Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  In the centre of the crowd, three priests had already begun chanting the funeral mass. Several long, high caskets lined with red cloth lay before them. The old people pushed us to the front.

  ‘Look, look,’ insisted one old man. ‘You can see the bullet holes.’

  They had not been able to make any attempt at separate burials; bones were jumbled together with clods of earth, twisted belt buckles, shoes, rags. Everything that had been found had gone in. The skulls were at the top, looking out, each with a neat round hole in the crown.

  ‘Lamb of God, have mercy on us,’ chanted the priests. The mourners joined in with quavering voices. Many were weeping, but they did not for a moment take their eyes from the bones, standing squarely in front of them and holding up their candles.

  ‘Lamb of God, have mercy on us.’

  The pines swayed a little against the sky.

  ‘Lamb of God, grant us thy peace.’

  The children playing hide and seek among the trees were breathless with giggles; a tiny boy was trying to hide behind a sapling, without realising that he was broader than it. He kept very still and squeezed his eyes shut.

  · 4 ·

  Bourgeois Medicine

  SOPHIE: Talking ill of Moscow!

  That comes of seeing the world! Where could be better?

  CHATSKY: Where there are none of us.

  Aleksandr Griboedov, Woe from Wit, 1824

  A little pale sunlight was failing to compete with the blaze of autumn the day that Edik Zelyony first took me out for an ice cream. He clasped his hands behind his back and picked his way through the drifting leaves, complaining about Voronezh in his precise English. ‘So small-minded. Just gossip, gossip … And there is no work here either. My aunt in Moscow will soon be sending for me, although of course Moscow! It’s just a big village. But it’s easier to go abroad from Moscow, you understand.’

  When we reached the ice-cream parlour at the end of Revolution Prospect, he removed his jacket and cap, peering in the mirror at his long, thin face and bulbous eyes, straightening his spectacles. He adjusted the silk scarf around his neck minutely and ushered me to a seat, explaining, ‘I’m a martyr to my throat.’

  The ice cream came in steel bowls and the teaspoons had holes in, to discourage customers from taking them home. Edik put a spoonful into his coffee and drank it before it melted. ‘Most of the Jews have already gone,’ he said. ‘The orchestras are empty all over the country … There are just a handful of us left.’ He licked his spoon disconsolately, then cheered up. ‘I’ll introduce you to the Uvarovs,’ he announced. ‘They’ll be glad to meet you. They keep an open house – you know, a salon. There you will find le tout Voronezh. It’s their daughters, Masha and Valya – Madame Uvarova is determined to find them each a suitable husband. At the moment Valya is seeing a boy who is terribly rich – dreadfully rich. His father is building himself a house with four turrets and a jacuzzi. But you know Madame Uvarova is not satisfied, she is chasing him away little by little … he is not a cultured boy, you see. That is what matters to La Uvarova. Also he is fat.’

  ‘What about you, Edik? Are you suitable?’

  ‘Oh, I am quite a habitué of the household. Not enough money, you see’ – he rolled his eyes – ‘but cultured. The Uvarovs say, Here is Zelyony – now we shall have intelligent conversation! You will hear them say it. The provinces, you understand … the intelligentsia is quite suffocated here.’ Gloomily, he licked the last of the ice cream from his upper lip.

  That evening, back at the hostel, I sat down to write a letter. ‘I’ve met a character straight from Chekhov!!’ I scrawled, not sparing the punctuation. ‘Only he’s not dreaming of Moscow, but the Rîve Gauche or Bloomsbury seething with intellectuals. He’s a wonderfully sympathetic character … perhaps because it feels as though I’ve already seen this play.’

  *

  A couple of days later there was a knock on my door and Edik walked in. ‘My throat is killing me,’ he greeted me piteously. ‘I can barely speak. Treat me with your bourgeois medicine.’

  He languished a little, while I looked through the bags under my bed. Searching through these bags took hours of my day in Voronezh. I rarely found the exact thing I was looking for, although all sorts of randomly associated, useless objects would emerge. This time I did find a packet of Lockets, but Edik dismissed them. ‘Soviet-style lozenges – not real medicine.’

