In Siberia (4 page)

The truck-driver had known the place before, and swore that a relative of Rasputin survived here. But the only people in sight were some old women seated strategically on benches at street crossroads. At the mention of a man resembling Rasputin they waved us in varying directions, until we arrived outside a ramshackle house with closed shutters, and a voice inside cried out: ‘Viktor!'

Perhaps he had been warned of our approach, because he was dressed for the part. As he loped towards us across his vegetable patch, even the truck-driver was taken aback. All the photographs of Rasputin that I had seen sprang to shocking life in his face. He was like a ghastly distillation. He wore the belted peasant smock of an earlier time, and the loose-fitting boots, and his black beard splayed down untrimmed. It was a conscious act of theatre. Greasy locks of hair dangled round his shoulders and divided across his forehead in two bands; and enshrined in this black halo, the remembered face with its heavy nose and pale eyes watched us with a kind of naive cunning.

The truck-driver said: ‘Are you his grandson then?'

‘There aren't any relatives left, officially. But my great-grandmother was Rasputin's maid. She helped in the house.' His voice
was melodious and cynical. ‘I think she sinned with him.' He touched his hair and beard. Rasputin's sin had become his glory. ‘That is why I look like this.'

He took my arm with the same confusing intimacy reported of his notional great-grandfather, and asked what he could do for me. I answered automatically: ‘I need a room for the night.' Mentally I divested Viktor's face of its props–the beard, the contrived slicks of hair–and still, I was sure, an extraordinary likeness remained. He emanated the dissoluteness and guile of his idol too, and perhaps cultivated them, together with the same intermittent tenderness. But there was no authority in him.

The villagers seemed to shun him. The truck-driver went away. Viktor was living with his sister and brother-in-law, because his own house was a wreck. When he asked them to accommodate me for the night, I glimpsed through the slats of the fence an angry-faced peasant kneeling waist-deep among his cabbages, and a bitter-looking wife, and soon above Viktor's pleas, suddenly whining, a harsh voice told him to fuck off.

He returned smiling, and petitioned three old women seated in the softening sunlight. I stood beside him as if I were being auctioned. They were the babushkas of cliche: matriarchs with a stout, vegetable calm, in flowery skirts and felt slippers. They looked me over with misgiving. One of them turned a creaseless, rather childlike face to mine, and said: ‘I'm afraid of men!' But the others burst out laughing, and she took me in.

But Viktor would not let me go yet. He conducted me about his village, bathing in the prestige of a foreigner. The dirt road swept 20 yards wide beneath our feet–a great rutted void, too big for the scattering of cottages. Mud streets drifted in and out of it, and the Tura river snaked through meadows beyond. A few farmers had appeared in the quiet evening, or were working their vegetable patches. They looked desperately poor: ill-nourished men with grizzled heads, faces louche and exhausted, and heavy, enduring women. They acknowledged Viktor reluctantly or not at all. In his half-mocking theft of Rasputin's identity, he seemed to occupy the timeless role of the village
yurodivy
, who played with God and simulated foolishness. He made people uneasy. In
Rasputin's day the settlement had been busier than now, alive with summer water-traffic, and prosperous.

‘It was full of Rasputins then,' said Viktor. ‘Thirty-three families. But at the start of collectivisation in 1929 they disappeared–they were rich, you see, kulaks–so they were taken off in convoys to exile, or they died. There are still Rasputin families to the north somewhere…but the real relatives, they're gone.' From time to time he would clasp my arm and stop, his breath warm and close over my face. His silky smile said:
Only I am left
. ‘And you see that mound? That's where the church was, the tallest building here. They destroyed it after the war. The masonry was so strong it took them over three months. That's where Rasputin wanted to sing.' His voice fell to a soft, transfigured bass:

But the clergy hated him.'

I asked: ‘Is there anyone left who remembers him?'

‘There was an old woman who used to cut the grass in his garden, but she died last year. She always said he was kind. And that's the memory he's left here. Whenever he came back from St Petersburg there was a village holiday. He usually came in the spring, when the corn was being sown, and in the autumn for the harvest.' Viktor's voice liquefied as he drifted closer to daydream. ‘He gave out presents–sweets for the children, and little cakes, and promissory notes for people to buy things in the store. They say he gave away everything….'

