The Secret History of Moscow

6: Sovin

Fyodor couldn't sleep-he thought about his childhood in Zvenigorod, about long and dusty provincial summers he usually spent riding his bicycle down local roads. The smell of heated asphalt and tar became forever associated with those summers, when the cheap tinny bicycle bell drowned out the singing birds.

The summers when everything but the road and the bicycle disappeared, and he could ride it downhill, the pedals spinning so fast he sometimes had to lift his feet off them, to the sun, orange and huge, that waited for him at the bottom of the slope. In those days, he half believed that if he rode fast enough, gained enough momentum, he would catch up to the sun and sizzle and become one with the angry red semicircle that set faster than he could pedal.

He was pleased to recognize this old belief in his current adventure-apparently, the ability to ignore reality and to take things for what they appeared, not what they were, was the key to entering the underground kingdom. Everyone here, Fyodor learned from Sovin, had been desperate enough or confused and hurt enough to believe that the doors appearing on solid objects would open and admit them inside, that the reflections were the same as their originals. This is why there were so many madmen here, Fyodor decided. He wasn't sure he should count himself among them. But certainly not Sovin-that man, as Fyodor learned, was stone cold sober, and it was really a miracle that he had managed to make it in at all.

Fyodor could not sleep, even though Sovin's house was comfortable in the way of an old-fashioned wooden village house, with its warm dark walls and low ceiling, each beam distinct and blackened with soot. He lay on the bed (a straw mattress covered with a blanket), and thought about their host, the stories he told while Yakov was yammering away with his youthful grandfather.

Sovin had fought in two world wars, earned three PhDs, and spoke five languages fluently. He was born in St Petersburg into the family of a fur merchant, studied philosophy in Germany, and returned to Russia in 1914, to fight. The world war quickly graded into the civil one, and Sovin chose the red side, surprising even himself. It wasn't any shrewdness in the face of soberly weighing his circumstances; it wasn't the realization of the inevitable victory of the proletariat. It was a desire for fairness, for equality. He tried to like his comrades.

After the war, he went back to the Petrograd University to get a degree in agricultural science. He traveled with Vavilov, he collected seeds; Fyodor could not even imagine the sights he had seen and asked about Tibet and the Himalayas, but Sovin was determined to stay on the subject of seeds. “You have to understand,” he said. “There's that thing, a grain of rice or wheat, and it's small. But everything, everything every stalk of wheat or rice has ever known is packed inside it. It knows where it lives, it knows whether it's cold or warm; it is perfect in how it suits the place. And every one of them is the same yet different-Asia, East, West, the Andes, any given place. How can you not love such a thing?"

Fyodor recognized that the question was rhetorical, and kept his indifference to grains of anything to himself.

"Anyway,” Sovin continued, “you probably know what happened after."

"Repressions?” Fyodor said.

"Lysenko,” Galina offered.

Sovin seemed amused by their answers. “You're both right,” he said. “But before all that, there was the Genofond and Vavilov's Institute."

Sovin went home to Leningrad, where he worked on cataloguing and classifying the seeds, studying their genetics, crossbreeding strains. His philosophy training not forgotten but rather dormant, he focused all his energy on understanding the seeds and the plants that grew out of them, on defining and describing their traits. The collection of the seeds, the Genofond, embraced all of the variety of cultivated crops and held great promise. Until Vavilov was arrested.

Sovin and others continued their work, apprehensive about the war and Lysenko's crusade against genetics and other sciences with a suspicious foreign whiff about them. Sovin confessed that it was the fear of the labor camps that compelled him to join the army again-he was over the draft age, but they took him. His division was just outside Leningrad when the siege started.

Sovin was tormented by the visions of starving people and the precious grains from all over the world, and their close proximity worried him. He felt deficient when he prayed at night that the Genofond survive. “I didn't want anyone to die, understand,” he said. “It was just-I wanted the grains to survive too. To the people, it was just bread. But it was the entirety of human history in there. Even as we moved East and then back West, I kept thinking about it. Some things are just too important."

"It mostly survived,” Galina said.

Sovin nodded. “Mostly. But not the people."

He wasn't inside the city under siege, but he had nightmares about frozen streets littered with corpses, snowdrifts building over their hollow faces. He started thinking about whether the present was worth sacrificing for the history.

When the war was over, he could not go back to Leningrad. Instead, he joined the faculty of Moscow State University, teaching introductory biology and plant science; he experimented with plant genetics in secret-Lysenko had already labeled it the bourgeois pseudo-science, and Sovin had to mind his own bourgeois origins. Nonetheless, in 1948 he was sent to a labor camp in Kolyma.

