In Siberia (8 page)

We reached a place where a silver pipe, propped on an old lorry
tyre, was spilling warm water into a pool. A blond deacon like a Nordic Christ planted the processional cross on the far side, and the archbishop, the priests, acolytes and pilgrims, the babushkas with their bags and bottles, a few war veterans and one mesmerised foreigner formed a wavering crescent round the water's rim.

The unkempt celebrant, clutching a jewelled cross, was ordered to wade in. From time to time he glanced up pathetically at Feodosy, who gave no signal for him to stop. Deeper and deeper he went, while his vestments fanned out over the surface, their mauve silk waterlogged to indigo, until he was spread below us like an outlandish bird over the pool. At last Feodosy lifted his finger. The priest floundered, gaped up at us–or at the sky–in momentary despair, recovered his balance and went motionless. Then, with a ghostly frown, he traced a trembling cross beneath the water.

A deep, collective sigh seemed to escape the pilgrims. Again the cavalcade unfurled around the pool, while the archbishop, grasping a silver chalice, sprinkled the surface with its own water, and the wobbly cross led the way back towards the noise of the bulldozers.

But the babushkas stayed put. As the procession glimmered and died through the darkness of the trees, and the archbishop went safely out of sight, a new excitement brewed up. They began to peel off their thick stockings and fling away their shoes. They were all ready. They tugged empty bottles labelled Fanta or Coca-Cola from their bags. Then they clambered and slid down the muddy banks and waded into the newly blessed water. At first they only scooped it from the shallows. It was mineral water, muddied and warm. They drank in deep gulps from their cupped hands, and winched themselves back to stow the bottles on shore.

Then it all went to their heads. Six or seven old women flung off first their cardigans, then their kerchiefs and skirts, until at last, stripped down to flowery underpants and bras, they made headlong for the waters. All inhibition was lost. Their massive legs, welted in varicose veins, carried them juddering down the banks. Their thighs tapered to small, rather delicate feet. Little gold crosses were lost between their breasts. They plunged moun
tainously in. I stood above them in astonishment, wondering if I was meant to be here. But they were shouting and jubilant. They cradled the water in their hands and dashed it over their faces. Holiness had turned liquid, palpable. You could drink it, drown in it, bring it home like flowers for the sick.

Two of the boldest women–cheery, barrel-chested ancients–made for the gushing silver pipe and thrust their heads under it. They sloshed its torrent exultantly over one another, then submerged in it and drank it wholesale. They shouted at their friends still on land, until one or two even of the young girls lifted their skirts and edged in. Bottle after bottle was filled and lugged to shore. But it was the young, not the old, who hesitated. The old were in high spirits. One of them shouted at me to join them, but I was caught between laughter and tears. These were women who had survived all the Stalin years, the deprivation, the institutional suffering, into a life of widowhood and breadline pensions, and their exuberance struck me dumb. Perhaps in this sacred and chaotic water-hole the world seemed finally to make sense to them, and all this aching, weary flesh at last found absolution.

The procession, meanwhile, had reached the open fields where the bulldozers worked. All the way to the future cathedral, which would stand in the compound's heart, the tarred pipes lay ready alongside their trenches, and the channel was blessed. I caught up with the remaining pilgrims clustered in the big meadows, beside the ghost-cathedral. Here Feodosy, above the lonely swing of a censer, blessed the site ‘where nameless thousands had laboured and died', and we stared across fields lacquered in blue and white flowers while the incense vanished over them. Sometimes I wondered if the past were being laid too easily to sleep, forgotten. But the monastery would countermand this, said the shy priest. In future years people would ask: Why is it here? and recognise its building both as a cleansing and a memorial. This was being done for the dead.

The procession moved on. I fell behind with a war veteran hobbling on a stick, and found myself wondering aloud again: why, why had this faith resurrected out of nothing, as if a guillotined head had been stuck back on its body? Some vital artery had
preserved it. And as I watched the pilgrims filtering back towards us from the pool, I thought: it was the women. ‘Yes,' the soldierly old man answered. ‘For me it was my mother. We lived in a remote region near Voronezh–not in a town at all, you understand, just a country village. No church for hundreds of miles. My mother was illiterate, but she remembered all the prayers from the old days, and taught me them.'

