In Siberia Page 2

  ‘It’s been destroyed.’

  ‘And our ruler did this.’ From fear or disgust, she would not say Yeltsin.

  ‘But everything’s changed now,’ I said, for some reason comforting her. ‘There’ll be a church here, and they will be made saints.’ Their canonisation, I thought, was only a matter of time.

  She flared almost angrily. ‘They are already saints! They head the saints in the cathedral of heaven!’ She spoke with lilting, passionate certainty. ‘It’s only here, in Russia, that we’ve been slow to know this. The Russian Church abroad canonised them long ago. Abroad the Mother of God took them up to heaven!’

  I nodded vaguely, wondering how she knew.

  ‘And not only Nikolai and his Czarina, but his whole family, she took them up, Aleksei, Olga, Tatiana…and those others, Doctor Botkin and the servants who died because of compassion for them!’

  ‘Your Patriarch in Moscow…’

  ‘I don’t know about our Patriarch. I don’t know him. I’ve heard that someone has even verified their bones, but I don’t know….’ She lifted her eyes to the sky. She did not care for any mortal remains. The family was living in the heaven of her will. ‘In the church where I worship, the Mother of God has told St John the Baptist that they are her ladies-in-waiting, her favourite children…Olga also, who protects and prays for me….’

  I thought doubtfully of the shy, capricious Olga, but the woman continued in a rush of celestial detail. John the Baptist, the Czar, Olga, the Virgin Mary…the throne-rooms and antechambers of heaven filled up like those of the Winter Palace, astir with favourites and intercessors. Her voice bustled and sang. Twice she called me Nikolai, and I felt flattered. ‘Now they all live in the courtyard of the Mother of God, and send our prayers to her. Direct.’

  On the edge of the desolation a tiny chapel had been raised to the Czarina’s favourite sister, the pious Elizabeth, who was martyred when the Bolsheviks threw her alive down a mineshaft. Years before, she had enchanted the French ambassador by her beauty and innocent seriousness, and after her husband, the Grand Duke Sergei, was blown to bits in the abortive 1905 revolution, she founded an order of nuns to care for the dying and abandoned. Now she was a saint.

  Under her chapel cupola, sheathed in wooden scales and topped by a high cross, we entered a sanctuary blazing with votive candle-flames, and Olga prayed to an icon of St Elizabeth floating in glory above her mineshaft.

  ‘We’d lost all that history until now,’ she said. ‘For years we lived in a dark valley–twenty million gone in the last war, and forty million more taken by Stalin. And nothing in return! Only in 1991 the Mother of God gave back the truth which Communism had concealed for eighty years.’

  Her eyes glittered over me unfocused as she replaced the Soviet myth with her own. The next moment we were standing, astonished, where a sheaf of flickering lights enshrined an icon of the imperial family, newly done: they had already been turned into saints. Olga set her taper before them with shaking hands, crying: ‘There they are!’ Her kisses fell softly on their painted hems and slippered feet. I examined them in fascination. In their icon they had acquired the elongated bodies and court robes of Byzantine saints, and their tapering hands held up white crosses. Crowned and haloed, they seemed to gaze out with a sad foreknowledge of their end. Their features echoed one another’s, as in some inbred clan, and they were all washed in the same amber light. All the vitality of remembered photographs–the moods and stains of real life–was emptied and stilled. Sainthood did not allow for them. Even the emergent individuality of the princesses–the imperious beauty Tatiana, the plump tomboy Anastasia–was drowned in this mist of holiness.

  Olga said: ‘Soon, Nikolai, there will be a resurrection of the Church.’

  ‘You mean a new czar?’ It was barely conceivable. Two years before, a young Romanov claimant had travelled to Russia with his mother, and been received with bewilderment and official circumspection.

  ‘No, not a czar.’ Even Olga demurred. ‘But a celestial union. The Church on earth will be united with the Church in Heaven! Soon, very soon!’ Her voice started its hypnotic music again. ‘Light for the future of humanity!’

  I said dully: ‘When?’

  ‘At any moment! Because now the Mother of God wants to carry Russia upward. Quickly, quickly Russia is going to the light! Perhaps it will happen through grief. Then the heart of Russia will open! A new, holy Russia!’

