Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (11 page)

We sat on the verandah drinking fermented camel’s milk. The wind rustled the leaves of his orange grove. I looked into the darkness and thought of the FSB, out there looking for us. Vasya was talking about the region’s early history, showing us photographs of rock drawings, images of animals, men, and strange discs, said to be about four thousand years old. The pool of light on the verandah seemed to hold us in a spell of safety.

When I confessed how heedlessly I had flown in on a borrowed passport Vasya laughed. As a boy growing up in Siberia, he had stowed away on a plane for Moscow. “There was just room around the oxygen containers. It was summer, but there was ice forming on every surface. We’d have frozen to death if the plane hadn’t stopped at Tomsk. We arrived in Moscow none the worse for wear and had a marvelous few days exploring the city.”

Ira mentioned Sasha’s story of the shining man. “What’s that all about?” Vasya walked over to his collection of stones and handed us fragments of gray-green stone, light, like pumice. “I’ve had it tested by a lab. It’s sand that’s been heated to an extraordinarily high temperature. Do you see the slight curve?” he said. “They’re part of a saucer-shaped crater, about twenty meters across.”

“Do you mean a UFO crater?” Ira asked.

“Yes. We see things like that all the time.” Despite the smile, he was serious. “The earth here gives off an energy they need. Vortex energy, they call it. They come to recharge themselves. But they also come to help.”

It began a few years ago, he explained. People started bringing stories to Ludmila’s husband, who was first secretary of the Communist Party. They were seeing UFOs, shining beings, all sorts of odd things. They wanted Oscar to “do something.” He handed the problem over to Vasya.

“And what did you do?”

“Oh, this and that! But Oscar’s their chosen man, not me.” Overnight, Vasya, a loyal Party member, had been drawn into a world teeming with invisible creatures. There was a hierarchy that ranged all the way from shining beings down to hairy runts, poltergeists, and little devils: “There are rough types, too. They’re the small ones, who haven’t made it. They throw things around, beat people up, and do all sorts of spiteful things.”

He was talking lightly, a slight smile playing on his face. Was he teasing us, I wondered? As if in response he went into the house and returned carrying a photograph: “Take a look—I’d just put a new film in my camera. When I developed it I found this image on one of the first frames I’d taken when I was winding on the film.” The photograph was black, except for one corner, which was brightly lit, with a leering face. The snout was long, like a pig’s, and there was the blurred outline of something like a paw over its mouth. “What on earth is it?” I asked. “It’s a
domovoi,”
he replied.

At that point, I gave up trying to make sense of anything. We were back in the world of monsters.
Domovois
were creatures from Russian folklore. After the alarms of the day, it was comforting sitting there, held in the ring of light cast by the bare bulb, listening to the fairy tales of this unlikely Scheherazade. The wind off the desert was blowing up, tossing the branches of Vasya’s orange trees. The darkness was alive with fantastical possibilities, ones which kept at bay the real threat that Zarafshan’s secret police were closing in on us.

Above us the stars hung so low that they seemed almost within reach. A young man dropped by to return Vasya’s night binoculars, which he had borrowed to watch for UFOs. I picked them up. Through them, the heavens came alive: there were gashes of greenish yellow light; luminous patches as faint as sighs; stars whose light throbbed and swelled. A sky like that made anything seem possible.

We stayed late, reluctant to move beyond the circle of safety that Vasya had drawn around us with his stories. As he walked us to the car, Ira asked how his own views had been changed by these experiences. “For twenty years I was a good communist. And I’ve always been a pragmatist—I’m an engineer after all,” he replied. “But now I know there’s a higher force controlling and guiding us. The beings are clear about that. ‘You must live in such a way that your good deeds outweigh your bad,’ they tell us. They’re leading us, prompting us—sometimes very harshly. But always in the direction of good.”

We said good-bye reluctantly. “I’m sure I’ll see you again,” he said. “Oscar’ll sort you out. Drop by anytime.” We drove back in silence. The headlights lit up five-story blocks on either side of the road, blocks where those people lived who had brought their Party bosses these weird stories.

I spent the night clinging to the side of Ludmila’s narrow sofa, Ira’s feet in my face, dreaming I was falling into an abyss of stars.

