Snowdrops (16 page)

"Oh."

"She's Masha's aunt."

"Masha ... is she the one who called you at Christmas?"

"Yes."

"Ah. Good."

We headed back to Nevsky Prospekt. It was about minus ten degrees. The winter somehow gets worse in March, I always found, because you can see the finish and you're desperate for it, like soldiers who become more scared when they know their war is about to end.

"It's nice that you're getting to know her family, Nicholas." I think this was her way of asking whether it was serious.

"Just her sister so far," I said. "I mean, her cousin. And her aunt. The aunt lives quite close to me in Moscow. She made us pancakes the other day."

"Very nice," she said. "Lovely. Pancakes."

I think maybe she was jealous of her--I think Rosemary was jealous of Tatiana Vladimirovna. I suppose she had reason to be. I'd spent more time with the old lady in the last few months than I had with my mum in the last four years. Which meant only one of them had seen what I'd become. Thank God I didn't introduce them.

W
E TOOK THE
train home, the five-hour service that runs in the afternoon. Outside the station in St. Petersburg there was an old woman standing in a raincoat, cradling a small numb-looking dog. "Leningrad, Hero City" it says in big letters on the roof of the building opposite. On the train the two of us looked out silently at frozen bogs and trees, some standing and some recently felled in gritty cold clearings. Inside the carriage there was an aroma of Dagestani cognac and the intermittent, varied ringing of mobile phones. A waitress came round with a trolley. When I tried to order a beer and a glass of sparkling water she said, "You can't be serious," looking into my eyes until I asked for cognac instead. At the station in Moscow, half the human detritus of the lost empire seemed to have swept up around the statue of Lenin in the main hall.

We found a taxi to take us to my flat. "Very cosy," Mum said, peering around her from the entrance as if she was nervous to go any farther, in case I had an opium den or an S & M dungeon set up in the living room. You know what she's like when she visits: struggling to seem relaxed but judging and rearranging when you're not looking, quietly trying to make my place more like the family home. Making me feel like I'd never escape it. An hour later we went out to meet Masha at Cafe Lermontov--an overpriced restaurant done up like a boyar's palace, around the Bulvar from my road on the way to Pushkin Square.

Looking back, I think Masha was ashamed that evening. I think she was capable of feeling ashamed. Somehow my mother was too much, not part of the arrangement. She wasn't rude exactly, just sort of shy and monosyllabic in a way that I hadn't seen before. She was wearing black jeans tucked into her boots, a black sweater, and not a lot of makeup. She looked as if she was going on to rob a bank afterwards or to change the sets in a theatre. Her outfit seemed to say,
I am not really here
.

"Nicholas tells me that you work in a shop," my mother said over the tourist-trapski borsch.

"Yes," Masha said. "I work in shop selling mobile phones. Also calling plans."

"That sounds interesting."

Pause. Slurp. Distracting gaggle of top-of-the-range mistresses at a table in the corner.

"Kolya said me you are teacher," Masha finally managed.

"Yes. I was a teacher in a primary school," my mother said, "but now I am retired. My husband was a teacher too."

It was dumplings all round, and pirozhki (little Russian pies filled with meat and mushrooms), and not enough vodka.

"We're going to the Kremlin tomorrow," I said.

"Yes," said Masha. "Kremlin and Red Square is very beautiful."

"Yes," my mother said, "I am very excited."

No dessert, thanks.

"Nicholas tells me that you are not from Moscow."

"No," said Masha. "I am from city called Murmansk. It is most far from Moscow."

"It's good that your family is here."

"My family?"

"Tatiana Vladimirovna," I said.

"Yes," Masha said. "Yes. We have aunt. Yes, it is very lucky."

Masha looked away from us, out of the window, and then up at the imitation eighteenth-century chandeliers.

"I hope one day we will see you in England," my mother said, which I suppose she felt she ought to say, though maybe she was actually talking to me.

