I
Vnukovo is Moscow’s oldest airport. I had never flown out of it, but I had heard plenty of stories – about wild dogs roaming free and pissing in the corners, that sort of thing.
This information was outdated. Vnukovo was now home to Putin’s presidential terminal and Mayor Luzhkov, the man Vadim the Digger had considered his arch nemesis, had taken the rest of the place under his control. He was very busy transforming it into a metaphor for his personal vision of Moscow, though whether or not his wife’s firm was directly involved in the lucrative reconstruction work I did not know.
The old airport was still there under the surface, even if concealed now by marble and plastic cladding to give it the appearance of modernity. To complete the effect the old kiosks selling stale bread and tea had been swept away and replaced with gleaming glass ones occupied by sullen women selling thimbles of coffee for $4 each. Shiny surfaces, crap service and low quality at high prices: ah, progress!
Luzhkov, a terrible snob, clearly wanted Vnukovo to compete with Moscow’s largest and most modern airport, Domodedovo, and offer flights to exotic holiday destinations and sterile, ‘civilised’ locales like Stockholm or Helsinki. Alas, it was still servicing outposts of the apocalypse. We arrived late, under cover of night. The destination board read Mahachkala and Abakan. The first of these is the capital of Dagestan, a federal republic that borders Chechnya, home to a mountain-dwelling people feared throughout Russia for their perceived violence and criminality.
The second is the capital of Khakassia. This is the birthplace of the Turkic tribes that swept westward to Constantinople, leaving behind them the cities and peoples of the states of Central Asia today. Though the land is littered with remnants of this ancient culture – including four thousand burial mounds and many standing stones – the Khakass themselves are nowadays outnumbered in their ancestral home. Ninety-nine other nationalities live there with them, though many did not come by choice.
And in addition, it is the gateway to Vissarion’s brave new world.
II
We sat under the announcements board. Nobody was going to Abakan except us. It was bizarre: Vnukovo was a ghost airport, ferrying invisible people to invisible cities.
‘I read an interesting story in the papers recently,’ said Semyon. He was already half-sloshed on a carrier bag full of hooch.
‘What was that?’
‘It was about a Russian pilot who let his sons fly the plane.’ ‘What?’
‘They were just boys, nine, ten years old.’
‘What happened?’
‘The plane crashed. Everyone died.’
I was sceptical.
Western newspapers are not the only ones containing poorly researched horror stories about life in Russia. Russian papers have them too.
‘Are you sure that’s true?’
‘Yes. The investigators found the – what do you call it in English – “black-box recorder”? They could hear the boys’ voices. They were laughing and having a very nice time – until they hit the ground, of course. The father was probably drunk. Russian pilots like to drink.’
‘Are you scared, Semyon?’
‘No, no … I just think it would have been better to take the train. It would have been nice, to ride the Trans-Siberian. We could have seen Russia …’
‘We would have seen the inside of a railway carriage, more like,’ I said. ‘What’s the point of sitting on a train for three days? That’s why God gave us planes.’*
III
We had to remove our shoes for the security check, but it was hard to imagine who would want to blow up a plane to Abakan. After all, if Semyon’s story was to be believed, the pilots were perfectly able to take care of terror in the skies themselves.
The departure gate was downstairs: Luzhkov’s remodelling was yet to reach this part of the airport. Here the green and white plastic of the original Soviet design persisted. The toilets too were ‘authentic’ communist holes in the ground.* Soon, however, it too would all be covered up with marble and plastic.
This vanishing corner of Soviet Moscow had a certain charm, and I was glad I had seen it before Luzhkov and his cronies got their hands on it. It was probably good that it was going: few people would lament it. But, like the final strains of a smallpox virus kept in a test tube in a lab somewhere, I didn’t want to see it destroyed once and for all … how would we ever really understand its existence in future if we were to do that?
I wasn’t the only one who preferred this rough and uncomfortable environment to the sleek façades upstairs either: this was where all the passengers were waiting. They knew that the dream airport under construction above their heads was not for them. The men wore black leather jackets and flat caps, the uniform of the Russian provinces. The women, mostly heavy set, had on thick fur coats. They were all clutching bags of treasure purchased in Moscow’s shops. But none of them were Muscovites heading east; they were all citizens of Abakan returning home.
