I Was a Potato Oligarch: Travels and Travails in the New Russia

by John Mole

  This pleasant life lasted for almost two years, up to the time of Tomas’s discharge from the army. The widow Natalya began to ask over their morning kasha what his plans were and insisted on a better answer than “I’ll see when I get back to Moscow”. His pupils asked what would happen to their lessons and their mothers wondered who would enliven their tea recitals and concerts and parties and play the music for the Komsomol New Year play. All Tomas could do was shrug. It would soon be none of his business.

  Three weeks before Tomas’s discharge, the commandant told him that there was a problem. Tomas was obliged by military law to complete a minimum number of days of training in things like small arms and map reading, which he had not done. This was very difficult to amend in retrospect, but if he stayed on until the New Year the days could be logged as training days.

  From that day on the pressure mounted. The widow doubled her attentions. Tomas was showered with presents after his lessons and recitals. The advantages of provincial life came up in conversation. It’s better to be the first boy in a town than the last boy in a city. And with pressure came growing revulsion. Natalya’s attentions were cloying. His pupils with their wooden fingers and cloth ears bored him with their clockwork sonatas and stupid excuses for not practising. Their mothers were dull and provincial, obsessed with their husbands’ rank and what was in the shops today. The town was mouldering and moribund.

  Tomas longed for lights and noise and crowded cafés. He loathed the countryside. He hated the wind sweeping across the plain, freezing in winter and dusty in summer. The vast horizon pathetically reflected chronic depression. He was trapped. But what could he do? Insist on his rights? A serving soldier on an island in the middle of the steppe had no rights. The commandant was God. Tomas dared not openly defy him. He had to find a subtle way of making himself undesirable.

  His opportunity came one Sunday evening. The commandant and his wife were entertaining their friends around the samovar and Tomas played for them. He sat down at the piano with his back to them and started off with Stravinsky, transcribed for piano from a suite permeated with jazz rhythms. Halfway through he abandoned the score and launched into the Fats Waller that had attracted the dramaturge’s malevolence. He was rusty - he had not played jazz for two years. But after a few minutes he warmed to it and was soon so engrossed that he forgot about his audience and the reaction he was banking on: for them to kick this cuckoo of decadence out of their comfortable nest.

  He played for nearly half an hour. Fats Waller, Thelonius Monk, Ragtime, Gershwin, all his favourites. Behind him there was silence, not even a cough or the clink of a tea glass. He came to his senses after the final chord of “Summertime”. He mopped his forehead with the cuff of his jacket and swivelled on the piano stool to face his listeners. They were turned to wax. They stared at him blankly. He felt a terrible panic welling up from his sandals. What if the commandant had him shot? Packed him off there and then to the Gulag with an instant court martial? He probably had a quorum of officers in the room.

  “Is that... jazz?” asked the commandant.

  “Yes,” said Tomas, lowering his eyes and slumping his shoulders.

  “It’s wonderful,” he said and clapped his hands. All the others started to clap too. The commandant was now on his feet. “Why didn’t you play this before?”

  “The American pilots in Murmansk played Glenn Miller,” said a retired colonel, a grizzled old bear with Brezhnev eyebrows. “We had great parties. Can you play Glenn Miller?” He started to sing and clap. “Da de da de da da. Come on, man. You must know it.”

  The party at the commandant’s lasted until midnight. Tomas played his repertoire three times over before taking a chance on improvising. It was not all jazz. The officers who had been in the Great Patriotic War sang their old songs and told stories about heroic drinking bouts with the Americans and the British and discussed the relative merits of vodka, bourbon, scotch, medical alcohol and engine antifreeze. Their wives clapped along to the rhythm and dragged up the English they had learned at school and showed off decadent western dances they had gleaned from old movies and embellished from their imaginations.

  The next day, through the throbbing haze of a hangover, Tomas leaned against an apple tree in the widow’s garden and contemplated his new future as the jazz maestro of Ozyorni-10. It wasn’t such a bad place, not such a bad life, if he could somehow get hold of US records and sheet music and a radio for Voice of America. The commandant said he could help. He had comrades from the Academy in Berlin and Prague.