A PIECE OF GREEN PUMICE

Next morning, Ludmila’s husband, Oscar Wentland, arrived by the early plane. The Party type, stocky, fair-haired, and Germanic, he breathed authority. He sat us down and laid out the situation: if the FSB found us, he would be unable to protect us. But he could help us get out of town; the next flight was leaving in an hour. Meekly, we agreed.

He looked at his watch. “We still have time. Do you have any questions?” When I told him what prompted my visit he gave a hollow laugh: “They’re broken people, parasites. They don’t even speak German. They’re only going for the free housing.” I bit my tongue. I did not like the way he was talking, but time was short. When Ira asked him about the shining beings Oscar’s response was brisk: “I might have guessed it—Vasya’s been telling you stories. Flying saucers, little green men … You must take what he says with a pinch of salt. I’m different. I’ve never seen anything paranormal myself.” So that was that. The cock had crowed and the creatures of the night had vanished.

Sasha led us to the plane by a back route and ran with us across the scorching tarmac under the pounding desert sun. The plane’s propellers were turning as he bundled a man and a woman off to make room for us. “Mind you keep your dark glasses on,” he said by way of a farewell. “I dread to think what they’ll do if they catch you with false papers and no visa.” As we flew back over the Kyzylkum desert, Ira and I sat mute, shaken.

My luck ran out on the last leg of our journey. What did it was the fact that the passport had run out four weeks earlier. Tashkent airport’s wiry Uzbek security chief led me behind a green curtain. “Come on, you’re not really Sukhonogaya, are you?” Blushing, I admitted it. The man looked incredulous; he was used to dealing with real criminals. Brushing aside my amateur attempt to bribe him, he took my passport and disappeared through the green curtain.

He reappeared and summoned Ira. She returned looking subdued, and gave me my passport: “Hurry. The plane’s waiting. I’ll come on the morning flight.”

“What’s going on?” I asked. Ira lowered her voice: “He offered me a deal. You can go if I spend the night with him.”

“And you agreed!”

“I’ll manage. He’s not a bad man. Don’t worry.” She was looking at her shoes.

The Uzbek was grinning from ear to ear: “Go on then. Don’t worry—I’ll take good care of her!”

There was a long silence. I thought about the prison cell which was probably waiting for me. I was very tempted. But I couldn’t leave without Ira. “No. Thank you, but I’m not going. If Ira’s staying, so am I.” We stood awkwardly, frozen in indecision, a ridiculous trio.

Then the pilot poked his head through the curtain: “Well, are they coming or not?”

The police chief growled. “Ah, what the hell. Off you go, both of you. But you owe me one …”

Back in Moscow, the rubbish was still piled high in the stinking streets and the cups in the sink were still unwashed. They were reassuringly real. From the baroness’s daughter and the gold town in the desert to the UFOs and hairy devils, our adventure was receding hour by hour, becoming no more than a tall story. There were so many questions I wished I had asked. What did Vasya mean when he said that Oscar was “their” chosen man, for instance?

Ira’s mother was away. I slept a lot, cleaned every surface, and met up with Ira in the evenings. “Thank heaven you were there,” I said as we stood on the balcony, watching the children playing on the swings. “If I’d been on my own, I’d be going crazy now, wondering whether I’d imagined it all.” We found ourselves avoiding meeting up with other people: what could we say? We could turn our trip into a funny story, but that would have been too easy. We liked Vasya, and he was no fool. “I knew people were going to laugh at me,” he said when we were leaving. “But I can take that. We’ve got to tell the truth, for the sake of, well, humanity.”

He gave me a fragment of stone. It came from a UFO crater, he said. He would spot them on his flights over the desert to check the water pipes. The outline would appear suddenly, from one day to the next. Some were radioactive, but this one had healing properties: “For those with the gift, it has the power to put them in touch with other worlds.” Back in Moscow, we looked at it. Whatever it might have been in the Kyzylkum desert, now it was just a piece of pumice, with a greenish glaze.

SIBERIAN CASSANDRA

On the train down to Saratov I tried to find a way of writing about our Zarafshan trip, but it was no good. Up until now, the language of reason had served my needs perfectly well. But that language was no use when it came to Zarafshan. Unless I could find a way of understanding it, I was not going to be able to write about it, at least not without mocking Vasya. He did not deserve that.

