Snowdrops (19 page)

We were having a warm, mellow period too, Masha and me. It wasn't real, I can see that now, maybe I could even see it at the time. But in a way it was the most real time, the most honest. It was still love, though by then you could also have called it an addiction. I do need to tell you these things, I think. I'm sorry if they hurt.

We talked. She told me about the winters of her childhood, and the gangster warfare that had gripped her city in the early nineties--the mayor's hoods on one side, she
said, the governor's thugs on the other. When one of the gangsters got killed, she recalled, his friends would put up a life-size statue in the cemetery of him holding his car keys: people called them "memorials to the victims of early capitalism." She told me about how as a teenager she'd longed to get to Moscow or, if not Moscow, then St. Petersburg, and failing that maybe Volgograd or Samara or Nizhny Novgorod, somewhere civilised, she said, anywhere where they'd have jobs and proper nightclubs, somewhere else. I told her things too, stuff I've never talked to anyone else about, except maybe you. Not secrets, exactly, I didn't have many of those then. More, you know, feelings and fears--about my job, my future, how I'd wound up alone.

We even talked again, but more like it was a script or a game, about her coming one day to live with me in England. Though it had started to seem doubtful that I would ever manage it myself: I'd begun to feel like one of those hopeless colonials you hear about who stay too long in Africa and can't survive when they wind up back in Blighty. I no longer had a picture in my mind of what life in London would be like, with no snow, dachas, and drunk Armenian taxi drivers. I'd lost my idea of me. I had long-term expat syndrome, which is maybe, I think, just an extreme version of the unmooring that seems to dizzy some people in early middle age. Masha was adrift too, in her way, but she seemed to know where she was going.

Two or three times I went down to meet her after her
shift in the shop, and we went for a stroll on the embankment or a drink in the Irish pub on Pyatnitskaya. Once we went to look at the icons in the Tretyakov Gallery, sliding around in those silly plastic slippers that they always make you wear in Russian museums, me feeling embarrassed until I registered that everyone else was wearing them too. Masha knew the names of all the saints, and which unlucky city it was that Ivan the Terrible or whoever was sacking in the pictures, but she wasn't really interested, and I was only pretending. She seemed tender, sometimes at least, spooning with me afterwards and once or twice putting on one of my badly ironed shirts to bring me coffee in the morning.

Thanks to Olga we had almost all the papers for Tatiana Vladimirovna's old flat. Just before Victory Day, Masha, Tatiana Vladimirovna, and I went to a psychiatric clinic to get the last one--an official declaration that she was of sound mind when she agreed to the deal (Katya was studying for her exams, Masha said, and didn't come). A babushka, a hard beautiful gazelle, and a bespectacled foreigner: a suspicious combination, I imagine, to anyone who might have noticed us.

E
VERY UNDERGROUND SYSTEM
has its official and unofficial rules. In London, on the Tube, you must stand to the right on the escalators, let disembarking passengers off
the trains first, never talk to strangers, and never kiss in the carriages before breakfast. In Moscow, after the stop before the one you're getting off at, you must rise and stand motionless facing the doors, formed up with the other exiting passengers like soldiers waiting to go into battle, or Christians into a Roman arena. Then you force your way out onto the platform as the take-no-prisoners grannies elbow their way in.

The day we went to get the certificate we stood up at Krasnoselskaya and got off at Sokolniki. Outside, a few ridges of ice sheltered in the gutters, moulded against the crumbling curbs, and a few little black-grey lumps clung to the bases of streetlamps. The pavement looked like it had been doused in chilled gravy. But the girls were back in their short skirts. The streets smelled of beer and revolution.

The clinic we'd chosen crouched in a maze of shabby seven-storey Soviet apartment blocks. Fat unburied heating pipes snaked around and between the buildings, like the outside of that arts centre in Paris, but less colourful and padded with asbestos. We went in, past the smoking nurses in the lobby and up two flights of stairs to the psychology department. There was a faint smell of gas and a distinct sound of dripping. We saw two patients in hospital gowns, one of them also wearing a broad straw hat. The psychologist had a framed certificate on his wall, John Lennon glasses, and three-day stubble. On his desk he had
a pile of loose papers, an old red telephone, and two plastic cups, one of them lying on its side. There was blood on his white coat.

