In Siberia (31 page)

Yulia stood up and writhed to the rhythm, gazing down at him. She had touched in some blusher along her cheekbones and over her eyelids, and when she smiled I imagined all her mother's lost teeth migrated to her mouth in a blaze of near-laughter. But Sasha only stared at his shoes. ‘I've got lots of songs!' she yelled. ‘American ones! English ones!' Her hips turned in quickening abandon. ‘Lots!'

But Sasha was retreating into his earlier self, into boyhood, and Igor. They began to shadow-box together. Then they arm-wrestled. Yulia's dancing grew more violent. Her hair oscillated across her face in black scythes.

‘Oh, look at my daughter!' Clara arrived in the doorway with a colander of rice and charred chicken. ‘Isn't she wonderful? She's such a daughter to me!'

Yulia stopped and dumped herself on a bed. Sasha was showing Igor his Chinese digital watch, which played a tinny march.

‘I love dancing too.' Clara gazed at me. ‘But do I look very bad?' Her mouth opened on vanished teeth. She did look rather bad. But she went out and returned in a mask of rouge and lipstick, and plucked me from my stool. We began to waltz. My squeaky boots and her clashing buckles made a ghastly duet over the scuffed floor. She was solid, but light on her feet, her face suffused by the pleasure of it, while Yulia watched her with stormy eyes. Her cassette went on playing all the current Russian favourites–‘My Love', ‘I'm Guilty'–and Clara's words scattered and drowned under the din. ‘He's divorced, you understand…Aleksei…suddenly…to reunite with his wife…. I don't know…he loves me…. He wants to go to Israel….'

By the time we assembled round the chicken it was cold. And now it was Igor who rebelled. We had waited too long for Aleksei, he said, and Aleksei hadn't come. So he refused to eat. Perhaps the photographs had resurrected some distress in him, I could not tell. ‘Aleksei just does what he likes,' he said, and turned his back.

But Clara folded her hands before the chicken and
kasha
. ‘And now Yulia will say the prayer.'

‘If you want it, you say it!' Yulia shouted. ‘Stop getting me to do things!'

So Clara began stoically: ‘Lord, we thank you…'

 

In the railway ticket offices they ask the price of a fare: sturdy old women, headscarved and slippered and so alike, superficially, that it is easy to discount them. The office barks a reply, and they consider the cost in disbelief. Then they consult together, return and ask: ‘Just for
one
ticket?'

Bark.

They sit down, weary-faced, wondering about other means of transport. Next they enquire about concessions. Bark.

You long to help them. But their pride, or your sense of it, prevents this. You know that the West has won the Cold War, that its values appear to have prevailed. The old are more easily hurt now, because their world is slipping away, all that they fought for. The war veterans seem to wear their medals with a last-ditch defiance. So I let the old women trail away. I never did help one of them.

This is a passage of shame.

 

It was almost November, and the Baikal–Amur Railway had carried me north along the river valley to within a hundred and fifty miles of the Pacific, to Komsomolsk-na-Amur. Hooded and quilted against the cold, I tramped down streets carved out for the heavy traffic of a future which never came. Komsomolsk was
Stalin's ‘City of the Dawn', founded by young Communist pioneers in 1932 far from the Trans-Siberian and the eyes of foreigners: a galaxy of warplane factories, submarine yards and concentration camps, cradled in xenophobia.

I had expected a place of worn ugliness. Instead, austere streets lined by facades of dull gold radiated away in a faintly forbidding classicism. The replication of their stuccoed brick lent them a muted theatre. In their stately shabbiness, they looked older than they were. The snow was falling along their avenues in wet, heavy flakes so that little infidelities of style (gauche friezes, useless
colonnettes
), the crumbling corbels and collapsing balconies, faded down long vistas of puritan uniformity, almost beautiful.

On the banks of the Amur, swollen a mile wide, a granite boulder marked the landfall of the first Komsomol volunteers. They had arrived on two steamers, the
Columbus
and the
Comintern
, in May 1932, and began to build their city in virgin taiga, spending the first winter in tents. The Soviet press turned them into a legend of young heroism, and the local museum was still reverent with their leftover mess-tins and paraffin-lamps, while diaries and letters recorded the hardships of dwindling supplies or an early scurvy victim (‘the first grave in our future city').

