Back to Moscow (10 page)

On Saturdays I played football. Our team played in blue shirts and was called the Blues Brothers, which was why – I seem to recall – we had started referring to ourselves as the
brothers. I’d met them through Colin at the beginning of my stay. We played an expat league but the rules allowed two Russian players per team. Stepanov was a solid midfielder. Colin played
up front with me and Diego spent most of his time on the bench, happy to come out for ten minutes and then enjoy the drinks.

We had played all winter on a covered pitch in Dinamo but now that it was warm and dry we played in Kazakova, a small park east of the ring road. The grass pitch was surrounded by woodland and
the ruins of a pre-revolutionary palace. A green oasis – it didn’t feel like Moscow.

It was the Dutch expats who managed the football league. They’d arrived in the mid-1990s, recruited by Russian oligarchs who didn’t trust local employees to run Moscow’s
casinos. They were all a bit older than the rest of us and most had Russian wives and kids. The Dutch booked the pitch, paid the referees and brought local casino employees every Saturday to serve
shashliks and salads and cold beers after our matches. So Saturdays were lovely, especially when it was sunny, and the players brought their wives, girlfriends and mistresses to watch our
games.

I would bring Lena and no one else. She would stand on the side of the pitch in her skimpy summer dress, her short blonde hair gleaming under the sun. She would pace on the grass, along the
sideline, following the game with attention, but I never heard her shout or cheer, not even on the rare occasions when I scored a goal. After the match, I would grab a bottle of beer from the ice
bucket, and lie on the grass to watch the next game with my head on Lena’s lap, feeling the sun warm my cheeks while she stroked my sweaty hair.

By mid-June, the nights were so short that the sky was bright until midnight, when we entered the clubs, and bright again when we came out onto the street a few hours later. Clubs opened their
own gardens and terraces, and it was around this time that the party boat started to run on Friday nights.

The boat was an elitni affair, and the point and time of its departure one of Moscow’s best-kept secrets. It was Stepanov who would find out on Friday which embankment the party boat would
depart from that night. After a few warm-up drinks in Stepanov’s place, we would get on board and, because we were in the know, we were always allowed in. There would be plenty of New
Russians on the boat, models and actresses and TV people, some of whom even I recognised, and the boat would drift all night up and down the Moskva river, stopping every now and then to load and
unload beautiful people.

On board, we felt part of Moscow’s tusovka, the chosen ones, gathering to spend the nights in communion with the city. We drank, talked to dyevs, made best friends, and I would often meet
the dawn dancing on the top deck, as the boat glided gently over the dark waters, blasting its mellow techno music under the enormous statue of Peter the Great or Christopher Columbus, and the
chocolate factory, and the House on the Embankment, with its giant Mercedes-Benz star, and my heart would beat faster as the boat passed under the Bolshoy Kamenny Bridge – where we would all
duck for no reason – and emerge by the earthy walls and golden domes of the Kremlin as the city was brought to life by a warm orange sun rising over the east.

Oh Bozhe, how I loved Moscow!

A
T THE BEGINNING OF
July, about ten months into my stay, I rented a studio on Tverskaya, on the top floor of an old soviet building. The landlady
requested that I pay in cash, which suited me fine as all I had was the stack of dollars I was getting from Stepanov. Rents in the centre, which would skyrocket later, were quite reasonable at the
time.

My flat had no bedroom, just a living room, half of which was occupied by an enormous corner sofa that unfolded into a bed. Once I’d got the landlady to change the carpet, the place looked
pretty decent. Above the couch, I hung an Indian tapestry that Lena had bought me for my birthday and had previously adorned my university room. The tapestry showed Lord Ganesh, in browns and
yellows, surrounded by white dots. Handing me the present, Lena had told me the story of how the Hindu god had had his head chopped off and replaced by that of an elephant. She assured me that Lord
Ganesh brought good luck, that he used the little broom in his hand to remove obstacles from the path of life.

The kitchen, a separate room with wood-clad walls and a small dining table, was functional, warm and cosy. On top of the table, next to the wall, I placed an old electric samovar. Lena insisted
that the samovar – a silvery soviet model I’d bought at Izmailovsky – made better tea than any modern kettle. I liked its polished look, which made me think of a well-deserved
trophy, and the way the lid rattled furiously when the water reached boiling point.

