Free Snowdrops by A. D. Miller Page B

worked, down near Novokuznetskaya Metro station. She wasn't expecting me. I turned right up towards the Tretyakov Gallery, past a derelict church and opposite it a subterranean cafe I'd been to once, where privileged Russian kids listen to angry music and pretend to be dissidents. Just after that was Masha's shop. I peered in through the window.
    She was sitting behind a desk with her hair in an Alice band, listening as a stone-washed young couple explained their telephonic needs. The shop had a reception area where you took a numbered ticket from a machine and waited to be called into the office, where Masha and the other sales staff sat. It was standing-room-only pandemonium, the atmosphere like I imagine the inside of the Ark. (There were more mobile phones than people in Moscow then, largely, it was said, because of all the men who had a separate number for speaking to their mistresses.) A woman in the far corner was whining as if she was giving birth. I wiped my steamed-up glasses and was elbowing my way through the crowd when the inner doors opened and Masha came out to meet me.
    "Kolya," she said in her amazing growl, that voice that reached into my insides, "go please to Raskolnikov's on Pyatnitskaya and wait. I will be twenty minutes maybe."
    "Okay," I said. I watched as she walked back to her desk, her lower half encased in tight black office-girltrousers, her upper curves softened by a racing-green company sweatshirt.
    I did as I was told and waited by the window in Raskolnikov's, a warm cafe that was buried in a little courtyard and not trying too hard to be found. Eventually Masha turned into the courtyard. She was wearing a coat that resembled a sort of red patchwork duvet, only sexier. She had three-inch heels that she'd put on after her shift, on which she somehow walked through the snow like Jesus on water. She had perfect winter suspension. She came in, took off her coat, and sat down opposite me.
    "How was work?" I said.
    "What is problem with you?"
    I don't know what I'm doing here
, I wanted to say,
and not just in Russia, either, I'm lonely, I love you
.
    I didn't say that, you won't be surprised to hear. I mumbled something English instead. I said I was feeling a bit low, a bit tired, that I wanted to see her, that I hoped she didn't mind the intrusion.
    "Listen," she said. "On Saturday we go to dacha."
    "What dacha?"
    The Russian dacha is a physical place, the most physical place, the earthy retreat where you grow potatoes, pickle onions, and go fishing. But it's also a place in the imagination, the place that is not Moscow, where there are no traffic jams, no hustlers, and no police.
    "It is dacha of my friend Anya's grandfather. But he is never going there. There is
banya
, we will make shashlik. With Katya. You will feel better."
    "Okay," I said. "Good."
    "But first in morning we go to Butovo."
    "Why will we go to Butovo?"
    "We go with Tatiana Vladimirovna," Masha said.
    "Why is Tatiana Vladimirovna going to Butovo?"
    Butovo is a suburb that clings to the monstrous city at its far southern rim, the kind of place that I guess used to be a separate village before Moscow bloated out to engulf it, like the ones in Middlesex sucked into London by the Tube.
    "She maybe wants to live there, and on Saturday we go with her so she may decide." I remembered them referring to their scheme, that afternoon when Masha and Katya introduced me to their aunt. I figured this must have been it.
    Masha put her hand under the table and onto my knee, sliding her nails up the inside of my thigh. "Don't worry, Kolya," she said. "I love you."
    O N THE S ATURDAY the three of us buzzed the crackly intercom outside Tatiana Vladimirovna's building and asked her if she was ready. "Always ready," she said, letting us in so we didn't have to wait outside in the slush. "Alwaysready" was the slogan of the Pioneers, Masha told me--the old Soviet equivalent of the Scouts, who were taught how to unmask spies and denounce kulaks as well