Шарлотта Хобсон: Black Earth City: When Russia Ran Wild (and So Did We)

“When I see the news from the Caucasus,” Mitya said, “I always wonder if I’ll see one of the boys I knew, up there in the mountains. They’re fighting now, I’m sure of it. They had a worse time than us in the army, of course… But if it taught them one thing, it was to stick together.”

On the first day of spring, Mitya and I walked down to the reservoir, past trees almost bare of snow. The ice still held and several fishermen were sitting by their ice holes for another day’s cold, silent vigil. These were the fanatics. The fish they caught were not at all good to eat; in fact most were poisoned by the dirty water. Occasionally the fishermen tried to sell them by the roadside, slapping a couple of pike on a plastic bag laid down in the mud. They did not look tempting. And to go out on the lake now, so late in the season… Apparently these men knew special paths, recognized the thin patches by sight and calculated to the hour when the ice would finally splinter. All the same, every year there were casualties.

There was a soft breeze, and for the first time in months I was outside without hat, gloves, and scarf; the air on my forehead and cheeks felt wonderfully free, and at last I could move without slipping or watching my feet. Mitya and I ran until we came to a stop, puffing, and sat on a railing by the water.

“Remember the yacht we were going to live on?” Mitya said. “Let’s sail it through the Black Sea in the summer. The Crimean coast, past Odessa, Yalta, and to Batumi. It’s a pity we’ll have to avoid Abkhazia.”

“Perhaps you could come and visit me in England this summer?”

Mitya looked at me and smiled. “If you’d like me to.”

When it grew cold, we turned back to the hostel, stopping to buy snowdrops from a babushka standing by the bridge.

“The spring arrives with them, children. Have two bunches,” she implored. “The wind’s chilly, I’ll go home if you take them.”

I was sniffing the icy petals as we came up the stairs and heard it: a high, long howl that grew in volume, choked, and continued. Someone shouted and silenced it. But instantly it began again. The sound made my heart thump. By the time we got to the fourth floor, there was a crowd outside the Armenians’ room.

The komendant came out and pushed past us. “Get out of the way.”

“But what is it? Is someone hurt?”

“Ashot,” said Garo, appearing in the doorway. His round face was slack and pale. “The Azeris have shelled his village in Karabakh. Half the houses are hit. His brother is dead and God knows who else.”

Within the room Ashot stopped howling and began to knock his head slowly and deliberately against the wall.

“Those bastards,” Garo said. “We’ll kill them.”

The reservoir held for a few more days. The following week I saw a couple of fishermen heading out across it, intent on a last catch, but by the end of the month great cracks had appeared; water was bubbling and hissing through them, tearing the ice apart. From the center of the bridge Mitya and I watched slabs like tectonic plates start to move. In some places, there were still footprints in the snow, and bits of debris from the life they had supported: sticks, broken baskets, a single shoe. The sheets of ice drifted beneath us, gathering speed as they made their way toward the sea.

Spring arrived with the frenzy of the habitually late. One morning the air was balmy and buds appeared on the trees; two days later the whole town was bursting out in foliage and the inhabitants of Voronezh were strolling about in flowery dresses, short sleeves, and sandals. They seemed to have wiped the memory of winter from their minds; their serene expressions congratulated each other on their good fortune—no, their foresight—in choosing to live in a place with such a pleasant climate, a climate in which cucumbers and tomatoes grew with such juicy vigor.

Everyone all of a sudden had become dachniki , country dwellers with mud under their fingernails who endured the week in the city only to hurry to the bus station and head for the country every Friday. They crammed into their Ladas, onto trolleybuses and elektrichki , some traveling a couple of hundred kilometers to open up their little wooden dachas and sow their seeds into the black earth.

In the evenings out there the men built fires for the shashlik and fussed around them like surgeons, issuing peremptory orders: “Bring the meat out! And a plate, please! Quick, vodka, we need vodka here now!” Every Russian man is an expert at the barbecue. When the meat is finally ready, they sit around the fire and eat it with flat Georgian bread and a handful of herbs; later on, someone pulls out a guitar and starts singing. The nostalgia for what is described as “nature,” a yearning that hangs over the broken, open-ended roads of the cities and in the concrete stairwells of the tower blocks, is here at its most acute. The succulent greenery that emits little rustles and creaks as it sprouts gives off an irresistible whiff of expectancy.

At the bus station, an English boy called John and I joined the crowd of dachniki heading in the direction of Kursk. It was five in the morning and we were going to the wedding of a couple I didn’t know. Well, I’d met Slava, the groom, a friend of Emily’s who had burst into tears in our room back in September and begged her to help him with a visa. He was going to visit his girlfriend Lucy in Manchester. Emily had done what she could to help, and so when his wedding to Lucy was organized Slava reappeared with her invitation. But Emily was away, and such is my shameless passion for weddings that when Slava asked me instead, I couldn’t help accepting.

“It will be nice for Lucy to have an English companion, as her family can’t come,” said Slava, hastily improvising a reason for my attendance. When the occasion demands it, Russians are the most polite people in the world. “You can come with John, he’s going to be our witness.”

The bus to Kursk took five hours: five hours of flat, unhedged farmland, and all the way John, who knew Lucy from Manchester, sat beside me sighing and plucking nervously at his beard. The male witness at a wedding has various duties apart from signing the register. He must look after the bride and groom, make sure their glasses are constantly filled, and propose a whole series of toasts, the longer and more poetic the better. He is also the defender of the bride’s honor for the day. At a certain moment it is customary for a group of marauding guests to swoop down and steal away the bride from her husband, and then it is the witness’s duty to capture her back. Sometimes this is done by paying a ransom in hard cash, but more often a feat is required of him. The bride’s white satin pump is produced and filled with vodka, and the witness must drink it down. Depending on the size of the bride’s foot, the shoe might contain most of a bottle… Then, ideally, the witness breaks into the place where the bride is held, tosses her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift and deposits her back at her husband’s side with a roar of triumph.

“You don’t know Lucy,” John said gloomily. “She’s not big, but, well, she’s not tiny.”

That was still not the worst of it. The most important duty of all, one that the male witness is never allowed to shirk, is to kiss the female witness. After a reasonable time complimenting her on her turquoise outfit—a quarter of an hour will do—tradition demands that he drag her into a bedroom and grapple her on the bed where the guests have left their coats. And if he doesn’t, make no mistake, she’ll drag him. John hadn’t yet made any public announcements about his sexuality, but it was clear that the idea of the female witness filled him with foreboding.