Snowdrops Read Online Free PDF Page B

my shoulder too. They laughed, Masha throwing her head back, Katya doing one of those suppressed blushing laughs that can keep you out of trouble at school when you crack up during lessons.
    "No," said Masha. "What is it called, this thing that men in army have?" She tapped again.
    "Epaulettes?" I said.
    "When one Russian makes this," she said, still tapping, "it means man who is in army, or can be police or one of others."
    "Your father?"
    "Yes," she said. "He was sailor. His father also was sailor. Like your grandfather."
    "Yes," said Katya. "Our grandfather was fighting next to convoys also. Maybe they were knowing each other."
    "Maybe," I said.
    We smiled. We fidgeted. I looked at Masha and awaywhen she caught me, that first-date cat and mouse. Behind the girls, through the steamed-up window and the rain that had begun to fall into the river, I could just make out the quiet park rides and the Krimsky Bridge and, beyond that, the glow of the giant ridiculous statue of Peter the Great that stands in the river near the Red October chocolate factory.
    I asked them about growing up in Murmansk. Of course it was hard, Masha said. Of course it was not Moscow. But in the summer it was light around the clock, and you could go walking in the forest in the middle of the night.
    "And we have one of this!" Katya said, pointing towards the ribs of the Ferris wheel in Gorky Park. She smiled again, and she seemed to me a harmless innocent girl, who thought a Ferris wheel was like Disney World.
    "Only," said Masha, "it was too expensive. To ride. When I was small girl, in eighties, during Gorbachev, I could only look at it, this wheel. I thought it was too beautiful."
    I asked, "Why did you leave? Why did you come to Moscow?"
    I thought I already knew the answer. Most of the provincial Russian girls came to the city with just enough money to look good on for a couple of weeks, while they slept on someone's floor and tried to find a job, or ideally a man, who could whisk them off to live behind the electricfences on the "elitny" Rublovskoe Shosse. Or maybe, if he was already married, he would install her in an apartment on the streets around Patriarshie Prudy--Patriarch's Ponds: the Hampstead of Moscow, with more automatic weapons--where he'd only bother her twice a week and let her keep the place when he got bored with her. In those days, leggy desperate girls were Russia's main national product, after oil. You could order them on the Internet in Leeds or Minneapolis.
    "Because of family," said Masha.
    "Your parents moved to Moscow?"
    "No," she said. "Parents stay in Murmansk. But I must move."
    She made another gesture, one that this time I understood. She raised her hand again and flicked the side of her white neck with her index finger. Drink. The all-Russia sign for drink.
    "Your father?"
    "Yes."
    I imagined the rows and the tears up there in Murmansk, and the wages drunk in pay-day binges, and the little girls hiding in their bedroom, dreaming of the big wheel they couldn't afford to ride.
    "Now," said Masha, "only mother is living."
    I wasn't sure whether or not to say I was sorry.
    "But," said Katya, "in Moscow we also have family."
    "Yes," said Masha, "in Moscow we are not alone. We have aunt. Maybe you meet her. She is old communist. I think for you it will be interesting."
    I said, "I would love to meet your aunt."
    "In Murmansk," Masha said, "we knew nothing. Everything we learned in Moscow. Everything good. And also everything bad."
    They brought all the dishes at once, as they always do in Caucasian restaurants, never much valuing the deferred gratification implicit in the starter/main course concept. We ate. Behind us the businessmen had given up on the food to paw at their companions, not very surreptitiously. Their table was an orgy of smoking. I imagine they smoked in the shower.
    I tried to find out where Masha and Katya lived. They said they rented a place out on the Leningradskoe Shosse, the choked highway that leads to