Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  Now, suddenly, the controls disappeared and seventy years of pent-up desire burst onto the streets. Voronezh at that time was far more liberal than London. Pornographic magazines and crotchless knickers were for sale at every bus stop. The morning news programme might show a woman giving birth, and soft porn dominated the airwaves in the evening. Even the babushkas exchanged their string shopping bags for new, Polish-made plastic with naked lovelies on each side.

  The Proletariat cinema on Revolution Prospect, meanwhile, revelling in its new freedom, dug out all the films it had not been allowed to show and billed them as ‘classics’ and ‘great entertainment for all’. The selection was unpredictable. Night Porter, in a fuzzy seventies print that made Dirk Bogarde’s face look orange, caused its final sensation here in Voronezh where it was advertised on a huge hand-painted board as ‘New! Shocking! Erotica!’ One week there would be a season of Fellini or Bunuel; the next you might find yourself watching Caligula, probably the only movie that Sir John Gielgud made in association with Penthouse Films. I was left with the distinct feeling that Sir John had not been shown this version of the film, in which chunks of soft porn had been spliced alongside the cinematic Ancient Rome that is familiar to us all. Billed as ‘educational’ and screened by the Proletariat at seven o’clock on a weekday, it played to the usual crowd of middle-aged couples on an evening out. Half an hour into the film, there were so many people walking out that you couldn’t see the screen. Not everybody approved of the new climate.

  In the Voronezh papers there was an air of bewilderment. Where had all this filth sprung from? How was it that a poll of teenage girls, who five years previously had held only one ambition – to be Lenin’s little helper – now answered overwhelmingly that when they were grown up, they wanted to be a hard-currency prostitute? For the time being, however, even the most choleric voices tailed away into resignation. It was inevitable, after all, that Western decadence would arrive along with glasnost, said the pessimistic characters in the butter queue. They’re only young, rejoined others comfortably. Let them enjoy themselves while they can. Lord knows we did just the same, although it was all a secret back then.

  *

  As winter approached and the rising prices began to pinch, in the hostel a few girls made a policy decision. Lena was an energetic girl who cleaned her room every afternoon in a baggy purple tracksuit. In the evenings, she left the hostel in a wig, miniskirt, fishnets and stilettos for the Brno Hotel, where she entertained businessmen from the Baltics and Tashkent. She was the kindest, smiliest girl, always willing to oblige. She’d lend you a saucepan if your own had gone missing, and one afternoon in Room 99 when Emily and the girls were almost expiring of boredom and poverty, Lena stripped to cheer them up. She must have given a great deal of pleasure to those businessmen. The only person who was not always happy was her English roommate. ‘I just don’t understand it,’ she used to complain. ‘She’s got a terrible lot of menfriends.’

  It was hard to support oneself on a student grant, and most people relied on their parents for food. Lola, whose parents lived in the Crimea, depended instead on what she referred to as aid from Africa. She had a Somalian boyfriend in the nextdoor hostel who used to cook her a lovely hot meal after they’d had sex. The point was that it was usually a meaty dish, while the rest of the hostel was living on candy-pink sausage meat, rumoured to be rat. ‘We had beef,’ she’d say, smiling complacently when she returned.

  In Room 99, poor Tanya had broken her leg, which prompted the girls to begin a blockade diary on the wall:

  Oct. 5 Spent last money on vodka for anaesthetic for Tanya.

  Oct. 15 Collected student grant – 92 roubles – enough for 18 packets of cigarettes. How will we survive the month?

  Oct. 20 Only half a sausage left. Don’t know if we can afford to keep on feeding the invalid …

  In fact the atmosphere was cheerful, for despite the prospect of starvation, the hostel air was having its effect. Yakov and Nina were together; Ira, up in our room, had instantly fallen for Joe, the boy she ate cheese toasties with at that first party, and for the rest of the year they sank into a happy, soporific passion fuelled by cannabis. Tanya was stepping out with an English boy, as far as the leg in plaster permitted. And Emily, my main ally, had finally been won over by Yuri, a sophisticated, funny boy who had swept aside her other admirers.

