Back to Moscow (15 page)

‘I don’t think I want to see you tomorrow,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I want to see you again.’

I sat up on the couch, draped a blanket over my shoulders. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘You really don’t care about me, about how I feel inside. You have no capacity for compassion.’

Compassion. Sostradaniye. Co-suffering. Lena didn’t like it that I wasn’t able to suffer with her.

She placed the cup of tea on the table, picked her crumpled jeans up from the carpet, shook out the legs.

‘Lenushka, please.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Please.’

She was holding the little cross of her necklace. ‘Do you love me?’

I grabbed my glass of wine from the table, had a sip. ‘In what sense?’

‘Why is it so hard for you to say I love you?’

‘Everybody says I love you. It means nothing.’

‘Maybe it means nothing where you come from. Here it means a lot. I love you, Martin. I’m not afraid of saying it. I’m connected to my emotions. I say what I feel. But you
never said you loved me. Not even once.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘I want to know that you have feelings for me,’ Lena said, ‘that I’m important to you. Not just someone you sleep with.’

I didn’t know what to say. I tried to come up with some smart words, something revealing the depth and complexity of my feelings for Lena without falling into the tackiness of a forced
love confession. Something witty, honest, simple – worthy of a Chekhov character. But the words didn’t quite form in my mouth.

Lena slipped into her jeans, wiped her tears with the tips of her fingers.

I stood up, grasped her hand.

‘Lena, I really like spending time with you. You know that. I love it when we are together. Let’s go to sleep, please.’

I tried to kiss her but she turned her face away. I wrapped my arms around her waist and pulled her gently towards me – her breasts now pressed against my body.

We embraced and on my cheeks I felt the damp warmth of her tears. I kissed her neck. Lena didn’t budge. We stood skin to skin, in the darkness. Not knowing what to do, I retreated to the
bathroom for a quick shower.

When I came out, Lena was standing by the double front door, zipping up her high-heeled boots. She was wearing a white woollen hat and a matching scarf. In high heels Lena was a bit taller than
me.

‘The metro must already be closed,’ I said. ‘Do you need money for a taxi?’

‘Martin, I’m not a whore.’

Lena stood motionless, waiting for me to open the doors. Tears had smudged her mascara – she had black smeared all over her face. I tried to wipe her cheeks but she pushed my hand away. I
unlocked the doors and she walked out.

Lena didn’t take the lift. Instead, she stomped down the stairs, her boots tapping loudly all six floors down to the street. I closed the doors, wrapped myself in the blanket again and
stepped onto the balcony. The air outside was icy and crisp – Moscow was covered in fresh snow. I saw Lena coming out of the entrance below, looking small and remote. She opened the metal
courtyard gate, turned left, and disappeared under the archway beneath my building.

I stood on the balcony, my nose going numb with the cold. The snowstorm had paused for a moment but tiny snowflakes kept on swirling in the darkness, sparkling around the street lamps.

Winter had arrived.

L
ENA
,
HERE
’
S MY BOOK
about Moscow. I imagine these days you don’t have much time to read
books. But if destiny puts these pages in your hands – the way it brought us together so many years ago – I can tell you now what I was thinking back then, on my balcony, when the first
snow of the season fell over Moscow and you left my flat in the middle of the night. Fuck you. Fuck you and your sad stories and your endless search for pain. And fuck that troubled soul of yours
that I was never Russian enough to understand.

U
NLIKE
P
USHKIN
’
S
T
ATYANA
,
WHO
stays with her
husband despite having a thing for Onegin, Anna Karenina decides to dump both husband and son so that she can pursue her affair with Vronsky.

These two stories, arguably the best-known love stories in Russia, have rather different endings. Two married women love another man. Married woman number one, Pushkin’s Tatyana, decides
to stick with her husband. Married woman number two, Tolstoy’s Karenina, ditches her husband and elopes with her lover. Married woman number one lives virtuously – if not happily
– ever after. Married woman number two falls into disgrace and ends up throwing herself under a train.

