Black Earth City Read online

  We were heading, inexorably, for the station, partly because I had a vague idea that we might see Sergei or the plums again, partly because we were always attracted to the railways, the trains idling on the way to Sofia, Odessa and the Far East. There was always commotion and bustle there, even at six o’clock on New Year’s Day. The waiting room was filled with refugees from the wars in the Caucasus who shifted and moaned on their bundles. People hurried to and from trains, policemen strolled about proprietorially, and the eternal line of babushkas gossiped by their buckets of meat pies, boiled potatoes and bottles of Moskovskaya vodka with crooked labels. Viktor walked among them, congratulating them, and where he went I followed with the packet of Smarties my father had left me, doling them out into mittened palms. ‘Little chocolates,’ I explained. ‘For health and success.’

  The long-distance trains were standing close by and as we wandered along, we saw that one of the windows was open. Without any further discussion we scurried across the tracks, climbed in and settled down to sleep and wake up the devil knows where. We’d only been there a couple of minutes before the conductress came upon us blazing with fury.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ said Viktor gently, kissing her inflamed cheeks.

  She suddenly simpered and looked at the floor, saying, ‘Oh well, and new happiness to you all too.’

  So we went to Lipetsk, Viktor’s home town, instead. The early-morning passengers on the elektrichka wore stoical expressions as they huddled in the corners away from the broken windowpanes. They watched with a certain pleasure as Viktor and Jim took their shirts off and we sang for the two hours of the journey, a sort of Schadenfreude for us ruining our health sitting in draughts like that. We took our revenge by inciting their husbands to drink with us.

  ‘Sasha, come on. Join us!’

  Sasha’s wife muttered furiously in his ear and he raised a limp hand in our direction to say, ‘Thanks, guys, but I really can’t, you understand the situation.’

  But we showed no mercy and kept on at him. ‘Join us! It’s a holiday. Only one, really!’

  Two days we spent in Lipetsk, and I remember little of it but a wall entirely covered by a huge reproduction of a lake surrounded by birch trees, and dancing with a crowd of blonde girls and dark husbands, and more vodka, and the feel of a brown blanket under my cheek as at last I slept some time that evening. No other coherent thought crossed my mind.

  But when we arrived back in Voronezh, Mitya was waiting, furious. Why hadn’t I told him where I was going? Why hadn’t I rung? He’d worried. He’d felt a fool, not knowing.

  To me, with my hangover, it seemed only reasonable that such a new year should take longer than usual to be born. But Mitya was hurt. At the end of our first serious argument, he walked away from me, sticking his hands in his pockets and hunching his shoulders. I should have gone after him. Instead I stood on the hostel doorstep and watched until he disappeared.

  · 11 ·

  The House of the Deaf and Dumb

  A newspaper cartoon shows a lone demonstrator waving a banner that reads ‘I don’t understand anything’.

  The Times, 25 October 1991

  Lapochka swung open the door to his room before we had time to knock.

  ‘Look at the doorbell,’ he boasted.

  A light bulb flashed when the button was pressed.

  ‘It’s a house for the deaf-and-dumb!’ He grinned at Mitya and me, delighted. ‘It’s full of surprises. I had an idea the house would be very silent, but in fact they make so much noise. They are always slamming doors, crashing pots in the kitchen, stomping up and down the corridor – and I can hardly ask them to be quiet, can I. Would you like tea?’ Lapochka arranged some chairs around his table. He had been given the job of boiler-stoker for the winter in the house, in return for which he received a pitiful salary and this room full of old stage sets and half-finished canvases. ‘The previous boiler-stoker was an artist,’ he explained. ‘Anyway – I’ve only learnt one concept in their language, and that’s this,’ he tapped his forehead. ‘Guess what it means.’

  ‘Crazy? Clever?’

  ‘Thinking? Understanding? Got a headache?’

