After Love (8 page)

If he came I could show him the remains of the Scythian boat which we had dug up the previous season. It had been buried in three layers of sand and clay and had taken us a week to get out.

Had I fallen in love again? Had I started to miss him? Of course, Vasu was in love, desperately. He would have dropped whatever he was doing and come to me.

There were five of us in my team, two men and three women. I would have preferred more men. It was easy to work with them, especially when you knew, as I certainly did, how to deal with their hungry looks and unwelcome advances. Boris Ivanovich Gryzlov, a linguist, was our leader. Vasu would surely enjoy discussing Sanskrit hymns and Hindu gods with him. Nikolai Nikolaivich Kravchenko, the second in command, supervised the diggings. The women in the team called him ‘Boris Godunov, the Usurper'. He and Maria Shulskaya, the surveyor, ruled jointly over us. Maria, from Leningrad, was so enormous it was hard to imagine that she had flown fighter planes during the War.

My special friend was Tetya Shura, born in a Cossack village not far from Rostov-on-Don. Her grandmother had died of hunger in Stalin's famine and so her father had been brought up in an orphanage. Her grandfather joined the Red Cavalry of Budenov and was killed in a battle near Kiev, but not before he named his son
Revolyutsiya
(Revolution).

Tetya Shura was an expert on ancient pottery and knew the provenance of most of what was found in the region. She could date it merely by looking at its colour, glaze and ornamentation.

Each morning Kravchenko chaired a meeting to discuss the tasks for the day and plan the work schedule. Often a group of volunteers from the
kolkhoz
school or the technical college in Poltava joined our party.

Our work had so far revealed remnants of a town spread across the valley lying between the River Vorskla in the east and a dry creek which ran to the west before merging with the Vorskla a few kilometres south-east of Bel'sk.

The remains of three fortifications and a system of walls and moats had been exposed and mapped. The eastern fortification, we had concluded, had stood on a river terrace rising a hundred metres above the river valley. The northern fortification guarded the port. Boats from the eighth-century Greek colony of Olbia, in the delta of the River Bug on the northern coast of the Black Sea, would have sailed along this river. The Greeks would have traded wine, textiles and fresh olive oil for grain, cattle, hides, furs, timber, wax and honey. The rivers beyond Gelon weren't big enough to carry large boats, so barges would have been used to carry goods and people to the north and east.

I was asked to join the team because they needed someone who knew how to describe and map both ancient and present-day landforms. My job was almost done. I had finished a map which I would have loved to show to Vasu because he understood patterns of ancient settlements better than I did. On it I had plotted the locations of the ancient Scythian settlements along the banks of streams criss-crossing the steppes between the River Dneiper in the west and the River Don in the east. Gelon was one of the biggest centres where the otherwise nomadic Scythians had decided to settle down. A complicated system of moats and walls was still visible in aerial photos although the fertile
chernozem
fields with their black topsoil rich in humus had been ploughed and planted for centuries. I used pairs of aerial photos to give me a three-dimensional view of the ancient kurgans we planned to dig. Unfortunately a large number seemed to have been disturbed, opened and robbed.

Three weeks after my arrival at the site Papa called to tell me that Vasu had been trying to contact me. He was surprised that I hadn't let him know about going to Poltava. I told Papa that Vasu should come round and be available when I called the following week. He sounded terrible on the phone, wheezing and coughing. But he was following my advice, going swimming and taking saunas, which meant he felt much better. I didn't even ask if he wanted to come to the dig. He already knew how much I wanted to see him.

Three days later he arrived, I met him at Poltava Station. I was delighted to see him; he looked and sounded much happier.

‘I am blessed,' he wouldn't stop whispering, which I found embarrassing. He is in love with being in love, I often thought. I knew that I was his first love, the very first woman in his life. This both pleased and alarmed me.

