Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (10 page)

To this day, some Russian Germans still defend Sneezer’s efforts on their behalf as well-intentioned. But this is what I believe happened to that plan to give Russia’s Germans back a homeland. It was a dark tale, so dark that I was struggling to keep my hopes alive. To undo that authoritarian conditioning was going to take far longer than I had imagined. But the process had begun, slow as it was, as I could see in Marx. Starting with the most basic unit of society, the individual, people were just beginning to imagine how they might live differently; how they might slough off the old obedience, learn about personal choice, risk, and responsibility.

AN ABYSS OF STARS

I had grown fond of my friends in Marx. But as the town returned to sleepy normality and the story I was following dried up, I was thinking of giving up. Then something intervened which changed the course of my travels.

I had seen only one faintly encouraging project in Marx. It was a settlement being built way out on the steppes to house a community of refugees from Uzbekistan. The refugees were Russian Germans, and the project was being financed by German money. The men were helping with the building, working at furious speed, all day and into the night under arc lights. In my desperation, I was wondering whether perhaps I should be following the fortunes of this new settlement instead. So later that summer I decided to visit the Uzbek town from which the Russian Germans were fleeing.

I asked Ira (daughter of my Russian mother, Elena) to come with me. With inflation rising all the time, she could not afford a holiday. But with my dollars, I was rich enough for two that year. Together we looked for Zarafshan on the map. It lay northwest of Tashkent, below the Aral Sea, a long way from anywhere. We presumed it was an agricultural settlement, for large numbers of ethnic Germans were deported to central Asia after the Nazi invasion, and farming was their major occupation.

The one hitch was that Ira had to be back at work in nine days. This was time enough for the trip, but not for me to get a visa to enter Uzbekistan. Ira, who was an experienced traveler, proposed that I borrow a Russian passport. It was she who taught me how to travel cheaply in the glasnost years by posing as a Soviet citizen. “But it’s an independent country now!” I demurred. She just laughed: “How many times do I have to tell you? This is Russia—trust me, nothing’ll have changed.” I wavered, but not for long: if I wanted to travel with her my options were limited. Looking back, I realize how typical Ira’s reaction was: few Russians really understood at that juncture that their empire had gone for good.

When the plane touched down in Tashkent, it seemed Ira was right. The bored officials barely glanced at my passport. I began to relax: the rest of the journey involved only a domestic flight from a smaller airport. Next morning when we turned up for this flight I had almost forgotten the risk I was running. The air smelled of blossom and woodsmoke and Ira and I were in a holiday mood.

We agreed that Ira would do the talking, lest my accent give me away. But I need not have worried. The plump Uzbek woman on passport control spoke Russian much more heavily accented than mine. She let us through. We passed through the second control with similar ease. Only when a girl in the baggage section called me back did I become alarmed. They asked to examine my locked bag. My heart thumped: she would see that everything in it was foreign. She and her colleague examined the contents minutely. Then they let me go. We were through.

A few minutes later passport control called me back. My heart was pounding so loud by this time that I thought everyone in the drab departure hall could hear it. The woman apologized, but explained that they had just been fined for letting a foreigner through. Could they take another look at my passport? “It doesn’t look very like you,” she said dubiously. This was an understatement. The woman who had lent me her passport had a broad Slav face. Mine was thin. She had peroxide hair. Mine was brown. “Of course it’s me,” I said breezily.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight.”

“Thanks.”

“What’s your name?”

“Tamara Vladimirovna.” My mind blanked out on my surname, but Ira leapt in: “Su-kho-no-gaya,” we chanted indignantly.

“OK, OK, no need to …”

In silence we stalked away and sat in a far corner of the hall, not daring to look at one another. There was nothing normal about these precautions, and on a domestic flight, too. What kind of agricultural settlement place were we going to?

Our fellow passengers were Russians, not Uzbeks, and their pale faces and briefcases suggested they were not farmers. “They’ll probably be waiting for us with machine guns,” Ira whispered as we boarded the plane. “Learn your passport details.” As the plane’s shadow followed us over unbroken desert I muttered the details of my fake identity to myself. By the time the plane touched down I knew who I was—but not where we were.

