Back to Moscow (3 page)

In any case, as
The Exile
famously wrote back then, Propaganda remained the best place in Moscow to meet dyevs who were out of your league.

It was in Propaganda that I met Lena.

Thursday night: Propaganda night. I’d been drinking with the brothers, vodka and whisky shots at Stepanov’s place, then vodka shots and beer in Propaganda. After a piss run, I found
myself standing by the bar, captivated by a pair of big blue eyes. Straight blonde hair falling over her forehead, stopping in a perfect line just above her eyelashes. Classic Propaganda
haircut.

‘I’m Helen,’ Lena said.

The music was loud, so Lena and I had to talk into each other’s ears. Lena’s hair smelled of rose water and cotton candy. Her voice was soft and sensual.

I ordered two shots of vodka and we toasted za vstrechu, to our encounter. I held my breath, drained the vodka glass, bit the lemon slice, breathed again. The alcohol made a lovely burning pang
in my stomach.

Lena took a small sip and left her glass, almost full, on the bar. ‘I like the DJ,’ she said.

I looked at the dance floor and saw Colin and the other brothers forming a circle around what I assumed were Lena’s uglier friends. The music was a tedious techno beat I didn’t
really care for.

‘I
love
the DJ,’ I said.

Lena and I talked for two or three minutes, which, back then, was as long as I could go before my Russian started to fail.

She didn’t smile, Lenushka, not even at the very moment when we first met, and, as I tried to make conversation, I couldn’t help but think she was somehow distracted and absent. Lena
was distracted and absent, I imagined, because she’s a nice dyev and we’re in Propaganda and, whatever
The Exile
said, nice dyevs come to Propaganda to listen to the DJ and
dance with friends. Not to meet foreign men. In her eyes, I thought, I’m nothing but a shallow Westerner, a soulless pleasure-seeker looking for an easy fuck.

‘So you’re an expat,’ she said.

Our cheeks touched accidentally. My entire body stiffened.

‘Student,’ I replied.

Lena was now fiddling with the lemon slice that came with her vodka. She looked towards her friends on the dance floor and for a moment I thought: she’s about to walk away.

Then she turned to me and finally asked The Question.

‘Why Russia?’

Now, I could tell Lena about my studies in Amsterdam. I could tell her about Katya and how she’d ripped my heart out and eaten it, leaving a hole in my chest. I could tell her how
I’d had no choice but to leave the city. I could tell her how Moscow had not even been near the top of the list of universities I’d initially applied for. But that’s not what I
told her. That was not a good story for Propaganda.

Instead, I carefully placed my hand on Lena’s shoulder, stared into her big blue eyes, and pronounced the magic word.

‘Pushkin,’ I said. To make sure she fully absorbed the sweetness of the sound, I separated the two syllables. Push. Kin.

Lena was now intrigued. I carried on and delivered the Propaganda version of my coming-to-Moscow story, telling Lena how the poetry of Aleksandr Sergeyevich had changed my life. I’d
practised most of the sentences at language class with Nadezhda Nikolaevna so I didn’t find it too difficult to describe, in my simplified Russian, how I’d gone from discovering Pushkin
to being interested in Russian literature to obtaining a research scholarship in Moscow. My story was a good story.

Colin said, with Moscow dyevs you just need a beautiful story that makes sense, it doesn’t need to be true.

To my surprise, I found myself whispering some Pushkin verses in Lena’s ears. Ya vas lyubil and so on.

Then, for a brief moment, Lena smiled. Lena smiled with her lips, with her big blue eyes, but also with her entire body. She pulled her shoulders back and I caught a glimpse of a small golden
cross dangling above her cleavage, sheltered by the lovely curve of her breasts.

Lena smiled, I thought, because she now trusted me. How could she not trust a foreigner who loved Pushkin?

A
S FAR AS
I
COULD
tell, Nadezhda Nikolaevna was the oldest person I’d ever met. With ashy hair and deep wrinkles, she had
reached that age where old people start to shrink and look pitiful. Yet, like most babushkas in Moscow, she radiated determination, a historical toughness visible in the way she pressed her lips
together firmly and looked straight into your eyes.

