INTERLUDE: FROM THE KALDER ARCHIVE

It was in the summer of 1998 that the depths began eating the city. The process started slowly at first – a small section in the suburbs gave way and swallowed a man as he was walking home with his dog one night. That’s how it happened – one minute he was walking along the surface and next he wasn’t, he was below, boiling to death in an upsurge of water, his dog’s yelps mixing with his screams as they both became broth.

The papers blamed it on hot water running free of cracked pipes. That weakened the pavements. That in turn was blamed on Luzhkov: the people thought he wasn’t doing his job. He was letting the city run to ruin while he enriched himself. As the graffiti outside my building read: Luzhkov: Mayor of Babylon.

But death was everywhere in those days. Businessmen were shot in the head so often it never made the newspapers, and the life expectancy of the Russian male had plunged to 57, less than it was before the Revolution. The inhabitants of the world’s former second superpower were drinking themselves to death, finding that preferable to living in poverty and humiliation, in a society where it was impossible to find honest work, or to feed your family, or yourself. The Grim Reaper rode out, laughing, and nobody could do anything. They just tried to keep their heads down, to avoid his scythe, and went to work, if they had work to go to… where they weren’t paid, of course.

So when the city started swallowing humans, nobody batted an eyelid, even though it happened again and again that summer. And then Vadim popped up in the press, claiming that he had a list of a hundred, or maybe it was a thousand, areas in the city in danger of imminent collapse. The whole of Moscow was about to be devoured by the underworld, he said. A spokesman for the administration dismissed the Digger’s claims…

Finally, a whole stretch of street in the centre of town collapsed. Prior to that all the people and property that had vanished had been in poor areas, so the city didn’t really give a fuck, or at least, not that much of a fuck. People were dying every day, in enormous quantities, what were a few more here and there? The whole country was collapsing in on itself; a few streets in the suburbs of Moscow meant nothing. But this time the depths had swallowed a street only a hundred metres from the Kremlin itself, a street containing two theatres, shops, boutiques and the stolovaya I frequented in the days when there were still Soviet-style canteens in central Moscow. A Mercedes was swallowed whole. For six months, maybe longer, the pit lay open and passers-by could peer into the guts of the ravenous underworld.

Then it was filled in. New tarmac was laid. The whole area was jazzed up and my Soviet café was replaced with a boutique selling rich man’s shit.

For the moment, the underworld was sated. It ate no more.