Snowdrops (2 page)

"Spasibo,"
said Masha. (Thank you.) She took off the sunglasses.

She was wearing tight, tight jeans tucked into knee-high brown leather boots, and a white blouse with one more button undone than there needed to be. Over the blouse she had one of those funny Brezhnev-era autumn coats that Russian women without much money often wear. If you look at them closely they seem to be made out of carpet or beach towel with a cat-fur collar, but from a distance they make the girl in the coat look like the honey trap in a Cold War thriller. She had a straight bony nose, pale skin, and
long tawny hair. With a bit more luck she might have been sitting beneath the gold-leaf ceiling in some hyperpriced restaurant called the Ducal Palace or the Hunting Lodge, eating black caviar and smiling indulgently at a nickel magnate or well-connected oil trader. Perhaps that's where she is now, though somehow I doubt it.

"Oi,
spasibo,"
said her friend, clasping the fingers of my right hand. Her hand was warm and light. I reckoned the sunglasses girl was in her early twenties, twenty-three maybe, but the friend seemed younger, nineteen or possibly even less. She was wearing white boots, a pink fake-leather miniskirt and a matching jacket. She had a little upturned nose and straight blond hair, and one of those frankly inviting Russian-girl grins, the ones that come with full-on eye contact. It was a smile like the smile of the baby Jesus we once saw--do you remember?--in that church in the village down the coast from Rimini: the old, wise smile on the young face, a smile that said
I know who you are, I know what you want, I was born knowing this
.

"Nichevo,"
I said. (It was nothing.) And again in Russian I added, "Is everything okay?"

"Vso normalno,"
said the sunglasses girl. (Everything is normal.)

"Kharasho,"
I said. (Good.)

We smiled at each other. My glasses had steamed up in the cloying year-round warmth of the Metro. One of the CD kiosks in the passageway was playing folk music, I
remember, the lyrics choked out by one of those drunken Russian chanteurs who sound like they must have started smoking in the womb.

In a parallel universe, in another life, that's the end of the story. We say good-bye, I go home that afternoon and back to my lawyering the next day. Maybe in that life I'm still there, still in Moscow, maybe I found another job and stayed, never came home, and never met you. The girls go on to whoever and whatever it would have been if it hadn't been me. But I was flushed with that feeling you get when a risky thing goes well and the high of having done something good. A noble deed in a ruthless place. I was a small-time hero, they'd let me be one, and I was grateful.

The younger one carried on smiling, but the older one was just looking. She was taller than her friend, five nine or ten, and in her heels her green eyes were level with mine. They are lovely eyes. Someone had to say something, and she said, in English, "Where are you from?"

I said, "I'm from London." I'm not from London originally, as you know, but it's close enough. In Russian I asked, "And where are you from?"

"Now we live here in Moscow," she said. I was used to this language game by then. The Russian girls always said they wanted to practise their English. But sometimes they also wanted to make you feel that you were in charge, in their country but safe in your own language.

There was another smiling pause.

"Tak, spasibo,"
said the friend. (So, thank you.)

None of us moved. Then Masha said, "To where are you going?"

"Home," I said. "Where are you going?"

"We are only walking."

"Poguliaem,"
I said. (Let's walk.)

And we did.

I
T WAS THE
middle of September. It's the time of year Russians call grandma's summer--a bittersweet lick of velvety warmth that used to arrive after the peasant women had brought in their harvests, and now in Moscow means last-gasp outdoor drinking in the squares and around the Bulvar (the lovely old road around the Kremlin that has stretches of park between the lanes, with lawns, benches, and statues of famous writers and forgotten revolutionaries). It's the nicest time to visit, though I'm not certain we ever will. The stalls outside the Metro stations were laying out their fake-fur Chinese gloves for the coming winter, but there were still long lines of tourists waiting to file through Lenin's freak-show tomb in Red Square. In the hot afternoons half the women in the city were still wearing almost nothing.

We came up the smooth narrow steps from the underground passages beneath the square, arriving outside the Armenian supermarket. We crossed the gridlocked lanes of
traffic to the broad pavement in the middle of the Bulvar. There was only one cloud in the sky, plus a fluffy plume of smoke flying up from a factory or inner-city power plant, just visible against the early evening blue. It was beautiful. The air smelled of cheap petrol, grilled meat, and lust.

