Back to Moscow (29 page)

If you thought about it, it was a matter of chance that they’d met in the first place, Margarita and the Master, when she was carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. I began to think of how
most relationships are based on a random encounter, a set of small interlinked events that lead to the fateful meeting. It was Margarita that the Master had met, but it could have been any other
woman. Then, once things get complicated, with the Devil coming to Moscow and all, the Master could have decided to move on, to forget Margarita. He doesn’t. The way Tatyana doesn’t
forget Onegin. Or Karenina doesn’t forget Vronsky. Or Liza doesn’t forget Lavretsky. Moving on is the easy way out, the path that’s never chosen, at least not in books. For some
reason, in most novels, once you’ve made a romantic choice, even if it’s a random choice, you stick to it. And you accept all the suffering that comes with it. This is, after all, a
fundamental premise in classic literature: a lover is irreplaceable.

And yet, this kind of love, the maddening attraction we read about in books, is nothing but a literary device, I thought, an author’s trick to endow characters with strong motivations. In
real life feelings are more malleable – suffering is optional. If things go wrong, you can move on and search for someone else.

Take Dushechka, in Chekhov’s story, who’s happy as long as she has
someone
to love, to worry about, regardless of who the recipient of her affection is. Maybe
Dushechka’s kind of love, a strong feeling whose object is replaceable, is the real kind of love.

I thought about Tatyana. If she were taken from me by a Devil-like figure, or if she decided to leave me for someone else, should I suffer and fight for her? Couldn’t I just move on to the
next girl?

All this was new to me. Had I understood these things earlier, before Moscow, I wouldn’t have had to go through the pain Katya had inflicted on me. Now, when I looked back at my time in
Amsterdam, I wondered why I hadn’t just moved on, like Dushechka. Why had I decided to suffer, as if I were a character in a novel?

After Katya came Lena and after Lena came Tatyana. In the end, in an unplanned manner, I had replaced the object of my affection. But what I felt now was not an endless capacity for love –
as Tolstoy had said of Dushechka – but rather a comfortable degree of nonchalance. Like the Master with Margarita, my relationship with Tatyana had also evolved from a casual encounter: the
moment she showed up at Kamergersky to show Colin an apartment. Our being together had been determined by a series of random actions without much individual meaning in themselves – random
actions that, put together, marked the direction of my life.

This bothered me. Maybe Colin was right and the one thing to do was to forget about relationships and fuck around. But then, if we accept this readiness to replace a lover, to care about
nothing, life itself dissipates into Chekhovian lightness. With nothing to care about, how do we go about looking for happiness?

Perhaps the antidote to this weightlessness is to endow life with a forced sense of gravity. Choose to care about things. Choose to consider our relationships as a matter of life or death.

Once, when Lena had been crying in my flat – I no longer remember the reason – I asked her why she always made such a big drama about everything. Why couldn’t we just have a
happy relationship, without the tears and the shouting? ‘If we don’t suffer for it,’ Lena had told me, ‘how do we know our love is real?’

Buried in their mysterious soul, I thought, there is something that makes Russians avoid superficial joy and choose to pursue deeper, sadder feelings – something that makes them chase the
resonance and aesthetic value of melancholy. Liza’s choice. And, perhaps, they got it right.

I looked across the square at the statue of Tchaikovsky, thinking that I needed to care about Tatyana as if I were the protagonist of a Russian novel: without doubts. I must decide to be with
her, I thought, and blindly take all the shit that comes with my decision. To relieve myself of the burden of choice, I now realised, I needed to believe in destiny. And accept pain. Like a
Russian.

I
HAD BEEN WANDERING
around the centre for an hour. The morning heat was so unbearable that I decided to take refuge at the subterranean shopping centre
in Okhotny Ryad. In the Internet café, I bought a cup of coffee and sat in front of a computer, enjoying the cooled air. I read a few international papers online, then responded to emails
from family and old friends.

As I was walking out of the café, I received a text from Tatyana suggesting that we meet for lunch at Ris i Ryba, a sushi restaurant in the Dom na Naberezhnoy, the House on the
Embankment. Sure, I texted back. I wandered among the shops, trying on clothes but buying nothing, and, when it was almost noon, I came up to the street.

