Natalia suspects something is wrong

He couldn't comprehend her spite. It sat ill next to her calm and happy demeanor.  One minute, she was all sweetness and light, but in an instant it would be gone, replaced by a storm of angry rebukes and a swiveling of her eyes enlarged by anger as she scoured him for the truth.

He was at times like these a mere paper ship on her tidal waves of fury, he was tossed around in the swell and helpless to calm the waters.  He floated and drowned at the same time.  Their deep magnetic passion for each another fixed them in opposition and created a tug of war between them, like the moon and the sea drawing ever closer and receding in unceasing struggle. She complained about the way he chopped a clove of garlic, too thick, and he struggled to remember her rules for combining laundry into the washing machine.  Natalia, for her part, watched him reading silently in his chair, paying no attention to her and turning the pages with a hint of violence.

He became all pockmarked inside, and she was a black swirling vortex. When her anger would reach high tide, she demanded to see his phone, his computer, to know where he stayed abroad or where he had been the day when she, tired and disoriented after a visit to the dentist, had almost been flattened by a tram near Dimitrovskaya and he had taken an hour to call her and ask if she was alright (clearly she was alright, but that was not the point).

Natalia began to view him as a liar in small and big things, as someone who played with truth and performed acrobatic tricks to keep it in balance with his actions, always trending away from her to other people, undermining his standing, his masculine being for her. She wondered if he even desired her physically any more. He was absent, reflective and brooding, his brow often creased as they say at dinner or held each other watching television on the sofa and eating dark chocolate.

She did not accept that he could be stressed or that his teeth were again playing up (she had arranged and sent him to her dentist and he had suffered his third root canal surgery). It had to be what was occurring outside the warm tension of their apartment and she assumed he was cheating on her and had to get down to the truth. It betrayed itself in many ways, in the way conversation dried up in the middle of his sentences, when he sometimes showered directly after entering the house and did not pause to kiss her as she sat under textbooks at the living room table, studying the civil code; it was in the missed calls and the lack of enthusiasm she detected on the end of their long distance phone calls, in the sound of people, women's voices in the background when she spoke to him during the patient congress; it was in his reluctance to introduce her to people in his office or to meet her there after her day was finished; in his general avoidance of Smolenskaya as a place for them to meet.

So gradually, locked and brooding in such thoughts, Natalia resolved to check up on him more frequently, to get behind his lies. She watched him as he checked again his messages before going to sleep, she questioned the necessity and implied he was expecting to chat to people (whichever people) and she demanded to know his itinerary for the next several weeks. She started to deny him sex, accusing him of being selfish in bed.

'Why do you always want me to go down on you? This is what you always want. You don't care about my pleasure at all.' She threw one of their cuddly toys at him with the sudden wrath of a child.

'Tell me what you want.'

'I am tired of telling you. Anyway, you are bad at it.'

'You always seemed happy.'

'Vanya, most women you will ever meet will be faking it. And you thought they liked it!' She squealed delightedly, sarcastically seeing the momentary look of consternation flicker across his face. 'You don't know how to find my clit.'

'That isn't true...'

'Once. In our whole relationship. Perhaps twice, you made me come.' She insisted.

So she subjected him daily and he submitted, secretly resentful yet otherwise meek like a flagellant pilgrim, stubbornly content to pay the price for a journey deeper into her inner self.  He drifted into the world of their past, rubbing his forehead and visualizing the times when they were together in harmony and he would bring her freshly-cut flowers down all the platforms of all the metro stations at the heart of Moscow in an effort to make her smile and show him her world.

He sat with a headache at his desk, disinterested in the scientific articles before him and thought about last autumn.  When they talked, in a train compartment on the journey to Tula, she was close and warm under her sweater and her body enveloped him as she clung to him and talked in a half-whisper of her past life.  She had kissed another girl, she had been addicted to amphetamines, ecstasy and weed, and had had panic attacks; the memory of it haunted her at night, when she would grind her teeth in sleep and turn fitfully and troubled from side to side in her bed.

