CHAPTER FIFTEEN

As soon as Julia got back from summer camp, I left for Moscow. I’d made some good progress on my revolution project. A day has twenty-four hours — eight to work, eight to drink, eight to sleep — a pragmatic rhythm in which I’ve written ten books.

In Moscow, I was busy working for the paper. I made two short trips by train to the provinces, cooked, and slept, but one evening, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I’d had enough of the talk in the papers and on TV, and of the press conferences as well. I called my Frisian beer-buddy Gerbrand, and an hour later we were sitting in café-bistro Zhan-Zhak as of old.

The girls were back again, spying from the corners of their eyes into the sparkling mirrored walls — or rather, they’d never been away. Gerbrand was more energetic than ever. He downed big jugs of beer. He looked at me mischievously the whole time, but what he was saying was actually pretty sad. For three and a half years, he’d tried to get a job in a Russian circus for his act with three black panthers, but he’d never managed to. The Russian who’d lured him to Moscow with tall tales of a golden future had fled, after wheedling ten thousand euros for arranging the air transport and quarantine and obtaining the necessary certificates. All his savings were gone. He’d briefly considered going back to Holland with his panthers, but the ban on predatory animals would soon apply from Trondheim to Gibraltar. As an animal tamer, he was a European refugee.

When I asked what he was going to do now, his eyes lit up like the diamonds on the collars of his panthers, who he’d always had enter the ring in darkness. At a party, he’d met a 40-year-old blonde, half-Russian, half-Uzbek woman, a former ballet dancer, who’d divorced her husband a year earlier, a filthy-rich Russian. Gerbrand had seduced her with his light blond Frisian head of hair, muscles like cables, and the photos of his panther act, and they’d ended up in bed together that first night. Within a week, she was completely addicted to him. She had the yoga studio in her villa in the Barvikha woods converted into a mini circus ring, with original props. And there he had to tame her, naked, with his whip.

‘She’s completely nuts …’

After a couple of beers, Gerbrand and I took a walk to another establishment close to Red Square. ‘She always wants to show me off at some party, an opening or a premiere. Hardly a day passes without some event. That story about taming her in her yoga studio is doing the rounds like a bush fire among her friends. But anyway, she’s given me a credit card with no limit. I have total carte blanche! She’s got eighty million dollars. The kid has no idea of money. I take $5,000 out of the bank every day. No more, no less. She doesn’t even notice. If I keep that up for a year, hopefully two, I’ll be made.’

Back in Tchaikovsky Street the pounding, drilling, and hammering went on without end. The dust seemed to be getting finer, by some strange mutation. Julia roamed through the flat all day with a damp cloth, worried about the cats. I even found her one morning wearing a mask, one of those white face masks that the Chinese use; she was trying to fit a similar piece of junk over Moesha’s snout. It was utter madness and I was stuck in the middle of it. How much can a person demolish?

The entire décor in this historical building above and below me was shot to hell. A young worker who I bumped into in the passage told me that the new sounds were actually from the renovation. All of the waterpipes, electrical and other cables were to be replaced, a process that would take at least eleven weeks.

At around five, Julia went to school — the evening school in Sadovaya where she doesn’t even earn the equivalent per hour of a cappuccino on Nevsky Prospect, but which she’s happy with and I encourage. Just after she left, her brother rang the doorbell.

‘Brother-in-law, are you home?’ he called up through the intercom.

‘Yes, brother-in-law, I’m home,’ I replied cheerfully into the telephone receiver, and pressed the button to open the outside door to the street downstairs.

I quickly checked whether there was beer cooling in the fridge. Julia had taken everything out to make room for the jars of preserves that she’d made from plums, blueberries, and strawberries for the winter. I put three bottles of Baltika in the freezer section, but once Alexei was sitting at the table opposite me as usual, with his shoulders sagging and his eyes glazed, he told me that he didn’t want any beer, or tea, or coffee — nothing.

‘There’s been a disaster,’ he said, stuttering with emotion. ‘I’ll tell you straight out, a downright disaster.’

The evening before, my brother-in-law and his friend and partner were having a drink on the Nautilus. Business was going well; the number of people wanting to do the sailing course was increasing, and sometimes they rented out the boat with a captain (mostly himself) to couples who wanted to have a romantic few hours sailing on the Gulf of Finland. In September, they could start repaying the debts to the bank and me. And now they’d finally had an evening off. A warm August breeze was blowing over the water; on the quayside at the little harbour, there was the sound of singing and an accordion that was coming from a group barbecuing meat in the open air. To celebrate their business success so far, they were drinking on the deck of their own boat like millionaires. Fool that he’d been! They hadn’t even had much to drink — at most five glasses of apple liqueur — but despite not having much alcohol in their veins, they got entangled in a heated discussion about the future of their joint venture, and finally about politics, at which point my brother-in-law’s partner called him a traitor.

In stark contrast to my brother-in-law, who’d travelled, spoke English, and followed the world news on the internet every day, his partner had only been abroad once: to Helsinki, in a rented van, to buy a new kitchen for his flat because everything there was half the price, even after paying the import costs. But as the offspring of a former Soviet military man, he was a patriot. He’d rather go on holiday in his own country, and he was proud that his son would soon be serving in the Russian army. As a good citizen of your fatherland, you have to be prepared to make sacrifices — if necessary, your own flesh and blood. After the NATO troops first began stirring things up in Ukraine, according to his partner, they were now right on the border with Russia, in the Baltic states. Poles, Americans, even Canadians, under the direction of Berlin!

Although my brother-in-law was the grandson of a sea captain in the Soviet navy, he was appalled by both the system and Russia’s military posturing, and had done everything he could to keep his own son out of the army. One day, he’d paid a fortune to a medical officer to obtain a fake exemption certificate; you’ll do anything to save the health and life of your child.

‘Traitor,’ his partner suddenly said to my brother-in-law on the boat.

‘What do you mean?’

There was a brief silence, after which my brother-in-law’s partner said the terrible word again. He was amiability itself without a drink, never looked for an argument, nor would he hurt a fly.

‘Anyone that keeps their son out of the army is a traitor.’

In an attempt to keep the peace, my brother-in-law topped up their apple liqueurs, murmuring by way of appeasement that luckily, as friends, they could have different opinions, and then he carried on with his line of reasoning. The country was in the grip of people who didn’t actually know anything about life. That went for the clique in Moscow, the governors from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka! Yes, they really had no clue! Maybe that was their greatest crime. They lived in villas and palaces, had private planes, sent their children to elite schools in the West, where they also had their country houses and their billions, but at the same time they followed the instructions of the satrap who said that they should detest the West, vilify it, hate it. How long could the country continue doing the splits? In the Kremlin, they only had the most modern smartphones, but the messages in their mailboxes came straight from the Soviet Union and from the Middle Ages! The country was going backwards, not forwards. And my brother-in-law, who in his stubbornness took after his father — my father-in-law — was paying for his propriety, after a life of hard work, with the pension of a glorified bum in a one-room flat, and now he told his partner that he was sorry he’d never really been to Europe. Not so much the museums in the fine city centres, or the coasts with their dunes and palm trees, but the interiors of countries such as Belgium, Germany, Denmark, and France, with their well-cared-for, ploughed fields, the cowsheds, factories, and small businesses that produced things that everyone wanted to have — otherwise they’d go bankrupt — and most of all the villages, the small towns and cities with their bakers, butchers, florists, carpenters, roofers, house painters, restaurant owners, publicans, and shopkeepers, who like the farmers didn’t only have an understanding of their trade, but shared a love of their work, in contrast to Russia, where almost all craftsmanship had been destroyed by the communists, and a quarter of a century after the fall of the USSR, it still hadn’t recovered, in fact it was suppressed.

