Back in Moscow, Edward gave me a few days to recover and then resumed calling, summoning me to more summits in McDonald’s. He had plans, so many plans. We had to go to Odessa, of course, and then Siberia, and then, and then …
Edward already had enough material for his documentary. He kept filming because he didn’t want to finish it. Because however much the film was intended to be a way of infecting other people with his vision, it was also a way of keeping Edward inside it. Edward created his world by the act of filming. And for as long as his life was devoted to amassing information for the film, he could ignore that other world, the one that loomed, threatening, outside – where you are required to find a wife, and a job, to pay rent and car insurance.
He was already hatching plans: he told me that when he did eventually finish his movie, he would then make another film, and another film, and another … each one homing in on a new detail, or elaborating on a fact, or the life of an exorcist. A series of footnotes to the ur-film he was currently working on, that would carry him safely to his grave.
I wished him well with it. But there wasn’t much room for me in there. Besides, on my last day in Kiev I had returned to the Vidubitsky Monastery, the site of one of our abortive demon-hunting expeditions, to witness one last exorcism. On our first visit I had checked the timetable of services and seen that a vichitka (the Ukrainian word for exorcism) was pencilled in for Saturday morning.
The Vidubitsky was one of the oldest monasteries in Ukraine, erected on a hill, surrounded by high white walls, above which peeped out brilliant green and blue domes and golden spires. As is traditional for many Orthodox monasteries it was difficult to reach, except in this case it was not a remote location that separated God’s house from the temporal world but rather lethal traffic hurtling up and down a motorway. It was run by the breakaway Kiev patriarchate, which is why I went alone: Edward, although extremely open to all confessions of Christianity, nevertheless had some reservations about entering a Ukrainian Orthodox church. It wasn’t that he was opposed to them, but he was concerned about how they would react towards him.
This is what happened: the priests chanted, the congregation prayed and crossed themselves, then the priest said something in Ukrainian and everyone got into a straight line. I joined them. The priest said something else, and everyone dropped to their knees. So did I. Then a long cloth was unrolled over our heads, and the priest started chanting. At the end of our line someone started screaming.
I was used to this by now, though. So I just kept my head under the cloth and waited for it to finish. It lasted about five minutes, then we all got to our feet and the congregation started lining up to get splashed with water and eat bread. I left, and caught the metro into town where I ate a burger. And that was that. I knew then that I had gone as far as I could.
Besides, I now had a new problem to deal with in my own reality. A visa I needed for my ‘original’ second book, the politico-historical epic that would have explained everything about a certain country in the post-Soviet sphere, had not come through. Without it, the projected follow-up to Lost Cosmonaut was impossible.
The strange thing was that I didn’t really care. Something had changed – some force had taken possession of me in Ukraine. I knew I was already on another path, and that I had to follow it to the end. Meanwhile the next stage lay right in front of me.
Remember Residential Property Shit? Well, I have an admission to make: I had written for the publication in question.
Allow me to explain. After university I spent several years writing strange short stories that I never showed to anybody. Naturally they were brilliant, but at the same time, there was never any obligation on me to follow rules or make sense to anyone except myself. So when I decided to start writing for an audience I thought it would be good to submit to an external discipline for a while. I wanted to write things that were extremely tedious and in direct opposition to my own interests. In short, I wanted to commit a few acts of violence against my own soul.
That’s where Residential Property Shit came in.
Their contributors were mostly Russians with a shaky grasp of English, so it wasn’t difficult to get hired. I wrote some crappy articles to order that were bereft of style or any point of interest. The money was laughable. I found it hard at times to deal with the self-loathing. The only pleasure came from inventing ever more unlikely pseudonyms: my favourite was ‘Becky Chambers’, a former cheerleader who was enthusiastic about everything.
But every now and then I would suffer a lapse and try to slip something through that interested me personally. For example I had an idea for a story set in a barren wasteland called Uglich. Though it was only 200 kilometres or so from Moscow it took ten hours to get there by bus because the main roads and railway lines had passed it by. And once you arrived there was nothing to see except a church, some water and one or two old factories. The government had never got round to paving more than a couple of streets and so the citizens stood around ankle-deep in mud, gazing into space. The cinema had shut down; the only shop I could find sold rubber balls and a metal bucket. Wait, I tell a lie: there was also a sex shop. I went in and saw a row of dildos and butt plugs standing upright behind a glass cabinet. The girl at the counter asked if I wanted to buy anything.
