Snowdrops (6 page)

"Thanks," I said.

"It's nothing," replied the Cossack.

We shook hands, and he kept hold of me for just a moment too long, a couple of seconds maybe, so I knew he could. "Say hi to my friend Paolo," he said.

Inside there was a dance floor with three podium dancers--two energetic and topless black girls, and in between them a male dwarf wearing a tiger-stripe thong. Katya pointed up at the ceiling. Two naked girls, sprayed gold to look like cherubs and with wings attached, were flapping above our heads. We headed for the bar. It had a glass floor, and underneath it there was an aquarium filled with sturgeon and a few forlorn sharks. There were a lot of priceless women and dangerous men.

I ordered three mojitos from a barman wearing the underpaid, harassed frown of barmen on a busy night everywhere, plus a round of the risky sushi that was then standard-issue across Moscow nightspots. I felt like a
lottery winner, sitting in Rasputin with the high rollers and their surgically enhanced molls--me with my pointless thick hair and pinched English features, and a new mid-thirties pad of flesh around my jaw that I looked for in the mirror every morning, in the hope that it might have gone away of its own accord. I felt like I was somebody, instead of the nobody who could at that moment have been flowing over London Bridge with all the others. I guess that's how I was supposed to feel.

Katya asked me more about England. The usual questions: Was Sherlock Holmes real? Was it hard to get a visa? Why did Churchill wait until 1944 to open a second front? She was a good kid, I thought, inside the micromini, deferential to her sister, keen to get on in an understandably narrow way.

Masha asked me about my job.

"Kolya," she said, "do you know only English law or Russian law also?"

I said I was trained in English law but understood Russian law well enough too, especially corporate law.

"What sort of deals are you doing?"

I said it was mostly loans, and the odd merger or acquisition.

"It means you are not working on deals for property?" Her voice was almost smothered by the cardiac beat of the Russki dance music and the cawing of thugs.

I said no, I wasn't. I knew a little about property law,
but not much--only really the parts covering long leases for commercial buildings.

I know I should have thought harder than I did about those questions. But I was busy thinking about Masha, and going back to my place, and whether this was what the famous "real thing" felt like.

K
ATYA SAID SHE
had a birthday party to go to. I said we'd escort her, but she said no, she was fine, and hurried off alone in the direction of the Bolshoi Theatre, into the early snow and the unruly Russian night.

I suggested getting a cab, but Masha said she wanted to walk. We walked back up towards Pushkin Square: past the pretty church that the communists had spared, and on the left the strip club at the side of the Pushkin cinema (where a group of Hungarian businessmen got cremated in the upstairs cubicles a few months later), and opposite that a casino with a sports car outside in a tilted glass case. Through the damp snow the city seemed to soften, the edges of the buildings fading out like in an impressionist painting. Ahead of us, the neon of the square, with its all-you-can-eat restaurants and statue of the famous poet, glowed like some gaudy Mongol encampment.

Masha told me that night how she worried about Katya, how apart from their aunt it was just the two of them in Moscow, how they'd always dreamed of coming
but how difficult it was. She'd had to come up with five hundred dollars to get her job, she said, the normal recruitment bribe for the manager of her shop, and it had taken her six months to pay off the money she'd had to borrow. She said she hoped that maybe one day she would live somewhere safer, somewhere cleaner.

"Like London," I said. "Maybe like London." I was going too fast, I know, especially compared to how it's been between me and you. But somehow the idea didn't seem outlandish, not at the beginning. I am trying to be honest with you. I think that's the best thing for both of us now.

"Maybe," she said. She took my hand as we went down the slippery steps into the underpass where we'd met and kept holding it after we reached the bottom.

Up on the other side of Tverskaya we walked for a while along the middle of the Bulvar. The city authorities had pulled the flowers out of their beds, as they do every year when the game is up, carting them away in the night like condemned prisoners so they don't die in public. The Russians had put on their intermediate coats, the women in the wool or leopard-print numbers they mostly wear until it's time for their mothballed furs. On the benches the tramps lay seasoned with snow, like meat sprinkled with salt on a butcher's slab. In my street the bonnet of the rusty Zhiguli was freckled with melting snowflakes.

