I fell asleep on the couch. When I woke up I made some tea, picked up my book of Chekhov’s plays, sat by the balcony. It had stopped raining. The sky was now white.
I started to read bits from Three Sisters. I went through the first act, pondering Irina’s daydreaming of Moscow and the symbolic value the city acquired in the play.
Chekhov had turned Moscow into a symbol of yearning, standing for things left behind and for the unreachable horizon that lies ahead.
After finishing the first act, I looked up from the book and saw the city extending away beneath my balcony, the white sky pierced by soviet constructions and red-brick chimneys. The wet roofs and terraces reflected the brightness of the sky like pieces of broken mirror. I thought how different my Moscow was from Chekhov’s Moscow, the city the three sisters dreamed about. And yet, the enormous amalgam of buildings and squares and wide avenues continued to capture the dreams of thousands of people, like Tatyana and myself, who, coming from different places, had been brought together by the city. I wondered whether being in Moscow made us happier.
Tatyana had left her hometown in Siberia — her babushka, her family — to search for a better life in Moscow. Had she dreamed in Novosibirsk about Moscow? Now that she was in the city, with a job and a few friends, now that she had me, was she happier than before?
‘We want happiness,’ Vershinin says in Anton Pavlovich’s play, ‘but we are not happy and we cannot be happy.’
Tatyana came over just after six. She hung her faux-leather handbag on the kitchen door handle, kissed me.
‘I have something for you,’ I said, handing her the pair of theatre tickets.
She grabbed the tickets and, before even looking at them, thanked me with another kiss.
‘Tickets to the theatre,’ she said, with a broad smile, her eyes shining. ‘Great, I haven’t seen this play. I only saw the film. An old soviet film, in black and white, very good one.’
‘I’m glad you like them,’ I said. ‘Would you like to eat something before we go or should we just grab a bite afterwards?’
She looked back at the tickets. ‘But they are for today?’
‘The show’s in an hour.’
‘But you should have warned me,’ she said, anxious.
‘It’s supposed to be a surprise. A change from watching a movie on the couch.’
Tatyana’s smile was gone. ‘But I didn’t know we were going to the theatre.’
‘It’s the Stanislavsky theatre,’ I said, ‘just around the corner, a two-minute walk.’
She looked at me, her face red. ‘But I have nothing to wear.’
‘What do you mean? You look great like this.’ She was wearing a black jacket and a black skirt, which I found quite elegant.
‘These are not theatre clothes. If you had told me I could have brought a nice dress from my flat.’
‘If I had told you then it wouldn’t have been a surprise. Don’t worry, it’s a small theatre, not a fancy opera. You look really good.’ To emphasise my words I kissed her again.
She was unconvinced. But, noticing my disappointment at her reaction, she forced a smile. ‘At least this is not Novosibirsk,’ she said. ‘Nobody knows me here. I’ll try to look my best.’
Tatyana took her cosmetics bag into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. First I heard the shower, then a hairdryer, which she must have had in her bag because I didn’t own one. Then I heard more water, and then silence for at least thirty minutes.
‘Are you OK?’ I asked through the door. ‘We’re going to be late.’
When she came out of the bathroom, Tatyana was wearing tons of make-up and a bizarre hairdo, her beautiful curly hair all tied up in a knot on her head.
Truth was, I loved Tatyana best in the mornings, when she’d just woken up and was wearing one of my old T-shirts — the green of her sleepy eyes a miracle every time, her cheeks warm and rosy. Tatyana didn’t need make-up. You look so pretty like this, I’d told her a few times. But she insisted that a girl needed to wear make-up all the time to look prilichnaya, decent. By now I had given up.
I gazed at her face, unnecessarily caked in powder. ‘You look gorgeous,’ I said, kissing her on the cheek, careful not to spoil her lipstick.
We made it to the theatre just in time to find our seats. They were in the third row, close to the action. The lights went out and the actors appeared on the stage. I found the play hard to follow. I’d expected a simple plot, a dog that becomes a human, but the Russian was complicated and, as I used my imagination to fill in the gaps in my understanding, the story in my head became darker and darker, chillingly interrupted every time the audience burst out laughing at jokes that I kept missing.
Tatyana was sitting with her back upright, her eyes fixed on the stage, completely absorbed by the action. Even with her hair like this she looked beautiful. She was wearing an overly sweet and pungent perfume which I didn’t recognise and which stuck in my throat. I was afraid the perfume could also be smelled by the people around us, even by the actors on the stage. I told myself that I would buy Tatyana a new perfume, something more subtle, when the occasion presented itself.
And so it was, at that precise moment, watching an adaptation of The Heart of a Dog at the Stanislavsky theatre, that I realised Tatyana had somehow become my girlfriend. Why would I care about buying her perfume otherwise?
After the play finished we followed the crowd into the street. People gathered on the pavement of Tverskaya, discussing the show. I was flooded by a sense of well-being, thinking about Tatyana, my girlfriend, but also about going to the theatre, which for some reason I regarded as something exceptional — kulturno, intelligentno — something I should have done more often. I knew all the bars and clubs in Moscow, but hardly any theatres. Maybe I could take Tatyana out more often, I told myself, and we could also watch Chekhov plays, which would be easier for me to follow. With these thoughts in my head, we walked into the French Café next door and sat at a small table by the window. My initial plan had been to stop at the kiosks in Pushkinskaya after the play and buy a couple of blinis for dinner, but since Tatyana had made such an effort to look special, I felt the French Café would be more appropriate.
‘I’m so happy we came to the theatre,’ Tatyana said, holding my hand. ‘Such a beautiful show. Thank you, Martin.’
She was radiant.
It was so easy to make her happy. She enjoyed reading books, cooking, watching movies, going to the theatre. All Tatyana wanted from life, she had told me, was good health, friends, family, a man. It was as if, by limiting the things she cared about, Tatyana had distilled life to its essentials. When I was with her, the rest of my existence seemed unnecessarily complicated. Even when I asked her about Russian books, her answers betrayed a simplicity that had to be admired. ‘I enjoyed reading Anna Karenina,’ she told me one day, ‘but I didn’t like the ending.’ That was all Tatyana had to say about Tolstoy’s masterpiece, that she didn’t like the ending, as if she were talking about the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Now she was my girlfriend, and that made me her man. A couple of times, when referring to me, she had in fact used those very words, my man, but she hadn’t used the usual Russian word for man, muzhchina, but muzhik, which, as had been explained to me, implied a degree of added masculinity and roughness. Tatyana pronounced the word in a natural manner, without irony, moi muzhik, despite the fact that we had only been seeing each other for a few weeks and had never talked about the nature of our relationship.
Yet, despite accepting Tatyana’s role in my life, I wondered about the implications of having a girlfriend, about the unwritten set of rules that falls upon two individuals whose existence has thus far been unknown to each other. And, every time the brothers dragged me off for a night out, I faced a series of connected and inevitable truths: that attraction is a fickle and capricious motherfucker; that even the selfless affection of someone who really cares for you can’t compare to the liberating excitement of meeting someone new; and that, if I wanted to preserve my feelings for Tatyana, to stop her from becoming a cause of frustration, I had no choice but to keep considering myself a free man.