Chapter 2
We were going to some
little place on the outskirts of Moscow that I’d never heard of and apparently
it would take about an hour on the little suburban “electrichka”. Since Vera
had turned up the mood had rather changed. Galina began speaking rapid-fire
colloquial Russian and David simply couldn’t keep up or join in. I felt it was
my job to field him.
I half listened to what
Galina and Vera were talking about. It was bits and pieces about working in
offices, some things about popular culture and a bit about what we were going
to do when we got to our destination. Vera sometimes even made somewhat
sarcastic remarks about some leader and his pretty new Russian wife. Galina
looked rather sternly at her. David began to look a little left out, so I
talked to him.
“You’re tired no doubt,” I said. “You must have
flown all night.”
“Yes, I flew from Aberdeen.
You may not know it. It’s a town in the North-East of Scotland.”
“Yes, I know where it is.”
“That’s strange, few people in Russia do.”
“How long have you been
learning Russian? You know, you speak it pretty well.”
“Around three, or is it
more like four years? I still struggle a bit when they speak quickly.”
I looked at him more
closely. I guessed that he was about thirty five. There was something very
intense and serious about his look. I could see how it might put some people
off. His eyes rather looked into your soul. Above all, he looked cold. He had
on a leather jacket that was simply inadequate for minus thirty and he just
didn’t have on the sort of clothes that Russians knew to wear. He didn’t have
on enough layers.
“Have you been to Moscow before?” I asked.
“Never, I’ve only been to Kaliningrad.”
“It’s rather strange, there’s nothing much there.”
“But you like it well enough.”
“Yes, but not for reasons of tourism. It’s my home.”
“I’ve never been much of a tourist either.”
He looked at Galina and
I could see that he wasn’t here to see anything, he was only here to see her.
She had changed since I’d last seen her. I remembered how she had arrived at my
class at the university; it must have been four or five years earlier. She used
to arrive as if dressed to go out to a nightclub. Her long black hair she used
as a sort of extra means of expression. She would touch it, flick it. She knew
that everyone was looking. I saw her sometimes as I went into the class. She’d
stand before the mirror in the hallway, adjusting her hair, making sure her
makeup was just right. She was stunning and she knew it. Everyone else knew it,
too.
For a long time, she’d
sat in the class and said almost nothing. But I took her aside one time and asked
why she was so quiet. I wondered if the class bored her. But no, in the next
five minutes she showed that she had taken in much of what I had been teaching
and had gone beyond it in a couple of places. She was able to think for herself
and wanted to do so. I wondered if she was worried about ruining the effect if
she started getting involved in a discussion of literature, philosophy and
theology. So I began asking her to have coffee with me so that we could talk
alone. We did this for some time.
Over the years I
watched how Galina changed her appearance. The young model look was suddenly
ditched at the end of her second year. She came back from the summer holidays
dressed as if she hadn’t thought at all about what she was going to wear. Her
hair was simply combed and she wore no makeup. She was still stunning, if
anything she was more beautiful. She wasn’t trying anymore. She didn’t need to.
The looks that she was used to getting from the boys if anything increased, but
she no longer seemed to welcome them. She rebuffed them.
Our occasional coffees
continued even after she graduated. She mentioned some of the things she was
exploring. She began buying books on Taoism, Buddhism, or forms of mysticism. I
tried to steer her back to the traditions which were closer to home, but she
wasn’t very interested. I said that it was a mistake to think you need to
journey to India to find the truth. You can find it in a prison like Boethius.
You can find it in Kaliningrad or anywhere else you happen to be. But she was
young and wanted to travel. She ended up working in a Russian language school
for foreigners. She was rather hindered, I suspect, by not speaking any
English, but her role was not so much that of a teacher as that of an
administrator.
Looking at her now
sitting opposite me I found the change extraordinary. She had taken off her
heavy jacket and unwrapped some of the other layers and set on one side her
faux fur hat. I was confronted with a beautiful twenty-four or twenty-five year
old woman who had tried and failed to make herself less beautiful. It was as if
she had turned herself into Cinderella or more sinisterly into a woman faced
with an invading army who tries to make herself
inconspicuous and ugly so as not be noticed.
Galina looked thin as
if she had been fasting or more likely, ill. This was plausible enough after
all, as she had only relatively recently returned from India and had been there
for some time.