  ‘No, no, no. Think laterally. It means grass! Two old guys here sell it to me. The first time they came to my door and stood there tapping their heads, well, I was a little bemused. Up till then, our communication had mainly consisted of the scenario where they’d stamp their feet and go “brrr”, and I’d stoke up the boiler a bit. But the head-tapping confused me until they brought out the grass. Then I started laughing, and they laughed too, and now we’ve got a deal going.’

  There were a great number of deaf-and-dumb people. At the beginning their quietness made them difficult for me to see: when everything was unfamiliar, the noisy claimed my attention first. Later the pool of silence around them rang louder than voices, and I found myself noticing the deaf-and-dumb everywhere. In the shop known as the Iron, or down at the station, they would be standing in a group, having an animated, silent conversation. At the war memorial and other sights, they were usually pointing excitedly. There were particular bars where they met, silently, to get rollicking drunk. I saw them parting at bus stops with a slap on the back and the signal that we would use to mean ‘telephone me’. This was one of their many mysteries that I never managed to penetrate.

  Lack of hearing aids and speech therapy, or rubella, or radiation – who knows why there were so many? They kept themselves separate, and even Lapochka did not really manage to make friends with them. When he tried to ask the old guys on his corridor about their lives, they grinned and gave each other a look. Then one covered his mouth, and the other his ears. Lapochka understood. ‘Hear no evil, speak no evil.’

  In the Soviet Union, of course, invisibility had been their lot. The mad, the handicapped, the homeless and the poor were not suitable participants in the Soviet experiment. How was the perfect society to be formed using imperfect materials? they reasoned, without quite expressing it so bluntly. What’s more, how could citizens have faith in the society they were building if they were surrounded by half-wits and cripples? Just as we sweep the streets clean of litter for sanitary reasons, so we must ensure that our cities are free of these unfortunate elements.

  The segregation began at birth: Ninety-five per cent of physically or mentally handicapped babies were removed from their families. Soviet medicine recognised a condition called ‘oligophrenia’ (literally: having a small brain). Children diagnosed as oligophrenics were further classified as ‘imbecile’, ‘idiot’ or ‘feeble’ and brought up in institutions run by the Ministry of Social Protection, where the exhausted and ill-trained staff did little more than feed them. The conditions were bad, perhaps most of all for those ‘oligophrenic’ children who, it turned out, had purely physical disabilities – who had been removed from their family, surrounded by emotionally and mentally disturbed children, left to fend for themselves and to grow without stimulation or attention of any kind.

  People who developed mental illnesses later in life were spirited away to various destinations. Some were put in institutions; many others ended up in and out of prison for antisocial behaviour. Others became part of the underground world that inhabited the edges of Soviet life and was rather haphazardly concealed from the rest of society. Before the Olympics in 1980, for example, the tramps and alcoholics were simply picked up from the streets of Moscow and dumped a hundred kilometres from the centre of town. By the time they got back to the centre, with any luck, all the foreigners would have left.

  Lately, however, the streets had begun to change. The underclass was coming out of hiding. An old man in an astrakhan coat and ancient felt boots buttonholed me on Revolution Prospect one day, saying, ‘You don’t want to wear trousers, dyevushka. That way the devil gets in, understand?’

  ‘But what am I to wear, then?’

  ‘In Central Asia they wear chiffon. Chiffon chuffon. Understand?’

  He was one of those, like Johnson, who had somehow k
ept on travelling all over the Soviet Union in the days when others needed a permit for a shopping trip to Moscow. Johnson came up to Mitya and me one afternoon in Koltsov Square, asking for a cigarette, and when we offered him a bottle of beer, he sat down with us and told us something of his life. Tattoos curled and interlocked over his face and wrinkled, bald head. He had been homeless, a bomzh, for twenty years and more. Summers he spent in the Crimea, where travellers from all over the Union lived in caves and revelled through the hot nights. He’d been in the Far East and in Leningrad, and he’d lived some years in Central Asia about which he said only that the Asians were good people, but they ate nothing but rice, which was why they were so small. For that reason, he concluded, they’d never rule like the Russians.

