Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  I guess it might actually have been another day—maybe the image just seems to belong with the meeting on the Metro, so I remember them together—but in my mind it was the same evening that I first noticed the old Zhiguli. It was on my side of the street, sandwiched between two BMWs like a ghost of Russia past or the answer to a simple odd-one-out puzzle. It was shaped like a child’s drawing of a car: a box on wheels, with another box on top in which the child might add a stick-man driver and his steering wheel, and silly round headlights on which, if he was feeling exuberant, the child would circle pupils to make them look like eyes. It was the sort of car that most of the men in Moscow had once spent half their lives waiting to buy, or so they were always telling you, saving and coveting and putting their names on waiting lists to get one, only to find—after the wall came down, they got America on TV and their better-connected compatriots got late-model imports—that even their dreams had been shabby. It was hard to be sure, but this one had probably once been a sort of rusty orange colour. It had mud and oil up its flanks, like a tank might after a battle—a dark crust that, if you were frank with yourself, you knew was how your insides looked after a few years in Moscow, and maybe your soul too.

  The pavement on the way to my entrance had been left to dissolve into the road in the way that Russian pavements tend to. I walked past the churchyard and the Zhiguli to my building, punched in my code on the intercom, and went inside.

  I lived in one of the Moscow apartment blocks that were built as grand houses by doomed well-to-do merchants just before the revolution. Like the city itself, it had been slapped about so much that it had come to look like several different buildings mashed together. An ugly lift had been fixed onto the outside and a fifth storey added to the top, but it had kept the original swirling ironwork of its staircase. Most of the front doors to the individual apartments were made of axe-resistant steel, but had been prettified with a sort of leather padding—a fashion that sometimes made it feel as though the whole of upscale Moscow was a low-security asylum. On the third floor the smell of cat litter and the screech of a nervous-breakdown Russian symphony emerged from my neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich’s place. On the fourth I turned the three locks on my padded door and went inside. I went into the kitchen, sat at my little bachelor’s table, and took the trolleybus ticket with Masha’s phone number on it out of my wallet.

  In England, before you, I’d only ever had one thing with a woman that you might seriously call a relationship. You know about her, I think—Natalie. We met at college, though until someone’s drunken birthday party somewhere in Shoreditch we hadn’t thought of each other as contenders. I don’t think either of us had the energy to end it once it had started, and six or seven months later she moved into my old flat without me really agreeing or disagreeing. I wasn’t exactly relieved when she moved out again, saying that she needed to think and wanted me to think too, but I wasn’t devastated either. We’d lost touch even before I went to Moscow. There had been a few Russian girls who’d seemed to be on their way to being proper girlfriends, but none of them lasted more than a summer. One became frustrated that I didn’t have and wouldn’t get the things she wanted and expected: a car, a driver to go with the car, one of those silly little dogs they drag around the designer shops in the cobbled alleys near the Kremlin. There was another one, Dasha I think her name was, who after the third time she stayed over began hiding things in the wardrobe and in the little cabinet above my bathroom sink: a scarf, an empty bottle of perfume, notes that said “I love you too” in Russian. I asked Steve Walsh about it (you remember Steve, the lechy foreign correspondent—you came along when I met up with him in Soho once and didn’t like him). He told me that she was marking her territory, letting anybody else I brought home know that someone else had got there first. By that September you had to be careful who you hooked up with in Moscow—because of AIDS, but also because foreign men were going to clubs, meeting girls, leaving their drinks on the table when they went to take a piss, then waking up without their wallets in the backs of taxis they didn’t remember getting in to, or facedown in puddles, or once or twice, probably when they got the dose wrong, not waking up at all.

  I’d never found what people like my brother had, what my sister thought she had until she didn’t, what you and me are signing up for now: the contract, the settlement, the same body only and always—and, in return for all that, the backup, the pet names and the head stroking in the night when you feel like crying. I’d always thought I didn’t want it, not ever, to tell you the truth, that I could be one of the people who are happier without. I think maybe my parents had put me off the whole thing—starting out too young, banging out the kids without really thinking about it, forgetting whatever it was they liked about each other in the first place. By then it seemed to me my mum and dad were just sitting it out, two old dogs tied to the same kennel but too tired to fight anymore. At home they watched television all the time so they didn’t have to talk to each other. I’m sure that, on the rare occasions they went out for a meal, they were one of those painful couples you sometimes see, chewing together in silence.

