Snowdrops (14 page)

"It's not a lot of work," I said to Steve. "It won't cost me
anything. And she's a nice old lady, actually. She was in the siege of Leningrad."

"Right," Steve said. Tatiana Vladimirovna was at least fifty years too old to distract him from the jungle dance.

We watched. We were sitting in a grubby little booth to the left of the stage. After a few minutes the drumbeat stopped and the waitresses put their dresses back on. Steve clapped.

He asked about the Cossack.

"Do you know who he's fronting for? Your Cossack friend, I mean."

"Who do you think?"

"Probably the deputy head of the presidential administration. Or the chairman of the Security Council. The St. Petersburg crew are taking over, the old defence ministry gang are getting nervous. They're trying to cash out a bit while they can. I guess they'll keep a piece of the company they've set up to give them some pocket money later."

"Maybe," I said. "We're not completely naive, Steve. Maybe you're right. But the project's on track and that's all we care about. They're going to get the second tranche of money in the next few weeks and the last one in a couple of months or so. They think they'll be pumping their first oil through the terminal by the end of the summer. If they start repaying any later than next spring, the penalty clauses will kick in."

"I'm sure you know what you're doing, Nick. But by the way, I asked around. That logistics firm you said was in with Narodneft? It's a shell. No one's ever heard of it. I bet you the only sort of logistics it arranges involve pumping money to Liechtenstein. If you find out who the backers are, let me know."

"Maybe, Steve."

Three girls in Red Army fur hats marched around the tables, carrying replica machine guns (at least I think they were replicas) and wearing bullet bandoliers, draped carefully around their curves so that they covered nothing up. There was a lot of silicone and very little body hair.

"Aren't you heading down to the Caucasus?" I asked him. It was hotting up again down there, the TV news said, down in one of those fiddly little Muslim regions where there's always somebody rebelling and dying.

"Probably," Steve said. "Hard to sell the story though. The news desk in London's not too interested 'til there are three zeros on the death toll. And the Russians are trying to keep everybody out. You have to go down to Chechnya and pay your way across the border. Maybe next week. Shame to miss it."

A couple of tourists disappeared into the cubicles next to the toilets, taking the rabbit and the bear with them. I'd done that too, or something like it, I suppose I should also admit, since I'm trying to tell you everything. Three times altogether, I think, I'd paid for it in Moscow. The first time
was by accident, when I realised too late that I was expected to and was too far gone to stop myself, the other two times after I'd broken the taboo and thought,
Whatthehell
. Once, near the beginning, I'd managed to talk a catwalk Ukrainian into coming home for nothing even though she was working. Don't hate me for it. I would never do it in London. At least, don't hate me yet.

"Steve," I said, "do you ever think about this? I mean, worry about it--the way we live out here. I mean, what if your mother could see you?"

"My mother's dead."

"You know what I mean."

"Russia," Steve said, looking me in the eye with his two bloodshot eyes and getting suddenly serious, "is like Lariam. You know, that malaria medicine that can make you have wild dreams and jump out of the window. You shouldn't do it if you're the kind of person who gets anxious or guilty, Nick. You shouldn't do Russia. Because you'll crack."

"I'm sure you told me Russia was like polonium."

"Did I?"

He'd stopped listening again. His eyes were focussed on the pole, around which a blonde in a Stetson and leather chaps and nothing else was lassoing a small herd of brunettes in cowhide bikinis. Steve waved at a waitress, tapping his empty glass for another hit of Moldovan Merlot.

Tatiana Vladimirovna went out to Butovo again, with Katya I think, sometime in the middle of February. I saw them all soon afterwards when we went skiing in the park at Kolomenskoe, down across the solid Moscow River. You didn't think I could ski, did you? You were right.

