The Return

Snow

I met him in a bar on Calle Tallers, in Barcelona, it must be about five years ago now. When he found out I was Chilean, he came over to say hello; he too had been born in that faraway place.

He was more or less the same age as me, thirty-odd, and he drank quite a bit, though I never saw him drunk. His name was Rogelio Estrada. He was thin, shortish, and dark. His smile seemed to be permanently poised between wonder and mischief, but after a while I discovered that he was far more innocent than he made out. One night I went to the bar with a group of Catalan friends. We got talking about books. Rogelio came over to our table and said that the greatest writer of the century was, without a doubt, Mikhail Bulgakov. One of the Catalans had read The Master and Margarita and A Theatrical Novel, but Rogelio mentioned other works by the distinguished novelist, more than ten of them, if I remember correctly, and he gave their titles in Russian. My friends and I thought he was joking, and soon the talk moved on. One night he invited me back to his place and I went, I don’t know why. He lived in a street nearby, a few yards from a very decrepit movie theater known to the local kids as the Ghost Cinema. The apartment was old and full of furniture that wasn’t his. We sat down in the living room, Rogelio put on a record — some awful, emphatic music with an unrelenting crescendo — and then he filled two glasses with vodka. On a shelf, presiding over the room, was a silver-framed photo of a girl. The rest of the decor was nothing special: postcards from various European countries and some very old shabby-looking soccer pennants: Colo-Colo, University of Chile and Santiago Morning. Pretty, isn’t she? said Rogelio, pointing at the girl in the silver frame. Yes, very pretty, I replied. Then we sat down again and drank for a while in silence. When Rogelio eventually spoke, the bottle was almost empty. First you have to empty the bottle, he said, then your soul. I shrugged. Though, of course, I don’t believe in the soul, he added. It all comes down to time, though, doesn’t it? Do you have time to listen to my story? Depends on the story, I said, but I think so. It won’t take very long, said Rogelio. Then he stood up, took the silver-framed photo, sat down in front of me cradling it in his left arm while holding the glass of vodka in his right hand, and began:

My childhood was happy; it had nothing to do with the way my life turned out later. Things started going wrong when I was a teenager. I was living in Santiago with my family and according to my father I was well on the way to becoming a juvenile delinquent. My father, in case you don’t know (and I can’t see why you would), was José Estrada Martínez, aka Chubby Estrada, one of the big wheels in the Chilean Communist Party. And we were a proudly proletarian family, fighting the good fight, upstanding and righteous. At the age of thirteen I stole a bicycle. You can imagine, I don’t need to spell it out. I was caught two days later and got one hell of a thrashing. At fourteen I started smoking dope — some of my friends in the neighborhood used to grow it in the foothills of the Andes. At the time my father had a senior position in Allende’s government, and his biggest fear, poor old dad, was that the right-wing press would reveal the misdemeanors of his eldest son. At fifteen I stole a car. I wasn’t caught (though now I know that with a bit more time, the cops would have found me) because a few days later the coup happened and my whole family took refuge in the Soviet Embassy. I don’t need to tell you what the days I spent in there were like. It was awful. I slept in the corridor and kept trying to hit on the daughter of one of my father’s comrades, but all they did, that bunch, was sing The International or No pasarán. You get the picture, it was dismal, like party time at the Bible Hall.

We arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1974. Personally, to be honest, I was glad to be going: a new city, blonde blue-eyed Russian girls, the plane trip, Europe, a new culture. The reality turned out quite differently. Moscow was like Santiago, but quieter, bigger and brutally cold in winter. At first they put me in a school where it was Spanish half the time, Russian the other half. Two years later I was at a regular school, speaking okay Russian, and bored out of my wits. I guess some strings were pulled to get me into the University, because I really didn’t study much. I enrolled in medicine, but dropped out after a semester; it wasn’t for me. Still, I have good memories of my time there: it’s where I made my first friend, I mean the first friend who wasn’t an exiled Chilean like me. His name was Jimmy Fodeba and he came from the Central African Republic, which as the name suggests, is in the middle of Africa. Jimmy’s father was a communist, like mine, and like my father, he’d been forced into exile. Jimmy was pretty smart, but underneath he was just like me. I mean, he liked to stay up late, he liked to drink and smoke the occasional joint, and he liked women. Before long we were joined at the hip. The best friend I’ve ever had, except for the gang back in Santiago, the guys who stayed — I’ll probably never see them again, but who knows? Anyway, what happened was that Jimmy and I combined our forces, and our desires, and, while we were at it, our needs as well, and from then on, instead of being two separate exiles, feeling lost and lonely, we were a pair of wolves roaming the streets of Moscow, and whenever one of us was scared, the other one dared, and so, little by little (because sometimes Jimmy had to study, he was a good student, unlike me), we started to get a general idea of the city where both of us would probably be living for a fair while. I won’t go on about our youthful adventures, all I’ll say is that after a year we knew where to find a bit of weed, which may not seem like much of a feat now, in Barcelona, but in Moscow, back in those days, it was truly heroic. By then I’d tried studying Latin American literature, Russian literature, radio broadcasting, food science, just about everything really, and whether it was because I got bored, or didn’t pay attention in class, or just didn’t turn up, which is basically what happened most of the time, I failed everything, and eventually my father threatened to send me to work in a factory in Siberia, poor old guy, that’s the way he was.

And that was how I came to enroll in the School of Physical Education, which some optimistic Russians used to call the Advanced School of Physical Education, and this time I managed to keep it together until I got my diploma. That’s right, my friend, you’re looking at a qualified gymnastics instructor. Not a good one, of course, especially not compared with some of the Russians, but qualified all the same. When I handed my father the diploma, the old man was moved to tears. I’d say that’s when my adolescence came to an end.

At the time I used to call myself Roger Strada. I was always getting into trouble; my friends weren’t what you’d call good, upstanding citizens and I was thoroughly bad. It was like I was full of rage and didn’t know how to get it out of my system. I worked as a trainer’s assistant for a man of dubious and disconcerting moral character (it was a true meeting of minds); he specialized in recruiting new athletes from secondary schools, and I spent most of my time at parties, making deals and doing shady business to supplement my salary. My boss was called Pultakov. He was divorced and lived in a tiny apartment in Leliushenko Street, near Rogachev Square. As I said, I was a bad boy and Jimmy Fodeba was bad too, and anyone who knew us well knew that we were bad (I think I chose to call myself Roger, at least for a start, because it went with Jimmy, and because I secretly thought of myself as a kind of Italian-American gangster), but Pultakov was seriously bad and working with him every day, I gradually came to discover all his tricks, depravities and vices. My father lived in a Moscow of papers and memoranda, a bureaucrats’ Moscow, with its commands and countermands, its current issues, its factions and infighting: an ideal Moscow. I lived in a Moscow of drugs and prostitution, black marketeering and living it up, threats and crimes. In certain circles the two Moscows would occasionally come into contact and even intermingle, but as a rule they were two distinct cities, each unaware of the other’s existence. Pultakov initiated me into the world of sports betting. We gambled with other people’s money of course, but also with our own. Soccer, hockey, basketball, boxing, even championship skiing, a sport I’ve never really seen the attraction of: we dabbled in everything. I met people. All sorts of people. Nice enough guys, in general, small-time crooks like me, though sometimes I did come across real criminals, the sort who’d stop at nothing, or at least you could tell that in certain circumstances they’d stop at nothing. An instinct for survival prevented me from getting too close to those people. Prison-fodder, sewer-food. People who could intimidate Pultakov and terrify me and Jimmy. With one exception, a guy our age, who for some reason took a shine to me. His name was Misha Semionovich Pavlov and he was like the whiz kid of the Moscow underworld. Pultakov and I provided him with information about various sports for his gambling, and from time to time this Misha Pavlov invited us to his apartment, or one of his apartments, never the same one, all of them dingier than Pultakov’s or mine, usually out in the old northeastern suburbs, where the workers lived: Poluboyarov, Viktoria and Old Market. Pultakov didn’t like Pavlov (he didn’t like anyone much) and tried to keep his dealings with him to a minimum, but I’ve always been naïve; Pavlov’s reputation as the underworld’s child prodigy and the thoughtful way he treated me — occasionally giving me a chicken or a bottle of vodka or a pair of shoes — finally won me over, and I succumbed completely, body and soul, as they say.

