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?
4
AS 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.