There was no tannoy. A fat old woman standing next to the glass doors leading to the landing strip barked ‘Abakan’.
We got to our feet and shuffled forward. She collected our tickets in her hand.
IV
Deeper into the darkness we went, deeper into the past. The view from the landing strip was classic Cold War: night, mist, planes of Russian officials, including the Atlant-Soyuz plane of the mayoral administration. It looked like something out of a film I had dreamed long ago, before I had lived in Moscow: about icy, mapless and unsmiling life in the Soviet Union.
Our plane was a TU-54. I had been on one of these before, but that plane had been retired and was in an open-air museum. I remembered, under glass, a display of tubes of cosmonaut food: pâté and cottage cheese in a tube.
It wasn’t very comfortable. There was no leg room. I couldn’t sleep. I irritated the woman in front of me by continuously bumping my knees against her seat. The little Khakass boy next to her got up on his knees to stare at me. He was wearing a woolly hat with bear features on it. It gave him an extra set of eyes. He stared at me with all four of them, impassive and wise. He looked like a miniature shaman.
The flight took six hours. I spent all of it gazing into the black nothingness of the window oval. Only once did I see the lights of a settlement in all that night, a floating, fragile cluster of luminous, cold coral in that vast deep ocean of darkness.
And then it was morning. We touched down and I disembarked onto cold concrete. I looked around and saw some sheds. In the distance: a couple of low, purple hills.
We were in Siberia.
I collected my bags and went into the arrival hall of Abakan airport. It was dark and cavernous. Something drew me over to a list of regulations, frozen behind glass on a marble pillar. The letterhead was adorned with a hammer and sickle and the legend CCCP. I was in a zone where rules issued in a country that had ceased to exist fourteen years earlier were still valid. Was the TU-54 not an aeroplane at all, then, but rather a time machine? And then I paused, mesmerised, in front of a destinations and arrivals board that jammed once, a long time ago. From Abakan you can fly to the earthly paradises of:
Moskva
Kyzyl
Vladivostok
Novosibirsk
Norilsk.
Don’t forget your bucket and spade.
The Hotel Druzhba* looked like a giant dog-eared library book, split open and stood on its end, engulfed by dead sky and concrete. We went inside: the air molecules in the lobby, so rarely disturbed, bristled at this intrusion. It took a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then I saw the receptionist, sitting behind a glass barricade, her skin milky as the eyes of a blind subterranean. We approached. She looked up.
‘There’s a better hotel in the centre of town,’ she said.
‘I’d like to stay here,’ I said.
‘Our rooms are horrible. Theirs are nicer, and cost the same.’
But I didn’t believe in Abakan quality. I knew that would mean rank mediocrity at ludicrous prices. I wanted a bad hotel, a room someone had slit his wrists in: a place with atmosphere.
‘That’s OK,’ said Semyon. ‘We’d rather stay here.’
She shrugged and took our passports. She started copying out the details. But then she saw that mine was foreign. She handed it back.
‘Really, you shouldn’t stay here. Go to the Khakassia. It’s better, and it’s the same price.’
‘But I want to stay here,’ I said.
‘You mustn’t stay here. I’ll call a taxi for you, if you just promise you won’t stay here … Please …’
She was ashamed. She didn’t want a foreigner to see how people lived in Abakan. She picked up the receiver, and started dialling.
I let her.
A serial killer was prowling Druzhbi Narodov Street. Next to a plaque commemorating a Great Khakass Painter I saw this poster for a missing person:
Ludmilla Baturina
Born: 1959
Last seen 29th October, 1400 hrs, leaving office in Siberia hotel.
Looks about 35, blonde. Any info as to whereabouts, please contact …
Above this text: a grainy, black and white headshot for a passport or identity card. But the features were so blurred it could have been almost anyone, even a man. There was something haunting about this, as though the missing woman’s face was dissolving, and with it, the memory of her.
