Back to Moscow (11 page)

Why, ultimately, had Anna Karenina thrown herself under a train?

This question was discussed at length in several papers, with so much fervour that I often wondered if the fact that Anna Karenina was a fictional character was lost on the authors. But talking
to Lyudmila Aleksandrovna I realised it was expected of me, as a prospective expert on Russian literature, to come up with my own unique interpretation of these fictional events.

With my mornings free, I would now sit in central cafés to read Russian books with the help of a dictionary, taking notes in my little red notebooks. I tried to understand why Russian
authors made their heroines behave the way they did and, ultimately, how these heroines tried to make sense of the world they lived in. In the long term, I thought, all I needed to do was to
compare these notes with my observations on Russian women, which were conveniently written in the same red notebooks.

I gave a lot of thought, for instance, to Tatyana’s actions at the end of
Evgeny Onegin
. Her decision to reject Onegin, which seemed so true and inevitable in the context of the
story, had originated, after all, in Aleksandr Sergeyevich’s mind – a mind moulded by his particular life experience.

Something worried me. When talking about Tatyana in the Pushkin Speech, Dostoyevsky had endowed her with the capacity to choose, the possibility to decide her own destiny. This didn’t feel
totally credible. Not just because Tatyana is a literary character at the mercy of her creator – in itself a major obstacle to choosing your own path – but because, unlike in books,
real life doesn’t always involve such clear choices.

And yet, any other ending to
Evgeny Onegin
– one in which Tatyana had not been presented with clear alternatives – would have lacked the literary quality that gave
Pushkin’s work part of its greatness.

Tatyana’s story, her lesson to the world, only made sense as long as she had a choice.

W
HEN
I
FIRST SAW
Y
ULYA
Karma she was over by the fat Buddha statue, taking a break from dancing, leaning
against the wall. Roundish Slavic face, enormous eyes. Even in the darkness of Karma’s underground dance floor, Yulya’s bright eyes, framed by thick eyeliner, resembled pure crystal. A
glance at her eyes and I could feel a revolution raging in my chest, a horde of tiny Bolsheviks taking over my entire body, making Yulya the one concern of my night. I approached her and we
chatted, and she seemed naive and shy, probably because her friends were around, I thought, and at some point she told me she was nineteen. When her friends were distracted at the bar, Yulya gave
me her phone number, which she asked me to memorise without writing it down, so that nobody noticed. At the end of the night, just before heading out of the club, I found her again and, when nobody
was looking, I stole a kiss. Her lips were full and soft and in the days that followed I couldn’t stop thinking about her.

We arranged to meet a couple of days later, at Pushkin’s statue. She was as beautiful as I remembered, even if, in plain daylight, her round figure was edging on plumpness. I took her to
Pyramida. We had a drink and she told me about the elitni economics institute she attended, the best in Moscow, she said. She was interested in politics, and in what I, as a foreigner, thought
about Russia’s shaky transition to democracy. She told me she read international newspapers online, to practise her English and to keep up with global affairs. I found her smart and witty
but, the more she talked, the more I felt she was uncomfortable, as if something were nagging at the back of her mind. When we finished our drinks and our shared tray of sushi, I suggested we go to
my place for a cup of tea.

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘but I have to tell you something.’

Then, as we walked through the perekhod, Yulya Karma informed me that first, she had a boyfriend, for two years now, and second, she didn’t intend to leave him. She did say first and
second, and I imagined this formal way of conveying what she considered essential information was the result of her privileged schooling.

‘Right,’ I said, not knowing how to react.

‘And another thing,’ she added, as we came out on the other side of Tverskaya and walked towards my building. ‘Today I have my period.’

‘Your period?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We won’t be able to have sex.’

I was taken aback.

Yulya clutched my arm.

‘It doesn’t mean that I can’t see you again another day,’ she said, smiling.

Up in my flat, I poured fresh water into the samovar and plugged it into the wall socket. While the samovar was heating up, I joined Yulya in the living room. She asked about the Indian tapestry
on the wall. I told her the story of Lord Ganesh, how he got his elephant head, and how he used the small brush in his hand to remove obstacles from the path of life. I didn’t mention that
the tapestry was a birthday present from Lena.

