Waiting For Masha
‘Gosh, you live in a shithole.’
It was at a Russian karaoke bar, of all places. I was there attending a birthday party with some friends when she came up to me and said, “Are you Serge Faldin?”
Instantly, I felt like a little Instagram celebrity, famous not for something they’d done but simply for being famous.
“As a matter of fact, I am,” I said, already flirting. “Wait, how do you know my name again?”
She—how can I describe her? If you asked ChatGPT to generate a cartoon version of a Russian woman in the mid-1950s, who, for mysterious reasons, lived not in Soviet Moscow but in New York, it would generate her.
Red lipstick, jet-black curly hair, pale face, one eyebrow perpetually raised, as if asking a provocative question, one side of her lips in a perpetual smile, a lit cigarette sitting between her thin, long fingers; and, of course, her thick Russian accent, which would be laughable on anyone else but somehow made her even cooler.
“You are Angelina’s ex!” she said eagerly. In the next few minutes, I’d learn she was the classmate of someone I used to date in Moscow—a coincidence that can only happen in London if you’re a Russian from a certain milieu. Then you know everybody.
“I’m Masha, by the way,” she said. Alongside Yulia, Natasha, and Nastya, this was one of the most common names for a Russian girl of my generation.
In the karaoke, I sang most of the songs, as always. Masha and I danced but didn’t speak much, inching closer to each other the way people do in clubs when they like each other but are still unsure whether it’s mutual. At some point, we went outside for a smoke. Underneath the neon lights of Soho, I asked her to roll me a cigarette. I could never learn how one does it; my fingers just don’t bend that way. As she got to work, I gathered all the courage I had and used the moment to draw closer and lean in for a kiss.
She was startled but eventually relaxed, kissing me back.
As we descended the stairs back into the packed club with dozens of drunk Russians, Masha’s friend, Liuba, who came with her, gave her a You’re kidding me, right? look. They’d agreed this would be their “girls’ night out”—an attempt to find good boys for both of them, following Masha’s nasty breakup and Liuba’s virtually non-existent love life. But when Masha waved her hands in an apologetic gesture, as if to say, What can I do? Liuba said, “Alright, go. Go. We’ll deal with this later.”
And so we went.
The first thing I noticed about Masha is how much she likes to be comfortable.
Spooning might look cozy in the movies, but in reality, it’s an intricate art, a fine line between bliss and torture. As a guy, you always feel one of your arms needs to be amputated or, at the very least, that mattress producers should come up with a hole in the middle. Where else do you put that arm?
Masha had the answer right away—a quality, I’d later learn, she applied to most areas of life: how to avoid getting a hangover, the best way to roll a joint, choosing the perfect kitchen counter wipes. With Masha, there are always answers. Her philosophy of life could be summarized by a Gino D’Acampo quote: “Minimum effort, maximum satisfaction.”
“Wait,” she said the first night we spent together, carefully putting one pillow on top of the other. “Put your arm in between the pillows.”
I did as instructed, and she put her head on top of the upper pillow, both of us forming a kind of hand-and-head pillow sandwich.
I remember thinking, Here’s a woman who knows what she likes.
“You really are something,” I said, which was roughly the 6,745th time that night I gave her that compliment without really knowing what it was I wanted to say.
Masha chuckled. “Now shut up, I have work tomorrow.”
Underneath the blankets, I put one leg on top of hers—this would later turn out to be one of the biggest problems in our relationship—but right then, for the first and last time, she didn’t mind.
She snored away, and I lay there, wondering what had just happened. Here I was, four months into a nasty divorce that had made me lose faith in womankind, falling asleep with a complete stranger in my bed. And yet, I felt weirdly that she wasn’t a complete stranger—not just because we had common friends or had just had sex.
It’s just that when you meet the right person, it feels like home.
What I mistook for Masha’s love of comfort was really a compulsion for orderliness.
“Honey,” she once said, six months into our relationship, “do you have plans for the weekend?”
“I thought we could go to the beach,” I replied, always seeking ways to make use of the car I had no use for in London.
She looked disappointed, hurt even. “I thought we could stay at home and do a deep clean of the bathroom,” she said.
With Masha, there are rules. Towels must be placed exactly where I found them; the toothpaste, which I typically use while in the shower—and as I am told, so do most guys—must be returned to the sink; the floors vacuumed on a semi-daily basis; the bedsheets changed more frequently than once a year.
This wasn’t anything new—my sister Kate, whom I grew up with, is a PhD in Cleaning & Scrubbing. She usually enters my apartment like a health and safety inspector on duty, leaving her suitcase at the door, peering into corners, and gliding her index finger along the surfaces to assess the sanitary levels.
Days before she comes to visit me in London, I usually find myself on all fours, scrubbing the bathroom floor with a used toothbrush, terrified she’ll find a tiny smudge underneath the carpet and hiss, “Gosh, you live in a shithole.”
