Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (30 page)

A disheveled man offered to sell me two buttons he dug up in the valley below; buttons from the coat of a British Hussar who had doubtless died there. “It is magnificent, but it is not war,” as the marshal of the French troops described the historic charge with unkind precision. By winning the battle, the Russians prevented us, the enemy, from advancing on Sevastopol from inland. But they had not saved the city for long.

Natasha was fun to explore with, an unending source of irreverent information. As we sat on the hillside, she expressed her delight at being free of the house, where she spent long days alone with Igor. So I made a suggestion: why not use her excellent language skills to organize English-language tours for schoolkids around the historical sites of Crimea? The idea appealed to her. But when we got home Igor took me aside and warned me off pursuing it: Natasha was not strong enough, he said. Fleetingly, I wondered what his motive was, but not for long. Igor was the one holding things together now.

When we first met, Igor was a caged bear, maddened, incapable of holding down a job. Natasha seemed like the resilient one. But perhaps that always was an illusion. This gifted woman was a Russian Orestes. She had taken on herself the role of scapegoat, carrier of the sins not just of her family, but of the herd. It was far too heavy for any one person to bear.

When Natasha and I reached home that evening, covered in fine white dust, we walked over the hill to bathe it off in the sea. The late-afternoon swimmers were leaving and the red sun danced on the water toward us. Up on those green hillsides despoiled by the concrete and metal graffiti of state socialism, Russia’s great oil companies were stealthily buying up the seafront, erecting forbidding, high-walled dachas, cementing today’s national tensions into Crimea’s future.

•  •  •

Leaving Crimea was proving difficult. Although I was a legitimate visitor, it transpired that I could not just go and buy myself a train ticket to Kiev: Volodya was going to have to “procure” a ticket for me. When he did, he refused to let me pay, which left me wondering how to repay his kindness.

I consulted Natasha and Igor. “It’s not things that he needs,” replied Igor. “But there’s something you could do—put the poor servicemen of our League of Officers in touch with some British organization.” I thought about this. Who to suggest? Language was one problem—few people in Crimea spoke English, and Russian speakers in my country were rare. British servicemen perhaps—but as Russia grew steadily more anti-Western, making that connection might be misconstrued. “You’re telling me there’s no one in England who’s interested in us?” Igor said provocatively. Nonsense, I told him, and told them about something I had never mentioned before. I described how we had organized Bookaid, how people from all over Britain had given us more than a million English-language books, which we had sent to the public libraries of Russia and its former republics. I admitted that I had not talked about it before because I found it too painful when people ascribed some ulterior motive to us. “Ulterior motive? Heaven forbid!” exclaimed Igor sarcastically. “You just wanted to teach us how to live!” Then I got really angry.

The silence that followed was long and awkward. Then Natasha moved the conversation onto safer ground: “I bet you can’t guess the most important thing you ever did in Marx. You probably don’t even remember—it was that evening you talked to my English pupils. That evening changed their lives—no, I’m serious. You treated them like equals. It made them see themselves differently. The encounter changed them. Because of you, because you kept their hope alive, they went on to study languages at Saratov University—all of them!”

I was grateful to Natasha for her intervention. In the past, when Igor was in attack-dog mode she would sit back and enjoy the spectacle. She was gentler now.

•  •  •

The following evening, when we were sitting in the shade of the camouflage, the couple finally started talking about themselves.

Natasha and I had just returned from visiting Inkerman, the site of another of the great battles of the Crimean War. There, at massive cost, the Russians staved off what might otherwise have been the allies’ easy conquest of Sevastopol. It took a year for our incompetently led, disease-ridden, bloody siege to prevail. At what price? In the end, the Russian fleet lay scuppered, their territorial advances were temporarily halted, as they were today. The French came away with what military glory there was; the Ottoman Empire was shored up for a little longer. But the war cost even more lives than the American Civil War. As for the British, the greatest gain was that the filth, disease, and terrible neglect of the wounded prompted Florence Nightingale and her pioneers to lay down sound principles for modern nursing.

