Deep Field (24 page)

The black ice was so treacherous that every so often I would find myself flying unexpectedly through the air to land with a painful crack, flat on my back. I even took to sliding my way home from work sitting on my briefcase—large enough to act as a kind of sled—and, despite the treacherous conditions, sliding fast down the pavements as dusk approached soon became, along with learning to iceskate, one of the daily pleasures of living in Kazan in the winter.

I discussed this with my Russian friends. ‘You must stride less,’ they said. ‘Keep your feet on the ground—you must learn to “walk like a babushka”.’ Despite plaudits from the great and the good of the West, vast oil and natural gas wealth, and the capital of Moscow with the highest number of millionaires per capita in the world, for Tatarstan, and much of the rest of Russia, the babushka-centric daily economy seemed to indicate that it was a country going in reverse. While the arms race and the prospect of mutually assured nuclear destruction during the Cold War had failed to bring down the communist bloc, joked British comedian Rory Bremner, introduce capitalism and ‘they’re screwed for a generation’.

‘Let’s start with the most important word in any language,’ said Arthur from deep inside a gothic pseudo-German beer hall called Bar Grot—‘cigarette’. I’d undertaken to learn Russian and was starting informally by exchanging Russian lessons for chess with a young Oxford exchange student at Kazan State University. Arthur was brilliant and chess was possibly the only field of knowledge where I held a brief and rapidly diminishing advantage. I had been stunned when I encountered him in the university corridors, not having heard another native English speaker for over three months. First came the voice—slow, resonant and authoritative—followed by the apparition of someone who resembled a young Rumpole, shuffling with babushka-like mastery of the conditions through the university.

It was a great university closely linked with Russia’s cultural and political past—Tolstoy had failed his final exams there, Lenin had been expelled after organising a demonstration against the regime in his first week, and Gorky had failed the entrance exam. With my mediocre attempts to master Russian in exchange for chess, I was privileged to be in such company. ‘In fifty years’ time,’ Arthur claimed, ‘people will wish they could say they had been, not in Oxford or Berkeley or the Sorbonne, but in Kazan.’ And we embarked on the search for the ‘cultural vortex’—to find that point between East and West that Herzen had identified as unique to the Tatar lands.

I sought this initially among my colleagues at the language school. When I started, there were no students and I was the only teacher, and I tried to satisfy my curiosity through idiosyncratic recruiting. At first I thought a retired Tatar schoolteacher would be my guide to the inner workings of the city. He appeared one day at the office in response to an ad—a small and hawk-like man with sharp, twinkling eyes that I almost imagined were on the lookout for prey. He had spent his entire working life in Kazan’s schools and offered to teach me Tatar. But on the appointed day he failed to show up, and never responded to phone calls—later we found out that he had died shortly after our job offer.

Another teacher I thought would be interesting was Zemfira, an elderly Kazakh woman who had also spent her working life teaching in Kazan’s schools. Zulya was sceptical—too old-fashioned, too formal and ‘Soviet’ in her approach—and referred to her in private as ‘Kazakh Woman’. But I found her fascinating, and in addition to early conversations about life in Soviet Kazakhstan and about her visit to the Baikonur Cosmodrome (the USSR’s space launching site) on an excursion from the collective farm where she worked, she had the most amazing set of silver false teeth I had ever seen. Once a status symbol in the Soviet Union, silver teeth had become an undesirable relic in the fashionable New Russia with its conspicuous advertisements and image consciousness. Advertisers had even begun to import models from Holland who had the desired ‘Western look’ rather than risk being associated with the grey drabness of the Soviet past somehow deemed manifest in the Russian physiognomy.

Unfortunately, in the classroom she was a total disaster. Students loathed her ‘Soviet’ methods—all lectures, dictation and rote learning—and they complained so much that she eventually left. I had not found the ‘vortex’ but I did learn never to recruit someone solely on the basis of dentistry.

