Black Earth City Read online

  The battle began. At two o’clock the Mongols almost broke through the centre of the Russian troops. By three the centre and the left wing were in confusion. It was a massacre: thousands, tens of thousands of Russians were killed. Bobrok and Vladimir the Brave, hidden in the woods, received petitions from their men demanding to go to the assistance of their comrades. But Bobrok simply said, ‘Wait a little longer.’ By four o’clock Mamai was triumphant. Prince Dmitri’s standard had fallen and Brenko of Bryansk was dead.

  Only then did Bobrok and Vladimir lead their men onto the field. They struck the Mongols in the rear and flank with great fury, and the Mongols were filled with terror. They fled, pursued by Bobrok and his fresh troops throughout the night.

  ‘It was a resounding victory for the Russians,’ Rita Yurievna concluded. ‘From then on they knew that the Mongols were not invincible.’

  For centuries Russian folklore had described battles with their attackers from the east, enemies possessed of such terrible powers that even when sliced clean in half, they did not die but sprang back as two warriors. On Kulikovo field, however, Dmitri Donskoy recognised a truth known to every successful Russian ruler. To be victorious, they had to match and outdo their enemies’ taste for blood; to be prepared to lose not only countless lives, but riches, peace and freedom to the fight. And this relentless sacrifice was demanded not only of soldiers on the front line, but of all Russians, who must be ready to give up everything for their country. It was necessary, simply in order to protect themselves. All Russia’s expansionism, all its ruthless oppression of its own people sprang, it could be argued, from this basic desire: to establish borders of such impregnable strength that its people could at last feel secure.

  Rita Yurievna led us briskly back to Russian grammar, and it was only at the end of the hour that she returned, obliquely, to the subject of the border.

  ‘All one wants,’ she said, ‘is to sleep easy in one’s bed. Isn’t that right? And one’s children to grow up peacefully. That’s all. That’s why we lived so well under Brezhnev. We were simply so relieved to be safe.’

  · 9 ·

  Free Day

  I love the frosty breath, and the confession of wintry steam.

  Ah. I am I. Reality is reality.

  Osip Mandelstam,

  The Voronezh Notebooks, 1936

  Mitya opened the steel door of his flat with a bottle of Soviet champagne in his hand. ‘A drink in the morning and you’re free all day!’ he announced. ‘Let’s skip class.’

  As I waited for the trolley bus ten minutes earlier, half frozen and the other half asleep, huddled in my elderly fake fur jacket and sneezing as each breath made the insides of my nostrils crackle, even then I had noticed a festive mood. The first sign was the station clock. I glanced at it, as always, to check that I wasn’t early, and found it had stopped at twenty past four. No one could help me at the bus stop. Just a few months previously it would have been rare to find a wrist without a watch: now people were constantly asking each other the time. All the same, people brightened at the sight of the clock. ‘Look at that!’ they said proudly to each other. ‘Frozen solid! How’s that for a frost?’

  I should have rung Mitya to check he was at home on his own: anything could happen in a freeze like this – school cancelled, offices closed. But the trolley bus wheezed towards the stop before I reached the telephone, and the combination of this holiday feeling, and the way trolley buses always reminded me of fat ladies, and a sudden bubble of joy made me run and jump on board. Mitya had a theory that extreme cold makes people optimistic, or perhaps that in the struggle for survival, optimism in the face of icy weather has proved most effective. He hadn’t decided which way round it was but he pointed to penguins as an example. Penguins are clearly cheerful birds.

  Now he stood in his hot, dark hallway, and beamed. ‘It must be about minus twenty, I suppose,’ he said, peeling layers of clothing from me. ‘The perfect temperature – everything looks wonderful, it’s too cold to work, the vodka’s chilled by the time it’s home from the kiosk …’ He took my foot in his warm hands. ‘Come on, drink the having-been-produced-for-export champagne,’ he said. ‘We’ve got nothing to lose but our chains.’

  *

  When we emerged, the champagne had propelled us into a perfect future. Snowdrifts had swaddled Voronezh a couple of days before; now the city glittered under a crust of ice. Light streamed from every surface.