And her bed was their bed for, although small it was hers, it belonged to her as he belonged to her, and dearly he loved it. He loved her standing by the mirror and brushing out straight her perfumed hair, naked and lovely, his perfect woman, visible to him as he lay there under the blue-green duvet and marvelled at her body's secrets that revealed themselves to him brilliantly and pure. Her white skin, her plush slenderness, her long graceful back that was straight as a crisp waterfall, her painted toe nails and the small yet plush shape of her feet.  Most of all he loved to watch her looking at herself intently in the mirror as she brushed her hair, lips pursed and eyes fixated on her image in the glass, almost brutally untangling the tangles of it with the brush, which was an instrument of perfection.

And then she would come to him, her warmth merging with his on the warmer side of the bed which he had heated, waiting, and she arrived switching out the light in a torrid and overwhelming stream of kisses, their hearts pressing together, their feet tenderly together and their caresses almost drawing blood, their mouths filling up with the taste of black, unbounded love; she would cover his skin, eclipsing him in a gaze both regal and terrible, clawing at him with her fingernails and turning him over and over in the night.

Outwardly, he was cheerful, mixing with people at the office and lingering on a Friday evening, in shirtsleeves, to drink beer or vodka with Seva in the atrium bar of the business centre.  Inwardly, he was in a tailspin and felt that any day his emotional helicopter was going to fall from the sky and burst into flames. He felt less and less in control of himself, spinning, rotating, feeling desire for other women who seemed incomparably softer and gentler, in contrast to Natasha who wanted him to suffer inside a prison of jealousy and possessive clinging.

He wondered if she really understood dedication to anything other than herself. He worked, he talked with doctors, he pushed hard so they had dry blood spot kits on their shelves in the remoter parts of Russia to do the genetic test for metabolic diseases. Their relationship gave him strength and he used it to do his work properly, to avoid it being just another indifferent expat living the Moscow lifestyle.  And this propelled him blindly forward, trusting in her understanding of his thoughts without communicating them explicitly.

He was often away, often working late in his small office next to the team, who had long departed home. He spent two or three evenings a week with Ludmila trying to improve his basic Russian with the help of cardboard pictures and blurry photocopies from old teaching textbooks she provided in abundance. He learned the days of the week, the cases, the verbs of motion, the seasons and the lakes, the forests. He learned vocabulary and prepositions, many adjectives. And he tried to string them together into meaningful statements and small talk.

In Kievsky Station

Standing close to the station entrance, Vanya tasted winter.

The air bit into his flesh through the flimsiness of his coat, through the delicate paper shell of his soul.  And he felt pain and loss.  Standing outside, all the people were blurred objects, flowing past abstractedly, he could neither feel them nor reach out to touch them.  A crowd flowed over London Bridge. So many...He smoked dejectedly, head down, eyes glancing outwards from under his Kazakh cap, its ear-flaps pulled down, his cold feet shifting furtively and his thoughts turned inward; except for acknowledging the cold he was a statue.  He backed away as an old couple passed by.  Vanya was ashamed to smoke in the face of old people.  A thought struck him.  She could have passed along the other side of the concourse, unseen among all these dark, hurrying shapes. But stubbornly he waited for Natalia to come.

He felt both alone and comforted in busy places, flowing with strangers.  He stood near the information board and watched them come and go.  He saw people hurrying along to catch a homeward train or hovering beside the coffee bar and the flower stall; a fat man in a sheepskin cap fingered some pink chrysanthemums.  People of all ages were here in the throng passing over the concourse, whose density ebbed and flowed with the coming and going of trains.  Vanya, abstracted, distant, saw scarves, satchels, sacks of potatoes, a colourful dress fluttering beneath a sealskin coat, boots - so many boots - and suitcases wheeled along squeaking like mice.  He watched a waiter unfold a plastic table cloth and spread it airily over a small square table.

Natasha, two weeks ago, stealing into the bedroom in her red polka dot pajamas, had lightly folded her arms around his shoulder-blades, and smoothed out his chest with her hands, straightening his posture, as was her wont when he stooped forward, hunched from too much desk-work or sitting on planes.  She held him for a long moment encircled in her slender arms and gazed at him directly, her familiar smell rising to meet him, her honey-coloured eyes large and glimmering in the lamplight.

He was careful to stay upright  when they walked, hand in hand, through the streets to the apartment, or she would dig into his ribs with fingernails the colour of ochre, sharp even in their gloves, or suddenly turn and bite his shoulder, as though he were a disobedient puppy.