The town's buildings are still blazoned with old pieties: corn-sheafs and banners and Lenin heads, and with the city's motif of a Komsomol cadet rising from the sea. The First Builders Avenue runs for seeming miles towards a sheaf of defunct smokestacks, and a monument raised to these pioneers portrays them climbing ashore in a windblown vanguard beside the Amur. Yet they march out of another moral world, whose paeans to metallurgical plants and blast furnaces, always on the brink of overtaking America, evoke easy cynicism. It has so quickly, cruelly, gone. When I inspected the memorial I saw–instead of the stock musclemen of Socialist Realism–a rather incompetent-looking and naive gang of youths. Beyond them, for hundreds of yards, the start of the First Builders Avenue had disintegrated to a track of weed-sown concrete dribbling through scrubland.

For it went through an old concentration camp. In fact the whole city was haunted by these sites. The ‘First Builders' had
barely formed a bridgehead before 100,000 political and criminal prisoners were herded in to build, and were soon to be followed by thousands of Japanese prisoners-of-war. Unmarked mass graves still scatter the city, with Japanese memorials to their dead. Komsomolsk's older inhabitants say their home town was not built by Komsomols at all, but by convict labour.

And now the city was emptying, its rationale faded. Its secretive distance from any industrial centre turned it illogical. Some of its arms factories were closing down, or exporting their submarines to India, or flying-boats to China, or converting to the manufacture of gliders, trawlers and yachts. All the same, I was not sure if I was permitted here. Nothing near Komsomolsk was on my visa. But the women managing my hotel, immured in one of the blocks built by Japanese prisoners, explored my passport in fascination, and did not register me. I settled in a room with a splintered door-lock, a communal basin and some stained blankets. But the stout radiators blazed with heat, and for three nights I slept in the silence of the deepening snow outside.

During the day I wandered the city in the anonymity of falling whiteness, hoping for something to happen. A waning populace of rough-faced men and boisterous women in vinyl coats and bobble hats made muffled processions over the pavements. I was back in Brezhnev's Russia. Every cafe I tried was closed or in desultory repair. The clerks, the shop-assistants, the restaurant waitresses seemed trapped in Soviet cliche: unsmiling, gross, bawling, dyed blonde or ginger. My arrival was always a hostile intrusion. Shops existed for those who worked in them: customers chanced along afterwards, like bad luck.

On my city map the once-secret industrial suburbs were whited out. I walked down alleys whose dinosaur factories were sloughing tiles and glass. Some had been abandoned in dereliction, their overhead railcars ground to a blackened sleep, their compounds splashed with murals glorifying work or a long-past anniversary. But most still panted smoke and steam, and the air stank of lead and coal tar. I stopped in the pouring snow to reexamine my airbrushed map. In this congested power-house it
showed only a furniture factory and a centre for ‘experimental mechanics'.

 

Boris understood secrecy. For years it had been his business. He lived with his wife in a flat near the city centre, from which he visited its prison three times a week to hold services. He was a chaplain in the resurgent Baptist Church, and he accepted me as the emissary of a Baptist penfriend in England, whom he had never met.

‘You might imagine that prison hopeless,' he said. ‘Beyond God.'

‘I did.' By chance I had prowled round it that morning: a lavatory-brick hulk, half of whose 1,200 occupants, I was told, were crowded in underground cells.

‘Many of its inmates have been criminals for years. Some reoffend and return after a few weeks of freedom, others are quite
happy
in prison–just as if it was here!' He opened his arms on his narrow sitting-room, cleaned by his absent wife; it was intimate with stained furniture, books, cassettes. I had brought him inhalers from England for his asthmatic daughter, and he left them standing on the table between us like symbols of trust. ‘But most prisoners are just ordinary fellows, and they come to me one here, one there, for counselling. I exploit the loudspeaker system to relay prayers and songs which get to every cell, every room.'