He began to accompany me on my mapping traverses, helping me understand the design of the ancient settlement. He had come prepared, carrying his own copy of Herodotus'
Histories
pasted with stickers. I would often take him to the highest point in the area and spread my maps before him and he would pick the best sites for settlement, imagining he was one of the ancient architects. The words poured out of him and although his speech was slow and measured, the intensity with which he spoke amazed me. He would pull out his notebook and begin to draw, explaining to me how villages grew organically into cities. I was impressed by the delight he showed in being with me at the site.

‘He is in love,' Tetya Shura would say to me and laugh. I was glad that she came to like him. He in turn appeared captivated by her warm husky voice and her melancholy ballads of Cossack horsemen, their lovely women and loyal horses.

One night he witnessed her in all her glory. The anger and anguish in her voice must have surprised him as he watched the drama unfold in front of his eyes.

We were sitting around the campfire after dinner, discussing the funerary ceremonies of the Scythians so vividly described by Herodotus. Tetya Shura seemed very aggressive, as if she were trying to pick a fight. Maria Shulskaya said something trivial about the funerary ceremonies, to which Tetya Shura reacted sharply. Someone hastily changed the subject to Saqqara, the Egyptian city of the dead built around a stepped pyramid near the western bank of the Nile. That's when Gryzlov was able to show off. He knew more about gods and goddesses than anyone else on the team.

But Tetya Shura ruthlessly interrupted Gryzlov's exposition.

‘My own favourite, you know, is Ma'at,' she said. ‘She's the goddess of fairness, or what the Egyptians used to call “right order”. Before committing a dead person to his grave, the Egyptians used to extract his heart, still warm and soft as a peeled mango. It was weighed in a balance against Ma'at. If the heart weighed more than the goddess, the person could look forward to a blissful life after death; otherwise he was condemned forever to live in horror and misery.'

She paused for a moment to take breath, gulped a mouthful of cognac and continued: ‘Imagine for a moment that Stalin is dead and that our Soviet apparatchiks are ready to weigh his bloody heart.
What nonsense!
some of you may say – and I agree the proposition is quite absurd. There wasn't any heart in the body of that brute, just a black hole and nothing else.'

She took another drink. ‘Yes, I hate him, even though I know that hate only demeans us. But can you imagine: my father, the idiot, never stopped reminding me that he went to War for
Tovarish
Stalin, the same bloody Stalin who deported his wife, my poor mother, to die in the camps.'

She got off her chair, pushed it aside, asked Gryzlov for a cigarette, and walked off.

Soon it began to drizzle. The fire died. ‘You'll catch cold, you fools,' we heard Tetya Shura yell from inside her tent. A prolonged bout of coughing followed.

‘Go to bed,' she barked again, spat lumps of phlegm and swore.

The drizzle continued through the night. From inside our tent we could hear Tetya Shura pacing up and down, unable to sleep because of an asthma attack. I took her a hot water bottle but it didn't help. She asked Vasu if he would give her an injection. She had everything necessary: syringes, needles, rubber band and capsules. We tied the band round her arm and struggled to locate a vein by the dim light of our torch. Once the vein had been found it was easy to insert the needle. Within an hour, Tetya Shura had settled down to sleep.

But for a long time we couldn't. We lay awake listening to the rain.

‘Why are you so quiet?' I asked Vasu.

‘I'm sad for Tetya Shura,' he replied.

That's when I told him the whole of Tetya Shura's story so terribly punctuated with tragedies: famine, deportation, camps and executions.

It rained the next day and the day after that. The digs in some kurgans were flooded. A pump was brought from the
kolkhoz
and we began draining water from the site. The rain had ruined our season. We felt cheated.

If this was really where a large Scythian town had stood, we should by now have found the remains of at least one, if not more, royal tombs. But we hadn't discovered anything remotely significant. Most kurgans had in fact been opened and robbed. Apart from a few minor trinkets, some coins and rings, nothing major, no gold nor silver, had been recovered. There were only a few ceramics, iron and bronze tools and weapons, mirrors, pots, vases and decorated bone jewellery, but not enough to establish beyond reasonable doubt that the site we were digging was indeed Gelon.

Fortunately, however, the rival team working at a site near the Don hadn't found anything either.

