At some godforsaken hour the next morning I crawled out of bed and went to the window: the promised vehicle was already sitting outside the cultural centre in the snow. It was an old UAZ minibus, a dark blue tin cigar that teetered on top of enormous narrow wheels. Hm. I had been hoping for something a bit more modern, perhaps a vehicle from Vissarion’s alleged secret fleet of stylish SUVs, with a TV built into the back of the headrest and those bouncy wheels you see in rap videos. No matter: we went down, shook hands with the driver, a young hippy in a headband, and then climbed inside. I perched myself on the edge of a bench that had been repaired with black masking tape and tried not to sneeze, in case the whole thing fell apart. A metal plaque stated that the UAZ had been built twenty years earlier in Ulianovsk, birthplace of Lenin. And now it was ferrying pilgrims to meet the Messiah. I smiled, but only briefly. It was an irony of the sort of which there is perhaps rather too much in Russia, and I quickly came to accept it as normal, natural even.
Nobody else from Petropavlovka was going to visit the mountain that day, so we set off immediately. I let Semyon sit next to the driver, ostensibly so that he could enjoy the view but really because it was too early in the day for me to listen to hippy blather. Semyon was no keener on it than me, but I was leader of the expedition, so I had privileges.
The oceanic night receded, leaving a few villages washed up on the shore of the new day. We stopped in one (a hotbed of musicianship according to the driver) to pick up a young girl who was coming to the mountain with us; her name was Antonina.
We drove on. By the time the sun had fully ascended all signs of habitation had fallen away, and only a mud road remained, cleaving a path between rows of trees that seemed to lead to nothing and nowhere. The old UAZ, however, was bearing up well: it could take any crevasse, any pit, and just keep going. It was a real Soviet war horse: fine as long as you didn’t object to the violent vibrations in your internal organs.
After an hour the world beyond the grimy window began to change: the wall of trees dwindled to nothingness and the sky opened out above us, held up on the peaks of mountains covered in thick forest. It was beautiful, but forbidding: the kind of landscape that warns you off as being too steep, or impenetrable, a solemn, silent nature that threatened death.
We drove and drove. It seemed as though we were plunging deeper and deeper into the wilderness, but of course, our penetration of the territory was in fact pitifully shallow. I knew that this realm of mountains and forest stretched on and on with appalling tedium; that we were just playing with it …
And then suddenly the UAZ stopped. There were a couple of shacks standing at the foot of a hill. They looked like prospectors’ huts from the California gold rush. The driver informed us we had arrived at the foot of the Holy Mountain. Then I discovered that he was not a true Vissarionite but a double agent in the employ of the same sinister aliens who had been training the Jews in the mastery of money, because he swiftly ripped me off, making something like 1,000 per cent profit on the cost of fuel. I didn’t have much choice but to pay him, however, as I was relying on him to drive us back in two days’ time. As soon as he had the notes in his hand, he grinned, jumped back in the van and drove off, his extraterrestrial masters no doubt well pleased with their good and faithful servant.
I didn’t fancy his chances of surviving the apocalypse.
It was a six-kilometre walk through taiga up the mountain to where Vissarion and his closest disciples dwelled. There was a path, but it was easy to lose as it had been buried in snow and deceitful pseudopaths snaked away from the main one, tempting the naïve visitor to go this way, or that way, and thereby encounter death by hunger or by cold. Antonina, however, had been to the mountain before: she knew the true route to the city of mankind’s salvation.
Antonina was a small, pale, odd woman in her early thirties. She had first encountered Vissarion and his ideas through videos while studying English at the pedagogical institute in Ryazan in southern Russia (she spoke the language, but in a stilted, ungrammatical way). His was the message she had been waiting to hear all her life, and she was converted almost immediately. But it was the 1990s and life was hard; she could not afford to move to Siberia. Thus she had been forced to finish her degree and after that work for several years, slowly scraping together enough cash for the move. But in all that time her dream had not wavered, she had remained faithful to the word and finally she had done it. She had now been living in the community for about five years.
Recently, however, she had separated from her husband. Vissarion did not permit divorce if it broke up a family, but Antonina and her husband were childless, so it was permitted, if not condoned. Even so, her position in the community had changed.
‘The Teacher says that women are to be homemakers for men, but now I have no man to care for. But I am not allowed to do nothing either. Vissarion says that I must work, and be a useful member of society.’
‘So what are you going to do?’ I asked.
‘I am going to live on the mountain.’
‘But what are you going to do there?’
‘I am going to teach English to the children in the school.’
It struck me that that was a job only marginally more useful than sitting on the sofa at home and counting the hairs on her arm. Why were they teaching English on the mountain? It made little sense, except as one more reflection of the religious influence the Vissarionites did not acknowledge: millions of children in the Soviet Union had been educated in European languages they would never have any call to speak, considering that the vast majority of citizens in that socialist paradise were forbidden to travel abroad. The purpose of the language was not pragmatic but rather to demonstrate how enlightened and humane the Soviet education system was, and how fully rounded Soviet citizens were.
‘Are the children interested?’ I asked. ‘I can’t imagine they have much use for it.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s what I must do.’
