‘She is your muse?’ he hinted, trying to evaluate the depth of their relationship.
‘Da!’
‘Which authors influence you?’
‘I try to be like Valentin Rasputin.’
‘Never heard of him.’
‘He was a writer from the Village Prose School, like Victor Astafiev and Fyodor Abramov.’
‘No clearer.’
‘He wrote Live and Remember.’
‘Sorry?’
‘He was from Siberia!’
Tom shook his head.
‘He writes like Shishkin paints’, Ekaterina interrupted.
‘So who do you like to read?’ Vladimir was nothing if not persistent.
‘Kafka!’ Tom was trying to lighten the atmosphere.
‘You like Kafka?’
‘Very much so. “Metamorphosis” is my favourite short story. But tell me, what English writers do you like?’
‘Joy Division.’
‘Ian Curtis, you mean?’
‘Did you meet him?’
‘No, I never had the pleasure. He committed suicide when I was still a kid.’ He looked towards Ekaterina. ‘I’m not really that old, you know.’ There was a plaintive tone in his voice which the Russians took for a joke, but was more of a subconscious appeal for acceptance.
‘What about Death in June?’
‘Yes, I’ve seen them several times.’
‘Have you heard Egor Letov’s Grazhdanskaia Oborona or Sergei Zharikov’s band DK?’
Tom was about to expound on the virtues of the neo-folk scene when Ekaterina put a hand to his mouth. A guitar was being strummed. The first chords of Rodina filled the room.
‘Quiet, Olga is going to sing!’
Later Nikki dimmed the lights and Marina draped a thin silk scarf over a table lamp. The guests’ faces were luminous in the flickering candlelight as they sat in armchairs, or stood, backs against the wall, sipping wine and vodka in front of a green flag bearing the image of Svantevit riding a white horse. In the middle of the room, a poltergeist of blue smoke hovered over a chocolate cake. They sang happy birthday to Viktoria, a dark-haired woman with a pinched white face and crimson lips.
As the last verse died away, she cut the cake, eyes moist with emotion, thin hands passing generous portions. Then the rock music was fired up again: Denis Maydanov’s ‘The Evil Approaches’. There was much hugging and kissing. People danced and fluted glasses were smashed in the fireplace. One young man sat on the floor, propped up by a pile of books. He was trying to sing, a tuneless monotone coming from his jerking head. A girl flung a cushion and then a shoe, telling him to be quiet. The drunk ignored her, taking a long pull on a flaring spliff.
Over in the far corner, Viktoria lay asleep by an electric fire. Her hair caught like sticky flypaper to her glistening face. Vladimir staggered across the room, an empty glass helicoptering in front of him. He kept mouthing, ‘A drink… do you want to drink with me?’
‘You’re dry’, Marina shouted, lifting a vodka bottle. Ekaterina reached to push it away.
‘Vlad’s had too much.’
‘Hey, you’re not his mother’, Marina exclaimed. ‘Let him enjoy himself!’
‘Da’, Vladimir said. ‘More!’ His muse shrugged in resignation. Vladimir threw back a glass and began to pour again. His eyes struggled to focus, squinting at the English Professor malevolently. ‘So you think I can’t write?’ he began to say in broken English, making a fist. ‘I bet you think I’m nothing good!’
‘Why do you always do this?’ Ekaterina pleaded.
‘Do what?’ he asked.
‘Drink and upset yourself.’ Vladimir’s finger pointed straight at Tom.
‘He thinks he’s better than me!’
‘I barely know you’, the Englishman replied defensively.
‘Oh, he knows you’, Nikki said, swooping in to guide Vladimir away to the other side of the room. ‘You’re another man to come between him and Katja.’ Marina clapped.
‘It’s true’, she said. ‘Vlad loves you!’
‘But we’re just friends’, she stammered.
‘He loves you’, Marina confirmed emphatically, ‘He confessed it to me at the festival.’
4.
I felt an abnormal, mean secret stirring of pleasure in going back home to my corner from a debauched St Petersburg night…
Tom descended, his shoes beating an unhurried drumroll on chipped concrete. The roar of car engines resounded in the tenement. Mesmerised by the tadpole-like raindrops sliding over splintered glass, his cold fingers played with the slip of paper where Ekaterina had scratched her mobile number.
He pulled up his collar and stepped into the wind. In the distance, a bridge curled over the canal, office lights reflecting like koi carp in dark water, the night groaning through loose guttering.
• In a direct reversal of historian Michael Khordarkovsky’s description of Russia’s relentless advance east across the steppe in the 1600s, the former colonisers become the colonised as population forecasts project that by 2030 there will be 250 million new Muslim immigrants living in Russia;
• Single Chinese men are the largest demographic visiting Ukraine, ostensibly searching for wives;
• Traditional village feasts along the Darya River are disrupted by rampaging Muslim youth;
• Human trafficking and sex slavery, practised so openly on the Shomali Plain, spreads across eastern Russia. Unconfirmed numbers of women are reported as committing suicide while thousands of girls are shipped in open trucks to Jalalabad;
• Mosques in Perm Krai, the Qosarif Mosque in Kazan, and the Central Mosque of Karachaevo-Cherkessia receive multi-million endowments from the Gulf;
• Over 320,000 Muslims travel from Russia to attend the hajj in Mecca;
• Al Faath veterans, formerly active as the 055 group in Bosnia, are reported to be carrying long ritual knives in order to slit throats and skin people in Khabarovsk;
• Russia Today secretly films meetings in Kandahar which implicate the Pakistani government in supplying munitions to the Taliban;
• Moscow’s Dormition Cathedral is bombed by Wahhabi extremists. The Head of the Union of Russian Muslims, speaking at the Imam Khatyb Madrassa, says: ‘There is only room for our faith in Russia.’
At the corner of Prospekt Bolshevikov and Ulitsa Krylenko, a group of feral Khachi youngsters wearing black scarves and bored expressions stood like sentinels. The Professor tried to walk by, acting as nonchalantly as possible, conscious they might scent his instinctive fear. For a moment, he tried to imagine himself in their shoes; a leather wallet, mobile phone, and a Western passport had real, convertible street value. It was certainly better than ABSOLYuT BANK in these uncertain times. There were no administration charges, just an exchange of goods in a dank stairwell followed by hours of drug-fuelled mayhem in the clubs. Ignorant, agitated, and high, the sight of a well-dressed foreigner walking alone on an isolated street would naturally excite their predatory appetite. They began calling to him, asking who he was.
A scooter ripped by at full throttle. Legs kicked out and a bottle smashed on the road ahead. Should he respond, or would they recognise bravado and charge? When he heard his name called, he became anxious. This was no chance encounter. They knew of him and no doubt why he was in St Petersburg. His knuckles whitened. The 250’s engine resounded off brick walls. Tom crossed the road, trying to retrace his steps. The buzz-saw sound of the scooter circled. He could just make out the hump-back silhouette of someone riding pillion, sliding off the seat as the bike skidded in a squeal of grating rubber. Then, a clenched fist stupefied his would-be assailant, sending his attacker reeling. Before Tom knew what was happening, Janssen was standing beside him, a swift blade gleaming in starlight.