The years went by and my family returned to Chile, except for my younger sister, who married a Russian; my father died in Santiago and had a beautiful funeral, or so they told me in the letters; Jimmy Fodeba went on living in Moscow and working in a hospital (his father went back to the Central African Republic, where he was killed), while Pultakov and I went scurrying like a pair of rats around the gyms and sports complexes. With the arrival of democracy and the end of the Soviet Union (not that I’ve ever been interested in politics) came freedom and the mafias. Moscow became a charming, exuberant city, buzzing with that fierce, typically Russian sort of exuberance. I can’t explain it, you have to understand the Slavic soul, and I don’t think you do, however many books you’ve read. Suddenly it all got too big for us. Pultakov, who was a Stalinist at heart (I still don’t get that, because under Stalin he would have ended up in Siberia for sure), was nostalgic for the old days. But I adapted to the new situation, and decided to save some money, now that it was possible, so I could get out of there for good and start exploring the world, Europe to begin with, then Africa, which, in spite of my age — by then I was over thirty and old enough to know better — I imagined as the kingdom of adventure, an endless frontier, a new story book where I could begin again, be happy, and find myself, as we used to say when we were kids back in Santiago in 1973. And that was how I joined Misha Pavlov’s staff, almost without realizing it. At the time his nickname was Billy the Kid. Don’t ask me why. Billy the Kid was quick on the draw; Misha never did anything quickly, not even pulling out his credit card. Billy the Kid was brave and, at least in the movies I’ve seen, agile and thin; Misha was brave too, but built like a Buddha, obese even by Russian standards, and allergic to all forms of physical exercise. I went on being a bookmaker, but soon I began to do other kinds of work for him. Sometimes he’d give me a bundle of cash and send me to see a player I knew to get him to throw a game. On one occasion I managed to bribe half a soccer team, one by one, flattering the more cooperative players and using veiled threats on the others. Sometimes he sent me to persuade other gamblers to withdraw their bets or not to make waves. But most of the time my work consisted of providing reports on athletes, one after another, without any evident rhyme or reason, which Pavlov’s IT expert would tirelessly key into his computer.

There was, however, something else I used to do for him. Most of the Moscow gangsters’ girls were nightclub hostesses or striptease artists, actresses or wannabes. No surprises there; that’s the way it’s always been. But Pavlov’s taste in women was for athletes: long jumpers, sprinters, middle-distance runners, triple jumpers. . he fell in love with the occasional javelin thrower, but his real favorites were the high jumpers. He said they were like gazelles, ideal women, and he wasn’t wrong. I was the one who organized it all. I went to the training camps and set up dates for him. Some of the girls were delighted at the prospect of spending a weekend with Misha Pavlov, poor things, but others, most of them, weren’t. Still, I always got him the girls he wanted, even if it meant spending my own money or resorting to threats. And so it happened that one afternoon he told me he wanted Natalia Mijailovna Chuikova, an eighteen-year-old from the Volgograd region, who had just arrived n Moscow, hoping to get a place on the Olympic team. I don’t know what it was exactly, but right from the start I realized that there was something different in the way Pavlov was talking about this Chuikova girl. When he told me to get her, he was with two of his buddies, and they winked at me as if to say: Make sure you do exactly what he’s telling you, Roger Strada, because this time Billy the Kid is serious.

