Snowdrops (17 page)

It took me a while to work it out. Then I said, "When? When will they need it?"

"They must make agreement for day of sale. I think it can be after two or three months. Maybe soon after Odessa."

I'd never bought a house in London. I rented the place that I shared for a while with my old girlfriend (I pointed it out to you once, I think, on the way to a dinner party thrown by that woman from your old agency, I can't remember her name). I hesitated when house prices were on the way up, then decided to wait until they went south. I had quite a lot of money sitting lazily in my bank account, waiting for me to decide what to do with it, what I was
going to do when I grew up. I earned a nice living, more than my parents ever could between them: not a lot by new Russian standards, maybe, but enough so I could spare twenty-five thousand dollars for a few months. I'd lent a bit of money to Russians once or twice before, in fact--a secretary at work, a Siberian girl I met at a party who wanted to buy a motorcycle--and always got it back. I thought I could pick them. With Masha and Katya I told myself that whatever was going on, we were on the same side. Though I think at the same time I was pleased to pay up, even relieved--because it made me useful, but more than that because I think I'd always known there had to be a price, and it had turned out to be only money, at least for me. As for them, I think they asked me for it just because they could, as if it was a sort of moral duty.

Masha said they needed twenty-five thousand dollars for Tatiana Vladimirovna. But it was also twenty-five thousand for that dinner with my mother, and in particular for the upcoming weekend on the beach in Odessa, maybe staying in the same room where Masha had taken the photo of herself in the mirror, almost naked, a picture that I can still see if I close my eyes, like an exiled believer can see a favourite icon.

"Okay," I said. "Tell Stepan Mikhailovich I am ready to lend him the money. Tell him I insist."

"Okay," said Masha.

"Okay," said Katya, and poured.

"To us!" Masha said, and we clinked, her lips moistened by the vodka as it slipped into her, my throat burning and my skin clammy with apprehension, and the thrill my misgivings brought with them.

"I'm not scared," I said.

W
HEN
I
GOT HOME
that evening, I found a smear of blood along the inside walls of my building, running up the stairs at about waist height. Outside one of the doors on the second floor the blood plummeted downwards, as if the person leaning against the wall and leaking it had collapsed there. Underneath there was a little bloody puddle, and next to the puddle a pair of old black shoes, standing neatly parallel to one another with their laces done up.

When I went downstairs in the morning the blood had been washed off the walls, but the shoes were still there. It was one of the alcoholics on the top floor, someone told me later. He fell. It was nothing to worry about, they told me.

At the end of March the brown Moscow snow started to melt, then tried to freeze again when the temperature dipped for a day or two, living on as a nasty ooze
--sliakot
, the Russians call it--from which you almost expect a hairy prehistoric arm to reach out and drag you under. The pavement and curb on the side of my street where the snow was piled up were slowly reappearing, the glacial heaps giving up their territory inch by inch. A single stained headlight emerged from the one in which the lost Zhiguli was buried, winking out like a muddy bloodshot eye.

It was the end of March, or maybe the very beginning of April. We met at Tatiana Vladimirovna's place so she
could sign the preliminary contract papers that I'd prepared, using the power of attorney she'd given me: her place by the pond to be exchanged for the new one in Butovo, plus fifty thousand dollars, on a day in early June. I walked around the Bulvar to her apartment through the afternoon slush. In the underpass at Pushkin Square, I remember, there was an old man playing the accordion with a spaced-out kitten on his lap, but I was hurrying and I didn't give him anything.

I was early. Maybe I was early on purpose, wanting to get there before Katya and Masha without really knowing why. It was only my second time alone with Tatiana Vladimirovna, after those few minutes in the waiting room at the notary, when Katya had got a better offer and left us. It was that afternoon, before the girls showed up, when I found out that she was not and never had been their aunt--not an aunt in English, not in Russian, not an aunt in any language. It was my last chance.

