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

by John Mole

  “This is Father Kiril,” said Natasha in Russian.

  “Cyril, Cyril, Cyril,” he said in gangster American. “You from Stateside?”

  “England acksherly.”

  “Okay, okay. The fifty-foist state. Good termeetcha.”

  Father Cyril was fat in the way weight lifters are fat. Tough with it. He had a bushy black beard and his hair was neatly tied in a bun under a Pittsburgh Steelers baseball cap.

  “Yinz must be whacked,” he said. “Come inside and drink some hot tea. I got kasha on the go.”

  “Lovely,” I said.

  The fug inside the trailer was worse than in the Niva. Wood smoke, cooking, ripe trainers, incense. There was just room to huddle on the bed in front of a cylindrical stove. On it was a teapot, a kettle and an encrusted iron saucepan. The bed was the only furniture, nailed together out of un-planed wood, a fakir’s treat of splinters and protruding nail heads. A thin lumpy mattress, a matching pillow and a khaki sleeping bag were the only furnishings. Hanging on the wall was an automatic rifle with a skeleton stock. The rest of the cabin was a stash of ten-kilo tins of charity meat, crumbs from the European beef mountain, covered in a jumble of icons and censers and candles and other liturgical paraphernalia. At the end of the bed, covered in transparent plastic, stood a sacerdotal scarecrow made up of a handsome gold-embroidered chasuble and matching hat and stole.

  “All your treasures,” I said, adenoidally.

  “Needs readied up,” said Father Cyril. “I’m waitin’ on steel doors for the sacristy.”

  “Black sheep in your flock?”

  “It ain’t the sheeps I’m worried about, it’s the wuffs. There’s a military camp about twenty clicks from here. Soldiers back from Germany. Living in tents, poor guys. They’re not bad sonsabitches. They make their own vodka. Drives ‘em crazy. Anyways, it’s deserters cause the problem. Come spring you’ll find plenty bodies out there. If the bears don’t find them first. Here. Help yourself to grits.”

  He gave us tin plates and spoons. I waited for Natasha to serve herself. Thankfully it was not the slimy white stuff but brown and nutty. I took half a spoonful and smeared it round my plate to make it look a lot. Fortunately Cyril was not watching, as he was doing the business with glasses of tea. He handed me one.

  “Sugar or sweetener?” he asked, holding up a packet of Sweet’N Low. I chose sugar and regretted it when he passed over a soup bowl of brown sugar. Except it wasn’t brown but white coagulated with tea drips.

  “So you spent time in America,” I said, sipping my unsweetened tea.

  “Hey, I was born there. Picksburg.”

  “I know Pittsburgh,” I said.

  “You do? Born and raised in the Mon Valley.”

  It figured. The steel mills along the Monongahela River sucked in immigrants from all over Europe and they brought their religions with them. Driving out from downtown Pittsburgh, past the communities of wooden houses, you see steeples and spires and domes of every rite and denomination from the Atlantic to the Urals.

  “How come you’re here?”

  “My grandaddy was born right here in this village,” he said. “He was priest. Got out in the twenties and made it to the Burgh. They wanted to extoiminate us.”

  “The Bolsheviks?”

  “Nope. The New Believers. They were on Lenin’s side. Took over our choitches, everything. They got their comeuppance. Lenin turned against ‘em too.”

  “You’re an Old Believer?”

  “That’s what they call us. True Believers if it’s all the same to you.”

  “You still got family in Pittsburgh?”

  “Wife and two kids. My Mom’s still with us”.

  “It’s amazing how you kept the old faith.”

  “Only my Grandaddy. That’s who I got it from. He never learn English. My Mom and Dad wanted nothing to do with it.”

  “What do they think of you coming back?”

  “My old lady walk out on me when I took up studying for priest. I had a good job at the plant. She didn’t take to living on charity. The plant shut down irregardless. Kids arn at school any more. My daughter keeps in touch. She’s kept her Russian. Anyways, that’s a whole nuther bizniz.”

  He drained his glass and wiped his mouth with the back of a hairy hand, as if he were trying to wipe the words away too.

  “Yinz wanna see the choitch?

