Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  • • •

  I woke up to a blinding light. Someone was dragging off the bedclothes, pulling up my nightdress. Through a haze of sleep I saw Vera leaning over me in her dressing gown. She was barefoot, her hair loose, furrows between her eyes. It was dark outside. She was feeling me all over, between my legs, under my arms, in my hair. “Don’t worry,” she said.

  She was looking for ticks, she said. In the middle of the night, a tick had bitten her on the neck. I was suddenly awake, heart pounding. Was Vera’s bite encephalitic? Only time would tell. As usual she was blaming herself: “It’s my fault. I’m so careless. I didn’t search myself before going to bed, or you …”

  After that, I lay watching Volodya’s shadowy figure through the cloth that hung over the doorway. He was busying around in the kitchen, tending to Vera. There was nothing I could do to help. He had sucked at the bite and smothered it in sunflower oil as thick as duck fat. She had drunk her urine, which was said to help combat the poison.

  • • •

  We lay in the dark in our adjoining rooms. The minutes passed with excruciating slowness. Soon, the dawn would come, and the paralysis would either set in or not. The town was held in a spell of silence. There was no known antidote to the bite of the encephalitic tick. Now and then Volodya and Vera whispered to one another. As long as Volodya stays in bed, I told myself, she’s all right. By breakfast time we would know.

  I understood the facts by now: this spring the local radio warned people that there were more infected ticks than ever. No one was to go into the forest in the breeding season. More than three hundred people had died this year … three hundred out of what, I found myself wondering. The community, Kuragino, Siberia?

  It was growing light now. The starlings were chattering in their high box. In the room next door, nothing was stirring. Volodya was right to blame me; I had distracted Vera. She was a city woman, and living, just living here, required every bit of her energy and attention. Vera would never have gone near the woods but for me. She came after me, to fetch me back. But I had not been able to resist the beauty of those flowering shrubs, so many familiar from my garden in England. If anything happened to her it would be my fault.

  SINGING CEDARS?

  Next day, Volodya came with Vera to see me off at the station. The tick bite was not malignant. Volodya was so relieved that, once he could see that I really was leaving, he had forgiven me.

  The train from Kuragino back to the lowlands was crowded. In the hard-class carriage, men lay on the high bunks like fallen statues. On the seats below, people sat crushed together in silence, shoulders sagging, faces set in masks of resignation. After the pure mountain air, the fetid air of sweat and dirty hair in the compartment was a shock. The contrast to those handsome people up in the mountain with their pink cheeks, fancy dress, and improbable beliefs was even more of one. Outside the train windows the snow-capped Sayan Mountains danced in and out of sight. Escarpments of crimson rock reared up. The river water hurled itself over the rocks toward the valley below. But none of my companions so much as glanced out of the window.

  Everyone in the carriage was eating. In contrast to Vissarion’s people, they were all too fat. They ate ritualistically, at every opportunity. They ate in order to forget what they had just been doing and in order not to think what they were about to do. The offer of food was a ritual of seduction whose origin was lost, overtaken by the urgent need for solace. These days they ate wherever they were, on planes, on buses, on the streets. At bus stops they ate sweets. Walking down the streets they ate bananas. Once they reached the sanctuary of a bench they whipped out a little cutlet, a sausage, or a boiled egg, wrapped up and brought from home. And through long days that lurched between being too hot and too cold for comfort, they heaved their heavy white bodies, vanity overtaken by a more deeply rooted yearning.

  In the corridor, a group of young girls in platform heels were playing pop songs on a tape recorder. I thought about the new songs by Kamburova which I brought Vera. I knew how much the singer’s music meant to her. But she had tucked the tapes out of sight and not mentioned them again. At first I assumed that Vissarion disapproved of such music. Then I blamed Volodya’s touchiness. But perhaps there was another explanation.

