing. From my gallery I could see his eyes – blue-grey, intelligent – and I could understand Lenka. From my galler
y I could see Julia’s lips – thin, with a twist of indifference and a little white lower tooth, and I could understand Sasha. From my gallery I could see absolutely everything, and it all got terribly mixed up.
Madness was building up in the commune again. It built up all winter and by spring had the power of a hibernating atom bomb. Lenka and Sasha made up and broke up, moved on to a brother-sister relationship, then fought and gave each other purple love bites. Julia and Producer continued their quiet, steady relationship and I watched them from my gallery. The light from a nearby bulb dimmed in my eyes because I couldn’t see both couples at once. My home is full of children who have forgotten they are children but all want games to play.
They started putting on concerts. Money came in. If they had had love everything would have been sorted long ago, but everything remained as it was and in late April Producer said, “Let’s go to the lake for the May Day holiday.”
He made it sound like a challenge to a duel. You go to the woods when you are strong and free and most urgently desire to be with the one you want. How they would get on in the woods not even old Artemiy could foretell. The timer clicked and the seconds started ticking away in the time-bomb. I saw their agitation and wanted only to immure myself in my gallery in order to survive the explosion.
We wander on for as long as our legs hold out. We come to a glade where the sun has warmed the moss, and lie down without a word and feel good.
“Sasha, what do you make of Julia?” “She’s cool.” “And Lenka?” “Little furry animal.” “Producer?” “Don’t give a toss.”
“No, but what do you make of him?” “I haven’t looked.” “What about the two of them.” “God only knows what’s going on.” “Do you know when I saw her as she really, really is?” “Who?” “Julia. When she stayed overnight with us one time. I looked at everyone then to see what they were like asleep. Her face was so child-like and vulnerable. I wanted to stroke her hair. That’s what she’s like, Sasha.”
Off the Beaten Tracks Page 10