Black Earth City

by Charlotte Hobson

  ‘Well, only from Voronezh,’ said John. He looked more nervous than ever.

  ‘Far!’ insisted Anatoly. ‘We must celebrate. Immediately.’

  We bounced along the wide roads of Kursk in his car, a squashy Pobeda – Victory – to an apartment on the outskirts of town.

  ‘Welcome, dear guests,’ beamed Slava’s father and mother, shepherding us into the kitchen. ‘You’ll be hungry after your journey. Sit down, please! Anatoly, will you –?’

  Anatoly nodded and took up a glass. ‘Dear friends, we are glad to welcome you into our home. There will be many toasts today, and each one will be longer than the last, so the first one had better be short. To our meeting!’

  So we tossed back a shot of vodka, which, at eleven in the morning, on a five o’clock start, an empty stomach and a long bus ride, had an explosive effect. The order had gone out: take no prisoners. The festivities were beginning.

  *

  In the summer of 1943, the plains around Kursk were the site of the greatest tank battle in history. Manstein threw whole panzer armies into a desperate attempt to destroy Russian armour, and so to stave off what he already knew was an inevitable defeat. The plan, having claimed thousands of lives, failed. After the war the city was rebuilt around a series of huge memorials that are still at the centre of every ritual event, and weddings in particular. After the registry office service, Lucy and Slava were driven to each one of them in a taxi decorated with Russian and British flags. Under the solemn gaze of the video camera, the bride and groom crossed expanses of concrete paving and laid carnations before the lists of the dead. This was the first part of the ceremony.

  Back in the apartment, Slava’s parents were waiting to greet their son and daughter-in-law with bread and salt. A horseshoe-shaped table had been set up in the sitting room and loaded with dishes of zakuski, salads, meats, smoked fish and every conceivable Russian delicacy. Uncles and aunts were standing in the hall, each ruddier, jollier and stouter than their neighbour.

  ‘Oh, what a beauty,’ they cried, kissing Lucy and pinching her cheek. ‘Now come along, come along.’

  And they hurried into the sitting room to take their places and boss each other around some more. Slava’s mother, carrying in still more plates of food, nodded at Slava and Lucy.

  ‘Sit down, you two.’

  They sat at the top of the horseshoe, holding hands and looking shyly around them.

  ‘Now, Anatoly, please!’ called out the jolliest of all the uncles, raising his glass.

  ‘Spring has come, the trees are in leaf after our long winter,’ Anatoly started, and the aunts settled down contentedly, recognising the beginning of a good long toast when they heard one. ‘The most fortunate time of year for a wedding …’ My mind drifted; I tried to imagine this scene taking place in Mitya’s parents’ flat, and failed. Finally a change of tone from Anatoly signalled a conclusion. ‘May your life together be full of light, health and joy.’

  We drank to that and began on the zakuski. This was the second part of the ceremony. More toasts followed in quick succession, the guests outdoing one another in eloquence; the plates of zakuski emptied and were immediately replaced by even larger, fuller plates; and as the hours passed, the ritual repetition of good wishes gave the proceedings a faintly hypnotic air. Every now and then, the cry of gorko! – bitter! – went up, which is the signal for the bride and groom to kiss. Slava and Lucy blushingly complied, while the most ribald of the uncles timed them on his stopwatch. And whenever there was a lull in the proceedings, the female witness, a determined blonde called Ina, fulfilled John’s worst expectations by suggesting a toast ‘na brudershaft’, with linked arms.

  ‘Oh, Ina!’ everyone exclaimed, in the indulgent tone that meant she is a one. We looked on as they drained their champagne glasses. John, laughing nervously, attempted to hold her away from him by bracing his arm, but she seized him by the beard and kissed him all the same.

  ‘What a handsome man,’ said the elderly aunt sitting next to me. ‘If I was Ina’s age, I wouldn’t let him get away.’ She roared with laughter. ‘There were no men when I was her age, you see. After the war there were seven women to one man, lucky boys –’

  ‘Did you ever marry?’

  ‘Oh yes, I married just before the war. Vladimir was his name, poor man, Vladimir Aleksandrovich. He was killed at Smolensk. He hadn’t had much of a life … Still, I shouldn’t talk about that here. Thank God those days are over.’