  We walked fast, in no particular direction. Outside the Opera theatre a yardman was snapping a line of icicles with a hammer to prevent them from melting in the afternoon and falling on passers-by. The yardman swung his hammer and listened to the jangle as they hit the ground.

  ‘Playing my xylo-thing,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘A yardman musician! Well, that’s the Opera for you!’ commented a lady in an astrakhan coat, who had also stopped to watch. ‘There’s nothing in the shops,’ she added, cheerfully, ‘so what can I do but stroll about?’

  Lenin Square was criss-crossed with people walking arm in arm; as they came closer, emitting little puffs of steam, we saw they were wearing their best clothes, glossy fur coats and hats that smelt a little of mothballs – clothes that only came out when it was twenty degrees below. Rosy cheeks and noses peeped out from a fringe of Siberian fox. The two bars on Revolution Prospect were overspilling onto the pavement where men stamped and swung their arms, waiting for a little vodochka to warm them up. Children were tobogganing down the slope to the reservoir, now and again hitting lumps of ice and flying off into snowdrifts with yelps of joy. Those who did not have toboggans used trays or pieces of cardboard or just flung themselves onto their tummies like seals. Mitya and I found some board and shot down the slope, colliding with a sledgeful of children. I instantly fell off and landed in the same drift, a few metres below them, but they had already begun to climb again. They were so bundled up that their arms stuck out at right angles to their bodies. Their faces were purple with exertion, yet they could think of nothing but speeding down the hill again. They were bewitched.

  The boy, the little lord of his sleigh,

  the leader of the gang,

  rushes past, red as a torch.

  I had just discovered Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks and my thoughts were full of his ice-sharp images, and the sideways leaps between them.

  In 1934, Mandelstam wrote his death sentence: a poem calling Stalin ‘the Kremlin mountaineer/The murderer and peasant-slayer’. He was arrested and interrogated, and it seemed he would be sent from prison straight to the camps. But by a lucky twist, he and his wife were exiled instead, first to the north and then to Voronezh.

  ‘The Voronezh of 1934 was a grim place, badly off for food,’ Nadezhda Mandelstam, his wife, wrote in her autobiography. ‘Dispossessed kulaks and peasants who had fled the collective farms begged in the streets. They stood by the bread stores and stretched out their hands. They had long since eaten their supplies of dry crusts brought with them in bags from their native villages.’

  Collectivisation was starving the countryside, while the purges emptied the cities. The Mandelstams, as ‘politically unreliable’ citizens, were constantly harassed. Every aspect of their lives was a struggle: they had no money, nowhere to live. Mandelstam himself was sick and nervous, and prone to attacks of breathlessness if Nadezhda left him even for a day. And yet in the midst of this desperation, he wrote three long cycles of poems filled with wonder and love of life. The repressions that would kill him just three years later could not compete, it seems, with the spontaneous delight that the country aroused in him. The snow-clad expanses, the city lost in the limitless steppe like a boat at sea, the ‘ten-figure forests’ and the ‘trains calling to each other in long-drawn-out whistles’: these somehow, miraculously, gave him the freedom to write.

  Most of this new work was composed on the move, as the poet walked through the back streets of Voronezh. He mumbled as he went, searching for the shape of a poem; finally, when he was satisfied,
he would rush home and dictate it to Nadezhda. He was a well-known figure in the town, considered a bit soft in the head. The children ran after him and teased him – their nickname for him was ‘the General’, and I could imagine, watching these breathless, red-cheeked kids in the snow, what gales of giggles assailed their forebears when one of them dared to shout it out behind his back. ‘Hey! General! Who’re you talking to?’

  Sixty-five years later, Mandelstam’s words are no less immediate:

  I’ll wonder at the world a little longer still,

  at the children and the snow.

  But a smile is like the road – it can’t be faked,

  and is disobedient, not a slave.

  At the hot-water pipes down by the reservoir, Mitya and I met Lapochka and Petya Pravda. We knew this place well, a cosy spot where one could sit and converse honestly and openly whatever the temperature. When we arrived, the boys were deep in discussion of a topic that has obsessed Russians throughout Soviet history: accommodation.

