At the bus stop a cosily sleeping and abundantly steaming cluster of people stood waiting for the trolleybus in thin quilt jackets and steaming fur-trimmed hats with hefty felt boots on their feet. Golden-yellow light glimmered from the windows of a concrete highrise, the dogs in the courtyard howling like a pack of wolves. The wind blew open the coats of passers-by and tore apart the bittersweet song coming from the loose folds of an accordion. There was a barber’s and hairdresser’s on every corner. A wheelbarrow and pieces of rusty pipe jutted out from under piles of snow on a side street, a broken Czech sofa slouched on one corner covered in little drifts of windblown snow. They kept on walking, through an industrial city waking from an icy dream, crossed courtyards, and found the gloomiest queue in the universe among the chilling mist. They went to stand on a sheet of ice at the back of the line, the man first, the girl behind him. The front of the queue disappeared into the sooty, thick, frosty fog. A woman walked past and left an opening behind her in the mist. The people were steaming like horses. The man turned around quickly.
‘We stand here suffering for no reason and don’t complain. They can do whatever they want to us and we take it all humbly.’
An old man with large grey eyes and a basket full of homemade pies yelled from somewhere behind them.
‘Jesus suffered, and commanded us to suffer. Deal with it.’
‘All we want is an easy life. Deal with that,’ a young man with a drinker’s red nose roared.
‘Not everybody can stand an easy life. Some destroy themselves,’ the old man said tepidly, pulling the earflaps of his fur hat down tighter.
‘Pure ignorance,’ the red-nosed one threw back.
‘Suffering is what gives life its flavour, thank God. Want and emptiness are good for you,’ the old man grunted.
‘It’s true that a person can get by on little, but without that little, you’ve got nothing,’ the young man shouted.
‘Shithead. I won’t discuss this with you,’ the old man said with a sharp swing of his hand clad in a dogskin mitten.
‘It’s just a joke, old man. No need to get all worked up about it. Think of your heart,’ the girl’s companion said soothingly, his voice cordial.
The old man walked up and gave him a long, critical look.
‘Listen here, comrade,’ he said. ‘A simple life keeps the spirit wholesome.’
‘And suffering purifies,’ the man answered, giving him a wink.
He bought a frozen watermelon, she bought a speckled frozen apple. They walked past a tattered phone booth where a woman with a yellow throat was speaking excitedly into the receiver. A man with red, bony ankles tapped a coin against the glass, trying to hurry her. There were deep cracks in the walls of the blocks of flats, snow-covered balconies that sagged and dripped, rows of doors hanging open, their handles stolen, an entrance filled with snow. Street lights buried in snow, extinguished, bent, broken. Electric power lines hanging in the air, open manholes, heaps of cables lying jumbled in the snowdrifts. And over it all shone an oversized sun in a clear blue sky. They made their way side by side to the dark fairgrounds. The paths had been ploughed, icy asphalt poked through the snow. They sat down on a snow-covered bench. The man took his folding knife out of his pocket, snapped open the sturdy blade, and cut up the melon.
‘Shall we go for a drive? There’s always time, and always will be. I’ve got a master plan that will cost us a bottle of whisky. Have you got it with you? I have an acquaintance here, or rather a good friend, who can arrange things, but even in this country, not everything’s free. You can wait here.’
The girl thought for a moment, dug a litre bottle of whisky out of her backpack, and handed it to him. He gave a satisfied whistle, popped the bottle into his breast pocket, and left. The girl sat on the bench shivering. Her cheeks glowed red and there were little drops of ice hanging from her nostril hairs. A crow, stiff in the morning frost, landed hard on the bench next to her. She offered it a piece of the frozen melon. The crow turned its head proudly away.
She had been fifteen when the train rattled through a Moscow neighbourhood in the early morning. She had watched from a window as the sun rose slowly from beyond the horizon over the red flags, stretching the shadows of the endless modular highrises to a surrealistic length. They were staying in the Hotel Leningradskaya on the edge of Komsomolets Square – her father, her big brother and herself. The ornate lobby of the hotel was bewildering. She had never seen such a fancy hotel, even in pictures. From the twenty-sixth floor there was a stunning view of the entire enormous city. They had full board, which meant that they could eat three times a day in the ornate hotel restaurant. She hated the black caviar, but was happy to listen to the gentle clunk of the abacus on the counter. They walked along Leningrad Prospect and watched the women street sweepers, something they’d never seen in Helsinki. In the evening they took a taxi to the Lenin Hills and looked down at her future seat of learning, the festively lit thirty-four storeys of the new Moscow University main building. Lit with floodlights, the monumental university complex and the red star on the sharp tower rising from the top of the main building looked like something borrowed from the Thousand and One Nights. On the second day, her father had showed her and her brother all that he had marvelled at in 1964, when he came to the Soviet Union for the first time. They walked around the functionalist Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and admired the walls of the Kremlin. They rode the trolleybus to Uprising Square to marvel at the twenty-storey block of flats and to Smolensky Square to gape at the twenty-seven-storey office building, which their father said was a mixture of Kremlin and American skyscraper. They visited the graves of Gogol, Mayakovsky, Chekhov, and Ostrovsky at the Novodevichy Cemetery.
On the third day, her father took them to the Kosmos pavilion at the National Economic Achievement exhibition. It was a shrine to the Soviet cult of outer space: life-sized model spaceships and satellites, every sort of smaller space paraphernalia, and of course the most esteemed relic of all, the Soyuz space capsule, with a grandiose, Soviet-style flower arrangement in front of it. You weren’t allowed to go inside it, but you were free to take as many photos as you liked. The pavilion was the best thing she’d ever seen in her life. She wrote in her diary that she wanted to move to Moscow as soon as she turned eighteen.
That evening they went to an Uzbek restaurant. An orchestra played Slavic songs and some people danced. At about midnight her drunken brother got into a fight with a West German tourist and someone called the militia, who came and took them both to jail until the tour guide came to bail her glum brother out for fifty dollars the next day. Before the restaurant had closed, her father had purchased a pretty Georgian whore, slipped away with her, and got hepatitis B as a souvenir. The girl had been left at the restaurant by herself. A fat waitress had called a taxi for her. She had cursed her whole family, including her mother, who had left them years ago and gone to northern Norway to work in a fish cannery. When her father got back in the morning he said that the whore tasted like milk and had a cunt as deep as sin. Moscow had been a stony fist, like in Mayakovsky’s poem. She never recovered.
A mighty sun swallowed the black clouds and a sturdy but well-dented green Pobeda with bulging sides appeared at the edge of the park.