Lost and Found in Russia

by Susan Richards

  “So what’s he doing now?” asked the husband.

  “Sitting in his palatial house, twiddling his thumbs,” replied Anna.

  I listened with pleasure as she entertained our fellow passengers with gossip about Saratov personalities. Her professional persona was confident and relaxed.

  When we reached Moscow Anna would be traveling on to the northern city of Novgorod. Her summer holidays were now spent exploring Russia’s ancient heartland. In the sleepy charm of towns like Vologda she had found a Russia she could love. The walls of her shabby flat were lined with little colored postcards of northern churches. They were the architectural embodiment of the spirituality she had embraced.

  The train had stopped at a country station. On the platform an old woman was sweeping the path from side to side with wide strokes of her long broom, wielding it like a scythe.

  Down below, the bulky couple were playing cards now. Yes, they, too, were using this shriveled pack of cards. It was only the other day, when I was playing cards with Tatiana’s daughter Nadezhda, that I noticed it. The lowest card of the four suites was a six. There were no twos, no threes, fours, or fives. These cards were just missing. When I asked the couple why they were playing with such a diminished pack, they looked at me blankly. Anna laughed: “You’re right—I first discovered how many cards the rest of the world plays with when I read The Queen of Spades!” In Pushkin’s famous story these cards played a crucial role.

  No one in the compartment knew what had happened to those missing cards. I guessed the Soviets deemed the very notion of the hierarchy to be counterrevolutionary. They probably wanted to chop out the whole royal family until someone pointed out that there would not be many card games left if they did. So they just cut the “plebeian” cards, as if to announce that from now on they were all kings and queens … Now communism was no more, but these Russians were still making do with the same censored pack.

  I took out the sheaf of poems which Anna had given me to read:

  I went out into a field

  by the quiet river one day

  and a sudden peace overcame me,

  the gift of a higher will,

  I stood there amazed at my fate

  as if it were not mine …

  That glimpse of grace

  of a soul not ready

  unaccustomed to understanding.

  If I could only remember how it had been—

  behind the village barns

  at sunset on that long summer evening.

  A profound change had come over Anna’s poetry, though the quality is lost in my translation. In Russian, the tranquillity she now managed to capture in her poems was the counterpoise to the painful struggle of her life.

  I look at a cloud, a branch

  A patch of asphalt and sand.

  What I took to be a shrimp

  Is in fact a folded maple leaf

  And I walk along—glad of my mistake

  ambushed by joy—toward

  my favorite dacha—there’s the fence

  the green all patched with rust

  the big lock on the gate

  the cabbage forgotten on the table

  the glistening threads

  on the freshly dug earth.

  Who is there I can tell about this—

  the small, lost patch of asphalt,

  the dimpled sand, slightly warmed by the

  crimson horror of the drought?

  The train passed a deep ravine etched into the steppe. In his novel The Naked Year, Pilnyak described how bandit gangs hid in those ravines when Russia’s wheat bowl was being fought over by the Red and White armies. Trains from the cities would crawl along these tracks, crammed with starving people who had come out here to forage for food. Was it surprising that the Russians had such a fear of chaos? The 1990s were a ripple by comparison. But the genetic memory it stirred up was traumatic.

  All night I spent coming to terms

  with my fate. I had almost managed.

  But by daybreak the rain had breathed its way

  through the planks, the plaster, and the chalk.

  And through the birch twig

  through the spiders’ web and the glass—

  on the wall that smells of chalk—

  a faint bluish patch of warm.

  So does it matter really, what happens to me?

  The damp stoop, the hook on the door,

  and the many-voiced silence

  of the wind in the waving branch.

  Yes, Anna had come to terms with her fate. But she found it hard to forgive those who failed to do so. Her cousin Sasha had killed himself recently, she was telling me: “I went to the funeral, of course. But I couldn’t cry—I was so angry. He was such a talented man, and so good at everything. How dare he do that to his family?”

  FINDING THE GOLDEN WOMAN

  Embarrassing though it was to discover that the source of Natasha’s information about the singing cedars came from a best-selling fairy story, I wanted to know more. Luckily, so did Sasha and Ira. So what about all those settlements which the Anastasia books were said to have inspired? Later that summer, the three of us set off to visit one out at Konyaevo, some 150 miles east of Moscow.

  Often by late September the golden days are over in Russia and winter has set in. But we were lucky: it was a sunny morning and the air was crisp. The journey took most of the day. After turning south off the Vladimir road we found ourselves in an undulating landscape of lakes and birch forests blazing with yellow and gold. The day was still, without a breath of wind. Here and there a poplar trembled, like a hen shaking rain off its wings. We caught glimpses of the occasional village, tucked in the folds of the land, well away from the road.

  As we drove, I considered what I had learned about the settlements since that first abortive visit to Vygovsky. The Anastasia books were nothing if not ambitious. They proposed that contemporary man was so swamped with trivial information that he had lost sight of the great issue as to where humanity was heading. Ever since the coming of Christianity Russians (and implicitly the rest of us) had been in the grip of a foreign ideology. Since then, all power had ultimately been controlled by the high priests, or their secular counterparts. The books, which had already been translated into dozens of languages, proposed that the key to liberation lay in the soil: everyone needed their own hectare of land, a place where they could live, grow their own food, and reconnect with nature and God.