The mountain climbed steadily, slowly, constantly upwards, but at such a low gradient that I didn’t realise how high above sea level I was: it was the thinness of the air that let me know I was ascending towards the heavens. Antonina was accustomed to it and soldiered on regardless; Semyon wasn’t bothered either – clearly he was a lot healthier than me. But suddenly I found myself gasping for air and physically exhausted for no apparent reason. Antonina slowed the pace a little, and then started asking questions. She seemed to think I was a follower of the Teacher. I rapidly disabused her of the notion.
‘Do you eat meat?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘You shouldn’t. The Teacher says it is bad for our souls.’
‘So why are you wearing leather shoes?’ I asked.
‘There is no alternative.’
Nonsense, of course: there are a great many alternatives – shoes made of cloth, wood, felt, plastic or rubber, for example. But I didn’t press the point: I wanted Antonina to open up, and give me an insight into some of the aspects of community life that were still shrouded in darkness – especially the ‘meetings’ that always seemed to be going on, where the Vissarionites resolved their problems collectively. I had learned a little more about them: the gathered believers would discuss moral problems, relationships, the construction of the village, the book, everything – though always under the guidance of an elder and with reference to the Last Testament. Nothing was off limits at these meetings; all topics were open to group discussion. Sometimes tempers flared, and conversations grew uncomfortable – but if the majority agreed to go on, then the meeting had to go on, until a consensus had been reached and the issue resolved.
It sounded like another echo of the old state religion, though this time it came from the earliest, most avant-garde days of communism: the re-engineering of the soul of man; the abolition of the individual in pursuit of an ideal and harmonious collectivism. The Vissarionites were trying to construct a city of transparent houses, where every citizen would be continuously visible to his neighbour, but need never fear because nobody ever felt the urge to sin. The Vissarionites after all were reconstructing man’s soul like the stars in the night sky, moving them around one by one, until his nature was changed and he was perfect, having conquered the ego and now living instinctively in accord with the multitudinous rules laid down by the Great Benefactor, Vissarion.
It sounded like a monumental struggle. I wanted some kind of illustration from Antonina: for example, what if a member of the village harboured a passion for his neighbour’s underage daughter? By the rules of the meetings he would have to reveal these thoughts, and ‘work through them’ with everyone, including the father of the object of his desire. But Antonina didn’t seem to have much of a theoretical grounding in her own beliefs. She couldn’t tell me much about this or anything. She wasn’t even able to say what it was about Vissarion’s teachings that had won her over and became exasperated when, out of boredom, I asked her about Vissarion’s stance on the theory of evolution.
‘Why don’t you read the Last Testament?’ she asked. ‘There is an English version on the internet … the Teacher answers many questions there.’
‘It’s just an introduction,’ I said.
‘Oh.’
‘And the translation is awful.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Unreadable: like someone who doesn’t speak English went through it word by word with a dictionary.’
‘Oh.’
She was silent for a minute.
‘Well, you might be able to ask lots of questions tomorrow at the sliyaniye.’
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Every Sunday, after the holy liturgy, we have a meeting with the Teacher on top of the mountain, and he answers some of our questions directly. If you are lucky he may answer yours …’
There was a security guard at the top of the ascent, sitting in a wooden cubicle with a ledger, keeping track of everyone who came and went on the mountain, just as though it were an office building in Moscow. He wrote our names into his book, then radioed ahead to say we had arrived.
I walked behind his cubicle and found a few dismal huts. They were abandoned, tiny and primitive: ancient Old Believer settlements, perhaps, or the last remnants of a White Army refuge dating from the post-revolutionary civil war. But in fact these hovels were little over a decade old. This was where the first Vissarionite pioneers had lived as they set forth to tame the taiga.
Beyond the huts was the peak of another mountain. Its sides were thick with trees like all the others, but towards its peak there were several alien elements: a futuristic circular building, and above that a house that stood suspended between abyss and void, looking out over the vast wilderness. This was the Heavenly Abode of Vissarion himself, the Eagle’s Nest, the mountain eyrie of the man with direct access to the father-mind of God, he who knew all that went on above and below, and who had revealed the true origins of the cosmos and the sixty-one rules of the soul for the first time, leaving his followers without words to describe the magnificence of his gift.
What was he doing now, the Son of God? Usually we encounter Messiahs in heavily truncated form and get only the best bits, edited highlights specially selected for our edification. We don’t get to hear about them moving from room to room, stealing a lazy moment, eating, farting, suffering through an afternoon’s ennui or watching TV. But right now, Vissarion was operating in real time, and a hidden camera placed in his rooms might well have revealed just such a moment of nothingness.
And standing there, I wondered not for the first time if there wasn’t something about the Vissarionites’ life on the mountain to envy, in spite of all the physical hardships, the isolation, the endless toil, the dismal food and the strict moral instruction. After all, they were so close to their Messiah that they could see him, and talk to him, and listen to his words in his voice, uncorrupted and unmediated by interpretation. They had a direct line to God; their faith was instantly rewarded and confirmed for them, and so their lives had a solid metaphysical purpose. There could be no dissent or doubt: the truth lay open all around them. Very few people in history had been in their position …
Sergei had spoken of ‘miracles that only we understand’: the story of how so much territory had come into Vissarion’s stewardship might have been what he was thinking of; it had certainly baffled me. There was timber on it; it had to be worth money. Land is always worth money. More than that, in the early nineties, when the community had been formed, private ownership of land was illegal, and yet Vissarion had managed to get his hands on an entire mountain. It seemed uncharacteristically generous of the state to just hand out so large a gift to such an extremely unorthodox belief.
