Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland (7 page)

I had to know if she was all right. There was no way I could ring her, as she had no phone. I tried reaching Natasha and Igor. After the usual delays, the Russian operator said in that familiar, Soviet categorical tone: “There’s no such place as Marx.” How good it would be to be able to write the place off as a chimera, a nasty, neurasthenic state of mind, but it was real.

“I’ve been there!”

“There is no such town as Marx,” repeated the robotic voice. “But I can put you through to Engels instead.”

So there it was, the partnership between Marx and Engels, still indissoluble, reincarnated in bricks and mortar. Later, I learned why Marx was not on the phone. The town’s telephone system was still being switched manually. The operators had been offered automation, but fearing for their jobs, they refused.

I scanned Anna’s poems for clues as to the source of her trouble. I found none. But I recognized the voice of a real poet. One of them (translated here by me) perfectly captured the desolation I felt when I arrived in that provincial town:

It was a battered bus that brought me
to the country, as if to prepare me for what I would find
.
It smelled thickly of burned out stars
and the dampness of the starry waste
.

Lumps of dark redbrick
lay around like meteorites
.
The red-eyed cur, abandoned since spring
(its owner was Rita-the-Slain)
,

Loomed everywhere, as if it had
innumerable bodies which, though wasted
,
were still sinister. It was no astronaut, but man
that dared to live among the groves

of clay-defying elms, which grow by the shaggy river
and reach toward the hills
.
Brave is the man who lives
so ill-defended from himself at such a time!

Resolute he strides into the nothingness
carrying his irreparable hump, the earth
,
having pronounced an irrevocable “yes”
to the crimson-gray, unpeoplable Universe
.

THE OTHER SIDE OF DESPAIR

“I think that you are a-little-bit-me.” With these words Anna reeled me back to Marx like a fish on a line. As I traveled down there on the train, I imagined what the town was going to look like in summer. It might have charms I could not have guessed at.

But no, Marx turned out to be even uglier without its cosmetic blanket of snow. The rows of decrepit residential blocks, the concrete high-rises and rusting sheds lacked any pastoral appeal. There were no redeeming features in the abandoned building sites, broken benches, and rutted, puddled streets where the infrequent traffic showered muddy water over passersby, but where, if you turned on a tap, there was no clean water to be had for whole days on end.

Anna’s boyish face was brown and her tonsured hair gleamed. But when I moved to embrace her she shied away. When she heard how anxious her letter had made me she looked horrified. “Forget it—it was just a little winter gloom.”

There was more to it than that, though. Because of her brave stand on the Volga German issue, Natasha explained, Anna was invited to Moscow in the spring for a trial period working on
Izvestia
, Russia’s oldest liberal newspaper. It was the first move toward offering her a job. When no offer was forthcoming, she fell into a depression: her chance of escaping the provinces was over. “You can’t blame them,” Natasha commented. “She’s a good journalist, but she can’t play the game—they’ll have written her off as hopelessly provincial.”

When I went to stay with Anna the first things that caught my eye in her cramped hallway were two photographs on her wall. One was of me, looking almost as wary as Anna. The other was of Elena Kamburova, the singer who had befriended me on Benya’s cruise. Since my last visit, she had given a concert in Saratov, and Anna and Igor (who had taken the picture for the paper) had both fallen under her spell. During a further evening of interminable silences, I clung to these gossamer connections.

The following morning we went for a walk along the backwaters of the Volga. Anna strode ahead, pursued by demons. Only once we had settled on a spit of wooded land surrounded by inlets did she start to relax. “Did you know that the man who introduced us is the KGB officer on our paper?” she said with a hint of a smile: “When I saw him again he asked whether I thought you were an agent.” Whatever suspicions she might once have had were over now, I realized.

