Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  He was Georgian, I think, my driver that night. He had two miniature icons stuck on his dashboard, little mothers of God that always made me feel safer and more vulnerable at the same time—less likely to have my throat cut, but also that my life might be in the hands of someone who thought looking in the mirror or braking were God’s worries rather than his. I reached for the seat belt, provoking a stern warning about the dangers of wearing one and assurances about his driving. He was a refugee from one of those filthy little wars that broke out in the Caucasus when the evil empire collapsed, wars that I hadn’t even heard of until I started taking Moscow taxis. He started telling me about it as we plunged into the tunnel beneath the all-day traffic jam on the Novy Arbat (a broad, brutal avenue of boutiques and casinos), then accelerated past the Gogol statue. By the time we reached Kropotkinskaya Metro station and the river, and the replica cathedral that they’d thrown up there in a hurry in the nineties, both his hands were off the wheel and miming what somebody had done with someone else’s body parts.

  Finally he pulled up on the embankment. I gave him the hundred roubles we’d agreed on, plus a soft-touch fifty-rouble tip, and ran across the traffic to the river side of the road. Through the drizzle that was starting to fall I could see the whiteness of the space shuttle and the loops of the rickety roller coasters in Gorky Park, on the other side of the black water. As I was crossing the little gangplank to the floating restaurant, I remember seeing a man in tight swimming trunks climbing out of the river onto the next platform along.

  The restaurant was giving out that blaring restaurant din, everyone struggling to be heard above everyone else. A band in garish national dress was playing Sinatra with an Azeri twist. I was intercepted by a waitress and began to tell her that I was meeting someone there, but as I did I realised that I didn’t know what name Masha would have booked under, or even whether she was really called Masha, and for a moment I thought, What am I doing here in this crazy country in my turquoise shirt? I’m too old for this, I’m thirty-eight, I’m from Luton. Then I saw them waving at me from the far end of the restaurant, the part that was done up to look like a medieval galleon. They stood at their table to greet me as I zigzagged across the room.

  “HELLO, NICHOLAS,” Katya said in English.

  The contrast was always unsettling. Her voice sounded like it belonged to a schoolgirl or a cartoon character, and yet there were the long legs in the white leather boots, bare from the knee to the hem of one of those short pleated skirts that a cheerleader or a waitress at Hooters might wear. Her blond hair was down over her shoulders. For a lot of men, I know, she would have been the main attraction, but for me she was just a little too young, a little too obvious. She was still trying them out—the walk and the hair and her curves—still seeing how far they could take her.

  “Hello, Nikolai,” said Masha. She was wearing a miniskirt that almost matched my shirt and a comparatively demure black jumper. Lipstick and mascara, but not too clownish like some of the others. Blood-red nails.

  I sat down opposite them. At the table behind me were half a dozen noisy businessmen, and with them seven or eight women who were young enough to be their daughters but weren’t.

  Naturally there was nothing much to say.

  We looked down for longer than we needed to at the menus, with their time-consuming lists of meats and sauces (and next to them two columns of numbers: the prices and also, as in most Moscow restaurants, the weight of the ingredients in each dish, an up-front detail supposed to reassure diners that they weren’t being ripped off). I remember how my eye involuntarily tripped on the prices for the Shashlik Royale and the Sea Surprise. Singledom can turn you frugal, even when you are flush.

  “So, Kolya,” Masha finally said in English, using one of those cutesy Russian diminutives. “Why did you come to our Russia?”

  “Let’s speak Russian,” I said. “I think it will be easier.”

  “Please,” Katya said. “We need practice for our English.”

  “Okay,” I said. I hadn’t gone to Dream of the East to argue with them. After that, we mostly stuck to English, except when we were with other Russians.

  “Tak,” Katya said. “So. Why to Russia?”

  I gave the easy answer I always did when asked that question: “I wanted an adventure.”

