I thought about Tatyana. If she were taken from me by a Devil-like figure, or if she decided to leave me for someone else, should I suffer and fight for her? Couldn’t I just move on to the next girl?
All this was new to me. Had I understood these things earlier, before Moscow, I wouldn’t have had to go through the pain Katya had inflicted on me. Now, when I looked back at my time in Amsterdam, I wondered why I hadn’t just moved on, like Dushechka. Why had I decided to suffer, as if I were a character in a novel?
After Katya came Lena and after Lena came Tatyana. In the end, in an unplanned manner, I had replaced the object of my affection. But what I felt now was not an endless capacity for love — as Tolstoy had said of Dushechka — but rather a comfortable degree of nonchalance. Like the Master with Margarita, my relationship with Tatyana had also evolved from a casual encounter: the moment she showed up at Kamergersky to show Colin an apartment. Our being together had been determined by a series of random actions without much individual meaning in themselves — random actions that, put together, marked the direction of my life.
This bothered me. Maybe Colin was right and the one thing to do was to forget about relationships and fuck around. But then, if we accept this readiness to replace a lover, to care about nothing, life itself dissipates into Chekhovian lightness. With nothing to care about, how do we go about looking for happiness?
Perhaps the antidote to this weightlessness is to endow life with a forced sense of gravity. Choose to care about things. Choose to consider our relationships as a matter of life or death.
Once, when Lena had been crying in my flat — I no longer remember the reason — I asked her why she always made such a big drama about everything. Why couldn’t we just have a happy relationship, without the tears and the shouting? ‘If we don’t suffer for it,’ Lena had told me, ‘how do we know our love is real?’
Buried in their mysterious soul, I thought, there is something that makes Russians avoid superficial joy and choose to pursue deeper, sadder feelings — something that makes them chase the resonance and aesthetic value of melancholy. Liza’s choice. And, perhaps, they got it right.
I looked across the square at the statue of Tchaikovsky, thinking that I needed to care about Tatyana as if I were the protagonist of a Russian noveclass="underline" without doubts. I must decide to be with her, I thought, and blindly take all the shit that comes with my decision. To relieve myself of the burden of choice, I now realised, I needed to believe in destiny. And accept pain. Like a Russian.
57
I HAD BEEN WANDERING around the centre for an hour. The morning heat was so unbearable that I decided to take refuge at the subterranean shopping centre in Okhotny Ryad. In the Internet café, I bought a cup of coffee and sat in front of a computer, enjoying the cooled air. I read a few international papers online, then responded to emails from family and old friends.
As I was walking out of the café, I received a text from Tatyana suggesting that we meet for lunch at Ris i Ryba, a sushi restaurant in the Dom na Naberezhnoy, the House on the Embankment. Sure, I texted back. I wandered among the shops, trying on clothes but buying nothing, and, when it was almost noon, I came up to the street.
There was nowhere to hide from the sun. I walked past the fountain with the horses, where a bunch of children were messing around with the water, covering some nozzles in unison to increase the water pressure and catch distracted pedestrians by surprise. They seemed to be having a good time. I dragged my feet through the park, under the blasting sun, and reached the end of Aleksandrovsky Sad — my shirt, drenched in sweat, stuck to my back.
On the other side of the asphalted esplanade, across the river, stood the Dom na Naberezhnoy, crowned with its enormous Mercedes-Benz logo against the blue sky. The encircled three-pointed star was not entirely aligned with the façade of the building and, every time I walked by, I wondered if perhaps the logo was meant to rotate around a central axis that no longer worked. As I walked over the bridge towards the building, it occurred to me that, maybe, at sunset, the Mercedes-Benz shadow would reach across the river, towards the walls of the Kremlin, a reminder to Russian rulers of their country’s defeat in its twentieth-century crusade against capitalism. The giant logo had probably been installed in the mid-1990s, when Russia, naively in love with the West, had embraced everything foreign with enthusiasm. I wondered if the country felt betrayed and, in my head, I imagined Russia as a woman writing a love letter — Tatyana’s letter to Onegin — to an unresponsive and arrogant West who had arrived after the collapse of the Soviet Union, not so much to help with the reconstruction, but to oversee the country’s capitulation and collect the spoils of the Cold War.
I entered the building through one of the southern entrances next to the Udarnik cinema, passed the okhrannik and went through a metal detector which I suspected hadn’t worked for years. I took the lift to the first floor.
The doors opened and I stepped into the fresh, artificially cooled air. Soothing lounge music played in the background. The waiter, probably Kazakh or Uzbek — most waiters in Japanese restaurants were of Central Asian origin — was dressed in black trousers and a black shirt with a white collar. He led me along the central aisle, passing by the open kitchen and sushi belt, to a small table by the huge floor to ceiling window. I found the smell of boiled rice comforting. The window overlooked the road, the park, the river. I ordered green tea and waited for Tatyana.
Built in the early 1930s as a residence for the soviet nomenklatura, the Dom na Naberezhnoy had also hosted distinguished academics, war heroes and pretty much everybody who had been elitni back then. Other than ample apartments and the sushi restaurant, the residential complex boasted a cinema, a clinic, shops, a stolovaya, common spaces. But what made it a legendary building in Moscow was not just the social standing of its former inhabitants, but the fact that many of them had vanished during their stay. I had been told that the building contained an elaborate system of secret passages connected to the luxurious flats and that, at the peak of Stalin’s repression, these corridors were used by the secret services to spy on the building’s notorious inhabitants and snatch them in the middle of the night.
Tatyana arrived a few minutes after me and was escorted to my table by the same waiter. She was wearing a white top with a scooped neckline, almost see-through. I could see the lacework of her bra. Her face was flushed from the heat, her eyes greener than ever, her blonde curls untied and airy. I served her tea and we ordered two lunch menus — mine with salmon sushi, hers with chicken teriyaki.
I asked Tatyana if she had ever shown any apartments in the Dom na Neberezhnoy.
‘I showed a three-room apartment a few months ago,’ she said. ‘So expensive. This is one of the most exclusive buildings in Moscow. The views are very beautiful, you can see the churches inside the Kremlin.’
‘Beautiful indeed,’ I said, glancing out of the window.
‘Most available flats are now rented by foreigners though. Russians don’t want to live here.’
‘Why’s that?’
Tatyana tried to take a sip of tea, but it was too hot. She placed the cup back on the table. ‘Because of the ghosts.’
‘Ghosts?’
‘You know, the spirits of dead people. The building is haunted.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Ghosts.’
‘The building’s residents were killed here during Stalin,’ Tatyana said. ‘Their spirits remain in the building.’
‘And people believe in these things?’