No matter how spotless my apartment was the day she arrived, Kate invariably ends up cleaning it on her last day. I try to talk her out of it, but she simply can’t help herself. My apartment before and after my sister’s visit is like an advertisement for a reality home makeover show. (Cue the TV show host voice: “This is going to be life-changing!”)
“It’s not that I am some kind of monster!” she said when I mentioned this to her. “I just like things clean!”
Once, in the early days of our relationship, while I was at class in the city, I left Kate and Masha alone for a couple of hours in the apartment. I was a little anxious whether they’d get along—they had just met—but my doubts were cast aside the moment I returned.
“What happened here?” I asked, finding them on the couch with a bottle of wine, whispering something in each other’s ear, chuckling in secret. They looked like two sisters or best friends who had known each other all their life. If I was a little hesitant before, now I just felt jealous.
Interrupting each other, they explained:
“We recalled our favorite scenes from Miyazaki’s movies—”
“—and when we spoke about the Moving Castle—”
“—we said in unison, ‘THAT SCENE WHEN SOPHIE CLEANS!’”
“It just felt so good to watch that.”
When we first moved in together, Masha said she loved podcasts, which I was happy about since I too have a love for audio storytelling. It took me several months to learn that what Masha referred to as “podcasts” weren’t podcasts in my sense of the word, which are mostly scientific or personal shows. Masha’s library boasted numerous collections of stories about murder, rape, theft—really, anything illegal. The bigger and truer the crime, the more, it seemed, Masha got excited.
“It helps me fall asleep,” she says in bed, sticking an AirPod in her ear with a new pedophile story, turning to face the wall.
At first, I laughed at this habit of hers, suggesting she go study criminology or, at the very least, attend a police academy. Her love of crime didn’t seem to fit her slender, elegant, almost aristocratic vibe.
“You’d make a good cop. Or an undercover agent for the KGB,” I said.
But lately, watching her scrub the kitchen with forceful motions, I started to wonder if there’s more to Masha than meets the eye.
The way she makes the surfaces of the kitchen counters look so pristine, so empty of stains.
Surely, if you were to murder someone, that would be a great skill to have.
A few months back, Masha and I went to a production of Samuel Beckett’s famous play, Waiting for Godot.
I’m always guilty for living in one of the capitals of theatre and attending so few shows, so the moment I saw the advert on the Tube, I bought the tickets, paying roughly $300 for both and putting it on a credit card.
The production featured Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw—whom I didn’t know but knew they were a big deal in the UK. This gave me an edge when selling the idea to Masha.
“They have, uh, Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw!” I said, when I pitched her the idea.
She looked at me and blinked twice. “I have no idea who that is.”
“Me neither,” I said, “but they are a big deal in the UK!”
“So?”
“So, we’ll be in the presence of stars. Isn’t that amazing?”
Even though Masha wasn’t sold on the idea, she obliged. A conservative that she is—preferring the same old sitcom or a beloved rape podcast to a romantic comedy—she typically delegates the experiments to me.
The production took place at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, which says nothing to you if you’re not from London—and maybe not even if you are—but it’s a popular theatre in central London, a city of many popular theatres. We arrived ten minutes before the start of the play and, as always, my tickets wouldn’t load on my phone.
By this point, both Masha and I were used to this curse—which started during our recent trip to Montenegro, when WizzAir wouldn’t load my boarding pass and we had to fly from another airport the following day. As I began to panic and hit the phone with my index finger, Masha took me aside and said, “It’s alright. Let’s just find connection and try again.”
Annoyingly, after she said that, everything worked out, and we were let inside.
Our seats were right in the middle of the stalls, and our neighbors were a mix of tourists from the States—“Oh. My. God. Like, literally, I am attending a play in London. How awesome is that?”—and older UK couples with pints of beer, who laughed loudly and quickly became the main characters in my daydream of a chandelier falling from the ceiling.
The seats themselves were made of wood and crammed so close, I could feel the person behind me breathing on my neck while my knees covered my ears.
“It’s an old theatre,” I thought out loud, as we made an unnamed yoga pose to take our seats, as if in the olden times all people were the size of five-year-olds.
The smell reminded me of my great-grandmother’s apartment, who, at the age of 95, would drink vodka for lunch, piss herself, and store rotten food in the fridge in plastic wrappers.
But it was a famous play, a classic, so as the lights dimmed and we found a pose that didn’t make our asses fall asleep, I gave Masha a knowing wink and kissed her on the cheek, as if to say, You’re welcome, dear!
If you’ve never seen Waiting for Godot, the idea of the play is in the title. It’s about two homeless people standing by a tree, waiting for someone named Godot, who might or might not come, and once he does, something miraculous might happen. I knew this coming to the play—I am an educated fellow.
But when, twenty minutes in, nothing happened but the characters Didi and Gogo waiting for someone named Godot, who might or might not come, and once he does, something miraculous might happen, Masha whispered to me, “What’s the play about, again?”
I put my hand to my mouth and whispered in her ear as quietly as I could, “This. They are just waiting. It’s a deep metaphor for the futility of our existence.”