There was nowhere to hide from the sun. I walked past the fountain with the horses, where a bunch of children were messing around with the water, covering some nozzles in unison to increase the
water pressure and catch distracted pedestrians by surprise. They seemed to be having a good time. I dragged my feet through the park, under the blasting sun, and reached the end of Aleksandrovsky
Sad – my shirt, drenched in sweat, stuck to my back.

On the other side of the asphalted esplanade, across the river, stood the Dom na Naberezhnoy, crowned with its enormous Mercedes-Benz logo against the blue sky. The encircled three-pointed star
was not entirely aligned with the façade of the building and, every time I walked by, I wondered if perhaps the logo was meant to rotate around a central axis that no longer worked. As I
walked over the bridge towards the building, it occurred to me that, maybe, at sunset, the Mercedes-Benz shadow would reach across the river, towards the walls of the Kremlin, a reminder to Russian
rulers of their country’s defeat in its twentieth-century crusade against capitalism. The giant logo had probably been installed in the mid-1990s, when Russia, naively in love with the West,
had embraced everything foreign with enthusiasm. I wondered if the country felt betrayed and, in my head, I imagined Russia as a woman writing a love letter – Tatyana’s letter to Onegin
– to an unresponsive and arrogant West who had arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not so much to help with the reconstruction, but to oversee the country’s capitulation and
collect the spoils of the Cold War.

I entered the building through one of the southern entrances next to the Udarnik cinema, passed the okhrannik and went through a metal detector which I suspected hadn’t worked for years. I
took the lift to the first floor.

The doors opened and I stepped into the fresh, artificially cooled air. Soothing lounge music played in the background. The waiter, probably Kazakh or Uzbek – most waiters in Japanese
restaurants were of Central Asian origin – was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt with a white collar. He led me along the central aisle, passing by the open kitchen and sushi belt,
to a small table by the huge floor to ceiling window. I found the smell of boiled rice comforting. The window overlooked the road, the park, the river. I ordered green tea and waited for
Tatyana.

Built in the early 1930s as a residence for the soviet nomenklatura, the Dom na Naberezhnoy had also hosted distinguished academics, war heroes and pretty much everybody who had been elitni back
then. Other than ample apartments and the sushi restaurant, the residential complex boasted a cinema, a clinic, shops, a stolovaya, common spaces. But what made it a legendary building in Moscow
was not just the social standing of its former inhabitants, but the fact that many of them had vanished during their stay. I had been told that the building contained an elaborate system of secret
passages connected to the luxurious flats and that, at the peak of Stalin’s repression, these corridors were used by the secret services to spy on the building’s notorious inhabitants
and snatch them in the middle of the night.

Tatyana arrived a few minutes after me and was escorted to my table by the same waiter. She was wearing a white top with a scooped neckline, almost see-through. I could see the lacework of her
bra. Her face was flushed from the heat, her eyes greener than ever, her blonde curls untied and airy. I served her tea and we ordered two lunch menus – mine with salmon sushi, hers with
chicken teriyaki.

I asked Tatyana if she had ever shown any apartments in the Dom na Neberezhnoy.

‘I showed a three-room apartment a few months ago,’ she said. ‘So expensive. This is one of the most exclusive buildings in Moscow. The views are very beautiful, you can see
the churches inside the Kremlin.’

‘Beautiful indeed,’ I said, glancing out of the window.

‘Most available flats are now rented by foreigners though. Russians don’t want to live here.’

‘Why’s that?’

Tatyana tried to take a sip of tea, but it was too hot. She placed the cup back on the table. ‘Because of the ghosts.’

‘Ghosts?’

‘You know, the spirits of dead people. The building is haunted.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Ghosts.’

‘The building’s residents were killed here during Stalin,’ Tatyana said. ‘Their spirits remain in the building.’

‘And people believe in these things?’

‘I wouldn’t want to live in this building,’ she said. ‘Just in case.’ She tried to smile, but I could see something was bothering her.