Both balconies, the kitchen one and the living-room one, faced not Tverskaya but the courtyard, which in warmer weather was half occupied by the tables and chairs of the summer terrace at
Scandinavia. Because the other constructions around the courtyard were only two or three floors tall, the view from my sixth-floor balconies spanned all the way from Barrikadnaya to the buildings
of the New Arbat, which may or may not have represented open books, but were, for some reason, loved by Muscovites and Christmas-lit all year round. If I stood on either of my balconies, I could
gaze at a vast urban scape, an endless extension of rooftops, twisted antennae, old pipes and tangled cables and – if the day was clear – I could follow the sun setting on the horizon,
behind the redbrick chimneys of the old soviet factories. Breathtaking.

I was now living in the heart of Moscow. Everything I needed was here: shops, restaurants, cafés, cinemas. Most places stayed open all night and it felt great to know that I could walk
down to the street at midnight to buy milk or books or blinis. There were always plenty of people on the street, day and night. So much life that you never felt alone.

My building stood just a few steps away from Pushkinskaya. This was convenient because, as I had discovered during my first months in Moscow, Pushkin’s bronze monument at the centre of the
square – the very statue Dostoyevsky had unveiled in 1880 – was Moscow’s favourite meeting point for couples, being both centrally located and, in a Russian way, romantichno. On
warm days I would often wait for a dyev beneath the petrified but somehow disapproving regard of Aleksandr Sergeyevich. I would be the only man in the square not holding a bouquet of flowers,
stingy foreigner, and I would be scanning the faces of arriving dyevs, trying to recognise the one I had met a few nights earlier, with whom I had probably exchanged a couple of kisses on the dance
floor of a nightclub and a few messages in the days that followed.

If I didn’t remember what she looked like, which was often the case, I would wait patiently beneath Pushkin’s statue, looking distracted, leaving her the task of recognising me.
Then, once we saw each other, we would say privet privet and I would take her across the square to Café Pyramida, which had an actual glass pyramid for a roof and lounge music and sushi and
cocktails, and dyevs liked it, and we would chat for a while. If after an hour or so things were not happening, I would walk the dyev back to the metro, say poka poka, and that would be, most
likely, the last time we saw each other. But if the dyev was friendly, and she didn’t order the most expensive thing on the menu, I would invite her for a cup of tea in my apartment,
conveniently located across the street, with that enormous couch that I usually left open as a bed, and the spectacular views of the west of the city.

A
S HARD AS
I
TRIED
to understand her, I could never predict Lena’s outbursts. Nor could I grasp the reasons behind her
frequent mood swings. One moment she was sweet and calm – the next she was hurt or hostile.

One hot summer evening we were in my apartment getting ready to go out for dinner. I had just showered and slipped into my jeans, and Lena was waiting for me by the door. I rushed around the
flat, shirtless, looking for my mobile phone. I turned over the cushions and pillows on the couch, looked in the kitchen, checked the pockets of the trousers piled on the old leather armchair. The
phone was nowhere to be found. The air in the apartment was warm and I was losing patience. ‘What the fuck,’ I said, in English.

‘What are you looking for?’ Lena asked.

‘My phone. Have you seen it?’

‘Did you check your pockets?’

‘Of course.’

‘Let me call you.’ Lena extracted her phone from her handbag and rang me. In a few seconds a faint ringtone emerged from a pair of jeans that lay draped over the wooden stool by the
front door. Lena took my phone from the pocket and handed it to me.

Twenty minutes later we were sitting on cushiony white sofas on a new summer terrace on the Boulevard, waiting for our salads. I was having a beer, enjoying the warm evening. The sky was bright,
pinkish, almost purple behind the buildings. But Lena was not in the mood. She was sipping her glass of chilled white wine, hardly speaking.

I knew she wanted me to ask what was wrong with her. But I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to reward her childish attitude. If she had a problem with something I’d done or
said, let her bring it up. So I kept talking, pretending not to notice the way she was avoiding conversation.

