Black Earth City Page 13

  It’s a strange thing, considering how lazy everyone insists Russians are. Sloth, which wraps the gentry in their dressing gowns and sends the peasant to doze on his stove, has long been supposed to be a part of the national character. Yet that winter people took on two or three extra jobs as well as their regular employment. They became taxi drivers, businessmen, antique dealers and speculators in currency. In the evenings they arrived home late, having driven twenty miles out of town to collect a spare part for the Lada which an acquaintance had agreed to exchange for a pair of fur boots. In the mornings they dropped in on a friend who was willing to sell dollars at a slightly lower rate, then picked up a passenger and ferried him to the other end of town before arriving at work, again late. Arriving on time at work was a luxury that even the most punctual couldn’t afford that winter. And yet they still arrived at the office somehow, despite the fact that their salaries shrunk each day and often were not paid for three or four months.

  And not only did they work hard, they took risks and responded to the market. Everyone became an entrepreneur, gambling their savings on a load of Turkish fruit juice, or Polish cigarettes that they then tried to sell on. As salaries were delayed by month upon month, workers began to accept payment in the goods they produced. Along the big highways the rows of figures sitting quietly beside identical piles of saucepans (if theirs was a saucepan factory), or buckets, or even garden gnomes became common. How did they survive? Mr Uvarov laughed when I asked him.

  ‘How do any of us survive?’ he replied, shrugging. ‘Habit, I suppose.’

  *

  It’s rare, I suspect, for people to come to Russia in search of moderation. When I arrived my head was stuffed so full of preposterous excesses, it made my eyes bulge. I’d read, for instance, that at the court of Nicholas II, so many jewels were pouring out of Siberia that they didn’t content themselves with necklaces. Collars, belts, whole breastplates of diamonds became the fashion. In the nineteenth century, the Tolstoys were so particular about their laundry that they sent it to be washed in Holland. As 1917 unravelled, the last aristocrats in the Empire washed their hair in champagne and danced barefoot in troughs of caviar. A few months later most of them were penniless or dead, but the attitude lived on. As late as 1982, the Communist Party leader in Azerbaijan, Geidar Aliyev, had an entire palace built for a visit by Brezhnev and presented him with a monstrous ring, which consisted of one large jewel (representing the Soviet Union, under Brezhnev) surrounded by fifteen smaller ones (the Soviet Republics). Brezhnev stayed for the weekend; the palace was not used again.

  Yakov had inherited something of this spirit, heaven knows from whom. In the New Year he and Nina parted ways. Nina had grown tired of listening to Yakov improvise on his guitar, and Yakov had begun to look hunted. He became very thin and seemed to develop a horror of physical contact. One evening I caught his expression of disgust as he glanced down at her hand holding his. They agreed to end the affair and Yakov did not visit the hostel for some weeks. Nina was a phlegmatic girl, and the entire episode – the turbulent opening scenes, the anguish, though short-lived, of her friend, Liza Minelli, and the anticlimactic end – barely impinged on her manner of faintly vacuous cheer. Soon the three girls were lolling in bed together until afternoon, drinking tea and stubbing cigarettes out in old beer cans, the same as ever. Yakov, however, seemed badly shaken.

  The next time I saw him it was three o’clock on a chill February morning and he was leaning over my bed, shaking me by the shoulder. Emily and Ira slept on.

  ‘Come down to the station with me. I want to show you something.’

  I sat up. ‘What –’

  ‘Come on, let’s go to the station.’ He was trembling. The half-light from the corridor emphasised his thinness, his puffy eyes.

  ‘OK, let me get dressed.’ It occurred to me that I’d rather he did not go down to the station alone. He had an air of urgency that felt dangerous.

  Yakov and I walked out into the black, glittering street. The temperature was a steady ten degrees below and the wind had fallen. At night, the ice compelled even the clouds far above to be still. Only the breath rising from our lips like blue feathers defied it.

  Yakov led me through the station and up the iron stairs of a bridge over the tracks. I clattered behind him. He hadn’t spoken since we left the hostel. Now he stopped in the centre of the bridge, panting, and waited. It was a fine, solid, Soviet construction, covered, with sides five foot high and crisscross wire netting stretched above, so no one could come to harm on the tracks. Where we stood, a long jag in the wire had been cut open and the loose section bounced gently, shaken by our footsteps. I waited with Yakov, watching him out of the corner of my eye. We were both shivering.

