Snowdrops (5 page)

I sat back in my chair and asked whether they'd like to come to my apartment for some tea.

Masha looked hard into my eyes and said yes.

I waved at the waiter and wrote a little squiggle in the air with an imaginary pen, the international let-me-out-of-here signal that, when you're a teenager and see your parents make it, you think you never will.

W
HEN WE GOT
outside it was colder. After three winters in Russia I knew this was the real thing: the big chill, the ice in the air that stays 'til April. The white smoke from the power plant down the river was congealed against the thick night. It was still drizzling, the droplets sliding down my glasses and blurring my vision, making everything seem even more fantastical than it already did. Masha was wearing her cat-fur coat, and Katya had put on a purple plastic raincoat.

I stuck out my arm for a lift, and a car that was already twenty metres past us braked and reversed back up the street and into the curb. The driver asked for two hundred
roubles, and even though it was daylight robbery I agreed and got into the front seat. He was a fat resentful Russian, with a moustache and a crack in the middle of his windscreen that looked like it had been made by a forehead, or a bullet. He had a miniature television jerry-rigged up to the cigarette lighter, and he carried on watching a dubbed Brazilian soap opera as he drove us along the river. Ahead of us were the throbbing stars on top of the Kremlin towers and the fairy-tale domes of St. Basil's at the back of Red Square, and next to us the soupy Moscow River, not yet frozen and curling mysteriously through the wild city. Behind me Masha and Katya were whispering to each other. The fat Russian's car was a mobile heaven, a ten-minute paradise of hope and amazement.

I
F YOU LOOKED
closely at the ceiling of my flat you could just make out a grid of intersecting creases, which told the apartment's history like the rings of a tree trunk or the wrinkles on a poet's face. It had been a
kommunalka
, a communal flat, in which three or four families had lived together but separately. I used to imagine how people must have died and been discovered by their flatmates, or had died and not been discovered. Like millions of others they must have taken their individual toilet seats down from the wall when they went to crap, argued about the milk in the communal kitchen, informed on each other, and saved
each other. Then in the nineties someone had knocked through all the old bedroom partitions and turned the whole place into a rich man's pad, and from that past life only the lines on the ceiling where the walls used to meet it were left. There were only two bedrooms now, one for the guests who almost never came, and the bad history and my good luck made me feel guilty, at least to begin with.

They took off their shoes in the way Russians are trained to and we went through into the kitchen. Masha sat on my lap and kissed me. Her lips were cold and strong. I looked over at Katya and she was smiling. I knew they might be taking me for something but there was nothing in my apartment that I wanted more than I wanted Masha, and I didn't think they'd kill me. She took my hand and led me to my bedroom.

I went to the window to close the curtains--they were a sort of rich ruched brown, and looked as if they should have opened to reveal an opera set--and when I turned round Masha had taken off her jumper and was sitting on the edge of my bed in her short skirt and a black bra. Katya was sitting in a chair, smiling. She never did it again, but that night she sat there all the way through, maybe for security, I don't know. It was kinkily disconcerting, but then the whole thing felt surreal, and the vodka took the edge off.

Masha was different from girls in England. Different from you. Different from me too. Less polite about it, less
like she was acting or pretending. She had a kind of basic earthy energy, gripping and encouraging and laughing, keen to please and to improvise. Whenever I looked up, Katya was just there, grinning, close enough for me to see even without my glasses, fully clothed like she was watching a science experiment.

Afterwards, when we were spooning and Masha was breathing heavily, not awake but not all asleep, she shook the hand I had stretched across her to hold her hand as if it was a defective toy--to make me hold her more tightly, or to prove that it and me were real, as if the hand and me were things she needed. Or that's how it seemed to me then. At the other end of the bed, part of us but also miles away, she hooked her leg around my leg, I remember, so I could just feel the painted toenails of her white foot digging into my calf.

When the light crept into my bedroom in the morning I saw Katya asleep in the chair, her knees curled up under her chin, still dressed, her blond hair spread over her face like a veil. Masha was lying next to me, with her face turned away, her hair on my pillow and her smell on my skin. I fell asleep again, and when I woke up a second time they had both gone.

