Lost and Found in Russia

  So that was what was festering inside Natasha. She had killed her mother. Beside this, the discovery that her father had built arms factories paled. This was the guilt that pursued her like the furies, right across Russia. Even in her dreams her mother still followed her, Natasha confessed, beautiful and hateful, promising never to let her go.

  Next day, Natasha came to see me off at the neoclassical airport. We had an hour to wait. We sat on a bench. The sun was shining and a brisk wind blew gusts of white blossom across the ravaged tarmac. The drivers were asleep in their cars. After last night’s confession, Natasha was helpless and clinging. She was also coughing and had a temperature. I hated leaving her in this helpless state. I urged her to give up smoking, just for the week.

  “Promise you’ll do it.” I wanted more than that, of course. I wanted to jolt her into facing the trauma of her mother’s suicide, which still seemed as fresh after twenty years as if it were yesterday.

  “I can’t,” simpered Natasha. She had told me that after her mother’s suicide, her father behaved as though nothing had happened. I found that extraordinary. But perhaps he had no choice, belonging as he did to the city’s Party elite? Part of the rationale for the state-controlled terror of the thirties was to shock people out of their private lives, so that the New Soviet Men and Women could advance into their radiant collectivized future.

  “Come on—promise,” I said, referring to the smoking.

  “What’s the point?”

  “Don’t wallow.”

  “What’s the point of my working on myself? I’ll become fat and healthy, full of energy, but what’s the point of that? I don’t believe in God—I can’t think of any good reasons for going on living. You tell me why!”

  “Why should I? Right now you wouldn’t recognize a good reason if I gave you one.”

  “You’re horrid.” Natasha was simpering again.

  “And you’re a coward,” I retorted. “Once you’ve faced your past you won’t need me to tell you. You think you’re clever, but you’re just a bloody fool.”

  “You’re a sort of anti-Mephistopheles—”

  “You think a bottle of brandy is some kind of answer.”

  “Don’t be beastly—it doesn’t suit you—”

  “Don’t simper—it doesn’t suit you. You’re a strong woman—act like one.”

  “You’re after my soul!”

  “Rubbish. Give up smoking—just for a week.”

  As the little plane took off, Natasha stood on the asphalt waving. I hated the hectoring role I had taken with her. I felt as if Natasha manipulated me into it, as if she were using me as a catalyst for a process she could not manage on her own.

  • • •

  As the plane headed southeast, toward Abakan, I considered the other crisis Natasha and I had not been talking about. Natasha was not the only one who was feeling ill. I had also been having headaches and feeling sick. The reason was almost certainly a leak at the plutonium factory somewhere near the couple’s flat. I heard about this only yesterday, from friends on the other side of town. There was nothing on the news, of course, and no one was being evacuated. But apparantly, when a Japanese group of scientists took their Geiger counter downtown the needle leaped so high that they refused to go any farther. When I told Igor and Natasha they just laughed and changed the subject, rather too quickly.

  Now, recalling that laughter, there was a steely edge to it. It sounded like stoicism, but it was despair. They had nowhere else to go. One reason Natasha had got drunk yesterday, I guessed, was that here in Russia alcohol was regarded as an antidote to radioactivity.

  No one was planning to close the leaking factory, far from it. It was the one arms-related factory still operating in the city, kept going by orders from France. No one was even complaining. In fact, everyone seemed to agree that the city was a good deal safer than before: until recently, radioactive waste was still being taken away in open trucks, through the densely populated old industrial area where Natasha and Igor lived.

  That leak loomed in my mind, becoming a grotesque manifestation of all those corrosive secrets which had been kept for too long, the city’s and those of Natasha’s family. Natasha’s father might even have built the leaking factory for all I knew. Perhaps the leak had already begun, even as we were lifting our glasses and toasting the old man’s health in his finest Armenian brandy? I should have drunk a lot more of it.

  A COUNTRY GOING GOLD TURKEY

  I was not looking forward to catching bus after bus for the next stage of my journey, from Abakan to Kuragino. But when the little plane touched down at Abakan airport Vera was there, to my amazement. Her heart-shaped face had filled out. She was plump and brown as a freshly baked bun. The ethereal radiance which once lent her a special beauty was gone. Instead, she looked happy.

