Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (18 page)

The couple were living austerely. Their three rooms were furnished with only an iron bedstead, a desk, two chairs, and a fridge. Here and there laths were exposed where the plaster had fallen away. Igor’s computer was their only possession of value. I went out and bought armfuls of food to celebrate our reunion.

When they started to tell me how things were I understood why Natasha had not been in touch with Anna and Tatiana. By the time they reached Novosibirsk, Natasha’s father was ill with cancer of the throat. He greeted his prodigal daughter affectionately. But he refused to help her. He had his own troubles, and clearly felt that she had received enough help already. “I don’t blame Father—he couldn’t trust me. I’ve behaved too wildly,” Natasha said bravely. But she had been counting on his help, I knew.

That first Siberian winter they found a room in some cellar, a refuge for winos and prostitutes. There was nowhere to cook, and nowhere to wash but in the street. One day they returned to find their front door stolen. From then onward they defied the temperatures of minus twenty degrees by wearing all their clothes at the same time. They could not find work. They spent their time reading books on marketing, requalifying themselves for this new world.

Natasha visited her old gang, the golden boys of her school days, to ask for help. Their fortunes mirrored that of the country. Ivan, who proposed that she join him in Canada, was back. “He did nothing but complain about the Canadians and their materialism!” Through his words, she heard the lament of a man who, when faced by the confident, bright surfaces of North American culture, had been undermined by a deep sense of inadequacy.

Another friend had also emigrated to the New World. Ilya had done well in Washington, working as a consultant. But he was back home, too, health shattered, after developing a brain tumor. He spent all his dollar savings on an operation to save his life.

With each visit her hopes faded. Vasily had become a civil servant, an important figure in the power hierachy of Novosibirsk. Solemnly he advised Natasha that if she wanted to earn good money she should go to the oil wells of Tyumen, live in a barracks, and turn her hand to manual labor. The cleverest of the group, Mikhail, an ex-physicist, was designing furniture for prison workshops.

The worst fates, the ones that broke her heart, were reserved for the two most gifted young men of her privileged gang. Anatoly married a woman so eaten up by greed that for love of her he had taken the shortcut to wealth and joined one of the city’s criminal gangs. He was the charming, quietly spoken extortionist in the well-cut suit whose task it was to visit factory directors for a cup of tea and deliver the ultimatum: hand over your profits or else.

Natasha’s closest friend, Yury, fell victim to just such a gang. He was that rarity, a successful businessman doing his best to be honest. Two men on a motorbike, hired killers, gunned him down with a submachine gun in broad daylight after he refused to bow to blackmail.

Statistically, the fates of these two were not so surprising. According to the official estimate of Russia’s chief procurator, half the country’s economy was in the hands of organized crime by now.

After each visit, Natasha would return to the cellar and take out her bitterness on Igor. Mostly, he took it patiently. He loved her dearly and understood what she was going through. But one day the torrent of blame became too much and something snapped. He hit her. It was not a hard blow, by her own admission, but it struck her full on the ear.

She lay in hospital for a long time. Her eardrum appeared to be broken; she was badly bruised and suffering from concussion. She could not talk properly and the rushing in her ears drowned out every other noise. She lost so much weight that she could barely lie down because her bones stuck into her. She promised herself that if she ever recovered she would leave Igor.

Only when the doctors gave up on her did she take herself in hand. She started asking around about doctors. There was only one who could help, they said. He was a brilliant man who had studied in China. But he took only private patients, and they paid him fairy-tale sums.

Using her last strength, Natasha pushed past all the people whose job it was to protect him, into the doctor’s office. His chilly gaze froze her. “If you ever wondered whether there was a God, help me now,” she lisped, this wisp of a woman who could no longer even talk properly. He accepted her as a patient, on one condition: she had to obey his every instruction. After the third session, the rushing sound in her ears began to die down. “It wasn’t your eardrum that was broken,” he told her, “it was your psyche.”

