Moscow! How much in that one sound has merged for the Russian heart!…
I don’t remember the rest.
I stood by the window and looked down at Tverskaya, wrestling laboriously with the December slush seven floors below. Moscow… Mosc… Frost, light snow, freshness and vigour. And -ow… Mud, snow mixed with salt, squelching underfoot, damp and rot.
Mos-cow.
Seven years ago, only two thousand days back, they had carted me off from Ugreshka to serve the Fatherland on the distant frontiers abroad, in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. I looked through tears at the little lights outside the window of the general carriage and thought: in two short years I’ll come home grown up, hardened, a man who has smelled powder, not a boy. Alas. Six months of square-bashing in the training unit I endured with clenched teeth. The cheerful guffawing of the grandfathers of the Soviet Army, thundering over my battered body, I could not endure. I bolted over the fence like a hunted animal. Escape! A word like a gunshot. Short, hot, joyful… The joy lasted one day. Then the nightmare began. The filthy, frightened word «deserter», ready to die of despair, came into its rights.
I pressed my forehead to the cold glass, shuddering at the memories of those dismal days. I tried to divert the flow of my thoughts into another channel, but without success. My eyes were blinded by the cold grey sky, and my ears were being cut, scraped… by a telephone ringing. What?
I looked round, shaking off the delusion, and now I definitely heard the rattling of the telephone on the bedside table.
– Hello.
– Arbalet?
– Yes. Speaking.
An unknown female voice on the other end of the line produced a German-language phrase. The gist of the phrase came down to conveying greetings from Hans and a wish for a speedy meeting.
I enquired whether my interlocutor knew the city. Having received a negative answer, I proposed meeting at a place known to any greenhorn who finds himself inside the Moscow ring road:
– Wait for me by the Pushkin monument on the square of the same name.
– Where is that? How do I find it?
– Write this down. You go out onto the street, stand facing the roadway and raise your right hand. A car stops next to you, and you say to the driver: Pushkin Square. Repeat it.
– Plosshat Pushkin.
– Excellent. I’ll be waiting by the monument to the green bloke. See you.
My interlocutor hung up, and I smirked at Hans’s stupidity. Fancy sending as a courier a girl with no knowledge of the language and, certainly, no notion whatsoever of native customs! I’ll give you a rouble to a hundred that this friend of ours gets shaken out of some cab without her money or the clothes she stands up in, somewhere out in Ochakovo. And serve her right. No business climbing into cars with strange men in a strange city!
Finding myself out on the raw street, blown through by some particularly malicious wind, I stood for a minute under the awning and cursed myself a couple of times for my slow-wittedness. What would it have cost me to find out where the courier was calling from? What? And now I had to trudge on foot to «Pushka» and languish there waiting for her, who knew how long. Damn it! Where would she be coming to the meeting from, and how long would it take? Maybe she was tearing along right now in some spirited motor from Sheremetyevo-2, and maybe she was thumbing a ride somewhere by the Rossiya cinema. Nothing for it. I’d have to stomp over to the monument and wait, wait, wait, standing in the wind.
I trudged off down the cold Tverskaya.
A dreary occupation, but the waiting ahead seemed drearier still. I’d freeze stiff, looking out for a courier. Sure as anything I’d turn from a dashing eagle into a strung-out penguin. What a life.
However, in the reserves of that overcast day, which had wrapped me in a foul mood since morning, there was room for an accidental joy as well. No sooner had I stepped onto the brown asphalt of the square than a small girl came flying up to me in a little black smock and dirty-grey jeans, with a canvas rucksack on her sloping little shoulders and the happiest of smiles on her bland German face.
– Arbalet?
– J-aa, – that was me saying «yes» in German, throatily and with relish.
– All the instructions are in the packet, – not giving me a chance to come to my senses and shift the run of my thoughts from the sarcastic groove to the businesslike, the girl shoved a blue oblong envelope into my hands, waved a little paw and disappeared into the underpass.
«Off on the metro, saving her pfennigs. Good girl,» I praised the thrifty Gretchen and turned back towards the Intourist. It wasn’t exactly May outside, and I was shivering.