by A. D. Miller
Apart from a dozen or so central-casting gangsters with fear-me black jackets, tree-trunk necks, and death-row haircuts, I was the oldest person there by roughly fifteen years. The leggy Odessan women looked at me in my jeans and party shirt like I was a flasher or a beggar. There was a strip show—a weird nude ballet featuring an immobile male hulk and two disappointingly long-in-the tooth, saggy-in-the-tits women. The ironic clubbers cheered and whooped.
When the strippers picked up their clothes and scuttled off, I climbed a pyramid and scanned the dance floor for the girls. It isn’t altogether clear for me now, that night, but in my dreamy memory of it I fought my way over to their spot in the corner by the stage, apologising inaudibly to the owners of the toes I trod on, my glasses sweating, my ears pounding. They’d teamed up with another girl and a boy, I remember, but the strangers retreated into the jungle of limbs when they saw me coming.
I stood in front of Masha, grabbed both sides of her head to keep it still, and shouted as loud as I could.
“Who is Seriozha?”
“What?” Her face stopped dancing but her body tried to carry on.
“Who is Seriozha, Masha?”
“Not now, Kolya.”
“Is Seriozha your son, Masha?”
“Not tonight, Kolya.”
“Is he with your mother? Was your mother really ill when you were young? Do you have a mother, Masha?”
“Not tonight. Tonight is for you, Kolya. Let’s dance, Kolya.”
Her body started up again. I still had her head, but she reached around me with one hand for Katya, and then I felt Katya’s arms pushing over my shoulders and her fingers mating with mine at the back of Masha’s skull, and Katya’s breath on my neck and her firm front pressing into the middle of my back.
I was half-full of piña colada, and the other half of me was drunk on understanding. I let Katya pull away my hands, stopped shouting at Masha, and swayed into my usual school-disco shuffle. We must have looked like a cheesy male fantasy.
But the thing about Odessa, even more than in Moscow, is that in the right light, with the right lubrication, you can somehow make things seem better than they truly are. You can make things be what you want them to be. People live on that, and so can you. So did I, for that long last night. The dry ice cleared, and I saw the shimmer of the Black Sea beyond the nightclub stage, and the crests of the waves on their way in to find us by the moonlight. It seemed to me that I could dance, dance like the bodies twisting on tables, and the bodies clambering up onto podiums to let the world see how young and beautiful they were in the young summer. It seemed that the gangsters meant no harm, and that Masha might have meant it when she kissed me. The pyramid looked like a pyramid, the fantasy smelled like happiness, and the night felt like freedom.
WE’D ONLY BEEN in bed for an hour or so when the light sailed over the water, through the trees, and between our hotel curtains. I looked for signs and clues and stretch marks on Masha’s hips and sleeping belly, but I couldn’t find them.
15
It was full-on summer when we got back from Odessa. Spring happens in a hurry in Moscow, seeming to pass almost overnight or while you’re watching a film: you wake up, or blink out of the cinema into the warming air, to discover it’s been and gone. I could taste the hormones and the energy. Something had to happen with that energy, someone had to do something with it.
A few days after we flew home—a day or two before the date we’d fixed to sign the contract for the flats—Masha and I went to see Tatiana Vladimirovna again. She met us at the door, shooed us out, and together we went for a walk on the path around the thawed pond. We gave her another little present that we’d bought for her, a fridge magnet that depicted the Odessa opera house and beside it the proud head of a tsarina. She held it up close to her eyes, then put it in the inside pocket of her skimpy navy spring coat. She said she’d love to go to the Black Sea again one day.
“You will,” I said.
“Maybe,” she said.
After that, Masha told her that there was a problem with the apartments. In fact there were two of them. The first problem, which according to Masha I had identified, was that if Tatiana Vladimirovna swapped her apartment for the new one as they’d agreed, she might have to pay hundreds of thousands of roubles in property tax. The authorities, Masha said, would calculate what they thought the new place was worth, and add that figure to the fifty thousand dollars to determine the nominal value of her old home. The total would be above the threshold at which property tax kicked in. So Tatiana Vladimirovna might lose the fifty thousand and maybe have to pay more besides.