The heat made the air buckle as we stepped out of the plane. The low hills all around looked like crumpled brown paper. There were armed guards, but they did not appear to be looking for anyone in particular. Relaxing slightly, we boarded the bus heading into town. It drove along suspiciously good roads, between well-built five-story blocks, letting passengers off as it went. Whatever this place was, it was large and rich. There was no trace of an old Uzbek town, or of agriculture. Apart from the desert scrub, there was hardly a plant in sight. A sign by the road read:

THROUGH THE WILL OF THE PARTY AND WITH THE PEOPLE’S HANDS THE TOWN OF ZARAFSHAN SHALL BE BUILT HERE
.

Finally, Ira and I were the only passengers left. Where did we want to go, the driver asked? “Oh, just drop us in the center of town,” said Ira casually. He turned and peered at her suspiciously. “Center? What center?” Hastily, I produced the address I had been given. It was that of the mayor, Oscar Wentland. Muttering, the driver let us off by a cluster of five-story blocks identical to the others.

It was midday and there was no one around. We looked for a telephone. Spotting a wraith-like woman resting her shopping bags on a bench, I approached her. “If you’re after a phone there aren’t any.”

“Could you—”

“Must go, must go …” she said, scuttling away.

We sat down and looked around us. Not a door slammed, not a window opened in the neat white housing blocks. The desert sun beat down on our heads. We sat in silence.

“I’m sorry, Ira.”

“Don’t worry—let’s go to Bukhara instead.” That ancient city, key staging post on the great Silk Road, was due south of us, a long bus ride away. A bird shat on Ira’s head: “That means good luck,” she said brightly.

No one answered Oscar Wentland’s doorbell. We decided to find somewhere to leave our bags before exploring the town. On the floor above, an old woman with a deeply fissured peasant face came to the door. When I explained why we had come her eyes filled with tears. “My family’s German! Come on in.”

“Come quickly!” she bawled down the phone. “The relations from England have arrived!” She came back carrying a photograph album: “Oscar Wentland! Fancy him having family in England! My mother was a German baroness, you know. No, really,” she went on, catching our skepticism. “Grandpa was a professor at Vilnius University. Look at this!” It was a photograph of a swan-necked beauty in a high-necked Edwardian dress. “That’s her. She was always composing something. So was Father—his first wife was Rachmaninov’s niece.” I tried not to laugh.

“And that’s Father,” the old woman went on. “He was high up in the Comintern.” Soviet intelligence had created the Communist International in the 1920s to harness the wishfulness of Western intellectuals to Soviet ends. It succeeded beyond its wildest imaginings. Bright young Hollywood directors, the intellectual cream of the Left Bank, of Berlin and Cambridge—they all proved susceptible. But for all their success, in the late thirties, the Comintern spymasters were charged with being Western spies themselves. Could the handsome dreamer in the yellowing photograph really be the father of this garrulous peasant? Only when she took her guitar and started singing did I believe her. For the light, ironic German romances she sang in a cracked, melodious voice were not Soviet. They belonged to that sophisticated central European culture that had been broken underfoot by marching armies.

A ring on the doorbell interrupted our recital. A tall, angry woman in scarlet strutted in on very high heels. Oscar Wentland’s wife, Ludmila, cut off the old woman and marched us downstairs to her flat. Closing the front door, she stood with her back against it. She had bright pink spots on her cheeks: “You might have warned us.” Phone lines to Zarafshan were down, I explained, but Ludmila went on. “If only Oscar were here.” He was away on a business trip. She sounded desperate.

I reassured her. “Don’t worry. Just give us a few telephone numbers and we’ll—” “You don’t have a clue,” Ludmila interrupted. “You can’t even step outside the door—they’re looking for you.”

“Who?”

“Who d’you think? The FSB.”

I sat down rather suddenly.

“Don’t you know anything about this place?” she asked, incredulous.

“Well …”

Ludmila’s face passed from incredulity to fury. Then she laughed until the tears fell.

Zarafshan was a closed town, she explained. It was built around a vast complex of gold and uranium mines. Under the old regime foreigners had not been allowed here. “In theory the security was strict, but in practice it was all right. Now it’s awful! It’s a punishable offense not to announce the arrival of a foreigner to the FSB within twenty-four hours. You’d have been fine if it hadn’t been for that old bag—she’s the town gossip. The news was around the factory in minutes. You can’t stay here—they know where you are!”