  She had made the long trek in by car thanks to a towering, red-cheeked, laughing young man with gladiator’s shoulders and hands the size of boxing gloves. The gladiator’s long-legged wife stepped out of the car and stood appraising me with amused curiosity, graceful in her cotton print frock.

  Around the airport, the wide green plain bordering the huge Krasnoyarsk reservoir was studded with clumps of purple iris in full flower. We headed east, up wooded slopes and grassy hills toward the Sayan Mountains. Vera and I sat in the back, holding hands, hardly talking, for there was too much to say. I gathered that she had married again. Our companions were her new stepdaughter and her husband. All three were in a holiday mood. They joked about Vera’s hopelessness as a housewife. I had not known what to expect, but this cheerful normality came as a surprise.

  “That’s Shushensk, where Lenin married Krupskaya,” remarked Vera’s stepdaughter as the car, innocent of brakes, sped past a church with a little spire. Lenin was exiled to Shushensk after being arrested with the proofs of a clandestine newspaper on him. He was still young. Reading about his life, you get the feeling that the beauty of Shushensk had tested his iron will as no punishment could have done. He even tried his hand at poetry. “In the village of Shushensk, beneath the mountains of Sayansk,” the poem began. But he never got beyond that first line. Lenin swam and fished. When Krupskaya joined him, they hunted together and seem to have enjoyed something like an ordinary married life. Lenin took up chess, and played with his neighbor. So obsessed did he become with the game that when his exile ended he forced himself to give it up altogether.

  Poor Krupskaya. Across Russia that summer the gossip was that her autopsy had revealed she was still a virgin. My Russian mother Elena’s friend Rosa had heard this in circumstances which made it almost believable. After the war, when she was only eighteen, the KGB officer in charge of her at work used to offload on her the secrets it was his job to collect. “He would come at night—no, there was nothing sexual in it. I suppose he chose me because I was so young and innocent, so much under his control. He knew most of it would make no sense to me. All I do remember was that story about Krupskaya’s autopsy. Even I understood how dangerous it was. I was appalled—to have to carry that around with me, knowledge that could wreck the life of anyone who heard it! I couldn’t tell my friends, my family! He’d taken that into account as well.”

  On top of the hill above Shushensk, we got out of the car. In European Russia what oppressed me was the relentless ugliness. But this—this was altogether different. To the south and east, where we were heading, mountains stretched away as far as we could see, the far peaks capped with snow. I breathed in the pine-sharp air. Overhead the song of a lark reverberated as if we were standing under the cupola of some vast building. What if Lenin had gone on playing chess, I reflected? If he had succumbed to the beauty of this place? How different might Russia’s fate have been?

  Several hours of speeding over green, undulating hills brought us to a broad brown river, still turbulent from its descent from the Sayan Mountains. We waited for the rusty ferry, which twisted and bobbed like a paper boat as it carried us over to Kuragino.

  The town was b
uilt on a grid of streets lined with low wooden houses, each with its garden enclosed behind high fencing. As we pulled up outside one of these houses, a man with the face of a rural philosopher strode out to meet us. Volodya welcomed me kindly, but his eyes were wary.

  In itself, their house was unremarkable, consisting of two large, light rooms looking onto the street and a mass of outhouses and storage rooms behind. It had electricity, but other than that it was unmodernized, having an outside privy, no running water, and a large clay stove built into the walls between the rooms. But I could not believe my eyes. The contrast to that cluttered, dusty flat in Saratov could not have been starker. Here, everything was in its place, scrubbed and immaculate. The large vegetable garden behind the house was freshly dug and pale green shoots were already beginning to appear in the meticulously planted beds.

  Vera and Volodya laughed at my amazement. When I arrived in Saratov, I remembered how Vera had taken me home and swept a path through the dust as she offered me her son’s bed. How determinedly she had battled against the claims of domesticity, clinging on to music and poetry as if on to a life raft.

