Петр Померанцев - Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible - The Surreal Heart of the New Russia

They drove her to court in the back of a van. She hadn’t slept or eaten. Her hair was a mess.

At court they put her in a cage in the accused stand. The judge looked matronly, with her hair in a bun and glasses. She looked like a sensible person. She would sort it out.

“Well?” said the judge.

“I don’t understand the charges,” Yana began. She tried to sound authoritative, but as she spoke she started to cry again. She didn’t want to, it was just the absurdity of it all. The tears came from the effort to make sense of it. “I’m being charged with trading what I trade. It doesn’t make sense…. ” She was sobbing now.

“All right,” said the judge. “Prosecution?”

The prosecutor was another man in a polyester suit.

“Yakovleva is a highly dangerous criminal. She has been hiding from us. We had to hunt her down. She needs to be put under arrest until the trial.”

What had he just said? Hiding? Where? Where had she been hiding? At the gym? At work? What were they talking about? The prosecutor just smiled at her. The judge nodded and repeated what he had said word for word and said no bail was granted. She would await trial in prison. The next hearing would be in two months.

Everything was spinning again. The prosecutor walked up to Yana and whispered, “Bad girl, why did you hide from us?”

Black is white and white is black. There is no reality. Whatever they say is reality. Yana began to scream. The more Yana screamed, the more guilty she looked: she saw herself for a second, a redhead with red eyes screaming in a cage in a courtroom.

They took her back to Petrovka. They took her prints. Her hands were covered with ink. She cried out for some soap. Some soap! They laughed at her. Then someone threw some soap at her: a gnarly corner of industrial soap that was dirtier than her hands. Then they said, “When you’re done with the soap we need it back.”

They put her in another police van and drove toward the prison.

There was a small barred window at the back of the van, and through it Yana could see Moscow. She put her face to the barred window. It was the dead of night, and the streets were empty. She felt like she was being smuggled, not just out of the city but out of reality itself into a nightmare fantasy land. Or was she just leaving the fantasy? We live in a world designed by the political technologists. A fragile reality show set that can seem, if you squint, almost genuine. We move from gym to open plan office to coffee bar to French movie to wine bar to holidays in Turkey, and it could seem better than Paris: better because it’s newer and more precious. And we can read SNOB or watch the reality shows on TNT, and it’s a simulacrum of the whole democratic thing. It feels almost real. But at the same time the other, real Russia rumbles on like a distant ringing in the ears. And it can grab us and pull us in at any moment.

She noticed they were driving around and around the Garden Ring. She couldn’t see the drivers, but by their voices she thought they were out of towners.

“Are you lost?” she called through the metal cage.

“Shut up.” Then, after a pause: “We need to find the turning for Volgograd Avenue.”

It had its humor, this new world. Hand in hand with everything else.

Yana directed them like they were learner drivers and she their instructor. Which lane to move into, where to U-turn, where to drive on. It felt good; for a moment she was in charge again.

They said “thank-you”; they were new in Moscow and couldn’t get their bearings. These ring-roads were confusing, you could go round and round for hours not knowing where to get off.

And again Yana found herself wanting to prove to the drivers, to these provincial lads, that she wasn’t a criminal. She tried to control the feeling: What did it matter what they thought? But it did matter. Because she needed some way to hold onto the life she lived a day ago. Just one day ago and that was disappearing.

She could hear the prison before she could see it. Triple iron gates opening. Huge locks and giant bolts turning. The great machine turning. Then the van was full of magnesium bright light that blinded her. There was the sound of dogs, many dogs, growling and howling and barking and scratching against the van. And there was the smell. The smell of prison. Mold and damp and cigarettes. She would never forget that smell.

All the while I’m shooting Yana’s story I’m thinking: Will TNT let me show this? Lately they have been telling me they want more of the new Russian woman, self-made, independent. Enough already of the gold diggers. There is a new generation stirring. And Yana ticked all the boxes. She was tall and strong and flame-haired. TNT said they wanted more drama—and Yana’s story certainly had plenty of that. And it was a love story, too. I really played up the love story angle when I pitched the film. But what about the rest? How much could I get away with? A wrongful arrest—maybe. Depending on how I could frame it… Shawshank Redemption ?

This was the paradox: TNT wanted to find the new heroes. Capture (and advertise to) the new (lucrative) middle class. But TNT couldn’t touch politics. And at one point the two meet. Crash. And so all the time I’m waiting for the call: “We can’t show this. Sorry, Piiitrrr, we can’t show this.”

She woke to the sound of forty-six throats coughing. All she could see were women. There were so many and so close they seemed to split into body parts rather than form separate human beings: dozens of noses and scores of hands, feet sticking out from bunk beds, butts, thighs, and breasts. There were forty-six women in her cell, all packed together; it was like being in the subway at rush hour but with no way out. In the far corner was a kitchen and a television playing MTV as loud as any nightclub. Someone was dancing, twirling in between the bunks. There were voices shouting, swearing, singing, laughing. Above her someone was snoring and beside her someone was rustling paper bags. At the end of the room were the toilets, and the water was pouring out of five taps full strength all the time because something had burst, and everyone was coughing.

Then it was time for their walk. They went down the stairs and into the yard: a sequence of concrete corridors that led to a concrete sack of a space ten meters by ten with two saplings and bars over the top. She paced round and round, thinking of tigers in cages. She didn’t talk to anyone, not at first.

At night she could hear the trains. The prison was right by the train lines. There were no windows facing the outside, but she could hear the signals and whistles of the train lines, and they would keep her up all night. Outside was suburban Moscow.

In the first days she just wrote. She curled up in her bunk and wrote letters to Alexey. Love letters. They kept her sane. They were sickly and sentimental, and she never intended to send them, but she needed to keep thinking about her life outside. She wrote about his eyes, how she dreamt of making love to him, how she wanted children with him, how they would be a family. Every time the door of the cell opened she would start up with the hope that the guards would say, “Yakovleva, you’re free,” but of course they never did.

She was allowed no visits from family, but her parents passed her a parcel with clothes. The clothes smelled so much of home; she burst out crying.

A woman, older, Eskimo-looking, came up to her.

“Don’t cry,” she said sternly. “It’s the worst thing you can do.” The older woman took out some photos from her pocket. “These are my children. I haven’t seen them for three years. But I don’t cry. We all want to cry.”