I dropped down earthworks into the redoubt of the fort. Here and there the ground rippled where a church or a barracks had stood. A few dead, recovered years later, lay in a common grave under a black cross. Otherwise nothing showed but bare earth. An icy wind was scything across the river. Inside the scarp, the earth walls still showed a trace of reinforcing stones. Their layers were the compacted history of Albazin. I probed them with frozen fingers. A queasy wonder overcame me. A foot beneath the surface a one-inch smear of ash wavered in a black artery, and grains of burnt wood fell out at my touch. Among them, where it had missed its mark over three centuries before, a tiny, corroded musket-ball trickled into my hands.
The house no longer matters to her. Its duckboards meander through derelict outbuildings to an earth closet and a smashed greenhouse. Two red stars over the gate, each bordered in black, commemorate two family members killed in the war. Agrippina Doroskova sits in a back room, writing. She is close to ninety. Beneath her cheekbones the flesh has caved fiercely in, and her mouth is thin and withheld. Yet until recently she walked half a mile every day through the snow to the Albazin museum which she started with her own funds: a collection of locally gathered weapons and fishing tackle, updated with gramophones, samovars and a Singer sewing-machine.
All day she labours at her four-volume history of Albazin. Her family is Old Siberian, seven generations back. She has finished writing the nineteenth century and is grappling with the twentieth. It is very hard. Because only after Lenin’s death, she believes, did the system go wrong. Her face has withered round two dark-rimmed eyes, which gleam out bird-like.
‘Even here, in the thirties, they arrested sixty people. Decent, ordinary folk. Tractor-machinists, and others. Some were my friends. But people informed on them to the secret police, and the police had to fulfil their quota.’
Yet she cannot bring herself to indict Stalin. The red stars on her gate commemorate her brother and sister, all she had, killed in the war Stalin won. Her fragility is deceptive. She has been a schoolteacher all her life, and wields a didactic energy. ‘Stalin may have been wrong sometimes, with all those arrests. But even those are exaggerated. I’ve read Solzhenitsyn and I’m not impressed. He could only write about what he knew, and that was limited. It gives him no authority to guess at numbers. Sixty million dead! Now the archives are opening, you’ll find the numbers are less, far less than he says….’
I frown at her, and don’t answer. I have not inhabited these horrors as she has. It is those who have inhabited them who may measure, mitigate, even excuse them. Twenty million dead, to Agrippina Doroskova, is far more forgivable than sixty million. To me both figures bulge towards the unimaginable. She pulls out yellowed heaps of manuscript. Her Stalin is still Lenin’s heir. All the Soviet history she is penning seems to her like a long, tragic falling-off from a pure Socialism which she cannot quite locate in time.
‘Until look what we’ve got now!’ A downward flicker of her hand consigns the government to oblivion. ‘I’ve already written it, about that Yeltsin. I’ve said everything I think.’
‘In Stalin’s day you’d have been shot.’
‘No! I spoke as I pleased then! And I wrote what I pleased! I always have!’ I look away from her. Has she already forgotten? ‘By 1938 the Soviet Union was cleaned up! Everything was all right! It may have been bad for some people, but for most it was fine. But who do we have to protect us now? Here in Siberia we’re rich in wood, in gold. And the Americans and British, they wish we weren’t here, so they could grab them. That’s what they want!’ She has forgotten, or never known, that I am British. Her eyes are angry. Her chin wavers forward. ‘In time our stupid young people will understand what I’m saying. In the West they’re building up weapons, while ours are declining. What we need is a new Revolution. But we’re afraid of the West invading. If we change politically, the Americans will send in an army and take power, and we’ll become slaves….’
I listen numbly. The span of her experience is so far outside mine, her language of power and slavery too strange. I recoil from her, from the whole world which haunts her. I feel glad she is so old, so past. And a little ashamed of my gladness. I notice how incongruous her hands are: hands that had belonged to an earlier, bigger woman, and been left behind on her lap.
‘But our people always overcome hardship!’ Her voice is edged with hysteria. ‘Russia will be victorious! Simple people will take power into their hands anyway. Russia dies, then rises again!’