So he had left behind a memory of the emigrant made good, visiting to scatter benevolence and receive applause, and perhaps to feel at peace. Yet he belonged nowhere. He had arrived in St Petersburg as an itinerant holy man, at a court susceptible to rural mysticism and the occult, and because some hypnotic authority in him calmed (it seemed) the internal bleeding of the Czar's haemophiliac son, he gained an ascendancy over the imperial couple which barely slackened until his murder in 1916.

Who was he? He slips away as you observe him. He enacts the
old Russian intimacy between holiness and sin. He was a lecher and drunkard, in love with power, in love with self. He boasted that he had bedded the empress. Transgression was the path to God. He could barely write, but he preached with peasant force. Sincerity, piety–the concepts blur around him, as they did around his putative descendant at my elbow. But his effect on the imperial family was fatal. He exacerbated all that was most insular in them. Their reputations shook and dwindled around him. Rasputin more than anyone, said their family tutor bitterly, was responsible for their end. Even now, nostalgia for a lost imperial utopia can find no focus in the last Czar.

‘That's where his house was. There.' Viktor pointed across the barren road. I had seen photographs, taken long ago, of a handsome two-storey mansion, fronted by a picket fence and set in a high-walled courtyard. Only a log cottage stood there now. ‘Soon after they destroyed the death-house in Yekaterinburg, the Party demolished this one too. They were afraid of it exciting interest. I remember that time well. They were going to break up the roof–a beautiful roof, it was–but the people here got up and protested, so a brigade came with seven tractors and lifted it off whole. They sold it to Kazakhstan for 40,000 roubles. The ruin stood for a long time, then the authorities told our people to take it away. A gang of volunteers got together–fellows who didn't want to lose their Party membership–and they razed it. Somebody built a pigsty out of the remains.'

His tone had slithered into self-pity–or the pretence of it–as if this was his own mansion they had wrecked, his patrimony. He said: ‘But that wasn't quite the end. A few years ago, when we were building a greenhouse in that garden, we opened up an underground passage, lined with beams, down to the river. Rasputin had enemies, and he must have used it to get to his boat unseen. He owned a dacha upriver, with a lake and a bath-house, where he would take
women
.' He rolled the word over his palate. It sounded a sweet corruption. His hand came up and covered his heart in the eerie gesture of Rasputin's hand in photographs. I imagined he did this when he was lying. Perhaps they both did. ‘Rasputin had
hundreds
of them.'

I crossed to the vanished mansion and looked back. A post-house had once stood opposite where horses were changed beneath Rasputin's windows, but this too had gone. In April 1918, on their way to Yekaterinburg and their deaths, the Czar and Czarina had stopped here under guard while their cart's horses were changed, and stood looking up at the house of the dead prophet. The empress recorded in her curt diary that they could see the frightened family watching them through the windows. Rasputin's daughter wrote that the empress was weeping.

We turned down mud streets past other houses. Some had pitched into the earth or were drowned in hopeless gardens; others stood weathered and pretty, their eaves and shutters painted blue and green, and they opened out at last on lush pastures under an empty sky. Already the Tura had wandered away from the village, leaving a reed-filled inlet to feint at the old landing-stage. Across the flats the river's banks lay so low that a steamer was floating across the grass. This August the current looked too sluggish for danger; but it had drowned Rasputin's only brother as he tried in vain to reach him, and swept away his epileptic sister as she washed clothes on its banks. Then, with his widowed and drunken father, Rasputin was alone.

Viktor too was a drunk, of course. With the collapse of the collective farm two years ago, the land had been parcelled out–11 hectares to each worker–and he rented his in exchange for vodka. He lived by selling potatoes. As we trudged back to the village he stopped before another house. ‘That's where I used to live. I was married for five years–and then one day I came back from Tyumen earlier than I'd said, and found her with another man. I actually found them….' He smoothed his hands lasciviously over an aerial bed.