"Does she drink?"

"No," I said.

"No," Masha said.

"Doctor," said Tatiana Vladimirovna, "I am not dead yet. I can answer your questions myself."

"If she drinks," the doctor said, "it is still possible to obtain the certificate. Only it will be a little more expensive." He folded his hands on his desk and smiled.

"I am sober," said Tatiana Vladimirovna.

The psychologist wrinkled his nose. He wrote something down. He looked disappointed.

"Drugs?" he said hopefully.

Tatiana Vladimirovna laughed.

"Who are you?" he said to me, suddenly prickly with propriety.

"I'm her lawyer," I said.

"Lawyer? I see."

The psychologist shuffled his papers. He moved on to the sanity test.

"What is your name?" he asked Tatiana Vladimirovna, leaning forward across his desk.

"Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin," said Tatiana Vladimirovna. She held her poker face--or maybe it was her interrogation face from the old days--long enough for the
psychologist to perk up, thinking he might have a pretext to up his fee. Then she said, "That was a joke."

She gave her real name, her date of birth, the name of the weasel president, and one or two other answers that most genuine lunatics could well have come up with. We paid four hundred roubles, plus another three hundred for (according to the psychologist) the secretarial work. We took Tatiana Vladimirovna's certificate of sound mind and left.

After that, I only saw her once more before we went to Odessa. This time I am sure of the date. It was the ninth of May: Victory Day.

I
INVITED THEM
over to my place--Masha, Katya, and Tatiana Vladimirovna. We would watch the parade of tanks and missiles in Red Square on television, then stroll up the Bulvar to Pushkin Square to watch the commemorative fireworks shooting over the Kremlin.

It was a lovely afternoon. Masha and I laid on blinis, smoked salmon, and the rest. That day she let me feel that we were like other couples, couples who have you round to dinner and show you how happy and speechlessly effective they can be together, how competently in love, how bickeringly at ease. After the parade, the radio played patriotic songs, and Tatiana Vladimirovna taught us some wartime
dances, a waltz I think it was, and another one I can't remember. First she danced with me, while Masha clapped and Katya laughed, next she showed each of the girls in turn. Then we moved the IKEA coffee table in my lounge to the side of the room and we all danced together, mostly me paired with Masha in her light green summer dress, and Tatiana Vladimirovna with Katya. Tatiana Vladimirovna was sweating and smiling and flinging Katya around like she was a teenager, and once or twice she let out a high, strange peasant shriek, a noise that seemed to come from somewhere in the back of her throat and deep in her memory or her genes.

Finally she bent over, panting, as the three of us flopped onto the sofa. "Bravo, kids," she said. "Bravo. And thank you."

I'd always thought it was a bit sick-making, the obsession the Russians have with the war. But that afternoon I could see that Tatiana Vladimirovna's friskiness was nothing to do with Stalin and the Eastern Front or anything like that. It was about lost loves and youth, and defiance, and going to Yalta in 1956.

After the dancing, Masha brought out the documents.

"Tatiana Vladimirovna," she said, "I wanted to let you know. Kolya has gathered all the papers for your new home in Butovo. The statement of ownership, the technical certificate--everything necessary to prove the sale will be legal
and without any problems. Here." She held up and spread out a sheaf of papers like a St. Petersburg duchess with a fan. "And we also have all the documents for your flat, which Stepan Mikhailovich will need to see." She held up the file Olga the Tatar had put together and that I'd given to her earlier.

"Show them to her, Kolya," Katya said, smiling.

"Yes, please, Nikolai," said Tatiana Vladimirovna. "I am sure they are all in order, but I would like you to explain them. Then I will be absolutely comfortable."

"Here you are, Kolya," said Masha, and she held out her fan of papers and the file.

The document that you cannot buy in Russia has yet to be invented. At Paveletskaya, in the underpass that leads from the Metro to the silly tower where I worked, you can buy college diplomas, residence permits, and certificates that declare you are a qualified brain surgeon. Sometimes the fakes are actually real, in the sense that they are drafted by corrupt officials of real universities or in the mayor's office or the Kremlin administration (there is a lively market in blank paper left over from the nineties, on which backdated contracts can be made up with period watermarks). Some of them are glaring counterfeits. I don't know where Masha got the documents for Butovo that I saw for the first time that afternoon. They were convincing enough, with all the right insignias and a rash of plausible
stamps. There was something funny about the signatures maybe, and the shadow that a photocopier sometimes leaves in one or two off-white corners, but nothing too obvious or alarming.

