The Troika Dolls - Miranda Darling [55]
This eternal state of pause seemed to have created its own collective gesture: the sideways roll. The silence in such a physical crush of people was striking. The crowd was not aggressive. It pushed and surged around Stevie but with no personal grudge, no animosity, and no apology if someone stepped on your foot. As the people in it rock with slow, grim focus, she was compelled by physical pressure to do likewise.
Stevie’s stomach fluttered as she stepped onto the down escalator. The depth of the tunnel, the incline, was vertiginous. The original stations had been built far underground so they could be used as air-raid shelters, until the arrival of the nuclear age, when people realised that you just couldn’t dig deep enough. The newer stations were much shallower. As she descended into the darkness, Stevie concentrated on the faces rising towards her on the escalator opposite, all so white. It was unusual to see an Asian face or a dark face—a black face rare indeed. No one wore any brightly coloured clothing, no one was laughing or talking.
Two pale boys on military service, conscripts, rose up towards her. They looked so young in their great coats with their soft mouths and apple cheeks. Stevie thought of Vadim’s stories, of the mothers in Red Square screaming for justice.
Stevie doubted it was much easier for any of the girls. She watched two friends in their early twenties, perfectly made-up. It wasn’t yet ten o’clock in the morning but they were drinking beer from big cans. They obviously took great care of their appearance. Beauty was one of the easiest ways out of the life of stagnation offered by the concrete monoliths on Moscow’s outskirts. Stevie thought of the clubs and restaurants and bars, the girls on display in lingerie and heels, part of the wallpaper.
For these young people in particular, their communist past seemed to have been vacuumed away. The present had roared in on a Hummer, past protesting pensioners in shabby clothing, bringing with it a Wild West of neon lights and dirty snow, of assassinations and pounding house music. There was, Stevie supposed, no middle way in Moscow. Everything was extreme.
There was no noise in the train carriage. No one wanted to draw the attention of the other passengers. Life here seemed to be an intensely private and interior matter, to be hidden from strangers—guarded from the state—at all cost. Any social capital Moscow may once have had, long ago, had truly been eroded and none of the developments since the fall of communism had been very effective in restoring any.
Stevie surfaced at Universitet station, past the kiosks selling beer and vodka to morning workers. If anything, the gloom was even more pronounced out here. The avenues of bare trees, the tall wrought-iron fence that ringed the university grounds, stood out black and lean against the snow. There was no colour, only shades of grey fading to black. The whole scene could have been an old photo capturing a lost moment in history.
Anya must have walked this way so many times, on her way to her music lesson. She must have walked through the trees, towards the monolithic university buildings—a central Gotham tower that should have had gargoyles instead of heroic statues and ceremonial urns and would have been more at home in uptown New York, with smaller, twenty-storey wings radiating off it. She would have carried her violin case, her school books, perhaps a snack.
Stevie casually glanced behind her. The feeling was back, even stronger now, that someone was following her. Had that man been in her metro car? Did it mean anything? Did she recognise the blue-grey jacket from GUM? She couldn’t be sure . . .
Stevie hurried towards the university. A tall figure strode out of the main building, past two gigantic bronze statues of a boy and girl made heroic through study, and down the ripple of stairs that ran to the grounds. Coat