Back to Moscow (21 page)

I ordered two mushroom soups and two Caesar salads.

At first Tatyana wasn’t very talkative but, after a swiftly drunk glass of wine, she became more relaxed. She told me that she came from Novosibirsk and had been living in Moscow for six
months. She liked Moscow but she missed her family, especially her babushka, who was the one who had really raised her. It felt good sitting in Café Maki with Tatyana. I imagined everybody
around us would be admiring her blonde, curly hair and her eyes, so green and perfect. She was clearly unaware of it, but Tatyana was without doubt the prettiest girl in the café.

‘I’m happy that my aunt found me a job in Moscow,’ Tatyana said. The aunt lived in a small town two hours away by elektrichka and Tatyana dutifully visited her every weekend.
‘Back in Novosibirsk it’s impossible to find work that pays decently.’

What she liked best about the capital, Tatyana said as our plates of soup were laid in front of us, was the culture on offer.

‘There are so many things going on in Moscow’s theatres,’ she said. ‘The classics, but also very nice new musicals. If I had the money I would go every night.’ She
smiled, her lips closed, probably conscious of the gap between her front teeth.

As Tatyana was talking about her interests, I took my red notebook out of my backpack and placed it to the right of my soup plate. I took some notes – Novosibirsk, babushka, aunt,
theatre.

‘What’s that?’ Tatyana asked.

I told her about my research project, how it was not just about reading books, but also about getting to know what Russians thought about life.

‘But I don’t have any interesting thoughts about life,’ Tatyana protested.

‘That’s an interesting thought in itself,’ I said, scribbling in the notebook.

Tatyana smiled. Her face was red. ‘Can I have a look?’

‘Sure,’ I said, pushing the notebook towards her side of the table.

She turned the notebook round, glanced at it in silence. ‘But it’s in English.’

‘Of course.’

Then she started to read slowly, sliding her finger under the lines, in heavily accented English. She started from the top of the page.

‘“When you saw the yellow tape, you knew spring was around the corner.”

‘What does it mean?’

‘Just random thoughts.’

She continued reading.

‘“Black coat. Yellow woollen hat. Apple green eyes.”’ She laughed. ‘You are so funny.’

I kept refilling her glass of wine. When the salad arrived, I ordered a second bottle.

Tatyana wanted to know what I thought about Russia, as a foreigner.

When we were done with the salads I suggested we share a plate of blinis with preserved strawberries and mascarpone.

‘Davay,’ she said.

The blinis arrived and I slid the plate into the middle of the table.

‘I didn’t know what mascarpone was,’ Tatyana said, her mouth still half full. ‘But I like it, it’s just like thick smetana.’

After dessert, we finished the bottle of wine, I paid the bill and we walked out into the dark street.

‘Thanks for dinner,’ Tatyana said. ‘It was lovely.’

‘Let’s walk to the metro,’ I suggested.

She looked at her watch. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk.’

It was colder now and, as we walked in silence back towards Pushkinskaya, I had to repress the urge to put my arm around Tatyana. Reaching the square, we descended into the perekhod but, instead
of going all the way to the metro entrance, we climbed the stairs out into the street again, and stood next to Pushkin’s statue, where we had met earlier.

I pointed to my block across the street. ‘That’s where I live.’

‘Above McDonald’s?’

‘On the other side of the block,’ I said. ‘You know the Scandinavia restaurant?’

‘Never heard of it.’

‘Would you like to come up for a cup of tea?’

‘I showed a flat in that block,’ she said. ‘A couple of months ago.’

‘It’s very central. I love it.’

‘Wonderful location,’ Tatyana said. ‘I don’t understand why you want to move somewhere else.’

I smiled, said nothing.

‘Is it noisy?’ she asked.

‘Not really. My balconies face the courtyard and I live on the top floor. There is a great view. I’ll show you. Let’s go up for a cup of tea.’

She stared at me in silence. For a few seconds we stood in the middle of the square. Cars piled at the traffic lights, expelling white fumes into the chilly night air. Muscovites rushed out of
the metro, onto the street, cramming into McDonald’s, Café Pyramida, the Pushkin cinema. I could see the neon lights of the casino reflected in Tatyana’s eyes. Just above us
stood Aleksandr Sergeyevich, leaning slightly forward, ready to descend from his pedestal. In the darkness of the night, Pushkin’s face revealed a soft smile.

