Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (20 page)

But when I realized why he was talking to me so urgently I became worried. He was in trouble. He needed funding, and he really hoped I would be able to secure it for him in the West. But how? I tried to imagine how it would be if I went home, rang up my few rich friends, and asked them if they would like to invest in a device which would connect them with the divine.

The professor was not asking me to understand, but to make a leap of faith. Had I lived in Russia (and not the Russia of Moscow and Petersburg, but this other Russia) I might have been able to. But I belonged in a different reality, as did Natasha and Igor. It was that problem of the golden woman again. As long as I was with the professor I almost believed that there was a golden woman hidden in the forests of Russia. But by the time I got back to London, she would have vanished, become the stuff of legend again.

Speaking Russian was one thing. Reaching across this gap between the two cultures—that I did not know how to do.

TICKET TO THE END OF THE EARTH

This morning I finally heard from Vera. As soon as I reached Novosibirsk, I sent her a telegram. I had not rated my chances of being invited highly, as Vissarion’s community was notoriously secretive. But a week later I received a message, via Natasha’s sister, that I was welcome.

Igor was working quietly at his computer. Natasha was visiting a friend in hospital. I took out a map of southern Siberia and considered the journey. First, I would fly to Abakan, a town on the River Yenisei south of Krasnoyarsk. Kuragino, where Vera was living, was the very last place marked on the map east of Abakan. I would have to travel on by a combination of bus and train. Beyond Kuragino the map showed no towns or roads, nothing but the wilderness of the Sayan Mountains.

Natasha had been begging me not to go. It was dangerous, she said. At first, I took her warnings seriously. After all, she was born and bred in Siberia. But when I pressed her, I could get nothing sensible out of her. “It’s just—it’s the end of the earth. Daddy says that there’ll be nothing but tractors out there! Stay here instead,” she wheedled. In Marx she had been a proud woman and guarded. Now she was clinging and slightly pathetic. The last thing I needed was Natasha’s anxiety.

Another friend had just shown me an article about Vissarion’s community in a national newspaper. It was an interview with a Petersburg woman who murdered her husband to escape from the community. She said her husband had fallen under Vissarion’s spell after losing his job; that her only hope of keeping the family together lay in following him. Things had gone wrong from the start. The woman’s teenage son had taken one look at the community and gone back home. She had not been able to stand the hard labor and the brainwashing. Why she had not just left was unclear. Instead, with money from the sale of their Petersburg flat, she hired two local men to kill her husband. There was a photograph of the murderer, looking young and vulnerable. I did not know whether to trust the story. It might be a pack of lies, but it was unsettling.

When I first met Vera in Saratov, the newspapers were sympathetic to Vissarion. But latterly, the coverage had turned nasty. The idea that Russians should be free to choose their form of belief was deeply alien. Until the Revolution, Russian nationality and Orthodoxy were considered synonymous. Now the Church was trying to reclaim that monopoly. Press reports usually bracketed Vissarion’s cult together with one called the Great White Brotherhood. In the early nineties, the Brotherhood’s undernourished, white-clad teenage converts were a common sight on the streets of Russia’s cities, importuning passersby. Its fate was comical and tragic. Its “living god,” an ex–Komsomol girl who called herself Maria Devi Christos, was rash enough to predict that the world was going to end on November 24, 1993. When it dawned, ten thousand of Devi’s stripling devotees converged on the sect’s headquarters in Kiev, causing mayhem in the city. Devi and her Svengali were imprisoned.

When Natasha arrived home she looked at Kuragino on the map. “No, you absolutely can’t go—you’d be mad! The ticks are breeding! It’s really dangerous! They’re hungry for blood! I wouldn’t go if you paid me!” The friend she had been visiting had come back from holiday in the Altai with a suspected tick bite. He was waiting to hear if it was infected.

“I’ll be fine,” I reassured her. But her news worried me. I had forgotten about the Siberian tick. Over the last few decades an encephalitic virus was spreading through the tick population in Siberia. One bite from an infected tick could be fatal, they said. Every year, hundreds of people were paralyzed and reduced to idiocy. For much of the year the ticks did not bite much, but at breeding time they were dangerous. Briskly, I reminded myself that Vera was the most impractical person I knew. If she could keep out of the way of the tick, so could I.

