Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (25 page)

1998

LOOKING FOR MOTHER OLGA

When I returned to Russia that September, the financial crash had only just happened. I was seriously worried for my friends, whose lives were just starting to sort themselves out. Would this catastrophic blow have sent them flying?

In the event, Anna, Natasha, and Igor had no money to lose, as they reminded me wryly. All three were unaffected. As for Misha, the last time I saw him he had been complaining how desperate he was for capital, how no one would give him a loan. But he had come through the crisis precisely because he had no capital, and had borrowed no money.

In Moscow, however, the lives of Ira and her new husband, Sasha, had been shattered. Since they started working together, their production company had been expanding fast, employing ever more people, turning out a stream of documentaries. The couple were a familiar sight on the Moscow social scene, at film premières and chic restaurants. They were successful and glamorous: tall Sasha, his Nordic good looks set off by a tailored Nehru jacket; Ira, slim and swan-necked, flamboyant in a miniskirt and thigh-high boots. They spent their summers in their house in Hungary, on the shores of Lake Baloton, and they were building a fine house in Moscow, in a gated community on the city limits. Sasha was just about to buy his own regional television channel, and had borrowed the money to do so.

The collapse of the market in August left Sasha with colossal debts. Both houses were instantly sold off to pay their creditors, as were all but the couple’s most basic possessions. When I stayed with them in the small, dark basement boiler room where they had found shelter Ira was the one comforting me: “Look, don’t worry—it’s only money! We’ll pay it back, however long it takes. We’re lucky—we love our work.” Her chief concern was clearly for Sasha’s health. I marveled at Ira’s stoicism. But Sasha’s gaunt face told its own story. It was not just his health that worried me. He was no longer young, and his creditors were threatening him, intimating that they would get their money by fair means or foul.

The country was back on its knees again. Now that Chechnya had won de facto independence in the first round of its war with Russia, people were worried about the possibility of Russia breaking up. What if other ethnic minority enclaves, like Tatarstan, were encouraged to secede from the Federation, they fretted? What if Siberia, with all that mineral wealth, decided to make a break for it?

Back in London, I had been reading about the emergence of a different manifestation of regional identity. A Keston Institute report suggested that paganism had survived as a coherent faith in parts of Russia; indeed, that one Finno-Ugric ethnic minority on the Volga near Kazan had even considered adopting it as their official religion after the fall of communism. I wondered whether Anna, who was a journalist in a Volga city to the south, knew anything about this. When we met up, I asked her. She burst out laughing: “Paganism! What a load of nonsense!”

I was not so sure. I wanted to go there and see for myself. For a start, Russia’s peasantry was well known to have clung on to its pagan beliefs for centuries after Christianization, practicing what they called
dvoeverie
, or “double faith.” Besides, when it came to Russia, I had given up believing that because something was implausible, it was necessarily untrue. No one traveling in Russia since the fall of communism could have failed to notice how, once ordinary people could no longer afford Russia’s health service, they had turned back to their traditional healers, the old peasant women, for help. The pages of Russia’s newspapers were peppered with small ads which offered to see off your rivals in love or business by means of a good, old-fashioned curse.

•  •  •

However, in the light of Anna’s reaction, I told Ira of my plan rather tentatively. Her response was different. Earlier in the year, she had been filming among one of those Finno-Ugric Volga minorities, the Mordvins, and she was amazed to find people so deeply in thrall to the old peasant healers. She even remembered the name of one of the wise women, Mother Olga, whom the locals talked about with particular reverence. Indeed, if I really wanted to go, she would be happy to come with me.

So off we went, in search of Mother Olga. We took the overnight sleeper east from Moscow, heading for Saransk, the main city of the autonomous republic of Mordovia. The Finno-Ugric Mordvins were one of a group of non-Slav ethnic minorities that had been living on the Volga since long before the Slavs came to the steppes. Over the centuries, most of these minorities had eventually converted to Christianity. The Mordvins had held out longer than most, until the seventeenth century or later.

