‘In the towns half the factories have broken down,’ she said, ‘yet the workers somehow find jobs. But here the collective farm is destroyed, and there’s nothing. The people who worked for it have left, and the bosses just dismantled it and took everything for themselves. Almost all the cattle have been sold off, so it’s hard even to get butter. There’s only chaos.’
I asked: ‘Why? Why?’ but there was no simple answer.
‘I don’t know why. Who knows? We need money for machinery–half the tractors are laid off–and the farm leader stole all the petrol.’ She turned her childlike stare on me. It was a look I was to see often: the bewilderment of a people betrayed, whose certainties had turned to mist. ‘In England, if you’re a couple, how much land do they give you?…Really?…Then if you’ve so little land, why are your lives better than ours?’ After a while, after my inability to explain, her wonder became a helpless threnody: ‘We used to have fine corn growing here, but now there’s nothing. There used to be flax and hemp, but they’re gone. It was full of vegetables and fruit before, but now you don’t see a thing.’ She hitched her skirts from her smooth, blotched legs. ‘If it wasn’t for these I could work. Now nobody works. My husband used to get up at four o’clock in summer, and came back after dark.’
‘In Brezhnev’s time?’
‘Long ago. He died at forty-seven, I don’t know why. He just fell asleep and didn’t wake up.’
The past was closing in on her. She had stuck her family photographs in albums at first, out of sight. Then one day it was not enough simply to leaf through them, as if visiting. She wanted them with her, always. So she tore them out and framed them along the shelf of the living-room, above the chest-of-drawers and the bed. She wobbled to her feet. ‘When there’s nobody here, and life gets heavy, then I look at them.’
It was a gallery of the young–hopeful parents, blond children–but they looked far away. I asked dutifully: ‘How many children do you have?’
‘Four. But three of them are dead.’ A white cowlick had loosed from under her headscarf and was knocking on her forehead. She looked like an ancient girl. ‘I had a daughter who fell ill and died at six months. And my eldest son–that’s him, with his car and wife–he died four years ago, only forty-four, from a blood-clot in the head. He came to repair their new apartment in Tobolsk, and had been lying there a week before they found him.’
Only one son had survived. Yet Anfissa’s grandchildren proliferated along the wall in a parade of cheekiness and summer dresses. Her eyes flickered over them and came to rest on a yellowing photograph at the end. ‘That’s my youngest son.’ A saturnine youth leaned towards the camera, unsmiling. ‘He was sixteen. He killed himself on a motor cycle.’ Her tone of routine melancholy sharpened into living pain. ‘He had such a future.’ His snapshot stood separate from the rest, enshrined. Her fingers trembled when she pointed at it. Above it she had plastered a saccharine print of the Virgin, and beneath it stood an icon, sooted by candle-flame, of the Mother of God cradling her Son.
‘There,’ she said, ‘there.’ It was the sound a mother makes as she soothes her child to sleep.
I went out into the night, brushing through the cow-parsley, and by the time I returned she had lit a candle beneath the icon and was contemplating her gallery again. I wondered why it comforted her to watch them: this regiment riddled by death. Perhaps in her mind the living and the dead occupied the same remote hemisphere, because none of them ever came to see her, she said, they were all too far away. Or perhaps she slipped back mechanically into the time before tragedy, when her husband had worked a combine harvester all day, and there was flax in the fields, and children.
Before bed I wondered whether to pull the divan into the kitchen and sleep there. But she only said: ‘It’s up to you. I’m an old woman. Nobody will talk.’ She laughed gruffly. ‘That’s all finished.’
Her bed stood under a garish wall-carpet, and for a moment, before I switched the light off, her stout body under its striped sheet lay framed in Persian glamour. Soon in the darkness her candle flickered and died under the Virgin and her sullen son, and only the lace curtains hung faint patterns of light in the windows. Anfissa’s talk came quiet and disembodied in the dark. ‘You have a mother? How old is she?…So she’s older than me…Does she look older?’ An obscure vanity was surfacing.
I lied. ‘Yes, of course.’
