Snowdrops (12 page)

Olga the Tatar was friendly, breathing onto my glasses
and then polishing them, but I must already have been giving out spoken-for pheromones, either that or bad breath, because she gave up and concentrated on Paolo. Over the meal Sergei Borisovich told us about his efforts to dodge the draft, which in Russia seems mainly to be a pretext for mass sadism and slave labour. His family had two choices, he said: to pay the recruitment officer to let him off, or to pay a crooked doctor to declare him an invalid. They paid the officer ten thousand dollars, Sergei Borisovich told us, but the guy double-crossed them and drafted him anyway, so in the end they had to pay the doctor too.

"What did you think afterwards?" I said. "About the army, I mean. And, you know, Russia. After the officer cheated you."

Sergei Borisovich turned his potato eyes away and thought hard for about twenty seconds. "Well," he said, "I probably should have paid the doctor to begin with."

Then, just then I think, I saw her--I saw Katya. She was waiting the tables on the other side of the restaurant. She was wearing a short black waitress skirt, a plain white blouse, and her hair in a neat plait. At first I wasn't sure that it was her, but then I was, and I got up and intercepted her as she was carrying the remains of a fruit platter back to the kitchen.

"Hello, Katya," I said.

"Meet me outside in two minutes," she said in Russian. "The fire exit, next to the bar."

It was suicidally cold in the street. Katya hugged herself against it when she came outside in her waitress outfit and someone else's coat.

"Kolya," she said straightaway, back in English and a little more poised, "don't tell Masha that you see me here. Please, Kolya. Please. I need more money to pay for studies, but Masha is not knowing about job. She may be angry that I am not studying all my time."

She put her hand, curled up inside her coat sleeve, just above my hip and looked at me without smiling. Another minute and we would have lost our extremities.

"Okay," I said, feeling sorry for her, which must have been one of the things she wanted me to feel: sorry about this secret extra work on top of her studies, sorry that she'd drawn a shorter straw than me in life. "I promise. See you tonight."

We went inside. Later, as our taxi crawled back to the Paveletskaya tower through the traffic, I had one of those moments of semidrunk reflection that at the time you can take for insights. They're just babies, I thought, these Russians with their blacked-out windows and their Uzis. All these adolescent hints of violence, from the bodyguards to the Cossack to the sabre-rattling president. For all their worldliness and pain, I thought then, the Russians are just babies.

* * *

"W
HAT A SHAME
,"
Tatiana Vladimirovna joked, as we all sat again in her overheated lounge. "Such a winter, and no war."

It was about nine o'clock in the evening on the same day, New Year's Eve. Outside, on the Bulvar and around the pond, teenagers were yelling and throwing firecrackers at each other. Katya had ditched her waitress outfit, and she and Masha were wearing skirts that told me we were going on somewhere afterwards. Masha had done her hair in a way I hadn't seen before, pulled back across her head with a ponytail at the back, with the tail wound around itself in a coil, which emphasised her green eyes and tight mouth. When we said hello, she kissed me on the earlobe. Tatiana Vladimirovna had gone to town again with the buffet. When I gave her the stuff I'd bought for her in London--some Scottish shortbread, English chocolate, and Earl Grey tea in a tin painted to look like a double-decker bus--I thought for a second that she was going to cry.

She put the tea tin on the shelf next to the black-and-white photos of herself and Pyotr Arkadyevich. I'd sobered up from lunch at the Uzbek place just in time for the evening toasts. We toasted the new year, and love, and Anglo-Russian friendship. When her blouse rode up as we lifted and clinked our glasses, I remember noticing that Katya had got her navel pierced.

We discussed the plan for the apartments.

Tatiana Vladimirovna was excited but nervous. Where would she buy her groceries? she asked. What if they never finished the Butovo place? It was true that she would like to get out of the city--she was too old, she was tired--but on the other hand she had been there so long, it was everything she knew.

Masha said that Stepan Mikhailovich was sure the building in Butovo would be finished by April. But to be extra safe, she said that they should wait until the end of May or the beginning of June to sign the final contract. Tatiana Vladimirovna would still be in there in time for the summer.