Four days had passed since Ludmilla’s disappearance. The notice was soggy, peeling off the wall.
The next one I found was already in the gutter.
Abakan’s shopping district lined the major highway leading into the centre. Cars and buses rattled past the storefront windows.
There were a lot of mobile phone shops, and also one or two designer boutiques: Mexx and Benetton. I preferred Lidya, however. There you could buy not only detergent, pirate DVDs and school notebooks but also a suit of armour, a snip at $1,000.
It was very shiny, and it had a plumed helmet.
In the city centre there was a busy street lined with Stalinist neoclassical houses. Some were painted pink, others yellow: very pretty. One was home to the Union of Khakass Writers, a holdover from the Soviet Union when all the county’s nationalities were provided with literary and musical organisations to bolster the state-approved versions of their cultures. I was surprised not only that the Union still existed, but also that it could afford to maintain an office in such a central position of the town. Meanwhile, two banners hung across the street: one for a circus featuring ‘Algerian lions’ and another for DJ Groove, who had been popular in Moscow ten years earlier.
It felt strange. I was looking at the same faces, and listening to the same voices having the same discussions, as if I’d driven thirty minutes out of Moscow to Zelenograd. But Moscow was four time zones away. If I’d flown the same distance in the other direction I’d have wound up in London.
No, something definitely wasn’t right here. I felt as though I was staring at a replica of something. Did this city belong here? Did these people belong here? How had they wound up in Abakan, so far from the centre of their culture? To me they looked marooned: Abakan was a remote island of Russian civilisation surrounded by vast oceans of land, and these people were doing their best to copy a world that was known to them only from the messages beamed to their radios and TV sets. The trees, the buildings had all been arranged to replicate these signals as best as possible. Whatever the true reasons for constructing the city, or why people had moved here in the first place, it all seemed forgotten.
The tip of the ten-foot concrete penis had a happy face; beneath it there were various geometric designs; at the base was a keyhole. Behind the penis there was a boxy subsidiary monument, also decorated with geometric patterns. Nearby were some bushes, with multicoloured rags tied to the branches for good fortune. The whole ensemble was located in front of a building site.
A Khakass woman, the first I had seen in Khakassia, saw us studying the penis monument. She ran across the street to join us. She was wearing multiple jackets; her long steel-wool hair was worn in thick plaits. She flashed a smile at us, revealing a half-rotten chessboard of brown teeth and gold implants.
‘Young men!’ she said, pointing at the monument. ‘What’s that?’
‘A monument,’ said Semyon.
‘But what does it look like?’
Semyon shrugged. I looked blank.
‘No need to be shy. You’re grown men …’
‘We know what it looks like …’
‘Out with it, then!’
‘I said we –’
‘It looks like a big cock, doesn’t it? And what about the thing behind? If that’s a penis, then this must be …’
‘We get the picture,’ said Semyon.
She tutted, exasperated by our modesty. ‘Why, it’s a lady’s minge of course!’
She talked about cocks and minges and the creation of the universe. I couldn’t keep up. Semyon didn’t want to. He just nodded, staring above her head. Then suddenly I understood her perfectly:
‘You know, here on this spot, four thousand years ago, there was a White Yurt. Do you know the White House, in America?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Well, here in Khakassia there was a White Yurt. And Adam lived in it. That’s Adam over there, the one who looks like a cock.’
She pointed at Adam.
‘Yes, Adam. The name has its roots in the Khakass language. So does Rai.* So does Jerusalem …’
‘Thanks, but we have to –’ said Semyon.
‘And who was Adam’s father?’
Silence.
‘The King of Heaven! Well, Adam was a hunter, and all women loved him. But the problem was that no woman could get near him, because he was so fast and he was so busy hunting all day. But there was one girl who was clever and she had the idea that she’d put antlers on her head so that she’d look a deer and trick him into hunting her. And sure enough, when Adam saw her, he followed in hot pursuit. She ran and ran, but then he shot an arrow and wounded her, and when he caught up with her, well, here was a beautiful woman, just lying there, naked and all aquiver with her hot little snapper exposed, just quivering and moist … Adam had never seen anything like it. He –’
‘I get the picture,’ said Semyon.
