‘Vika, listen. I need to go now.’ I shook her hand off, threw a thousand-ruble note on the table. ‘I’ll call you.’
‘Go to hell.’
49
ON SUNDAY I WOKE UP just before noon. I put the percolator on the stove and two slices of bread in the toaster. I sat at the table, my head throbbing, waiting for the coffee. My mobile had been on the kitchen table all morning. I had six new text messages that had arrived during the night without my noticing. All from Vika.
privet, kak dela, sorry about earlier
why are you ignoring my message?
oh, maybe you are with your friends, have a good time
maybe we can meet tomorrow to talk
if you have time. otherwise another day
I’m thinking about you
I typed a short reply proposing to meet for coffee during the week, pressed send and immediately switched off the phone. After I finished my coffee and toast, I bundled the bedsheets into the washing machine, lay on the couch.
It had been a long night. I stopped drinking at about four in the morning, when I found myself on the basement dance floor in Karma, barely able to keep my eyes open. I said goodbye to Diego, who was slow-dancing with a fat dyev, but I was unable to find the others. I walked upstairs, into the open air, and was surprised to see daylight. I ignored the drivers waiting outside Karma and decided to walk, heading towards Petrovka Ulitsa. In summer I loved to walk home from a night out, crossing empty streets, breathing fresh air, observing how the night retreated and a new day took over the city. It was the only time of day when Moscow didn’t feel crowded.
I went back into the kitchen and made another cup of coffee. I hung the bed linen on the balcony. The sun was now hitting the western façade of my building. It would be dry in a couple of hours, I thought, just before Tatyana arrives.
I had a cold shower. Feeling refreshed, I lay back down on the couch, naked, observing the little white dots on my Indian tapestry. If I kept my eyes fixed on one of the dots that surrounded Lord Ganesh, the intricate painting seemed to shift slightly, the elephant head somehow peeking out of the wall. It was a bizarre visual effect I had noticed before, usually when drunk or hungover, and I wondered if that was the intentional purpose of the white dots — dots that otherwise didn’t add anything to the image. I closed my eyes, my mind drifted, and, in the sweet moment when my awareness was slipping away but I wasn’t yet asleep, a thought flitted across my mind: I missed Tatyana.
I stumbled to the kitchen, switched on my phone and sent Tatyana a text message: Miss you.
She replied in a minute: Me too, love you.
See you tonight.
At five, feeling a bit better, I decided to go out for some fresh air and to buy stuff for dinner. I walked into Eliseevksy, always comforting with its elegant gilded ceilings, chandeliers and wall paintings. The most beautiful place in the world to buy dried fish and imported biscuits. At the deli counter I got cured salmon, sturgeon, liver blinis, a jar of red caviar and smetana. On the way back I stopped at a booth in the perekhod and bought a film of the type Tatyana liked. The seller at the stand, who recognised me from previous purchases, assured me that the English subtitles worked well.
Pushkinskaya was bursting with life. Muscovites walked in and out of the metro, rushed through the perekhods, sat at the outdoor tables of Café Pyramida. I walked on among the crowd, towards my building, bag of groceries in one hand, movie in the other, feeling light-hearted at the thought of the night ahead — at the thought of Tatyana coming home.
50
STEPANOV WAVES HIS HAND at the waitress and points at his empty coffee mug. ‘But I don’t understand your problem,’ he says, turning back to me. ‘You can keep your girlfriend at home from Monday to Friday and enjoy your freedom on weekends.’
I glance around the garden. The morning is grey, threatening rain. A few ravens are pacing on the nearby grass, awaiting our departure to jump on the breakfast leftovers.
‘Russian women are forgiving,’ Stepanov says. ‘They accept that we have lovers on the side.’
The waitress fills our mugs with coffee, then heads off to attend to a table further away, where two white-haired expats are reading copies of the Moscow Times.
‘Not sure about that,’ I say. ‘I’ve met girls who were less trusting than Tatyana.’
‘Perhaps spoilt Muscovites,’ Stepanov says. ‘But real Russian women, from outside Moscow, it’s a different story. They understand that men need to chase women, that it’s in our nature and we can’t do shit about it. They don’t take it personally. They know it has nothing to do with feelings.’
I take a sip of coffee.
‘Of course there are rules to observe,’ Stepanov says, ‘but as long as you don’t bring other women home, and you’re discreet and respectful, you’re allowed to sleep around.’
‘Like in Chekhov’s stories,’ I say.
‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s not just that people cheat in Chekhov’s stories, adultery is old in literature. It’s the factual way Anton Pavlovich tells us his characters cheat. No moral consequences.’
Stepanov adjusts his sunglasses, which today are large and greenish. ‘That’s my point. In Russia infidelity is something that can be addressed with a bit of discretion and mutual understanding.’
I take a red notebook out of my bag, place it on the table, begin to scribble.
Stepanov leans forward, takes his sunglasses off, places his elbows on both sides of his empty plate. His blue eyes are bloodshot. ‘We, Russians, accept cheating as part of life,’ he says, speaking slowly now, ‘because we accept life as it is. Some things you can’t change, you have to live with them.’
I stop writing, look up. ‘You mean you just accept your sudba?’
‘Exactly. We’re fatalistic.’
I drop the pen and take a sip of my coffee.
‘Russians are fatalistic,’ Stepanov repeats, tilting his head towards my red notebook.
I nod. ‘Right.’
Stepanov’s eyes stay fixed on my notebook, and it hits me that I’m expected to write down his acute insight into the Russian mentality. I lift the pen and write Russians = fatalistic. I circle the word ‘fatalistic’ so that Stepanov sees it.
Stepanov nods with an approving smile. ‘You Westerners are always angry because you want to change everything in life. We Russians are always sad because we know that most things cannot be changed.’
I feel Stepanov has been waiting for the right moment to squeeze this pearl of wisdom into our conversation. I’m about to write it down when I see Colin and Diego approaching our table.
‘Sorry we’re late,’ Diego says. He’s wearing a baseball cap, green, white and red, the word ‘Mexico’ stamped on the front.
‘It’s fine,’ Stepanov says. ‘I was sharing with Martin some of the secrets of the Mysterious Russian Soul.’
‘Nonsense,’ Colin says, taking a seat at the table. ‘The Mysterious Russian Soul is—’ He doesn’t finish his sentence, distracted, glares at a raven that has approached our table begging for food. ‘Nothing but a marketing trick,’ he finally says, scaring the raven away with a wave of his hand. ‘An old slogan to promote a culture of laziness and alcoholism.’
My mind drifts back to the moment when Lyudmila Aleksandrovna gave me her take on the Mysterious Russian Soul. The expression Russian Soul, as known today, had been coined in the 1840s by Belinsky, the influential literary critic. It was Russia’s reaction to German romanticism, an ideal to agglutinate a divided nation, to put Russian idiosyncrasies above those of other European states. Lyudmila Alek sand rovna told me how the expression had been part of the romanticising of Russian peasant life and how, in her view, it had been Fyodor Mikhailovich — good old Dostoyevsky — who had popularised the term later on, making the soul, she said, the depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil. I had written down her exact words: In Dostoyevsky the soul is the depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil.