Back to Moscow (6 page)

It was true that, as things turned out, I was dedicating less time to my research than I’d initially intended. Not that I didn’t appreciate the intellectual stimulation of academic
life, or Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s mentorship. It was simply a question of scheduling. Free time was scarce in Moscow–my weeks came with a number of fixed appointments. Tuesday night was
of course ladies’ night at the Duck. Wednesday night we were expected to attend the Moscow-famous Count down at the Boarhouse, where, if you arrived early enough, you could get up to four
drinks for the price of one. Thursday night was Propaganda night. Unmissable. And then, come the weekend, we had new clubs to explore, but also the old ones, which we still had to keep up with:
McCoy, Karma, Dirty Dancing, Beefeater, Papa Johns.

One day Lyudmila Aleksandrovna handed me a reading list on Lermontov, which we were supposed to discuss at our next meeting. A week later I showed up in her office apologising
for not having read the articles.

‘But these articles were mostly in English,’ she said, gazing at me from behind her thick glasses. ‘You shouldn’t have any problem reading them.’

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I just didn’t have much time this week.’

‘Don’t worry, Martin, go back to the library right now and come back tomorrow.’

She was pissed off.

I decided not to go out that night and focus on Lermontov instead. After dinner, I sat in my room trying to read the articles, a selection of texts about the sociological and historical context
of
A Hero of Our Time
. The articles were interesting but I found it hard to concentrate. As I lay on my bed, taking a break from the reading, trying to focus on Mikhail Yuryevich’s
life and times, my head kept flashing up images of Propaganda. The dance floor, the chilled vodka, the pretty dyevs. It was Thursday night and, by now, the brothers were probably getting into the
club. I thought about the night I met Lena, when we left Propaganda and she took me to the rooftop to show me the view. I recalled how, at some point, I put my arm around Lena, and, before we
kissed for the first time, I had to listen to a long exposition on the importance of meditation and yoga in her life.

Back at my desk, I tried to channel my thoughts from Propaganda back to Lermontov and the articles I had spread in front of me. But my mind rebelled, fought back and drifted to Propaganda.

What was the point of coming all the way to Moscow if I was going to stay in my room reading articles?

I began to think about the ultimate purpose of my academic work. When I’d first discussed my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, she’d suggested that I also use non-literary
sources. ‘If you are going to study the female characters in Russian literature,’ she’d said in our second meeting, ‘you could start by analysing the situation of women in
Russia.’ She then suggested that I read demographic studies, opinion polls, media analyses, and use all this scientific data to extract a clear picture of the role of women in Russian
society. ‘This could help you understand the real-life context in which literary heroines are born,’ she’d said.

I could certainly check those sources, I now thought. In fact, if Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s point was that I form a clear picture of Russian women, I might as well adopt a more direct
approach. I could add, for instance, a primary source of qualitative data. It then occurred to me that meeting dyevs could well be considered, to some extent, part of my academic research.

I stood up and began pacing around the small dusty room, contemplating the possibility of leaving Lermontov aside for the night and joining the brothers in Propaganda. From an academic point of
view, I told myself, it would be interesting to discern to what extent Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov – the whole bunch, really – were describing
Russian women as they
were
in real life, and to what extent they were describing
their own ideas
about Russian women. The more dyevs I met, I told myself, the better I would
understand the defining characteristics of real Russian women.

Thrilled with my breakthrough, I took a quick shower, put on a black shirt and a thick coat, and headed for the street. In the taxi I continued to think about my research. I was aware, of
course, that my new methodology brought with it some technical difficulties. To begin with, I could anticipate a high degree of cross-contamination between the two populations of my study: heroines
from Russian books and women from Moscow’s nightlife. While it was surely real women who had inspired the heroines of the Russian literary canon, the opposite was also true: Tatyana Larina,
Anna Karenina, Natalya Rostova, they had all influenced the way Russian women saw themselves.