Masha smiled. The whole thing was agony, and then it was over.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I took Mum to the Kremlin to see the tarted-up churches, the massive cracked bell that was never rung, and the mighty cannon that was too big to fire. Two soldiers on the gates tried to tap us for a "special" entry fee. Afterwards we went out to Izmailovo market, so she could choose some souvenirs among the chaos of icons, sperm-whale tusks, astronauts' helmets, Stalin paperweights, gas masks, samovars, Uzbek cotton, Nazi hand grenades, Russian dolls depicting Britney Spears and Osama bin Laden, carpets, maltreated dancing bears, and the sad fat freezing ladies singing "Kalinka malinka" for the tourists. She bought a furry hat for my father and a little jewellery box painted with a picture of a Russian forest for herself. I took the Monday off work, and we went out to Novodevichy Cemetery, where Khrushchev and other bigwigs are buried in gaudy tombs. Undaunted Russian children were hurling themselves on makeshift sledges down the slope from the walls of the adjacent convent, down to the frozen pond at the bottom, while the late winter sunshine bounced off the silver domes. We went to see Mayakovskaya Metro station on the way home, with its bright ceiling mosaics of zeppelins, parachutists, and fighter planes, and the discreet
hammer-and-sickle insignia sprinkled around them that no one has got around to removing yet.

In the evening we went to a classical music concert at the Conservatory on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, in the main performance hall, which has bad portraits of composers lined up around the walls. There was a bit of a scene at the beginning because two old women were sitting in our seats, and I could only get them to budge with the help of a ferocious usher. I don't remember what the music was. But I do remember glancing across at my mother after the interval, looking down into her lap and seeing her hands joined together and her thumbs twiddling round each other, and having a sudden sense of seeing her as if she was still a girl on a cold Welsh holiday--of seeing the person she was before she was my mother, and realising how little I knew her.

We walked home, up Bolshaya Nikitskaya to the building that belongs to one of the lying Russian news agencies, with its big, aquarium windows, then along the Bulvar. Half the pavement in my street had been roped off with plastic tape, strung between metal rods like at a crime scene, to protect pedestrians from the lethal icicles dangling from the gutters with intent. The hillock of snow that contained the orange Zhiguli had the shape of a collapsed igloo or a burial mound, its surface dimpled with litter and spiky with half-submerged bottles and struggling twigs.

Oleg Nikolaevich was on his landing, carrying a bag
that smelled of cat litter, smiling defeatedly like an aristocrat in a tumbrel. By then, I usually tried to avoid him, truth be told, so I wouldn't have to talk about his missing friend, or see the disappointment in his eyes. I generally took the lift to avoid the spot he haunted, which I'm sure he noticed.

"Oleg Nikolaevich," I said, "this is my mother, Rosemary."

"Very pleased to meet you," said Oleg Nikolaevich in Russian. He took her hand and I think he was about to kiss it, but thought better of it. Then in his rudimentary English he said, "How you like our Russia?"

"Very much," she said loudly, as some English people do when they're talking to foreigners, as if they're all just a little deaf. "It is a beautiful country."

We stood there, suffocating in the uncontrollable central heating, goodwill, and silence. Oleg Nikolaevich's eyes were badly bloodshot, I remember noticing, as if he'd been crying.

"No sign of Konstantin Andreyevich?"

"Nothing at all," Oleg Nikolaevich said.

"How is George?"

"George is always unhappy in March."

I said, "And how are you, Oleg Nikolaevich?"

"In the kingdom of hope," Oleg Nikolaevich said, "it is never winter."

I said good night, so did my mum, and we were turning
away and upstairs when Oleg Nikolaevich dropped his bag of cat litter and grabbed the sleeve of her coat.

"Mrs. Platt," he said in English in a funny sort of stage whisper, "take care your son. Take care."

I
NSIDE MY FLAT
my mum disappeared into the bathroom. Sitting in the kitchen I heard the taps running, the toilet flushing, teeth being brushed, the automatic unelaborate ablutions of a resigned sixtysomething.

I'd given her my bed and opened out the futon in the spare room for myself. I heard her go into my room, then come out again and pad into the kitchen. She was wearing an old ankle-length nightie that might once have been purple or lilac but had been washed down to a gruel grey. She went to the fridge for some water, and stopped and turned back towards me on her way to bed.

"What did he mean, Nicholas? Your neighbour."

