Eduard searches for Natasha in Moscow and returns to Kharkiv

In December 1989, Eduard searches Moscow for Natasha, his wife, who has disappeared after arriving in the Soviet Union ahead of him. His attempt to find her turns an official literary visit into a cold, disorienting passage through the city, its family history, and the limits of what he knows about her life. When the search yields no address and the night brings danger rather than news, he abandons his tour and takes a third-class train to Kharkov. There, instead of finding Natasha, he appears without warning at the apartment of the parents he left fifteen years earlier.

The Search Begins

At the Hotel Ukraina, Eduard meets the French theater director Antoine Vitez over a Soviet-style breakfast of herring and hard-boiled eggs. Vitez has read and liked several of Eduard’s books, and is pleased by the gravity he finds in Soviet life: to him, the West offers comfort without importance, while the Soviet Union’s restrictions make everything seem to matter. Eduard is wary of this admiration from a man who himself lives in freedom and comfort, but he is glad to encounter a French intellectual who is not wholly infatuated with Mikhail Gorbachev’s changes. More urgently, Vitez offers a listener to a man with no clear place to begin. Eduard tells him that Natasha is lost somewhere in Moscow.

The circumstances he describes make the disappearance both familiar and frightening. He and Natasha had fought in Paris, as they often did; she left for Moscow on a whim a week before he did, then called once, drunk, saying that everything there was awful. Since then, he has heard nothing. He has no address for her, and her mother does not initially answer the only number he has. He suspects Natasha’s visa has expired, but does not think that would stop her. When Vitez asks whether he loves her, Eduard answers that she is his wife. Vitez imagines the search as a descent into the city in pursuit of a lost beloved; the comparison gives the walk an almost mythic shape, while the actual circumstances remain painfully uncertain.

Moscow as a Search Landscape

Eduard leaves the hotel at daybreak and walks without a destination, moving quickly in a sailor’s jacket and unlined boots. The city he encounters is not the Moscow he remembers from the seven years he lived there. Its broad avenues must be crossed through underground passages crowded with dirty water and people waiting at kiosks for cheap goods. There is nowhere obvious to rest: cafés, if they exist, are hidden away, and questions meet hostile looks. The lavish subway stations stand out as the city’s most beautiful public spaces, but they offer only passage, not refuge.

The walk also draws him into older attachments. He wanders through Novodevichy Cemetery and other settings associated with his love affair with Tanya, passes the building where he once slashed his wrists, and remembers Tanya’s poodle, whose white curls turned black with dirt during the thaw. Her number is in his address book; they still speak sometimes, and she now lives in Madrid with a Spanish marquis. Yet the imagined call that would ask her to come downstairs and return with him feels impossible. He treats any lesser appeal as sentimental, and does not make the call. The search for Natasha thus moves through places marked by a previous love without reopening that relationship.

A Lead, and a Night at the Squat

After trying telephone booths, Eduard finally reaches Natasha’s mother. She confirms that Natasha came to stay for two days and then left without saying where she was going. Her mother lives far away, so Eduard takes the subway to visit her. In a tiny, meticulously ordered apartment, lined with collections of classic books behind glass, he finds a woman worn down by worry. She fears that Natasha’s expired visa may mean the worst. She knows about her daughter’s alcoholism, which had already killed Natasha’s father, but not about the more disruptive patterns Eduard associates with her bipolar disorder: stretches of quiet writing followed by several days away, then a return in a devastated state. He keeps these details to himself, unwilling to add to her mother’s fear.

The mother asks the same question Vitez asked about love. Again, Eduard does not offer an account of desire; he says Natasha is his wife and that he has cared for her for seven years and will not stop. Her response is to kiss and bless him, calling him a good man. The encounter gives his duty a public witness, even as he privately recognizes that life might be easier if Natasha disappeared from it. The contradiction does not resolve the search: her mother can only provide the address of a former classmate who may know something.

That lead takes Eduard, after a long subway ride and a walk in below-zero weather, to a late-night artists’ squat. The classmate, a hostile blonde, tells him that Natasha came there with two men, stayed overnight, and behaved in ways that humiliate and disturb him. She blames Eduard, saying that Natasha had described his treatment of her. Others join them in the kitchen, including Jalal, a Chechen man who presses Eduard about whether he is Jewish and then tries, with an increasingly menacing joking manner, to take his passport. Eduard remains outwardly calm amid the drunkenness and danger. His last clear recollection is of saying that the country is brilliant at making history but incapable of normal life. At daybreak, he crosses the squat without waking its passed-out occupants and checks that his passport is still there.

The Turn to Kharkov

The morning after the squat, Eduard has a plan: return to the hotel for his bag, leave Yulian Semyonov’s tour, get to the station, and take the first train to Kharkov. He buys a third-class ticket without hesitation. The eighteen-hour journey strips away the status of the well-known writer and places him among passengers on benches and bunks laid out like a barracks. Some seem rough and criminal; others appear so vulnerable that their presence moves him. Their weathered faces recall Vitez’s distinction between Soviet seriousness and Western comfort, while the dirty window frames a sparse landscape of birch trees, snow, black sky, distant stations, and old women selling pickles or cranberries on the platforms. Eduard, accustomed to cities, wonders what it means to live in such remote places.

At seven in the morning, a taxi drops him in Saltivka, outside the prefabricated concrete building where he spent his adolescence. He climbs the bare stairs with his duffel bag and hesitates at his parents’ door, wondering whether his sudden appearance will shock them. He rings and calls through the door; his mother answers warily, and he repeats that it is him, Edichka. She opens three locks before they stand face to face. His father comes up behind her. Their surprise is unexpectedly restrained, more like the response to an unannounced visit from a nearby cousin than to a son they thought they would never see again.

Homecoming Without Recognition

His parents embrace him and hold his face, but his mother quickly steps back to inspect him and asks where his coat is. When he says he has none, she insists that he cannot go out in such cold without one. She retrieves a good coat his father no longer wears, and the three of them gather at the closet while Eduard tries it on to reassure her. His father remarks on the good clothes kept away from moths and on the apartment that no one will inherit if they die; he asks whether Eduard wants to move back. The offer of a comfortable, quiet home makes the distance between them tangible. Eduard says he has come only for a couple of days.

He explains the reason for his Moscow visit: a VIP reading tour and a book printed in three hundred thousand copies. He wants his parents to understand that he has succeeded and to be proud of him. But these achievements belong to a world too distant from theirs to command their interest; they do not even ask whether he has brought a copy. Their attention turns instead to whether he has a wife and whether they might have grandchildren. Eduard confirms that he has a wife but no children, withholding the complications of the search and his marriage. His return has carried him back to the threshold of his family home, but the people waiting inside recognize neither the public writer he has become nor the full burden he has brought with him.