Snowdrops

by A. D. Miller

  That’s what I learned when my last Russian winter thawed. The lesson wasn’t about Russia. It never is, I don’t think, when a relationship ends. It isn’t your lover that you learn about. You learn about yourself.

  I was the man on the other side of the door. My snowdrop was me.

  17

  In the end, under pressure from the bankers and our London bosses, Paolo and I went up north to check on the Cossack’s oil operation for ourselves. We flew up from the abattoir-like domestic terminal at Sheremetyevo Airport, on a plane seemingly held together by Sellotape and hope. It was beautiful from above, the Arctic landscape: the pine forests were still dusted with diehard ice, little streams slalomed and frothed among the trees, and the sea was dark and calm.

  The nearest airport to the site of the terminal was at Murmansk, the city where Masha and Katya said they had grown up. I hadn’t clocked the connection until we made the trip. Now, looking back, it feels sort of fitting and hurtful at once that I ended up there. At the time I was excited, even though it was too late and things had gone bad. I was excited to see the parks they might have sat in, the pavements they walked on, the views that wallpapered their lives. My grandfather had been there too, of course, when it was hell on earth. But I don’t think I thought much about him. There was a big war memorial at the edge of town, but I didn’t visit it. I didn’t have time.

  The Cossack’s project company had an address that the hotel receptionist said was in an old Soviet housing estate. She said it was up near the Ferris wheel that rotated very slowly on a hill above the docks. We called the number we had for the office, but nobody answered.

  On the second day Paolo and I went by ourselves to the spot on the coast from which, according to Vyacheslav Alexandrovich, the oil would very soon be pumped out through a pipeline to the supertanker. The road stopped a few hundred metres from the shore. We got out of the taxi and walked along a rough path. It was hot and there were mosquitoes. We slung our suit jackets over our shoulders and swore. On a flat stretch by the sea there was a square pit, about the size of a squash court, muddy but dried up, like a kidnapper in a thriller might keep a woman captive in. But there were no pipes, no supertanker, and no oil. There was nothing.

  Paolo lit a cigarette and smoked it in one drag. We stood up there for about ten minutes, taking in the dimensions of our fuckedness, or that’s how it felt to me. Then we went back to the hotel to get drunk.

  We sat at the bar on the top floor, run by a Dagestani barman and a Korean madam. We drank for a long time and a lot. It was light around the clock up there in the summer, and through the window at three in the morning we could see cranes standing around the docks, silhouetted like paralysed insects against the sentimental pink clouds, with seagulls wheeling around them. It wasn’t really our fault, we told each other. We’d done all the paperwork right. Maybe we’d given the Cossack a little more slack than he deserved. Perhaps my mind had sometimes wandered. But we weren’t engineers or private investigators: we were only lawyers. Basically, we agreed, we’d just been unlucky to be exposed when the Kremlin changed the rules—when someone decided that actually running businesses and siphoning off their profits month by month was too much like hard work, and that it would be easier just to fleece the banks instead.

  All the same, we knew this would stick to us forever. No partnership for me, probably the boot for Paolo, no bonuses for either of us, and very likely no more Moscow. No more no limits.

  “Fucking British Virgin Islands,” Paolo said. I could make out a birdshit-covered Lenin statue in the square beneath the hotel. “Fucking Cossack. Fucking Russia.”

  His pupils had shrunk to vicious black dots. Later on, I wondered about Paolo—I wondered whether, just maybe, he had somehow been mixed up in it. I thought about how he had been with the Cossack, about the times he’d seemed to be angry and that meeting at Narodneft on New Year’s Eve when we’d approved the loan, trying to remember any moments or tells I might have missed. But it didn’t add up to much or enough.

  We drank to us, and then to Moscow and the weasel president. Paolo took one of the Korean madam’s plump associates back to his room for comfort. I lay on my bed, looking out into the milky Arctic air. I felt like crying but I didn’t.

  A few hours later—I’m not sure what time it was, I was still drunk, and down, and also on a strange sort of high at the same time, the high of nothing more to lose—I got up, went out, and strolled in the direction of the cranes and the docks. I crossed over a railway line on a graffitied footbridge and landed on a cargo quay. I heard music, and saw a café open a little way along the water.

  It had a tiled floor and a counter and one human being, a fat man in an apron with crowdedly tattooed hands.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  “I’m listening,” he said.

  “Coffee, please.”

  He put a teaspoon of Nescafé in a cup and gestured at an urn of hot water at the end of the counter. I mixed the coffee and sat down. The café smelled of oil. An antique fridge gave off an ominous hum.

  I remembered what Masha had told me about her father. I said to the café owner, “Is this the base for the nuclear icebreakers?”