Being one of the very few ‘Westerners’ in Kazan and certainly the only Australian, I inadvertently became a very minor celebrity. While dozing off during the fifth act of Mussorgsky’s opera
Boris Godunov
at the Kazan Opera House, a vast neo-classical building built in the 1950s by German prisoners of war, I was elbowed in the ribs by a young woman sitting in the row behind. As I embarked on an apology, fearing that I’d fatally cast aspersions on one of the great works of Russian civilisation, she whispered loudly, ‘Do you like tennis?’ Despite my better instincts, and still on the increasingly quixotic pursuit of the vortex, I said yes. At the end of the act she issued me with instructions to meet her the next day at a location near the university.

Wondering where we would play tennis in the middle of the Russian winter, I set off and soon found myself not in some ice-bound tennis court, but in a small and grotty recording studio with a translator.

‘Thank God you’ve arrived,’ said my mysterious operatic assailant from the previous evening. ‘I have to present a tennis program on the radio today, but I don’t know anything about tennis.’

I turned, ashen-faced, to the translator, who had interjected by saying that he detested all sport particularly tennis, and felt obliged to confess that I didn’t know anything about tennis either. But it was too late—we were on air and I discovered that I was on Kazan’s niche talkback tennis show.

Feeling like a player without a racket bracing himself for the first serve before an imagined audience of millions, the first question was ‘Have you ever seen a kangaroo?’ After that the barrage was fierce and relentless: ‘How many rubles is tennis in Australia?’, ‘Can you name the most famous tennis player in Tatarstan?’ and, increasingly unimpressed with my answers, one aggravated listener asked, ‘Do you know anything about any other sport?’

I sang the praises of Russian tennis, lauded the great contribution of Kazan to the sport over the centuries and hoped that the translator, who by now had assumed an attitude of superior boredom and contempt, was making it all sound better in Russian.

As I left the studio still racking my brain for any tennis-related trivia I could think of, a large black sedan screeched to a stop on the kerb next to me. A woman dressed in pink threw open the door and said in tones that presented no alternative, ‘Ivan wants to see you.’ So I got in and was driven at speed to the headquarters of Kanal 6, Kazan’s main commercial TV network. Ivan turned out to be the head of news and, like the tennis presenter, had found himself in a sporting quandary: it was the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics and he, too, needed to find something to say. And so I was placed in front of a very small TV screen in the basement of Kanal 6 trying desperately to work out what to say about the Olympic Games. The figures on the screen were distant and tiny and the parade of Australiana was even more absurd when viewed from a place that styled itself as the Gateway to Siberia.

Mounted cattlemen charged to the theme of
The Man from Snowy River
, boys and girls moved like ants with what appeared to be corrugated-iron sheets and water tanks, a horde of people seemed to be mowing a giant lawn, while an enormous octopus turned red and slowly floated into the night sky. In a moment of desperate genius, Ivan came up with something to say—‘What is your favourite Olympic sport?’ he asked. I seized the moment and said how much I looked forward to some strong competition in the synchronised swimming. That night as I watched the news I saw myself on screen, dubbed into a deep basso profundo Russian, apparently sounding very knowledgeable about the Tatar athletes competing at the games, the origins of the Olympics and how proud I was to see Sydney on the world stage. It really didn’t matter what I said—Ivan had got his Australian, and my pursuit of the cultural vortex had produced bizarre results.

Zulya summoned me to the office one day. ‘You must do something. A man called Adam has been here every day asking for you. We don’t know what he wants, he just comes and sits and asks to speak to you. Please talk to him for us,’ she implored, clearly sick of this stranger occupying her days.

Adam was an exceptionally tall Sudanese, of South Sudan’s Dinka ethnicity. He had come to Kazan on a scholarship from the then Soviet-allied Khartoum and had studied engineering. His achievements were spectacular—not only had he learned Russian fluently (as well as speaking Dinka, English and Arabic) but from war-torn Sudan, where few had primary schooling, he had gone on to earn a doctorate in a country known for the incredible rigor of its scientific education. He was now a research assistant at the Kazan’s specialist institute for designing power plants. But there it had stopped. War had prevented his return to Sudan, and the collapse of the Soviet Union had eroded his pay to a pittance and led him to rely on part-time and marginal jobs at the institute. He wore thin shoes against waist-height snow and ice, and could not afford a new coat even though his was now threadbare. He was now getting by on $20 a month—his salary from the institute—and in the university canteen I asked him what he ate. ‘Only potatoes,’ he said woefully.