  Brezhnev died and was replaced by Andropov. Andropov died and was replaced by Chernenko. Chernenko died and was replaced by Gorbachev. The Berlin Wall came down. The Red Army retreated into Russia. In Ozyorni-10 life went on unruffled. Conscripts cleaned the rockets, warrant officers brewed bootleg, the town pursued its social life.

  The commandant retired. His replacement had a young Latvian wife who was into Latin American. Tomas built up a combo with drums, sax, guitar, synthesizer. He didn’t dare try to find out what his civil status was. He had never received discharge papers and for all he knew he was still a conscript. Or a deserter. His passport was out of date. He could not live or work or marry without those papers. He was a Nobody who lived Nowhere.

  In August 1991 Gorbachev’s aides tried to oust their boss. Yeltsin stood on a tank outside the White House and defied the coup. In December the Soviet Union died. Yeltsin proclaimed the freedom of the Russian people. Tomas listened to all this happening on the BBC. He orchestrated the New Year’s Eve ball and led “Auld Lang Syne” on the trumpet.

  The day after New Year’s Day he packed up his music and his trumpet and his savings and got on the bus. No one stopped him.

  “What do you do without papers?”

  “There is a Russian saying. With papers, you’re a human being. Without papers, you’re shit. Do you know free jazz?”

  “Sure.”

  “I am free shit.” He grinned.

  “Will you play at our opening? I’ll get you bowler hats.”

  Goodness has no smell

  Close to where I lived was the church and convent of All Saints. It was a handsome church built in 1733 in the reign of Empress Anna Ivanovna in the muted Moscow baroque style, ochre and white with barely tumescent onions sprouting graceful spires on the belfry and the slate-grey cupola. One snowy Sunday in early winter I went in, enticed by a Russian choir in full voice.

  The nave was packed. Incense and mist from damp over-coats and bad breath and fart and mumbled prayer and candle smoke and deep-throated harmonies billowed round the faithful and rose in a reverent miasma to the cupola where Christ Almighty looked down on us, big-eyed and stern and holding his breath.

  A murky side-chapel at the back was relatively underpopulated, perhaps because two of the worshippers were dead. They lay on their backs in open coffins. Both were old women taking part in their last liturgy, down here anyway, the theory being that they had joined the eternal liturgy up there. One of them, nearer the far wall, was heaped with red gladioli and surrounded by mourners, who said prayers and crossed themselves and bent over to touch the ground and lit candles to stick into trays of sand on brass stands. The other was alone, no flowers, no candles, no mourners. It was so sad. Wasn’t there anyone to see her off? The other mourners didn’t give her so much as a glance. Nor did the newcomers. They stamped snow off their boots, kissed the icon of the Virgin not two yards from where she lay, lit a candle and crossed themselves three times before pressing forward into the nave.

  She was dead. She had no idea she was as friendless now as she probably had been when she was alive. But still, I thought it was a shame. I lurked for a bit in the shadows in front of a faded fresco of the Dormition of Our Lady, cuddling my shapka and hoping people would take me for a local. When I felt sufficiently anonymous, I sidled round to the icon of the Virgin and took a fresh candle from the wooden box. The chink-chink-chink of coins was like a gong announcing me. I lit the candle and took it b
ack to the coffin, shielding it with my hand. It was an irrational gesture and I was embarrassed - people might draw the wrong conclusion about who I was. But it didn’t seem right for her to be lonely and ignored in a crowd of Christians, even if she were dead.

  Her nose was sharp and white and her toothless mouth open in a perfectly round black hole. Her eyes were not quite closed and peeped from under red lids, like my mother pretending to be asleep when I went into her room too early in the morning. Without the benefit of candles or flowers or embalming, the woman exuded the fragrance released when you take the cellophane off a turkey burger that has been out of the fridge too long. She looked like a cross-faced old bitch. Was this why nobody had come to see her off? Once in her life she must have been nice.

  Her head was bound in a nunnish wimple and a cheap cotton shroud was laced up to her neck. Her hands were crossed on her breast and her chicken-claw fingers held an ornate ivory crucifix that was at odds with the rest of her pauper’s weeds. Her last possession? The one thing she refused to sell? Her candle holder had been appropriated by the popular old woman. I dripped wax on the corner of the coffin and stuck her candle into it. “Good luck darlin’,”I whispered and slunk away before the candle fell in the coffin and set fire to her shroud.

