Black Earth City Page 12

  ‘You mustn’t ever let them see you know,’ he whispered. ‘But they can hear, really, and speak.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The deaf-and-dumb people. In reality they aren’t. I drank with them one day, you see. We all went out to the vodka bar on Koltsov Square. That’s where they all go, they call it the White Horse … And I bought them drinks and they bought me drinks and I think they must have put something in them, too, because I started feeling very hazy and you know that’s not like me … everything was looking unsteady … and then one of them suddenly said, You know I can talk if I want. But I don’t want … And another one said, We’re underground, three kilometres underground … I remember particularly, three kilometres.’

  ‘Then why do they pretend?’

  ‘They have their reasons,’ said the Horse, shrugging. ‘Who knows why?’

  He grinned his toothy grin and changed the subject. The Horse liked a mystery.

  · 12 ·

  Little Pavlik

  Is there room here, perhaps, to tell the story of little Pavlik, whose diminutive size was the source of so much amusement? ‘Little Pavlik!’ people would call, pretending to search for him. ‘Have you slipped down behind your bed? Been crushed under your blanket? You’ve not been trying to shave again, have you? How many times have we told you, that’s for big boys, not little Pavlik.’ They’d laugh and Pavlik would summon a smile, although who knows, it may have been then that the possible uses of a razor first occurred to him.

  Pavlik was, I think, eighteen. He must have been about four foot eleven, very slight and pale, with soft, colourless hair and a large forehead that sloped into a weak chin. His eyes flickered away from direct contact, but his mouth had an aggressive cast that only increased his comic potential. Just occasionally, when he thought himself unobserved, his large head drooped and revealed the nape of his neck. There was something horrifying about its slenderness.

  His size, you see, was not hereditary. Pavlik had grown up in a children’s home, fed on porridge and scraps of oily fish. All the inmates of Soviet institutions were badly fed, from the pride of the Red Army to the prison camps, but the orphans, of course, never recover from the effects of malnutrition and early misery. His parents had died, and his grandmother, old and weak herself, couldn’t take on the burden of a young child. She had only her pension to live on – how would she feed a growing boy? He’d be better looked after by the state which cared for each of its children like a father and a mother. She left him at the children’s home with a small bag of clothes and a knitted puppy, promising that if he worked hard, she would fetch him soon. Pavlik waited, listening out for her voice in his sleep. Years passed, the puppy unravelled under its burden of love. When nothing remained but a soggy woollen ear, Pavlik was called into the director’s office and told that his grandmother had died some time before.

  ‘We decided to wait until you were older before telling you,’ said the director. ‘It’s our policy.’

  Pavlik worked hard, just as his grandmother had told him. It was exceptional for a child from a home to get a place at university, but Pavlik was in his second year already. He was an intelligent boy, he would work in an office one day, have a suit, an apartment. But for the time being he lived in the hostel, and moved along its greenish corridors with a familiarity that made me sad. He never complained about the showers, like we did, or the claustrophobia. In the afternoons he lay on his bed, which was unusually comfortable by hostel standards. I exclaimed at it once and Pavlik’s face lit up.

  ‘It’s a good bed,’ he told me, seriously. He had two mattresses, and another standing against the wall to form a sofa back. He patted them with pride. ‘These are my own, you see. I bought them.’

  They were his refuge, his own mattresses. Sometimes he would stay there until the evening, sleeping and eating pieces of bread. He was little enough to stretch out in the institutional iron bed frame, which gave the rest of us cramp and froze our toes. His possessions packed neatly into his locker. Little Pavlik, too short to kiss girls or to be popular. Brought up on Soviet rations, it was as though he had turned out regulation Soviet size, to fit the low-ceilinged rooms and the shoddy furniture without protesting. Why protest? Didn’t the state do the best it could for its orphans?

  During the course of that winter, however, something gave way in Pavlik. The teasing didn’t help. A rumour got around that at least one part of Pavlik had not been stunted by bad nutrition. The boys exclaimed about it when they came back from the showers, joked and widened their eyes. Somehow it gave them carte blanche with Pavlik, now that he could be envied.