Two days later I got to talk to Natalia Chuikova. It was at the Spartanovka indoor track, on the Boulevard of Sport, at nine a.m., and I’m definitely not a morning person, but it was the only time I could meet her there. First I saw her in the distance: she was about to start running to the high jump, and she was concentrating, clenching her fists and looking up, as if she was praying or watching for an angel. Then I went over to her and introduced myself. Roger Strada? she said, So you must be Italian. I didn’t have the courage to destroy her illusions altogether: I said I was Chilean and that there were lots of Italians in Chile. She was five-foot-ten and can’t have weighed more than 120 pounds. She had long brown hair, and her simple ponytail gathered all the grace in the world. Her eyes were almost jet black and she had, I swear, the longest, most beautiful legs I have ever seen.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the reason for my visit. I bought her a Pepsi, told her I liked her technique and left. That night I didn’t know what I was going to say to Pavlov, what lie I was going to invent. In the end I decided to keep it simple. I said we’d have to give Natalia Chuikova a little time, she wasn’t like his usual kind of girl. Misha looked at me with that face of his, somewhere between a seal and a spoiled child, and said OK, I’ll give you three days. When Misha gave you three days, you had to fix it in three days, not one day more. So I spent a few hours thinking it over, asking myself what my problem was, what was holding me back, and eventually I decided to settle the matter as quickly as possible. Very early the next morning, I saw Natalia again. I was one of the first to arrive at the track. I spent a long time watching the athletes coming and going, all half asleep like me, chatting and arguing, though all I could hear of their voices was a senseless murmur, or shouts in an incomprehensible Russian, as if I’d forgotten the language, until Natalia appeared in the group and started doing warm-up exercises. Her trainer was taking notes in a little book. There were two other high jumpers talking with her. Sometimes they laughed. Sometimes, after jumping, they’d sit down and put on blue and red tracksuits, which they soon took off again. Sometimes they drank water. After half an hour of happiness I realized I was in love. It was the first time it had happened to me. Before that, I’d loved a couple of whores. I’d treated them wrong, or right, it didn’t matter. Now I was really in love. I spoke to her. I explained the situation with Misha Pavlov, who he was, what he wanted. Natalia was shocked, then she thought it was funny. She agreed to see him, against my advice. I made the date for as late as I could. In the meantime, I took her to see a Bruce Willis movie — he was one of her favorite actors — and then to dinner at a good restaurant. We talked and talked. Her life, with its hardships and disappointments, was a model of perseverance and willpower, just the opposite of mine. Her tastes were simple; it was happiness she wanted, not wealth. Her attitude to sex, which is what I was really hoping to get out of her, was broad-minded. That depressed me at first: I thought Natalia would be easy game for Pavlov, I imagined her sleeping with all his bodyguards, one by one, and I couldn’t bear the thought of it. But then I understood that Natalia was talking about a kind of sexuality that I just didn’t understand (and still don’t), and it didn’t mean she had to go to bed with all the gang. I also understood that in spite of everything, I had to protect her.

A week later Pavlov sent me back to the indoor track with a big bunch of red and white carnations that must have cost him an arm and a leg. Natalia took the flowers and asked me to wait for her. We spent the whole day together, downtown for a start (where I bought two novels by Bulgakov, her favorite writer, from a stall in Staraya Basmannaya Street) and then in the little room where she lived. I asked her if she’d had a good time. Her reply completely stunned me, I swear. She said the flowers were self-explanatory. It was just so hard, so cold, you know what I mean: she was Russian and I was Chilean, it was like a chasm was opening in front of me, and I burst into tears right there and then. I often think about that afternoon of crying and how it changed my life. I don’t know how to explain it; all I know is I felt like a child, and I felt all the cold of Moscow for the first time, and it seemed unbearable. That afternoon we made love.

From then on my life was in Natalia’s hands and her life was in the hands of Misha Pavlov. The situation, in itself, seemed simple enough, but knowing Pavlov I knew that by sleeping with Natalia I was risking my neck. Also, as the days went by, the certitude that Natalia was sleeping with Pavlov — and I knew exactly when she was — progressively embittered and depressed me, and led me to take a fatalistic view of my life, and of life in general. I would have liked to talk it over with a friend and get it off my chest. But no way could I tell Pultakov, and Jimmy Fodeba was always really busy; we weren’t seeing each other as often as before. All I could do was put up with it and wait.