‘And now I'm already a grandfather! I'm forty-six–and Rasputin died at forty-seven!' Suddenly his gaze was a soft question-mark, inviting pity, perhaps a little afraid. For years he had grown older alongside Rasputin; but what would happen when he reached his death? Would he become meaningless? Would he die?

Then he cried out: ‘Have you drunk Rasputin vodka? Rasputin's
death is on the labels. It says he was born in 1869, but he wasn't, he wasn't! He was older, he was born four years before, on 12 January 1865. Wasn't he? Wasn't he?' If Viktor was right, then he had four years longer before the death of his shadow. But he was wrong. There were only a few months left. And every Rasputin vodka bottle he emptied carried on it this haunting deadline.

But the next moment he had turned buoyant and sly again. ‘Anyway, who needs a wife? Not when the women of Tyumen are the prettiest in Russia!'

‘You have a girlfriend there?'

His breath was hot in my ear. ‘Many! I go to Tyumen every week. And do you know why they're so pretty?' His hand came up to knead my arm in sensuous conspiracy. ‘Because after the Revolution all the prostitutes from St Petersburg and Moscow were pushed out to the Urals, then to Tyumen! And these are their descendants. A paradise of them! You can sin all night….'He gazed at me in self-adoration, self-disgust. ‘Many every week…Paradise!'

We had arrived at the door of Anfissa, the old woman who had accepted me for the night. Her cottage was newly painted, her garden immaculate, her lace curtains drawn. As I pushed at her courtyard door, Viktor vanished like a ghost at cockcrow. Only beyond her neatly stacked ramparts of firewood did the garden disintegrate, and cow-parsley pushed against the privy walls.

Anfissa: her face is boxed in on three sides by short grey locks, and on the fourth her chins cascade seamlessly into her neck. When she smiles her mouth is a mass of steel, which lends her a glittering intimacy. She is kind, in her cautious way, and rather lonely. She has trouble with her legs. ‘It's my heart. They swelled up because of my heart, the doctors said.'

She gives me vegetable soup, flecked with scraps of meat of varying ages, and she has baked the light brown bread herself, from local flour. ‘That Viktor,' she says, sitting beside me (but not eating), ‘I thought he'd taken you drinking. Because that's all he does. His brother drinks even more, and his sister, she drinks…. That's the kind of people they are. His parents gave him a house
when they died, and he can't even maintain the fence. Now the place is falling down, and still he does nothing.'

From outside, these log cottages look as comfortless as trappers' shacks; but inside Anfissa's the walls were thickly plastered and papered, and an immured brick stove separated its two rooms, heating both. She drew her water from a pump in the street, and sometimes it was dry. But electric wires multiplied over the walls and ceiling, feeding a television, and an ethereal white cat flitted in and out. Everything was wrapped in paper or secured with string or safe in jars. She seemed to be shoring herself up against the changes rocking everything outside.

‘In the towns half the factories have broken down,' she said, ‘yet the workers somehow find jobs. But here the collective farm is destroyed, and there's nothing. The people who worked for it have left, and the bosses just dismantled it and took everything for themselves. Almost all the cattle have been sold off, so it's hard even to get butter. There's only chaos.'

I asked: ‘Why? Why?' but there was no simple answer.

‘I don't know why. Who knows? We need money for machinery–half the tractors are laid off–and the farm leader stole all the petrol.' She turned her childlike stare on me. It was a look I was to see often: the bewilderment of a people betrayed, whose certainties had turned to mist. ‘In England, if you're a couple, how much land do they give you?…Really?…Then if you've so little land, why are your lives better than ours?' After a while, after my inability to explain, her wonder became a helpless threnody: ‘We used to have fine corn growing here, but now there's nothing. There used to be flax and hemp, but they're gone. It was full of vegetables and fruit before, but now you don't see a thing.' She hitched her skirts from her smooth, blotched legs. ‘If it wasn't for these I could work. Now nobody works. My husband used to get up at four o'clock in summer, and came back after dark.'

‘In Brezhnev's time?'

‘Long ago. He died at forty-seven, I don't know why. He just fell asleep and didn't wake up.'