Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (15 page)

Philimon sighed deeply: “We live in a decadent age. All these distractions and labor-saving devices take us away from the physical work which brings us to God. The sins we commit we wash away through work, through prayers and tears.” He sighed and closed his remarkable blue eyes. “Man cannot serve two masters. This is the time of the Antichrist. We’ve got to escape from his snares. We will have to do it, before we meet our Maker. It will take fortitude. Determination. Self-discipline.”

Philimon spoke with a peasant burr, but the cadence of his speech and his vocabulary were grand, fashioned by the sacred texts. “Any day now the Antichrist will come. We have no idea when that will be. We are so wrapped up in our lives that we won’t even notice. He will creep up on us unawares. He will be sitting right beside us. We must take ourselves in hand. Repent. But …” He paused.

“You mean the community isn’t ready?” Elena Ivanovna prompted him.

“That’s exactly what I mean. It’s the path of the few, I’ve got to accept that.”

However much they revered their
starets
, their lay preacher, this flourishing community was not going to leave everything behind and follow him. That was the tragedy Philimon faced. He sighed: “But then again—how could I leave my family?” His face looked tortured.

Philimon had never expected to become Burny’s
starets
. His father, who held the position before him, was revered for his piety and leadership qualities. When he resigned the villagers elected Philimon. In those days he was something of a rebel in Old Believer terms. He was, and remained, the best hunter in the region: his average winter harvest of two hundred sables was four times more than most men’s. Back then, he read voraciously, and wrote poetry—he used to compose verses for each newly built house and write them on the walls, they told me. The community, who were charged by tradition with arriving at a unanimous choice, hoped he would show his father’s talent for leadership. Philimon accepted the challenge. He changed his life to embrace the myth of original purity behind the Old Belief.

All of our cultures were once defined by such myths of purity, I had been reflecting; myths which could not be changed if they were to retain their meaning. But for the Jews, the story of the Garden of Eden was succeeded by the promise of a New Jerusalem. Looking to the future as it did, it unlocked the concept of modernity for us.

Yes, I reflected, this is it, the secret of Burny’s success. It is vested in this man with his blazing commitment to his faith. He asked a lot of the villagers. But he did not do so by telling them what to do so much as by challenging them to live up to the example of the books. Philimon was a long way off retiring, but I wondered who would succeed him. Might it even be his madcap oldest son, Ivan, the boy racer with his motorbike? More unlikely things had happened.

These Old Believers saw their lives as a gradual spiritual progression. Little was expected of the children and Burny’s teenagers danced, smoked, drank, and loved rock music like their counterparts anywhere. Only once they married, which they did early, were they expected to start taking their inner life seriously. From then onward, it occupied a progressively more important role in their lives, until in the end the serious men—the women did not appear to have this choice—retreated to a hut in the forest to devote themselves to the life of the spirit. That is what Philimon’s father did when he retired as the village’s
starets
, and Philimon himself would doubtless do the same in due course.

I took my leave and walked back along the raised boardwalk to Maxim’s house. Over the fence, Ivan was taking his motorbike to bits. A group of children in rubber boots were driving cows home through the mud. Photinia was taking her washing off the line.

•  •  •

Sociologically, Philimon was just a peasant. Yet, in respect of everything he valued, I was the primitive one, and in his presence I felt it. He had turned his lively intelligence inward and developed resources in himself which were mysterious to me. Philimon was not in a confrontational mood this afternoon, but face-to-face with him I felt him measuring my spiritual poverty, and that of my world.

PHOTOGRAPHY IS A SIN!

Disaster. On our last night in Burny Kirsty, Alan, and I were invited to attend a special five-hour saint’s day service at old Anisim’s house. The service was due to start at 4:00 a.m. The room was packed. I felt honored to be included. We had come a long way since that first service glimpsed through the curtain. Alan was particularly pleased, as he had been given permission to photograph the service.

But at the first click of the camera—Alan did not even use a flash—Philimon stopped the service and thundered at him, eyes flashing like a prophet from the Old Testament: “Photography is a sin! Get out!” I reeled out into the night along with Alan and Kirsty. What had Alan done wrong? As we edged our way in the dark back to Maxim’s house along the narrow wooden boards Alan was fulminating.