When Fyodor was young, he met some of the men who went through the labor camps-they were recognizable, those craggy old men with gunpowder prison tattoos, foul language, and incessant smoking. No matter how mild-mannered and educated a person had been when they first went in, by the time they emerged they had been transformed by the harsh living and hard labor, by the life stripped to the essentials of survival, its most basic formula: if you work, you eat. The fact that they emerged alive meant that they had worked hard enough not to starve, and Fyodor tried to imagine how he would do in such circumstances. The unavoidable conclusion was that he would perish, and he respected those who were better at living than he. Maybe even envied them a little.

Sovin was released in 1958, after ten years of hard labor, and returned to Moscow. His reputation as a geneticist prevented him from working in his former position, and he realized then that the world as it existed did not have a place for him and, the letter of rehabilitation notwithstanding, he felt hollow and wrong, somehow. He took a job as a night guard in some vast and empty warehouse.

He did not concern himself with what it was supposed to be warehousing, and paid no mind to the miles of razor wire surrounding the perimeter of the empty lot in the middle of which the warehouse sat like a monstrous toad. It felt familiar, especially in winter when the winds howled and the flat lot froze and grew humped with snowdrifts, save for a single path that led from the locked gates to the warehouse and a small cabin, heated with a woodstove and illuminated by a naked bulb hanging from the ceiling like the lure of an anglerfish-his home.

He spent his days sleeping and reading-he became interested in physics and electrical engineering-and his nights pacing under the echoey corrugated roof of the huge warehouse, empty save for the piles of refuse in the corners. There were rats and he left them be, wondering how they survived in the empty frozen place.

The rats grew bold and invaded his cabin; when he woke up in winter, after the early sunset, he heard their scrabbling and the howling of dogs somewhere outside, and thought that he still was in the camp, and had to wait for his heart to stop thumping against his fragile ribcage.

The rats ran free, and he shared his modest food supply willingly. He knew from his time in Siberia that feeding them prevented theft and wreckage of flour bags and other delicate groceries, even though the other prisoners and the guards never believed him; it was their loss, Sovin thought. He was the only one whose stuff the rats left alone.

In his new home it was the same, and the rats behaved. He gave them names, and they learned to come when he whistled gently; they took stale bread from his hands. The rats were cunning and mistrustful, and he felt somewhat proud of having won their benevolence. They watched him from the corners, silent, whiskers a-twitch, as he read or soldered. He put together radios and other small appliances, but never used them.

He was rather isolated in his warehouse and his cabin, and only came into contact with the outside world when he went to pick up groceries-he had developed ascetic tastes, and only bought unrefined flour which he mixed with water and fried into heavy flat pancakes, an occasional carton of milk, rice, buckwheat and canned pork. At the store, he picked up on what was happening to the world-what they called “Khrushchev's thaw” was in full swing, and young people talked about changing times and the unprecedented freedoms of the sixties. Sovin did not believe that; he had learned that the world was not friendly, and any freedom was just an illusion. He heard about the dissidents who moved west, but he knew that their new lives and freedoms were illusory too. He envisioned the world as a giant machine, bloodied fragments of bones stuck in its monstrous wheels, and the only periods of happiness or perceived freedom were just a pause while the cogs swung around, nearing the next bone-crunching turn. He knew better than to be lulled by the temporary silence and to stick his head out.

He bought what he needed and headed back, never talking to anyone. He brought day-old bread for the rats. They waited for him, their eyes twinkling in the shadows.

He never listened to the radios he built, but the rats seemed to enjoy the static and the voices and somber music that occasionally broke through it, and he placed small radio sets along the walls of the warehouse and the corners of his room. He supposed this was why the rats made him a gift.

They labored in secret, and he only found out when they decided to reveal that the back wall of the warehouse had been gnawed through-they pushed away the sheet of corrugated metal, and he saw a hole with ragged edges and distant wan stars shining in a black expanse of frozen sky. He stood a while, looking at the snowy plain, listening to the distant dogs and occasional laughter the wind brought from somewhere far away, from the world he knew about but wasn't a part of. The rats gathered together and nudged him along.

He took one step and realized that the hole, clearly leading outside, did not take him onto his empty lot-instead, he found a dry path under his feet, slightly powdered with dry crumbling leaves, and a distinct smell of autumn and smoke. The rats gathered behind him, chittering excitedly, and he sighed. We can run away together, he told the rats. No one will miss us, we're the unloved children of the world. We are the corners which time sweeping by never touches, and leaves us clogged with our dust and useless memories. Let's run away.

