Back to Moscow (7 page)

At the centre of the table stood three bottles of vodka.

Sergey’s mother offered me a chair at the head of the table, which, I guessed, she must have been using before my arrival. I refused, but she insisted and, to avoid further awkwardness, I
accepted. She sat on a stool next to the fridge.

‘Dear comrades,’ Sergey said, ‘let the party begin.’

For some reason everybody laughed.

Sergey stood up, opened a bottle of vodka, filled all of our glasses. ‘I would like to dedicate this first toast to Ira,’ he said, ‘my beloved girlfriend, whose birthday we are
celebrating today.’

He was talking in a rather formal tone – I wasn’t sure if it was for real or meant to be a joke.

He looked at Ira. ‘Irinochka, lyubimaya, I would like to wish you a long happy life full of love and friendship and success, professional, personal, spiritual. May all your wishes come
true. To Ira!’

‘To Ira!’

Sergey kissed Ira. We all drained our glasses of vodka and placed them back on the table.

Sergey did not correspond to the image of Sergey I had formed in my mind. Ira had told me how he’d quit university to become a professional photographer, and for no particular reason
I’d imagined him tall, blond, Slavic-looking. But Sergey was short and dark-haired, with black eyes and thick eyebrows. His chin was black with stubble. I imagined he must have some Caucasian
background, Georgian or Armenian perhaps, but I decided not to ask.

‘Kushaite, kushaite,’ Sergey’s mum was telling me, ‘you need to eat. Take some salatik.’

‘Thank you, Aleksandra Olegovna,’ I said. ‘This looks very nice.’

‘I feel so old,’ Ira said. ‘It was only yesterday that I finished school and here I am, almost done with university, with a new job. Life goes so quickly.’

Sergey was now refilling the glasses with more vodka.

‘If you only knew,’ Aleksandra Olegovna said. ‘One day you wake up and realise your life is almost gone and what have you done with it? Nothing. Because there is nothing you
can do. We just survive year after year as we get old—’

‘Mama, don’t start,’ Sergey interrupted.

‘I remember when I was your age as if it were yesterday,’ Aleksandra Olegovna continued, looking at Ira. ‘Of course things were different back then. I already had my little
Seryozhka.’ She placed her hand on Sergey’s shoulder.

Sergey shook off his mother’s hand and stood up. ‘Dear friends,’ he said, ‘I would like to propose another toast. Let us drink now to peace and friendship among the
peoples of the world.’

We raised our glasses and, as I was about to pour the vodka down my throat, I realised with panic that everybody was staring at me. It struck me that I was somehow considered by those around the
table as a kind of international envoy to Ira’s birthday. For a few seconds I wondered if I was expected to give an acceptance speech in return for the toast. My Russian wasn’t up to
the task, I decided, so I just raised my glass again, smiled and glanced around the table, indicating with my silent but sincere gesture that I was honoured to accept the toast on behalf of my
fellow non-Russians of the world.

We drained our glasses and soon the conversation split into different groups.

A few minutes later Sergey opened the bottle of French wine I’d brought and poured it into the water glasses around the table.

‘This is great,’ he said. ‘French wine. Where did you get it?’

‘I bought it in Eliseevsky, they have a wide selection.’

‘Oh, but it’s so expensive in there,’ Aleksandra Olegovna said.

‘I hope you like Bordeaux,’ I said.

I held the glass under my nose. The wine had a pleasant aroma, woody and sweet. I had indeed invested a significant amount of time and money in procuring the bottle. It wasn’t the kind of
wine you could find in metro shops selling cheap Moldovan and Georgian varieties.

‘We love French wine,’ Sergey said. ‘The best. This toast,’ he went on, raising his glass of wine, ‘I would like to dedicate to Ira’s parents, who can’t
be here today, and to all of our parents.’

‘To our parents!’

They all raised their arms and, to my horror, drank the Bordeaux as if it were a shot of vodka, in two, three gulps.

‘That was a great wine,’ Sergey said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Then he took a bite of black bread.

‘This was an excellent wine,’ Ira said. ‘Thank you, Martin.’

‘Much better than the Moldovan crap we normally get,’ Ira’s cousin said.

Aleksandra Olegovna was looking at my glass. ‘Martin, why don’t you drink your wine?’

With the aged Bordeaux in my hand, I hesitated for a moment. Now everybody was staring at me in silence. I forced a smile, took a deep breath and drank the wine in one.