In fact, Vissarion didn’t own the mountain. Later I learned that the community had leased the land from the government for eighty years as an ‘experimental ecological settlement’, without referring to the religious nature of the group. At the time Vissarion had not yet declared himself Christ: that didn’t happen until a few years later, at a press conference, when he was asked directly by a journalist.
It still seemed incredible: so much land, for nothing, for no profit, for the most idealistic of goals. And it wasn’t just bizarre in Russia: it would be bizarre anywhere. And some Vissarionites did take the event as proof that Vissarion really was fulfilling God’s will.
But there was another, less magical explanation. Vissarion had started his mission during late perestroika, and this was extremely significant. It was a period of unprecedented openness and change in Russia and the Soviet Union, both commercial and spiritual. One Vissarionite had put it like this: ‘Conditions came together at that precise moment that had not existed before then and do not exist now, and we were able to take advantage of that and make real something that would be impossible now.’
And Vissarion knew he had been the beneficiary of a remarkable moment in Russian history. He was very careful not to provoke the new regime. Although the mountain was remote, he obeyed all the laws of the state, opening up the community to the authorities, permitting the emergency services and safety inspectors to perform regular checks, ensuring that the children studied the state curriculum and took state exams. The governor was invited to their festivals. Vissarion may have created a reality, but he was aware its continued existence depended on the goodwill of the larger, more earthly reality surrounding it.
A tiny figure emerged from the wall of forest, distracting me from my thoughts. He walked towards us, slowly growing larger and larger until finally he was standing at full height under my nose. His name was Alim; he had Asiatic features subverted by piercing blue eyes. Like Ali he was from Dagestan; like everyone else we had encountered, he knew nothing about me. More than that, he was in a rush. I was distracting him from his important labour and he was keen to return to it. ‘The first I heard about you was this morning, when they radioed us from Petropavlovka,’ he said, as he raced back towards the trees, retracing the path he had just cut out of the snow. I half-walked, half-ran to keep up, answering the questions he tossed over his shoulder as he tried to figure out how to get me off his hands as quickly as possible. Alim didn’t know that I was supposed to be interviewing Vissarion. Like Antonina, he suggested I could ask one question during the sliyaniye the next day. ‘Everyone will be asking questions, though. A face-to-face meeting is impossible.’
‘No, it isn’t,’ I said. ‘That’s what I’m here for. That’s what we agreed with Vadim.’
‘With Vadim? You’ve spoken to him?’
‘Many times,’ said Semyon.
Alim’s tone softened slightly. ‘Well, it might be possible. I’ll radio the Heavenly Abode, but I’ll need to see a list of questions first. The Teacher has given many interviews, he has answered many questions; he’s tired of it now. Nowadays when Russian journalists come we turn them away. You might be lucky because you are a foreigner. What do you want to ask him?’
I paused a moment, thought, then realised: I had no idea. It was startling. In all this time, during all these preparations, dating from my first efforts at contacting Vadim back in Moscow to this very moment, I hadn’t once thought about it. But then, it didn’t seem to matter. I wasn’t interested in getting Vissarion to prove himself to me, or in trying to provoke him with lazy, niggling questions … I just wanted to meet the man possessed by the strange vision, who had ended up creating a whole reality in such extreme conditions, and attracting so many intelligent people to follow him. I knew that he would be ready for anything I asked him; he was a master at explaining himself. I wasn’t going to get much truth or understanding from his words. My instinct told me that his power, that what made him remarkable, was not to be found there anyway. No: the interview was a pretext. It was standing in his presence that was my goal.
‘I’ll write them down once we arrive in the village,’ I said. Alim seemed satisfied with that. We pushed on into the forest.
The taiga opened up into a wide circular clearing. There was a sculpture in the centre: two wooden angels standing back to back with their arms raised, bells hanging from their wings. A globe emerged from the space in between them, topped by a star with so many points it looked like a particularly cruel mediaeval weapon – something homosexuals might be made to sit on while the villagers pelted them with muck and old turnips, hooting with delight.
I was still carrying my memory of the furniture from the night before, and the knowledge that, in some people at least, the act of surrendering their will to Vissarion had unleashed remarkable talent. So I was surprised to see that the centrepiece of the holiest village in the community was a piece of syncretistic New Age crap that had raided the chest of religious symbols but failed to synthesise them in a convincing way. It was kitsch, yes, but not the entertaining kind.
‘We are forbidden to walk up to this monument unless we are praying,’ said Alim, leading us in a wide circle around it.
‘What does it represent?’ I asked.
‘Nothing much,’ said Alim. ‘We’ll put something better there later.’
