by James Cook
Manny, of course, made the trip without a qualm. He stayed abroad on two stable feet the whole time, shaking hands and making friends with the few people who remained upright: a politician from South London, a banker from Hamburg, a pickpocket from Marseilles. When they left the boat Manny had their names, their addresses, and their affection, and he would hold on to them ever after.
We stayed aboard ship at Southampton. A year earlier, when Manny first went to Europe, he had gone ashore and been detained by the British as an enemy agent, which I suppose in a way he was, and so we decided not to take any risks and stayed aboard ship until we reached Bremen a day or so later. From Bremen, we took the train to Berlin, rolling through the lush low countryside, where the harvest was just beginning to come in, and we tried to look as if we really belonged there.
In those days, Berlin was the gateway to Russia. None of the other western countries maintained diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, but the Germans had won the war on the Eastern front, so why shouldn’t they go on dealing with their vanquished enemy. Lenin had not only sued for peace, he had relinquished all the neighboring territories Russia had absorbed over three centuries from Estonia to the Ukraine. When the Germans were themselves defeated by the Western powers, the Russians got them all back again. The Germans embraced pacifism and socialist idealism, leaving the U.S. and Britain to undertake those military misadventures at Murmansk and Vladivostok that were supposed to turn back the tide of history.
Before we went on to Moscow, we spent two or three days exploring Berlin, that most beautiful and corrupt of capitals. Manny saw to it we took in the Eldorado, the city’s most glamorous and notorious nightclub. A dim cavernous establishment, Eldorado had a telephone on every table, and you dialed someone who attracted you at one of the other tables and arranged your pleasures for the evening. The prospects were little more than children—young girls and a smattering of boys—schooled in satisfying the most jaded tastes in Europe. Another night I called the tune, and we visited the nightclubs and cabarets where newcomers like Brecht, Eisler, and Hilda Wangel were laying the ground for a new kind of theatre. And then, our flesh and spirit sated, we went to the Soviet embassy and picked up our Soviet visas.
To Manny’s delight, the visas were waiting for us, just as they were supposed to be, and this proved, Manny said, that the Russians had finally accepted his status as a friend of the Soviet Union. The year before, they had kept him waiting nearly a month. He’d had a letter of introduction from the Soviet trade mission in New York and a letter from Pop to Lenin himself, but nobody had paid any attention, so in the end he was forced to give up on Berlin, take a boat for Riga, and make his way to Moscow through the back door.
This time they knew who he was, who we were, and what we were prepared to do for the socialist cause. Within hours we had boarded the long blue-and-yellow train that would carry us across Poland, through Byelorussia, and on into the ancient city of the Mocovites itself. What we were doing was completely against the law. U.S. citizens were prohibited from going to Russia, but nobody seemed to care.
It took us three days to get to Moscow. At Scolpce on the Polish border you had to change trains. All the other railroads in Europe were four-feet, eight-inches wide, but the Russians wanted greater stability and carrying capacity and so built their railroads to a six-foot gauge. You achieved a lot more efficiency apparently, but you lost what you’d gained because you had to change equipment and transfer traffic to get from one system to another, and that cost time and money. Even worse, you added one more protective barrier between Russia and the rest of the world, shutting out influences that might otherwise contaminate the inward, self-absorbed purity of the Russian soul.
The train was crowded and ill-equipped, there were no dining cars, and you brought you own food and drink or scrounged it from fellow passengers. At night there were not even any lights to guide you to the primitive toilet facilities. The railroads had been taken over by the government after the revolution, and anybody who wanted to could travel free of charge anywhere in the country, and everyone did. All Russia seemed to be on the move. Half the country was still engaged in a civil war and another quarter was starving to death. Everybody seemed to have decided that things had to be better somewhere else and determined to go there.
With its narrow streets, towering walls, and low-slung ramshackle buildings, Moscow was a strange and hectic place. But I never had time to orient myself to it, to figure out where the river was in relation to Red Square, and where the Square was in relation to the seedy, unbelievably squalid hotel Manny and I had settled in. We spent only two days there, long enough for Manny to check in at the Ministry of Natural Resources, and then we were gone again, heading for the Faust platinum mine at Platinumgrad on the far side of the Urals.
This time we traveled by private railroad car; that was part of the deal Manny made when he agreed to take the platinum mining operation off the government’s hands. We didn’t ask for a mining concession, you understand, we weren’t exploiting the people’s natural wealth. We were taking it off their hands for a time and developing it, enabling them to do what they would not otherwise have been able to do for themselves.
On the fourth day we arrived in Ekaterinenberg, or Sverdlovsk as they later renamed it in honor of the Soviet Union’s first president. This was the place where the tsar and his family had been executed, and the guides the government sent along with us insisted we go see the House of Special Purpose, as they called it, the house where the shooting had taken place. So why not? They held the train for us a few hours, and we traveled across town to a handsome if fairly modest two-story villa built in the side of a hill. There was a tall fence separating it from the street and behind it a carefully tended garden. An ancient white-haired caretaker escorted us through the rooms, a crone, a seeress, who recounted what had happened that day less than four years before, talking as if the event had transpired a century ago and she was the remaining witness.
