Snowdrops (15 page)

"What else do we need?" I asked Olga.

"Now you only need the transfer document from the property registration department. And the old lady needs to be examined by a doctor to prove she is not drunk or insane."

This was necessary, Olga explained, because sometimes Russians sold their flats, but claimed a few months later that they'd been sozzled or high or deranged at the time of the transaction, and on that basis got the sale annulled and their apartment back. Or else some long-lost nephew turned up and claimed those things for them. In a Russian court you could prove anything for the right fee, but a certificate from a clinic would make it harder for anyone to try it on, she said.

I told Olga she was an angel.

"Not such an angel," she said, but she sounded more sad than flirtatious.

"What about the Butovo flat?"

"For the other apartment," she said, "there is also some
progress. The building has been constructed legally on the territory of the Moscow city government. In the old lady's unit, number twenty-three, no one else is registered to live. It is connected to the city drainage system and to the electricity network. The owner is a company called MosStroiInvest."

I said I thought Stepan Mikhailovich owned the apartment.

"Maybe this MosStroiInvest is his company," Olga said.

She held the forms above my head like bait. "So, when do we go for cocktails?"

I thought of something Paolo had said to me soon after I arrived in Moscow. He said he had some bad news to tell me about being a lawyer in Russia, but also some good news. The bad news was that there were a zillion pointless, unintelligible, and contradictory laws. The good news was that you weren't expected to obey them. I was sure there would be a way around MosStroiInvest.

"Soon," I said, reaching up to take the papers.

Sergei Borisovich the potato face had come back from his winter holiday in Thailand, I remember, and he made us all watch a PowerPoint presentation of his photos. We were feeling virtuous, businesswise at least: we'd signed off the second instalment of the Cossack's loan and, according to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor, at the current rate of engineering progress he'd soon be entitled to the
rest of it. The Cossack had sent us a crate of live crabs (from the sea around the new terminal, he said). When I looked out of my window in the tower I could see a flock of snow scrapers in orange overalls clearing the white rooftops on the other sides of the square, crawling along the inclines and reaching perilously into the gutters.

T
HE CENTRAL HEATING
had baked my bedroom. I'd opened a window to let in some cold air and drawn the weird ruched curtains. Masha was on top, her fists scrunched into my chest, looking past my head and into the wall, breathing and concentrating like a middle-distance runner.

I hadn't seen her for more than a week. I'd been ill, and I thought she might have been away for a few days--her phone had been switching straight to voice mail--though she denied it when I asked her. I suddenly remembered what Olga had told me and worried and wanted to find out.

"What is MosStroiInvest, Masha?"

"What?"

"What is MosStroiInvest?"

"What?" She stopped her rocking and arching but she was still panting. "I don't know," she said.

"It's the company that owns the apartment in Butovo, Masha," I said. "The one for Tatiana Vladimirovna."

She rolled off. She lay on her back next to me, looking
up with me at the hieroglyphic lines on my ceiling. No part of us was touching anymore.

"MosStroiInvest ... I think it is company of Stepan Mikhailovich. Or of--how you say it?--the husband of one sister of Stepan Mikhailovich."

"Brother-in-law."

"Yes, company of his brother-in-law. Yes, I think this is name of company. Yes, MosStroiInvest."

"It is better to be certain," I said, "because otherwise there may be problems for Tatiana Vladimirovna." There were lots of problems with Russian developers in those days. Sometimes they sold all the flats in a building, disappeared before it was finished, and the buyers built protest camps and set fire to themselves outside the government headquarters in the White House, up near the Hotel Ukraina.

Masha thought about it, her face turned away from me and into the pillow. Her neck was flushed. My fingers had made red imprints on her rib cage.

"There will be no problems," she said. She rolled onto her side so she was facing me, took one of my hands in both of hers, above and below, and looked into my eyes. Her eyes were jungle green. Her skin looked young but her flesh was tough, taut and muscled like a dancer's or a fighter's. "And, Kolya," she said, more cold than tender, "we ask you only to prepare papers for Tatiana Vladimirovna for selling her apartment. These other papers for Butovo, Stepan Mikhailovich will make. It is not needed for you to
worry. We have all these papers already. For you it is necessary only to tell Tatiana Vladimirovna that all papers are in order. You must tell her this, Kolya."