“Is this correct, Nikolai?” Tatiana Vladimirovna asked me. I don’t know why she trusted me so much. Masha was looking me in the eye, not winking or encouraging or slyly nodding, just knowing what by then I was ready to say and do.
“It’s true,” I said in my best lawyer’s voice, even though this was the first I’d heard of it. I checked later: it wasn’t. But it sounded true.
There was a solution, Masha explained. They could make two separate contracts: one for the sale of Tatiana Vladimirovna’s flat by the pond, just for the fifty thousand dollars, then another one for the purchase of the new place in Butovo. On the second contract they would set some fair-sounding price for the Butovo purchase, a number high enough so the authorities wouldn’t think the sale was a sham. But the figure wouldn’t be important because Tatiana Vladimirovna wouldn’t actually have to pay it.
“Two contracts,” said Tatiana Vladimirovna. “I see. How long until we sign the second contract, the one for my new home?”
“It will be soon,” said Masha. “Very soon.”
Tatiana Vladimirovna stopped walking and looked down towards her shoes for a second. She shrugged and said, “Okay.”
The second problem, Masha said, was that Stepan Mikhailovich had called to say the apartment in Butovo was almost ready, but not quite. It would be ready in a week or two, he promised, three weeks at the very most. But Masha suggested that Tatiana Vladimirovna should go ahead with the sale of her place anyway—she should sign the papers, take the money. She said we’d already made an appointment at the bank where the cash would be counted, and we would have to pay for it now even if we postponed the deal. (In those days, property sales, like all major Russian transactions—buying off judges, bribing tax inspectors—were always and only done in cash.)
“For that we have to pay?”
“Yes, Tatiana Vladimirovna,” I said.
However, Masha went on, Tatiana Vladimirovna would be able go on living in the place by the pond until Butovo was finished. It was just the kitchen to go, she said, Stepan Mikhailovich was putting in the worktops and the dishwasher and then it would be done. The only thing Tatiana Vladimirovna would have to do was de-register from her old building—that is, tell the authorities that she was no longer living there. She would be living nowhere. Masha said all this with no hurry or stumbling, no obvious nerves or emotion. She was amazing.
“Dishwasher!” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, and she laughed. Then she paused, a long pause during which I worried that she would consent but—I admit—worried more that she wouldn’t. I remember looking down at the ground and thinking how miraculously dry the path around the pond was. The trees looked alive again, almost pure green, and there was a banging coming from the restaurant tent on the other side of the water. The magical animals crawling and pouncing on the wall of the building opposite Tatiana Vladimirovna’s shone as though they’d been groomed for the summer.
Finally Tatiana Vladimirovna said, “Okay. Let’s meet at the bank,” and the three of us walked on.
THE BURIED ZHIGULI had emerged from its cocoon of snow in my street. It had a crack in the windscreen but looked cleaner than it did before it disappeared, as if its stains had been washed away by the winter. When I passed the building where Oleg Nikolaevich’s friend lived, or used to live, I saw that a team of Tajik workmen were schlepping wheelbarrows of sand, bundles of plywood,
and vats of paint up the stairs. The summer café on the corner of the Bulvar had thrown open its shutters to let in the caressing air. The poplar trees that some genius Soviet planner had planted all over the city were in heat, sending out their furry white seeds—a benign June plague Muscovites call “summer snow,” which sticks in your hair and sometimes your throat, and collects along the gutters in clumps that drunk adolescents set fire to.