  That wasn’t really true. The reason, I can see now, is that I found myself entering the thirtysomething zone of disappointment, the time when momentum and ambition start to fade and friends’ parents start to die. The time of “Is that all there is?” People I knew in London who had already got married began to get divorced, and people who hadn’t adopted cats. People started running marathons or becoming Buddhists to help them get through it. For you I guess it was those dodgy evangelical seminars you once told me you went to a couple of times before we met. The truth is, the firm asked me if I’d go out to Moscow, just for a year, they said, maybe two. It was a shortcut to a partnership, they hinted. I said yes, and ran away from London and how young I wasn’t anymore.

  They smiled.

  I said, “My company asked me to come to the Moscow office. It was a good opportunity for me. Also,” I added, “I’d always wanted to come to Russia. My grandfather was in Russia during the war.”

  That part was true, as you know. I never knew him properly, but his war record came up all the time when I was a kid.

  “Where did your grandfather serve?” Masha asked. “Was he spy?”

  “No,” I said. “He was a sailor. He was on the convoys—you know, the ships that brought supplies to Russia from England. He was on the convoys to the Arctic. To Arkhangelsk. And to Murmansk.”

  Masha leaned over and murmured something to Katya, which I thought was a translation.

  “Really?” she said. “No jokes? He was in Murmansk?”

  “Yes. More than once. He was lucky. His boat was never hit. I think he wanted to go back to Russia after the war. But they were Soviet times and it wasn’t possible. My father told me all this—my grandfather died when I was young.”

  “This for us is interesting,” said Katya. “Because we are from this city. Murmansk is our home.”

  Just then the waiter arrived to take our order. They both asked for sturgeon shashlik. I ordered lamb, plus some of the Azeri pancakes that they stuff with cheese and herbs, the little eggplant rolls filled with a walnut mush, some pomegranate sauce, and half a bottle of vodka.

  At the time my grandfather having been in their hometown seemed an important coincidence or clue. I asked them why their family had lived up there. I knew Murmansk had been one of the special restricted military cities, where you only wound up if you had a reason, or if someone else had a reason for you.

  Masha looked me in the eyes and tapped the red nails of her right hand on her shoulder. I thought I was supposed to say or do something in response, but I didn’t know what. After a few seconds I tapped my hand on my shoulder too. They laughed, Masha throwing her head back, Katya doing one of those suppressed blushing laughs that can keep you out of trouble at school when you crack up during lessons.

  “No,” said Masha. “What is it called, this thing that men in army have?” She tapped again.

  “Epaulettes?” I said.

  “When one Russian makes this,” she said, still tapping, “it means man who is in army, or can be police or one of others.”

  “Your father?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He was sailor. His father also was sailor. Like your grandfather.”

  “Yes,” said Katya. “Our grandfather was fighting next to convoys also. Maybe they were knowing each other.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  We smiled. We fidgeted. I looked at Masha and away when she caught me, that first-date cat and mouse. Behind the girls, through the steamed-up window and the rain that had begun to fall into the river, I could just make out the quiet park rides and the Krimsky Bridge and, beyond that, the glow of the giant ridiculous statue of Peter the Great that stands in the river near t
he Red October chocolate factory.

  I asked them about growing up in Murmansk. Of course it was hard, Masha said. Of course it was not Moscow. But in the summer it was light around the clock, and you could go walking in the forest in the middle of the night.

  “And we have one of this!” Katya said, pointing towards the ribs of the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park. She smiled again, and she seemed to me a harmless innocent girl, who thought a Ferris wheel was like Disney World.

  “Only,” said Masha, “it was too expensive. To ride. When I was small girl, in eighties, during Gorbachev, I could only look at it, this wheel. I thought it was too beautiful.”

  I asked, “Why did you leave? Why did you come to Moscow?”