  It was evening by this time; we’d been at the table for five hours at least, and Slava and Lucy were looking pale and overwhelmed. I sympathised; an age seemed to have passed since the morning. But the older generation showed no signs of slowing up.

  ‘Come on, Charlotte!’ the aunts suddenly announced. ‘Come with us! You know how to dance to this modern music.’

  Someone put on a tape of Showaddywaddy and we danced in the hall – me in the middle surrounded by middle-aged ladies. After a time we worked out a little routine which made them laugh so much that they had to hold onto their bosoms.

  ‘Don’t stop!’ one of them gasped. ‘I’m just getting started.’

  They quietened down a little after three in the morning, but when John and I left to catch the bus back to Voronezh, they were beginning again, as spruce and rosy-cheeked as ever. They had stamina, that generation, and they approached an event such as this one with determination, not with our lightweight, stay-as-long-as-we-feel-like-it attitude. Each wedding party is a victory celebration, in a way, and a reiteration of Kursk’s heroic survival in 1943. Each marriage is a triumph of spring, of immortality. It demands time and application.

  *

  Early in May, Mitya and I walked past the shop called Sport and saw shiny, fold-up bicycles being unpacked. Despite the fact that there was a constant shortage of bicycles and these were the first in the shop for months, central planning had decreed that they should be sold for about fifty cents, or the price of a pot of honey. So I became the owner of a bright green bicycle. And when Mitya took his bike down from its place strapped to the ceiling of his parents’ hall, we started making our own pilgrimages to the countryside.

  On Victory Day, a week or so after the wedding of Slava and Lucy, we pedalled out of town with a picnic in a rucksack. The streets were cleared of cars, and bunting was fluttering all the way along Revolution Prospect. Stalls selling vodka and buns had been set up at regular intervals along the pavement. Families were strolling down the centre of the Prospect hand in hand, wearing their best clothes; their little daughters had ribbons at both ends of their plaits. It was still early, but against the walls, the drunks were already lurching at one another and discussing impossible things. Later on we were going to a jazz concert and other festivities, but just for the afternoon, we were heading for the woods. It was a glittering, cloudless day and even in the centre of town the smell of the forest could occasionally be detected, a sharp and bosky scent that drew us through the suburbs and along the river to the birch trees.

  Our shashlyk were a makeshift affair. There’d been no time to marinade the meat, so we bought a small chicken and skewered it, whole, on a stick. The fire is meant to be carefully fostered in a metal drum of some kind, which we didn’t have; also the wood was wet. But Mitya remembered a can of lighter fluid in his bag which produced a leap of flame and foul-smelling black smoke. The chicken, drumsticks outstretched like a martyr, charred slowly in the fumes.

  ‘Now let’s have a drink,’ said Mitya, producing a bottle of vodka.

  ‘I thought you said you were going to buy beer.’

  ‘There was only the expensive beer. Anyway, vodka’s better. It’s a holiday today.’

  ‘But we talked about it. We said we weren’t going to drink vodka today, or not until this evening, anyway.’

  ‘Come on, we’re in the woods! It’s so beautiful! Don’t spoil it.’ Mitya handed me a glass of vodka. ‘The first toast is to us. Let’s drink to all our future picnics. To English picnics this summer,
maybe.’

  I drank the vodka. The less I felt like drinking spirits, the more Mitya insisted on his daily intake. It had got to the stage where he regularly drank so much that the next day he remembered nothing after nine in the evening: sitting in the hostel until one in the morning, walking home and going to bed were all expunged. Out there among the birch trees, I didn’t see the point of having a fight with him about it: our afternoon would only be ruined. But by the time I was back in Britain and trying to make sense of what had happened, it was moments like these that struck me as fatal.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Mitya. ‘You worry too much. It’s fine. Listen – I heard this Chinese fairy story on the radio, it’s so good.’ He lit a cigarette. ‘There was a man who lived in the mountains and when he was very young, he put on a pair of iron boots. And he never took them off. He wore them to walk all the way down to the river to collect water and to carry the water back up to his hut. He wore them to till his fields, he wore them to drive his animals to pasture and back again, he even wore them in bed. For twenty years he lived like this, until suddenly he took them off.’

