Prepare yourself, above all, for a year in a remote and underdeveloped city. The post takes six weeks to arrive. To make an international telephone call, you must queue at the central Telegraph Office for several hours. There is little entertainment other than that which you make yourselves.
A stereo, a backgammon set and a sandwich toaster joined the pile. To qualify, books had to be more than five hundred pages long: The Brothers Karamazov, Swann’s Way, The Master and Margarita, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom and several weighty biographies filled another case. At the last moment, Emily decided she couldn’t bear to suffer from her bad back for a year, and packed up a double futon, five foot square, made by the blind in Dundee. We each had a baggage allowance of twenty-two kilos; between us, what with the futon, our luggage must have weighed more than a hundred. And then the tanks rolled into Moscow.
19 August 1991: 11 a.m.
A breezy, efficient woman called Felicity Cave was in charge of the scheme with Russian universities; from my seat in front of the television I tried her telephone number throughout the day. It was engaged. In Moscow the weather was still and humid. The Special Forces soldiers surrounding the television centre had faces tense and shiny with sweat.
At about four o’clock, tanks arrived outside the Russian parliament building, known as the White House, where Boris Yeltsin and his supporters had established themselves. For a quarter of an hour the tanks pointed their guns at the White House, engines running. Inside, the only real opposition to the coup was at the Emergency Committee’s mercy. There was only a small number of people watching, and yet the tanks hesitated.
Suddenly Yeltsin walked out of the White House. Alone, without bodyguards, he approached one of the tanks and clambered on top of it. He shook hands with the soldiers inside and turned to his spectators.
‘Citizens of Russia,’ he shouted. ‘The legally elected president of the country has been removed from power…. We are dealing with a right-wing, reactionary, anti-constitutional coup d’état …’ The crowd cheered.
Soon afterwards Felicity Cave answered the telephone. I should have known it would take more than a coup to flummox her. Her cheerful tones trumpeted down the line like the hunting horn across the valleys.
‘Tanks? Never mind the tanks! Of course you’ll be going, just as planned! All be over in two or three days, take my word for it.’
And she was right. For two days we watched as demonstrators collected around the White House. On Monday night, a crowd of thousands spent the night outside, behind the rickety barricades. The tone on the BBC was still sombre. We had seen the coup leaders looking shaky and indecisive at a press conference, but seven months earlier, in Vilnius, we had also seen Russian tanks firing on the crowds surrounding the television tower.
Fifty thousand people were outside the White House on Tuesday night, when the tanks were expected to move against the parliament. Then, just as the liberals looked in the greatest danger, the coup collapsed. The troops were ordered back to barracks and the plotters were arrested, except for the Interior Minister, Pugo, who killed himself. An aged, shaken Gorbachev returned from the Crimea, and Yeltsin was acclaimed as the saviour of Russia.
At the end of the month, Emily and I met in London and celebrated. The Soviet Union had fallen to pieces. Ukraine had declared its independence from Moscow on 24 August, and Belorussia had followed a day later, changing its name to Belarus. Moldova left on 26 August, Azerbaijan on the 30th. The Communist Party, which had governed these vast lands since 1917, had been dissolved. Officials who had collaborated with the coup were under arrest, Party property was seized and Pravda, the Party organ, was closed down. Gorbachev was unemployed. Yeltsin was trying to reform the system and there was a mood of wild optimism on the streets.
None of this momentous news, however, was our main cause for joy. Emily and I drank red wine at her house and played a song by the Waterboys called ‘Red Army Blues’. ‘Took a train to Voronezh,’ it went, ‘it was as far as we could go.’ We had our visas. In a week we would already have arrived.
· 2 ·
Hostel No. 4
They’re light-minded … well, what of it … mercy sometimes knocks at their hearts … ordinary people … only the housing problem has corrupted them.
Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita
Hostel No. 4 teemed with activity, most of it verminous. Cockroaches swarmed through the building unchecked; they inhabited the central heating system and the warm, juddering fridge motors in every room. In the kitchens were piles of rubbish two foot high that rustled in the dark. The light bulbs in the toilets were always being stolen, making the fauna in there difficult to identify; but the occasional shouts of horror from people picking their way through the darkness were testimony to its existence.
The human overpopulation was equally intense. There were at least three and often closer to six people to each room, in which the occupants slept, worked, had parties, ate, drank, sulked, wrote letters, cooked, smoked and hung out their washing. In Room 179, which Emily and I shared with Ira, a kind, velvety-eyed girl from a town in the Voronezh region, our belongings were thrust under the beds and into two thin, coffin-shaped cupboards by the door. The fridge chugged like an idling truck. The Voronezh-made television, which Ira turned on as soon as she woke up, crackled and buzzed. The brand-new orange wallpaper peeled gently away from the walls, and the rug we bought from the Univermag gave off puffs of red and purple powder at every tread.
Less than a week had passed since I’d stepped off the train with our group of thirty British students into the pale sunshine of a Voronezh morning. The clock had struck nine as we looked around us at the yellow station dozing in the dust.