Leaning from my train window in the early morning, I saw a different country. All night we had pushed east towards Khabarovsk and the ocean, and now the forest had receded, and level snow-fields gleamed to the horizon. The whitewashed cottages of early Ukrainian settlers dissolved into this starker whiteness, and isolated larches made a frosty beauty in the sun, and the pines were silvered Christmas trees.
Beneath my berth the cubicle was humming with exercise. Six times a minute the sweaty deltoids of the man below emerged level with my head as he grunted through his pull-ups on the bunk-rail, and the burly youth opposite sat up and was rotating his shoulder-blades. Everybody seemed to be in training. Their pectorals quivered under T-shirts inscribed ‘Top Fit’ and ‘Bulls’. A team of athletes, I thought–or perhaps a circus troupe–had boarded the train in the night.
Then I climbed down, and the fantasy dissolved. The man whom I’d imagined a shot-putter turned out to be an engineer on his way to Belogorsk, and the youth with the shoulder-blades was attending technical college. The lanky fellow in the bunk below (I’d made him a marathon runner) was out of work, and the nymphet who looked like a gymnast was the daughter of the man who wasn’t a shot-putter.
Around noon they got off at different stations, leaving behind a whiff of illusory prowess, and my carriage filled up with others. The farther east we went, the more packed and boisterous it grew. A crowd of youths roamed the passages to argue, show off, pry, flirt; and gangs of shaven-headed sailors were drinking their way to the Pacific. In my cubicle three Moldovan gypsies–fierce-looking teetotallers–were doing undiscoverable business between Belgium, Turkey and Vladivostok, and a full-skirted Old Believer was commuting between her fourteen children. Threading their way through the carriage, a pair of drunks preyed on all the rest. Their eyes tried to meet ours, build a moment’s camaraderie, then they wheedled for cigarettes. Two railway police marched down the corridors and took one away.
What had he done? Nobody knew.
Beside me a young Tajik chemist, seeking work in the Russian Far East, asked me questions with delicate insistence. His eyes shone out of fine-boned darkness. He seemed gently troubled by me. Why was I alone, he asked? Wasn’t I afraid? Why did I learn Russian when English was the language of the future? Siberia was meaningless, wasn’t it? Why did I go to places whose history was over? Why…?
Only a madwoman stopped him. She wedged herself between us, ranting. She had the desolating thinness of the self-tortured, with beautiful, web-frail hands. But her language was angry gibberish. With her cropped hair and knee-length cardigan, she looked as if she had just escaped an institution.
The man opposite us, a balding giant, pushed her in the ribs and shouted at her: ‘I don’t understand your lingo. So I’ll tell you in Russian, fuck off!’
Then her exhausted face fell silent, as if she’d found the peace she wanted. She went slack against my shoulder.
The giant was an old-style nationalist. He went on to deride the government in bursts of virulent sarcasm which rang through the carriage eliciting gales of laughter and concord. Even old people, to whom such words had once imported death or prison, roused themselves to smile or argue, and our carriage became a chaotic parliament. ‘Remember my words.’ The giant had already singled me out. ‘The Soviet Union will come back! It will coalesce again. Everything will be better only when that happens. And it will! The people want it. Zhirinovsky’s the man. What do people think of him in the West? Are they afraid?’
He wanted me to sa
y the West was afraid. He wanted fear, as Stalin had been feared.
But the buffoonish reactionary Zhirinovsky touched me only with distant apprehension. I said: ‘In the West we think Zhirinovsky’s a joke.’
He was silent a second. Then: ‘So Yeltsin’s your man? But his crew have just evolved out of the taiga!’ He dragged his fingernails over his chest. ‘Apes!’ A ripple of laughter went up. ‘They’re all agents of America! Puppets of the CIA! They’re all in league. When the time comes, we’ll kick them over the border, since they love the West so much, and leave Russia to the proper Russians. The people want reunion…’
‘How do you know what the people want?’ I was getting sick of this.