We left Tatiana Vladimirovna in a muddy little cafe by the entrance to the park, waving us away and ordering tea and blinis for herself. Masha and Katya brought their own skis, longer and thinner than the ones I remembered from my week of downhill when I was at university (drinking games, pissing in the chalet sink, a sprained ankle). I hired my skis from a kiosk beyond the gates, plus some felt boots
that looked like they might first have been worn when the Russians invaded Finland. By then, the snow packed against the churchyard fence on my street had begun to resemble that multilayered Italian dessert you like: whitish on top, creamy underneath, then a sort of stained yellow like leaked battery fluid, then a layer studded with rubbish (broken bottles and crisp packets and lonely discarded shoes, suspended in a gritty white lava), and beneath that, at the bottom, a base of sinister black slime. But at Kolomenskoe the snow was still white, stupidly white. It was hard and compacted beneath the top inch, and painful when you fell in it, which I did every time I went up or down an incline, once or twice losing my glasses and scrabbling around in the powder with my fat gloves to find them.

Masha and Katya seemed to be able to ski naturally, as naturally as they could walk on stilettos and dance. They laughed at me when I fell but went slowly 'til I caught up. In the park there was a wooden cabin in a grove of oak trees that was supposed to have been built by Peter the Great, and an old church, dedicated--as they always are--to some mythic victory over the Poles. The church was closed, and covered with scaffolding for renovations, but long pure icicles hung from the horizontal scaffold boards like necklaces of tusks. There was a man with a sledge, covered in bells and drawn by three white horses, offering people rides between the trees. The girls were wearing skiing
kit, thin waterproof trousers and aerodynamic jackets. I wasn't, and I got hot and wet at the same time. But when we came out onto a ridge above a lake, frozen down below in the middle of a leafless forest, it didn't matter. It was stunning.

When we arrived back at the cafe, they went one at a time, I remember, to change into their jeans and see to their hair in the toilets, while I thawed out with Tatiana Vladimirovna.

"Well done, Kolya," she said when we were all sitting down. "Soon you will be one of us. A proper Russian."

"Maybe," said Masha. "He can't ski at all, but he loves the
banya."
She looked at me, smiling with one corner of her mouth, a smirk of carnal triumph. I blushed.

Tatiana Vladimirovna told us about her trip to Butovo. It didn't seem as if much work had been done on the apartment, she said. But Stepan Mikhailovich had explained that they'd been busy fixing the wiring, and the main thing, Tatiana Vladimirovna said, was that it was nice there in the snow, so nice, with the trails made by winter boots running between the trees and around the pond in the forest opposite her new building.

When she was a girl, Tatiana Vladimirovna went on, before they moved to Leningrad, they'd made their own skis out of bark. They'd laid down big bottles of pickles for the winter, cabbages and beetroot and tomatoes, and killed a pig in November that they lived off almost 'til the thaw.
Her family had been poor, she told us, but they didn't know they were poor. I noticed a little blond moustache on her upper lip that I hadn't spotted before. I think she may have bleached it.

"You know," she said, "it is possible to see a church from the window of the apartment in Butovo. Do you know which church it is, Kolya?"

I'd seen the church she meant--the one with white walls and gold domes--but I didn't know which saint or tsar it commemorated.

"It is a very special church," Tatiana Vladimirovna said. "It was built as a memorial to the people killed by Stalin. They say that twenty thousand victims were shot near this church. Maybe more. Nobody knows exactly ... I am not a religious person like my mother was, we lost all that in Leningrad. But I think it is good that I will be able to see this church from my window."

I didn't know what to say. Masha and Katya were quiet too. The condensation on the inside of the cafe's windows was thick and streaked.

In the end Tatiana Vladimirovna asked, "So, Kolya, will you have children?"

I'm not sure why--something to do with life going on, or needing to believe that it does--but the question seemed to follow naturally from the Stalin church and the mass graves. I tried not to look at Masha but I could sense her concentrating on her tea, turning away from me.

"I don't know, Tatiana Vladimirovna," I said. "I would like to."

It wasn't really true. I'd always looked at acquaintances who'd become fathers with a mixture of contempt and animal terror. I'd looked at the babies, with their crawling and grabbing, their purposeful yet random tortoise movements, with no feelings at all. Don't worry, it's different now. I know you want children, it's settled.

That afternoon I just said what I thought Masha might want to hear, what most women want to hear. And if she'd told me then that she was pregnant, I might have wanted to keep it, I might even have been joyful--not because of the baby, but because it would have meant I was in with a shot at forever. Though at the same time I wonder whether I knew, deep down, that we couldn't have a happy ending, whether in fact the nowness of it was what I liked about her most. I think I could see that there was something missing, or something extra, even if I was trying not to.

