He kept a black BMW for himself — a bumer, he called it — which gave him much to talk about but rarely left its parking place in Stepanov’s courtyard. To the chagrin of those Muscovites who could now afford decent cars, it remained much easier to navigate the city by public transport or the large and very efficient fleet of unofficial taxis permanently cruising the streets.
We had a great summer that year. Truth be told, I don’t remember much of the legendary nights of the summer of 2001. It’s not that I forgot them — it’s more that they never registered in my vodka-soaked mind. I only know what happened because I recall Colin, Diego, Stepanov telling and retelling our stories in Starlite, or at Stepanov’s place, and the stories that weren’t told back then were for ever lost, and, in the end, my memories of those great nights are not my own memories, but those I borrowed from the brothers.
38
IN SEPTEMBER RUSSIA changed again.
A week after the attacks in New York and Washington, in the midst of worldwide soul-searching and hysteria — as the Western media talked about the war against civilisation, or ‘the day that changed the world’ — The Exile came out with an article that caused a stir among expats. Under the heading ‘Be Cool, America’, the article said, more or less, that America had it coming.
Russians also seemed to have mixed feelings about these historical events, brought up as they were to hate their Cold War foe. Russian leaders, including the president, rushed to publicly offer condolences and assistance but, if you looked carefully at the TV while they spoke, you could detect a trace of a smirk on their faces.
These are the kind of people we have to deal with in today’s world, Russian politicians said, referring in the same breath to the war in Chechnya. But Russia went ahead and allowed America to use its air space to attack terrorist bases in Central Asia. Russia also shared intelligence from the soviet experience in Afghanistan. All of this was unprecedented, historical in fact, and, in the few weeks after 9/11, Moscow expats had the feeling that Russia was warming to the West. Russian leaders sounded more obliging, helpful and understanding than ever before, perhaps thinking that, if the world was to be split along a new Iron Curtain, they wished to be, this time, on the right side of history.
This geopolitical rapprochement cascaded down to our everyday Moscow lives, where we all perceived a small post 9/11 shift. Expats were in vogue again, and for a few weeks, we — the ambassadors of Western civilisation — were the recipients of kind words of support.
It didn’t last long though. By the end of the year, as the images of the planes crashing into the towers lost part of their power to shock, things went back to normal. Russia redirected its course away from the West, disappointed perhaps that its friendly gestures had not been taken seriously. And, in Moscow, expats no longer deserved any particular sympathy.
Stepanov said the Americans had done this to themselves; not by provoking others, as The Exile had suggested, but by actually planning and carrying out the attack on their own soil. He maintained it was all a CIA conspiracy. This theory was widely held in Moscow at that time. It was a bizarre hypothesis which I couldn’t understand until, at some point, after long drunken discussions on the topic, it dawned on me why Russians didn’t know how to deal with 9/11. Russians were envious of Americans and regretted that 9/11 hadn’t happened to them instead. They couldn’t bear the fact that an event so full of suffering and historical meaning, an event that was to mark the fate of the new century, had happened to undeserving Americans instead of Russians — hungry and ready as they were for national tragedies.
39
READING WAR AND PEACE IN Russian was an ambitious project I had tackled several times but never managed to carry through. I knew I was no real expert in Russian literature — and, clearly, I lacked the intellectual focus to become one. But if I could at least claim to have read War and Peace in its original language, word by word as Lev Nikolaevich had written it, I thought I would somehow feel less of a fraud.
For the last few days, I had been going every morning to Coffee Beans. I would sit by the large front window and carefully arrange the two volumes of my 1944 edition on the table, next to a dictionary and one of my notebooks. I would ritually spend a few minutes holding my hot mug of coffee, observing how Muscovites fought winter in the street. For some reason, I took pleasure in the contrast between the two sides of the glass wall — the world of high ceilings, gilded mirrors and fresh coffee, and the world of crawling traffic, red noses, teary eyes and thick scarves. From the warm interior of Coffee Beans, listening to cool jazz, people in the street appeared to me as fictional characters.
I would take my time with every page, sipping coffee, flipping through the dictionary, struggling with bizarre Russian words I had never encountered before and, I suspected, I would never encounter again. I would take notes, my work occasionally slowed by my having to exchange looks with a dyev at a nearby table.
Every now and then, the thick double doors of Coffee Beans would open to let a new customer in, coat peppered with snowflakes, shoes caked with ice and mud. The floor of the café was constantly being mopped by diligent waitresses in a Sisyphean effort to keep winter outside, so, after passing through the door, newcomers would hesitate for a few seconds before defiling the shiny floors. To me it felt as if each newcomer were an intruder who had, for some reason, less right to be in the café than me.
A few days into my latest War and Peace attempt I realised that I wasn’t making significant progress, that at this pace it would take me months, if not years, to finish Lev Nikolaevich’s book. I decided to recalibrate my objectives. After all, I told myself, it’s not that I had to read the entire book in Russian. A taste of the original language was all I needed, as long as I knew the story well enough to form some original opinions of my own. So, one morning, before entering Coffee Beans, I walked into the Moskva Bookshop and, overcoming a vague sense of guilt, I bought an English translation.
Now I would flip through the pages of the cheap Penguin Classics translation — which I kept half-hidden under the table — identifying interesting passages that I could later read in Russian in my beautiful soviet edition. I couldn’t be bothered with the war bits. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna had told me that Tolstoy’s battle scenes were masterpieces in their own right, the best depictions of violence in world literature, she said, so realistic and vivid. But when I tried to read them I would soon lose interest. I always ended up skipping those sections and looking for the passages about the lives of the characters in times of peace, analysing Lev Nikolaevich’s take on his female characters.
One morning I sat by the window of Coffee Beans observing how snowflakes floated among the cables and banners of Tverskaya. They didn’t seem to reach the ground, the snowflakes — they glided peacefully towards the street’s surface, then hovered above it for a moment, weightless, as if having second thoughts, and were briskly swept away by the breeze, sideways and upwards, back into the sky. Of course the snowflakes had to reach the ground at some point, I thought — Tverskaya was covered in white.