Tatyana and Marina set the outside table with candles. For dinner we had cucumber and tomato salad with dill, boiled potatoes with butter and dill, sliced kolbasa, cheese and black bread. There was an additional bowl of freshly cut dill on the table. We had wine, but agreed not to open the vodka. After dinner we moved inside to avoid the mosquitoes and had tea with jam. We played a few rounds of a card game they taught me, and Tatyana and I lost, but she kept smiling. We opened another bottle of cheap Moldovan wine. Tatyana told a couple of anekdots — the narration interrupted by her own laughter — and I realised that it was the first time I’d seen her really drunk. We went to bed soon after midnight.
‘Thanks for coming to the dacha,’ Tatyana said, kissing me goodnight.
‘I’m glad we came,’ I said, just before falling asleep.
The next morning Tatyana and I woke up early and decided to go to the forest for a walk. My head was aching from all the beer and wine. We walked down the creaking stairs, trying not to make too much noise, and stepped into the fresh air and the smell of wet grass. Following a dirt road, we wandered through the village. Most dachas were closed up, but a couple of neighbours were taking advantage of the morning chill to work on their gardens. We crossed a small meadow and reached a thick line of trees.
Inside the forest, the air was cooler and moist and, as we walked, I started to forget about my headache.
‘So nice here,’ I said.
I kissed Tatyana. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and her beautiful hair was all messy. Holding hands, we followed a path under the trees. I was a bit disappointed that the ground was scattered with beer cans, vodka bottles and plastic bags. Tatyana pointed at different trees and told me their names in Russian, but to me they all looked the same. After five minutes the forest ended abruptly. The trees had been cleared, we were facing a construction site.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’re building new dachas.’
‘These are not dachas,’ Tatyana said. ‘They are cottages. For New Russians. They are big and ugly.’
For a few seconds I pictured Tatyana and myself in one of these cottages, taking up gardening, having friends over for beers and shashliks.
We retraced our steps back into the forest.
‘Maybe we can pick mushrooms,’ I suggested.
Tatyana laughed. ‘It’s not the season, stupid.’
We stopped by a tree and kissed. I grabbed her ass and moved up to her breasts. She closed her eyes. We hadn’t had sex in a few days. We kissed with increased intensity and, to my surprise, she unzipped her jeans and pulled them down, together with her underwear.
‘I adore you,’ she whispered in my ear.
She was now wearing a T-shirt but naked from the waist down. She dropped to her knees and unbuttoned my jeans. I grabbed her mass of blonde curls and looked around, worried someone would see us. Only trees and rubbish. When I was hard, she pulled me to the ground.
‘Hold on,’ I said. I was now sitting with my back against the tree.
‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. I’ve just had my period.’
Then, she positioned herself on top of me, her apple green eyes bursting with life.
When we returned to the dacha, Marina was making tea in the kitchen.
‘Where have you been, love birds?’ she said.
Tatyana blushed.
We all sat at the outdoor wooden table with steaming cups of tea, pecking at a plate of bread and cheese. Above the cherry tree, the sky was blue and clear and immense.
It wasn’t a lake, really, but a large pond with stagnant water. By the shore, the ashes of old campfires were surrounded by broken glass and rubbish. I hid my disappointment, but couldn’t help comparing the muddy waterhole to the lake I’d pictured in my mind, something like the beautiful lake Pavel and Marina visited with their friends in lesson six of Russian As We Speak It.
The better spots around the shore had been taken by other dachnikis, so we had to set our blankets on a sandy slope a few metres from the water. We all changed into swimming clothes. There were six of us now. Diana had arrived earlier in the morning with her boyfriend, coincidentally also called Anton. Tall, freckled, ginger-haired, Diana was wearing a red bikini a size too small.
After swimming we lay in the sun drinking beer with bread and kolbasa. I put my head on Tatyana’s lap and closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my face. Tatyana stroked my hair and I found myself thinking of Lena, when she came to watch me play football in Kazakova and we lay in the sun. I wondered where Lena might be now, and why she hadn’t answered any of my messages after our encounter at the Boarhouse. I finished my beer. With the sun warming my skin and the sound of Russian chatter in the background, I fell asleep.
Back at the dacha, the Antons started to prepare the mangal to cook the shashliks. I went into the kitchen and offered to help the girls with the salads.
‘Go help the men with the meat,’ Tatyana ordered, mock-threatening me with a large knife.
Dinner. Vodka. Toasts. We were sitting around the table, eating grilled meat, which I found delicious, and I wasn’t sure if Diana was looking at me or if it was just the vodka clouding my head. I was haunted by the image of her red bikini. She was now wearing a white skirt and a white shirt — the milkiness of which accentuated her fiery red hair. I felt Tatyana squeezing my hand. Tatyana was listening attentively to one of the Antons, who was sharing his secret recipe for the shashlik marinade. I didn’t know if Tatyana was squeezing my hand because she’d noticed my attention drifting towards Diana or if she meant it as a spontaneous act of affection. I tried to focus on what Anton was saying, something about yoghurt and herbs, but I was missing most of it — he was speaking in drunken chubak slang, and I wasn’t used to Russian spoken by men.
We drank and drank, until I couldn’t keep my eyes open. My brain shut down, my stomach lurched. I stood up, staggered down to the toilet hut, closed the door behind me and vomited. I made an effort to keep it a silent puke, which I managed to place entirely into the shitting hole, and then I threw a few twigs and a bit of soil on it, as I had been instructed. When I came back to the table I felt better.
I forced myself to drink water, and then Marina made tea, but I was too wasted to put anything other than water down my throat. I needed to lie down.
‘I think I’m going to bed,’ I said as I got up from the table.
Tatyana stood up, looked at me, laughed. ‘Let’s go, my little drunkard.’
I couldn’t sleep. I wanted to let it all out — vodka, wine, shashlik, salad — but I didn’t have the strength to crawl out of bed and go all the way to the toilet. I closed my eyes and tried to focus on soothing thoughts but what I saw was the lake and Diana in the red bikini and the table strewn with food and vodka and the cherry tree, and it was only when I heard Lyudmila Aleksandrovna shouting that I was a superfluous man that I realised I was dreaming. I forced my consciousness to abandon the drunken dream and return to the room, where the air was now steamy. I was sweating. Tatyana was fast asleep, breathing rhythmically. I tried to keep my eyes open for a while. I threw one of my legs out of the bed, to the floor, but, after a couple of minutes, I felt I was about to be sick again and decided not to risk it any longer. I tumbled down the stairs, holding the walls, trying not to make too much noise, but the floorboards creaked all the same. As I crossed the garden towards the toilet, wearing nothing but my underwear, my stomach lurched once more, and I managed to reach the hut just in time. I knelt down over the hole, which smelled of fresh shit, and vomited at length.