The tsar and his family had fled there for safety, but the forces of justice finally caught up with them and a few months later they were killed in a room in the basement of the house. There were chair rails along the walls and wire grills over the windows, but the room was otherwise empty. You could still see the bullet holes in the walls, the broken plaster, the blood stains. The floorboards were scratched and scarred from the bayonets that finished what the rifles had failed to accomplish, and if you let your imagination run riot you could sense the terror in the room, the sweat, the trembling, the cries of despair as the rifles rang out, the dark shapes on the floor, the bayonets, the riflebutts, the blood, the bone, the silence.
They shunted our train onto a branch line, and we headed north, a hundred miles to Alapayevsk, the asbestos capital, and then two hundred more beyond that to Platinumgrad, where I would spend the next eight months of my life. It was a godforsaken place, a hodgepodge of huts and shanties beneath the towering snow-capped peaks of the Urals. I renamed it Nekudagrad the first time I saw it, Nowheresville, the city at the end of the world.
ii
At daybreak, the mountaintops always looked as if they had caught fire. A rim of gold would break along the edges of the peaks, spread and deepen across the snowfields beneath them, and suddenly burst into flame, sometimes in great streaks and streams of fire, flashing and flaring against the morning like the manes of maddened horses. The winds caught the snow on the mountaintops, I suppose, and sent it whirling into the rising sun. I always thought the dawn of creation must have been like this—when the world was new, when life was just beginning to stir in the primeval ooze, and all things still seemed possible.
Below the mountains, the world was still gritty with night. You could see it beginning to emerge from the dark, the steeps and drifts of the mountains, the cliffs, the jumbled buildings of the town, the fences, the standing animals, the road that climbed to the mine. In the winter, it grew light around eight and by then the workers had trudged up the slope to the mine, and
I was already at my desk. The temperature was still forty degrees below zero or lower. The winds roared out of the Arctic north, and when you went outside you froze; your face, your nose, the very fluid of your eyes ached; and you covered yourself in wool, skins, and furs. You hid your face, hands, and feet, hurrying to get inside again. Even indoors you never really got warm.
I sometimes had nightmares about the mountains that towered over the town. Waking nightmares, that is, that would overcome me like a chill when I trudged down the road to the mine office or turned up the wick on the oil lantern on my desk. I had the sense that their immensity was beginning to avalanche down upon us all, obliterating the town, myself, and all humankind, not necessarily as weight and momentum, but with the power of darkness, extinguishing the universe it encompassed and all the creatures within it, sucking the life from your throat with your breath.
We lived in a big two-story white house fronted on either side by second-floor balconies. It was the only house in the village with central heating, but that wasn’t enough. I sometimes thought I would go mad that winter with the cold, the unceasing noise of the wind, the howling wolves in the woods or on the hilltops, the snow trailing like smoke across the ground. There were four of us living there, the mine superintendent, his deputy, and the deputy’s wife, but our quarters were separate, and I saw less of them than I thought I wanted to until I actually spent some time with them, as I did maybe one night a week over dinner. The mine superintendent was a closed-mouthed Russian named Omitri Pudovkin, Mitya as we usually called him. His assistant was an Englishman named Willy Smith, who had married a Russian woman before the war and become a citizen. His wife, Lena, cooked, served, and presided over the table, but otherwise had nothing to do with me, and as far as I could tell with Willy Smith either.
The two men had run the mine when the British owned it and continued to run it after the government took over, except that their roles were now reversed. Pudovkin was superintendent, Smitty the mine manager; but nobody seemed to mind.
That winter, I spent much of my time poring over the Russian grammar I had picked up before leaving New York, trying to retain words and phrases in a language that seemed impossibly bizarre, formal, elaborate, brutal, without those connections with other European languages that might make you feel you were not venturing into totally unfamiliar territory. Mitya’s broken English was hard to follow, but Smitty had a Yorkshire accent so thick that I had almost as much trouble understanding him as I did Mitya. The Russian words I picked up were those that came out of the job. The words for adit and stope, mine opening, shaft, drill, explosive, you name it—production, shift, worker, timekeeper—so that, even if I could get by in Platinumgrad, nobody anywhere else would know what I was talking about.
Smitty spoke no more Russian than he had to, and the miners didn’t always speak Russian either. A good half of them came from barbaric places on the northern slopes of the Himalayas—Tien Shan, Sayan, and Alma Ata, ranges nobody else ever heard of, places with exotic names like Kazakh, Turkeman, Kirghiz, and Uzbek—and they knew even less Russian than I did, spoke their own languages and communicated with Smitty through the foremen who actually ran the mine and who could generally make sense of their dialects.
You were no longer in Russia, in Europe, you were in Asia on the eastern edge of the Siberian steppe that rolled endlessly beyond the hills that closed the valley in on the east. Nothing was quite familiar. There were mornings you were awakened by the Muslim call to prayer, to submission to Allah, and you would see the men dropping to their knees, pressing their foreheads to the frozen earth, humps and grumps of skins, furs, and cloth.