  But when I met Masha that day in September, somehow I thought she might be it, “the one” I hadn’t been looking for. The wild chance of it seemed wonderful. Yes, it was a physical thing, but not only. Maybe it was just the right time, but straightaway I thought I could see her hair falling down the back of a towelling dressing gown as she made the coffee, picture her with her head resting asleep against me on a plane. If I was being blunt with you, I guess I might almost call it “falling in love.”

  The smell of poplar trees crept in through the open windows of my kitchen, along with the sound of sirens and breaking glass. Some of me wanted her to be my future, and some other me wanted to do what I should have done, and throw the ticket with the phone number out the kitchen window and into the pink and promising evening air.

  2

  I rang her the next day. In Russia they don’t go in so much for the phoney self-restraint, the sham waiting and feints, the whole dating war game that you and I played in London—and anyway, I’m afraid I couldn’t stop myself. I went through to her voice mail and left her my mobile number and my number at the office.

  I heard nothing for about three weeks and almost managed to stop thinking about her. Almost. It helped that I was busy at work, like all the Western lawyers in Moscow then. Cash was gushing out of the ground in Siberia, and at the same time another flood of money was rolling in. A new breed of Russian conglomerates were frantically dismembering one another, and foreign banks were lending them the billions they needed to make their acquisitions. The bankers and the Russian businessmen came to our office to agree on their terms: the bankers in their double-cuff shirts and whitened smiles, the thick-necked ex-KGB oilmen in their tight suits, and us, doing the paperwork on the loans and taking our little cut. The office was in a crenellated beige tower on Paveletskaya Square, a building that hadn’t quite achieved the air of sleek wealth that its architect had been shooting for, but was nevertheless the air-conditioned daytime home of half the expats in Moscow. On the other side of the square was Paveletsky train station, the domain of drunks and wrecks and glue-sniffing children, poor hopeless bastards who had fallen off the Russian tightrope. The station and the tower stared at each other across the square like mismatched armies before a battle.

  There was a clever new secretary at work called Olga, who wore figure-hugging trouser suits and came, I think, from Tatarstan, and who I’m sure is by now running some pipe-importing or lipstick-distribution company, living the new Russian dream. She had deep brown eyes and sensational cheekbones, and we had some nice running banter about how I was going to show her London, and what was she going to show me?

  Then towards the middle of October Masha called and in her growly voice asked me whether I wanted to have dinner with her and Katya.

  “Good morning, Nicholas,” she said. “This is Masha.”

  She clearly didn’t think she
needed to say which Masha, and she was right. I felt my neck flush.

  “Hello, Masha, how are you?”

  “I am good, thank you, Nicholas. Tell me, please, what do you do this evening?”

  They’re funny, don’t you think, those first phone calls, when you talk to the new person who’s been living in your head, though you don’t really know them yet at all? Those awkward moments that could be a turning point in your life, that could be everything, or could be nothing.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “We are inviting you for dinner. Do you know one restaurant that is called Mechta Vostoka?”

  “Dream of the East.” I did. It was one of the kitsch Caucasian places that float on big moored platforms in the river opposite Gorky Park—the kind of restaurant proposition that you would turn up your nose at in London, but which in Moscow means summer walks along the embankment, deep red Caucasian wine, other people’s nostalgia for sunny Soviet holidays, stupid dancing, and freedom. She said they’d booked a table for eight thirty.

  • • •

  IT WAS THE same day, the same afternoon, this time I’m sure it was, that I first met the Cossack. He appeared in our office on the ninth floor of the tower at Paveletskaya, smirking.

