Russian Roulette

ДОМА – HOME

“Yasha! We’ve run out of water. Go to the well!”

I can still hear my mother calling to me and it is strange to think of myself as a fourteen-year-old boy, a single child, growing up in a village six hundred miles from Moscow. I can see myself, stick-thin with long, fair hair and blue eyes that always look a little startled. Everyone tells me that I am small for my age and they urge me to eat more protein… as if I can ever get my hands on anything that resembles fresh meat or fish. I have not yet spent many hundreds of hours working out and my muscles are undeveloped. I am sprawled out in the living room, watching the only television we have in the house. It’s a huge, ugly box with a picture that often wavers and trembles and there are hardly any channels to choose from. To make things worse, the electricity supply is unreliable and you can be fairly sure that the moment you get interested in a film or a news programme, the image will suddenly flicker and die and you’ll be left alone, sitting in the dark. But whenever I can, I tune into a documentary, which I devour. It is my only window onto the outside world.

I am describing Russia – about ten years before the end of the twentieth century. It is not so long ago and yet it is already somewhere that no longer exists. The changes that began in the main cities became a tsunami that engulfed the entire country, although they took their time reaching the village where I lived. There was no running water in any of the houses and so, three times a day, I had to make my way down to the well with a wooden harness over my shoulders and two metal buckets dragging down my arms. I sound like a peasant and a lot of the time I must have looked like one, dressed in a baggy shirt with no collar and a waistcoat. As a matter of fact, I had one pair of American jeans, which had been sent to me as a present from a relative in Moscow, and I can still remember everyone staring at me when I put them on. Jeans! They were like something from a distant planet. And my name was Yasha, not Yassen. Quite by accident, it got changed.

If I am going to explain what happened to me and what I became, then I must begin here, in Estrov. Nobody speaks of it any more. It is not on the map. According to the Russian authorities, it never existed. But I remember it well; a village of about eighty wooden houses surrounded by farmland with a church, a shop, a police station, a bathhouse and a river that was bright blue in the summer but freezing all year round. A single road ran through the middle of the village but it was hardly needed, as there were very few cars. Our neighbour, Mr Vladimov, had a tractor which often rumbled past, billowing oily, black smoke, but I was more used to being woken up by the sound of horses’ hooves. The village was wedged between thick forest in the north and hills to the south and west so that the view never really changed. Sometimes I would see planes flying overhead and I thought of the people inside them, travelling to the other side of the world. If I was working in the garden, I would stand still and watch them – the wings blinking, the sunlight glinting on their metal skin – until they had gone out of sight, leaving only the echo of their engines behind. They reminded of me who and what I was. Estrov was my world and I certainly didn’t need an aeroplane to get from one side to the other.

My own home, where I lived with my parents, was small and simple, made of painted wooden boards with shutters on either side of the windows and a weather vane that squeaked all night if there was too much wind. It was quite close to the church, set back from the main road with similar houses on either side. Flowers and brambles grew right beside the walls and were slowly creeping towards the roof. There were just four rooms. My parents slept upstairs. I had a room at the back but I had to share it whenever anyone came to stay. My grandmother, who lived with us, had the room next to mine but she preferred to sleep in a sort of hole in the wall, above the stove, in the kitchen. She was a very small, dark brown woman and when I was young, I used to think that she had been cooked by the flames.

There was no railway station in Estrov. It was not considered important enough. Nor was there a bus service or anything like that. I went to school in a slightly larger village that liked to think of itself as a town, two miles away down a track that was dusty and full of potholes in the summer, and thick with mud or covered in snow during the winter. The town was called Rosna. I walked there every day, no matter what the weather, and I was beaten if I was late. My school was a big, square, brick building on three floors. All the classrooms were the same size. There were about five hundred children in all, boys and girls. Some of them travelled in by train, pouring out onto the platform with eyes that were still half-closed with sleep. Rosna did have a railway station and they were very proud of it, decking it with flowers on public holidays. But actually it was a mean, run-down little place and nine out of ten trains didn’t even bother to stop there.

We students were all very smart. The girls wore black dresses with green aprons and had their hair tied back with ribbons. The boys looked like little soldiers, with grey uniforms and red scarves tied around our neck, and if we did well with our studies, we were given badges with slogans – “For Active Work”, “School Leader”, that sort of thing. I don’t really remember much of what I learned at school. Who does? History was important… the history of Russia, of course. We were always learning poems by heart and had to recite them, standing to attention beside our desks. There was maths and science. Most of the teachers were women but our headmaster was a man called Lavrov and he had a furious temper. He was short but he had huge shoulders and long arms, and I would often see him pick up a boy by the throat and pin him against the wall.