In truth, those in power looked down on people like them: the enterprising lower-middle classes. How long had they had to beg for the permits for their sailing school? How much time did it take to get the right stamps? How many kickbacks did they have to pay to various people? How in God’s name could his partner like these characters who essentially deeply despised him? The satrap had once lived abroad as a spy, distrusted everyone, was always on his guard. Later, as president, he visited most of the foreign capitals, but what did he know about real life there? Had he ever driven on a French country road with cattle grazing to the left and right, and fertile fields, not in a limousine with a motorcade stuffed with bodyguards, but as any free European citizen in a small car? He had no idea what a pleasure it was to stroll through a French market, where local farmers sold their fresh produce, doctors shopped for groceries with their families — doctors who helped people first and foremost because they were doctors, and not because of bribes. Or what it was like to wander around towns where you could trust police officers and officials, where judges really administered justice and didn’t just carry out their orders from above, where a person — in brief — could live as a person should.

‘Russian tomatoes are the best in the world,’ his partner remarked, not having understood my brother-in-law, or been willing to. ‘And if things are going so well there, why is half of Europe in revolt? And what are you talking about those farmers for? Our grain harvests are breaking all records. We’re the granary of the world again!’

My brother-in-law eventually sloped off. It was only this morning that he found out what had happened afterwards. His partner had stayed on the Nautilus. He’d opened a second bottle of apple liqueur. After a while, two figures had left the shashlik-barbecuing, music-making group further down the quay: two young women. They’d wheedled their way on board the yacht, where a broad-shouldered man was drinking to excess, alone by the light of a storm lamp. They began drinking with him, and soon persuaded him to take a boat trip with them over the water. My brother-in-law still didn’t know quite what happened. In any case, his partner went sailing with his boozy head and, miracle of miracles, he made it back from the Gulf of Finland intact. But coming back, he must have run into something in his alcoholic haze — a mooring-post, a buoy, maybe the quay itself. In any case, the boat was so badly damaged that it was almost on the point of sinking. The Nautilus was totally smashed up and had to be repaired as quickly as possible — the damage would run to thousands and thousands.

‘What a fool I’ve been!’ My brother-in-law raised both hands to his head in despair. ‘First to start drinking, and then to start a quarrel about damned politics. Usually, my partner’s a nice lad, I swear it, it’s always the cursed drink … What am I to do now?’ Alexei looked at me with the sad, damp-eyed expression of a seal pup that’s been abandoned by its mother. ‘Go on, I’ll have a beer then … How could I have been so stupid? I’m ruined, I don’t know what to do, I’m totally wracked with nerves …’

When I came back from the kitchen with two ice-frosted bottles of beer, my brother-in-law took one straight out of my hands, mumbling that he didn’t need a glass, and lifted the neck to his mouth. Then he began to say how his sailing school should under no circumstances suffer from the incident, naturally. He’d built up a reputation after all! What’s more, the roster was full of people for the course till the end of September. While the Nautilus was being repaired, he’d have to hire a boat; he’d already been nosing around on the internet, there was enough on offer and his partner had promised to sell his car. That was enough for 70 per cent of the initial costs, but they were still stuck with that damned 30 per cent.

‘How much?’ I put the cold bottle of Baltika to my lips; a sharp pain jabbed into my front teeth.

‘For me, it would be a question of three grand,’ my brother-in-law answered. ‘Tell me, what’s that awful pounding upstairs the whole time?’

In the bedroom, Julia had covered all the furniture with sheets; it gave it a spooky feel, like a house where the occupants have gone away for a long time, but in the evenings we could at least crawl into a dust-free bed. I tugged a sheet off a dresser, bent down, opened the little door and took out a grey metal money-box. The money-box had always stood in my father’s office, among the packs of macaroni, super-size tins of tomatoes, crates of wine, and other stock; there, he did the bookkeeping at a table that had previously been in the café, often while he was still wearing his chef’s tunic. The money-box was one of the few things that I’d inherited from him. At the time, I’d left most things to my brothers, on account of their offspring.

I still had eight thousand saved — a hundred and sixty fifty-euro notes. I always kept the key to the mini-safe with me. Julia didn’t know about the money. Every man has his secrets. I’d wanted to use it to pay off part of my home loan, but in the end I’d decided to set it aside for what the Russians call ‘a black day’. I quickly counted out sixty fifty-euro notes. I put the box back, shut the dresser door, and pulled the sheet over it again; Tooter came to pay me a visit with his tail up, until the whine of an electric drill picked up again from above, and he quickly sped off to join Moesha and Peach in the linen closet.

Back in the living room, my brother-in-law was sitting there with a pencil and paper working out some figures, the tip of his tongue sticking out of his mouth. He glanced up at me and said calmly, ‘If I don’t have any more setbacks, I can start paying you back in the summer of next year. Don’t worry, brother-in-law, I know exactly how much I owe you. One day, you’ll have it all back. This damned country is finally condemned to success, and so are we!’ His snigger turned into a guffaw, and although I didn’t know if he was being serious or was really making a joke, I naturally laughed along with my brother-in-law.

Back in Moscow on my way to an appointment for work, I passed by October Square, where I hadn’t been for quite some time. The majestic Lenin was still on his pillar; Julia and I had looked out on him from our double hotel room in the winter of 1990. Lenin surveyed our city like a general would a battlefield, with his right hand in his trouser pocket, flapping coattails, and bronze revolutionaries at his feet. Back then, this neighbourhood had been the epicentre of the newly emerging market economy.

Meanwhile, in the present, capitalism had become as common as a Big Mac, but October Square and the start of Lenin Prospect was still one of the busiest traffic arteries in the city.

After the two Siberian scientists from Novosibirsk had received the million Deutschmarks for their tomography project, I never saw them again, at least not in person. Khinshtein had been appearing on TV for years, as a nuclear expert, and spokesperson for one of the parties that supported the satrap like an applause machine. He’d grown older, but in a way that didn’t involve decline, rather a gradual conservation process. His helmet of blue-black hair had turned whitish-grey, but his sharp bird’s face was as sharp as ever. He was the type of man who would grow to be very old. Soon after the duo had defrauded the German funders, his fellow member of the Academy of Sciences, Trofimov, had died. He disappeared into the waves in the sea near Mallorca; his body was never found. I only learned about it by chance when Khinshtein was doing an interview online about education in the Soviet Union, and he recounted the sad fate of his former good friend and fellow scientist.

The hotel of the Academy of Sciences where Julia and I had once taken a champagne bath had transformed over the years into a shabby transit house. There were massage parlours, and human traffickers stowed their living cargo here from the East, heading West. Bazaar-like shops had sprung up on the ground floor around the lifts in what had once been a fairly chic lounge, to which Pozorski had descended shortly before he was murdered.