‘He cried out to God, his father, the King of Heaven – please cure this girl, so that I, the Great Hunter might know love! And then God looked down and – but wait, that’s not all. Look closely at the face. Those great big eyes, that nose like a potato, the lips like a lepyoshka:† who does it look like?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Those great big eyes, that nose like a potato, the lips like a lepyoshka!’
‘I still don’t know.’
‘I’ll help you: doesn’t he look Russian?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Doesn’t he, in fact, look like a Russian actor? Doesn’t he, in fact, look like none other than the great Pugovkin!?!’
‘Actually, he does a bit … ’ said Semyon.
‘Who’s Pugovkin?’ I asked.
‘A Russian actor with a funny face. He made comedies. He’s dead.’
‘Now, at the base of the Adam cock … do you see the keyhole?’
‘Yes.’
‘It’s the keyhole to paradise. But the problem is – there is no key. Now President Putin …’
‘Yes?’
‘Does he have the key?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Exactly! Putin is going the wrong way. You know the Pope of Rome?’
‘Yes.’
‘Putin follows the Pope of Rome. That is the wrong way. Now what about me? Who do I look like?’
‘OK, thanks for your time, but we have to go …’
‘No, wait, one last question. Who do I look like?’
She played girlishly with her braids. She looked like a pagan witch, an old medicine woman, a female shaman, skin dried as leather by rituals performed in the howling gales of the steppe.
‘Why, the Virgin Mary of course! And Mary, too, is a Khakass name in origin … Clearly this spot is the centre of the universe. Civilisation was born here, on the site of the White Yurt …’
We made our excuses and left. Of course, the Virgin Mary was outraged that we didn’t want to hang around for further enlightenment. But it was starting to snow, and the cold was gnawing at my bones.
Just beyond the Adam cock: a row of dilapidated wooden barracks. They had been slapped together as storage for assemblages of human bone and flesh in the 1930s. Seventy years later, assemblages of human bone and flesh were still living in them. Someone had daubed the legend ‘Down with the slums’ on one of the shacks.
Next door, vicious dogs prowled the brick house of a rich man.
Next door to that, stood the striped tent of the Novosibirsk Circus that promised Algerian lions and illusions. But the lions were silent, and a sign tacked to the kassa window announced that the circus was cancelled.
Beyond the circus, meanwhile, lay a vast park, where goats grazed and a metal tower built on the edge of a river commanded a view of the whole city.
The tower was unoccupied.
MONUMENT TO THE VICTIMS OF REPRESSION
I stared at the title for a long time to be sure that I had interpreted it correctly, that it was not dedicated to the war dead, or the White Army’s victims. But no: it was definitely about the Great Terror. Apart from a rock near the old KGB (now FSB) headquarters in Moscow and some bad sculpture hidden behind the enormous New Tretyakov Museum, I didn’t know Russia had any memorials to Stalin’s victims. One was too many for Semyon, however. It offended his sense of patriotism: ‘Anti-Soviet propaganda,’ he muttered.
I went closer. The monument was a black wall, like a giant tombstone, incorporating the outline of a weeping female figure and a long list of names. More than 60,000 people had died in Khakassia, among them representatives of all one hundred nationalities in the republic. It was a remarkable list of names: Russian, German, Korean, Khakass and others I didn’t recognise. The monument was so shocking that I wrote some of them down, as though later I would need to prove to myself that I had actually seen it; or perhaps I was reinforcing the knowledge in myself that there was a person behind each name:
Grek F. G.
Dementiev M. P.
Domozhikov G. S.
Shestak S. N.
Suetin N. T.
Penkin S. A. & S. A.
Kim Chen Bek
Kim En Mu
Doppert N. Ya.
Bahmanin V. F.
Veide E. K.
Van Sek Hak Gaidai V. A.
Gogenberg H. I.
Gusev N. P.
Bekker F. B.
Abashin S. E.
Aeshin F. A.
Chydrgashev E. I., T. V., F. B., A. E., A. M.
There were many others.