  ‘Come and have a little drink, little one,’ they would invite him.

  ‘Be careful over that crack in the floor,’ some joker added. ‘Do you want an extra cushion?

  ‘Drinking already, so little and yet so experienced –’

  ‘Not so little where it counts!’

  It was also, no doubt, the alcohol, which Pavlik never refused. He did not talk much when he was drunk, but took to sloping wordlessly along the corridors, clenching and unclenching his fists. The tendons on his neck stood out. He, who had been so peaceable, became angry. Arguments flared up with his roommates: they were keeping him awake, encroaching on his part of the room. He stopped taking showers and grew a tufty, gingery ghost of a beard.

  One day a girl from one of Pavlik’s classes dropped by to borrow a book, and he offered her tea. It was the dead time in the middle of the afternoon and soon there was a small group in the corridor marvelling loudly at Pavlik’s way with women, the little devil. The girl did not stay long, and once she had left, Pavlik came out into the corridor with a bottle in his hand, opening his mouth to shout at them. No sound came out. Then he dropped the bottle and left the hostel, returning, very drunk, at midnight.

  There were apologies the next day. No one really wanted to hurt Pavlik; it was just that we were all cooped up together, bored and thoughtless. From then on the boys exerted themselves to be friendly, but he was never convinced. His eyes, circled by purplish shadows, flickered warily over them and went blank: as he’d expected, they didn’t really mean it.

  In that blank look I saw disillusion. So this is real life, he seemed to be saying. This is what I bore those years in the children’s home for, what I stifled my complaints and starved for. All those years you promised me that one day I would leave the institution and be a Soviet citizen, like everyone else. All lies. No one is a Soviet citizen now. Each one of us is alone, each of us is orphaned.

  Pavlik cut the arteries in his wrists soon afterwards. When Mitya and I came back from the cinema, there was a kerfuffle in the corridor and the Komendant was shouting ‘Open, open up, idiot!’ and heaving his shoulder against Pavlik’s door. We leant our shoulders to the task and the door burst open. Inside Pavlik was lying on his bed smiling faintly. Blood was running down his hands and soaking into his mattresses. Seeing us, he picked up the razor and began to saw at his wounds.

  ‘Leave me,’ he whispered.

  He screamed as they dragged him down the corridor, and the noise hung in the air long after he had gone. We wiped the stains on his bed half-heartedly and avoided each other’s eyes. Then Viktor announced, ‘Son of a bitch, I’m thirsty,’ and we turned to him in noisy agreement. We sat in Viktor’s room that night.

  Pavlik didn’t stay long in hospital, but by the time he returned, his possessions had been moved to a room on a different floor. We saw little enough of him after that. From glimpses in the corridor, I noticed that Pavlik had shaved off his beard and begun to grow a moustache; it aged him. A little later, two friends appeared in his life and the three of them played table tennis together. Pavlik seemed to be surviving, yet when we had first met him, only a few months before, you could watch the emotions following one another across his features: fear and boredom and half-credulous hope. Now his face had settled into a single expression: the aggressive stare that had formerly seemed comic. Don’t think me sad because I am alone in the
world, it seemed to say. I’ve grown strong, because I rely only on myself. You are weak: you need each other. But one day you will know what I know: each of us is alone, each of us is an orphan …

  · 13 ·

  Inflation Fever

  Like Boris Yeltsin in a television interview last week, Mr Gorbachev gave a warning of ‘unpopular, but necessary’ economic measures to come, but neither he nor his economic advisers would elaborate on what they had in mind.

  The Times, 22 October 1991

  Here comes trouble: open the gates wide!