Thing is, we know Anna Karenina could’ve got away with her affair, if only she hadn’t been such a drama queen. Tolstoy makes sure we understand as much, by showing us that other
women in Anna’s milieu were having affairs – discreetly, without major repercussions. But Karenina makes a big fuss about her story with Vronsky and ends up messing everything up.

As a result of her public infidelity, Karenina gets a bad reputation, and all of a sudden it’s uncool among the elitni tusovka to be seen near her. She loses her friends. All she has now
is Vronsky. Vronsky likes Karenina, but she becomes so clingy and dependent that, at some point, he feels suffocated. Who could blame him.

So Vronsky does what anyone in his position would do: he tries to cool things off. He lets Anna know that he would like her to go and get a life of her own, but of course now she can’t
because she has become a social outcast. Vronsky still has his friends, because he is a man, and in nineteenth-century Russia – as in twenty-first-century Russia – men can fuck around
and remain respectable members of society.

Anna is now jealous and kind of paranoid and she whines all day. She becomes a bore. So Vronsky tells her, what the fuck, Anna, just chill out. But Anna Karenina, who’s a sufferer, makes a
scene about Vronsky’s every move. Is Karenina proving the extent of her love through her suffering? Vronsky won’t have any of it, and she becomes more desperate – unbearable. She
has nowhere to go. In the end, she can’t stand it any longer and, in what’s probably the most famous scene in Russian literature, she goes and throws herself under a train.

Tolstoy shows us a parallel storyline, that of Levin and Kitty, who enjoy a stable if somewhat dull marriage that is based not on carnal love, but on mutual respect and sacrifice. Is Tolstoy
against the idea of romantic passion?

Kind of. Levin, Tolstoy’s alter ego in the novel, is motivated not by his passion for Kitty, but by the intellectual notion of domestic life, the concept of creating a family.

Anna Karenina is punished by Tolstoy, who writes the story from an omniscient God-like point of view. In a way, Anna’s punishment is to be expected – Lev Nikolaevich had forewarned
readers by giving his book an epigraph of a scary Bible quote: ‘Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.’

So Anna Karenina pays, first with her social status, then with her sanity, finally with her life. All because she made the wrong choices. But what are those wrong choices? What is, in the end,
the fateful decision Anna has to pay for?

She doesn’t pay for having an extramarital affair. Nor does she pay for abandoning her child, something Tolstoy would not have considered particularly wrong. Karenina is punished for
betraying her own nature, her Russianness. Trying to feed her romantic and sexual desires, Anna Karenina forgot Tatyana’s lesson: that life is not about happiness – it’s about
meaning. For that, she deserves to be crushed by a train.

T
HE MORNING AFTER THE
first snowfall I awoke to the sound of metal shovels scraping the asphalt in the street. I made coffee and toast and sat by the
balcony. Down in the courtyard, street sweepers in orange uniforms were gathering piles of snow, then loading the snow onto their trucks. The sky was cloudless, cosmos blue. The roofs of the city
were covered in white.

I checked my phone and saw that Lena had not replied to my text message. I showered, put on winter clothes, went down to the street. In the metro, I prepared mentally for my monthly meeting with
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. Typically, after talking about the weather, I would tell her what I was reading, which, to her disappointment, was rarely academic books or articles but mostly novels, the
classics, which she thought I should have known by now. She would then give me some pointers for my research, recommend further reading and, when we ran out of things to say, we would discuss
politics, history or whatever was in the news.

I had to admit that I wasn’t dedicating much time to my research, at least not to the more conventional part – reading scholarly papers, meeting professors, visiting the library.
Come to think of it, I hadn’t been to the library in weeks. Not that I wasn’t working, but getting to know Russian women was taking up most of my time. Why should I bother with dusty
old literary theories – I thought, as the metro sped through the tunnels – when I can spend my time reading Chekhov and meeting real women?

I arrived at the university before eleven, just in time for our meeting. When I entered her office, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was reading at her desk, hidden behind stacks of books and papers.

‘Please sit down,’ she said. ‘Let me boil some water.’