  ‘Well, no, but –’ I thought for a moment and took up the first thing that came to hand, which happened to be a bottle of vitamin B pills. ‘You’re right. You need something stronger … these are the thing. Take them with water. Yes, I know they don’t taste good. It’s because they are double strength.’

  So we both set off satisfied to the Uvarovs’ flat on Liberation of Labour Street, in one of the solid blocks built under Stalin with fat stucco cornucopias on the mustard-coloured facade. Inside the flat, there was little trace of the Soviet years. Photographs of the Uvarovs’ illustrious ancestors and the grandfather who had emigrated were propped on every surface. In the sitting room a grand piano stood open with a book of nineteenth-century ballads on the stand, and a bust of Plato gazed at the wall.

  Mrs Uvarov appeared, a fragile, vivacious woman. ‘Come into the kitchen. We’ll have tea.’

  We took our shoes off and sat down at the kitchen table while Mrs Uvarov summoned her daughters. ‘Masha, Valya,’ she trilled. ‘Edik is here to tell us the gossip.’

  Edik twined his large, bony legs together. ‘Oh, Tatyana Mikhailovna, what can I say? Charlotte has cured my throat – you know how I suffer with it. Just one little pill – it’s quite better.’

  ‘No!’ Mrs Uvarov began to lay out tea with jam on saucers, little meringues and sweets. ‘Tell us, what was it? Of course we won’t be able to buy it here, but my cousins in America, perhaps –’

  ‘Oh, I don’t – I can’t think what the medical name is –’

  ‘Well, you must be sure to let me know. Ah, here are the girls. What’s kept you, girls?’

  A pale, blonde girl hurried in, followed by her sister. ‘Hello, I’m Masha,’ said the first, smiling quickly. ‘Edik told us all about you already … This is Valya.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Valya. At first glance, they were almost identical – there was probably less than a year between them. Yet everyone they met must have noticed how, by the injustice of nature, their faces differed. Where Masha’s eyes were exhausted, Valya’s were dark and luminous; Masha’s unhealthy pallor was Valya’s translucent complexion, while Masha’s animated, nervous manner only emphasised her sister’s look of passive fury.

  ‘Oh, how delightful it is to have a foreigner here,’ continued their mother brightly. ‘You cannot imagine how we suffer in Voronezh, so isolated, not a cultured person in the whole city, is there, girls? How we long for news. Tell me, is it the fashion in Britain to look so scruffy?’

  ‘Er … perhaps not.’

  ‘Isn’t it true,’ asked Valya idly, ‘that when foreigners come to Voronezh, they deliberately dress like tramps? They think that way they’ll fit in?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so –’

  ‘Don’t mind Valya, she’s in a mood,’ interrupted Masha. ‘Now Charlotte, tell us: are there other charming English students here? Will you bring them to meet us?’

  ‘She means boys,’ supplied Edik.

  ‘Oh, Edik, shhh … of course I mean no such thing. We are all lovers of foggy Albion, you know, we’ve read all your literature –’

  There was a slight pause. Then Valya yawned. ‘You must understand. The point is that we can’t leave this place.’

  *

  That autumn, after several years of worry and expense, Edik was registered as ‘Idiot: Grade Three’. I bumped into him on Friedrich Engels Street as he returned from a final medical examination and he showed me his new identity card. ‘Come and celebrate,’ he said, grinning. ‘My mother is at home frying eggs.’

  The Grade Three Idiot in the Soviet system receiv
ed various benefits: cheap fares on public transport, food and medicine coupons and, on occasion, special housing. I suspected, however, that the sums that had exchanged hands over Edik’s file more than outweighed the economic benefits of idiocy. No, the real point was that idiots did not do military service. (Or not below the rank of General, as the Soviet joke went.)