And then, at last, after so much planning, so many preparations, I was finally in the Abode of Dawn, the village on the mountain, where those closest to the Messiah lived, those most righteous men and women Vissarion had hand picked from among his followers to live close to his divine light. Over the years the village had been named and renamed: New Jerusalem, Town of the Sun, Town of the Masters or simply the Town, or the Town on the Mountain. On 14 August 1998, however, the leaders of the village had made a decision to call their settlement the ‘Abode of Dawn’. The fourteen streets had then also received their names, and they were, according to the church’s official information:
Children’s Dreams
Moon Flowers
Tender Dreams
Eternal Quests
Solar Winds
Diamond Dew
Crystal Gates
Forest Spirits
Naughty Rains
Twinkling Mysteries
Silver Springs
Chanting Mountains
Star Fields
Ahem. God the Father may have been the embodiment of pure love but he clearly didn’t have much power to stop his followers from succumbing to utter tweeness. And for all the florid poetry of the names, the village didn’t look like much. There was a lot of snow, and some wooden houses. They weren’t as primitive as the ones I had seen next to the security guard’s hut, those dark, pokey holes in which the early settlers had huddled together, sheltering from the taiga. Some of them had high vaulted roofs, and looked quite comfortable and spacious. One had a vaguely oriental design. My eye was drawn upwards, however, back to the futuristic circular building I had seen earlier (Alim explained that it was going to be an art gallery containing Vissarion’s paintings and those of his most talented disciples), and above that, the Teacher’s own house, that stood in the heavens like a second sun; visible from every angle and with a clear view of everything beneath. But in fact the Teacher’s domain was better than the sun: it was closer to his people and its light could never be obscured by clouds.
Alim stopped at one of the smaller huts.
‘This is where you’ll be sleeping.’
It was good to stop walking, to get inside, into warmth, and to sit down. I took off my boots and my socks, soaked all the way through, hit the wooden floor with a wet slapping sound. We were in a workshop with a kiln, where Yura, Vissarion’s brother-in-law (he was married to the Messiah’s younger sister) made little clay coffee cups that the community sold at the Krasnoyarsk markets. His elegant creations lined one wall: they were small, dark and unvarnished, and each one had two raised beans close to its mouth. A workbench ran along the other wall, decorated with a photograph of Vissarion, some books and a row of tapes by Phil Collins, Enya, Enigma and Deep Forest: the aural equivalent of the street names of the village. Yura, a tall, gentle man, offered to put on some tunes: I politely declined.
As he busied himself in another room, making us cups of coffee, I tried to think of some questions for Vissarion that were not too obvious or banal. I couldn’t take too long about it, though, as I wanted Alim to think I had a master plan and not just that I had turned up for an idle chat and cup of tea with his lord and saviour. Fortunately some switch in Alim’s brain had been flipped; his previous indifference towards me vanished and the enthusiastic convert in him started to uncoil, randomly spitting out facts and ideas about the new life on the mountain.
He spoke about the weather, which was so extreme, and surely mitigated against building a settlement here; which made it look like madness in fact. But the cold wasn’t so bad. The climate was dry, so if it was minus 15, like today, then he’d work without a coat. In Dagestan, he had lived on the coast and there minus 1 was more unbearable than minus 15 in southern Siberia. On the other hand, the current temperatures were uncharacteristically warm. Usually it would be minus 40 by the start of November. The last couple of years had been like this. Winter came quickly. It just happened, suddenly, at the end of October. One day you’d wake up and there’d be snow everywhere. Summer was the same, you’d just wake up one day and it would be 40 degrees and there would be mosquitoes everywhere, eating you alive …
Alim was far more confident talking to me than anyone in Petropavlovka had been. There was no hesitation; he knew exactly what it was that he believed. But then, he lived literally a kilometre from the Divine Truth, so that wasn’t surprising. His speech about the climate came to an end; I hadn’t finished my questions yet, so I tossed him a question to keep him occupied.
‘How do you decide who gets to live on the mountain?’ I asked.
‘In the past Vissarion himself decided, but the number of believers is growing, and there are too many people now. So if someone in one of the villages around the mountain applies, then a panel selects. However, there are some extra rules: women can’t just be homemakers if they want to live here. They must have some useful skill – whether it is sewing or teaching or working in the fields.’
He stopped, almost panting, ready for another question. I tossed him one: ‘Are there any special privileges for people living on the mountain?’
‘No. In fact, life is harder. There are no extra prayers or worship. Our only benefit is that we live closer to the Teacher. After the liturgy he comes to a special place on the mountain where we meet with him as a group; I told you about that. But he doesn’t always come. Usually, he does, but you can’t take it for granted. You can ask anything, and his answer will be recorded and put in the Last Testament.’
‘Is it possible to have face-to-face meetings with the Teacher?’
‘That’s our other advantage. If there’s a problem, we can radio the Heavenly Abode, and we can get our answer faster. But you can’t just go to him with any problem. We have a system. First, you should read the Last Testament. Vissarion has already answered many of our questions; you just need to know where to look.’
‘How do you find out where to look? People are very busy, and there are seven volumes.’
‘If you can’t find the answer, then you should take it to one of our community meetings, then to one of our priests. Only then, if the problem is still unresolved, should it be taken to Vissarion, who will decide if it requires a personal audience …
‘It’s amazing what’s happening here,’ Alim continued. ‘Before we came it was just wilderness. And now, there’s a village. And two hundred people. There are families, young people. And it’s all because of the Teacher, because we’ve been given energy by his teaching. Life here is hard, of course, incredibly hard. It would be impossible without the Teacher, and not everyone can cope with it. Some people have to leave, and go back into the world. But look: you’ve arrived late, and yet the village is abandoned. Everyone is out working in the forest. That’s how motivated we are.’
I was almost finished my list of questions now – I just needed him to talk a little longer. Fortunately he broke into a lament, and it was the same lament Sergei the priest had made in the Petropavlovka at the end of our interview.