  A torchlight was wavering towards us along the rails; the ringing note of iron against iron identified it as a signalman, checking the points. As he drew closer I saw him puffing as he walked, bending and swinging his hammer rhythmically.

  ‘That must be a lonely life,’ I remarked to break the silence.

  It struck a nerve. Yakov responded in a high, wobbly voice. ‘Yes, you know I work and I study … struggle to do the best for everyone … and the whole world is running and no one has time … even my mother hardly speaks to me since I came back from Minsk … and all these people, my friends, these girls – they all want something from me and I’m exhausted, given my heart and yet rejected …’

  ‘But Yakov, what do you mean? You haven’t been to visit us lately, we thought you must be too busy. I heard you were working?’

  ‘I have been! Working like a madman, and yet what comes of it but problems, awkwardnesses?’ Yakov paced away from me and back. He was very pale, on the verge of tears. ‘You know what, if this was a stage and down there –’ he gestured at the tracks – ‘down there were ten thousand people – ten thousand – waiting and watching, you know what I’d say to them?’ He expanded his chest. ‘I would stand here, and I would say, “None of you, not a single one of you understands me.”’

  There was a pause. After a moment I couldn’t help myself; a bubble of laughter rose in my throat and burst. ‘Come on,’ I said hurriedly. ‘We are your friends, dear Yakov, whatever you think. Let’s go back. It’s too cold.’

  Yakov nodded, deflated. He left me at the door of the hostel and went home.

  A few days later I heard the rest of the story. The Salvation Army were setting up a branch in Voronezh and for some reason they had employed Yakov to install their telephone system for them. Why, the Lord only knows: Yakov was a mysterious answer to their prayers. He was hardly an electronics expert, although that was not the real problem.

  The awkwardness emerged when the Salvation Army called Yakov in and spread half a million roubles on the table before him. Money for equipment, they told him. No doubt they arranged a date by which the system would be ready. Perhaps they suggested convenient times for installation, when the office would be empty. Being Christian soldiers, uninterested in money, they did not notice the expression on Yakov’s face as he gazed at half a million roubles in brand-new notes. He’d never seen so much money before. He pocketed it and walked out of the building in a daze. Nina and he were no longer going out, but he’d met a girl the week before, a beautiful girl, she’d been on his mind ever since. She’d been visiting, but now she’d be back in her home in Minsk. Yakov found himself down by the station. Minsk, Minsk – there was a train in several hours’ time. Ah, to hell with it, he thought, and got in a taxi.

  ‘Take me to Minsk,’ he announced, spilling half a million roubles onto the leatherette seats. Then he fell asleep and dreamt he was swimming in warm water.

  In Minsk, one thousand kilometres later, they waited for some hours outside an empty flat. Late that night, the girl came home with her boyfriend. She was less than pleased to find Yakov and the taxi driver, who happened to be called Brezhnev, on her doorstep. She let them stay the night on her floor, however, and cooked them fried eggs in the morning.

  ‘P
retty girl,’ said Brezhnev approvingly, when they left the flat after breakfast. ‘So, chief, time to go home?’

  Four days after the meeting with the Salvation Army, Yakov arrived back in Voronezh. Brezhnev dropped him off at the station.

  ‘Mind if I leave you here, boss? You’ve worn me out with this trip of yours. I’m going home. My wife’ll give me hell! She’ll never believe that I’ve been to Minsk and back … Oh, here’s your change, colonel. Take it and good health to you!’ He pressed fifty thousand roubles into Yakov’s hand and drove away.

  Apart from his midnight visit, I didn’t see Yakov for a time. The Salvation Army were understanding, I heard, and even carried on employing him. Perhaps they saw him as a prodigal son, although Yakov was not repentant. According to him, he had been spreading love in the world. It was just that we did not understand him.

  *

  I continued to feel dizzy and light-headed, and after a couple of weeks Mitya arranged for me to see his doctor. The waiting room was full and silent. Even the children were subdued. An old lady was crying as she talked to the receptionist. Now and again a sob broke from her, and she repeated, ‘He’ll kill me! If I go back, he’ll kill me!’