  Last night Vera told me how hard she had found it to adjust to her new life. “But the longer I spend here, the crazier life in the city seems to me—all those people buying labor-saving devices so that they can rush to work, sit out their time there, and rush back home exhausted to their families. What’s it all for? Here the rhythm’s different.”

  • • •

  Watching Vera kneading dough, her forearms covered in flour, I understood why she no longer needed Kamburova’s music. Beautiful though they were, the songs were all about loss and grief, and she was happy now.

  Her days were busy with the very chores she used to hate so much. They were no longer a distraction, but a discipline. That was the secret at the heart of all contemplative religions. Did it matter what Vissarion called himself if he brought about that kind of change in people’s lives?

  • • •

  Back in Novosibirsk, I climbed the dark staircase to Natasha and Igor’s flat uncertainly. I was not confident of my reception. I regretted having taken such a high-handed tone with Natasha, my Orestes, in flight from her furies.

  I need not have worried. The cat had not yet given birth. But apart from that, it might have been a year, not a week, since I had seen Natasha. Her broad features had cleared. Her snub-nosed, high-cheekboned face looked vivacious, younger. She brushed aside my apologies. “Nonsense—I’m glad you were so rude. It’s just what I needed.” She was still smoking. But she had taken more drastic action. She had tracked down a therapist whom she had known since she was young. “He was a star, quite different from these quacks with their miracle cures. He was dedicated, a sort of holy man. I found him terribly aged. He was only nine years older than me, but his beard and hair had gone gray. He’d used himself up helping his patients.

  “Amazingly, he even remembered me. He said I’d have to let go of it all. He tried hypnosis and it all came pouring out. I could see it all so clearly. I could see you, too—you were everywhere. You were right when you accused me of being afraid. I’ve been running away. And suddenly I can face it. I see why you wouldn’t tell me what the point of living was. You were right. I’ve kept thinking about the word for ‘fate’—sud’ba. I used to think it meant what’s been doled out to you—lifeline, stars, and all that. But that’s wrong. What it means, quite literally, is God’s judgment.”

  Natasha had actually been quite ill, Igor confirmed. “And while I was in bed I had this frightful dream,” Natasha said. “I was surrounded by bears with great black auras. They were like the bears in the fairy tales. They had people inside them. But there was nothing sweet about them.”

  After her first session with the doctor, she tried to persuade Igor to visit him. He refused. He, too, she told me now, was haunted by the ghost of a mother. His had also been a raging beauty, cold as sin. Behind her back everyone had called her “Mme SS.” She refused to divorce Igor’s father, who loved another woman. His father escaped by committing suicide. Instead, Natasha dragged a young friend of theirs to the doctor. “He’s another victim of the mothers. His is psychotic—she’s sucking the life out of him. He’s handsome, talented, and decent. But she won’t even let him go out with a girl!” The doctor agreed. “He said the woman should be put away and never let out. They should all have been locked up, the mothers—Igor’s, mine and that lovely boy’s. The deadly mothers. The boy’s life’ll improve. But can he ever be normal? Can Igor and I? That’s the question.”

  Next day, I traveled west again, leaving Natasha, that talented, dynamic woman who had spent years destroying herself. I was hopeful. For the first time all those different Natashas—the golden one, the dark star, and the pathetic little girl—had a chance of coming together. With the help of her holy man she might even be able to confro
nt her past.

  Natasha had other news for me, too. Before leaving for Kuragino, I told her about our expedition to the Old Believer village, and about the music I heard in the forest. She was visibly struck by what I said. It reminded her of something, she said. While I was away, she had remembered what it was. She had read an interview in the local paper with some old woman called Anastasia who lived on her own for years in the Siberian forest. Every now and then she would hear the Siberian cedars “singing” to each other. The music was her delight, her reason for living in the forest. What’s more, “She said that only some people could hear it!”

  That was all Natasha could remember. She did not even know what paper the article was in. But what she told me was enough. So I really had heard the cedars singing.