‘You’re not going to be here long enough to get the feeling. You need to meet the people, to talk to them, to feel them, to understand …’
I let the issue of ‘feeling’ pass away in silence. I had ‘felt’ something in the furniture-maker’s studio the night before, and I had ‘felt’ something in Ukraine when talking to Viktor, who had abandoned his television career to serve Father Grigory. But I had felt a lot of things in my time, and anyway, inner feelings come and go.
I finished writing down my questions. They weren’t brilliant but they weren’t embarrassing either. There were even a couple on the list that I thought rather original and that would probably hook the Messiah’s interest. Alim looked them over: ‘Not bad,’ he said, and then dashed out the door to radio the mountain. He wasn’t gone long. Yura had just served us coffee and was talking about his brief sojourn in LA in the early nineties when Alim returned. He was impressed.
‘Well, lads, you’re all right. You can go up.’
Our guide, dressed in white and pale as a phantom, emerged out of the snow, only to immediately start drifting away from us, like a filament of spider’s web caught on a breeze. He had no name; he asked no questions. He led us in silence through the village to the foot of the path that led to Vissarion’s house, and without a pause, began the ascent.
The air was very thin now, and I felt like an old man climbing the steps to some abandoned place where he had decided to die. After only ten minutes I had to stop, to lean against a tree, to inhale deeply.
The ghost-guide smiled: I was too young to be struggling like this. Perhaps it was evidence of my life, lived badly amid the corruptions of the world beyond. I ignored my exhaustion and resumed walking, but very soon I had to stop again, and then again, and then again.
‘I need pollutants,’ I gasped. ‘This air is too clean for me. It doesn’t have the chemicals my system requires.’
‘What’s he saying?’
Semyon translated. The phantom didn’t crack a smile. There was nothing good about pollutants. The Teacher had said so.
By the time we reached the top, the dusk was drifting in from the corners of the sky, shrouding everything in a murky haze. There was a guardhouse and a fence, behind which a huge dog was leaping up and down, barking and snarling and slobbering with a lust for violence and the taste of blood.
The phantom floated through the fence to get the gatekeeper to call off Cerberus. I thought about the dog, which was there to plant fear in souls. Was the Messiah afraid of intruders? After all, there had to be some terrifying loons among his four thousand followers. Was this enhanced security a precaution, or had it emerged as a response to something that had already happened?
Vissarion’s house was just above us now. It was bigger than the buildings in the village, but not extravagantly so. Beneath it, the stumps of dead trees thrust out of the snow, like so many headless necks. I recalled Sergei talking about those early days, when the Teacher and two men equipped only with axes and saws and the intoxication of a new revelation had ripped out an opening in the taiga for the Teacher to inhabit, as mosquitoes tore at their flesh: madness, divine madness.
But it had paid off, for Vissarion had one of the most beautiful views on earth. When he awoke in the morning it was to the peaks of mountains, crowned with trees, dreaming beneath a vast silent sky. That way lay Russia, that way China, and over there, Mongolia. But here, here was Vissarion. This was the sort of place where the top of your head could fly off and signals from space and messages from angels invade your sense of self. Indeed, it might be hard to prevent it happening, to shut the messages off, even if you wanted to. But then again, it wasn’t here that Vissarion had had his revelation. No: that had happened in Minussinsk, a smear of dirt on the face of the earth, while he had been working as a traffic cop. From industrial hellhole to mountaintop, surrounded by worshippers, bathed in sky: God #2 had been good to his boy.
‘Russia …’ said Semyon.
‘Yes,’ I felt an impulse to wax lyrical, to spout some shite about a mystery wrapped inside an enigma or something like that. I waited for him to finish his thought.
‘It’s big.’
‘Yep.’
There was nothing else to add.
Vadim welcomed us at the entrance of the Teacher’s house. I had the jarring sense that I already knew him, because I had seen him before, in the video Tatiana had shown us, and in photographs online, and on the cover of his CD – and so the ‘old’ Vadim Semyon had spoken to on the phone in Moscow was in fact also the prog-rock apostle I had read about on the site. He was tall and thin, and his face really was as long as it had looked in all those two-dimensional reproductions.
There were a lot of people moving around in Vissarion’s house: I saw the grandkids of God, and also the divinity’s daughter-in-law, whom I recognised from the oil painting in the Minussinsky Dom in Petropavlovka. She was tired and flustered. A staircase directly in front of me led upwards: I knew who was up there. I wanted to slow time down, so I could drink everything in, but Vadim was eager to get started:
‘Shall we go up?’
Vissarion was standing there, just a few feet away from me, smiling and nodding in his long white robes, his lank hair down at his shoulders, his eyes half-closed, his beard, all as they had appeared in the film and photographs. And yet he was much taller and physically stronger than I had expected, and his presence was overwhelming, like nothing I had ever encountered before. He needed the mountain and its sky simply to be, and here, cooped up in a little wooden room, he looked as constrained as a lion in an enclosure at the zoo.
Back in Moscow I had wondered: How do you greet the Son of God? In Russia, men always shake hands when they meet. I had picked up the habit myself and now did it all the time. It seemed a bit forward, though, shaking hands with Christ. So what should I do?
‘Hello,’ I said.
He nodded; smiled; then nodded again. There was a look in his half-closed eyes, as if he were dreaming this encounter, and neither of us was actually in the room at all. I was just a shadow moving across his eyelids as he slept, or lay hypnotised somewhere else.
The Messiah didn’t step forward. He didn’t extend his hand. He sat down. I did the same.
Etiquette problem solved.