All the same, by the time I went to buy my ticket to Abakan for the journey next day, I was rattled. Novosibirsk’s airport for local flights was a grand neo-Stalinist building with outstretched wings and a classical portico. The May breeze blew a drift of white cherry blossom across the deserted asphalt. In Soviet days it might have been a hub of activity, but now flights were few and far between. The ticket office in the marble hallway was empty, and my appeals for help echoed round and round. Finally a young woman of enormous girth emerged from a back room. “Come back on Monday!” she said, taking one look at my passport and shaking her frizzy head at me.

“Why not now?”

“It’s impossible.” This was the old Soviet answer. Usually, it meant “I’m in the middle of lunch.”

“I can’t wait—I’ve been told that there are only two seats left.” This was actually true.

Then I realized what the problem was: she had never issued a ticket to a foreigner before. So I tried charm. It took her half an hour to make out the ticket. When she handed it over triumphantly I saw it was made out in the name of Mrs. Smith. “But that’s not my name,” I observed mildly. The pleats of white lard around the young woman’s neck suffused with pink. “The form is correctly filled out!” she barked. I took a look at the dummy form from which she had been copying. The name on it was Mrs. Smith. Patiently, I explained the problem. “Don’t worry,” she said, trying to sound in control. “I’ll be on duty. I’ll get you through.” “But what about my return journey? How am I going to explain that I have a ticket belonging to Mrs. Smith?”

There was a long pause. I watched her struggling to come to terms with a world in which foreign women were not going to stand for being called Mrs. Smith. In the end, she wrote me another ticket. It had taken an hour, but we both emerged triumphant. I had my ticket for tomorrow’s flight. She had crossed her Rubicon into the new Russia.

What is more, the whole transaction was so funny that I had forgotten to be anxious.

THE RUSSIAN ORESTES

When Natasha told me how her father had made his living I thought yes, this was the source of her distress. But there was more to it than that, as I found when I returned to the flat from buying my ticket. Igor opened the front door a crack and peered out suspiciously. “You! Natasha said you wouldn’t be back for a week!”

Natasha had forgotten I was not leaving until the next day. This confusion was new, and alarming. While Igor sat working, she would be sitting around in a distracted state, chain smoking. Now she was fast asleep in the bedroom, breathing strangely. Igor admitted that once she thought I had gone she took four sleeping pills and washed them down with a bottle of brandy. She had been feeling unwell, he said.

That was how I discovered about Natasha’s drinking. All that time in Marx she was drinking secretly, unbeknown even to Igor, who thought that she had given up. So that was what used to keep her out of the house all day on Engels Street. No wonder I found her so unfathomable. She really was a person in hiding.

Late that night, when she finally woke up, Natasha seemed almost relieved that her secret was out. While Igor kept working at his computer, she sat on the floor, pale and intent, her little-girl act forgotten, stroking her pregnant cat, telling me about her mother. A beautiful woman, she committed suicide when Natasha was eighteen. “She’s the forbidden subject in our family. But when I came back to Novosibirsk I wanted to know about her—to lay the past to rest. So I went around to see old family friends. What they said was terrible. “She was the curse of your father’s life,” they told me, “a horrible wife and a dreadful mother.” I’d blanked her out—couldn’t even remember what she looked like. Then I found some photos in Papa’s flat—I was shocked to find how beautiful she was. She’d made our childhood into hell—one long series of rows, threats, and ultimatums. She was convinced she was too good for my father and for the world she lived in. My father put up with it all, covered up for her. He felt we needed a mother—that even a mother like that was better than none at all.

“My sister had this lovely friendship with a boy of the ‘wrong type.’ Ma was convinced he was going to take her to some horrible cellar and rape her. She forbade my sister to see him. Then one day she saw them together in the street. That was it—she came home and made this ghastly scene—lying on the floor, banging her head. I was terribly rude to her. I couldn’t stand her. Papa said, ‘You mustn’t be rude to your mother!’ He smashed his fist down on this glass table and broke it to bits.

“After that, Papa and I left. We looked for my sister everywhere, but she’d run away. Papa told my mother we were leaving. He said she could have the flat and everything in it, but we weren’t coming back. I remember praying for her death.” There was a long pause. “A week later she killed herself. I remember the tremendous sense of relief. But I knew I’d done it.”

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