He wagged his passport at me, fixing me with small, lashless eyes which were not stupid. ‘I’ve travelled all over the Soviet Union, that’s how I know.’ I wondered vaguely what his job was. ‘If you go to Tajikstan or the Ukraine or anywhere from the old Union, they say: How are things with you? How are things? They all feel like brothers who’ve been split apart. Borders should be demolished! The people don’t want them.’
I said: ‘Some people do. Badly.’ I appealed to the Tajik. ‘Don’t you?’
But he only looked sweetly astringent, and the giant barged in: ‘They’ve had war there. In the old days they never had a war….’
On the bunk above him, oblivious, a small Uzbek girl was cradling a cosmetics case. Methodically she was ringing her eyes and thickening her eyelashes with kohl, and her frown of concentration drew them together.
But the giant was in full spate now, gripped by an incontinent patriotism that could not believe itself unloved. ‘We don’t want to live like you in the West. We don’t want a world where everybody’s just for himself, where a man says: This is my house, that is your house! Your car, my car! We’re a people who share and who open our doors. We’re close, we’re brothers!’
Everybody nodded at this, especially a drunk slouched opposite. They were staring at me for a reply; but I only found myself muttering ‘Fine…that’s fine….’ I was trapped in his sentimentalist’s Russia. I denied it at my peril. All down the corridor it had turned smiling to listen: housewives, sailors, the old, the unemployed. Only the madwoman stirred and spat.
The man rushed on: ‘Our people have always been together! Russia! The Baltic! Central Asia! Georgia!’ With each name he hacked the air in a karate-chop. ‘All through the Great Patriotic War! We fought side by side. We were brothers!’
I said dourly: ‘You think they wanted your Union?’
But at once I saw myself in the passengers’ eyes, and regretted it. They found the West shoddily triumphant now, and I, perhaps, its emissary. And their pride, their last pride, lay in the war. So I blundered out the West’s debt to them, afraid that only half of them were listening. Their expressions softened, but I had only made confusion. The Tajik patted my knee.
Above us, her hair glossily pleated and ribboned and her eyes wide with kohl, the Uzbek girl was gazing at herself in a mirror, and secretly smiled. Outside the snow was falling like some universal blessing or accident, laying the land to sleep.
I clambered out into a quiet station. All around Birobidzhan the marshy plains were smoothed to snow-fields and sheet-ice under wooded hills. I glanced up through drifting flakes under the station gateway, to see the town’s name inscribed there in Hebrew.
But I emerged into a conventional Siberian settlement, into the muted classicism of buff and pale green apartment blocks, a drift of cottages and prefabricated suburbs. Ice and snow were heaped along the pavements, and choked the gutters. Nothing reaffirmed the promise of those hallucinatory Hebrew letters that here, in this land of persecuted and sheltering minorities, there had grown the bizarre dream of a Jewish homeland.
What happened was grotesque. The pogroms and chaos of the Civil War, and the breakup of the Pale that had confined most of Russia’s Jews since the time of Catherine the Great, created a ‘Jewish problem’ in the 1920s, which eluded quick solution. It was a time when subject peoples of the Soviet Union were being graced with nominal autonomy, the first step on their ascent towards a perfect, unifying Communism. Both Ukraine and the Crimea were mooted as suitable Jewish homelands, but their local people resisted. So in 1928 the Jews were allocated this wilderness along the borders of China. Larger than Palestine, it was conceived as a propaganda counter-blow to Zionism. It would attract Jewish finance from the West, while populating the Soviet East against Japanese expansion. Above all, it would instate the jobless or unskilled Jews of European Russia as farmers in a conventional Soviet cast, insulated from their Orthodox elders, building the Socialist future.
But the promises of a rich and waiting land drew only a trickle of settlers. Religious and integrated Jews alike distrusted it. Ilya Ehrenburg openly castigated it as another ghetto. In its first ten years 43,000 settlers arrived, including idealistic groups from America, Europe, the Argentine, even Palestine. They found a derelict land of mosquito-plagued marsh, wild forest and mud tracks. Often nothing was prepared for them: no implements, no barns, no livestock. Many immigrants were urban artisans with no experience of planting crops or draining soil. Their scant loans and allowances soon gave out. More than half of them returned, or took up their old occupations in Siberian cities, where Jews had been prospering for a century.
