Back to Moscow (16 page)

Then, out of nowhere, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna launched into a lecture about the lishniy chelovek, the superfluous man, a type of male character common in nineteenth-century Russian literature.
‘Superfluous men,’ Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was saying, ‘are typically born into wealth and privilege. They are sensitive men, like you, Martin. They are also very cynical. You
know, they disregard social values.’ She took her glasses off and wiped them.

‘Why superfluous?’ I asked.

‘They don’t contribute anything positive to society. They suffer existential boredom. Often, they end up challenging other men to useless duels.’

‘Existential boredom,’ I said.

She put her glasses back on, now smiling. ‘Of course the father of all superfluous men, the model to follow, is Evgeny Onegin himself.’

I glanced around the cramped office, at the piles of books on the floor, at the book-lined walls, at the small window, partly obscured by books. I remembered how puzzled I was when, during one
of our first meetings, I’d spotted the brown adhesive tape around the window frame. By now, at the start of my second winter in Moscow, I’d learned that the tape was a necessity in old
buildings, to avoid a freezing draught seeping in during the cold months.

Looking back at Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s smile, I couldn’t tell if she was mocking me, or truly accusing me of being superfluous.

‘There are other examples,’ she said, ‘of course. I presume you’ve read Turgenev’s
Diary of a Superfluous Man
.’

‘Not yet.’

‘You could also say that our dear Pechorin in
A Hero of Our Time
is one of them. And, of course, our good old friend Oblomov.’

‘
Oblomov
,’ I said. ‘I’ve read that.’ Goncharov’s
Oblomov
was the story of this guy who’s so bored and uninterested in the world that
he spends a large part of the book trying to get out of bed.

Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was now pointing her finger at me. ‘Martin, tell me, are you a superfluous man?’

‘I’m not into duels, if that’s what you mean.’

‘I’m serious,’ she said.

‘I don’t know, Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. I admit that my contribution to society is rather limited. But existential boredom, I don’t know.’

‘Think about it,’ she said.

In the end, I agreed to bring an entire outline of thesis chapters to our next meeting. We then talked about the impossible traffic in Moscow and she gave me a speech – a version of which
I’d heard often from other Muscovites – about the city having the most efficient and beautiful metro system in the world.

Before leaving her office, I placed two theatre tickets on her desk – Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
at Taganskaya.

‘This is for you,’ I said. I’d been told that MGU professors expected little presents every now and then from their students. She stood up and thanked me for the tickets, said
she would take her daughter to the theatre with her.

As I left Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s office I was wondering who, among men, is not superfluous.

I
HAD SOME SPARE TIME
after seeing Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, so I decided to visit the university’s second-hand bookshops. Browsing through the
Russian literature section I found an edition of
War and Peace
in two volumes, printed in 1944, with cardboard covers and a beautiful old-paper smell. I bought the two volumes for a
hundred and forty rubles, about the price of a vodka shot in Propaganda.

I had arranged to meet Ira for lunch at the main stolovaya. I found her standing outside the entrance, reading a book in English. We said hello and I showed her my purchase. She seemed
unimpressed.

‘Sergey’s mum has so many of these old books,’ she said. ‘We store them at the dacha.’ She dropped her book into a plastic bag. ‘Let’s eat. I’m
starving.’

We stood at the end of the food queue. Ira looked thinner, her watery eyes brighter. When we reached the front, a sour-faced babushka with a paper kitchen hat loaded our trays with borsch,
chicken, buckwheat. To drink we each took a glass of syrupy kompot. At the cashier’s desk I pointed at both our trays, but Ira insisted on paying for her own food.

‘It’s nice to be back at the university,’ I said, as we sat at one of the big tables by the window. I could see the courtyard covered in fresh snow. ‘I hardly come down
these days.’

‘How’s the research going?’

‘I’m reading stuff,’ I said. ‘Thinking, meeting people. Just not writing that much. What about you, how are things?’

‘Not that good.’

I had learned by now that, whenever confronted by a ‘how are you’ or ‘how are things’, Russians rarely answered with a simple ‘fine, thanks’. They saw the
question not as a polite greeting formula, but as a welcome chance to enumerate the many problems life had recently dumped on them.

