Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (4 page)

BENYA’S ARK

After that I had a good time on the boat. Elsewhere in Russia my friends were living on bread, milk, and potatoes. Here every meal was a feast. Solemnly, we ate our way through cutlets, meat pies, trifles, soups, pastries, pancakes with sour cream and smoked fish, salads drenched in mayonnaise. As Benya’s guests we ate without ceremony, packing our bodies like suitcases before a long journey, preparing for a return to life in the wreckage of Russia’s empire.

The star among my friends was the “Russian Edith Piaf,” whose concert had astounded the Dixieland trumpeter. With her long, dark hair and soulful eyes Elena Kamburova looked like one of those characters who gaze out from early Christian Coptic grave portraits, their eyes trained on eternity. The dying red roses in Olga’s suite were tributes from her concert the night before.

Later on, back in Moscow, I would watch the reticence fall off like a cloak as she walked onstage. She seemed to live fully only in those moments of performance. For the time being, I watched her sing on the screen of a faulty video recording taken the night before. Though the image was distorted, the velvet-dark sound was undamaged. She was indeed the apotheosis of Russia’s great tradition of singer-poets.

As we sat out on deck, Kamburova was sewing a present for Benya. It was a bearded cloth doll with multicolored clothes and pockets for his pens and pencils. “How else can I thank him?” she murmured. “Anything that money can buy he can get himself.” My new friends were devoted to Benya. It was all very puzzling. The cream of Russia’s creative intelligentsia, they were unlikely to accept hospitality from a mafia boss. But how to ask about Benya without making my misgivings rudely obvious? Was he a Party boss who had walked off with the funds? When all business dealings were illegal, the Party controlled the biggest scams. The richest oligarchs to emerge from the confusion of those years would turn out to have come from that background.

Finally, angling for information, I asked Olga about the thugs who were lunching at the captain’s table. She burst out laughing: “Of course! You must’ve thought you’d landed in some mafia stronghold! Well, rest assured—Benya’s not like that.” Not long ago, those two young hoods had attacked him when he was carrying a huge sum of money, she explained. “Being Benya, he invited them to join him! We tried to dissuade him, but he reckoned that since he wouldn’t be able to shake them off, he’d try to convert them—that’s Benya all over. So far, it’s worked. He certainly needs protection. Times are changing, it’s becoming dangerous—at least they keep the others off.”

Benya grew up in a mountain resort in southern Russia. Theater was his great love. The dean of a Leningrad arts college, on holiday in a resort, spotted him in some production and encouraged him to apply for a theater course at his college. All would have been well if Benya had not decided to redecorate his student room in Leningrad. Halfway through the job, he dragged a refuse bin in from the courtyard for the rubbish. The police turned up and started poking around in the bin. They found a dead body, and pinned a murder charge on Benya. When the charge would not stick, they saved face by charging him with “appropriating state property.” Of course, the refuse bin belonged to the state, as did the brushes and paint. In those days everyone lived like that, stealing odds and ends from a state that owned everything.

Benya was given a minimum sentence of three years. The conviction ended his chance of a career in theater, or in any other profession. After his release, he took casual jobs as a maintenance man here, a nightwatchman or caretaker there. But theater remained his passion. Night after night he would be there with carnations for his favorite actor or singer.

When Gorbachev came to power, Benya started trading. He was quick-witted, and, having no stake in the old regime, he could move fast. He started importing Japanese video recorders, which allowed early glimpses of life in the abundant West. Then he moved on to personal computers, each of which could be sold for the lifetime salary of an average professional. He made his first fortune well before the fall of communism. He was a talented deal maker, the legacy perhaps of generations of Odessa Jewish traders. When the first chink of freedom allowed, he opened a little theater. He seems to have had little use for money personally. He kept on the move in his white Mercedes, brokering deals, trading goods wherever they were in short supply. When he had made enough, he started bankrolling films, which was how he met Elena. Later, when I asked her why she had not told me that he called himself Benya she explained that she would not invoke Babel’s mafia lord because “it’s unworthy of him.”

Zhenya-Benya was a grand jester, riding a carnival moment of chaos. He was a wanderer in the service of a higher truth, only his truth was not religious. Dressed in his multicolored clothes, sleeping in his white Mercedes, he belonged to that tradition of social outcasts touched by grace, Russia’s holy fools. He believed that Russia could be redeemed, but only by its artists.

