"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.