‘What’s wrong?’ I was dissecting the chicken with my knife and fork, trying to extract some meat from the skinny thigh.

‘Sergey.’ Ira slurped a spoonful of soup. ‘He does nothing all day, just drinks beer, watches TV.’

‘What about the photography?’

‘Not even that any more. Not inspired, he says.’

‘What can you do,’ I said, smiling. ‘Sergey’s an artist.’

‘He’s my boyfriend,’ Ira said, gesturing at me with a piece of black bread, ‘and I love him with all my heart, but I’m tired of his laziness.’

‘Give him a break. He’s probably just going through a difficult phase.’

She held up the piece of black bread, which seemed to stand for Sergey in our conversation. ‘I don’t care if he wants to do photography or painting or whatever he wants, but he could
have finished his degree and got a real job as well. In the end all he does is talk and talk and no action. I don’t know, sometimes I question the whole thing between us.’

I realised what looked different about Ira. She was wearing make-up. Eyeliner, shadow, powder – you could hardly see the dark circles around her eyes.

‘All talk and no action,’ I said. ‘Sergey’s a dreamer, a classic Russian idealist.’

Ira bit into her black bread. ‘A what?’

‘A Russian idealist. You know, a typical character in Chekhov’s works. Nabokov writes about this in his
Lectures on Russian Literature
.’ I took my red notebook out of
my backpack and started to flip through the pages.

‘You and your Chekhov. The world is not a book, Martin. There is literature and there is reality.’

‘Here it is,’ I said, pointing at my own handwriting. ‘The Russian idealist, Nabokov says, is an intellectual who combines lofty dreams and human decency with an inability to
put his ideals into action. Just like Sergey.’

I smiled.

Ira didn’t. She stared down at my notebook, lost in thought. ‘Sergey’s a drunk,’ she said. ‘He has no lofty dreams, he just wants to drink all day and maybe, one
day, if he feels like it, take his stupid black and white photographs that nobody needs.’

A group of young students sat on the other side of our table.

‘Lucky you can support him.’

‘I don’t earn that much,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘They exploit the Russian staff in our firm. American colleagues doing the same job as me get three or four times
my salary. It’s so unfair. In the end, after sending money to my family and paying the bills, I can’t really save much. And, you know, I would like to rent my own apartment one day.
Sergey’s mother is very nice, but the place is too small for the three of us.’

‘This chicken is all bone,’ I said. ‘There’s no flesh.’

‘Welcome to Russia,’ Ira said, in English.

Through the large window, I saw five or six students having a snowball fight. They seemed to be having fun, running after each other. I thought it would be nice to join them. There was something
about fresh snow, a promise of renewal and peace.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Lena left me.’

‘Again?’

I nodded. ‘Yesterday. I think this time it’s for real.’

‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing.’

‘You must have done something.’

‘I didn’t
do
anything. She found a hair in my bed.’

‘Another girl’s hair?’ Ira asked.

‘I guess. Long and black.’

‘You’re such an asshole.’

‘I told Lena it was probably an old hair caught in the blanket, but she didn’t want to listen. She just started to cry.’

‘And she left? Just like that?’

‘First she asked me if I loved her,’ I said.

‘What did you say?’

‘What was I supposed to say? Anyway, she was all emotional, not listening.’

‘Western men, you’re all pussies.’

‘Then it occurred to me that the hair could be from my cleaning lady.’

‘Is that possible?’ Ira asked.

‘Maybe, who knows.’

‘You don’t know what your cleaning lady looks like?’

‘Perhaps it was her hair. Anyway, I told Lena I thought the hair belonged to the cleaning lady, but it was too late. She was too pissed off.’

‘Of course,’ Ira said, ‘she didn’t believe your bullshit.’

‘It’s not that she
didn’t
believe me. She
chose
not to believe me.’

Ira put her empty soup plate aside. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, she preferred the drama of finding another lover’s hair over the triviality of finding a hair from my cleaning lady.’

‘I see.’ Ira shook her head. ‘And, I presume, that’s because she’s a woman?’

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘That’s because she’s Russian.’