We talked about things I already knew – the end of the world, the need to accumulate a critical mass of good flesh. Vissarion confirmed that he was in constant contact with the Godhead and had access to all knowledge; when someone entered the Krasnoyarsk region, for example, he knew what that man wanted, and could feel the troubles in his soul. He did correct me as regards one misunderstanding, though – the ‘global situation’ was not necessarily going to get worse. It didn’t need to; things were already bad enough. And I was struck by one other clarification: according to Vissarion, Russia’s traumatic experience in the twentieth century actually gave Russians an advantage. For the Bolsheviks’ slaughtering of priests, demolition of churches and suppression of faith had actually been to Russia’s advantage. By obliterating the traditional beliefs of the people, their minds had been cleared of dogma. Russians knew little about Christianity or any other religion, and thus they were more ready than anyone else to accept his new belief and be saved. And so, once again, the exclusive Russianness of his belief was driven home to me, this time by its very originator, albeit in a slightly perverse form.
But otherwise, Sergei had taught me well. I didn’t even need to listen that closely, as I knew what was going to come. His voice was fascinating, however. It was a soft, weary whisper almost without modulation. I was glad I was recording it: I knew that if I didn’t then I would forget it, although the sound of that half-chanted speech was important, essential even. It was connected to the hypnotised look in his eyes, and, I felt, contained as much meaning as his words. I stopped listening for meaning and listened only to the music of his speech, and there was still something there, in the air that he sucked in and expelled again, modified by his God-designed lungs and vocal cords.
Meanwhile, I made a mental inventory of the contents of his room. There was:
a sword on the wall;
a large selection of oil paints;
a gold crown (sitting on a shelf);
an easel;
several canvases (turned away from me so I couldn’t see them); some tapes, but they were too far away for me to read the spines; a parrot, squawking away in the background – I could see the edge of its cage, but not the beast itself.
The most confounding object in the room, however, was a young girl of about twenty, who was sitting next to Vissarion and smiling nervously. Her clothes were tight and sexy, and she had flashing cat’s eyes. After a few minutes I recognised her too: I seemed to know everyone on the mountain. She was the other woman, the younger girl with the inappropriate gaze in the portraits in the Minussinsky Dom, the one that Sergei had seemed to claim as his own wife. Perhaps I had misunderstood him: she must have been Vissarion’s daughter.
But still, what was she doing here? She looked bizarre, sitting at the side of the Teacher, whose eyes were closed, and whose head tilted slightly to one side, as if it contained thoughts too heavy for any human skull, and whose extraordinary presence filled not only the room but was flowing out through the windows, down the mountainside and into the village below. It was like staring at an icon, only to notice someone had added Betty Boop.
Vadim was sitting to the left of Semyon recording the interview, as every formal utterance of Vissarion was precious and not to be lost. Perhaps the Teacher would produce some new wisdom during this meeting. But Vissarion wasn’t interested in what he was saying. It was nothing new; he had said it all thousands of times before. He didn’t care if I believed or not. He had said that himself: he wasn’t concerned that his base was in such a remote location, and he wasn’t going to send out missionaries. If people were ready for his message, then they would come, though they needed to hurry, for time was short. If I wasn’t ready, that was my problem.
I needed to do something before we both fell asleep. I decided to abandon the information-gathering approach and strike right at the heart of the subjective experience of being Christ. That was what interested me most: what did it feel like, to be responsible for human destiny? ‘In the New Testament,’ I said, pausing for a moment, ‘in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus cried out to God that his mission was too difficult. Is your mission a burden – or is it a joy?’
Vissarion paused. I had just stepped across a line. Something had changed. ‘Excuse me?’
I repeated the question. He laughed: ‘I can’t imagine any work harder than this.’
‘But do you ever cry out?’ I continued. ‘Do you ever cry out: “Father, relieve me of this burden”?’
He shook his head; warming to the theme he continued: ‘It’s useless. You can’t make it easy. While you’re on earth you’re inside a body that can experience feelings and sorrow. My mission is to be open, not distant from people. If I didn’t have feelings, I wouldn’t be able to understand what was happening inside man. Of course, my mission makes me tired, but I can’t stop it … some Eastern spiritual leaders talk about meditation to transcend the self – but that’s not for me.’
‘What about the end?’ I said. ‘Christ’s mission on earth lasted three years, you’ve already been among us for fifteen. Do you know when you will leave?’
‘No,’ he laughed again. ‘But I will know close to the time.’
Vissarion had changed. He was alert, and listening, and enjoying himself, cracking gags and laughing. I had touched directly on his Christhood, and he liked that – it had transformed him into quite a lively Messiah. Then I asked about Mohammed, Buddha and Krishna. If he was a direct continuation of Christ, but had come to unite all religions, then what was his relationship to these other teachers?
And now Vissarion really took flight. This was one of the ‘major themes’ of his thought, but difficult to explain and ‘very delicate’. He placed the New Testament higher than any other holy book, though they all had validity. The problem with the New Testament was that it contained not teaching so much as a ‘good message’. In fact, he had special praise for Islam: for the Muslims had analysed the problem with Christianity, detected its incompletion, and by adding long lists of rules and directions had produced a finer message, which even Jesus hadn’t managed to reveal.