'Straight!' Though soft, her voice was strict, echoing down the years the voice of her gymnastics instructor from her hard childhood in Krasnodar, when every day by reason of her scoliosis she had been forced to stretch over a medicine ball to straighten out her spine.  However, as usual, her tone was subtly mocking.  Vanya only half-believed that she could be so strict, or think that he was not listening to her.

Natasha was changeable. She was above compromising.  She could bite, scratch or wrestle him to the floor and pin his arms and legs, rendering him immobile; in an instant, she would fling her arms around him and plant a tender kiss, running her nails across his flanks so that electricity flowed to his heart.  He could not resist these attacks, and let himself yield passively to her wounding, teasing caresses. He tried not to flinch away, though she kept surprising him with her shifts.  Sometimes, his reflexes caused him to flinch at her approach, and Natasha's face would immediately furrow with a disappointed look, as though his body had rejected her.

Once she trapped him completely in a headlock, interlacing his shins with her small, bare feet and she refused to release him at any cost, tickling him mercilessly and gnawing the edges of his ears.  He felt a tightening in his chest as a shortness of breath enveloped his lungs. He cried out imploringly for her to stop.  Instead, she whispered in his ear, 'You have to be honest,' and then suddenly released him, with the glare of a triumphant combatant.

'I was being honest,' he winced, fingering a tender ear. 'I told you I was going to Samara for the patient congress three weeks ago.'

'No, you didn't.'

'I'm sure I mentioned it when we had dinner outside.'

Her eyes darkened and she averted her gaze to the floor, about to yield, but then bore down on him with a direct look.

'You have to tell me about your business trips. You are always so secretive.'

He raised a hand, still lying on the bed, and tried to deflect her.  'There is too much going on.  I don't even know what's going through my calendar.  Svetlana just books things. I don't even know about next week.'

'Then how are we supposed to make plans? Am I supposed to just sit at home and wait for you to come back? What about my plans?' She began to pace about the room, gesticulating ominously.

'In a relationship, you have to be honest.  All you think about is your business, all you talk about is work.  And you don't even  have a life, or real friends.'

'Yes I do,' he protested. 'What about Seva? What about Kolya?'

'Those people are not your friends.  You are their boss - you feed them, they are obliged to be friendly with you.'

'I don't believe that,' he defended himself, surprised at her cynicism.

'And you, the director,' she practically sneered the word.  'You shouldn't be making friends with your employees.'

'But we're a small team and we are friends.'

'Those people are not your friends!' she exclaimed, picking up a towel and folding it.

'Then what?'

'Do you even know what a friend is? You are so selfish. And your family. Have you listened to yourself when you talk to your family on the phone? I have.' She daggered a tiny finger at him, and her hands were suddenly more pretty to him, more terrible.  'You only talk about yourself. I never hear you ask about them. How they are doing. What they have been doing.  It is all about you and your stupid business situation. Your issues. You are a selfish son, and a careless boyfriend. I should get myself a real man!'

Natalia was animated now, and threw away the towel. Her eyes flashed and blood glowed hotly in her cheeks.  She seemed to be speaking from thoughts that had been deposited inside her and reasoned through into careful, stinging words calculated to wound him, to subjugate his arrogance and indifference to her pain, to her existence.  She stood directly opposite him, speaking forcefully yet quietly into his face, as if reading from some unseen dramatic script emblazened in her memory by each one of his misdeeds.  Vanya could feel her words hotly flicking his face. Her breath carried towards him. He remarked, afterwards - after they had made up - it was so different from the taste of her mouth which by kissing he knew so well.  










   

Kolya

A stubborn crowd of workers huddled on the office steps for a cigarette, despite the falling snow and the biting air. It was a life-affirming statement somehow, this morbid embrace of the cold each person encased in their own thoughtful, glum smoke-cloud.

This morning Kolya was among them. A strong-chested man of sixty-one, with misty, rather large blue eyes he wore a somewhat wistful, hangdog look that clung to his ruddy and careworn face like fog, and sometimes his expression was softened by his short white hair which was nearly always short, and this and the clean white beard extending from temple to temple gave him the bearing of a hermit or a saint.

But thunder would roll across the roughened face, breaking in the centre of the prominent forehead suddenly in a black wave that made his body shake with suppressed anger and the emotions that he could not articulate to the boss, that made him stand fixed to the blue carpet like a lightning-conductor absorbing the voltage of a lightning strike - Kolya was earth, and forest and a hunter of beasts; he liked to shoot wild ducks on the outskirts of Moscow and carry them home to the dacha slung over his shoulder in a hunting bag, the gun in his other hand, whistling.