"I don't know, Mum. He's upset because he's lost a friend. I think he drinks." I said this even though I didn't believe it. As far as I know, Oleg Nikolaevich was always sober when I saw him.

She stood there in silence, but she was trying, really trying, I could see that.

"Are you sure about that girl, Nicholas? About Masha."

"Why?"

"It's just that she seemed ... cold. Too cold for you maybe, Nicky."

"Yes," I said, "I'm sure."

"Are you happy, Nicholas?"

It was the biggest question she'd asked me in about twenty years. I thought about it. I answered truthfully.

"Yes," I said. "I'm happy."

I
OWED
M
ASHA
a favour, and she called it in.

It was, I guess, approaching the middle of March. There was a crust like thick dried semen on the right wrist of my puffy Michelin-man jacket, where for months I'd wiped my nose as I struggled through the streets. I hadn't seen Masha for a week or so, since the evening with my mother. I think she may have been out of Moscow again, but, again, she didn't say so. I hadn't seen Katya for longer. The three of us met in a restaurant just off Tverskaya, on the other side from the stretch of heated pavement outside the mayor's office. It was still below zero, but Masha was already back in her autumn cat-fur coat. Katya was late.

"Did you like my mother?" I asked Masha.

"For me, it was very interesting. She is--how you say in English?--scared. She is scared person. Maybe like you."

She had her hair drawn back, tight across her scalp, and her eyes picked up the glow of the spotlights in the
ceiling. She looked at me and I looked away. A waitress came and we ordered vodka and cutlets.

I said, "How is your mother, Masha?"

"Not bad," she said, "but very tired. Coming old now."

"I would like to meet her," I said.

"One day, maybe."

"How is your job?"

"I pretend work, they pretend pay me."

Katya came in. She was only six months older than she'd been when I'd first met them, but it was a long six months for a girl of her age. She'd grown up into her hips and lips and possibilities. They'd been a long six months for all of us--or long and short at the same time, as always with Russian winters, which always seem like they can never end and must go on forever, right up until the warm moment when it feels as if they've never happened at all.

Katya took off her coat and sat down. Beneath her shirt I caught a glimpse of a new fuck-me tattoo on her hip bone.

"How is college?" I asked her.

"Good," she said. "Excellent. I am number two in class. Soon I will have exams."

She gave us a long angry account of how, that evening, two men had got on to her tram and extracted ten roubles from each of the passengers by pretending to be ticket inspectors. Since almost none of the passengers had tickets,
they all paid, even though they knew the men were fraudsters.

"Terrible," said Masha.

"Terrible," I said, as if this was the most terrible event any of us could think of, or wanted to.

They had two things to say to me that evening. One of them, the first one, the softener I realise now, was that around the end of May or beginning of June they were planning to go to Odessa for a long weekend, and would I like to go with them?

"You remember?" said Katya. "From photos."

The photos they'd shown me on our first night, at the floating Azeri restaurant at the beginning of the winter. Did I remember? "Yes," I said. "I remember."

They said they had a distant uncle who had a place out near the beach where we could stay. We'd swim and go to nightclubs. It would be "class," Katya said. It would be perfect, Masha said. I said I'd love to go to Odessa with them.

The other thing they wanted to talk about was the money.

"Stepan Mikhailovich is having problems with money, money for Tatiana Vladimirovna," Masha explained, "because of some questions with his business. He says it is very slow, this building. It is necessary to pay his men from Tajikistan. He can pay police to arrest all Tajiks--this is cheaper--but then he must find new workers. He can give
twenty-five thousand for Tatiana Vladimirovna but for this other twenty-five there is problem. Of course Tatiana Vladimirovna does not ask for such money, and so Stepan Mikhailovich may simply say she will have only half, only twenty-five thousand. This way is easy. But we are thinking it is more kind if he is borrowing money to give to her."

"Why doesn't Stepan Mikhailovich just give her the money later, when he's in the clear?"

"This also is possible," Masha said. "But, frankly speaking, after they change apartments, I think Stepan Mikhailovich will think it is better he keep money than give it to this babushka. But if he is owing money to someone important, then he may pay. Like if he will owe money to foreigner. Maybe to lawyer."