“You’re not doing well, Leo Tretyakov!” he would boom. “I’m sick of the sight of you. Buck up your ideas or get out of here!”

Even the teachers were terrified of him. But actually, he was a good man at heart. In Russia, we were brought up to respect our teachers and it never occurred to me that his titanic rages were anything unusual.

I was very happy at school and I did well. We had a star system – every two weeks the teachers gave us a grade – and I was always a five-star student, what we called a pyatiorka. My best subjects were physics and maths, and these were very important to the Russian authorities. Nobody ever let you forget that we were the country that had sent the first man – Yuri Gargarin – into space. There was even a photograph of him in the front entrance and you were supposed to salute him as you came in. I was also good at sport and I remember how the girls in my class used to come along and cheer me when I scored a goal. I wasn’t all that interested in girls at this time, which is to say I was happy to chat to them but I didn’t particularly want to hang out with them after school. My best friend was the Leo that I just mentioned and the two of us were inseparable.

Leo Tretyakov was short and skinny with jutting out ears, freckles and ginger hair. He used to joke that he was the ugliest boy in the district and I found it hard to disagree. He was also far from bright. He was a two-star student, a dismal dvoyka and he was always getting into trouble with the teachers. In the end they actually gave up punishing him because it didn’t seem to make any difference and he just sat there quietly daydreaming at the back of the class. But at the same time he was the star of our NVP – military training – classes which were compulsory throughout the school. Leo could strip down an AK47 automatic machine gun in twelve seconds and reassemble it in fifteen. He was a great shot. And twice a year there were military games, when we had to compete with other schools using a map and a compass to find our way through the woods. Leo was always in charge. And we always won.

I liked Leo because he was afraid of nothing and he always made me laugh. We did everything together. We would eat our sandwiches in the yard, washed down with a gulp of vodka that he had stolen from home and brought to school in one of his mother’s old perfume bottles. We smoked cigarettes in the woodland close to the main building, coughing horribly because the tobacco was so rough. Our school toilets had no compartments and we often sat next to each other doing what we had to do, which may sound disgusting but that was the way it was. You were meant to bring your own toilet paper too, but Leo always forgot and I would watch him guiltily tearing pages out of his exercise books. He was always losing his homework that way. But with Leo’s homework – and he’d have been the first to admit it – that was probably all it was worth.

The best time we had together was in the summer, when we would go for endless bicycle rides, rattling along the country roads, shooting down hills and pedalling backwards furiously, which was the only way to stop. Everyone had exactly the same model of bicycle and they were all death traps with no suspension, no lights and no brakes. We had nowhere to go but in a way that was the fun of it. We used our imagination to create a world of wolves and vampires, ghosts and Cossack warriors – and we chased each other right through the middle of them. When we finally got back to the village, we would swim in the river, even though there were parasites in the water that could make you sick, and we always went to the bathhouse together, thrashing each other with birch leaves in the steam room which was meant to be good for your skin.

Leo’s parents worked in the same factory as mine, although my father, who had once studied at Moscow State University, was the more senior of the two. The factory employed about two hundred people, who were collected by coaches from Estrov, Rosna and lots of other places. I have to say, the place was a source of constant puzzlement to me. Why was it tucked away in the middle of nowhere? Why had I never seen it? There was a barbed wire fence surrounding it and armed militia standing at the gate, and that didn’t make sense either. All it produced was pesticides and other chemicals used by farmers. But when I asked my parents about it, they always changed the subject. Leo’s father was the transportation manager, in charge of the coaches. My father was a research chemist. My mother worked in the main office doing paperwork. That was about as much as I knew.

At the end of a summer afternoon, Leo and I would often sit close to the river and we would talk about our future. The truth was that just about everyone wanted to leave Estrov. Outside work, there was nothing to do and half the people who lived there were perpetually drunk. I’m not making it up. During the winter months, they weren’t allowed to open the village shop before ten o’clock in the morning or people would rush in as soon as it was light to buy their vodka; and during December and January, it wasn’t unusual to see some of the local farmers flat on their backs, half covered with snow and probably half dead too after downing a whole bottle. We were all being left behind in a fast-changing world. Why my parents had ever chosen to come here was another mystery.

Leo didn’t care if he ended up working in the factory like everyone else but I had other ambitions. For reasons that I couldn’t explain, I’d always thought that I was different from everyone else. Maybe it was the fact that my father had once been a professor in a big university and that he had himself experienced life outside the village. But when I was watching those planes disappear into the distance, I always thought they were trying to tell me something. I could be on one of them. There was a whole life outside Estrov that I might one day explore.