  I found myself alone in Room 179 one evening. It was close to midnight and I could no longer concentrate on my book. The bulb overhead gave off a greyish, shadowless light, barely illuminating the piles of clutter, the washing on the line, the layer of dust. The fridge shuddered violently and fell silent, as though for ever. It was very quiet. Only a little creaking noise could be heard occasionally as the wallpaper peeled away from the walls. I listened hard. Surely I was not the only person who heard this tiny, insistent beat, the pulse of hostel couplings. Creak-creak. Creak-creak. It began slowly, then picked up speed. Creak-creak. Creak-creak. The walls were pulsing too; the whole building was joyfully, mindlessly joining in the rhythm.

  I pulled the blanket over my head and tried to go to sleep.

  · 3 ·

  Memorial Wood

  I should like to call you all by name,

  But they have lost the lists.

  Anna Akhmatova, ‘Requiem’

  The forest outside Voronezh covers many miles and it is easy to lose your way among its closely planted stands of pine and birch. Russian families eager for mushrooms and berries flock to it in daytime, but when the light begins to fade and the birds fall silent they make sure to catch the little electric train back to town. Once they are at home, however, tasting the mushrooms fried in garlic, the conversation returns to nature and its healing properties. To our woods – someone announces, raising a glass of vodka – how good they are for the soul. Everyone agrees, glasses are clinked. The massacres, after all, happened long ago; when a secret is kept for so many years, it can almost be forgotten.

  Igor Kazakov was a big, lazy, graceful man with a sense of irony. He lay stretched out on a bed in the hostel the first time I met him, smoking cigarette after cigarette, saying little. It was late and there were empty bottles under the table by the time he mentioned the woods.

  ‘I know a beautiful place in the forest, a camp, all on its own. A few wooden huts, and a river where we bathe after the steam bath …’ he began slowly. ‘My father and his friends built it in the sixties, when they were at university and it was all free love and the songs of Bulat Okudzhava.’ Igor smiled. ‘He’s a cynic now, of course.’

  He drew hard on a cigarette. Then he continued. ‘You know how Russians are. The idea of living in the countryside is horrible, yet we have a passionate romance with nature … It’s a nine-kilometre walk to this camp, and by the time you arrive, it’s as though the city never existed. Everyone behaves differently there, they’re happy …’ He laughed. ‘You should see it for yourselves.’

  So on Saturday morning five of us met Igor at the station. He was carrying his guitar and a five-litre jar of marinated pork for shashlyk, kebabs. With him stood a boy and a dark-eyed, intense girl whom he introduced as Seryozha and Lyuba.

  ‘When Igor rang, I said we wouldn’t miss it for anything,’ Lyuba told us as we headed for the train. ‘We need to relax.’

  ‘You’ll see,’ said Igor, ‘that when Lyuba relaxes, she does it properly.’

  We peered out of the train windows at the city’s Saturday afternoon bustle. The industrial zone on the left bank of the reservoir puffed pinkish smoke into the sky. A fishing boat chugged past the bridge, while the fisherman hurriedly prepared his bait. From the steep right-hand bank, with its jumble of wooden houses, came the busy tock-tock of homeowners engaged in renovations and on Revolution Prospect even the chess players, baking gently in the sun, looked more animated than usual. This was what Russians call the ‘woman’s summer’, the last warm days of the year before its youth is cut short by autumn. Our little elektrichka, clattering along the tracks to
the woods, only added to the air of hardwon holiday.

  After half an hour we climbed down onto a strip of crumbling concrete and looked about us. The mid-afternoon sun made everything glow. Igor played the opening riff of one of those Russian songs that sound like a march and originate in the prisons. ‘Let’s go,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘Nine kilometres to the camp.’

  *

  It is hard, now, to catch the sensation of that night without later events intervening. Birches lined the road, their leaves already orange against a soaring pale blue sky. Behind them stood the dark, serried pines, growing so close as to be almost impenetrable. We occasionally passed tracks which branched off at right angles to the road; lined with identical trunks, they ran far into the distance. After three or four kilometres there was a sign by the road. The silhouette of a man’s chest riddled with bullet holes stood out against a white background. There was one word written underneath: MEMORIAL.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a sign,’ said Igor.

  ‘Igor, but what does it mean?’

  ‘Oh, Russian politics. Lyuba knows all about it.’