  “No.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Round the bay. There is a separate military installation. It is secret.” They kept the submarines there too, he told me. It was where they’d towed the one that sank a few years before, to fish out the bodies of those poor swollen boys. I could see that he wanted to talk but needed to pretend that he didn’t.

  “Is that where the Petrograd docks?”

  “Which?”

  “The Petrograd. It’s an icebreaker.”

  “No. There is no Petrograd.”

  “Yes, there is. I’m sure there is. I mean, I think there is … or maybe there used to be but they took it out of service?”

  “No,” said the fat man. “There is no Petrograd. I worked on that base for twenty-five years. I was a mechanic. There is no Petrograd.”

  I cupped my coffee. My hands shook. I remembered another thing Masha had told me about her childhood in Murmansk.

  “Tell me,” I said. “The wheel—the big wheel.” I gestured over my shoulder in the direction of the hill it stood on. “In the eighties, was it expensive? I mean, was it too expensive for some children to ride?”

  “It wasn’t there in the eighties,” the fat man said. “They put it up in 1990. It was the last thing the Soviet Union did for us. I remember because I got married that year. After we signed the register, we went on the new wheel.” He looked down at the floor for a second, maybe fondly, maybe ruefully, I couldn’t tell. “It cost twenty kopecks,” he said. “But in the eighties it wasn’t there.”

  NARODNEFT DENIED ALL liability for the Cossack’s scam. They’d only promised to pump the oil and pay the fees, they pointed out, after the terminal was built. Their listing on the stock exchange was postponed. The assorted government ministries we petitioned told us to fuck off, only less politely. We never heard from Vyacheslav Alexandrovich the surveyor. They must have turned him, probably that first time when he went missing, then came back to us with his bogus report. Maybe it was threats, maybe money, maybe women, probably all three. I can’t blame him. From our firm’s perspective the only consolation was that our Arctic debacle was swamped by the spate of even worse Russian news—the big expropriations up in Moscow, the tanks down in the Caucasus, the fear and grudges that erupted in the Kremlin, and seemed to spread across Red Square and the whole shabby, stunning Russian continent. We got a few paragraphs in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, and an honourable mention in a feature Steve Walsh stitched together about naïve bankers in the Wild East.

  Soon afterwards the Russians and Americans started squaring up again, the Kremlin postponed the elections, and most of the foreigners started heading for the airports anyway. But I think Paolo would have stayed on if the company hadn’t cut him loose to help pacify the bankers. I heard he moved
to Rio.

  Instead of being fired I was called back to London to work on due diligence in the corporate division at head office, as you know: to sit in the basements of companies that are being bought or sold, vet files, and never under any circumstances speak to clients—a bit like being put back on traffic after you’ve been a detective. Back to the thin life I have now. The old university friendships that are all duty and awkwardness, the job that is killing me. You.

  I think I might just have quit the firm and clung on in Moscow, possibly tried to get a job with some up-and-coming steel magnate or aluminium baron, if I’d still had Masha. I knew she didn’t really love me—she didn’t have to love me. I would have carried on, I think, seeing her twice a week, taking her home twice a week, knowing there was no other or better me I could be somewhere else, anchored to Moscow by the heavy inertia of approaching middle age. I don’t think I’d have worried too much about how much of what she’d told me had been true, or even about what she’d done. I could have lived without Tatiana Vladimirovna. I might have managed to forget about her. So I think that Masha was better than me in the end. She had Seriozha, so she had a better excuse. And she at least acted like she’d done something wrong. I don’t know who was in charge, but I hope she got a decent cut.

  A couple of days before I left Russia, I went once again to Tatiana Vladimirovna’s old place. It was the last time, and to be honest I think it was more out of nostalgia than anything more moral or noble. I punched random numbers into the keypad in the courtyard until someone buzzed me in. I climbed the stairs to her apartment. The door had been padded in maroon leather since the last time I saw it, and a creepy security camera had been installed above the top left-hand corner, which tracked me as I approached the threshold as if it was about to zap me with a laser. I rang the bell, listened to the footsteps, felt the eye peering at me through the peephole, and heard three or four locks turning and a bolt being drawn.

  He was wearing a silk kimono and a green face pack and at first I didn’t recognise him.

  I said, “Excuse me …” trailing off as I tried to place him. I knew I’d met him before, but I couldn’t remember where. Through work maybe, I thought, or at a party somewhere, maybe that one time I’d been for the drinks they threw at the British embassy to celebrate the Queen’s birthday.

  “Yes?”

  “Excuse me …”

  I could see boredom and mild anxiety competing on his forehead as we stood there, both of us waiting for me to finish my sentence. Then I got it. It was the Russian in the plush coat who’d been leaving Tatiana Vladimirovna’s as I was arriving a few months before. His hair was still impeccable. I peered around his silk shoulders and saw that the Siberian chandelier was gone, and the walls of the corridor had been painted racing green. The eternal parquet was still there. I heard a tap running and a radio playing. I thought, They sold it on before they even got it from her.