‘So,’ Sergey said, ‘Ira tells us that you are doing some research on Russian literature?’

Ira placed her hand on my shoulder. ‘Martin is trying to figure out why Anna Karenina throws herself under a train.’ She laughed.

‘It’s about how Russian heroines behave,’ I said, slightly annoyed that nobody seemed to take my research seriously. ‘I’m first trying to identify some common
characteristics between Russian heroines and real Russian women.’

‘That sounds very interesting,’ said Aleksandra Olegovna. ‘How do you like our dear Pushkin?’

‘Pushkin,’ I said, ‘of course.’ I was thinking which of the stories proving my devotion to Pushkin I was going to tell, pondering if reciting a few verses would be
appropriate at this point in the evening, when Ira’s cousin stood up, clinking his glass with a fork.

‘Let me propose another toast,’ he said, in a sombre tone. ‘All of us around the table are good people with big hearts.’

Ira looked at Sergey and rolled her eyes.

‘Today,’ Ira’s cousin continued, ‘we are celebrating Ira’s birthday. It’s thanks to Ira that we are here today, and if so many good people are around the same
table because of Ira, well, that means that Ira herself is a great person.’

I wasn’t sure I had understood everything right.

‘Of course I
am
a great person,’ Ira said.

We all laughed.

‘To friendship!’ Ira’s cousin said, raising the vodka in his right hand, and hovering his left hand over the rest of us, as if to indicate that the effects of the toast were
limited this time to friendship among those present in the kitchen.

‘Thank you, thank you,’ Ira said.

‘That’s beautiful,’ Aleksandra Olegovna said with tears in her eyes.

We drank up.

Soon, the three bottles of vodka were empty and three more bottles appeared on the table.

Someone told an anekdot and, although I understood all the sentences, I couldn’t figure out what was funny about it. But I nodded along to the story and, when everybody laughed, I joined
in. Suddenly, the thought of being in Ira’s kitchen laughing at a Russian joke I hadn’t got seemed hilarious to me. To my surprise, my forced chuckle turned into real laughter, which in
turn made everybody else laugh louder.

Sergey patted my back, seemingly in approval.

As we continued drinking, my understanding improved significantly. At some point I found myself totally immersed in the Russian conversation, almost unaware that I was speaking a foreign
language. It was not that I knew more words, but I seemed more able to grasp the overall narrative – filling in the language gaps with my own drunken version of whatever was being said at the
table.

Sergey put an arm around my shoulders and said, ‘I really respect you.’ He then thanked me for helping Ira with her English. ‘You are such, such a nice guy. You could be
Russian.’ He stared at me in silence. His breath smelled of vodka and herring.

‘Spasibo,’ I said, smiling.

Sergey’s gaze was somehow lost in a space behind my head, and for a second I was afraid he was about to hug me or kiss me, but at that moment Ira’s uncle stood up on the other side
of the table and proposed a new toast. This one to the women in the room, to their beauty and their pure hearts, and to something else which I didn’t get but included, I thought, the Russian
word for air or for breathing. We all drank up and had a bite of bread and salad.

‘So,’ I said, turning to Sergey, ‘Ira told me you are now working on a project, black and white photos.’

‘Not black and white – I’m using different tonalities of grey. With loads of shadows. It’s a series I’ve called
Moscow’s Soul
.’

‘Interesno,’ I said, digging my fork into my mushroom salad.

The salad tasted of damp earth and fresh dill, and, as I swallowed, I was overcome by a tide of positive feelings towards my physical surroundings. I glanced around the kitchen, my eyes unable
to focus on any particular point, and I perceived everything in a warmer light – a blurry vodka gleam cast over the salad bowls, the flowery tablecloth, the rattling fridge, the flowers in
the kitchen sink, the reddened faces of the other guests. It felt as if all the parts of the kitchen had become one single entity – coherent and meaningful. Then, peering through the window
into the darkness, I discerned the crazy air-bound dance of fresh snowflakes.

‘You know the statue of Peter the Great?’ Sergey asked.

‘You mean the big statue in the middle of the river?’

‘Yes, Tsereteli’s statue,’ Sergey said, munching on a piece of cucumber. ‘I’m trying to capture all of its ugliness in one single frame.’

He laughed.

I laughed too. ‘I see.’

‘The statue is very symbolic,’ Ira said. ‘It’s representative of the new Moscow.’

