Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  “Excellent,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna.

  I smiled and chose to say nothing.

  12

  “I want you to meet my mother, Masha.”

  “What?”

  “My mother is coming to Russia next week. I am meeting her in St. Petersburg on Thursday and bringing her back to Moscow on Saturday. She’s staying here ’til Tuesday. I want you to meet her, Masha.”

  “Why?”

  I don’t know why. I wanted you to meet her too, eventually, so you could see what you were signing up for (though I know you’ve never quite understood why her pettiness gets to me so much, which I guess is often the way with other people’s parents). But that wasn’t it with Masha. She never asked very much about my family, and I don’t think I ever imagined a setup in which both she and my parents featured prominently. Partly I think I wanted to show her off, to show my mum how complete my Russian life was without her and everyone else. Maybe partly I was trying to reassure her, offering Masha up as a witness to my contentment, and therefore to her moderate success as a parent. Or maybe I wanted and expected Masha to wear or say or drink the wrong thing, to do the work of anger and insult that I didn’t have the stomach for myself. Perhaps I was even trying somehow to contaminate my mum with it, the stain that I darkly knew was coming. I think to Masha I was trying to say, look, no secrets, this is where I come from, come in, and at the same time, don’t worry, this is not me anymore, I’ve crossed over, look how far I’ve come.

  “Only for an hour, Masha,” I said. “Please. It will be nothing.”

  “Okay, Kolya,” she said, “I will meet your mother.”

  “Thank you. I owe you one, Masha.”

  “Okay.”

  I DOUBT SHE really wanted to come. I think she must have experienced some late spasm of motherly anxiety, or at least of the feeling that she was supposed to be anxious. It may have been brought on by the thrum of bad news that was starting to beat out of Russia—the bombing on the Metro, the mysterious pipeline explosions, and the thing with the ex-finance minister’s helicopter. I wished some parallel, grown-up Nick and Rosemary could have talked about it honestly, said they loved each other in their way but agreed that it would be too much—five days, one hundred and twenty hours—with too little to say and at the same time much too much if we dared or bothered. But they didn’t, and at the beginning of March, she came: my mother came to visit.

  I waited for her at the airport in St. Petersburg. It always looks, don’t you think, like a lovely little moment of grace, the moment when you see a crew of happy strangers walking through arrivals, having flown through the air and landed alive—and at the same time somehow enviable and painful, the way they embrace their relatives, sometimes cry, then link arms and turn back to lives you know nothing about. Eventually my mother came through with the other British tourists. We kissed each other awkwardly, like politicians at a summit, and I found a taxi driver to take us into town. He was a retired army colonel, he told me, when I chatted with him on the way. He said he had a nice line in knockoff army clothing if I ever wanted some.

  I’d booked us into a hotel at the wrong end of Nevsky Prospekt—one of those city-sized Soviet hotels with a thousand rooms, a bowling alley, a casino, an empty café on each floor, and a brothel in the basement. The house prostitutes were chatting around the coffee tables in the foyer when we arrived. The front desk made me pay for both nights up front, a sensible precaution considering the state of the rooms (electricity cords looping across the ceilings like telegraph wire, and in the bathrooms no sinks and suspiciously damp brown carpet). My mum said she was tired, so we ate in the hotel. She made me ask whether the salmon on the menu was fresh: the waitress said it “had only been frozen once.” There was a small posse of third-division mafiosi in the middle of the restaurant and a group of wobbly girls, who the men kept pushing out of their chairs to dance with each other between the tables, bullying the waiters to turn up the music.

  When we went to bed, someone kept calling me to ask whether I was bored, and would I like to be introduced to a very beautiful woman? I took the phone off the hook at about three in the morning, and slept until the late milky St. Petersburg dawn—the northern light that makes you feel as if you’re sleepwalking after you get up, or that you’re already awake when really you’re still dreaming.