  We’d been instructed to act for a consortium of Western banks on a five-hundred-million-dollar loan, to be paid out in three instalments and repaid at a fat rate of interest. The borrower was a joint venture involving a logistics firm we’d never heard of and Narodneft. (Maybe you remember reading about Narodneft: it’s the giant state energy company, which had swallowed the assets the Kremlin strong-armed from the oligarchs using bogus lawsuits and made-up tax demands.) Together they were proposing to construct a floating oil terminal somewhere up in the Barents Sea—I didn’t pay too much attention to the geography, to be honest, at least not until I finally went up there. Their plan was to convert a huge Soviet tanker ship to sit stationary in the ocean, with a pipeline from the shore to feed it the oil.

  Narodneft was getting ready to list a chunk of its shares in New York and needed its books to look healthy. So, to keep the liabilities for the project off the balance sheet, the management had found a partner and set up a separate company to run it. The project company was registered in the British Virgin Islands. The front man was the Cossack.

  The truth is, I liked the Cossack, at least to start with, and I think in a way, in his way, he liked me. Something about him was endearing—the unabashed hedonism, maybe, or the blasé thuggery. It might be better to say I envied him. He was a little man vertically, five feet six or thereabouts, half a foot shorter than me, with a boy-band fringe, a ten-thousand-dollar suit, and a murderer’s smile. He was equal parts twinkle and menace. He had nothing with him when he slid out of the lift—no briefcase, no papers, no lawyers—except a tank-shaped bodyguard with a shaven turret-shaped head.

  I’d drawn up a mandate letter, a sort of preliminary contract, which the Cossack needed to countersign on behalf of his joint venture. We’d faxed a copy to his lawyers a couple of days before: the lead bank undertook to get the money together, roping in a few other banks to spread the risk, while the Cossack promised not to borrow it from anyone else. We led him to the glass-walled meeting room in the corner of our open-plan office. We were me, my boss, Paolo, and Sergei Borisovich, one of the keen young Russians in our corporate department. Paolo was well into his forties, but he was still lean and suave in the way that middle-aged Italian men can be, with a picturesque burst of white hair on one side of his head and a wife he avoided as much as possible. He had woken up one morning in the early nineties in his comfortable Milanese bed, picked up the whiff of money wafting in from the East, followed it, and stayed too long. Sergei Borisovich was short, with a face like a perplexed potato. He had finished learning his English on an exchange programme in North Carolina but he had started with MTV, and his favourite word was still “extreme.”

  We passed the document to the Cossack. He turned the first page, turned it back again, pushed the file away, sat back in his chair, and puffed out his cheeks. He looked around as if he was waiting for something else to happen—a strip show, maybe, or a stabbing. The blue and gold onion domes of the Novospassky Monastery winked at us through the ninth-floor window from across the Moscow River. And then he started making jokes.

  The Cossack had one of those senses of humour that are really a kind of warfare. Laughing at his jokes made you feel guilty, not laughing at them made you feel endangered. His personal inquiries always felt like a prelude to blackmail.

  He told us he was a Cossack, from Stavropol, I think it was, or somewhere down there in the southern badlands. Did we know what Cossacks were? It was their historical mission, he explained, to keep the “blacks” quiet down in the armpit of Russia. Why didn’t we come up north to the site of the oil terminal, his new posting, to see him? He would introduce us all to Cossack hospitality.

  “Maybe one day,” Paolo replied. I said I had a wife in Moscow who didn’t like me going away. That’s how I know it was definitely the same day as my dinner with Masha and Katya: because I remember those words, as I said them, feeling like only three-quarters of a lie, only a temporary lie, perhaps.

  “Well,” the Cossack said in Russian, “you can have two wives—one in Moscow and one in the Arctic.”

  He smoked a cigarette, baring his teeth. Then he signed the mandate letter without looking at it, belched, and grinned. We saw him and his minder to the lift. As he said good-bye he was abruptly sombre. “Guys,” he said as he shook our hands, “this is special. Russia is grateful to you.”

