Black Earth City Read online

  Only that afternoon, Emily and I had been lolling on our beds when we heard a rustling and clinking from the other end of the room. Looking closer, we found Sveta under the table collecting the empty bottles for the deposit.

  ‘Go ahead,’ we said shirtily. ‘Don’t mind us.’

  Sveta, like most people, was concentrating on surviving the winter. She didn’t only collect bottles. Under her bed were her savings; year after year of presents and castoffs from English students which she had seized upon, cleaned, and arranged neatly in boxes. Slivers of old soap, medicines, half-used exercise books, knives and forks, all tied together with little pieces of string.

  ‘Do you want this?’ she was always asking casually, picking up a bottle of shampoo with a couple of drips left in the bottom, or an old biro. Viktor teased her that she was putting together her trousseau.

  ‘Have me, Sveta. I can bring a knife and fork and half a towel to the union!’

  But Sveta just tossed her hair back and turned away from him, smiling. She had already chosen her man. He was called Sasha, a quiet, clever boy with a soft beard who sat out in the hostel corridor. Their courtship was lengthy. Months passed while they drank tea together; Sveta’s beautiful eyes glittered and Sasha blushed. This continued until even the hostel gossips lost interest. One day, however, we noticed that Sasha no longer sat in the corridor but instead in Sveta’s room, having removed his shoes and left them neatly at the door. Sveta’s room was always spick and span and the stirrings of passion were certainly not going to interfere with hygiene.

  After this, things moved more quickly. While walking home from university one evening, Sveta spotted a job advertisement among the frillies on the lampposts. These scraps of paper had a description of the job or service offered at the top, and underneath, a fringe of small strips bearing a telephone number, ready for the interested passer-by to tear off. Most people, if they needed to sell their car or swap their flat for two smaller ones, needed to do no more than write out several dozen frillies and post them up around town. And Mr Jackson, despite being an honest-to-goodness American entrepreneur and a genuine example of the foreign investment that had arrived to transform the planned economy, used the same method to advertise the job of his assistant. Sveta was a connoisseur of the frillies and she saw straight away that this was something out of the ordinary. Within a week Sasha, in a neatly pressed suit, had applied for the post and been accepted.

  *

  A decade or so earlier, Sasha’s new employer, Mr Jackson, was a millionaire businessman in Texas, when he had a dream telling him to follow the path of spirituality or die. Mr Jackson was so struck by the dream that he sold everything and went to India, where he spent seven years at the feet of a guru in the mountains. He was in his mid-seventies when the guru finally told him that only in Russia would he become truly spiritual. Upon which Mr Jackson stuck a pin in a map of the USSR and promptly began negotiations to buy a huge farm in the Voronezh region. The idea was to found a sort of Happy Valley of plenty and communal living, combining American technology with the area’s rich black earth.

  His plan seemed to be taking a long time to materialise. Sasha, when questioned, would say only that it was complicated. People used to point to a house close to the University park – a house where, according to a plaque, Tolstoy once visited his goddaughter for tea – and hiss, ‘The house of Mr Jackson!’ I hoped that the ageing seeker after truth took comfort from this coincidence, for no doubt there was much in the progress of Russian reforms that was dispiriting.

  Foreign investors had otherwise shown little interest in the city. Economic rationalisation, the process by which Russia’s rusting plant was to be refashioned into consumer goods factories sweetly humming with activity, had not taken off. The glittering left bank produced at least some marketable goods. In this the city was better off than many that relied on armaments factories, like Tula; but still the Voronezh televisions gathered dust on the conveyor belt, waiting for the cathode tubes made in Tbilisi and circuit boards from the Baltic states.