  It was an old Orthodox idea: that suffering would flower into purity. Out of the anguish of history–even of daily, Chekhovian frustration–a new world must be born. It made sense of sorrow, of tedium. It made suffering dangerously embraceable. It seemed to heal Time.

  On the night of the murders the corpses were driven into woods twenty miles from the city. There they were stripped naked–the girls’ corsets oozing jewels–and lowered into a flooded mine. But the next evening they were dredged up again and taken towards a remoter site. When the lorry that carried them broke down, two of the corpses were painstakingly burnt and the rest heaped into a shallow grave and doused with acid. Yekaterinburg fell to the White army a week later.

  The Whites found the Czarevitch’s spaniel wandering half-starved in the Ipatiev garden. But when they located the mine they discovered no bodies: little but the doctor’s false teeth, a finger of the empress, and the medallions of Rasputin which the princesses had worn round their necks.

  Only in 1991 was the impromptu grave fully excavated. Then a forensic scientist from Moscow’s Ministry of Health reassembled the skeletons, and DNA testing on samples from living relatives proved whose bones these were. The missing two were Aleksei and the third daughter, Maria.

  For a long time the rest lay in fragments on a tin table in a Yekaterinburg morgue. Then they were buried with small ceremony in the imperial mausoleum in St Petersburg. Their obsequies divided Church and State, even the Romanov heirs. At the service, their names were never mentioned, for the Church, pandering to the Russian Orthodox abroad, refused to acknowledge whom they were burying. Their canonisation has become a political and ecclesiastical minefield. It is the living, now, who will not rest in peace.

  Behind the vanished Ipatiev house is a medley of trees and shrubs long ago gone wild. Here, under the eyes of their guards, Nicholas would carry the Czarevitch out to a chair, then walk for half an hour with his daughters in the garden. In these last weeks, he wrote, the scent from orchards all around was overpowering.

  A path went through the trees–less a man-made track, it seemed, than the spoor of some animal. I followed it idly, and arrived where a broken ladder crossed to a rubbish-tip. My feet snagged on wires and bottles. For all I knew some fragments of the Ipatiev house were here, whose bulk had ended up on the municipal dump. But an eerie sense of habitation touched the place. Around me someone had festooned the trees with carrier-bags–twenty or thirty of them–all rotted and split. They drooped from the branches like dead bats. In the dump’s crater, bits of debris had returned to their old use: a defunct stove set with dented kettles, a sodden sofa facing a broken chair, two shoes decomposing side by side. And a campfire was guttering.

  At first I thought it the play-house of a child, but from above me a voice bellowed: ‘Get the fuck out of here!’

  He seemed very small, and bent, and old. Either through weakness or drink he half fell through the trees towards me, then recovered. His features were nested in white hair, and as he straightened, his eyes snapped open. ‘Oh, it’s you! I thought you were one of those officials. But’–and his voice turned quite tender, blurred by drink–‘it’s you. You’ve come back.’

  My words rang polite in the rubbish-dump: ‘It’s the first time we’ve met.’

  But he didn’t hear. ‘Sit down!…not there, that’s wet…find some rags.’

  I perched on the chair, and he on the sofa. Already the damp was leaking through my trousers. It had thundered and poured all night, and his shelter of canvas and branches lay collapsed nearby. ‘The water came in everywhe
re. It put out the fire after you left, and I didn’t sleep….’ Then his black eyes refocused me, and he realised I was a stranger. He said: ‘The bastard, I knew he wouldn’t come back.’ His shoulders hunched. ‘In September I’ll go away too. It’s terrible here in winter. The frost clutches you. If you take my advice, you’ll go south in the autumn.’ He fingered the points of the compass in mid-air. ‘I’ll go to Rostov, to the Black Sea….’

  ‘Alone?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You too, alone?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘My wife and son are up in Archangel. We…well, she…’ His words trailed into privacy. Then he asked ceremoniously: ‘Would you like lunch?’

  So we sat there, he on the sofa-springs, I on the three-legged chair, while a rusty pan of potatoes bubbled over the fire. Around us spread a sea of scrap-iron and rags, splintered furniture, gutted machinery and pots. We enquired about one another. He found a jar of green peas awash with rainwater and forked them fastidiously out. I passed him some English sweets. Once he plumped up a tattered cushion for me, then reached into a box of sodden magazines and offered me a ten-year-old copy of The Orthodox Times; and twice we toasted one another in vodka, rather formally.