The prehistoric standing stones were embedded in dirt on the pavement outside the state museum. Khakassia was the birthplace of the Turkic peoples, after all: here were traces of those long-vanished ancestors. Unfortunately it was getting dark, so the details of the carvings rapidly dissolved in the gathering night.
A few minutes later we stumbled upon Victory Square. By the light of the sputtering eternal flame I was able to decipher the markings on another set of monuments that had preserved the idea and practice of ancestor worship when the shamanistic forms indigenous to this region were outlawed: the graves of fallen Heroes of the Soviet Union.
I ended my tour of Abakan with dinner in a Soviet snack bar and the movie Doom in the Nautilus Cinema. It had been a good day. Now, however, I had to change my thinking. Tomorrow I was going to travel to the village of Petropavlovka, 200 kilometres away from Abakan.
The rules would be different there.
I awoke in a world grown much colder. Winter, so long postponed, had finally arrived. The slushy, late-autumn snow underfoot was now lethal black ice; the wind, raw and Arctic, scraped at our eyes. We half-walked, half-skated to the taxi rank. The journey that had taken twenty minutes the day before now took forty-five.
Vadim had reassured Semyon that all the taxi drivers would know Petropavlovka. But none of them did. Everyone we spoke to just scratched their chins: ‘Nah, mate. Never ’eard of it.’
‘Er … do you know Vissarion?’
Everyone knew Vissarion. Quickly we had a car organised. It was a ‘customised’ brown Lada Zhiguli with no rear-view mirrors or door handles (except on the driver’s side), and, as a final touch, a piece of polyethylene in lieu of a rear window. The driver also pointed out an admirable feature I had missed: ‘I don’t have any snow tyres either. The weather was good yesterday, y’see.’
Although none of the cars was especially roadworthy, this one was unquestionably the worst of the bunch. In fact, it looked like a mobile death-hastening device.
‘What the fuck,’ I thought.
I climbed in.
We had been driving for about ten minutes when the driver said: ‘Two hundred kilometres without snow tyres … hmm … not sure I’ll make it.’
Which he quickly followed with:
‘By the way, lads, have you got a map?’
The driver wasn’t a fan of Vissarion. In fact, he thought we were wasting our time. ‘Fuck that wanker,’ he said. ‘You should go to Krasnoyarsk. The city I mean, not the region. Now that’s really interesting.’
‘What have they got there?’
‘A hydroelectric power station.’
‘Really? That sounds fascinating.’
‘It is. And they’ve got a fucking big dam, too. Biggest in the world.’
‘That’s true,’ said Semyon. ‘My dad’s seen it. He said it was fucking big.’
‘Maybe next time,’ I said.
Nevertheless I did manage to draw some Messiah-related information out of the driver. I learned:
• Vissarion lives like a king, on money derived from the sales of his followers’ houses, which they are obliged to give to him. He is driven around in a gleaming black Land Rover which can occasionally be seen in Abakan.
• His followers eat only vegetables. As a consequence they are pale, sickly people, prone to illness. The children are particularly unhealthy. They die.
• The Vissarionites are forbidden to use modern technological devices such as TVs and radios. Music is banned.
• Those who violate the rules of the community are cast out and exiled to the taiga, where they starve to death or are eaten by bears or die from exposure.
• The whole thing is a trick to con people out of their money. Vissarion’s agents show people films of Siberia in summer. The films are full of images of beautiful landscapes and idyllic village life. Duped into believing they will enter a pastoral paradise, they sell their houses and then give Vissarion the money.
‘And what do people in Abakan think about him?’
‘We don’t care. Everyone is too busy trying to make money. Just staying alive is a struggle for us. We’re more worried about all the fucking Chinks coming over the border and taking over our markets. I mean, this is Russia, for fuck’s sake. Why are we so poor and everyone else so rich? It’s our fucking country.’
‘But are there many people from Abakan living round the mountain?’
‘He’s taken everyone he can from round here, so he isn’t interested in us any more. His followers are outsiders, city folk, arsewipes from Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod and places like that. He prefers to avoid Siberians. We’re suspicious by nature. We don’t fall for his kind of shite so easily.’
