Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  I learnt to speak Russian as students do. I began to answer ‘How’s things?’ with a laconic ‘normal’, and to sprinkle my speech with slang that had evolved so elaborately that I didn’t recognise the obscenity at its core. I even picked up something of a Voronezh accent – a soft, guttural tone that sounded faintly Ukrainian. People began to look at me askance and ask if, perhaps, I was from Poland? Or could it be the Baltics? Because they speak oddly, a bit like you.

  One day two old ladies tugged at my coat on the bus. ‘What’s that funny language you’re talking at?’ they demanded.

  ‘English,’ Emily and I said. ‘We’re from England.’

  ‘Oh.’ They eyed us suspiciously, and a moment later we heard them muttering to each other. ‘They’re not English girls, those two – they’re just trying to fool us! Look at that one –’ pointing at Emily – ‘she’s got Belorussian eyes. They’re from Belorussia, that’s what.’

  English people should not be riding around on buses in Voronezh, wearing tatty clothes and carrying trays of eggs from the Central Market. Nor, really, should they be speaking Russian, even with an English accent. In previous centuries Russian peasants had a simple rule of thumb: Russians spoke and all the rest were nemtsi, dumb people. Nemets has evolved to mean German, but there is still a sense that you are not really a proper foreigner if you speak Russian.

  ‘Why do you want to speak our language?’ people were always asking, looking at us with ill-concealed pity.

  ‘It’s a beautiful language.’

  They were unconvinced. ‘Of course it’s a beautiful language. But books, music, you can read and listen to them back home in comfort. Why come here?’

  ‘It’s stimulating to live in another country –’

  ‘What, our poverty? The chaos we’re in now?’

  I always fell back on my one, incontrovertible reason. ‘My mother was Russian –’

  ‘Ah,’ they’d say, relaxing. ‘Now we understand. It’s in the blood … Emigrés never really settle. In that case, of course you speak Russian.’

  A certainty which, as I struggled to make sense of Russian grammar, I found rather a comfort.

  *

  Our teachers were a disparate lot, with the particular exaggerations that teaching seems to encourage. V. P. Pavlov was meticulously dull, with a mouthful of blackened stumps that made it painful to watch him talk. He discussed etymology in Novoyaz, Soviet jargon: ‘The socio-philosophical aspect of this development leads us to the extrapolation of historical trajectories –’ He was utterly unaware of this habit, like the girl in the fairy tale who spewed forth toads and foul-smelling insects every time she opened her mouth.

  A. S. Saltykov was tall, handsome, intelligent, and so overwhelmed by cynicism that every time he lifted his hand to scratch his head one could see him thinking, ‘What’s the point?’ His lessons were fascinating, and yet I always had to force myself to go to them, knowing that the rest of the day would be shadowed by his despair. Yulia Antonovna, on the other hand, was romantic in a folksy, plaits-and-toenails fashion. She taught a class called ‘Musical Phonetics’; for a couple of hours a week we’d gather round as she strummed on her guitar and taught us Russian folk songs. Everything with her was in the diminutive. ‘Let’s sing a dear little song,’ she’d suggest. ‘A tiny song in a chordlet of fah.’

  The teacher from whom I learnt the most was Rita Yurievna, a brisk, cerise-lipped matron with a sense of humour. Under her guidance we picked our way through the tangled forests of the Russian lexicon, as beautiful and as dark, in her eyes, as the Russian character itself. It has always seemed to me that grammar exercises reveal the culture that they spring from. The French book I was taught from featured Madame Bertillon, an air hostess, who was on a diet. ‘Mme Bertillon a perdu du poids!’ it announced approvingly. The first Russian sentences I came across, on the other hand, were a mystery. ‘Is this a table?’ asked a cheerful young student, pointing at something out of the picture. ‘Nyet!’ sang back another student. ‘It is a bridge!’ It seemed a strange mistake to make.

