To the Ends of the Earth

The dark one was Olga, the blonde Natasha—a ballet dancer, she said. Olga spoke Italian; Natasha spoke only Russian, and had a dancer’s slimness and pallor and china-blue eyes with a Slavic slant and an expensive Russian mouth.

I said I was walking—I needed the exercise.

“We will go with you!”

That was why, about ten minutes later, I came to be walking with a Russian woman on each arm, and carrying Natasha’s laundry—Olga pushing little Boris in his pram—down Karl Marx Prospekt. Olga was chatting to me in Italian and Natasha laughing.

“You seem to be doing all right for yourself, Paul!”

It was a group of people from the tour, heading back to the bus. I was delighted that they saw me—what would they make of it?

We stopped at a café and had a hot chocolate and they said they wanted to see me again—“We can talk!” They made a fuss about the time, probably because they were deceiving their husbands, but we agreed on a time when they would call me.

There was a message waiting for me when I got back to the Hotel Ukraine: “Olga will call tomorrow at twelve.” She called on the stroke of noon the next day to say she would call again at two. At two she said she would meet me at three-thirty. These phone calls had the effect of making our meeting seem necessary and inevitable. It was only when I was waiting on the hotel steps that it occurred to me that I had no idea why I was seeing them at all.

Natasha walked by but did not greet me. She was wearing old clothes and carrying a shopping basket. She winked at me; I followed her to a taxi, in which Olga was already sitting and smoking. When I got in, Olga gave the driver an order and he drove off. After that they intermittently quarreled over whether this was the right direction or the quickest way.

After twenty minutes of this—we were now deep in the highrise Moscow suburbs—I said, “Where are we going?”

“Not far.”

There were people raking leaves and picking up litter from the streets. I had never seen so many street sweepers. I asked what was going on.

Olga said that this was the one day in the year when people worked for nothing—tidying up the city. The day was called subodnik and this work was given free to honor Lenin—his birthday was two days away.

“Don’t you think you should be out there with a shovel, Olga?”

“I am too busy,” she said, and her laugh said Not on your life!

“Are we going to a house?”

Olga gave more directions to the driver. He turned right, entered a side street, and then cut down a dirt road and cursed. That bad road connected one housing estate with another. He kept driving on these back roads among tall bare blocks of flats and then he stopped the car and babbled angrily.

“We can walk the rest of the way,” Olga said. “You can pay him.”

The driver snatched my rubles and drove off as we walked toward a sixteen-story building, through children playing and their parents sweeping the pavements in a good subodnik spirit.

No one took any notice of me. I was merely a man in a raincoat following two women down a muddy pavement, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three prams were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The lift had been vandalized but it still worked. It was varnished wood, with initials scratched onto it. We took it to the top floor.

“Excuse me,” Olga said. “I couldn’t get my friend on the phone. I must talk to her first.”

But by now I had imagined that we had come to a place where I was going to be threatened and probably robbed. There were three huge Muscovites behind the door. They would seize me and empty my pockets, and then blindfold me and drop me somewhere in Moscow. They didn’t go in for kidnapping. I asked myself whether I was worried, and answered: Kind of.

I was somewhat reassured when I saw a surprised and sluttish-looking woman answer the door. Her hair was tangled, she wore a bathrobe. It was late afternoon—she had just woken up. She whispered a little to Olga and then she let us in.

Her name was Tatyana and she was annoyed at having been disturbed—she had been watching television in bed. I asked to use the toilet, and made a quick assessment of the flat. It was large—four big rooms and a central hall with bookshelves. All the curtains were drawn. It smelled of vegetables and hair spray and that unmistakable odor that permeates places in which there are late sleepers—the smell of bedclothes and bodies and feety aromas.

“You want tea?”

I said yes, and we all sat in the small kitchen. Tatyana brushed her hair and put on makeup as she boiled the kettle and made tea.

There were magazines on the table: two oldish copies of Vogue, and last month’s Tatler and Harper’s Bazaar. Seeing them in that place gave me what I was sure would be a lasting hatred for those magazines.

“My friend from Italy brings them for me,” Tatyana said.