Brandishing at lunch his new company-issued i-phone, with aplomb he appalled his colleagues with a photo album from last month's holiday in Vietnam, flicking through it with his pink fleshy fingers.

The Hawaiian T-shirt revealed his enduring physical strength in the breadth of his shoulders, his smile was a boyish grin of satisfaction and they could all see his pride, standing there in flip-flops and tuquoise bermuda shorts with boat symbols, holding up a live cobra by the neck while his Vietnamese guides, much slighter than he in their khaki hats and uniforms, laughed raucously at the joke, baring  missing or rotten teeth.

Abruptly, one of the men decapitated the struggling yellow snake, squeezed out venom and blood into a glass jar; then, with a practiced motion, slit open the body, extracted the small muscular heart, and put it down bloody and small, into a ceremonial dish - and true to the ritual, Kolya ate the heart, triumphant, virile, man over beast.

Kolya had a pretty petite wife, with auburn hair and sunglasses, wearing a light green summer dress, who looked on smilingly at the men. He had a grown-up daughter in Moscow and a grown-up son living in London.

And Kolya was a medical doctor - he had trained as a pediatrician and practiced in Moscow until the fall of the USSR and, coming of necessity to the drug industry, toward the end of the '90s he naturally knew everyone in the pediatric hospitals throughout Moscow, he drank vodka with the geneticists from the RAMS Medical Center, he was equally intimate with the doctors from Novosibirsk and Komi and Penza, and he was a man who commanded respect but whose quiet, rather brooding demeanour most of the time and whose broken English meant he often was not respected, especially by the foreigners who came in via Sheremetevo and fucked for hard currency the thin, still-teenage girls who serviced the big hotels; only last week, he had seen one incident, the round, powerful American, pink almost and freshly-showered, hasten in white hotel slippers and a dressing-gown to the locked glass doors of the corridor that gave upon the rooms, just as the tiny bell announced the elevator, to chaperone his girl inside, he - Kolya - standing there, a hermit, invisible behind this snip of a nineteen-year-old girl, her body a devilish gift, and as she glided onto the tenth floor he took in her perfume and could almost feel in his throat her tiny heart quiver.

    

In Gorky Park again

"It is possible to live on earth as you mean to live hereafter.  But if men will not let you, then quit the house of life...No need to make a great business of it. In a while now you will be ashes or bare bones; a name, or perhaps not even a name..." - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations. 

“Look at what they give you” – he said very slowly to no-one but himself, breathing air and smoke, vaguely watching the children playing on the grass, bickering over rights to the slides and the climbing frame. “You grind yourself out in the corporate machinery, and what’s left of you is humiliated by pictures of happy families, vegan food and athletes, pornography and return on investment, which trample your self-esteem and eat you up with lust.”

  Silently now and bitterly he mused: “I can see that people are asleep, they are living their lives on autocorrect and spell check. I am asleep as well.”

Take a breath of fresh air and look up to the sky, where the moon wanes slyly between flat, cold clouds and the roof-tops are windswept with October’s chilly arrival.

The sunset bleeds through the airport windows where the suicide bomber struck.

He picked a leaf from the folded deck chair, unfolded it, sat down on it. She is not coming again. She is like the Tollund Man, clinging to her grave of peat. This is entirely his Gorky Park. 

Cigarette ends are everywhere. The garden has died and weeds he previously paid no attention to  have grown up from the gravel and become tall as the children. 

Nemesis

Entries found in Vanya's private diary

Friday 2 October - A blackbird died on my roof sometime during the night. I think it was the cold snap.

Saturday 3 October - It lay there, on its side, one wing limply folded, an eye upturned, glassy - lifeless of course, in summary; and I stayed out, shivering as the purple-black sun vanished behind the Gazprom building, and I observed that some feathers that during the day had blown off the corpse (?) had mingled with my speckled cigarette-ash, and the slowly-falling darkness, until they were imperceptibly intertwined, because I had had two-thirds of a bottle of Scotch by then, given to me the previous week by someone obsequious who works for me - as if for a wake, ha, ha! - and I said fuck it, you were drunk and sincere with everyone you met and I was alone on my vertical-cold roof terrace, with a dead blackbird, so I drank most of it and shared the rest with the neighbours who were up on their terrace talking about gym training and whom I'd never met.