The rats indicated that this was the idea, their idea from the beginning. Uncertain of what lay ahead, he stepped back into the jagged hole and packed a bag with a thermos of strong sweet tea and enough food to feed himself and the rat army. And then they left, he leading the way, the rats close behind. He did not turn around but with his back he felt the rats following him, the weak phosphorescent spots of their eyes bobbing on the wave of brown fur and sharp claws, their long yellow teeth bared in giddy smiles.

Fyodor dozed a bit and when he woke up long before dawn he discovered a large rat sitting on his chest, watching his face with an intent but inscrutable expression.

"Hello,” Fyodor said. He guessed the rodent for one of Sovin's rats, the ones who showed him the way underground, and he smiled. “You're still watching over him, huh?"

The rat twitched its nose and bared long dangerous incisors.

"It's all right,” Fyodor said. “We are friends."

The rat sniffed and twitched and skittered up to his neck on its pink nervous feet. It sat up, its paws, disconcertingly similar to human hands, reaching up to Fyodor's neck.

He froze, scared now, but reluctant to do anything that would upset Sovin or his pets.

The rat grabbed hold of the chain around his neck and pulled it out from under his T-shirt. The faceless coin dangled in its paws, catching light from the glowtrees outside. The rat studied the coin while Fyodor held his breath; finally, the rat was satisfied. It jumped off his chest, hopped across the floor, and disappeared through a cleft in the wall.

Fyodor breathed; this incident disturbed him even more than jumping through the windows of a moving train and finding himself in an underground world. Perhaps Galina was right, he thought; perhaps they did die in the fall, and this was the afterlife. He fingered the coin on his chest, warm from his body heat. Perhaps this coin was meant to weigh down his eyelids; perhaps the rat was just assessing his ability to pay for the passage.

His train of thought was interrupted by a quiet scrabbling at the door.

"Who's there?” he whispered.

"It's me.” The door opened and Galina looked in. “I couldn't sleep."

"Rats?” Fyodor asked.

"No, haven't seen any.” She tiptoed inside and closed the door behind her. “Yakov's sleeping like a log."

"Figures,” Fyodor said.

Galina sat on the floor by his makeshift bed. “Did you hear what David said? About Berendey?"

Fyodor nodded. “Berendey's Forest. I remember; it was a movie or something."

"I saw it too, when I was a kid. How can it be real?"

"It probably isn't,” Fyodor said. “Or at least different. Do you think anything here's real?"

"Feels real,” she said. “What else do we have to go by?"

Fyodor had to agree with that assessment-once one started doubting one's senses, the subsequent reasoning led straight to a brain in a jar. “Nothing,” he said. “It is real. Sovin certainly is."

Galina laughed, covering her mouth with her hand to keep it down. “Yeah. I couldn't have dreamt him up.” She grew serious. “Can I ask you something?"

"Sure,” Fyodor said, and propped himself up on his elbow.

"How did you know to jump through that reflection? I mean, how did you know it would work?"

"I didn't,” he said. “It was a literal leap of faith."

She eyed him cautiously. “But you dragged us along."

"I had to. If I were by myself, I would've doubted. When I had two lives on my conscience, I had to believe in it. Otherwise…"

Galina shook her head, as if chasing away doubt or harsh words. “It worked, so that's all that matters. Do you think Berendey will show up tomorrow, or are we just going to hang out in the pub again?"

He shrugged. “Don't know. But if you ask me, I don't mind the pub that much. Seems like a lot of interesting people."

"Yes.” Galina sighed.

"I know that you want to find your sister,” Fyodor said. But sometimes you just have to wait."

She nodded. “Let's hope I won't have to wait too long. Thanks for talking. I'll let you rest now.” She stood and left as silently as she had appeared.

Fyodor lay awake. He felt as if he was the only one who was a tourist here, with no particular agenda or heartbreak, and no tragedy to run from. He felt dirty and thought of the loud foreigners that crowded New Arbat, haggling over mass-produced matryoshkas repulsive in their cheery colorfulness and floridly red cheeks. They bought the dolls and thought that they were somehow authentic, and that by carrying the little wooden monstrosities home they better comprehended the depressed souls of the drunken natives.

Fyodor wondered if the suffering he had found underground was the same, slightly obscene, mass-manufactured by the cruel system, with as much thought as a matryoshka artisan cooperative that slathered paint and varnish on the light pear-shaped birch husks; perhaps his curiosity had the same sordid taint to it, the illusion of comprehension. His ignorance of real life was now patched up by the images of Sovin's unshaven hollow-cheeked face, dark like a Byzantine icon; still it remained ignorance but armored now with the arrogance of delusion.

