London . . . What does this word mean to Larisa, a young woman from Moscow? Not very much, especially when she is surrounded by tall grass rustling in a fresh summer’s breeze, and her beloved River Moscow is urging her to take a dip in the cool waters before her.
Larisa was lying on her side on the riverbank, resting her chin on her left palm. From her vantage point where the river gently bends round the old village of Islavskoye, the countryside beyond Moscow—that panorama so close to her heart—opened up before her.
It had taken her two buses to get there. By taxi would also have been possible, but Larisa had wanted to revive some memories from her childhood. Back then, the resort shuttle bus had gone as far as Gorki-10, and they made the rest of the journey on foot. Or they walked from the guesthouse along the river. Now, five months pregnant, walking was not an option.
Larisa had come to Moscow to visit her mother (her father had died long ago) before she was no longer permitted to fly. In her mother’s opinion, she was already at that point; and nor should she be going outside her flat into “that filthy London”. Larisa’s mother lived near Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane, in what was virtually the only area with hospital-standard cleanliness in the whole city (with, perhaps, the exception of the Kremlin complex). The impression of such cleanliness in Larisa’s recollections was heightened by the proximity of a clinic for the authorities: a tall building with marble columns in various styles and a cupola topped by a lantern-shaped tower. The clinic, where Larisa’s father—a former employee within the Party apparatus—had sometimes gone for treatment, resembled a multi-tiered wedding cake—typical Stalinist empire architecture. It soared above the surrounding streets and alleyways and seemed to enjoy lording it over the modest houses of the Aksakovs and Herzen.
A jumble of architectural styles (if architecture is the word for bunkers decorated with gable roofs or an unusual tinted window the length of a whole wall) also struck visitors to the village of Islavskoye. It was, however, no longer a village but protected territory: the horticultural association Sadko.
Larisa, raising her sunglasses slightly, glanced with sadness over in the direction of the Church of the Saviour, which adorned the bend in the river. Without that church, Islavskoye would certainly have become nothing more than a characterless horticultural association. With the church, it retained something of the sublime. “Enclosed within your wings, grant me shelter.” Larisa recalled the pre-revolutionary postcard with this caption to a painting of a cherub by Elizaveta Boehm.
For several years, Larisa and her husband Kirill had been engaged in selling pre-revolutionary knick-knacks as well as more serious objects of art, brought legally, and possibly also illegally, from Russia. When questioned by the potential buyer as to the legal status of this or that Russian object, Larisa was reminded of an exchange in the film Brother 2 when the main character is questioning another man about his supply of weapons: “Listen, where is all of this from?” “The echo of war.” For some reason, she found this association weirdly comical. A couple of times the deal fell through because she hadn’t been able to stop herself actually laughing out loud. This made Kirill angry, while she was secretly pleased: it meant that one antique could remain longer in their possession and even, as was sometimes the case, perhaps be returned to Russia.
Larisa lay on her back with her head on her leather backpack. Her blue taffeta dress ballooned over her bump, which was still modest in size. (The colour of the summer sky outside Moscow, just as I’d hoped for, thought the Instagram-oriented Larisa.) In her belly, all was still: it was in the night that her baby did its somersaulting. Larisa stroked her bump and ran her fingers again through the thick grass that was tickling her elbows. Her own dear Russian grass, the Russian sky—maybe not quite as dear to her because of all the buildings, but nevertheless there were still the beautiful views of the river. Living in a rented flat in the distinct concrete and metal world of the City—London’s financial district—made her homesick for these views. It’s true that not far from the flat there happened to be an old cemetery with moss-covered tombstones. Kirill joked before they moved in that he wouldn’t mind being buried there, which made Larisa realize how much she did not want to die outside Russia. She decided, though, to keep that thought to herself for the moment, to avoid setting Kirill off on his favourite monologue on “the special calling of Russian emigrés” and the phenomenon of a “second homeland”.