‘Interesno,’ Yulya said. ‘So you hung an elephant above your couch to make your life easier?’

‘It’s not an elephant. It’s a Hindu god. He brushes all my problems away.’

‘What a boring life you must have,’ she said, laughing.

The samovar rattled. Back in the kitchen, I carefully opened its tiny tap and poured boiling water into two mugs. I returned with the steaming mugs to the living room. While the tea was brewing,
we stepped onto the balcony. Yulya was impressed by the view from my flat.

‘You can even see the New Arbat from here,’ she said, pointing at the cluster of buildings to the south.

‘I love how the buildings in the New Arbat look like open books,’ I said, as I stepped behind Yulya and put my hands around her waist.

She pushed my hands away, turned, and kissed me. We kissed for a couple of minutes on the balcony, then moved inside to the couch. I took her shirt off. But when I tried to unfasten her bra, she
stood up and said, ‘Ne nado.’

Ne nado. It meant no need or don’t bother, except Muscovites used the expression all the time, in awkward and quite diverse situations. Ne nado, I don’t need the change back. Ne
nado, I can walk myself back to the metro. Ne nado, I’m not giving you my phone number. Ne nado, you are not getting laid today.

‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I have my period. Wait for next time.’

I was sweaty.

‘Davay pit’ chai,’ she said, sitting forward on the couch. Let’s drink tea.

I took the tea bags out of the mugs and placed them on a napkin. She took a sip of tea, then placed her mug back on the coffee table. She grabbed my hand and smiled.

‘How often would you like to see me?’ she asked.

‘In what sense?’ My heart was still pumping fast.

‘If we become lovers,’ she said, ‘how many times a week would you like to see me?’

I wasn’t sure I understood. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘One, two, three times a week?’

‘Twice a week,’ I said, without giving it much thought.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell my boyfriend that I’m taking English lessons. Then I can come to see you on two different days for a couple of hours.’

And so Yulya Karma started to visit me on Mondays and Wednesdays from five till seven. The second time she came, after tea, we went down to the Moskva Bookshop in Tverskaya and I bought her two
English language books, one with grammar lessons and one with exercises, and also a small Oxford dictionary. From then on, when she came to my place, she always carried her English books. And a few
times she did bring some essays she’d written in English for her studies, things on international trade or finances, and we would go through the text lying on my couch and later, when she was
getting dressed, she would say, ‘Very nice class, professor.’

One day Yulya Karma broke our schedule. She sent me a text on a Thursday around midnight saying
I miss you
and asking if she could come over. She showed up at my place an hour later,
wasted, barely able to stay on her feet. She’d been drinking cocktails with some girlfriends, she said. For the first time, she spent the night in my flat.

Next morning, as she was getting ready to leave, she asked if I had a spare toothbrush. I looked around but couldn’t find one.

‘You are not ready for all your lovers,’ she said, which struck me as odd because we had never talked about other people.

The next time she came to my place – Monday at five, as per the schedule – she brought me a present. ‘Open it,’ she said, excited. It was a box containing a set of
colourful toothbrushes. In fact, after a closer look, I realised the box contained only one toothbrush handle but five different heads, identical in shape but different in colour.

‘This is for you and all your lovers,’ Yulya said, laughing. ‘You can change the heads. Each of us can have a different colour.’

‘Spasibo,’ I said. ‘Very thoughtful.’

‘I pick red,’ she said and at the end of the two hours, as if to mark her territory, she fitted the red head to the handle and brushed her teeth before leaving.

For weeks I left the multiheaded toothbrush next to my sink, and offered it to anyone who came home. When dyevs asked which colour they could use, I would say that any colour was fine, they were
all new. This was, I thought, the right thing to say. They didn’t seem to notice that one of the brushes had been used and, for some reason I never understood, they all picked red and ended
up brushing their teeth with the same head.

I enjoyed the regularity and predictability of Yulya’s visits. It was easy to arrange my days around our encounters and I appreciated not having to deal with the logistics of bringing a
new dyev home, sending text messages back and forth, the initial exchange in Pyramida and all that work.