  Lyuba was silent for a moment. Then she said, ‘It’s a monument put up by the Voronezh Memorial group. My father’s the president. If you’re interested, I can explain it to you –’

  ‘I’d like that –’

  ‘But not now. I’m sorry.’ She turned away. ‘I hear about nothing else at home. Now let’s have a drink, Seryozha, shall we? We’ve come to enjoy ourselves.’

  The woods have many powers. Their sheer extent – stretching a quarter of the way around the world, north and east of Voronezh all the way to Vladivostok – draws you in like vertigo. One thousand million pine trees, each identical to its neighbour. How many people have vanished into their enormity? How many woodsmen live on undisturbed, unaware, perhaps, of the fall of Communism, or even of the Revolution? There were Polish partisans from the last war who did not emerge until the fifties. The Greens, Russian peasants who abandoned or were driven out of their villages in the civil war, were not quelled for a decade: they would burst out of the forest, slaughter villages or Red Army columns, and disappear.

  Every Russian child knows that the woods are full of terrors. Bear, wolves, boar roam in them; mischievous and evil sprites of all kinds entice you, mislead you and drive you mad. I remember my mother telling me about the witch, Baba Yaga, who lives in the woods. By day she sleeps in a house that stands on chicken legs, surrounded by skulls with glowing eyes. By night she flies through the trees in a pestle and mortar, searching for victims. Even in the gentle English downlands, the idea was enough to keep me awake and rigid in my bed.

  ‘Listen,’ said Igor, stopping suddenly. ‘Can you hear?’

  In the silence I heard a thousand whispering voices.

  ‘The woods are telling us something …’

  ‘Oh, shut up, Igor!’

  Igor laughed, took up his guitar again and sang.

  ‘Akh, that evening, that evening,

  When the evil wind blew …’

  *

  The light was fading by the time we arrived at the camp, and a huge yellow moon had risen. Seven or eight huts were clustered by a river where it widened to a form a deep pool. Mist was rising from the water in coils; behind it the ghosts of trees on the opposite bank could just be seen. We were excited and ran about, building a fire for shashlyk and for the steam bath. Seryozha and Lyuba had finished off the wine on the way, so that Seryozha sagged palely against a tree and fell asleep, and Lyuba was roaring drunk.

  ‘Now who’s going to pour me some vodka, lads,’ she cried, swaying a little.

  We spooned red caviar straight from the tin, then cooked shashlyk on skewers and ate them with flat Georgian bread. After we’d finished, Lyuba danced a Caucasian dance of her own invention, sat down suddenly and said, ‘Hey Igor! We’re going to have fun, aren’t we?’

  ‘As much as you want, Lyubochka.’

  She leant across and kissed him. His arms hanging by his side, nonchalantly, he kissed her back.

  ‘To the moon!’ shouted Lyuba, raising her glass. ‘To life! To oblivion!’

  ‘To the woods …’ said Igor, taking Lyuba’s hand.

  The steam bath was ready. Seryozha was shaken awake. All of us hurried, stripped naked in the damp, pine-smelling room, and entered the banya itself, blinded by steam. It was a little wood-lined chamber, with slatted shelves at various heights; the stove, its iron cover heated until it glowed, stood in the corner. Water was flung on and the stove let out a sharp hiss; scalded drops ran about the metal and disappeared. The room vanished. Everyone was silent, taking short breaths of the pine-smelling steam. Sweat prickled through skin. When we could bear it no longer, we plunged, shouting, through the mist to the river.

  *

  The following week I visited Lyuba and her father. At home Lyuba was neat and businesslike, whisking the books and papers she had been working on into a drawer and preparing tea. Her father, a kindly, unassuming man in a beige cardigan, beamed and asked about England, our families and so on. After a while, she interrupted.

  ‘They’ve come to hear about the Memorial Wood.’

  ‘Ah yes.’ For the first time since our arrival, Lyuba’s father stopped smiling. Then he went over to the desk and took various files from the drawers. ‘Perhaps you have heard of our organisation?’

