Black Earth City Read online

  The rumours did Bill no harm; on the contrary, he became an object of curiosity. Everyone invited him to their parties and tried to persuade him to accept a glass of vodka. Men encouraged him to talk about the US army. Girls sat on his lap and asked him questions, and Bill’s scrubbed face took on the permanent, amiable smile of the popular guy. Leda was the only one with the power to remove it: with an arch of her eyebrows, she could confuse him. But she, too, was intrigued.

  ‘Come on, guys –’ Leda sat on my bed between Peanut and Bill, the two flatmates. She leaned over to fill the glasses around her, the line of her bare arm gleaming in the half-dark. ‘Drink with me. To New York City, am I glad to leave that place.’

  ‘You know I don’t drink,’ said Bill. His T-shirt showed his pectorals; sitting quietly, he looked helpless, his big pink hands turned upwards on his lap. Leda just flared her nostrils a fraction and laughed.

  ‘Darling, we’re not in Atlanta now. We’re in Russia, we drink.’

  Bill looked at her, embarrassed. ‘Give me a break, wouldya?’

  Peanut stepped in. ‘OK, New York,’ he repeated. ‘To Brighton Beach, where all the Russians with any sense have gone already.’

  ‘Brighton Beach!’ we echoed, and drank.

  That evening I found myself watching the three of them: Peanut, leaning across and whispering to Leda, making her laugh; Leda, eyes glittering, letting her hand rest on Bill’s knee. Bill sat between them like a great clean baby and blushed as Leda teased him about his biceps.

  ‘I like a man with an arm measurement the size of my waist,’ she said. ‘Let’s see – can you raise a shot glass to your mouth, or will you let me help you?’

  At last Bill gave in, as everyone knew he would, and accepted some vodka. Everyone does – it is almost impossible to resist the collective will of Russians urging you to drink. It soon becomes clear that it is simply self-centred of you to keep on refusing. How can you think of your work, your sleep, your liver when all your friends are ruining their careers and their health so much faster and more conclusively than you? What kind of a person keeps a clear head to observe his comrades drinking away their youth? You need alcohol inside you to bear it. What’s more, even one sober guest leaves a chill in the air. How are the rest of us to expand and float away with this cold draught to deflate us? It’s pure selfishness not to drink, and it was to Bill’s credit that he understood this and began, slowly at first, then faster, to imbibe.

  There were only five or six of us still there when Leda slammed her glass down on the table. ‘This is getting dull. I know.’ She looked speculatively at the boys on either side of her. ‘We’ll play the truth game.’

  ‘OK,’ said Peanut, laughing.

  I watched for Bill’s reaction. He was slightly blurred by drink; he gave Leda a look and smiled. ‘Haven’t played that since I was fourteen.’

  ‘About time, then,’ Leda replied briskly.

  We cleared a space for the bottle, and there was a moment of silence. Leda was enjoying herself. The bottle spun in the half-dark, skittered across the table, and came to rest pointing at Leda herself.

  ‘All right, Leda, you start. What’s the worst crime you’ve committed?’ said Bill.

  ‘Worst crime! Jesus. I dunno. Not sending my grandmother a birthday card. Buying smack for my ex. Which is worse?’

  The bottle spun again.

  ‘Peanut,’ Leda drawled. ‘We’ll start easy. What’s your greatest desire?’

  ‘To tell the truth,’ he laughed.

  Spin.

  ‘Bill,’ asked Peanut. ‘When was the best sex you ever knew?’

  ‘Er … dunno.’

  ‘Come on!’ she snapped.

  ‘Well, all right – last night, with you, Leda,’ Bill said, smirking.

  ‘For God’s sake! You’re all liars, the lot of you.’ She jumped up in a fury.

  Later that night, when I stumbled to the kitchen for a glass of water, I glimpsed Bill and Leda at the end of the corridor. They were standing in each other’s arms; their expressions were grave. She was speaking: by her tone, telling him something important. When I came back, I realised she was teaching him to waltz. Leda’s head was inclined, revealing her long pale neck; sternly, she was intoning, ‘One, two, three. One, two, three – now turn! – two three.’ Every line of Bill’s body expressed submission. If he had any secrets, he surely wasn’t going to keep them for much longer.

