Timeless
Nina was late - of course she was, they always are - which was lucky, as it turned out, because it allowed me the time to finally stumble into the bouji and impossible-to-find bar that she had suggested as our meeting place. Of course, received wisdom on these matters sternly recommends that the man should always choose the date venue, but when I’m in a foreign city, especially one as labyrinthine and impenetrable as Moscow, I tend to cut myself a little slack.
This place was especially hard to uncover. Something I experienced several times in Moscow when endeavouring to locate a particular address on Google Maps was the technology bringing me to the approximate location - usually a grey street lined with unmarked and anonymous doors - and then dumping me there with no way of knowing how to gain ingress into whatever hidden dive I was looking for, and the cyrillic text on signs providing me with no handy clues. Often this is because - like in Germany - Moscow has a proliferation of 19th century townhouses with courtyards, and bars and other places of entertainment are sometimes in the hinterhaus, and unfortunately this small but crucial nuance is not always reflected on Maps.
Down a small staircase to a basement entrance - unprepossessing enough from the outside, but when I was finally let in by the staff - there was a kind of speakeasy vibe to the place - I was pleasantly surprised by the interior. I was led into a back room, where couples sat at small tables eating and drinking and listening to a lady playing the harp very beautifully. There were candles at the tables and many chandeliers - delicate and dimly lit - hung from the ceiling.
‘Bad girl - you’re late’, I said when Nina appeared next to me as jarringly as when someone unexpectedly materialises in a dream. Well, I had been lost in the dream world of the internet on my phone waiting for her.
‘Am I?’ she said, predictably impenitent.
‘We’ll figure out later how you can make it up to me. What are you drinking?’
‘Negroni’
I raised a hand and a waitress came over.
Nina is one of the few girls I know who looks as good, if not better, in real life as she does on Instagram. I had originally met her a couple of years before, in 2019, when I was in St Petersburg with my friend Tom Torero. The snow was waist deep that January, and getting to the Galeria shopping mall across the street from our lodgings was an epic task that seemed to take many hours. Nina had appeared out of a doorway in that mall, our eyes had locked for just a little too long, and I walked up to introduce myself to her.
Well, you have to practice what you preach, don’t you?
It was a short conversation, enough for me to get her name and to add her on Instagram. She was a student from Ukraine on some sort of professional placement (hard to decipher what, exactly) that meant she was working in St Pete for a few days. We parted, and shortly afterwards I returned to London.
I had wanted to see her again, but my romantic entanglements in London plus the small matter of a global pandemic put paid to that. Nina had returned to her home in the warzone in Crimea, and for most of 2020 no one was going anywhere. But we remained in touch, sending one another pithy and flirtatious messages from time to time. And on her wall, Nina posted arty images of herself - not the usual Insta-ho stuff - but classy and sometimes strange compositions. Nina with a crown of bananas on her head. Nina painting in a latex apron and (apparently) nothing else. Nina staring into the middle-distance in a broken down, abandoned bus garage. From her posts it appeared that she had the same fascination for the desolate and the run-down that I do. I was drawn to her vision, and her apparent unconventionality.
It was a surprise when, in the summer of 2021, I learned that Nina had moved to Moscow.
‘I am attending university here’, she told me - some sort of postgrad course (again, the details are opaque).
‘Do you miss Ukraine?’ I asked.
‘Better not to talk about that’, she replied, and I felt for her - I know only too well the displacement you feel when spending extended periods away from your homeland.
But tonight Nina was chipper. She wore a smart, long coat that covered a short skirt and black tights beneath. Most strikingly, she wore dramatic lines of pink makeup over each eye, her signature look, an expression, I supposed, of her taste for the performative.
‘Like David Bowie’, I said.
‘Oh,’ she responded briefly. (It’s hard to tell in advance what cultural reference points will stick with girls like Nina. On one hand she was probably too young to have heard of Bowie. On the other, she was a cultured girl with a good grasp of English, and likely an anglophile. It was striking, travelling around Russia, just how often you would hear British pop music playing, from Queen to Elton John to acts like Coldplay, Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa (who I think we can claim). And of course, Russians all love the Beatles, despite the fact they never performed in the former Soviet Union).
We sat together on the red velvet couch I’d asked the waitress to put us on while she sucked down her Negroni and we engaged in chit-chat about her course, her move to Moscow, the out-of-town suburb where she now lived, Sputnik and various other matters. But I was getting restless, and I wanted to move to another venue (remember, received wisdom tells us that when you are on a date with a girl you should ALWAYS go to more than one venue, as it makes it seem like you’ve known one another for longer.) Also I wanted to take back the frame - once we left this bar I would be in charge, which seemed like the right way around. Further, my newly-discovered taste for shisha was whining at me like a recalcitrant child.
‘Come on, let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said.
‘OK’, she responded, meekly enough, which was encouraging, since what had been clear from our intercourse so far was that Nina was nothing if not feisty. She had a good command of English - much better than I’d expected - and far from being the shy and demure small town girl I’d anticipated, she was challenging and sparky in the manner of a woman you might meet in London. Which was fine - I like the women I spend time with to have some fire in their souls - but it does mean that from the off you are engaged in a frame battle of sorts where both parties are subtly competing for the upper hand.
And as we know, women tend to end up despising those men they are able to dominate. So you have to be careful.