  The worst times, he told us, were in prison. Johnson rolled back his sleeves and showed us his ageing biceps, decorated with chains, guns and a swastika. If either Mitya or I had had any experience of prison, we could have read them like a diary. Some showed what his crime was, where he’d served time and how long. Others revealed his rank in the prison hierarchy and so how much respect he deserved. Johnson particularly pointed out the swastika; it showed he was one of the tough guys. The weakest, he told us, were given tattoos by force. Tattooed teardrops on a man’s cheeks meant that anyone was free to force him into any service. Those men rarely survived.

  When Johnson was free, he would stay in a place for a few months, even a year, and then his head would start to torment him. The voices would marshal at his back and, almost without noticing, he’d pull on his boots and walk out into the great singing steppe where there was no shelter and not a crust of bread awaiting him. He was wizened and jittery from all his adventures but, he explained, he couldn’t stop himself.

  ‘Those voices chase me out,’ he said. ‘Lord knows why.’

  Beggars of all kinds were appearing in the centre of town. There were Russians: old women who sat flat on the icy pavement and gaunt men who knelt, faces turned to the ground, and held up cards that read, ‘God have mercy on me, I’m hungry.’ Such a thing had not been seen since the famine after the Great Patriotic War. There were Caucasian refugees carrying their babies and repeating the story of their flight from the south; most people brushed past them suspiciously: everyone knew how rich and wily they were, those Caucasians – they passed those babies from hand to hand, poor little mites, to get more money out of the soft-hearted. It was hard to see how they spent all their riches. They were largely Armenians, living in the railway station and wearing cloth shoes that they’d patched in several places. Grief had worn them almost transparent.

  There were also gypsies. I saw a group of gypsy women burst upon the outdoor market one grey afternoon, shouting to each other and moving quickly among the crowd. They wore layers of raucous scarves and frills, orange petticoats and pink–red shawls tied around their waists. Gold and sequins flashed from their arms as they elbowed shoppers out of their way. They offered their goods to sell with threats and laughed hoarsely when they were refused. Cursing them, the crowd turned their backs until the gypsies were gone. All the Russians despised and feared the gypsies. They’d steal the bread out of your mouth and give you the evil eye afterwards. They were not governed by the same laws as normal people; they were the harbingers of chaos. Two gypsies jumped on my trolley bus one day: ‘Pregnant woman,’ the man shouted, forcing a way for him and his companion towards the seats. ‘Pregnant woman!’ Two old men stood up meekly, while the man and his companion, a blade-thin girl of perhaps sixteen with a jingle of jewellery and kohl-rimmed eyes, took their seats and laughed in their faces. Opposite, a pale, solemn baby in his mother’s arms stared at them and burst into furious tears when she tried to turn his face away. I would have gone with the gypsies, if they’d wanted to kidnap me.

  I asked them once, on a whim, if I could stay the night with them. They were camped on a piece of waste land out towards the road to Moscow. Mitya and Edik were buying cigarettes. The woman that I asked laughed, and said, ‘Better let me tell your fortune.’

  ‘Let me just sit here and chat, then. We’ll drink tea together.’

  She looked dubious. ‘I’ll have to ask my baron,’ she answered at last. ‘Wait over there, and I’ll find him.’

  I joined Mitya, Edik and the others, who looked at me with disgust. ‘They’re dirty, Charlotte, what do you want with them?’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of diphtheria? And tuberculosis?’

  At last a squat man in stonewashed jeans approached us. ‘You want to talk to the baron,’ he stated flatly. ‘He’s away … he won’t be here today.’

  ‘Come on, we have to go,’ Edik broke in. ‘What’s interesting about them?’ he said, as we got back in the taxi. ‘They’re dangerous.’

  And to most Russians, they were. Not just because of their thievery and their diseases, but because of the breath of anarchy that they released onto the streets. Like devils, they were, come to tempt us.

