Putting on a black kimono, she would shut herself in the bedroom again with some delightfully foolish activity: laying out patience maybe, or piecing together a huge jigsaw puzzle. It was usually then that Claude arrived. She would receive her guest in the kitchen and they would drink tiny cups of coffee, one after another. At this time of the day she was unable to eat or drink alcohol; she was terribly weak, and didn’t even have the strength to start smoking until evening, when she had eaten something and poured her first vodka.
Alik would finish work at around seven. If they had money, they would eat in one of the little restaurants in Greenwich Village. Alik’s first years in America were his most successful; there weren’t so many Russian artists living in New York then, and he even enjoyed a small following.
From the start of her life in America Nina was crazy about everything oriental, and they would visit various Chinese or Japanese restaurants. Alik, of course, knew the most authentic ones. Before going out for the evening she would spend a long time dressing up and putting on her make-up. She would generally take her cat Katya with her on these outings. Pale-grey, with yellow eyes, Katya had been brought over from Moscow with all the proper papers, and was also mad: what normal cat would lie for hours across someone’s shoulder, her paws languidly dangling down?
If guests came over they would order pizzas from the café downstairs, or Chinese food from their favourite restaurant in Chinatown, where the owner knew them and always sent over a small present for Nina. People would bring beer or vodka; there wasn’t much hard drinking then. “It’s the climate,” Alik used to say. “There’s no hard drinking in this country, only alcoholism.”
It was true: by Nina’s third year in America she was an alcoholic, even though she didn’t drink much, and her beauty became even more startling.
The landlord had arrived in the city the previous day to put his affairs in order. He docked Claude’s pay for a garbage fine, and demanded Alik’s immediate eviction on the grounds of his three months’ arrears. Claude tried to defend his oldest resident, citing his terrible illness and apparently imminent death.
“I’ll see for myself,” the landlord declared, and Claude had no option but to take him up to the fifth floor.
It was eleven o’clock and things were in full swing as they got out of the lift. Nobody paid any attention to the bulky old man with the pink, chamois-leather face. There was none of the rowdy merriment and specifically Russian drunkenness he had expected; instead, a large crowd of people were huddled in front of the television. He looked around. He hadn’t been up here for a while. It was a good apartment; fix it up and it would fetch at least thirty-five hundred, maybe forty.
“He’s a fine artist, this guy,” Claude glanced at the canvases stacked against the wall; Alik never liked hanging up his paintings, his old work got in his way.
The landlord peered briefly at them; a friend of his in Chelsea had run a cheap boarding-house here in the twenties. It was more of a flop-house really, and he had let all sorts of riff-raff in, impoverished artists, out-of-work actors. Somehow the place had survived the depression. A few times, out of the goodness of his heart, the man had let his artists give him paintings instead of rent, and he had hung them up in the hall. Years passed, and he turned out to own a collection worth a dozen boarding-houses. But that was a long time ago; times had changed, artists were two a penny now. “No, no, I don’t want any of these paintings,” he decided.
Nina saw Claude at the entrance and wandered over to him with her elegant, unsteady gait, preparing some French phrase for him. But she didn’t have the chance to use it, because Claude said, “Our landlord’s here on business.”
Nina displayed an unexpected command of the situation. Muttering something to him she darted to Libin, grasped his head in her hands and whispered urgently in his ear: “Our landlord’s here, the super brought him. You must make sure they don’t get near Alik. Please, I’m begging you.”
Libin quickly took in what was happening and went over to the landlord grinning imbecilically. “We’re all a little bit concerned, there’s a political coup going on in Moscow, you see.” He spoke as though he were prime minister of some neighbouring state. As he did so he pushed them towards the lift with his belly. They didn’t resist. By the lift he finally stopped smiling and said very distinctly: “I’m Alik’s brother. I apologise for the arrears, I paid all the rent yesterday and I guarantee it won’t happen again.”
Now the damned Irishman will start ranting, Claude thought. But without saying a word the landlord pressed the button of the lift.
THIRTEEN
Like a classical drama, the plot had unfolded for three days. In that time the past, from which they had more or less totally cut themselves off, came back into their lives and they were horrified. They wept, searched for familiar faces in the crowds outside the White House, and were rewarded by the moment when Lyuda’s son suddenly yelled: “Look, there’s Dad!”
On the screen a bearded man in glasses, who looked somehow familiar to everyone, was walking towards the camera with his head bowed.
Lyuda clutched her throat with both hands: “It’s Kostya! I knew he’d be there!”
By this time it was obvious that the coup hadn’t succeeded.
“We’ve won,” Alik said.
It was unclear who “we” was, but it was the same “we” Father Victor had discovered to his surprise in Paris at the start of the Second World War. His grandfather, a White officer who had become a priest after emigrating, began to feel this sharp connection with Russia then. All of a sudden, the “they,” for whom his feelings had been hardening during his years in exile, had become that same “we,” very nearly causing him to return home in 1947 to certain death.
Libin disagreed with Alik but he wasn’t going to argue, and merely murmured, “Well it’s not clear who’s won, in fact.”
Everyone was just happy that civil war had been averted, and that the tanks had left the city.
The news bulletins continued uninterruptedly: on Lyubyanka Square they toppled the statue to Dzerzhinsky and showed the empty plinth. The finest monument to Soviet power was an empty pedestal; the party, which had immortalized itself in granite, marble and steel, had crumbled to dust and vanished like an hallucination.
Three people were killed and buried, three grains of sand picked from the crowd by a heavenly hand, three young men with good faces, a Russian, a Ukrainian, a Jew. Over two of them they waved incense, the third was covered with a prayer shawl. There were thousands and thousands of people. There had never been such funerals in this country. It was as though everything sick, rotten and wicked was being thrown away like slops, a bucket of stinking rubbish floating down the river.
The people sitting here now, former Russians, were unanimously happy, and they celebrated not by drinking more than usual but by singing old Soviet songs. Best of all sang Valentina:
Around us all is blue and green
Under the window the nightingales sing …
There was nothing blue and green in this neighbourhood, this apartment, their lives here had other nuances, other degrees of intensity, yet each recalled the colours of their childhood: Valentina remembered Institute Street in Kaluga, running between two rows of pale lime trees to the soapy-blue Oka; Alik remembered the blues and greens of Moscow Province, the diffident, sweetly trusting colours of the spring foliage and the long tender shadows across the sky; Faika remembered her village, its lank back gardens, and the clumsy golden church domes against the bright-green hedge.