Besides, the clandestine nature of her visits – the fact that she came to my flat to cheat on her boyfriend – made me think of
The Master and Margarita
. I saw myself as the
master and this notion gave our entire arrangement a certain literary quality, as if Bulgakov himself were giving us his blessing.

I found Yulya Karma attractive but, despite my efforts, rather unresponsive in bed. She would lie on my couch, naked, relaxed, smiling, but hardly moving or moaning, waiting patiently for me to
finish. At first I tried to be creative but after a few attempts I gave up.

Yulya’s breasts were large and heavy but, once she was fully undressed, so were her thighs and her buttocks. I never mentioned this to her – I really didn’t care – but
she would bring it up herself often.

‘I was so much thinner before,’ she said one of the first times we met.

‘You are thin.’

We were lying naked on my couch, which I had recently covered with blue washable fabric. Through the balcony, the summer breeze carried the sounds and smells of traffic into my flat.

‘I could eat whatever I wanted,’ she said. ‘Really, I never used to put any weight on. I was so thin, you should have seen me. Now, even if I starve myself for a week, I
can’t get rid of the extra kilos. I hope it’s just a phase.’

‘Perhaps you could join a gym,’ I said, staring up at the wall, my eyes fixed on Ganesh.

‘You think I’m fat?’

‘Not at all, I like your figure. You are very sexy.’

‘Thanks. I don’t have time to go to a gym.’

One day, at the end of our two hours, Yulya was slipping into her jeans when she told me she had started to visit a masseur twice a week. The masseur, she said, massaged her thighs for an hour
to release the excess fat and redistribute it within her body. I told her that this method of losing weight was unknown in the West and that, to me, it didn’t sound very scientific. She
insisted that these massages were the latest fashion in Moscow, but I found myself wondering if this was true or if the masseur was perhaps just another guy she was also fucking on a fixed
schedule.

O
N WARM EVENINGS THE
air inside my flat became stuffy and I’d have to open the balcony doors. If there was a breeze, the air from the street was
fresh, but, when the evening was still, the smoke from the grill at Scandinavia reached my sixth-floor balconies and the entire flat smelled of burnt animal fat.

The summer terrace at Scandinavia, I’d learned, opened every year as soon as the last snow of the season had melted. At first, when the evenings remained chilly, they provided blankets and
mushroom gas-heaters but, as the days got warmer, the blankets disappeared and the clientele, mostly expats, flocked to the terrace, attracted by cold beer on tap and hamburgers that were grilled
until midnight.

The Exile
said Scandinavia made the best burgers in town.

Sometimes, when I walked into my building, I would see guys I knew from football chilling out on the terrace. I’d have to stop to greet them and, if I wasn’t alone, they would ogle
my companion, usually nodding in approval – an approval I had not sought, and which annoyed me, really. Later, at night, from my living room, with the balconies open, I could hear their
voices which by then would be drunk and loud.

I enjoyed it when Lena spent the night. She brought me old soviet films that she’d seen a hundred times, comedies usually, the jokes mostly lost on me, and when she saw that I didn’t
laugh she would pause the film and try to fill in the cultural and linguistic nuances she thought I was missing. I found her explanations interesting because they revealed, if not Russian thinking
per se, at least a great deal about soviet aesthetics. But, despite Lena’s efforts, I rarely got what was comical about the scenes, which to me seemed clown-like and childish, and at a
certain point I had to pretend that I, too, found them funny so that we could move on and watch the rest of the film.

At night, before falling asleep, we would lie reading on the couch. She was always nose-deep in some spiritual book or self-help manual, Lena, about the power of meditation or compassion or
friendship, and every time she encountered a new concept – an insight she found revealing – she would read it aloud to me, hoping that I’d embrace it at once as she had, and she
would get pissed off when I teased her and didn’t take her books seriously. It seemed to me that most of Lena’s books talked about the same crap – about refusing temptation and
attachment and material pleasure, about how we all needed to focus instead on the spiritual world around us.