One of the bunks in our compartment was taken by a pale, hollow-chested young lieutenant returning home on leave from Murmansk. As luck would have it, he lived not far from Mother Olga’s village. “Not my scene,” he said condescendingly. Of course, when he joined the army he left all that behind; became part of modern Russia. But Ira persisted. “Ma’s into all that,” he conceded. “But you can forget about her—Mother Olga’s given up seeing people. Her son was killed in a motorcycle accident—well, they called it an accident.” It happened right after she used her mysterious powers of divination to help the police identify a murderer belonging to one of the local mafias. Before we even arrived, our one fragile lead had broken off.

Did he have any other suggestions? “Dunno,” he said, turning his back on us. “But Ma did mention some woman in Chamzhinka.” When the train arrived in Saransk next morning we looked for a taxi. “Woman in Chamzhinka?” the driver on the platform pondered. “Must be Alla Stepanovna. Been there with the wife.” Was he playing us along? There was no knowing. As he headed out of town he reminded us that the Finno-Ugric Mordvins belonged to two tribes, the Moksha and the Erzya. Chamzhinka was Erzya country.

After driving through rolling countryside of fields and woods, we reached the outskirts of a small town. The car slewed off the road on to a mud track flanked by half-built houses, each sporting a comical array of architectural features, expressive of their owners’ long-thwarted individuality. The building outside which we stopped was different. It was cobbled together out of bricks and concrete, festooned with trailing cables. There was no placard, nothing to suggest that this was the house of a well-established folk healer. In fact, the place seemed deserted. We rang the doorbell long and hard, but there was no reply. Still, it was only breakfast time.

Exploring the building, we opened a door at the side. The dark basement was full of people. They were packed around two trestle tables, dressed as if for church. We waited outside. It promised to be one of those golden September days which often come just before the Russian winter sets in. “Women’s summer,” they call it; when it arrives, it is like a consolation, a promise to hold on to through the dark months. In the gardens around us, the boughs of the trees were heavy with apples and cherries. We had come to the
chernozyem
, the belt of fertile black earth which runs up from southern Russia in a broad northeasterly belt.

People were busy harvesting potatoes and fruit. But in the healer’s garden there was nothing but weeds, rubbish, and a rusting generator. A mongrel bitch and her puppy came and sniffed our legs. Presently a middle-aged man with a cherubic face framed by gray curls came out, peered at us through the tinted glasses on the end of his nose, and went back in.

As the sun moved higher, the people in the basement started to join us, settling on planks, stumps of wood, and upturned buckets. We swapped symptoms and troubles, shared food and fizzy drinks from the local store. Some were clearly seriously ill, people on whom the doctors had given up. A sad-eyed woman called Masha, who had brought her tearful daughter, told us about her previous visit. She had slept overnight in the basement with a group of people, waiting for a session. But next morning, Nina Stepanovna chucked them all out: during the night someone crapped on the healer’s front doorstep. “Who’d have done that?” I asked. “A sorcerer,” whispered a frail old man who was kneading bits of bread into balls and popping them into his mouth.

“They’re always trying to get Nina Stepanovna,” Masha volunteered. “She’s white, they’re black,” she said, spelling out the obvious for these outsiders who understood nothing.

“It’s war!” said a babushka in a red headscarf. “Always was—always will be. There’s one near me keeps devils under her floorboards!”

The sun was high by the time the healer’s cherubic emissary appeared again. Briefly, he sawed at a piece of wood, then lost interest and stood in the sunshine, enjoying his status as “her” husband: “Hang on. She’s having a cuppa. My advice is—don’t cross her. The tongue on her!”

Finally, the healer appeared. She was short and shapeless and wore a flowered housecoat. She had an enormous frog-like mouth. “Whadda you think?” she said, nodding proudly toward her man. “Not bad-looking is he, my Yura?” Then she returned to the house. Clutching his gray curls, as if to say “I’ve done what I can,” the cherub followed her.

The patience of the waiting group amazed me. No one even ventured to ask the healer why we were waiting. By midafternoon one young couple started looking restless; their daughter would be on her own at home. “Don’t leave—you can stay the night in the basement,” said Masha. They were not convinced. The basement was a damp concrete box with a tiny window, trestle tables, and a few narrow benches. We were sad to see them go; after the hours of waiting they were no longer strangers. No sooner had they left than the healer beckoned us all into the basement. “Sorry you had to wait. No way I could see you while
they
were here.” A frisson passed through the group. “Meaning?” I asked Masha. “A spell. They’d come to put a spell on her!” she whispered. Ira and I exchanged amused glances: this woman understood about power.