  We spent a day and a half looking at the Rembrandts and gilt in the Hermitage, scurrying along the frozen canals (“I didn’t realise it would be this cold,” my mum said moronically), poking our noses into the yellow, malevolent St. Petersburg courtyards, with their shivering cats and icy piles of rubbish. We nosed obediently around the churches, all besieged by beggars—drunks, crippled soldiers, drunks impersonating soldiers, real uncrippled teenage army conscripts, who I imagined were working the streets to keep their officers in booze—and filled with icons, incense, woebegone head-scarfed women, and a haze of ancient prejudice. Plus the old addictive high, the crack for the soul that the Russian church seems to push: the idea that life in this hard place could be beautiful.

  I told her about my job, about Paolo and a little about the Cossack, but lost her when I tried to explain Narodneft and project finance. She told me she was worried about my father—not his health, she said, or not only his health. She started talking about their own childhoods, hers and my dad’s. His father had come back from the navy after the war, she said, but had always been away somewhere in his head, and she thought now that might explain the distance between Dad and my siblings and me. She didn’t go any further and I didn’t press her. That’s how it was between us that weekend: we kept starting conversations that might have led us into confidences or closeness, then steering away just in time. She went on and on about a very cold holiday she’d taken with her parents in Wales in the fifties, and how her father, who was a railwayman and who I never knew, made them all have a picnic in a hailstorm. It snowed as she talked. Her owlish glasses were constantly steaming up. She wore embarrassing boots.

  Down by the river, the Winter Palace glowed like a pink hallucination against the early sunset. The Bronze Horseman had dandruff. I stopped at a kiosk and bought Tatiana Vladimirovna one of those soppy snow globes, with a miniature St. Isaac’s Cathedral inside. In a funny way I think I missed her.

  “It’s a present,” I explained. “It’s for a woman I know.”

  “I see,” said my mother. She looked at me sideways as we slipped along the pavement ice beside a motionless canal. I could tell she wanted to insinuate something with her look, for it to be an adult moment between us. But she couldn’t quite manage it, flustered, and looked away.

  “No,” I said, “it’s for someone called Tatiana Vladimirovna, someone I know who used to live in St. Petersburg.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s Masha’s aunt.”

  “Masha … is she the one who called you at Christmas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah. Good.”

  We headed back to Nevsky Prospekt. It was about minus ten degrees. The winter somehow gets worse in March, I always found, because you can see the finish and you’re desperate for it, like soldiers who become more scared when they know their war is about to end.

  “It’s nice that you’re getting to know her family, Nicholas.” I think this was her way of asking whether it was serious.

  “Just her sister so far,” I said. “I mean, her cousin. And her aunt. The aunt lives quite close to me in Moscow. She made us pancakes the other day.”

  “Very nice,” she said. “Lovely. Pancakes.”

  I think maybe she was jealous of her—I think Rosemary was jealous of Tatiana Vladimirovna. I suppose she had reason to be. I’d spent more time with the old lady in the last few months than I had with my mum in the last four years. Which meant only one of them had seen what I’d become. Thank God I didn’t introduce them.

  WE TOOK THE train home, the five-hour service that runs in the afternoon. Outside the station in St. Petersburg there was an old woman standi
ng in a raincoat, cradling a small numb-looking dog. “Leningrad, Hero City” it says in big letters on the roof of the building opposite. On the train the two of us looked out silently at frozen bogs and trees, some standing and some recently felled in gritty cold clearings. Inside the carriage there was an aroma of Dagestani cognac and the intermittent, varied ringing of mobile phones. A waitress came round with a trolley. When I tried to order a beer and a glass of sparkling water she said, “You can’t be serious,” looking into my eyes until I asked for cognac instead. At the station in Moscow, half the human detritus of the lost empire seemed to have swept up around the statue of Lenin in the main hall.

  We found a taxi to take us to my flat. “Very cosy,” Mum said, peering around her from the entrance as if she was nervous to go any farther, in case I had an opium den or an S & M dungeon set up in the living room. You know what she’s like when she visits: struggling to seem relaxed but judging and rearranging when you’re not looking, quietly trying to make my place more like the family home. Making me feel like I’d never escape it. An hour later we went out to meet Masha at Café Lermontov—an overpriced restaurant done up like a boyar’s palace, around the Bulvar from my road on the way to Pushkin Square.