Sunday 4 October - I cried over my ex-girlfriend, chain-smoked four cigarettes and 'manipulating' a pink plastic dustpan and brush, squeamishly I fed the dead bird into the whisky-box, its displaced bottle empty to the dregs and lolling gently in the roof-gutter like a loose tongue.

PS - The hardest part was getting the edge of the pan under the body to tip it in there, without touching it. Some people would just have picked it up with their hands.  I can't touch anything dead with my hands right now.  I had to force the wing in with the brush and close the cardboard lid. The rubbish bag went out promptly today.

Wednesday 7 October - This morning, I found a bird's feather in my bedroom, beside the bed.  I don't know how the fuck it got here. It makes me want to call somebody.     

The Other Girl

"Now an idea has occurred to me; une comparaison.  An awful lot of ideas keep occurring to me now...that's just like our Russia." - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Devils (1871)

"No, I met her online," Vanya loudly disagreed, even shaking his head.  They were on their third round of cuba libres a little way off Tverskaya, and it was making the table-top, all and sundry and the whole evening in fact start to glisten all green relative to Anna's vague, black eyes.  Vanya thought they shone with the empathy of a friend, completing her soft oval of a face and matching the jet black of her shortened hair, but they may have contained as much ice as his glass of rum for all he really knew.  Vanya knew women, but he did not know women at all.

And this was the way they liked it, she, half-Egyptian and the rest proudly Muscovite and he, of no fixed address living interminably in the Ukraina with no discernible origin since he floated into Moscow past the bulky concrete M-O-C-K-B-A lettering higher than a man that spoke of Napoleon's defeat, and Hitler's defeat and the defeat of all invaders who come to prey upon Russian soil. Borodino. Magnificent defiance, even now, even in the world today.

Vanya marvelled at it, he smiled in Anna's face and she had no idea what he was thinking. It was so baselessly defiant, and yet with some enduring wintry invincibility there it was, yes there now, in his mind's eye, clearly, just beyond the thinning of the silver birch forests into dry tall grass and burned-out wrecks behind a car wash, where traffic from Domodedovo slowed to a salute like a slowly pulsing artery cluttered with debris, pumped by a bitter and aching yet still living heart, and after that monument, (so tiny in a way next to the deeds!) motorway bridges reared up, an overpass, tunnels, blocked, clogged, smoking, straining forward, picking up a stronger radio signal in the car now and catching sight of modern Moscow in glass and steel towering up in an architect's fantasy, ringed by coils of elevated highway, huge earthworks being torn in the brown earth to set fresh foundations for a mockery of the sky.

At times, on the train, he glimpsed empty platforms surging past his eye, perusing the daily newspaper or the on-screen news, their station names frustratingly indiscernible from the speed of the train. And yet a swastika was painted there, on a fence, in dripping black lines...but instantly he corrected the attenuation in the memory - because that was by the allotments, out among the trees. How much there was, out in those trees. Good that it was not in the City, his adopted home, among the noble ranks of old housing stock, tiny vegetable gardens, small balconies, cluttered or bare, all identical, ranks of windowed walls and walled windows (overlooking fields or roads, a giant pond or other windows) and the sugar-paper walls of some, which easily as Easter wrapping paper a gas explosion might tear asunder, he read it in yesterday's paper, cleaving families and grandparents and cats suddenly and cruelly as a shell-burst.

And if it was not the gas, he was thinking about, he did not want to think about it any more, such a chill thought it should remain there on the edge of town and on the fringe of his conscience, he was in 'bourgeois' Moscow now among the Seven Sisters and the buzz of money, the domain of the black Mercedes and the red Ferrari, and by reason of its very artificiality, it - this bubble - was very much inured against catastrophe.  So this tiny heart, this left ventricle of weath and privilege with its hypertrophic skin nestled rather superior, ever unconscious of its own ill-health, peeking from the roof-terrace of the Hilton at the Kremlin Palace opposite as dance music blazed numbingly, cigarette ends burned orange in the lamp-light and two business men were speculating whether Petra was a good fuck and worrying whether to hedge the rouble. And, his eyes coming back to Anna's slender purse, and her fleshy hands, and the cold drink in his hand, somehow he was aroused and gratified now, sitting here with this girl, his friend, talking about another girl, his disaster, and getting both lightly drunk and gratified on it all, especially on his awareness of all these thoughts and their melding with the view of the sunset streaked orange and pink above the exquisite battlements and his visual and sensual impressions of Anna, of everyone. He felt superior.  It was good to be at one with Fidel and Che at a time like this. Ideology. The world turned upside down was still the world.