I took off my shoes. She'd already started to pack. Cardboard boxes were stacked along the parquet of the corridor, unsealed and stuffed with papers and trinkets (the arm of a candelabra stuck out of one of them, like a cadaver's arm from a coffin), plus one or two of those enormous patterned bags that you see immigrants lugging around airports. But in the lounge nothing seemed to have been touched yet. The photos of her lithe Stalinist self and her dead husband, the musty encyclopaedias, and the
medieval telephone still sat there like exhibits in a "how they used to live" museum, along with my bus-shaped box of English tea. The phantasmagoric animals watched me from across the pond through the soup of an afternoon. Tatiana Vladimirovna brought tea and jam.

I gave her the corny cathedral snow globe I'd bought for her in St. Petersburg. She smiled like a baby, then kissed me and put it on the desk in between the telephone and the photograph of her husband.

She asked me whether I liked St. Petersburg. The truth was that I'd found it stressful and vaguely spooky, but I white-lied and said I did, it was very beautiful, the most beautiful city in the world. I can't now remember whether I prompted her, or whether she just started on her own, the conversation receding naturally from my visit to her past, but that day we talked about the siege.

She said that when she thought about Leningrad now, it was always cold and always snowing--she looked over at my gift and smiled--though she knew that some of the time she was there it must have been summer and hot and light. Of course, she said, St. Isaac's wasn't a cathedral then. The communists had turned it into a museum of atheism, or a swimming pool, she couldn't remember which, she must be losing her mind.

"Everything," she said, "was turned upside down. At first we listened to the radio and it told us we were heroes, and that Leningrad was a hero city, and we felt like heroes.
But then people became animals, do you understand? And all other animals were food. We had a dog, he was only a little dog, and we hid him from the other people. But he died anyway, and in the end we ate him ourselves. It would have been better to eat him when he was fat!"

She laughed, a short, fierce Russian laugh.

"The richest people were the people who had the most books," she said. "They burned them, do you understand?"

"Yes," I said, though of course I didn't.

"Books were for burning. Dogs were for eating. Horses were for eating, sometimes when they were still alive. They fell down in the street and people ran with knives. Boots and shoes were for making soup."

She paused, sort of swallowed, always trying to smile.

"I was in a basement ... I remember after the war, in the children's camp, they gave me an ice cream. They told me I was lucky."

I said, "Would you really like to go back to St. Petersburg?"

"Maybe." She closed her eyes for about five seconds, then opened them. "No."

I asked whether Masha and Katya's family had been in Leningrad with her during the siege.

"I don't know," she said. "There were many people in Leningrad. More at the beginning, of course."

"Didn't you live together?"

"What?"

"I thought you might have lived together?"

"Why would we have lived together?"

"Because you were family."

"Family? No, they are not my family."

Yes, I was surprised, though maybe not altogether surprised. But in that moment I chose to hide it. I chose to turn my last chance down.

"I'm sorry, Tatiana Vladimirovna," I said. "I made a mistake. I thought you were their aunt."

"Their aunt? No," Tatiana Vladimirovna said, shaking her head but smiling, "I don't have any family now. Nobody." She looked away from me and rocked slightly in her seat.

"How do you know them, then?" I asked her as calmly as I could. I didn't want to alarm her but I wanted to know the facts. "How do you know Katya and Masha?"

"It was very strange," she said, shifting her buttocks on the sofa like she was settling in for a long and gripping story. "I met them on the Metro."

I
'LL COME BACK
to Tatiana Vladimirovna, I promise, but I want to flash forward again, just by a few hours. I want to tell you what happened later that day. I think it will help you to understand the way I was behaving. Assuming you want to understand. It helps
me:
looking back, the two
meetings feel part of the same event, one little revelation spread over an afternoon and evening.

After we left Tatiana Vladimirovna's, I went with Paolo to meet Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor and the Cossack. It was a Sunday, I think, but we needed to see them urgently. The banks were due to release the last and biggest tranche of the loan the next day: two hundred and fifty million dollars, give or take the odd million. The Cossack invited us to an office building on the embankment, near the old British embassy and across the river from the flesh-coloured walls of the Kremlin. It wasn't his office, we found out later. I doubt the Cossack even had an office then. He just had a Hummer, his chutzpah, and his
krisha
.