“We’ll leave—we’ll go to Bukhara.”

“Not a chance,” Ludmila answered, serious again. “You can’t get out of here. There are no buses, and the next flight is tomorrow. Sit down. I must make some calls.” She walked out, closing the door on the phone’s long extension cord.

We huddled on the sofa, considering our options. Ludmila could hand us over to the FSB, or she could hide us, but she was the mayor’s wife; she had to go on living here. When “they” caught up with us how was I going to explain my frivolous decision to borrow a Russian passport?

Ludmila returned looking calmer. “Let’s get you out of here. Hurry!” We sprinted to her small car and headed out of town, toward those crumpled brown hills. As town gave way to scrub, and scrub to a leafy suburb of small dachas, she relaxed slightly. “It’ll probably be all right. Oscar’ll sort something out. He’s arriving tomorrow morning from America. I’ll just have to keep you out of the way till then.”

She drew up at a bungalow set in a grove of fruit trees. We spent the afternoon at the dacha, picking up fallen apricots, which Ludmila split and laid in the sun. We worked in silence. I was mortified. The whole escapade was so unnecessary. Ludmila was taking a big risk. A gold mine! Now the airport security made sense. A car drew up and I retreated under the trees. But it was only a friend of Ludmila’s. Sasha ran the airport. His fair-haired good looks were marred by a squint so severe that to look directly at us he turned his face to one side. “How did you hear about us?” he asked. “Germans—what Germans?” Then he, too, laughed. “You really don’t have a clue, do you?

“You’re in deep trouble,” he went on, squinting, grinning from ear to ear. “You couldn’t have picked a worse person to talk to than that hag. The news’ll be all around town. They’ll catch up with you—it’s only a matter of time. I’d get out if I were you.” Get out! I had to walk away or I would have said something rash. He knew very well that there was no way out until tomorrow.

I went on collecting apricots, leaving Sasha talking to Ira. As I passed with an armful of fruit he was telling a story. “This tall, shining figure was walking toward him. ‘Stop!’ he shouted—the figure went on coming. He shouted for his mates. One fired a round of bullets—the figure went up in a shower of sparks.” Was he pulling Ira’s leg? But the slight smile on his face looked more like embarrassment. “They found the guy who’d fired the shot lying on the ground with one hand around a telephone receiver. It’d been ripped out of the wall. There were signs of a fight all around. The guy was unconscious, paralyzed from the waist down. When he came to he was scared witless. Kept saying ‘they’ were coming for him. ‘We came to help you with your ecological disaster,’ they said, ‘and you met us with gunfire. We’ll be back. Meanwhile, we’re borrowing your legs. You’ll be paralyzed for ninety-three days.’ And they did come for him again. It was in the ward—in full view of lots of people. He was carried to the door by invisible hands. He clung on to the doorpost—people rushed up and dragged him back to bed.”

“So what happened?” Ira asked.

“After three months he recovered the use of his legs.”

When Sasha left I asked Ira what that was all about.

“Something that happened recently on night watch at the mine.”

“He was pulling your leg—”

“Things like that are happening all the time, he said.” When I asked Ludmila to explain she groaned. “I’ve not seen a thing myself. Ask Vasily Vasilevich. He’s Oscar’s best friend. I’ll be taking you over there when he’s finished work.”

Vasily Vasilevich was the engineer in charge of supplying the water that kept the fifty thousand people in this desert town alive. The light was failing when Ludmila drove us over, and the windows of his bungalow were dark. “He’ll be here any minute.” I got out of the car. A dry wind was blowing off the desert. The sound of rustling leaves was magnified by the emptiness. The headlights fell on chunks of stone stacked along one side of the house. I was looking at them when a voice from the darkness said: “Let me give you some light.” The bare bulb revealed a thin, tanned man in his fifties in faded brown shorts and a half-buttoned shirt. With his bright blue eyes and enchanting smile, he looked like some desert Ariel.

“People think the desert’s dead, but that’s because they don’t know how to read it—the Syr Dar’ya used to run near here on its way to the Aral Sea. Now every drop of water we use comes from two hundred kilometers away. Look at this—it’s jaspar. That’s white opal. Here’s a fossilized tree. It wasn’t always desert here, you know.”