  Just as I made it to the door, a hand gripped my arm and pulled me back into the shadows of the chapel. I jerked round and saw at my elbow, and no higher than it, a cross-faced old woman, sharp-nosed and toothless. Under a black scarf her head was tightly wrapped in white like a nun. I looked over at the coffin and was relieved to see the dead old woman still in there.

  “She knew you’d come,” croaked the living crone. She smelt terrible. Not just unwashed but anointed with fetid liniment. I tried to get away, if only from the smell, but she held tight to my sleeve. She pulled me into an alcove where an old man was standing propped against the wall and leaning on two sticks. He wore a long khaki greatcoat and a grubby green woolly hat pulled down over his ears. His yellow parchment face featured bright red scabs that glowed even under a white beard. He had the worst case of the shakes I have ever seen. The poor chap jiggled all over, from nodding head to tapping feet. In a moment of panic I thought the woman was about to introduce me to my putative father. I tried to struggle free, but she held tight. With her other hand she took aim, seized one of his jiggling hands and put it into mine.

  “Outside,” she rasped and made shooing gestures. Before I could find the words to refuse, she turned away and waddled back into the nave. The shaking man gave me a smile, which immediately turned into a scowl and back into a smile, then a scowl then a smile and so on in an infinite regression of tics. No wonder he dribbled onto his sodden grey scarf. At least he didn’t smell as bad as the old woman - unwashed underwear and garlic and damp wool, but no liniment. We processed down the aisle in a manic two-step to the rhythm of his sticks clacking on the floor and every fifth bar or so against each other.

  Outside, snow was falling from heaven in thick, wet globs. It got up the nose and in the eyes and slithered down the back of the neck. It dampened the noise of traffic and sirens and people shouting in the street outside. It did nothing against the belfry clanging out the everyday miracle of bread into flesh, wine into blood. Painstakingly we navigated the slippery steps and shimmied down the gauntlet of beggars and collectors rattling their poor boxes like maracas to accompany us.

  Once clear in the yard I tried to shake the old man off. “Goodbye. God bless,” I said, but he refused to let go of my arm. He lifted a stick and wobbled it in the general direction of a little white building beside the churchyard wall. The stench was unmistakeable. He needed to go.

  I breathed through my mouth as I shepherded him up the cement-block steps and across the slippery tile floor to a cast-iron urinal. Thanks for small mercies, he didn’t need a crap. He took position and rapped a tattoo on the green-stained iron with his sticks as he fumbled with his flies. There were no buttons or zip, which was a time saver, but he had trouble finding himself in folds of wool and flannel.

  “Hold it for me, please,” he said.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said to myself. But I’d gone this far. I reached down and rummaged in the clammy warmth until I found his thing and pulled it out. It was long and wrinkled and covered in red scabs.

  “You poor bastard,” I said in English and fought down the urge to throw up. Remarkably and conveniently, it was the one bit of him that didn’t shake. I held it patiently between thumb and forefinger, trying desperately to think beautiful thoughts, until it gushed a stream of thick yellow soup. When it dribbled to a stop I gave it a perfunctory shake and tucked it back in.

  “I meant hold my stick. But thank you anyway,” he said.

  We skated across the churchyard to a single-storey building built onto the side of the church. Other old people limped and shuffled and staggered with us. The snow was falling thick. I was grateful for the metallic smell of it that killed all others and for the cold that anaesthetized my thumb and forefinger.

  In the porch my man rapped on the door with a stick. A spy hole snapped open and shut and the door was swung aside by a nun with brawny bare forearms and an aura of soup. She grabbed him by the shoulders and hoicked him inside. She looked me up and down and without a word slammed the door on me.

  The Devil’s balls

  “Dzhorn! I have solved all your problems. You will be rich,” said Natasha and tinkled like a chandelier in a draught. This was a crystals day when she retuned herself to the cosmos by wearing glittering little bits of glass in her ears, her hair, round her neck, her wrists and pinned all over the front of her blouse. Afanasy warned me not to comment on them unless I wanted the full lecture, including the origin and function of every little shard.