  And whereas grades One and Two might be subject to spells in psychiatric wards and unspecified doses of drugs, Three was more or less left to his own devices. For a time it had looked as if Edik would go down with a Two – all the Threes had gone for this year, according to the doctor – which would have been a little sticky, but still worth it, apparently. But at the last moment, Edik’s dad managed to rustle up a few hundred extra, and the Three had come through after all. It was just in time – by some sleight of hand, Edik had avoided the army before university, and while he was a student he was safe. But now he had finished his degree, and the recruitment officers were circling.

  Edik’s mother, Polina Eduardovna, opened the door. Her hair was spun into a vast orange confection for the occasion. ‘Edichka!’ she hugged him. ‘My little boy shall stay at home.’

  Edik was at least two foot taller than his mother but she whisked him about the hall in a stiff and jolly little waltz and sang ‘Edichka, Edichka, Edichka of mine, in the garden a little berry, a little raspberry of mine!’ until she ran out of breath and came to a stop, laughing.

  Edik looked reproachfully at both of us and said, ‘Shhh.’

  ‘Now, Edik,’ said Polina Eduardovna, pulling herself together, ‘run out to the Gastronom and ask Maria Aleksandrovna for some sausage. Don’t be long …’

  The Gastronom was just opposite, an echoing hall with counters displaying tins of pilchards. The meat department stood empty; behind it a stocky blonde picked her teeth.

  ‘Be so kind,’ said Edik, ‘as to tell us where we might find Maria Aleksandrovna, young lady.’

  The blonde jerked her head backwards and inspected some small object she’d retrieved from a molar.

  ‘Do please be so charming as to inform her that Polina Eduardovna sent me to see her. I believe she is expecting us.’

  For some moments the blonde watched the object closely; then she popped it back into her mouth. She sighed, pushing herself off the counter with a thrust of her muscly behind, and disappeared into the cavernous storerooms out the back.

  The Zelyony family, you see, had connections. Polina Eduardovna’s acquaintances numbered bureaucrats and psychiatrists, the manager of the Gastronom and a lady who worked behind the shoe counter in the Univermag department store. Other acquaintances supplied car parts and petrol, medicines and travel permits. In the Aeroflot office they greeted Edik by name, and every month or so he paid a visit to the railway station, where the signal controller would be keeping a parcel for him from his cousins in Moscow.

  Maria Aleksandrovna appeared, large and stern, and beckoned to us to follow her. Everyone knew what went on in the back of the shop – the stores stuffed with rare milk products, the stacks of fruit jellies and Birds’ Milk cakes, the haunches of meat, all sold ‘on the left’ to fortunate and wily folk such as the Zelyonys. The latter were admired as often as resented. Everyone was fixing ‘on the left’ a little – but some were more talented at it than others.

  ‘How is your mother keeping?’ inquired Maria Aleksandrovna, leading us into an office that smelt of raw meat.

  ‘She’s well, thank you.’

  ‘And I hear we must congratulate you?’

  ‘Oh, yes …’

  ‘A little idiot!’ She glanced skittishly at Edik and pressed a string of pallid sausages into his arms.

  Edik blushed. ‘Thank you, Maria Aleksandrovna.’

  He was quiet on the way back, holding the sausages away from his body with a look of disgust. Abroad, his look seemed to say, surely no one needs to suffer this humiliation to buy a kilo of horsemeat. Only in Russia does one have to be publicly branded an imbecile to get by. ‘You see the kind of society one mixes with in Voronezh,’ he said after a while, summoning up a laugh. ‘You cannot call it civilised.’

  *

  Polina Eduardovna laid a table in Edik’s room with cheese and salami and all sorts of delicacies, followed by a plate of sausages and slithery, steaming fried eggs. She refused to eat with us, laughing and smoothing her nice stout stomach. ‘I must think of my figure!’ Then she left us, only popping her head back in to say to me, ‘Charlotte, Edik tells me you have a miraculous cure for his throat. You will tell me what it is, won’t you?’

  We ate and drank champagne until we were pop-eyed and rosy. Even Edik’s pallor lifted, aided by the red shirt that he had changed into for the occasion. Then he put a finger to his lips, and took a large volume of Steinbeck from the shelves. ‘Hidden from my father,’ he hissed, pulling out a bottle of clear liquid from behind. ‘My aunt distils it herself, from beetroot. Here’s to the army, may they rot!’