I was saying something about how nice it was to live in the centre, how glad I was that I’d moved out of the university. Then I told her about my idea of writing a book about Moscow, a
fictionalised account of my life in the city. She was looking down at her glass of wine, her blonde fringe, which she’d let grow a little, falling over her eyelashes and covering her
eyes.

When I took a long sip from my beer, she finally jumped in.

‘Martin, tell me, why does it say Lena Propaganda in your phone?’

So this was it. The cause of her misery.

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘When I called you before, in your place. On the screen of your phone, it said Lena Propaganda.’

‘That’s where we met,’ I said. ‘Propaganda. Remember?’

‘You could just write Lena.’

I smiled. ‘It’s not such an original name in Moscow, you know.’

Her eyes remained fixed on her glass of white wine. I grabbed her hand across the table. ‘I just want to be sure it’s you I call.’

She removed her hand and stared at me – her big blue eyes now moist.

‘Who are the other Lenas?’

‘I don’t know. Old friends. I’m no longer in contact with them.’

‘Why do you keep their numbers then?’

‘Does it bother you?’

‘I don’t want to be Lena Propaganda.’

‘If it makes you happy, I can change it. Would you like me to add your surname? Or perhaps your patronymic?’ I took the phone out of my pocket, placed it on the table, between my
beer and her wine. ‘What is it? Sergeyevna? Borisovna? What’s your father’s name?’

‘I don’t want you to write anything but my name.’

‘Is it my fault that so many girls in Moscow share the same few names? It’s all Katyas, Mashas, Lenas, Tanyas, Olyas, Natashas.’

She looked at me, now on the verge of tears. Then, in a shaky, soft voice she said, ‘I just want to be Lena.’

‘In my heart,’ I said, ‘you’re just Lena. Besides, it could be worse. You could be Lena Beefeater, or Lena Hungry Duck. Propaganda is classy, elegant, refined.’

‘It’s not funny, Martin. I know I’m not that important to you, but at least I would like to think that I’m more than just someone on a list.’

‘But, Lenushka, you
are
important to me. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here, right now. Listen, if I ever write my book about Moscow, you’ll be the only Lena in it. I
promise.’

‘You have no heart,’ she said, a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘And my mistake is that I let you have me too easily.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You never had to fight for me.’ She took a sip of wine, then placed the glass in front of her. ‘You never bought me flowers.’

‘When the hell was I supposed to buy you flowers?’

She didn’t answer. She lifted her glass, swirled it, drank all the wine at once. ‘Now it’s too late,’ she said, eyes down, shaking her head. ‘For you, I will always
be Lena Propaganda.’

In a way, Lena, you were right. Now I know. Had we met anywhere else but Moscow – had there been no other Lenas in my mobile phone – things would have turned out
differently. Truth is, Moscow brought us together, but Moscow kept us apart. What can I say now? Sorry, Lena, I wish I’d bought you flowers.

T
HREE WEEKS AFTER MOVING
into my new flat, I decided to drop my language lessons. The daily commute to the university took up too much of my time
– I had to free my agenda from unnecessary distractions.

I knew I would miss Nadezhda Nikolaevna. I would miss the hours in which we inhabited the structured world of language textbooks. I would miss her enthusiasm and dedication – which kept me
awake, most of the time, despite my hangovers and chronic lack of sleep – and I would also miss the little sweets she brought me once a week, usually on Fridays – blinis, syrnikis,
home-made preserves. She, too, must have felt sad about finishing our classes because she wept a little when we hugged goodbye after our last lesson.

Without language classes to attend, I only had to visit the university to see Lyudmila Aleksandrovna and discuss my research. Following my suggestion, and despite her initial resistance, we had
now agreed to meet less often – once a month. She had taken some convincing though, as I hadn’t really told her about my plans to use the Russian women I met as a primary source for my
research, an original approach I suspected she would disapprove of.

My discussions with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, which covered the more orthodox aspects of my investigation, helped me understand the different interpretations that scholars had given to crucial
events in Russian novels. Reading the articles she recommended, I understood that every Russian literature scholar had to develop an original opinion about the key moments of seminal novels.