Soon Tanya was sleeping with Nikita. He picked her out from the others, despite the difference in their ages, and took her with him to Turkey on a buying trip. He took her once, then a second and a third time, and within two months Tanya, a woman with a commercial streak, had become a shuttle herself, having seen that the enterprise really wasn’t rocket science.
Then Nikita was murdered, shot by no one knew whom. One morning they found him at the market with a bullet hole in his head, and that was that. Nikita’s saleswomen migrated across the way to Tanya and were glad to do so. Tanya proved much more efficient than Nikita, and business began to boom. As a bonus, Tanya was less of a shit than the deceased.
After another six months, Tanya stopped traveling to Turkey. Not because she was tired, although life as a shuttle was hard. At that time you had to carry the goods yourself, in enormous bundles that you dragged around airports and railway stations, skimping at every turn, even on luggage carts, which had to be paid for. She stopped traveling herself because she had discovered her niche: she was exceptionally good at business.
Tanya flourished, and her business soon grew to the extent that she hired five and then another five shuttles and became the proprietor of what, in the context of a local market, was a large business. The shuttles traveled, her women traded, and Tanya managed them all. She was already going around, as people put it, “not dressed like a Turk”—in other words, like a European. She was a habituée of all the restaurants, where she ate, got drunk, threw her money about, and relaxed after work. She had plenty of money left over for herself, her family, and her workers. Takings in those years were astronomical. She had lovers befitting her income and years: virtuosos. Tanya got rid of them when she felt like it. Andrey, to be frank, had not been worth much in that department.
Another year passed and Tanya decided to refurbish the flat, having first taken over ownership of it. She bought some rather poky apartments for Andrey, his brothers, and her father-in-law, which made all of them happy. Tanya kept her elderly mother-in-law with her. Pity aside, she needed someone to look after her sons. The elder, Igor, had reached puberty and was causing problems, while the younger boy was sickly.
Tanya did, however, carry through the refurbishment as a kind of retaliation. “I just really wanted to show them who owned the place!”
She threw everything out, absolutely everything. She sold off all the heirlooms and expunged all traces of her in-laws’ dusty gentry past. Nobody protested. Her mother-in-law went off to the dacha and kept out of the way. The result was a modern European flat equipped with cutting-edge technology.
After the renovation Tanya decided to move on: she abandoned the shuttle business and went into mainstream commerce, buying a number of shops in Moscow.
“What? Those shops belong to you?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Tanya was the owner of two excellent supermarkets I would drive to after work. “Congratulations! But your prices… !”
“I know, but Russia is a rich country!” Tanya parried, laughing.
“Not that rich. You’ve become an imperialist. A bit hard-nosed.”
“Of course. Yeltsin’s gone, and with him the easy money and the romance. The people in power now are insatiable pragmatists, and I am one of them. You are against Putin, but I am for him. He almost seems like a brother to me, downtrodden in the past and getting his own back now.”
“What do you mean by ‘insatiable’?”
“The bribes. The endless bribes you have to give everyone. Just to keep hold of my shops, I pay up. Who don’t I give bribes to? The pencil pushers at the police station, the firemen, the hygiene inspectors, the municipal government. And the gangsters whose land my shops are on. Actually, I bought them from gangsters.”
“Aren’t you afraid to do business with them?”
“No. I have a dream: I want to be rich. In today’s Russia that means I have to pay them all off. Without that ‘tax’ I would be shot tomorrow and replaced by someone else.”
“You aren’t exaggerating?”
“If anything, I am understating things.”
“What about the bureaucrats?”
“Some of the bureaucrats I pay myself, and the rest are paid by the gangsters. I give the gangsters money and they keep those other gangsters, our bureaucrats, sweet. Actually, it’s quite convenient.”
“Where is Andrey now?”
“He died. In the end he couldn’t take the fact that I had moved up in the world and he was eating my caviar. He asked me to take him back, but I wanted none of it. I told him to find himself another student. Anyway, I don’t want to live with an ugly man. I’ve decided I like handsome men. I go to male strip shows and choose my partners there.”
“You’re kidding! Don’t you miss family life? Domestic bliss?”
“No. I don’t. I’ve just started living. There is a downside. Of course there is. You may think it is all sordid, but what was so pure about the way I used to live?”
“What about the children?”
“Igor, unfortunately, has turned out a weakling, like Andrey. He’s on drugs. I’ve sent him to a clinic. This is the fifth time already…. I am having Stasik educated in London. I’m very pleased with him. Very. He’s first in everything there. My mother-in-law looks after him. I rent a small flat for her. Stasik lives in a student hostel during the week, and at the weekends in this flat with my mother-in-law. I paid for her to have a hip replacement. They did it in Switzerland. She’s come back to life, running around like a young woman, and she absolutely worships me. I think she really does. It’s a great thing, money is.”
David swirled into the room bearing a tray. “Time for tea, girls,” he crooned. “Just the three of us. All right, Tanechka?”
Tanya nodded and said she’d be right back. She wanted to change for tea. David exuded degeneracy and languor. It was all rather unpleasant. A couple of minutes later, Tanya returned. She was covered in diamonds, her ears ablaze, her decolletage ashimmer. Even her hair was glittering.
The show was for my benefit. I politely registered appreciation. Tanya was really pleased, as radiant as her diamonds from the pleasure of presenting herself, the new Tanya, to an old friend.
We quickly drank our tea and said our good-byes.
“Only not for ten years this time!” Tanya proposed as we parted.
“Let’s make an effort,” I replied, and thought as I went down the stairs that in the Putin era people really did meet up more often. Old friends, I mean. There was a time in Russia, the late Yeltsin period, when everybody was terribly busy just surviving, when people didn’t phone each other for years, some embarrassed because they were poor, some because they were rich. It was a time when many emigrated forever; when many put a bullet in their brains because nobody seemed to need them anymore; when people snorted cocaine out of disgust with themselves. Now, however, it was as if everybody who had survived was meeting up again. Society had become noticeably more orderly, and people even had free time.
When the new times had arrived, women were the driving force, going into business, divorcing their husbands. The husbands became gangsters, and in the first years of the Yeltsin period, many died in shoot-outs. These things happened because, on the eve of perestroika, many Russian women had felt, like Tanya, that they would never be able to change their lives. Suddenly here was their big chance.