Vissarion, however, had arrived with the final word on everything. And then suddenly, like Sergei the priest, he was talking about alien civilisations, critiquing systems based on reason and not faith and emotion, but unlike Sergei, who had been recollecting a catechism, Vissarion was speaking from inspiration, from his essence, with a force and inspiration that was unstoppable. The time was coming soon when conditions would lead people to reject dogmas. It was coming, but it had not yet arrived. The earth was changing, there was movement from one step to another. It wasn’t God’s will, but it was coming, and only a few people would survive the calamities ahead and become ‘the basis of future mankind’.
He spoke these words with total calm, as if the apocalypse was good. After it, mankind would leave earth behind and move into the universe, which was the purpose for which we had in fact been born: to constantly change the laws of the material world by love. ‘But we must understand ourselves first, and become one nation, with one belief. Only then will people have the qualities that will help them leave the earth in ways different from how they do it now. And then we will settle other planets.’
He had me in his power, in the grip of his reality. By talking to him as Christ I had placed myself in the position of acolyte, which, of course, was how he related to everyone around him. Infused with energy for prophecy, he was ready to ‘Vissarion’ at me all day. The interview was getting out of control. I tried to undermine him a little, to throw him off.
‘Christ was physically resurrected,’ I said. ‘But you teach that we are reincarnated.’
Vadim’s eyes became thoughtful and he nodded, as if he hadn’t resolved this contradiction for himself either. For a second I wondered if I had asked a question that was going to enter the Last Testament.
‘Yes,’ said Vissarion.
There was a pause. The parrot squawked. I’d been hoping for a bit more. Eventually, seeing that I wasn’t satisfied, Vissarion continued: ‘It’s basically the same thing …’
Then he lost me in a long disquisition on the nature of the body, and the nature of the soul.
It wasn’t exactly an answer. It wasn’t an answer at all, in fact. You might even call it an evasion. Vadim didn’t look any more enlightened, either. No, this conversation wasn’t making it into the book.
Vissarion was still talking. But now I wanted to look for Sergei Torop, to see if I could find him somewhere concealed beneath the robes and beard and glittering eyes. I tried to steer him into discussing his past, his life before the revelation.
‘Before you were thirty, did you have any indications in your soul that this destiny was waiting for you?’
‘Yes, I felt it. But at that time I couldn’t understand it perfectly. If I had, I couldn’t have been silent. But at that time it was forbidden to believe in something so unorthodox.’
‘So your revelation happened at the right time?’
‘The hour was prepared: it had to be at that time, and that time only.’
It wasn’t working; his answers were short and matter of fact, leading to nothing except their own conclusions. So I tried again, with questions about art, and questions about his children to get at Sergei Torop; it didn’t work. Anything that even hinted at his old life drew a blank, or led to a lecture on something else entirely. I didn’t think he was evading the questions: he simply did not understand them. They referred to someone else, someone who didn’t interest him. Sergei Torop’s DNA had long since fused with Vissarion’s; the sleeper could not be awoken from his dream. The dream in fact had taken over – devouring him and all those others camped out around the mountain, awaiting the end, their final vindication. Perhaps if I had had access to other methods, say involving rubber tubing, crocodile clips and a car battery, I might have been able to locate the traffic policeman, but even then, maybe not.
I ran out of juice. I’d been there for about an hour, it was pitch black outside and I was hungry. I thanked him for his time and switched off my tape recorder.
But Vissarion didn’t want me to go. He was enjoying himself. I even think he liked me.
‘Stay,’ he said. ‘Ask anything you like.’
But I knew now that I was just going to receive more wisdom, and I had had my fill of it. ‘Can I ask about the parrot?’ I asked.
Vissarion laughed. ‘Yes.’
‘How long has it lived on the mountain?’
The girl at his side answered. ‘One year,’ she said in English, thrilled by the sound of the alien language exiting her mouth.
‘Does it speak?’
‘Name,’ she said, before adding something in Russian.
‘It imitates the sound of the telephone,’ said Semyon.
Then Vissarion himself took the initiative. He spoke about the body’s ‘informational field’, which did not die with the body, but rather persisted over days, slowly fading, until the now disembodied memories it contained vanished completely. Only the soul was deathless. ‘But in the future, people won’t change their bodies so often. For the body may live for hundreds of thousands of years. It will still die, and the soul will change bodies, but it will keep a record of acts in previous life …’
But I wasn’t listening. He talked a little longer, and then stopped. Without a willing audience, the revelations dried up.
I asked if Vissarion would pose for a photo with me.
‘What for?’ he asked.
The mock confusion struck a false note, the first time I had felt that he didn’t believe himself. It was a gesture towards the total annihilation of the ego he preached, but nothing more. Considering the number of portraits I had seen hanging in homes in Petropavlovka, and the picture by the altar in the cathedral, it was clear that he knew exactly what photographs were for, and then he posed happily for multiple shots anyway. As soon as they were taken, however, a curtain fell. Vissarion turned away and began a conversation with Vadim. I was still in the room, but I was no longer in his presence.
The girl saw us out. At the foot of the stairs she spoke:
‘I stady Eengleesh,’ she said, staring at me, waiting for some practice.
‘Very good,’ I said. ‘So what’s your name?’
‘My name Sofia …’
‘And whose daughter are you? Vissarion’s or Vadim’s?’
She giggled.
‘I … not daughter.’
Eh?
‘I … wife Vissarion.’ Her eyes flashed.
I wasn’t sure what the next question was. Or rather, I couldn’t ask it. Something else came out instead.