  First, they proposed, you have to realize your dream in imagination. Then you will be ready to wind up your old life and buy your plot of land. After that other great changes will start happening. You will begin to recover the remarkable powers which man had lost. You will not just be changing your life: you will be joining the great cosmic battle against the forces of evil …

  When we finally arrived at Konyaevo we found our way barred by armed guards. Baffled, we asked at the local shop. The plump shop assistant whispered that we’d come to a secret rocket installation. She’d heard there was another Konyaevo somewhere nearby—perhaps we’d got the wrong one? It was indeed the wrong Konyaevo. We drove on through the forest for a long time until we were waylaid by a sturdy tribe of old men and women in woolly hats, who put us on the right road in return for our loading the car with cranberries and jars of pickled mushrooms.

  The red sun was spinning on the horizon by the time we turned down a dirt track leading through birch forests. The land, which some collective farm had claimed from the forest in Soviet times, stood waist-high in weeds. But a crop of idiosyncratic buildings was starting to rise up, each set on its hectare of land. The place seemed deserted. Then we spotted a man working on the frame of a wooden house. Sergei, a plump, curly-haired computer programmer from Moscow, made us a cup of tea on his camping stove. When the buildings were finished there would be some six or seven hundred people here, he said, half of them young. And was it really going to be possible to feed a family from one hectare of land as the books claimed, Sasha asked? The
chubby programmer smiled, unruffled: we’ll see, he said. Maybe it wouldn’t have been in the past. But a lot of the settlers were technocrats like him; they may never have lived in the country, but thanks to the Internet, which would be powered here by solar panels, they had the benefit of the latest farming techniques.

  Dark fell suddenly, like a blackout curtain. We were a long way from the nearest town. Did Sergei know of anywhere we could stay the night, Sasha asked? “Dunno—most people have gone back to the city by now.” Disappointingly, it was starting to look as if these were just city folk building second homes for themselves. As we drove on down the track into the old village the headlights picked out two women walking down the track. Sasha rolled down the window: “Ladies, I wonder whether you could suggest where we could spend the night? We would pay of course …” “You’ll find no place here,” said a broad woman, clamping her jaws shut. But Sasha teased her until she surrendered to his charm and invited us home.

  Aunt Ksenia, buxom and bossy, lived in a traditional wooden house with her crimson-faced, monosyllabic husband, nine hens, five goats, and three kittens. The clay stove was warm and the air sweet with the smell of animals and apples. Only seven people now lived in the village all year round, she said, and she was the youngest.

  Over a meal of homegrown potatoes and tomatoes Aunt Natasha inveighed against the “sectarians,” who were ruining the countryside. They took all the firewood and bathed in the lake, naked. Most barbarous of all—they buried their dead on their plots of land! “Disgusting,” she sniffed. We fell into bed early, weighed down by her indignation.

  All night two kittens tore around the darkened room wailing and I lay awake thinking of the Siberian cedars whose singing led me here. Those cedars were the symbol at the heart of the Anastasia legend: Sergei was wearing a sliver of cedar around his neck and had planted a cedar by his house. Well, Vygovsky was right about one thing: the cedar business was clearly lucrative.

  Next morning, a gray mist was still clinging to the ground when we left the village. In the middle of a wasteland rank with weeds three people were working on the roof of a skeletal house. A small, elderly woman with sun-bleached features explained that she and her son had come from Kazakhstan. With Russia facing demographic collapse, people from the old colonies were now being offered inducements to return. When Sasha questioned them about Anastasia and their dreams for the future, mother and son looked perplexed. Simple people, they did not appear to be inspired by any great Russian Idea. They just needed a house and in Kazakhstan they had practiced these pioneer skills all their lives.

  We were about to head back to Moscow when the other young man, who had not said a word, spoke up: “Hold on—there’s someone I think you should meet—follow me.” He led us across the wasteland toward a wood of densely grown young birches. As we followed, the sun broke through the clouds and moved across the abandoned fields. By the time we reached the wood and were walking down a winding path the woodland floor was bright with red toadstools and yellow birch leaves. We came to a clearing with a small house built of whole trees. It had not a single window or door. Nearby, a heavy plastic sheet stretched between sticks was providing rudimentary shelter. A young man with a heart-shaped face and plaited headband around his long dark hair was shoveling earth out of an enormous hole. Damir was digging his pond, he said. We followed the sound of children’s laughter down another path. In the next clearing, by a house of bright new wood, a young mother was tickling her child in a hammock, while a blond young man was laying roof felt on the house. “This is just the outhouse, but we’ll overwinter in it,” the young man explained as he showed us his handiwork. “I could’ve gone to university, but I didn’t want to spend my whole life at the whim of some boss. My father works in the prosecutor general’s office, and my uncle’s in the FSB—I could’ve done anything. But this is what I want! And I know plenty of people in Moscow who’re dying to join us. They’re just waiting to see how we get on.”