This Soviet building, together with thousands of other Soviet buildings in the city, had been recommended for demolition, just like the apartment that I’d rented in the nineties. The places in Moscow where I’d spent the best years of my life were rapidly being lost. Maybe it was time to head off for good. But where to?

I’d been out and about that day researching a piece, which I wrote up in my flat on Bolshaya Tatarskaya. Then, in my inbox, I found a message from my friend Felix from Cap d’Antibes. Ten days earlier, I’d sent him the latest version of my book about the Russian Revolution of 1917, which still wasn’t finished. I’d ignored the emails from my publisher in Amsterdam, asking where the manuscript was, and suggesting that, although I hadn’t actually overrun the delivery date, she was getting to the stage where she wanted to know what sort of book it was going to be. What was getting in my way was fear: the eternal fear of failure. I was happy that everything would soon be over for good.

My friend’s opinion hadn’t changed very much, even after a couple of hundred more pages. I was a fool not to have developed the theme of the Neva more, and also connected it to the current state of affairs. In what was then Petrograd, the Neva had been the dividing line between rich and poor, wealth and want, exploitation and rule. The Mediterranean was the new Neva. The outcasts in the world were coming to claim justice, not across the ice this time, but over the waves in boats. The exodus from Africa to Europe continued unabated. Wretches who only dreamt of a humane existence drowned every day like rats in the cold waves, and right-wing bastards all over the world seemed to think this was okay, and did nothing, or even encouraged turning the sea into a floating fortress, supported by the plebs who’d crawled out of their lairs; the old continent had once again become a zoo full of political adventurers and agitators.

Oh, yes, my friend in the south of France was right: you only had to change the word ‘SIRE’, which the poor slobs had helplessly directed at the czar in their petition in the winter of 1905, to ‘EUROPE’, ‘PETROGRAD’ to ‘AFRICA’, and ‘QUARTERS’ to ‘COUNTRIES’, and the poem of history rhymed again:

EUROPE,

“We, inhabitants of Africa, who come from various countries, our wives, children, and helpless elderly parents, have come here to YOU, EUROPE, to seek justice and protection. We are poor and oppressed, we toil endlessly, and we are degraded. (…)

We are being suffocated by despotism and our lack of rights, we are gasping for breath. Oh, EUROPE, we have no strength left. We have reached the limit of our endurance. We have come to that terrible moment when it seems better to die than to continue in our unbearable sufferings…”

During the first days of the revolution, the cold and bloody days of February 1917, it soon became clear that the czarist world was finished for good. Servants were ordered to drape the façades of the elite’s neoclassical city palaces with red flags and banners, and rig private coaches and sleighs with red reins, as proof of their masters’ warm support for the revolution. There may have been aristocracy living here, but they were good aristocracy, with their hearts in the right place. Of course they welcomed the Bolshevik revolution! Hadn’t they pleaded all their lives for a more just society? More rights and opportunities for the poor? A fairer apportioning of the earthly pleasures and riches? Hadn’t they secretly flirted with the ideas of the revolution in their younger years, as members of the privileged, intellectual, ruling class? Always read the right books, papers and periodicals? Oh yes, they’d kept it a secret — a person doesn’t want to flaunt their goodness — but they had supported the Narodnaya Volya, the People’s Will movement, which aimed to overthrow the czar, both morally and financially, even if no receipts actually existed. The red reins that they now had harnessed to their coaches were the proof!

The red reins would have to save their lives.

The revolt of 1905 had broken out after Czar Nicholas II had ignored the people’s petition and had his troops fire on his subjects; the streets were suddenly strewn with the bodies of the rich, and the horizons of the countryside glowed orange and red from estates that had been set on fire by the peasants, out for vengeance on their landlords. The abstract love of the privileged for their poor fellows had taken a knock, but the remorse and guilt they felt still ran deep. The rich were like drug addicts though, and could only forget their existential pain in intoxication, continuing to party, living off the interest on the family fortunes that they’d inherited, travelling to sanatoria and rivieras, while in the evenings they were still served food and wine brought by their servants from the kitchens, which they’d often never set foot in themselves.

After the revolution, Nicolas Nabokov, the cousin of the writer, pondered in his memoirs, ‘Were all of us, the entire upper class of Russian society, so completely insensitive, so terribly alienated, that we didn’t realise that the delightful life we were leading was unjust in itself, and it was impossible for it to continue like that?’

After the outburst of fury in Petrograd in 1917, Lenin’s world revolution almost succeeded. In Germany, Italy, the Balkans, and the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire, a furious throng traipsed through the streets with red banners and flags, clubs, bludgeons, knives, and firearms, to settle accounts for good with the old capitalist regimes. In the end, it was only after World War II that Stalin was able to install his communist satellite states in Eastern Europe, but the years 1918 and 1919 could have been the historic moment for the Occident to truly turn red — not with blood, but politics.

Many of the German soldiers who’d returned from the trenches and found the land of their birth in complete chaos, cowardly abandoned by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who’d fled to the Netherlands, pinned their hopes on the Spartacists led by the German communists Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. The red spectre was now belching, farting, and reeking from every pore, and crapping all over the old continent. Soon, Hungary had its own Soviet regime, under the leadership of ‘The Budapest Lenin’, gentleman-dictator Béla Kun. The communists were also stirring in the Carpathians, the Balkans, and in the new small republic of Austria, while in nearby Bavaria the beer-halls were jam-packed with furiously smoking Red Guards, communists, former deserters, defected soldiers, nihilists, students, and artists — the men sporting long hair, the girls often close-cropped — who called for Soviet republics, full of revolutionary zeal, sex, and fighting songs, while at headquarters fingers hovered over the triggers of the machine guns, ready for the global uprising.

But it would all end in the slaughter of the communists, followed by the establishment of the Weimar Republic in 1919 — the first parliamentary republic in German history — where an ex-paper-hanger and failed painter from Austria, with a black toothbrush-moustache, would soon succeed in filling those same Bavarian beer halls, drawing in people with his hypnotic and demonic talent for rhetoric — a born comic, with people literally doubled up laughing, sprawling over the wet wooden tables as he again conjured up some greedy little Jew — mostly rousing the same men to rapture who had previously huddled together in this place, deflated and disillusioned, to listen to the communist prophecies from other mouths, and who now stared hopefully up at the podium once again, while the Löwenbräu flowed from the beer taps like biblical liquid gold, spattering into the steins.

Hitler was soon christened the ‘Bavarian Mussolini’, the counterpart to the Italian who’d been sent by the gods, with his granite eyes, granite fist, and granite chin, who knew how to manipulate mass psychology — with short salvos from deep in his throat, the staccato of a machine gun — an art in which Lenin had been his forerunner. It was with Lenin, and nobody else, that this irascible barking began, and the dismissal of opponents, the propaganda, the spectacle that since then has never ceased. German democracy did its work. Hitler was elected chancellor. The revolution had succeeded after all, even if the outcome was somewhat different than some had hoped for and expected.