  Looking back, I think Masha was ashamed that evening. I think she was capable of feeling ashamed. Somehow my mother was too much, not part of the arrangement. She wasn’t rude exactly, just sort of shy and monosyllabic in a way that I hadn’t seen before. She was wearing black jeans tucked into her boots, a black sweater, and not a lot of makeup. She looked as if she was going on to rob a bank afterwards or to change the sets in a theatre. Her outfit seemed to say, I am not really here.

  “Nicholas tells me that you work in a shop,” my mother said over the tourist-trapski borsch.

  “Yes,” Masha said. “I work in shop selling mobile phones. Also calling plans.”

  “That sounds interesting.”

  Pause. Slurp. Distracting gaggle of top-of-the-range mistresses at a table in the corner.

  “Kolya said me you are teacher,” Masha finally managed.

  “Yes. I was a teacher in a primary school,” my mother said, “but now I am retired. My husband was a teacher too.”

  It was dumplings all round, and pirozhki (little Russian pies filled with meat and mushrooms), and not enough vodka.

  “We’re going to the Kremlin tomorrow,” I said.

  “Yes,” said Masha. “Kremlin and Red Square is very beautiful.”

  “Yes,” my mother said, “I am very excited.”

  No dessert, thanks.

  “Nicholas tells me that you are not from Moscow.”

  “No,” said Masha. “I am from city called Murmansk. It is most far from Moscow.”

  “It’s good that your family is here.”

  “My family?”

  “Tatiana Vladimirovna,” I said.

  “Yes,” Masha said. “Yes. We have aunt. Yes, it is very lucky.”

  Masha looked away from us, out of the window, and then up at the imitation eighteenth-century chandeliers.

  “I hope one day we will see you in England,” my mother said, which I suppose she felt she ought to say, though maybe she was actually talking to me.

  Masha smiled. The whole thing was agony, and then it was over.

  THE NEXT DAY I took Mum to the Kremlin to see the tarted-up churches, the massive cracked bell that was never rung, and the mighty cannon that was too big to fire. Two soldiers on the gates tried to tap us for a “special” entry fee. Afterwards we went out to Izmailovo market, so she could choose some souvenirs among the chaos of icons, sperm-whale tusks, astronauts’ helmets, Stalin paperweights, gas masks, samovars, Uzbek cotton, Nazi hand grenades, Russian dolls depicting Britney Spears and Osama bin Laden, carpets, maltreated dancing bears, and the sad fat freezing ladies singing “Kalinka malinka” for the tourists. She bought a furry hat for my father and a little jewellery box painted with a picture of a Russian forest for herself. I took the Monday off work, and we went out to Novodevichy Cemetery, where Khrushchev and other bigwigs are buried in gaudy tombs. Undaunted Russian children were hurling themselves on makeshift sledges down the slope from the walls of the adjacent convent, down to the frozen pond at the bottom, while the late winter sunshine bounced off the silver domes. We went to see Mayakovskaya Metro station on the way home, with its bright ceiling mosaics of zeppelins, parachutists, and fighter planes, and the discreet hammer-and-sickle insignia sprinkled around them that no one has got around to removing yet.

  In the evening we went to a classical music concert at the Conservatory on Bolshaya Nikitskaya, in the main performance hall, which has bad portraits of composers lined up around the walls. There was a bit of a scene at the beginning because two old women were sitting in our seats, and I could only get them to budge with the help of a ferocious usher. I don’t remember what the music was. But I do remember glancing across at my mother after the interval, looking down into her lap and seeing her hands joined together and her thumbs twiddling round each other, and having a sudden sense of seeing her as if she was still a girl on a cold Welsh holiday—of seeing the person she was before she was my mother, and realising how little I knew her.

  We walked home, up Bolshaya Nikitskaya to the building that belongs to one of the lying Russian news agencies, with its big, aquarium windows, then along the Bulvar. Half the pavement in my street had been roped off with plastic tape, strung between metal rods like at a crime scene, to protect pedestrians from the lethal icicles dangling from the gutters with intent. The hillock of snow that contained the orange Zhiguli had the shape of a collapsed igloo or a burial mound, its surface dimpled with litter and spiky with half-submerged bottles and struggling twigs.