Although I had never told anyone else except Leo, I dreamt of becoming a helicopter pilot – maybe in the army but if not, in air-sea rescue. I had seen a programme about it on television and for some reason it had caught hold of my imagination. I devoured everything I could about helicopters. I borrowed books from the school library. I cut out articles in magazines. By the time I was thirteen, I knew the name of almost every moving part of a helicopter. I knew how it used all the different forces and controls, working in opposition to each other to fly. The only thing I had never done was sit in one.

“Do you think you’ll ever leave?” Leo asked me one evening, the two of us sprawled out in the long grass, sharing a cigarette. “Go and live in a city with your own flat and a car?”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“You’re clever. You can go to Moscow. Learn how to become a pilot.”

I shook my head. Leo was my best friend. Whatever I might secretly think, I would never talk about the two of us being apart. “I don’t think my parents would let me. Anyway, why would I want to leave? This is my home.”

“Estrov is a dump.”

“No, it’s not.” I looked at the river, the fast-flowing water chasing over the rocks, the surrounding woodland, the muddy track that led through the centre of the village. In the distance, I could see the steeple of St Nicholas. The village had no priest. The church was closed; but its shadow stretched out almost to our front door and I had always thought of it as part of my childhood. Maybe Leo was right. There wasn’t very much to the place, but even so, it was my home. “I’m happy here,” I said and at that moment I believed it. “It’s not such a bad place.”

I remember saying those words. I can still smell the smoke coming from a bonfire somewhere on the other side of the village. I can hear the water rippling. I see Leo, twirling a piece of grass between his fingers. Our bicycles are lying, one on top of the other. There are a few puffs of cloud in the sky, floating lazily past. A fish suddenly breaks the surface of the river and I see its scales glimmer silver in the sunlight. It is a warm afternoon at the start of October. And in twenty-four hours everything will have changed. Estrov will no longer exist.

When I got home, my mother was already making the dinner. Food was a constant subject of conversation in our village because there was so little of it and everyone grew their own. We were lucky. As well as a vegetable patch, we had a dozen chickens, which were all good layers so (unless the neighbours crept in and stole them) we always had plenty of eggs. She was making a stew with potatoes, turnips and tinned tomatoes that had turned up the week before in the shop and that had sold out instantly. It was exactly the same meal as we’d had the night before. She would serve it with slabs of black bread and, of course, small tumblers of vodka. I had been drinking vodka since I was nine years old.

My mother was a slender woman with bright blue eyes and hair which must have once been as blond as mine but which was already grey, even though she was only in her thirties. She wore it tied back so that I could see the curve of her neck. She was always pleased to see me and she always took my side. There was that time, for example, when Leo and I were almost arrested for letting off bombs outside the police station. We had got up at first light and dug holes in the ground which we’d filled up with drawing pins and the gunpowder stripped from about five hundred matches. Then we’d sneaked behind the wall of the churchyard and watched. It was two hours before the first police car drove over our booby trap and set it off. There was a bang. The front tyre was shredded and the car lost control and drove through a bush. The two of us nearly died laughing, but I wasn’t so happy when I got home and found Yelchin, the police chief, in my front room. He asked me where I’d been and when I said I’d been running an errand for my mother, she backed me up, even though she knew I was lying. Later on, she scolded me but I know that she was secretly amused.

In our household, my mother and my grandmother did most of the talking. My father was a very thoughtful man who looked exactly like the scientist that he was, with greying hair, a serious sort of face and glasses. He lived in Estrov but his heart was still in Moscow. He kept all his old books around him and when letters came from the city, he would disappear to read them and at dinner he would be miles away. Why did I never question him more? I ask myself that now but I suppose nobody ever does. When you are young, you accept your parents for what they are and you believe the stories they tell you.

Conversation at dinner was often difficult because my parents didn’t like to discuss their work at the factory and there was only so much I could tell them about my day at school. As for my grandmother, she had somehow got stuck in the past, twenty years ago, and much of what she said didn’t connect with reality at all. But that night was different. Apparently there had been an accident, a fire at the factory… nothing serious. My father was worried and for once he spoke his mind.

“It’s these new investors,” he said. “All they think about is money. They want to increase production and to hell with safety measures. Today it was just the generator plant. But suppose it had been one of the laboratories?”

“You should talk to them,” my mother said.

“They won’t listen to me. They’re pulling the strings from Moscow and they’ve got no idea.” He threw back his vodka and swallowed it in one gulp. “That’s the new Russia for you, Eva. We all get wiped out and as long as they get their cheque, they don’t give a damn.”

