His grandfather’s truth had aged by the time Petya inherited it. Not that it bothered him either way at first, of course. The fat little Petya of early photographs, wrapped up in six layers of artificial fur so he stood stiff as an overstuffed bear, holding the string of a toboggan and beaming as hard as his chubby, chilly face would allow – he was no child philosopher. The shadow that crept over him was particular to his experience – vodka in the courtyard at fifteen, military service and beatings by the tough guys, a two-room flat with an invalid mother and Friday evenings in small-town Russia, a pack of young boys bursting with energy and nowhere, nowhere for them to expend it. By the early nineties, the truth was a sensation-seeking little rag. No kind of word to have on your identity card.
*
At the beginning of the year Petya was at university with the rest of us. He was too thin, with a boyish, energetic manner, and he wore the same threadbare jacket summer and winter. He was not a diligent student; he and the Narcomen kept themselves amused without having to attend lectures. The exams, when the time came, were oral – no problem. I sat in on an exam of Petya’s, once. Mitya and I had been up all night with him and Lapochka when he decided that I must go with him as his talisman. It was the kind of joke he enjoyed.
Petya’s mother had a tendency to keep every bit of paper, including the doctor’s notes from the days when her illness was not so advanced. So the next day we arrived at the faculty together and presented the lecturer with a note stating that P. Pravda had arthritic cramps, and three days’ bed rest was essential.
The professor, Maria Mikhailovna, was a motherly figure well known for her susceptibility to young men, but even she raised her eyebrows a little as Petya assured her that he wouldn’t have missed this exam for the world: ‘To lose a chance to defend my Pushkin would set me back even further, Maria Mikhailovna. You understand me.’ He fixed her with his dark eyes. ‘But Charlotte has agreed to rub the area during the exam, if you don’t object.’ And I stood behind him with my hands poised ready on his shoulders.
‘Pushkin massages his words into place,’ Petya began, making me snort. He continued smoothly. ‘Even the clumsiest, most unmanageable Russian verb, stiff with prefixes and trailing an endless, glutinous reflexive agreement, is made to feel supple and extraordinarily powerful … because each of them occupies an unassailable position in Pushkin’s world, in the world of language, a world that is lucid and vivid, ordered and yet more spontaneous than our own – a world that, in fact, is more real than reality.’
Maria Mikhailovna smiled dreamily and marked him ‘excellent’.
*
The Narcomen rolled their joints on the photograph of old Pyotr Pravda and talked about their latest discoveries in music or literature. Yet they shared the conviction that brains were no good to them in their Russia. ‘What’s the point?’ they said to me. ‘To be successful, you either need connections, or you need to be a thug. You don’t need brains.’
This made me angry. ‘But how can you say so? Maybe under Brezhnev it was true, but now there is every opportunity! You can work, write, start a business, be free …’
‘Oh yes?’ The Horse glanced at me coolly. ‘For a moment drop your assumption that elections and a free press mean democracy, which is the solution to all social ills, and look. Free thought? I’ve had that all my life. Of course there was a shortage of books and tapes before, but we passed them around … we got hold of things. We had less, but we appreciated it more. Travel? It was in the old days that we could travel, spend the summer in Dubrovnik, sail on Lake Baikal, walk in Karelia. A ticket to Moscow cost 7 roubles then – now it’s 25,000. I couldn’t afford to go up to Moscow, let alone look for a job there, rent a flat for hundreds of dollars a month, buy a suit … Start a business? Just look at the kind of guys running businesses down here in Voronezh. Do you think it is a coincidence that they share the low and bulging brow, the arms too long for their bodies, the form of apes in their maroon jackets? The only businesses that succeed in this transitional period are rackets. And I’m not interested.’
‘It’s not just that you don’t need brains,’ Lapochka added. ‘It’s a disadvantage to have them. Look at the intelligent Russians: either they have left the country or they are starving.’
I felt chastened.