W
HEN THE INTERCOM RANG
I was lying on the couch, reading a book. I glanced at my watch – almost midnight. I placed the book on the coffee table,
face down so as not to lose the page, walked over to the entrance, picked up the receiver.

‘Martin, it’s Sergey. Are you alone?’

‘Sergey? Come up.’

I pulled a pair of jeans on over my underpants and opened the two front doors of my flat.

A minute later Sergey knocked at the open door.

‘Come in, come in,’ I said.

‘Sorry to show up this late.’ Sergey made sure he was fully inside the apartment before shaking my hand – some odd superstition about not greeting under a threshold. Since I
last saw him, Sergey’s thick stubble had grown to almost a full beard. His eyes were bloodshot. He smelled of vodka.

‘Everything OK?’

‘It’s so hot in here,’ he said.

‘The heating is on high these days. I have to open the windows so as not to boil to death. It cools off later at night.’

‘You’re lucky to live in the centre,’ he said, taking his shoes off. ‘We don’t get that much heating in the northern suburbs.’

I hung his coat behind the door and directed him into the kitchen. ‘You all right?’

‘It’s good for your health to get some cold air into the apartment,’ he said. ‘Even now, in the heart of winter. My mum opens the windows every morning, it helps clean
the air and get the infections out of the house.’

‘It would be easier if I could regulate the temperature myself.’

Sergey glanced around the kitchen, as if searching for something. ‘Do you have a beer?’

‘Sure.’ I opened the fridge, took out two bottles of Baltika and a plastic box of salt cucumbers. I sliced a cucumber and arranged the slices on a small plate. Sitting at the table,
I moved a pile of books to one side and opened the two bottles.

Sergey stared at his bottle, saying nothing.

‘Do you want a glass?’ I asked.

‘No, thanks. It’s all right.’

‘Davay,’ I said. We clinked our beers.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘in Georgia people never toast with beer.’

I took a sip. ‘Why’s that?’

‘I don’t know,’ Sergey said. ‘Bad omen, I suppose. Did you know my father was Georgian?’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘From Gori, like Stalin. Came to Moscow in the late 1960s, to study at MGU. Of course back then it was all the same country so things were easier. Besides, half of Moscow’s
intelligentsia were Georgians. Artists, poets, singers. Many came to Moscow.’

‘But your mum is Russian.’

‘Half Ukrainian, half Russian. That makes me a perfect soviet specimen. Except of course there is no Soviet Union any more.’ He glanced down at his Baltika and shook his head.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I was born in Moscow. I’ve lived all my life in this city, and yet I don’t always feel I belong here. I get stopped in the street all the time
by policemen hoping that I’m an illegal immigrant and they can squeeze some rubles out of me.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘They’re kids, these policemen, illiterate drunks who
think they’re important just because they wear uniforms.’

I took a piece of cucumber. I could see Sergey’s eyes were watery, tears waiting to be released.

‘It’s about Ira,’ he said, head down, now brushing his thick eyebrows with his thumbs.

‘Is she OK?’

Sergey lifted the beer bottle, drank a few gulps, placed it back on the table. He started to peel the label. ‘She’s fucking another guy.’

‘In what sense?’

‘An American asshole,’ Sergey said. ‘From work. She told me. Well, it’s more that I caught her. My mobile phone ran out of credit so I used her phone to text a friend.
When I went to check that my text had been sent, I saw a sent message in English. You know my English is not very good, but I knew what it meant.’

‘Your English is good.’

‘The message said
I miss you
. It was sent to this guy Robert S, her boss at the firm. So I asked Ira about the message and she started shouting at me, saying that I was breaching
her privacy because I had looked at her mobile phone. As if
that
was the important thing.’

‘I see.’

Sergey was staring at the bottle of beer, tearing strips from the label, placing them next to each other on the table. ‘She told me they had just been flirting and nothing else but, when I
insisted, she admitted that they have been sleeping together. For a few weeks.’

Sergey held the bottle to his lips and, as he began drinking, let out a sob. He choked and spat some beer on the table.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, now openly crying.

‘Don’t worry.’ I took a roll of paper towel and handed it to him. He made a ball of paper, wiped the table. Then he tore another piece of paper towel off the roll and blew his
nose.