Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (5 page)

When I returned to Vera’s flat, perplexed and bruised, she would smile her dizzy smile and pull me into her cocoon. She, too, thought I was mad to be pinning my hopes on Russia’s economic regeneration: “This is only the beginning. The chaos will get worse, far worse. But we have to be cleansed. It will be terrible, but there’s no alternative. Until then, nothing’ll thrive here.”

The apocalyptic tenor of such remarks made me wary of asking about the source of her inner radiance. However, over supper in her cramped kitchen one evening, she answered my unspoken question: “Have you heard of Vissarion?” My heart sank. Vissarion was the leader of a cult. “He came in the nick of time—I was losing hope.” Russia was a fairground of beliefs. The Moscow subway was plastered with bright advertisements for the Bhagavad Gita; smiling American missionaries were plying their trade in the streets like hookers; in the bookshops, the long-forbidden works of Gurdjieff and Madame Blavatsky were walking off the shelves; the Moonies and Scientology were thriving. Among the homegrown cults, there were six prophets in Moscow that summer who claimed to be the Second Coming. Vissarion was one of them.

Vera’s face glowed as she talked about him: he revealed himself on Red Square on New Year’s Eve, just as the Soviet regime was passing into history. “It was crammed with people celebrating. He was wearing nothing but a red robe and an old fur coat. He preached to the crowd.” She showed me photographs of his paintings. They were crude. There was a video, too: with his saccharine smile and red robe he might have been playing Jesus in a provincial theater production. “Brothers and sisters!” he pronounced, in a singsong voice. “The time has come when you must choose between the paths of Good and Evil.” The end of the world was nigh; only those who followed Vissarion were going to survive …

After that, we skirted around the subject of Vissarion. Vera was not deceived by my polite interest and I distrusted the source of her radiant spirituality. The appeal was obvious. The Orthodox Church could not respond to people’s needs, as it was emerging from what some believed was the worst period of sustained persecution any Christian church had suffered since the late Roman Empire.

Next day, I understood Vera’s desperation better. When I arrived back at the flat bringing a bottle of Napoleon brandy, the color drained from her face. “It’s my husband—he’s …” Her voice dropped: “alcoholic.” She hid the bottle on top of a cupboard. I had hardly met the man. Handsome, with a ravaged face, he left early and arrived home after we had gone to bed.

I might have guessed. Russian men were managing the Soviet collapse much less well than women. In the early 1990s, a million more men would die than if the old regime had continued. With the arms factory closed, Vera’s husband had nothing left to do but drink. No wonder she had grown desperate, living with him in a single room. She had planned to leave him when her sons grew up, but the collapse of the economy had dashed those hopes.

As for the Napoleon brandy, it was fake. The twenty-nine-year-old marketing it would soon emerge as Russia’s richest oligarch. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, favorite child of the old Party, was already running his own bank. Within a few years he would control Russia’s oil. Soon after, he would be behind bars. At least his brandy did not poison or blind, like many of the fakes.

I had still not reached Marx when I ran out of time. Something had obviously gone wrong with the project to rebuild that homeland for Russia’s Germans with foreign money. But what? I was clearly unwelcome in Saratov. I was in the city illegally, and my Russian visa was about to run out. But even as I packed to leave I was determined to come back and find out what lay behind that wall of silence.

1993

OPENING THE CAGES

I reached the Volga town of Marx only that winter. What drew me was a sense that I had to be in Russia at that moment. Russian history had been shaped by long periods of stability interrupted by sudden discontinuities like this. I had a hunch that the character of its people was forged at such times. Ordinary Russians were in a fog of anxiety, and the fog was nowhere thicker than in that Volga region.