For the rest of the night he stormed up and down Galya’s front room, while Kirsty and I tried to calm him down. Had Vladimir Nikolaevich given Alan the go-ahead without checking with Philimon? By the time the sun came up we were all exhausted. I sat around at Photinia’s, pretending to help make jam, while Kirsty shuttled back and forth between the Alekseevs and her husband, trying to broker a peace.

Picking over the berries, I came to my own conclusion about Philimon’s outburst. Whatever misunderstanding there may have been over the photography, he was angry with Alan for other reasons. Ever since he arrived Alan had been asking the villagers about television: did they watch it, did they own one, and so on. He discovered that although there was hardly a set to be seen in Burny, most of the villagers loved television. They just kept their sets well hidden from the village elders. One of Philimon’s sons had gone so far as to hack out a hole in the frozen ground and lower the television into it when it was not in use.

Philimon must have known about those televisions. My hunch was that he was in a rage with Alan for undermining the community with his questioning. The young people had been telling me about the community’s attitude to rules. “Imagine a full glass of water,” one of them put it. “You can tip it this way and that as long as you don’t break the skin. But if you break it, the water’ll be gone! It’s your own business how you behave—what you mustn’t do is upset the community.”

This was it, the elusive, almost mystical concept of
sobornost
, togetherness. A crucial element in the social DNA of Russia, it often lurked behind those things Westerners took to be a charade in her political life: those Soviet elections which voted in leaders by 99 percent, or the value people placed on political stability at the expense of individual rights. From Philimon’s point of view, as the community’s
starets
, Alan was creating mayhem by pointing a spotlight at the village’s secret vice.

Later on Philimon did invite us for supper. The sun shone low through the window onto a table heaped with blueberries, pine nuts, and honey; fresh jam, smoked grayling, and aromatic gray bread. The scene looked as tranquil as a Dutch still life. But pull back the focus and the faces were troubled. Philimon was telling hunting stories, making an effort to be hospitable. The real man had retreated inside. Elena Ivanovna sat frowning. Alan displayed his injured pride like a war wound. Kirsty’s eyes were puffy from tears. Vladimir Nikolaevich was cracking pine nuts in his teeth, shelling them, and adding them to the pile in front of him. Then he sat back and pushed the pile over to Alan.

Philimon’s intervention had drawn a line and I was torn both ways. I loved this thriving, iconic community, this buried heart of Russia. Philimon’s unyielding authority supported it like a steel girder. But its survival in the modern world was a delicate balance, an act of defiance. The casual curiosity of an outsider could set it wobbling. In my world, however, curiosity was no sin. How pleased Philimon would be to see the back of us.

MUSIC OF THE FOREST

The last dinghy had just disappeared around the headland on its way back to Burny. We were standing on that island of pebbles in the middle of the river, waiting for the plane to pick us up. It rose out of the forest around us, a sustained chord that appeared to come from an immense choir hidden in the trees, a choir that never drew breath. Soon the air was ringing with sound. It was growing louder all the time. It filled the sky, sonorous as the Om of a cosmic Buddhist meditation. The lowest notes of the chord rumbled darkly, as if a host of great Russian basses were hidden among the trees. The high tones piped childishly true and clear. The forest was ringing with song, the music of the spheres.

“Listen!” I cried. “Listen!” My companions paused only briefly before resuming their conversations. Then I became very afraid. They could hear nothing. What did that mean? This trip to the Old Believer community had been my fairy-tale wish. I had willed it into being. But it had been difficult. Perhaps it had all proved too much? Had I become a tuning fork for the tensions in the group? Was this glorious music the sound of my madness?

As we traveled back to Krasnoyarsk the memory of it did not fade. It rolled on and on inside me. But I locked it away and told no one about it.

1995

THE DARK SIDE

Moscow was a city where appearances had always been deceptive. In Soviet times the unifying idea was equality. Now it was prosperity. Only a few years back, I was giving my secondhand clothes to Ira’s mother, Elena. Now she was the one mocking me for wearing the same shabby clothes year after year.

