Mince pies, finger portions of salmon and sturgeon, sour cabbage soup washed down with Holy Source mineral water and Georgian sweet red, camembert on crispbread. My mother sits in my father’s place at the head of the table. Anna, the homecoming child, is next to her. I the in-law, welcome but contingent. On careful inspection the meal is a cunning pregnancy test. My mother’s smile stiffens as Anna tucks into obstetrician-proscribed camembert and drains a second glass of wine.
I repair to the television, a ninety-centimetre colour Sony with remote control that my mother says she purchased for our homecoming. A surfeit of current affairs, overwrought heads talking in newly minted slang. I could have been in exile for twenty years. A debate begins between the professional buffoon Vladimir Zhirinovsky and the urbane, progressive liberal darling Boris Nemtsov on ‘Democracy for Sale’, referencing pillaged assets, sham privatisation. Ignoring Zhirinovsky’s crude interjections, Nemtsov expatiates on what he calls Russia’s “stillborn” democracy, the audience concurring as one. ‘But’ – he pauses masterfully – ‘dear friends, let’s not succumb to gloom. For Mother Russia’ – pitched at older denizens to whom the phrase still means something – ‘endures. Five, ten, twenty years on there will be a rebirth. It’s a shame not all of us will be around to see it.’ Zhirinovsky throws a glass of water in his interlocutor’s face. Stunned, Nemtsov dabs it away with a white handkerchief.
I brandish the remote. Hit him back, you’re in a dogfight, pal. Pretty words won’t do. Three or four men restrain Zhirinovsky and the ‘debate’ is abandoned. Credits roll, segue to BMW advertisements, a lottery promotion.
Enough. I go to our bedroom, a well-tended mausoleum. Rip the rock-star posters off one by one, Boris Grebenshikov last. Bye bye Boris. On the upper shelf Spock’s Guide to Sex. We won’t be needing that either. I roll them up, grab Spock and half a dozen dusty English-language books, open the front door, walk to the communal chute and hurl the lot down. They make a satisfying clunk as they hit the ground.
Anna enters the room, takes in the stripped walls. She changes into her dressing gown, slides under the blankets. First night home is an occasion to mark, is it not?
‘Well, here we are.’
‘Yes here we are.’ She mimics an older woman. I fail to impress. I slide nearer. Firmly she pushes me away, kisses me goodnight and turns to the wall.
I want to shake answers from her, quash some unthinkable thoughts. Ten years on, will I catch you honing your imitation of middle-aged me? Even more devastating than your impersonation of your late, barely lamented father-in-law. Because it’s all that keeps you sane. From defenestrating me. Is that how our marriage ends? I want to surprise you. I want you to recognise me too. Doesn’t love fall somewhere in between?
Too late. She’s snoring fit to rouse the Kremlin.
‘Vasya?’
‘Huh?’
‘Where are we?’
‘Moscow would be my guess.’
‘No, idiot. I mean where are we? As individuals. A couple. Are we a couple?’
‘Yes to the last. Can I get back to you on the others? It’s a very important conversation. Too important to have when jetlagged.’
She elbows me in the ribs. ‘Gone soft Down Under have we? I could skate to Park Kultury and back.’ Props herself up on both elbows. ‘Do you still dream in English?’
‘Not since Nikolai’ – a fish bone in my throat – ‘passed away. Know what else I discovered in Melbourne? English for me is a brain implant fast wearing out. I won’t be going to hospital for a replacement any time soon.’
‘Mine’s dissolved away altogether. Australia. Did it even happen? Like we dozed off on a train, were spirited away to some wild netherworld, and somehow made our way back to the main line. Bruised, shaken, intact. It gives me a crazy optimism I’ve no right to.’
‘Crazy all right. Crazy as it gets. But you know what? It’s catching.’
I’m lying through my teeth. But it does the trick. We move closer, kick off the blankets.
My mother and I circle each other. It turns out she is working up to a tour of her office, where she is in charge. She is coy about its location.
Coarse-grained salt sprinkled outside our apartment exit dissolves ice into slip and squelch, like treading on wet semolina. The kilometre walk to Park Kultury Metro disabuses me of the Melbourne habit of striking up conversation with complete strangers, fellow passengers. To these grim folk a smile is a gloat. People are killed here for less.
Only when we alight at Kievskaya do I realise where we are going. Now open-plan, what was English Plus hums with enterprise. Bibles and clerical exegeses bound in sumptuous navy leather, ready to be packed, bubble-wrapped and shipped abroad. A forklift-load is on its way to the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, Buena, New Jersey, USA. Lapsed or not-so-lapsed clergy, some in cassocks, most ponytailed, bustle between slim partitions or ponder inventories on desktops. The fair, youngish one with the chunky Rolex looks to be in charge. Is it Father Aleksey?
‘That’s Dad’s old computer in the corner, isn’t it? The shabbiest guest at the wedding.’ Indeed it is decrepit beside third-gen Apple Macs.
As we leave through the front door she stops, nods at me, a satisfied twitch of her lips. I can only fold my arms. As though I signaled complicity she nods again, more pronounced, and makes for the corridor.
‘Congratulations Mum,’ I say in her wake.
I will need another lifetime to get to know Teresa Maximovna Kurguzikova. Her real self, briefly on display, slides shut with the lift.
English and Russian concur that месть – это блюдо, которое подают холодным – revenge is a dish best served cold. Other languages too, I’d wager.
★
PROSHAI
★
Should we wait out the prescribed forty days before visiting relatives’ graves? Shivering through a Moscow winter entombing Boris in his garage, permafrost not seen since the sixties when they started spiking clouds with rain-retardants, the question is academic.
On the last morning in March, Echo of Moscow Radio forecasts ten plus, the trigger to switch off seasonal socialism, better known as central heating. Anna peels off the tape sealing the windows as gas pipes judder shut.
April 23 1995. Easter Sunday. We leave Boris at the cemetery gates. Save for a woodpecker’s throaty click and susurrating pines, all is still. My mother and I hang back while Anna enters the restored chapel, writes our departeds’ names on a chit of paper which she lays alongside others on the altar, utters a short prayer, and emerges, signalling she is done. We walk together to the twin headstones, treading carefully round hooped iron borders. No epitaphs, just her parents’ full names, birth and death dates, gold leaf twining over brown granite. She lays her wreath of white chrysanthemums purchased at a flower stand outside Kaluga, crouches trembling for several minutes and rejoins us.
My mother leads the rest of the way. Two believers and a backsliding agnostic, we tarry at an atheist suicide’s grave. Black marble headstone bears the sly epitaph my father chose himself – SERGEY VLADIMIROVICH KURGUZIKOV 1934-1994 – A FOREVER YOUNG PIONEER.
At his feet my mother places sugar-dusted Easter cakes – kulichi – and two eggs, one dyed crimson the other she painted herself, blue and green stripes flowing round a red star.