“My name is David,” the handsome, ox-eyed young man with dark curly hair murmured. He kissed Tanya’s manicured hand. I remembered a time when her hands hadn’t looked like that: they had been worn by many hours of washing clothes for a large family. David drifted off into the depths of the flat. “Well, don’t let me spoil things for you, girls.”
Oh, dear. We really were not girls.
“All right, tell me. Reveal the secrets of your youthfulness and prosperity,” I begged my old friend. “Where is your family?”
“They aren’t my family anymore.”
“What about Andrey?”
“We split up. My sentence of hard labor came to an end.”
“Have you remarried? This boy? David?”
“David is my boyfriend, short-term, just for the sake of my health, really. He’s my toy boy. I’ll keep him for as long as I feel like it.”
“Good heavens! Who are you working for?”
“I don’t work for anyone. I work for myself,” Tanya answered firmly and with a metallic edge to her voice that didn’t seem to go with the image of the slightly indolent, manicured lady with a young lover who was sitting opposite me.
Tanya is a happy product of the new life. In the summer of 1992, when there was nothing to eat in the majority of homes in Moscow (the outcome of “economic shock treatment,” part of the market reforms of then-prime minister Yegor Gaidar), Tanya, together with her children and the rest of the professor’s family, was living in the country at the in-laws’ old dacha.
In that terrible, hungry summer, Muscovites, if they had a dacha, were sitting it out in their wooden shacks in the country and growing vegetables for the winter so as to have at least something to eat. The research institute where Tanya worked had closed for the summer. The facility had no work at all and hadn’t, in any case, paid anybody’s salaries for ages. The employees, town dwellers all, had gone off to hoe their vegetable patches or to trade in the markets that had sprung up in large numbers on the streets of starving Moscow. Tanya was busy growing vegetables of her own and looking after the children. Andrey often stayed in the city and didn’t come back to sleep at the dacha because, unlike the majority of research institutes, his technological university had not closed.
One morning, for some reason, Tanya turned up in Moscow unexpectedly, unlocked the door of their flat, and found Andrey and a young woman student in her matrimonial bed. A loud-mouthed woman from the south of Russia, Tanya bawled at Andrey so the whole apartment block could hear her.
Andrey made no excuses. He said he loved the student. She herself said nothing, got dressed, and went through to the kitchen, where she began boiling the kettle for tea as if nothing had happened.
For Tanya her rival’s silence and her manifest familiarity with the layout of the flat was the last straw. She decided, then and there, that she hadn’t been putting up with Andrey’s pathetic family all her married life only to let a rival invade their space. She told Andrey not to imagine he could get away with it. He collected his things and left with the student.
That, in effect, was the day Tanya’s new, completely independent life began. Andrey behaved abominably, giving her not a kopeck to support herself or the children. Three years later, when Tanya had made a little money, she would, in fact, occasionally feed him and even buy him clothes, but not from any feeling of sympathy. Tanya fed Andrey because revenge is sweet. She gave him red caviar, a symbol of luxury in Soviet times, which she could now afford. Andrey gobbled it up until it was coming out of his ears, not even blushing at the humiliation, because he was so hungry. At times he ate at the soup kitchens set up at churches, pretending, for good measure, to be a believer. He even learned how to cross himself.
In 1992, the summer of the free-market breakthrough, these events were still in the future. After a week, when there was nothing left to feed the children, and with her mother-in-law insisting that she must forgive Andrey and take him back, Tanya went off to trade at a nearby market.
Her mother-in-law shrieked, “The disgrace of it! The disgrace!” and took to her bed. She soon came around, however, when Tanya began buying her medicine with the disgraceful money she was making at the market. Not one of the old lady’s sons, her husband, or her other daughters-in-law had been able to do anything like this for her. Matters had taken on a tragicomic aspect when it was resolved, at a family council, that they would never, come what may, sell off the family heirlooms, the antique furniture inherited from their forebears, the rare antiquarian music albums, the pictures by famous nineteenth-century Russian painters. Lying obstinately in her bed and readying herself for death rather than disgrace, Tanya’s mother-in-law was the first to vote against the idea. In the early 1990s, other long-established families who had held on to their heirlooms through the Stalin years were selling them off on the cheap or, as people said at the time, “for a meal.”
Meanwhile, Tanya was out at the market from six in the morning until eleven at night. It was not work but hard labor. It was pure purgatory, but it had one redeeming feature: this was slavery with a price tag. Tanya, stood in the market and earned real rubles that rustled in her pocket. What was more, you got your cash on the day. You stood there and you got the money, not later but right then, and that was what mattered. Tanya always came home with money. She also came home with swollen legs, barely able to put one foot in front of the other, and with enormous swollen crab-claw hands, incapable even of washing herself or making herself look half human. But—she was almost happy!
“You may not believe it, but I was happy not to be dependent on anyone else anymore. Not on the director of the institute, who didn’t pay me; not on Andrey, who was giving me nothing, not on my mother-in-law, with her family heirlooms and traditions. I depended solely on myself.” Tanya, now rich and beautiful, told me the story of how it had all changed ten years ago. “My mother-in-law? Well, one fine day I just told her where to get off. ‘Go **** yourself!’ And what do you think? For the first time she didn’t preach back at me. It was a revelation. A revolution took place before my eyes. The seemingly incorruptible old Moscow intelligentsia was being broken. It was being broken by the money I was giving my mother-in-law. She stopped lecturing me because I started feeding her. Me, the one who was always in the wrong. Gradually all of them, that whole family, which had looked down on me for so many years because I didn’t come from the same sort of background and because, as they always said, I had inveigled Andrey into marrying me because I wanted to move to Moscow, the whole bunch learned to smile at me and even to listen attentively to what I had to tell them.
“And it was just because I was feeding them all by trading at that market. I gloried in it. I was prepared to continue doing it for just one reason: to get more and more money, more and more, and to humiliate them by rubbing their noses in it.”
When Tanya returned home toward midnight, she would collapse on the bed. She no longer had any time for her sons. She did not check their homework. She would collapse and then she was out like a light. Early the next morning everything started again.
Her mother-in-law began looking after Tanya’s children—for the first time, it has to be said, since they had been living under the same roof. Tanya was amazed yet again.
In the market, Tanya found herself working for an adroit young man who was a “shuttle,” as people said then. Nikita’s “shuttling” consisted of importing cheap clothes from Turkey, cheap watermelons from Uzbekistan, cheap mandarins from Georgia—in fact, anything cheap from anywhere at all. Tanya and the other women working for him sold his goods. There were no taxes, no state levies. In the market, the rules were the same as inside a prison. Disagreements were resolved at knifepoint, extortion was rife, people got beaten up. The women traders were mostly in the same situation as Tanya, single women with children abandoned at home, former members of the scientific and technical intelligentsia whose institutes, publishing houses, or editorial offices had closed. They were little better than whores for their bosses.