  Russian proverb

  That winter I learnt a new skill: walking on icy pavements. It’s not as simple as it sounds. Each step must be deliberate, flat-footed, like a prison warder – no lazy, sweet swing of the hips. The bones of the pelvis, which in spring jut forward away from the curve of the spine, in winter disappear back into the flesh. The centre of balance must be held exactly above the feet. The eyes must be fixed on the ground to verify each foothold, the arms must hover out from the body ready to save you if all else fails. And in my case, there was no guarantee that any of this would save me; the more careful I was, it seemed, the more capriciously the ground shot from beneath me and the bus stop reappeared upside down, with a hand of Mitya’s reaching from the sky to haul me up once he could stop laughing.

  It was a slippery time altogether. As the temperature continued to fall, the curtains opened on a series of magic tricks that astonished us all. The world turned white and familiar shapes were shrouded. A man in a suit conjured up all the kopecks in the country and pfff! made them disappear. A one-rouble note wrapped in a handkerchief became ten roubles, then twenty-five, then one hundred, then five hundred, and finally – drum roll – one thousand roubles! As a finale, an assistant wheeled a casket on stage that contained savings accounts, hundreds of thousands of them. The audience trembled as, with a silver sword, he sliced them in half! And in quarters! And at last each little nest egg hatched into a rook and flew away. The show ran and ran: they called it hyperinflation.

  Alchemy of a sort occurred that year. Even the poor became millionaires. They sold their watches and their televisions and took home wads of roubles instead. Wallets couldn’t hold all their money. They stuffed their pockets full of notes, bought Polish plastic bags to carry the loot. At first they found it hard to throw off their old-style thriftiness. They took their crisp new notes home, stashed them away with their valuables and papers, and in no time the value had evaporated and all that was left was paper. Soon we began to realise that the only sensible way to manage our personal finances was to spend like one-armed bandits. The faster the coins disappeared, the more chance you had of hitting the bonus button. As long as you were winning, it was exhilarating.

  Rules for Hyperinflationary Times

  1. Spend now, worry later. Never be cautious. Spend more than you earn: that way you’ll get rich. And never leave your savings in the bank. Blow it all on fur coats and televisions.

  2. Don’t expect your employer to pay you. Don’t expect your employees to turn up every day. And by the way, job security is dead. You’re sacked.

  3. If you are a professional musician, film director, scientist, soldier, coal miner, steelworker or academic, you’d better adapt, or starve. Forget your training. Forget, above all, your career. Don’t produce anything. Don’t get involved in manual labour. Import–export is the only way to keep your head above water. Buy and sell. Buy and sell. The faster the better.

  4. Legal work does not make money, thus the simple equation: a successful person is a criminal.

  5. In all, rely only on dollars. Not the state, employers, friends, lovers. Dollars are the only real certainty.

  The first time I had changed money in Voronezh, back in September, the exchange gave me several packs of new-issue twenty-five-rouble notes, purplish-mauve with the curvy, curly lettering that you expect on circus posters. There were then thirty-nine roubles to the dollar, and the average monthly pension was forty-two roubles. The money came to us still bound in wads of a hundred notes; Emily and I broke one open, took half each and went to the market.

  It was not long since the official exchange rate had been one rouble to one pound, and some of the prices in the shops were still fixed on that basis – not essentials, but goods that had been manufactured under the old system and sold slowly: a pair of ice skates for forty-two roubles, for example, a cheese grater for six. The sense of how much a currency is worth does not disappear instantly: in the public perception, at least, the rouble was still worth something like one pound. Imagine this hapless foreigner asking for six apples – and pulling out of her pocket a whole stack of huge, spanking new purple twenty-five-pound notes. The stall owner looked at me with a sort of horror, and shook her head.

  ‘Impossible! I haven’t change for that sort of money.’ She shoved an apple into my hands and said, ‘Vozmi, i vitaminiziruisya! Take this and vitaminise yourself!’ And she turned to bawl at her scrawny little husband, for no reason other than the trick that was being played with her livelihood.