In the basement people were sitting pressed shoulder to shoulder around the table. The room was lit by a single bare bulb. A row of paper icons was fixed around the wall. The atmosphere was charged. The three of us sat on benches at the side with other latecomers.

Half an hour later Nina Stepanovna made her operatic entrance. Gone was the country baba; carrying a huge leather-bound book, the silver threads of her headscarf catching the light, a large brass crucifix around her neck, she circled the tables like a diva. Now and then she stopped to feel someone’s head, neck, or breast. “Don’t be shy now—pretend you’re on the beach!” she clucked, putting people at their ease.

At the end of the table sat Borya. Six months ago he’d been carried in here, unable to walk. The healer had been working on him ever since. She’d taken a curse off him, he said. Now she made him parade up and down the room; he was still limping, but only slightly. They beamed at one another in triumph.

Opposite Borya sat a woman with a corkscrew perm called Valya. All day she was groaning, restless from the pain in her back. Her blond, virile husband had taken her from one hospital to the next, but no one could tell her what was wrong. We were longing for the healer to put Valya out of her agony. But Nina Stepanovna’s progress around the table was slow. She would move on, then turn back, as if weaving a web around us.

“Which of your folk was killed by lightning?” the healer asked the red-scarfed baba, after putting her hand on the woman’s head. The baba’s mouth dropped open. “That was Uncle Fedya—but how did you …?” she gasped. Nina Stepanovna moved on, feeling people here and there, using her cross like a stethoscope. “Wow, you steal a ton of stuff!” she commented, rummaging in one woman’s hair as if she could feel the booty. The woman hotly denied it. Nina Stepanovna smiled and patted her fondly: “Can’t kid me. I’ve worked on a farm, too. But I never took more than I needed—don’t get greedy.…” Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes: how well Nina Stepanovna understood her!

She might have been reading from some invisible printout of their lives. When she reached Masha’s tearful daughter she put her mouth to the girl’s back, walked to the corner of the room, and bent over, her body wracked with coughing. The girl started sobbing. “Cry, doll. Go on, let it all out. You’ll feel better soon,” said Nina Stepanovna kindly. “And when the first frost comes go out in your nightie and lie in a puddle at the nearest crossroads. Don’t worry, no one’ll see—and you won’t catch cold.” The girl hugged Natasha Stepanovna as if her life depended on it.

Next came a well-dressed woman from a long way away. Nina Stepanovna dealt with her briefly: “As for you, my china doll, why did you sell your wedding dress? Ai, ai, ai—you can’t sell wedding things. You can’t give ’em away and you can’t borrow ’em! You’re body’s cold all the way down the right side—go to church and confess.”

“It’s your thyroid,” she said to the next woman. “When you get home, take a knife and go like this”—passing the cross over her throat. Then she muttered: “Leave this white body, leave these yellow bones, amen, amen, amen. And avoid mushrooms.”

Next she came to the old man with the fearful eyes. “How old are you?” she asked. “Sixty-five? You look ten years older. Don’t worry, it’ll be all right—where were you in the army? It’s the radiation that done it. Oats and hops—three spoonfuls to a liter of water, strain and drink with fifty grams of honey. And what were you up in court for? I know. You didn’t mean it. You were drunk.”

There was no judgment, and no condescension. Like children, her patients showed her their bruises and let her kiss them better again. “What about kids?” she asked the old man. “Did you leave it too late? … There’s an adder hiding under your house. Go home and find it. Kill it, put it on the crossroads, and say: ‘Snake, dear little snake, wherever you came from, whoever put you in my house, I leave you at this crossroads. This is your family, and to me amen, healing, and grace’—that’s what you must do, dearie!”

Valya’s turn was next. Twisted over in pain, she could hardly wait, and nor could we. But Nina Stepanovna returned to the old man again. “Are your legs tired?” she said. “That’s the arthritis—is there a birch in your garden? Take the one that buds earliest, cut it down, and give away the wood to lonely old women—whatever you do, don’t take it into the house. And say this: ‘John the Baptist, John the Healer, take my darkness, give me your light. Cure my ills, my pains, my nerves, and my veins.’ ”