  “I wanted to ask you, do you know where the old lady is, the one who used to live here? Where is Tatiana Vladimirovna?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

  He smiled and slowly closed the door.

  I went outside and stood beside the pond. I thought I’d try Masha’s number one more time, for the last time. This time it rang and rang and rang but didn’t cut into the automated out-of-order message. It rang and rang and rang, and then she answered.

  “Allo?”—in that impatient, time-is-money way the Russians have.

  It didn’t sound like Masha, and it took me a few seconds to work it out. It was Katya.

  “Allo?”

  “Katya?”

  She went quiet. A bottle smashed somewhere on the other side of the pond, somewhere near the basking fantasy animals. I guess there must have been some credit left on the SIM card that they didn’t want to waste. I guess they reckoned that I and anybody else they’d been trying to lose and didn’t want to speak to would have given up dialling that number, and that they could safely switch it back on.

  “Katya, it’s me, Kolya.”

  She was quiet again. Then, “Da, Kolya.”

  “How are you?”

  “Normal.”

  “Can I speak to Masha?”

  “No, Kolya. It is not possible. Masha has gone away.”

  “To see Seriozha?” I said, in a voice that didn’t sound like me. “Has she gone to see Seriozha?”

  “Da, Kolya. To Seriozha.”

  I hadn’t thought it through properly, what I wanted to say, what I wanted to get out of it. I could hear her almost hanging up.

  I went back to the beginning. “Why me, Katya? Why did you choose me?”

  She paused, I suppose trying to figure out if it could cost her anything to tell me the truth. She must have decided that there was nothing I could do to them.

  “You watch us too long, Kolya. In Metro. We see you are easy. We have other possibilities. But then we see that you are lawyer. This for us was very interesting, very useful. Also foreigner is good. But it could have been another person. We need only someone she may trust.”

  “So that was all? For Masha, I mean. That was all. Just useful.”

  “Maybe not all, Kolya. Maybe not. I don’t know. Please, Kolya.” She still sounded the same, half child, but very tired. “It was business,” she said. “Just business.”

  “Why the money too?” I said. “Why did you take my money?”

  “Why not?”

  I remember that I wasn’t as furious as I wanted to be.

  “When I saw you at the Uzbek restaurant—you know, during the winter—why didn’t you want me to say anything to Masha?”

  “I worry maybe she will be angry. She will think maybe you see everything is not true. For me it is not good when she is angry.”

  “Are you really cousins, Katya? Tell me. Are you really from Murmansk? Who is Stepan Mikhailovich?”

  “This is not important.”

  There was only one thing left.

  “Where is she?” I said. “Where is Tatiana Vladimirovna?”

  She hung up.

  THE AFTERNOON BEFORE I left Russia, the last day of four and half years that feel like a whole life, I went down to Red Square. I made my way around the Bulvar, past the summer café and the beer tents to Pushkin Square. Then I walked down Tverskaya and through the underpass beneath the crazy six-lane highway at the bottom. A small crew of diehard Communists with ragged hammer-and-sickle flags and wild eyebrows were holding a demonstration, trickling in from the direction of the Ferrari showroom and the statue of Marx. There were about three hundred riot police, most of them sitting in the funny rickety buses that they always roll up in, a few outside smoking and tapping their truncheons against their shields. The Lenin impressionist was having his photo taken with a cluster of Chinese businessmen.

  I walked up through the gates. In front of me the make-believe domes of St. Basil’s soared above the cobbles. Far above the Aztec mausoleum, the giant stars on the Kremlin towers glowed blood-red in the sun. It was high summer, but even then you could sense that the winter was recuperating somewhere across the Moscow River, getting ready for its comeback. You could feel the cold germinating in the warmth. I stood in the middle of the square, tasting the air and the city, until a policeman came over and moved me on.

  You’ve wanted to know why I haven’t talked to you about Russia. It’s partly because it seems so long ago and far away, my old life without a seat belt, too hard to explain to anyone else, too private. I guess maybe that’s true of all our lives. Nobody can ever live yours except you, whether you live it in Chiswick or Gomorrah, and there is only a limited point in trying to revive it in words. And it’s partly that, the way it ended, it seemed best to let it die. I didn’t think I could tell you the whole story, until now, so I’ve just kept quiet.

  But it hasn’t only been that. Since I’m being honest, or trying to be, since I’m telling you almost everything, I should tell you the other reason, maybe the main reason. It’s up to you wha
t you do about it.

  Of course, when I think about it there is guilt, there is some guilt. But most of all there is loss. That is what really hurts. I miss the toasts and the snow. I miss the rush of neon on the Bulvar in the middle of the night. I miss Masha. I miss Moscow.