Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux Read Free Book Online

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 high-rise Moscow suburbs—I said, "Where are we going?"
    "Not far."
    There were people raking leaves and picking up trash 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?"
    "We are going to my girfriend's apartment."
    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 apartment houses 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 towards 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 sidewalk, past walls that had been scribbled on, past broken windows and through a smashed door to a hallway where three baby carriages were parked and some of the floor tiles were missing. It could have been a housing estate in south London or the Bronx. The elevator 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 apartment. 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 water in a 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.
    "She has many foreign friends," Olga said. "That is why I wanted you to meet her. Because you are our foreign friend. You want to change rubles?"
    I said no—there was nothing I wanted to buy.
    "We can find something for you," Olga said, "and you can give us U.S. dollars."
    "What are you going to find?"
    "You like Natasha. Natasha likes you. Why don't you make love to her?"
    I stood up and went to the window. The three women stared at me, and when I looked at Natasha she smiled demurely and batted her eyelashes. Beside her was her shopping basket with a box of detergent, some fresh