Soon after, Petya was deemed unsuitable to remain a university student. Professors other than Maria Mikhailovna showed signs of restlessness when Petya defended his exams. They wanted a display of linguistic developments pioneered by Pushkin, a knowledge of the social background that gave rise to Pushkin’s verse. The rest of the country might be going to pot, but within the concrete confines of the university, the old standards still prevailed. Students still took their classes in ideological enlightenment; the boys spent Mondays wriggling across patches of rough grass in camouflage while the girls learnt to assemble a Kalashnikov in fifteen seconds and administered first aid to mannequins of the Red Army. The collapse of the Soviet Union did not alter the truth behind Brezhnev’s ideology: Russia is great. Russia is powerful. To her greatness and her power every citizen must pay his homage and make his sacrifice, as our parents and grandparents did. Why, otherwise, did all the Soviet martyrs have to die? Anyway – look at this boy. He’s quite plainly a degenerate.
Petya sat before them with a fixed smile, and attempted to interest them in Buddhism. Nirvana, he suggested, was a civilised type of afterlife, a Communist type, even. Then he went out and got drunk, and had a fight with the doorman at the university buffet. He wasn’t taken to court but it was the end of his student days.
His mother wept and took it up with the bureaucrats, but it soon turned out she needed more that her invalid’s pension to get the decision overturned. So instead she exchanged her father’s medals for a wad of greasy roubles, counted out by an old friend of hers – an engineer now turned taxi driver and antique dealer – and booked Petya an appointment for an alcohol cure.
‘Hmmm, been having a few too many, have you?’ said the doctor cheerily. ‘Your Mama’s paid me in advance for the pleasure of fitting you with a capsule. You know how it works, don’t you? A classy little container of poison under the skin of your arm. It sits there all snug and not causing you a moment’s trouble, until you have a few grammes of alcohol. Partial dissolution of the casing follows, and yolki palki! you feel sick as a rabbit. Outcome: you stay off the stuff. How do you like the sound of that? You’ve got to be careful though, you can do yourself an injury if you go on a real binge.’
Petya sat on a chair looking faintly green. His head was pounding. He was desperate for a drink. ‘Listen, doctor.’ He raised his eyes. ‘This is going to do me no good. My system won’t take it. What do you say to splitting the cash and you get to keep the capsule?’
The doctor studied him for a minute, then measured his blood pressure. He checked Petya’s reflexes and shone a light in his ears. ‘Well …’ he said at last. ‘Sixty–forty, and you’re on.’
*
Petya slept a lot that winter, grew thinner and older. Once or twice Mitya and I stood outside his window and called ‘Petyuk!’ in a whisper and he appeared in his dressing gown. He sat down with us outside and lit up a ready-rolled joint, his eyes huge, almond-shaped and expressionless.
How is a man to live? In the old style, this was our subject as we sat in the yard under the gaze of his black eyes. And as the post-Soviet world grew increasingly grotesque, Petya decided that the only sincere way of life was in the mind. He became a zealot. ‘From henceforth I have decided to live by the seasons,’ he announced to us all. ‘In the summer – alcohol. In autumn, the new harvest of grass. In the winter, fireworks and speed. And in the spring, all damp and tender – the only thing for it is opium.’
‘Petya is a dualist, you understand,’ Lapochka said. ‘He sees that freedom lies in the spirit, not the body. Demands of the world – to earn a living, to get a degree, to covet and desire and envy, there’s no difference between them! – they are all temptations
that distract one from matters of the spirit. It’s not Petya that’s irresponsible. Quite the opposite – the irresponsible ones are those that devote their lives to their career and their family, at the expense of their soul.’
Petya saw my face and laughed. ‘Don’t listen to this antisocial nonsense!’ he said, and changed the subject. I never discovered if Lapochka was expressing Petya’s ideas, or his own.
*
Alcohol, of course, was always available. But it didn’t satisfy Petya. ‘In reality,’ he used to say, ‘I do not like these official intoxicants. They make you stupid and lustful.’
Autumn was a pleasant season. Cannabis was for sale all over the place, if Lapochka’s neighbours were out. But when the winter set in, with month after month of dark, cold days, Petya needed to go faster and further. Then he’d try the university research laboratories for amphetamines – he had an acquaintance there, a panda-eyed girl who’d help him out. It wasn’t such a smooth journey, though. A couple of times her supplies gave Petya’s mother a scare.