  “My cousin is a priest. He has a village and a farm. They will grow everything you need. We will go to him on Saturday and you will give your order.”

  “But it’s snowing.”

  “The best time. No mud.”

  It was too good to be true, but there was no harm in checking and it would be a day out. The village was five hours’ drive northeast of Moscow in the direction of Nizhny-Novgorod. The engine flogged, the body rattled, and my head banged against the roof as we pounded over the ripples and holes on the motorway. Natasha was hunched over the wheel, knuckles white, her nose nearly on the windscreen, peering through a brown mist thrown up by the trucks. All the vehicles, including ours, were completely stuccoed with it, motorized turds slipping along an open sewer. Roadside petrol stations were unreliable. Like everyone else we were loaded with jerry cans of fuel. If there was a pile-up we would make a glorious firework. The radio didn’t work but we couldn’t hear it anyway. It was useless trying to talk.

  After three hours we turned off the highway onto a local road. Under the snow was a pair of parallel ruts, so at least there was no danger of us sliding into a ditch. Natasha leaned back and relaxed her hands in best Land Rover training school fashion so the wheel didn’t break her wrist if we hit a kink in the ruts. The country on either side was a flat white sheet with hummocks of barrack-like buildings.

  “Are we nearly there?”

  “Nearly there,” she said. “That’s what you say to children, isn’t it?”

  “Do you have children?”

  “No.”

  “Are you married?”

  “Yes. We couldn’t afford a family. Now he sleeps with his professor. I don’t see him any more.”

  “Are you divorced?”

  “Of course.”

  Suddenly she put her foot down and veered to the right. We slithered and tilted and it occurred to me in the lucidity of fear that our conversation had prompted her to escape this miserable life. But she was only escaping the ruts and we fishtailed along a ribbon of packed snow through the forest. It all went quiet, since the engine was almost idling and she only gunned it when we threatened to go broadside.

  “We’re like the pictures on a Palekh lacquer box. The dashing prince whipping up the
sleigh horses and the princess next to him wrapped in furs. Ours is the feminist version.”

  “Dzhorn! Do all English like empty conversation? It is entertainment for you.”

  The road spilled out into a clearing. Natasha put her foot on the brake and cut the ignition and we shimmied to a stop in a patch of soft snow. The ticking of the cooling engine was all that remained of the racket of the past few hours. As well as the whooshing in the ears that deep silence brings.

  “We’re here,” said Natasha, a fatuous but customary remark. I wound down the window to see where “here” was. Up to now my view had been through a segment of brown window. Icy breath made me wind it up again fast, but not before glimpsing low wooden houses on the rim of the clearing. They were dark brown and grey and green and hardly visible against the trees beyond them. The giveaway was the curls of smoke and black patches round chimneys on snow-covered roofs.

  We bundled our clothes on like lovers in a lay-by. Natasha jumped down nimbly onto the packed snow and made a pirouette. I felt brave and adventurous in the snowbound wilderness and jumped down less nimbly. My legs shot away from under me and I plumped down on my bottom.

  Once bright green and red and blue, the houses had mellowed out of neglect into camouflage colours. Where the wood had rotted they were patched with whatever came to hand: bits of tin, plywood, split logs, tar paper. Piled up around them was the stuff of country life, ramshackle sties and hen houses, bits of old vehicles, privies and dung heaps. In the middle of this rustic slum was a brand new wooden church. Walls of bright yellow plank, roof of rich brown shingles. It was of the old Russian style before it was perverted by onion-dome orientalism and Italian baroque - angular, geometric, cubic, perfectly proportioned. In front was a silver Chevrolet pick-up and a rusty metal caravan with a crooked stovepipe chimney.

  I followed Natasha towards the church with the mincing little steps I reserve for walking on snow. The place looked deserted. I suspected eyes behind the curtains. A bearded man slammed the caravan door open from the inside and stepped onto the ammunition box that was his front step. He wore a one-piece scarlet overall tucked into calf-length boots. He opened his arms wide to Natasha and waited for her to get in range to throw them round her. He was only about five foot tall, so he stayed on his box to even things up. They exchanged hugs and smacking-cheek kisses before we made our own, less exuberant acquaintance.