His fantastical career reached its high point that summer of 1992 when he hired the
N. Gastello
, filled his ark with his favorite artists, and indulged them with every luxury. But by that time the mafias were starting to carve up the territory between them. It was becoming dangerous for a loner.

As the
N. Gastello
steamed into Saratov I prepared to leave, but Olga told me Benya was expected. He was throwing a feast. Everyone was dressed up. Benya’s girlfriend, in her flowing dress, presided over the table of honor. But the chair beside her remained empty all evening. Over dinner, the thug with tattoos entertained me with filthy underworld anecdotes, which he said were “English.” When he smiled his scar seemed less terrible. “The name’s Yuris—if you’re ever in trouble in Petersburg, call me up …” Beside him sat the
extrasensor
, my nemesis Boris, looking very ordinary in a badly cut jacket and white socks. Since Olga had taken me under her wing, he had made himself scarce.

After dinner Boris whirled Olga around the deck. Relaxed now, I danced with the jazz pianist who had played on deck that afternoon: “I hate this country,” he confided, flicking his ponytail. “Life’s hell here. But when I got the chance to stay in America I found I was condemned to Russia.”

We leaned on the rail, peering over the river into the darkness. It was so broad that we could not see the east bank. Somewhere out there lay Marx, the town where I was going to chronicle the making of the new Russia. Thanks to its history, I told the pianist, thanks to foreign investment, this place would be transformed long before change came to the rest of rural Russia.

He sighed. “I wish you luck. But remember that foreigners come here and see change because they want to. In fact there’s only one riddle, and that’s insoluble—why is Russia the way it is?”

“I’m fed up with this Russian fatalism,” I replied. “Things are going to change now—and I’m going to watch the preview.”

VISIONS AND FAKES

Next morning the boat was due to head back to St. Petersburg. Late that night in Olga’s candlelit suite my friends tried to dissuade me from leaving. “Don’t be a fool,” said my boyish protector, “no one’ll have time for you—they’ll be too busy grubbing around for the next meal. Stay here. We’ll have fun, and you’ll get to meet Benya.” It was tempting. I had been counting on Benya to introduce me to people in Saratov. All evening we had still been half expecting him. But his chair remained empty.

My protector had put her finger on another problem. The glasnost years, when everyone wanted to know a Westerner, were over. Now it was the fault of the West that people’s magical expectations had failed to come true.

Staying in Saratov was going to be difficult for other reasons, too. When the boat docked, Kamburova’s concert agent in the city had come to pay his respects to the singer. He inquired if I had a visa for Saratov.

“I don’t need one now!” I responded airily. Under the old regime, each city required separate entry visas for foreigners.

“In Saratov you do,” he replied grimly.

“Russia’s full of rules which no one obeys,” I responded. But I noted the triangle of anxiety between his eyes.

“In Saratov, rules are rules.”

“Come off it, Sergei,” remonstrated Kamburova’s pianist.

“You don’t understand—nothing’s changed here! I’ll help you with a visa, but you’ll have to go back and apply from Moscow.”

He told me that Saratov had been a city closed to foreigners until only a few weeks before. Until then, they were allowed only to travel past the city by train in the dead of night.

What to do? From the boat, I could see Saratov stretching uphill from the Volga as far as the eye could see, toward the “yellow mountain” of its Tatar name. It looked dauntingly large. No hotel was going to let me stay without a visa. I could be handed over to the police simply for being here. The only hope was to stay with someone. My one contact was away. “Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow,” a woman’s voice said when I rang. Or maybe not.

Saratov sounded grim, but I was reluctant to return to the Russia I knew with Marx only a bus ride away. I slept fitfully in my luxurious cabin and woke out of a strange dream. After traveling through a desert I arrived in a place which looked like a north German city, with cobbled streets and Gothic churches, except that everything was carved from solid stone. Giant Coca-Cola bottles and finned 1950s Cadillacs were carved into the buildings, but it was unclear what their function was. The city was humming with unfathomable life, but I could only make myself understood by writing in trochees, dactyls, and spondees, the language of scansion.