‘Just looking,’ I said.
‘Like everyone else,’ she said.
I had come to write about a family that had turned their living room into an alternative-history museum, dedicated to Uglich. After wandering round for a few hours I stumbled upon their little wooden house. Inside there was a bizarre display of life-size papier-mâché dummies representing various deranged tsars and tsarinas with real or tangential connections to the town, as well as junk they had found lying in the mud: an old arrowhead, a piece of metal, a rotting camera. Bizarrely there was also an original edition of Diderot’s dictionary sitting in a glass case. The father delivered an impenetrable lecture explaining that Uglich was the centre of the cosmos. Then he and his children dressed up in period costumes and enacted scenes from the history of the town.
I was there with Semyon, who had helped organise the interview with Vadim the Digger. The performance left him feeling depressed; he said the family was insane. I agreed that they were strange, but thought this was probably a good thing. Their madness had filled the world that surrounded them with meaning and symbolism. It gave them satisfaction. Instead of feeling hopelessly stranded, as many Russians in the provinces do, they felt absolutely central. ‘Madness’ was the best and most rational response to their situation.
I wrote this story up for the magazine, doing my best to cut out all the best stuff. But even so, no matter how boring I tried to be, I was never quite boring enough. They kept postponing publication until finally I knew it had been spiked for good. Then one day the editor said to me:
‘Hey, have you heard of Jesus of Siberia? That’s exactly the sort of thing you’re interested in.’
‘Jesus of Siberia?’
‘Yeah. He’s an ex-traffic cop who believes he’s the Second Coming of Christ. He lives up a mountain somewhere in Siberia, surrounded by followers. You don’t know about this?’
‘First I’ve heard.’
‘Well, about a year ago a guy went out there for us. He actually managed to meet him and conduct an interview. He wrote a story about it. A pretty good one, in fact. Didn’t run it, though.’
‘Why not?’
‘It was too interesting.’
I shit you not: that’s actually what he said.
And now, a year later the details of this conversation came flooding back to me, and I was suddenly filled with the urge to find out more about this ‘Jesus of Siberia’.
Instinctively, I knew that he belonged with Vadim the Digger and Edward and even the family in Uglich, who I now understood were part of this same secret movement that I had been following, this group of unaligned radical outsiders who sought to supplant the ‘real’ world with one of their own imagining, to replace our drab molecules with better, more radiant ones. Like them, this man also sought to spread his ideas and convert others to belief in them.
But this Messiah went much further, in every way. If what the editor said was true, then here was a literal builder of an alternative reality. Vadim claimed he had followers, and Edward had sought to create them with his film. The Uglich family proclaimed their truth from their living room. But the Siberian Christ was not only possessed by a vision, he’d actually brought it out of his skull and into the world, and now people lived in it, as his followers, at the base of the mountain. It was physical; it existed. You could touch it.
I went out on the net to look for traces of this Jesus. It didn’t take long to find some.
I
The newspaper interview wasn’t very detailed. I learned that the Siberian Christ had been born Sergei Torop in Krasnodar, a city located in Russia’s warm south, but had grown up in the Siberian town of Minussinsk, where in the early 1990s he had realised he was the Messiah. ‘Torop’ was interesting. I had never seen this name before; it didn’t sound Russian. Better yet, it was true that he had been a traffic cop, an interesting career choice for a future Saviour of Mankind. Jesus was a carpenter: that profession has an appealing symbolic simplicity. A mangy rat-fuck copper employed in the most despised branch of a despised organisation, hitting up drivers of clapped-out Ladas for a few grubby, well-thumbed rouble notes as bribes, does not.
Aside from this, I learned that this Christ’s name was not Jesus but Vissarion. Vissarion, like Torop is an unusual name. Its most famous bearer was a nineteenth-century literary critic, an early champion of Dostoevsky who was famous for his criticism of autocracy. Stalin carried it sandwiched between Josef and Dzugashvili as his patronymic. Apart from that, I knew of no others.
Vissarion said that he and Jesus were the same person, though not in any ordinarily understood sense. They shared some sort of cosmic soul essence, but Vissarion himself said it was difficult to understand. He and his followers lived in Krasnoyarsk, a vast territory ten times the size of the UK. Many dissidents had been exiled to this land, or had chosen to go there to escape state oppression. Vast, empty, full of forests and hiding places, it was a good place to build a new reality.