  Rita Yurievna’s examples were more elaborately surreal. We were taught to be precise about whether we had crawled around the swamp just once, or many times; if we were in the habit of flying deep into strange territory or if it had been merely a temporary aberration; and how to differentiate between a crowd of people running to their respective homes and all converging on our own. Each case demanded a specific, prefixed verb.

  ‘You must understand,’ said Rita Yurievna, ‘that in Russian, verbs are not only about action. They are also about the experience. Think how different it feels if you walk down a street every morning of your life, and if you walk down it for the first and only time. It may be the same action, but it is another experience entirely.’

  Lesson I: Exercises

  Lesson II

  I learnt most of my Russian from Mitya, of course. Several days a week, Mitya fixed it so that his classes didn’t start until ten, two hours after his parents had left for work and taken his brother to school. Two hours in an empty flat: Rita Yurievna didn’t stand a chance. On those days I stumbled out of bed and dressed in the kitchen so as not to wake the others. The streetlights were still lit; I slid through the snow and the shadowy light to the bus stop. I always glanced down Peace Prospect to check by the station clock that I was not early; I didn’t want to bump into Mitya’s mother on the stairs. By eight o’clock she would have left her younger son at school and set off for her engineering firm, never suspecting that some foreign girl, trembling with cold and excitement, was banging on her steel door.

  Those snowy mornings, I began to gain a sense of the language; its soft, sliding rhythms that seemed to follow a looping pattern of their own until you reached the noun at the end of the sentence. Mitya teased me with strings of participles.

  ‘Hello, pink-cheeked, having-walked-through-the-cold-morning-air, still-sleepy-eyed girl,’ he greeted me.

  ‘Mitya –’

  ‘Come in and taste the having-been-smelt-in-the-hallway coffee.’

  Russian is malleable, and Russians love to manipulate it, to roll the words around their mouths, to distort them, to reinvent them. Colours, for example, can become verbs; verbs are transformed with prefixes and turned back into adjectives and nouns; neologisms are a part of everyday speech. It makes for a wonderfully suggestive language, a language of association and imagination. And somehow its soft-shoe shuffle, its twisted vowels that turn e into ye, o into a, and the network of agreements in each sentence that give the impression of internal rhymes, all give spoken Russian a particular sensuality.

  ‘Learning Russian is like falling in love,’ Rita Yurievna remarked on one occasion, looking knowing. ‘To fall in love: vlyubit’sya. You take the verb to love, lyubit’, and add the prefix v-, meaning in, into. Then make it reflexive, because it is happening to you, isn’t it? Not to anyone else. No one else could be feeling like this! Lovers always think they are unique. Isn’t it a beautiful word?’

  Mitya and I drank coffee in his parents’ flat and tried to talk. We made precarious progress. On the one hand, misunderstandings were common. The hostel obscenities that I introduced randomly into the conversation were obviously a little surprising, but that was nothing to the surreal impressions I sometimes took away from Mitya’s conversation. On one occasion we went to an exhibition. Mitya glanced at each picture and said casually, ‘Yes, I painted that one. And that one. Yes, that one too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I painted them. It didn’t take long. I did it as a favour to Fyodorov.’

  It was an exhibition of Fyodorov’s work. For a moment, the thought that I was with a dangerous megalomaniac eclipsed all others. Then I realised: he had written the descriptions posted up underneath the pictures, not painted them. The same verb, pisat’, could be used to mean either.

  I realised after a time that learning Russian was as much a matter of adapting my tone as accumulating vocabulary. Russians,
for example, have none of the contorted, apologetic manner of the English. If you start out on ‘Would you possibly be so kind as to help me, if you’ve got a moment, to point out where the post office might be?’ any Russian who is not a bureaucrat or an official will look at you as though you are mad. After a time I learnt to ask simply, ‘Where’s the post office?’ Equally, the Russian habit of saying in a commanding tone, ‘Give me one cigarette!’ soon stopped sounding rude. Both the tone and the sentiment behind it, which assumes that the cigarette-rich person will always share them with the poor, came to feel quite natural. I was becoming Russian, it seemed to me; and the happy, swift feeling of losing myself was part of the process. ‘Nichevo,’ I responded airily when there were problems, shortages; when, back in England, I would have grumbled. All of that was important, it was all necessary, and none of it mattered a bit, it was nothing – nichevo. The only piece that I have come across that captures this sensation was written by a Madame Jarinstzov, in 1919:

  ‘True, with us it is nichevo when people walk into the room without knocking; or come without invitation at any time for the simple reason that they wish to see you; or men get up from their seats and pace the room up and down in the heat of a discussion during the course of a meal; all this is certainly nichevo, because these points are but trifles to a Russian mind, and the Westerner may smile with disgust or condescension at the thought of such manners! … True, again, a Russian will fly down a long, steep hill in his sledge, cart or brougham, and will say ‘nichevo!’ if the vehicle happens to go into the ditch at the bottom of the hill. But in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred it would not do so, because rushing down a hill is a universally beloved thing, to which generations of horses have been used since the time when the Russian land first began to be. And if a driver did not rise in his seat, and let all the reins loose, and shout words of love and encouragement to them at the sight of a steep road downwards, the horses would think that something had gone unmistakably wrong.’

  · 7 ·

  The Truth Game

  With large-scale privatisation to come, state officials and deputies are using their positions to take the best pieces of the pie …

  Observer, 27 October 1991

  The vakhtersha beckoned me over one day with a little mittened hand and passed me a note: parcel for collection, Post Office number so-and-so. It was a building that I hadn’t noticed before, slightly set back from the road, windows filled with the sinewy Busy Lizzie plants that Soviet state employees felt so tenderly towards. Inside it was empty. I waited and tried to breathe shallowly. The air was dense with familiar Soviet smells – damp wool, tobacco, old people – and overlaying them all an earthy, half-sweet stink, possibly human, that made the saliva run nauseously in my mouth.

  After some minutes a rustling noise in the back rooms grew louder and a babushka appeared, carrying a mug of tea with a piece of black bread laid over it. Her bottom lip was clamped tight over her top and she gave no sign of noticing me. Having learnt a little about such situations, I said nothing. Officials, including shop assistants, train conductors and post office workers, did not belong to the majority of Russians who liked a direct and honest approach. If you came straight out with even ‘Excuse me! I’ve been waiting …’ or ‘Sorry to disturb you …’ this type of babushka was liable to fly into a rage and ignore you for a full five minutes. Of course it depended on who you were: pensioners, in particular veterans of the Great Patriotic War, had special privileges. They would have let fly a spittle-beaded stream of abuse. Otherwise the best technique was simply to stand there looking polite, and when she finally glanced at you, to thrust the ticket forward with a gush of flattering entreaty. ‘Please, comrade, be so kind, I have a parcel waiting here?’ If she still looked unconvinced, you might try an emotional appeal: ‘From far away in my home country, how I’ve been missing it!’

  This time, however, there was no need. When she read my name on the ticket she threw her hands up. ‘Slava Bogu! Thank goodness you’ve come.’

  She returned within a few seconds with a box and pushed it at me, forgetting even to stamp my receipt for her records. It was postmarked six weeks previously. It was also, clearly, the source of the filthy smell.

  ‘Off you go, dochka. Take it, and good health to you!’

  It felt faintly warm in my hands as I carried it back to the hostel. Mitya was in my room when I arrived. He stubbed out his cigarette and together we slit open the packing tape. The box gave off a faint hiss and a stink that made us fall back and cover our mouths. Even Joe stirred in his sleep.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry, everyone.’

  At the bottom of the box was a cellophane packet blown up like a balloon, containing a blackish, lumpy puddle.

  ‘What is it?’ whispered Mitya, awed.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I whispered back. ‘But six weeks ago, I think it might have been … camembert.’

  This hunch turned out to be right. A friend had made up a parcel of delicacies that were hard to come by in Voronezh: chocolate, crisps, magazines, and – my favourite – a piece of camembert. Not, perhaps, the most practical cheese to send by post. Six weeks had seen it pass through some intense organic processes.