  THE TWELVE-STEP CORE

  On my way back from Siberia I passed by Saratov to visit my friends. Last time I saw Anna she was in an exalted state, acting the passionara. Despairing of democracy, she was bent on exposing the corruption of Saratov’s deputy mayor, whatever the danger to herself. Now that I knew more about the Eurasians whose thinking inspired her I had come to share Misha and Tatiana’s concerns.

  Every time I arrived in Saratov, my heart sank. The old city center was looking more dilapidated. Rubbish overflowed the bins, the streets were all holes, and the appearance of the odd new shop mocked the surrounding shabbiness. Most depressing was the contrast between the shabby, sad-faced pedestrians and the ebullience of the men and women I met in Vissarion country.

  For all this, my friends were surprisingly buoyant. Tatiana had just given birth to a baby daughter, whom they christened Nadezhda, which means hope. The family was living in Saratov now—and the rift with Anna was a thing of the past. Indeed, Misha and Anna were closer than ever.

  By way of celebrating my arrival Misha took Anna and me, his daughter Polina and her friend out of town for a picnic by the Volga. There was a new authority about Misha. Business was booming. Having taken the risk of going into manufacturing before inflation was low enough to make it profitable, the gamble had paid off. His virgin sunflower oil cost twice as much as anyone else’s, but it was good. It tasted of sun and nuts and people were prepared to pay. With sixty people on his books, Misha was now Marx’s biggest employer. Although he had started without capital, he had a head start on his competitors.

  Anna had been through a tough time. Her newspaper, Saratov, was in serious financial trouble. She was put on reduced hours and forced to take work wherever she could find it, collecting material for opinion polls. Her outgoings were minimal, since she lived a monastic life in her hostel. But she admitted that sometimes she was barely able to keep herself fed. That period was clearly over now, though what caused the change I did not yet know. I was curious. But I knew Anna better than to ask. She would tell me what she wanted to, in her own good time.

  At a casual glance, she looked little changed: she still wore her hair in a tonsure which framed her grave brown eyes with their blue-tinged whites. She still walked as though facing into her own private gale, head down, striding. But the force field of tension around her had died down. It was only occasionally now that I felt her alarm, flapping like the wings of a wild bird. She was much better dressed, too. Indeed, all in all, she was looking rather handsome.

  On our way to the Volga we drove through the outskirts of Marx, through the area they called New Thieftown. Since my last visit brand-new buildings had sprouted up. They were fantastical in design, towered, turreted, indiscriminately arrayed with arches, pillars, dormers, mansard roofs, windows French, oriole, and gothic. “Each time the builders start work on a new building we try and find out who they belong to,” Anna commented. “But they put the builders under oath to say nothing—and the paperwork always credits ownership to some Ivanov, or pensioner aunt.”

  Misha finally stopped the car in a meadow studded with tiny white and yellow flowers. The floodwaters of the Volga had just died down. The mass of inlets which fissured the landscape on this low eastern bank were still full of water. On a finger of dry land between two inlets, two men were harpooning their quarry with long-handled forks as the fish spread their eggs in the shallows.

  It was the first picnic of the year. The sun was shining. The branches of the trees were still bare, but even before the buds burst, an aura of green hung around them. Although the air was cool Anna stripped off down to her lime-green bikini and offered her long pale shanks to the sun. We all wandered around, collecting driftwood for the bonfire. Above our heads, a cloud of gnats filled the air with a ringing tone, and from the nearby willows a chorus of frogs were singing in contralto bursts. Such moments of beauty were rare in European Russia, where the most beautiful places had been despoiled by man’s messy pursuit of an unrealizable idea.

  As we hauled our wood back to the fire I ventured to ask Anna how her crusade against corruption was going. “I can’t bear it when journalists play at false heroics,” she growled, slamming the door on further questions. “There are risks in journalism, of course, but you have to be realistic.” Realistic? Anna? She had taken the job of law correspondent at the newspaper. I understood that she started to thrive from that moment on. Indeed, last year she was voted one of the twenty best journalists in Russia by the Writers’ Union. “I’m not even a member!” she said crossly, and I understood that she was just trying not to sound too proud.

