Free Back to Moscow by Guillermo Erades Page A

insignificance. Life is a
succession of dull moments, sometimes interrupted by short bursts of joy, always full of irrelevant thoughts that keep us distracted as we get older, dreaming of better lives but gradually
accepting the unimportance of our own existence.
    Then, one day, we die and everything is forgotten.

14
    R USSIA CHANGED FAST DURING the first months of my stay. On the last day of the year, as the world prepared hysterical celebrations for the arrival of a
new millennium, Russia’s president – widely regarded as an endearing old man with a drinking problem – went on national TV and, to everybody’s surprise, announced he was
resigning from office. As successor, he appointed the latest of his many prime ministers, a relatively unknown politician with an obscure background in the secret services.
    At first, Muscovites didn’t seem to give much significance to this. ‘Nothing will change,’ Nadezhda Nikolaevna had told me when we resumed our language classes after the
holiday break. ‘They are all thieves anyway.’
    But things did change. In fact, it seemed to me that the country had entered a new era.
    By early spring everyone had stopped talking about the economic crisis. TV news, which I watched often to exercise my comprehension skills, showed endless footage of the new president, looking
young and sober. We could see him every night on the news, practising judo, riding a horse, reprimanding under-performing ministers or winning, pretty much single-handedly, a nasty war in the
Caucasus. According to the national media, Russia was now doing great. Overnight, the country had become rich, confident and assertive.
    These changes were quickly reflected in Moscow’s clubbing scene. The city entered the elitni era. A new club opened every weekend, each more select than the last. Nightlife was no longer
the exclusive realm of dyevs and expats. Russian oligarchs began to show up at the doors of the latest elitni clubs, first in limousines with tinted windows, then in black humvees, always
accompanied by an entourage of drivers, okhrannikis and whores.
    The nightlife crowd became known as the tusovka, each of us a tusovschik. For some reason that was never explained to me, it was around this time that cafés and clubs began to serve sushi
or, rather, a local version of the Japanese delicacy, which in Moscow included plenty of cream cheese, smetana and dill. To keep up with the trend, the tusovka had to learn to use chopsticks.
    Elitni clubs came with their own elitni sections, cordoned-off VIP areas, which were only accessible if you spent a few hundred dollars on champagne. It soon became hard for us, humble expats,
to get into these clubs. We would be turned away at the door by bouncers who spoke no English and didn’t care that we did.
    But we didn’t give up. We, determined Westerners, who had won the Cold War by standing for decades against Russian bullying, were not about to accept defeat without putting up a fight. So
now, when out with the brothers, we would always try to make it into the latest of elitini clubs, many of which were no longer called clubs but ‘projects’. Sure, we had to adapt to our
new status, make a few concessions, adopt a less prominent profile. We would now ask our taxi driver to drop us round the corner, as the sight of a crumbling zhiguli would instantly kill our
chances of passing face control. We would approach the front door of the club in small groups, walking purposefully, radiating self-confidence, barely acknowledging the bouncer, looking as wealthy
and as Russian as we could.
    Sometimes it worked. And nothing compared to the feeling of gliding through face control, those first seconds after the bouncer has casually beckoned you in, and you step firmly onto the carpet,
and you enter a pafosni universe prohibited to mere mortals, chosen because you are handsome, special, and you walk towards the boom-boom beats with your heart full of anticipation and