  Oleg Nikolaevich was on his landing, carrying a bag that smelled of cat litter, smiling defeatedly like an aristocrat in a tumbrel. By then, I usually tried to avoid him, truth be told, so I wouldn’t have to talk about his missing friend, or see the disappointment in his eyes. I generally took the lift to avoid the spot he haunted, which I’m sure he noticed.

  “Oleg Nikolaevich,” I said, “this is my mother, Rosemary.”

  “Very pleased to meet you,” said Oleg Nikolaevich in Russian. He took her hand and I think he was about to kiss it, but thought better of it. Then in his rudimentary English he said, “How you like our Russia?”

  “Very much,” she said loudly, as some English people do when they’re talking to foreigners, as if they’re all just a little deaf. “It is a beautiful country.”

  We stood there, suffocating in the uncontrollable central heating, goodwill, and silence. Oleg Nikolaevich’s eyes were badly bloodshot, I remember noticing, as if he’d been crying.

  “No sign of Konstantin Andreyevich?”

  “Nothing at all,” Oleg Nikolaevich said.

  “How is George?”

  “George is always unhappy in March.”

  I said, “And how are you, Oleg Nikolaevich?”

  “In the kingdom of hope,” Oleg Nikolaevich said, “it is never winter.”

  I said good night, so did my mum, and we were turning away and upstairs when Oleg Nikolaevich dropped his bag of cat litter and grabbed the sleeve of her coat.

  “Mrs. Platt,” he said in English in a funny sort of stage whisper, “take care your son. Take care.”

  INSIDE MY FLAT my mum disappeared into the bathroom. Sitting in the kitchen I heard the taps running, the toilet flushing, teeth being brushed, the automatic unelaborate ablutions of a resigned sixtysomething.

  I’d given her my bed and opened out the futon in the spare room for myself. I heard her go into my room, then come out again and pad into the kitchen. She was wearing an old ankle-length nightie that might once have been purple or lilac but had been washed down to a gruel grey. She went to the fridge for some water, and stopped and turned back towards me on her way to bed.

  “What did he mean, Nicholas? Your neighbour.”

  “I don’t know, Mum. He’s upset because he’s lo
st a friend. I think he drinks.” I said this even though I didn’t believe it. As far as I know, Oleg Nikolaevich was always sober when I saw him.

  She stood there in silence, but she was trying, really trying, I could see that.

  “Are you sure about that girl, Nicholas? About Masha.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s just that she seemed … cold. Too cold for you maybe, Nicky.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m sure.”

  “Are you happy, Nicholas?”

  It was the biggest question she’d asked me in about twenty years. I thought about it. I answered truthfully.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m happy.”

  I OWED MASHA a favour, and she called it in.

  It was, I guess, approaching the middle of March. There was a crust like thick dried semen on the right wrist of my puffy Michelin-man jacket, where for months I’d wiped my nose as I struggled through the streets. I hadn’t seen Masha for a week or so, since the evening with my mother. I think she may have been out of Moscow again, but, again, she didn’t say so. I hadn’t seen Katya for longer. The three of us met in a restaurant just off Tverskaya, on the other side from the stretch of heated pavement outside the mayor’s office. It was still below zero, but Masha was already back in her autumn cat-fur coat. Katya was late.

  “Did you like my mother?” I asked Masha.

  “For me, it was very interesting. She is—how you say in English?—scared. She is scared person. Maybe like you.”

  She had her hair drawn back, tight across her scalp, and her eyes picked up the glow of the spotlights in the ceiling. She looked at me and I looked away. A waitress came and we ordered vodka and cutlets.

  I said, “How is your mother, Masha?”

  “Not bad,” she said, “but very tired. Coming old now.”

  “I would like to meet her,” I said.

  “One day, maybe.”

  “How is your job?”

  “I pretend work, they pretend pay me.”

  Katya came in. She was only six months older than she’d been when I’d first met them, but it was a long six months for a girl of her age. She’d grown up into her hips and lips and possibilities. They’d been a long six months for all of us—or long and short at the same time, as always with Russian winters, which always seem like they can never end and must go on forever, right up until the warm moment when it feels as if they’ve never happened at all.