  “Lipstick on a pig,” Paolo said as the doors closed. It was what we used to call it when we dealt with undomesticated businessmen like the Cossack—the kind of deal which, between you and me, made up half our revenue in those days, and which not even our sanitising covenants, undertakings, sureties, and disclosures could quite perfume. It felt grubby sometimes, like a kind of legal money laundering. I used to tell myself that it would all have happened without us anyway, that we were just link men, that it wasn’t us who were bankrolling whatever the Russians were going to do with the loans. Our job was just to make sure our clients would eventually get their money back. The usual lawyer’s cop-out.

  “Lipstick on a pig,” I agreed.

  “Extreme,” said Sergei Borisovich.

  I spent the rest of that afternoon in one of those distracted dazes that come over you when you have a job interview or an ominous doctor’s appointment, and you nod and answer automatically when people speak to you but don’t really listen. Those days when your watch seems to take a lazy age over each minute, and there is always so much time left, so little passed, since the last time you looked. And then at the end, when you’re suddenly nervous and want to back out, the time goes in a rush and it’s now. At about six in the evening I went home to change out of my goon suit and clean the bathroom, just in case.

  3

  Back then, before I started avoiding him, I must have seen my neighbour Oleg Nikolaevich almost every day. I generally found him standing on the landing outside his flat when I went up or down the stairs, pretending that he wasn’t waiting for me. I’d enjoyed talking to him when I first moved in and scarcely knew anyone in Moscow. He was patient with my pidgin Russian and gave me sound advice about parts of town to steer clear of. Later, when I’d settled in, it didn’t cost me much to chew the fat with him for a few minutes. I felt I owed him that, and now and then it was interesting.

  Oleg Nikolaevich lived alone, apart from his cat. He had a white goatee and hair in his ears. He told me once that he was the editor of a literary journal, but I wasn’t sure whether it actually still existed. He was one of those careful Russian crabs that cling to the ocean floor, knowing when to hide and when to keep quiet, staying out of harm’s way and trying to do none himself. He was old and lonely. He was loitering on his landing, wearing an artistic silk scarf, as I left for my dinner at Dream of the East.

  “Good evening, Nik
olai Ivanovich,” he said in Russian. “How is the life of a lawyer?”

  This was how Oleg Nikolaevich always greeted me. After he found out that my father’s name was Ian, he started calling me Nikolai Ivanovich, which is what I would have been known as if I’d been Russian. You call people by their father’s name as well as their own until you’re well acquainted, and forever with old people and your bosses. Since nobody else called me that, I sort of liked it, the acceptance of me that it implied, as well as the old-school courtesy. I said I was very well and asked how he was.

  “Normalno,” he replied. (Normal.)

  I asked him to please forgive me, I was in a big hurry. I guess it must have been obvious what sort of hurry. I was doused in aftershave—the same one I sometimes use now, the one you think smells like horse piss—and I was wearing a flashy turquoise shirt that I normally saved for weddings. I’d made an inadvisable bid to slick down my hair.

  “Nikolai Ivanovich!” he said, holding up a single hairy finger. I could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. “The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap.”

  The odours of cat fur, decaying encyclopaedia, and ageing sausage escaped from his flat and caught up with me as I hurried down the stairs, two at a time.

  IF I CLOSE my eyes, I can watch that whole evening on the inside of my eyelids, as if it was preserved on one of those grainy old home movies from the seventies.

  It was getting dark as I left home, and you could feel in the cold air that it wanted to rain. As I headed for the Bulvar from my building I saw two men sitting in the orange Zhiguli. They were not the type of men that the child would have drawn after he’d done the car. My eye caught one of theirs and I quickly looked away, as you do in London and you especially do in Moscow, where you’re always seeing things through archways and in car parks or underpasses before you realise it might be better not to. I hurried up to the corner to find a taxi. The second or third passing car stopped for my outstretched arm. (I never had my own car in Russia. When I arrived, Paolo told me to start driving immediately, because if I waited ’til I was familiar with the anarchy and the ice and the traffic police on the roads, I never would, and he was right. But the unofficial taxi system is a surprisingly safe way to get around, so long as you obey two simple rules: don’t get in if the driver’s got a friend with him, and never if he’s drunker than you are.)