This time, I found the very banality of Marx reassuring. Experimentally, I mentioned the trip to Natasha and Igor. It came out as a funny story and they laughed. I did not mention it again. I was uncomfortable, on this frontier between the mapped and the unmapped territory, between the world of reason and the land of those fabulous monsters.

I took a bus out to Stepnoye, where those families from Zarafshan were living. The houses looked like rows of freshly painted toys, abandoned by some giant child on the red mud of the empty steppe. The incumbents had moved in months ago. But with few exceptions, they had made no effort to organize the community, or even to plant their own gardens. I was incredulous: these people had what every Russian dreamed of—new housing, land, opportunities. But they were sitting in their houses, looking out over the red mud, getting drunk. What were they waiting for?

I spent the day with a biologist. Galya and her nuclear physicist husband (he had worked in Zarafshan’s uranium mines) were the only people in the settlement with a higher education. She was rearing chicks, growing vegetables, and planning a fish farm. At one point she turned around, put her hands on her hips, and hissed: “Look here. You’re amazed that no one’s opened a shop, that they haven’t planted anything. You don’t understand—if these degenerates haven’t got something, they’ll do without. The notion they could improve their lives wouldn’t enter their heads! I’m ashamed for you to see this. But what shames me most is that I’m one of the few people here who’s got any idea that there’s anything to be ashamed of!” Galya was spring-loaded, so close to breaking point that I feared what would happen if I touched her.

Late that night, I ventured to ask about Zarafshan’s paranormal epidemic. Galya groaned. “If I hear the word UFO again—” But her husband interrupted. “Yes, weird things were happening all the time. For instance, one night, with some other scientists, I saw a cigar-shaped craft heading for the airport. As a scientist, what struck me was the way it stopped in the sky, then streaked off in another direction. That just didn’t make scientific sense. But that’s what I saw—we all did.” Perhaps it was collective hysteria, I speculated, relieved to be talking to a scientist. “No, there was more to it than that,” he said firmly.

Next morning I took the bus back to Marx. Broken people, Oscar called them. I had bridled at the judgment, but he seemed to be right. I could not bear the implications. I got off the bus feeling wretched. The street was flanked by housing blocks which looked as if they had been bombarded with mortar fire. Keeping my eyes lowered, I kept walking for the sake of walking, to avoid returning to Engels Street. How Igor was going to crow! He had tried to dissuade me from going to Stepnoye. “They’ll be broken people, serfs,” he said, eerily echoing Oscar’s words. “You can set them up in new houses, give them land, but they’ll be sitting there drinking themselves to death. Gimme, gimme—it’s all they know!” Could it really be that he was right? That all over Russia, people who had lived with guaranteed jobs had unlearned the most basic instincts?

A sudden wind swept across the steppe, slapping the town, bending the poplars, sending washing flying. Soon, the wind would stop and the rain would sheet down. When it came, it was like a bucket being tipped over the town. I must have looked Job-like when I walked into the house on Engels Street. For Igor made tea, wrung out my wet clothes, and kept his judgments to himself.

When the sun came out, we walked across the square, past the ruined church and the statue of Lenin, down to the pier where the Volga ferries used to dock before traffic on the river stopped, when the Soviet music ended. During the famines of the 1920s barges full of starving people searching for food had docked here. Then, in September 1941, thousands and thousands of Volga Germans sat here, surrounded by armed guards, waiting to be deported. All this belonged to a past which had for so long been forbidden territory.

We looked out to the white cliffs on the river’s far bank. A nightingale sang in the elms and the fish were rising, leaving ripples on the surface of the water. “To live surrounded by this beauty, and to squander it so—that’s what makes me mad!” sighed Igor. He talked about the happy times he and Natasha had spent here, messing about in a boat in the early days. But when he started complaining again, I snapped. “It’s your fault. You’re chasing her away. I think you’re just bored. Go ahead. But soon you’ll have destroyed your love and you’ll be alone. Is that what you want?”

Igor looked shocked. But when Natasha arrived home he was contrite and loving. After supper, I poured out my heart about my trip to Stepnoye. “So now you see,” Natasha said after a long silence. “We thought we were different, that when the Party lost power it would be fine. We thought we’d spend our time
being free!
We had no idea how much we’d all become products of the Soviet system.”