Apartment blocks and garish billboards were springing up in the city center. The streets were vivid with glamorous women. When Ira stepped out wearing her Garbo hat, thigh-length black boots, and long pale blue coat with velvet cuffs no one would have guessed that she and her new partner, Sasha, were living in a cubicle in a high-rise a long way from the city center. The couple were on their way now. They had bought a house in Hungary, and were at the heart of Moscow’s new, smart cinema set.

Yet that year there was fear in the air. It was hard not to be infected by it. I kept reminding myself that it was probably nothing but the fear of fear. Still, it was hard to be sure. Everyone had been warning me against the trains. An epidemic of robberies had broken out on the long-distance trains. Someone knew someone who had lost everything after being knocked out by an odorless gas in their locked compartment. A friend gave alarming detail about a spate of murders in which bodies were bundled off trains in the dead of night. To be a woman traveling alone was bad enough. To be a foreigner, too, well, that was courting danger. So by the time I boarded the sleeper for Saratov I was feeling more than usually anxious.

I need not have worried. A stout woman with crimson hair was traveling from Ukraine to a factory in Saratov in the hope of getting her hands on the billions owed to her factory. A balding, unemployed doctor was retraining as an
extrasensor
, or healer. As we pooled our picnics, the talk was of everyday horrors like cholera, which had surfaced again; of meat infected with tuberculosis; of the dangers of depositing money in the country’s unscrupulous banks.

On my way through Saratov I usually stayed with Vera, who befriended me when I arrived off Benya’s boat. But when I rang from Moscow this time a drunken voice, presumably her husband, told me she no longer lived there. She must have made her escape, joined her cult somewhere in the wilds of Siberia. I was delighted for her. But Saratov would be a sadder place without her.

It was too sad already. Unlike Moscow, no veneer covered the city’s wretchedness. People looked hunted and shabby. Plastic shop signs dangled, street lamps did not work, rubbish overflowed, and now and then a cavalcade of Mercedes limousines sped down the rutted streets, carrying the city’s mayor, or a mafia boss.

Natasha and Igor had finally managed to swap their house in Marx for a one-room flat in Saratov. But they seemed strangely reluctant to meet up. When we did, I understood why. Natasha was thin, jumpy, and so distracted that I was not sure she really knew who I was. Igor looked crushed.

They were trying to sell the flat and move to Siberia. This was a terrifying business. With privatization in full swing, the property market was dominated by thugs. Many had connections high up in the administration. People who had sold a flat were being found mysteriously murdered. For my friends, every encounter with a potential buyer was another round of Russian roulette. There was no way of knowing whether potential buyers were genuine or not. “I somehow thought it would be all right once we got out of Marx,” Natasha admitted, close to tears, chain smoking. “But we’re having to go through the whole thing all over again in Saratov. Seven years of my life it’s cost me.”

They had presumed it would be a matter of weeks before they could move back to Siberia, and the protection of Natasha’s powerful father. But weeks had turned into months. They had run out of money. Ever since I first met Natasha she had been telling me grandly that she was “done with possessions,” that she “didn’t want to be weighed down by furniture and all that clutter,” that she just wanted to be free. Now anything saleable had gone long ago.

When the couple moved to the city, Anna took pity on Igor and secured him a job as a photographer on her newspaper. He took wonderful photographs, but the job did not last. As usual, he had turned quarrelsome. “I told him to give in his notice at once,” Natasha confided. “He just can’t sustain normal relationships—he’s either got to be in control, or utterly dependent.” Since then, they had survived on the English lessons that Natasha’s advertisements brought in. Now that summer was here she was down to one pupil. During lessons, Igor sat in silence on the bed, behind the partition.

Under a white cloth in the corner of the room stood Igor’s invention, that machine for making shoulder pads. He was about to deliver it to his ex-wife when a gang searching for her Chechen lover broke into her Moscow atelier and smashed up everything. She had to flee for her life and was hiding out somewhere in the Caucasus.