And so a year went by.

Life with Pavlov was strange. His life was divided into at least three parts and I had the honor or the misfortune of being acquainted with all three: the life of Pavlov the businessman, continually surrounded by his bodyguards, which gave off a subtle odor of money and blood that unsettled the senses; the life of Pavlov the serial romantic, or lech, as we used to say in Santiago, which tormented me in particular and inflamed my imagination; and the life of Pavlov the private man, with his inquiring mind, a man who spent or wanted to spend his spare time, his “moments of inner repose” as he said, exploring literature and the arts, because Pavlov, though it’s hard to believe, was a keen reader, and, of course, he liked to talk about what he was reading. That was why he used to call on the three people who made up what you might call the cultural or cosmopolitan arm of his gang: Fedor Petrovich Semionov, a novelist; Paulo Ripellino, a genuine Italian, who was studying Russian on a scholarship from the Moscow School of Languages; and me, who he always introduced as his friend Roger Strada, though he sometimes treated me like a dog. Two Russians and two Italians, Pavlov would say, with a little smile on his lips. He did it to slight me in front of Ripellino, but Ripellino was always respectful to me. They were actually fun, those meetings, but sometimes we’d be summoned at midnight; the phone would ring and we’d have to get ourselves pronto to one of the many apartments Pavlov owned around Moscow, and endure the boss’s rants, when all we wanted to do was to go to bed. Pavlov’s tastes were eclectic — that’s the word, isn’t it? The only author I’ve read, to be honest, is Bulgakov, and that was only because I was in love with Natalia; as for the others, I’ve got no idea, I’m not much of a reader, that’s pretty obvious. Semionov, as far as I know, wrote pornographic novels, and Ripellino had a film script that he wanted Pavlov to back for him, something about martial arts and the mafia. The only one who really knew about literature was our host. So Pavlov would start talking about Dostoyevsky, for example, and the rest of us would tag along. The next day I’d take myself to the library and look up information about Dostoyevsky, summaries of his works and his life, so I’d have something to say the next time, but Pavlov hardly ever repeated himself; one week he’d talk about Dostoyevsky, the next about Boris Pilniak, the week after that, Chekhov (who he said was a faggot, I don’t know why), then he’d be onto Gogol or Semionov himself, raving about his pornographic novels. Semionov was quite a character. He must have been my age, maybe a bit older, and he was one of Pavlov’s protégés. I once heard that he’d arranged for his wife to disappear. I didn’t know what to think about that rumor. Semionov seemed capable of anything, except biting the hand that fed him. Ripellino was different, a good kid, and the only one who openly confessed that he hadn’t read a single one of the novelists that our boss used to hold forth about, although he’d read some poetry (Russian poetry, with proper rhymes, easy to remember), which he’d sometimes recite by heart, usually when we were drunk. And who wrote that? Semionov would ask in a booming voice. Pushkin, who else? Ripellino would reply. Then I’d seize the opportunity to say my piece about Dostoyevsky, and Pavlov and Ripellino would recite Pushkin’s poem in unison, and Semionov would get out a little book and pretend to be taking notes for his next novel. Or we’d talk about the Slavic soul and the Latin soul, and once we got onto that subject, of course, Ripellino and I were bound to come off badly. You can’t imagine how long Pavlov could go on about the Slavic soul, how profound and sad he could get. Semionov usually ended up crying, and Ripellino and I backed down at the first sign of trouble. It wasn’t always just the four of us, of course. Sometimes Pavlov sent out for some whores. Sometimes there’d be one or two unfamiliar faces: the editor of a little magazine, an out-of-work actor, a retired army officer who actually knew the complete works of Alexei Tolstoy. Pleasant or unpleasant company, people who were doing deals with Pavlov or hoping for a favor from him. Sometimes the night even turned out to be enjoyable. But it could go the other way too. I’ll never understand the Slavic soul. One night Pavlov showed his guests some photos of what he called his “women’s high-jumping team.” At first I didn’t want to look, but they called me over and I couldn’t refuse. There were photos of the four or five high-jumpers I’d gotten for him. Natalia Chuikova was one of them. I felt ill and I think Pavlov realized; he put his massive arms around me and started singing a drinking song in my ear, something about death and love, the only two things in life that are real. I remember laughing or trying to laugh at Pavlov’s little joke, like I always did, but the laughter died in my throat. Later, when the others were sleeping it off, or had gone, I sat down by the window and looked at the photos again, taking my time. Funny how it is: right then, everything seemed OK, all in order (as my father used to say), I was breathing deeply, calm, free. It also seemed to me that the Slavic soul was not so different from the Latin soul, in fact they were the same, and the same as the African soul, which presumably illuminated the nights of my friend Jimmy Fodeba. Maybe the Slavic soul could withstand more alcohol, but that was the only difference.