But, local or not, I doubted the driver’s reliability as a source of information. It came to a head while we were discussing the Khakass. He had lived among them all his life, but he knew nothing about them.
‘What religion are they?’ I asked.
‘Christians,’ he said.
‘Really?’ I was startled. ‘Who converted them?’
‘Uh … I think it was Stalin. Yeah. Stalin converted them.’
Minussinsk was a grim concrete outpost of Russian civilisation, whipped by snow and dirt. But this was where Sergei Torop had grown up, where he had worked as a traffic cop, and where he had received the first intimations from God that he was the Messiah. I tried to superimpose this knowledge on the reality I saw through the grimy taxi window. It wasn’t easy: like trying to perceive a toilet plunger as a magic wand.
Outside Minussinsk the view was of old, low, tired hills – just like the ones you see driving from Fife to Glasgow. But I was in Siberia, so where was the sense of vastness? Why, if I was in the geographic heart of Asia, did it look so much like central Scotland? I kept waiting for the ‘real’ Siberia to appear – some mountains, a bear, a type of tree I had never seen before even: but nothing.
Gradually, however, some new features did begin to manifest themselves in the landscape. Periodically the hills would vanish, then reappear. Sometimes they had snow on them, at other times not. There was one area where the field was green but the road adjacent to it was buried under deep snow. Then we arrived at an area with no snow at all; then an area where everything was entombed in the stuff. There were fields; there was emptiness, a river. One moment a blizzard, then a clear blue sky: neither lasted long.
Human settlements were scarce and scattered. Occasionally we’d pass a grim village, rotting in the snow, and you could practically smell the human-flesh barbecue. They were the kinds of places where kids are found playing football with a human head.
Then we’d pass a lonely human, standing by the roadside, far from any village. What was he doing, I wondered, surrounded by so much snow and emptiness? Sometimes the humans were just standing around, black dots against the vast whiteness. Others were walking, but where to? We drove through a corridor of tall trees and spotted the figures of a father and son (or perhaps a paedophile and his victim) shuffling ahead of us. I expected them to flag us down. They didn’t, but I still felt guilty as we drove past. Nobody should be out there, I thought, on the road, on their own. The space might eat you. The silence might breathe you in. And yet they watched us go by so blandly, as if we were a comet in the distant sky they could never hope to touch.
Three hours after Minussinsk the driver was starting to think he was lost again, so we stopped and spoke to one of these stranded humans. He was staggering along a remote country road running between the vast spaces of two empty fields.
‘Hey! Where’s Petropavlovka?’ asked the driver.
‘Where?’
‘Petropavlovka! Are we on the right road?’
The man shook his head, smiling: ‘Sorry, friend. I’m a stranger here myself.’
After about four hours we came upon a big carved wooden sign announcing that we had reached Petropavlovka. Instantly I knew that we were somewhere totally different from all the other villages. An old woman walked up. The driver wound down his window. ‘Who are you looking for?’ She was exceedingly cheerful.
But I was suspicious. This woman, trapped deep in the great void, abandoned by her government, should have been full of anger, bitterness and suspicion. I know I would have been. But her eyes were bright and her smile was honest and open: it just wasn’t natural.
Semyon had been told to ask for Andrei and ‘the German House’.
‘You have come to the right place,’ she said, smiling. Then she leaned in through the window. ‘But what brings you to our little village?’ she asked, staring directly at me sitting in the back.
I didn’t answer. We drove on.
The village was set in a flat plain enclosed by a wall of dark forest that ascended to crown a series of low hills in the distance. This was the beginnings of the dense and impenetrable Siberian taiga. Above that thick green line the world was a brilliant blue, beneath it, a dazzling white. It looked as though we were driving through the crater of a frozen volcano.
On our right, a half-frozen river, on the left – houses. Some of them were dilapidated, miserable shacks like those we’d seen along the road. But dotted among them were the frames of future homes, other buildings almost completed, and still others with roofs and windows that were light and bright and hadn’t suffered from exposure to the elements. These were buildings intended for a future life, and not relics of an old one. They were startling and strange and alien.