Adam could not return to Sudan and we discussed migration to Britain or Australia—both of which he had tried and failed. I suggested teaching at Linguamir, at least for extra cash, but this would jeopardise his proper work at the power plant and was not feasible. Or so he said, but underlying this was the knowledge that as an African he would never fit in, even in as diverse a place as Kazan. Racism was on the rise in Russia: leather-jacketed skinhead gangs (called Gopniks) were on the streets and an English friend had recently been beaten up when gang members heard his accented Russian. The graffiti at the local cinema said (in English) ‘Fuck Nigger’ and there was an increasingly disturbing ultra-nationalism which meant that, beyond the liberal institute where he worked and where he was valued for his abilities, Adam would never be accepted, let alone employed. In any case, even if he earned $50 a month instead, this was not going to change things substantially. His one remaining option, he said, was the Mormons, who had recently been allowed into Russia and had set up a meeting hall in a former chess school.

We met a number of times—going to the canteen where I would buy him lunch or dinner and ensure that there wasn’t a potato to be seen. But increasingly he spent his time with the missionaries of the Latter Day Saints, knowing that this might be his last, if severely circumscribed, chance of a future outside Russia. As we parted company, he cut a forbidding picture of isolation walking off down Bauman Street, past its designer shops, a lone African student in the Russian winter left behind by the consequences of state collapse. In an apocalyptic sudden reversion back to the Middle Ages, this highly trained scientist was now forced to seek a future in the ideological obscurantism of the Mormon church.

Late one night after an evening at Bar Grot, our small party walked out into the deepest cold of the winter. It was minus 30, a fresh snow had fallen while we were inside and the crystalline night was still, hard and clear. Arthur’s beard turned instantly white with frost and we stood collectively awed by this perfect ice world. On a hill above us, a fort that predated Moscow’s conquest of the Tatar lands—the Kremlin—stood white and illuminated against the night sky. Inside we could see twin cathedrals: the onion domes of the Orthodox Church, like alien planets hovering just above the city, and a reconstructed Tatar mosque whose minaret soared into the firmament.

‘Let’s storm the Kremlin,’ someone shouted and we ran, ploughing through the snow, straight at the hill and the tall crenellated walls. On we went, even as the snow reached waist height, swimming almost through the crisp powder, falling, picking ourselves up and lurching onwards to the spire and the domes. Snow got into my boots and down the back of my neck as I plunged headfirst into the embankment, an exhilarating razor-shock of cold that set my senses on edge. I crashed on, into the steepest part of the ascent, inhaling stabbing Arctic breath and covered in a thick white down of snow. In a final staggering lunge, I fell against the summit and reached out to touch the base of the walls with my bare hands. And lying there I looked up, beyond the blur of white, past the vertiginous Kremlin defences and deep into the night. Over Freedom Square, the new Russian tricolour fluttered and I could just make out the statue of Lenin striding forth in bronze perpetuity in the direction of the Opera House and the up-market shops on Bauman Street, and in the distance came the muffled Tataraccented humming of the morning’s call to prayer.

Rich Arabic coffee served in the desert. The Himalayan night sky. An evening walk through a camp as families talk and prepare meals. Such ordinary moments of reflection and reprieve forge bonds with people and place in extreme contexts such as state collapse, natural disaster and conflict. If the majority of the stories in this book occur in countries and societies at the point of crisis, they are also about connection and disconnection—negotiating the new and immediate cultural, political and institutional demands of humanitarian work. This is work that often jarringly sets worlds and realities in contrast to each other in ways that illuminate and question. And despite the problems of humanitarian assistance—who should do it, how it should be done, and how effective it may be—it is this sense of curiosity and the desire to think and explore, while also performing a function during the day’s work, that is the source of humanitarian action and, ultimately, of the view that things can and should be different. Much of this comes down to dollars and cents—vital funds that allow institutions to act and to engage—but it is also much more than that. It is about learning to live with complexity and somehow negotiating a path through, no matter how arduous, that does not see lives as numbers, or ‘stories’ that fit a media cycle, or the deliberately heart-rending advertisements of an aid agency.