We went up in a mirror-walled lift to the third or fourth floor, to a room with an imposing conference table and windows overlooking the river. It was late afternoon and gloomy, but you could see how down below the ice on the river was buckling and cracking, great plates of it rubbing and jostling each other as the water shrugged it off, a vast snake sloughing off its skin. Down along the embankment the yellow and grey buildings disappeared into the dirty sky, the lights of the upper windows flashing out of the murk like low-flying UFOs.

There was vodka (plus some black bread and pickles, for the sake of appearances).

"Something to drink?" said the Cossack, heading for the sideboard.

"Just one," Paolo said.

"Okay," I said.

"No thanks," said Vyacheslav Alexandrovich.

Paolo knew him from the previous time he'd worked with us, but I'd only met him once before, at the beginning of the winter, when we signed him up for the oil terminal job. He was a short, pale man, with thick hair, thick Soviet glasses, and worried eyes. I suppose if you wanted to you could say he looked like a sort of compressed or stunted version of me. His suit smelled of cigarettes and Brezhnev. I remember he had scrunched-up bits of cotton wool plugged into his ears, a precaution some superstitious Russians take if they go outside when they have a cold.

The vodka bottle was shaped like a Kalashnikov. The Cossack picked it up by the butt and poured four large shots. When he held my glass out towards me, I saw that his cuff links were miniature dollar bills.

"Something to drink," he said to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich, telling him, not asking, as he gave him the glass he hadn't wanted.

"To us!" said the Cossack, knocking his back in one, then wiping his mouth on the back of his funeral-black sleeve. Paolo and I clinked and drank. It was top quality, smooth, no after burn, almost no taste.

Vyacheslav Alexandrovich took a sip and smiled thinly.

"Drink it," said the Cossack, not smiling.

Vyacheslav Alexandrovich took a deep breath, like a
diver going under, and downed it. Afterwards he gasped, his mole eyes blinking and watering behind his glasses.

The Cossack laughed and slapped him on the back. They must have been about the same height, but the Cossack had a heavy prison-weight-lifter build, and Vyacheslav Alexandrovich was all slouch and paunch, with one of those ill-fitting bodies that are somehow fat and skinny at the same time. He shot forward, then steadied himself and tried to smile again.

"Well done," said the Cossack. "So, let's sit down."

We were there to certify the papers the banks needed before they could write the final cheque or push the money-transfer button. We each had laminated copies of the letters of assurance from the Arctic regional governor. We had those promises of high-volume oil deliveries from Narodneft. The banks had their political risk insurance and our comforting book-length contract. But we needed Vyacheslav Alexandrovich's latest progress report.

I took notes. Everyone else smoked, Vyacheslav Alexandrovich inhaling in a hurry but looking less relaxed with each drag. He told us that the supertanker had been fully converted, and the tugs were about to tow it out to the loading site. The twelve anchors that would hold it in place had been sunk, the sea floor had been prepared. He stood up and talked us through a presentation that he projected onto a screen on the wall. It included scale drawings and photos of relentless bits of spiky equipment burrowing into mud.
There was one of a stretch of pipe lying half buried in the ice, like a negligently disposed-of corpse, and a blurry image that was supposed to show the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The presentation stalled at one point, and I could see the sweat standing out on Vyacheslav Alexandrovich's neck and nose as he pummelled the computer to get it to start up again.

In conclusion he said he was confident the equipment was in place for reliable oil exports to commence very soon. At the end he looked down at the table and smoked like his life depended on it.

The Cossack said, "Good news!"

Paolo and I conferred. I was distracted that evening, it's true. But it was mostly a formality anyway. It was too late for us to advise the banks to back off, even if we'd wanted to. And we didn't want to: Vyacheslav Alexandrovich seemed thorough and Narodneft was still on side. We didn't confer for long. Paolo said he thought the banks should release the funds. I agreed. We told the Cossack.