The bank we used for signing the final contract and counting the cash was close to Tatiana Vladimirovna’s apartment, in the part of Moscow known as Kitai Gorod, China Town. There was a gambling hall next door, I remember, and a discount DVD store opposite. I was late. It was during the week—a Monday, I think—and we were busy in the office with another new loan. The cash was still cascading into Moscow, even after what the Kremlin had done to that uppity oil tycoon, his unfortunate lawyer, and his livid minority shareholders. When I arrived, they were huddled on the pavement outside the bank, Masha and Katya both in trouser suits that I hadn’t seen before (tight at the hips), Stepan Mikhailovich with his rat tail and a vaguely tweed jacket, Tatiana Vladimirovna in a long pleated skirt and brown blouse. We went inside, past a line of moody tellers behind their fortified windows, through a security-coded door, and into a sort of boardroom, its windows high up near the ceiling like in a prison, tepid water in a decanter on the table.
There were two bank officials waiting for us: one to countersign the documents to be sent to the state property registration bureau, the other to count the money, which Stepan Mikhailovich had brought with him in a fraying leather briefcase. (I never did know where the other twenty-five thousand dollars came from.) In the far corner of the room there was a doorway, and across it they had one of those sliding metal security grates that you see outside shops when they’ve locked up for the night. They opened the gate, and we processed through the door in single file and down a spiral metal staircase—the bank people, Stepan Mikhailovich, Tatiana Vladimirovna, and me as her legal representative—silent apart from our footsteps and a couple of gasps from the old lady. She was in front of me, and when someone locked the gate behind us, screeching it across the threshold and then bolting it, I saw her head half turn back in some automatic Soviet spasm.
The room at the bottom was a windowless, airless, merciless vault with a small wooden table in the middle, the kind you and I took exams on in the old days, and a solitary light dangling above it. The walls were made of safety deposit boxes. The woman from the bank whose job it was to count the cash—plump, middle-aged, Armenian, I think, friendly in an exhausted sort of way—sat down in the only chair. Stepan Mikhailovich took the money, fifty thousand dollars worth of thousand-rouble notes, out of the briefcase and handed it to her to scrutinise. The rest of us stood around her, breathing, while she fanned out the notes under a fluorescent lamp. She looked at them through an eyepiece like the ones diamond dealers use, then ran the money in stacks through a noisy counting machine. She divided the bills into three piles, strangled them with elastic bands, and put them inside a charcoal-grey deposit box. She made out a form, and finally slid the deposit box into a slot in the wall.
We panted up the stairs. Tatiana Vladimirovna sat down at the table with Stepan Mikhailovich. I stood against the wall between Masha and Katya. Tatiana Vladimirovna signed the new sales agreement that I’d got Olga the Tatar to draw up for us in a hurry: just her flat for our fifty thousand dollars. She signed quickly, without reading the document, and turned towards us to smile. A copy of the agreement would be sent to the property registration bureau, the bank people explained. When, in a week or two, they estimated, the bureau sent back the certificate declaring Stepan Mikhailovich was now the owner, he would get the duplicate set of keys to the property that the bank would be holding, and Tatiana Vladimirovna could come back for the money.
“Congratulations!” said Masha.
“Oi, Tatiana Vladimirovna!” said Katya, and lunged forward to hug her from behind as she sat at the table.
“Congratulations!” I said.
“Thanks,” said Stepan Mikhailovich.
“Dishwasher!” said Tatiana Vladimirovna, and laughed.
VYACHESLAV ALEXANDROVICH the surveyor went missing again around that time. The loan had been disbursed in full, but he was supposed to confirm that all the terms and deadlines were being observed—in particular, that the terminal would deliver its first oil that summer, and thus that the project company was on course to meet the repayment schedule. But his phone was switched off, and he’d set up a mysterious autoreply message on his e-mail account that said he was extremely sorry, please forgive him, it might be some time before he was able to respond. The Cossack was all of a sudden incommunicado too. Sergei Borisovich went round to the building opposite the Kremlin where we’d had our last meeting with him. It turned out to belong to an oil-trading firm owned by an obese Uzbek murderer. They told Sergei Borisovich they’d never heard of the Cossack and escorted him out of the building. When we contacted Narodneft, they reminded us, in writing, that they had no legal responsibility for any undertaking made by the joint venture. Paolo said there was no reason to trouble the banks yet, but I could see that he was stressed: he had dark circles under his eyes and he’d started swearing in Italian. He kept referring to the Cossack as “the friend of Nicholas.” People avoided him in the office, and jumpily watched the red numbers tick up above the door of the lift, willing theirs to arrive, if they got stuck inside it with him.
