Back to Moscow (30 page)

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.

S
ATURDAY 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.

A
BOUT 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.

T
HE 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, minding 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.

I glance around at the other passengers. Babushkas, old men, students, the mother with her child. They all look serious, grim. And so do I, I realise, spotting my reflection in the window. My
face looks aged, my eyes sunken. My nose and mouth are connected by two deep shadows. Just then it occurs to me that, despite my new-found tranquillity, I too look sad and self-absorbed. As long as
I don’t open my mouth, I think, other passengers will be unable to see that I’m not Russian. Like them, I’m wearing dark clothes. My entire wardrobe is now brown or black, the
result of almost three years in Moscow. During this gradual, unconscious transformation of my appearance, my body language and my facial expression must have become more sombre too. With this
thought running through my mind, I try to force a smile, a Western smile, from my previous life, a simple social gesture meant to demonstrate friendly feelings towards my fellow passengers in the
metro. But my experimental smile, which I direct at the woman and boy across the wagon, must have come out somewhat forced and absurd, even threatening, I realise, because the woman instinctively
grabs her child tighter and looks away. I stop smiling. After all, what the fuck should I smile for. I don’t need to prove anything to anyone.

I get off at Universitet. It’s been a while since I last visited the campus. The academic year has just started and I can feel the buzz and excitement in the young students rushing
around.

‘Ready to work again?’ Lyudmila Aleksandrovna says when she sees me. Nothing has changed in her office – except the kettle, a newer cordless model.

I raise my right hand to my forehead, saluting as a soviet pioneer. ‘Always ready,’ I say. Then I tell her about the books I’ve been reading and she says my Russian has
improved. She seems happy to see me. I can’t wait to finally start writing my PhD.

That night, back at home, I feel things falling into place. The beginning of a new life. I’m looking forward to winter, to the first snow of the season, to taking care of Tatyana as she
gets bigger.

After dinner and a bit of TV, I sit on the couch, reading
The Seagull
. Tatyana lies with her head on my lap.

‘I’m so tired these days,’ she says, her eyes closed, her hand on her belly.

Then she falls asleep as I hold Chekhov’s book in one hand and stroke her curls with the other.

L
ENA EMERGED FROM THE
metro and marched across the square towards me. She was wearing a grey skirt and a grey jacket that stretched tight across her
breasts. She looked elegant, refined, as if she were going to work in an office. Beneath Pushkin’s statue, we kissed on the cheek. She suggested we go for a walk. We crossed through the
perekhod, emerged on the other side of Tverskaya and strolled along the Boulevard. It was a fresh autumn morning, the path was carpeted with dry brown leaves.

She asked about my research at the university, about the brothers. I learned she was going to a new yoga centre now. She had finally found an instructor who was strict but inspiring.

We turned right at Malaya Bronnaya, kept on the sunny side of the street. It seemed to me that Lena walked with more confidence than before, with a hint of arrogance in her gait, more aware
perhaps of the impact she had on men. I was waiting for the right moment to tell her about Tatyana and the baby.

Weeks after our encounter at the Boarhouse, Lena had finally answered one of my messages and agreed to see me. I felt a strong need to end Lena’s chapter in my life before I could move on
to the next. But now that Lena was next to me, I didn’t know where to start. I was enjoying her presence, always so physically intense, and all the memories that it triggered.