Alexey taps on his window. ‘We’re here, Rosie.’
I look up until I can’t put my head back any further. The building in front of us is a khrushchyovka, one of the dreary apartment complexes built up during the Khrushchev era. Made of off-white concrete, with square windows, it could pass for some kind of urban sanatorium. This can’t be right. We’re supposed to stay at Alexey’s erstwhile home, somewhere I imagined would be dignified and stately, just like him. It would have a smear of Imperial-era glory, of Mum’s fairy-tale universe. Like him.
Not this. I grew up in this.
I step out of the car, blinking in the glare of sunlight. I test the pavement. Solid ground. I am back in Moscow. Throughout our journey here I’d hoped, feared, that I would return to my home town and feel different. I would instantly reclaim the sense of continuity that comes naturally to most people, because they live their lives as a single thread. Winding and curling perhaps, but smooth and uninterrupted.
But I still have no such sense. For me, there is one thread that starts the day I was born in this city and stretches until one humid summer night in 1977. There is the other that begins the moment Mum and I touched down at Heathrow and stretches until now. And I’ve never been able to tie the two together.
The driver and I wait for Alexey by the pavement, beneath a peeling sign for a post office. The driver has a sculpted, serious face. He says nothing. His close-cut hairstyle suggests the military or prison time, places where people learn to say nothing. The silence has become almost unbearable. Beads of sweat pop up along my hairline and pool beneath my ponytail. Everything around us smoulders in the visible heat.
‘My keys still work!’ Alexey’s voice. ‘Come on!’
I turn away. We loop around the side of the building and approach a half-hidden blue door, choked by weeds. Alexey gestures for us to enter behind him and pulls the door shut, plunging us into darkness.
‘Ready?’ he says.
There’s a flood of harsh light. The long fluorescent tube attached to the low ceiling throws our surroundings into sharp relief: The nasty, narrow stairwell, the shrieking graffiti, the driver’s expressionless face. A layer of dust resettles over the ground.
‘There’s no lift,’ says Alexey. ‘But it’s only a few storeys up.’
I hear myself laugh. It sounds like a gasp. The driver proceeds up the stairs behind Alexey, bags hoisted onto his shoulders. I look down at my holdall, at my fingers around the handle, already white from squeezing too hard. I follow them up the stairs, telling myself I’ll catch my breath once we go in, but when I reach the landing and Alexey fiddles with the keys and the door grinds open, I realise that there isn’t anything to breathe.
No air, no wind, nothing, has disturbed his apartment in all these years.
Alexey opens the first door we see to reveal the kitchen, the shoebox of a fridge, the used plates and mugs on a small table. Dead flies on the sills. Further down the central hallway there is one bedroom and two separate rooms for the bath and the toilet. The toilet has no seat. In the living room, the furniture is buried beneath piles of books, correspondence, film reels, paint cans, and Pravda.
All the lights seem to be working, but there isn’t a single lampshade in sight.
I hover in the living room by the door to the balcony, feeling an unexpected stab of panic. The driver comes up beside me and places my suitcase on a mound of what could well be the sofa. It is backed against the wall, trapped by the mess. I mumble my thanks and step out onto the balcony, but I can’t breathe that well out here either. The air smells dirty, asphalted, like car fumes. Like all big cities.
So why is there a disorienting note of freshness, the pulpy fragrance of a new book?
Zoya.
It is her first visit to me since Yorkshire, and I know immediately what she wants me to remember: I was twelve, maybe thirteen years old. Mum was putting me to bed and lighting another of her candles to read by. I told her that the candles reeked and, worse, they were a fire hazard. Everything’s a fire hazard in England, Mum moaned; but she acquiesced. She showed me what she’d bought that day, a copy of Tolstoy’s War and Peace in the original Russian, and went straight to her favourite passages, including General Kutuzov’s advice to Prince Andrei:
There is nothing stronger than those two warriors, patience and time; they will do everything …
I didn’t hear her at first. I was in my bed, duvet pulled up to my nose, staring up at the ceiling, counting cracks. One, two. One, two. Mum repeated herself and suddenly, it registered.
‘Rosie?’ Alexey’s voice, from within.
It’s been fourteen years. Patience and time.
To celebrate his first night in Moscow, his victorious return to the land that banished him, Alexey invites both me and his driver to dinner at an upscale restaurant. While the hostess makes an embarrassing fuss over us, I squint at the tapestry mounted behind the driver’s chair. It is one of many that adorn the walls. Knights on horseback, weeping maidens, large predatory birds. Fiery scenes. Bold colours.
The hostess sashays away, drawing the driver’s attention with her.
‘Does she know who you are?’ I ask Alexey.
‘People assume we have money,’ he says. ‘We look foreign.’
If this restaurant is Russia, then I have always been foreign. My gaze wanders to a high pillar upon which a marble bust of a man’s head has been placed. The faces of most people in here look just like the bust. Wan, bloated, male. Wealthy. Nobody else eats at a place like this. I turn to the raised platform not far from our table, where a floppy-haired youth sits on a stool with an acoustic guitar, crooning away. He sounds like a fur seal.
‘Is he the son of the owner?’ I ask.
The driver smirks.
‘It’s been years, but I used to play,’ muses Alexey. ‘I should ask for a turn.’
He’s having us on. He’s going to steal the spotlight, right here in the middle of our meal? He’s going to sing with a set of century-old lungs, strum with fingers that were once frostbitten to the bone?
‘Don’t think I can?’ He turns to the driver. ‘What do you think, eh?’
The driver finally cracks a smile.
Alexey rises from his chair. He winds between the tables, finding his way in the modest light to the platform. The guitarist pauses to hear what Alexey has to say, then he scrambles off the stool, offering his instrument as penance, backing away, disappearing by instinct into the shadows. Alexey looks at me and winks. Then he tries out a few chords, strums for a moment or two.
Already the restaurant is going quiet.
‘I wanted to speak, only she had the words …’
I don’t know how he does it. We are sitting in the same silence of that lecture hall in London last month. It seems to follow him everywhere he goes.
‘And if I was too weak, then she was the earth …’
His expression is casual, contemplative, but there’s a distant note in his eyes. He isn’t playing for this audience, or any audience. He’s playing for someone else, across time and space, across memory itself.
But for whom? Kukolka?
Behind me, the driver makes a sound. I whip my head around. He’s fishing in his glass of water for the ice cubes, which he extracts and deposits into his serviette. He’s an attractive bloke, dreamy even, but in a sort of hardened, unhappy way. The way of people who have seen and done things they don’t talk about.
He senses my stare and meets it.
‘How long have you been a driver?’ I ask.
‘I’m not.’
‘I thought Alexey said—’
‘He asked for someone for you.’ The driver amends this. ‘To help you.’
‘I don’t understand. I’m—’
‘You’re his employee this summer, no?’