Back to Moscow (13 page)

I texted Lena and asked her to come over for dinner. I hadn’t seen her since the day of the bomb in Pushkinskaya. She came over and was in good spirits. I was glad she didn’t mention
the CD incident. After tea on the couch, we moved to the kitchen to prepare dinner. My fridge was almost empty so we boiled some frozen pelmenis and served them with smetana. I opened a bottle of
wine.

While we were eating at the kitchen table, I mentioned the submarine.

‘All the sailors will die,’ she said.

‘Why?’ I asked, irritated by so much Russian negativity.

Lena looked confused by my question. She placed her fork on the plate and took a sip of wine. ‘Because we are in Russia,’ she said. Then she went back to eating her pelmenis.

Catching sight of my own reflection in the silvery surface of the samovar, it dawned on me that Russians regarded tragedies, deaths, not as extraordinary and avoidable events, but rather as an
integral part of normal existence. The expected.

As if listening to my thoughts, Lena grabbed my hand and, with a sad smile, added, ‘That’s how things always end up here.’

After dinner, we moved back to the couch to watch a film. It was an old soviet film I had read about and insisted on watching. It turned out to be in black and white –
long, slow, arty. Lena fell asleep before the end. Through the open balcony door I could hear the murmur of expats having drinks at Scandinavia.

Lena had a soothing effect on me. When I was concerned about something in particular, or when my thoughts were drifting towards a darker place, it was enough for me to check that Lena was there,
next to me. For some reason, the physical proximity of her body gave me a reassuring sense of calm.

In fact, I often found myself wishing that Lena were at home with me. With another girl I would chat for a while, have tea, and that would be nice but, at some point during the evening, I would
be struck by an irrepressible urge to be alone. Sometimes, if the dyev was perceptive, she would sense my mood darkening and would leave the flat on her own initiative. But often the dyev would
insist on staying around. In those cases, I would grow irritable, my Russian would become sloppy and, as the evening advanced, communication between the two of us would deteriorate. The dyev would
then try to bridge the emotional gap, now evident to both of us, with physical contact, but, at this point, physical contact would no longer work for me.

Lena, on the other hand, knew when I needed space. Maybe it was something she’d picked up from her readings on compassion and all that spiritual stuff. She never forced herself upon
me.

With Lena, I talked about films and books and food and current news, about everything, really, aside from other girls. Not being able to discuss girls with Lena was a nuisance, since it ruled
out the most important part of my research and a large proportion of the time I wasn’t spending in her company. In a way, I wished I could talk to Lena about other girls because for me they
were not that relevant, and they certainly did not affect the way I felt about her. But she never asked, at least not in a direct way, and I assumed we had somehow agreed to avoid the issue.

Over the next couple of days I followed the news about the submarine, wishing for a happy ending for the sailors, until, finally, it became clear that they were all dead.

A few days later I learned that Britain and Norway had offered technical assistance and modern equipment to rescue the Russian sailors. From his retreat in Sochi, the Russian president,
reluctant to allow foreigners inside the secret nuclear submarine, had respectfully declined the offer.

O
NE DAY
L
ENA TOLD
me she wanted to show me the beautiful side of Russia. She used those words, beautiful side of Russia, as if
all I had seen up to that point were the ugliest bits of the country.

‘Let’s get out of Moscow for a weekend,’ she said. This came as a surprise, as we had never spent more than a few hours together, a night at most, and it was always my idea to
meet. But I was intrigued, so we made plans to spend a couple of nights in Suzdal, a small city on the Golden Ring I absolutely had to see, unreachable by train but only four hours away by bus, a
place untouched by the buzz of Moscow.

So, on a Friday morning in mid-September, we got on an old bus at Shchyolkovskaya, at the end of the dark blue metro line. After leaving the station, the bus passed through endless rows of
identical buildings with grey façades and I tried to imagine the lives of their inhabitants, so far away from central Moscow. Who were they? How did they spend their days? After a while, the
road turned greener, and there were dachas and warehouses. Then the forest.

We were sitting near the back of the bus, Lena and I, a row behind two old men who seemed to be sleeping. The bus stopped for a toilet break and, once we were back on, one of the old men, white
beard and deep wrinkles, turned round and, pointing at me, asked Lena, ‘Does he drink?’, as if asking permission to feed a dog.