Jogging up and down the hospital steps, forcing herself to eat, Natasha began to mend. “I realized I was crazy to think of leaving Igor. Who for? My ‘golden boys’? Igor was worth a dozen of them.” She returned to the cellar to find Igor living off tins of cat food. But he had landed himself a job—as a lavatory attendant. It was there that he made his first business contact, with the director of a building firm. Igor convinced the man to let him do the marketing.

Natasha and Igor both ended up working for the man he met in the public lavatory. He ran a fine company, building blocks of flats for ex–army officers, using their redundancy money for capital. It did well, in fact too well, for it attracted the attention of a man called Kibirev, “Novosibirsk’s largest rat of all,” as Natasha put it. Kibirev took over the building firm and ousted its director. He stole its capital and poured it into the election campaign which General Lebed was mounting to oust Yeltsin from the presidency.

Natasha and Igor were admirers of the popular General Lebed, who had negotiated the end of the Chechen war. But from the vantage point of the asset-stripped company, they watched in horror as sinister power blocs lined up behind the general’s election campaign. They knew that they had to leave the company. But winter was coming on and the prospect of living among the winos again was more than they could bear. Despising themselves, they kept on working for Kibirev.

There came a day when they could take it no longer. Natasha staged a spectacular public row. She vented her contempt on Kibirev and taunted him with her freedom, the freedom of those who have nothing left to lose. After that, things became hard. But by then they were at least beginning to understand something about business.

BUILDING HEAVEN OR HELL

Natasha’s father was holding a birthday party. I had heard a lot about him over the years: the charmer, the great builder, member of Novosibirsk’s old Party elite. She never mentioned her mother, and something about her silence deterred questions. It was her father who raised her, and she spoke of him with love and pride. She was clearly his darling. But I still had no idea why she fled from him, and from all the privileges that came with that background. In Russia, it was far riskier to throw away such advantages than in the West. What made her leave her first happy marriage, to rush hither and thither across Russia, from one husband to the next, only to end up back home in a basement with winos and dropouts?

Natasha’s father and stepmother lived in a flat in the city center. We traveled in on the tram. Despite their penury, Natasha and Igor were smartly dressed in clothes from a shop which imported secondhand clothes from the West.

The front door was opened by a vivacious, nut-brown man with a vigorous mane of curls, the spitting image of his daughter. Gallantly, he kissed my hand. The flat was light and airy, but perfectly modest. Had Natasha’s father’s savings gone in the inflation of those first postcommunist years, I wondered? Or was the opulence of Natasha’s childhood, which she recalled so vividly, only relative?

Despite the cancer that had struck his vocal cords, her father seated me beside him and regaled me through the long summer evening with whispered jokes and stories. But his efforts and his gallantry could not disguise the sadness which hung over the occasion. His much younger wife, a broad-hipped doll with a round, painted face, produced a sumptuous birthday meal. She hardly spoke all evening, but her face wore a martyred smile. “What about me?” it seemed to say. Even as she netted her big boss, he had turned into a sick old man.

Natasha fussed around her father and me like a nanny. She was nervous, and it was no wonder. For while we were changing for the party she dropped a bomb into our conversation: her father had spent his life building those arms factories which dominated the city’s skyline. “One made nuclear weapons,” she said in a horrified whisper, holding my gaze in the miniature mirror in which she was making up her eyes.

“My sister and I grew up knowing nothing—we thought he just built houses.” In fact, of course, most of the city’s economy, and 40 percent of the Soviet empire’s, was military. “It wasn’t Papa who told me, but Sasha.” He was her first husband. “He didn’t want to. He knew what it would do to me—I bullied him into it.” She turned around and looked at me directly. “I adored Papa so much. He’d been my idol—I felt betrayed. I couldn’t forgive him. He belonged to that world—he knew all about it and he never told us, never prepared us. How I used to laugh when people used to talk about psychotronic weapons! I thought it was pure paranoia! They counted on that, on us thinking it was too far-fetched! But when I asked him about them recently, he said he ‘knew the factories well’!” Before I could ask her any more, Igor interrupted us, hurrying us off to the party. In the tram coming in Natasha would not look at me, but stood gazing out of the window, frighteningly pale and still.