Now, was the world on the cusp of revolution again? Wasn’t it a recipe for disaster that there were, once again, millions of stateless persons and refugees roaming the globe, with unemployment that had never disappeared, and a mass of people thundering towards Europe from Africa?

To many, the Russian aristocracy’s flirtation with the underprivileged — those they’d ordered to fetch firewood every day, or to take their coats, or tuck hot foot-warmers in their beds — was only a fashion statement in those years before 1917, a perfume you put on; it cost them little. But when the revolution came, people learned: the rich started employing these ‘red reins’ en masse, not when it was too late, but preventatively.

After the revolts throughout western Europe in the sixties and seventies, western society slowly became the Realm of the Red Rein, where optimism reigned supreme, where people could finally think about themselves for once, and growth seemed uninhibited, a universe in which everything was possible, in which a generation ruled the roost that had never been through anything.

History had ended; everything was purely and exclusively focused on the shining future, shinier than the present.

Most people one came across were kind and friendly; workers stuck out their hands the way you’d blissfully stroke a stray dog’s head on the street. People praised newcomers for the variety of their cultures — essential enrichment; by now, their own lives were as pristine and immaculate as newly starched sheets — if a blemish were to appear, an immediate panic would ensue. Never before had the liberties and delights of life smelt and tasted so good, certainly in the ever-swelling archipelago of restaurants — take two steps and the cuisine of the world was on your plate; only Philistines still cooked and ate at home. The aeroplane was the new bike; in the Realm of the Red Rein, people travelled to their holiday homes in France, Florida, and Tuscany, just as ordinary people would walk up the gravel path to their garden sheds. War and poverty were far distant phenomena; if the threat came closer, approaching the borders of their blessed districts, sometimes terrifyingly close to their streets and fine homes, then something had gone terribly wrong beyond the scope of their understanding. People would look around like a mother who’d lost her child at the beach, and a guilty party would soon be located.

From preschool, people were taught to love threatened plants, animals, and distant peoples, and were prepared step by step for a diffuse philanthropy, a warm empathy for humanity. By some wondrous ethical mechanism, people were even saved from guilt. Criticism of their actions stemmed from the malodorous crypts of bastardry, hate, envy, jealousy; they themselves did little or nothing wrong — a person who wished others well could never be a bad person.

In the Realm of the Red Rein, it wasn’t particularly about political colour. The reins were taken up by all persuasions and creeds, from left to right; those who adhered to a leftish world view lived like the right, and those who were on the right lived like the right too — their actions barely differed, their lives were often completely identical. It was a phenomenal and magnificent spectacle, with a moving and sometimes almost poignant beauty. The members of the Brotherhood of the Red Rein took their red reins in hand and collectively drove an immense air-carriage, drawn by air-horses, with their hooves clattering in the pink clouds, as though they were swimming. There was enough room for everyone on the comfy, silky-soft cushions, for the family, their children, often for their friends too. They drifted over the countries of Europe like some unearthly phenomenon, in radiant, twinkling light. The masses looked up at them with their heads raised, at first filled with awe, open-mouthed, as though it were a reverse eclipse; but anyone who looked too long would get a sore neck, a stabbing headache, and after a while some were slightly blinded by the sight. Spots appeared before their eyes, not red ones but black and brown.

The most important principle in the Realm of the Red Rein was this: always, and without fail, you must act in accordance with the law. Within that boundary, anything was possible, even the abandonment of your own morality. In public, you could plead for diversity, write about it in books, pamphlets, and newspapers, you could even lead political parties that were almost exclusively driven by ethnic prophesising, but at the same time no one barred you from sending your child to the very best school, and always a white one. Often the entire network was desperately tapped — tips were feverishly exchanged on the silky-soft cushions of the air-carriage about universities all over the world, institutions that would give the children of the Brotherhood the best chances of success. These were the most precious things they possessed. The contacts that children made on holidays, beneath the smiling gaze of their parents, were maintained digitally for the rest of the year and on short vacations — a week skiing, a week snorkelling, a city trip. There seemed to be no limits for the children in the gilded air-carriage either; they glided over the world like eagles over ploughed fields, they knew each other, spoke each other’s language.

In the Realm of the Red Rein, people mostly went to work like other mortals, but at the end of the month, many of the members of the Brotherhood came home with three, four, five, sometimes fifteen or twenty times more than those that still stared at them from the ground with their sore necks. It was the market, the law of supply and demand, that explained and determined and justified these great differences; there was nothing illegal about the fact that one person had to work an entire month for what another earned in a day. This had been true in the directors’ offices at multi-nationals, banks and law firms since time immemorial. But now it had gained a foothold elsewhere too: the directors of semi-public enterprises, housing associations, utility companies, hospitals, care facilities, and even schools had begun to act like capitalists, with bonuses and chauffeur-driven cars, not with private capital, but the community’s. Friends were taken on as consultants for daily sums that a butcher in an abattoir wouldn’t earn in a month.

In the beneficence of the golden air-carriage, the nouveau soon spoke the same language as the older passengers; as well as tips about schooling, addresses were secretly exchanged for bankers and accountants — entirely honest, reliable, decent folk that could help them to pay the state as little of their thoroughly deserved earnings as possible. Many of these recommendations came with tips about buying property abroad, or making financial arrangements off-shore; there was nothing illegal about this, it was all above board, people in every country were doing it. If the new European aristocracy with their barely taxed salaries and allowances wanted to stretch their legs and head to the nearby paupers’ wards, it was as if they were taking a stroll back in time from the chic Nevsky Prospect to the outskirts of the Vasilyevsky Island of 1917, with the revolution already brewing.

Modern poverty was particoloured, both native and external; an ironic and sickening consequence of the actions of the members of the Brotherhood of the Red Rein was that these ordinary people were set against each other, fighting for jobs, for some air, for a respectable life. But it was different from Petrograd in 1917, where the bourgeoisie had gone around wrapped in furs, while bums were often left shivering and barefoot in rags. The difference between rich and poor on the streets in contemporary Europe was now almost invisible. Two boys in the same jeans, wearing the same trainers, staring at the same smartphone, were standing at a stop waiting for a tram. The tram came, they got in, and a little while later they got out at different stops. One boy came home to a house with a velvet cord in the drawing room; the other stumbled over a mountain of unpaid bills, staring at the toes of his far-too-expensive shoes. The clichés about poverty from Dickens to Dostoyevsky had slyly metamorphosed, but one thing had remained the same: those in the Realm of the Red Rein still professed a love on a mass scale that cost them nothing; they pleaded for a better life for others, some even screamed it from the rooftops; they even budgeted for the costs to bring this about, but once again they mostly had others pay for it — their own prosperity remained largely unmolested.

The discourse conducted by the Brotherhood of the Red Rein centred on gender, art, vegetarianism or otherwise, benevolence, and the necessity for meditation, all to distract attention from the real problem: the ever-growing differences between rich and poor; one’s own pleasant life versus the awful lives of others. In the Realm of the Red Rein, they continually pointed to the politicians. Of course, they voted for the right party — a party that stood up for the weak; it was others that were holding back progress. At the same time, the lives of those they professed to love were further away than Saturn — those who cleaned their houses, served them in restaurants, washed the bottoms of their parents. When there was any criticism of their own decadent lifestyles — the absurd salaries, bonuses, and allowances, the nepotistic networks — the Brotherhood of the Red Rein took refuge in a sort of bizarre logic that was reminiscent of the red aristocracy under Stalin. Whenever anyone denounced their lives, they furiously dismissed this with the riposte that they didn’t own the luxury goods, but only made use of them with the approval of the state. This dialectic came quite naturally to the Brotherhood of the Red Rein.