‘You can ask him,’ Lena said, and, before I had time to prepare a clever excuse in Russian, I was pulled out of my seat, finding myself in the very back row, which had been
previously unoccupied, sitting with the two men and a bottle of vodka.

When you are the victim of a vodka ambush there is no polite way to get out of it, even if you’re on a bus and it’s only ten in the morning. I had no choice but to join them.

The younger of my two sobutilnikis, my drinking buddies, took a pocketknife out of his bag and began to slice bread and kolbasa. He prepared little buterbrods, which I was instructed to bite
after every shot of vodka. He was sickly thin, with pockmarked cheekbones, missing most of his front teeth.We drank out of plastic glasses, toasting first our vstrechu, then friendship, the usual
stuff.

They wanted to know if I liked Russia, if I liked vodka, if I liked Russian women. The first bottle was finished and another bottle made an appearance and at some point I realised I must have
drunk more than I’d thought because we were singing Russian songs that I was learning as we went.

We arrived at Suzdal around lunchtime and, standing outside the bus, I said do svidaniya, first shaking hands but then with a hug that, to my surprise, became quite emotional, as if instead of
strangers on a four-hour journey we were old comrades returning from war. I was given a phone number so that we could call and visit them in Suzdal before we went back to Moscow. I said we would
and, before parting, the older man with the white beard told Lena that I was such a khoroshi paren, that he respected me, that I could be Russian.

Suzdal was gorgeous. It was sunny but not too warm and the centre of the town was crammed with beautifully coloured onion-shaped churches, blue and gold and yellow, and at first I thought it
could have been the setting for one of Chekhov’s short stories, perhaps an unnamed provincial town, a town called simply S., where life passed without much drama. But as Lena and I walked
around the centre, it occurred to me that Suzdal was more spiritual, more mysterious, more Dostoyevskian, and it wouldn’t have surprised me to see one of the Karamazov brothers, Alyosha
maybe, turning a corner and walking towards me.

We checked into our hotel, which happened to be a monastery that rented out some izbas to visitors. The izbas, tiny cottages, were located at the back of the monastery, within the walled
compound behind the central chapel. Inside, the izba was very clean, with an old wooden bedstead. We left our bags and went for a walk.

Being wasted is a great way to visit a place for the first time, I realised – everything is illuminated in a special light and the impressions are much stronger. Outside the monastery we
bought cabbage pirogis and salted cucumbers from a babushka who kept them in a bucket under a piece of cloth. The pirogi was oily but warm and it felt great when I bit into it. We walked into a
church, which was dark and moist and smelled of burnt wax and incense. Lena covered her hair with a scarf. She lit tall, thin candles, crossed herself, kissed the icons. Despite her unusual
approach to religion, I hadn’t expected Lena to follow these rituals. As she went around the church performing her Christian duties, I stayed behind, admiring the tranquillity of the place,
listening to the faint crackling of the candles, breathing the holy air of the temple. I was feeling a growing tickle in my heart, a hint perhaps of my own spiritual awakening, and somehow I ended
up wondering what it would be like to start a new life as a monk, spending hours in meditation or prayer, believing in something good, big and supernatural.

After visiting two more churches, we were out in the air again and walking among rows of small wooden houses, which were like the dachas I’d seen outside Moscow, but better kept. The
windows had ornate wooden frames. Now I thought about what would it be like to live in these places, comparing the two experiences, living as a monk or living as a Russian peasant, and I
couldn’t decide which of the two was more idyllic. In a dacha I could live with Lena, who would cook while I repaired the roof and cut wood for winter, and, walking along the unpaved streets
of outer Suzdal, I fully appreciated the beauty of that simple existence, even though I’d never cut wood or fixed a roof in my life. Yet in a monastery, I thought, I could receive spiritual
stimulation, and I imagined having someone like Zosima, an elder, a saint, a spiritual leader and mentor to guide me through life, and then I realised I was too drunk to make any sense of my
thoughts.

We passed the last row of dachas and then we were in a small park that ended in a forest. Among the trees, I took a few pictures of Lena, who was looking gorgeous, and I asked her to take her
shirt off, then her bra. She glanced around to check, then did as I’d asked. She posed for me, topless, her jeans on, her arms extended above her head, pulling her breasts upwards, and
I’ll always remember Lena like this – leaning on a tree, her breasts like perfect forest fruits – because, so many years after that day in Suzdal, I still keep those photos, and I
look at them often, and Lena looks younger than I felt she was when the pictures were taken.