How could the local population be opposed to a plan from which they stood to gain so much? Ethnic tension, which had erupted right across Russia’s southern border, had been a crucial factor in the unraveling of the Soviet empire. But these Russian Germans were white and indistinguishable from Russians. Most did not even speak German. On my last day in Saratov I had met a young woman who had a flat in Marx. She had invited me to stay there, “in the unlikely event that you ever come back.” Anna was a local journalist and she had championed the cause of a homeland for Russia’s Germans. We met briefly, in the offices of the city’s only liberal newspaper, where she worked. A tall, gangling young woman, she moved awkwardly, as if her clothes were lined with prickles. Her lively, boyish face was framed by a tonsure of dark hair. She appraised me guardedly from a pair of large brown eyes whose whites were tinged with blue. They sparkled with intelligence. Over meatballs in the paper’s canteen—which poisoned me for a week—she said something intriguing: “I should warn you—do you remember what happened when Gerald Durrell freed the animals in his zoo? He opened their cages and they wouldn’t leave—just sat there and howled. They refused to go back to the jungle and start hunting for food again. Well, that’s us—that’s what we’re like in Marx.” I laughed. But she was not smiling.

My fellow passengers on the battered bus from Saratov sat in silence, bulky in their overcoats, buttressed in with bulging bags. The windows were iced over with crystalline patterns. Melting a hole with my gloved hand, I peered out. There was nothing to see but the snowy steppe stretching away to meet the snowy sky.

I thought about Benya, mysterious host of my cruise. I finally got to meet him in Moscow, over supper at Elena’s. He could not have been less like the flamboyant outlaw of Babel’s Odessa. He looked like an out-of-work clown with his long face, straggling beard, and sad eyes. Rather than multicolored clothes, he wore an old hand-knitted jersey. He was accompanied by a bodyguard, an athletic young Kirghiz whose smart pale blue suit did not conceal the bulge of a gun.

I felt there was something very wrong, but Elena was reassuring: Benya was famous for getting into scrapes and out of them. His luck was down, but he would soon bob up and start splashing money around again, she said. Yet soon after that supper he went missing. In his empty offices, the telephone rang and rang. At first his friends assumed he had gone to ground, as he did whenever he had promised more money to his artist friends than he could deliver. Now he had just surfaced after months of silence. He had turned up in a police station somewhere in Siberia, wearing no coat or trousers. It was minus twenty outside and he was penniless. Exactly what had happened he would not say, but he appeared to have been acting as middleman in a negotiation that went wrong between the Kirghiz and Chechen mafias. The Chechens defaulted, and the Kirghiz held Benya responsible. They kidnapped him and stripped him of everything he owned. The Kirghiz whom he introduced as his bodyguard that evening was in fact his jailor.

The bus was late by the time it rattled to a halt by some rusting factory buildings on the outskirts of Marx. Anna was standing by a telegraph pole, shoulders hunched against the cold. As I stepped down, the sun came out from behind a cloud, throwing Anna’s shadow and that of the telegraph poles onto the snow like exclamation marks. “We must hurry—the light’s going to fail,” she said brusquely, striding off down a street of dilapidated wooden houses.

I followed, hampered by a heavy bag. Anna crashed down on the frozen snow. Then I went flying. Still she kept on hurrying. Finally she stopped in a snowy wasteland. “This is the old German cemetery. In summer it’s littered with bones.” Clearing the snow away, she showed me toppled headstones and tombstones engraved with Gothic inscriptions in German. “They ripped the place apart in ’41. And they’re still doing it today.”

“Is the memory still so strong—after half a century?”

Striding off again, she muttered: “Memory? You’ll find no memory here!”

As I hurried to keep up, slipping and falling, I remembered a sad little story by Daniel Kharms about a carpenter who left home one day to buy glue. He fell over, banged his head, and popped into the chemist for a plaster. On the way home, he fell down again and went back for another plaster. Again and again he fell down, and each time he went back to the shop for another plaster. Finally the chemist suggested he buy the box. “No!” said the carpenter optimistically. “I won’t fall down again!” But by the time he reached home he was so covered in plasters that his family did not recognize him and turned him out on the street …

Kharms was one of the “repressed” writers whose work was finally enjoying cult status in Russia. A comic, a performance artist before the phrase was coined, he used to make his stage appearances out of a cupboard. When he was arrested in 1930 he was charged with “distracting the people from building socialism with … absurdist views.”