  ‘You know, they call this a transitional period,’ said Mr Uvarov to me one day, bitterly. ‘It’s like the early twenties, that was a transitional period too. All those Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries, on the same side as the Bolsheviks, as they saw it, all working away to establish a socialist state … then they were all massacred just a few years later. They had a transitional mentality, or something. That’s what they’ll say about us. “Of course, they tried, but they made unforgivable mistakes … victims of the transitional period, what could they do? It was their fate.” And all the time this is our life …’

  There were several attempts at joint ventures with foreign companies. An Italian firm set up a pizza restaurant: installed a shiny oven, trained a couple of chefs, and left, satisfied that one more city would now have access to civilisation with extra pepperami. For some months the pizzas were cheap, tasty and fast. Mitya and I liked watching the chefs slapping the dough down onto the huge trays and sliding them into the oven. The restaurant was warm and bustling and although you could only stand at chest-high tables, it was always full. I seem to remember pontificating to Mitya about the advantages of the free market as we stood and ate.

  ‘Oh, bla bla bla,’ Mitya responded, crunching a pizza crust. We weren’t getting on so well. Also I’d refused to stop for a hundred grammes of vodka on the way to the café.

  Then types of pizza started dropping off the menu. The prices, of course, went up with inflation and the place began to empty. We still came, although we often had to wait ten minutes for the chef to appear behind his counter. Then the pizza dough turned grey and gritty and the toppings shrank to a smear of tomato and a few hunks of sausage. I don’t know what the story was: protection money almost certainly, difficulties with supplies, low morale, and perhaps just a sort of diffusion, an atmosphere that somehow smeared itself even on that shiny oven.

  The Gastronom on Revolution Prospect where we collected our sugar ration was at the other end of this diffusion process. We were given coupons for all the necessities: grain, meat, butter, eggs, household soap and one bottle of vodka a month, but it was only sugar that was strictly rationed. Picking it up at this time of year was bleak. We queued up first to show our passports and sign the register. Then we queued again, watching the assistant as she shovelled pinkish granulated sugar into bags. Her big arms were flushed with exertion and her mouth was grimly set. Bag after bag was whisked over the scales and dumped on the counter as she yelled, ‘Next!’

  Nearby old ladies hovered, looking mournfully at their ration and itching to weigh it again. But no one had the courage to ask. That assistant was a bully. She was capable of taking back the sugar, emptying it on the floor, and demanding ‘Happy now?’

  Later, economic analysts would say ‘Of course, people survived that winter because they still had savings accounts stuffed with roubles, as well as the vegetables and so on from their dachas.’ It was not how it felt at the time. We went on from the Gastronom to the Central Market, which was half-deserted. Most of the concrete display slabs were empty, and the pigeons fluttering and calling in the dome could be heard above the traders below. In one corner the honey vendors still beckoned, offering to dab the back of your hand with their stiff, yellow nectar. There was sour cream to buy from women wrapped and bandaged against the draughts, and on the opposite side of the hall, stringy old men in aprons were selling pairs of trotters wired together and heaps of offal flecked with sawdust. But the toppling mounds of vegetables had dwindled away to potatoes and moon-faced cabbages, and what customers there were only drifted between the counters, asking prices, nodding, and drifting on.

  In the street outside a row of pensioners stood in the cold. They wore their best coats and hats, and at their feet lay their prize possessions: a set of novels by Alexei Tolstoy, crystal glasses, shiny pairs of shoes that had been wrapped in felt since the sixties, a rug from the Caucasus. They looked strangely diminished in the open air.


  ‘How much would you like for the shoes?’ I asked an old lady.

  ‘Whatever you’ll give me,’ she answered faintly. ‘I’m a teacher, I’m not used to this kind of thing.’

  She reminded me of Lisa, my great-aunt who starved in Moscow at the end of the twenties. In those days, too, the middle classes had stood outside selling everything they owned. There are photographs of pianos and chandeliers in the snow, being snapped up by the new Soviet bourgeoisie. Antiques in Russia do not have an easy time. Those same chandeliers were probably back out on the pavement in 1992.

