Guillermo Erades - Back to Moscow

She pushed my hands away, turned, and kissed me. We kissed for a couple of minutes on the balcony, then moved inside to the couch. I took her shirt off. But when I tried to unfasten her bra, she stood up and said, ‘Ne nado.’

Ne nado. It meant no need or don’t bother, except Muscovites used the expression all the time, in awkward and quite diverse situations. Ne nado, I don’t need the change back. Ne nado, I can walk myself back to the metro. Ne nado, I’m not giving you my phone number. Ne nado, you are not getting laid today.

‘I told you,’ she said, ‘I have my period. Wait for next time.’

I was sweaty.

‘Davay pit’ chai,’ she said, sitting forward on the couch. Let’s drink tea.

I took the tea bags out of the mugs and placed them on a napkin. She took a sip of tea, then placed her mug back on the coffee table. She grabbed my hand and smiled.

‘How often would you like to see me?’ she asked.

‘In what sense?’ My heart was still pumping fast.

‘If we become lovers,’ she said, ‘how many times a week would you like to see me?’

I wasn’t sure I understood. ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘One, two, three times a week?’

‘Twice a week,’ I said, without giving it much thought.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell my boyfriend that I’m taking English lessons. Then I can come to see you on two different days for a couple of hours.’

And so Yulya Karma started to visit me on Mondays and Wednesdays from five till seven. The second time she came, after tea, we went down to the Moskva Bookshop in Tverskaya and I bought her two English language books, one with grammar lessons and one with exercises, and also a small Oxford dictionary. From then on, when she came to my place, she always carried her English books. And a few times she did bring some essays she’d written in English for her studies, things on international trade or finances, and we would go through the text lying on my couch and later, when she was getting dressed, she would say, ‘Very nice class, professor.’

One day Yulya Karma broke our schedule. She sent me a text on a Thursday around midnight saying I miss you and asking if she could come over. She showed up at my place an hour later, wasted, barely able to stay on her feet. She’d been drinking cocktails with some girlfriends, she said. For the first time, she spent the night in my flat.

Next morning, as she was getting ready to leave, she asked if I had a spare toothbrush. I looked around but couldn’t find one.

‘You are not ready for all your lovers,’ she said, which struck me as odd because we had never talked about other people.

The next time she came to my place — Monday at five, as per the schedule — she brought me a present. ‘Open it,’ she said, excited. It was a box containing a set of colourful toothbrushes. In fact, after a closer look, I realised the box contained only one toothbrush handle but five different heads, identical in shape but different in colour.

‘This is for you and all your lovers,’ Yulya said, laughing. ‘You can change the heads. Each of us can have a different colour.’

‘Spasibo,’ I said. ‘Very thoughtful.’

‘I pick red,’ she said and at the end of the two hours, as if to mark her territory, she fitted the red head to the handle and brushed her teeth before leaving.

For weeks I left the multiheaded toothbrush next to my sink, and offered it to anyone who came home. When dyevs asked which colour they could use, I would say that any colour was fine, they were all new. This was, I thought, the right thing to say. They didn’t seem to notice that one of the brushes had been used and, for some reason I never understood, they all picked red and ended up brushing their teeth with the same head.

I enjoyed the regularity and predictability of Yulya’s visits. It was easy to arrange my days around our encounters and I appreciated not having to deal with the logistics of bringing a new dyev home, sending text messages back and forth, the initial exchange in Pyramida and all that work.

Besides, the clandestine nature of her visits — the fact that she came to my flat to cheat on her boyfriend — made me think of The Master and Margarita . I saw myself as the master and this notion gave our entire arrangement a certain literary quality, as if Bulgakov himself were giving us his blessing.

I found Yulya Karma attractive but, despite my efforts, rather unresponsive in bed. She would lie on my couch, naked, relaxed, smiling, but hardly moving or moaning, waiting patiently for me to finish. At first I tried to be creative but after a few attempts I gave up.

Yulya’s breasts were large and heavy but, once she was fully undressed, so were her thighs and her buttocks. I never mentioned this to her — I really didn’t care — but she would bring it up herself often.

‘I was so much thinner before,’ she said one of the first times we met.

‘You are thin.’

We were lying naked on my couch, which I had recently covered with blue washable fabric. Through the balcony, the summer breeze carried the sounds and smells of traffic into my flat.

‘I could eat whatever I wanted,’ she said. ‘Really, I never used to put any weight on. I was so thin, you should have seen me. Now, even if I starve myself for a week, I can’t get rid of the extra kilos. I hope it’s just a phase.’

‘Perhaps you could join a gym,’ I said, staring up at the wall, my eyes fixed on Ganesh.

‘You think I’m fat?’

‘Not at all, I like your figure. You are very sexy.’

‘Thanks. I don’t have time to go to a gym.’

One day, at the end of our two hours, Yulya was slipping into her jeans when she told me she had started to visit a masseur twice a week. The masseur, she said, massaged her thighs for an hour to release the excess fat and redistribute it within her body. I told her that this method of losing weight was unknown in the West and that, to me, it didn’t sound very scientific. She insisted that these massages were the latest fashion in Moscow, but I found myself wondering if this was true or if the masseur was perhaps just another guy she was also fucking on a fixed schedule.

ON WARM EVENINGS THE air inside my flat became stuffy and I’d have to open the balcony doors. If there was a breeze, the air from the street was fresh, but, when the evening was still, the smoke from the grill at Scandinavia reached my sixth-floor balconies and the entire flat smelled of burnt animal fat.

The summer terrace at Scandinavia, I’d learned, opened every year as soon as the last snow of the season had melted. At first, when the evenings remained chilly, they provided blankets and mushroom gas-heaters but, as the days got warmer, the blankets disappeared and the clientele, mostly expats, flocked to the terrace, attracted by cold beer on tap and hamburgers that were grilled until midnight.

The Exile said Scandinavia made the best burgers in town.

Sometimes, when I walked into my building, I would see guys I knew from football chilling out on the terrace. I’d have to stop to greet them and, if I wasn’t alone, they would ogle my companion, usually nodding in approval — an approval I had not sought, and which annoyed me, really. Later, at night, from my living room, with the balconies open, I could hear their voices which by then would be drunk and loud.

I enjoyed it when Lena spent the night. She brought me old soviet films that she’d seen a hundred times, comedies usually, the jokes mostly lost on me, and when she saw that I didn’t laugh she would pause the film and try to fill in the cultural and linguistic nuances she thought I was missing. I found her explanations interesting because they revealed, if not Russian thinking per se, at least a great deal about soviet aesthetics. But, despite Lena’s efforts, I rarely got what was comical about the scenes, which to me seemed clown-like and childish, and at a certain point I had to pretend that I, too, found them funny so that we could move on and watch the rest of the film.