"This is it," Masha said.

We were standing outside a classic old Moscow building, with a cracked pastel facade and a wide courtyard where the nobility would once have kept their horses and their plotting servants. Now the courtyard contained two unhappy trees with drooping brown leaves and three or four cars, chichi enough to make it clear that money was in residence. We went through the arch from the street, and across to a metal doorway with a vintage intercom in the far left-hand corner of the yard. The air was wet--heavy with something that isn't sleet and isn't quite snow, a Russian humidity that tastes of exhaust fumes and seeps into
your eyes and mouth. It was the kind of Moscow weather that makes you want the sky to just get on with it, like a condemned prisoner looking up at the blade of the guillotine.

Masha punched in the number of the flat. There was a pause, then a crackly buzz. A woman's voice said,
"Da?"

"It's us," said Masha in Russian. "Masha, Katya, and Nikolai."

"Come up," said the voice. "Third floor."

She buzzed us in and we climbed the stained marble stairs.

"She was once communist," said Masha, "but now I think she is not."

"She is sometimes forgetting things," Katya said, "but she is very kind."

"I think she is not so happy," Masha said. "But we try."

She was waiting for us on the landing. She had one of those miniature shot-putter babushka figures, and a face that looked younger than her grey hair, which she'd trimmed into a pragmatic Soviet bowl. She was wearing lace-up black shoes, tan stockings, and a neat but worn woollen skirt and cardigan that told you straight off that the money didn't live with her. She had clever eyes and a nice smile.

"Dear one," said Masha, "this is Nikolai ..." I saw her realising that she didn't know my surname. It was, I think, only the fourth time we'd seen each other, not including
the first day on the Metro. We were strangers, really, perhaps we were always strangers. But at the time it felt right, being introduced to her aunt. It felt like we might last.

"Platt," I said, and then still in Russian as we shook hands, "Very pleased to meet you."

"Come in," she said, smiling.

I am getting ahead of myself, I'm afraid. But I wanted to tell you how I met her--how I met Tatiana Vladimirovna, the old lady.

I
N THOSE GOLD-RUSH
days--when half the buildings in the centre of the city were covered in submarine-sized Rolex adverts, and apartments in Stalin's wedding-cake skyscrapers were going for Knightsbridge prices--money in Moscow had its own particular habits. Money knew that someone in the Kremlin might decide to take it back at any moment. It didn't relax over coffee or promenade with three-wheeled buggies in Hyde Park like London money does. Moscow money emigrated to the Cayman Islands, villas on Cap Ferrat, or anywhere else that would give it a warm home and ask no questions. Or it combusted itself as conspicuously as possible, poured itself into champagne-filled Jacuzzis, and took flight in private helicopters. Money especially loved the top-end car dealerships along Kutuzovsky Prospekt, on the way out to the war museum and Victory Park. It decorated its Mercs and fortified
Hummers with flashing blue emergency lights, dispensed for thirty thousand dollars or so by obliging officials at the interior ministry, lights which parted the Moscow gridlock like the seas of Egypt. The cars congregated around the must-be-seen-in restaurants and nightclubs like basking predators at watering holes, while money went inside to gorge itself on caviar and Cristal champagne.

On a Friday night at the sharp end of October--two or three weeks before I was introduced to Tatiana Vladimirovna at the door of her apartment, I guess about the same length of time after my first night with Masha--I took the two girls to Rasputin. It was then one of the city's most elitny nightclubs, on a corner between the Hermitage Gardens and the police station on Petrovka (the station where they film the Russian version of
Crimestoppers
, embellished with corpses and considerately staged shoot-outs). At least, I tried to take them to Rasputin.

