At the end of the street I turn right and walk until I reach the Russian State Library, still known as Biblioteka Imeni Lenina, with its enormous neoclassical columns, and I approach Dostoyevsky’s statue, a mournful Fyodor Mikhailovich facing the street, far from the entrance, his back to the library like a punished schoolboy. The soul is the depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil, he says to me, and I walk towards Okhotny Ryad and then Red Square, following the tourists — the guests of the capital, as they are called in metro announcements. As I cross the cobblestones of Red Square, which, it being a Sunday, is crowded, I find some comfort in seeing myself surrounded by other people. The fact that all these strangers don’t know about Lena, that they go on with their business as if nothing had happened, enjoying their morning stroll through the heart of Moscow — unperturbed by the thoughts in my head — makes me feel somehow lighter, less oppressed. I pass by the fairy-tale towers of St Basil’s Cathedral, which always strikes me as smaller and less impressive than in postcards and books, and I see tourists taking pictures of each other, dyevs from the provinces posing like models, one hand on the hip, the other behind the head, walking away from the camera to fit the entire cathedral and the Kremlin into one single frame. I walk past, knowing from my own experience that it’s impossible to take a good photo of Red Square, that the ploschad is too three-dimensional to be captured in a single image and that, whatever the chosen angle, the person in the picture will look small and insignificant.
I cross the bridges, over the dark waters, onto the southern bank, then wander into Pyatnitskaya Ulitsa, which feels like ancient Moscow, with its low buildings and pastel-coloured façades.
Around the metro station there is an explosion of life, Muscovites emerging from the subterranean stairways like disciplined ants, couples holding hands, a stand selling honey and soap, a babushka selling flowers, and for the first time I feel like buying flowers, a nice bouquet for Tatyana, I think, that will make her happy. I approach the babushka, and choose the biggest bouquet. Yellow roses. Twenty-five yellow roses, the babushka says.
I walk towards the river, retracing my steps, and I feel awkward with the flowers, wondering if I should carry the bouquet upright in front of me or if it’s fine to clasp it by the stems with the flowers pointing at the ground, and people are looking at me, the muzhik who’s bringing flowers to his woman, and, in the midst of my pain, the idea provokes — I think — a smile on my face.
It then occurs to me that I didn’t buy the flowers for Tatyana. For a split second my mind replaces the image of Tatyana receiving the yellow roses with that of Lena. I’m aware that I cannot give the flowers to Lena, that it’s Tatyana who will be coming home tonight after the weekend at her aunt’s, and I wonder if I want Lena because I know she won’t be there, and, maybe, if Tatyana were the one who had disappeared from my life, I would feel the same about her.
I cross the bridges back onto the northern bank, turn left and follow the southern wall of the Kremlin towards the cathedral of Christ the Saviour. I walk on the left pavement, by the river. I know Christ the Saviour is gigantic, an enormous building, and yet, as I look up at the distant golden dome under the lead-coloured sky, I’m surprised to see that it looks small and boxy, lacking the elongated elegance of European cathedrals, as if a small Russian country church had been artificially magnified and placed in the centre of Moscow.
There is a sad story about Christ the Saviour. When Sergey first told me about it, I was surprised to learn that it is in fact a brand new construction. Now, as I walk towards the cathedral with the yellow roses in my hand, I wonder where Sergey is, and I think of Ira and wonder if they got back together, and I regret having lost touch with them, because they were my real Russian friends, and back then, when we met, life was simpler and Moscow was such a great place.
Christ the Saviour was initially built to thank God for Napoleon’s defeat in 1812, Sergey had told me after a dinner in his apartment with Ira and Sergey’s mum, as he showed me a series of black and white photographs he had taken of the building. A couple of tsars worked on it but the whole construction wasn’t finished until the 1860s, when it stood as the largest Orthodox cathedral ever made. The cathedral was erected by the Moskva river, its golden dome within sight of the Kremlin. But the soviets, who dropped the capitalisation of the word God and wrote bog instead of Bog, had other plans for the site. In 1931, under Stalin’s orders, the cathedral was dynamited and reduced to rubble.
I walk along the naberezhnaya and cross under the Bolshoy Kammeny Bridge, and on my left across the river I see the House on the Embankment, with its giant Mercedes-Benz logo, and I’m thinking that Tatyana can give me calm and security, but she can’t reach as deep into me as Lena. Lena hurts. And I wonder if perhaps it’s precisely the pain I’m attracted to, and pain is what people search for when they say they want love. Pain is what keeps us awake, what makes us feel alive. We need pain as a reference point, to recognise and measure happiness. Why, otherwise, would we choose to chase only those who can hurt us?
The depository of human contradictions, of the eternal struggle between God and evil.
After the cathedral was destroyed, Sergey said, a grandiose project started to take shape, the construction of the Palace of the Soviets, which, Stalin hoped, would be the tallest building in the world. According to plans, the palace was to be crowned by a giant statue of Lenin, his arm raised to the sky, pointing at the horizon towards a better future. Construction of the palace began in the mid-1930s — the riverbank was dug, the foundations were laid for what was to be a monument to the workers’ paradise.
I know I can’t stop thinking about Lena because she’s no longer within my reach. I want the Lena of my first days in Moscow — not Boarhouse Lena, but Propaganda Lena — and suddenly it occurs to me that maybe back then she was already a whore. I want a Lena who no longer exists. I want a Lena who perhaps never existed.
The Palace of the Soviets was not meant to be. When Russia was attacked, this time by Hitler, construction had to stop. It never resumed. There were technical problems, the site kept flooding, and superstitious Muscovites believed it was a divine punishment for having destroyed the cathedral in the first place. For many years, the site of what was intended to be the tallest building in the world, the ultimate monument to the working class, was nothing more than an empty construction site, a monument to abandoned dreams.
It was in the late 1950s, under Khrushchev, that the site was turned into an immense swimming pool, the biggest open-air pool in the world. Muscovites loved the swimming pool, especially in summer months, Sergey had told me, and now I wish the site had remained a pool — a man-made lake, perfectly round, as I had seen in photos — in which I could take a dip and refresh my body, relieve my headache, purify my soul, but I’m heading not towards a public swimming pool but an enormous cathedral with a golden dome, because, after the perestroika, the mayor of Moscow and the Patriarch of all Russians decided to rebuild Christ the Saviour exactly as it had been before the soviet demolition.
The cathedral was newly completed when I arrived in town, so, as I walk towards the golden dome with my bouquet of yellow roses I think, we have this in common, we’re both newcomers to Moscow, Christ the Saviour and me, and it’s a bizarre name, and I’d never thought much about Christ, whom I’d always considered a mythological figure, at least until I read Bulgakov and saw Yeshua pleading with Pontius Pilate for his life and then it occurred to me that maybe Christ had been, after all, a real man.