Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (38 page)

ALEXANDER PUSHKIN

I woke up during the night, fretting about Anna. We were back at Tatiana’s flat in Saratov. But Anna had not asked me to stay. She had not come over. She had not even rung. I was accustomed to Anna’s strangeness. I had learned not take it personally. This was different, though. She had never avoided me before. That hurt.

When I first arrived on this trip, she had been there to greet me at Saratov station. Her lean, tanned face lit up by a lopsided smile, she dodged my embrace as usual. She returned with us to Tatiana’s flat, and stayed for a meal. It was long enough for me to register the change in her.

Anna had somehow grown into her skin, become womanly, attractive. There was a new animation about her. She had let her hair grow for the first time, and wore a striking plaid jacket and trousers. Strong colors suited her. I wondered fleetingly whether she was in love. She slipped away after the meal and I was longing to see more of her.

There had been times back in England when I was trying to write about Anna that I was so maddened by her elusiveness I almost fancied she didn’t exist, that she was merely the part of myself that I left behind in Russia when, with regret, with relief, I returned to the daylight world of the West. Now, when she was looking so vibrant, when she was only half a mile away, she had dropped out of sight.

Being with Anna had never been easy. Silences had been the other, the constant companion of our friendship. But since she had written me that wonderful letter after we met I had never doubted the connection between us; the fact, as she put it, that I was a-little-bit-her. Was that no longer true?

I remembered those early days, when we were both looking for answers to the same question: what does it mean to be Russian, now that communism has gone? We shared the same hopes for Russia, too. Her enthusiasm for the ideals of liberal democracy was untarnished. And I, her friend from the West, was the living representative of her hopes. Even then there were good reasons why she needed to retreat into silence, I reflected. Hers was a country with volatile politics and a venerable tradition of punishing people for their opinions. Before we ever met she had lost her job and her flat simply for having come out in support of Marx’s Russian German community.

Then there had been the time when a Moscow journalist picked up on her account of a hysterical attempt by Marx’s leaders to provoke rebellion against the region becoming a Russian German homeland. So crushed was the community by the mocking article he wrote in a popular paper that when I arrived in Marx shortly afterward, no one would talk to me. Anna had been the agent of their humiliation, albeit unwittingly. Muscovites were dangerous enough, foreigners far more so.

The reasons for Anna’s silences had changed over the years. Though I was often left struggling to grasp what lay behind them, I never doubted that she was challenging me to try to understand. After Putin came to power, after Russia’s relationship with the West became strained, there had been a tacit agreement between us that I would not expose her to unnecessary difficulties by asking her directly about politics.

Increasingly she had turned her energies inward and started exploring her spiritual world. But even then she wanted me to bear witness to her life. Or so I thought. Had I been kidding myself? The thought was unbearable.

Perhaps the problem was connected with the Orthodox Church? I had watched her wavering between the two branches of Christianity, Western and Eastern. I saw how she struggled to resist the comfortable lure of Catholicism. She battled to breach the outer defenses of Russia’s Church, the obscure language of its liturgy, the way it made no effort to help the uninitiated. That was a journey where I could follow her only so far. But she had clearly broken through long ago, found her way to something that nourished her. She had discovered a Russia she could love. I was even a little envious.

The problem, if there was one, was that the relationship between Church and State in Russia has always been so close. In its idealized form it amounted to a quasi-mystical “symphonia” between them. “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationhood,” ran the old tsarist rallying cry. When Putin embraced the notion of sovereign democracy, the regime was setting itself up as the legitimate inheritor of that autocratic tradition.

I noticed with alarm how other formerly liberal friends, now pious believers, had started investing Putin with the reverence traditionally accorded to the tsars. Had the burst of popular patriotism prompted by the war with Georgia affected Anna in the same way? Had she felt challenged to go the full stretch, to embrace the notion that if she loved her country, she must support the values and actions of its rulers?

The thought was so alarming that I was now wide awake. Outside in the street, a cat fight had started. I switched on the light. So that was it, was it? Anna had thrown in her lot with sovereign democracy. She could not cope with our friendship any more. All this time, I had never really been more than a function of her idea of the West. Or was it just that the distance between Russia and the West had grown too great? Either way, the connection between us had snapped.