We weaved through the pride of parked, tintedwindow automotive monsters to the entrance. It was fortified by agents of what Muscovites call
feis kontrol:
two or three Himalayan bouncers and a haughty blonde wearing a headset, whose job it was to keep out insufficiently glamorous women and undersalaried men. The blonde looked the girls up and down in the frankly competitive way that Russian women do. Katya was wearing a leopard-print miniskirt above her white boots, and I remember Masha had her long hair in a sort of tousled mane, and a silver
bracelet with a miniature watch in the shape of a heart attached. I think it was my fault that they stopped us. I was trying to fit in with the mafia ambience by wearing my dark work suit and a black shirt, but I probably looked like a member of the chorus in some school production of
Guys and Dolls
. I could see the woman on the door guessing how much pain I could call down if I got angry, estimating the seriousness of my
krisha
--the protective human "roof" that every Russian needs, preferably in one of the security services, if they want to get off the hook, into a lower tax bracket, or into Rasputin on a Friday night. From the market trader with his friendly policeman who looks the other way, to the oligarch with his obliging Kremlin overlord, anyone who wants to prosper needs a
krisha:
someone to bend an ear or twist an arm, a relative maybe, or an old friend, or just someone powerful whose compromising secrets you are lucky enough to know. The woman whispered something to one of the bouncers, who ushered us around a corner into a roped-off line of rejects. We might be admitted later, he told us, if there was room for us among the A-listers.

It was snowing. It was light, October snow, the type Russians call
mokri sneg
, damp snow, which settles on kind surfaces like the branches of trees and the roofs of cars, but is obliterated when it hits the unfriendly Moscow pavements. Some of the flakes weren't making it that far, getting caught in up gusts as they passed the tops of lampposts,
pirouetting up again in the artificial light as if they had reconsidered. It was cold--not seriously cold, not yet, but flirting with zero Celsius. The other people in our rejects' line drew their hands up into their sleeves, making them look like a race of amputees. Assorted gangsters, off-duty colonels from the security service, and midrange officials from the Ministry of Finance were waved through by the bouncers, each trailing a high-heeled personal harem. I was cross and embarrassed and ready to give up and leave. Then the Cossack arrived.

He was with two or three other men and four tall girls. I called out to him, and he hung back behind his friends as they went through the velvet curtains on the door. It was one of those moments when parts of your life that are supposed to be strangers collide, like running into your boss in the foyer of a cinema or the changing rooms of a swimming pool.

"Good evening," he said. He was talking to me but looking at the girls. "Not bad."

"Good evening," I said.

I'd seen the Cossack again a couple of days before. He came to Paveletskaya to sign papers, make promises, and burp. He'd agreed to our appointment of a surveyor, who was to visit the site of the oil terminal every few weeks and confirm that construction was on schedule. That would help to prove that the repayments would eventually be met, and that, as the contract we'd drawn up provided for in
lavish detail, there'd be something for the banks to repossess if the Cossack and his friends ever defaulted. The surveyor we briefed was a little mole of a man called Vyacheslav Alexandrovich. We'd worked with him before, on the finance for a port development down on the Black Sea coast.

"Aren't you going to introduce me?"

"Excuse me," I said. "These are my friends Masha and Katya."

"Enchante,"
said the Cossack. "Which one of you is Nicholas's wife?"

He'd rumbled the little lie I'd told him about being married, but he didn't seem to mind. I blushed. Katya giggled. Masha shook his hand. It was the only time they met, as far as I know, and in a way I'm pleased they did. It simplifies things for me, somehow, that memory of Masha and the Cossack together.

"Do you have a problem?" he asked me.

"No," I said.

"Yes," Masha corrected. She was always calm, determined, self-assured. Always. I liked that about her too.

"Maybe," I said.

"Just a second," said the Cossack.

He walked over to the blonde with the headset. He had his back to us so I couldn't see his expression. But I saw his shoulder blade twitch in our direction and the woman look over at us. He kept talking and her face fell, then her
head dropped, and she spoke into her headset and beckoned towards me.

The Cossack said, "Enjoy yourselves!"

You know the way, in action films sometimes, they show how soldiers look when they're seen through night-vision goggles--edged in a sort of shimmering thermal glow? The Cossack looked like that all the time, I think. He was outlined in violence. It was invisible but everyone could see it.