"A hundred years ago," Anna began, with a rather amused look playing across her handsome Arabian face. "I am sure most people were saying that this century, the twentieth century, was a pretty damn good century. I mean look, there was no Napoleon -"

"That was 1815." Vanya murmured. He liked Anna. She was intelligent and fierce about her views.

"...and Europe, however shaky with diplomatic tensions, was peaceful. People lived their lives, like we are living our lives -"

"Without Facebook."

"...and you know what I think about it?" Her eyes became wide and her mouth twisted as she formed the obviously rhetorical question. "We're only about the same amount into the Twenty-First Century!"

They had been talking several nights running about America versus Russia, so this statement was perhaps not unexpected, but still Vanya found it shocking.  There was nothing sexual between them, but Vanya couldn't help wondering what Anna looked like under her clothes which rather hid her figure.

"The Americans think the whole world is a fucking chessboard. I read a book on that," he said, somewhat forcefully - which was wholly true, he had read it on a flight from Switzerland. "They want to force everyone else to their knees, the Saudis, the Latin Americans, most of all the Europeans, and Russia is one of the few countries to stand up for itself and fight for its interests. But," he added, not shying away from an argument "Russia and the Russian people, are two different things."

"Things? Spasiba!" retorted Anna "Don't you know what is the difference?" She gave him a penetrating look tilting her head rather sexily and sarcastically.

"Oh, you mean me who is fucking the Russian people, well at least the female half?" he said responding to the innuendo across the small, high table that was by now loaded with small, empty glasses half-full of ice. "Or me as a capitalist fucking the system with my expensive drugs?" he said, referring to work.

"Come on - a small percentage of the female half...sometimes, when they aren't looking" she shrieked with perverse delight having trapped him (again), it was always the way...always the attraction. The first time they met, they had teetered together with Julia, blind drunk into the park at Patriarch's Ponds, where Bulghakov's literary editor was beheaded by a tram. The tram driver was a woman.  It was so cold they had all embraced tightly traversing the park as one body.

"I told you, I met her online, I met them all online and the girl from Omsk. Polina, she was the one but she didn't speak a word of English and a year ago I didn't speak much Russian..." Anna was a translator and a writer, who loved to write blog posts and short stories. Julia was a receptionist and she wanted to flee to Egypt, make MTV shows for the Arab world, and dive into the Red Sea, run free on a sandy beach and get her breasts enlarged. Vanya would have taken her as she was - tall, with a prominent nose and golden brown eyes, her hair capable of morphing her into a prim blonde girl of twenty-five with glasses, who sat dutifully through nights behind reception at the Marriott, or a sensual, serpentine and pretty thing unbuttoning her coat to reveal a pencil-thinness about her waist, and a languid small-breasted body about which she was strangely insecure.    

"That must have been a very entertaining date for you, stupid arrogant chilovek!" Anna emphasised the last word hotly, without affection.  "I imagine you would want to fuck all aspects of the system." She replied to his earlier comment about work, women and orphan drugs being the aspects in question.

Vanya thought about Polina.  "She was dressed in red," he mused "She had the 'sh-ch' in her family name, she'd just moved to Moscow and so had I." Wistfully he sipped some rum. "She was beautiful, Anna darling, but we couldn't communicate at all."

"You should have fucked her then." Direct, Russian, his arousal quickened - bolstered by the sunset over the Kremlin and the cigarette-smoke.

"Yes, I should. But how?"

Anna feigned very serious and frowned. "Do you mean that you not know how to ask a Russian girl if she wants to fuck with you?"

"Natasha," he lingered on the name, felt a quite sudden physical arousal "said it very clearly to me in Italian and in English." It was at the fifth time of meeting - after the coffee shops, after the dubbed version of the Rum Diaries in the crowded cinema near Kievski Vaksal, where she kept tearing at his arm with her fingernails, caressing his ear with her lips in the dark, and after the nice dinners, after a slurry of emails in horny half-prose and an autumn walk in Gorky Park where she bit him on the shoulder through his coat after they kissed and the flames rose up in both of them. Abruptly, she called him one afternoon and came to him in the hotel. He was cold, hesitant now as he watched her standing by the window which gave onto a river view, and the parliament beyond.