The rubbish vans came and went, roaring hungrily, collecting refuse along the street. Dawn broke, and I got up early, waiting for the moment when Nadya would be at school and I could discuss my fears with Tatiana. She would tell me the truth. She knew Anna well.

Tatiana was unequivocal. “No, that’s all nonsense. Anna’s just being Anna,” she told me firmly. I felt a rush of relief. The night devils slunk away. What on earth had got into me? Then she added, in her emollient way: “You’re her conscience—and she can’t bear it.” That seemed highly improbable. Anna had more than enough conscience of her own. Tatiana was just trying to make me feel better.

After that, I insisted that Anna and I spend an evening together. Perhaps I should not have tried. For the occasion comically recapitulated our first, painful evening in Marx sixteen years earlier. There was I, longing to talk, to catch up on her, find out how she was. And there she was, deploying her words like well-placed guns, behind whose cover she kept contriving her retreat back into that hinterland of silences.

Topic after topic, she simply vetoed. “Don’t let’s talk about my work—I’m fed up with it. I’d love to leave, but there’s nowhere else to go. They’re not interested in serious, objective journalism anymore. It’s all become—well, very political.”

Anna dealt with the subject of the war with Georgia with equal dispatch, chopping it up like an awkward joint of meat. “How did people react to the war?” she growled. “They didn’t. Oh yeah? So they’re killing each other in the Caucasus again? My boots need mending.” Then she added bleakly: “Still, you get to the point where there’s nothing you can do
but
back your government. Living in a weak country’s no picnic. We tried that. It’s preferable to live in a strong one. Now let’s talk about something more cheerful.”

So we focused on the good news, her summer holiday exploring the glorious churches of the far north, the Moscow periodical
Arion
, which was publishing more of her poems.

Lucy, her beloved cat, who had survived falling seven stories from the window of her flat since my last visit, did her best to keep me entertained while Anna made a fuss about the fact that the hot water hadn’t been turned on as promised. She rang to tell the building manager off. Then she ran a very deep cold bath into which she dangled a small electric element, which might or might not warm the water up enough to give her a bath around midnight.

Meanwhile, I could hardly fail to notice that she had no furniture or carpets. Money had proved another taboo subject. Anna had been proud of her earnings. Now she was visibly struggling. Inflation was running a good deal higher than growth, and prices had shot up. The price of bread alone had risen by 22 percent since the beginning of the year. According to one survey, Russia’s middle class was shrinking, down from 25 percent of the population last year to 18 percent this year. Half Anna’s salary went in rent, her friends reckoned. Meanwhile, her parents, now old and infirm, needed her help to survive on their basic pension of $74 a month.

Anna had moved home since I was last here. She had just redecorated her old flat when the owners decided to sell it. This one was wretchedly dark and shabby and all but empty, except for a pile of periodicals thrown in a corner and a bookcase which the owners had left behind. Tatiana said she had refused all offers of furniture, in order to be prepared for further, involuntary moves. Anna slept on the floor now. Only her icon corner looked cared for. There, on a small chest covered with a freshly laundered cloth, lay her Bible and a few small paper icons.

Stilted though our evening was, I came away reassured that Anna had not lost her head and become a rabid nationalist. Nor was she trying to distance herself from me. She was just under greater pressure than I had ever seen her, struggling with the unexpected descent back into poverty, with having no home, hating her work, hedged around with constraints it would have been dangerous or demeaning to talk about.

Anna’s recent articles revealed more about her than she was prepared to admit to me directly. The brash tabloid for which she worked had always been a mine of interesting stories. It was tame now. Page after page of celebrity gossip was leavened here and there by patriotic articles. Russia’s popular press had morphed into its Western counterpart.

A Moscow friend was clear about her judgment of this development: “What we’ve got today is much more damaging than Soviet censorship was. It keeps people mindlessly occupied so they don’t have the time or inclination to think for themselves.” All this was true. Anna’s articles were different, though. There had been times after Putin came to power when her articles were bland, constrained by her anxiety to keep out of trouble. Not anymore. Now they were bold.