Silence. Then: ‘Your flat in London, is it made of wood?…And do you have cattle or pigs?…Ah…ah…’A clock rustled on the wall above my divan. Time became audible. ‘But you have no children. How can that be? Think how quickly they die!’ She stirred and groaned. ‘In England, do you have a war now or not?…No? There’s always war in this land. And you, travelling here alone, aren’t you afraid? It’s become terrible in the towns. People are taking to killing now. In Tobolsk too. Last week a mafia boss was pulled from his car and murdered. I heard it on the radio. It’s bad for you to go, very bad. You ought to be afraid…’
Her voice sank in sleepy misgiving. In her experience, men died young. Her sentences shrank to disconnected words–Alone…mafia…’–until the patterns in her curtains grew dim above my head, and she fell silent, or I ceased to hear.
At the bus-stop beside the Tobolsk road two drunks, who had dogged me out of the village, closed in to beg with whines and threats, and prodded at my rucksack. Nobody knew when a bus might come. As they became more menacing I grew more angry, and they retired to mutter plans in a nearby field. An hour went by. Then, close beside me, I heard a familiar, caressing voice and turned round to see Viktor, tousled and weak-eyed, clambering towards me up the roadside embankment. ‘It’s early…you’re leaving early.’
I sat in the dust while the beggars circled round me, sensing competition, and beside me Viktor’s gaze flickered up and down the road, his voice a corrupting whisper: ‘Pay me. Just a little…pay me…’
But roubles, I knew, would liquefy down his throat. I had already left money for Anfissa, and she had held the note in front of her a long time in astonishment–fifteen dollars was a third of her monthly pension–then turned away to wash something already clean in her sink, murmuring: ‘It’s a great deal. I did not expect it.’
Now Viktor handed me a useless Soviet coin. ‘For your journey. Take it…’ and the bolder of the drunks slunk to my other side and passed me a gold disc. I examined it sceptically. It turned out to be a Soviet maternity medal, awarded to women who had borne five children. But the man was not laughing. He said: ‘What will you give me? What?’ Viktor was pressing me on the other side. ‘I’m ill,’ he breathed.
I said: ‘Go to a hospital.’
‘A hospital can’t cure my illness.’
‘I know.’
He tried to encircle me, excluding the other men. ‘Vodka is our medicine now.’
‘I don’t have any.’
‘Then pay me….’
Each of us could hear the others, yet everything transpired in whispers. ‘Just a little…What? What?…Pay me….’
Then, far away down the cratered road, a ramshackle bus materialised, making for Tobolsk. As I climbed in, Viktor’s face slithered into smiles, without resentment. ‘Remember me’–his stage whisper stroked my ear–‘your Rasputin.’
‘I will.’
The road cut through a slushy, formless land–the raw material of creation–easing into pasture where the hay was rolled up like bedding and tributaries of the Tobol river turned figures-of-eight through the loamy soil. A band of forest crossed every horizon and sometimes shadowed the road with an evergreen dark, in which a few silver birches glimmered. From time to time we stopped for passengers to smoke–they crouched by the roadside, puffing with knit brows; and twice we passed road-blocks where the police were disembowelling lorries. ‘Drug searches,’ said a man. ‘We never had that before.’
Three hours later we were wending through a labyrinth of wooden houses and decayed stone churches. On the heights above, behind the walls of a kremlin, the sle
ek white bodies of cathedral and bell-tower floated under their domes. Almost from the start of Russia’s sixteenth-century invasion, until 1824, Tobolsk was the capital of Siberia. Near this site, in 1582, the Tartar centre of Sibir had been sacked by a band of Cossacks who muscled their boats over the Urals and inaugurated the conquest of the whole subcontinent.
The Cossacks’ leader Yermak has endured in legend as a primitive paragon. A former river-pirate, he invaded at the instigation of the powerful Stroganov merchant dynasty, to push their fortunes east. Because he and his Cossacks were free men, he was later hailed by Communist propaganda as a hero of the people, who liberated lesser tribes from the Tartar yoke. In fact, Yermak was a brutal mercenary, and his Cossacks a medley of freebooters, itinerant labourers and criminals, and they went with imperial backing. During three years of warfare, with fewer than a thousand men, he shattered the Tartar khanate whose warriors–a remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde–were the most redoubtable barrier to Russian expansion. At the height of his success, Ivan the Terrible rewarded him with an elaborate suit of armour embossed with the imperial arms. But little by little the dispossessed khan Kuchum wore the Cossacks down. While bivouacked one night on a storm-swept island in the Irtysh river, they were surprised and butchered almost to a man. Yermak, it is said, hacked his way to the river-bank and plunged into the current, but the weight of his imperial armour pulled him under.