We decided to stop our fieldwork, wind up the camp and return next season.

On the way back to Moscow we met Aunty Olga at Kiev Station. She wanted us to break our journey and stay with her.

‘The chestnuts are blooming,' she said. Vasu wasn't well, which Aunty Olga noticed. She made us stay the night. The next day she phoned a friend and got him a pocket inhaler.

‘He looks fine now,' she whispered to me as she farewelled us the following day.

Tamrico's Apple

Vasu

It was three o' clock on a September morning, cold but not unpleasantly so.

I was sitting huddled round a tiny kitchen table celebrating the thirtieth birthday of Vladimir's girlfriend Katya. It was also a birthday party for Shurik, who had turned thirty-five on the same day.

I had met Shurik, a criminal lawyer, when he had come to see Vladimir in the hospital. He loved telling stories about the Moscow militia. Tales from
Slukhovaya Pravda
(The Pravda of Gossips) he used to call them.

His draftsman uncle had once worked with Konstantin Melnikov, the famous constructivist architect, and just a week earlier, Shurik had led me along the cobbled streets to Melnikov's cylindrical house. We even went inside to look at his large desk and examine some of his sketches of Gorky Park. A few streets away we found the block of apartments where, in a room on the third floor, Shurik had been born. On that walk he also showed me the building where his mother Vera had died in the summer of 1943, fighting fires started by Nazi bombs. After his mother's death four-year-old Shurik was sent to an orphanage in Tashkent.

His mother, a designer, had been a minor official in the Party at one of Moscow's textile factories. Her marriage to Isaac, a Polish Jew from Lvov, was brief, because Isaac was soon deported to a camp in Kazakhstan, where he died of cholera.

Shurik once showed me the manuscript of his book
The Private Life of Shurik Z
, in which he described his trip to Kazakhstan. The book had several photos of a lakeside resort and salt mines where his father had been forced to labour.

Shurik's wife Tamrico was an actress in the Moscow Youth Theatre. She came from Georgia and assured me that one day she would take me to her wonderful Tbilisi to drink wine and dance the
lezginka
. I liked her, and not only because she played guitar and sang beautiful Georgian songs. During this party she saw that I was tired and bored and told me to pick up my parka and leave. ‘There is nothing as beautiful as Moscow in the early hours of the morning,' she told me. ‘Go, you idiot, and don't worry about Katya. She won't be offended.' Then she took an apple from the table, kissed it and shoved it into my pocket. So here I was, a solitary flaneur, ready for the city to reveal itself to me. I was dead tired and wanted to sleep but a voice inside told me to keep walking.

It was still dark and the moon that would turn full later in the week moved along with me. Outside the Hotel Prague I saw a waiter sitting on the steps, smoking.

‘Come and have a cigarette,' he invited. ‘Talk to me.'

I ignored his invitation, turned right onto Gogol Boulevard, and stopped at the famous writer's statue. It stood with its back to one of the most beautiful boulevards in Moscow. On the granite plinth I spotted a dog trying to chew the plastic wrapper off a bouquet of flowers. On the other side an old woman slept under a filthy blanket.

The week before at this very spot I had witnessed a protest by four dissidents: three men and a young woman in a bright yellow sweater. They held a long red banner with white letters, the top line in Russian with an English translation underneath. The English words ‘freedom' and ‘travel' were misspelt.

A crowd of onlookers had gathered to the right of Gogol. Facing them stood three militiamen in uniforms and two men in caps and black leather jackets. Two vans were parked across the boulevard, with more militiamen inside. It was a silent protest and nothing much had happened. Then suddenly a man in the crowd pulled a camera out of his backpack and took some pictures. One of the leather-jackets rushed towards him and snatched the camera, opened it and ripped out the film. The three militiamen moved quickly towards the protestors to pull down the banner. Only the young woman resisted. A militiaman, who later revealed herself as a good-looking blonde, pulled hard at the banner and the woman in the yellow sweater slipped and fell. She scraped her nose, which bled, but she kept hold of the banner.