Beside me on the window sill, Anna’s hamster, Anfissa, was whirling around on the wheel in her cage. With Anfissa and her black cat, Lucy, Anna was tender and intimate. As a prominent journalist, her public manner was confident now. But without that professional armor, she still found intimacy hard.
How painful that break with Father Michael and the nuns must have been, I reflected. Her reason was almost the same as that which precipitated the schism in Christianity in 1054. The Western Church proposed a slight change to the Creed. They wanted it to say that the Holy Spirit proceeded not just from the Father but from the Son, too. The traditionalists of the Eastern Church objected that the Latins were trying to make the Trinity too comprehensible, too rational: the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Ghost was a mystery, and so it should remain. Ten centuries later, Western Europeans like me were still itching to understand, to bring reason into it, to keep changing things. At the start of my travels, Anna and I both hoped naively that the fall of communism would change something in Russia. In retrospect, of course, liberal democracy never stood a chance.
The night before, the heat wave that gripped Saratov broke. Now, even wearing all my summer clothes at once, I was still cold. I paced up and down the flat, trying to keep warm. Once again Anna had left her diary out on the table. This time I did not even hesitate.
“This morning when I woke up I watched the light come up and saw what it was that stopped us living in the light. But now I feel ill and tired. Very tired. My nerves are shot. I can’t just comfort myself by saying, ‘You mustn’t. Going through all that again is meaningless.’ I’m tired and I long to go back to the church which has got so many warm associations for me.” She must mean the community of nuns in Saratov’s Catholic church.
“I’ve got to go on, make good my choice, embrace the cross. Though I find myself thinking: I’m too vulnerable psychologically, there are so many things I can’t bear—loud music, for example, crowds, the company of people who make me feel uncomfortable … Still I’ve got to do it, do what I can. First, I’ve got to stop complaining, blaming God. For the fact that ‘we live in a country like this’ and all that. Be happy that you can bring at least a little light into this darkness. How little, alas! So little that I can’t even seem to see it myself.
“Once, a long time ago, that silly little S*** W*** [my italics] wrote to me: ‘You’re like a nun who lives in the world.’ I found it funny then—I didn’t like it. It didn’t seem to fit me at all … What’s important is bearing the cross. In its totality. And that I’m absolutely not capable of. My unworthiness starts right here—with my whining, my inner struggle. I measure my whole life by how good or bad I feel. My flat, my pay, blows of fate, relationships with those around me. Yes, we feel defenseless when we’re children. But we grow up. We have to decide how to relate to the world around us, to everything that happens to us. How to live, how to be. And that decision has to be radical, whole, focused. People like that can be positive, or negative. There was Serafim of Sarov and there was Lenin! But the principle’s the same—wholeness, radicalism.
“Great joy saves people. Deep spiritual truth. It’s that, not the outward kind of jollity, that attracts and saves people. Outwardly a person may be cheerful, but you can tell they’re feeling bad inside. That kind of jollity is often noisy, exhausting, importunate, extrovert …
“A complex which grows worse with the years: I’m going to have to go on working—think how ridiculous I’ll be, this babushka running around with her notebook. But what matters is how to work. If you do serious, principled work, rather than just earning your bread and butter, it doesn’t matter one bit if you’re a babushka …
“Very tired physically. Keep falling asleep. But I can still feel and see. There are some places, zones, that are alive and others that are burned-out, trampled, dead. Special feeling for the places that are alive—I’m drawn to them. But I’m tired. Horror, shame for the past, makes everything painful. It’s hot and the brief showers of rain bring no respite.”
I closed the diary, stunned. There it was, the raw matter of Anna’s daily struggle with despair, and the measure of her achievement. I once thought Anna might be a depressive. No, her despair was a rational response to the rottenness around her. Never once had she complained to me. But her days were spent chronicling the corruption of this city, the bottomless greed of its high officials at the expense of the powerless. If she was holding her own now, it was thanks to her faith. When I arrived and found her so buoyant, I thought perhaps she had found happiness. But no, she had just become more resilient. At what a cost.