The workers lived in barracks, with maybe fifty to seventy people apiece, and most of the larger barracks had a Red Corner—a sort of assembly hall that was also used as a classroom—to teach those who couldn’t to read and write and those who didn’t understand the social system and the principles of Marxism on which the new system was being built. In the evenings, the Red Corner became a sort of nightclub or dancehall, with the workers providing their own entertainment. Vodka had been outlawed during the revolution, but the workers made an acceptable substitute out of potatoes or grain, a sort of Russian version of bathtub gin, and though it was cloudy rather than clear it packed a bigger wallop than any of the legitimate vodkas I’ve ever tried.
People played the guitar, the balalaika, and the accordion, and everyone sang and danced. I would often go down to the nearest Red Corner and sit in the shadows for hours listening to sounds that I’d never heard before. Frantic, frenzied, passionate, barbaric. The excitement was palpable, compounded of noise and energy and alcohol, and for a time you almost stopped feeling the cold, forgot that you were trapped there, at the edge of the world.
The officials who now ran the mine—the directors, I suppose, of the operation—represented the local soviet, or town council, but they ran the mine just as it had been run before the Revolution, except that socialist thugs replaced capitalist bullies, with no appreciable improvement for anyone. The managers still retained seigniorial rights over the women and children—not just Mitya, Smitty and I, but the dozen or so mine foremen as well. They could take them into their beds when they were of a mind to, and nobody thought to question them about it. Women, children, it made no difference. It was the way the world was run and had been from the beginning of time. Mitya, Smitty, and some of the other managers availed themselves of the privilege (the presence of their own wives notwithstanding), and I stood by with utter amazement. Most of the women were filthy and smelly, not likely to cause most men to lose their senses in an excess of desire, though with enough vodka to fire you up you might well not worry about that or remember where you were or who was watching. Indeed, you might not even care about being watched in an act so swaddled in coverings it might scarcely seem to be visible. I didn’t partake myself. Not because I had moral qualms, but because the seigniorial right was a claim too personal for me ever to imagine myself making on somebody else.
When Manny had arrived there the previous spring, the town was in turmoil. Production had come to a halt; the miners were starving, and though it might be illegal to strike they had in fact stopped working. As Manny explained it to me, they considered it all our fault. As concessionaires, we had promised to provide them with food at the company store, and the food had not been forthcoming. The workers were ready for blood. Manny’s blood, my blood, if I had been there. Manny promised them the moon, stars, and borscht, and took off with his skin intact for Ekaterinenberg to look for the food shipment he had sent east from Moscow a month or two before.
He found the boxcars without any great difficulty sitting on a siding on the edge of town where they had been ever since they arrived. Manny demanded an explanation, and the stationmaster explained innocently that the rail was too light to move such heavy equipment north. Manny didn’t know anything about railroads, but the stationmaster offered so many excuses for not transferring the loads into lighter cars that Manny became convinced he was angling for a bribe. He ordered the stationmaster to get the train moving at once, and when the man failed to do so, Manny got in touch with the Cheka, the local secret police, flashed his passport from Lenin, and had the stationmaster executed on the spot. Within an hour, the trains had begun moving north, without incident, over rail supposedly too light to bear their weight.
“Shot him?” I said. “You had him shot?”
“Him and a lot of others.” From then on, they shot anyone caught interfering with food shipments east of the Urals.
“How could they allow you to do that?” I said “Just up and shoot somebody without any charges or trial or anything?”
“They’re used to it. The secret police shot them under the tsar and they shoot them under Lenin. How else do you think they’ve been getting the country running again? I may not like it, but I can see that it’s necessary. How else do you think 20,000 party members brought order and stability to 160 million disordered Russians? You gave them orders, an
d if they didn’t obey, you shot them. You can’t do anything else. I can accept that.”
“Wow!” I said, helplessly “I’m not sure I could accept that.” But I decided not to make an issue of it.
“I don’t expect any more disruptions,” Manny announced, “and if anything like that happens again, you’d better be prepared to take it to the secret police or you might end up dead yourself.”
With the mine workers fed and the mine in production again, Manny wanted me to do a thorough assessment of it and its operation with the idea that American know-how would be enough to put it back on a sound economic basis. Where Manny got such an idea, I have no idea, much less that I was the man to do it, but he went back to Moscow a few days later and left me to figure out what had to be done.
I had never been in a mine before in my life, and for weeks I was terrified every time I entered the place. I walked bent forward into the shadowy dark as if every step would be my last. I was terrified by the mass of rock hanging down over my head, by the narrowness of the passages, by the pounding hammers and explosions that shook the earth, by the dark, the wet, the running water, the candles, the lanterns that lit my way or blew out in some subterranean wind leaving me groping the walls for the next turn in the passage or picking my way over the rocky path to some pinpoint of light who knows how many yards ahead.
I tramped through those miles of corridors following the eccentricities of the vein, up and down, around corners, into the bowels of the earth. I went down from level to level, riding in a bucket, clinging to a chain in the dark. I went to the mine face where in the underground heat men, stripped to the waist, held drills to the rock face for other men to hit with sledgehammers. I watched the explosives being packed in the hole, the wick touched with flame, spurting, flaring, and everybody running back, stumbling over me to escape the explosion.