But something had gone terribly wrong in recent years. The passengers on their silk cushions in the golden air-carriage had suddenly glanced down and observed the state of things, such strange and unexpected things, so that all of them like a single being were driven to the corners of the carriage in panic; but the horses continued to canter and managed by a whisker to keep the whole thing upright. The passengers, clutching each other tightly so that no one would tumble out, looked in astonishment at how black smoke was rising from the earth, from explosions: not the detonation of fireworks, but real bombs. At first, everything seemed far away, pandemonium like in a silent film, but all too soon the thunder, the blasts, and the gunpowder smoke of the battlefield came closer by; and at the same time, another phenomenon unfolded below, but at first they couldn’t work out what it was — a horde of ants, cockroaches, lemmings? — but when one of the passengers, an MEP from Brussels, took out his ivory opera glasses, which he always carried with him for his weekly visits to La Scala in Milan, and set the precious object to his eyes, twiddling the lenses open-mouthed, he suddenly exclaimed: ‘People! There are people down there!’ And for a little while, a terrible panic broke out in the golden air-carriage, a clamour, cries of fear, and telephone calls to family and children — with recommendations flying back and forth like fleas in a circus for how to secure their homes and possessions. A stream of people was advancing from the south to the north, and thank God passed the neighbourhoods and houses of the passengers in the golden air-carriage; this was a natural process, there was little they could do; water simply happened to flow downhill. The passengers had barely recovered when the most terrifying thing imaginable occurred; the opera glasses were passed from hand to hand, the ivory grew moist from their sweaty, trembling fingers. Among the continuous stream of people — poor creatures in search of a decent life, a plate of food, safety — a raging sea of balled fists suddenly rose, like weeds in a stubble field. This repugnant sight was accompanied by guttural screams and curses at those on the silk cushions in the golden air-carriage, where their fidgety buttocks sidled back and forth in cold fear. As well as their fists, people held up flags, while metallic echoes arose from songs sung in unison. The Bavarian beer halls of the old days hadn’t only been brought back to life, now filled with the supporters of new political adventurers, who’d cribbed the arts of the black toothbrush moustache, but also seemed to be spreading out over the earth beneath the cantering hooves of the air-horses, like an aggressive eczema. But then — as though in a fairy-tale with a happy ending — the riff-raff thinned out from one day to the next. The offensive that the passengers in the golden air-carriage had initiated on a mass scale, using their smartphones like old-fashioned cannons, the networks that they’d made sweat and steam, the newspapers, TV, and other media that had sped to their aid, had transformed into a triumph of democracy, reason, control, and hope mostly. Even if there were autocrats in power and lunatics elsewhere in the world, and the drowning in the cold waves went on every day, the inhabitants of the Realm of the Red Rein began making plans again; they phoned their offspring, happily and optimistically, from their homes and holiday homes, with some studying abroad, or backpacking somewhere on the globe, and once again consulted their financial advisors, daring to take another look at the state of their securities portfolio after such a long time, and even bought some extra shares, immersed themselves in culinary delights as before, in a delicious Babel-like confusion of paletes; while the theatres and concert halls were crowded too. The delight that people derived from the arts, which offered consolation for the sufferings in this world, had in fact never abated; the music of Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, and others could still affect their tender souls, move them to rapture, like the Saint Petersburg aristocracy who had sat on the plush blue velvet in 1917, listening breathlessly to Chaliapin’s bass voice in the Mariinsky Theatre — the opera Boris Godunov — while the Winter Palace was being stormed a short distance away, and the vermin were creeping from the gutters and readying themselves for the final struggle. And just as then, when they’d left the beautiful temples, when they’d exchanged the delirium of the arts for the delirium of ordinary life, lips curling in distaste, heads turned away and cursing the vulgus under their breath as they passed them on the street, not the Saint Petersburg pariahs this time, but those that had looked up at the passengers flying through the firmament in their golden carriage, feeling distaste, envy and hate, until everything before their eyes had turned black and brown, and they’d shown their true character, their pigs’ faces, their uvulas weak from yelling slogans, after which they raised their collars and walked on swiftly, or hoisted a hand and vanished into the night by taxi.

It was quite a thing, human existence!

Whatever way you look at it, that’s life.

It’s like the sea, an endless ebb and tide.

I’d been drinking wine for the last couple of hours sitting here at my desk on Tchaikovsky Street 40. The thrumming renovation had finally ceased. The cats lay together in the linen closet in the bedroom; safe in there, content. I turned Hildegard Knef’s voice down a bit. Not that I needed to: my Russian neighbours above and below had left, without my having been able to say goodbye to them; they’d disappeared like thieves in the night.

Many of my generation have never heard of Hildegard Knef. An international star, a diva, a writer, wife, mistress, mother, chanteuse, human. Every word of hers, every verse that she sings in her husky, smoky, Berlin voice, with the timbre of some old brothel madam, strikes my flesh and blood like bullets.

Today, there may be happy hours,

But tomorrow will bring misery,

Because each new day is a clean slate,

So you’d better get ready.

Julia had left at six to teach at the evening school. I walked to Yuri’s on Furshtatskaya soon after. I thanked him again for arranging the Gippius thing. He started reminiscing about one of his Casanova conquests from the old days, and I came back with two bottles of Pinot Grigio. I drank it slowly, glancing at the pages of the manuscript of my book on the Russian Revolution of 1917. I’d managed to finish it after all, two weeks earlier than planned.

Of course, my friend was right, there in Cap d’Antibes among the parasol pine trees, staring out over the azure sea. Artists should talk about their own times. But what do I, the son of a capitalist, have to do with the masses in that earthly world? And anyway, the world these days seems more like 1905 than 1917: the feared tidal wave of vengeance, the envy of the common folk, the powers of darkness, all a trickle. The dance goes on — yes, the dance always goes on. Maybe this was another false rhyme of history, and we were on the cusp of a new biblical deluge of blood.

Tomorrow, I will send my manuscript to Amsterdam. The only care, the only love I’ll have from now on, is for our three cats and my wife, who at this very moment was teaching German in a classroom where once children — between their maths and biology lessons — were trained to assemble and disassemble Kalashnikovs, revolvers, and hand grenades; a practice that has largely returned.

You have to figure out how you want to live.

That’s what it boils down to.

And if you’re in pain, don’t complain,

There’s nothing you can do.

What a fine language German is! And what a singer!

My second bottle of Pinot Grigio was now half empty. Luckily, there was a dash of red left from the previous day on the mantelpiece between the brass candlesticks. I chucked a couple of birch logs on the open hearth, with some wood chips to light it, along with the thick paper from my old manuscripts.

A literary fire!