  Now the couple gave me their living room to sleep in. As I went in to unpack I caught sight of Vera out of the window. She was in working clothes, planting out lettuces in the garden. I did not presume to join her. I had a feeling that I was very much here on approval, from Volodya’s point of view. All afternoon Vera went on working in her vegetable garden. Yes, I got the point: this was how you achieved order, through sheer hard work. But it was tantalizing not being able to talk to her.

  I went out for a walk. It was a sunny evening. The dust roads were covered in drifts of apple blossom. Here and there cows with calves were grazing on the broad verges. Kuragino was a charming, sleepy town. Unlike Marx, it was not disfigured by neglect and shoddy workmanship. The carving above the windows of the wooden houses was elaborate and in good repair. Here in Siberia, unlike European Russia, that popular tradition was still very much alive. I thought of Natasha and her father in that radioactive hell, imploring me not to come here because it was too dangerous. The contrast to the decaying, dirty, dysfunctional ugliness of Novosibirsk was stunning. Small boys were herding the townspeople’s cattle back into town. The herd walked down the broad main street, raising dust, each beast peeling off one by one as if in a slow ritual dance, making its way down a side street, waiting outside the high wooden gates of its home for the owner to let it in.

  Russian writers have often evoked the delights of the countryside with sentimental eloquence. Usually they were city people, writing about summertime at the dacha. In practice, metropolitan snobbery about the provinces had always been corrosive. But since the fall of communism a few quite prominent literary figures had chosen to move out of the city into deep unspoiled countryside. Perhaps these were just individual choices. But there were deeper factors pointing toward a revival of interest in the great neglected landmass of Russia. For a start, climate change was making Siberia more productive agriculturally. And of course the key to Russia’s future revival, her great mineral wealth, lay not in the west, but here.

  There were political undercurrents, too. Leading nationalist figures were saying that the country’s center of gravity today lay not in European Russia but in Asia. They said that Novosibirsk should become Russia’s new capital; that Moscow had sold out to the world order. The idea was being trailed that a partnership of second and third world powers, led by an Orthodox and Islamic coalition, should challenge the domination of the rich Western powers led by America. As yet, most people were too preoccupied by survival to be interested. But if Russia were to turn back toward autocracy, this might be the direction in which an ambitious future leader looked for a “big idea” around which to rally people.

  Vera kept working through the long summer evening, until we all met up for supper. The food was delicious, the vegetables so freshly picked that they tasted of the earth. Vissarion’s people were not just vegans, I learned, they ate no meat, fat, dairy food, drank no alcohol, tea, or coffee. When I congratulated Vera on her domestic skills she cast an agonized look at her husband’s severe face. “Volodya’s the one you should be congratulating. He’s the one who’s had to put up with me—he brought up his family in a house which he built entirely himself.” She paused. “He’s been terribly patient, but when we were first together I went through this phase when I was even more hopeless than usual. I can’t tell you, Susan—I nearly burned the house down. Twice …”

  Volodya’s stern expression softened and he looked at his wife adoringly: “In the end, I realized there was no point in shouting at her,” he said. “I’d just have to take her as she was.”

  “After that it passed,” Vera concluded. “I can’t explain it—it was as if he had to love me at my worst!”

  Silence fell around the table. There was so much I wanted to know about Vissarion. But beyond explaining the community’s dietary rules, no one had mentioned his name since I arrived. However, on the wall in the room next door hung a kitsch icon which boded no good. It was a framed photograph of Vissarion sitting against a studio backdrop of Tiepolo clouds, wearing a red robe, shoulder-length hair, and a saccharine smile.

  When the light began to fail we went to bed. Vera and Volodya were sleeping in the kitchen, leaving me the large room next door. There, the only signs of Vera’s old life were a couple of small paintings by her talented son. There were hardly any books, and no sign of a tape deck or record player. Did Vissarion disapprove of music and books? If so, it would be a shame, as I had brought my hostess all the songs that Elena Kamburova had recorded since Vera left Saratov.

  Soon, the sound of snoring came from the next room. But I was programmed to Natasha and Igor’s nocturnal habits by now. On the window sill, a vase full of purple lilac filled the air with sweetness. I lay looking out of the window, luxuriating in the bright starry night over the Sayan Mountains, thinking about the craziness I had left behind me in Novosibirsk.