She approached a side table under the bookshelves, switched the rusty kettle on. The water must have been hot because it boiled in a few seconds.

‘Finally, the snow,’ she said, sitting at her desk with two steaming cups of tea before her. ‘So late in the season. If the weather keeps changing year after year, soon
we’ll have no winter at all. You know, in soviet times winters were cold and dry. They always came at the same time of year.’

‘Everything was better organised in the Soviet Union,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ she said, missing the irony of my remark. ‘Everything worked back then. Not like now. Don’t believe what they tell you in the West, Martin, life was much
better then. Life was dignified.’

I sat across from her at her desk, keeping steady, afraid to lean back in case my wobbly chair fell apart. ‘It must have been an interesting time.’

‘Good times indeed,’ she said softly, speaking not to me but to the tea bag she was taking out of her cup. ‘You know, back in the 1970s, I used to travel a lot. I had to attend
academic congresses and literary seminars all across the Soviet Union. It was wonderful. We even had seminars in Sochi, Martin, can you imagine?’

‘Yes, Sochi.’

The fabled seminars in Sochi must have been important for Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, because she mentioned them almost every time we met.

‘We stayed in a beautiful dom otdykha by the sea,’ she went on, ‘very quiet and peaceful, and we had academic discussions until late in the night. And everything was paid for
by the trade union! Everything, Martin, can you imagine?’

‘Everything.’

She took a sip of tea, placed the cup back on the table. She looked at me, her thick glasses steamed up. Her golden tooth was framed by a dead smile, her thoughts surely lost in the 1970s.
Lyudmila Aleksandrovna belonged to the generation of Muscovites who were too old and too soviet to embrace the changes that the perestroika had brought to the country.

‘Believe me,’ she said. ‘Train, accommodation, meals, everything was covered. And look at things now, with our pitiful university salaries, we can hardly afford to buy bread
and kolbasa. And the streets of Moscow are full of brainless oligarchs driving expensive German cars. Russia is a bardak.’

‘Some things seem to be better now,’ I said, trying to cheer her up a little. ‘You know, with the new president. The economy is doing great.’

‘Nothing’s changed. Don’t be fooled because you live in the centre of Moscow, Martin. Most people in this country don’t have enough to eat.’

I unwrapped a block of chocolate I had bought in the metro, broke it into pieces and placed it on the desk, among the stacks of books. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna took the biggest piece and bit it
with gusto.

‘Martin, you are going to have to work a bit harder, you know. I haven’t seen any real work from you in the last two or three months.’

She took a sip of tea.

‘I’ve been doing some interesting reading lately,’ I said. ‘I’ve gone through a lot of Chekhov, as you recommended.’

‘It’s good that you read the works of Anton Pavlovich,’ she said, ‘but, as I told you before, proper research is not only about reading the books. You need to read
academic papers, talk to experts, compare views. You need to check those sociological studies of women that we talked about. I suppose that’s not what you do when you go out at night. After
all, Martin, you are in Moscow to write your thesis, not to go to discoteks. This is MGU, the Moscow State University. Students all over would kill for the chance you have to work in this
faculty.’

I straightened my back and gripped my cup of tea. ‘You are absolutely right, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. I do need to focus a bit more. But, you know, at this stage of my research I’m
trying to learn more about real people.’

‘In what sense?’

‘Before writing about literary characters, I feel I need to learn about the real Russian mentality. You know, about the intricacies of the Mysterious Russian Soul.’

I’d learned by now that Russians loved to hear the expression
Mysterious Russian Soul
. It made them feel special, unique. The Russians I met often referred to the Mysterious
Russian Soul to describe deep feelings that, I was told, a foreigner like me would never be able to comprehend.

‘Martin, you have been in Moscow for more than a year. The Russian soul has no more mysteries for you. It’s about time you started to put what you’ve learned down on paper. You
need to write your thesis. Otherwise you might end up losing your scholarship.’

There was no point arguing with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. In her long academic life, she’d surely seen too many students trying to bullshit their way out of work. I was not going to win her
over with my revolutionary methodology of using dyevs as primary sources.