I said nothing. She touched me.

"Come back," I said. That was all, but we both knew what it meant. I'd chosen to believe her. I'd taken her side.

"Okay," she said, and she came back.

She is a special person, Masha. I have to tell you that. All that focus and self-control. I'm sure she could have been a great surgeon. Or maybe, in a different century, a champion nun. Or an actress--she would have made a great actress. She
was
a great actress.

P
EOPLE WERE SKATING
on the deep-frozen pond the next time I went round the Bulvar to Chistie Prudy. There was a man leaving Tatiana Vladimirovna's flat as I arrived, a man I didn't recognise. He was fortyish, slick looking, wearing a top-notch suede coat. Banker, I thought immediately. He had a signet ring on one of his little fingers and looked like he'd recently had an expensive haircut. He smelled of money. Katya was flirting with him as he tried to leave, smiling and twisting and sticking out her tits. The man said "good evening" to me in Russian, turned up the collar of his coat, and left. He didn't look to me like the sort of man who could have had a reason to visit Tatiana Vladimirovna.

"Who was that?" I asked as I took off my boots.

"I don't know," said Katya, and laughed.

Straightaway Masha slid across the parquet in her socks, grabbed us both by the hand, and said, "Guys, come to eat some blinis!"

The Russians were celebrating Maslenitsa, a half-pagan February festival, something to do with Lent, something allegedly to do with the end of winter, when the church bells ring and you eat pancakes. The three of us perched at the edges of Tatiana Vladimirovna's kitchen, eating blinis with sour cream and red caviar. The kitchen windows were sealed against their frames with masking tape to keep out the chill--an old Siberian habit, I imagined, that she couldn't quite shake off. There were toasts.

"I have almost all the documents for this flat," I told Tatiana Vladimirovna.

"Huge thanks," she said, and kissed me on both cheeks.

"And Kolya is also preparing all the papers for your new apartment in Butovo," Masha added, talking to her but looking at me.

"Excellent," said Tatiana Vladimirovna.

I smiled and chose to say nothing.

"I want you to meet my mother, Masha."

"What?"

"My mother is coming to Russia next week. I am meeting her in St. Petersburg on Thursday and bringing her back to Moscow on Saturday. She's staying here 'til Tuesday. I want you to meet her, Masha."

"Why?"

I don't know why. I wanted you to meet her too, eventually, so you could see what you were signing up for (though I know you've never quite understood why her pettiness gets to me so much, which I guess is often the way with other people's parents). But that wasn't it with Masha. She never
asked very much about my family, and I don't think I ever imagined a setup in which both she and my parents featured prominently. Partly I think I wanted to show her off, to show my mum how complete my Russian life was without her and everyone else. Maybe partly I was trying to reassure her, offering Masha up as a witness to my contentment, and therefore to her moderate success as a parent. Or maybe I wanted and expected Masha to wear or say or drink the wrong thing, to do the work of anger and insult that I didn't have the stomach for myself. Perhaps I was even trying somehow to contaminate my mum with it, the stain that I darkly knew was coming. I think to Masha I was trying to say, look, no secrets, this is where I come from, come in, and at the same time, don't worry, this is not me anymore, I've crossed over, look how far I've come.

"Only for an hour, Masha," I said. "Please. It will be nothing."

"Okay, Kolya," she said, "I will meet your mother."

"Thank you. I owe you one, Masha."

"Okay."

I
DOUBT SHE
really wanted to come. I think she must have experienced some late spasm of motherly anxiety, or at least of the feeling that she was supposed to be anxious. It may have been brought on by the thrum of bad news that was starting to beat out of Russia--the bombing on
the Metro, the mysterious pipeline explosions, and the thing with the ex-finance minister's helicopter. I wished some parallel, grown-up Nick and Rosemary could have talked about it honestly, said they loved each other in their way but agreed that it would be too much--five days, one hundred and twenty hours--with too little to say and at the same time much too much if we dared or bothered. But they didn't, and at the beginning of March, she came: my mother came to visit.