  I asked him about his family and work. He seemed so old, I thought, it must all be long ago. He answered in a code of hints and omissions. Locked in his rough quiet, an urban delicacy survived. From time to time he let out a long, guttural Errrr, which seemed to comfort and stabilise him. ‘Maybe I committed crimes during my marriage, I suppose I did. Now God go with her…she lives alone.’ He prodded the potatoes with a soft Errr, errr. ‘That’s how it is. Both of us, alone.’ His tone showed no regret or pleasure: solitude was simply a fact of life, perhaps its law.

  I said: ‘You’re used to that?’

  He looked vacantly round him. ‘My father was killed in the war, I never knew him. And my mother died in the factory when I was thirteen. An electric cable fell on her. And then my sister brought me up, and I sat with her when she died just as I’m sitting with you now, for a long time. I was nineteen then, in 1958…. Errr.’

  With a shock I realised that he was the same age as me. For a second I gaped at his features, then at his scarred hands, their nails black and worn to the quick, and up again at his face, and for a moment saw in that tangled froth of hair and beard my own mortality. Then I grew confused. Sometimes his face seemed a trembling wreck in its tempest of hair. But his voice was strong, and at other times the delta of lines radiating down his cheeks appeared to reverse its course and fill his eyes with mirth, or even contempt.

  I said: ‘How long have you been travelling then?’

  He answered at once: ‘Thirty-four years. I began in Khrushchev’s day, in the hard times.’

  ‘But those times were better than before.’

  ‘No, not better. Stalin’s time was better! I’ve seen his villa on the Black Sea, where he used to sit in battledress smoking his pipe!’ He swelled back on the sofa and bent his cheap cigarette into an imaginary pipe. ‘That was a man who didn’t insult the people! It’s a lie that he made Russian life a misery. In his day a man in prison was better off than a free man now. And today the prisons are still overflowing. You can get sentenced for nothing.’ He jabbed a thumb back and forth between us. ‘You steal my bag, and you go to prison! Five years!…Errr…I steal somebody else’s bag, and–prison!’

  I heard myself say: ‘You did that?’

  ‘Yes.’ No change of tone interrupted him. ‘I sneaked off with someone’s carrier-bag. I got five years. And that’s the minimum, I might have got ten.’

  I glanced up involuntarily at the trees. A wind had sprung up and was swinging the rotted carrier-bags in the branches, and rustling papers over the waste-tip. I said: ‘And now you have as many as you like?’

  ‘Oh those, yes.’ But he went silent, as if wondering himself why he had hung them there. Then he said: ‘That prison was the cell system. I was in with rapists and murderers…. But others had done nothing.’ He wiped a chipped plate with a rag, and speared me two potatoes. ‘It was like home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Somewhere to sleep and get food. It was better there.’ He was suddenly depressed. ‘You could watch television there. And here there’s nothing. Here you have to find food.’

  ‘You watched television in prison?’

  ‘All night, sometimes, in the camp. I went on to a camp, where I worked at a lathe, then a metal press. After that I took to the road. I used to watch television through people’s windows. Sometimes I did manual work to keep alive. But being on the move, that’s the thing! Central Asia, Latvia, the Ukraine…I’ve been to all of them. But then the years came, and my legs swelled.’

  I felt a naive surprise. So even in Brezhnev’s time this gypsy life had continued, the life of people who moved beyond official sight, migrating with the seasons, by roads and systems of their own.

  He poured me a tumbler of vodka. ‘Somebody wrote that to walk our Russian countryside is to see a land of miracles. Just like in Turgenev’s time! I’ve been in parts like that, without even tractors. Those were the good days, a century ago. People lived simply then, gathering mushrooms and berries….’

  The vodka was tipping him into paradise, a bucolic summer that had never been. He filled my tumbler again. ‘To Turgenev!’ Then he clambered to his feet and struggled over a ramp of garbage to hunt among the sticks and canvas of his fallen hut. At last he drew out a bunch of dahlias and handed them to me.

  ‘Where on earth did you get these?’

  His eyes avoided mine. ‘Well, people grow them…then they…bring them.’