Ahead there was a little hexagonal pagoda, and beyond that a big wooden building, about three floors high, with many windows and a pointed roof. I couldn’t tell what it was for — it was too big to be a house, but nor was it a shop, or a shed, or a barn for keeping animals in.
It looked fantastical, like something from the pages of E. T. A. Hoffmann, the German romantic who wove grotesque tales of living puppets. Inside, a dead-eyed marionette was waltzing up and down the stairs. At night it would creep out from a cupboard and kill children with a pair of sharpened scissors, stabbing them through the ear as they dreamt in their beds.
The driver stopped the car and we got out. Just beyond the German House was a wooden church, all spikes and points, with a thin spire emerging from the bristling mass of subsidiary roofs like a wizard’s hat. The cross on the church was not Orthodox. It lacked the two extra bars – one at the top and one slanted at the bottom. Instead it was enclosed in a circle, like so:
A wizened, mangy-looking guy was leaning against the fence of the German House, staring at us. ‘Is Andrei here?’ asked Semyon.
‘Yes,’ he said. I caught a flash of gold teeth.
‘Can we speak to him?’
He looked us up and down.
‘Depends. Who’s asking?’
It was an awkward moment. I had just invaded another world. The people here were perfectly content being unknown to us. What could we want from them? Why didn’t we just fuck off?
And sure enough, Vissarionites started arriving at the house. They greeted each other with expressions of joy, with hugs, and kisses – and then walked right past us, beaming blissfully as they approached the entrance. We were invisible.
Only the mangy little guy with the gold teeth reminded me I had not blinked out of existence. He would not lift his suspicious gaze, as if he was worried I was going to make a dash for the doorstep, drop my jeans and commit a terrible act of blasphemy.
I managed to restrain myself. Suddenly a smiling hippy in a headband emerged from inside. He looked like Bjorn Borg and spoke as if he had some seniority. That didn’t mean he had heard of us, though. He hadn’t.
‘And not only that,’ he said, ‘but no one in the house knows anything about you either, ha-ha! Isn’t that funny? You came all this way and nobody has the faintest idea who you are!’
Semyon explained that we had spent two months arranging the meeting with Vissarion. Bjorn Borg listened, nodding and smiling. ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you, oh no. But there’s a problem, you see – the Andrei you want is nowhere to be found!’
‘But he does live here?’
‘Oh yes. He’s just gone AWOL. I haven’t the foggiest where he is!’ Bjorn Borg chuckled.
‘What about Vadim?’ asked Semyon.
‘Vadim’s in Krasnoyarsk right now. He won’t be back until midnight. So you see, it’s simply impossible to check your story or confirm exactly what you agreed upon with anyone! Isn’t that funny?’
‘Not really,’ said Semyon.
Bjorn Borg wiped away a tear of laughter. ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll find you a place to stay in the village, and you can just hang around until Vadim gets back. If everything is OK, you can go up the mountain and meet Vissarion tomorrow. Just let me make a phone call.’
He disappeared back into the house. A minute later he reappeared.
‘I’ve managed to put you in a house with English speakers. I’m not going to promise their English is great, but it’s the best you’re going to get! Ha-ha!’ He paused.
‘By the way, do you have a torch?’ He was very serious all of a sudden.
‘No.’
‘Well you’re in trouble! The village disappears when it gets dark.’ And with that he turned away from us and re-entered the German House.
Our driver had been standing in the background all this time, studying the proceedings. Semyon settled the fare with him. But he didn’t want to leave: he was worried for us. ‘Listen, lads … that guy was a fucking loon.’
Semyon shrugged.
‘ … a complete knob-end. He couldn’t find his own cock in a blizzard, unless you tied his hand to it.’
‘Maybe,’ said Semyon.
‘Take my number. Just in case. You never know what these fuckers might try.’
We duly noted it down.
‘And if you make it back to Abakan …’
‘Yes?’
‘Let me know what happened, eh?’
He climbed back inside his car, slammed the door shut, and drove away.
We were marooned on planet Vissarion.