  ‘And then?’

  Mitya blew smoke into the air and grinned. ‘He flew away! He took his iron boots off and just flew up into the air. Don’t you think the meat is cooked by now?’

  Against all the odds, the chicken was delicious; we ate it with bread and tomatoes – the first fresh tomatoes I’d tasted for months – and I couldn’t help feeling happy.

  In the late afternoon we biked back through the woods and parted when we arrived at the Central Market, me to go back to the hostel, Mitya to go home.

  ‘Meet you at seven outside the concert hall, all right?’

  ‘OK. Don’t drink too much tonight, though, will you? You turn into someone I don’t know.’

  He laughed. ‘Listen to her! You sound like a Russian woman. I won’t, I promise. Just enough.’

  *

  At quarter past seven, there was no sign of Mitya. People were streaming in to hear the jazz; they had dressed up and were chatting eagerly as they went in. Fifteen minutes more passed, and finally a figure appeared running across Lenin Square.

  ‘Sorry,’ he panted when he got to me. His eyes had the red-rimmed, blank look that meant he’d had at least a bottle. ‘Lapochka and I … we got held up.’

  Lapochka, Petya Pravda and a girl I didn’t know were walking behind, gesticulating energetically to each other in the way that very drunk people do.

  ‘After you went back to the hostel, Lapochka and I met up for a bit of a celebration,’ Mitya explained. ‘We just came to get you. The concert doesn’t start till seven forty-five. Come on –’

  We went to the back of the Opera building to a dingy yard. Four blokes were already there, sharing a couple of bottles of vodka.

  ‘Look,’ Mitya pointed at them. ‘It’s Victory Day. It would be disloyal not to get drunk.’

  The others arrived and produced some brandy. ‘No glasses. It’s straight from the neck.’

  We stood in this filthy yard, where a stray dog was picking about on a mound of rubbish, and drank the bottle. After a time my fury abated and instead tears rose to the backs of my eyes. Mitya put his arms around me.

  ‘Don’t worry, milaya,’ he said, ‘We’re just taking our iron boots off, don’t you see?’

  ‘Taking them off and … flying away!’ Petya Pravda repeated, giggling.

  We saw only part of the concert. Our arrival caused a small commotion; we had seats right at the front and the audience were united in their disgust at this shambling group who were arriving late and clearly the worse for wear.

  ‘It’s a disgrace!’ hissed the usherette, as she led us to our row.

  It didn’t help when Lapochka pointed out a remarkable similarity between the musicians’ appearances and their instruments. The tuba player was shiny and tubular; the pianist was straight-backed with black and white teeth. The boys were convulsed with laughter, and the people behind began to whisper furiously. After a while, Petya Pravda leaned across with a confidential air and said, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m thirsty.’

  ‘We need a beer to set us right. Let’s go.’

  It was dark outside. I sat on a bench while they bought beer from the kiosks outside the Spartacus cinema. Most of the women seemed to have gone home but there were still crowds of men milling about in the streets, drinking and spitting onto the pavement. Under the yellowish streetlights their faces were shiny and, it seemed to me, hostile. Music was blaring out from the kiosks.

  ‘You bastard, that’s mine!’ shouted someone from the park behind us. ‘Give it!’

  I turned around. Through the darkness I could just make out two figures struggling on the grass. Men were standing around and watching them fight.

  Mitya and Lapochka were laughing, looking over towards the classical facade of the cinema.

  ‘Where’s Petya gone?’

  ‘Over there,’ said Lapochka. ‘He wants to climb up to Spartacus.’

  ‘Let’s watch,’ shouted Mitya. ‘Come on!’

  It happened fast after that. Mitya and Lapochka staggered across the park and headed across the road to the cinema. As they reached the pavement a police van drew up and two policemen jumped out and slid open the doors.

  ‘Right, boys,’ I heard them say, ‘To the vytrezvitel with you.’ By the time I caught up, Mitya and Lapochka were in the van and the doors were closed.

  ‘Where are you taking them?’

  ‘To the lockup to sleep it off. They’ll be out in the morning. Go home, dyevushka. Your friends are bad news.’