When we got inside Masha put on a CD, took off her
coat, then, slowly, and like she'd done it to music before, everything else too.

Afterwards she ran a bath. She squeezed in behind me, her groomed pubic hair bristling against my coccyx, and wrapped her long legs around my loose belly. She had a front-row view of the copses of hairs on my shoulders and the top left corner of my back, those asymmetrical practical jokes played by my genes that you're not all that keen on. She half sang, half hummed a weepy Russian folk song, running her wet fingers through my hair. It felt to me like a new kind of nakedness, our bodies limp and open rather than exhibits or weapons. Slopping in the water with each other felt like honesty, and the streaked fake-marble tub, with the jet-stream valves that didn't work, felt like our little womb.

She told me in the bath, I remember, about how proud she'd been of her father when she was a little girl, but how things had changed when the old empire died and his salary had stopped being paid. That was when the serious drinking started, she said. She told me about how, when she was very young, she'd been taught at school to revere some Stalin-era brat who'd informed on his own father for hoarding grain. They'd sung songs about him and drawn pictures of him, this little Siberian sod, until one day their teacher had told them to stop singing the songs and to tear up the pictures, and that was how she knew that something terrible had happened.

"Didn't you feel free?" I asked her. "When communism ended, didn't you feel free?"

"In Murmansk," she replied, "we felt only poor. And cold. People said, 'Freedom we cannot eat.' "

She told me that when she was seventeen her mother had needed an operation. As with everything else that was theoretically provided by the government, from the midwife who brought you into the world to your burial plot, they'd had to pay--had to bribe the doctor and buy the medicines, the soap, and the sutures to sew her up afterwards. So Masha had left college only a week after she'd started, she said, to work in the canteen at the naval base. She still sent money back to her mother every month. My guess had been close: she was twenty-four, she said, and Katya was twenty.

I asked her how she felt about it all--leaving school, going to work, sacrificing her chances for her mother.

"It was normal," she said. "You know, Kolya, in those times we weren't having such big hopes. Bad food. Bad men. Bad luck. This was not surprise."

It was the right combination that she was offering, of course, with her strength and her misfortune. She was tough and worldly, somehow older than me as well as much younger (though by Moscow standards the age gap was respectable). At the same time, she seemed powerless and almost alone. She tapped the right mix of needs: the need to save someone, or think you can, that I reckon all men feel somewhere, and the need to be saved.

I knew I didn't have the kind of money she'd probably been hoping for. But I thought I could offer her security.

I asked her what sort of ship her father had served on. She said she wasn't supposed to tell anyone, especially not a foreigner. Then she laughed loudly and said it probably didn't matter anymore.

"He was on boat--how do you say?--boat against ice. To make path for other boats."

"Icebreaker."

"Yes," she said, "icebreaker. He was on atomic icebreaker. My grandfather also was on icebreaker. In war he was helping to break ice for Western ships. For your grandfather maybe."

"What was the ship's name? Your father's, I mean." I thought that was another question you should ask about sailors.

She said she wasn't sure, she'd forgotten. But she thought for a few seconds and said,
"Petrograd
. Icebreaker was called
Petrograd
. Because of revolution." She smiled, the way you might if you'd dredged up a lost but precious fact out of your memory.

I
N THE MORNING
, when she was still asleep, with her head in profile on the pillow, I found a small crook two-thirds of the way up her nose, invisible from the front--the result, I guessed, of a fatherly backhander or a rough sailor
boyfriend. I found matching dark freckles in the middles of the moon-white cheeks of her arse. And I noticed the tiny creases that were just appearing at the corners of her eyes. I remember how those lines made me want her even more, because they made her real, a physical thing that could die, but not only die.

Later, when we were drinking our tea with lemon slices in the kitchen--IKEA mugs, IKEA chairs, most of my flat was from IKEA, which was by then as inevitable in Moscow as death and tax evasion (and cirrhosis)--she told me again about her aunt, the one who lived in Moscow. She told me that she and Katya saw her as often as they could but not as much as they should. She said she would like to introduce me soon.

