All through the winter our room was learning to pound out African rhythms on the drums. Tolya and I were the ablest pupils, learning to beat out the basic rhythms, which Roma ornamented with beautiful, non-repeating, unexpected rhythmical patterns. All winter long we treated our neighbours to this and, when the snow melted, migrated our little piece of Africa to the pavement of Kuznetsky Most to make some money.
We were discovered within a fortnight. A plummy woman came along, put a hundred roubles in Roma’s ginger-coloured hat, beckoned him over and said, “Are you a permanent group or have you just now got together?” “A permanent group,” Roma Jah confirmed swiftly. “Give me your phone number. We organise corporate parties and our theme next week is ‘Natives’. We’ll invite you and your group to play.” Roma nodded and gave her our Yakimanka number.
Madame didn’t call the next week, but two weeks later she did. It was a Saturday and our entire commune was at home. Tolya was having a creative crisis over his pictures and moaning that he needed to get smashed but hadn’t any money, and I was reading Kerouac up in my gallery. It was no problem for Roma to get us together and take us on the metro out to Shchelkovskaya. What a corporate party involved none of us had any idea. In the metro the drums clunked against each other in our rucksacks. Tolya asked Roma Jah whether there would be drink.
Next to the metro station, near the Matrix Cinema, a black Volkswagen was waiting and drove us far out beyond the outer ring. I sat in the back with despondent Tolya, while Roma tried to make conversation with the driver. Talking to drivers was a hitchhiking habit of his. The latter remained impassive, however, not even responding to direct questions. “Actually, he was a shaved gorilla,” Tolya opined afterwards.
We drove up to an impenetrable white wall, one section of which tipped over and admitted the car to a clean, empty courtyard. The white walls of a not spectacularly large house were surrounded by a hedge, which was still bare and unwelcoming. Glass doors in the porch slid back at our approach to reveal two bronze borzois, restless and lean, light and life-sized. Everything in the interior of the house was white and understated, but with a particular, gilded kind of understatement.
We were taken through to a large room almost entirely occupied by what looked like a triple-sized table-tennis table on which sat slender, beautiful girls. They were tanned to the point of swarthiness and had had so much ointment rubbed into them that their skin reflected the bright lights. One was a genuine mulatto. They were lightly dressed. More precisely, they were scantily clad in scraps of cloth suggestive of the attire of African natives. A dozen very professional-looking men and women were doing their hair, applying make-up, manicuring them, pedicuring them. The girls were putting on costumes, laughing, and talking loudly. As we entered we were dazzled by this riot of gleaming, sophisticated, fragrant, chocolatey beauty.
“Bloody hell!” Tolya exclaimed. Someone asked, “Who are these?” “Musicians,” someone else answered on our behalf. “To make-up!” we were instructed, and proceeded to a corner of the table.
“You are negroes,” the woman who had discovered us on Kuznetsky Most announced. She was plump and a product of the most chocolatey of solariums. Golden rings and bangles jangled on her neck, arms and legs. She was large, loud and ready to party, like a fertility goddess in a drought-stricken rainforest.
“Will there be food?” Tolya enquired, looking around tentatively, like a proletarian under arrest on the eve of the Great October Revolution.
“Later.” The woman checked him out cursorily. “Two hundred dollars, shall we say?” she informed rather than asked Roma Jah. “Those are very good,” she said with a nod towards Roma’s dreadlocks. “Pity about that one.” This in respect of Tolya. “I shaved them off yesterday,” he bumbled.
“You will have costumes.” She eyed me. “Do her hair the same way,” she concluded after a moment’s hesitation. “Do you dance?” I shook my head. “Cover her up,” she decreed. Roma was already having brown greasepaint applied. “I don’t suppose that’s shit, is it?” Tolya enquired warily, sniffed the jar and with a sigh closed his eyes. “Go ahead. What won’t we do for money!”
“You need wax to make it go like that,” I said, indicating Roma’s dreadlocks, “but I’m not up for it. I’d lose my day job.” The make-up artist nodded and started braiding my short gamin haircut into a thousand and one plaits. I was issued a green linen tunic, then painted almost black, and ribbons of various colours were braided into my plaits. My arms were stained up to the elbows and I was urged not to raise them or the loose sleeves would fall back to my shoulders. Looking at myself in the mirror I saw the reflection of a charred hedgehog.
“Go, Rastas, go!” Tolya commanded in a scary terrorist voice and, festooned with tom-toms, we proceeded to the performance space. We had no idea what was going to happen to us and my palms were sweating. Only Roma Jah was cool, his ginger dreads bobbing over his painted forehead to the beat of music playing inside him.
We sat down on the floor of a large reception room and started playing with practised ease whilst surreptitiously taking in our surroundings. The hall was decorated as a hut in the jungle, but this was evidently the hut of a leader of all the tribes of Africa, who had long ago sold half his subjects into slavery. Wooden carvings of giraffes and elephants were positioned around the floor, ritual masks hung from the walls, and everything was painted in strong African colours. A divan and the floor were strewn with imitation straw. We sat beneath a real palm tree in a pot and played, while the skinny girls we had already met listened.
We played and nothing happened. The girls yawned, popped grapes and pieces of fruit into their mouths, sent text messages and chatted among themselves. I couldn’t make them out at first, but then just got used to them. They were ordinary girls, most likely studying somewhere. There was one I quite liked. She wasn’t tall and had almost no tan. She had big eyes and a little mouth with peculiar, almost predatory teeth, which gave her a slight lisp. She jiggled her foot in time to our rhythms. Her toes were bare, and the thin strap of her shoe was twined around a slender ankle. The little white heel of her shoe jogged rhythmically in front of my face, like a tooth amulet. We exchanged a smile and nodded to each other and I stopped worrying, concluding that the girls were as much part of the furniture, beautiful, exotic pieces, as we were. It just wasn’t clear for whose benefit all this was being put on. There was no sign of an audience.
Madame entered all a-jingle, rolling her sun-kissed waves of flesh. She instantly sized everything up — the girls, us, and the other elements of the setting. She came to Roma and said, “Play louder and make it last. Don’t use all the music up at once. They’re dining now and will come through afterwards. We’ve got some other musicians for later. You’re the support act.”
Then she whispered something to the girls and opened a door in the far wall. A babble of men’s voices and the smell of food drifted in. Tolya strained over his drum to look. More time passed, the girls started turning off their mobile phones, adjusting their expressions, then shimmied over and disappeared through the door. Swaying slightly and with his eyes half closed, Roma began a simple Rasta song. Tolya and I picked up the rhythm and began to enliven it.
Rastafari — will be forever — love and Jah. — And Rastafari!
The girls began coming back, their heels clacking, laughing, their myriad pendants jingling prettily. Men in business suits followed them in, still chewing and continuing unfinished conversations. The girls sat on the divan, then stood up and started to dance, trying to get the men to join in, but they were still deep in their business discussions and not yet inclined to dance.