Later, I found out more about Serafim of Sarov, whom she mentioned in her diary. An engaging character, he became a monk at the time of the French Revolution. After living on his own in a hut for twenty-five years, he came out into the world. He was credited with all sorts of miracles, including levitation and the gift of prophecy. But it was my guess that what appealed to Anna was the fact that Serafim was a mystic of a particular kind: he believed that anyone could reach the kind of mystical experience which was the ultimate reward of the contemplative’s prayer.
The town of Sarov, where Serafim spent his life as a monk, has acquired another more sinister claim to fame. It lay farther up the Volga from Saratov, by Arzamas-16, the secret military research base where the world’s first hydrogen bomb was hatched. Andrei Sakharov worked there, among many other top Soviet scientists. So secret was their research then, and perhaps now, too, that the scientists were not even allowed to talk to one another about it.
In 2003, Putin was among those who went there to celebrate the centenary of Serafim’s canonization. He now enjoyed a close relationship with the Church. Many Russians found this reassuring, though I am not sure why. The Church and the old KGB enjoyed the closest of relationships during the Soviet period, and that had not changed. The saint and Arzamas-16 were the icon and the axe, two faces of power. That remained the trouble with institutionalized belief, and not just in Russia.
THE CROOKED AND THE BEAUTIFUL
The communal taxi was jolting downhill from Saratov’s industrial heights toward the old port. Misha and Tatiana had just flown in from their family holiday in Turkey, and I was going to stay with them.
Anna and I had been through a tricky couple of days, and I felt bad about leaving. First, there was the argument about Chechnya. Anna must have been reading about negotiations between the Spanish government and ETA over independence for the Basque region, as she suddenly burst out: “Why are they negotiating with terrorists? This’ll sound terrible to the liberals and democrats, but you’ve got to stand firm! They’re always saying Yeltsin shouldn’t have started the second Chechen war—but we had to fight it, or Russia would’ve fallen apart!”
“But Anna …”
“When Yeltsin pulled out in ’96 it didn’t end the war!” she steamed on.
“But it ended the fighting, which …”
“Let me tell you this story.” It was about a little girl from Saratov, daughter of a businessman, who was kidnapped and taken to Chechnya: “They started sending her fingers home one by one …”
“This is no way to discuss the rights and wrongs of a war.”
Anna was not to be stopped: “It was wrong to withdraw in ’96. Like a doctor who fights to save a patient, then gives up and says ‘You’re cured!’ when he knows the patient’s getting worse!”
“Don’t be absurd! You should be learning from the Spanish—that’s what we did with the IRA over Northern Ireland, too. Things aren’t brilliant there, but the war’s over and the economy’s growing.”
Suddenly Anna was listening. “But you can’t sit down with terrorists!” she concluded lamely.
• • •
The exchange left us both slightly shaken. It was a shock to hear that Anna wanted to disassociate herself so firmly from the “liberals and democrats.” I hoped she had been saying this to me “for the record,” but it was a faint hope. Her friends told me she had become ob
sessively cautious as a journalist since Putin came to power. The particular trigger was the case that had been hanging over her since we last met. On the basis of a press release, she had written an article about weapons the police found in the garage of a Chechen living in Marx. The newspaper had destroyed the press release, and the police department which issued it had been reorganized and disposed of its records. So the man won his case. The paper was fined, and no one blamed Anna. But the incident had left her badly frightened: she had developed a mania for writing and rewriting, checking and rechecking every article, they said.
The following day, a public holiday, the familiar Saratov gloom descended on me. Longing to get out of Anna’s dreary flat, I suggested we go to see the pilgrimage: some three hundred thousand pilgrims had started flooding into Saratov to see one of John the Baptist’s fingers from some Serbian monastery which was doing the rounds of provincial cities. The notion of this ex-fortress of communism in the grip of religious fervor fascinated me. But Anna was categorical: it would be dangerous. “Anyway, I hate crowds.” Too late, I realized my tactlessness: a couple of days ago a friend of hers had been run over and killed by a bus full of pilgrims.