When they decided to buy a property of their own, Larisa was still on the fence about putting down roots in this foreign soil but agreed that buying made sense financially. Kirill tried to find a flat in a greener and more family-friendly part of the city. There was one opposite a sports complex with a swimming pool but, unfortunately, with no meadow grass growing anywhere near. This brand-new flat that Kirill had with such enthusiasm fished out of the meagre trickle that was the London housing market at the end of the late 2010s was situated in a building of the former Ministry of Pensions. Larisa went to have a look at it when she was two months pregnant, but there was nothing to see yet: they had only just started decorating. The construction company had fully converted the interior of the building, leaving untouched the old ministry corridors that ran through the whole structure connecting up the various entrances. The façade also remained as before. The long wall with austere rows of windows, despite its welcoming beige limestone, brought to mind military barracks from the period of the great empires of Europe. Larisa walked around the building on the newly created fixed-pebble path. Within the former ministerial walls, they were already erecting the dividing walls for the kitchens, bedrooms, toilets and built-in wardrobes. Outside, along its entire perimeter, the building was surrounded by cast-iron railings topped with stylized arrowheads. I’ve seen those arrowheads somewhere before, thought Larisa. She exited the grounds through a gate into a quiet street along which plane trees grew—magnificent trees but also so alien to her. She ached with longing to see a birch tree or at least a fir—with moss all around it.
It was this longing that prompted Larisa to go to Islavskoye—to stroll through the woods along the river, press her cheek against the bark of the trees, unsullied by noxious city dust, and tell her yet-to-be-born baby about her own childhood. She slowly stood up, wet her lips with some water from the bottle that had grown warm in the sun, and then, squinting into the sunlight, started looking for a shady cluster of trees.
There were now fewer and fewer birches around Islavskoye, and it was the same with the pine trees the region was famed for. Larisa still remembered how each summer they came to Islavskoye to stay at the government holiday resort situated right next to the village. It was called “Distant Woods” and during the Soviet period was meant for top Party members. Post-1992, it was reassigned to the newly formed Administration of the Russian President. Larisa barely noticed the difference in ownership. From the late 1980s all through the early 1990s she kept enjoying summer walks with her father in the same pine forest not far from Islavskoye, near the place where the Rublevskoye motorway—that famous route used by the Party elite to reach their summer dachas—suddenly continued as a narrow country lane. Her father didn’t like the lame entertainment provided at the resort, which alternated with the special dietary meals: breakfast with rice porridge, lunch with little steamed rissoles, and an afternoon snack of kisel—a fruit concoction semi-jellied with starch. Once retired, he would get up late, have a light breakfast, ask the kitchen to give him his lunch in a tiffin box and then go off on his own to walk in the woods or along the river, as far as Prishvin House (which had been turned into a museum a couple of decades after the writer Mikhail Prishvin’s death), or in the direction of Zvenigorod as far as the Savvino-Storozhevsky Monastery. He returned in the early evening, heated his lunch up in his room, wolfed it down and then went outside to sit on one of the many benches and socialize with the “contingent”, as he called them. “It’s all right not to love people, but it isn’t acceptable to shun them altogether,” was what he said to Larisa when she was tired of accompanying him, sitting silently and smiling in response to the compliments of his elderly but still robust fellow workers.
“That’s strange,” thought Larisa, trying to relate the riverside path that led from Islavskoye to the resort to the one that had surfaced in her memory . . . This place—the country road, the old church and river—had seemed in her childhood to be a quiet area well beyond the town, but now it was different—and rather unappealing. It’s true that the family had barely visited in the 1990s, but the most unpleasant change came about later, in the noughties, and was embodied in three words: Barvikha Luxury Village, a sprawling, fenced-off cluster of oligarchs’ residences. Larisa recalled seeing the roadside sign to it for the first time. She suddenly wanted to escape to a place where people didn’t give a pretentious French pronunciation to “village”, rhyming it with the Russian for “make-up”—to a country where the word simply means “a very small town”.
On the matter of neologisms, Larisa was an intolerant purist, maybe under the influence of her father: he didn’t know any foreign languages and at the end of his life had enjoyed reading works by Trediakovsky, where he hunted out “our Old Church Slavonic expressions”, which he later extolled in conversation with the family. In search of a pure English, unadulterated by ideological overtones, after completing her studies at the diplomatic academy Larisa had decided against working in that profession. Bidding her privileged friends farewell, she had left the country and gone to live in the English town of Warwick (which these same friends referred to as a backwater) to work in a trainee team of Russian suppliers of Land Rover vehicles. She liked the fact that for the residents of Warwick the name Land Rover was as prosaic as the words “tank” and “tractor” to Russians.