  I had. Memorial was one of glasnost’s triumphs, an organisation that emerged in Moscow in 1987 to establish information on Stalin’s victims and to commemorate them. At first it was a group of perhaps fifteen human rights activists who wrote a petition demanding the right to start work on this massive task. Their acquaintances wouldn’t sign, afraid that it was yet another KGB provocation. So the members of the group took to the streets to collect signatures. To their astonishment, people responded, although signing could still result in arrest. The signatures grew to hundreds, then thousands. By the end of 1988, over two hundred regional branches of Memorial had been founded, including this one in Voronezh, all dedicated to research and to putting up monuments to the dead.

  ‘Well.’ Lyuba’s father wiped his kind, plump face. ‘In this wood that you walked through, we have uncovered around seven hundred corpses from pits beneath the pine trees. Most of them were shot between January and March 1938 with heavy-calibre bullets to the back of the head, using Nagan revolvers, standard issue to NKVD officers. They would have been transported there from various camps in the region: Boguchar, Ostrogorsk, Sosnovka, Borisoglebsk, Novokhopirsk …’

  ‘Bobrov,’ added Lyuba, pouring tea.

  ‘Bobrov too. Taken in trucks to the edge of the wood and then marched to their graves. We don’t know if the NKVD prepared the graves beforehand or if the victims dug them. Here is something we found –’ He passed me a battered cardboard wallet, stained and bent. It was a student identity card, the photograph inside faded almost to extinction; I could just make out a round, serious face, cropped hair. ‘A boy, only nineteen … There were men and women of all ages, but most were less than forty years old. We have only identified a few.’

  ‘Here,’ Lyuba added, picking out another picture of a young man. ‘A post office worker, accused of conducting anti-Soviet conversations with Christ. He was charged with crimes of the tongue.’

  ‘Beniamino Ferroni.’ Her father held up a photo of a dark-haired man in a suit. ‘He was an Italian who ran the Voronezh circus. Shot for espionage. Please, look for yourself.’

  I sifted through the papers. Among them were photographs of the objects that they had found in the graves: silver crosses, wedding rings, handcuffs. A few faded, grey-eyed faces looked out at me, expressionless, and I had a swift vision of them marching towards their graves. They must have used the same road as us.

  ‘There were priests among them, peasants from the collective farms, apparatchiks,’ said Lyuba’s father. ‘The KGB have prepared a list of eighteen thousand victims from the region who are now to be rehabilitated.
Eighteen thousand innocent people … We’ve hardly begun our excavations. There are those who believe that the whole forest stands on the bones of Stalin’s victims, not just the Memorial Wood at Dubovka. They’re probably right. Where else could they have hidden thousands of dead bodies?’

  There was a pause. Then he continued. ‘We’ve fought for this for more than two years, you know. We demanded to be allowed to see the archives. Finally they let us in. Then we demanded permission to dig. Suddenly, the KGB, the Party organs and the city council were willing to collaborate … an order from above. I know they still have not shown us all the records. Voronezh is a conservative place – there are those who simply think this work is unnecessary, and there are also those who think it sabotage, yet another attempt to blacken Stalin’s name. But we’re not going to give up.’ He gazed across at the dark window, stirring more sugar into his tea. ‘Well,’ he sighed. ‘There is to be a funeral service. You must come.’

  Lyuba showed me to the door. We stood there awkwardly for a moment, until I plucked up the courage and asked her.

  ‘What about the camp where we stayed, Lyuba. Is that ground also –’

  She looked levelly at me. ‘Who knows?’

  *

  Two weeks later a group of us travelled out of Voronezh to the woods again, this time by bus. The city still basked in the sun, although early autumn had already added a touch of gilded prettiness to the parks. It was a weekday, so most of the passengers on the bus heading for the Memorial Wood were pensioners. They carried flowers and strangely shaped bags. Some had brought their grandchildren, wrapping them up in woollies until they were scarlet in the face. Lyuba and her father were to meet us there.

  We came to a halt at the edge of the woods. The sky was the same clear, sharp blue as it had been when we arrived with Igor. Shadows danced over the small crowd, and a group of children chased each other through the trees, laughing and gasping for breath. The mourners pulled home-made wreaths from their bags. Some had a photograph in the centre framed by pink and red crepe roses; others an Orthodox cross, and the letters V.P.: vechnaya pamyat – eternal memory. Manuscripts don’t burn, as Bulgakov wrote. At first it’s easy to forget. Then time creeps on, and it becomes almost impossible.