Snowdrops (10 page)

An hour or so later we were sitting abreast on the sofa in the warmed-up dacha, eating barbecued lamb with flat Armenian bread and a hot Georgian pomegranate sauce,
drinking snow-chilled vodka from chipped shot glasses, chased down with beer. Masha's hair was down over her shoulders. They both ate with the quiet intent opportunism that Russians seem to inherit.

"I like your friend," Katya said.

"What friend?"

"At club. At Rasputin. Friend who help us."

"He's not my friend," I said.

"Maybe he should be your friend," Masha said. "He is useful person."

She smiled, though I don't think she was joking. I liked her frankness. But I didn't want to talk about the Cossack.

"Who is Anya?" I asked them.

"Who?" said Katya.

"The girl whose grandfather owns this dacha."

"Her grandfather has dacha from time he work for railway," Katya explained. "Railway owned all this land and gave everybody piece. But he never come and Anya live now in Nizhny Novgorod. I think maybe grandfather is dead. She also is our sister."

"You have another sister?"

They smiled. They thought about it.

"You know, Kolya," said Masha, "in Russian this word 'sister' means not only daughter of your parents. It also can mean daughter of parents' brother or sister. I think in English you have one other word for sister of this type?"

"Cousin," I said. "I didn't know that."

"Da,"
Masha said. "Cousin."

"And what kind of sister is Katya?" I asked.

"She is also cousin," said Masha, after a pause.

"Yes," said Katya, her cheeks flushed from the sauce and the vodka, "I am cousin." She licked up the last traces from her hands.

"Are your family also in Murmansk? With Masha's mother?"

"I think yes," Katya said. "Yes, in Murmansk."

Not sisters, then. Not quite everything I thought they were. For the first time, with them, I felt like I sometimes did when it dawned on me that a Moscow taxi driver was drunk or mad, and I sat fingering the door handle in the back of his car and contemplating when to leap out, all the time knowing that in fact I wouldn't. I never did.

I might have asked more about their family, and how they were all related, but Masha put down her plate and said, "Let's go,
banya
is ready."

T
HE OUTHOUSE HAD
a tiny greasy anteroom, about the size of a large wardrobe, with a couple of hooks on the wall and a hatch for the stove into which Katya fed a couple more logs. We stood there for a few seconds, like we were strangers thrust together in a refrigerated lift. Then we took
off our clothes, arses and elbows bumping and rubbing. They were both wearing G-strings--my impression is that unmarried Russian women are obliged to wear them by law--frilly pink for Katya with a matching bra, I can't remember Masha's. They took those off too. I pulled off the posh boxer shorts I'd chosen with such care, and put my glasses into one of my winter boots. "Okay," Masha said, "hurry!" and we darted into the heat before it could escape.

It had none of the amenities--the lemon tea, the savage masseurs, the hushed conversation of powerful hairy men--that you get in the upscale Moscow places I sometimes went to with Paolo. But this is definitely the
banya
that I remember best. There was a rough homemade bench, and one window that let in the fading light from outside. In the wall opposite the window was a metal plate that formed the back of the stove: to make steam you threw water from a little bucket against the metal. It was already impossibly hot. We sat down on the bench, trying to keep our feet off the roasting floor. I was in the hottest seat, nearest to the stove, Katya was in the half-lit spot by the window. It was one of those situations when you try not to look, and fail, and console yourself that probably you were supposed to. She had mannequin-firm breasts, bigger than Masha's, and she wasn't a real blonde.

We sat skin to skin, our sweat running together and pooling on the floor.

"So, Kolya," said Katya, "what do you think from Butovo? As home for Tatiana Vladimirovna."

"I thought it was very nice."

"I am not sure," said Masha, her long legs just visible but her face in the dark. "It is far away. Maybe I like old apartment of Tatiana Vladimirovna more."

"But if she want to go to Butovo," said Katya, "maybe you help her, Kolya. I mean papers. Legal things. Papers for old apartment that Stepan Mikhailovich may need. She is old Soviet woman and does not understand."