There was a sudden flash of yellow-green wings overhead. “That’s an oriole—there’s a nest up there.” Anna knew her birds; she had read biology at university. The trunks of the willow trees were standing in water and the air was filled with the fluff of seeding poplar trees. Two pink-gray ring doves were flying to and fro across the water, as if harnessed together, cooing their murmuring song. A water rat swam across the inlet, breaking the surface with its nose.

“I’m sorry I was so unfriendly when you were here last,” she said after a long silence. “I used to be so pro-Western. Then I started meeting people from the West.” She pulled a face. “Mostly journalists from Germany. They treated us as if we were animals in a zoo, rare specimens of malformation! You’re different. At least you’re interested in us as people.” Then, after a long pause, “You know what it’s like to live on the other side of despair.”

Her words caught me off guard. She was right, of course. But how did she know? After all, she had succeeded in choking off every substantive attempt I had made at conversation. Despair had indeed brought me here to Marx. When Gorbachev opened the Soviet empire in the late 1980s I had become as enthralled as she had by the dream of Russia’s Westernizers, who wanted to see Russia become a European state, with the institutions of liberal democracy—civil society, free speech, democracy, and the rule of law. The Slavophiles, on the other hand, insisted that the Western path of development was not right for Russia; the country’s backwardness protected qualities in her which allowed her a different and spiritually superior way forward. I had been fascinated, as I imagined she had been, by the idea of this piece of countryside having an ongoing, supportive connection with Europe, through the Russian Germans. We both dreamed, as Catherine the Great had once done, that this rural region would become a haven of prosperity and civilized values.

After this promising flash of intimacy, our friendship developed with painful slowness. I sensed that she was holding herself together with difficulty. She responded badly to questioning and rarely volunteered information about herself. She was like a wild bird, poised to fly off if I got too close. So when we spent time together I took to sitting very still, hoping she might just come to trust me. Often, her large dark eyes were wary, defiant. Only now and then, when she let her guard slip, would her face light up with amusement or curiosity.

It was Natasha who told me why Anna would not talk to me in the winter. An article she wrote had had a devastating effect in the town of Marx, and she was not going to risk that happening again. A bizarre story, it made it amply clear why that Russian German homeland could never have got off the ground in any circumstances.

In October 1991, shortly after the Communist Party’s attempted coup, a government spokesman announced that the Russian German homeland would be established by the end of the year. By that time, local opposition had died down. It was even dawning on people that the development might improve their lives.

Their elected representatives disagreed. They announced a state of emergency in the region and called a grand meeting in Marx. In speech after hysterical speech, the deputies declared that unless the decision were reversed they would close all borders and roads to the province and destroy the bridges over the Volga. The town’s prosecutor, backed by the police chief and the head of the local KGB, warned them that such actions would contravene the criminal statute book. But they were shouted down with cries of “Monster!” “Eunuch!” “Coward!”

Anna covered the event for a Saratov paper. Her article merely reported the facts, but that was enough: unlike Marx’s paper,
The Banner
(formerly
“of Communism”)
, it said nothing about the “thousands of demonstrators” because there were none. Indeed, the episode would soon have been forgotten had a Moscow journalist who was visiting his mother-in-law not read Anna’s article. Vastly amused, he rewrote the story under his own byline.

It appeared on the front page of one of the most sensational national newspapers,
Moskovsky Komsomolets:
“From now on the deputies of Marx’s town council are as free as birds,” the article began. “No one’s going to take any notice of them. The regional prosecutor, the chief of the KGB, the head of the police and the judges have all declared in black and white: ‘We disassociate ourselves from the actions and proceedings of the present council. We’ve got enough trouble with hooligans already …’ ”

The people of Marx opened their favorite paper to find that the whole country was laughing at their elected representatives. Instead of joining in, they closed ranks: for all their faults, the deputies were
theirs
. Solidarity in times of crisis was an ancient reflex. It was born of Russia’s geography and climate, the experience of scratching a living out of this tricky soil, watered by patchy rainfall in a land situated too far north for easy living. The survival of the group was a safer option than individual initiative in these obdurate circumstances.