  I thought I already knew the answer. Most of the provincial Russian girls came to the city with just enough money to look good on for a couple of weeks, while they slept on someone’s floor and tried to find a job, or ideally a man, who could whisk them off to live behind the electric fences on the “elitny” Rublovskoe Shosse. Or maybe, if he was already married, he would install her in an apartment on the streets around Patriarshie Prudy—Patriarch’s Ponds: the Hampstead of Moscow, with more automatic weapons—where he’d only bother her twice a week and let her keep the place when he got bored with her. In those days, leggy desperate girls were Russia’s main national product, after oil. You could order them on the Internet in Leeds or Minneapolis.

  “Because of family,” said Masha.

  “Your parents moved to Moscow?”

  “No,” she said. “Parents stay in Murmansk. But I must move.”

  She made another gesture, one that this time I understood. She raised her hand again and flicked the side of her white neck with her index finger. Drink. The all-Russia sign for drink.

  “Your father?”

  “Yes.”

  I imagined the rows and the tears up there in Murmansk, and the wages drunk in pay-day binges, and the little girls hiding in their bedroom, dreaming of the big wheel they couldn’t afford to ride.

  “Now,” said Masha, “only mother is living.”

  I wasn’t sure whether or not to say I was sorry.

  “But,” said Katya, “in Moscow we also have family.”

  “Yes,” said Masha, “in Moscow we are not alone. We have aunt. Maybe you meet her. She is old communist. I think for you it will be interesting.”

  I said, “I would love to meet your aunt.”

  “In Murmansk,” Masha said, “we knew nothing. Everything we learned in Moscow. Everything good. And also everything bad.”

  They brought all the dishes at once, as they always do in Caucasian restaurants, never much valuing the deferred gratification implicit in the starter/main course concept. We ate. Behind us the businessmen had given up on the food to paw at their companions, not very surreptitiously. Their table was an orgy of smoking. I imagine they smoked in the shower.

  I tried to find out where Masha and Katya lived. They said they rented a place out on the Leningradskoe Shosse, the choked highway that leads to Sheremetyevo Airport and the north. I asked Masha whether she enjoyed her job at the mobile phone shop.

  “It is work,” Masha said. “It is not always interesting.” She gave me a short ironic smile.

  “What do you do, Katya?”

  “I study MGU,” she said. MGU meant Moscow State University, Russia’s version of Oxford, but with bribes to get in and then out again with a degree. “I study business management,” she said.

  I was impressed, as I was supposed to be. I started to tell them about my own college years in Birmingham, but Masha interrupted me.

  “Let’s dance,” she said.

  The band was playing “I Will Survive” at double speed, the musicians sounding like massed mourners at a Caucasian funeral when they joined in with the chorus. The only other dancers were an excited child and the tipsy father she had dragged out into the space in front of the band. Masha and Katya were all curves and pelvic thrusts, with a dash of the simulated lesbianism that was then de rigueur on Moscow dance floors, unself-conscious as only people with nothing to lose can be. That was something else about Masha that I liked: she could just be in the moment, cutting it off from before and afterwards in order to be happy.

  I shuffled and jerked, tried a little twist, then felt maybe I’d overdone it (I know I have to go to those lessons before we do our number on the day, I haven’t forgotten). Masha took my hand and we did a couple of minutes of sub-ballroom stumble, me clinging on to her for cover. I was relieved when we made it to the end of the song and could retreat to the table.

  “You are beautiful dancer,” said Katya, and they laughed.

  “To the women!” I said, a standard fallback toast, and since in Russia the toastee drinks too, they clinked their stumpy vodka glasses against mine and we drank.

  I still wasn’t sure what the proposition was, if there was one, and if it wasn’t just curiosity and the chance of a free dinner. In Moscow the main event was usually the third date, like for us in London—I expect like on Mars—or maybe the second in the summer. I didn’t know what was supposed to happen with Katya.

  “Maybe you want to see our photos?” Masha asked me.

  She nodded at Katya, who brought out her mobile phone. They loved photographing each other, the girls in Russia—something about the novelty of the cameras, I think, and the idea that they might matter enough to have their pictures taken.

