MOSCOW

The portrait

An empire that had just fallen. In December the red flag had been lowered over the Kremlin for the last time, and what lay exposed was the cold: the real cold, the kind of winters that never end, and the other kind, that of a country whose floor had been pulled out from under it in a single night. Shelves empty, and then, overnight, full of things impossible to pay for. A lifetime's savings turned to paper in a matter of months. Pensioners selling what they owned on a piece of cardboard, on the sidewalk, next to the subway entrances.

The soul

A city that had stopped believing in everything at once, which is why everything was worth so little. Where nobody is in charge anymore, anybody starts giving orders: the first German cars with tinted windows appeared, the brigades, scores settled in broad daylight, murder for hire turned into a new trade with its rate and its prestige. And at the margins, the worst: the children who were surplus and the parents with debts, and the soft-handed men who bought boys the way you sign a deed, and kept them in unheated rooms to manufacture out of them exactly what was needed.

The appeal

The terrible magnet of a world without rules. In a city like that, a kid with cold hands and nothing to lose could become anything — a rich man, a corpse, a weapon — and the vertigo of that possibility had its own sinister beauty. It was the place where you learned the only loyalty that never fails: the one born of hunger and fear shared, stronger than any flag.

In the dark

Loving another man, there and then, was a crime with an article number and a sentence in years; it would stay one for one more winter, until ninety-three erased it from the code almost without anyone celebrating. So desire lived where everything forbidden lived: on the platforms of certain stations, in the parks everyone knew and nobody named, in the back room of fear. There were no flags. There were signals — a look held half a second too long, a cigarette asked for without needing one — and behind every one, the shadow of a beating, a blackmail, or a cell. Tenderness between two men was contraband: you moved it at night, you hid it well, and whoever carried it knew it could cost him dearly. For some it cost something worse: it taught them that affection, like everything in that city, had to be paid for.

Light and shadow