  *

  Anarchy was not new to Voronezh. As a border town, it had been barely controlled by Moscow until the end of the eighteenth century, inhabited by escaped serfs, schismatics fleeing persecution, and smugglers. The Cossacks who bred their famous horses in the region acknowledged no authority but their own. As late as 1765, when the Bishop of Voronezh visited a village in his diocese, he encountered a procession bearing a beribboned young man – a representation of Yarylo, the god of fertility. It was, a contemporary lamented, ‘a half-pagan, half-barbarian region’.

  Even in the 1930s, during the purges, Mandelstam detected an underlying spirit of dissent which he considered to be ‘the free spirit of the borderlands’. In one village he found the members of a sect – the jumpers – who were persecuted in Tsarist times. There was chaos in the village because a short time before his visit the jumpers, speaking in tongues, had announced the date on which they would with one holy leap reach Paradise. Nadezhda Mandelstam described the scene: ‘The sectarians had fixed a day on which they would take off for heaven, and, convinced that by next morning they would no longer be of this world, they gave away all their property to their earthbound neighbours. Coming to their senses when they fell to the ground, they rushed to recover their belongings, and a terrible fight broke out.’

  In another village, the Mandelstams found the villagers were the descendants of exiles and convicts of the eighteenth century. Although the streets were now called after Soviet heroes, the villagers proudly repeated the old street names which commemorated their forefathers’ activities: Strangler’s Lane, Embezzler’s Lane, Counterfeiter’s Row.

  This part of Voronezh’s history, however, was little known or appreciated by the 1990s. For many people, the rabble that had begun to appear on the streets since perestroika was proof that the so-called democratic system was dragging their country into shame and disorder. Their town suddenly seemed strange to them, and dangerous. It was then that the hissed warnings began: don’t go on the bus at night, don’t walk at night, don’t go to the market on your own, don’t talk to Caucasians. These people – good, responsible citizens all of them – even regretted the end of the propiska, the residence permit, which had more or less prevented free movement within the Soviet Union. They were the ones who would tell you that Russians could only be ruled by the rod: look at our history! We’re an Asiatic people, we’re not European, they would explain. Russia is a great country – we just need a strong leader to bring us order.

  They were right, of course, that this explosion on the streets meant misery to many. Old people suffered the most. The housing shortage made them vulnerable to New Russian property developers, who tricked them out of their apartments. An old woman appeared in the stairwell of a friend’s apartment one winter day – he saw her standing by the radiator as he left for work, waiting for someone, perhaps. In fact she was homeless and sick. Later that day she went up to the top floor, lay down on the cold steps, and died. There were many like her.

  And yet for other members of the underclass it
was a time of liberation. Johnson the bomzh told Mitya and me, ‘A whole year’s gone by without prison.’ He couldn’t tell us why, but he added wistfully, ‘I’m going to the Novosibirsk region. They say it’s beautiful there, with forests and lakes …’

  His tone reminded me of the dreams of the Russian peasantry in the nineteenth century, of a utopia on the White Waters of the Altai mountains. Inspired by some omen, whole villages would suddenly set out towards these mythical lands, leaving their houses and fields behind. In 1856, not realising that the Crimean War had already ended, thousands of serfs departed on foot for the Crimea in the belief that the Tsar would set free all those who fought in the campaign.

  And indeed, similar stories began to circulate in Voronezh in 1991. The Americans were about to open a factory in Voronezh, and all those who worked there would be given visas to the USA. The government was going to announce an immediate redistribution of land. And it was funding investigations into alien landings in the Voronezh region, as there had been so many sightings: one had even been reported by the TASS news agency – humanoid giants, three or four metres high with very small heads, had landed in a vehicle like a shining ball right in the centre of the city – Koltsov Square, or thereabouts.

  Why not? Stranger things were happening all around. It was clear, now, that the grey materialism of the Communist regime was too tight to contain all of life. Chaos, passion and the old superstitious Russian magic had burst the seams, and now reality was layered and raucous.

  So I was hardly surprised when the Horse told me about the deaf-and-dumb people. It was late one night at the bar in the Theatre of the Young Spectator. We were talking about Lapochka’s housemates when the Horse sloped towards me and swore me to secrecy.