They offered a compelling glimpse of the dark malfunctioning of power in Saratov. Take the ongoing topic of the murder of the province’s harsh but honest chief prosecutor six months earlier. For a long time, the police got nowhere with their search for the culprit. Then the murder was pinned on the boss of one of the city’s most powerful factories, Hammer and Sickle. (I remembered it, of course. In the 1990s, the manager’s hair turned white overnight when the boss was beheaded for refusing to surrender his factory to a criminal gang.)

Anna did not bother to hide her skepticism at this turn of events. With one hand the prosecutor’s office was handing out awards to those responsible for the arrest, she noted coolly. With the other they were refusing the defendant his choice of lawyer. Back at his factory the disbelieving workforce were asking what possible motive their boss had for murder. Their view was that his arrest was the beginning of another hostile takeover attempt.

To add to the mystery, shortly before the murder an extremely personable swindler had been offering to “replace” the doomed prosecutor with a more amenable candidate, for a cool $1.5 million. The tape recording of the conversation played in court was collected by an aging police stooge with dark glasses and a puffy face who gave evidence in a tremulous voice. He died quite suddenly, mid-trial. Self-assured, amused, Anna exposed the holes in the evidence presented by this Gogolian cast of characters.

Reading these articles left me feeling chastened. How unimaginative I had been! No wonder Anna did not want to talk to me about her job. As her paper’s legal correspondent, each time she wrote an article she was picking her way through the minefield of a corrupted polity. The law served a state whose leaders had no higher vision than self-enrichment and the perpetuation of their rule. It was a terrifying job. But she, who had always seemed so fearful, was not just chronicling these cases. She was daring to make her own judgments clear.

Sometimes she even appeared to be enjoying herself. She had become a virtuoso at negotiating such moral complexities. And she could pull it off because all the lawyers, prosecutors, and politicians knew her to be incorruptible. I felt ashamed to have doubted her.

When Tatiana took me to Saratov station to catch the sleeper back to Moscow, Anna joined us, wearing a smart pink jacket (“secondhand,” she told me proudly). Ten years ago, you had to push through a swarm of hawkers, beggars, and displaced people with bundles to get to the platform. Now the place was spotless. This morning, the Indian summer spell had finally broken. The golden light which had touched Saratov with grace during the days of my visit had given way to drizzle. “You’re taking the sunshine with you,” said Tatiana with a rueful smile. Her face was whiter than ever today, and her eyes were dark holes. Anna, on the other hand, looked perversely vital, even amused as she shifted from foot to foot and hunched her shoulders against the rain.

Farther down the platform a school brass band was seeing somebody off, rum-pa-pa, rum-pa-pa. We stood there, pretending everything was normal, talking about future plans. There was a piece by Anna I was going to publish in the magazine I edited. I would meet up with Tatiana’s older daughter when I was in Moscow … The words were not the point, they were just a promise that whatever lay ahead, our friendship would hold fast.

We had shared a great grief in the years of our friendship. In the strangled silence between us lay our aborted hopes for a new Russia, one which would at last come to prize its own people, rather than hoisting itself up on their bones. All of us had bowed to the conventional wisdom that our hope for Russia at the end of communism was naive. But was it? Surely what was wrong was just that it was not stubborn enough. Hope is sacred, the fine point of the fulcrum of change.

What my friends were really feeling I hardly dared think, dare not even now. I was feeling cowardly, longing to be gone, to leave behind the plague of emotions bearing down on me. Guilt was the worst of them. I had never imagined leaving them to face such a difficult situation. Before we next met, relations between Russia and the West looked likely to get worse. Russia’s economy depended on selling oil and gas to Europe. The world recession, triggered in the West, was going to hit long-suffering Russians. And the harder it hit them, the more Moscow’s war party were likely to beat the nationalist drum and seek out confrontation with the West as a distraction. “We can’t afford to look ahead, any of us. It’s too awful,” Tatiana was saying over breakfast. “All we can do is live in a continual present, manage each day as it comes.”