"I want children," said Katya. "Maybe six. Maybe seven. But only when I have finished my studies." She was a simple soul, I thought, an open book, a fairy tale.

"And Masha," said Tatiana Vladimirovna affectionately, "I can see you as a mother."

"I want children, yes," Masha said in a low intense voice without looking up. "But not in Moscow."

"Mashinka," said Tatiana Vladimirovna, taking one of my hands in one of hers, and one of Masha's in her other
one, "if I could change one thing in my life, this would be it. Pyotr Arkadyevich and I, we were unlucky, and of course he had his work, and we had a good life together, but in the end ..."

"That's enough," said Masha, like she meant it, and took her hand away.

Tatiana Vladimirovna's eyes bustled between us from beneath her grey bowl fringe. Under our feet the floor was slippery with dying snow.

We ordered some vodka and "herring in a fur coat" (marinated fish buried under a sludge of beetroot and mayonnaise). We talked about the arrangements for the apartment swap.

I said I was taking care of the property searches. I said I thought we'd have all the certificates we needed within a couple of weeks.

"Thank you, Nicholas," said Tatiana Vladimirovna. "Thank you very much."

Then we talked about the money.

I think it was the first time they'd discussed the money in detail. Masha said that, because the new place in Butovo was worth less than Tatiana Vladimirovna's old one, Stepan Mikhailovich was going to give her fifty thousand dollars. (People talked and thought and bribed in dollars in Moscow then, at least when serious money was involved, though, when it came to it, legitimate transactions were done in roubles.)

The truth is that fifty thousand wasn't enough. Flats in the centre like Tatiana Vladimirovna's were in demand from oil-drunk foreigners, as well as well-heeled Russians keen to set up their mistresses close to the office. There were bottles of wine in Moscow that cost almost as much as Stepan Mikhailovich was offering, and human beings who cost a lot less. But to Tatiana Vladimirovna fifty thousand dollars must have sounded as amazing as the twenty thousand people buried on top of each other under the snow in Butovo.

At first she said no, she wouldn't know what to do with so much money. Then she conceded that it was true, her pension wasn't enough, nobody's pension was enough--though, on the other hand, she had a little money saved from her job, and she got her special allowances from the state as a survivor of the siege of Leningrad, and a little bit more on account of her husband's contribution to the lost Soviet cause. All the same, she said, it might be nice to be able to go back to St. Petersburg one day ...

"Take it," Masha said.

"Take it," Katya said.

"Tatiana Vladimirovna," I said, "I think you should take the money."

She scanned our faces again. "I'll take it," she said, clapping her hands. "Maybe I will go to New York! Or London," she said, and winked at me.

We laughed and drank.

"To us!" said Tatiana Vladimirovna, sinking her vodka in one. She smiled, and her fine skin, still taut over her high Russian cheekbones, looked for a moment like the skin of that happy girl in the photo from the Crimea in 1956.

T
HAT
F
EBRUARY--ABOUT
a fortnight before my mother was due to visit--I caught a killer Moscow cold. It introduced each of its symptoms to me in turn, like musicians doing solos before they all join in for the finale: first the runny nose, then the sore throat, then the headache, then the works. Masha prescribed honey and cognac and no blow jobs. I had two or three days in bed, halfheartedly watching DVD box sets of American dramas, listening through the window to the street scrapers and the prehistoric garbage trucks and, from downstairs, George's occasional sad meowing.

When I got back to the office at Paveletskaya, Olga the Tatar perched on the edge of my desk and ran me through the paperwork we had so far for Tatiana Vladimirovna's apartment. The privatisation had been legal, one of the forms attested. Another one showed that the mayor had no current plans to tear down the building. A third demonstrated that nobody else had the right to live there. Tatiana Vladimirovna's husband was listed alongside her on one of the pieces of paper, but someone had crossed out his name and printed the word "deceased" above it. We had the technical
certificate with the dimensions of the rooms and the floor plan and the details of the sewerage and the power supply. All the forms were splattered with stamps, like blotches across a modern work of art. All this paper, I thought, and you still didn't own the place, not really. You never really own anything in Russia. The tsar or president or whoever is in charge can take it away, or take you away, any time he feels like it.