It was dark and bitterly cold by the time Anna stopped again. A full moon, yellow as double cream, shone on a white, empty space where a statue of Lenin stood pointing at the remains of a neoclassical Lutheran church. “This is where they held the anti-German demonstrations.” “I don’t really understand why they were demonstrating,” I began, but Anna shot me a dark look and strode off again.

Anna’s Spartan little flat at the top of a high-rise block was barely heated. There was no hot water and the bathroom fittings, sink, and lavatory cistern were laid out on the floor. Still, it was a relief to have arrived. Now we could talk. “So why were people here so against the German homeland?” I began. “Surely they stood to gain so much from it?” She frowned: “Hmm, that’s what you’d think,” she began, then tailed off into silence. She offered me strong tea. She offered me a pancake; but she left my question unanswered.

I asked Anna how she came to be living in Marx, since she worked in Saratov. She threw such a poisonous glance at me that I recoiled. “It’s a long and boring story,” she said with finality. After that she tucked up her legs on a high stool and sat in silence, like a pinioned owl. I was baffled. Last time we met she was a different person—relaxed, amused. Today the tension was coming off her in waves. She seemed afraid, and I felt myself catching that fear, without knowing what there was to be afraid of.

I ventured another question or two. But she answered monosyllabically, and with such daunting finality that I relapsed into silence as well. On the kitchen wall hung a photograph of the moon-faced Yegor Gaidar, architect of the economic reforms. All around him Anna had stuck pictures of happy dogs cut out from colored magazines. The walls at least told me that she supported Yeltsin’s economic reforms.

It was only just after 5:00 p.m. An interminable winter evening stretched before us. Had there been anywhere to go I would have left. Had there been anything to eat, I would have eaten it. Anna’s little pancake had whetted my appetite. “This is how hunger begins”—the first line of a ditty by Daniel Kharms came back to me.

The morning you wake, feeling lively
,
Then the weakness begins
,
Then the boredom begins;
Then comes the loss
Of the power of quick reason
,
Then comes the calmness
And then the horror begins
.

I just wanted supper. Kharms died of starvation.

This evening was my initiation into the world of silences. Silence can have many different qualities, as I would find. All I knew about this one was that I could barely control the impulse to get up and leave. Later, I would learn the reasons behind it, though never from Anna herself. She was young, and had not known the harshest years of Soviet censorship, but already her words and opinions had cost her dear. Although we would become friends, she was never going to forget that, as a foreigner and a writer, I was potentially dangerous.

By the time Anna finally laid out a mattress for me on the floor I was charged with her tension. I lay there hurt and baffled. Why had she invited me, if she thought I was some kind of spy? What had been going on that was so terrible she could not talk about it? Now and then a chilling scream penetrated the walls.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s my neighbors’ idea of fun.”

I was lost in the fog. Nothing had prepared me for the low-level collective hysteria that had Marx, and indeed Russia, in its grip. Factories were folding. Ordinary people, beggared by inflation and rising prices, were unpaid for months on end. Meanwhile, the old Soviet bosses were stripping state assets, appropriating raw materials, salting money away for themselves. Here in Marx those bosses were egging people on to take out their grievances on people like me, cartoon capitalists who were supposedly prowling around, eyeing Russia’s wealth. That would come later. But at the time, the nation’s wealth was worth less than a large Western corporation.

Twice in the course of the night, Anna sat bolt upright. “What’s up?” I whispered. It was as if she were waiting for that dawn knock on the door. But that was absurd—this was not the 1930s.

“Nothing. Go to sleep.”

I had intended to stay in Marx for a few days, but I changed my mind: I was going to catch the bus back to Saratov next morning.