In the late afternoon, as the effects of the vodka dissipated, I was hit by a wave of exhaustion. I suggested we go back to our monastery and have an early night.

Back in the izba I kissed Lena. We lay on the bed but, when I was about to unzip her jeans, she said, ‘Sorry, not today.’ I was disappointed because it was our weekend away and I was
having such a great time – I was feeling spiritual, high, and I thought it could be a special occasion. Now I knew the weekend would not be perfect. Then Lena said, don’t worry,
I’ll do my best, and she – who had spent the entire afternoon praying, lighting candles and kissing icons – crawled down the bed, dragging the golden cross of her necklace over my
shirtless body, pulling my jeans off, together with my underwear.

A
T THE END OF
summer the days remained mostly sunny but you could feel a chill in the air, especially late in the afternoon, and you knew that winter
was forming somewhere deep in Siberia, gathering strength, preparing to descend on Moscow. Local girls, though, defied the change of seasons and continued to wear miniskirts as they paraded up and
down Tverskaya.

I’d been living in Pushkinskaya for a couple of months now, closely observing life in the square, which I saw as a window onto the entire country.

Sometimes there were demonstrations, with a dozen, twenty protesters at most, who stood stoically across from McDonald’s, next to the Kroshka Kartoshka kiosk, unperturbed by the smell of
baked potatoes, holding banners against the war in Chechnya and exhibiting black and white photographs of what I assumed were victims of the conflict. Often, though, the protesters were older and
held pictures of Lenin and Stalin and red Communist banners or, occasionally, Orthodox crosses and religious icons with what looked like biblical quotes painted on them.

Sometimes I would see a bunch of demonstrators and, despite my best efforts to understand their cause, I could not figure out what they were protesting against, and nobody stopped to talk to
them anyway, at least not the normal people, who just walked by and looked at them as if they were mental patients who had escaped from a madhouse.

I started to go for long morning walks. I tried new routes every day, venturing further away from the centre, discovering parts of the city previously unknown to me. Sometimes I would find
myself walking in some remote neighbourhood, along wide avenues, past endless rows of concrete buildings, lost in a soviet landscape that was both shabby and monumental. When I lost my bearings, I
would have to ask for directions to the nearest metro station to return to the centre.

Later, overwhelmed by the dimensions of the city, I began to take my walks closer to home, reducing my Moscow to manageable proportions – Pushkinskaya becoming the centre of an imaginary
circle whose limits I no longer crossed. Mayakovskaya in the north, Tretyakovskaya in the south, Smolenskaya in the west, Chistye Prudy in the east. I would only venture out of these invisible
urban borders, by taxi or metro, to attend university or to find new clubs with the brothers.

At some point I noticed that I’d settled into a fixed routine, turning always at the same corners, down the same alleyways, somehow finding comfort in the familiar details I encountered
every day as I moved through the heart of the city.

After breakfast each morning, I would typically walk along the Boulevard, under the trees, then turn left at Bolshaya Nikitskaya, keeping to the left pavement, passing the old houses and the
small church on the corner, until I reached the Tchaikovsky conservatory. At this point, I would often cross the street and sit on the terrace of Coffee Mania, where I would spend one or two hours
drinking coffee and reading books in Russian with the help of a dictionary, writing down words and thoughts in my red notebooks.

I was now reading Chekhov in Russian. I had bought the collected works of Anton Pavlovich, a soviet edition from 1970, eight volumes in blue hardcover. The books, which I had acquired for a
decent price in the basement section of the Moskva Bookshop, were lovely and smelled of ancient paper. A colour picture of a pensive Anton Pavlovich adorned the first page. I always carried one of
the volumes in my backpack, usually the one with the dramaticheskie proizvedenya, all the plays, or the one entitled
Rasskazy i Povesti 1895–1903
, which included Chekhov’s
best-known stories. I liked reading the plays because they were subtle, understated, particularly the big four, and I admired the way Anton Pavlovich didn’t seem so much interested in telling
a story as in conveying a nastroeniye – a mood or atmosphere.