But little by little those who persisted founded a city. In 1934 their province became the Jewish Autonomous Region of Birobidzhan, and the thrust for agriculture was being redirected into industry. By now the population was overwhelmingly Russian–Jews numbered 23 per cent–but textile factories grew up, furniture artels, Jewish newspapers and schools. It was a hesitant beginning.
Yet I wandered a town of Slavic quiet. I saw no more signs in Hebrew, heard no Yiddish. In the museum its post-war Jewish history faded away. The receptionist in my hotel–standing on Sholom Aleichem Street–said there were no Jews left. I wore myself out trudging the suburbs. Half their alleys dribbled into scrubland where the hills stood grim and withdrawn, splashed with leafless forest. Only outside the concert hall a sculptured musical clef was shaped like a Jewish menorah; but its neon lights were broken and the ensemble inside was billed to play ‘Far East Russian style’.
Now here seemed farther from that other promised land. The market was monopolised by Chinese traders arrived across the border near Khabarovsk. Walking between their stalls of track-suits and sequined cardigans, I understood why the Russians feared them. They were watchful and needle-hard. They lived on nearly nothing, crammed noodles into their mouths where they worked, camped all together in cheap tenements. They spoke a harsh, slurred Mandarin. Their Russian competitors, by contrast, were comfortable and slow. I searched in vain among them for a Jewish face. Even the older street facades showed no trace of the early immigrants. That vision had died away into the ice, the concrete, the unsanctified spaces.
After 1936, in the purges which swept the whole Soviet Union, the leaders of Birobidzhan and the committees supporting it were liquidated. The post-war years saw a fleeting revival, after 10,000 Jews arrived from the ravaged Ukraine, but persecutions let loose in 1948 dashed the region’s hopes for ever. One by one its leading figures disappeared, accused of obscure conspiracies. All Jewish institutes, schools, theatre, newspapers closed down. The only Jews who reached the region now were penal exiles, and only Stalin’s death prevented it from becoming a zone of mass deportation, even mass murder.
The province had run on Leninist principles, of course, not on religious ones–the first settlers held their prayer-meetings in secret–and its tentative synagogue had burnt down in 1956. Afterwards, with no rabbi, the depleted faithful rented a little house where on the Sabbath they might raise a quorum. By 1990, during emigration to Israel and America, the Jews dwindled to fewer than 10,000, just 6 per cent of the inhabitants, and Yiddish vanished from the streets. I did not know what had happened since. Perhaps they had been subsumed in the Slavic majority. Perhaps they had all gone.
But next morning, on a nondescript street, somebody directed me to a painted cottage where chrysanthemums were poking through the snow. I peered inside. The shutters were drawn back from a flood of winter light. A pretty girl brushed past me in woollen stockings and ankle-length skirts. Inside, all the walls and benches were painted mud-brown in the Russian way, but the tables were heaped with Hebrew prayer-books. On the lectern a Torah lay open. Cupboards were piled with scrolls wrapped in crimson velvet, and the walls shone with mementoes: a framed photograph of Jerusalem, a map of Israel whose boundaries enclosed the Palestinian West Bank, pennants carrying the Star of David, the Lion of Judah.
In an alcove a small, bent man was trying to comfort a weeping woman. Some spinal deformity had stooped him forward from the waist, but in the white dust of his hair and beard a steep forehead and tranquil eyes lent him dual authority. As I sat at a bench the woman detached herself and he limped over to me. ‘Who are you?’ He wore blue dungarees and built-up shoes.
‘I was looking for the rabbi here.’
‘There’s no rabbi here. I’m just a caretaker.’ His voice was high, courteously inflected. He sat beside me. ‘For years there’s been no rabbi.’
‘But this is your synagogue?’ It appeared domestically simple.
‘It’s scarcely a synagogue, just a prayer-house.’ He was staring hard at me. ‘We don’t have ten men to form a quorum now.’
I looked for his sadness, but found none. ‘Then you can’t hold services?’
In Siberia Page 24