And now there was a new group of dissenters out there. According to the article there were four thousand Vissarionites, living in a hundred villages surrounding Vissarion’s home on the mountain, which was called the Abode of Dawn.
II
The Son of God’s own website was more thorough.
He had the right look: the beard, the straggly long hair, the slightly beatific smile. In some pictures he wore blood red robes, in others white. His head was usually cocked off to one side, as if it was too heavy to hold perfectly upright. The overall impression was warm and welcoming; but there was an otherness too. It was hard to pin down, but it was there, residing in his eyes: something enigmatic I didn’t recognise.
Living on the mountain with him was Vadim the Chronicler. Vadim had shoulder-length curly black hair and a very long face. In another life he might have been a member of a particularly spaced-out Eastern European prog-rock band. But Vadim was the main scribe of Vissarion’s Word, entitled the Last Testament (although there were some sections the Teacher had written himself, in his own hand). Everywhere Vissarion went, Vadim followed, recording the words and deeds of the new Christ for the generations to come: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rolled into one.
Vissarion’s followers were pictured en masse, in white robes, usually against a backdrop of green trees and lush grass. In this Siberia, it never snowed, and skies were always blue: life was an eternal festival. Women had garlands of flowers in their hair; men wore headbands. I saw some acoustic guitars. They reminded me of modern Druids, but without the defensive pomposity. The Vissarionites were unselfconscious, and totally beyond the fear of appearing ridiculous. The look of delight and happiness on their faces was like that of the Hare Krishnas you see dancing in high streets, handing out books with colourful covers: blissful, slightly vacant, alien.
I recognised these people. Over the years I had met many of them, though in writings about Russia today they are rarely, if ever, mentioned. There is a reason for this: the Yeltsin era of unbridled greed and violence very nearly obliterated their culture, and cast them into the outer darkness of poverty and total irrelevance, where they remain under Putin’s steelier, more restrained helmsmanship of the Russian state. Nowadays they skulk, lost and lonely, scrabbling to survive like insects trapped in the cracks of Moscow’s concrete vastness; or slowly starving to death in the provinces, wailing and gnashing their teeth as they try to make sense of what has happened to them. A few have given up and gone on to compromise with the state, or taken jobs as editors of (for example) Playboy. The vast majority, however, have been left out of Russia’s new wealth entirely.
I’m talking about the massed army of dreamers, artists, hippies and musicians that arose during perestroika espousing a philosophy of crystals, the Beatles, Pink Floyd, mediaeval history, Tolkien and barely digested Eastern mysticism; who idolised the West as the home of freedom; who devoured long-suppressed books on spirituality; who read the works of Soviet dissidents when they were first published; and who mixed this jumble of ideas and a fractured conception of Russian religion and history with their own deep impulses: a sense of the Russian soil as sacred as well as tragic, and a desire to reject materialism and embrace the ‘spiritual’.
They were the people who, for a brief while, had thought they were going to inherit the Soviet Union and make it good and holy. Had they been born ten years earlier they would not have been infected by the ideals of perestroika and could have retreated into nostalgia for the Soviet Union fuelled by bitterness. Had they been born ten years later they would have adjusted more easily to the cynicism of the nineties. But it was too late: they had been born into an era that died just as it was getting started. Suddenly the children of freedom were faced with a grim realisation: ‘liberty’ and ‘democracy’ had already come and they did not matter a fuck, either at home or abroad.
Sergei Torop was born in 1961. He came of age in the late seventies/early eighties, a period of stagnation and decline, and was a young man during perestroika. He was just the right age to have drunk deep of the ideals and images of this epoch. And it looked as though, deep, deep in Siberia, he had codified and formalised them, blending veganism with environmentalism and a late-Soviet hunger for all forms of ‘spirituality’. The result was a creed that appeared to be the opposite of the governing ideologies not only of Russia but also of Western culture, however much it pays lip service to these concepts. And then, to top it off, he had declared himself not only supreme leader of the movement but God-born Saviour of all Mankind, establishing an authority that went way beyond the earthly.
And so out there, the children of perestroika could triumph – because it was not AD 2005 but 45 ED (the Era of Dawn). The cosmic clock had been reset with the birth of their Messiah. They had turned their back on the civilisation that had raised them up into the light only to cast them out into darkness. Now they were somewhere else, somewhere better, finding miracles in the earth, in holy stones shaped like bears and hearts, in new festivals and music, and most of all in Vissarion’s word and luminous presence. Soon the end would come, washing away the civilisation that had wounded them.