  As he talked, a barefoot teenage girl had run down the path to join us. She had gray eyes, a slightly upturned nose, and long fairish hair plastered flat. She stood in the sunshine very upright, quivering slightly, as though with the effort of holding herself in check. Her skin was burnished by the sun and she was glowing with excitement.

  • • •

  “Where did you sleep last winter?” Sasha was asking. “Outside, of course, in the tents!” the girl broke in. “It’s fine, really!” Her words tumbled out like fish from a net. “I knew very early on that I didn’t want to live like other people. I’d go to the shops and I could never see anything I wanted to buy. Hems a little longer, hems a little shorter—just more things. And the longer you stay out here the less you need. You start to change.”

  Damir’s girl was a musician, like him. “Would you like to hear us play?” she said, taking charge of us. “Come back for our marriage next April,” called the blond young man as we followed her. “Will there be a priest?” asked Sasha. “Oh no—nothing like that,” he was emphatic. “Everyone’ll dress in glorious clothes. There’ll be lots of games, and dancing.”

  Damir’s girl had run on ahead of us. She moved like a deer, leaping as she ran. While she and Damir took out their instruments—she a fiddle, he a guitar and mouth organ—they talked about how they had traveled across Russia, hitching lifts, earning their way with Damir’s songs.

  “Good morning, planet, we greet you!” “Thank you for the gift of life!” “We are happy, happy, happy, today,” they sang. They were a musical couple, and their happiness was infectious, but my heart sank at the relentless cheerfulness. Ira, who clearly felt the same, said: “That was lovely. But do you have songs for sad occasions, too?” Damir’s girl replied for both of them: “But we’ve got nothing to be sad about!”

  “Come on,” Damir’s girl said, leading us across an abandoned field toward another wood. In a glade a swing had been hoisted between two tall trees. This was where they met up in the evenings to dance and sing around the bonfire. Ira asked about their plans: presumably they would start a family soon? “Not for some time—there’s an awful lot to be done before then,” replied the girl. “The house has to be finished, then there’s the planting. It’s got to be perfect.”

  “But you wouldn’t mind if a little one came along before?”

  “It won’t,” the girl replied, a touch sharply.

  I was swinging backward and forward, high in the trees, and I lost the rest of their conversation. But something about the way the two women were standing, heads close, taut, suggested that the conversation had taken an unexpected turn.

  The couple showed us their secret spring: in a copse of birches the clear water rose languidly out of the earth and curled like a shell. At a lake fringed with birches we stripped off in the milky sunshine and dived in; the water was brown as tea, cold and pure. “Now we’ve shown you all our favorite places,” Damir’s girl said as we returned to the car.

  “Aren’t you afraid to be out here on your own?” asked Sasha as we said good-bye. “What’s there to be afraid of?” replied Damir’s girl. “Well, we’ve been hearing these horror stories about people who’ve bought land, then found some Chechen still owned the title deeds.” The couple looked at Sasha and smiled. “Don’t worry, it’s all going to be all right,” Damir reassured him.

  Yes, it would be, I reflected. Unlike their parents or grandparents these two were not afraid. If anything bad happened to them, they would head off and build a home deeper in the forest, like earlier generations of Russians who had rejected the incursion of state power into their lives.

  As we drove back away, Damir’s girl was standing waving in the autumn sunshine among the silver birches. I thought of all those European travelers who had returned home with stories about a golden woman hidden in the forests of Russia. For me, Damir’s girl was golden enough.

  I asked Ira what the two of them were talking about in the glade. “She was trying—very delicately—to point out why she knew she wasn�
��t going to get pregnant before they’d built their home—I was so obtuse, I just couldn’t get it!”

  “And?”

  “She’s a virgin.”

  Only once they had built their home and taught themselves how to live off their land, and off the forests, would they live together as man and wife. That is what she wanted Ira to know. They were working their way back to a state of grace, rebuilding Eden for their children. They did not believe in Original Sin, though: organized religion was just another way of controlling people, preventing them from realizing their freedom, she told Ira. Their children would be different.

  Yes, what my golden girl and Damir were building was much more than a home. They really were reimagining Russia.

  2008

  IN DECEMBER 2007, PRESIDENT PUTIN ENDED A PERIOD OF POLITICAL uncertainty by announcing that he would step down after his second term of office. This must have triggered fierce squabbles over spoils at the top. For the information spilled out that Putin had amassed a personal fortune of $40 billion, making him the richest man in Europe.

  His favored successor was Dmitri Medvedev, first deputy prime minister and chairman of Gazprom. In May Medvedev duly took up office, having been endorsed by the electorate. Putin assumed the post of prime minister.

  No one knew how this novel combination was going to affect the political scene. The West and Russia’s liberals were encouraged by the fact that Medvedev was a lawyer by training and did not come from a security background. They hoped that his appearance might herald a period of liberalization and long-overdue institutional reform. But since Medvedev lacked any power base of his own, it was not clear how he could pursue any independent political program, in the short term at least.

  The campaign against corruption which Medvedev announced was a good example. It was the right objective: a third of the country’s annual budget was being eaten up by corrupt officials, according to one official source. But how could such a campaign be effective without incriminating the very elite to which he belonged, and without rolling back the centralization of the last eight years?