  *

  Leda was at first given a room in Hostel No. 7, a miserable block at the other end of the city, but Edik Zelyony stepped in and, in a glimpse of his later success in business, instantly found an answer to two problems. Leda wanted to rent a room with a family; the Uvarovs wanted an inostranka, a foreign girl, as a lodger. When Mitya and I went to visit the following week, we found Leda smoking in the kitchen with Masha and Valya Uvarov. They already wore the look that, it seemed to me, expressed their relationship with Leda: admiring and a little uncertain, as though a beautiful, powerful, nervous bird had somehow flown into their apartment and a wrong movement might send it crashing towards freedom.

  ‘You know, my family worried about me coming to Russia,’ she said. ‘But they had no idea … the scary place for me was New York. Did I tell you already about my boyfriend? He was older than me, you know, and I adored him, he was a photographer, so sexy. It was ages before I realised he was a junkie. I was so naïve, and he hid it from me, kind of protective in a way. Once I knew, he used to send me out to score, slap me around if there were problems getting hold of it. What a disaster.’

  ‘At least it’s over now.’ Masha wanted to change the subject: it was the kind of thing she thought vulgar. She didn’t like to associate it with their Leda. But we were interested.

  ‘What did he look like?’ asked Valya.

  ‘Like a rock star, dark and skinny – I used to like that look. Not any more. Now I go for clean-cut men, athletic, you know, straightforward kind of guys.’

  ‘You mean, like Bill?’ I said.

  Leda laughed. ‘Bill! He’s athletic, I agree. But I’m not sure he’s so straightforward.’

  ‘Do you know that for sure?’

  ‘No. That’s why I thought it would be interesting to play the truth game.’

  ‘So you and he, are you –?’

  ‘No! But he’s keen. And I’m teaching him to waltz. I’ve never danced with a secret agent before. It’s kind of exciting …’

  Masha started laughing. ‘But – bozhe moi, it’s not possible!’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘You said this boy is living with Peanut? Well, people say that Peanut’s family is KGB, rather high-ranking – they have been for several generations.’

  ‘No!’

  We pondered this information.

  ‘Who, do you think, follows whom? They take it in turns, perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, who bugs whom?’

  ‘It’s absurd,’ Valya said firmly. ‘The stupidest nonsense I’ve ever heard. We’re not living in the thirties, to be making such remarks about our friends. Peanut’s family are in the army, just like Bill will be.’

  We all agreed with her. It was nonsense.

  ‘I’ll tell you something, though,’ said Mitya, after a few moments. ‘I mean, this is progress, isn’t it? Truly enlightened. Let them bother each other, and leave the rest of us in peace.’

  *

  Peanut had a tendency to disappear for a few days at a time. It was one of the things that made him mutny, cloudy, opaque. It’s a common phenomenon, this cloudiness. The efforts required to achieve anything are so labyrinthine in Russia, the steps necessary to buy things ‘on the left’ or to obtain the right documents, that it becomes hard to live simply. Cloudiness starts to fog your days, your motives. People don’t like to be questioned too closely. You guard your contacts and deflect inquiry. This time, however, the whole town was talking about his family.

  There’d been a wedding last Saturday, his cousin, or perhaps his second cousin. The bride and groom
had returned from ZAGS, the registry office. They’d been welcomed into the house with bread and salt, and the toasts and the feasting had begun. Soon the families had relaxed, no doubt they were leaning back in their chairs, mopping their faces, laughing and groaning as the mother of the bride carried in more meat, smoked fish, pressed everyone to try a little Jewish salad. That’s how it is at Russian weddings, at least simple family occasions like this one. The father of the bride, like fathers of brides the world over, looks relieved, a little emotional, puts his arm around his wife and gives her a squeeze – ‘We didn’t do too badly, did we, after all?’

  Sources disagreed over what happened next. Some said that two men forced their way into the room and grabbed the father of the bride. People the other side of the room didn’t even realise it had happened. The two men clamped a hand over his mouth and dragged him out. In the shocked second before anyone reacted, they had thrown him down the stairwell. Others said that a fight broke out among the guests themselves, and that’s how he ended up on the concrete three flights below. Whichever: by the end of the wedding, the man was dead.

