Snowdrops (20 page)

Oleg Nikolaevich said, "They are putting in a Jacuzzi."

"Where?"

"In Konstantin Andreyevich's apartment. Someone has moved in."

I hadn't thought about Oleg Nikolaevich's friend for a long time, and, if I'm honest, I didn't much care to.

"Who?"

"I don't know. I don't know. A woman I know who lives in the building told me. She saw it."

"What?"

"The Jacuzzi."

He waited for a reply, but I had nothing to say about
the Jacuzzi or his friend. I think probably he just needed to tell someone. I'm sure he knew it was too late to expect much help from me anymore. Just as it was too late for his opinion to make a difference to me and the girls.

To end the silence, I told him that I was going to Odessa for a few days at the beginning of June.

Oleg Nikolaevich looked into my eyes, then out for a moment towards Masha and Katya in their strappy dresses. When he spoke he seemed to be addressing a point somewhere along my collarbone.

"Invite a pig to dinner," he said, "and he'll put his feet on the table."

W
E WATCHED THE
fireworks from Pushkin Square, Tatiana Vladimirovna standing between me and Masha, our arms interlocked with hers. She liked being around lovers, I think, even if not much of the love was for her. Katya had a packet of sparklers that she handed out, and we waved them at each other. When the bangs started, we looked up into the sky above the Kremlin and said "oooh" and "hurrah."

"Enjoy yourselves, kids," Tatiana Vladimirovna said when she wished us good night, and blew us all kisses, and winked at me.

* * *

I
TOOK ANOTHER
day off work and we flew to Odessa on a Friday morning. In the end the place on the beach fell through, if it had ever existed, and we stayed in a hotel. I paid, naturally, and in return I got to act out the whole big-shot routine, checking in with the two of them, turning up for breakfast with them. The hotel was on a lovely lazy avenue, crowded with blossoming trees and statues of dead Odessans, above the grand old steps down to the seafront. It had a fine wooden staircase, a restaurant that must once have felt like the Ritz, and a beautiful view of the early summer sun swimming in the oil-dark sea. It brings it all back, telling you about it like this.

We took a room and a half--a big bedroom with a single-bed children's annexe and a shared bathroom. Katya went out straightaway to stroll and flirt. I admit it, I asked Masha to drop her dress, open the wardrobe door, and stand in front of the mirror, like she did in the photo they showed me at the very beginning. Only now I was sitting behind her, looking at her back in front of me and her front in the mirror and myself in there with her. Our eyes met somewhere in the door, the images of us close in the glass but our real selves separating, already far apart.

I sat and she stood like that, only our eyes speaking, until Masha said to the me in the mirror, in the same violent voice that had come out of her at the airport, "Is it enough, Kolya?" In Odessa she was attentive, punctual,
courteous to the needs she'd got to know. But it was as if she wasn't really there, or maybe as if I was already not there, inside her head, and perhaps because I wasn't there she could afford to be generous with me.

We got dressed. At the top of the steps down from the shady avenue to the sea we found a dwarf crocodile, a balding owl, and a nervous monkey, waiting to have their photos taken with suggestible tourists. It was warm in the sun but almost cold in the shadows. The Odessa cafes were opening up for the season, unfurling their umbrellas and letting down their awnings like animals stretching themselves after hibernation. Bashful American men chatted awkwardly about the menus with the online brides they'd flown in to meet. There were two girls circulating in knee-high PVC boots and suspenders, giving out leaflets for a strip club. I'd been wrong, maybe, to have thought their religion was dying, these flamboyantly sinful Slavs. Maybe to be this immoral you've got to have religion somewhere--some decrepit gods lurking at the back of your mind, gods you are determined to defy.

In the middle of the afternoon we took a taxi out to the beach.

I asked Katya, "How were the exams?"

"What exams?"

"Your exams at Moscow State University."

"Yes," she said. "Exams. They were excellent."

We were sitting at a little bamboo beachside cafe. Lean teenage boys were hurtling into the cold sea water from rickety waterslides and the end of a broken-down pier. From a distance the sand looked like the kind I once saw on a volcanic beach in Tenerife (a long time ago, before you, before Russia). On closer inspection it appeared to be mostly cigarette ash. Katya was wearing a transparent dress with a red bikini underneath. Masha was twirling her sun umbrella. I couldn't see her eyes behind her sunglasses.