‘And … how long have you lived in the village?’
‘Long time,’ she said.
So Vissarion had known her since she was a child.
Well, well, well …
The phantom was waiting at the door. I had been with Vissarion for almost an hour; he was impressed.
‘It went well?’ he asked.
‘Very,’ I said.
We went out into the night and then down the mountain, weaving between trees, cutting through the darkness. It was much easier going down than up; I didn’t feel tired at all. It was still necessary to concentrate, however, to stay on my feet. But that was difficult: there was just one thing on my mind, and it was young and nubile and spoke English badly. Antonina had said divorce was forbidden, and I had seen Vissarion’s first wife in the house. Was it really what it looked like? Because it didn’t look good.
‘Let’s ask our guide about Sofia,’ I said.
‘I don’t think we can,’ said Semyon. ‘It’s not polite …’
‘I’ll be discreet. Ask … ask when Vissarion married Sofia.’
Semyon was reluctant, but he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said the phantom.
He stepped up the pace a little. I tried to think of another question, one that would be harder to evade. After a few minutes stumbling down the path, I had it:
‘If Vissarion is the highest spiritual authority in your community …’
‘Yes …’
‘Then who performed the marriage ceremony?’
‘Eh?’
‘Well, no priest can do it,’ I said, ‘because the Teacher is higher than a priest.’
He paused for as moment, then spoke: ‘We believe that when a man and woman start living together, that is marriage. We have a ceremony, but it is not necessary. Love is all that matters.’
After that he retreated into silence, and it was permanent. The topic made him uncomfortable. I enjoyed that discomfort, and knew that I was onto something. But I decided to leave it for the moment; I had pushed him as far as he would go.
It didn’t matter anyway. A few hours later Yura told me directly that Vissarion had two wives, and as for the dog, yes it was there to stop crazy people getting in. An incident had taken place in the past that had necessitated the step. And that was that – he wasn’t ashamed, he didn’t attempt to conceal anything. But at the same time, he didn’t exactly elaborate on the themes either, and it was clear to me that I was not supposed to ask. Because his acquisition of a second, younger wife suggested that he had entered a new stage, one common to men who believe themselves prophets or half-gods, when they start according to themselves sexual privileges that none of their followers have; because, of course, no one else had two wives, let alone a young and nubile one. The Last Testament stated that a family should consist of one man, one woman and children.
Well, that no longer applied to the Messiah it would seem. And now he had crossed that line, would he stop at just two? What would happen when Sofia grew old and his ardour for her died? Would another young girl from the Abode of Dawn graduate to life on the mountain with the Teacher himself?
It was an ominous sign.
I walked through the village, back towards the statue of the two angels that marked the centre of the settlement. I wanted some time away from watchmen, from guards, from observers. I had received only hospitality and warmth from the Vissarionites, but that in itself was oppressive. Since my arrival on the mountain I had never been unseen, except on trips to the outhouse; and even then it didn’t take much imagination to deduce what I was up to. I craved darkness, invisibility.
Once I was at the statue, though, I stopped. I had seen the view from Vissarion’s mountain, and knew that from his vantage point he could see everything. The clearing was a circle from which multiple paths stretched outwards, the centre of a fourteen-pointed star. Even now, the moon illuminated the path clearly enough that from up there I was probably a small black dot, visible if the Messiah chose to look. Real disappearance would require me to enter the taiga.
Antonina had told me about a child who, in the early days of the community, had done just that, wandering into the trees, never to return. It was hard to imagine a more terrifying death. He would have spent days stumbling from tree to tree, hungry, thirsty, terrified of sounds and shadows, always expecting his parents to appear and save him. The Vissarionites had notified the authorities, and an emergency party had been sent out to search for him, but to no avail: he was lost for good, food for all the scavengers, the insects, the birds, mice, rats and maggots. They would have started with the soft, exposed parts first, the eyes and the tongue, before moving on to his meat and internal organs, reducing him to a skeleton over a period of weeks. And now, somewhere out there, his bones were lying under the moon, half-buried in dirt, picked clean. And so there really was no invisibility to be had out here, for invisibility meant death. Life could only exist in the village, under the watchful eye of Vissarion.
Slowly, silently people started to materialise from out of the void, returning from their work in the forest, from their war on the forest, for it was obvious that life on the mountain was absolutely precarious, and that only by constant vigilance, and by constant and unremitting acts of violence against nature, could the taiga be held back, and the village that had been dreamt into existence by the Teacher continue to exist. These warriors fighting against their own obliteration walked right past me, asking no questions, paying no mind to the presence of an intruder in their midst. Some said hello, but without any tone of suspicion or query. On the contrary, they were friendly, knowing that if a stranger was on the mountain there had to be a good reason for it. They had faith in the vision of the Messiah on the mountaintop, the one who saw and understood all, and through whose will, all this had been made real.
It was difficult to sleep that night. As soon as I closed my eyes, Vissarion appeared, and he was so solid, so vivid, it was as if he had been hiding at the back of my retinas all this time, ever since I had left his house. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t move; he just sat there, grinning, staring at me.
But of course, he was just an illusion, an impression, a series of private actions taking place inside my skull. Yet even so, there was something in that gaze of his that this miniature phantom Vissarion had retained from his corporeal double on top of the mountain. It was something I had never seen before, something overwhelming.
Something very strange had happened to Sergei Torop: I had no idea what it was.