Snowdrops by A. D. Miller Read Free Book Online Page B

have thought harder than I did about those questions. But I was busy thinking about Masha, and going back to my place, and whether this was what the famous "real thing" felt like.
    K ATYA SAID SHE had a birthday party to go to. I said we'd escort her, but she said no, she was fine, and hurried off alone in the direction of the Bolshoi Theatre, into the early snow and the unruly Russian night.
    I suggested getting a cab, but Masha said she wanted to walk. We walked back up towards Pushkin Square: past the pretty church that the communists had spared, and on the left the strip club at the side of the Pushkin cinema (where a group of Hungarian businessmen got cremated in the upstairs cubicles a few months later), and opposite that a casino with a sports car outside in a tilted glass case. Through the damp snow the city seemed to soften, the edges of the buildings fading out like in an impressionist painting. Ahead of us, the neon of the square, with its all-you-can-eat restaurants and statue of the famous poet, glowed like some gaudy Mongol encampment.
    Masha told me that night how she worried about Katya, how apart from their aunt it was just the two of them in Moscow, how they'd always dreamed of comingbut how difficult it was. She'd had to come up with five hundred dollars to get her job, she said, the normal recruitment bribe for the manager of her shop, and it had taken her six months to pay off the money she'd had to borrow. She said she hoped that maybe one day she would live somewhere safer, somewhere cleaner.
    "Like London," I said. "Maybe like London." I was going too fast, I know, especially compared to how it's been between me and you. But somehow the idea didn't seem outlandish, not at the beginning. I am trying to be honest with you. I think that's the best thing for both of us now.
    "Maybe," she said. She took my hand as we went down the slippery steps into the underpass where we'd met and kept holding it after we reached the bottom.
    Up on the other side of Tverskaya we walked for a while along the middle of the Bulvar. The city authorities had pulled the flowers out of their beds, as they do every year when the game is up, carting them away in the night like condemned prisoners so they don't die in public. The Russians had put on their intermediate coats, the women in the wool or leopard-print numbers they mostly wear until it's time for their mothballed furs. On the benches the tramps lay seasoned with snow, like meat sprinkled with salt on a butcher's slab. In my street the bonnet of the rusty Zhiguli was freckled with melting snowflakes.
    When we got inside Masha put on a CD, took off hercoat, then, slowly, and like she'd done it to music before, everything else too.
    Afterwards she ran a bath. She squeezed in behind me, her groomed pubic hair bristling against my coccyx, and wrapped her long legs around my loose belly. She had a front-row view of the copses of hairs on my shoulders and the top left corner of my back, those asymmetrical practical jokes played by my genes that you're not all that keen on. She half sang, half hummed a weepy Russian folk song, running her wet fingers through my hair. It felt to me like a new kind of nakedness, our bodies limp and open rather than exhibits or weapons. Slopping in the water with each other felt like honesty, and the streaked fake-marble tub, with the jet-stream valves that didn't work, felt like our little womb.
    She told me in the bath, I remember, about how proud she'd been of her father when she was a little girl, but how things had changed when the old empire died and his salary had stopped being paid. That was when the serious drinking started, she said. She told me about how, when she was very young, she'd been taught at school to revere some Stalin-era brat who'd informed on his own father for hoarding grain. They'd sung songs about him and drawn pictures of him, this little Siberian sod, until one day their teacher had told them to stop singing the songs