Natasha’s anxiety rubbed off on her father. Even now it was clear how close the two were. When everyone else was in the kitchen fetching food, he whispered hoarsely in my ear, out of the blue, as if he knew what his daughter had been telling me: “It wasn’t right what we did.” At that moment Natasha walked in from the kitchen bearing a steaming plate of
pilau
. “You were only the builder—it wasn’t your fault!” she protested, rushing to his defense. “Well, what’s done is done,” sighed the old man, reaching up to the top shelf of the cupboard for his best bottle of Armenian brandy. “Let’s be grateful for small mercies—the Armenians still love us.” He smiled bravely, filling my glass.

As we sat back, sated with delicious
pilau
, the old man turned to me: “I don’t believe in God—I won’t have that,” he rasped in the shell of my ear so that no one else would hear. Even behind these words I heard an uncertainty: had he been wrong about that, too? “Let’s drink to peace,” said the old cold warrior.

•  •  •

Natasha’s confession about her father had been prompted by her seeing the book I had been lent that morning. It was about psychotronic weapons. I had not heard the term before.

Apparently, they inflicted damage at long distance. They could implant thoughts in people’s minds without their knowing it. Oh dear, I thought on hearing this, here we go, back into that unmapped territory, among the monsters. Back home, I would have laughed. But the man who pressed the book on me, a scientist, insisted that these were no fabulous monsters. There was a reason why they did not appear on my mapped world, he was saying: the secret had been too well guarded by governments. It was the dark side of the science he worked in.

Natasha was nobody’s fool. She had been like a cat on a stove since seeing that book. Her reaction was what made me really want to know more. When we got back home from the party and she was asleep, I started reading the book.

Psychotronic weapons were no futurologist’s idea, I read. They already existed; they were capable of destroying command systems at long distance. The information they transmitted could kill troops, and potentially whole populations. They worked by manipulating the electromagnetic force fields around living organisms …

I looked at the sleeping Natasha. Was it possible that her beloved father, builder of the arms factories, had built a factory for psychotronic weapons? Was that it, the shock that had destabilized her life, sent her spinning around Russia pursued by furies, ridding herself of the antiques, the crystal, all the finery bought with her father’s money?

TOUCHING THE COSMOS

It was on a hunch that I had rung up Professor Kaznacheev’s laboratory. Having heard that he worked with shamans, and was a leading figure in an alternative tradition of Russian science, it seemed possible that he might be able to shed some light on the mysterious behavior of the community in Zarafshan.

So that morning I had made my way up to Akademgorod, the privileged settlement built for Soviet scientists on the wooded hills above the grime of Novosibirsk. The professor’s laboratory was housed in a prestigious building, the headquarters of the Soviet Siberian Academy of Scientists. It was a tall tower block set in a forest of birch trees. The foyer was clad in marble, and had a fountain in it, but the tiles were coming loose and the fountain was long dry. Upstairs, floor after floor of long corridors connected the laboratories and offices. But the doors were closed. Somewhere in the building, a window was banging. The place seemed abandoned.

One of the doors in this rabbit warren carried the intriguing title International Institute of Cosmic Anthropo-ecology. I knocked on it. Kaznacheev’s deputy gave me a guarded welcome, sat me down, and talked. He talked not about science, but about philosophy.

The branch of science they were pursuing belonged to a different tradition from that of the West, he explained. It was the result of a uniquely Russian conjunction of scientific thinking and religious philosophy which went back to the nineteenth century. These philosphers disagreed with the way the Enlightenment had displaced God from the center of the intellectual world. They believed that the West’s unswerving attachment to rationalism had led Western philosophy to be obsessed with a false set of problems, the need to demonstrate the existence of external reality. What mattered, of course, was the relationship between people. Western philosophy had lost sight of this self-evident truth.

•  •  •

I was aware that there had been a great revival of interest in Russia’s religious thinkers since the fall of communism. Their work had been banned in the Soviet Union. But the professor’s assistant was saying that scientists who belonged within that tradition had continued practicing right through the Soviet period.