Back to Moscow (8 page)

I lay on the bed writing about the word compassion. Lena was staring at the ceiling in silence – her fingers fiddling with her golden chain, her perfect breasts swelling and ebbing with
each breath, like waves in the ocean.

We hadn’t had sex. At least not sex sex. We had never talked about this but, as far as I understood, Lena didn’t enjoy the most primal aspects of human sexuality. For her, it
wasn’t about gathering momentum and losing control. Lena approached sexual intimacy as a flat sensory experience, as a slow succession of caresses and kisses, which often remained at the
level of touching. It wasn’t shyness or prudishness. Lena felt comfortable with her body. As soon as we were alone in her bedroom, she would often take her clothes off and go about her tasks
in complete nakedness – making tea, lighting incense, moving piles of clothes from one bed to the other, fully aware of the powerful effect her naked body had on me. But once my own clothes
came off, she would immediately apply herself to me, with precision, without pause, as if deactivating a ticking bomb. On the rare occasions when she had allowed me to get inside her, she had
insisted on keeping the lights on and staying beneath me, her blue eyes fixed on my face. A few times, at the beginning, in the heat of the moment, I had tried to wrestle her on top of me, to give
her more control, to fully appreciate the weight of her breasts, but she had always climbed off right away; and once, when I’d tried to stay beneath her body for a few seconds, she had
abruptly jumped out of bed and run off to the bathroom – to return a few minutes later, her eyes red from crying. On that occasion I’d asked her what was wrong. Nothing, she’d
said. But ever since that day, I always followed Lena’s lead, her tempo, her moves, adapting my own expectations to whatever she was in the mood for – afraid to cross a line that, I
suspected, originated in some obscure episode of her life.

I circled the word compassion in my notebook and dropped the pen. I turned to Lena, grabbed her golden cross. ‘What’s this?’

‘From grandmother.’

‘Beautiful.’ I found Orthodox crosses aesthetically interesting, the slanted lower crossbeam breaking the symmetry of the design.

‘Do you believe in God?’ Lena asked, staring at the ceiling.

I was aware of Lena’s spiritual side, but it had never occurred to me to raise the question myself.

‘No, I don’t,’ I said. ‘You?’

She thought about it for a few moments, as if she were considering God’s existence for the first time. Then she turned to me. ‘I believe there is good and there is evil.’

‘What about God?’ I said. ‘You know, the all-powerful creator.’ I extended my arm and grabbed the New Testament from the pile of books on her bedside table. ‘The
God from your Bible.’

‘There is no God,’ Lena said. ‘The Bible is a beautiful fairy tale – a skazka.’

‘Why do you wear the cross then?’

‘You don’t need to believe in God to be a good Christian.’

I dropped the New Testament next to the pillow, leaned over Lena’s body, kissed her stomach, then her breasts. ‘A good Christian?’ I said.

Lena burrowed her fingers in my hair. ‘I believe in the values of Christianity as preserved by the Russian Orthodox Church. I believe in forgiveness, in compassion, in
resurrection.’

My tongue was now toying with her nipples. ‘If you ask me,’ I said, looking up, ‘I find resurrection the weakest part of the Gospels. You know, coming back from the dead. Bit
of a stretch, don’t you think?’

‘You shouldn’t mock this,’ Lena said, now placing her hand over the New Testament. Like most of her books, the volume was encrusted with plenty of bookmarks. ‘It gives my
life a sense of direction. Trying to be good is a daily struggle.’

I kept playing with her breasts.

‘Resurrection,’ she continued, ‘is of course a metaphor. Flesh is flesh, when it dies, it dies. But a dead soul can return to life. Bad deeds can be redeemed.’

My lips caressing her skin, I glanced up at her face. ‘What about Yeshua?’

‘Yeshua?’ she said.

‘Christ, you know, Jesus. Yeshua, like in
The Master and Margarita
.’

‘I think the Gospels are beautiful.’

‘But you can’t believe they actually happened.’

‘I don’t. The New Testament was written by men. But I think Christ, the historical figure, must have been an incredible man who walked the Earth with a beautiful message. I believe
in the message.’

Trying to keep her exact words in my head, I turned over and reached for my red notebook. These were the kind of thoughts I could find a use for in my research.