  *

  As March began, torpor fell on the hostel. The days were short and dull and there was no light in the sky. We slept a lot. Jim appeared out of his room one day looking a little dazed, saying, ‘That makes one hundred and nine hours since I last left the hostel.’ Some went travelling to shake off the sadness; one boy left for Mount Elbrus to learn to ski. He stayed so long that he’d qualified as a professional ski instructor by the time he returned.

  Others were driven a little crazy. One of the English girls drank so much vodka that at last it poisoned her, and she lay shrieking in the corridor until a doctor arrived and gave her a shot of adrenalin. Peanut, trying to impress, kept attempting to climb up the outside of the hostel to his new girlfriend’s window and failing; he gave himself a black eye and gashed his leg, and no one was sympathetic. Parties were as likely to end with a group of girls sobbing together as dancing; one was in love with a bastard, another had had an abortion, and none of us knew what we’d be doing in six months’ time. The year limped towards spring.

  I escaped from it all, wrapping my head in a scarf, running across the First of May Park and banging on the iron door of Mitya’s shop. We spent the night there, sleeping fitfully on the sun lounger. In the mornings I was exhausted by a procession of busy, unpleasant dreams that were instantly forgotten. Only one stuck in my mind. I was standing in the stairwell of a block of flats in Voronezh. A woman opened the door to me, holding her dressing gown around herself with one hand. In the grimy light she looked fat and forty and tired of life, but she managed an ironic little smile. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘You don’t know me.’ At first it looked like Sveta, but as I woke, I realised it was me.

  The shop smelt stale and claustrophobic. I dressed quietly. Mitya was still asleep as I inched open the iron door and walked out into the shadowy street.

  Later that day Mitya came to the hostel to find me. He put his hands on my shoulders and looked at me searchingly.

  ‘I’ve brought you something,’ he said at last. ‘We’re going to stay together, aren’t we?’

  I peered inside the bag he’d given me. There lay a set of peach-coloured North Korean lingerie (size: medium).

  · 15 ·

  International Women’s Day

  On International Women’s Day, I bumped into Yakov with his new girlfriend, inspecting the roses for sale in glass cases outside the station. She was called Katya, a dewy-eyed, sweet girl from Voronezh, who accepted Yakov on his own reckoning. The flower sellers were doing a busy trade; clusters of men stood waiting, counting out roubles in their hands. It was important to buy flowers for the woman in your life on 8 March. You’d never hear the end of it otherwise.

  The girls in Room 99 had explained it all to me. On International Women’s Day, Soviet women bask in their menfolk’s love and gratitude. In the morning, as it is a holiday, they lounge in bed instead of going out to work. Their husbands, with much cursing and clattering of pans, cook breakfast for the family; by ten o’clock they proudly serve their wives a charred and shrivelled egg. Beside the woman’s plate will be a bunch of flowers and a little gift, a bottle of scent perhaps, or a pair of tights, which she will exclaim over until the children, scarlet with fury, insist that their mother makes them their proper breakfast.

  Later the real celebrations begin. A Soviet woman’s days are usually taken up with dressing the children and taking them to school, arriving at the office on time, nipping out of work at lunchtime to buy something for dinner, and again in the afternoon – if they can sneak away without being reprimanded – to try and find cough medicine for the little one. They’ll leave work on the dot of six so that they can pop into several more shops to check if there is anything good on offer, and into the market where they see some cheap eggs. They’ll pay the electricity bill at the post office and collect the laundry, since they’re passing; then they’ll dump their shopping at home and pick up a bucket to fill up with those cheap eggs from the market. By the time their husbands have arrived home, they will have given the flat a vacuum, dusted, and put two lots of dirty clothes on to soak (always advisable if you’re washing everything by hand). On International Women’s Day, therefore, they go back to bed after breakfast and sleep like squirrels.

  Their husbands, meanwhile, meet up with friends and express their feelings for their wives in the simplest and most sincere way they know: by drinking themselves into a stupor with toasts ‘to our beloved ladies – where would we be without them?’ Late at night they return home and tell their wives they love them. All in all, it’s a not a bad day for the women of the former Soviet Union.