It looked as if she had
cut her hair herself. It was short but rather uneven as if she had used dress-making
scissors and used them quickly. But the black sheen of her hair was still there
and somehow despite her efforts it was as if she was trying out some
experimental hair style. She had a dark beauty, partly from the blackness of
her hair, which would have survived any of her attempts to wreck it. But this
darkness was not really matter of complexion, which was fair, or eyes, which
were light brown, as it was simply how I had always seen her. I’m not using the
word dark in any way negatively, quite the reverse. I think, everyone would have agreed about the
description dark, just as everyone would have agreed about the description
beautiful, even if it isn’t always easy to describe quite in what way she had
these qualities.
I couldn’t help
noticing how David glanced at her. He was quite obviously in love with her and
hoped that she would come to love him. It was equally clear to me that she did
not, at least not in an ordinary straightforward way. Otherwise, she would have
been engrossed in conversation with him.
I thought, any woman
could have grasped the truth of the whole situation in second. After all, why
else would he have flown so far if he did not love her? He certainly would not
have done so to meet a man. The very idea was absurd. But then I thought,
surely Galina could grasp this situation, too. In which case why did she ask
him to come? I assumed she had. Then I remembered how they had been when I
first saw them that morning. They’d seemed like a couple somehow. There had
been that spark. But it wasn’t there now. I sat puzzled.
I saw how David glanced
and looked away so as not to appear as if he was staring. Obviously, he still
found her attractive. He was right, too. Somehow the Cinderella look worked
even better than how she had been aged eighteen. That was a little girl playing
with makeup, this was a woman who was beautiful because she didn’t give a damn
how she looked.
“You met Galina in
Kaliningrad?” I asked David. I saw Galina glance up at the mention of her name.
“It was on my second
trip there,” said David. “She was working at the school and one of the teachers
thought it a good idea that she show me around and that we have some
conversation practice.”
He spoke very well indeed for someone who had only been learning Russian for three or four
years. The grammar was more or less correct and his accent fairly natural.
Still I adapted the way I spoke. Thinking of words he would probably know and
saying them clearly.
“It seems to me your
conversation practice must have gone well. After all, you are here.”
“The first time we had
an afternoon together I hardly understood half of what she said. She has a
habit of getting excited and speaking very quickly. I was still working out the grammar in my
head and spoke poorly. But somehow there was a sort of breakthrough that day.”
“I know what you mean.
I teach English as well as bits and pieces of other subjects. The key I think
is always that moment when you must understand and speak because you so
desperately want to. It’s good to have that motivation. What better motivation
could there have been?”
I glanced across and
saw that he had caught my glance, though I thought, no one else had.
“I realised that I
could understand without getting all the words and I could make myself
understood even if I didn’t know a word or if I mangled the grammar. I used all
sorts of strategies including pantomime, but I could talk about films I loved
and literature, too.”
Galina interrupted: “You
speak much better now, David, there’s no comparison.”
“It’s all down to you,” he answered.
“You exaggerate as always.
What have I done? We spent a few days together, then as I recall you decided to
snub me.”
“What this?” I said. “Was there a tiff? Do tell!”
“It’s all best
forgotten,” David said. “I was rather silly. Galina, you see, was a bit busy back
then and after meeting up a few times, it turned out she had no more afternoons
free. So after that we saw rather less of each other, only really at the
school.”
“He became very formal,”
said Galina, “like a 19th century English gentleman. I remember he rather
surprised me on his last day by saying something rather withering in
extraordinarily good Russian. I was observing his class and made a comment and
he just let rip with a sentence that was far above his level as if he was
dredging it up because he so desperately needed it.”
“Perhaps, now it is you that is exaggerating,” said
David.
“I think not. When he
left that day he all but clicked his heels and made a bow. It was very charming
indeed.”
“I don’t understand then,” I said. “It sounds like
it all ended badly.”
“So why am I here?” said David.
“Quite so,” I said.
“I wrote to him,” said Galina. “How could I not?”
“And I wrote back,”
said David. “Not only did she teach me to speak, she also taught me to write.”
“Nonsense,” said Galina.
“You taught yourself. He writes really rather well, remarkably correctly. He
writes these long letters which somehow describe emotions, but not specifically;
they say almost nothing, but are full of feeling.”
“Sometimes I get even get replies,” he said.
It was extraordinary
listening to this exchange. She was pleased to see him. More than that, at
times she was acting like a school girl.
“Is this your first meeting since the heel clicking
and the bows?” I said.
“Yes,” said David. “Since then we’ve only written
e-mails.”
I sat their wondering.
Why did she write to him? Why did she invite him to see her in Moscow? What
really did she want?
