Feeling better, I spat in the hole, wiped my mouth with toilet paper and stepped into the fresh air. As I was about to go back inside the dacha, I saw Diana sitting on the grass.
‘What are you doing here?’ I asked.
She was wearing the white shirt but her legs were now uncovered, extended in front of her. ‘Couldn’t sleep.’
‘And the others?’
‘Everybody’s sleeping,’ she said. ‘You OK?’
‘I’ve been better.’ I sat next to her, keeping my breath away from her face. The ground felt wet.
Diana drew in her long legs and embraced them, her head now resting on her knees. ‘You shouldn’t try to drink as much as Russian men.’
‘Do you know any stars?’ I asked.
‘Over there.’ She pointed above the cherry tree. ‘I think that’s the Great Bear.’
I moved closer to her and with my eyes followed the direction in which she was pointing. I tried to swallow as much saliva as possible to kill the smell of puke on my breath.
‘That must be Orion,’ I said, pointing to the sky.
‘Where?’
‘There. I think.’ I grabbed her arm and directed it towards a place in the sky where Orion may or may not have been. When I dropped my arm I held her hand.
‘Here, zagorod, you forget about everything,’ she said, clutching my hand. ‘It’s like a different life. Moscow feels so far away.’
A dog was barking in another dacha. I put my arm around Diana and she leaned her head on my shoulder. I swallowed more saliva. We remained in silence for a minute or so, our hands clasped. Then I kissed her. She kissed me back. We kissed for a couple of minutes. I could hardly breathe. I pushed her back on the ground, my left hand under her shirt. She rolled away and, just when I thought she was about to get up and leave, she took her shirt off. She was wearing no bra.
‘Let’s go to the forest,’ I said.
‘Ne nado. Everybody’s sleeping.’ Then she rolled her knickers down her long legs.
All lights were off at the dacha. I took off my own underwear.
I lay next to her, kissing her neck, holding her breasts, breathing heavily but realising in a panic that I wasn’t ready. I tried to calm down, focused on her elongated body, on her pretty freckled face. I rubbed my groin against her thighs for a minute or so but, to my horror, my body was not reacting.
Diana put her hand between my legs. ‘Relax,’ she said.
‘I really want you,’ I whispered, embarrassed.
‘I want you too.’
We kissed, and she tried for a while, but down there nothing worked.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I drank too much.’
‘Don’t worry. Let’s go to sleep.’
Back in bed, Tatyana remained in the same position I’d left her, face up. Her breathing was heavier now, with a hint of a snore.
My head was flooded with dark, impenetrable thoughts that vanished as soon as they appeared, leaving traces of bitterness. A black hole was growing inside me.
Tatyana remained peaceful in her sleep.
I kissed her.
She rolled over and dropped an arm over my chest. Her body exuded warmth and moisture.
‘I love you,’ I whispered.
Tatyana didn’t react. She was sleeping.
56
THE LATE-AUGUST MORNING was fresh and lovely. I was sitting on the terrace of Coffee Mania, reading The Master and Margarita. I felt cheerful as I nibbled my slice of Napoleon cake and sipped my coffee, glancing occasionally at the square and the trees and the façade of the Tchaikovsky conservatory.
Ever since Tatyana had moved into my flat for most of the week, I felt as if my body had more energy to face my Moscow days. This new vitality didn’t come so much from the novelty of sharing my flat with Tatyana, I thought, as from the fact that, coincidentally, I was sleeping better at night.
Besides, things had changed since the draining weekend by the lake. In the days that had followed our trip to the dacha, I’d felt a gradual but definite change in my mental state — an unexpected re-set of my inner self. The thought of meeting a new girl — which had in the past motivated a large number of my daily actions — now made me feel exhausted. I couldn’t face the prospect of taking someone to Pyramida or Café Maki for the first time, of having to deal with all the misplaced expectations. After almost three years in Moscow, I realised, I couldn’t be bothered to meet more Russian women.
I finished my coffee, raised my empty cup to order another one.
These days, when Tatyana visited her aunt for the weekend, I would usually stay home in the evenings, enjoying the novelty of waking up fresh the next day. Cooking, walking, reading. These activities, which at present occupied the greater part of my day, felt somewhat meaningful. Even on the rare occasions when I’d gone clubbing, it had been mostly to catch up with the brothers. The time had come for me to do other things. Perhaps, I thought as I looked around the square, I could start writing my thesis. After all, I had collected enough material. My red notebooks were brimming with observations.
The waitress brought my second cup of coffee with a smile. Unable to concentrate on The Master and Margarita, which I was reading in Russian for the first time, I closed the book. I looked at good old Tchaikovsky, who was sitting outside the conservatory, in the middle of the square, his right arm over a lectern, his left hand half raised, as if asking people in the street for silence. The muted notes of Swan Lake tried to emerge from a remote corner of my memory, carrying the forgotten sadness of another time, of another life, of Amsterdam.
I glanced back at the book. The cover featured a black and white sketch of Margarita flying on a broomstick. I started to picture myself as Bulgakov’s Master. I’d gone through a similar mental exercise in the early days of Yulya Karma, but now I was considering the book from a different angle. I was wondering why, among all the women in Moscow, it was Margarita the Master was obsessed with. What was it that made Margarita irreplaceable?
If you thought about it, it was a matter of chance that they’d met in the first place, Margarita and the Master, when she was carrying a bouquet of yellow flowers. I began to think of how most relationships are based on a random encounter, a set of small interlinked events that lead to the fateful meeting. It was Margarita that the Master had met, but it could have been any other woman. Then, once things get complicated, with the Devil coming to Moscow and all, the Master could have decided to move on, to forget Margarita. He doesn’t. The way Tatyana doesn’t forget Onegin. Or Karenina doesn’t forget Vronsky. Or Liza doesn’t forget Lavretsky. Moving on is the easy way out, the path that’s never chosen, at least not in books. For some reason, in most novels, once you’ve made a romantic choice, even if it’s a random choice, you stick to it. And you accept all the suffering that comes with it. This is, after all, a fundamental premise in classic literature: a lover is irreplaceable.
And yet, this kind of love, the maddening attraction we read about in books, is nothing but a literary device, I thought, an author’s trick to endow characters with strong motivations. In real life feelings are more malleable — suffering is optional. If things go wrong, you can move on and search for someone else.
Take Dushechka, in Chekhov’s story, who’s happy as long as she has someone to love, to worry about, regardless of who the recipient of her affection is. Maybe Dushechka’s kind of love, a strong feeling whose object is replaceable, is the real kind of love.