‘My father was a metro driver. When I was a child he would take me into the driver’s cabin with him and lead me through those dark tunnels, and together we would watch the play of light and dark on the tunnel walls. As we travelled through the underworld, my father explained to me what lay above us, and that the place beneath the surface was full of buried secrets, that here lay the history of civilisation…
‘Then when I was twelve, my father died. On my birthday that year I gathered together a group of my friends and together we started to explore the underworld. Digging had officially begun.
‘We broke into basements and climbed into manholes. One day I got into the warehouse of the Academy of Oceanography. I wandered through a labyrinth of dark, empty tunnels, with dripping ceilings. Then suddenly I came upon a huge room full of dead things in jars. Pickled squids, eels, other sea creatures, all pale and lifeless. And I knew then that the underground was mysterious and full of secrets. But suddenly the whole room rumbled, and we realised that a metro tunnel passed close by. I tried to find a way from this basement into the tunnel. I didn’t succeed, but from that day I became obsessed with what lay beneath the surface.
‘This was in the seventies. It was difficult then, because the KGB didn’t want young kids exploring down there. Sometimes we were caught, and questioned. One time we exited a drain that led us right into the backyard of the KGB building. They interrogated me for hours. But once Gorbachev came to power, things relaxed and it became easier to go underground…
‘Later of course I understood that this devotion to the underground was a mania, an illness. It was not common. Only selected people have it. My grandparents were also connected to the underground. My great-grandfather was a manager of mines. Mine is a close connection, a spiritual bond to the world below. It is difficult for me to live without going underground. The longer I am separated the more I feel a compulsion to return beneath. It is something genetic… I try to go underground as often as possible. It is a madness, a hunger for this underground world!’
Vadim was sitting up in his chair now, declaiming, arms waving. The longer he recounted his origin story, the more animated he became: he was the Homer to his own Odysseus, hero and narrator of the same heroic quest, composer and transmitter of this endlessly evolving oral narrative, that had been passed on many times…
But still he wouldn’t meet my eye. He never met my eye. He’d look at Ed, Tatiana, the cat… anyone except me.
‘Once I had pneumonia. For one whole week I didn’t go underground. I felt then that I had lost my connection to that world, my special closeness. It’s my second home. Wherever I travel, I always go underground. In Paris, in New York, I have been underground. I need it to feel the atmosphere, to feel my own sense of self-worth. I don’t need to go underground for a long period, not every day. To restore my spirit, it is enough to find a place in the suburbs of Moscow, perhaps to descend fifteen metres into a well or tunnel, then walk for a while, and that will restore my spiritual harmony. But once a week, at least, for some time…’
And then a sudden shift:
‘For it was I who created the philosophy of underground spaces created by man. I developed it from my father. It is based around the idea of light entering darkness – and by that I don’t just mean physical light, for me it’s a principle – that light must enter the darkness… For me every tunnel, every cavern sublimates historical energy. I receive information from these places. I don’t need to read books: I can feel it, in the air and in the stones.’
And then suddenly another shift, away from the tales of what Vadim had seen and done, towards a lecture on the history and philosophy of the Diggers. He began by explaining that he had taken the name from a progressive Christian group founded by Gerrard Winstanley in England in 1649. According to Vadim they had promoted social reform and democracy. And then he was in full flight, mixing together Easter Island, Atlantis, the Dogon Tribe of Africa, Thor Heyerdahl, and the famous Soviet explorer Yuri Senkevich, who had operated on himself on top of a mountain, removing his own appendix with a pair of scissors and a rusty tin opener, or something like that… And Vadim tied all these digressions together into a theory that civilisation had begun under the earth.
‘The only reason nobody has ever found proof of this underground civilisation is that nobody has ever looked, I mean it exists, it just has to exist. What about all the motifs and figures recurring in the mythologies of ancient societies on different sides of the globe, hm? How do you explain that? Well of course: there is a network of tunnels connecting the continents, and the secret ancient ancestors of modern humanity would pass back and forth, spreading these stories! What else could it be?’
And so on.
My eyes glazed over. I stopped taking notes. Tatiana stopped translating.
Meanwhile I wondered about various things: how many other Diggers there were, for example. Most of the photos I had seen showed Vadim on his own, and he only ever spoke in the first person singular: ‘I’ this or ‘I’ that, I, I, I, I… never ‘we’. Tatiana had admitted that he found it hard to keep his acolytes close at hand. I wondered if he was actually the only Digger, that the others had all gone, and the idea of a society was a fiction he maintained for his own personal, psychological purposes. But Tatiana reassured me that there was a small team of long-term Diggers although she was evasive as to how small that hardcore was. Boys, much younger than Vadim, would pass through, but would give it up as their upper lips sprouted cheesy moustaches and they realised that splashing about in shitty tunnels was not the best way to attract girls.
Then I wondered about Tatiana, sitting at my side. Ever since Vadim had mentioned his assistant I had wondered who she was, how she had come to be involved with this strange, strange man. The first time I had asked she looked away, changing the subject to Edward Limonov, a Russian author we both admired. This evasiveness, of course, led me to suspect that in the long, distant past, there had been some kind of romance between her and Vadim.
Some time later I asked her again. This time she was a little more forthcoming:
‘Well you see, I am an economist. My job requires me to sit in an office all day, in front of a computer screen, working with numbers. It is extremely boring… But helping Vadim gives me an opportunity to enter another world. Because of him I have been underground. I have met lots of interesting and unusual people. He is very difficult to work with of course… but he has no one else to translate for him. And so when he asks me to help, I always come back.’
Edward interrupted Vadim’s flow:
‘Daniel, have you heard about the monster that Vadim saw under the city?’
