Guillermo Erades - Back to Moscow

As the train arrived, Marina and Tatyana pushed themselves through the crowd, leaped into the wagon and claimed four seats facing each other. The elektrichka began to move and Anton opened four bottles of warm beer. It was hot inside the train and through the open windows I could hear the deafening metallic noise of the wheels grinding on the rails. Within a few minutes everybody on the train was drinking and eating — the entire wagon smelled of smoked sausage, dried fish and pickled cabbage.

Tatyana had insisted that we spend the weekend at a dacha with her two girlfriends from work and their muzhiks. To overcome my initial resistance, Tatyana had argued that it was very important to her that I meet her friends, that she’d been accused of having an imaginary boyfriend.

The elektrichka advanced through the outskirts of Moscow, snaking through large suburbs of identical buildings and industrial zones, until the landscape became greener.

Every few minutes, someone would show up at the wagon door and, screaming above the noise, would address the crowd as respected passengers, thereafter touting a bewildering array of merchandise: out-of-date women’s magazines, sets of knives, dried fish, ice cream, potato peelers, pens, pads.

Anton kept opening bottles of beer and, by the time we arrived at our destination, two hours later, we were done with what I’d thought were the drinks for the entire weekend. At the station’s produkty magazin we bought more beer, four bottles of Moldovan wine, three bottles of vodka and two bags of ice. Then, for only forty rubles, a zhiguli drove us down dirt roads, following Marina’s directions, until, after twenty minutes, we arrived at the dacha.

Wooden walls, flaking paintwork, tin roof: a classic soviet dacha. The garden was overgrown but charming, scattered with flowers and vegetables. On one side of the plot, next to the fence, grew an enormous cherry tree. Marina insisted that Tatyana and I take the master bedroom, which was on the first floor, at the top of steep wooden stairs.

While the girls opened the windows and dusted the house, Anton and I went to the nearby forest to gather soil and twigs for the outdoor toilet. Back in the dacha, Anton grabbed two bottles of beer from a tub of ice and handed one to me. We sat on plastic chairs in the garden.

I took long sips of chilled beer, listened to the birds and to the chatter of people in neighbouring dachas. I could hear the girls in the kitchen chopping vegetables, Tatyana’s laughter rising above the sound of the knife hitting the wood. She was unusually chatty, full of energy, clearly enjoying herself. Soon — overwhelmed by the aromas of fresh dill and chopped cucumbers that hung in the air — I began to feel little currents of beer-induced joy sparking in my brain.

‘This is the life,’ Anton said.

From a nearby dacha I heard the voice of an old lady teaching a boy to unearth potatoes. For some reason, perhaps because of the old lady’s didactic tone, it made me think of Lyudmila Aleksandrovna. If this was the kind of soviet life she longed for — a simple life, without the stress of modern Moscow — I could understand why Lyudmila Aleksandrovna was in a permanent state of nostalgia. Perhaps, it now occurred to me, she was right and the soviet system provided everything that people needed to enjoy life, the essential things, without the infinite choices that made our capitalist existence stressful and complicated.

Tatyana and Marina set the outside table with candles. For dinner we had cucumber and tomato salad with dill, boiled potatoes with butter and dill, sliced kolbasa, cheese and black bread. There was an additional bowl of freshly cut dill on the table. We had wine, but agreed not to open the vodka. After dinner we moved inside to avoid the mosquitoes and had tea with jam. We played a few rounds of a card game they taught me, and Tatyana and I lost, but she kept smiling. We opened another bottle of cheap Moldovan wine. Tatyana told a couple of anekdots — the narration interrupted by her own laughter — and I realised that it was the first time I’d seen her really drunk. We went to bed soon after midnight.

‘Thanks for coming to the dacha,’ Tatyana said, kissing me goodnight.

‘I’m glad we came,’ I said, just before falling asleep.

The next morning Tatyana and I woke up early and decided to go to the forest for a walk. My head was aching from all the beer and wine. We walked down the creaking stairs, trying not to make too much noise, and stepped into the fresh air and the smell of wet grass. Following a dirt road, we wandered through the village. Most dachas were closed up, but a couple of neighbours were taking advantage of the morning chill to work on their gardens. We crossed a small meadow and reached a thick line of trees.

Inside the forest, the air was cooler and moist and, as we walked, I started to forget about my headache.

‘So nice here,’ I said.

I kissed Tatyana. She wasn’t wearing any make-up and her beautiful hair was all messy. Holding hands, we followed a path under the trees. I was a bit disappointed that the ground was scattered with beer cans, vodka bottles and plastic bags. Tatyana pointed at different trees and told me their names in Russian, but to me they all looked the same. After five minutes the forest ended abruptly. The trees had been cleared, we were facing a construction site.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘they’re building new dachas.’

‘These are not dachas,’ Tatyana said. ‘They are cottages. For New Russians. They are big and ugly.’

For a few seconds I pictured Tatyana and myself in one of these cottages, taking up gardening, having friends over for beers and shashliks.

We retraced our steps back into the forest.

‘Maybe we can pick mushrooms,’ I suggested.

Tatyana laughed. ‘It’s not the season, stupid.’

We stopped by a tree and kissed. I grabbed her ass and moved up to her breasts. She closed her eyes. We hadn’t had sex in a few days. We kissed with increased intensity and, to my surprise, she unzipped her jeans and pulled them down, together with her underwear.

‘I adore you,’ she whispered in my ear.

She was now wearing a T-shirt but naked from the waist down. She dropped to her knees and unbuttoned my jeans. I grabbed her mass of blonde curls and looked around, worried someone would see us. Only trees and rubbish. When I was hard, she pulled me to the ground.

‘Hold on,’ I said. I was now sitting with my back against the tree.

‘Don’t worry, it’s safe. I’ve just had my period.’

Then, she positioned herself on top of me, her apple green eyes bursting with life.

When we returned to the dacha, Marina was making tea in the kitchen.

‘Where have you been, love birds?’ she said.

Tatyana blushed.

We all sat at the outdoor wooden table with steaming cups of tea, pecking at a plate of bread and cheese. Above the cherry tree, the sky was blue and clear and immense.

It wasn’t a lake, really, but a large pond with stagnant water. By the shore, the ashes of old campfires were surrounded by broken glass and rubbish. I hid my disappointment, but couldn’t help comparing the muddy waterhole to the lake I’d pictured in my mind, something like the beautiful lake Pavel and Marina visited with their friends in lesson six of Russian As We Speak It .

The better spots around the shore had been taken by other dachnikis, so we had to set our blankets on a sandy slope a few metres from the water. We all changed into swimming clothes. There were six of us now. Diana had arrived earlier in the morning with her boyfriend, coincidentally also called Anton. Tall, freckled, ginger-haired, Diana was wearing a red bikini a size too small.

After swimming we lay in the sun drinking beer with bread and kolbasa. I put my head on Tatyana’s lap and closed my eyes, letting the sun warm my face. Tatyana stroked my hair and I found myself thinking of Lena, when she came to watch me play football in Kazakova and we lay in the sun. I wondered where Lena might be now, and why she hadn’t answered any of my messages after our encounter at the Boarhouse. I finished my beer. With the sun warming my skin and the sound of Russian chatter in the background, I fell asleep.