Recalling her first SUV (a business car, but all the same!), Larisa felt a tiredness that had crept up on her unawares; she kept forgetting that she was carrying a few extra kilograms. It was clear that she wouldn’t be able to return to Moscow from Islavskoye by public transport. Having called a taxi and taken a final deep breath of the air from the river, she went to the Church of Our Saviour, from where she was to be picked up by a luxury car and driven to her mother’s pre-revolutionary brick house.
While waiting for the taxi, Larisa came to the realization that she would never return to Islavskoye again. Her childhood, along with the wood in Rublyevka where they used to go mushroom-picking, belonged to the past. The time had come to tear herself away from these roots and become a cosmopolitan. To give birth to a citizen of the universe and make him a second Elon Musk. But why a second? How about mother Larisa brings a great new original into the world? Not burdened, though, as she was, by late-Soviet memories, or handicapped by self-doubt and complexes about his national identity and other things. It’s easier for a person without roots to have the courage to leave Planet Earth and go travelling in space.
*
Larisa’s husband had followed an unusual career path. For some time he struggled to decide on a profession. As a teenager, he had played the piano quite well and dreamt about studying at the Moscow Conservatory, but had failed the entrance exams. Then, having made friends with a young priest—a former mathematician who had gone to a village near Novgorod to revive the parish there—he almost became a monk himself. In 1996, he finally returned to his parents in Moscow and ended up in the first intake of students at the newly established Faculty of Byzantine Studies at Moscow University. Older than Larisa by eight years (an age difference that, in her opinion, was not really that significant), he seemed to her, because of his mindset, like a doddery old professor—no doubt because he idolized his university teachers and copied them in everything, including their manner of peering over the frames of their old-fashioned glasses, perched on the end of their noses, at the person they were speaking to. Hidden behind the innocent outer appearance of a bookworm was someone very sure of himself and with an enterprising streak. Through some acquaintances from the Byzantine Faculty, he found a vacancy for a Greek and Latin teacher in a private school in the UK. There was a shortage of specialists in these dead languages among the local pool of teachers, and the school was delighted to arrange a work visa to enable him to fill the vacancy. In 2006, he persuaded Larisa to make her home with him in Britain.
Among the parents of his students, Kirill met the owner of one of the largest London antique salons. At the outset, it was just advice he offered his new acquaintance, but then he became a business partner and helped him revive what was at that point the rather dormant trade in Byzantine and, more broadly, religious artefacts; he introduced him to new Russian immigrants, who were often keen collectors, and after a couple of years managed to free himself from his teaching job and open his own antique business in London. He started dreaming of purchasing a late-Victorian house where the atmosphere would be set by Alma-Tadema paintings. Since visiting the Leighton House Museum in Kensington, he had fantasized about a grand room decorated with ultramarine mosaics across which there were strings and swirls of Arabic script.
Larisa, however, had objected to that. Victorian houses annoyed her with their stone porticos and steep steps, up which (she had already thought everything through) she would have to manoeuvre a pram; hallways as long and narrow as a giraffe’s neck; cold air blowing through old and ill-fitting, single-glazed windows.
“A modern flat in old government offices—that’s just the thing!” she exclaimed at Kirill’s lucky find. “There’s something familiar in the air of this former Pensions Ministry,” she said. “And these rows of windows, and this system of entrances, even the cast-iron fence around the guarded grounds . . . ”
Kirill wanted to joke about a similar-looking building in “Old Square” in Moscow, which this five-storey London leviathan resembled, but he looked at the expanding belly of his wife—hope for a new life—and held back. “The main thing is that you like it, my love,” he said, and thought to himself: “There we have it: the Party seed. How does Bulgakov put it in his play Zoyka’s Flat? There are no former noblemen? The irony of history. Boris Semyenovich Gus-Remontny, formerly Gus. Now he’s probably an eagle. Larisa, formerly a goose, is now probably Nike of Samothrace, or a goddess of ecstasy.”
He started to feel uncomfortable about having negative thoughts concerning his pregnant wife. To show himself that he was really only joking, he fetched the old guitar from his student days and started to sing a ditty from Zoyka’s Flat:
Why oh why and for what reason
Am I in love with a Communist, and non-card-carrying people I torment!
Ah, here we go, and once again! . . .
Larisa, with a deliberately indignant face, stormed out of the bedroom, where she had been trying in vain to find something decent to wear that she could still fit into, and back into the living room With her swollen belly and hair tied back in a ponytail, Kirill thought she looked like one of those typical Soviet citizens Bulgakov made fun of—a vulgar and quarrelsome communal-flat dweller.