I was meeting Nadezhda Nikolaevna four times a week in a small classroom at the humanities faculty. If I had been out the night before, which was often the case, I would spend our three academic
hours – which each lasted forty minutes – struggling to keep my eyes open while she read bits from old soviet books and made me repeat words such as perpadavaltelnotsa,
prepadavaltelnetsa, prepodavatelnitsa, which I couldn’t quite pronounce but just meant teacher, for chrissake.

But, against my own expectations, the combination of lessons at university and chatting up dyevs in nightclubs seemed to be working – I was picking up the language. During our lessons,
Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who had been teaching Russian to foreigners for decades, spoke simple Russian and mimed vividly, so, after a few weeks, I was able to figure out, if not exactly what she was
saying, at least the general idea she was trying to convey.

Sometimes I got it badly wrong though. One day Nadezhda Nikolaevna walked into the classroom looking particularly morose and told me she was devastated because her cherepakha had just passed
away. I’d been to the Duck the night before, so cherepakha day must have been a Wednesday. The remains of vodka in my blood had put me in a dark mood and Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s tragic
loss made a strong impression on me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, regretting my inability to express proper condolences in Russian.

I didn’t know the word cherepakha. In my mind, I went through all family-related vocabulary I had learned so far, which at the time was limited: brat, brother; sestra, sister; syn, son;
dochka, daughter. As far as I could tell, cherepakha had not entered my lexicon.

‘Life goes on,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna said. ‘Let’s get to work.’

At that moment, confused by my unexpected encounter with death at such an early hour of the day, I couldn’t help but admire what I identified as yet another example of Russian resilience.
I found myself thinking of Ilyusha’s death in
The Brothers Karamazov
, about
The Death of Ivan Illich
, about the natural and yet intimate relationship Russians have with
mortality.

‘Cherepakha?’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna asked.

‘I don’t think I know the word.’

‘Yes, Martin, you know, something that something slow and something hard.’

‘I’m sorry, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, I don’t understand.’

Then, in a gesture I will never forget, Nadezhda Nikolaevna raised her elbows and moved her arms in a slow crawling motion. She tilted her head, inflated her wrinkled cheeks, and stuck her
tongue out. It made a gruesome sight.

‘Cherepakha, cherepakha!’ she repeated.

She took my notebook, started to draw. First she made a big circle. Then, with the precision of an architect, she drew two short perpendicular lines on each side, followed by a smaller
pear-shaped figure on top, a head, I realised, and I gradually understood what she was trying to draw.

That’s when I learned that cherepakha means turtle.

From then on, every time I encountered the word cherepakha, what came to my mind first was the image of Nadezhda Nikolaevna sticking her tongue out, and not the reptile she had mimicked for my
understanding.

One day, at the end of our language class, Nadezhda Nikolaevna proposed that we go on an excursion into town later in the week. She thought that, as a prospective Russian
literature expert, I’d be interested to see Gorky’s house, a beautiful art nouveau building in central Moscow which had been turned into a museum. I wasn’t wild about the idea of
having to get up earlier to spend the morning in a museum, but Nadezhda Nikolaevna seemed really keen so we made plans to take our last lesson of the week to the city centre.

On Friday morning, I stood in the middle of the Arbatskaya station platform, among the rush of Muscovites, waiting for Nadezhda Nikolaevna. It was the day after I’d first met Lena in
Propaganda and I’d had barely two hours’ sleep. My head was aching and clouded; my throat dry. Yet, as I tried to identify Nadezhda Nikolaevna in the moving mass of people, I felt a
cheerful tickle in my chest, an unusual feeling of excitement, provoked not so much by the prospect of visiting Gorky’s house as of meeting Lena later in the day.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna emerged from the crowd wearing a babushka headscarf and carrying a plastic bag. Out in the street, we walked slowly along the frozen pavement of the Boulevard. The
temperatures had dropped in the last few days and we were both tucked into our winter coats. Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s gait was stooped and – in my head – turtle-like. For a brief
moment, it crossed my mind to offer her my arm, but then I thought the gesture condescending, a bit ridiculous, and I continued walking at arm’s length.

We turned left at Malaya Nikitskaya and soon reached Gorky’s house. The babushkas taking care of the museum were almost as old as Nadezhda Nikolaevna. After paying for the tickets, we were
ordered to wear giant felt slippers over our shoes so as not to damage the original parquet floors. Slippers strapped on, we glided carefully over the polished floors of the museum. I was
particularly impressed by the large library, which, according to a laminated leaflet in faulty English, contained Gorky’s own books, most of which were annotated in the margins by the great
writer himself.