It was hard to talk, the hot air rushing in and scalding the back of my throat when I opened my mouth, and I just said, "Yes."

We baked for maybe twenty minutes. I was already dizzy from the vodka and wanted to leave after about five, but I didn't want to be the first to quit. Finally Masha said, "Now we wash."

"How do we wash?"

"In snow," said Katya.

"We jump in snow," said Masha.

"Isn't that dangerous? You know," I gasped, gesturing at my chest in the murk, "for the heart."

"Life is dangerous," said Masha, dripping an arm around me. "No one survived it yet."

We slipped out on the sweaty floor and closed the door. We went straight through the anteroom. Masha and Katya dived giggling and facedown into a patch of deep
untouched snow by the back fence, under a heavy pine tree. I shivered for about three seconds and jumped after them.

It felt as if I'd been slapped all over, or stung by a thousand bees, but in a good way, the snow killing the heat of the
banya
in an arrested heartbeat. More than that, it felt as if I'd done something reckless, like a high dive or a train robbery, and lived through it. The tingly pain proved that I was alive, every inch of me was alive, more alive than ever.

That's the truth about the Russians that I missed until it was too late. The Russians will do the impossible thing--the thing you think they can't do, the thing you haven't even thought of. They will set fire to Moscow when the French are coming or poison each other in foreign cities. They will do it, and afterwards they will behave as if nothing has happened at all. And if you stay in Russia long enough, so will you.

When we stood up I looked down into the snow, now dull but luminous in the darkness, and to my weak glasses-less eyes the hollow that Masha's body had made looked like the shape of an angel. We ran back into the outhouse, our feet numbing, ice forming in our hair. Katya snatched up her stuff and ran out naked again up to the dacha. I picked up my boots, but Masha took them from me, dropped them, and led me back into the heat.

"Did you have a
banya
in Murmansk?" I asked her. I could barely see her anymore through the scorching gloom.

"Yes," she said, and that was all she said.

She felt strange at first, cold like a corpse from the snow almost everywhere except her mouth, but wet and electric. She was my private oblivion, my personal avalanche in the thin air of the
banya
. She blotted out, for those minutes, the creepy Cossack, the waste of my thirties, and all my doubts.

I
WOKE UP
during the night with absolutely no idea where I was. I remember calming myself with the thought that I was in my bed in Birmingham, in the last student house I lived in, on one of the rougher streets in Edgbaston. Then I saw Masha asleep alongside me, underneath the worn covers in the narrow attic bed. The fine blond hairs on the knots of her spine glowed in the moonlight from the window, like a love letter written on her body in invisible ink.

I needed to piss, the nocturnal weakness that ambushed me in my mid-thirties--an early signpost to the grave, if you stop to think about it, like the new and upsetting head-crushing hangovers of your twenties. I creaked down the stairs in my boxer shorts, passed Katya sleeping on the sofa, put on my boots and coat and waddled outside. I pissed, and saw the animal warmth of myself melting the deep snow in front of me. By the moonlight I could make out
the submerged green leaves at the bottom of the hole I had cut in the whiteness.

When I think back now, writing this, about my lost years in Moscow, despite everything that happened and everything I did, I still look back on that night as my happiest time, the time I would always go back to if I could.

Now and again, when I was in Moscow, I would hear in the street or through a window--or think I'd hear--a sound like the distinctive screech black London cabs make when they brake for a speed bump or to go round a corner. Now and again I would have liked someone to apologise to me when I stepped on their foot in the Metro, like people do on the Tube. On the basis of those reflexes I guess you might say that part of me missed England. I did sometimes wish I could decompress, just for an hour or so, in its law-abiding, unhectic familiarity. But the feeling was never enough for me to want to move back, not even at the end. London and Luton weren't really home anymore.