When they first arrived in Crimea, Igor and Natasha lived in the village of Inkerman. It lay at the end of a deep inlet whose mouth was guarded by Sevastopol. Natasha and I took the ferry down the inlet from the “hero city,” along a lovely, rocky coastline despoiled by spent machinery, rusting hulks, abandoned floating docks, and gaping sewage pipes. “We loved it here,” said Natasha as we walked inland from the boat. “We lived in the dormitory settlement of a power station that was closing down. The buses had stopped—not profitable! So we had to walk everywhere—we developed these Herculean thighs. Our best friend was this great black dog called Jack. It was he who showed us around the Inkerman caves.”

Without Jack they would never have found the concealed entrance to a vast underground military complex which was tunneled out in the 1930s. The dog led them to it. “There it was, with all its own factories and houses. We thought it was abandoned at first, but we were wrong! There are people still living down there—whole communities, schools, and shops. We got chased out. People say there are vast arms dumps down there.”

Then, pointing up the hillside to a place where the smooth green slope broke up like a cubist composition, Natasha went on: “And that’s where they blew up another underground town in 1942, to stop it falling into German hands—it was still full of people, our own people! They gassed them to finish them off. And it was the Germans, the enemy, who set about rescuing them! Our people only admitted that three years ago. There are survivors still alive—we met some of them.” Yes, this had been a leitmotif of my travels—this daily reminder of the contempt of those with power for those without it.

“We used to spend whole days up here with Jack,” Natasha continued. “It’s been the animals who showed us the way, always the animals. One day when we were walking around here we came on this great big crow, far larger than any we’d ever seen. It didn’t fly away, just turned around and gazed at us. When we got home I looked up the crow in a book of mythology. It said that in cultures all over the world the crow means a meeting. What do you know? On the following day we met Volodya!”

Natasha and I walked to another cave community which Jack showed them. This one was in the high white chalk cliffs behind the village of Inkerman. Time and conquest had exposed the interior of layer after layer of eroded caves on the pale cliff face. Here and there in sheltered corners frescoes still clung to the rock. People had clearly been living in these caves since long before recorded history. But the visible traces of habitation dated back to the eighth and ninth centuries, when icon-loving monks from Byzantium had fled the iconoclasts and taken refuge here. Following Jack’s path, we walked to the entrance to the catacombs, but it was sealed off now with a metal gate.

Around the corner a recent breach blasted in the rock led to a white quarry. The remains of searchlights betrayed that it was once worked by the Soviet slave army, part of the Gulag. I went into a small whitewashed working church to light candles for the victims. Natasha waited outside: “I won’t come in—I feel awkward in church. Don’t know why.”

Later, when Natasha was telling Igor about our day, he interrupted her at this point: “I know why you wouldn’t go in,” he jeered. “It’s because you’re cursed.”

“It’s true!” Natasha agreed cheerfully. But the way she said it made me hope that however much she once felt cursed, she no longer did: it was a joke now, if an edgy one.

“Yes,” she went on, “Crimea’s been miraculous for us. It’s taught us how to live. And each step of the way it’s been the animals who helped us. That black dog Jack was the first. He was wonderful—he used to come to our house and scratch on the door, inviting us to come out and play with him. Then he got terribly ill and his owner had to put him down. That same day—it must have been ten in the morning—we heard this scratching at the door and we said, “It must be Jack.” I opened the door and there was nothing there. I found out next day that he’d died at that time in the morning. His owner said the same thing’d happened to her.” She paused. “After that how could you fail to believe that animals have souls?”

“And it was dolphins who cured Natasha of the drink,” Igor took over. “One day I came home and found her lying on the floor in a pool of blood. I really thought she was done for—”

“I’d got blind drunk and fallen down, gashing my head and nearly taking out an eye …”

“Volodya came and took her to hospital.”

“What about that crate of vodka then?” I finally asked the question.

“Ah, that—I keep it there as a warning.”

It was Volodya who took her to the dolphins. They were once part of the Soviet navy’s intelligence operation. Most had been sold off. The rest were going through a lean time, as they always lived off frozen fish, and now there were none. The woman who trained them went around collecting money for them. She got them working again, too, this time not to make war but to heal people.