  ‘We can’t help you here, babulya, forgive us,’ the receptionist said firmly.

  I was beckoned into the doctor’s room at last, where she tapped my chest and asked me staccato questions. When she’d finished, she sighed, and sat down.

  ‘Half the population of this city is suffering from dizziness,’ she said shortly. ‘They’re not eating enough fruit and vegetables, they’re not sleeping properly, their nerves are in a state of agitation, they’re exhausted. It’s the life we’re living these days. Just try and take better care of yourself, ladno?’

  *

  A final example of inflation fever: Arkady left Voronezh before I arrived, headed for Moscow and found a job in a brand-new casino. I heard a lot about him, though, how he was working as a croupier, how he was promoted to one of the tills. Once he came down to visit, a lanky man with indecisive features. He described the casino to us matter-of-factly, the owners in three-piece suits, the punters with their blondes, security who gave a guy brain damage the week before. (He’d been messing about with the croupier, a girl. If it had been anything more serious they’d have killed him.) He seemed to me to be unimpressed by it all.

  Impressed or otherwise, however, it made no difference. For Arkady was a gambler. One quiet afternoon, when the owners were out, Arkady put eight thousand dollars from his till into a carrier bag, walked to a casino where no one knew him, played – with a look on his face as though he was slipping in and out of sleep – and lost it all. They caught it all on closed-circuit TV. Then he disappeared.

  Eight thousand dollars was not a great deal for the owners of a casino in Moscow, particularly then, when the Russians flocked joyfully to the tables as though the times demanded it. But they would not let anyone rob them and go unpunished. They searched, and when, after a few weeks, they did not find him, they sent someone to drop in on Arkady’s parents in Voronezh.

  ‘You’ll have to pay us back,’ he told them. ‘Plus interest.’

  Arkady’s parents were elderly. They’d moved to Voronezh when they retired and now they were living on their pensions. So his father found a job as a watchman, and told the casino owners that they would pay them back, a few dollars a month. Don’t worry, he said proudly, you’ll get your money.

  But the casino owners were not happy with the arrangement. Again they sent their man to Voronezh.

  ‘I said, you’ll have to pay us back,’ he told them again. ‘Not some miserable few dollars a month. Now.’

  And he smashed up the place a bit, so that they understood. They sold their flat and paid off the debt. Then they rented a room in a communal apartment, where they live still. They suffer from the lack of privacy and the cockroaches, but they suffer most for the loss of their son. Arkady has never reappeared, although there was a rumour that he’d gone to Amsterdam; others say he’s still in Moscow, hiding; others that he’s dead.

  · 14 ·

  The Commission Shop

  I started going out again at night in February. It was dark by half past four and once the offices had emptied, the streets were soon quiet. The atmosphere in the city had changed since the autumn, when Mitya and I had walked all evening. Now there were stories of muggers, and a friend of ours had been set upon by a group of drunken teenagers – young boys – and beaten up. I carried a tiny canister of Mace and only told Emily where I was going. Russians would just have made a fuss and tried to stop me.

  With my hood up and a scarf covering half my face against the cold, I ran out of the hostel gates, through the First of May Park opposite, and across Petrovsky Square. Just past the statue of Peter the Great, I turned down a steep little alley and arrived at an iron door. My knock sounded too loud; I restrained myself from looking over my shoulder. An eye appeared at the peephole, and in a second filled with the jangle of padlock and bolts I was suddenly certain I’d walked into a trap. Then Mitya opened the door, grinning.

  ‘Look at this,’ he said instantly, pulling me inside. ‘There’s a jacuzzi – Chinese crisps – and here, food for cosmonauts!’

  Mitya had taken on a night watchman’s job in a commission shop to earn some extra money. It made him the envy of many; not only was it unusual to find part-time jobs that actually paid, but he could spend all evening inspecting the strange and exotic goods that appeared on its shelves. For example, there really was spacemen’s food: vacuum-packed yellow pills like dog biscuits, which described themselves as ‘High-nutrition sustenance for a gravity-free environment’.

  ‘People buy it for the vitamins,’ said Mitya gleefully. ‘Let’s try one.’