“Well, let’s think of somewhere else to go.”
“There is nowhere to go.” She shot me a withering look. So for the second day running we were stuck in Anna’s flat. When I offered to help her with her English by recording something, she said brusquely when handing me the tape: “Tell me about your family.”
I considered this as I looked out of the window, over the dancing heads of the poplars: Anna knew my husband was recovering from a serious illness, yet she had never even asked how he was.
“Sorry. I don’t feel like it,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re not really interested.”
“What?”
When I explained, she burst into tears. For the rest of the day she did little but weep, on and off. I felt terrible. My mistake was to take Anna’s new resilience at face value. Drawn back momentarily into my own family crisis, I forgot how fragile Anna’s equilibrium was. She was a formidably strong woman. But she suffered from the vulnerability of a person determined to remain true in a society where everything around her was crooked. I had no idea how to mend what I had broken.
I arrived at Misha and Tatiana’s in time to watch France playing Portugal in the semifinals of the World Cup. This was a big occasion for Misha, now chairman of the soccer club in Marx. In his mid-forties now, and brown from his holiday, his boyish good looks had hardened to a glint of steel. For Misha the French team played a beautiful game, but the Portuguese—pah! Each time a Portuguese player fell over, accusing a French player of foul play, Misha roared with indignation. Portugal’s narrow victory left him inconsolable: it was the last straw, this most public triumph of the sly ones who snatched victory from the honest men by bending the rules!
Foul play was very much on his mind. The factory had twice as many storage silos as on my last visit; it was producing nearly three times as much virgin sunflower oil and they were farming ten thousand hectares of land, too. Sales had spread beyond the Volga provinces, into the Urals. “That’s the problem,” Misha told me over breakfast next morning. “Here, once you’ve grown large enough, you start attracting attention—and it’s the wrong kind.”
Every year it was proving harder for the business to hold its own against the big manufacturers. Solntse was competing against farmers in the black earth region of southern Russia, where the same amount of land harvested twice the crop. “The only way to stay ahead of the game is technology and know-how,” Misha explained. “Farmers here are deeply conservative—when I came back from Germany last year, full of ideas, my people were horrified. My manager couldn’t bear it—walked off the job.”
Viktor Goldantsev, the ex-boss of Murmansk’s nuclear power station, would not have done that. But since my last visit Misha had lost the farm manager who shared his dream of modernizing Russian agriculture. Viktor died in a car crash, swelling the hideous statistic of untimely deaths among Russian men. His photograph hung over Misha’s desk.
The loss had left Misha no less determined: “The Germans may think it’s going to take twenty years for us to catch up, but I haven’t got that long. Here, farmers still leave the earth fallow for a year. European farmers have given that up—good farming land’s at too much of a premium. Last year we tried working it like that for the first time. But it’s expensive—you’ve got to keep the soil well fertilized, as well as using pesticide.”
I asked him whether business had become easier since those chaotic early days. “Oh—don’t start me, we’ll be here all day! It’s hugely more difficult. The corruption’s all in the state now, which means it’s much more dangerous.” A neighboring farmer had taken out a criminal case against him. The farmers of the region acted as middlemen for one another, selling on seeds and new technology. Last year Misha bought seed and sold it on. Everyone seemed pleased—except one farmer, who did not pay, complaining that the yield was less than he expected. “He blames me! In fact he’s just lazy!” Misha took him to court for nonpayment, and won. Now the man was accusing him of fraud. In normal courts, there would be no case to answer, for Misha had sold the seed on in sealed packets. “But this is Russia—the man’s got close ties with the local police. Maybe he’s just out to squeeze money out of me, but maybe someone’s out to get me! There’s no knowing!