It was mid-August, but behind my desk I still enjoyed the smell of burning and the flames. Have I already told you about our open fireplace? An artefact made of pure marble, with a chiselled nest and a pair of swallows feeding their three young from their beaks; the work of an unknown Italian master.

What life doesn’t give us, art does!

Whatever way you look at it, that’s life.

So I say, live for today.

Whatever I’ve done, I tried to have fun,

And don’t regret anything anyway.

I once wrote a story about this building, and those who had passed through it. I can still see all of them before me.

You already know my downstairs neighbour, Gennady Nikolaevich, in his striped sailor’s top, chopping up a gleaming antique cherry-wood dresser with an axe, while his wife looked on with her alcoholic clown’s face, and also the rest of the occupants of the kommunalka who I’d said hello to on the stairs over the years. Good, honest people in general — with lives, pasts, feelings, desires, and expectations —who I always enjoyed a good chat with, who helped me out, who I sometimes helped too. Now they had all disappeared for good.

I would never again hear the civilised voice of my elderly upstairs neighbour, Eugene, a retired physics teacher, and a secret homosexual, who told me one day on the couch in his little three-metre by four-metre room about his father’s suicide in 1950. He’d made it to Berlin as a 20-year-old soldier, but when he returned to Moscow after the war, he was seen as a traitor because he was not a body on the battlefield — had not fought hard enough or he would not still be alive — an offence that landed him in a penal colony twice. ‘I was standing there with my little brother. My father was standing in front of the bathroom mirror. He cut his throat with a razor. Just like that, from ear to ear. The blood spurted out as though from a shower head. My little brother and I ran in terror. We never saw him again.’

What stories, what misery.

The meagre few square metres that the residents of the kommunalka had been allocated one day by the Soviet authorities were privatised after the fall of the USSR, and have now been sold on with kickbacks, and everyone has disappeared to a pigeon-coop somewhere on the outskirts of the city.

The opera singer who lives in her four-hundred-square-metre apartment on the top floor with her son and mother was relieved by this turn of events. In a while, she told me in passing this week, our building will finally be back the way it was in 1900. It was only by some stroke of audacity that the bourgeoisie had ever been driven out and the common people had taken possession of everything.

The dark-haired soprano is called Galina Gorchakova. You can find her on YouTube, just like Hildegard Knef. I’m not making anything up, why would I? I’m beyond fiction. Her apartment is the former residence of Count Vasily Pavlovich Zubov, an intimate of the Romanovs, who kept the apartment before the revolution as a pied-à-terre to meet young women. The soprano bought out the Jewish residents who occupied the entire upper floor in the late nineties. With ready cash in their pockets, they emigrated to Israel. The diva got rid of everything that reminded her of Soviet times and restored her palace. One day, amid a cloud of Chanel, she took me to her music room; the walls were draped with light-blue satin and there were chairs with carved-out backs in the form of treble-clefs. As she smiled, she pointed out a white Bechstein grand piano from 1893 in the middle of the space.

The ostentation of the past was back.

Meanwhile, there were people living below her who’d had less luck, in their musty rooms with a communal kitchen, where the tiles dropped off the walls together with the plaster, the passages reeked of the food smells from six families, and cockroach poison, nicotine, and the unremitting stench of the parade of people defecating on the one toilet, like in the kommunalka on Vasilyevsky Island, where I’d spent my first nights of love with my present wife.

You’re in this world to find some happiness,

But you don’t know where that is on earth.

You may use your wits for money,

Or you may feel that only love has any worth.

For a long time, our building was a time machine: a grotesque mixture of rich and poor, where the shadows of the czarist age, communism, and these new times competed with each other beneath the rafters. All that was over now because of some prole in the city authorities.

But to return to our marble hearth. It has an historical allure.

One day, I began searching for our apartment in the books and archives, and came across a Frenchman, a certain Viscount Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé. After a diplomatic career in Constantinople, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, he’d ended up at the French consulate in Saint Petersburg in 1878. A little later, he married a Russian beauty, went looking for an apartment, and where do you think that nobleman ended up? At Tchaikovsky Street 40, of all places, here on the third floor where I’d finished my wretched book yesterday. Our living room served as the viscount’s political cabinet. He’d already been active on a literary front in his earlier postings. Now, he began to bombard France with books, writings, and articles about Russia from inside this very room. He familiarised his countrymen with the works of Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and other classic Russian authors. While the world was largely fixated on France in those days, it’s not too much of a leap to say that the European advance of Russian literature — which would result in Dutch translations that I read as a teenager, that took possession of me and would ultimately bring me to Russia — actually began here between these high walls.

Everything in life is a coincidence; it is totally arbitrary.

The wine was finished, including the last dash of red. I’d eaten a couple of handfuls of cashews and a bag of paprika crisps and my stomach had fallen prey to a nasty fermentation. Bad stomachs make for bad minds. This is one of the few pieces of wisdom that life has taught me. The only remedy is something sweet; not actual sweets, but a sweetness of alcoholic origin. I found five mini-bottles of banana liqueur in the kitchen drawer below the one with the cutlery and the eighty old corks, buried among meat-skewers and aluminium foil. No idea where I got them. From an airport? Or a mini-bar? I poured the contents of one bottle down my throat, glugging it. A deliciously warm, full aroma of banana. And then another one immediately. A tongue-caress from Tenerife where I once lived, but that’s another story.

I got a text from Julia: she isn’t well, can I come and pick her up at school?

I had to go.

The flames in the open hearth would go out all by themselves.

That’s perhaps the most beautiful and most comforting thing in creation: that sooner or later everything goes out all by itself. To be on the safe side, I closed the dividing door to the room where our dear cats slept. I walked out into the cool echo of the passage, but damn it … What was going on? I hadn’t even locked the door behind me yet and all the lights had gone off. The stairwell was as dark as a coal mine. Keeping close to the banister, I descended carefully, step by step, my fingers gliding over the pre-revolutionary wood. But in the lobby, I still couldn’t see my hand in front of my face. I pushed on in a cocoon of sweat, a shortness of breath, an irregular heartbeat. That’s because of the drink; everything is because of the drink. And because of mankind. ‘That’s great, my boy,’ I can still hear my father saying from his hospital chair, when the cancer had reached his throat and I’d told him about my plans in Moscow. ‘But be careful. People in this world are sons-of-bitches.’ All of us are growing older. That’s for sure. Meanwhile, we’re not only surrounded by lunatics and hypocrites, but by lies too. With the gait of a blind person, I walked straight towards the door to the street; it’s a wooden monster, like at a factory. I wrestled it open, but then too … Darkness! The bluish-black dark enveloped me again, although it was not total … Darkness on earth is seldom total. People are like moles of hope, and hopelessness. The electricity in our part of the city was apparently out; that happened a month ago too. Some people say it’s because they’re busy renovating, others because we’re still lumbered with the old Soviet junk. I moved between the wings of the tall houses, and stood up straight; I blinked my eyes. I saw something incredible, of such a moving beauty that my granite face streamed with tears, the ducts bursting like a pregnant woman’s waters. There was a meteor shower falling from a point in the sky, carving long tails, a shower of sparks. The stardust of the Perseids. It comes at around the same time in August every year. And yet, I’ve still witnessed this natural wonder so infrequently. Blinded by the light on earth.

