Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  ‘Drink up,’ insisted Viktor. ‘Moskovskaya vodka, full of vitamins.’

  Mitya was still thinking about the army. ‘God, the filth we drank,’ he groaned. ‘When I was called up, we were taken to Kiev for registration. The first night we drank samogon – I thought I would die. Anyway, one boy disappeared. They didn’t find him until the next morning – he’d gone to the latrines and the seat had given way beneath him. He almost drowned. There was a thousand-litre tank underneath, he had to keep swimming all night. He was in such a state of nervous collapse, they sent him straight home –’

  I had not eaten since morning, and so after two shots I noticed that the objects and people around me were brighter and clearer than they had been. The smoke from Mitya’s cigarette curled upwards in fascinating bluish strands, Viktor’s face was a fiery pink, and he was telling a long story about a journey to the Caucasus. I could barely understand him.

  ‘… hounds …’ he seemed to be saying. ‘… the Southern nights … exotic fruits, the silky moustaches of the women …’

  Ashot leant forward. His eyelids weighed more heavily on his eyes than ever and something in his expression woke me. ‘Now they are starving there. My family live in Karabakh. They’ve had no electricity for more than a year. They’ve hardly any food and no medicine and any day the Russians might drive them out of their villages or the Azeris shoot them … I’ve had no news from them since January.’

  There was a pause. ‘You Armenians started the war,’ said Viktor.

  ‘We have the right to freedom, just as you do.’ Ashot spoke quietly.

  Mitya put on his coat. ‘I have to go home. My parents will be waiting for me.’

  Ashot got up with him. ‘’Bye,’ he said. ‘Thanks for the warming.’

  ‘Nichevo.’ When they’d gone, Viktor sighed and filled our glasses. ‘Back in 1988, in the army, everyone used to talk about independence. We thought it sounded wonderful. I suppose we never thought it would happen.’ He drained his glass and began to tell me about the army.

  *

  Men didn’t talk about their military service much. Oh, occasionally we heard about the drinking, their friends, the having to get out of bed and ready in forty-five seconds. But that day Viktor wanted to talk. ‘You know they beat me until I cried,’ he started. He shook his head, barely able to believe it. ‘Cried! My mother always said she’d never seen me cry, yet under their boots it didn’t take long.’

  Viktor was sent to a base beyond the Urals, near the Chinese border – a spot that even Russians considered remote. The officers had been there so long that they’d become naturalised into two types: a few brutes, and many poor mangy creatures. When the conscripts got food parcels from home, you could be sure the latter would turn up in the dormitory on the off-chance. ‘Hey guys, what’s new?’ they’d ask casually.

  Of course it was the brutes that ran the place, along with the second-year conscripts – not the men about to go home, who wore their caps on the back of the head and lolled at their posts, chewing their cigarette butts and gazing with lofty amusement at the rest. They were separate; their imminent freedom came off them like steam. No, the men to watch were those who’d just made it into their second year, who still smarted with the treatment they’d received in the previous twelve months. They were the ones who organised entertainments like the silver chair: take three new boys and make them crouch over a seat of needles standing up in wax until their thigh muscles give way.

  Four years after Viktor returned to Voronezh he went to the doctor with a painful boil on his calf. It was lanced, and the doctor was astonished to find a needle poking out of the flesh. Over the years, it had worked its way down the leg. The doctor said he was lucky: it could just as easily have turned inwards.

  For his first few months in the army, Viktor vowed to himself that he would not make trouble. But by Christmas, what with malnutrition and cold, his control was wearing thin. One day a sergeant took exception to the way he completed the morning run, and sent him to clean the latrines. Viktor bowed his head and trudged away. There was a song that he used to repeat to calm himself down, about a happy, drunk, naked woman in a supermarket, but this time it did not diffuse his anger. As he bent over the first pan and began to scrub, two second-year men came in and saw him.

  ‘Look at the little shit-lover,’ one jeered. ‘Like getting your hands dirty, do you?’

  Viktor said nothing.

  ‘Let’s help him out, lads,’ said the other, standing over him and undoing his flies. ‘We’ll wash your hands for you.’

  Before he had realised what he was doing, Viktor was shaking his senior until the latter’s eyes popped.

  ‘What’s all this?’ the sergeant bellowed, entering.

  The second-year men were sent away, Viktor returned to his scrubbing and the rest of the day passed without incident – until the evening, when they came to pay Viktor a visit, along with a few of their friends. They pinned him in the corner and broke his jaw.

  For two weeks, he wore a metal brace, while his commanding officer tried to extract names from him. Since perestroika they couldn’t ignore these things completely. But Viktor, looking him straight in the eye, muttered only that he’d slipped in the shower and, sir, it was painful to talk.

  ‘My God,’ exclaimed the CO after a second interview, exasperated, ‘The number of injuries these men sustain in the shower room. It’s a wonder we allow them to wash at all.’

  As Viktor lay there recovering, the guys came to see him again. ‘Here,’ one said, ‘we heard you kept your mouth shut.’

  ‘Not that he had much choice,’ sniggered the other.

  ‘We brought you something to make the time pass.’ They produced a jam jar containing spirit, the sort that was kept in the tank shed to clean parts. ‘Drink it down. It’ll do you good.’

  Viktor opened his mouth as far as he was able – about an inch – and sucked the spirit through his teeth. Halfway through he stopped, retching, but they tipped the jar up and sent a great gulp flooding down his throat and chin. When it was finished, they gave him water and clouted him on the shoulder. ‘See you,’ they said, and left.

  ‘After that it was all right,’ Viktor continued, topping up his glass. ‘Normal. And, you know, when I got into second year, I did the same. We all did.’

  It is a commonplace among Russian mothers that their sons are changed for the worse by their military service. He left such a good boy, they lament. Never been away from home, seventeen, mild as milk. The army ruined him. Now he drinks, and when he’s drunk he gets angry, and as for his feet! The smell of them! Nonsense, reply the fathers. I came through it all right, didn’t I? They have to learn to be men. You learn a lot in the army, oh, it’s amazing how fast you learn …

  *

  I didn’t see much of Ashot apart from that one afternoon. He changed money for us, drooping his eyelids as he counted out the notes; occasionally he sold on some cannabis, measured by the glass, although he can’t have made much money from the deals. None of our Armenians conformed to the stereotype – grasping, wily, flash with their money. They were as shabby as the rest of us, but something kept them separate. He and the other Armenians – Garo, round and jolly, with a bristly face like a pirate’s, Pasha, and the Komendant – sat together night after night behind a closed door, and all we heard of them was the buzz of conversation and laughter that seeped out into the corridor. I asked Mitya about it.

  ‘It’s very simple.’ He shrugged, slightly exasperated. ‘The historical imperative for them to hate Russians has been supplemented by personal experience.’ After a pause he added, ‘Military service is just one example. Men are sent thousands of miles to regiments made up of the multitude of friendly Soviet peoples. It’s meant to turn them all into Soviet patriots. After two years of the army, you can imagine, they go home hating each other even more than they did in the first place –’

  This was the map of the Soviet Union that the boys picked up: Armenians hated Azeris, Che
chens hated Ossetians, ethnic minorities hated Russians, Russians hated Jews, and everyone hated the lads from Moscow – so pleased with themselves, looking down their noses, with that nasal accent that made you grit your teeth. They were sent food parcels with condensed milk and jellies and little hunters’ sausages, the kind of delicacies you could only get on Kalininsky Prospect. They paid for it though. The men made sure those Muscovite noses paid for it.

  The point was, Mitya explained, you had to watch out for the Caucasians and the Central Asians. The guys who beat you up and bullied you weren’t out to kill you, although it did happen – games that went too far, people who didn’t know how to take a beating. You still had to be careful, but that was to be expected. The dangerous ones, though, were the wild boys from the mountains and the desert who instantly established a clan system within the camp and who’d grown up knowing how to fight. They carried knives with blades as supple as grass, that twanged in their hands if you passed them too close in the corridor. ‘All right, calm yourself,’ you’d say, not knowing if they felt their honour had been compromised, if they even understood you. They were different. It was just one of the things you had to accept in the army.