‘No,’ I said.
Edward looked over at Vadim. ‘Well?’
‘I never said I saw a monster,’ said Vadim defensively. ‘I just said I saw something that might have been something … but it was very fast…’
‘It was like a cheetah, but underground.’
‘I only glimpsed it –’
‘Well, what about the underground ocean and that monster?’
Vadim was still ruminating on his lost underground civilisation. He didn’t like being disturbed. He told me the story very quickly.
‘In 1983 we went down under a construction site, where the Marriott hotel stands today. There was a crack in the earth; we went through it and found a cave, which led in turn to some tunnels. The tunnels were filled with poisonous gas, so we required respiration equipment to breathe. It was dangerous and unpleasant. But gradually, as we followed the tunnels, the air started to change, becoming cleaner. We rushed forward in order to find the place where we could breathe freely. Suddenly the tunnel opened out onto a huge space, and below us was a vast underground sea.
‘There was no horizon: space is curved underground. There was something in the water, but I couldn’t be sure what. Perhaps it was a whale, perhaps a submarine, perhaps a cloud of plankton, or maybe just bacteria, producing light. Was it a big creature or millions of small ones? I can’t say. It was frightening: I was afraid it might eat me. So we left. It was a very long journey to get there, but even longer back.’
Vadim returned to the theme of an ancient subterranean civilisation. There wasn’t much air in his room and I started to feel as though he were jumping on my brains. So I tried again to get him back onto less – how shall I put it? – speculative material.
‘What about Ivan the Terrible’s library?’ I asked. Actually I didn’t give a shit about this particular legend, but it was all I could think of at that moment.
‘It’s a pile of books from Byzantium. Some of the manuscripts date back to the pharaohs. It’s probably under the Kremlin somewhere.’
‘What about bunkers? Secret bunkers?’
‘In the 1980s I discovered that the city has many subterranean levels. At some points there are six, but at others twelve. We found lots of stuff then, including a secret bunker for Stalin. It was easy to break in. There was nobody guarding it. But the KGB walled the bunkers up as soon as we found them. They’re inaccessible now.’ He stopped.
‘I read an article where you talked about cannibals underground…’
‘The bomzhi believe a tribe of cannibals roams around in the deeper levels of the city, that if you stray too far from the crowd they catch you and devour you. I’ve never seen one of these cannibals, though. I think the bomzhi just get lost and starve to death.’
‘What about you? Have you seen a corpse?’
‘I’ve seen dead bomzhi. They crawl down a ventilation shaft to stay warm, then fall asleep. While they’re sleeping the heat dehydrates them and they die. Then sometimes you find bodies that have been shot or stabbed: gangland killings.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Well, first I take a scalpel, then I make an incision in the chest and reach down into the cavity to –’ He looked at me as though I were stupid. ‘I call the police of course. Once I found a chamber and there was the naked body of a baby girl in it, lying on a table. The corpse was fresh. The heart had been cut out, and eaten. There were pentagrams, and other strange markings on the walls. I told the police and they asked me to keep an eye on the place. They were certain the people who had done it would return to the site of their black mass. But I refused. No way I was going to wait for a group of murdering Satanists.’
Then I remembered the legendary secret city under Moscow, that subterranean Xanadu, built for the elite in the event of a nuclear war, with its freeways, apartments, theatres… Mikhailov had included it in his diagram for Residential Property Shit, and I’d even read instructions how to enter in a guidebook once.*
‘It exists,’ he said. ‘It was stocked with supplies to keep the country’s leaders alive for twenty years. Since then, however, bomzhi have eaten all the food and it isn’t maintained any more. It’s big enough to house six million people, and requires one and a half-million people to keep it functioning.’
‘One and a half million?’
‘Yeah.’
He didn’t even blink, but rather stared at me with an intense conviction that these entirely absurd figures, which he had obviously just snatched from the ether, were completely accurate.
And then suddenly we were talking about Nord Ost. This was what had happened: Vadim had been sitting at home, listening to the Ministry of Emergency Situations on his special radio, when he realised that something was going on at the Dubrovka Theatre. He didn’t know what, but he knew it was big. He decided to get there immediately.
When he arrived, the barriers were already up around the theatre, and cops were everywhere, keeping people away. Vadim approached them in full digger gear, and explained that he had an appointment with the head of the FSB. It was a bluff of course, but the cops didn’t dismiss it. In fact, within minutes the head of the FSB had agreed to talk to him, to see what help the Digger could offer.
And suddenly I was listening. Because this story was completely different from the others. This was no guff about lost civilisations, or some rumour lifted from the fringes of the Russian internet… no, not at all. The tone was different. The details were different. In place of wild generalities were specifics. There were dates, times, names. This was a real story, animated by its precision.
Then he fumbled it. Perhaps he realised he was telling me too much. The denouement was a fog of vagueness: suddenly Vadim was underground, with the Special Forces… just showing them some vents, some closed entrances, some ways in, but in the end… well, nothing really.
His mum ran in.
‘Don’t talk about this horrible subject!’
Vadim laughed. ‘Mum, I’m not going to –’
‘Don’t talk about it! Look!’
‘What?’
‘The windows are open!’
‘So?’
‘People might be listening’.
‘Mum, the FSB aren’t at the window.’
She started slapping him around the head.
‘Don’t talk about it! Don’t talk about it!’
She grabbed a box of videotapes and started rifling through them. ‘Let’s watch a film,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to talk about this subject. It’s not safe.’
She grabbed a tape and fed it to the video. Little wheels began squeaking and the screen flickered into life. She turned the volume up. ‘Yes, this is an interesting one.’