But his evangelism was sober, grounded. At fifty-seven, he did not hope easily. I found him reassuring. The droop of his moustaches to a trimly barbered beard turned him faintly lugubrious, and he spoke in one of those resonant, half-swallowed voices which fill the bass roles in Russian opera and the Orthodox Church. But the songs he relayed over the prison tannoy came from Baptist America. His favourite cassette was titled ‘He's Still in Business', sung by a wholesome couple from the Midwest.

Boris was guiding inmates through Bible courses too, coping with a mound of exam papers. I leafed through them. They were question-and-answer tests from ‘The Source of Light School' in America. I read: ‘What is the greatest sin which a person can commit? Choose between the following: a) Murder b) Disbelief
in Jesus c) Adultery.' The ex-robber Viktor had duly ticked b) and got full marks. Now he had triumphantly completed the ‘New Life in Christ Course One'.

I tried to imagine what this might mean to a man festering in Komsomolsk prison: the sense of some other authority, some graspable goal.

‘A few prisoners convert to it deeply,' Boris said. ‘They've even converted their guards. With others, it's hard to know. A while ago I had to counsel a young murderer. He'd gunned down seven men, I don't know why. He was sentenced to death. I told him of the two thieves crucified on either side of Jesus: the one repentant, the other not. And he said he understood. Soon after, he was taken away and shot.' His melancholy had deepened. He had a face of cautious, conditional kindness. I liked him.

‘I thought there was no death penalty in Russia,' I said.

‘It ended that year.' He looked grim. ‘Perhaps he was the last.' Then he handed me the snapshot of a bearded young man with ambivalent eyes, standing between Boris and another pastor. ‘But here's a success story! I converted this one in labour camp. The moment he left he came straight to the church!'

I asked: ‘What had he done?'

‘I can't tell you. When we are converted, the past is wiped clean.' His hand swept the air with a sombre authority. ‘He has become a new man in Christ. Whatever he did is best forgotten. It is no longer he who did it.'

I looked down at the photograph, touched by doubts. Christ had not wiped away his look of hunted cunning. I said: ‘So you visit labour camps too?' The words still carried a muffled shock. I knew the camps still existed, but their last political prisoners had left in 1992, after the fall of Gorbachev. Now they were peopled only by reputed criminals; but the image of virtual death-camps lingered in me.

‘I've visited them all over our Far East,' Boris said. ‘There are three in this area alone. They still house convicts in barracks–a hundred to a room sometimes, but sometimes forty or six or one, it depends. Prisoners have lavatories now, and the barracks are made of brick. But their bedding and clothes are still atrocious.'

I thought of the lethal corvees of the Gulag, men worn to bones. ‘What about work?'

‘There isn't any. They should be working in factories, but everything's closed down in the last five years. The convicts just sleep and eat–and the food's less and worse than five years ago, and they fight. It would be better if they were working. It would be more dignified. And you find boys as young as fourteen quartered with the rest, just sleeping on the opposite side of the barracks. So you can imagine….'

I began: ‘But you've gained entry to these camps….'

‘Well, I haven't always been a chaplain. How could I? I followed my father into the army.' He went to a cupboard and pulled out his military uniform. I watched him without surprise. Half the Siberians seemed to keep their Soviet identity closeted away like this, as if they might need it again. But Boris's tunic was formidable: a dark turquoise dress-uniform, tiered and spattered with medals. On the right breast I saw two decorations hanging separately and I noticed, with only a slight tremor–as if something already known had slid into place–the embossed sword-and-shield of the KGB.

‘Yes,' he said. ‘I worked for them.' He was smiling. ‘I worked for seven years in counter-intelligence, then eleven years in camp administration for the Interior Ministry.' He turned abruptly and hung the jacket in its cupboard again. I stared at his back, his trim head, wondering what they had done. But he believed in the power of conversion, of course. He must have undergone it.
‘Whatever he did is best forgotten. It is no longer he who did it.'

When he turned round he was still smiling, at ease. The KGB did not mean to him what it stirred in me. He said: ‘My duty was principally to cleanse the army of spies–like Americans and British.' He touched my forearm. ‘But we never found one!' He was looking at me with an expression of quaint caring. He had already marvelled that I had travelled so far unscathed. I must have reached him through the grace of God, he said. He was used to recognising a higher bureaucracy. He repeated: ‘No, we never caught one,' with a wondering relief, focusing me, imagining.