When I woke Anna was lying in bed in her overcoat, hat, and gloves: I had been sleeping with her only extra blanket. If I thought that my change of plan would please her, I was wrong: “You can’t. I’ve fixed up all these appointments for you.” So with bad grace I trailed behind her along the icy streets to my first appointment. “Boris Pilnyak went to school there,” she volunteered. Looking up at the nondescript school block, I went flying across the icy ground. Pilnyak was a popular, stylish writer, a star of the 1920s literary scene. “Was he a Volga German?”

“Of course,” she replied.

The meetings were a waste of time. The mayor looked as if he was having a nervous breakdown. The museum curator tried to sell me his museum’s archives. A schoolteacher with a pudding-bowl haircut and beard that spouted like a jet of water from his chin fired platitudes at me like missiles. Anna maintained her Trappist stance, refusing to divulge anything. Later I learned that the mayor was a frustrated reformer, while the schoolteacher was the local demagogue who had roused crowds against the German homeland by invoking memories of the Nazi invasion.

“What’s wrong with everyone?” I grumbled.

“Now do you understand? No one here’s going to talk to you!”

“But why?” She refused to elaborate, but I detected a glimmer of sympathy.

During one of these pointless meetings Anna ran off to draw her monthly salary. “I must spend it, or it’ll be worthless,” she muttered, patting a shopping bag bulging with notes. “But what on? I used to buy books, but they’ve disappeared now.” During my next meeting, she spent it all on a red and white summer dress. When she held it against herself in the snowy street I caught a glimpse of the dashing young woman Anna might have been had she not lived in that place, at that time.

As we trudged down the street someone hit me on the head from behind. The weapon was only a long sausage, but I had had enough. Bruised, hungry, and perplexed, I let out a volley of hopelessly outdated Russian curses. Two young men scuttled away, looking aghast. For a moment Anna stood petrified. Then she laughed. She laughed so much that she almost fell over again. “They thought you were German!” she gasped. I did not see the joke.

FALSE PREGNANCY

That night, Anna returned to Saratov and I stayed on. Some friends of hers had offered me a bed. She walked me to their ramshackle wooden house, then strode off to catch the bus. Snowbound clouds hung over the town. The icy street was empty and the town was wrapped in silence. Between the houses, high fences sealed off the yards from the street. Presently, the door opened to reveal a small, curly-haired woman. “Come in, you must be freezing. Where’s Anna? Ah, yes, she and my husband aren’t speaking at the moment.” She laughed and rolled her eyes.

Natasha spoke in English, fluently. At that juncture, it was extraordinary to meet anyone in the provinces who spoke a foreign language well. As I peeled off my outer garments I complimented her. “Thanks, but here it just marks you out as a suspicious character.”

In her bare kitchen a three-legged marmalade cat was licking itself on an upturned log of wood. “You must be hungry if you’ve been staying with Anna,” she went on. Natasha had a lively, snub-nosed face and high Slavic cheekbones, though she was deathly pale. As I ate, she told me how she and her husband had ended up in Marx. “We were living in the Caucasus. When Gorbachev announced the plan for a German homeland, we thought it was all going to happen here.” She sighed and lit a fresh cigarette from the stub of the last. “We were just married. In love. Full of dreams. I saw this ad in the paper.
Delightful private house on the banks of the Volga
. I bought it sight unseen. “It doesn’t matter if it isn’t exactly what we want,” we said to ourselves. “Once the Germans get things going we’ll be able to do anything—restore it, build another.”

“Everyone warned us. My father pleaded with me. My cousin Borya, who’s a KGB general, traveled across Russia to get me to change my mind: “Don’t be a fool, it’s not going to happen!” he said. He must’ve known something we didn’t. But we wouldn’t listen. You see, it was the new beginning we’d been longing for.”

Natasha sighed and poured us tea. “To think—I gave up my little house in the Caucasus for this barrack! It had this garden full of flowers. When we arrived I asked the driver why he’d stopped. “This is it,” he said. “You’re joking!” I said.