“My dear,” she drawled, fixing her dressing gown, “as I’ve said before, a joke is something that everyone finds funny. And this isn’t funny to me. And in any case, even your parents were in the Party and enjoyed certain Party privileges.”
“What privileges?! As factory workers they weren’t allowed not to join,” Kirill was going to protest, but decided not to spoil the evening’s atmosphere. “Anyway, they weren’t my words—they were Bulgakov’s. There was another song in that play too. Here, listen,” and in an out-of-tune bass he started to drone the popular romance: “Don’t sing, my Beauty, to me those songs of sorrowful Georgia . . . ”
“Please stop. You’ll frighten the baby!” Stroking her belly tenderly, Larisa turned and went back into the bedroom.
Kirill put his guitar away and absorbed himself instead in reading the property developer’s brochure.
*
The move took place two months after Larisa’s trip to Islavskoye, when she was already in her seventh month. Kirill was worried that it would be too much for her, but the removal men, his personal specialists in the transport of objects of art, carefully seated her on a sofa that was holding open the automatic door to the entrance, and said that all would be fine.
Larisa did feel a little unsettled, though, when a group of women in black niqabs filed through the front entrance. They were carrying recognizably expensive handbags and the babies in their top-of-the-range prams were wearing sunglasses. Through the slit in their niqabs Larisa had the impression they were looking askance at what she was wearing on that hot day: maternity shorts and a T-shirt, which had puckered up her now considerable bump.
Earlier Larisa had thought what she’d put on was entirely appropriate for moving house, as well as being rather attractive—even intriguing (her T-shirt had a medieval fresco across it), but she suddenly felt embarrassed about her bare legs and at the same time offended that she was made to feel ashamed. She got up and went to find Kirill, who was giving instructions on where the furniture was to be positioned.
The spacious entrance with a little plant in a tub and bronze handles on the doors reminded Larisa of the entrance to the old Party health clinic. In the bedroom, despite the new interior design, there was already an atmosphere of family order. Wide window ledges, carved chairs with silk upholstery that her mother had brought over from Moscow, and her father’s writing desk in the study. She would have been happy to stay put inside the flat.
Outside, London life bubbled along in its usual way. At a petrol station around the corner, some miserable-looking migrants of indeterminate ethnicity were hurriedly washing cars with dirty rags in the time it took for the drivers to pay for their petrol. In front of a supermarket, a white woman, completely wasted from heroin addiction, was swearing at the shoppers passing without giving her any money. Here and there red double-decker buses were darting around the cyclists clogging up the road. At the beginning, Larisa had liked the buses, but since the time a madman had urinated inside a bus right in front of her, she had become completely disenchanted. In the square in front of the block, a briar rose was in flower, and some pigeons were pecking at mouldy crusts of white bread. Nearby a couple of London alcoholics were admiring the pigeons from the bench
where they were sitting.
Larisa moved away from the window and started to take the crockery out of some boxes. She suddenly thought of peaceful Sivtsev Vrazhek Lane, then with a shake of her head shouted out:
“Kirill, let’s go and have some okroshka soup at Zima tomorrow. Summer’s almost over and it will disappear off the menu soon. And I suddenly have such a longing for it!”
*
A few months passed. The day when Larisa gave birth arrived, and when she returned home from the hospital there were noisy, champagne-fuelled celebrations with Kirill’s friends. The moment came too to breastfeed her baby for the first time. That didn’t go as Larisa had imagined it: a quiet experience bringing her a sense of peace and tranquillity; no, it turned out very differently: with tears and a decision to give up on breastfeeding and feed her baby from a bottle instead. Things went more smoothly after that but only with the help of a breast pump. Larisa was unable to overcome her feelings of awkwardness about the baby feeding directly from her breast. After expressing milk for a couple of months, Larisa moved her baby onto a formula milk with the cheery name Cow & Gate. In all other respects, she felt like the ideal mother and was happy. She bought a whole set of baby grows with the SpaceX logo on them and a stuffed toy rocket, in which the little one, if truth be told, showed scant interest.