I tried to imagine his old face young, and found a puckish boy there. A dust of hair was still brown over his scalp. He said: ‘And in the war, when I was on the front, my mother prayed for me and I for her, secretly. She gave me one of these'–he pulled a miniature icon from his wallet. ‘Marshal Zhukov kept one in his pocket all through the war–and so did other generals. And nobody knew it.'

He paused from the pain in his foot. Neither his icon nor his mother's prayers had saved him from a German sniper. The bullet had opened up a 10-inch wound, and now he had this trouble walking. ‘We didn't have bullets like that in Russia, it was a type of shrapnel. When it hit me, it exploded and shattered the leg bones. Now I try to walk like this…or this…but nothing works.' He said: ‘God must have been looking away.'

When we arrived back at the chapel we found a long table in the shade, laden with salads and jams. The babushkas had returned. Their hands were ready beside their soup plates in two ranks of sun-cracked knuckles and broken nails. The archbishop, presiding at the head, commanded me to sit beside him–‘We have a guest from England!' he boomed. ‘We must make him welcome!'–and I looked down an avenue of nodding heads, which turned to gaze at me as one, and murmured: ‘England…England….' Their cheeks bunched into smiles, and faltering lines of teeth parted in welcome.

Feodosy pounded the table with a bottle. ‘This is for you!' he said. ‘It's our monastery water! It cures everything!' He read off the label. ‘Chronic colitis and enterocolitis! Liver ailments! All gastric problems! Cystitis! Non-cancerous stomach ulcers! Duodenal ulcers…'

The babushkas crossed themselves and commended me to God.
They looked deeply respectable. Nobody would have guessed that half an hour before they had been ducking one another half-naked in a water-hole. Yet under the benches their bags bulged with bottles of holy water and they were sitting becalmed, almost smug, in the warmth of their success.

Around me at the table's head the priests had turned pallid in the desanctifying light. Stripped to simple soutanes, they fingered their cutlery nervously around the archbishop. On his far side the celebrant appeared to be defensively asleep. His beard, I noticed, was fringed with white but auburn at the roots, as if it had turned white after some shock and was getting over it now. Only Feodosy survived proximity, and still looked formidable. His black eyes and aquiline nose broke imperiously through the gush of grey hair and beard which swamped his pectoral crosses and lapped at his nape. He hammered out commands at the nuns who had appeared from nowhere to serve us, or shouted down the table. ‘Brothers and sisters! Pass the mineral water round!…Sisters, bring on the
kasha
.' The vegetable soup was gone in a trice, and soon he was ramming the rice into his mouth with giant wedges of bread. ‘And no water! Sisters…' I wondered if he had been promoted for his looks. A burst of jet-black eyebrows lent him the glamour of a converted Mephistopheles. Nobody dared ask him questions. He addressed me in explosions of German which I could rarely understand. ‘The man who found the first mass grave here–this was the hand of God–it was the local Party Secretary! And now he's become a priest, yes! He's chaplain to a Cossack regiment in Omsk. Sisters! Where is the bread?…'

He ladled a dollop of strawberry jam on to my bowl of rice. It was like being back at school. ‘And in the spring we'll start the building of the cathedral, yes, God is in this place of tragedy!' He gestured out to the fields. ‘There are dead out there.' He turned sombre. ‘And everywhere. The monastery will gather information on them, and the monks will pray for their souls.'

‘And what will you do with so much space?'

‘Do?' he bellowed. ‘We'll plant it with roses! Nothing but roses!' The enamel crosses trembled on his paunch. ‘An ocean of roses!'

All down the table the faces broke into smiles again, and stray wisps of hair shivered free of their headscarves. As the meal broke up, one of the women tapped my arm and held out a thin blue sash stamped with prayers. ‘This is for you,' she said, ‘to wear on your train.' Then she committed me to God, and went back among her friends.

I spread the sash in my hands and read: ‘He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways. They shall bear thee up in their hands….'

Yes, I thought, I would wear it as a belt. I must have grown thinner, because my trousers were loose. So I knotted it round my waist.