We went out into the main street, lined with fancy upscale shops like Dior and Gucci and I ordered a Yandex on my phone (the Russian version of Uber). I embraced Nina in a faux-gentlemanly way, ostensibly to protect her from the cold, and we joked around until the car arrived.
In the back of the car with Nina! Her face illuminated by the glow of the lights from the street as we shot through the centre of Moscow! There are moments in life - even quite mundane moments like taking a taxi - that seem significant somehow, as though they are scenes from a movie. Driving through the night, it’s so exciting, the Pet Shop Boys once sang, and it’s true. How fantastic, I thought to myself, to be in a car in this mysterious and grand city, so foreign to me and yet so comfortable at the same time, with this beautiful girl. No matter what comes of this particular night - or any night for that matter - moments like this are akin to jewels that we can treasure.
We pulled up outside Timeless, the shisha bar, on an old street off Tverskaya, conveniently (and entirely coincidentally) just across the road from my hotel, the Marriott Grand. I took Nina by the hand and led her in.
The word TIMELESS is written in lights outside the building - thankfully in Latin characters - but the doorway itself is unprepossessing, and no lights from within are visible from the street, leading me, on my first visit, to wonder if the place was actually open. But push on the door and it gives way, ushering the visitor into a smoky paradise.
How I’ve come to love shisha bars on my travels with Tusk! I’ve smoked it before, of course, several times in London, but it was in Russia that I really developed the taste for it. I have far too few decadent habits, these days, you see, what with not drinking or doing drugs anymore, or even smoking cigarettes. But in the past year I’ve discovered the delights of expensive cigars - with Tristan Tate - and shisha with the incorrigible Tusk.
There is just something so fantastic about visiting a great shisha lounge, shrouded in haze, reclining on a chaise lounge with a beautiful woman, sucking in smoke, hearing the bubbling of the liquid, and enjoying that inevitable nicotine head rush together. And Timeless is - apart from another place we discovered in the upscale seaside resort of Sochi - the very best of these smoky palaces I have discovered to date.
There are actually three branches of Timeless in Moscow, although I have only visited the Tverskaya one, set up by a young Russian entrepreneur who studied at Oxford University before returning to his homeland, which doubtless explains certain anglophile touches to the decor, including a red telephone box as you walk in, and Union Jack cushions and drapes.
Not that Timeless is a British-themed place - far from it. The interior is defiantly eclectic, although deep leather couches and chairs are a defining attribute. The word TIMELESS set in lights on the wall. A neon-lit bar area (or areas, since there are two bars, one for alcohol, the other for the construction and consumption of shisha).
The waiting staff are young, good-looking and polite, and they speak very little English.
‘Mr Francis? Ah yes. This way please, sir’.
A waiter led Nina and me though a complex hive of discrete areas, like small, interconnected sitting rooms, where impossibly beautiful girls and rich, sometimes violent-looking men sit smoking together. The soundtrack is cool pop and house music. Some areas are larger than others. One housed about eight people, who were all playing video game on a big screen.
We were taken to a small, slightly secluded cubbyhole providing a good view of the other guests - perfect for people-watching - and a couch - perfect for seduction.
‘Come sit next to me here,’ I told Nina, patting the couch and she complied, putting her bag down next to her.
‘Cocktail? I asked.
‘Yes’, she said, and so I picked up the menu and suggested something randomly.
‘No, I do not like vodka,’ she said.
‘OK, well how about this one?’
She screwed up her face.
‘OK, get another Negroni,’ I told her.
She shrugged.
‘As you wish.’
‘I’ll order us a shisha too.’
‘You know, I used to be a shisha girl in Ukraine,’ she said. ‘Maybe I can select. I have smoked many, many shishas. I know what is good.’
Again, I felt the unmistakable force of a feminine frame grab. I have no doubt that Nina knows a damn sight more about hookah than I do, but it didn’t matter. If I allowed her to choose what we would drink and what we would smoke then all would be lost. And so when the shisha master appeared (yes, he really called himself that), I noisily overrode her and ordered a pipe I had enjoyed previously. And then I sank back into that deep leather couch and put an arm around Nina, who had now crossed her legs demurely next to me, and she lent into me placidly enough, her pretty head on my shoulder. And Russian pop music played and the thought rushed quickly through my mind that, were I to die here tonight, it wouldn’t be an altogether bad way to go.
‘You know they show Playboy videos in the toilets,’ I told Nina
‘Really?’ She perked up, seemed interested.
‘Yeah - naked women cavorting around with one another on-screen while you use the restroom’ I said.
‘Cool’, she responded.
A woman in London would probably have reported the venue to the authorities for misogyny, but Russia is a very different sort of place. But it was true - video screens in the bathrooms showed luxurious clips of beautiful women, sometimes solo, sometimes in faux-lesbian clinches with other girls, dancing naked onscreen for the punters’ delectation. I approved - it was a nice, seedy touch, reminiscent of the porn video cabins you sometimes still see in European cities, or a time many years ago when clubs would sometimes show erotic films as an accompaniment to the house music they played, a decadent gesture that would no longer be tolerated in the West.
‘Well women’s bodies are far more beautiful than men’s’, she said.
‘I can only concur,’ I purred into her ear.
I had a sense that this was going to be a very interesting evening.
No comments:
Post a Comment