  *

  Some of the trade was still controlled by the central planners. I imagined them up in Moscow, totting up rows of figures on an abacus. ‘So …’ they’d say, jotting something down. ‘One rubber boot costs ten roubles and seventy kopecks, and a pair for twenty-one roubles forty.’ The prices were like that, precise to the last kopeck. Forty-three roubles and twelve kopecks for a saucepan, one hundred and eight roubles and nineteen kopecks for a plane ticket. A marketing manager would have blanched; the thought cheered me as I searched for change with numb fingers and the queues buckled and muttered behind me. There was a brass dish beside the cash register to receive the money, and the shop assistants had a way of tapping on it and breathing heavily through their noses that was guaranteed to make me scatter my coins on the floor.

  In Soviet times, the fixed price for a piece of bread in a café was one kopeck, and a glass of tea, I believe, cost three. Anywhere in the Union you could be sure of a modest snack for ten kopecks; that hadn’t changed since the war. That winter, the kopeck quietly vanished from circulation. Once we reached a hundred roubles to the dollar or so, there was no point. The only ones that remained, and in fact rose in value with inflation, were the dvushki, the two-kopeck pieces, which you needed for public telephones. Enterprising babushkas sold stacks of them outside the central post office: ten two-kopeck pieces for twenty roubles.

  *

  As Christmas approached, a vivid green note began to circulate, the colour of birch leaves as they push their way out of the bud. It was worth a hundred roubles. The girl at the exchange could not help shaking her head as she counted them out to me, two for each tatty dollar. Mitya and I decided to eat – I was feeling as though the ground was far away, as though the notes stuffed in my pockets made me lighter, more buoyant.

  The nearest shop was the Gastronom by the station, a dirty place where we had once seen a rat running along the eye-level shelves behind the shop assistant’s head. Usually there was a bustle of housewives, alcoholics cringing at the vodka counter, the ordinary crowd. That day the place was empty, apart from a single assistant who was humming in the corner. Her voice echoed tunelessly in the huge, columned hall. It was not simply that there were no customers. The shelves, yards and yards of them looping gracefully along the curving wall, were bare. In one of the counters there was a display of bread made of plaster; the bread racks behind stood unused. I fingered the crisp birch-leaf notes in my pocket and shivered.

  The assistant called us over. ‘The only products we have today are these,’ she told us, and waved at the shelves behind her. There was a row of green and silver bottles.

  Champagne, from the Moscow champagne factory – sek or demi-sek (as we say in Russian). Either one cost the same: about seventy pence.

  ‘It was meant to be here for New Year,’ the assistant said nonchalantly. ‘Just arrived last week. And chocolate bars, if you want. Not cheap, though.’

  Be
neath the champagne lay a pile of familiar black and red wrappers: Mars bars.

  Mitya and I sat on a bench outside the shop and started in. It’s interesting how champagne drunk of necessity has a different effect. No aristocratic jollity for us. We were drunk, of course, but it was a sober drunkenness, a light-headed, yet solemn state.

  ‘So we’ll live on champagne and chocolate alone,’ said Mitya.

  ‘Better than the French Revolution,’ I agreed, beginning to nod and then deciding against it.

  The bubbles ran to my head, and it was not long before I was feeling so buoyant that I had to hold onto the seat with both hands.

  *

  The Uvarovs had the first five-hundred-rouble note that I came across. It was larger, with the swirly writing this time in piercing fuschia pink – really the prettiest bank note I have seen. I dropped in to see them just after they’d withdrawn their savings from the bank.

  ‘Come in, come in,’ Mrs Uvarov said kindly, as always. ‘You look dreadful. Have something to eat with us, come along.’

  I ate a bowl of soup while they planned how best to spend the money. It was at about this time that I remember hearing a calculation on the radio: if you bought a tonne of steel in Russia, sold it for foreign currency, and then spent that foreign currency on Russian steel; if this were possible, and you repeated the operation just eight times, you could buy the entire Russian steel industry.

  This was a hypothetical exercise, of course, but all the same, millions were being made that year. Everyone had something that they were trying to sell abroad, and in the Uvarovs’ case, it was an enormous petrified log. I don’t know how they had come by such a thing, but they were confident that there was a living to be made from it. They were ringing up, writing letters, spending every evening driving about all over the place to talk to people about the log.