A light intoxication, something welcome and unexpected (for we had drunk only water) descended on me out of the half-healed land. A priest was tolling a carillon of bells on a makeshift scaffold near the chapel, but softly (perhaps he was practising) as if to lay to rest the spirits, and the pilgrims, by twos and threes, were returning to the coach. I climbed in among them. For a moment I wanted to believe that everything was as they believed. I was thankful for their stubborn needs and passions. I sat squashed between two babushkas (there was a shortage of seats) and they began to sing. ‘Sing! Sing!' they cried. I hitched up my sash: ‘He shall cover thee with his feathers,' it went on, ‘and under his wings shalt thou trust….' Yes, I thought, everything will get better. We will abrogate reason and love one another. Perhaps monastic water will turn us near-immortal. The past will forgive us, and the earth will bear roses….

 

A land of interlaced earth and water, mutable, near-colourless–the sway of fescue grass above the swamps, the wrung-out platinum of winter wheat–spread out from the train window to a bleached sky. Half-way to Novosibirsk, the Baraba steppe was once a place of exiles and Tartar nomads, crossed by a string of Cossack forts. Now wild geese and coots flew from the marshes over a glint of lakes fringed by salinated soil. Here and there the
old collectives spread long white barns, but they looked uninhabited. The villages, too, were empty. Distance resolved them into the hamlets of Russian fairy-tale, where the witch Baba Yaga might appear, or a formation of swan-princesses fly in.

In four hundred miles we stopped only three times. I stared out to a faint, light horizon where the forest made charcoal lines. Occasionally a horseman watched his cattle, or a field of rapeseed broke into buttery flower. More often, for mile after mile, the late summer haze turned this into looking-glass country. Its water-smeared earth wobbled against the sky. All matter looked temporary and dissoluble, all liquid so silted that it was half-way to being earth. Yet a farmer beside me said that the summer rains had been too few, and I noticed how low the rivers dawdled in their banks, and how the shrubs were already taking on the burnish of autumn.

We were following the line eastward of the Trakt post road, the precursor of the Trans-Siberian, which by the 1760s stretched from the Urals to the Pacific. In those days the bone-crunching journey–by horse-cart or sleigh–might take a year. When Chekhov embarked on his long tarantas ride towards Sakhalin, coughing up blood and sinking deep into depression, it was raining day and night, the rivers flooded, the ferries groping back and forth in howling wind, and ice-floes on the move. Now, as we rumbled towards Novosibirsk, the largest city in Siberia, trains passed us every three minutes on the busiest freight line in the world, bringing coal from the Kuzbas basin to the smelting furnaces of the Urals.

 

You disembark at Siberia's biggest station, then taxi into the third most spacious city in Russia. Space is the sterile luxury of Novosibirsk. In summer it hangs in vacant stillness over the flattened boulevards. In winter it starts to move, and howls between the islanded buildings and across the squares. The city is a claustrophobe's dream. Its roads sweep empty between miles of apartment-blocks and Stalinist hulks moaning with prefabricated pilasters and cornices. As for the people, there are one and a half million of them, but they seem lost in space. They trickle along
the pavements to work. You become one of them, reduced. The traffic, too, seems sparse and far away, meandering over a delta of stone and tarmac.

Longing for intimacy, you avoid the 888-room Hotel Novosibirsk. But instead you find yourself in the void of Lenin Square, where the largest opera house in Russia, bigger even than the Bolshoi, crouches like a square-headed tortoise under a dome of silver scales. To reach it you have to sprint 200 yards across traffic-sprinkled space. Then you are turned away. It is closed in August.

So you stand, a little ashamed of your indifference–for this, after all, is Siberia's industrial giant, its centre of heavy metallurgy and machine-tool manufacture, of international trade conferences and joint ventures–you stand on a traffic island christened by a gold-domed chapel: because here, it has been calculated, lies the geographical centre of Russia. You wait, as visitors wait in Times Square or Piccadilly Circus, expecting something to happen. But nothing does, of course. And you are alone. The streets reel away on either side. From the granite steps of the chapel you gaze miles down the main street at the shadow of a bridge over the Ob river, to where on the far bank glimmers a suburb of smokestacks and flat-blocks built in Khrushchev's time, now misted in smog. Here the Ob, the fourth longest river in the world, moves imperceptibly towards the Arctic–dropping only two inches a mile–and downstream will fill with industrial waste and toxic oil, becoming so polluted that in winter it sometimes fails to freeze.