I laid out the paperwork on my kitchen table and sat down at it with Tatiana Vladimirovna. We ran through the documents for her old flat first. Then I showed her the one that listed the amenities of the building in Butovo, and the one showing how nobody else was registered to live in the flat that was supposed to be hers. And the one that identified Stepan Mikhailovich as its current rightful owner.

It was a nice afternoon, and it would have been a shame to spoil it. We were going to Odessa and it would have been a shame to spoil that too. It would have been tricky to go back from where we'd already got to. But the reality was worse and simpler than any of those explanations. It felt like almost nothing, I have to tell you, when I took Tatiana Vladimirovna through those documents on Victory Day. It felt inevitable, almost natural. I know how it must sound, but there's nothing else I can say.

"Excellent," she said when we'd flipped through them. "Nikolai, you are like an angel."

"Yes," said Masha, "Kolya is our angel." She ran her hand through my hair, very lightly, just once.

"You're welcome," I said.

"Let's go," said Katya, standing up and stretching. "It will soon be time for the fireworks."

W
E RAN INTO
Oleg Nikolaevich on our way out that night. We took the lift down past his floor, but he was coming in through the building's front door as I went to open it. He was wearing his black suit and a white dress shirt, like he was a jazz musician or an undertaker, and carrying a briefcase which, I was fairly sure, was empty. Masha and Katya were behind me, Tatiana Vladimirovna behind them.

I congratulated him on his country's great victory, as the Russians do on Victory Day. He congratulated me on Great Britain's victory too. "Glory to your grandfather!" he said. I'd told him once, when we used to talk more, about the convoys and my family's Russian connection.

"Oleg Nikolaevich," I said, "let me introduce my friends, Masha and Katya."

"Yes, yes," he said, as if he recognised them. "Your friends."

"Happy Victory Day!" Katya said, and giggled. They were like cagey members of different civilisations, who just happened to speak the same language.

"Yes," said Oleg Nikolaevich. "And to you too, girls."

"So," said Masha. "It's time for us to go. Excuse us, please."

Oleg Nikolaevich flattened his body against the wall to
let the girls pass. They brushed past him and went out into the street. "All good things," he said quietly.

Tatiana Vladimirovna was still inside and standing next to me. I couldn't think of how to explain who she was, so I just said her name.

"Pleased to meet you," Oleg Nikolaevich said.

"Me too," said Tatiana Vladimirovna.

I saw the wariness in both pairs of eyes, felt them sizing each other up for background, education, the quantity of blood that might have been washed off their hands or their families'--the sort of instant epic calculations that older Russians make, a bit like the way English people weigh up each other's shoes and accents and haircuts. Then their eyes softened, their shoulders relaxed, the guards dropped.

"And I congratulate you too, Tatiana Vladimirovna," said Oleg Nikolaevich.

"Sixty years," said Tatiana Vladimirovna. "Is it sixty?"

"More or less," he said.

I suppose she must have been six or seven years older than him, but they'd both lived through it all--the war, Stalin, the whole Russian nightmare. They were both old enough to have believed in something, even if the thing they'd believed in had turned out to be a sham. The younger ones, most of them, had nothing to believe in even if they had wanted to. No communism, no God. Even the memory of God had been forgotten.

"We went to Kazan," Oleg Nikolaevich suddenly said. "On the Volga. My father was a technician in a physics laboratory. We were away from Moscow for two years."

"Leningrad," Tatiana Vladimirovna said, just the name of the city, nothing else.

Oleg Nikolaevich nodded.

We were moving away and out of the door when he said, "One minute, Nikolai Ivanovich. One minute alone, please."

Tatiana Vladimirovna went out into the almost-warm dusk to join the girls, while he and I stood in the doorway. The women were a few metres away from us. I guess they could have heard what we were saying if they had strained and if they had wanted to.