‘On time exactly,’ the Komendant, head of the hostel, had smiled, as our luggage was loaded onto a cart. ‘Our railway system has not yet adjusted to our new political situation.’
We followed him over the tram tracks, up the street, and into a yard in which stray dogs were picking over a pile of smouldering rubbish. In front of us stood a squat, flat-fronted block: Hostel No. 4. The entrance hall was underwater green; against one wall sat a babushka whose metal teeth glinted in the half-light. Heaps of rubble lay in the corners. On the fourth floor, halfway down the corridor, Emily and I were shown into a long, low room, empty but for three iron bed-frames. The stink of the rust-coloured paint that had been splashed over the ceiling and the grimy lino floor rose up to meet us, along with a stale, sweaty smell. There was a pause.
‘I’m sure we can improve it,’ I ventured.
Emily did not reply. At last I glanced at her. She was laughing: her silent, hysterical laugh that possessed her so completely, there was no breath left even to wheeze.
A few days later, however, term began and the place was transformed. Ira arrived and our room filled up. Out in the bottle-green corridor, a crowd appeared, chatting, cooking, scrounging cigarettes, offering KGB telephones or medals or icons for sale. At any time, half of them were drunk and the other half had a hangover. Occasionally there were scuffles; sometimes the Komendant walked past in a lordly way and was bombarded with requests. It was a cosmopolitan place, housing more than twenty nationalities. The majority still were Russian, yet on our floor alone were Syrians, Egyptians and Armenians as well as British, and one Italian, sent halfcrazy by Russian food. Downstairs were Angolans, Nigerians, East Germans; New Yorkers visited from other hostels, and Venezuelans studying forestry, Georgians, Uzbeks and Cossacks. A hubble of languages rose through the smoke and pungent smells of ten dinners cooking in one kitchen; twenty stereos roared out different tastes in music. If it were not for the determined ugliness of the place, we might have been in an Anatolian bazaar. There was no doubt that it had a certain filthy charm.
The hostel residents had simple priorities. Food, for one. It was scarce that year; the shops had an echoing, dusty feel, and even the tins of corned beef labelled ‘EC: Humanitarian Aid’ were marked up in price each week, according to inflation. The Italian b
oy saw it as a challenge, and day after day set off to scour the city, returning triumphant and exhausted with a piece of lean beef or some ripe tomatoes. With the regular supplies of tinned Italian butter, olive oil, arborio rice and so on that his family sent him from Milan, he managed to get by. The rest of us more or less gave up eating and concentrated instead on the second priority: drink. Vodka was so much simpler to get hold of, and there was juice to drink with it for the health-conscious. The third priority was really the most pressing. Beyond eating and drinking, entertainment was needed, mental and physical exercise and inspiration. Sex, above all, preoccupied Hostel No. 4. Soon I began to notice the couples circling the hostel in search of an empty room.
‘Are you going out?’ they’d hiss. ‘Lend us your room, just for half an hour.’
But even half an hour of privacy was not easily available. Some resorted to kissing on the stairs and in the corridors, oblivious of the bustle; or their roommates would return from ten minutes in the shower to find the door locked, and no amount of knocking and pleading would persuade those inside to open up. Those couples who were stricken by modesty had nowhere. Hotels were impossible – apart from the expense, you needed some kind of official chit to book a room – and outside, despite the blue skies, the wind was cold and insistent. Thus a heady strain of unrequited desire added spice to our communal claustrophobia.
*
One sunny afternoon, a man built in the Socialist Realist mould knocked at our door. His gaunt, wedge-shaped head and chips of blue glass for eyes gave him an air of steely dedication, while the six-foot-four frame filling our doorway suggested a character who would stop at nothing. He produced a bottle of vodka and said in a voice from the grave, ‘Let’s get acquainted.’
Viktor, he told us, was his name. Emily and I introduced ourselves, and we all drank a large shot of vodka. We began to talk, using a mixture of broken Russian and English. But somehow after every few minutes, Viktor would apologise and interrupt.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten what you are called … ah, yes! Now let’s drink to our acquaintance.’
In our innocence we kept on telling him our names, earnestly spelling them out, until we were halfway through the bottle. Viktor looked as though he might be suppressing a smirk. ‘Your names? I just can’t seem to keep them in my head.’
It was a challenge to keep them in my own head by then. Ira arrived back from lectures and admonished him. ‘Viktor! What have you done with my anglichanki?’
‘Baptised them,’ said Viktor, grinning. ‘Have a drink.’
Other people wandered in and before I’d noticed, it was a party. A couple of English boys put Ozric Tentacles on and started dancing. Ira thrust haphazard cheese toasties into the sandwich toaster. Viktor made a trip to the railway station for more vodka and returned with three girls, who burst into the room talking and gesticulating with cigarettes and, in one hand, a kitten.
‘These are the girls from Room 99,’ Viktor explained. ‘Nina, Tanya, and the tall girl is known as Liza Minelli – well, you can see why.’
‘Who’s a brave little bunny?’ said Liza Minelli to the kitten. She had the hair and spider-leg eyelashes of her heroine. ‘Tanya, over there, she’s its mother. It’ll be lucky if it survives, poor little thing.’
