Back to Moscow (32 page)

Tatyana kept grabbing her belly. She was breathing rapidly. I held her hand and whispered into her ear. For a short while, she seemed to calm down. But halfway through the first night, something
snapped inside her and she began to mutter hysterically, about missing work, how she had an appointment in the morning to show an apartment in the centre. ‘I hope we get out before
eight,’ she said, her eyes staring straight past me into the red velvet seats.

The women in hijabs were ranged along the side aisles, facing the audience, holding their pistols up. Most hostages were calm, as though ready to endure whatever came their way. The orchestra
pit was used as a toilet. People took turns, and a silent queue formed along the first row. Two rows in front of us, an old man spent hours clutching an immense bouquet of flowers, as if expecting
the show to resume so that he could hand it to one of the actors during the final curtain call. The scene reminded me of the times when the metro stops abruptly for no reason and passengers,
trapped underground, remain serious and composed, waiting for movement to resume; except that, inside the besieged theatre, everybody looked ridiculous and out of place, especially the older women
in their formal dresses and complicated hairdos – their best perfume mixing with the stench of shit and piss that wafted from the orchestra pit.

Then came the long hours in which I was neither asleep nor awake. My mind was caught in a feverish state of expectation, drifting in and out of uneasy dreams – every little sound triggered
a violent reaction in my head, bringing me back to the reality of the theatre. At some point I heard a muffled shot coming from the direction of the lobby. It’s starting now, someone mumbled,
but then everything went quiet again. Tatyana slept for hours, or at least lay down in silence, her head on my lap.

It’s only when you meet the possibility of your own death that you fully comprehend the banality of the mental processes that kept you going for so long. Suddenly, I could no longer see
the horizon and, as a hungry hole of nothingness swelled ahead of me, I couldn’t help but think about the fragility of our existence. In the face of extinction, simply being alive became, in
itself, meaningful.

You were wrong: I wanted life more than you desired death.

Then, on Friday night, after two days of angst and exhaustion, I woke up gasping for air – my heart racing, the red velvet seats spinning endlessly. My eyelids felt heavy. For a split
second I saw Tatyana stretched on the floor, among the rows of seats, her head turned away. Before I could reach out my hand to touch her, an irresistible force sucked at my consciousness and
dragged me back down into a pool of blackness.

When I woke again I was a different person. Paralysed by a blinding headache, I squinted around, disoriented, searching for Tatyana. It took me a few moments to realise that I
was no longer in the theatre. Two men in white gowns were standing nearby, their eyes fixed on a small TV that hung on the wall. A hospital room, I realised, and, before I was able to speak, I was
told we were celebrating. The news coverage had just announced that all nine hundred hostages had been freed, unharmed. All the terrorists had been killed. In preparation for their assault, the
Russian special forces had pumped a powerful sleeping gas into the theatre, knocking everybody out. A seamless operation, we were told. Now, on the TV screen in my hospital room, I saw family
members celebrating outside the Dubrovka theatre, as messages flew in from around the world to congratulate the Russian leadership on their success. The grainy images on the screen showed the armed
men and the women in black hijabs scattered among the theatre seats and on the carpeted floors. Their eyes and mouths were wide open, their foreheads adorned with perfect bullet holes.

S
ADNESS
. M
ELANCHOLY
. L
ONGING
. Depression. The Russian word toska is rich in meaning. In his annotated
translation of
Evgeny Onegin
, Nabokov warns us that ‘no single English word renders all the shades of toska’.

‘At its deepest and most painful,’ Vladimir Vladimirovich writes, ‘it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a
dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning . . .’

Recently I’ve been thinking about toska. About the way our brain detaches itself from whatever is out there, and glides towards a permanent state of longing. I’ve been thinking that
our feelings of euphoria, accomplishment, satisfaction – they are all transient sensations, ephemeral states of mind. The only lasting human feeling is toska, the ‘dull ache of the
soul’.

Even tragic events that cause unbearable pain become, with time, nothing more than sad memories. Because time goes on, eroding both our joy and our suffering, mercilessly and relentlessly
depriving us of the cause of our anguish. Things that we believe serious, meaningful, very important, there will come a time when they will be forgotten or will seem unimportant.

I
LEFT
R
USSIA AT THE
end of 2002. Back in Europe I surrounded myself with new friends, started the process of putting those
years behind me. Yet hardly a day passes when I do not think about my time in Moscow.

I think about Lena, of course – but also about Polina and Yulya and Vika, and the others who lay on my couch. The fleeting moments of shared intimacy, which back then I chased so eagerly,
are becoming little more than an amalgam of broken thoughts in my head.

I close my eyes and I see the snow settling gently on the rooftops of Moscow. I remember how, on winter nights when the brothers came to my place, we made a heap of snow on the balcony to chill
bottles of beer and vodka. Then I see the snow melt, and spring and summer and autumn fall over the city with all the fullness and perfection of the seasons in a children’s book.

When I think about Tatyana I often picture our first night, after dinner in Café Maki. She’s standing beneath Pushkin’s statue, before we kissed for the first time. It’s
dark and her eyes are gleaming, full of hope but, at least in my memory, also coloured by a tinge of sadness. As if she already knew.

Then I think about that other life, the life I would be living if Tatyana and I had not gone to the theatre on the night of 23 October 2002. That life advances in its own parallel universe,
unlived by me, not meant to be – dissolved in the hours that followed the rescue operation, as it became clear that some hostages would never wake up, that they had been killed by the gas
pumped into the theatre. Eager to preserve military secrecy, the special forces refused to reveal the composition of the gas; doctors at the scene, not knowing what they were treating, were unable
to help. Today, a memorial plaque on the wall of the theatre bears a hundred and thirty names.

I
N METRO SYSTEMS AROUND
the world, a screen above the platform shows the time left until the arrival of the next train. Five minutes. Four minutes.
Three minutes. Two minutes. One minute. Then the countdown stops and you feel the breeze and you hear the rattling of a new train approaching through the tunnel.

Not in Moscow.

In Moscow’s metro, the electronic counter above the platform shows the time that has passed since the departure of the last train. With unnecessary precision, the seconds keep adding up,
one by one, informing you not about the train to come, but about the one you’ve missed, the train that would be carrying you, if only you had arrived earlier. But that train is for ever gone.
You don’t know when the next one will arrive.

Guillermo Erades was born in Málaga, Spain, and has lived in Leeds, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Moscow, Berlin, Baghdad and Brussels, where he is currently based.
Back to
Moscow
is his first novel.