It might seem that living in Russia with a name like mine is a rather sad fate. Something like living in America and being called Whatze Phuck. Yes, the name does lend my life a certain tone of gloom, and there is always a certain inner voice ready and willing to ask - ‘So what the fuck were you expecting from life anyway, A Hu-Li?’ But as I have already said, this is the very least of my concerns, not really even a concern, since I work under a pseudonym. It’s more like a humorous comment - although the humour, of course, is black.
Working as a prostitute doesn’t really bother me either. My shift partner at the Baltschug hotel, Dunya (she’s known as Adulteria in the hotel) once defined the difference between a prostitute and a respectable woman as follows: ‘A prostitute wants to get a hundred bucks out of a man for giving him a good time, but a respectable woman wants all his dough for sucking all the blood out of him.’ I don’t entirely agree with this radical opinion, but it does contain a certain grain of truth: morals in modern Moscow are such that the correct translation of the phrase ‘for love’ from the slick humour of the glamour magazines into legal terminology would be ‘for a hundred thousand dollars plus a pain in the arse’. Why bother paying any attention to the opinion of a society dominated by a morality like that?
I have more serious problems. Conscience, for instance. But I’ll think about that in some other traffic jam, we’re almost there now.
A top hat is a badge of caste indicating membership of the elite, no matter how we might feel about that. And when you are met at the entrance to a hotel by a man in a top hat who bows low and opens the door for you, you are elevated thereby to social heights that impose serious financial obligations towards those who have been less fortunate in life.
Which fact is immediately reflected in the menu. Taking a seat at a table by the bar, I immersed myself in the drinks list, trying to locate my niche among the forty-dollar whiskies and fifty-dollar cognacs (and that’s for just forty grams!). The names of the long drinks arranged themselves into the storyline of a high-tension thriller: Tequila Sunrise, Blue Lagoon, Sex on the Beach, Screwdriver, Bloody Mary, Malibu Sunset, Zombie. A ready-made proposal for a movie. So why am I not in the movie business?
I ordered the cocktail called Rusty Nail - not in honour of the impending meeting, as anybody of a psychoanalytical cast of mind might be inclined to think, but because in addition to scotch, its contents included the incomprehensible Drambuie. One should experience something new every day of one’s life.
There were two of my co-workers sitting in the bar - Karina, an ex-model, and the transsexual Nelly, who moved here from the hotel Moscow after it was closed. Nelly had just recently hit the big five-oh, but business was still going pretty well for her. Just then she was swarming all over some gallant Scandinavian type, while Karina was sitting on her own, finishing off a cigarette that wasn’t her first by a long way - that was obvious from the lipstick-smeared butts in the ashtray. I still haven’t finally figured out why that happens, but it kept happening all the time: Nelly, an ugly freak who spent her previous life in the Komsomol, earned more bucks than the young girls who looked like supermodels.
There could be various reasons for this:
1. Western man, who has imbibed the ideals of equal rights for women with his mother’s milk, is not capable of rejecting a woman because of her age or her external imperfections, since he sees her above all as a person.
2. For the thinking Western man, to satisfy his sexual needs with the help of a photographic model means to follow the dictates of the ideologues of consumerist society, and that is vulgar.
3. Western man regards social instinct as so far superior to biological instinct, even in such an intimate matter as sex, that his primary concern is for the individuals least capable of competing in the conditions of the market.
4. Western man assumes that an ugly freak will cost less, and after an hour of shame, he will have more money left for the payments on his ‘Jaguar’.
I did as the barman Serge said and didn’t even look in his direction. In the National everybody reports on everybody else, so you have to be careful. And anyway, right then I wasn’t much interested in Serge, I was more concerned about the client.
There were two possible candidates for the position in the bar; a Sikh wearing a dark-blue turban who looked like a chocolate Easter rabbit and a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit with glasses. They were both sitting alone - the man in glasses was drinking coffee and surveying the rectangular courtyard through its glass roof, and the Sikh was reading the Financial Times, swaying the toe of his lacquered shoe in time to the pianist, who was masterfully transforming the cultural legacy of the nineteenth century into acoustic wallpaper. The piece concerned was Chopin’s ‘Raindrops’, the same composition that the villain in the film Moonraker is playing when Bond appears. I used to adore that music. Leo Tolstoy’s wife, Sofia Andreevna, was right to entitle the rebuttal of her husband’s ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ that she worked on in her final years as ‘Chopin’s Preludes’ . . .
I’d prefer the one in glasses, I thought. He was obviously not saving up for a ‘Jaguar’, he already had one. For his kind the whole thrill is in spending money, they get more excited over that transaction than all the rest, which doesn’t even have to happen at all, provided you can get them drunk enough. But that Sikh would be really heavy work.
I smiled at the man in glasses and he smiled back. That’s great then, I thought, but just after that the Sikh folded his financial newspaper, got up and came to my table.
‘Lisa?’ he asked.
That was my pseudonym for the day.
‘That’s right,’ I said happily.
What else could I do?
He sat facing me and immediately started abusing the local cuisine. His English was good, not the kind people from India usually have - genuine Oxford pronunciation, with that dry tone to it reminiscent of a Russian accent. Instead of ‘fucking’ he said ‘freaking’, like a Boy Scout, and it sounded funny, because he stuck the word into every second sentence. Maybe swearing was against his religion, there was some little point like that in Sikhism, I thought. He turned out to be a professional portfolio investor, and I only just stopped myself from asking where his portfolio was. Portfolio investors don’t like jokes like that. I know that, because every third client of mine at the National is a portfolio investor. Not that there are all that many portfolio investors at the National, it’s just that I look very young, and every second portfolio investor is a paedophile. I don’t like them, to be quite honest. It’s strictly professional.
He began with extremely old-fashioned compliments, saying how he couldn’t believe his luck; I was like the girl from the romantic dreams of his childhood - that was what he said. And then more in the same vein. Then he wanted to see my passport, to make sure I wasn’t under age. I’m used to requests like that. I had a passport for foreign travel - false, naturally - in the name of ‘Alisa Li’ - it’s a common Korean surname and it suits my Asiatic face. The Sikh looked through it very carefully - he was obviously concerned about his good name. According to my passport I was nineteen.