  As time went on and the police showed no sign of finding the killers, people drew conclusions. That was no coincidence, they said. Live by the sword, die by the sword. It was not as if this was an isolated incident. A secret war was being waged in those last few months of the Soviet Union that would shape the power blocs of the next decade, and Peanut’s relation was just one of the casualties.

  Something else was extinguished with him, too. We didn’t miss it straightaway, yet, as the months of winter wore on, the sensation of loss grew stronger – a tiny thing, just a little flicker of optimism, a timid idealism that had been lit back in the summer when the mood was brave and fiery.

  It was such a short time ago that people had tasted victory. At the end of August, when the coup orchestrated by KGB and Party chiefs had crumbled, furious crowds had surrounded the Central Committee building in Moscow. Dzherzhinsky’s statue had been dragged from its pedestal outside the Lubyanka. ‘Smash the KGB!’ the placards had read. ‘Send the Party to Chernobyl!’

  In his book Lenin’s Tomb, David Remnick described the scene inside the building. Party members and KGB officers were in a panic. How to destroy the evidence of their criminal activities over the past seventy years before the crowd surged in and lynched them all? They tried desperately to shred the most incriminating documents. But one by one the paper shredders juddered and broke: in their terror, the apparatchiks had forgotten to remove the paper clips. For a moment, the effects of their corruption must have appeared before them in horrifying clarity.

  It didn’t last. One of Yeltsin’s first acts on taking power after the coup was to re-employ the majority of the Party functionaries and put the KGB back in business. Those who had not found more lucrative work in the private sector were back at their usual jobs the following Monday.

  They had learnt their lesson, though. It was clearly no good relying on the state to provide for them. Now the collective nest was no more, they were forced to feather their own. In the next ten years, apparatchiks and secret police officers would gain control of all the major industries in the country. As directors of the new private companies that traded in Russia’s vast resources of oil and gas, of diamonds, gold, wood and steel, they had access to wealth that they could only have dreamt of in the old days. Inevitably, there were disagreements between them and when these needed to be solved, perhaps an audience of wedding guests was welcomed. Pour encourager les autres.

  *

  Life in the hostel lurched on, as delightful as ever, although for me it had changed in one respect: I agreed with Mitya about the rumours. There were still hints that we were being supervised by some rather tolerant father figure. There were even moments when I felt anxious, as when I lost my wallet in town later in the winter. I was lucky, really – there was no money in it, nothing at all, in fact, except my student identity card, and a joint. For some days I felt the breath of the KGB on the back of my neck. But nothing happened. Perhaps it is still sitting in a file. Or perhaps the thief emptied the contents into a bin and sold the wallet, and the rest is paranoia – I don’t know. The point was that the secret services were too busy to have much time for us that year. No doubt a little routine form-filling was going on; letters were read and people were called in for questioning now and again. Old habits die hard, particularly among bureaucrats. But the Cold War was over. Making money was the first priority now.

  Leda realised this as well, it seemed. A month passed before I went round to the Uvarovs again, and when I did, Leda was there with her new boyfriend. Her flirtation with the secret services had come to nothing, although judging by appearances, there was no lack of interest on the part of the CIA. No, Leda was true to her word.

  ‘Meet Sasha,’ she drawled. ‘He’s a volleyball champion.’

  Sasha smiled sweetly. He was sitting four-square in the corner, hands crossed tidily on his lap, and keeping quiet. He had clear brown eyes and shiny hair and a healthy sportsman’s complexion. He certainly looked straightforward, although who, I thought, smiling back at him, could ever really tell?

  · 8 ·

  Dmitri Donskoy and the Borders of Russia

  You have your millions. We are numberless, numberless, numberless. Try doing battle with us!

  Aleksandr Blok,

  ‘The Scythians’, 1918

  Strange things had been happening on the train to Kiev. In class one day, our teacher Rita Yurievna told us about the visit she had just made to her relations. She was shocked.

  ‘The police went straight through the carriage demanding money,’ she said. ‘Those Ukrainians! It’s just pure greed, this nonsense about visas.’