On Christmas Eve that winter I was driven out to Domodedovo Airport, through the grey slush, by a driver keen to share his scientific proof that Russian women were the best looking in the world, with the possible exception of Venezuelans. The theory, I remember, had something to do with how few men there had been left in Russia after the war, and how they'd had their pick of the abundant girls, who in turn had given birth to beautiful daughters, and so on ... Someone important must have been on the move because the streets were temporarily barricaded by police cars, and we got stuck beneath the snowy outstretched arm of the Lenin statue at Oktyabrskaya. The ice on the reservoir was blotchy with fishermen sitting next to the holes they had cut in it. At the airport, as my passport was stamped, I felt the lightness everyone always feels, even if they love Moscow--the lifting of the weight of rude shopkeepers and predatory police and impossible weather--the lightness of leaving Russia.

When we reached London, it was already dark. From the air, the lights flashing along the roads and down the river and blazing in the football stadiums seemed to be putting on their electric show just for me, in my honour, the conquering corporate-law hero.

Three hours later, in my parents' Luton semi, I was howling on the inside and knocking back my father's supermarket-brand Scotch. They always make an effort, but you know what they're like--it somehow manages to
be claustrophobic and lonely at the same time. I arrived before the others and slept in the bedroom I shared with my brother until he went to university. My mum said again that she wanted to visit me, she wanted to see St. Petersburg, and how was the beginning of March? Cold, I told her, still very cold. My father's back was playing up, but he tried, I could see that, asking me how work was going and whether the Russian president was as bad as they said in the papers. I don't know why he always seemed so disappointed with me underneath. It might have been a moral thing, because I did a job that was more about money than making the world a better place. Or it might have been the opposite, and me and Moscow and the money I was earning reminded him of everything he'd never done and never would do himself.

On Christmas day my brother came in from Reading with his wife and their children, William (the one who pinched your iPod at my dad's seventieth) and Thomas, and my sister came up from London, alone. We gave each other the usual, impersonally practical presents--socks and scarves and I-give-up John Lewis vouchers. I'd brought Russian dolls and furry hats for the kids and picked up the rest in duty free.

It could have been nice. There was no reason for it not to be nice. It was just that we'd gone separate ways and lost each other, leaving nothing much in common besides a couple of soft-focus anecdotes, featuring donkey rides and
ice cream overdoses, that you've heard a dozen times, plus some old irritations that flare up like a phantom itch when we get together. The children had once felt like a second chance, for my brother and me, at least, but they let us down. We ate the turkey and said how moist it was, and lit up the Christmas pudding for the boys, then moved to the chintz sofas in the lounge wearing lopsided paper hats, persevering in the sort of dutiful drinking more likely to result in murder than authentic merriment.

We had a lively exchange about the new parking restrictions in the town centre, and a ritual disagreement about whether we should watch the Queen's Christmas message, as my father always wanted to. When my phone rang it was like hearing the all-clear in a bomb shelter.

"How is England, Kolya?" I felt giddy, elated, like I might be sick.

"Fine. Okay. How is Moscow?"

"Moscow is Moscow," Masha said. "Bad roads and many fools. I am missing you. When I am in shop I think about you. At night I also think about you, Kolya."

"Sekundochku,"
I said: "just a second" in Russian, a bit of automatic camouflage that was doubtless more incriminating than talking in English. I rushed out of the room as though I'd been called by a teenage girlfriend. I went into the kitchen, where my mother had pinned her offspring's phone numbers to the fridge with a magnet from Durham
Cathedral. On the windowsill was a Christmas television guide, in which she'd put tragic little asterisks next to the programmes she wanted to watch. I'd been sucked, as I always was, into the time warp of family, the instant rewind that takes you back to the roles you've grown out of.

"I'm thinking about you too," I said. "I've told my family about you, Masha." The second bit wasn't true, I just thought it was something she'd like to hear. But the first part was. I was already thinking of her and me as real life, and the rest as somehow distant and less important. I wanted to tell her about whatever had happened to me, as if somehow without her knowing about it, it hadn't really happened. Do you know what I mean?

I asked her about Katya, and her mother in Murmansk, and about Tatiana Vladimirovna.

"Listen, Kolya," she said, "maybe you will bring something for Tatiana Vladimirovna, something for New Year. I think maybe she is not receiving so many presents."