‘Why Peter’s statue?’ I asked.

Sergey moved closer to me, lowered his voice. ‘Tsereteli’s statue represents the banality of modern Moscow.’

‘I find the statue hideous,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ Sergey said. ‘Everybody in Moscow hates the statue. Only the mayor likes it. But the main thing is, the statue is not what it looks like. It’s a
fake.’

Ira placed a boiled potato on my plate and one on Sergey’s plate. ‘Seryozhka,’ she said, ‘eat more. You shouldn’t have drunk before we started the party, now you
are drunker than the rest of us.’

‘A fake?’ I asked. ‘In what sense?’

In what sense, v kakom smysle, was a useful expression I’d learned to drop into a conversation every time I got lost. It was particularly handy in a situation where a question was
addressed to me, an answer was clearly expected, but my comprehension skills had let me down. Instead of asking for the question to be repeated, which would have cast doubt on my credibility as an
interlocutor, I would just ask, ‘In what sense?’ It was such a useful phrase that, with time, I also began to use it when I didn’t know what to say and wanted more time to think.
In what sense?

‘The statue wasn’t meant to be in Moscow,’ Sergey said.

‘It wasn’t?’

‘The statue was meant to be in the United States. It was commissioned as a present from the Russian people to the American people at the end of the Cold War. Americans didn’t like it
so they said no thank you.’

‘Why would the Americans want a statue of Peter the Great?’

‘That’s the whole point,’ Sergey said. There was a bit of sour cream stuck on his thick eyebrows. ‘When the statue was made, it wasn’t Peter the Great. Originally
it was a statue of Christopher Columbus, and it was meant to symbolise the union between the two sides of the Atlantic, or some shit like that. When the Americans refused it, nobody knew what to do
with a giant Columbus.’

‘A waste of money, if you ask me,’ Aleksandra Olegovna said.

‘So,’ Sergey continued, ‘the mayor asked Tsereteli to turn Columbus’s head into the head of Peter the Great. And he fucking did! But they couldn’t find a place in
Moscow to erect such a monster, you know, all the squares are occupied by Lenins and soviet stuff, so in the end they decided to plant the thing in the middle of the Moskva river.’

‘Martin, try the herring and beetroot salad,’ Sergey’s mum said. ‘It’s a typical Russian dish.’

‘Thank you, Aleksandra Olegovna, everything is delicious.’

Sergey began refilling the glasses with more vodka. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘let him eat whatever he wants.’

‘So,’ I asked, ‘the statue in the Moskva river is not Peter the Great but Christopher Columbus?’

‘Exactly,’ Sergey said. He wiped his eyebrows, seemed puzzled to find sour cream on his fingers. ‘If you look closely you’ll see he is standing on an old vessel, from
Columbus times, not from the times of Peter the Great.’

‘It’s a botch job,’ Ira said.

Aleksandra Olegovna stood up, started to clear some plates. ‘I can hardly recognise the city any more.’

‘This is Moscow today,’ Sergey said, putting a hand on my shoulder. ‘We are losing our soul and nobody gives a shit.’

L
ENA LIVED IN AN
old kommunalka not far from Chistye Prudy, sharing the communal bathroom with three families and her bedroom with a girl from Tula.
They had some kind of arrangement, I imagined, as the Tula dyev was never around when I visited and Lena and I could always enjoy a couple of hours of privacy.

Lena’s bedroom was a total bardak, a mess. The bedside tables, like every flat surface in the room, were completely covered in piles of books, old magazines, food leftovers, make-up
paraphernalia, old cups of tea. The room always smelled of incense, which Lena kept burning in my presence – whether for some spiritual purpose or to mask other smells, I couldn’t
tell.

One cold evening in late December we were lying on Lena’s bed, naked, listening to music from an Asian lounge compilation she liked to play when I was around. I had picked up a book from
the pile on her bedside table, a cheap paperback on compassion, written, according to the back cover, by his holiness the Dalai Lama. I thumbed through the pages, many of which were dog-eared,
reading the bits that Lena had underlined and trying to decipher the comments she had scribbled in the margins. It struck me that the Russian word for compassion, sostradaniye, derived from the
word suffering, stradaniye, and literally meant co-suffering. A compassionate person was, in Russian, a co-sufferer. Considering this a valuable insight, I jumped out of bed and grabbed the red
notebook I was carrying in my backpack.