  ‘But why did it have to sit there all that time?’

  ‘That’ll be the KGB, ublyudki,’ said Mitya, lighting a cigarette hurriedly. ‘Kept it there for all that time. They’d never seen French cheese before. Halfwits.’

  It was a memorable introduction to the secret police: a smell so bad you could almost hear it howl.

  *

  I was inclined to treat the KGB more as rumour than reality, until they started leaving deliberate hints. For example, not only had the letter inside my parcel been opened and read, but someone had put a cup of coffee down on it. Our post was always erratic, but occasionally a letter was delayed by months rather than weeks and arrived with words underlined, or with mysterious red marks in the margin. Whoever made these seemed not to understand English very well – perhaps they had simply been given a list of key words to identify. A friend received a letter in which her mother described setting off on holiday: ‘We had to wait for an hour at the bank to pick up our foreign currency, and another to get the visa, so rushed to the station and only just caught the train.’ In a dusty little office somewhere in Voronezh, a guardian of the Soviet state’s security had carefully underlined ‘foreign currency’, ‘visa’, ‘station’, and had passed it on to his superior to request further action. The letter took several months to arrive.

  Then several friends in the hostel told us that they had been called in for questioning – a friendly chat, apparently, in their blank-faced office block on Plekhanov Street.

  ‘So, how’s life in the hostel?’ the officer would ask. ‘Are Ira and Joe still going out together? Are they getting on well? Emily and Yuri, they going to get married? Or not? Eh?’

  It sounded implausible to me. Surely, in these times of economic crisis, even the KGB had to earn themselves a living. What was the sense in paying these pathetic juniors – Cinderellas in brown suits – to stay late at the office, copying out the reports of our student parties? On the other hand, of course, the thought of files marked with our names being filled with details of hostel life was wonderfully comical, not to say glamorous. Perhaps they would be forwarded to Moscow, where some smooth-cheeked colonel would tap my documents, gaze out of the window and mutter, ‘Hmmm, Charlotte Hobson … she sounds interesting.’ It added a piquancy to life to imagine a secret biographer at our backs. We felt we had to keep providing him with material.

  Yet – and for the first time the comedy turned a little sour – who was passing on the information from the hostel? We assumed it was one of the duties of the Komendant to keep the security forces up to date. But that didn’t stop the rumours about other people. Almost the day we arrived, somebody took us aside and whispered: see him over there? He’s KGB. Don’t trust him. One of the British girls seemed unerringly to fall in love with them: the str
ingy, scrawny one; the one with black hair and a face like a hatchet; the kindly, plump one – according to the gossip, all of them were KGB.

  Mitya hated the whole business. ‘Only a sovok would believe all that stuff,’ he said. A sovok: someone who lived in the old Soviet way, fearful, credulous, boot-licking, deceitful. ‘All that is irrelevant now.’

  He was right, of course. And yet we couldn’t help listening to the stories when they came round.

  *

  We had a party on what remained of my parcel. A browneyed Russian called Peanut brought a couple of American students, Bill and Leda. Leda was wild. She looked like a swan herself: a long, taut neck and white skin which seemed barely to conceal the movement of her bones. She had black hair and sharp red lips and when she entered a room, you could feel fear and excitement rising in all the men. The gossip in the hostel had nothing but admiration for her.

  Bill, on the other hand, was a clean-cut, tidy boy who was lodging with Peanut’s family. He did not touch alcohol or nicotine, was conscientious about hygiene, and insisted on respect for the American flag. After college, he told us, he wanted to join the army. It was just the sort of behaviour that set tongues wagging. Somebody – as usual, no one knew who’d said it first – suggested that Bill’s army ambitions meant something more specific. Intelligence, they said. Look how cagey he is, doesn’t drink. That’s always suspicious. Before long the consensus was that he was CIA. There’s always one, people said. Believe us, it’s sure to be him. He’s bright, he keeps in training. There was no end of evidence once you got to thinking about it.