  We each drank a shot of the samogon and winced.

  ‘It’s good for you. My mother says it cleans the gut. Can you imagine what they would think in St Tropez if they were given a drink to clean the gut?’

  ‘You’re right. They don’t have gut in St Tropez.’

  Edik giggled. ‘You know Valya has got rid of her boyfriend, the fat one? She might be going to America soon. They’ve got cousins there, of course.’

  ‘But I thought she was in love!’

  ‘It seems not. Mrs Uvarova is thrilled.’ Edik thought for a minute and then brightened. ‘Wait …’

  He chose a record from the shelves. ‘Latin America,’ he said in parenthesis. He took up a fork from the table and put it between his teeth, as applause from the sixties crackled and died away. He adjusted his glasses, put one hand behind his head and pointed at the mirror with the other, giving himself a fiery look. Then he pulled me up from the sofa and, with a pointy-toed kick, the tango began.

  *

  Foreign travel became easier under perestroika. Business and cultural exchanges were funded by well-meaning organisations in the West, and the embassies in Moscow were swamped by Russians with invitations from long-lost relatives and friends. Several people we knew had been abroad – Sasha had spent a year at Atlanta University on a scholarship, Yuri had been invited to England by a friend.

  The process was still tortuous, however, and the pitfalls were many. First you needed an external passport, a separate little red book to the internal passport that you were required to carry at all times. If you happened to have spent your military service in an area of restricted access – anything from telecommunications or tanks to nuclear submarines – then you could be refused a passport. Likewise if you had lived in a ‘closed city’, the scientific research city at Akademgorodok in Siberia, or cities that produced armaments, or the space city in Kazakhstan. Cosmonauts, for instance, could easily have been refused a passport to travel to Germany. The local KGB openly took an interest in your plans to travel; around this time, a friend was sent an invitation in the post by an English girl. It never arrived; instead his father got a call from an officer of the KGB one day. ‘We’ve got an invitation here for your son from an anglichanka. What do you know about that?’

  The invitation was the second step. An invitation from a British business, stating that they’d pay for their Russian guest, more or less guaranteed a visa. It was the same for British travellers hoping to visit Russia, except that in London you can simply buy an invitation from a travel agency. Many times I’ve queued at the Russian embassy clutching a letter from, say, a language school in Ryazan, or from the Yaroslavl Institute of Forestry demanding my presence for a New Year conference; in some dusty file I must have an alternative career as professional negotiator and conference participant.

  For most Russians this route was not possible. The next step for them was to try with a personal invitation, although these applications were always met with suspicion. Somehow the Home Office had boundless faith in the benefits of busines
s travel, no matter how unsavoury the trade that it generated (and some of it really was unsavoury: during 1991, for example, two Chechens travelled to London to arrange an arms deal; they were murdered in their rented flat and smuggled out in a freezer by their Armenian assassins). This faith was matched, however, by their distrust of invitations from friends, and above all friends of the opposite sex. The KGB and the Home Office, just like Mrs Uvarova, concentrated on averting the disaster that any one of these personal invitations concealed – the Unsuitable Marriage.

  Edik had no problem with his external passport – his mother saw to that – but he did not have an invitation. He never asked me for one – even if it wasn’t for the drawback of an invitation from a girl, he was much too diffident to ask – and no one, including me, offered. The others took a different view of his Chekhovian tendencies – pretentious, they called them – and somehow my patience ran out too. I grew irritable, while Edik indulged his talent for subtle insult.

  ‘Why is it that your country sends us only junk?’ he’d say when I brought his mother a Mars bar.

  ‘For someone like me, it is very hard to talk to uncultured people. It gives me a physical pain, in the kidneys – my kidneys are very sensitive,’ he’d announce loudly at our parties.

  And after I met Mitya, he’d shake his head and say sorrowfully, ‘Poor Charlotte. She has been spoilt by that vulgar boy.’