  We put on our parkas and stepped out into the breath-catching fresh air. Cyril steered Natasha by the elbow and I minced along behind. The sun was setting now over the trees and flooding the clearing with old gold. The church was incandescent.

  “Wow, it’s like a space ship just landed,” I said.

  “Nah. They got those ceramic tiles. The re-entry heat bounces offa them. Now you tell me it’s a five hunnerd pound ingot just been poured and I might go along wichyer.” Mon Valley imagery.

  Inside the church was beautiful as an old-fashioned barn. The proportions were delicious. Hidden skylights flooded the steep tent roof with golden light. To the right of the door was an icon with a red lamp burning in front of it and a candle tray with half a dozen guttering candles. The icon was garish and new, Saint Kiril holding a cross and an open bible. He looked remarkably like his priest. Cyril went up to it, crossed himself fluently three times and kissed the foot. He looked pointedly at Natasha.

  “Two-fingered heretic,” he said in Russian and laughed and clapped her on the shoulder.

  “Why two-fingered?” I asked in English.

  He was taken aback, surprised that I understood the Russian. “True believers make the sign of the cross with three fingers. For the Holy Trinity. The heretics use two fingers.”

  “I’m Catholic,” I said. “I use four.”

  “Y’all are a lost cause. At least we got hope with Natasha here. She’ll come back. That right, Natasha?”

  Before Natasha could think of a suitable reply, the door opened and an old woman came in. She was swathed in black shawls and her feet were swaddled in sacking tied up with parcel string. She shuffled over to Cyril, grabbed his right hand, kissed the hairy fingers and tried to genuflect, much against the will of her arthritic joints. He tried to pull her up with both hands, but she took this as encouragement to subside. They wrestled like this for half a minute until he gave in and let her sink to the floor. She babbled in toothless Russian and Natasha and I diplomatically moved away.

  “What’s this True Believer stuff?”

  “A long time ago in the 1600s the church had reforms. The Old Believers broke away. There are many different sects. This village is Bezpopovschini. It means without priests.”

  “But Cyril is a priest”

  “I know, but not like Orthodox. He’s not made by a bishop. The people elect him.”

  “Like our Methodists.”

  “During the persecutions they lived wild in the forest until it was safe to come back. Villages like this were completely cut off. That’s why they have no electricity or roads.”

  “Or they escaped to Pittsburgh. How did you keep in touch?”

  “We didn’t. Cyril came to Moscow after Perestroika, said his father was my father’s cousin. He was trying to find all the people his grandfather talked about. I think he got the wrong family. We have same name, but we never heard of this place and nobody remembers anything about Old Believers.”

  “Didn’t you tell him this?”

  “Do you remember the food queues? The best thing in the world was to have was a relative in America. One turns up on your doorstep with dollars in his pocket, you don’t send him away.”

  Cyril gave the old lady a blessing and pulled her to her feet. She backed away from him to the door.

  “Did you forgive her sins?” asked Natasha.

  “She said someone put the evil eye on her. Yinz got a bed for the night anyways. She keeps a clean house. You won’t get bitten too bad.”

  “Are we staying the night here?” I asked.

  “I’m not driving back in the dark,” said N
atasha.

  I was not pleased. There had been no mention of sleeping there. I didn’t like her story of acknowledging Cyril just to have an American connection. I could see a long evening ahead with kasha and cabbage and home-brewed vodka and a flearidden mattress with a priest who wasn’t a priest and an old hag with her feet done up in sacking and a batty divorcee, for whom I was just another foreigner who turned up with dollars for the taking. I left them on the pretext of admiring the iconostasis. It was not much to look at: a plain wood partition in front of the sanctuary with a door in the middle underneath a Cyrillic cross. I went up to the door.

  “Stay outa there,” boomed Cyril.

  “What’s in there?”

  “Nothin’,” he snapped. “Everythin’.”

  I led the way out of the church and slithered off moodily towards the caravan, while Natasha waited for Cyril to lock up. It was getting dark. I felt cold and fed up.

  “Watchat ice, slippy!” shouted Cyril. Too late. My feet shot away from me. I plumped down on my bottom.