Marx’s chiefs of the KGB and police were forced to resign and the judges to apologize. Only the town prosecutor refused to back down and survived in office. He retreated behind his desk, armed with heart pills and the complete works of Chekhov, and took to lobbing missiles at fools who wasted his time.

That buried the last hope of a homeland for Russia’s Germans. It was not Anna’s fault; but, nevertheless, her words were instrumental.

I was reminded of a story by Nikolai Leskov, supreme chronicler of provincial life in nineteenth-century Russia. The peasants on a well-managed estate had gone on the rampage, smashing machinery and burning buildings down; so the baffled owner hired someone to find out why. The estate’s English manager could cast no light on what had triggered the revolt. All he had done was build new factories and introduce modern farming techniques, he said. And of course he had never beaten them.

The investigator also met a wall of silence when he talked to the peasants. No, the Englishman had not beaten them or worked them too hard, they agreed. There was nothing wrong with the new factories either. But in the end, one peasant cracked. He said the Englishman had meted out this terrible punishment to a lazy peasant: rather than beating him, he sat him on a fancy armchair, tied him there by a thread—“Just like a sparrow!”—and forced him to watch his fellow peasants work. That was what set the peasants off.

Russians will endure almost any hardship, these two stories reminded me. What they cannot endure is the suspicion that they are being laughed at, humiliated. No wonder I had run into a wall of silence when I first arrived here. My questions had picked the scab off a very fresh wound.

TIED BACK TO BACK

Natasha and Igor greeted me like an old friend, and insisted that I stay with them. It was a relief to have my own room in their house on Engels Street, since the air of Marx was still thick with mistrust. Walking through it was like heading into a strong wind.

The couple were in a state of shock. When they arrived in the town the only local newspaper was the ponderous
Banner of Communism
—which was to sack Anna for supporting the Germans, and kicked her out of her flat. The couple had persuaded the town’s tractor factory to let them start a paper of their own. They called it
The Messenger
and they wrote and produced it entirely themselves. They wanted to liberate the townspeople with their words, to bring them that sense of freedom and opportunity which fired Russia’s urban population during the glasnost period. And it did become a popular little publication. Every issue sold out. But for reasons they could not explain, the factory had just sacked them and appointed another editor.

The success of an enterprise binds people together, while failure divides them. Since my last visit, Natasha had been corresponding with an old admirer, who had moved to Canada and become a successful businessman. Recently, he had asked if she would join him there. “I’m not in love with the man, of course, but he’s nice enough, and he’s had a soft spot for me for years.”

“Does Igor know?”

“No—for goodness’ sake don’t breathe a word! It may all come to nothing. But whatever happens, when that letter arrived, I came back to life.” She had indeed. In the winter she was deathly pale and remote, like a faded photograph. Now her snub-nosed, high-cheekboned face radiated energy, and the eyes under that mane of brown curls sparkled.

The house, which belonged to her, was on the market. “That means nothing though—everyone in Marx is trying to get out. But who’d buy a house here now?” She had told Igor she wanted a divorce. “We had this terrible fight. He attacked me with a kitchen knife. It was scary—but funny, too. Yes, really! After that I realized I’d got to get out fast. I just want to start my life all over again!” When the house was sold, she would return to Siberia. Her father would help her get started: “I won’t need much. I’ve done with possessions. Antiques, pictures, china—I’ve had it all. Even the junk we’ve now got weighs me down. I just want to be free! The years I’ve spent in Marx have taken their toll on me, I know that. But I was given a lot. I’ve still got enough of what it takes to begin again. I can’t wait to travel and see the world!”

In the meantime, Natasha was spending most of her time out of the house. She left in the morning and did not return until supper time, though she had no work but the odd English lesson. Where she went she did not say. “Igor’s become impossible. I can’t bear to be with him. He won’t take a job, and he’s quarreled with all our friends.” But in the evening, the three of us would sit long over supper, my company seeming to act as some sort of buffer between them.