Anna just twirled her mixer and assumed her 'fuck me' expression, mocking him.

"And?"

"And she did what she said she was going to, and then she left..." he fell away gesturing. Natasha did not reply to his phone calls now or his emails and he had become a beggar, like the amputated veterans who in the underground market under Paveletskaya station, where he had been only yesterday, just sat mute and empty on a piece of cardboard. He, revolted yet not giving, knew it wasn't a sham.

"You mean she treated you like a man treats a woman? How big your illusions about Russia!"

"Shattered dreams you mean."

"No it's American bullshit, my friend, I don't buy it! You wanted to fuck 'Russian woman', not write her poetry" she mimicked quite deliberately. "But 'Russian woman' fucked you instead!" She laughed and lit a thin cigarette out of a mother of pearl case.

Vanya liked Dostoyevsky, at times he would wait for someone near Dostoyevsky's statue beside the national library, it was dominated by thick-bodied, slow-winged pigeons that would cover the statue's bulging scalp in layers of their shit. This was the fundamental point. But the forehead was still handsome, the brow knitted with thoughts that belonged to another world.  He was moved practically to tears by The Idiot and disgusted by The Devils to the same degree, hoping for a better ending to both books.  Life does not allow...it does not allow, he thought, threading his way along old Arbatskaya to the Stalin building opposite his office.

And spellbound, he disliked practically everything else in the canon until, through trial and error being mainly Anna Karenina and Pasternak and Koestler, he discovered his truly favourite authors: Sholokhov and Grossman: he read in disbelief the slow, deliberate account of Treblinka, its killing-machine so finely tuned and sarcastically, sadistically murderous...the author so precise, detached, perceptive, his prose so wonderfully damning; and then Everything Flows, with its devastatingly beautiful, beautifully devastating multitude of horrors, cruelties and deprivations during the Ukrainian famine of the 1930s. He was hardly known, but there was only Grossman who was great enough to sit with Dostoyevsky among the pigeon-shit.  The sores still festering in the Russian people - the people of the world!

But no-one else seemed to understand this, except Anna hinted at it from time to time, so he had kept it to himself, until it came out gay and open in the sunlight, along with everything else, to Natasha Aleyevna, who worked as a legal secretary but wanted to be a writer and travel to Bucharest and Rome.  

Wreckage

Vanya swirls vodka in his unkempt mouth, tasting bitter failure.

One tooth to the back of his mouth which he can feel with his tongue he knows to be black and hollowed out with a creeping decay like the apartment blocks which suddenly collapse inwards from time to time in the outer reaches of the city.  He dreams of Volgograd, walking the battlefields, sniffing around Pavlov's house and Mamaev Kurgan.  Instead he journeys to Samara, drunkenly saluting the space shuttle moored close to his hotel and queues for the return flight to Moscow amid a crowd of doctors pressed together beside a coffee stand at five in the morning.

Kiosks are his passion, innocuously they dispense the real medicine of newspapers, coloured magazines, cheap lighters and innumerable bottles of inebriating poison which he so badly needs.  Ice cream in winter has become his diet.

Inspiration is needed. The toilet smell drifts down the aisle all the way back into the west, the plane a floating sunspot over Nizhny Novgorod and the Volga a ribbon of gunmetal infinity snaking like an umbilical cord over the untrammeled plains of central Russia.

His eyes heavy, dimly take in a chocolate factory he always heard tell of.  The long ateries disconcertingly unchoked by traffic at this early zenith of an autumn dawn, a taste of hunger in the mouth and curled up memories of park pavilions and painted gates unraveling somewhat on the ride from Sheremetovo.

Daylight weak yet pure and a sense of emptiness as Saturday awakens into a long gleaming vessel gliding in slow motion.  Scratching an eyebrow and checking for messages.  Nothing from Natasha, and it has been three days.  An accordion reverberates joyfully in the underpass on Kievskaya.  He's back to Moscow.  The hospitals are full of amputees, brilliant children with blood diseases and hearts as big as trees.