  I knew he had pilfered them from the memorial cross. Pilgrims often left flowers there; on weekends, he said, wedding parties brought bouquets, and sometimes shared their vodka. Squatting like nemesis in the ruined garden, he stole the flowers overnight.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘take them. Put them in your room.’ He thrust them against my chest.

  I said woodenly: ‘They were meant for the Czar’s family.’

  He blinked at me. ‘That family…they shot them all, didn’t they?’ He looked down at the dahlias as if they had turned to ash. He was very drunk. ‘They shouldn’t have done that, the bastards. Children are the flower of life!’ He tossed the bouquet stubbornly into my lap. ‘If people ask “Was the Czar a good man?” I always say “Yes! He gave the people food!” Wonderful man, the Czar was….’

  The vodka closed his eyes, and he grew grateful for everything. The Czar might not measure up to Stalin, but he had become the benefactor of the poor and vagrant, and his dahlias still served. By the time I got up to leave, the hermit had reeled back on to the sofa, his beard and cigarette jutting at the sky.

  I wondered what to leave him. I had brought from England some souvenir key-rings and two solar calculators. But this man had nothing to add up, nothing to lock up. I laid some money near his head, and went back through the trees. After a while his voice echoed: ‘You’ll come back tomorrow? I’ll make a proper campfire! You’ll come?’

  Back over the littered earth, his cries sounding after me–‘God give you health! Good health!’–I tried to find sense in his presence there, to believe it other than accident; but I heard instead the soulless twittering of sparrows in the branches among the carrier-bags, and somewhere in the thicket, from eighty years before, imagined other footsteps.

  At the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900, visitors crowding into the Palace of Russian Arts could board a lavish replica of the half-completed Trans-Siberian Railway. Each compartment of the wagons-lits was served by a marble-lined washroom with a porcelain bath, and lounges done up in Louis XVI or Empire style adjoined Moorish or chinoiserie smoking-rooms. While multilingual waiters served caviar and bortsch in the restaurant-car, a diorama of Siberia, painted by scenic artists from the Paris Opera, was wound slowly past the windows in an illusion of snug villages and eternal forest.

  Many of these luxuries never materialised. The h
airdressing salon in white sycamore and the ice-box air-cooling system survived only in the Parisian memory, and travellers reported variously that poor food was doled out by clottish waiters, and that the only bath-tub was to be found in the baggage car, where it had been requisitioned for meat storage. Yet in general the de luxe wagons were ponderously palatial, and within fourteen years of the railway’s foundation in 1891 they were rumbling along the Pacific. Reaching five and a half thousand miles from the Urals to Vladivostok, they travelled by far the longest railway in the world.

  These vaunted trains, with their expensive cargo of merchants, diplomats and adventurers, were interspersed by others–more important–which went almost unrecorded. Chains of cattle-trucks, lugged by primitive, wood-burning engines, crawled over the Urals and far into the steppeland. Stacked on three tiers of shelves, or crammed into wagons labelled ‘40 people or 8 horses’, went a horde of migrating peasantry. Some wagons became moving farmyards as three-generation families decamped wholesale with their cattle, fowl and angry dogs haunch-deep in excrement. The few foreigners who glimpsed them described a verminous, pale-faced multitude huddled in fetid sheepskins, and whole wagon-loads of single men, barefoot and half-savage.

  This onset of migrants before the First World War was the climax of an eastward trickle which had been going on for three centuries and which had given Siberia its peculiar personality. In the wake of the sixteenth-century Cossack bands trading in the ‘soft gold’ of furs, came farmers and hunters, vagabonds and religious dissenters, whom European Russia either threatened or cramped. Sometimes encouraged, sometimes impeded, restless and ambitious peasants filtered into the limitless state lands to settle. Many were in flight from serfdom; others were in exile; but it was land-hunger, in the end, which drove most from the oppressive, sometimes famine-stricken central provinces in the west, and the abolition of serfdom in 1861 turned the trickle to a steady flow. For long months they laboured eastward beside horse-drawn carts heaped with household goods and sentimental treasures, and many died along the way. Only at the century’s end did the railway ease their passage, and carried in such a tide of poorer peasantry that in less than twenty years Siberia’s population had doubled to ten million.