‘The thing is,’ I said, ‘I met her before I met you.’ I thought this would somehow make things more understandable for Polina. ‘It’s mostly sexual attraction. Nothing serious, really. I like you, Polina.’
Polina went to the entrance of the apartment and tried to open the first door, but her hands were shaking — she could not turn the key.
‘Why don’t we meet tomorrow?’ I said. ‘We can go to TGI Fridays, and then to the cinema.’
Polina finally managed to open the door. She turned round.
‘You are cruel,’ she said.
Then she left.
Lena arrived an hour later. We hardly talked. After removing her hat, scarf, shoes and coat, Lena continued with the rest of her clothes, sweater, shirt, bra, jeans. She stood in the corridor, silent — wearing nothing but her necklace, her blonde hair uncombed, her breasts whiter than I remembered. Then she kissed me.
Thirty minutes later we were lying on the couch in silence. I was staring at the tapestry on the wall — at Ganesh’s elephant head and his useless little brush. I didn’t know what to say. Somehow, despite all the anticipation and all the longing that had built up over the weeks, being with Lena didn’t feel as good as the thought of being with Lena. I could not understand why, but her body could not fill the emptiness inside me.
Then Lena dressed, kissed me goodbye, left.
I closed the doors and stepped into the kitchen. At the sight of Polina’s bottle of wine, a black void grew in my chest and sucked the air out of my lungs. I let myself fall onto a chair and covered my face, surprised to find a tear rolling down my cheek.
35
IN WINTER I WOULD OFTEN walk along Bolshaya Bronnaya, turning right into Malaya Bronnaya, keeping to the edge of the pavement where the snow was fresh and crunched under my feet. It was a beautiful walk along the quieter streets of the centre and I would focus my mind on the frozen air flooding my lungs, then steaming out my mouth in small white clouds. After fifteen minutes I would reach Patriarschiye Prudy.
I would stroll around the frozen pond, where children played with sleds or hockey sticks. Then I would walk back through Mayakovskaya into Tverskaya, descending towards Pushkinskaya and, often, when the cold had seeped through my many layers of clothing and had reached my bones, I would enter the Revolution Museum, which was always empty but warm. I would leave my coat, scarf, gloves and hat in the cloakroom, get a hand-cut ticket from a babushka at the entrance and wander into the exhibition galleries.
I passed through the initial halls, which contained old soviet flags, newspaper clippings and photos of Lenin, and walked straight into the rooms with soviet propaganda posters from the 1950s and 1960s, the wooden floors creaking under my feet. The museum had long lost its purpose, but there was a church-like tranquillity about it. I was usually the only visitor among the cleaning ladies and unsmiling dezhurnayas.
One morning, a couple of days after Polina’s departure, I found myself standing in front of a poster depicting a blonde soviet woman. One hand shielding her impossibly bright blue eyes, the woman was gazing into the distance, perhaps, I thought, at the prospect of a socialist paradise. For some reason, the image reminded me of the painting of the three knights in Stepanov’s place, who also gazed into the horizon, except that the knights were carrying swords and lances, while the beautiful soviet woman carried a basket of vegetables and potatoes.
‘Comrades,’ the poster said, ‘come to the kolkhoz. Let’s produce more potatoes and vegetables. Let’s build our nation.’
I loved the naive and hopeful tone of the soviet posters — the way they portrayed a world based on work and sacrifice. I found it therapeutic to look at these images, at their beautifully faded colours, to see all those soviet men and women working together for a common goal. Women looked stunning in these posters, but not in a delicate dyevushka way — they were strong and maternaclass="underline" you could not picture these women putting on make-up or complaining about the food in a café. These women were resilient, self-sufficient, forward-looking.
Where are they now? I asked myself.
I had read my share of Solzhenitsyn, and a couple of books on Russian history, and was aware of the darkest side of the soviet period. But, looking at these posters, I couldn’t help but feel both sadness and nostalgia. I felt sad and nostalgic for a past I’d never lived, a past that, as far as I knew, had never really existed, at least not as portrayed in these posters. But looking at these images full of symbolism infused me with a sense of hope.
My first contact with soviet imagery had come through Khavronina’s Russian As We Speak It, a language book Katya had given me as a present back in Amsterdam, a few weeks before we split up. It was a second-hand book with a faded blue cover that she had asked a friend to bring from Minsk.
‘I’ve been told,’ Katya said with the book in her hand, ‘this is the best manual for beginners.’ It was early in the morning and I was still in bed. Katya had already put on make-up and done her hair. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to learn Russian, not knowing whether I would get a scholarship, but I loved the drawings in the book, depicting the simple, happy, soviet lives of Pavel and Marina.
Pavel was a chemist who worked in a factory outside Moscow and Marina a doctor who worked in a children’s hospital. In lesson three, they talked about their apartment, which was plain but cosy. In lesson nine, they went to a restaurant, ordered chicken Kiev and spring salad, drank borzhomi water and then went dancing. In other lessons they went to the post office, to the countryside, to the supermarket, to the theatre. On Sundays, Pavel and Marina went to the park, where, the book said, the sun shone and birds sang.
Standing in the empty hall of the Revolution Museum, I now wondered if that was the Russia I craved — the simple and beautiful world of Pavel and Marina, and not the complicated Russia I had been thrown into.
But, as I had discovered early on in my stay, the Russia of my language book was fictional. There were no singing birds in Moscow. The birds I saw were crows or ravens — vorony, they called them — perched on the electric cables of Pushkinskaya, screeching loudly, scavenging the rubbish bins in the square, going through the leftovers outside McDonald’s.
Where had all the hope of the soviet years gone? Russians had been cheated, and, in a way, they had earned their right to be cynical. Poor old babushkas at the Revolution Museum, I thought, themselves a tragic part of the exhibits, working for a few rubles a month and then commuting to the outskirts of Moscow where they lived on a diet of beetroot, potato and mayonnaise. Poor cleaning ladies sweeping the metro, old Nadezhdas and Revmiras, whose hopes and ideals had been flushed away with the perestroika. Poor Sergey, a soviet man with no country. Poor Nadezhda Nikolaevna, scolded by a young waiter for not knowing the rules of the New Russia. Poor Lyudmila Aleksandrovna, who lived trapped in the 1970s, in her Sochi seminars, because she could not understand that, despite her admirable and firm denial, Russia was for ever changed.
The woman in the poster looked ahead with her confident regard, carrying the promise of a brighter future. In that moment, I felt a strong urge to join her and her struggle. Come with me, she seemed to be saying, stop wasting your life. I wanted to answer her call, cross the line that divides reality from historical fiction and meet her at the kolkhoz, where I would kiss her, marry her, co-suffer with her, and I would pick potatoes and vegetables all day long until my hands bled. I would do it for her, for her cause. For something to believe in.
PART FOUR. Olga’s Soul