“When Putin came to power everyone was longing for political stability. Now they’ve got it. But it’s not the kind of stability business needs! What happened to Khodorkovsky could happen to any of us. Any day. Yes, of course there was a political dimension in his case. But it’s true all the same—they can pick us off any day they want.” Mikhail Khodorkovsky, richest of the oligarchs, started using his money in the interests of democratizing Russia. The tax police charged his oil company, Yukos, with owing billions of rubles in back tax. The company was broken up, and its assets redistributed among Putin’s people. He was in prison in Siberia, in solitary confinement.
Had the new 13 percent flat-rate tax Putin had introduced not made things easier, I wondered? “In theory. But in practice the tax inspectors are bent and their powers unlimited. Take this business hanging over me—those inspectors could move into my office tomorrow and kill the business stone dead. If they’re out to nail me, they’ll find something to pin on me. I used to love doing business. But I’ve had enough. The trouble is if you get off the treadmill for a second it all comes to a grinding halt.”
I did not envy Misha. But what he was saying left me hopeful. While journalists like Anna had no power now, businessmen were surely different. At some stage, people like him, whom Russia needed to encourage if the economy was ever to escape its dependence on oil and gas, must become a force the state had to reckon with.
• • •
Before I left on the evening sleeper, Tatiana and I slipped off to walk in our favorite park, planted on the English model by an Anglophile governor in the nineteenth century. The cold snap had passed and the sun was shining again. The paths threading through the dark oak trees were thronged with people. The swans on the glassy lake were imperturbable. A rash of smart new tower blocks now hemmed the park in along one side; there were rumors, Tatiana said, that the developer had bribed the authorities and the next lot of blocks were going to invade the park.
Business at the café was brisk. As we waited for our Siberian beer and sushi I asked after Misha’s mother, whom I had not seen as she was living in the family’s house in Marx. “Well, she’s better off there,” Tatiana sighed. “Misha’s working around the corner, and he drops around. She’s got someone looking after her. And she can putter around the garden. But she’s not happy. How could she be? All her life she’s done nothing but work, and now there she is—blind, with nothing left to do.”
I looked over the table at Tatiana. Over the years, this pale northern beauty had grown into a snow queen, full-lipped and sensual. So what
about her? She rarely talked about herself. Yet what I saw in her gray eyes struck me to the heart.
Over breakfast, I was looking through her family photographs. There was a faded snap of Misha on the day they met. He was just a boy, blond and wiry, with a cheeky grin. “He doesn’t like himself,” she whispered now, as if carrying on an earlier conversation. “That’s what drives him. He’s got to outwit the lot of them. When he was young, it just made him a wonderful sportsman. But now if he’s not working he’s planning his next move. It’s got so bad he can’t relax. If we go out somewhere with friends he says he feels out of place. And if I look as if I’m enjoying myself he says, ‘There, you see, you don’t need me.’ ”
Recently, she admitted that she was sorry not to have developed the gift of healing which her grandmother wanted to pass down to her. But without being aware of it, she had done so. Of all those who befriended me in Marx, Tatiana, once the shyest, had become the hub of the wheel. Throughout that strange, upside-down time in Russia’s history, she alone never lost her sense of balance. Perhaps it would have been easier for her if she had. Each of my other friends reacted to the fall of communism by going crazy in their own way. Each faced the task of reinventing themselves, as well as having to survive the suicide buried in their family. Tatiana just became more like herself with the years. Only now she carried the curse of memory, the unspeakable weight of the past.
GLIMPSES OF GRACE
About Anna, Tatiana was reassuring: “Don’t worry—next time you see her she’ll have put herself back together again.” When we met up at the Moscow sleeper, it seemed Tatiana was right. While I read on my top bunk, Anna was chatting to the couple with whom we were sharing a compartment. They were gossiping about Ayatskov, the corrupt ex-governor of the province who still proved immune from prosecution.
Lost and Found in Russia Page 28