Despite my Propaganda hangover, I tried my best to follow Nadezhda Nikolaevna’s enthusiastic explanations about the beautiful house and Gorky’s life. The mansion, she was saying, had
been commissioned in the early 1900s by a wealthy banker called Ryabushinsky. After 1917, the building had been expropriated by the Bolsheviks and used as headquarters for several soviet
institutions. When, in the early 1930s, Gorky returned from Italy, he was bestowed with plenty of honours, including, Nadezhda Nikolaevna said, renaming both Tverskaya Street and the city of Nizhny
Novgorod after him. Stalin awarded him the Ryabushinsky mansion, with the intention that it would become an intellectual hub for soviet writers.

As I listened to her talk, I pictured Gorky and his illustrious visitors – which, I was told, included Stalin himself – discussing literature and socialism beneath the stained-glass
windows and carved wooden frames. Every now and then, my mind would temporarily drift from Gorky to Propaganda, as I was bombarded by flashes of the previous night. The big blue eyes. The goodbye
kiss.

Nadezhda Nikolaevna seemed proud of the museum. I made sure that I looked impressed by everything she was telling me, even if I missed some of her explanations. When we were done with the first
floor, we tackled the spectacular staircase, which had a wavy banister that ended in a bronze jellyfish-like lamp. I let her go first, and discreetly positioned myself behind, worried that, with
the cumbersome slippers, she might trip and roll down this fine but slippery example of Russian art nouveau.

Half an hour later, as we walked back towards Arbatskaya, Nadezhda Nikolaevna suggested that we find a café and sit for some tea. ‘The visit only took us one hour,’ she said,
‘we still have time left.’

I was hoping to stay around the centre, see if Stepanov was at home so that I could crash on his couch for a couple of hours before meeting Lena.

‘It was a very interesting visit,’ I said. ‘I think we can consider it a full lesson. Let’s stop here and meet next week.’

‘Martin, I would prefer if we finish our lesson time. I’m paid for a three-hour lesson and it’s my job to give it to you.’

She looked determined. Not wanting to offend her sense of duty or make her feel I didn’t value her teaching, I agreed to continue our lesson.

We walked into the Old Arbat. A few stands stood in the middle of the pedestrian street, selling wares for tourists: soviet flags, matryoshka dolls, lacquered boxes, painted eggs. We walked into
the first café we saw. It was warm and cosy inside. The wood-panelled decor imitated a traditional Russian country house and included, near the entrance, a real stuffed cow. We sat at a
small table by the window, facing each other, and ordered a pot of black tea.

I was afraid we wouldn’t have much to talk about, but Nadezhda Nikolaevna continued speaking about Gorky. To my surprise, in the intimacy of the café, she was giving me an entirely
different spin on Gorky’s story. As I understood it, Nadezhda Nikolaevna was now telling me that Gorky was a sell-out. While he’d written very interesting stuff in his early years,
after 1917 he’d become a puppet of the soviet regime, especially following his return from Italy. The house we’d just visited, I was being told, was unworthy of a writer who claimed to
represent the proletariat. In exchange for supporting Stalin’s increasingly totalitarian regime, Gorky had been granted plenty of favours, including a position as president of the
Writers’ Union.

‘And for what?’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna said. ‘He didn’t write a single good line after the revolution.’

I wondered why Nadezhda Nikolaevna hadn’t told me this version of Gorky’s story while we were inside the museum. Perhaps, I thought, she was afraid that the dezhurnayas following us
across the rooms – to ensure that we didn’t break or steal anything, I’d assumed – would intervene if she deviated from the official version of Gorky’s story as
presented by the museum.

When the tea arrived, Nadezhda Nikolaevna took a small foil-wrapped parcel from her plastic bag and placed it at the centre of the table. ‘A little surprise,’ she said, smiling. She
unwrapped the parcel, uncovering a napkin with a few rolled-up blinis.

‘I made them myself for our little excursion,’ she said proudly, as she extended the napkin with the blinis next to the teapot. ‘I hope you like blinis with tvorog.’