After breakfast, the captain of the
N. Gastello
blew the horn. The sun glittered on the deserted waterway as I hugged my friends good-bye and walked down the gangplank. Perhaps my punk contact would turn up. A woman was standing on the promenade. Tiny, with a full skirt and wicker basket, I recognized her from the evening before, when the boat had docked. She had joined us as we enacted the ritual the singer Kamburova had adopted whenever she arrived in a city, feeding the stray dogs. When the price of food doubled and tripled, people started turning their dogs out. Pedigrees and mongrels, they sat on the sidewalks like unemployed men, hoping for their luck to change.

The tiny woman and I waved to the
N. Gastello
as she sailed north. Then, flashing a dazzling smile which showed her worn teeth, she asked, “Are you Susan? I’m Vera. Elena told me that you needed help. Would you like to stay with me?” I put down my bag and hugged her. As Vera and I started up the hill, through crumbling streets of neoclassical buildings, she talked of Kamburova: “Her songs have been my lifeline. So I’m thrilled at the chance of doing something for you!”

Before the Bolshevik Revolution, Saratov used to be called “the Athens of the Volga.” Then, it was a rich merchant town, trading in timber and hard wheat. In the Second World War, it was spared destruction, thanks to the battle of Stalingrad to the south. Since then time had been wrecking what the tanks spared. Now scaffolding held in place the bulging walls and extravagant wrought-iron balconies above the plastic shop signs.

Vera lived in a small flat off a leafy street near the city center. Outside her front door an enormous black mongrel sat waiting. “Jack’s a stray—he followed me home one day.” Her flat was cluttered with books and paintings. “My son’s away, so you can sleep in his bed. Excuse the mess.” Her son’s walls were hung with Led Zeppelin posters. “I hate housework. If I spent my time looking after the flat, I’d have time for nothing else,” she said as she cleared a path through the dust to the bed with a mop.

We sat drinking tea on her rusting balcony overlooking an inner courtyard full of plane trees. Vera played me Kamburova’s songs on an old gramophone. The rich, dark voice floated over the courtyard, transmuting the drabness and the tragedy of everyday life. “Pessimistic,” the Soviet authorities had dubbed her music. She had operated in that fertile margin beyond Soviet approval, but this side of prohibition. “When I had nothing else, I had Elena’s songs,” Vera murmured.

Vera herself was born into the Soviet elite. She trained as a physicist, and held a prestigious, well-paid job in an armaments factory. “But it wasn’t feeding me,” as she put it. So she gave it up, became a librarian, and retired into her own world, avoiding newspapers and television, protecting herself from Soviet reality behind barricades of music and the poems of Tsvetaeva.

A light breeze rustled the leaves of the plane tree. In the courtyard below a babushka in a flowered housecoat sat asleep in the sun with a brindled cat on her lap. “Isn’t it wonderful?” murmured Vera, her heart-shaped face glowing. “It’s taken me a long time to learn to live in the moment. Now I see how lucky I am.”

I failed to see the luck. Saratov had been closed to foreigners because its industry was largely military. Her husband had been an engineer in an armament factory. He was unemployed, thanks to Reagan’s deal with Gorbachev. One of her sons was a student, and her own salary as a librarian was barely enough to keep the three of them in porridge, potatoes, and windfall apples.

Despite her plight, Vera’s radiant cheerfulness marked her out. Before the fall of communism the population of this closed city was well paid, its shops well stocked, and its housing, schools, and colleges among the best in the empire. Then the arms factories closed. Now people walked with eyes lowered, faces averted from one another. In shops, I was served reluctantly. When I asked the way, people pretended not to hear. To them, I was an outrider for the victorious armies of capitalism. In Vera’s company it was different. Few could resist smiling at this diminutive woman whose radiant, heart-shaped face told one story, while her darned clothes and worn teeth told another. One morning, we passed a blind man groping his way to avoid the open manholes and gaping holes where the asphalt had collapsed into the sewers. Vera slipped her arm through his and we walked him home across the city center.

Marx was tantalizingly close now, but first I needed contacts there. I was in a hurry as my Russian visa was running out. But each time I mentioned that homeland for Russia’s Germans, people clammed up. The project had clearly met with vigorous local opposition. Why? No one would tell me. I even met a radical who talked about how he tried to quell that opposition by applying something he called the algebra of harmony. He was happy to talk about the equation:
. But I got no satisfactory answer when I asked him why people were so opposed to a project from which they stood to gain so much.