Finally, the thaw came, and with it heroin from Central Asia. In April, a group of us went out to a dacha one weekend. The breeze was exhilarating, life was stirring in the woods. The others hurried on, leaving Mitya and me to gaze at the birds wheeling above the trees. By the time we arrived they were all lying on the sofa and smiling beatifically, apart from Petya, who stood and looked them over.
‘All of this free market, it is just as stupid as our Soviet materialism …’ he began. ‘Now the people think that they were wrong all those years to believe in Communism, because it never gave them the glossy washing machines and American trainers that the free market has … But they don’t understand … Any philosophy which has as its highest aim a state in which everyone has washing machines, whether it achieves that by collective efforts or individual, is poor and mean.’
‘But what about your mother?’ I meant that she needed him.
‘My mother – she suffocates me with her preventative medicines, with her meals, her Eat up!, her obsession with the flesh when she is almost a cripple, she should recognise that it is not important … Everywhere it is the same. In the street shops, posters, people shoving each other to get the last tin of pork, beggars – why don’t they just die? They’d be happier. Even in the church it’s all money, money, gold icons, fat priests, and people hoping their loathsome flesh will be preserved for all eternity … it’s all disgusting.’ He grinned. ‘If only I were a religious man, how people would admire me.’
*
The Voronezh police didn’t think much of Petya’s theories. In fairness to them, they didn’t think much at all. They arrested him one drunken evening and took him to the lockup, where they advised him that such a carry-on was bad for his health. To push the point home they broke a couple of his ribs and gave his kidneys a good bruising. His mother blanched and put him to bed, but he couldn’t settle until he’d downed the Lily-of-the-Valley cologne he’d given her for International Women’s Day.
The ribs healed, leaving Petya breathless but apparently stronger than ever. He wore the same thin little jacket and trousers, out of which his bony, bruised arms and feet protruded; his skin turned waxy. He moved with jerky, horrible energy and he was always making plans. After Victory Day, when he tried to crown Spartacus with laurels, he disappeared for several days. Then he suddenly rang Lapochka at five in the morning and said, ‘Let’s go to Central Asia. In the summer. We’ll study the way of the dervishes.’
His aunt Ludmilla said, ‘He’s not long for us.’
With the warmer weather, according to the Horse, came an especially pure load of heroin. Petya had been warned, the Horse said, and Petya, more than anyone, knew the score. And the Horse shrugged.
The funeral was a pitiful affair. The photographs and paper rosettes that decorate Russian cemeteries give them a temporary, tattered look. The graves are inches apart; even in death Russians these days must be thrifty. Afterwards there was a wake back at the flat. We stood about feeling awkward until a few toasts were drunk – without clinking glasses, as is the custom when you drink to the dead. Slowly the atmosphere warmed up and the Narcomen, who had been looking forlorn, began to talk and gesticulate. Lapochka, while telling one of Petya’s stories, knocked old Pyotr Pravda’s photograph off the wall onto the samovar, breaking the glass, and his grimaces of apology made everyone laugh. We stayed till midnight, by which time the flat was a welter of plates, and tears, and jokes, and empty bottles.
Ludmilla kept an eye on Petya’s mother for the next few weeks and made sure she ate. Even the Narcomen visited a couple of times. By Orthodox custom, however, the soul remains in this world for forty days before departing for ever to the next. So, forty days after his death, we met to say goodbye to Petya Pravda.
It was a less emotional event than the funeral. The Horse was leaving for St Petersburg the week after – he was having an exhibition. Petya’s mother gave him paper and books that had been Petya’s and a scolding to dress warmly. I watched her bustle about the flat and wondered about her arthritis.
‘Yes,’ she said and for the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. ‘It is strange, but the flat has become so warm since … since. It used to be damp, the draughts gave me constant pain. You know, I am a crazy old woman, but I think it is my son looking after me.’