  ‘When I see the news,’ Mitya said, ‘I always wonder if I’ll see one of the boys I knew, up there in the mountains. They’re fighting now, I’m sure of it. They had a worse time than us in the army, of course. If they survived that … And if the army taught them one thing, it was to stick together.’

  *

  On the first day of spring, Mitya and I walked down to the reservoir, past trees almost bare of snow. The ice still held and several fishermen were sitting by their iceholes for another day’s cold, silent vigil. These were the fanatics. The fish they caught were not at all good to eat; in fact most were poisoned by the dirty water. Occasionally fishermen tried to sell them by the roadside, slapping a couple of pike on a plastic bag laid down in the mud. They did not look tempting. And to go out on the lake now, so late in the season … Apparently these men knew special paths, recognised the thin patches by sight and calculated to the hour when the ice would finally splinter. All the same, every year there were casualties.

  There was a soft breeze, and for the first time in months I was outside without hat, gloves and scarf; the air on my forehead and cheeks felt wonderfully free, and at last I could move without slipping and watching my feet. Mitya and I ran until we came to a stop, puffing, and sat on a railing by the water.

  ‘Remember the yacht we were going to live on?’ Mitya said. ‘Let’s sail it through the Black Sea in the summer. The Crimean coast, past Odessa, Yalta, and to Batumi … It’s a pity we’ll have to avoid Abkhazia.’

  ‘Perhaps you could come and visit me in England this summer?’

  Mitya looked at me and smiled. ‘If you’d like me to.’

  When it grew cold, we turned back to the hostel, stopping to buy snowdrops from a babushka standing by the bridge.

  ‘The spring arrives with them, children. Have two bunches,’ she implored. ‘The wind’s chilly, I’ll go home if you take them.’

  I was sniffing the icy petals as we came up the stairs and heard it: a high, long howl that grew in volume, choked, and continued. Someone shouted with it and silenced it. Instantly it began again. It made my heart thump. By the time we got to the fourth floor, there was a crowd outside the Armenians’ room.

  The Komendant came out and pushed past us. ‘Get out of the way.’

  ‘But what is it? Is someone hurt?’

  ‘Ashot,’ said Garo, appearing in the doorway. His round face was slack and pale. ‘The Azeris have shelled his village in Karabakh. Half the houses are hit. His brother is dead and God knows who else.’

  Within the room Ashot stopped howling and began to knock his head slowly and deliberately against the wall.

  ‘Those bastards,’ Garo said. ‘We’ll kill them.’

  *

  The reservoir held for a few more days. The following week I saw a couple of fishermen heading out across it, intent on a last catch, but by the end of the month great cracks had appeared; the water was bubbling and hissing through them, tearing the ice apart. From the centre of the bridge Mitya and I watched slabs like tectonic plates start to move. Footprints could still be seen on some of them, and bits of debris from the life they had supported: sticks, broken baskets, a single shoe. The sheets of ice drifted beneath us, gathering speed as they made their way towards the sea.

  · 17 ·

  Iron Boots

  If you call yourself a mushroom, you must jump in the basket.

  Russian proverb

  Spring arrived with the frenzy of the habitually late. One morning the air was balmy and buds appeared on the trees; two days later the whole town was bursting out in foliage and the inhabitants of Voronezh strolled about in flowery dresses, short sleeves and sandals. They seemed to have wiped the memory of winter from their minds; their serene expressions congratulated each other on their good fortune – no, their foresight – in choosing to live in a place with such a pleasant climate, a climate in which cucumbers and tomatoes grew with such juicy vigour.

  The whole city all of a sudden had become dachniki, country dwellers with mud under their fingernails, who endured the week in the city only to hurry to the bus station and head for the country every Friday. They crammed into their Ladas, onto trolley buses and elektrichki, some travelling as far as a couple of hundred kilometres to open up their little wooden dachas and sow their seeds into the black earth.