So time went by.

Natalia was dropped from the Olympic team because she never managed to jump the required height. She competed in the national trials and wasn’t highly ranked. It was clear that she wouldn’t be breaking any records. Although she didn’t want to admit it, her career was over, and sometimes we talked about the future with a mixture of fear and anticipation. Her relationship with Pavlov had its ups and downs; there were days when he seemed to love her more than anyone in the world and days when he treated her badly. One night when we met her face was covered with bruises. She told me it had happened at training, but I knew it was Pavlov. Sometimes we talked late into the night about travel and other countries. I told her stuff about Chile, a Chile of my own invention, I guess, which sounded a lot like Russia to her, so she couldn’t get excited about it, but she was curious. Once she travelled to Italy and Spain with Pavlov. They didn’t invite me to the send-off, but I was one of the people who went to the airport to welcome them home. Natalia returned looking very tanned and pretty. I gave her a bunch of white roses (the night before, Pavlov had called from Spain and told me to buy them). Thanks, Roger, she said. You’re welcome, Natalia Mijailovna, I said, instead of confessing that it was all thanks to a long-distance phone call from our mutual boss. Right then he was talking with some heavies and didn’t notice the tenderness in my eyes (which have often been compared to the eyes of a rat, even by my mother, God rest her soul). But the fact is that Natalia and I were letting our guard down.

One winter night Pavlov called me at home. He sounded furious. He ordered me to come and see him immediately. I’d heard through the grapevine that some of his business operations weren’t going so well. I tried to suggest that maybe it could wait, given the time and the temperature outside, but Misha wasn’t in a waiting mood: Either you get here in half an hour, he said, or tomorrow morning I cut your balls off. I got dressed as fast as I could and before going out I put a knife in my pocket, a knife I’d bought when I was a medical student. The streets of Moscow, at four in the morning, are not exactly safe, as I guess you know. The trip was like the continuation of the nightmare I’d been having when I was woken by Pavlov’s call. The streets were covered with snow, the temperature must have been about five or ten degrees and for quite a while I didn’t see another human being. At first I was walking ten yards and then trotting the next ten to warm myself up. After fifteen minutes, my body resigned itself to plodding on, step by step, clenched against the cold. Twice I saw patrol cars coming, and hid. Twice I saw taxis, but neither of them stopped for me. Apart from that, I came across drunks, who ignored me, and shadows, which, as I passed, disappeared into the enormous entrances along Medveditsa Avenue. The apartment where I was to meet Pavlov was in Nemetskaya Street; normally, on foot, it would have taken thirty or thirty-five minutes to get there, but that hellish night it took almost an hour and when I arrived four toes on my left foot were frozen.