  In the silence that the van left behind it, I sensed myself being noticed. A woman walking alone at this time of night could only be working. I began to thread my way through the crowd in the direction of the hostel.

  ‘Hey, dyevka, you on your own?’ asked a guy, putting his hand on my elbow.

  ‘No,’ I snapped and shook him off. He was too drunk to respond. On Revolution Prospect there was a fight going on outside one of the bars; I crossed over and a group of men gestured to me.

  ‘You coming to join us, beauty?’

  I walked on. The trolleybus stops were empty, which could only mean that the trolley buses had stopped running for the night. I stuck my thumb out for a taxi and almost immediately a car stopped beside me.

  ‘Where to?’ said the driver.

  ‘Just up Friedrich Engels Street.’

  He nodded, and it was only when I was already sitting down that I saw there was another man in the back.

  ‘How about a drink? Have a little one with us.’ The man lurched across and put an arm around me.

  ‘No, thank you,’ I replied coldly.

  ‘Oh. Cigarette, then?’

  ‘I don’t drink or smoke. I’m a Baptist,’ I added. ‘From Riga.’

  ‘Oh.’ He drew away. At the hostel they let me out politely. My pulse was still racing when I got back to our room.

  There, in my bed, lay Mitya. He was fully dressed, asleep and snoring. Over the other side of the room, Emily sat up and looked at me.

  ‘You’re back. I was worrying.’

  ‘When did he get here?’

  ‘Oh, ten minutes ago. I couldn’t get a word out of him. But someone said he was taken to the vytrezvitel in a van, then let out straight away. They didn’t keep him – I suppose tonight they didn’t have room.’

  A shiny purple bruise was appearing on his temple. It was quiet; Ira was sleeping in the third bed, breathing softly.

  ‘We have to ring and confirm our return tickets this week,’ Emily whispered.

  In two months we were going home. I squeezed into the bed beside Mitya, blinked at the ceiling and thought: flying away. Relief, like sleep, engulfed me.

  · 18 ·

  Peter Truth

  There’s no returning to the heart:

  The dead to the environs go

  Away from resurrected stone.

  Reducible to soil and snow

&nbs
p; They hem the town in hard as bone:

  The outer zones of Voronezh.

  Alan Sillitoe, Love in the

  Environs of Voronezh, 1968

  Petya Pravda’s dead. At the end of spring he died, as elongated and translucent as an icon. His mother found him in the morning and straight away set up a wail that brought in the neighbours: Pyotr! Petya! My little Petya! And they hurried in, old Kolya hitching up his belly, stinking of hangover, Anna Nikolaevna already back from the market, and Petya’s aunt Ludmilla, wrapped in her dressing gown with emerald eye-shadow on one eye.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d come running to this cry. More than once, Kolya had dashed off for the doctor, while Ludmilla tremblingly applied the first aid she learnt at the factory. Petya suddenly blinked, so pale it seemed the colour had left even his irises, with a ghastly crimson ring of Ludmilla’s lipstick smeared around his mouth. All the women started laughing and crying. Ludmilla wiped the lipstick off with a thumb. And Petya just lay there and, after a few moments, turned on his side and closed his eyes.

  This time, however, he stopped breathing during the night, and by morning there was nothing they could do. His mother, who was almost crippled by arthritis, was persuaded to rest. Kolya closed Petya’s eyes with fifty-kopeck pieces, and the women organised the funeral. By the time we saw him he was stretched out on the table and surrounded by crosses and incense. I thought how amused he would have been to be given an Orthodox sendoff – yet, in a way, it wasn’t inappropriate.

  Pyotr Pravda – Peter Truth. Part of the burden of life that Petya found repellent must have been his name – how to live up to such a name! The first Pyotr Pravda, his grandfather, a railway worker who fought in the civil war, had taken the surname as a new beginning in a brand-new world. There was a black-and-white photograph of him in their front room: a bony face with dark eyes, a medal-decked chest and the Soviet passport, touched up with red ink, poking out of his top pocket. Petya looked identical, although he had none of the pride that bristles from his grandfather’s portrait. His mother got him to hang it up not so long ago. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I only knew him when he came back from the camps, like a little old nut and grumpy as hell. May he rest in peace,’ she added.