Instantly his legend spread. The Tartars said they recovered his body from the water, and that his uncorrupted flesh worked miracles. Above his riverside grave sprang up a column of unearthly fire, and every midwinter an arm in golden mail reared like Excalibur above the water where he had drowned. Around the fugitive campfires of Siberia, ballads and folk-tales nourished and distorted him into a Slavic Parsifal or Robin Hood. The Church beatified him.
The Tartar khan Kuchum, a grander figure, continued to harry the Russians from his exile, although almost all his family had been captured or killed. He rejected the soft amnesties which the czars held out to him. He wanted his kingdom back. Still defiant in his blind old age, he was murdered by hostile tribesmen, but like Yermak he entered his people’s heart, so that a century later revolts were still sparked in his name.
The Russians’ advance eastward grew remorseless. They set out across the continent as other nations embarked over the ocean, and just as spices or silver tempted European empires into being, so Russian Siberia was the creation of the sable. A few pelts from this glossy tree-marten could make a man’s fortune. Their revenue poured into the czar’s hands. The invading Cossacks exacted an imperial fur-tribute from natives crushed by their firearms, and spread like a disease along the rivers, spiking their passage with log forts. No sooner was the sable hunted out in one region than the Russians advanced on another. In time-dishonoured imperial fashion, they exploited the tribes’ disunity, and within sixty years of Yermak’s death they had pushed clear across Asia and reached the Pacific.
Tobolsk was the springboard for this conquest. Its lower town is still restless with Tartars. The shells of great churches haunt the wooden streets. Their naves are littered with cattle-dung and broken farm machinery. From here the walls of the kremlin on its hill rear into view, while above them the cathedral domes bulge like overripe vegetables. From below, the cliff rampart looms over 100 feet and seems impossible to breach. Nothing shows but crenellated walls. Then as you draw closer a deep, man-made cutting opens in the hill, hewn out three hundred years ago by Swedish prisoners of war. You climb through concealing trees. From the battlements jut square and round towers topped off by candle-snuffer turrets and flying iron flags. You pass under a heavy arch, pierced with the bolts of vanished gates, and creep cat-like along a sunken way. Above you there surge blue and spinach-green domes dusted with gold stars, whose lanterns bloom into a swarm of secondary cupolas and filigreed crosses. Nothing sounds but the scrape and clink of desultory repairs in the kremlin courtyard where they rise. A light rain starts to fall. You enter the court over rank grass: the heart of old Siberia, spacious and derelict. The seventeenth-century cathedral inherits the first bishopric in Siberia, founded in 1621. There is an episcopal palace and an old merchants’ emporium. An enormous bell-tower hovers nearby. Everything is plastered white.
Stubbornly, insidiously, the past is returning. Tobolsk is the seat of an archbishopric again. Students from the reopened seminary walk in their dark jackets along the overgrown paths. But when asked if they want to revert to a theocracy, or install a constitutional czar, they look indifferent. And their priest points to a small tower where the first exile to Siberia was hung. This was not a man, but a 700-pound bell from Uglich, which rang an insurrectionary alarm on the murder of the imperial heir in 1581. The usurper Boris Godunov had the bell publicly flogged and its tongue ripped out, and ordered the citizens of Uglich to drag it over the Urals to Tobolsk, where it was forbidden to ring. The czars were full of madness, says the priest.
Tobolsk eased out of history. First the great overland Trakt road, then the Trans-Siberian Railway, bypassed it to the south. As you walk along the battlements the town heaves below you in a sea of mansions, soft with birch trees and its own decay. Its colours are gentle and dim: dark with weathered wood and rust, streets silenced by rain, a glint of gold where churches are resurrecting.
