Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  It was a quarter to midnight. The priests disappeared behind the iconostasis and reappeared almost immediately in golden robes stiff with embroidery. The Bishop of Voronezh stepped out in front of them, his strong old face thrust forward purposefully. He lit the candles of the few people close to the altar and, in a cloud of incense, followed by his priests, he proceeded once around the interior of the church. The excitement was building. The flame from the bishop’s candle had by now spread from hand to hand back through the crowd; three hundred faces, lit from beneath, glowed and shone in the sudden heat. Those at the front were able to follow the priests, but where we were the crowd heaved and buckled, and twice I watched, unable to move, as a candle passed too close to a tangle of hair. Katya looked over her shoulder at me desperately.

  ‘Help,’ she whispered. She was being crushed from one side; she’d almost lost her footing. I grabbed her arm and pulled her back beside me. We grinned at each other, relieved.

  The doors of the church were flung open. We passed through them and began to circle the church. Once, twice, three times. Hundreds of feet shuffled through the slush and pushed it back until the earth was revealed. Night air, the deep, slow voices of the choir and the rattling censer. At last we gathered in front of the doors where the bishop stood silent, surrounded by priests. The babushka beside me was weeping into her scarf.

  Raising his arms in an embrace, the bishop cried out: Christ is risen!

  And the crowd answered in a shout: In truth he is risen.

  The bells jangled. The doors of the church opened and inside it was unbearably bright.

  Katya and I left soon after midnight, although the service would continue until morning. As we hugged goodbye, I promised to visit her soon, to see if there was anything I could do to help. Now there was less of a crowd, I saw she had lost weight. Her brown, spaniel’s eyes welling with emotion in her pale little face made me shiver. A less motherly figure would be hard to imagine.

  *

  It turned out that I was the one who needed help. A couple of days later, Mitya, Yakov and I were on a trolley bus trundling along the left bank, going to visit friends, when my head spun and everything went black. When I regained consciousness, they’d got me off the bus and were carrying me towards a small wooden house, painted green and blue and covered in snow. Katya appeared in the door, eyes wide.

  ‘She fainted,’ Mitya explained. ‘Can she lie down?’

  ‘Oh,’ Katya said, looking over her shoulder. ‘Mama!’

  I leant against the doorframe and began to slide gently towards the floor. Mitya caught me under the elbow.

  ‘What have you done to her?’ Katya’s mother demanded. ‘Poor girl.’

  Mitya went white. ‘Nothing –’

  ‘Bring her in, quick!’

  I was aware, suddenly, of lying down on a couch. ‘Just not eaten,’ I tried to explain. My tongue felt swollen. ‘Nothing …’

  ‘Off you go, boys.’ Katya’s mother interrupted. ‘Shoo!’

  Mitya and Yakov were bundled out of the house.

  ‘Nothing serious,’ I finished to an empty room, and fell asleep.

  In the darkness, I jolted awake and couldn’t think where I was. Then a voice loomed mournfully from the road and I realised it had woken me.

  ‘Charlotte!’

  It was Mitya, furious at his dismissal. But as I staggered to my feet, Katya’s mother appeared.

  ‘Where are you going? Now you keep warm, you’ve got no slippers on, can’t go wandering about.’ She was at the window and calling before I could stop her. ‘Go on home, Mitya! She’s staying the night! She’s fine! Just leave her alone!’ She drew the curtains. ‘Don’t worry about him,’ she said comfortably, tucking the blanket around me. ‘He’s brought you to the right person. I’m a doctor, you know. Now, put this under your arm. I want to take your temperature.’

  Of course I should have demanded Mitya be allowed in. Instead, with a delicious sense of relief, I lay back, pressing the cold glass of the thermometer under my arm, and allowed her to boss me around. The house had a cosy, solid feeling unlike anywhere else I had been in Voronezh. The wallpaper had faded where the sun fell on it until the pattern was barely visible. There was a desk with a green-shaded light and a couple of armchairs with knitted rugs on the back. The room smelt of coal smoke from an old-fashioned stove in the corner.