She glowered at Tanya, who, without stopping talking for an instant had settled down, put her feet on the table, and opened a new bottle. Nina was giggling and squeaking on each inhalation.
‘Pay no attention,’ Viktor murmured. ‘Liza Minelli is furious with the other two; you see, she and Nina have fallen for the same man.’
‘So why is she angry with Tanya?’ I asked.
Viktor shrugged. ‘Just because.’
‘Ladies, gentlemen, small cats,’ Tanya announced. ‘A toast – to this university year. May it bring all of us exactly what we want.’
Her roommates looked daggers at each other, and Viktor laughed. ‘Otdykh,’ he said. It was his favourite word, meaning relaxation in its widest sense, with associations of the long, peaceful exhalation one makes after downing a glass of vodka. On Viktor’s lips it spoke of pleasure in all its forms: a long-awaited cigarette, a summer breeze, the seduction of some unsuspecting girl. As I came to know Viktor better, I realised that my first impression of a man with a cause was not so mistaken. His life was a quest for otdykh, and his dedication did much to persuade the rest of the hostel down the same path.
After a while, a slight, attractive boy with floppy hair pushed his head around the door. ‘Hi everyone,’ he muttered.
‘Yakov!’ cried Liza Minelli, holding out her hands to him. ‘Come in.’
‘Hi Yakov,’ said Nina, patting the chair beside her. ‘Sit here with me.’
He was obviously the lucky guy. He smiled a little goofily, pleased with himself, and sat between them. It didn’t look as though he had much option.
Another crowd of people arrived, including some Americans from a different hostel, and we drank several more toasts. Someone turned the lights off. The party was really hotting up now; I could see at least three couples in sweaty embrace and Tanya seemed to be taking her clothes off in the corner. ‘Is that your roommate over there?’ said someone in my ear. It was a muscly, dark-eyed Russian in flip-flops, pointing at Emily. ‘Viktor and me, we think she’s incredibly attractive.’
‘Oh, yes, she’s great, she –’
He’d already gone, squeezing across the room towards her. I found myself talking to a large American boy with red curly hair and freckles. ‘It’s always been hard for me to fit in,’ he was saying. ‘I guess it’s because I’m black.’
‘You’re black?’
‘Albino. I have black features, you see, but Scottish colouring. My name’s Sasha McDuff.’
Out of the corner of my eye I could see Emily chatting to Viktor and her other admirer. Ira was giggling with one of the English boys, Joe, who was trying to feed her pieces of toasted cheese sandwich. Someone fell over, bringing down the washing line.
‘I call myself Sasha now because I feel that Russia’s my spiritual home,’ the American was telling me. ‘It’s very important for me to feel that I’m making progress towards a more solid sense of identity.’
‘I see –’
Suddenly Liza Minelli turned the lights on. All the couples on the beds sat up, blinking, and Tanya hastily put her knickers back on. ‘That’s enough,’ said Liza Minelli. ‘Everyone, you’ll have to listen to me for a moment. I’ve borne this for too long. He –’ she pointed one trembling finger at Yakov – ‘will have to make his choice.’
‘Me?’ Yakov looked startled.
‘Oh for God’s sake, can’t you just sort this out among yourselves?’
‘No!’ barked Liza Minelli. ‘I want witnesses. Then he can’t go back on his word.’
‘All right then,’ said Tanya. ‘Yakov, who’s it to be?’
‘Bozhe moi,’ Yakov gulped. ‘I don’t know if I can …’
‘Why not?’ Nina said indignantly. ‘What about the things you said to me last night?’
There was a quiver of anticipation from the audience.
‘Choose, you bastard,’ said a few female voices.
‘Don’t say a thing! Don’t let the women bully you into it!’ said the blokes.
‘Is anyone willing to take a bet?’ hissed Joe. ‘I’ll put a thousand roubles on the blonde.’
‘Yakov, look at me,’ said Liza Minelli. She spread her hands out before her, palms upwards. ‘Everything that I have, I give to you. My heart, my soul …’
The audience went crazy. Yakov hesitated, and turned. ‘Nina?’ he enquired.
Nina giggled in that way that she did, squeaking with each inhalation. ‘Come on, milenky,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘Let’s go. Sorry, Liza.’
They left and Liza Minelli turned on her heel and rushed down the corridor in the other direction. Someone turned the lights back off and the party resumed. After that, Yakov and Nina were another couple to be found
sloping around the hostel looking for an empty room. Liza Minelli got over the whole affair quite quickly. She had a kind disposition beneath the melodrama. The only time she got annoyed was when she got back from lectures to find the door of Room 99 locked; then she’d come upstairs to visit us and curse the pair of them.
*
The hostel had a well-deserved reputation for low morals. In its defence, however, it must be said that a sexual revolution was taking place all over Russia. The Communist regime was prudish in the extreme. Of course men had affairs, that was normal, but women were expected to behave nicely – not smoke in public, for example, or wear short skirts. As for any hint of open licentiousness, despite what went on behind the scenes in Party dachas – it was considered antisocial and dealt with severely.
Black Earth City Page 2