"What subjects did you take, Katya?"

"Business ... economy ... and many more." She smiled. "I am very good student."

"First in class," said Masha, and they laughed. I laughed too.

The concrete path that ran behind the beach smelled of piss, but somehow not too objectionably. An old man was tending a punchball game, and a mournful old woman offered to weigh us on a set of old-fashioned scales. There was a pile of snoozing dogs. There seemed to be almost nothing to hide now. They weren't sisters. Tatiana Vladimirovna wasn't their aunt. Katya worked as a waitress in the Uzbek restaurant. Everything was coming out.

We sat on the beach (Masha and Katya spread out plastic bags beneath them to protect their clothes). We agreed that in the evening we'd go back to one of the beachfront nightclubs that we'd walked past. We bought three ice
creams from a woman who seemed to me to look like Tatiana Vladimirovna, and licked at them in silence.

I found out about Seriozha at the hotel, when we were getting ready to go out again.

M
ASHA RETREATED TO
the bathroom and locked the door. The taps ran. Katya fell asleep. I could see her lying on her front through the door of her room, with her arms straight by her sides like a corpse. After about a quarter of an hour I knocked and asked Masha whether she was all right, and after a long pause she said
"da,"
drawing the word out in a voice somewhere between an orgasm and a death rattle. I turned on the television: I found a weight-lifting contest, soft-core adverts for Italian chat lines, a scrum of men in tight suits attempting to throttle each other in what I think was the Ukrainian parliament, and a strange military ceremony, involving a brass band and some camels, transmitted live from Turkmenistan. I switched it off. From somewhere behind the hotel I heard what I amateurishly took to be two gunshots. Then I saw Masha's pink-trimmed purse sitting on the side table by the bed, picked it up, and looked inside.

She had both passports, the international one plus the internal kind that Russians have to carry around with them. That's how I can be sure of her surname. Afterwards
I realised that I could have found and written down her address. Perhaps I should have, but I was in a hurry and careless and I didn't. She had a membership card for a gym and another for a nightclub in the Taganka district that I'd never heard of. She had a discount card for an accessory shop on the Novy Arbat, three stamps on a "buy six get one free" card from a coffee shop at Pushkin Square, a Metro pass, about two thousand roubles and fifty dollars. I found a scrap of paper with her phone number on it, which all practical Muscovites carry, so that anyone who stole the purse could get their granny to sell Masha's identity documents back to her a couple of days later. She had a photograph.

He looked too innocent, the little boy in the photo. It was black-and-white, passport size, but I could make out a Tintin blond quiff, the hair curling out of a winter bonnet that was tied under his chin. I couldn't tell for sure--the monthly stages and cute accomplishments that parents get so worked up about have always been beyond me--but I reckoned he was about a year old in the photo. You could only see his top half, but he seemed to be wearing a miniature sailor suit. He was half facing the camera, half glancing up at the woman whose lap he was sitting on. It was Masha.

I turned the photo over. Someone had written "With Seriozha" on the back, and a date. It was about five or six months before I'd met her. I calculated that at the time of Odessa he must have been about two years old, that little
boy. I put the photo back in the purse and the purse back where I found it.

T
HEY BOTH WORE
catsuits that night--Masha's dark blue and Katya's, I think, purple--and too much makeup. We went for dinner at a Ukrainian buffet. I piled my plate with dumplings, but ate almost nothing, just sat there thinking,
Who is Seriozha? Who is Seriozha? Who is Seriozha?
They talked about where they'd go on holiday if they could afford it (the Maldives, the Seychelles, Harrods). Afterwards we had a pina colada in a heaving bar, then took a taxi out to a nightclub on the beach. Rameses, I think it was called, or Pharaoh.

It was the first weekend of the season, early in the evening, maybe ten thirty, and cool. The place was half empty. There was a stage drowning in dry ice, a bereft dance floor, and around it tables climbing the sides of three plastic Egyptian pyramids. We sat down and waited for something to happen, not bothering to try to talk above the techno. Slowly, then all of a sudden as parties and nightclubs tend to, the place filled up. Masha and Katya went off to dance. I headed for the bar and stood there on my own, looking and drinking.

