‘But imagine you have it all,’ I said to Tatyana. ‘A beautiful family and a great man who would take care of you. What would you do?’
‘Well,’ Tatyana said with a smile, ‘if I have a great man to take care of me I won’t have to work. I’ll stay at home and raise my children. I work now because I need the money. I don’t want a career. I’m not a modern Western woman. You know that.’
‘You don’t have to be modern or Western, some women just want to have an interesting career. We are in the twenty-first century, you can have both: a job and a family.’
‘I’m Russian,’ she said as we moved towards a sunnier alley lined with little chapels. ‘I don’t believe in this equality thing between men and women. We are not equal, you and me, we want different things in life. I don’t want to be like a man any more than you want to be like a woman.’
‘Would you like to live abroad?’
‘Do you want to take me abroad? Martin, what is this? Are you going to propose? Here, in a cemetery?’ She turned to me and bent her knee ceremoniously, bowing her head, one hand up in the air, the other lifting an imaginary long skirt. She was laughing.
‘Stop it. I’m just curious, we’ve never talked about this.’ I glanced down at our map, trying to figure out if perhaps the pilot was on it and could help us find our way to Chekhov.
Tatyana gripped my arm. ‘Let’s just walk around,’ she said, removing the map from my hand and sliding it into her handbag. ‘We’ll find it.’
We strode in silence among the sea of graves. Rulers, generals, scientists, poets, writers, composers, actors, painters — an elitni crowd like no other, an impressive number of world-famous personalities who had undoubtedly made great contributions to humanity. Yet it occurred to me that, considering the scale of the cemetery, the big names were but a chosen few. The majority of the Novodevichy graves were occupied by people whose lives had not justified a mark on the visitors’ map. Lives that were already being forgotten.
‘I’d like to live in Russia,’ Tatyana said.
We had stopped by a cluster of headstones with elaborate wrought-iron fences that formed garden-like plots. I wondered if it was all right to sit on the enclosed stone benches and picnic tables or if they were reserved for the relatives of the dead.
‘Look around,’ Tatyana said, sweeping her arm over the rows of graves. ‘So much greatness. Why would I want to live anywhere else? Russia is the best country in the world. Of course I’d love to travel and see other places. But, to live, I’ll always prefer Russia. This is my home, my rodina, where my friends and family live. I love the food. Everybody speaks Russian.’
‘In Moscow? Would you like to live always in Moscow?’
‘Martin, why are you asking me all these things?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, resuming our stroll. ‘Just wondering.’
‘I wouldn’t mind going back to Novosibirsk. Live closer to my family. Or somewhere else in Siberia, in Altai for example. Everything is much cheaper over there. You can buy property for next to nothing if you compare to Moscow prices. It’s very beautiful, there are lakes and mountains and the air is so fresh. A better place to raise children. And people are much friendlier than in Moscow.’
The crunching sound of our shoes on the gravel made me think of fresh snow and, for a fleeting moment, I missed the feeling of winter. ‘Moscow has its advantages,’ I said.
‘Of course. Moscow is the cultural capital of the world. We don’t have that many theatres and museums in Siberia. I could always come to visit every now and then.’
‘What about the weather?’ I said. ‘Winters must be harsh in Siberia.’
‘As my grandma says, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.’ Tatyana stopped and took a deep breath. For a moment her bright gaze was lost above the graves. A tiny white flower remained trapped in her curls, just beneath her ear. ‘You know what?’ she said finally. ‘If I lived in Siberia, I would not care about the weather.’
55
IT WAS FRIDAY AFTERNOON and the entire city was fleeing to the dacha for the weekend. Dachinikis moved around the crowded platform of Kursky Vokzal, lugging overloaded plastic bags, beer crates, sacks of coal, birdcages, potted plants, metal buckets, grills, toolkits.
Tatyana introduced me to Marina, who had dyed black hair and a sickly Goth-looking face, and Anton, Marina’s boyfriend, a tall lad with cropped blond hair and a crushing handshake. Anton was carrying a crate of Baltika. I was told that the third couple would join us at the dacha on Saturday morning.
As the train arrived, Marina and Tatyana pushed themselves through the crowd, leaped into the wagon and claimed four seats facing each other. The elektrichka began to move and Anton opened four bottles of warm beer. It was hot inside the train and through the open windows I could hear the deafening metallic noise of the wheels grinding on the rails. Within a few minutes everybody on the train was drinking and eating — the entire wagon smelled of smoked sausage, dried fish and pickled cabbage.
Tatyana had insisted that we spend the weekend at a dacha with her two girlfriends from work and their muzhiks. To overcome my initial resistance, Tatyana had argued that it was very important to her that I meet her friends, that she’d been accused of having an imaginary boyfriend.
The elektrichka advanced through the outskirts of Moscow, snaking through large suburbs of identical buildings and industrial zones, until the landscape became greener.
Every few minutes, someone would show up at the wagon door and, screaming above the noise, would address the crowd as respected passengers, thereafter touting a bewildering array of merchandise: out-of-date women’s magazines, sets of knives, dried fish, ice cream, potato peelers, pens, pads.
Anton kept opening bottles of beer and, by the time we arrived at our destination, two hours later, we were done with what I’d thought were the drinks for the entire weekend. At the station’s produkty magazin we bought more beer, four bottles of Moldovan wine, three bottles of vodka and two bags of ice. Then, for only forty rubles, a zhiguli drove us down dirt roads, following Marina’s directions, until, after twenty minutes, we arrived at the dacha.
Wooden walls, flaking paintwork, tin roof: a classic soviet dacha. The garden was overgrown but charming, scattered with flowers and vegetables. On one side of the plot, next to the fence, grew an enormous cherry tree. Marina insisted that Tatyana and I take the master bedroom, which was on the first floor, at the top of steep wooden stairs.
While the girls opened the windows and dusted the house, Anton and I went to the nearby forest to gather soil and twigs for the outdoor toilet. Back in the dacha, Anton grabbed two bottles of beer from a tub of ice and handed one to me. We sat on plastic chairs in the garden.
I took long sips of chilled beer, listened to the birds and to the chatter of people in neighbouring dachas. I could hear the girls in the kitchen chopping vegetables, Tatyana’s laughter rising above the sound of the knife hitting the wood. She was unusually chatty, full of energy, clearly enjoying herself. Soon — overwhelmed by the aromas of fresh dill and chopped cucumbers that hung in the air — I began to feel little currents of beer-induced joy sparking in my brain.
‘This is the life,’ Anton said.
From a nearby dacha I heard the voice of an old lady teaching a boy to unearth potatoes. For some reason, perhaps because of the old lady’s didactic tone, it made me think of Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. If this was the kind of soviet life she longed for — a simple life, without the stress of modern Moscow — I could understand why Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was in a permanent state of nostalgia. Perhaps, it now occurred to me, she was right and the soviet system provided everything that people needed to enjoy life, the essential things, without the infinite choices that made our capitalist existence stressful and complicated.