•  •  •

Hoping to cheer Natasha up, one of her ex-pupils organized a picnic and asked Tatiana and me to come, too. On receiving this invitation, Tatiana rolled her eyes, but refrained from further comment.

We met up at Tatiana’s flat in Marx on a cloudless, sunny day. Natasha, mercurial as ever, looked like a different woman: her broad-cheekboned face, with its upturned nose, gleamed with excitement and her curls stood to attention. We were being driven by a tow-headed trader called Volodya with bright cheeks and hands like hams, and his business partner, a solemn young Dagestani.

Natasha contrived it so that she and I would travel on our own, chauffeured by the silent Dagestani. On the way, clinging on to my arm, she confided the saga of her many marriages. Igor was her fourth husband. She had bolted from the first three and now she was about to leave Igor. As soon as they sold the flat she was going to Canada to join her childhood friend, she boasted. She was longing to start a new life.

The more wonderful and talented her husbands were, the faster she ran away from them, as far as I could see. Her first, whom she had married when she was in her teens, was an artist, handsome and clever. “Sasha taught me how to live. He painted and sculpted and to this day when I see something beautiful, I long to share it with him.” So why had she left him? She brushed off the question: “He wasn’t made for marriage.” She paused. “Anyway, he committed suicide a bit later—and no,” she said, anticipating my next question, “not because of me. Sasha was his own man.” Husband number two was a successful businessman in St. Petersburg now. “I got bored,” was her only comment on that marriage. Her third husband was a cripple with “a talent for attracting pity.” Then there was Igor.

Natasha’s account raised more questions than it answered. What lay behind her boredom? There were so many things about her that did not add up. She talked a lot about her father, for instance. A construction boss, he had been part of the inner circle of the Communist Party that ran Siberia’s capital, Novosibirsk. She clearly adored him; he was the kindest, most able man in the world, she kept telling me. So why did she exchange her gilded life for penury in Marx? Was it just too easy? Did she need to load herself down with handicaps in order to feel alive? The more I saw of her, the less I could fit the pieces together. When Natasha was in high spirits, like today, she was great fun. But I had caught glimpses of another woman altogether, a black star who ate the light.

After a while, the car swerved off the road, following Volodya’s down an undulating track. We passed an old couple piling grass onto a wooden platform fitted to the sidecar of an ancient motorcycle. For them, summer brought no days off; every fine day, they would be out collecting hay to feed their livestock through the long winter.

•  •  •

As the car wound through a woodland of scrubby birch and elm, we passed quiet inlets of the Volga, fringed with yellow irises, where the odd fisherman was sitting. After driving through some rusting gates, our chauffeurs left us and drove off again, muttering about “fetching some stuff.” The place was an abandoned holiday camp. Before the fall of Soviet power, it would have been crowded this time of year. Now there were no awnings on the sunshades; the paint had peeled off the pedal boats, and the rusting swings lay upended by floodwater. Straggling birches were pushing the camp into the water.

Natasha raced down to the white sandy beach, dancing wildly: “Hooray! I’ve left my cage and the horrible beast I’m condemned to share it with! Who needs men? Anna’s not to be pitied—we’re the pathetic ones, the ones who’ve been imprisoned by men. I’ve done with them! From now on I’m going to live alone!”

“Don’t believe a word of it,” muttered Tatiana, “she’ll never leave Igor.”

The water stretched out like an inland sea to distant white cliffs on the far side. The scale of the Volga never ceased to take my breath away. A breeze puckered the green surface of the river. Huge dragonflies with blue bodies and iridescent wings hovered overhead. A heron rose up from the bullrushes. We sat on the white sand and talked. Slowly, the shadows of the poplars lengthened over the water. Still, our cavaliers had not reappeared. Desperately thirsty, we explored the camp, looking for drinkable water. We found taps. But when turned, they emitted only faint groans and scratchings, as if water sprites long trapped in the pipes were making their escape.

Finally, as dark fell, Volodya and his silent companion turned up with meat and alcohol in vast quantities, but no water or soft drinks. The bonfire flared up and we threaded chunks of lamb onto branches of willow, drank sweet Caucasian wine, and settled in for a catastrophic night.