The waiter brought us bowls of miso soup. I held mine with two hands and looked out the window. I could see the traffic thickening, cars crawling across the bridge with their windows open, then
the river, dark and silent. The glass was thick and I could not hear the traffic or feel the heat. Like watching a silent movie.

‘We need to talk,’ Tatyana said.

This was unusual. Tatyana and I never needed to talk, at least not the kind of talk that needed to be announced. It had crossed my mind, walking in the heat on my way to Ris i Ryba, that she
might want to discuss something in particular. Why hadn’t she suggested lunch before she left for work that morning? In fact, I had felt a slight distancing in the last few days, a small drop
in the temperature of our relationship, as if she were holding something against me. Nothing dramatic, just the tone of her voice or the way she wouldn’t follow up on a conversation I
initiated.

Perhaps Tatyana was about to suggest moving into my apartment on weekends as well, fully taking over what was once my separate life. I wasn’t sure I was ready to give it up. I took a sip
of miso soup and I prepared myself to defend the nature of our arrangement, to repel any threats to the status quo.

Tatyana left her bowl of soup on the table and held my hand. Her hand was warm from the soup.

‘Martin, I’m temporarily,’ she said, with a shaky voice, then stopped and looked at me, waiting for a reaction.

‘In what sense?’

‘You heard me.’

‘I don’t think I understood.’

Tatyana tried to smile. ‘You did.’

‘I didn’t,’ I said, a bit irritated. ‘Temporarily what?’

At that moment the waiter brought our plates of salmon roll and chicken and two small bowls of seaweed salad. I took a pair of wooden chopsticks from their paper wrapping, split them and offered
them to Tatyana. She accepted them with two hands, somewhat ceremoniously.

‘I’m pregnant,’ she said. In case I still didn’t understand, she added, ‘With a baby in my belly.’

That’s when I really learned the difference between vremennaya, with a v, temporarily, and beremennaya, with a b, pregnant.

I saw that the line of cars was now stuck on the bridge, inching towards the centre, their exhaust pipes expelling smoke into the hot Moscow air. Old soviet cars, Ladas and Volgas, and new
German cars owned by rich Russians. I could now recognise luxury models, at least those sold at Stepanov’s dealership.

‘How do you know?’ I said, turning to Tatyana.

‘Women know these things.’

‘Have you been to a doctor?’

Tatyana’s lips were shiny, the sunlight reflected on her lip-gloss. ‘I took a test. I’m probably five or six weeks pregnant.’

‘And you are sure it’s mine?’

‘Why do you even have to ask? You know you’re the only man in my life.’

Giving myself time to think, I gazed at the river, focusing my eyes on the closest of the fountains. The water was pumped high into the air, with strength, and, in the cloud of falling drizzle,
I could discern the timid shades of a rainbow.

Gradually, Tatyana’s words started to become a reality, the concept of her pregnancy growing in my head, like a balloon inflating and occupying all the corners of my mind. But I
wasn’t exactly thinking about the life-shattering implications of the news, or pondering our options. For some reason, I found my mind preoccupied with Tatyana’s teeth, the one
imperfection on her face. It occurred to me that perhaps I should take Tatyana to the international medical centre and have her front teeth fixed.

When I looked back, Tatyana’s face was red.

I held her hand. ‘Everything will be OK,’ I said.

She smiled.

Sunlight illuminated her from behind, a halo of bright light forming around her loose golden hair. She looked prettier than ever.

I kissed Tatyana across the table.

‘Who have you told about this?’ I asked.

‘Nobody, I only found out this weekend. My breasts hurt a bit, and I was late, so I bought the test.’

‘I thought we had been careful,’ I said.

‘Most of the time. These things happen. It must have been at the dacha, in the forest. Remember?’

‘But you said it was safe.’

‘Martin, I’m a grown woman. I want to have the baby.’

‘We didn’t plan this,’ I said.

‘You can’t plan everything in life.’

A long-ago memory from a rainy day was now casting a shadow over my thoughts. ‘Sudba,’ I said.

‘Yes.’ Tatyana smiled. ‘It’s destiny.’

The food remained on the table, untouched. The waiter came to ask if everything was OK.

‘Everything’s good,’ I said. Then, turning to Tatyana, I repeated, ‘Everything’s good.’