The older one asked, in English, "What is your job in Moscow, if it is not secret?"

"I am a lawyer," I said in Russian.

They spoke to each other very quickly, too fast and low for me to understand. The younger one said, "For how much years you have been in Moscow?"

"Four years," I said. "Nearly four years."

"Are you liking it?" said the sunglasses girl. "Are you liking our Moscow?"

I said that I liked it very much, which is what I thought she'd want to hear. Most of them had a sort of automatic national pride, I'd discovered, even if all they wanted for themselves was to get the hell out of there and head for Los Angeles or the Cote d'Azur.

"And what do you do?" I asked her in Russian.

"I am working in shop. For mobile phones."

"Where is your shop?"

"Across river," she said. "Close to Tretyakov Gallery." After a few silent paces she added, "You speak beautiful Russian."

She exaggerated. I spoke better Russian than most of the carpetbagging bankers and mountebank consultants in
the city--the pseudo-posh Englishmen, strong-toothed Americans, and misleading Scandinavians the black-gold rush had brought to Moscow, who mostly managed to shuttle between their offices, gated apartments, expense-account brothels, upscale restaurants, and the airport on twenty-odd words. I was on my way to being fluent, but my accent still gave me away halfway through my first syllable. Masha and Katya must have clocked me as a foreigner even before I opened my mouth. I suppose I was easy to spot. It was a Sunday, and I was on my way home from some awkward expat get-together in a lonely accountant's flat. I was wearing newish jeans and suede boots, I remember, and a dark V-neck sweater with a Marks & Spencer's shirt underneath. People didn't dress like that in Moscow. Anybody with money went in for film-star shirts and Italian shoes, and everybody without money, which was most people, wore contraband army surplus or cheap Belarussian boots and bleak trousers.

Masha, on the other hand, was authentically beautiful in English, even if her grammar was shaky. Some Russian women shoot up into a sort of overelocutioned squeak when they speak English, but she had a voice that dropped down, almost to a growl, hungrily rolling her
R
s. Her voice sounded like it had been through an all-night party. Or a war.

We were walking towards the beer tents that go up for the summer on the first warm day in May, when the whole
city takes to the streets and anything can happen, and are folded up again in October when grandma's summer is over.

"Tell me, please," said the younger one. "My friend said me that in England you have two ..." She broke off to confer with her companion in Russian. I heard "hot," "cold," "water."

"What is it called," the older one said, "where water comes? In bathroom?"

"Taps."

"Yes, taps," the younger one went on. "My friend said me that in England there is two taps. So hot water sometimes is burning her hand."

"
Da
," I said. "
Eta pravda.
" (Yes, it's true.) We were on a path in the middle of the Bulvar, near some seesaws and wobbly slides. A fat babushka was selling apples.

"And is it true," she said, "that in London is always big fog?"

"Nyet,"
I said. "A hundred years ago, yes, but not anymore."

She looked down at the ground. Masha, the sunglasses girl, smiled. When I think back on what I liked about her that first afternoon, apart from the long firm gazelle body, and the voice, and her eyes, it was the irony. She had an air that suggested she already knew how it would end, and almost wanted me to know that too. Maybe this is just how it seems to me now, but in a way I think she was already
apologising. I think that, for her, people and their actions were somehow separate--as if you could just bury whatever you did and forget about it, as if your past belonged to someone else.

We reached the junction with my street. I had that drunk feeling that, before you, I always used to get in the company of premier-league women--half nervous, half rash, like I was acting, like I was living in someone else's life and had to make the most of it while I could.

I gestured and said "I live over here." Then I heard myself say, "Would you like to come up for some tea?"

You'll think it sounds ridiculous, I know--me trying it on like that. But only a couple of years before, when foreigners were still considered exotic in Moscow and a lawyer was someone with a salary worth saying yes to, it might have worked. It
had
worked.

She said no.

"But if it is interesting for you to call us," she said, "you may." She looked at her friend, who took a pen from the pocket above her left breast and wrote a phone number on the back of a trolleybus ticket. She held it out to me, and I took it.

"My name is Masha," she said. "This is Katya. She is my sister."