Each time we tried to draw the silent Dagestani into conversation, Volodya would cut across whatever he was saying with a boast; about his car, his trading, his three pigs, seven hens, five sheep, and wife. Whatever anyone said, Volodya could do it better; whatever anyone had to offer, he had a better one. As he turned up his tape recorder, filling the silence with thumping pop music, I escaped into the water, swimming out until the group around the fire were swallowed up in darkness.

Mother Volga, they called it. Longest of Europe’s rivers, she flows through the Russian psyche, provoking her people to song and revolt. Russia’s expansion into the steppes had been one long story of ambition and insecurity. The Volga proved the key to controlling that steppe, as the Mongols showed when they set up their capital on its banks to the south of here, commanding trade routes in all directions. Muscovy’s control over the vital trade up the river remained precarious well into the sixteenth century. Samara and Saratov were originally built as fortresses. Pirates, runaway peasants, and sectarians sought refuge from the state down here. The greatest of the peasant revolts were mounted from this river, Stenka Razin’s in the seventeenth century, Emilian Pugachev’s a hundred years later.

Long before I ever saw it, I got to know the Volga through Gorky’s early stories. In its heyday as a trade route, it was heaving with life, crowded with sails and steamers; barges loaded with wheat and timber for the northern cities, dragged by lines of men; rafts carrying whole peasant households, complete with huts and cows. Today, thanks to the economic collapse, there was not a boat on it.

When I climbed back out of the water, Volodya was stripping off his shirt, challenging Natasha to arm wrestle him. Tatiana and I walked off along the beach: “I’m so sorry about this,” she said. “It’s just what I was afraid of. This is what passes for Having a Good Time here. It’s unbearable—people with no education, no conversation, who can conceive of no way of enjoying themselves that doesn’t involve booze.” It was obvious by now that Volodya had no intention of taking us back that night. I unfurled a damp, stinking mattress on a double-decker bunk in a beach hut which our Dagestani politely broke into for us, and went to sleep.

I woke from a dream that I was at sea in a storm, sinking in a small boat. It was dark outside, and the bunk was rocking to and fro, springs groaning. Below me, a man’s voice, thick with drink; a woman’s giggle. It was Volodya, but who was with him? Mosquitoes were devouring me. Burying myself in the fetid blanket shut out the insects, but not the squeals from the bunk below. There followed a crash and peals of laughter. It was Natasha. She had put her elbow through the window pane. Later, they both ran off into the night. In the silence I heard a quiet sigh. I was not the only witness of this scene.

Next morning, I found Tatiana sitting alone on the beach, arms around her knees. There was no sign of Natasha and Volodya. Here and there on the bushes bits and pieces of clothing were draped. We looked at one another and burst out laughing. “Volodya’s car’s gone.” This was more worrying, for Volodya had been far too drunk to drive. There was nothing we could do but wait, and nothing to drink but sweet wine; we preferred to go thirsty.

Tatiana sighed: “There you have it—the two Natashas, each devoted to different ends. Last night’s Natasha was not an aberration. That destructive force is real enough. It’s shaped her life, and it may well win in the end. Then there’s the other one, the one who can do anything, who is confident, generous with herself, who knows exactly what she can and what she can’t give. Perhaps in the end she was just given too much.

“You can’t pity her, though. Whatever she has, she’s chosen for herself. She started with everything—a powerful father who adored her, an education, a position, choices. Did you know that she was a brilliant mathematician, too? Why did she divorce Seryozha? Why did she leave Sasha? Don’t ask me. To spite her father? To spite herself? Who knows?” A long silence followed. “Have you noticed what they’ve all got in common—Anna, Natasha and Igor, Misha? Suicide. Natasha’s mother killed herself. So did Igor’s father. Misha’s grandmother and Anna’s grandfather …”

Some hours later, I spotted two faces peering out of the greenery.

Natasha’s hair stood up like Medusa, and her face was white: “How wonderful people are! What a miracle!” she said, and her voice seemed to be coming from a long way off.

VOLODYA:
We couldn’t find anyone.