What do I hear? The sound of hooves?

The dark forms of parked vehicles were all around me; expensive cars, off-roaders. The rest of the traffic appeared to have been banished from Tchaikovsky Street. I breathed in the warm evening air with a deep gulp. An oscillating blue glow moved closer, a will-o’-the-wisp, with the swelling sound of hoofbeats. A truly regal sound! My nostrils swelled with the smell of stables. The city lights all around switched on just before the carriage reached me, with its brass lantern on a swishing arm; the windows of the houses growing yellow.

The carriage came to a halt in front of me. There was a Russian on the front seat with a bulbous head. He had an enormous black moustache, and was dressed in a cherry-red operetta coat, with imitation gold buttons and braiding. I’d seen him a few times — this Russian of around sixty, who looked as if he was an escaped extra from the Imperial Theatre. He’s one of the coachmen on the pleasure carriages that pick up tourists on Palace Square in front of the Hermitage and take them on trips around the city.

‘Hey, coachman!’ I called. ‘How much would it cost to get to the Sadovaya?’

‘I’m going home.’ The man on the front seat loosened the reins in his white-gloved hands for a second. ‘I’ve been driving tourists around since this morning. Chinese — it’s an epidemic!’

‘It’s a surprise for my wife …’ I feverishly patted my body, found a five-thousand ruble note in my back pocket and held it up to this apparition from an operetta. ‘Here, is this enough?’

Five thousand rubles, eighty euros. Death on instalment, life on credit.

‘Just there, or back as well?’

‘There and back. I want to pick up my wife.’

‘Well, chief, get in …’

And we were driving, we were driving!

I stared at the broad-shouldered back of the coachman, who occasionally drew his whip from the sheath and gave his two horses what’s for, while making a shrill whistle between his teeth. We glided at a trot through Tchaikovsky Street towards Tauride Garden. By Zinaida Gippius’s corner house, we turned right, but what a speed! Before I had a chance to take it in, we’d already passed it. I glanced back; there were figures moving behind the high windows.

The earthly palace has vanished, but it is still occupied.

I breathed in another gulp of the August evening air, taking delight in its scent, the withering sap of an approaching autumn. The sky was uniformly grey, lit from below by the pale sheen of streetlamps. The meteor showers above must have been ongoing, I’m sure, but what a person doesn’t see doesn’t exist, or at least they don’t need to know about it — all the rest is philosophy!

A couple of years before his death, the godfather once showed me his telescope in the villa that his wife and children had left. The editor-in-chief of the biggest newspaper in the country was always surrounded by chaos and din, but he most liked to stare at the eternal stillness of the universe alone.

Nobody and nothing in life are quite what they seem. The fraudsters are always around us, the boasters, the preachers of false love, the travelling salesmen of humanity. A masquerade! A charade! What is it the Russians say? Write the way you breathe and breathe the way you write.

The acid in my stomach rose; I let the third bottle of banana liqueur glide down my throat as we set off, trotting towards Nevsky Prospect through streets like monstrous alleys, where the clattering of hooves echoed off the walls. Once again, the warm, sweet anaesthesia. But then I was struck by a sledgehammer blow from inside, as though a black curtain had dropped inside my cranium, its cords snapped, the dust flying. There was Gippius, alone in her apartment in Paris, an old woman after more than twenty years of exile. It’s 1942, the Krauts are striding through the streets; she’s been talking to her husband about Russia, he’s been telling her how much he misses his country, and dies shortly after. ‘I was entirely calm, I didn’t shed a tear, not at the time and not later. Maybe my heart’s made of ice and will never melt again.’

That’s the devilish thing about life too, that people with a heart say they have a heart of ice. And the reverse!

I found Knef again, scrolling through my phone. I wormed the earphones into my ears, the husky voice resuming exactly where it left off:

We all have the right to be happy.

You have to take whatever road you must.

And only God can say if things will turn out okay.

But it’s up to you, however tough.

‘Coachman!’ I took the earphones out; I couldn’t shake that damned image of a lonely Gippius. I wanted to hear my own voice, to be certain that I was not drunk and dreaming.

The man half turned to me.

I asked, ‘How much longer?’

The Russian said with gusto, ‘Ten minutes, squire!’ and cracked his whip over the horses, which gleamed black with sweat, stallions by the look of it.

The streets like alleys were now behind us; as we drove onto Uprising Square, the Nevsky was chock-a-block with traffic to the left and right of us. I was blinded by the commotion, the jumble of lights from the shops, the illuminations over the road and the headlights of cars, as if I were seeing this profusion for the first time.

As we went round the roundabout in front of the station — where the trains leave for Moscow, and where the criminals and politically oppressed gathered with chains riveted to their ankles, for transportation to Siberia before the revolution — the clock read ten to ten.

Right on time, everything well in hand.

This guy was going to pick up his wife in an open carriage drawn by two black stallions! Rarely has anyone integrated as quickly and as well as her. After a year, she read and spoke Dutch fluently. She was a walking encyclopaedia of my fatherland. A sponge for history, arts, even cabaret and variety. But because her master’s degree was seen as inferior because she came from a country where people couldn’t think independently, she spent the first few years selling shoes. She was a forerunner, a pioneer, a trailblazer for the legions that would later follow: the hordes from the Eastern Bloc who’d work as waiters, chambermaids, plumbers, cleaners, and nannies to satisfy the needs of Western civilisation; but apart from their labour, they were meant to leave everything else behind at home, certainly when many of them turned out to have come from entirely different worlds and started to develop pretensions. Where did they come from? Where was their gratitude?

So you’d better make up your mind how you want your life to be,

That’s what it boils down to.

And if you’re in pain, don’t complain

Because there’s nothing you can do.

What traffic, but watch out, boys! If you’re not careful, you’ll hit our fine horses!

I recognised almost every building, every shop. Images of the past and present flitted through me as if on the shuttles of a loom. The kaleidoscope of someone who’s perhaps lived here too long, whose time has come, who one day may have to bugger off out of this country, but where to?

The delicatessen paradise of the Elisseeff brothers! There isn’t a finer store anywhere, at least not in Saint Petersburg. You can go there for pastries, chocolate pralines, fine meats, smoked salmon as fine as tissue paper, the very last black caviar, and other comestibles. It was around ten, but the chandeliers were still lit in the gold-leafed emporium that has survived all revolutions. If I had a child, a grandchild by now, I’d have popped by occasionally with the little girl or boy to enjoy the moving fairy-tale figures made of brightly coloured wood in the shop window, before going in for a lolly, a bag of toffees, or an ice-cream.

I enjoyed the sights flashing by. We slowed down behind a line of cars, and once more I was overcome by terrible confusion, not because of what I was thinking this time, but what I saw.

It couldn’t be the drink — just two bottles of white wine, half a bottle of red, and a few drops of banana liqueur for the sweetness; I’d never used drugs, but it felt as if I were hallucinating.

Impossible!

On the broad granite pavement to the right of me, a young man wearing a fur hat on his fleshy, red head is shoving this ancient woman along in a prehistoric-looking wheelchair. The young man is me and the lady in the wheelchair decked in fur from head to toe in spite of the August heat is none other than Madam Pokrovskaya.