Next she explained that Tatiana Vladimirovna and Stepan Mikhailovich would have to obtain various important documents before they closed the deal. They needed proof of ownership for the two apartments and proof that the privatisation of Tatiana Vladimirovna's place had been legitimate. They would need a certificate showing that her building was not due to be knocked down in one of the mayor of Moscow's architectural culls: the mayor would summarily condemn a building to death, and her brother would get a handsome commission to put up another one on the same site. They needed a document confirming that no one besides Tatiana Vladimirovna was registered to live in her flat--no one who was, say, away in jail, no estranged spouse who might turn up and claim his right of abode. (You still can't just live anywhere you like in Russia, you
see, you can't just turn up like you and I did in Kennington. You have to register at a particular address, so the authorities know where to find you.) They also needed technical certificates for both apartments, which showed the floor plans, the plumbing, the structure of the buildings, and so on. Finally they would need the legal contract itself. Normally, Masha said, all this was put together by a real estate agent for a crazy fee.

"But, Kolya," she said in Russian, "you will help Tatiana Vladimirovna with the legal side, won't you?"

"Yes, of course," I said. I'd promised I would in the
banya
, as neither of us had forgotten.

"You are a real English gentleman," said Tatiana Vladimirovna. "We are so lucky to have found you."

"It's nothing," I said.

We agreed that, on the day after the long New Year break, we'd go first thing in the morning to a notary, to get a power of attorney that would allow me to act on Tatiana Vladimirovna's behalf.

Just before midnight Tatiana Vladimirovna broke out a bottle of sickly sweet Crimean champagne. We watched the fireworks that were exploding above the magical building by the pond.

"May God hold you in the palm of his hand," said Tatiana Vladimirovna.

We left as soon as we could without being rude, or maybe just before, and flagged down a car, driven by a
spotty adolescent who was sixteen at the outside. He took us round the Bulvar and across Tverskaya, then up past the casinos on the Novy Arbat, shining out of the midwinter night like an oasis in an Arctic desert, and across the frozen river to the Hotel Ukraina.

The hotel occupied one of the great gothic towers built in Moscow under Stalin, with grimy statues on the facade and, inside, Georgian gangsters, second-division Moldovan prostitutes, and out-of-their-depth European school parties. We shuffled around to the side of the building on the icy pavement, the girls stabbing at the ice with their stilettos. At the back of the hotel we climbed up some fire-escape stairs and rang a buzzer. Masha repeated the password that she'd got from one of her colleagues, and we were let in to a giant speakeasy nightclub.

We emerged at about four--Masha back to my place, Katya off on her own into the chilly new year. I tried to get Masha to take me back to their apartment, but she wouldn't. She never did. At the time I thought that was just an ordinary version of shame.

First thing in the morning on the first day after the New Year holiday--I guess it must have been the tenth of January or thereabouts--I went to the notary with Tatiana Vladimirovna, as we'd agreed, to get the power of attorney. Masha had to go to work in the shop that morning, but Katya came with us. She was our chaperone.

Notaries are one of the staple Moscow professions, like property developers, Georgian restaurateurs, and prostitutes. They are essentially pointless functionaries left over from tsarism, whose job it is to issue and stamp the legal documents that you need to do more or less anything in Russia. The ones the three of us visited that morning had
an office hidden inside an old circus building, just to the north of the city centre. I guess that when the music stopped and the evil empire collapsed, and the Russians looked at each other for a split second before grabbing whatever they could, these notaries had somehow wound up with a room that had once housed a troupe of acrobats or lion tamers.

We skated across the pavement outside the circus, Tatiana Vladimirovna moving quicker than I could over the ice, in her element in the winter like a penguin in water. We crept along the dark circus corridor and sat down in the notaries' waiting room. There was a big proud map of the Soviet Union on the wall. It was part of their job to make us wait, I think. Any Russian who has power over you (notary, ambulance man, waiter) is obliged to make you wait before they help you, so you know they can.