Apart from a dozen or so central-casting gangsters with fear-me black jackets, tree-trunk necks, and death-row haircuts, I was the oldest person there by roughly fifteen
years. The leggy Odessan women looked at me in my jeans and party shirt like I was a flasher or a beggar. There was a strip show--a weird nude ballet featuring an immobile male hulk and two disappointingly long-in-the tooth, saggy-in-the-tits women. The ironic clubbers cheered and whooped.

When the strippers picked up their clothes and scuttled off, I climbed a pyramid and scanned the dance floor for the girls. It isn't altogether clear for me now, that night, but in my dreamy memory of it I fought my way over to their spot in the corner by the stage, apologising inaudibly to the owners of the toes I trod on, my glasses sweating, my ears pounding. They'd teamed up with another girl and a boy, I remember, but the strangers retreated into the jungle of limbs when they saw me coming.

I stood in front of Masha, grabbed both sides of her head to keep it still, and shouted as loud as I could.

"Who is Seriozha?"

"What?" Her face stopped dancing but her body tried to carry on.

"Who is Seriozha, Masha?"

"Not now, Kolya."

"Is Seriozha your son, Masha?"

"Not tonight, Kolya."

"Is he with your mother? Was your mother really ill when you were young? Do you have a mother, Masha?"

"Not tonight. Tonight is for you, Kolya. Let's dance, Kolya."

Her body started up again. I still had her head, but she reached around me with one hand for Katya, and then I felt Katya's arms pushing over my shoulders and her fingers mating with mine at the back of Masha's skull, and Katya's breath on my neck and her firm front pressing into the middle of my back.

I was half-full of pina colada, and the other half of me was drunk on understanding. I let Katya pull away my hands, stopped shouting at Masha, and swayed into my usual school-disco shuffle. We must have looked like a cheesy male fantasy.

But the thing about Odessa, even more than in Moscow, is that in the right light, with the right lubrication, you can somehow make things seem better than they truly are. You can make things be what you want them to be. People live on that, and so can you. So did I, for that long last night. The dry ice cleared, and I saw the shimmer of the Black Sea beyond the nightclub stage, and the crests of the waves on their way in to find us by the moonlight. It seemed to me that I could dance, dance like the bodies twisting on tables, and the bodies clambering up onto podiums to let the world see how young and beautiful they were in the young summer. It seemed that the gangsters meant no harm, and that Masha might have meant it
when she kissed me. The pyramid looked like a pyramid, the fantasy smelled like happiness, and the night felt like freedom.

W
E
'
D ONLY BEEN
in bed for an hour or so when the light sailed over the water, through the trees, and between our hotel curtains. I looked for signs and clues and stretch marks on Masha's hips and sleeping belly, but I couldn't find them.

It was full-on summer when we got back from Odessa. Spring happens in a hurry in Moscow, seeming to pass almost overnight or while you're watching a film: you wake up, or blink out of the cinema into the warming air, to discover it's been and gone. I could taste the hormones and the energy. Something had to happen with that energy, someone had to do something with it.

A few days after we flew home--a day or two before the date we'd fixed to sign the contract for the flats--Masha and I went to see Tatiana Vladimirovna again. She met us at the door, shooed us out, and together we went for
a walk on the path around the thawed pond. We gave her another little present that we'd bought for her, a fridge magnet that depicted the Odessa opera house and beside it the proud head of a tsarina. She held it up close to her eyes, then put it in the inside pocket of her skimpy navy spring coat. She said she'd love to go to the Black Sea again one day.

"You will," I said.

"Maybe," she said.

After that, Masha told her that there was a problem with the apartments. In fact there were two of them. The first problem, which according to Masha I had identified, was that if Tatiana Vladimirovna swapped her apartment for the new one as they'd agreed, she might have to pay hundreds of thousands of roubles in property tax. The authorities, Masha said, would calculate what they thought the new place was worth, and add that figure to the fifty thousand dollars to determine the nominal value of her old home. The total would be above the threshold at which property tax kicked in. So Tatiana Vladimirovna might lose the fifty thousand and maybe have to pay more besides.