"Maybe next week," she said. "Or week after next week. She is alone in Moscow and comes happy when we visit. She will like you. I think she is not knowing many foreigners. Maybe none. Please."

Yes, I said. Of course I would meet her aunt. Masha drank her tea, kissed me on the nose and went to work.

I
T WAS APPROACHING
the middle of November. All the
mokri sneg
had melted, but some of the ice that had formed during the October cold snap survived, retreating into the cracks in the pavements and wounds in the roads
like trapped platoons waiting for reinforcements. Tatiana Vladimirovna said, "Come in."

Say what you like about the Soviets, they were the all-time world champions of parquet. It stretched away from the plain front door of her apartment in interlocking Khrushchev-era boomerangs, interrupted in the middle of the floor by a faded Turkmen rug. There was a glittery communist chandelier, which looked fabulous as long as you didn't get too close to it.

We took off our shoes, hung up our coats, and followed Tatiana Vladimirovna down the corridor. I can remember her apartment much better than I'd like to. We passed a bedroom with two single beds, only one of them made up, plus a dark wooden wardrobe and a white dressing table with an ornamental mirror. There was another room half-full of packing boxes, then the door of the bathroom and a kitchen with tired linoleum and a primitive fridge. The lounge she led us to was covered in a kind of hairy brown wallpaper, peeling a little in one corner where it met the ceiling, with a bookshelf full of old Soviet encyclopaedias and reports and a big wooden desk covered in green baize. On the desk was the kind of Russian party spread I always dreaded, as inedible as it was extravagant. It had probably cost her about a month's pension and a fortnight's cooking, all sweaty fish, jellied and unidentifiable bits of animals, Russian chocolate broken into clumps, blinis that were
getting cold, sour cream and a special sweet cheese they fry in little rolls.

The windows were closed and the central heating--still controlled centrally by the city government, like in the old days--was inhuman. Tatiana Vladimirovna gestured us towards a moulting sofa. "Tea," she said, a statement not a question, and left.

The girls sat down to whisper. I got up and poked around. Tatiana Vladimirovna's place overlooked the Bulvar and the pond at Chistie Prudy ("Clean Ponds"--typical Russian wishful thinking as far as the water was concerned, but an increasingly smart part of central Moscow). She had a big window that faced across the pond and the trees that flanked it. They'd packed away the Bedouin-tent-style restaurant that was set up on a platform over the water in summer, and the gondolas that offered overpriced serenades had been beached. On the other side of the pond was a strange blue building decorated with reliefs of real and imaginary animals, one of the beautiful things you sometimes trip over in that city, like flowers on a battlefield. I could make out owls, pelicans, double-headed griffins, two-tongued crocodiles, pouncing but somehow despondent hounds. The confused November sky reminded me of a black-and-white television set that hasn't been tuned in.

On one wall of the room there was a set of plates, with the classic blue-and-gold St. Petersburg pattern, and a certificate from a technical college in Novosibirsk. There
was an old Bakelite-style radio, a faux-mahogany contraption as big as a trunk that opened at the top. Two framed black-and-white photos sat on the bookshelf. One showed a young couple perching on some windy rocks by the sea, she laughing and looking at him, he prematurely balding, wearing serious spectacles and looking into the camera. The couple looked happy in a way that I didn't think people in the Soviet Union were supposed to have been happy. In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, in stencilled white lettering, it said "Yalta, 1956." The other photo showed a girl stretching herself across the diameter of a sort of outsized hamster wheel, her hands clutching the rim, apparently taking part in a synchronised gymnastics routine: two more wheels with girls inside them jutted into the picture. When I crooked my head and looked closely, I could see that the angled figure was the same slim girl as in the beach photo, maybe a few years younger, wearing tennis-style shorts that were sexier than they were probably meant to be and a wide fixed grin. It was her, my bent head finally understood. It was Tatiana Vladimirovna.