Larisa also started to feel more relaxed about leaving the flat. She limited herself to outings across the road to the gym, where she was able to drop Misha (they had named him after the wide-winged Taxiarch Archangel Michael) off at the crèche. Larisa loved swimming: slicing her way through the chlorinated blue water she could forget that she was away from her home country. “Water—everywhere water; the most important thing is to be able to swim,” was the new rule that formed in her mind, similar to the aphorisms of her late father.
“Michelin,” she whispered joyfully in her baby’s delicate little ear, amusing herself by playing with another variation on his name, “we’re going to make a British astronaut of you! Timothy Peake, watch out! It’s a long way to Mars. But to the Moon and back, to tidy up the rubbish tourists leave behind on their visits—that would be noble work. On behalf of the whole of humanity. Tidying up space—a twenty-first-century mission.
Michelin burst into tears: by the time Larisa collected him from the crèche, he’d worked up quite a hunger.
*
“Look at this! What’s going on here?” a woman half a metre shorter than Larisa shouted out, gesticulating wildly. She was wearing bright yellow leggings and a sports bra.
Larisa, returning from the toilet with four-year-old Mika, looked around anxiously, trying to work out what the problem was. Everything seemed to be in order in the changing room on the first floor of the gym, which connected the crèche with the swimming pool. There were no puddles of water, and no dirty nappies lying about as sometimes happened; and the plastic changing tables were all lined up against the wall. The cow (this quickly struck Larisa as the appropriate term for her!) carried on wailing:
“I come in here with my baby girl and what do we find? This mess, all over the bench, and my little girl has to look at this, and this . . . ” —she hesitated, searching for a more respectable word than the obvious one she preferred to avoid, but failing that, she went ahead with it— “. . . underwear!”
Larisa and the gym attendant, who’d come over to see what the rumpus was about, simultaneously looked at the bench at which the Englishwoman was shaking her finger. On the bench lay Mika’s underpants, Larisa’s backpack and Larisa’s clothes scrunched up in a ball: she hadn’t managed to stow them away in a locker before dealing with the future astronaut’s urgent need to go to the toilet.
Larisa’s first reaction was to call the woman a bitch. Having grown unaccustomed to Russian swearing (at home she and Kirill only swore in English), she struggled to come up with any suitable synonyms. She had a fleeting memory of the word халда (khalda), but before she could decide whether its meaning was the one she was after, it disappeared again into the recesses of her memory. At the same time, the gym attendant started to apologize timidly: Larisa didn’t quite understand for what and to whom. Glancing again at her son’s dear little underpants bearing the NASA emblem, Larisa realized that she needed to make some effort to find out.
“What seems to be the problem?” she enquired in a voice that wasn’t quite her own.
The cow and the gym attendant turned around. Coughing, Larisa added, this time more firmly:
“They’re our things.”
And she prepared herself for battle.
But the children came to the rescue just in time. The cow’s daughter, up to that point hiding behind her mother’s thighs, was fascinated by Mika’s naked body and, unable to contain herself any longer, emerged, saying in her little girl’s voice:
“Look, Mummy—a penis!”
Mika, as taught to behave when meeting new people, also stepped forward and introduced himself:
“My name is Mikhail.”
The Englishwoman didn’t find anything amusing in this little exchange.
“Get your sick child away from my little girl,” she yelled at Larisa.
Larisa was on the brink of giving the woman a good punch, but Mika tugged at her hand whimpering that it was time to go swimming. Larisa had a sudden desire to be at the Distant Woods resort—far away from all of this and these people, not having even the right words to swear at them. She wanted to be back there where there were paths carpeted in thick grass, kisel for the afternoon snack, and walks in the woods and along the river. She even longed for the resort procedures and treatments, such as ultraviolet therapy for the larynx, a Soviet specialty. She wanted to be over there where she could be the one telling someone off for leaving their child’s underwear lying around. She wanted to be under the protected pine trees—safe, proud and privileged.
“Come, Mika!” she exclaimed when she finally found the strength to get up from the bench.
The cow with her pipsqueak daughter and the gym attendant had long gone. Larisa looked around fearfully, but, no: there was no one around who could hear her besides Mika.
“Let’s go, my little one!” she continued, for some reason not clear to herself, in English. Kissing her son on his chubby cheeks and straightening the little cross made of cypress wood on his chest, she whispered: “Let’s tell Daddy that we want to go home soon. There’s this place called Distant Woods. It’s a long, long way away from here, the place where your mummy was born. There they can’t hurt us. There we’ll be like royalty. Let’s go!”