Tatyana looked at her watch, then back into my eyes. She opened her mouth, as if about to say something, then closed it again without uttering a sound. I put my arm around her shoulder, squeezed
her body against mine, gave her a kiss.

T
HE RAIN CAUGHT ME
by surprise as I walked down from Mayakovskaya. I increased my pace, hoping to reach my apartment before the water soaked my clothes.
A gust of wind came out of nowhere, flapping the advertising banners above Tverskaya with unusual strength. The sky dimmed to leaden grey, the rain thickened and – though only two minutes
away from home – I had no choice but to take shelter from the storm. I stepped into the Stanislavsky theatre.

The entrance hall of the theatre was empty, aside from a babushka at the ticket booth. I smiled in her direction. She grumbled back. Waiting for the rain to clear, I began to study the posters
on the walls. I noticed the babushka glancing my way above her thick glasses, frowning in a menacing manner – accusing me with her gaze of having entered her theatre under false
pretences.

To dispel her suspicions, I approached the programme on the wall and ran my finger down the list of plays. After all, I could be a genuine theatregoer, interested in the shows the Stanislavsky
had on offer. When I peeked back at the babushka I could see she was irritated, impatient, about to ask me to leave. Outside, the rain was battering the pavement with increasing force, forming
lakes and flooding the asphalt. Realising that I would have to stay inside the theatre for a while, I approached the booth and asked the cranky babushka for the best pair of tickets available for
the evening performance.

That night’s show turned out to be a play based on Bulgakov. I placed a thousand-ruble note on the counter and, after checking its validity against the light of a table lamp, the babushka
relinquished the tickets and the change, still reluctantly, as if suspicious of my intentions.

When the rain eased off I rushed home. I changed into dry clothes, boiled some pelmenis for lunch and lay on the couch. Tatyana and I had agreed to meet that evening.

A month had passed since we’d met and Tatyana was now spending two or three evenings a week in my flat. After dinner, we would linger at the kitchen table, brewing tea with the samovar,
and she would tell me about her day: how the price of real estate was going up, about the difficult clients she had, mostly expats who were looking for perfect apartments but were stingy with their
budgets.

Tatyana’s angelic beauty – her blonde curls, soft smile, trusting green eyes – stirred something buried deep inside me. Even the gap in her front teeth, the only imperfection
in her otherwise faultless face, made her real, provincial, likeable. For some reason, I often found myself picturing Tatyana and myself from an outsider’s point of view, as if we were actors
in a film. Cooking at home, walking in the street. Every time Tatyana was next to me, I would pose for an imaginary viewer.

I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up I made some tea, picked up my book of Chekhov’s plays, sat by the balcony. It had stopped raining. The sky was now white.

I started to read bits from
Three Sisters
. I went through the first act, pondering Irina’s daydreaming of Moscow and the symbolic value the city acquired in the play.

Chekhov had turned Moscow into a symbol of yearning, standing for things left behind and for the unreachable horizon that lies ahead.

After finishing the first act, I looked up from the book and saw the city extending away beneath my balcony, the white sky pierced by soviet constructions and red-brick chimneys. The wet roofs
and terraces reflected the brightness of the sky like pieces of broken mirror. I thought how different my Moscow was from Chekhov’s Moscow, the city the three sisters dreamed about. And yet,
the enormous amalgam of buildings and squares and wide avenues continued to capture the dreams of thousands of people, like Tatyana and myself, who, coming from different places, had been brought
together by the city. I wondered whether being in Moscow made us happier.

Tatyana had left her hometown in Siberia – her babushka, her family – to search for a better life in Moscow. Had she dreamed in Novosibirsk about Moscow? Now that she was in the
city, with a job and a few friends, now that she had me, was she happier than before?

‘We want happiness,’ Vershinin says in Anton Pavlovich’s play, ‘but we are not happy and we cannot be happy.’

Tatyana came over just after six. She hung her faux-leather handbag on the kitchen door handle, kissed me.

‘I have something for you,’ I said, handing her the pair of theatre tickets.

