Back to Moscow by Guillermo Erades Read Free Book Online Page B

seemed deeply unhappy.
    Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Krasnye Vorota.
    You could hop on any metro line and get off at a random station, and you would always resurface among wide streets and identical buildings. Each suburb had a different name, often related to
communist lore, but they all looked pretty much the same. Stations had their own makeshift markets, which sold cheap clothes and newspapers and chocolates and flowers and gloves and hats and
scarves and pirate CDs and, later on, mobile phones.
    Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Komsomolskaya.
    When we first met, some three weeks after my arrival, Ira was about to start working part-time as a secretary at an American firm. Wanting to improve her English but unable to afford language
classes, she’d pinned a handwritten ad on the announcement board of my faculty.
You want to practise Russian?
    On Tuesdays we spoke in English and on Thursdays we spoke in Russian. That was our arrangement. We would meet in the first-floor cafeteria at MGU, where they only served a local variety of
instant coffee and the price of a cup changed according to the amount of sugar you wanted in it.
    Ira had a boyfriend, a piece of information she’d forced into the conversation while we were sipping our first cup of coffee, and this was good, I thought, as I could do with a real
Russian friend. Besides, I wasn’t attracted to her. Ira was plumpish, and her eyes, an undefined watery colour, were always framed by dark circles. Her hair was thin, short and messy. By
Moscow standards, Ira was what Colin referred to as below average.
    Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Krasnoselskaya.
    So we became friends, Ira and I, and she introduced me to another side of Moscow – not the clubbing scene or expat hang-outs, which she didn’t really know, but the cultural side of
the city. She showed me the places where the young intelligentsia gathered, and she used those words, young intelligentsia, by which she meant, I realised, other cash-starved students. Ira
introduced me to some of her girlfriends. They were very nice but, for some reason which defied the rules of probability, not one of them was above average.
    Ira and her friends taught me modern slang and expressions I would not learn at language class with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, who was a hundred years old and probably didn’t know them. From Ira
I also learned Russian swearwords, which proved useful with time, when I began to take on rude waitresses and shop assistants.
    It was Ira who first showed me Café OGI, the underground establishment, famous in Moscow, that later sprouted two separate cafés with similar looks and names – all selling
cheap books, cheap food and cheap drinks. But Ira took me to the original one, on Chistye Prudy, and it was dark and smoky, out of a Dostoyevsky novel, and, as I sipped on a warm beer, I glanced
around at the colourful clientele, trying to identify the philosophers, the schemers and the impoverished students with murderous intentions.
    Mind the closing doors. Next stop: Sokolniki.
    I jumped off the metro, took the escalator up to the street. It was a cold December day. I wandered in the snow for ten minutes, holding a hand-drawn map in my gloved hands, trying to recognise,
among the indistinguishable blocks and entrances, which one corresponded to the one where Ira had drawn a cross. It was dark and by the time I found the podyezd, as they called the entranceway, it
was quarter past eight. I tapped in the entry code, as written on Ira’s instructions, and took the lift to the third floor.
    ‘Happy birthday,’ I said when Ira opened the door. ‘This is for you.’
    I handed her a bottle of expensive French wine I’d bought in Eliseevsky.
    ‘What else?’ Ira asked.
    ‘Was I supposed to bring anything else?’
    ‘Of course not,’ she said, laughing. ‘This is great. What I mean is, what else are you going to tell me? Or is happy birthday all you wish me?’
    I took my shoes off,