I couldn’t get away from work the day the certificate came through, so I wasn’t there to see Tatiana Vladimirovna waddling off, as I imagined her doing, with fifty thousand dollars’ worth of roubles in a plastic shopping bag, heading back to the flat she’d lived in for forty years and expected to stay in for a few more weeks. It definitely would have happened, though, about ten days later, around the middle of June, when the days are longest and the winter seems like a dream. They couldn’t fix that part. The bank was in charge, and the people there would only have given the money to her. So she must have had it, at least to begin with.
But before I left her, on the day they counted the notes down in the vault, Tatiana Vladimirovna invited us up to hers for the last time. It was only a short walk from the bank. Her boxes were dutifully stacked in the corridor. The furniture looked naked and embarrassed. The plates and certificates had been taken down from the wall. There was a bunch of flowers in the kitchen sink, which Tatiana Vladimirovna said her colleagues at the museum had given her, along with a new radio, when she’d left her job at the end of the previous week.
She gave me a present too. She said she had too many things, she didn’t know whether she had room for all of them in Butovo, what use did she have for such things? She wanted me to have a memento of our friendship. It was the photo of her inside the gymnastic wheel, taken when she still had four decades of communist lies and shortages ahead of her, before a decade of hope, more lies and shortages, and finally Masha, Katya, and me. I tried not to take it, but she insisted. I think you saw it once in a drawer, and asked me who it was, and I mumbled something about souvenirs but didn’t really answer. Of everything I own—not all that much, admittedly, for a man of my age and bank balance—that photo of Tatiana Vladimirovna in her black-and-white youth is the thing I would be most happy to lose, the possession I would most like to escape from, but somehow can’t.
16
Like I said, it was the smell.
The flowers were back in their beds in the middle of the Bulvar, gaudy regiments of pansies and tulips. In accordance with a secret clause in the Russian constitution, half the women under forty had started dressing like prostitutes. The warmth and the petrol fumes were creating a hazy mirage effect above the casinos on the Novy Arbat, as you looked up towards the river and the Hotel Ukraina. It was the middle of June, and Konstantin Andreyevich started to smell.
I was leaving my apartment in the early evening, on my way, I remember, to meet Steve Walsh at the American diner up near Mayakovskaya Square.
When I walked down the stairs to Oleg Nikolaevich’s landing, I found George sitting on the mat outside their front door. He was an old, arthritic white cat, with pink ears and disconcertingly pink eyes, fat like he was pregnant but with a bone-skinny tail. He was staring at the wall as if he was suffering from posttraumatic stress. I leaned over him and rang Oleg Nikolaevich’s bell, more than once, but there was no reply. George’s empty pink eyes and my eyes met. I left him there and headed down the stairs to the front door and the tasty evening air.
I saw Oleg Nikolaevich first. He was facing away from me but I could tell it was him, standing there in a crumpled suit, his head down like he was praying or weeping. There were other people moving and talking all around him, but he was standing perfectly still and alone, and nobody was talking to him.
From the way I came, the crowd was blocking my view. But I caught the smell immediately—the rotting-fruit smell that had given Konstantin Andreyevich away. From about ten metres away, I saw the foot.
There was only one, stepping out of the boot of the orange Zhiguli, hanging down over the smudged number plate. The foot still had its shoe on, I remember. Above the shoe there was a stretch of sock, and above the sock there was a glimpse of greenish flesh.
From the knee up he was still in the boot and out of sight, thank Christ, but somehow I knew straightaway that it was Konstantin Andreyevich, Oleg Nikolaevich’s missing friend. I reached Oleg Nikolaevich and stood alongside him, saw the thinning white swirls on the top of his bowed head, and looked at the ground with him for three minutes or a century, me and him, apart and together. Oleg Nikolaevich hadn’t glanced up or sideways but I knew he knew I was there.
