Waiting For Masha

‘Gosh, you live in a shithole.’

“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.”

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.