  The evening was not as bad as I had feared. Our hostess’s name was Maria Olegovna. She was probably in her 50s, but thanks to hard work, simple food and the rustic life she looked about 80. From a distance her house was picturesque. Fretwork round the eves, heart-shaped holes in the shutters, a wisp of smoke from a crooked chimney. But we had to tread carefully on the rickety steps up to the balcony and tiptoe round jagged holes in the boards.

  Inside was a surprise, bare and spotless, the floor and wooden walls scrubbed white, like a Swedish apartment. Except that in Sweden it indicates post-materialist affluence not pre-materialist poverty. The heat took me by the throat. It came from a massive black-brick stove, a cube with two-metre sides that divided the room in two. On our side were only a couple of benches against the walls, a three-legged stool and a scrubbed pine table covered in a threadbare white cloth. The only decoration was a colour reproduction on shiny cardboard of the Mona Lisa in the middle of a white wall. Was there some cross-cultural confusion with the Virgin Mary? On a shelf in the corner next to the door an oil lamp burned in front of a more orthodox icon of Herself.

  Maria Olegovna bowed to us and kissed Cyril’s hand as if we were living icons come to visit. She had stripped off her shawls down to her best black dress and replaced the sacking on her legs with felt boots, like the elephants’ feet you used to put umbrellas in. She protested when I helped carry the benches to the table. Natasha and I sat opposite Cyril. I pointed to Lisa smirking down on us.

  “Where did you get the lovely picture?” I asked in Russian.

  Maria looked at Natasha, who repeated what I said word for word. She replied to Natasha, who translated for me into English. It was like this all evening. Because I was a foreigner Maria treated me like a half-wit.

  “She went to Leningrad when she was a girl. She means Peterburg. A sailor gave it to her.”

  “I bet he did. Was he a Greek sailor?”

  “How should I know? Why do you ask?”

  “It’s the lid off a box of Greek chocolates.”

  Cyril asked Maria and for a moment she looked frightened. She gabbled something and scuttled away to the stove.

  “She said he was Christian. She means Orthodox. But she could have been saying that for my sake. You nebshit these people, they tell you anything.”

  There was a taste of bitterness in his remark. It was a hint that his return to the land of his fathers was not quite the prodigal son’s homecoming.

  Our dinner had more surprises. It was delicious. Several varieties of pickled mushroom, each with a different herb. Wild garlic and tiny eggs, also pickled. Beetroot salad. Smoked pike. Smoked trout. Slivers of smoked wild duck. Nutty black bread.

  “This is great. Do they have this every day?”

  “Every day a stranger comes to dinner. You’re the guest of honour. It’s all outa the forest. Eat hearty. You pay a fortune in Moscow for this.”

  Cyril ate hearty. Natasha picked. I would have preferred cabbage soup. Every mouthful was a reproach made by poverty to affluence. Maria didn’t touch the food. She hovered at the end of the table and refilled my plate and watched every bite. For Cyril and me there was vodka to wash it down. It tasted like cornmash whiskey and was probably made the same way. I looked hard at Natasha aglow in the lamplight, imprinting her on my retinas, in case she was the last thing I saw before I went blind. For Natasha there was a jugful of melted snow. Women don’t drink vodka, in public anyway.

  “Here’s to us,” said Cyril, raising his glass. “Welcome to our little corner of the Faith. The early Christians started in the catacombs. Who’d ever believe those guys’d conquer the world? We’re the same. Egg-zackly the same. The Tatars drove our ancestors into the forest of Rus. Here we keep the true faith alive. We’ll spread out from here. First up, the Babylon of Moscow, ripe for the taking. And when we have the Kremlin then we’ll see. You’re a lucky man, Johnny, you’ve seen where it starts. None of us will live to see the end. But we’re in at the start. To the Faith!”

  We clinked glasses and tossed down the sacramental firewater. While my eyes watered, his were blazing. When I met him I assumed he was cracked. Leaving America to build a church among hovels in the Russian forest I attributed to a sheltered upbringing with a fanatical granddaddy in a Midwest backwater. But now I knew he was more than cracked, he was raving mad. Manic. Messianic.