After that? The new era, the new earth – and they were going to be at the heart of it.
I had walked in the darkness of the Underworld; I had heard the screams of souls tormented by devils. Now it was time to ascend into the light and encounter Christ. I became obsessed with Vissarion: I had to penetrate his community in Siberia, and not only that but seek out the Messiah himself, stare into his eyes and hear him speak.
The English-language pages of his site showed that he wanted to connect with the world outside Russia, and so my status as a foreigner would be an advantage in dealing with him: contact with me would give him publicity abroad. But at the same time, there was a lot of room for madness, strange demands and sudden reversals. After all, the Digger lived about a mile from my flat and it had taken three months to organise the septic tour. Edward never stopped phoning me with proposals, but still it had taken us over four months to reach Kiev, which was a mere sixteen hours away by train. As for Vissarion, he was thousands of miles distant, living on top of a mountain in a region where even the major cities were notorious for the poor state of their rotting infrastructure.
And being the Son of God, he was probably quite busy.
I drafted an exceedingly respectful letter. Semyon translated it into exceedingly elevated Russian. It fell into an abyss.
I sent it again; the abyss was still hungry.
Next: phone calls to a remote room. I pictured a small cube, a single wooden chair, an old bed, an oriental rug on the wall, darkness. The old, black, Bakelite phone sat ringing on a battered and scratched table.
On the first day, it went unanswered.
On the second day, it went unanswered.
On the third day, it went unanswered.
But on the fourth day –
A woman, startled by the sound of her own voice, as if she had not expected to ever speak on the device she was holding in her hand. She had no answers, only another number. Semyon took it, and this time the call was answered immediately.
‘It was some guy,’ he explained to me, sitting in a café several hours later, ‘called Vadim. Not the gospel writer. He was too old. This Vadim is some sort of personal secretary to the Teacher. He had a lot of questions about you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. He’ll need to talk to Vissarion, but I think he wants to help.’ ‘How did he sound?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Suspicious? Paranoid? Like a paedophile?’
‘Not at all,’ said Semyon. ‘He sounded very positive. My impression of him was very good.’
The obligatory stage of negotiations and counter-negotiations, proposals and counter-proposals followed. I wanted to meet Vissarion in his home on the mountain, and also to spend time among the believers in one of the villages, moving around physically in his reality. Vadim had no objections, but Vissarion was about to embark on a six-week tour of Russia, moving from city to city, accompanying an expo of photographs and text about life in the community, displaying his paintings (he was an artist in addition to being the Messiah) and also holding personal meetings. So if I was going to meet Vissarion on the mountain I had to leave immediately, or wait six weeks.
It was late September. In six weeks it would be early November. I had zero desire to climb a mountain in Siberia in temperatures of minus 40 or less. But there were few English speakers in the community, so if I went immediately I couldn’t be guaranteed an interpreter, and, having read some of Vissarion’s writings, which were prolix and convoluted, I knew I would need one.* But Semyon had a wife and a baby and a job in an office selling ATMs. The possibility of escaping that third feature of his life for a few days made him keen to go, but he couldn’t leave at such short notice.
This led to proposal two, which was:
– Meet Vissarion in Moscow, the first stop on his Russian Messiah tour. This fell through, however, as Vissarion mysteriously disappeared a few hours after his arrival in the capital. Semyon phoned, reached a harried Vadim who was unable to speak, and then heard nothing for twenty-four hours. When Vadim called back the Messiah was sitting on a train heading north. For unexplained reasons he had decided to abandon the Moscow segment of his tour.
This led to proposal three, which was:
– Meet Vissarion in St Petersburg. Vadim offered to show me some photos so I could get a sense of life in Siberia, and a personal audience with the Teacher. But by this time I had experienced a shift in my thinking. I knew now that I had no choice: I needed to go to Siberia. An hour grabbed at the back of the Metallurgist’s Palace of Culture in St Petersburg was not going to reveal very much to me. I not only needed but wanted to see Vissarion in his own environment, the one he had forged himself out of the great void, where he was at his most powerful. This was something remarkable, a grand achievement that was worth witnessing. More than that, I was suddenly glad, grateful even, that it should be difficult to get there. The path to salvation is always narrow and hard to find. Let the way forward be strewn with traps and snares: I was now ready to welcome physical exertion, madness and starvation.
Anything else seemed like cheating.