“There was one in particular,” Natasha went on. “I’d hang on to him so tightly that it must have been very painful for him. But he didn’t object—he’d swim off with me around his neck, and I could feel his power—”

“Their trainer’s the one who said to us: ‘People think of the relationship between man and animals as being like a pyramid, with man at the top. But you should turn that pyramid on its side—that’s how it really is.’ ”

Natasha interrupted: “That’s what we’ve come to learn here—to take animals seriously; to live with them, to live with plants.”

“Maybe that’s where you’re one step ahead of us,” I reflected. “After all, communism and capitalism were ever only variations on the same theme. In both of them man’s on top of the pyramid. Capitalism may have proved stronger, but it may be doomed too because of just that—our arrogance about the natural world. Look at climate change. There’s a chance we’ll get through, because the market’s inventive. But if we have an economic collapse it’ll be much worse for us. At least you’ve learned how to live with a minimum.”

“Last winter the mice got into our clothes.” Natasha laughed. “They ate only the very best of them.”

“Only the very finest wool, for their nest.” Igor took over. “They turned up their noses at the rest.”

“The wise mice,” Natasha added. “We had to learn not to mind about things. Yes, animals have been our teachers—we had a lot to learn. We were emotional cripples. Take Pasha for example.” Pasha was their mongrel. “He’s the one who taught Igor that he can’t do anything with his head alone—that he has to learn how to love.”

The sun had dropped behind the hill by the time Natasha and I took Pasha out for a walk. It was magic hour and the sharp outline of a pale crescent moon hung in the violet southern sky. We walked over the open grassland to the wooded hill and looked down over the coast. “As soon as I saw this place I thought, yes, I could live here,” she said. “I recognized it, too. I used to have this recurring dream: there was the sea, rocks, and a bay. I’d never seen the sea either. But that dream came back again and again. When we arrived here I recognized it at once.” She paused. “The situation here’s bad—but at least there’s work for us to do.”

The air was balmy with the smell of growing things. Each footfall released the scent of bruised wormwood. All along the little river at the foot of the hill the frogs were singing. In this half-light the Soviet detritus of concrete and rusting metal that scarred the landscape was barely visible. “The Greeks believed that the gates to heaven and hell were in Crimea. Well, they were right—they
are
. Everything that God has made is heavenly, and everything that man made is hell,” Natasha murmured.

As we walked we were greeted by a red-bearded Tatar shepherd. Evdan was grazing his sheep. He was just back from Kiev, he told Natasha with an enormous smile; he became betrothed there. His fiancée was longing to come, he said. This was a lonely place to be a serious Muslim, for few of Crimea’s Tatars were interested in religion, but it was even worse in Kiev. All this land was once owned by his grandfather, Evdan explained. That was before Stalin deported the Crimean Tatars en masse to central Asia. Evdan was an educated man, a mechanic by trade. But when he started taking his religion seriously, he decided to become a shepherd to keep out of harm’s way. Walking the land every day with his sheep, it felt like his again.

Dark fell before we reached home. We were noisily greeted by little Musya. Natasha brought out fruit juice and we sat out in the courtyard under the crescent moon. “When Evdan and I started talking,” Igor began, “we found that though we had nothing whatever in common, we’d come to the same conclusion: that the world was so multifaceted, so infinitely beyond our comprehension that all we could do was to concentrate on living as decently, as ethically as possible, and encouraging our neighbors to do the same.”

•  •  •

“Susan, you remember when we first met?” Natasha went on after a long silence. “We were expecting the worst.”

“Yes, you were pretty unpleasant that night.”

“In the old days you, the West, were a fairy tale,” she continued. “A land where everyone was decent and true. Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park, we trod them in our dreams.”

Igor interrupted: “But by the time we met you the foreigners had started coming, and we’d found out that they were just the same little jerks as us, cheap businessmen who despised us, who simply weren’t interested in who we were. We’d been brought up to believe that the collective was everything; that there was no such thing as individuality. That’s why we’re all so riddled with inferiority complexes. And now it turns out that there isn’t anything
but
the individual; that all governments are equally awful, that there’s only this fundamental principle, the same in religions the world over.”