“Right,” she said, her face crooked in an expression I can only describe as complete and utter betrayal.
Someone cleared their throat behind me, and a woman in front holding a pint turned around to stare at me in a way that screamed, “Shut the fuck up,” so I did.
Sitting in silence now, I watched as Didi and Gogo walked from one side of the stage to the other, taking out stuff from their shoes, occasionally yelling and waving their arms, but mostly talking about nothing in particular, the way you do when you make small talk at a bus stop because you’re bored to death.
New characters would appear on the stage, and just as you’d think the play was going somewhere or an inciting incident might occur, it didn’t. And even though I knew that was the whole point of the play, it made me angry.
Why can’t great art be more interesting, exciting, grabbing? I thought, looking over at other people in the room, who seemed to be engaged in the play, smiling, their faces stuck to the stage in concentration, saliva dripping from their beer-stained mouths. Not wanting to appear as an uneducated idiot, I squinted in a way people squint when they want other people to see what great connoisseurs of art they are.
I imagined talking to someone in the audience and using an adjective reserved for the New York Times book blurbs.
“Intense!”
“Life-affirming!”
“Brilliant.”
Then they’d know how educated and in-the-know I was.
Eventually, I got bored and stole a glance at Masha, who was blinking very slowly and shaking herself awake every few minutes. She looked like Mr. Bean, about to put toothpicks in his eyes to stay awake.
“How are you?” I whispered.
She nodded and smiled.
“At least we get to see UK’s very own Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw!”
Masha raised her eyebrow as if to say, Don’t even start.
During intermission, the lights turned on, and the applause followed. Masha got up, took her coat, and headed for the exit. I thought she wanted to go outside for a smoke, so I followed her. As we were walking up the stairs, she said, “Please tell me we’re not staying until the end. I will die.”
“But it’s a masterpiece!” I replied in a voice that was two full octaves higher than mine.
“I know, honey, and I appreciate it. But I really really hate it.”
She offered to go to a local pub and have a drink while I stayed and watched the rest of the play. “If it’s that important to you,” she added in a tone that suggested I had a choice but only one option was correct.
I asked myself what I’d rather do: stay in a smelly room, crammed like an adult in a toy car, pretending to see something I could not simply because it’s art—or get dinner. The choice was made by my stomach, which, as if included in the conversation, made a grumbling sound.
“I guess we’re not intellectuals after all,” Masha chuckled, as, moments later, we walked toward Soho in search of a place, our breath visible in front of us in tiny clouds.
And that—right there—is the fundamental difference between us.
As I stared at my shoes moving on the pavement, I thought about how I was brought up with the idea that you should strive to be someone better than who you already are. My childhood was one long stream of feelings of guilt, shame, and tough love, with that impossible-to-reach goal of betterment. If I didn’t like high-brow classical works or attended theatre on the weekends, then it wasn’t the art to blame: I was the imbecile.
Masha, on the other hand, knew exactly what she liked and what she didn’t. It was easy to imagine her childhood as full of acceptance, unconditional love, and support. She didn’t pretend to be someone she wasn’t or like what she was supposed to like simply because someone said she should. If she disliked a play, she simply got up and left. If she wanted to eat late, she ate. If she wanted to smoke, she smoked, and didn’t have an anxiety attack over ruining her health.
During three years of university, I’d learn, she attended exactly two classes, yet somehow managed to graduate with a diploma in Computer Science and be one of the few graduates to receive a classy job at an international company. That’s just the way she is.
“You know what,” I said as we walked toward Soho. “The play really was shit.”
We stopped at a pedestrian crossing in front of Piccadilly Circus and waited for the double-decker bus with an advert for my university to roll past.
“Of course it was, love.”
I kissed her, and in that moment, I was transported back to how we first met.
Less than a year ago, Masha’s friend Liuba, about to be left alone in a club full of drunk Russians, had urged her, “Go, go,” and Masha went. Later, while we debated the perfect placement of my hand on the pillow in the comfort of my apartment, Liuba was unceremoniously kicked out of the club and dumped onto the streets of Soho at 1 a.m., like a stray cat.
After a twenty-minute wait and a forty-minute ride to the other side of London, Liuba arrived, only to realize that the apartment wasn’t even hers anymore.
Turns out, she’d put the old address by mistake.
Thanks for reading.
I started a thread where you can leave feedback, give me a shoutout, or ask a question –just click right below. I’d love to hear what worked for you over these past several months, how I can make these essays better, and what stood out for you in particular.
As always, a special thanks to , , , for your generous support.
If you want to support me, you can do so by clicking below. Starting with January, paid members will receive 4 essays a month – alongside other cool subscriber benefits I am still thinking about. I’ll explain it all later in the month.
Until next Thursday!
Cheers.
Brilliant piece 👏🏻
I admire your stamina to sit through the whole HALF of Beckett’s play! I felt similar at Henry IV but at least I got to see UK’s very own Sir Ian McKellen😂