I waited for her at the airport in St. Petersburg. It always looks, don't you think, like a lovely little moment of grace, the moment when you see a crew of happy strangers walking through arrivals, having flown through the air and landed alive--and at the same time somehow enviable and painful, the way they embrace their relatives, sometimes cry, then link arms and turn back to lives you know nothing about. Eventually my mother came through with the other British tourists. We kissed each other awkwardly, like politicians at a summit, and I found a taxi driver to take us into town. He was a retired army colonel, he told me, when I chatted with him on the way. He said he had a nice line in knockoff army clothing if I ever wanted some.

I'd booked us into a hotel at the wrong end of Nevsky Prospekt--one of those city-sized Soviet hotels with a thousand rooms, a bowling alley, a casino, an empty cafe on each floor, and a brothel in the basement. The house prostitutes were chatting around the coffee tables in the foyer
when we arrived. The front desk made me pay for both nights up front, a sensible precaution considering the state of the rooms (electricity cords looping across the ceilings like telegraph wire, and in the bathrooms no sinks and suspiciously damp brown carpet). My mum said she was tired, so we ate in the hotel. She made me ask whether the salmon on the menu was fresh: the waitress said it "had only been frozen once." There was a small posse of third-division mafiosi in the middle of the restaurant and a group of wobbly girls, who the men kept pushing out of their chairs to dance with each other between the tables, bullying the waiters to turn up the music.

When we went to bed, someone kept calling me to ask whether I was bored, and would I like to be introduced to a very beautiful woman? I took the phone off the hook at about three in the morning, and slept until the late milky St. Petersburg dawn--the northern light that makes you feel as if you're sleepwalking after you get up, or that you're already awake when really you're still dreaming.

We spent a day and a half looking at the Rembrandts and gilt in the Hermitage, scurrying along the frozen canals ("I didn't realise it would be
this
cold," my mum said moronically), poking our noses into the yellow, malevolent St. Petersburg courtyards, with their shivering cats and icy piles of rubbish. We nosed obediently around the churches, all besieged by beggars--drunks, crippled soldiers, drunks impersonating soldiers, real uncrippled teenage army conscripts,
who I imagined were working the streets to keep their officers in booze--and filled with icons, incense, woebegone head-scarfed women, and a haze of ancient prejudice. Plus the old addictive high, the crack for the soul that the Russian church seems to push: the idea that life in this hard place could be beautiful.

I told her about my job, about Paolo and a little about the Cossack, but lost her when I tried to explain Narodneft and project finance. She told me she was worried about my father--not his health, she said, or not only his health. She started talking about their own childhoods, hers and my dad's. His father had come back from the navy after the war, she said, but had always been away somewhere in his head, and she thought now that might explain the distance between Dad and my siblings and me. She didn't go any further and I didn't press her. That's how it was between us that weekend: we kept starting conversations that might have led us into confidences or closeness, then steering away just in time. She went on and on about a very cold holiday she'd taken with her parents in Wales in the fifties, and how her father, who was a railwayman and who I never knew, made them all have a picnic in a hailstorm. It snowed as she talked. Her owlish glasses were constantly steaming up. She wore embarrassing boots.

Down by the river, the Winter Palace glowed like a pink hallucination against the early sunset. The Bronze
Horseman had dandruff. I stopped at a kiosk and bought Tatiana Vladimirovna one of those soppy snow globes, with a miniature St. Isaac's Cathedral inside. In a funny way I think I missed her.

"It's a present," I explained. "It's for a woman I know."

"I see," said my mother. She looked at me sideways as we slipped along the pavement ice beside a motionless canal. I could tell she wanted to insinuate something with her look, for it to be an adult moment between us. But she couldn't quite manage it, flustered, and looked away.

"No," I said, "it's for someone called Tatiana Vladimirovna, someone I know who used to live in St. Petersburg."