While we sat there Tatiana Vladimirovna told me how she'd come to the very same circus more than forty years ago. They'd had two elephants and a lion, she said.

"One of the elephants stood up on its back legs," she remembered, smiling and holding up her hands like hamster paws to show what the elephant did, "and when we saw that elephant, we knew that we'd arrived in Moscow, Pyotr Arkadyevich and I. We knew Moscow truly was the capital of the world. An elephant!"

I asked her whether she'd missed Siberia or the village outside Leningrad where she grew up.

Of course, she said. "The forest. And the people. The people are different in Siberia. And in Moscow I also learned about other things, which maybe it would have been better not to know. It wasn't only elephants."

Katya looked up from the epic text message she'd been composing and told Tatiana Vladimirovna not to bore me. I said I wasn't bored, it was interesting. That was one of the things I liked to think about myself in Moscow--that I was interested, concerned, nobler, somehow, than most of the other expat lawyers, who generally only stayed for two or three oblivious years, then retreated to service more reputable crooks in London or New York, sometimes as a partner in Shyster & Shyster or wherever, taking with them a handy offshore bank balance and some tits-and-Kalashnikov Wild East stories to console their live-long commutes.

I asked her how she'd lived through it all--Stalin and the war and the rest. It was a stupid question, I know, but the main one.

"There were three rules," Tatiana Vladimirovna said. "Obey these rules and it was possible to live, if you were lucky." She counted them off on the stumpy wrinkled fingers of one of her hands. "First, never believe anything they say. Second, don't be afraid. And third, never take any favours from anyone."

"Except for the apartment," I said.

"Except for the apartment."

"What about the apartment?" said Katya, looking up again.

"Nothing," Tatiana Vladimirovna said, smiling.

I asked her what she thought of the current weasel president (a mass murderer, like all Russian leaders as far as I can tell). She told me he was a good man, but he was only one good man against many bad ones, and he couldn't solve all the country's problems by himself. She hushed her voice and looked around, even though she was being polite. I said, didn't she mind that the people in charge seemed to spend half their time stealing? Yes, she said, of course she minded, but there was no point putting new people in the Kremlin, because they'd just start the stealing all over again. At least the ones in there now were already rich, so they could afford to think about other things too sometimes.

I asked her whether life was better now than before. She said yes, things were better, certainly for some people they were better. They were absolutely better for the young people she said, looking at Katya and smiling.

We were quiet. Katya's phone beeped. She read her message, frowned for a moment, and said, "I've got to go." She leaned into me until I felt her breathing in my ear, and whispered in English: "Please, Kolya, don't tell Masha that I go from you. I must to go to university." Then she stood up and said, still in English so Tatiana Vladimirovna
couldn't understand, "Kolya, remember, she is old lady and is sometimes making mistakes."

She put on her coat and left.

There was only one other time when I was alone with Tatiana Vladimirovna, besides those fifteen minutes in the weird circus waiting room before the notary called us in. By the second time, I can see now, it was already too late, I was in too deep, had slipped too far from what I was before to what I was becoming. But I think, I hope, that on that January morning I hadn't yet, not quite. Things could--I'm sure, I hope--have been different, if I'd asked a couple of simple questions, instead of sitting there in silence, smiling and watching the slush from our boots slurp across the parquet.

In the end I asked her about Oleg Nikolaevich's friend.

"Tatiana Vladimirovna, I understand there is only a very little chance that you will, but I wanted to ask you, do you know an old man called Konstantin Andreyevich? He lives in the same area as me."

"Just a second," she said, closing her eyes and pressing her fingers to her temples. "Konstantin Andreyevich ... I'm not sure. Who is he?"

"He is a friend of my neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich. We cannot find him."

"No," she said, "I don't think so. I'm sorry."

We were quiet again.

"Thank you again for the biscuits and the tea," Tatiana
Vladimirovna said to break the silence. "It is excellent to have a speciality of England."

"Maybe one day you will see England for yourself," I said. "Buckingham Palace. The Tower of London."

"Maybe," she said.