‘Hey, coachman!’ I yelled before he could giddy up with the whip in his hand. ‘Stop! I have to get out for a moment!’

The White Nights were over, the devil no longer tugging at the sheets, I know that this is a city of phantoms, but I was not drunk, though still it was me walking there. A 27-year-old version of myself, wheeling that terribly elderly Russian woman from the home where I’d fruitlessly handed out bibles, on a mission for Siderius. She’d begged me to take her outside for a trip through the city.

When I’d brought her back to the director and asked if there wasn’t anything she could do for her, maybe get in touch with the poor woman’s daughter, she burst out in a satyr’s laugh. The woman was completely nuts! When she’d still been able to walk, she gave all the feral cats in the neighbourhood food in the courtyard, costly victuals meant for her. The daughter was only in her head, it was all a delusion, she’d never had a child in her whole life!

I stepped out of the carriage, the man on the front seat yelled at me that he couldn’t stay here long, that it was prohibited. But I urged him to wait, and trailed after my phantom apparition.

They hurried away in front of me with the rickety chair.

I was sober as a judge. But my calves were as heavy as stone from the alcohol. Once again, that nasty, sweaty shortness of breath, the irregular heartbeat. I waded forward through the throng; the pedestrians coming towards me in the liquid, blue light of the lamps, parting to the left and right of me, and although I kept shouting angrily at him to stand still, my 27-year-old self didn’t have any notion, but I started to sprint and then I laid a hand on his shoulder.

The guy in the fur hat turned around to face me. He looked at me aggressively, with a mouth full of brown, stubbed teeth and that ugly, fleshy head. The pensioner in the wheelchair turned towards me too, looking up at me like a weasel. She had no teeth at all, her head a shrivelled blue plum. They were tramps who live by begging off tourists, immured to the world, wrapped in fur summer and winter.

‘What is it?!’ the guy said, incensed.

His words were borne on his stinking breath.

I apologised profusely; it was a misunderstanding!

As I was about to hurry off, the man laid one of his mitts on me. He moved threateningly towards me and grabbed me with his other hand too, and asked what in the devil’s name I was after. He bellowed like a bear that I’d provoked. I laid my hands on him, he wanted compensation, three hundred rubles! The woman in the chair started bellowing too, as if I were trying to rape her.

I plunged my hand into my back pocket and gave the guy a thousand-ruble note, which he studied as though he was seeing money for the first time.

After I was back inside the carriage, the coachman pulled off right away. I could tell from his body language that he was irked. I yelled up to him that I’d pay him a little extra. I popped the earphones back in, pressed play, and closed my eyes amid the waves of light from the city.

I was startled awake again by honking that pierced the German diva’s voice. We carried out a deft turn halfway down the Nevsky, surrounded by tooting cars, and drove into Sadovaya, a renowned street where, in the month of February 1917, the first insurgents died in their droves in the snow, cut down by machine-gun fire. What an assault to the senses. That I’d seen myself pushing a wheelchair on the Nevsky! Was it that damned banana liqueur? What did you say, coachman? I’m having awful trouble hearing you.

‘Which number?!’

But I didn’t know which number; I did know where the building was though. My wife’s evening school was thirty metres ahead.

‘Pull up here, coachman, stop!’

I got out and walked into the lobby of the institute, which stank of cigarettes. A school as they should be, with sea-green tiled walls. People still learnt here, from books, and by heart. A group of boys of around twenty years of age stormed down the wide stone stairs. They already had moustaches, some had hipster beards; they had the voices of adults, but their pumped-up joy was reminiscent of infants. If another war came, these would be the soldiers, or else their children or grandchildren. Only idiots believe that the rhyming of history will one day cease, and be replaced by fairy-tale prose.

Julia came down the stairs amid a floating haze. She held her books pressed to her chest, like a student in an American film. She was talking to one of her students and hadn’t noticed me. I was concealed behind a pillar, spying from my position, and again felt as nervous as almost thirty years ago when I waited for her for the first time in the lobby of another school. She’s past fifty now, but I can still see in my wife’s current form who she was back then. And if I look closely, I can even see the girl of five, just like in the black-and-white photo on my desk, where she’s pictured with her grandma, who’d cry with joy each time she arrived in old East Prussia from Leningrad, ‘And who do we have here then? What treasure has come to visit us?’

Thirty years — everything has changed, but everything has remained the same.

Suddenly, my throat felt parched. As soon as the student left, I stepped forward and popped up in front of my wife, like a jack-in-the-box.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ She pointed at my moist face.

‘These damned contact lenses! The tears keep running because of my dry eyes. I’ll have to go to the optician again soon.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’

‘The usual.’

‘Well, how much is that?’

‘Whatever way you look at it, that’s life,’ I begin to sing out loud in my fine singing voice. ‘Today, there are only happy hours …’

Then my wife burst out laughing.

‘Knef?’

‘Our immortal Hildegard!

I planted a smacking kiss on her mouth and led Julia outside, onto Sadovaya, where my coachman was waiting for us on the front seat of his open carriage, with a fine vermilion-black silhouette.

‘What’s this?’

The man dismounted and charmingly opened the door for us, we got in, and in the blink of an eye we were riding.

‘Hey, what’s this about?’ My wife still had her books pressed to her tummy. ‘Have you won the lottery or something?’

I took the two remaining mini-bottles of banana liqueur from my trouser pocket, unscrewed the tops and gave one to my wife. As I glugged the contents down in one gulp because of my parched throat, Julia took a sip.

‘Sweet!’ she said. ‘Delicious and sweet! Where are we going?’

‘Home …’ After another circus-like turn, we were already flying down the seething Nevsky, but in a different direction now.

My wife stopped asking questions. I saw how she was enjoying the unexpected trip through her own city, the clattering of hooves, the whistling of the coachman, the panting of the stallions, the wind rushing by.

‘We’re going pretty fast!’ she cried, with her hair fluttering.

I thought of the five grand in my father’s money-box in the bottom of the dresser in our bedroom. Death on instalment, life on credit. If we died, we’d regret two things the most: not showing each other enough love, and not travelling enough together. I asked my wife where she’d like to go.

‘What do you mean?’

I told her I’d finally finished my book, that I really had to get away for a while, away from these streets, these former battlefields.

She was terribly surprised.

The world’s big, but Europe’s enough for us.

A carousel of potential future pleasures spun through her mind. She thought out loud. Thuringia, the lavender fields of Provence, the coasts of Bulgaria, Croatia or Romania, the hills of Kent, the arid vistas around Toledo, Tuscany. Italy. We decided to look for a house for a month, somewhere in Liguria.

‘Moesha and the boys can come too, can’t they?’ My wife looked at me imploringly with her almond eyes.

It used to be the girls; now it was the boys.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Moesha and the boys can come.’

At that moment, the two stallions squeezed out two ginormous deep-yellow turds while at a full trot and in stereo. They were as round as bullets, gleaming gold in the evening light, they fell between the kicking legs. We traced a circle again on Uprising Square and eventually turned right in the direction of Tchaikovsky Street.

Not named after the composer, but after the revolutionary.