He kept an eye out for the rats but they didn't manifest again. He was still wide awake when the morning came-the light changed imperceptibly underground, with the glowtrees flaring up brightly, and the shimmer of golden dust that remained suspended in the musty air, as if millions of butterflies had shed the scales of their wings in midair.

Sovin knocked on the door and called for Fyodor to get up and get some breakfast. Fyodor obeyed, and brushed his jeans to get rid of the hay that covered them. Galina and Yakov already waited at the table, with an old-fashioned copper samovar lording over the rough kitchen table, chipped mugs, and a sugar dish. Sovin hunched over the stove, making pancakes.

"Sorry,” Sovin said. “Didn't expect visitors, so I don't have any cheese or meat."

They reassured him that it was quite all right and thanked him for his hospitality.

"Anyway,” Sovin said. “Stay as long as you need to. Eventually, we'll fix you up with houses of your own; they're pretty low-tech, but land is not an issue here."

Fyodor traded looks with Yakov. “I'm not going to stay here,” he said. “Are you?"

Yakov and Galina shook their heads.

"Huh,” Sovin said. “I don't really know about anyone who left."

"You don't think it is possible?” Yakov said.

The breeze outside caught a hold of white curtains on the window and tossed them about. Sovin watched their frantic dance. “I don't know,” he said. “I never asked. Although if you consider why this place was made, you'll doubt leaving here is easy."

"Could you explain that?” Fyodor asked. “You told us yesterday about who lives here but not why."

Sovin slammed a clay plate heaping with misshapen flap-jacks onto the table, and sat down. “Eat,” he said. “Have some tea, and I'll tell you all about it."

It started as the place for the pagan things to go, Sovin said. Back in 980, when all of Russia was christened with fire and sword; there was no Moscow then, and the forested, hilly spot was perfect for spirits and their human allies to seek refuge. When Moscow was built, the things that inhabited the forests and the swamps, the things that hooted in the night and laughed in the haylofts were buried under the foundations of the first buildings-pagan blood was spilled under every stone, and a spirit was interred under every foundation. Or so they said, the old things, who hollowed out the ground in which they were buried.

"Did anyone know about them?” Fyodor asked.

"Of course,” Sovin answered. “This is why they sealed the underground off, and it's not as easy to find an entrance as it once was. As for going back-I suspect that those who created the barrier took care of it. Don't know if it applies to people, but some of the old residents are itching to get out, only they can't, at least not for long. So they have to meddle indirectly."

As he talked, Sovin picked up a flapjack and tossed it on the floor. Immediately, a pack of several large, glossy rats appeared as if from thin air, quickly followed by a tiny bearded man, dressed in traditional Russian costume, of the sort one expected to see on the male lead of a touring troupe of folk dancers; in other words, a fake.

"Cute,” Galina said. “You actually have a domovoi."

Sovin nodded. “Everyone does; they appear the moment you build a house. Can't keep them away, but they do the dishes and dust occasionally."

They watched the little man and the rats engage in a brief standoff; the rats decided that the domovoi posed no danger and ate the flapjack, tearing off chunks with their front paws. The little man looked forlorn until Galina took pity and tossed him one of her own flapjacks. The domovoi grabbed the treat and ran toward the wainscoting, pursued by one of the larger rats.

"Yeah,” Sovin said thoughtfully. “So we live."

At the pub, there was no news of Berendey. Galina grew angstier by the minute, and soon rose and said that she was going to look around, ask the natives about the birds and what they knew about the world above. “You can't just isolate things from each other,” she said. “I'm sure there are more influences and interactions than Sovin tells us."

"Suit yourself,” said Fyodor, and settled deeper into his chair. “The cop will probably want to reconnect with his long-lost grandfather, and I'm going to people-watch. And god-watch."

"Have fun,” she said and left; the door slammed behind her with uncalled-for force.

"Women,” Fyodor muttered into his glass. Like she expected him to drop everything and go traipsing through the narrow streets and vast no man's lands of the underground. He would much rather choose a good vantage point and wait for the world to come by. Eventually-if one stayed put long enough and picked the right spot-he would see everything he needed to see; he remembered reading it in a book.