‘Leave your notebook,’ Lena said. ‘Please.’

Lena didn’t like my notebooks. When I began carrying them around, I’d tried to explain how it was important for me to understand her way of seeing the world so that I could compare
her views with those of literary heroines. I’d thought she would feel proud to be useful, to take part in my research. But instead, she had developed an unexplained aversion towards my
notebooks, and I could feel, every time I took one of them out of my backpack, that she didn’t appreciate my taking notes.

‘I just want to write something quickly,’ I said, looking for a blank page.

With sudden violence, Lena ripped the notebook from my hands, and threw it into the air. The red notebook flew across the room, hit the wall, and landed on the other bed, next to a pile of dirty
clothes.

I didn’t know what to say.

‘Martin, right now you are with me.’

It was often the case that I couldn’t make much sense of Lena’s actions. I decided to let it go and move on. I kissed her lips, caressed her hair, and tried to continue with our
conversation.

‘I don’t think you need any bible to tell you what’s good and what’s bad,’ I said. ‘If you are a good person, you don’t need religion.’

‘And how do I know I’m a good person?’

‘You are,’ I smiled. ‘Trust me.’

‘I don’t know if I’m a good person, really. That’s why I need to search.’

‘Search for what?’

She didn’t answer.

I pushed my body against hers, kissed her neck, her ear. She didn’t react. Her eyes were moist.

‘For chrissake, Lena, why can’t you just enjoy life as it is?’

‘Because,’ she said softly, ‘without the search, life is a lonely and meaningless thing.’

Those were her exact words – a lonely and meaningless thing. I know because, later that night, I wrote them down in my mistreated notebook.

And now, so many years later, the smell of incense still brings me back to Lena’s room in the kommunalka – the piles of clothes, the old bed, the worn books – and I feel an
emptiness in my chest because life since hasn’t been anything like so complete, so full of promise, so void of pain, and, even if I didn’t know it, back then I could extend my arms,
reach out, and almost touch happiness.

I
N
1900, A
NTON
P
AVLOVICH
Chekhov, by that time very sick and living in Yalta, wrote a play about three
sisters who were stuck in a provincial shithole and spent their days dreaming about moving back to Moscow.
Three Sisters: A Drama in Four Acts
is not a story of sweeping mad love or
tragedy. It’s about boredom and dullness and the futility of pursuing happiness.

Olya, Masha and Irina live in a small town, absorbed in the insignificant tasks of daily life, watching time pass by, reminiscing about a happier past and dreaming about a brighter future. For
the three sisters, who feel they don’t belong in the provinces, there is only one way out of their dull existence: Moscow.

Moscow is the place where they could be happy again.

The three sisters, each in their twenties, had left Moscow eleven years earlier, when their father – a general, now dead – had been awarded the command of a regiment in the
provinces. They have a brother, Andrey Sergeyevich, who plans to return to Moscow to become a university professor, taking his sisters with him.

At the beginning of the play, Irina, the youngest, is radiant and hopeful. While her older sisters can’t help being moody, Irina’s dreams infuse her naive soul with endless optimism.
It’s in Moscow, she believes, that she will find true love and they will all be happy.

To the great disappointment of the three sisters, their Moscow plans never seem to take off. As the play advances and the sisters begin to understand that they might be stuck in the provinces,
Moscow becomes less real, more ethereal. A spiritual aspiration.

Moscow represents where they want to be, both the past and the future. Moscow is everywhere, except here and now.

In
Three Sisters
, Anton Pavlovich exposes the very human weakness of believing that both the past and the future are better places to be. And holding on to the illusion that things will
get better is our way of coping with life’s dullness.

A series of visitors, mostly military officers from the battalion in town, come to see the three sisters. Among them is Vershinin, a colonel, who at the beginning of the play has just arrived
from Moscow and impresses the sisters with his sophistication.

Masha, the second sister, married at eighteen, is now bored of her husband. Whining about her life, she says that if only she lived in Moscow she would not even care about the weather. In
response, Vershinin tells her the story of a French political prisoner who writes with passion about the birds he sees from the window of his cell, the same birds he never noticed when he was a
free man. In the same way, Vershinin tells Masha, you will not notice Moscow once you live there again. We want happiness, he concludes, but we are not happy and we cannot be happy.

