‘Hello, Inna,’ she says, recognising my breed instantly, but thinking me my sister.
‘Rimma Evlampevna, it’s Masha.’
‘Oh, Mashenka, good morning.’
Rimma Evlampevna speaks so calmly, as if it is entirely in the nature of things that your neighbours from many decades ago, the nice ones who stuffed everything up by leaving ‘forever’ (the first out of the building, in fact), will one day casually greet you at your building’s door. I am grateful for the serenity of her welcome (and it is serenity, not senility – Rimma Evlampevna’s mind, as we have plenty of opportunities to verify, is intact), grateful for the modesty and tranquillity of her hug. Rimma Evlampevna takes Natasha’s lush, magnificent roses from my hands, assuming the flowers are for her. I am utterly unprepared for this development, and as I watch myself surrendering my birthday bouquet – I can hardly wrestle it from this dignified matron, or can I? – the sense of entitlement that my former neighbour still possesses strikes me as wonderful. In her mind the flowers are intended for her and, of course, they are nothing short of spectacular.
‘Shall we go in, girls?’ Rimma Evlampevna opens the door. Here we are, inside, and instantly I feel as if I am looking at an X-ray of my internal organs. For the past two decades I have internalised these stairs and walls decades overdue for major works, these letterboxes that look like long-forgotten birdhouses perched between the ground and the first floor and now, all of a sudden, these things appear outside me, reassembled as material objects, three-dimensional as anything.
We walk up the stairs (I am last in the procession, an old habit) past the door of the apartment that belongs to the woman and her bra. ‘This is the one,’ I say to Billie. She nods and we keep walking. On the next floor the apartment Rimma Evlampevna used to share with her husband Nikolai Pavlovich – who she still calls by his full name with the patronymic, even now almost five years after his death – is just the way I remember. Most of its furniture is from that golden era when Nikolai Pavlovich was dean of some prestigious institute and Rimma Evlampevna a senior lecturer there. (Kharkov, being a major research centre, had an incredible number of such establishments. I remember my father calculating that from our place you could easily walk to seven of them.) In the 1980s, when we lived below them, Nikolai Pavlovich and Rimma Evlampevna were a power couple, able, I assume, to entertain in style. Now the once status-proud, dust-free furniture, and the assorted china on display in glass cabinets look pitiful and lost. Rimma Evlampevna points out the family in their photo frames, introducing both the living and the deceased by their full handles – so and so is a Dean; her brother is a Professor; the husband is a Leading Engineer. ‘So glad you are in academia and not in business,’ she says, having established what it is that I do now that I am all grown-up. I see Natasha’s face go just a tiny bit red – she is in business, not in academia, God bless her.
Natasha and I leave Billie with Rimma Evlampevna as a deposit and run to the shop around the corner, where we go halves buying cheese, sausage, a lemon, a loaf of bread and a semi-stale jam roll. Rimma Evlampevna tries to stop us (any self-respecting hostess from this latitude would), ‘Don’t go anywhere. I have enough for us all in the fridge.’ ‘It’s my birthday,’ I shout, already at the door, ‘and I am the birthday girl, so you cannot stop me, Rimma Evlampevna. You cannot offend me like that.’ The old birthday trick.
To enter that shop again, not as a child dispatched by my parents with a handful of kopeks for the most basic of provisions, but as a discerning consumer in a rush somewhere (a cashed-up one too compared with the pensioners crowded next to the counter), someone who just wants to buy things quickly and be out of the store – this feels unexpectedly gratifying. It is good to be grown-up. I do not think I was ever particularly good at being a minor. When some of my friends reminisce nostalgically about their carefree childhoods with not a worry in the world, I can never quite join in. Perhaps because I have always craved self-determination more than I feared responsibility. I always wanted to call the shots.
By the time Natasha and I run back into the apartment, the table is fully set. In the middle is a bottle of Cahors wine in my honour, as well as fruit preserve served in little china vasettes. You can take the woman out of high society, but you cannot take high society out of the woman. Compared with other pensioners, Rimma Evlampevna is doing very well, for she receives a scholar’s pension, far higher than the pension paid to mere mortals. Her capital however is frozen, and she is scared about what might happen now that the global financial crisis is taking hold. (In front of my eyes the exchange rates go through the roof and euros, American dollars and other foreign currencies disappear altogether from the city’s banks.) All alone in her three-room apartment, prime real estate now, Rimma Evlampevna seems deeply sad and lost. ‘Something in me got broken after Nikolai Pavlovich’s death. Terrible thoughts come into my head,’ she says. Being an ethnic Russian, she feels ill at ease in the independent Ukraine. The Ukrainisation of every aspect of life in the past two decades – media, government, education and social services – has disconcerted her and made her feel out of place, but she is too old now to move to Russia.
Even for people who do not care for politics, the massive tension between Russia and Ukraine is impossible to ignore: television programs from Russia are no longer shown on Ukrainian channels, while homegrown corruption and continuing disputes with Russia over the supply of its natural gas for Ukrainian consumption means that heating is by no means a certain proposition in the autumn and winter months. It is minus-two degrees outside now, but half of Kharkov’s central heating, including in the home of a dear family friend where we are staying, has not been turned on by the authorities. We all go quiet listening to Rimma Evlampevna’s woes. Then, using my discretionary powers as a birthday girl, I completely change the topic.
‘Rimma Evlampevna, how did you manage to get your hair looking like that?’
‘I went to the hairdresser’s every week, would never miss an appointment.’
‘It was some spectacular hair, I must say.’
Billie and Natasha laugh, but I can see that Natasha gets it – she can instantly recognise how hard old age is on women like Rimma Evlampevna, especially when they find themselves on their own on the margins of their families, their community and their city. Rimma Evlampevna apologises for the state of her apartment. ‘Oh,’ I say, ‘please don’t ever apologise. You know how my mum used to be – she kept our apartment so beautifully clean – and still every night I would have to wait for a minute after turning the lights on in the toilet so that cockroaches could scatter away.’
‘Oh, Mashenka,’ she says, ‘there are no more cockroaches in Ukraine, all gone!’ And I thought cockroaches and rats could survive even a nuclear holocaust.
Stuck in its time warp, her place is as close as Billie is going to get to imagining her mother’s childhood home. The layout is much the same as ours was and, as we discover when Rimma Evlampevna takes us downstairs to introduce us, the woman in the bra has rearranged and reconstructed our old apartment within an inch of its life. The bathroom and toilet now share a single space, while my parents’ former bedroom, once lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, has been demoted to a storeroom. We learn that the occupant, who is now wearing a loose top (you should see the relief on Billie’s face), is called Tatyana, and she lives there with her husband, a former policeman. ‘Thank God he quit the police force. He is an investigator and a lawyer now. When he was still with the police, half of his mates from the local police station used to hang out here all the time, drinking and some such, in this tiny kitchen – can you imagine?’ Yes, I can. My parents managed to get most of their friends inside that kitchen, and they had a lot of friends, none of them policemen. What’s the point of actually saying anything? Tatyana asks no questions about where we come from, how long ago we lived in this apartment, what brings us back, nothing – as if her curiosity cannot stretch even for a moment beyond her own concerns.