I paid the taxi fare and strode towards the queue outside Propaganda. I needed to start meeting dyevs in a more structured way. I needed to learn about their lives, their ambitions, their fears.
In a later stage of my research I could merge the qualitative data obtained from these encounters with the quantitative data I could gather from scientific sources, such as sociological studies.
That would give me a complete picture of Russian women that I could compare with the behaviour of heroines in Russian literature.

Of course, at this stage, I didn’t need to share these details of my research with Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, I told myself as I walked past the bouncer and entered Propaganda – it
would be my own methodology, my unique approach, my very personal path into the core of the Mysterious Russian Soul.

A
N INITIAL MISTAKE
I made was not taking notes on my encounters. This caused me a great deal of confusion. Dyevs had diverse and interesting stories and
I could at first identify some Tatyanas and Kareninas, but soon their backgrounds began to merge into one single narrative in my head and my many meetings turned into a continuous conversation with
a changing interlocutor.

I often found myself in the awkward position of asking a dyev about a friend or a job she’d never had. When I noticed their confusion, I blamed my faux pas on my poor Russian. They seemed
happy to correct me but, to avoid further embarrassment, I began to carry notebooks so that I could keep track of my meetings. Now, on long metro journeys, or sitting alone in cafés, I would
take one of the red notebooks I’d purchased at the university, and I would scribble thoughts and bits from my conversations. With time, these notes – my field observations, so to speak
– became particularly useful, as they allowed me not only to quickly recall the background of each girl I met, but also to identify common features of the Russian woman, the kind of
information that could become handy at a later stage of my research.

I also wrote down the new words and phrases I encountered. Thanks to my regular meetings, my vocabulary was being expanded by intriguing concepts, such as sudba, a word that was used often,
meaning fate or destiny, but in a distinctively Russian way. Events in life, I learned, were either ne sudba, when they didn’t happen and therefore were not meant to be, or sudba, which
implied a supernatural predestination against which simple human will was powerless. Once I understood the importance of this concept, I tried to use it as much as I could. And so I often found
myself walking along the Old Arbat or sitting in a café, holding a girl’s hand and telling her how I thought our meeting had been such a huge sudba. They liked that.

M
IND THE CLOSING DOORS
. Next stop: Chistye Prudy.

I was heading north on the red line, rocked from side to side, observing the other passengers, not thinking of anything in particular.

As the metro clanked through endless tunnels, I began to reflect upon the sheer size of the city, how nobody could tell me how many people lived in it. More than in Paris or London or New York,
I was often told.

Every day, millions of unsmiling Muscovites navigated their way through the underground arteries of the city. Silent strangers in dark clothes, crammed into wagons yet trying to avoid human
contact, staring at their newspapers, at their books, into the air. Not a smile. Every passenger in Moscow’s metro seemed deeply unhappy.

Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Krasnye Vorota.

You could hop on any metro line and get off at a random station, and you would always resurface among wide streets and identical buildings. Each suburb had a different name, often related to
communist lore, but they all looked pretty much the same. Stations had their own makeshift markets, which sold cheap clothes and newspapers and chocolates and flowers and gloves and hats and
scarves and pirate CDs and, later on, mobile phones.

Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Komsomolskaya.

When we first met, some three weeks after my arrival, Ira was about to start working part-time as a secretary at an American firm. Wanting to improve her English but unable to afford language
classes, she’d pinned a handwritten ad on the announcement board of my faculty.
You want to practise Russian?

On Tuesdays we spoke in English and on Thursdays we spoke in Russian. That was our arrangement. We would meet in the first-floor cafeteria at MGU, where they only served a local variety of
instant coffee and the price of a cup changed according to the amount of sugar you wanted in it.

Ira had a boyfriend, a piece of information she’d forced into the conversation while we were sipping our first cup of coffee, and this was good, I thought, as I could do with a real
Russian friend. Besides, I wasn’t attracted to her. Ira was plumpish, and her eyes, an undefined watery colour, were always framed by dark circles. Her hair was thin, short and messy. By
Moscow standards, Ira was what Colin referred to as below average.

Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Krasnoselskaya.

So we became friends, Ira and I, and she introduced me to another side of Moscow – not the clubbing scene or expat hang-outs, which she didn’t really know, but the cultural side of
the city. She showed me the places where the young intelligentsia gathered, and she used those words, young intelligentsia, by which she meant, I realised, other cash-starved students. Ira
introduced me to some of her girlfriends. They were very nice but, for some reason which defied the rules of probability, not one of them was above average.

Ira and her friends taught me modern slang and expressions I would not learn at language class with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who was a hundred years old and probably didn’t know them. From Ira
I also learned Russian swearwords, which proved useful with time, when I began to take on rude waitresses and shop assistants.

It was Ira who first showed me Café OGI, the underground establishment, famous in Moscow, that later sprouted two separate cafés with similar looks and names – all selling
cheap books, cheap food and cheap drinks. But Ira took me to the original one, on Chistye Prudy, and it was dark and smoky, out of a Dostoyevsky novel, and, as I sipped on a warm beer, I glanced
around at the colourful clientele, trying to identify the philosophers, the schemers and the impoverished students with murderous intentions.

Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Sokolniki.

I jumped off the metro, took the escalator up to the street. It was a cold December day. I wandered in the snow for ten minutes, holding a hand-drawn map in my gloved hands, trying to recognise,
among the indistinguishable blocks and entrances, which one corresponded to the one where Ira had drawn a cross. It was dark and by the time I found the podyezd, as they called the entranceway, it
was quarter past eight. I tapped in the entry code, as written on Ira’s instructions, and took the lift to the third floor.

‘Happy birthday,’ I said when Ira opened the door. ‘This is for you.’

I handed her a bottle of expensive French wine I’d bought in Eliseevsky.

‘What else?’ Ira asked.

‘Was I supposed to bring anything else?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, laughing. ‘This is great. What I mean is, what else are you going to tell me? Or is happy birthday all you wish me?’

I took my shoes off, placed them at the end of a line of shoes ranged neatly along the wall. ‘What’s wrong with happy birthday?’

‘Martin, in Russia you can’t only wish someone happy birthday.’

I handed my coat to Ira. ‘You can’t?’

‘Happy birthday is just a formula,’ Ira said, hanging my coat on a rack bulging with winter clothes. ‘You need to tell me what you wish for me in the next year, like happiness,
love or success, you know.’

‘Sorry, I didn’t know. I do wish you all that as well.’

A pungent smell of cabbage wafted in from the kitchen.

‘This is Sergey’s mother,’ Ira said, pointing at the older lady who had just appeared. ‘Aleksandra Olegovna.’

Aleksandra Olegovna had clearly made an effort to look festive. Her hair was blown out, in the fashion of 1980s pop singers, and she was wearing a black dress and a thick necklace with pearly
stones. She was in her late forties or fifties, I could never tell with older Russian women.

‘Come in, come in,’ Aleksandra Olegovna said. ‘Apologies for the small apartment.’

It was customary among Muscovites to apologise for the size of their apartments. Colin said it was yet another manifestation of their inferiority complex vis-à-vis foreigners that, in the
minds of untravelled Russians, all Westerners live in big houses. The thought made me laugh as, in Amsterdam, I’d been living in the smallest of flats, with a cupboard shower at the back of
the kitchen and a sink I used both for shaving and piling up dirty dishes.

I was led into the kitchen, where I was introduced to about a dozen people. Ira’s cousins, aunts, friends, a young couple I’d met before and Sergey. All Russians. All crammed around
the table in silence, under a bright neon light. There was no music – you could hear the rattling of the old fridge. Realising that I was the last one to arrive, I wondered if the others had
been asked to come earlier.

The table was covered with a flowery tablecloth and blanketed with food: mayonnaise-based salads, smoked salmon, beef-tongue jelly, pickled herring, salted cucumbers, mushrooms, boiled potatoes
with butter and dill, smetana. Everything was untouched.