London and Luton weren't really home anymore.
On Christmas Eve that winter I was driven out to Domodedovo Airport, through the grey slush, by a driver keen to share his scientific proof that Russian women were the best looking in the world, with the possible exception of Venezuelans. The theory, I remember, had something to do with how few men there had been left in Russia after the war, and how they'd had their pick of the abundant girls, who in turn had given birth to beautiful daughters, and so on ... Someone important must have been on the move because the streets were temporarily barricaded by police cars, and we got stuck beneath the snowy outstretched arm of the Lenin statue at Oktyabrskaya. The ice on the reservoir was blotchy with fishermen sitting next to the holes they had cut in it. At the airport, as my passport was stamped, I felt the lightness everyone always feels, even if they love Moscow--the lifting of the weight of rude shopkeepers and predatory police and impossible weather--the lightness of leaving Russia.
When we reached London, it was already dark. From the air, the lights flashing along the roads and down the river and blazing in the football stadiums seemed to be putting on their electric show just for me, in my honour, the conquering corporate-law hero.
Three hours later, in my parents' Luton semi, I was howling on the inside and knocking back my father's supermarket-brand Scotch. They always make an effort, but you know what they're like--it somehow manages tobe claustrophobic and lonely at the same time. I arrived before the others and slept in the bedroom I shared with my brother until he went to university. My mum said again that she wanted to visit me, she wanted to see St. Petersburg, and how was the beginning of March? Cold, I told her, still very cold. My father's back was playing up, but he tried, I could see that, asking me how work was going and whether the Russian president was as bad as they said in the papers. I don't know why he always seemed so disappointed with me underneath. It might have been a moral thing, because I did a job that was more about money than making the world a better place. Or it might have been the opposite, and me and Moscow and the money I was earning reminded him of everything he'd never done and never would do himself.
On Christmas day my brother came in from Reading with his wife and their children, William (the one who pinched your iPod at my dad's seventieth) and Thomas, and my sister came up from London, alone. We gave each other the usual, impersonally practical presents--socks and scarves and I-give-up John Lewis vouchers. I'd brought Russian dolls and furry hats for the kids and picked up the rest in duty free.
It could have been nice. There was no reason for it not to be nice. It was just that we'd gone separate ways and lost each other, leaving nothing much in common besides a couple of soft-focus anecdotes, featuring donkey rides andice cream overdoses, that you've heard a dozen times, plus some old irritations that flare up like a phantom itch when we get together. The children had once felt like a second chance, for my brother and me, at least, but they let us down. We ate the turkey and said how moist it was, and lit up the Christmas pudding for the boys, then moved to the chintz sofas in the lounge wearing lopsided paper hats, persevering in the sort of dutiful drinking more likely to result in murder than authentic merriment.
We had a lively exchange about the new parking restrictions in the town centre, and a ritual disagreement about whether we should watch the Queen's Christmas message, as my father always wanted to. When my phone rang it was like hearing the all-clear in a bomb shelter.
"How is England, Kolya?" I felt giddy, elated, like I might be sick.
"Fine. Okay. How is Moscow?"
"Moscow is Moscow," Masha said. "Bad roads and many fools. I am missing you. When I am in shop I think about you. At night I also think about you,
On Christmas Eve that winter I was driven out to Domodedovo Airport, through the grey slush, by a driver keen to share his scientific proof that Russian women were the best looking in the world, with the possible exception of Venezuelans. The theory, I remember, had something to do with how few men there had been left in Russia after the war, and how they'd had their pick of the abundant girls, who in turn had given birth to beautiful daughters, and so on ... Someone important must have been on the move because the streets were temporarily barricaded by police cars, and we got stuck beneath the snowy outstretched arm of the Lenin statue at Oktyabrskaya. The ice on the reservoir was blotchy with fishermen sitting next to the holes they had cut in it. At the airport, as my passport was stamped, I felt the lightness everyone always feels, even if they love Moscow--the lifting of the weight of rude shopkeepers and predatory police and impossible weather--the lightness of leaving Russia.
When we reached London, it was already dark. From the air, the lights flashing along the roads and down the river and blazing in the football stadiums seemed to be putting on their electric show just for me, in my honour, the conquering corporate-law hero.
Three hours later, in my parents' Luton semi, I was howling on the inside and knocking back my father's supermarket-brand Scotch. They always make an effort, but you know what they're like--it somehow manages tobe claustrophobic and lonely at the same time. I arrived before the others and slept in the bedroom I shared with my brother until he went to university. My mum said again that she wanted to visit me, she wanted to see St. Petersburg, and how was the beginning of March? Cold, I told her, still very cold. My father's back was playing up, but he tried, I could see that, asking me how work was going and whether the Russian president was as bad as they said in the papers. I don't know why he always seemed so disappointed with me underneath. It might have been a moral thing, because I did a job that was more about money than making the world a better place. Or it might have been the opposite, and me and Moscow and the money I was earning reminded him of everything he'd never done and never would do himself.
On Christmas day my brother came in from Reading with his wife and their children, William (the one who pinched your iPod at my dad's seventieth) and Thomas, and my sister came up from London, alone. We gave each other the usual, impersonally practical presents--socks and scarves and I-give-up John Lewis vouchers. I'd brought Russian dolls and furry hats for the kids and picked up the rest in duty free.
It could have been nice. There was no reason for it not to be nice. It was just that we'd gone separate ways and lost each other, leaving nothing much in common besides a couple of soft-focus anecdotes, featuring donkey rides andice cream overdoses, that you've heard a dozen times, plus some old irritations that flare up like a phantom itch when we get together. The children had once felt like a second chance, for my brother and me, at least, but they let us down. We ate the turkey and said how moist it was, and lit up the Christmas pudding for the boys, then moved to the chintz sofas in the lounge wearing lopsided paper hats, persevering in the sort of dutiful drinking more likely to result in murder than authentic merriment.
We had a lively exchange about the new parking restrictions in the town centre, and a ritual disagreement about whether we should watch the Queen's Christmas message, as my father always wanted to. When my phone rang it was like hearing the all-clear in a bomb shelter.
"How is England, Kolya?" I felt giddy, elated, like I might be sick.
"Fine. Okay. How is Moscow?"
"Moscow is Moscow," Masha said. "Bad roads and many fools. I am missing you. When I am in shop I think about you. At night I also think about you,
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