  ‘Divided straight down the middle, you see,’ Petya was saying as we approached. He shook hands with us. ‘This is the renovation in my flat. I’m planning on making it into two parts, one for my mother and one for me, entirely separate.’

  ‘But you’ll barely be able to turn round.’

  ‘Ah, but still – you haven’t heard the brilliance of the plan yet. Entirely separate parts, yet linked at one vital point.’

  ‘The kitchen?’

  ‘Better than that. The fridge. I’ve designed a two-doored fridge with the motor down the side – she stocks it from that side, and I eat from this. Mother love at its most elemental.’

  Lapochka got out a papirosa and began to tap the tobacco onto the ground. ‘You’d have to talk to each other through the fridge, past the milk products. It’d be good. You’d never argue, would you? Hard to argue with a yoghurt?’

  Petya passed a matchbox to Lapochka, who poured a little pile of marijuana out of it onto his palm. All that was left of the papirosa was an empty tube of cardboard and cigarette paper, which Lapochka began to pack with grass.

  ‘Look,’ said Mitya, ‘look at the fishermen.’

  From the hot-water pipes we gazed out onto the reservoir, now a snowy plain dotted with figures. They sat beside the holes they’d sawed out for themselves, motionless, dark and furry as otters. They neither talked nor gazed at the scenery. They peered intently at their lines vanishing under the shadowy blue ice. It was clear that it was a matter of moments before a monster, a prizewinner, leapt out at them.

  As Lapochka twisted the end of the joint, Smokey turned up with another friend. The Narcomen, as this lot were known, had perfect timing in these matters. Petya Pravda claimed he could smell it half a kilometre off, and classify it at one hundred metres on quality, strength and entertainment value. The last consideration outweighed the rest – he had a horror of being bored. It was an oversensitivity caused by the monstrous tedium of much of Soviet life. Queues, bureaucracy, the dreary verbosity of officialdom, the uniform architecture – the Narcomen were in vigorous protest against them all.

  ‘When you are on the train to boredom, it’s simple,’ explained Petya to me, speaking slowly in case the concept was hard to follow. ‘All you do is smash the window and jump out to an unknown fate. Understand?’

  It was not always easy to keep to this edict. Drink and drugs helped, of course, but they were not the only ways to jump off the train. Ideas were just as important to the Narcomen – theatre design, philosophy, Latin American literature, performance art – anything new. Books and tapes were passed from hand to hand, and suddenly the talk would be all Borges, or Zoroaster, or Massive Attack. In this, Voronezh had not changed since the eighties when, by the process known as magizdat, cassettes of dissident music circulated the country, recorded and re-recorded until they were barely audible. Mitya had a tape that had been made in some flat in Moscow before perestroika. Through the crackle you could just make out the sounds of a party, people chatting, calling for more vodka, and then the hoarse, amused voice of a Russian punk, Petya Mamonov, singing: ‘I eat rubbish, I drink from puddles, I’m a filthy … [here he achieved a tone of some menace] … pigeon. And yet … I can fly.’ It could have been the Narcomen’s anthem.

  We smoked the joint and Petya began messing around; he took a run-up and launched himself onto an ice slide that some kids had made. He slid for twenty metres, knock-kneed and gangly, and landed with a crash.

  The light enveloped everything; we were six dark spots on a landscape of blazing white reflection. Above us the glassy blue eye of the heavens was empty. I lay back and gazed into it, and after a minute or two the world flipped over and I was suspended above the sky, feeling the tug of its gravity deep in my solar plexus.

  ‘Don’t fall asleep, or you’ll freeze,’ said Mitya. ‘Let’s go.’

  There was one more wonder awaiting me that day. We wandered along the edge of the reservoir to the other side of the bridge, where the beach was in summer; behind a grille lay a stack of pedaloes covered in snow. A solitary figure stood by the pedalo hut. As we came closer, I realised he was taking off his clothes. Hat, scarf, coat; then the jersey, shirt and vest came off to reveal a bony little chest. He was a slight man with a wispy beard; with a composed, sensible expression he was now slipping off his boots, two pairs of socks, trousers and baggy pink long johns. Each article was folded neatly and placed behind him.

