Before leaving her office, I placed two theatre tickets on her desk — Chekhov’s Three Sisters at Taganskaya.
‘This is for you,’ I said. I’d been told that MGU professors expected little presents every now and then from their students. She stood up and thanked me for the tickets, said she would take her daughter to the theatre with her.
As I left Lyudmila Aleksandrovna’s office I was wondering who, among men, is not superfluous.
30
I HAD SOME SPARE TIME after seeing Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, so I decided to visit the university’s second-hand bookshops. Browsing through the Russian literature section I found an edition of War and Peace in two volumes, printed in 1944, with cardboard covers and a beautiful old-paper smell. I bought the two volumes for a hundred and forty rubles, about the price of a vodka shot in Propaganda.
I had arranged to meet Ira for lunch at the main stolovaya. I found her standing outside the entrance, reading a book in English. We said hello and I showed her my purchase. She seemed unimpressed.
‘Sergey’s mum has so many of these old books,’ she said. ‘We store them at the dacha.’ She dropped her book into a plastic bag. ‘Let’s eat. I’m starving.’
We stood at the end of the food queue. Ira looked thinner, her watery eyes brighter. When we reached the front, a sour-faced babushka with a paper kitchen hat loaded our trays with borsch, chicken, buckwheat. To drink we each took a glass of syrupy kompot. At the cashier’s desk I pointed at both our trays, but Ira insisted on paying for her own food.
‘It’s nice to be back at the university,’ I said, as we sat at one of the big tables by the window. I could see the courtyard covered in fresh snow. ‘I hardly come down these days.’
‘How’s the research going?’
‘I’m reading stuff,’ I said. ‘Thinking, meeting people. Just not writing that much. What about you, how are things?’
‘Not that good.’
I had learned by now that, whenever confronted by a ‘how are you’ or ‘how are things’, Russians rarely answered with a simple ‘fine, thanks’. They saw the question not as a polite greeting formula, but as a welcome chance to enumerate the many problems life had recently dumped on them.
‘What’s wrong?’ I was dissecting the chicken with my knife and fork, trying to extract some meat from the skinny thigh.
‘Sergey.’ Ira slurped a spoonful of soup. ‘He does nothing all day, just drinks beer, watches TV.’
‘What about the photography?’
‘Not even that any more. Not inspired, he says.’
‘What can you do,’ I said, smiling. ‘Sergey’s an artist.’
‘He’s my boyfriend,’ Ira said, gesturing at me with a piece of black bread, ‘and I love him with all my heart, but I’m tired of his laziness.’
‘Give him a break. He’s probably just going through a difficult phase.’
She held up the piece of black bread, which seemed to stand for Sergey in our conversation. ‘I don’t care if he wants to do photography or painting or whatever he wants, but he could have finished his degree and got a real job as well. In the end all he does is talk and talk and no action. I don’t know, sometimes I question the whole thing between us.’
I realised what looked different about Ira. She was wearing make-up. Eyeliner, shadow, powder — you could hardly see the dark circles around her eyes.
‘All talk and no action,’ I said. ‘Sergey’s a dreamer, a classic Russian idealist.’
Ira bit into her black bread. ‘A what?’
‘A Russian idealist. You know, a typical character in Chekhov’s works. Nabokov writes about this in his Lectures on Russian Literature.’ I took my red notebook out of my backpack and started to flip through the pages.
‘You and your Chekhov. The world is not a book, Martin. There is literature and there is reality.’
‘Here it is,’ I said, pointing at my own handwriting. ‘The Russian idealist, Nabokov says, is an intellectual who combines lofty dreams and human decency with an inability to put his ideals into action. Just like Sergey.’
I smiled.
Ira didn’t. She stared down at my notebook, lost in thought. ‘Sergey’s a drunk,’ she said. ‘He has no lofty dreams, he just wants to drink all day and maybe, one day, if he feels like it, take his stupid black and white photographs that nobody needs.’
A group of young students sat on the other side of our table.
‘Lucky you can support him.’
‘I don’t earn that much,’ she said, lowering her voice. ‘They exploit the Russian staff in our firm. American colleagues doing the same job as me get three or four times my salary. It’s so unfair. In the end, after sending money to my family and paying the bills, I can’t really save much. And, you know, I would like to rent my own apartment one day. Sergey’s mother is very nice, but the place is too small for the three of us.’
‘This chicken is all bone,’ I said. ‘There’s no flesh.’
‘Welcome to Russia,’ Ira said, in English.
Through the large window, I saw five or six students having a snowball fight. They seemed to be having fun, running after each other. I thought it would be nice to join them. There was something about fresh snow, a promise of renewal and peace.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Lena left me.’
‘Again?’
I nodded. ‘Yesterday. I think this time it’s for real.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing.’
‘You must have done something.’
‘I didn’t do anything. She found a hair in my bed.’
‘Another girl’s hair?’ Ira asked.
‘I guess. Long and black.’
‘You’re such an asshole.’
‘I told Lena it was probably an old hair caught in the blanket, but she didn’t want to listen. She just started to cry.’
‘And she left? Just like that?’
‘First she asked me if I loved her,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
‘What was I supposed to say? Anyway, she was all emotional, not listening.’
‘Western men, you’re all pussies.’
‘Then it occurred to me that the hair could be from my cleaning lady.’
‘Is that possible?’ Ira asked.
‘Maybe, who knows.’
‘You don’t know what your cleaning lady looks like?’
‘Perhaps it was her hair. Anyway, I told Lena I thought the hair belonged to the cleaning lady, but it was too late. She was too pissed off.’
‘Of course,’ Ira said, ‘she didn’t believe your bullshit.’
‘It’s not that she didn’t believe me. She chose not to believe me.’
Ira put her empty soup plate aside. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, she preferred the drama of finding another lover’s hair over the triviality of finding a hair from my cleaning lady.’
‘I see.’ Ira shook her head. ‘And, I presume, that’s because she’s a woman?’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘That’s because she’s Russian.’
31
WHEN THE INTERCOM RANG I was lying on the couch, reading a book. I glanced at my watch — almost midnight. I placed the book on the coffee table, face down so as not to lose the page, walked over to the entrance, picked up the receiver.
‘Martin, it’s Sergey. Are you alone?’
‘Sergey? Come up.’
I pulled a pair of jeans on over my underpants and opened the two front doors of my flat.
A minute later Sergey knocked at the open door.
‘Come in, come in,’ I said.