  ‘Good, no temperature. Just low blood pressure,’ said Katya’s mother briskly. ‘Now, lie quietly. Here’s Katya with a tonic for you.’

  ‘You’ve woken up.’ Katya gave me a glass of clear liquid and folded herself into the armchair opposite me. ‘Mama’s giving me tonics, too, for me and the baby.’

  ‘What’s in it?’

  ‘Oh, vitamins, iron, natural extracts that are health-giving. Mama makes them up herself.’

  A tiny, bent old lady appeared, shuffling determinedly towards one of the armchairs. She sat down and leant forward to peer at me.

  ‘She’s the English girl,’ she stated. ‘Well, she doesn’t look well at all. Natasha was right to keep her here. She’s been living an unhealthy life, like you, Katya.’

  ‘Babushka, she does understand Russian, you know.’

  Her grandmother looked unconvinced. ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Charlotte,’ I answered.

  ‘Ah, Charlotte Brontë!’

  This was the usual Russian response to my name. We smiled at each other politely, then she took out the beginnings of something tiny and pale blue on her knitting needles and fell silent.

  ‘What about your father? Where is he?’ I asked Katya

  ‘Oh, he left years ago … We’re a house of women here, my grandmother, my mother and I. And now the baby.’ Katya laughed, a breathy little giggle. ‘We all think she’s sure to be a girl.’

  ‘What about dinner, Katyusha?’ said her grandmother. ‘Your mother’s tired and your guest must eat something.’

  ‘It’s in the oven, babushka. I’ll go and check.’

  Katya’s mother returned and felt my forehead with a cool hand. Then she sat down at her desk and began quietly writing out reports in copperplate script. The warmth and the click of the knitting needles were soporific; in this comfortable industry there was a peace that, it seemed to me, could last for generations.

  It was here, in this strict, kindly matriarchy, that the Revolution breathed its last breath. The Revolution, with its images of muscly warriors, its glorification of ferocity, violence, and what it deemed the necessary spilling of blood, was a masculine affair. The old regime was feminine: weak, decadent, with soft white hands unused to work. El Lissitzky’s contemporary poster, ‘Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge’, demonstrated this contrast graphically: a white circle – a large, soft, feminine shape – was split open by the Bolsheviks’ red phallus. Propaganda constantly reinforced this idea: it was the battle of the sexes transposed onto class.

  Now all those slab-chested images were lying in the snow and the red wedge had shrivelled almost to nothing. The Revolution had failed, and Russian men were faltering with it. Oh, it was still the women who came back from work and shouldered the whole burden of looking after the family. They still suffered an average of seven abortions because of the lack of other birth control; and a beaten wife was still barely an exception. But it was the men who were dying. Young men died on their military service, in fights on the street, in car crashes, in or out of prison. Middle-aged men fell ill, went into hospital, and as Gogol put it, ‘got better like flies’. They were crushed by alcohol and despair. What life was left, after all, for a cosmonaut without a space programme, a statistician working with false numbers, or an unemployed Hero of Socialist Labour?

  At home, however, the women rarely lost faith in the same way. Perhaps it was simply that they could not afford to with children to look after. They concentrated on the basic elements of survival: food, warm clothes, health. Within this framework, the collapse of socialism was hardly a surprise: mothers had seen it coming for twenty
years, as they stood in the milk queue. And they were prepared for it, in the sense that they were prepared for any new hardship that the regime might ordain for them. Inside their apartments family life would carry on regardless: mustard plasters would be applied to chesty coughs, draughts would be rigorously excluded, a sore throat would be treated with a spoonful of honey. It made sense to me now that Katya had the courage to have the baby: it would be safe here. Yakov and others like him could come and go; they would always be marginal. They might drink too much, run off, have affairs, and even then the women had their defence: it would not be unexpected.

  *

  After a while, Katya announced that the meal was ready and we went into the kitchen to eat. I was still feeling weak and made little progress with a large plate of kotlyety, fried potatoes and carrot.

  The grandmother watched me, murmuring without pause, ‘Eat up, eat up.’

  Katya’s mother intervened. ‘I think it’s best if she does not have too much. Her stomach is not strong.’