"I'm Nick," I said. Katya leaned against me in her pink skirt and kissed me on the cheek. She smiled the other smile that they have, the Asiatic smile that means nothing.
They walked away down the Bulvar, and I watched them for longer than I should have.

T
HE
B
ULVAR WAS
full of boozers and sleepers and kissers. Gangs of teenagers clustered around squatting guitarists. It was still warm enough for all the windows of the restaurant on the corner of my street to be thrown open, ventilating the minigarch and midrange hooker crowd that used to congregate there in the summer. I had to walk in the road to avoid the long, unimaginative sequence of black Mercedeses and Hummers that had overrun the pavements around it. I turned into my street and walked along the side of the mustard-coloured church on the way to my flat.

I guess it might actually have been another day--maybe the image just seems to belong with the meeting on the Metro, so I remember them together--but in my mind it was the same evening that I first noticed the old Zhiguli. It was on my side of the street, sandwiched between two BMWs like a ghost of Russia past or the answer to a simple odd-one-out puzzle. It was shaped like a child's drawing of a car: a box on wheels, with another box on top in which the child might add a stick-man driver and his steering wheel, and silly round headlights on which, if he was feeling exuberant, the child would circle pupils to make them look like eyes. It was the sort of car that most
of the men in Moscow had once spent half their lives waiting to buy, or so they were always telling you, saving and coveting and putting their names on waiting lists to get one, only to find--after the wall came down, they got America on TV and their better-connected compatriots got late-model imports--that even their dreams had been shabby. It was hard to be sure, but this one had probably once been a sort of rusty orange colour. It had mud and oil up its flanks, like a tank might after a battle--a dark crust that, if you were frank with yourself, you knew was how your insides looked after a few years in Moscow, and maybe your soul too.

The pavement on the way to my entrance had been left to dissolve into the road in the way that Russian pavements tend to. I walked past the churchyard and the Zhiguli to my building, punched in my code on the intercom, and went inside.

I lived in one of the Moscow apartment blocks that were built as grand houses by doomed well-to-do merchants just before the revolution. Like the city itself, it had been slapped about so much that it had come to look like several different buildings mashed together. An ugly lift had been fixed onto the outside and a fifth storey added to the top, but it had kept the original swirling ironwork of its staircase. Most of the front doors to the individual apartments were made of axe-resistant steel, but had been prettified with a sort of leather padding--a fashion that
sometimes made it feel as though the whole of upscale Moscow was a low-security asylum. On the third floor the smell of cat litter and the screech of a nervous-breakdown Russian symphony emerged from my neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich's place. On the fourth I turned the three locks on my padded door and went inside. I went into the kitchen, sat at my little bachelor's table, and took the trolleybus ticket with Masha's phone number on it out of my wallet.

In England, before you, I'd only ever had one thing with a woman that you might seriously call a relationship. You know about her, I think--Natalie. We met at college, though until someone's drunken birthday party somewhere in Shoreditch we hadn't thought of each other as contenders. I don't think either of us had the energy to end it once it had started, and six or seven months later she moved into my old flat without me really agreeing or disagreeing. I wasn't exactly relieved when she moved out again, saying that she needed to think and wanted me to think too, but I wasn't devastated either. We'd lost touch even before I went to Moscow. There had been a few Russian girls who'd seemed to be on their way to being proper girlfriends, but none of them lasted more than a summer. One became frustrated that I didn't have and wouldn't get the things she wanted and expected: a car, a driver to go with the car, one of those silly little dogs they drag around the designer shops in the cobbled alleys near the Kremlin.
There was another one, Dasha I think her name was, who after the third time she stayed over began hiding things in the wardrobe and in the little cabinet above my bathroom sink: a scarf, an empty bottle of perfume, notes that said "I love you too" in Russian. I asked Steve Walsh about it (you remember Steve, the lechy foreign correspondent--you came along when I met up with him in Soho once and didn't like him). He told me that she was marking her territory, letting anybody else I brought home know that someone else had got there first. By that September you had to be careful who you hooked up with in Moscow--because of AIDS, but also because foreign men were going to clubs, meeting girls, leaving their drinks on the table when they went to take a piss, then waking up without their wallets in the backs of taxis they didn't remember getting in to, or facedown in puddles, or once or twice, probably when they got the dose wrong, not waking up at all.