  ‘But, Rita Yurievna, the Ukraine has declared its independence.’

  ‘How can they be independent? It’s absurd! They’re Russians, just like us. Kiev was the first capital of Russia. And what they call a language, well, it’s more like a dialect. You know how they say, “Workers of the World, Unite” in Ukrainian? You used to see it on the banners: “Workers of the World, Jump in a Heap!” In any case, in East Ukraine everyone’s Russian, like my relatives.’

  Rita Yurievna was not alone in holding these views. The Russians have long seen the Ukrainians as their jolly, dim-witted country cousins. Their accent, with its gutturals and rounded vowels, is the equivalent of Hardy’s rustic burr and will reduce a roomful of the most liberal Russians to giggles. Khrushchev, who had the habit of wearing his embroidered Ukrainian shirt when he acted the buffoon for Stalin, embodied this image. Photographs of him banging his shoe on the podium at the United Nations and grinning toothily over a basketful of maize did nothing to raise the intellectual profile of his country.

  Many Russians were faintly surprised, therefore, to find that the Ukraine had declared itself an independent state on 24 August (almost immediately the coup was resolved), not to say astonished when it became one of the largest countries in Europe. Governed from its ancient capital Kiev, it included the mining region of the Donbass, most of the Soviet navy and a huge number of nuclear missiles. On paper, the Ukraine had the capacity to become a major European power. And thus Voronezh suddenly found itself on an international border.

  ‘It doesn’t have the atmosphere of a border town,’ Emily commented.

  She was right; Voronezh had the sleepy, defenceless air of a city deep in the provinces.

  ‘It’s absurd!’ Rita Yurievna repeated, frowning. ‘Although, of course, that was precisely how Voronezh began its life. The Battle of Kulikovo took place only a few kilometres north of here.’

  We looked blank.

  ‘You know the story of the Battle of Kulikovo?’

  Our textbooks, open at the chapter concerning the declension of numerals in Russian – a tedious business – were quietly closed. Rita Yurievna was not often distracted, but we recognised this solemn look of hers. She began to describe the battle in the reverent, dramatic tone otherwise reserved for Pus
hkin. This was more than history: it was sacred myth.

  *

  In 1379, the Mongol khan Mamai vowed to crush the Russian princes utterly. It was almost a hundred and fifty years since the Golden Horde had bloodily subdued the Russians, but the Mongols had never ruled over them directly. Instead they exacted tribute from the Russian princes. In the late fourteenth century, however, Prince Dmitri of Moscow, later known as Donskoy, began to exert his authority over the other Russian princes and to resist paying up. It was this insubordination that enraged Mamai.

  A whole year was spent mustering the Mongol troops. Half a million men gathered under Mamai’s colours, included hired Armenians, Turks and a whole regiment of Genoese from Kaffa. On the other side of the Don, Dmitri’s enemy Oleg of Ryazan waited to join the Mongols.

  Mamai was jubilant. ‘We are going to eat Russian bread and grow rich on Russian treasure,’ he crowed. ‘The terror of me will crush Moscow.’

  On 7 September 1380, Dmitri of Moscow’s men crossed the river Don just north of Voronezh and ranged themselves on a wide, almost flat piece of ground bordered on each side by steep-banked rivers, known as Kulikovo field. That evening Bobrok of Volhynia took Prince Dmitri out onto the field and showed him how to judge his enemy’s size by putting his ear to the ground. Dmitri listened and knew that the Russians were outnumbered by almost three to one. Bobrok and Vladimir the Brave were therefore ordered to lie back in the woods with their men and wait for the right moment to ambush the Mongols.

  It was a bold plan. The Golden Horde was accustomed to fighting on the steppe where it could surround and engulf its enemies. For this reason, the Russians had chosen an enclosed space, where the Mongols’ great number would be of only limited use. But Dmitri and his men were aware that Kulikovo could just as easily become a trap for the Russians. If the ambush worked, they had a chance, they agreed. But if it failed, their destruction was certain.

  The morning of 8 September, the Virgin’s Nativity, dawned misty; but by eleven o’clock the fog lifted and the shout went up: ‘The Mongols are coming!’