She grabbed the tickets and, before even looking at them, thanked me with another kiss.

‘Tickets to the theatre,’ she said, with a broad smile, her eyes shining. ‘Great, I haven’t seen this play. I only saw the film. An old soviet film, in black and white,
very good one.’

‘I’m glad you like them,’ I said. ‘Would you like to eat something before we go or should we just grab a bite afterwards?’

She looked back at the tickets. ‘But they are for
today
?’

‘The show’s in an hour.’

‘But you should have warned me,’ she said, anxious.

‘It’s supposed to be a surprise. A change from watching a movie on the couch.’

Tatyana’s smile was gone. ‘But I didn’t know we were going to the theatre.’

‘It’s the Stanislavsky theatre,’ I said, ‘just around the corner, a two-minute walk.’

She looked at me, her face red. ‘But I have nothing to wear.’

‘What do you mean? You look great like this.’ She was wearing a black jacket and a black skirt, which I found quite elegant.

‘These are not theatre clothes. If you had told me I could have brought a nice dress from my flat.’

‘If I had told you then it wouldn’t have been a surprise. Don’t worry, it’s a small theatre, not a fancy opera. You look really good.’ To emphasise my words I
kissed her again.

She was unconvinced. But, noticing my disappointment at her reaction, she forced a smile. ‘At least this is not Novosibirsk,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows me here. I’ll try to
look my best.’

Tatyana took her cosmetics bag into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. First I heard the shower, then a hairdryer, which she must have had in her bag because I didn’t own one.
Then I heard more water, and then silence for at least thirty minutes.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked through the door. ‘We’re going to be late.’

When she came out of the bathroom, Tatyana was wearing tons of make-up and a bizarre hairdo, her beautiful curly hair all tied up in a knot on her head.

Truth was, I loved Tatyana best in the mornings, when she’d just woken up and was wearing one of my old T-shirts – the green of her sleepy eyes a miracle every time, her cheeks warm
and rosy. Tatyana didn’t need make-up. You look so pretty like this, I’d told her a few times. But she insisted that a girl needed to wear make-up all the time to look prilichnaya,
decent. By now I had given up.

I gazed at her face, unnecessarily caked in powder. ‘You look gorgeous,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, careful not to spoil her lipstick.

We made it to the theatre just in time to find our seats. They were in the third row, close to the action. The lights went out and the actors appeared on the stage. I found the play hard to
follow. I’d expected a simple plot, a dog that becomes a human, but the Russian was complicated and, as I used my imagination to fill in the gaps in my understanding, the story in my head
became darker and darker, chillingly interrupted every time the audience burst out laughing at jokes that I kept missing.

Tatyana was sitting with her back upright, her eyes fixed on the stage, completely absorbed by the action. Even with her hair like this she looked beautiful. She was wearing an overly sweet and
pungent perfume which I didn’t recognise and which stuck in my throat. I was afraid the perfume could also be smelled by the people around us, even by the actors on the stage. I told myself
that I would buy Tatyana a new perfume, something more subtle, when the occasion presented itself.

And so it was, at that precise moment, watching an adaptation of
The Heart of a Dog
at the Stanislavsky theatre, that I realised Tatyana had somehow become my girlfriend. Why would I
care about buying her perfume otherwise?

After the play finished we followed the crowd into the street. People gathered on the pavement of Tverskaya, discussing the show. I was flooded by a sense of well-being, thinking about Tatyana,
my girlfriend, but also about going to the theatre, which for some reason I regarded as something exceptional – kulturno, intelligentno – something I should have done more often. I knew
all the bars and clubs in Moscow, but hardly any theatres. Maybe I could take Tatyana out more often, I told myself, and we could also watch Chekhov plays, which would be easier for me to follow.
With these thoughts in my head, we walked into the French Café next door and sat at a small table by the window. My initial plan had been to stop at the kiosks in Pushkinskaya after the play
and buy a couple of blinis for dinner, but since Tatyana had made such an effort to look special, I felt the French Café would be more appropriate.

‘I’m so happy we came to the theatre,’ Tatyana said, holding my hand. ‘Such a beautiful show. Thank you, Martin.’