  The grandmother stopped her chorus for a moment and looked distrustfully at her daughter. Then she turned back to me. ‘Eat up, eat up a little more,’ she said again, ‘and then I’ll read your cards for you.’

  ‘Babushka reads the cards for the whole neighbourhood,’ Katya told me. ‘They come and consult with her about everything – whether they should get married, or move, or whatever. They bring her presents –’

  ‘They think I’ve got powers,’ said the grandmother, smiling.

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘Bozhe moi, what a question. It’s not for me to say. But I have known some witches in my time … The old lady, Valentina Sergeevna, do you remember her, Katya? She died last year. In her nineties, she was, and weak as a feather, but she wouldn’t die … Week after week she lay in her bed barely eating a thing and those black eyes of hers burning. Everyone was telling her daughter, don’t feed her! But she kept on giving her little pieces of chocolate. “She doesn’t want to die,” her daughter said to me, “look at her eyes.” And at the last moment, when she felt death lying down beside her, she crawled away! So weak she could barely lift her arm, and yet her daughter found her on the other side of the room under the table. And when she tried to carry her back to bed the old lady fought her and cried, and so she made her up a bed and Valentina Sergeevna died right there, under the table … That’s a real witch, that’s how strong they are.’

  There had always been rumours of witches, but these days some even practised openly. Just the other day, a friend of Mitya’s had discovered six needles stuck in his door and realised that his problems were caused by black magic. So he went to see a witch. As he joined the queue outside her flat, she appeared at the door, nose twitching.

  ‘There’s one of you,’ she said, ‘who is surrounded by evil forces of great power.’ Spotting Mitya’s friend, she called him up. ‘You! You need my help more than anyone.’

  He glowed with pride as he told us about it. It was expensive, he told us earnestly, but well worth it.

  The Soviet regime never managed to crush Orthodoxy in Russia. It had still less impact on older, less articulate, but almost universally held beliefs. Lighting candles in front of the old, dark-eyed icons and circling the church three times at Easter was a part of them; also crossing yourself at the sight of a black cat, not putting empty bottles on the table, and a hundred other precautions and charms for shoring up the corners of the world. There were both male and female ministers of this faith: witches and healers and horoscope casters and herbalists. But it was usually the women who preserved it at home, combining it with a mass of traditional remedies to keep their family safe from harm. And there is no doubt that it gave comfort. It represented, among other things, a rare continuity in Russian life.

  ‘And I can tell you who you were in a former life,’ the grandmother added. ‘Just eat up a few mouthfuls more.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ I replied, responding to the expectant, kind faces that surrounded me, although – superstitiously – I’ve always avoided having my fortune told.

  Back in the sitting room, the grandmother laid out nine cards in three rows of three. ‘Here’s your past,’ she said, patting the first row. ‘Here’s a great sadness, a death, followed by a long journey. Am I right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Here you are now,’ she patted the next row. ‘A dark-haired young woman, and you have an important decision to make. A painful decision. There are two paths ahead of you, and a powerful force is urging you down the wrong one.’

  ‘What sort of a decision?’

  ‘It’s about a man, isn’t it?’ interrupted Katya’s mother. ‘He’s no good for her.’

  ‘I believe it is,’ pronounced the grandmother. ‘You must be strong. You must think of your family, your home – here is the card for the home – and you must decide what is best for you. But if you choose the right path, look, success awaits you. Here is the card for fortune …’

  ‘Russian men are not worth the suffering, Charlotte,’ said Katya’s mother, sighing. ‘Take my word for it.’

  For a moment fury prevented me from answering. How dare they try to influence me against Mitya?

  ‘Very enlightening,’ I muttered at last. ‘So who was I in a former life?’

  The grandmother made a series of calculations. ‘You lived about 1725,’ she said, ‘in Mexico. A woman, a singer or a dancer.’

  ‘A Mexican dancer!’ I couldn’t help laughing angrily. ‘I’ve never heard anything so silly.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she smiled. ‘An entertainer, rather secondrate.’