Masha, deeply impressed, starts an affair with Vershinin.

Irina talks about finding meaning in life through labour. But when she starts work at the local telegraph office she realises her life has no more meaning than before. Time goes by and Irina,
too, loses her spark, drifting into ennui. As the dream of Moscow evaporates, she accepts her sudba and agrees to marry an officer she doesn’t love.

At one point, Masha realises that she can hardly remember the face of her dead mother. Their own mother, who died young and is buried in Moscow, is being forgotten. And we will all be forgotten
one day, Masha says. Yes, Vershinin replies, they will forget us. That’s our destiny, our sudba: things that we believe serious, meaningful, very important, there will come a time when they
will be forgotten or will seem unimportant.

At the end of the play the local battalion moves out of town and Vershinin has to leave with the other officers. Masha returns to her husband, who accepts her back despite his knowledge of the
affair. This being Chekhov, there is no judgement, no punishment.

The sisters realise they will never go back to Moscow. They will grow old in the provinces. And they accept their destiny – settling for less than they had hoped for.

If life has meaning, it’s not something within the grasp of Chekhov’s characters. They are imperfectly human, shortsighted, and yet fully aware of their own insignificance. Life is a
succession of dull moments, sometimes interrupted by short bursts of joy, always full of irrelevant thoughts that keep us distracted as we get older, dreaming of better lives but gradually
accepting the unimportance of our own existence.

Then, one day, we die and everything is forgotten.

R
USSIA CHANGED FAST DURING
the first months of my stay. On the last day of the year, as the world prepared hysterical celebrations for the arrival of a
new millennium, Russia’s president – widely regarded as an endearing old man with a drinking problem – went on national TV and, to everybody’s surprise, announced he was
resigning from office. As successor, he appointed the latest of his many prime ministers, a relatively unknown politician with an obscure background in the secret services.

At first, Muscovites didn’t seem to give much significance to this. ‘Nothing will change,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna had told me when we resumed our language classes after the
holiday break. ‘They are all thieves anyway.’

But things did change. In fact, it seemed to me that the country had entered a new era.

By early spring everyone had stopped talking about the economic crisis. TV news, which I watched often to exercise my comprehension skills, showed endless footage of the new president, looking
young and sober. We could see him every night on the news, practising judo, riding a horse, reprimanding under-performing ministers or winning, pretty much single-handedly, a nasty war in the
Caucasus. According to the national media, Russia was now doing great. Overnight, the country had become rich, confident and assertive.

These changes were quickly reflected in Moscow’s clubbing scene. The city entered the elitni era. A new club opened every weekend, each more select than the last. Nightlife was no longer
the exclusive realm of dyevs and expats. Russian oligarchs began to show up at the doors of the latest elitni clubs, first in limousines with tinted windows, then in black humvees, always
accompanied by an entourage of drivers, okhrannikis and whores.

The nightlife crowd became known as the tusovka, each of us a tusovschik. For some reason that was never explained to me, it was around this time that cafés and clubs began to serve sushi
or, rather, a local version of the Japanese delicacy, which in Moscow included plenty of cream cheese, smetana and dill. To keep up with the trend, the tusovka had to learn to use chopsticks.

Elitni clubs came with their own elitni sections, cordoned-off VIP areas, which were only accessible if you spent a few hundred dollars on champagne. It soon became hard for us, humble expats,
to get into these clubs. We would be turned away at the door by bouncers who spoke no English and didn’t care that we did.

But we didn’t give up. We, determined Westerners, who had won the Cold War by standing for decades against Russian bullying, were not about to accept defeat without putting up a fight. So
now, when out with the brothers, we would always try to make it into the latest of elitini clubs, many of which were no longer called clubs but ‘projects’. Sure, we had to adapt to our
new status, make a few concessions, adopt a less prominent profile. We would now ask our taxi driver to drop us round the corner, as the sight of a crumbling zhiguli would instantly kill our
chances of passing face control. We would approach the front door of the club in small groups, walking purposefully, radiating self-confidence, barely acknowledging the bouncer, looking as wealthy
and as Russian as we could.