Guillermo Erades - Back to Moscow

Recently I’ve been thinking about toska. About the way our brain detaches itself from whatever is out there, and glides towards a permanent state of longing. I’ve been thinking that our feelings of euphoria, accomplishment, satisfaction — they are all transient sensations, ephemeral states of mind. The only lasting human feeling is toska, the ‘dull ache of the soul’.

Even tragic events that cause unbearable pain become, with time, nothing more than sad memories. Because time goes on, eroding both our joy and our suffering, mercilessly and relentlessly depriving us of the cause of our anguish. Things that we believe serious, meaningful, very important, there will come a time when they will be forgotten or will seem unimportant.

I LEFT RUSSIA AT THE end of 2002. Back in Europe I surrounded myself with new friends, started the process of putting those years behind me. Yet hardly a day passes when I do not think about my time in Moscow.

I think about Lena, of course — but also about Polina and Yulya and Vika, and the others who lay on my couch. The fleeting moments of shared intimacy, which back then I chased so eagerly, are becoming little more than an amalgam of broken thoughts in my head.

I close my eyes and I see the snow settling gently on the rooftops of Moscow. I remember how, on winter nights when the brothers came to my place, we made a heap of snow on the balcony to chill bottles of beer and vodka. Then I see the snow melt, and spring and summer and autumn fall over the city with all the fullness and perfection of the seasons in a children’s book.

When I think about Tatyana I often picture our first night, after dinner in Café Maki. She’s standing beneath Pushkin’s statue, before we kissed for the first time. It’s dark and her eyes are gleaming, full of hope but, at least in my memory, also coloured by a tinge of sadness. As if she already knew.

Then I think about that other life, the life I would be living if Tatyana and I had not gone to the theatre on the night of 23 October 2002. That life advances in its own parallel universe, unlived by me, not meant to be — dissolved in the hours that followed the rescue operation, as it became clear that some hostages would never wake up, that they had been killed by the gas pumped into the theatre. Eager to preserve military secrecy, the special forces refused to reveal the composition of the gas; doctors at the scene, not knowing what they were treating, were unable to help. Today, a memorial plaque on the wall of the theatre bears a hundred and thirty names.

IN METRO SYSTEMS AROUND the world, a screen above the platform shows the time left until the arrival of the next train. Five minutes. Four minutes. Three minutes. Two minutes. One minute. Then the countdown stops and you feel the breeze and you hear the rattling of a new train approaching through the tunnel.

Not in Moscow.

In Moscow’s metro, the electronic counter above the platform shows the time that has passed since the departure of the last train. With unnecessary precision, the seconds keep adding up, one by one, informing you not about the train to come, but about the one you’ve missed, the train that would be carrying you, if only you had arrived earlier. But that train is for ever gone. You don’t know when the next one will arrive.

Guillermo Erades was born in Málaga, Spain, and has lived in Leeds, Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Moscow, Berlin, Baghdad and Brussels, where he is currently based. Back to Moscow is his first novel.