  ‘How funny! A second-rate entertainer!’ Katya repeated delightedly. ‘Performing in some bar –’

  The room suddenly felt stifling. ‘Thank you very much for all your kindness,’ I said, standing up. ‘I think I’m well enough to go back to the hostel now.’

  ‘Are you sure? I think you should stay the night –’

  ‘No, no, there’s no need.’ I had my coat on; they were following me to the door.

  ‘In my previous life I was apparently a priestess in Ancient Egypt,’ Katya’s mother said. ‘Well, visit us again soon –’

  ‘Yes, look after yourself,’ the grandmother called after me as I reached the street. ‘Russian men need Russian girls to manage them. You’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘Goodbye, goodnight.’ I’d escaped; the dark, glittering night and the cool air felt good. What did she know anyway, the interfering old woman? Her spiel was nothing but platitudes – the very worst sort, that have a ring of truth. I thought about going to the commission shop to find Mitya. But by the time I reached Friedrich Engels Street, my head was spinning again. The lights of the hostel and even the vakhtersha’s mealy-mouthed smile felt like a homecoming.

  · 16 ·

  The Thaw

  Finally, there is Soviet man, the most important product of the past 60 years…. This is a man who, while an ardent patriot, has been and will always remain a consistent internationalist.

  L. I. Brezhnev, addressing the Twenty-fifth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, 1980

  Fifty Russian families a day are arriving in Voronezh from the former Soviet republics.

  Voronezh Courrier, 25 March 1992

  In April the thaw began. For a fortnight it was cloudy and dull; the sky weighed on the city and people took to their beds. ‘The pressure,’ they said. ‘It gives me a nervous headache.’ An easterly wind blew; it whipped around raw corners and slid inside my collar like a knife edge against the skin. I hadn’t felt so cold in all the five months of winter.

  Branches and tree trunks turned black and shiny and parts of roofs started to appear. Every day for a week, snow fell, wet, sloppy drifts that soaked through fur boots and stood on the streets in puddles up to a foot deep. Walking would have been impossible if paths had not evolved, built collectively, piece by piece: hop onto that little stone, then to the kerb past the puddle, then one foot on that bit of board and a quick splash in
the icy water before you reach dry land for another five yards. It was pitiful to watch the pensioners trying to follow these courses.

  One day I stood on the hostel steps gazing at the pale sunshine on the poplar trees and listening to the sound of dripping water. The thrill was almost erotic.

  ‘During my first year of military service,’ Mitya said as we sat in my room drinking tea, ‘in the Urals, a roar like tanks coming at us started up and for two days we all wandered around half-crazy from the noise. Then one lunch time we heard what sounded like gunfire, round after round of it. We ran down to the river and it was the ice cracking. Great chunks the size of a car were flying up in the air, rolling and crashing and roaring like an avalanche. That’s what happened when it began to thaw out there.’

  The atmosphere in the hostel was still subdued. Sveta was sweeping cockroaches out of her room and watching them scuttle through the doors on either side and over Mamonov’s legs; he was sitting in the passage, groaning to himself, hoping for someone to drink with. Ibrahim’s hapless friend came knocking at his door: Bang-bang-bang! Ibrahim! Bang-bang-bang! Ibrahim, our Syrian neighbour, never answered this cry, which echoed hoarsely down our corridor several times a day.

  The outside world seldom impinged on our little community. We occasionally saw the news, less often read the papers, and ignored the stirrings on Russia’s southern border. In Georgia, refugees were pouring out of Abkhazia, and up in the mountains of Karabakh, Armenians on one side and Azeris on the other were cleaning their weapons after the winter lull: we knew this, vaguely, and yet the idea that it could end in war seemed as distant and incredible as summer.

  ‘When the weather is changing one has to be very careful of one’s health.’

  It was Viktor, of course, with an open bottle of vodka, saying, ‘Time for otdykh.’

  With him was one of the Armenians, Ashot, who had a face like a boy’s: slight, with heavy-lidded eyes and a sleepy expression. It looked as though the two of them had already been drinking. Ashot raised his glass and said without smiling, ‘To the friendship of nations.’