Pavlov was waiting for me by the fireplace, reading and drinking cognac. Before I could say anything he smashed his fist into my nose. I hardly felt the blow but I let myself fall anyway. Don’t stain my carpet, I heard him say. He proceeded to kick me about five times in the ribs, but since he was wearing slippers, that didn’t hurt too much either. Then he took a seat, picked up his book and his glass and seemed to calm down. I got up, went to the bathroom to wash away the blood that was running from my nose, and then returned to the living room. What are you reading? I asked him. Bulgakov, said Pavlov. You know his work, don’t you? Ah, Bulgakov, I said as my stomach tied itself in a knot. You mention Natalia, I thought, and I’ll kill you. I slipped my hand into my coat pocket, feeling for the little knife. I like sincere people, said Pavlov, honorable people, who aren’t underhanded; when I place my trust in someone, I want to be able to trust that person implicitly. My foot is frozen, I said, you should drop me at the hospital. Pavlov didn’t listen, so I decided to stop complaining, anyway it wasn’t that bad, I could already move my toes. For a while both of us were silent: Pavlov looked at the book by Bulgakov (The Fateful Eggs, I think it was), while I watched the flames in the fireplace. Natalia told me you’ve been seeing her, said Pavlov. I didn’t say anything but I nodded. Are you sleeping with that whore? No, I lied. Another silence. Suddenly I was convinced that Pavlov had murdered Natalia and was going to murder me the same night. Without weighing up the consequences I threw myself at him and slashed his throat. I spent the next half hour covering my tracks. Then I went home and got drunk.

A week later the police arrested me and took me to the Ilininkov police station where I was questioned for an hour. A pure formality. Pavlov’s replacement was called Igor Borisovich Protopopov, also known as the Sardine. He wasn’t interested in athletes, but he kept me on as a bettor and match-fixer. I served him for six months before leaving Russia. What about Natalia, you must be wondering. I saw her the day after killing Pavlov, very early, at the sports center where she trained. She didn’t like the look of me. She said I looked like I was dead. I detected a note of scorn in her voice, but also a note of familiarity, even affection. I laughed and said I’d drunk a lot the night before, that was all. Then I took myself to the hospital where Jimmy Fodeba worked to get my frozen toes checked out. It wasn’t really a serious problem, but by greasing a few palms we got them to keep me there for three days; then Jimmy fiddled the admission forms so it turned out that when Pavlov was killed, I had been flat on my back, warmly tucked up and happy as could be.

Like I told you, six months later I left Russia. Natalia came with me. First we lived in Paris and we even talked about getting married. It was the happiest time in my life. So happy that when I think back to it now, it makes me feel ashamed. Then we spent a while in Frankfurt and in Stuttgart, where Natalia had friends and hoped to find a good job. The friends weren’t so friendly in the end, and poor Natalia couldn’t find steady employment, though she even tried working as a cook in a Russian restaurant. But she was no good at cooking. We hardly ever talked about Pavlov’s death. Unlike the police, Natalia thought his own men had done away with him, specifically the Sardine, but I said it must have been a rival gang. Funnily enough, she remembered Pavlov as a gentleman and always spoke warmly of his generosity. I let her go on and laughed to myself. Once I asked her if she was related to General Chuikov, the man who defended Stalingrad, now known as Volgograd. The things you come up with, Roger, she said, of course not. When we’d been living together for a year she left me for a German, by the name of Kurt something or other. She told me she was in love and then she cried, because she felt sorry for me or just because she was happy, I don’t know. Come on, that’s enough, mala mujer, I said to her. She started laughing like she always did when I spoke my language. I started laughing too. We shared a bottle of vodka and said good-bye. After that, when I realized there was nothing to keep me in that German city, I came to Barcelona. I’m working as a gymnastics instructor in a private school. Things aren’t going too badly; I sleep with whores and there are two bars where I hang out and have a circle, as they say here. But sometimes, especially at night, I miss Russia, I miss Moscow. It’s pretty good here but it’s not the same, though if you asked me, I wouldn’t be able to say exactly what it is I miss. The joy of just being alive? I don’t know. One of these days I’m going to get on a plane and go back to Chile.