But it is not a healthy town to live in, says the priest: the flooded river erodes everything, and half the old houses are abandoned. The past is rotting away. You cannot live in it.
2
Heart Failure
Six hundred miles north of Tobolsk, as the twin-engine Antonov crossed the Arctic Circle, the land transformed. The forest had gone, and in its place glimmered a treeless tundra whose earth was a silvery maze of lichen and fungi. No road or railway crossed it. For thousands of square miles the wilderness shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams, as if the whole continent had flattened to sponge, where the rivers wound fantastically upon one another, and splintered ten or twenty ways.
Yet a few feet underground the soil was set iron-hard in ice. For eight months of the year the snow seals it. Then out of the permafrost in spring evaporating water oozes to the surface, and these strange, transitory lakes and streams return. The rhythmic upheaval of the soil–its seasonal swelling and shrinking–deposits boulders and stones in mysterious, concentric rings, as if some pedantic intelligence were at work, and carves out circular pools. Yet the region is almost uninhabitable. It spreads like a protoplasm where nature is still forming, or has already disintegrated. To the west the Urals lift in naked stone.
A low, continuous judder in the aeroplane kept me on edge (this, after all, was Aeroflot, and we had only two propellers). An air hostess handed out bowls of fizzy water and some stale sweets. In the seat beside me a woman was plaiting her daughter’s hair. Suddenly below us, out of the tundra, shot up smokestacks and a black detritus of factories and ruins. It came like a physical shock: Vorkuta. For years the name had sounded a death-knell. Coal was discovered here in the early twenties, and by 1934 the mines were sucking down an army of innocent convicts. Soon the place became an evil jewel in the Gulag crown. The numbers of dead ran into hundreds of thousands. Forty thousand alone died constructing the railway west. The last victims were released, sickly and redundant, only in 1959.
North of Vorkuta a loop-road still links its thirty mines, but only eleven pits are still working. That evening I roamed the town in fascinated unease. Its apartment blocks and offices were decomposing untouched, their walls dripping plaster, half the windows smashed. A river lisped over slag. I passed factories ringed with barbed-wire and searchlights, as if this were the only architecture anyone could remember, and every other street dribbled into a tundra hung with skeletal shutes and pit-wheels.
Here the only superfluity is coal. It lies in heaps along the roads, and litters every compound. The streets are laid on coal-dust. When it rains, the puddles shine black. It hazes the air and it worms under your fingernails. Eventually, it eats your lu
ngs.
The cars make a wandering trickle between the pot-holes on Lenin Street. Cloth cap in fist, his statue still looks across Lenin Square at the Miners’ Palace of Culture. The pool in front is awash with vodka bottles. Everywhere on ministerial facades the carved insignia survive: red stars and crossed hammers, torches and banner-dripping spears. Along the rooftops leftover slogans set up an archaic clamour. ‘To the masses of Vorkuta!’ ‘The Miners are the Guardians of Labour!’ There is no will either to remove or to replenish them. One by one their letters are dropping off.
I came upon some barracks built for convict miners which no one had bothered to demolish. The weed-sown earth crept half-way up their wooden walls, and the aisles where their bunks had been were filled with rubble. Sometimes the prisoners were packed so closely that they could barely turn in their sleep. At the end of each barracks the life-saving stoves had collapsed in cascades of brick, and garbled English graffiti spattered the walls from a later age. ‘Lucky Streik’, ‘Kiss my Ais….’
A young girl stands in Lenin Square. It is almost deserted. She looks about fifteen, but her black skirt barely descends below her hips, and her stockings stop half-way up her bruised thighs. How many days a year in Vorkuta can she dress like this? She appears pathetically tired and young; perhaps it is her first time. Jobs are hard in Vorkuta. But the palm of one hand is pressed against her cheek, as if to deny her presence here. Then a middle-aged man strolls up and says something. Haltingly, she follows him along the pavement. Her fingers keep slipping behind to pull down her skirt, to no avail. The man hails a car beneath the statue of Lenin, and she climbs tentatively in. By now her hand covers half her face.
In Siberia Page 4