  I thought about all those secrets which were leaking out there, and about the strange science which had been pursued on the quiet through the Soviet period by people like my professor. More than once on my journey I had felt as if my sanity were under assault. Now, gazing into the night I felt clear. At the moment, things were inside-out and back-to-front in Russia. But the craziness was not to be found in the obvious places. The people seeing those visions in Zarafshan were not the really crazy ones. Nor were the Old Believers, even if they did bury their televisions in the frozen earth. Nor was I, despite the fact that I had heard the forest singing. I knew little as yet about Vissarion’s sect, but whatever the newspapers were saying, these sectarians were going to have to be very dotty to compete with the madness of life in mainstream Russia.

  The true insanity had been there in that awesome experiment which Russia and its colonies had undergone, that imperial mission to collectivize the human soul; to own and control everything, from the natural world to every last word printed in the empire.

  Today this was a country going cold turkey, drying out from that experiment, from an addiction to control, to secrets, secrets, secrets. Things might seem to be all over the place, but people were recovering. Before the country could start to develop the first vestiges of a civil society, or institutions which respected the concept of the individual, much more time was going to pass and many more of those toxic secrets were going to have to be drained out of the poisoned body of the state.

  THE SOCIETY OF ORIGINAL HARMONY

  I was woken at dawn next morning by a loud thrumming outside the window. It was coming from a wooden box strapped onto a long, spindly pole. When a starling flew up to it, beak full, I realized what it was. There is a word in Russian meaning “starling box.” I came across it as a student and remember wondering why on earth anyone would go to the trouble of building a nest for such noisy, intrusive birds. Now it made sense: the busy, gossipy sound was a rural alarm clock, a summons to get going, use every hour of daylight in this br
ief Siberian summer.

  Outside the window stood an apple tree in full bloom. Recalling Vera’s old life, cooped up in that dark, cluttered flat with a drunkard, I was happy that she had found this peace and beauty. But the kitsch photograph of Vissarion hanging on the wall was a reminder that I still knew nothing about this man and his cult.

  Underneath the flowered curtain covering the doorway to the next room Vera’s slippered feet were padding to and fro as she clattered around, preparing breakfast. Yes, she really was domesticated. It had rained overnight, and the air was sharp. I washed my face in rainwater from the tub and listened to the neighbors’ pigs grunting behind the high solid wooden fencing.

  Vera and I walked to the market. On the way, she pointed out a wooden house: “One of the Decembrists was exiled here—that’s his house.” Even here, on the edge of the wilderness, you could not quite escape the heavy boot of the Russian state. The moving spirits behind Russia’s first attempt at revolution from above were officers. After driving Napoleon’s Grande Armée out of Moscow, they ended up in Europe in 1814, parading in victory down the Champs-Elysées. Their tsar had gone on to preside over a Congress of Vienna which convened to stamp out the bacillus of revolution everywhere. But these young officers were already infected. Most were aristocrats, pampered young men who imagined that if only they could kill the tsar, “justice” and “freedom” would break out in Russia. Their rebellion in 1825 was an amateur affair and easily quelled.

  Once their prison sentences were over, the rebels were consigned to perpetual exile in Siberia. Most made the best of it, starting schools where there were none, experimenting with crops new to Siberia, writing books and painting pictures. And Siberia rewarded them by adopting them as its very own aristocracy.

  Kuragino’s Decembrist was not like that. Alexei Tyutchev was not cut out for heroics. As a young man he belonged to Petersburg’s elite Semionovsky Regiment. They mutinied because of intolerable conditions and were dispersed among other regiments. In the south, where he was sent, Tyutchev joined another secret organization, the Society of Original Harmony. Its members were not aristocrats, but penniless country landowners, provincial civil servants, and officers like him. Had it not been for Tyutchev, the Society’s members would have grown old talking freedom in their cups. But grander Decembrist friends from the old regiment got in touch with their old mate, and they all became embroiled in the Decembrist plot. In exile, Tyutchev married a local girl, took to drink, and eked out a living on handouts from richer Decembrists.