  That was not all. Izvestia asked her to become their full-time correspondent in the city. She refused: she was quite happy where she was, thank you. What a sweet moment that must have been, considering how some years ago the paper had asked her up to Moscow for a trial, then failed to offer her a job. Now, in her capacity as law correspondent she earned more than any other journalist on the staff. Finally, most important for her, her poems were being recognized: the city’s literary journal, Volga, was publishing them regularly.

  At this point, I embarrassed Anna by bursting into tears. I felt so proud. It was paying off, the long, slow bet I had placed on these intelligent, decent young provincial Russians. The way their lives were progressing bore out my growing conviction about the country and its postcommunist time of troubles. Despite the chaos—indeed because of it—it was proving an enormously creative time on the level of individual lives. While the country’s leaders flailed around, behaving reprehensibly, on the level of ordinary people something important was beginning to happen, something on which Russia’s future depended. Anna and Misha did not count as remotely ordinary—they were too smart. But in one sense they were. For they both started with no advantage but native wits and education. Where they led, others could follow. Given time, people who did not have their natural advantages would also start recovering from their addiction to state control. They would lose that terrible obedience to the state which was Russia’s curse. The frightened little person who sits inside every Russian was starting to shrink. Russia’s people had started their twelve-step cure. It was early days yet, the trees were still bare, but the aura of green was there.

  Later on, at Anna’s office I would leaf through her recent articles, observing the common thread now running through her work. She was keeping up a sustained attack on the popular sentimentality for “the good old days” which had started to settle in. She was educating people about themselves and their past. Here she was interviewing an old man who was a prosecutor during the Khrushchev years. He was haunted by the memory of sending a man to the camps for ten years for complaining about bread rationing: “I knew the worker was right. But I kept my protest to myself …” Nothing had happened to change Anna’s view that fascism was creeping in. But rather than offering herself as a despairing sacrifice she was working to ensure that the Russian people would be better able to resist it.

  Recently, when a gang in Saratov gunned down eleven young rival gangsters with submachine guns, the shock waves reverberated right around Russia. The national press blamed capitalism, and demonized the thugs, assuming that they belonged to a criminal underclass. But Anna
tracked down their parents. She found that these “demons” were children of the old Soviet proletariat, communism’s favored class. They still lived at home; washed their hands before meals, and gave their mothers flowers on Mothers Day. She wanted her readers to understand what had happened to these young people. When the economy collapsed, their sudden descent from privilege into poverty was more than they could cope with. They responded by helping themselves to what they were brought up to think was theirs by right.

  I went out and bought a good bottle of wine: I wanted to celebrate Anna. In the old days, we had both been culpably wishful. But she was now using her journalism to encourage her readers to acquire the basic tools needed if that missing civic space were going to be built in Russia. It was going to take time, a long time. But if politics were going to change here, ordinary people were going to need to develop a new take on individuality, one which vastly increased their sense of the rights and responsibilities due to the individual.

  Now, as we sat on the flower-studded water meadows, something began to stir far away in the steppe. Minutes later, the wind was on us, gusting through the trees. The poplars were dancing and the tops of the willows and birches swaying. But here on the ground, the air was quite still. Then, as suddenly as it had come, the wind moved on and a gust of rain swept in, sending us diving for shelter.

  The rain stopped as abruptly as it started, and we gathered around the bonfire to drink beer and eat salt fish. On the bonfire, Misha was cooking long kebabs which we threaded onto stripped green branches. His boyish face had filled out and he looked confident and, for a moment, almost relaxed. When we first met, there was little to distinguish him from all the other young men who were trading in anything they could lay their hands on. I did not yet understand what it was in the circumstances of his life, or parentage, that stiffened him for success. His rarest quality, it seemed to me, was his faith in the future. Fortune favors those who can imagine a future when others cannot.