  “From Odessa,” Katya said. They had been there at the beginning of the summer, they explained. They had a relative there, apparently. More or less everyone seemed to have a relative in Odessa (a sort of cross between Tenerife and Palermo).

  We leaned into the middle of the table, and Katya gave us a slide show on the tiny screen of her phone. In the first photo they were in a bar, the two of them and another girl. Katya was looking away from the camera and laughing, like she was sharing a joke with someone out of the picture. In the second one they were on the beach, standing next to each other in bikinis, with what looked like an Egyptian pyramid behind them. The next was just Masha. It showed her taking a picture of her reflection in a wardrobe mirror: she was standing with one hand on her hip, the other hand holding the phone so it obscured a quarter of her face. In the mirror she was wearing red bikini knickers and nothing else.

  I sat back in my chair and asked whether they’d like to come to my apartment for some tea.

  Masha looked hard into my eyes and said yes.

  I waved at the waiter and wrote a little squiggle in the air with an imaginary pen, the international let-me-out-of-here signal that, when you’re a teenager and see your parents make it, you think you never will.

  WHEN WE GOT outside it was colder. After three winters in Russia I knew this was the real thing: the big chill, the ice in the air that stays ’til April. The white smoke from the power plant down the river was congealed against the thick night. It was still drizzling, the droplets sliding down my glasses and blurring my vision, making everything seem even more fantastical than it already did. Masha was wearing her cat-fur coat, and Katya had put on a purple plastic raincoat.

  I stuck out my arm for a lift, and a car that was already twenty metres past us braked and reversed back up the street and into the curb. The driver asked for two hundred roubles, and even though it was daylight robbery I agreed and got into the front seat. He was a fat resentful Russian, with a moustache and a crack in the middle of his windscreen that looked like it had been made by a forehead, or a bullet. He had a miniature television jerry-rigged up to the cigarette lighter, and he carried on watching a dubbed Brazilian soap opera as he drove us along the river. Ahead of us were the throbbing stars on top of the Kremlin towers and the fairy-tale domes of St. Basil’s at the back of Red Square, and next to us the soupy Moscow River, not yet frozen and curling mysteriously through the wild city. Behind me Masha and Katya were whispering to each other. The fat Russian’s car was a mobile heaven, a ten-minute paradise of hope and amazement.

  IF
YOU LOOKED closely at the ceiling of my flat you could just make out a grid of intersecting creases, which told the apartment’s history like the rings of a tree trunk or the wrinkles on a poet’s face. It had been a kommunalka, a communal flat, in which three or four families had lived together but separately. I used to imagine how people must have died and been discovered by their flatmates, or had died and not been discovered. Like millions of others they must have taken their individual toilet seats down from the wall when they went to crap, argued about the milk in the communal kitchen, informed on each other, and saved each other. Then in the nineties someone had knocked through all the old bedroom partitions and turned the whole place into a rich man’s pad, and from that past life only the lines on the ceiling where the walls used to meet it were left. There were only two bedrooms now, one for the guests who almost never came, and the bad history and my good luck made me feel guilty, at least to begin with.

  They took off their shoes in the way Russians are trained to and we went through into the kitchen. Masha sat on my lap and kissed me. Her lips were cold and strong. I looked over at Katya and she was smiling. I knew they might be taking me for something but there was nothing in my apartment that I wanted more than I wanted Masha, and I didn’t think they’d kill me. She took my hand and led me to my bedroom.

  I went to the window to close the curtains—they were a sort of rich ruched brown, and looked as if they should have opened to reveal an opera set—and when I turned round Masha had taken off her jumper and was sitting on the edge of my bed in her short skirt and a black bra. Katya was sitting in a chair, smiling. She never did it again, but that night she sat there all the way through, maybe for security, I don’t know. It was kinkily disconcerting, but then the whole thing felt surreal, and the vodka took the edge off.