This all struck me as insane. There couldn’t be any real danger, not here in Estrov. How could the production of fertilizers and pesticides do anyone any harm?

My mother seemed to agree. “You worry too much,” she said.

“We should never have gone along with this. We should never have been part of it.” My father refilled his glass. He didn’t drink as much as a lot of the people in the village but, like them, he used vodka to draw down the shutters between him and the rest of the world. “The sooner we get out of here, the better. We’ve been here long enough.”

“The swans are back,” my grandmother said. “They’re so beautiful at this time of the year.”

There were no swans in the village. As far as I knew, there never had been.

“Are we really going to leave?” I asked. “Can we go and live in Moscow?”

My mother reached out and put her hand on mine. “Maybe one day, Yasha. And you can go to university, just like your father. But you have to work hard…”

The next day was a Sunday and I had no school. On the other hand, the factory never closed and both my parents had drawn the weekend shift, working until four and leaving me to clean the house and take my grandmother her lunch. Leo looked in after breakfast but we both had a lot of homework, so we agreed to meet down at the river at six and perhaps kick a ball around with some other boys. Just before midday I was lying on my bed, trying to plough my way through a chapter of Crime and Punishment, which was this huge Russian masterpiece we were all supposed to read. As Leo had said to me, none of us knew what our crime was, but reading the book was certainly a punishment. The story had begun with a murder but since then nothing had happened and there were about six hundred pages to go.

Anyway, I was lying there with my head close to the window, allowing the sun to slant in onto the pages. It was a very quiet morning. Even the chickens seemed to have abandoned their usual clucking and I was aware of only the ticks of the watch on my left wrist. It was a Pobeda with black numerals on a white face and fifteen jewels that had been made just after the Second World War and that had once belonged to my grandfather. I never took it off and over the years it had become part of me. I glanced at it and noticed the time: five minutes past twelve. And that was when I heard the explosion. Actually, I wasn’t even sure it was an explosion. It sounded more like a paper bag being crumpled somewhere out of sight. I climbed off the bed and went and looked out of the open window. A few people were walking across the fields but otherwise there was nothing to see. I returned to the book. How could I have so quickly forgotten my parents’ conversation from the night before?

I read another thirty pages. I suppose half an hour must have passed. And then I heard another sound – soft and far away but unmistakable all the same. It was gunfire, the sound of an automatic weapon being emptied. That was impossible. People went hunting in the woods sometimes, but not with machine guns, and there had never been any army exercises in the area. I looked out of the window a second time and saw smoke rising into the air on the other side of the hills to the south of Estrov. That was when I knew that none of this was my imagination. Something had happened. The smoke was coming from the factory.

I leapt off the bed, dropping the book, and ran down the stairs and out of the house. The village was completely deserted. Our chickens were strutting around on the front lawn of our house, pecking at the grass. There was a dog barking somewhere. Everything was ridiculously normal. But then I heard footsteps and looked up. Mr Vladimov, our neighbour, was running down from his front door, wiping his hands on a cloth.

“Mr Vladimov!” I called out to him. “What’s happened?”

“I don’t know,” he wheezed back. He had probably been working on his tractor. He was covered in oil. “They’ve all gone to see. I’m going with them.”

“What do you mean… all of them?”

“The whole village! There’s been some sort of accident!”

Before I could ask any more, he had disappeared down the muddy track.

He had no sooner gone than the alarm went off. It was extraordinary, deafening, like nothing I had ever heard before. It couldn’t have been more urgent if war had broken out. And as the noise of it resounded in my head, I realized that it had to be coming from the factory, more than a mile away! How could it be so loud? Even the fire alarm at school had been nothing like this. It was a high-pitched siren that seemed to spread out from a single point until it was everywhere – behind the forest, over the hills, in the sky – and yet at the same time it was right next to me, in front of my house. I knew now that there had been another accident. I had heard it, of course, the explosion. But that had been half an hour ago. Why had they been so slow to raise the alarm?

The siren stopped. And in the sudden silence, the countryside, the village where I had spent my entire life, seemed to have become photographs of themselves and it was as if I was on the outside looking in. There was nobody around me. The dog had stopped barking. The chickens had scattered.

I heard the sound of an engine. A car came hurtling towards me, bumping over the track. The first thing I registered was that it was a black Lada. Then I took in the bullet holes all over the bodywork and the fact that the front windscreen was shattered. But it was only when it stopped that I saw the shocking truth.

My father was in the front seat. My mother was behind the wheel.