The next day, I thought a lot about my naïveté. It staggered me. Of course going underground was dangerous. What if the cops had got me? I would have had to bribe my way out of a nasty situation, and it wouldn’t have been a small bribe. There could have been serious troubles for my visa, perhaps a beating too. And what if they had got Vadim? What would have happened to him? Would he have been barred from going underground? Russia’s terrorism situation was far worse than anything faced by Western Europe. The police were entirely right to make the subterranean parts of the city off limits.
I felt foolish, too, when I thought about my original ideas. Of course he didn’t live underground. How could you do that, with no light, and nowhere to grow food? With rats, damp, cold, darkness everywhere? No: the Lord of the Diggers lived with his mother. He had no girlfriend. No wife. He didn’t work. He had his passion, his obsession and that was all. And he was 40. Soon he would be old, and it would be harder to clamber through the tunnels. And what then? Did he think about that?
I had wanted to believe it was possible to leave society and enter another reality, and live there in a world of your own creation. That even if I couldn’t do it, others could. But life wasn’t like that. It came and got you. You had to struggle against it, if you were going to force it to do your will. And it was a struggle, quite literally, to the death.
Vadim’s life was one such struggle. He was possessed by his vision; he couldn’t do anything other than follow it. It fulfilled him and tormented him at the same time. He was like some weird Martin Luther, but nailing his ninety-five theses to his own flesh instead of the door of a church in Wittenberg in 1517. More excruciating still, these theses were written in a private language no one else could understand. ‘Here I stand, I can do no other.’ That was all I could make out. Beyond that, it just seemed as though he was crucifying himself, slowly.
But this, of course, only made me more sympathetic.
I contacted the magazine and explained the situation. The editor not only agreed to pay for the interview and access to the archive, but added an extra $100 as a contribution to Vadim’s work.
So now everything was set up. I would do an interview, and consult his archive, and that was all. But the desire for mysteries would not let me go. Vadim had said it was impossible to go beneath, and I knew now that he really meant it, that he wasn’t just trying to raise the price on me. Even so, I still found myself thinking that maybe, if I wrote a really good article on Vadim, he’d be so impressed he’d invite me to join the Diggers, to become an honorary digger… I’d still be able to go underground, to see the wonders that were down there, beneath the city…
A week later I returned to Digger HQ with Semyon, although I didn’t anticipate he would be doing any translating. I just thought he would be interested to see how the story played out.
Vadim’s mum was there, but Vadim wasn’t. There was another Digger in the kitchen, though, tall as a basketball player, with limbs that filled the room. It couldn’t have been easy for him, clambering around in those tunnels, like a giraffe trapped in a sewer. I noted a look of profound boredom in his dark eyes. He had clearly been waiting for his leader for a long, long time. We grunted at each other. I passed through the tiny corridor to Vadim’s room.
It hadn’t changed. It was still crammed with relics, although there were more replica guns this time. But it was disturbing to be in the room a second time. The novelty was gone: now I was looking at the naked reality of a life lived in poverty.
The cat was still hungry. Semyon petted it for a while, then it walked out, in search of food.
After half an hour or so the Digger from the kitchen appeared in the doorway. He sat down in Vadim’s chair and started interrogating me. I gazed at him blankly; he was talking too fast. So he switched to English, and it was bizarre: his English was fantastic, fluid and fluent and spoken without a trace of a Russian accent. In fact he sounded rather plummy, as if he might be a minor member of the royal family. His name was Edward. He wasn’t a Digger at all but rather a music producer and documentary filmmaker. I told him I was a journalist, working on a story about Vadim.
‘Well, in that case you might be interested in me. I’m making a documentary on exorcisms and I myself sometimes assist an exorcist based in the Moscow region in the casting out of demons.’
He stared at me, blinking, waiting for a response.
‘Really?’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s interesting.’
I couldn’t think of anything else to say. We exchanged phone numbers, as I thought it might be interesting to get into exorcisms once my adventures with the Digger were over.
Edward started talking about the unfathomable mysteries of the Russian soul, as Russians frequently do with people they’ve just met. We discussed it for several minutes, and Edward was getting quite excited at our insights, but then Vadim entered the room, interrupting the flow of profundity.
Vadim shook Edward’s hand, grunted at me, and then sat in his usual chair, looking away. He never looked at me. When he talked he stared into space, or at the person doing the interpreting, but never at me. Was it the language gap? But Vadim had had a lot of experience dealing with foreigners…
Tatiana hadn’t arrived yet, and once more Vadim refused to talk without her. He sat in silence, glaring at the empty doorway. Then his mum came in and gave him a cup of tea. Vadim sat there, face like granite, sipping on his tea. Edward, Semyon and I eyed his cup thirstily.
Edward tried to rekindle our analysis of the Russian soul. What about the Russian state’s tendency to sacrifice large numbers of its population for the sake of grandiose, fantastical projects? He decided that this was just part of Russia’s attitude to all its resources – too much oil, too much gas, too much land, too many people, so none of it was valued, vast amounts were wasted, because there was always more.
We might have got even deeper, but then Tatiana arrived. We briefly discussed business, money changed hands. Now Vadim was ready to talk.