  Yakov had spotted the flowers he wanted. ‘Fourteen of the red carnations, please.’

  ‘Fourteen!’ exclaimed Katya, thrilled. ‘But shouldn’t it be one less or more?’ Even numbers of flowers are given only at funerals in Russia.

  ‘I have to give a few to the girls in Room 99,’ he explained. ‘There,’ he said, dividing up the bunch and handing her five flowers with his warmest, sweetest smile. ‘S prazdnikom, darling.’

  Katya’s face fell and she was quiet as we walked to the hostel. In Room 99 we found the girls painting their nails dark orange and gossiping.

  ‘S prazdnikom,’ we greeted each other. Yakov passed out the carnations, three for each of the girls. ‘Nina’s making blini,’ reported Tanya, taking the flowers for both of them and putting them on the table without much evidence of gratitude. ‘They’ll be ready soon, so stick around.’

  ‘I certainly will,’ said Yakov, squeezing in between Liza Minelli and Katya and draping an arm around each of them. He was in fine spirits.

  Nina opened the door with one foot, talking over her shoulder. ‘Tell Yuri too,’ she called. ‘Here, golubki, my doves,’ she said, advancing with a full frying pan. ‘Take, eat these blinis, in celebration of being a woman.’

  ‘You too, Yakov,’ added Liza, giving him a look from under her eyelashes that could have fried pancakes. Katya giggled nervously.

  Yuri and Emily arrived and we covered blinis with thick sour cream and red caviar and drank champagne, as families did all over Voronezh. Sometimes poverty is hard to measure.

  After a bit Tanya started telling us about the affairs she’d had with the mafiosi when she was working as a secretary in the police department in her home town, and the six parrots in her parents’ flat who were all called Gosha. Liza Minelli put on some music and began to dance Liza Minelli-style to it, still looking at Yakov, and then he told her she was tense, and took her over to the window and made her visualise a path through a sweet-scented forest, with a little breeze … Tanya told some story about going to the forest with Yakov that I can’t remember, but that sent Emily into a fit of silent, breathless laughter, which, as always, made the rest of us laugh. And Katya sat on the bed saying nothing.

  ‘Have some champagne,’ Yuri offered. But she refused.

  ‘Oh, give it to me,’ Tanya demanded. ‘I’ve known Katya for years, she’s happy just to sit there like a cabbage.’

  Katya bit her lip. ‘I can’t drink,’ she said quaveringly, ‘as Yakov knows very well. I’m having a baby.’

  There was a pause. ‘We haven’t decided that,’ said Yakov, leaving Liza Minelli by the window.

  ‘What is there to decide? I’m not having an abortion.’

  Liza Minelli glared at them both. ‘You’re pathetic,’ she spat, and walked out.

  ‘Well –’ said
Yuri into the silence. ‘Let’s drink to the baby. Congratulations.’

  *

  The next time I saw Katya was at the Easter service, a few weeks later. Mitya refused to come; the new religious freedoms had not changed the fact that he, like most Russians, was an atheist. The church, however, was crowded with people of all ages: from the babushkas in black who had worshipped here for decades to the young women half-hidden behind scarves, recent and passionate converts. The majority, however, were here just for Easter, which promised to be a spectacle. At midnight would come the great awakening; until then the priests were still in mourning black, the candles were extinguished, the iconostasis only gleamed modestly through the murky light. The crowd jostled and shifted with excitement. They had dressed up and bought candles for the service; at home a feast awaited them, with twelve toasts and the kulich, a cake of sweet cream cheese the shape of a sandcastle.

  ‘I’d like to be baptised,’ Katya said. ‘Just so that I could cross myself, you understand? I can’t even cross myself if I see something nasty. I think it would be good for the baby, don’t you?’

  ‘Aren’t you nervous about having a baby?’

  ‘A little,’ she confessed, frowning. ‘But my mother’s going to help. We’re going to live with her at the beginning.’