The photograph of old Pyotr Pravda was in its old place; without the glass, the resemblance to his grandson was even more marked. But after its steaming from the samovar, it was looking its age. The red of the passport had made a bloody wound down his chest. Around his head was a yellow–brown tea stain, and his dark eyes gazed out of this impromptu halo with a look of serene despair.
· 19 ·
Leaving
Let me go, return me, Voronezh:
you will drop or lose me,
you will let me fall or give me back.
Voronezh, you are a whim, Voronezh, you are a raven and a knife.
Osip Mandelstam,
The Voronezh Notebooks, 1936
‘Do you remember Smokey, Lapochka’s friend?’ Mitya asked. ‘He’s gone. He and a friend of his called Vlad went to the Ukraine last week, and from there they’re going to try and get a boat to Bulgaria without a visa.’
‘A summer holiday.’ We were sitting on the Voronezh beach – the sandbank at the edge of the reservoir – and eating slabs of vanilla ice cream. It was so hot I was only half listening, wondering whether to move into the shade.
‘Well, not exactly. From Bulgaria they think they can cross into Yugoslavia and fight as mercenaries for the Serbs.’
‘What? Do they have some idea about the unity of the Slavs?’
‘No.’
‘Why then?’
‘Why do you think? For the money.’ Mitya was silent for a minute, then he added, ‘And to get out of here, of course.’
Everyone seemed to be leaving. The Horse was going to paint in St Petersburg. Valya Uvarova was heading for the USA. Yuri, Emily’s boyfriend, Igor and Lyuba all had places to study abroad. Sasha, the guy in the hostel who’d been in the Afghan war, had been wearing tinted glasses for the past six weeks. He’d had laser surgery to cure his short sight: it was one of the conditions of joining the French Foreign Legion.
‘Seven years of service and then you get French citizenship,’ he explained.
‘Is it really worth it?’
‘Of course it’s worth it. In seven years I’ll be thirty-one.’ He grinned. ‘If I make it.’
Even Lapochka was preparing to get out. He had scraped together ten dollars and an envelope containing articles from the Voronezh Courrier that described him and the other Narcomen by name as degenerates. He was going to hitch to England with his ten dollars – he was sure he’d get there somehow – and demand asylum. The article proved that he was in danger in Voronezh from the growing influence of the ‘red–brown coalition’ – the old Communist and Nationalist parties whose bigotry brought them together. What were the odds that such
a plan would succeed? Yet a year and a half later I met Lapochka bicycling down Upper Street in Islington as though he’d lived there all his life.
*
Our last weeks in Voronezh were astonishingly, gloriously hot. The pavements were dusty and ice-cream sellers stood in the shade of the knobbly plane trees with their cans shaped like milk churns, mopping their foreheads and uttering faint enticements.
‘Creamy ices,’ they murmured as you passed. ‘Cool yourself … the healthiest, the purest.’
On the weekends the city emptied and even the weeks seemed to have a lackadaisical, gone-on-holiday slowness. Shop assistants propped open the doors and sat outside; they fanned themselves and almost forgot to terrorise their customers. Other strange phenomena occurred, which everyone ignored completely. One June morning I woke up to see the sun blazing in a turquoise sky and the air full of snowflakes.
‘Oh,’ Ira said, without even turning to see. ‘It’s pukh. When they planted all the poplar trees, they somehow got hold of the wrong sort, with seeds like this. So every June the Soviet Union is full of pukh. It gives people terrible asthma.’
The pukh, like cotton wool, settled in drifts, and small boys amused themselves by setting fire to it. Meanwhile on the corner of Friedrich Engels and Peace Prospect, a crater seven foot in diameter appeared overnight and was fenced off with a little piece of string. Since the thaw, roads had been caving in and flooding all over town wherever a pipe had burst. There were dozens of examples. On one occasion drivers waiting at a set of traffic lights suddenly found that their cars were standing in a foot of water. When they tried to drive away, their tyres seemed to have collapsed. They stepped out of their cars and screamed: the water was scalding hot. Their tyres had melted.
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