One September evening, the woman at the back of the church that first day, hair uncoiling from the handkerchief, was sitting at the café as Anna went out. Had she come under surveillance? There were spies and the spied-on. One could alternate, but it was still difficult to be neither.
‘Care to join me? I am Teresa Maximovna, but please just call me Teresa.’ She insisted on paying for tea and crumbly biscuits.
‘Prayer’s a great solace, isn’t it? How did we ever manage without?’
She kept the conversation on Anna, her interest quickening when the younger woman revealed she was alone in the capital, and invited Anna for dinner the coming Wednesday. She wrote down the address and telephone number on scrap paper and pressed it into her palm as they rose to go.
Though only a twenty-minute bus journey, the dinner invitation loomed larger than Anna’s move to Moscow. She spent the week in a lather of indecision. What to wear? Permissible topics of conversation? Would she be jeopardizing her residency by dining with a woman and her family whose political soundness was untested, motives mysterious? Twice she called Teresa from a street phone to decline. Each time the machine gobbled her kopeks as someone picked up the receiver. That had to be an omen. A proper dinner was too good to pass up. She borrowed an iron from the communal laundry pressed the green muslin dress into a presentable state. Decided against makeup – not only would she arrive a streaky mess, but she might as well stick a ‘Follow Me’ sign on her back.
The bus dropped her in the genteel sandstone precinct of Ramenki, half a kilometre shy of the address. With the last of her monthly stipend, she had bought a sponge cake with coconut and marzipan frosting, at a shop abutting a courtyard the size of a football pitch. Attuned to Moscow’s social gradations as she was, guests mustn’t arrive empty-handed even if that meant she wouldn’t eat for three days prior to the next payment.
She followed Teresa’s scrawled directions. The entrance to Flat 153 was halfway along the opposite side of the courtyard, five floors up via a lurching, rattling elevator. A man in a white flannel shirt opened the door, introduced himself as Sergey. His thick red hair was mussed as if he had just pulled off a jumper. Teresa came out of the kitchen past a boy about Anna’s age folded into an armchair, all four limbs flung over the sides.
‘Nice to meet you, Vasya.’ Anna extended her hand to shake. Was this the done thing? He didn’t reciprocate. Whose faux pas? She was the naïf from Kaluga. Both questions answered themselves.
‘Likewise.’
She need not have fretted about her provincial manners. He nodded in her general direction and resumed reading an English grammar paperback.
Teresa looked unimpressed. ‘Why don’t you show our visitor around before dinner?’
‘I’m hungry. How about afterwards?’ He stood up, avoiding eye contact. A lean, pale offcut of his father. Hair blonder, finer. When he turned his head away she noticed a thinning swirl on his crown.
Teresa set down four bowls of mushroom soup with slabs of ryebread. Anna hesitated in case a toast or other ritual came next, but Teresa motioned her to sit down and begin. In the centre of the table was a sort of beetroot pudding doused in mayonnaise. An urn bubbled under it.
‘Looks delicious. What is it?’ Every topic, even food, seemed fraught.
‘Beetroot under a fur coat,’ Sergey replied as though it was everyday fare in the Kurguzikov household.
She ate at the same pace as everyone else so as not to emphasize her scrabbling student existence. Vassili concentrated on his soup. First to finish, he mumbled thanks, rose, and looked at her. His mouth moved as if he was working up to something.
‘Would you like the two-minute tour? The three-minute version includes the kitchen. Currently out of bounds.’ He was wittier than his first impression.
She followed him to his bedroom door padded with inch-thick mustard vinyl, outsize brass studs stretching its corners. Boy-reek pinched her nostrils, her dormitory to the power of ten. A tiny latch window was open the width of her hand.
‘Into rock and roll?’ Satin-clad pop stars adorned a wall each. ‘Mick Jagger. David Bowie. John Lennon.’ His blasé enunciation suggested longstanding, not particularly glamorous acquaintances whose company had long since worn thin. Their heads strained towards the middle of the ceiling, creating a dome effect. Vassili nodded to the fourth poster above his bunk bed. ‘Boris Grebenshikov from Aquarium, you’ll have heard of him.’ From a bookcase alongside Grebenshikov he reached down a sheaf of album sleeves, their covers molten technicolour, young men wielding or straddling guitars. He translated the groups’ names: Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Scorpions, Stones. ‘I’d put them on for you but the stylus is gone.’ He gestured to an ancient LP player. ‘Decent ones are in short supply. Even on the black market.’
‘I could bring over mine. Only it needs repairs itself.’
‘Do that. Dad’s handy.’
The bookshelf displayed English language texts and dictionaries sorted by size and thickness. The Russian books were pushed to the corners. Her eyes fell on a chunky paperback perched on the edge of the shelf. She peered closer, could make out the title – Spock’s Guide to Sex.
An awkward silence. She stood up. ‘I suppose I should go. They don’t like us returning late.’
Teresa accompanied her to the front door. ‘Anyushka – may I call you that? We would be delighted to have you again. Same time next week?’
‘Don’t forget your player,’ Vassili called as she stepped into the corridor.
Sergey carried out the repairs on the Korvet, parked it in Vassili’s room, and Wednesday dinner became a fixture.
Never did she feel on probation. If anything they were too anxious to impress, desperate to bring her into the fold. After the third week Teresa forbade Anna buying cakes. Instead she sent her to buy bukhanki, bread aromatic with cinnamon, doktorskaya kolbasa, sausage with the gristle taken out ‘just what the doctor ordered’, mineral-rich borjomi, bottled water from Georgian springs. But she urged Anna to avoid beriozki shops where prices took a sharper trajectory. Other shoppers might draw wrong conclusions about Anna’s income, or worse, her occupation.
Anna’s suspicions deepened. A language professor, full-time housewife, and postgraduate son whotaught English part-time could not live this well and be law-abiding. Which mystery gradually resolved. Sergey moonlighted as entrepreneur. He showed her tickets to the Bolshoi or Conservatorium, or beriozki coupons his clients purchased as payment in kind. His biggest partner was a telecommunications engineering concern that pumped in investment dollars to develop first-generation cordless phones, a prototype of which, resembling a mini-accordion with the casing prised off, he brought home.
Looking back, all three played her like a trout, allowing Vassili’s better attributes to creep up on her.
One evening they sat down to watch a Soviet Central Television special report on the auction of a propiska – permanent residence stamped in the lucky recipient’s internal passport that validated every Muscovite’s existence. Enveloping chaos and disaster crowded out entertainment – the real as opposed to official toll from the Chernobyl reactor meltdown, the empire’s periphery exploding into civil wars, Armenia and Azerbaijan at loggerheads over a strip of territory called Nagorny-Karabakh, a calamitous earthquake near Yerevan, 6.8 on the Richter scale, twenty-five thousand dead. That the propiska backlog, aggravating the already dire housing crisis, warranted a program of its own, underlined its gravity. Or Muscovite pretension.