  Succeeding toasts were more cursory and more frequent. Fill - clink - swallow. The food and drink and heat brought euphoria and dizziness. Everyone talking loud. Fill - clink - swallow. Everyone talking soft. Fill - clink - swallow. Rushing in the ears. Fill - clink - swallow. Everything sharp. Fill - clink - swallow. Everything blurred. Fill - clink - swallow. I knew the vodka was really getting a hold when I saw the Devil peeping over the stove, first one side of the chimney pipe and then the other. Pointed head, spiky hair, slant eyes. God help us. A trick of the light. Fill - clink - swallow.

  The second course was kasha, soft and savoury like couscous. It was smothered in goulash, fibrous lumps hacked off the European beef mountain but tasty nonetheless. I had second helpings in the time-honoured but mistaken expectation that it would soak up the booze. Fill - clink -swallow.

  “Natasha,” I said, en-un-ci-ating every word to stop the sibilants turning into shibilantsh, “it’sh time we dishcushed why we’re here.”

  Blow me if can remember why we’re here. The mind’s a blank. All I can think of is the old joke about the man who drinks to forget and when he’s asked what he’s trying to forget says he can’t remember. It’s so funny I burst out laughing and this fat bloke at the head of the table asks me what I’m laughing at and I tell him and he guffaws too and slaps his thigh and an old lady joins in laughing and the woman opposite looks bored and sips her snowmelt. What’s her name? Fill - clink - swallow. Dear God, there’s that Devil again.

  “Dzhorn! I told Cyril you’re opening a restaurant in Moscow and that you’re looking for farmers to provide the produce.”

  The woman is looking at me and I don’t know what she’s talking about. Who the hell is Cyril? Why am I here? I can’t even remember where here is. A Pittsburgh bar. An African shebeen. An Irish lock-in. Sure I’ve been here before. What I don’t know is if I ever left. Fill - clink - swallow.

  “We got land offa the cooperative. We gotta farm,” says the fat bloke. He’s got gravy trickling down his beard. Fill -clink - swallow. Fill - clink - swallow. “Tell us what needs growed. We’ll grow it.”

  It’s like jogging and bursting through the pain barrier. One minute you feel like you’re going to die and the next you feel like you could run for ever. Lucidity is the word. Pure lucidity. The mind is crystal clear even though your speech is not. It’s the closest to having a stroke without actually having one. You have to choose your words and be careful not to fall over.

  “Potatoes,” I said.

  “What?”

  “Potatoes. I want pot-at-oes.” What a ludicrous word. Potatoes. It’
s the funniest thing I’ve heard all evening. I laugh, but this time the fat bloke doesn’t laugh with me. Better get serious.

  “We’re starting a restaurant that serves baked potatoes. It’s the British answer to pizza. You put stuff like cheese on them. It will really catch on. We do one and then we franchise. First in Moscow then in Peterburg then all over Russia. Conquer the world. None of us will live to see the end. But we’re here at the start.”

  The fat bloke looks at me like I’m raving mad. Manic. Messianic. “Whaddya want?”

  “Kartoffel,” I say. “Kartoshka.”

  The old lady stares at me. Her hand is over her mouth like she’s smelling her own breath. Over her shoulder is the Devil and this time he doesn’t duck down.

  “It’s a good idea,” says the young woman. Natasha’s her name, I remember now. Hard to say when you’re avoiding shibilantsh. Comes out Natasa. The fat guy, Shyril’s his name, looks as if he’s going to burst a blood vessel. His face is crimson.

  “Devil’s food,” he says.

  “We’re not talking dessert here,” I say. “Main course. Kartoffel”

  “Kartoffel is the filthy German word. The true Russian name is gulba. You know what it means? It means going astray. Sin. It’s the forbidden fruit Adam and Eve ate.”

  “You’re thinking of apple. You know, apple for the teacher.”

  “Tayder is the Devil’s apple. Whoever eats it disobeys God, violates the Holy Testament and will never inherit the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  “Shorry Shyril. We’re talking potatoes here. There are no potatoes in the Bible.”

  “Outa your mouth you said it. It ain’t food for Christians.”