The Pub was rather empty at this early hour, but he spotted a tall man, covered in blue mottled skin and naked save for a few strips of fish scales running along his arms and spine. He guessed him for a vodyanoy, a water spirit; his suspicion was confirmed when he noticed that the blue stranger continuously dripped water. It soaked into the sawdust on the floor, and a dark saturated spot spread like an especially slow ripple from a dropped stone. Then there was a cold wind from the door, and Fyodor watched, delighted and entranced, as the dark water froze into fine crystals, and a stout man in a red coat walked up to the bar.

"Gimme a shot,” he demanded from a small domovoi who operated the home-whittled beer taps and opened the bottles. “It is freezing."

Now it was, and Fyodor shivered in his windbreaker and T-shirt. “You're Father Frost,” he called to the stranger. “Right?"

The old man turned around and scowled. “Oh, look at that, another bright young thing. ‘Father Frost, will you bring me a New Year present next time?’ Fuck you, young man. I'm no Santa Claus, and don't you push your foul Western influences on me."

"I just wanted to buy you a drink,” Fyodor said.

Father Frost grinned. “Ah, you've got your head on straight. All right, sonny.” He stomped his boots, shaking off imaginary snow, and sat at Fyodor's table.

The domovoi brought over two shots of moonshine, the foul liquid with a strong undertaste of gasoline.

"That's the stuff,” Father Frost said. “Warms you right to your bones, doesn't it?"

Fyodor nodded; he indeed felt warm. “You won't freeze me, will you?"

"Not as long as you keep buying me booze.” Father Frost motioned to the domovoi bartender. “Keep them coming."

Fyodor searched his pockets, and came up with a roll of several rubles.

Father Frost looked at them skeptically. “Paper money is no money at all,” he said. “What about your coin?"

Fyodor found it disconcerting that everyone was suddenly interested in his talisman. “It's against the evil eye,” he said. “I need it."

Father Frost laughed with such deafening glee that the beams in the ceiling shook, spooking several barn owls who were apparently nesting there. “That's a nerazmennaya moneta,” he said once he stopped laughing. “Changeless coin."

Fyodor smiled. “Really?"

"Come on, I'll show you,” Father Frost said. “Clueless folk on the surface, gods forgive me. Everything needs to be taught and if it weren't for me you'd be all speaking French now. Assholes.” He beckoned the domovoi, and urged Fyodor to take off his coin. When Fyodor gave it to the domovoi, the coin underwent a metallic mitosis, one remaining attached to the chain, while the other was clenched in the domovoi's tiny and slightly dirty fist.

"Cool,” Fyodor said. “Does it work like that on the surface?"

"Sure does,” Father Frost said. “Only the coin is useless. That's irony, isn't it?"

"Not really,” Fyodor said. “What was that about French?"

Father Frost heaved an exasperated sigh. “Have you dum-dums ever noticed that the moment there's a foreign invasion, you get a record cold winter? Who do you think is doing that, huh?"

"You?” Fyodor answered, and threw back another shot of the foul liquid. “Why?"

"Because I care,” Father Frost said, drunken sincerity coloring his deep voice. “I care about you surface motherfuckers, unlike your stupid wimpy god."

"We were atheists for a while there,” Fyodor said. “Materialists, even."

"So am I,” Father Frost said. “A materialist, I mean. Berendey is too, but the gods are all solipsists. Especially the one you've picked; those who are here are all right, even though they're mostly big fish in a small pond, demigods and such. And you, you… you stupid surfacers, all of you either depressed or melancholy.” He cast a wild gaze around, finally focusing on the bar. “Hey, what did I just say? Keep ‘em coming."

Fyodor paid with the changeless coin again, and the domovoi dutifully took the spawned copper, as if he saw nothing at all unusual or wrong with being paid with the same coin again.

"As I said,” Father Frost continued. “All you know how to do is to wreck what the others have built and mope around as if you were the ones wronged.” Father Frost spat, and the gob of saliva froze in the air and shattered as it hit the floor.

"Not all of us,” Fyodor said. “So, why do you help us if we're so worthless?"

"It's not about you. It's about the land. It is mine, and I am keeping it that way. No matter what you do and how much of it you sell, bit by bit, until you have nothing left. And then, there would be no one left but us, those who were here before you, holding on to it like a handful of sand in the river, feeling it wash away grain by grain, but never letting go. We hold it together, stupid, so don't you ask me why."

Fyodor tossed back another shot, and waited for the familiar alcohol fog to drown out his sense of loathing of the world. Father Frost was right-the surface world had failed its denizens. And the underground world was a mystery, hidden from the majority, affecting things in an oblique and uncertain way. Their saviors hid underground, exiled and forgotten. It did not surprise Fyodor-Moscow was not kind to those who cared about it.