  In the evenings out there the men built a fire for the shashlyk and fussed around it like surgeons, issuing peremptory orders: ‘Bring the meat out! And a plate, please! Quick, vodka, we need vodka here now!’ Every Russian man is, of course, an expert at the barbecue. When the meat is finally ready, they sit around the fire and eat it with flat Georgian bread and a handful of herbs; later on, someone pulls out a guitar and starts singing. The nostalgia for what is described as ‘nature’, a yearning which hangs over the bumpy, open-ended roads of their cities and in the concrete stairwells of their tower blocks, is here at its most acute. The succulent greenery that emits little rustles and creaks as it sprouts gives off an irresistible whiff of expectancy.

  *

  In the bus station, an English boy called John and I joined the crowd of dachniki heading in the direction of Kursk. It was five in the morning and we were going to the wedding of a couple I didn’t know. Well, I’d met Slava, the groom, a friend of Emily’s who burst into tears in our room back in September and begged her to help him with a visa. He was going to visit his girlfriend Lucy in Manchester. Emily did what she could to help, and so when their wedding was organised Slava reappeared with her invitation. But Emily was away, and such is my shameless passion for weddings that when Slava asked me instead, I couldn’t help accepting.

  ‘It will be nice for Lucy to have an English companion, as her family can’t come,’ said Slava, hastily improvising a reason for my attendance. When the occasion demands it, Russians are the most polite people in the world. ‘You can come with John, he’s going to be our witness.’

  The bus to Kursk took five hours: five hours of flat, unhedged farmland, and all the way John, who knew Lucy from Manchester, sat beside me sighing and plucking nervously at his beard. The male witness at a wedding has various duties apart from signing the register. He must look after the bride and groom, make sure their glasses are constantly filled, and propose a whole series of toasts, the longer and more poetic the better. He is also the defender of the bride’s honour for the day. At a certain moment it is customary for a group of marauding guests to swoop down and steal away the bride from her husband, and then it is the witness’s duty to capture her back. Sometimes this is done by paying a ransom in hard cash, but more often a feat is required of him. The bride’s white satin stiletto is produced and filled with vodka, and the witness must drink it down. Depending on the size of the bride’s foot, it can contain most of a bottle … Then, ideally, the witness bursts into th
e place where the bride is held, tosses her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and deposits her back at her husband’s side with roar of triumph.

  ‘You don’t know Lucy,’ John said gloomily. ‘She’s not big, but – well, she’s not tiny.’

  That was still not the worst of it. The most important duty of all, the one that the male witness is never allowed to shirk, is to kiss the female witness. After a reasonable time complimenting her on her turquoise outfit – a quarter of an hour will do – tradition demands that he drag her into a bedroom and grapple her on the bed where the guests have left their coats. And if he doesn’t, make no mistake, she’ll drag him. At this stage John hadn’t made any public announcements about his sexuality, but it was clear that the idea of the female witness filled him with foreboding.

  Now and then the bus stopped to let a couple of dachniki out. They shouldered their bags and trudged away, and I was reminded of a proverb quoted by Pasternak: ‘Life is not as easy as crossing a field.’ The black earth, freshly sliced and turned, was so rich that it seemed as though you could spoon it straight into your mouth. As the sun climbed, the wet soil began to steam and the bus was filled with its smell. When the Nazis invaded the Ukraine, they were so astonished by the black earth that they looted it. A whole convoy of lorries was loaded up and sent back to Germany; even now there must be German farmers, who, every springtime, lift their heads and sniff this same, delicious scent, as sweet and dark as chocolate pudding.

  In Kursk, one of Slava’s relatives, Anatoly, was waiting for us at the station. He was a huge man. His neck was corded with tendons, his chest bulged, and his face was full of guileless, rapacious delight.

  ‘Welcome!’ he bellowed, thumping John on the back. ‘Guests! You’ve come far –’