  ‘No –’

  ‘OK. Let’s try the Chinese crisps then. I didn’t think they ate crisps in China.’

  ‘For goodness’ sake –’ But he was already ripping open the packet. I don’t know why I felt so nervous. It was partly that the flutter of fear as I ran through the park hadn’t quite left me. But I was also wary of the owners of this shop, men who wore creaky leather jackets and looked their customers up and down with leaden aggression before serving them. They’d been drinking before they left; a couple of empty brandy bottles and three smeared glasses stood behind the counter, along with two or three videos: Casanova in Russia, Schoolgirls’ Excursion. I couldn’t shake the thought that they were still there, watching Mitya make free with their property. Then I realised: the shop smelt of them, of old cigarettes and leather, overlaid by a powerful waft of aftershave.

  The commission shop owners were making money that winter; they had all the right friends, who were also making money. The basic business plan was simple. You imported cheap goods from China, Poland, Romania – anywhere with an economy that was affordable – and you pegged the prices to the dollar. People still bought them. What else were they to do, if they needed a winter coat and Soviet goods had disappeared from the shops?

  And there was a thrill in this random, brightly coloured array. Banana-flavoured liqueurs, books on acupuncture, marbled chocolate cakes in shiny wrappers, purple suspender belts and marital aids in the shape of Elvis Presley – no one had seen anything like it. They poured in off the sludgy February streets, out of their fusty, cracked-Formica offices and the neon-lit crush on the trolley bus that stank of mildew and sweat; they crowded in to stare at the goods and to ask, timidly, if they might inspect a pair of boots made in India with a rubber logo on the ankle saying ‘Kikkers’. And in return the thug lounging against the shelves would narrow his eyes and expel a lungful of smoke in their direction, wondering whether, really, it was worth the effort to stretch his arm even the six inches necessary to fulfil their request.

  ‘What are you looking like that for?’ said Mitya, taking my hand. ‘Don’t worry, they’ve gone for the evening. Sit down, have some vodka.’

  ‘I don’t want vodka, thanks.’

  ‘All right
, have a beer. Look, here’s what I’m going to get you as a present.’

  In the counter was a pile of women’s underwear in various colours. A daisy with huge eyes and a pink dress decorated the packets.

  ‘They’re made in North Korea,’ Mitya told me. ‘I bet you don’t know anyone else who wears North Korean lingerie.’

  I laughed. Mitya went on. ‘God, they’re going to be jealous! Look at this on the front of the packet: “firm support”, “imparts silky texture to skin”, “treated with herb medicine to increase size of ladies’ chest”.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Yes – look. How does one know what size to buy, I wonder?’

  We giggled about it, drank beer, and ate the picnic that Mitya’s mother had packed up for him: black bread, sausage, and two slices of salty white salo, pig fat. We balanced ourselves on the broken-down sun lounger that was Mitya’s bed and watched the crackly old video of Hair that Lapochka had lent us. And it was only much later, looking around at the shelves crowded with useless, expensive gimmicks, with plastic boxes three times as large as their contents, with piles of clothes and knick-knacks and chemical drinks, that it struck me as pitiful.

  ‘You know what it reminds me of,’ Mitya said, trying to cheer me up. ‘It’s what Sveta’s flat will be like one day, with all her hoard stacked up all around her.’

  I laughed. ‘Of course! That’s what she’s planning. A shop selling empty shampoo bottles –’

  ‘– and old clothes and saucepans with no handles. She’ll make her fortune.’

  ‘Yes she will, sooner or later, I’m certain.’

  *

  If this were a Soviet novel, Sveta would surely be the heroine. She carried her beauty as though it were a mild disability; if anyone stared or, in the Russian way, murmured compliments to her in the street (‘Your eyebrows are the wings of birds!’), she tossed her head and tutted. The practicalities of life were her concern. She had astonishing aquamarine eyes that looked out of her smooth, high-cheeked face with a matter-of-fact expression. Her nose was pretty and her chin was determined. The abundant tawny hair that glittered in sunlight was usually scraped back into a bun, and every muscle in her sturdy body was set to work scrubbing the floor, wringing her clothes dry or slicing vegetables double-speed. She was always busy.