  Petya Pravda grinned at my horrified expression. ‘He’s a walrus,’ he said, as if explaining.

  ‘Yeah, and you’re George Harrison! Are you sure it’s not suicide?’

  ‘No, no – watch,’ they shushed me.

  Now dressed only in black underpants, the walrus took a metal bucket in both hands. He raised it over his head and tipped it up, and we heard a strangled croak, as a small sea bird might emit at the sight of a polar bear’s tonsils. Two gallons of icy water sluiced over the wretched man. But no sooner was it done than the walrus caught sight of us and, merrily towelling his back and his pitiful, blue-toned little belly, hallooed a welcome.

  ‘Fine day, isn’t it!’ he shouted, whipping on his long johns, the trousers, boots, vest, jersey, coat and hat in a trice. His beard was frozen into crinkly panels and his face glowed a fiery red.

  ‘One of the finest!’ Lapochka called in reply.

  The walrus stuffed his towel into a little rucksack and swung it over his shoulder, coming towards us with springy steps. ‘Aaaaah, that feels good!’ he announced. ‘I never miss a day. Normally I go in the water, of course, but the hole froze so solid last night, I didn’t have time … Until last year, my father and I always swam together, but now he’s seventy, the doctors say he shouldn’t. Fools!’

  He saluted us and stomped off, and once he’d rounded the corner, the others looked at my expression and started laughing. For some reason, heaven knows why, it struck them as funny; Petya Pravda, in fact, was so overcome that he was forced to bend over and stamp his foot several times. It was as though we had achieved some snowy, bright, breathless peak; we were light-headed and triumphant, and there seemed to be no good reason for us ever to come down.

  ‘Mityush,’ I said when we arrived back at the hostel, ‘we’ll always be together, won’t we?’

  ‘Of course,’ he answered. There was nothing more to say.

  If I had to produce proof of a compassionate God, this would be one of my first exhibits: the blissful, lunatic assumption of the happy man that for him alone, time does not exist. Even Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam felt it: just months before Osip was arrested for the second time, as they moved back to Moscow from Voronezh, Nadezhda wrote, ‘Improbable as it may seem, we fell into an inexplicable state of calm and believed for some reason that our life was at last secure …’

  Akhmatova, visiting them in Voronezh in 1936, saw their position more clearly:

  And the town stands locked in ice:

  A paperweight of trees, walls, snow.

  Gingerly I tread on gla
ss;

  the painted sleighs skid in their tracks.

  Peter’s statue in the square points to

  crows and poplars, and a verdigris dome

  washed clean, seeded with the sun’s dust.

  Here the earth still shakes from the old battle

  where the Tartars were beaten to their knees.

  Let the poplars raise their chalices

  for a sky-shattering toast,

  like thousands of wedding-guests drinking

  in jubilation at a feast.

  But in the room of the banished poet

  Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn,

  and the night falls,

  without the hope of dawn.

  · 10 ·

  New Year, New Happiness

  In general, our people are not too successful with representative institutions.

  Nikolai Gogol, Dead Souls, 1842

  I met my father in St Petersburg for Christmas. The day I arrived, I had the sensation that the city with all its monumental architecture was not as solid as it should be; the colours were overluminous, the snowy street billowed beneath my feet like canvas. When I arrived at my father’s hotel, he hugged me and looked at me intently. ‘How are you feeling, Charlotte?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got a fever, surely.’ He was right, of course, and I wasn’t the only one: the whole country was in a fever, a fever of finality. In a week’s time, on New Year’s Eve, the Soviet Union would formally cease to exist.

  It was a most elegant Christmas. We celebrated alone: Orthodox Christmas falls on 7 January, and in any case New Year is the important festival for Russians. My father and I strolled along the canals and over the bridges, through the fantastic labyrinth of the Hermitage and the idylls of Tsarskoe Selo. We ate sparsely. On 25 December we sat on spindly gilt chairs at the Maly Theatre to watch The Queen of Spades, and in the interval a lady in a dark silk coat rushed up to my father and said in ringing English tones, ‘Darling! How wonderful to see you here. I’ve got a box, there, I always come to St Petersburg for Christmas … Tomorrow I have a little salon, you must come.’