Pavel was waiting at the exit from the airport, though I wasn’t sure if he wanted to see me or not. There was a look in the eyes squinting behind those round spectacles that suggested he was contemplating running away. The son of the friend of a mother of a friend, we had spoken only once and then very briefly, trading descriptions of ourselves on the phone the night before. ‘I am a big man with a red beard,’ he had said. His hushed and mellifluous tones had given no indication how big, however. From a distance he resembled a shy, lumbering, ginger bear. Walking alongside him, however, I felt as though I was in the shadow of a living mountain.
Pavel ushered me onto a blue minibus that was waiting in the airport car park. It was clean and modern and entirely at our disposal (he had commandeered it from work). Defying every known law of the physical universe, the living mountain squeezed into the front seat. The driver started the engine, Pavel gave him some instructions, and soon we were travelling on the road leading to Arkhangelsk. Pavel explained that we were going to a hotel in the centre of town where he had booked a room for me.
Everything was progressing smoothly.
Pavel talked about the history of Arkhangelsk, giving me the date of its founding (1584, as the fortified monastery of Archangel Michael) and then relaying the sort of Important Facts you might find in an encyclopaedia – that there were two Arkhangelsks, the city and the surrounding oblast (which was more than twice the size of the UK); that in 1693 Peter the Great ordered the construction of a shipyard; that it was the first Russian port to trade with England; that its population was 480,000; that it was situated fifty kilometres from the White Sea and that it was much longer than it was broad, running for twenty kilometres along the River Dvina. From time to time I nodded, but said no more than I needed to reassure him I was listening. It had been an early morning flight and the channels for issuing instructions from my brain to my tongue were still blocked. I was grateful to him for filling the space around us with noise.
But still, as the external world passed by and he continued listing events, names, dates and objects I started to wonder if he actually knew why I was in Arkhangelsk in the first place. Had my friend told his mother to tell her friend to tell her son that I was in search of Nikolai Sutyagin, constructor of the great wooden tower of the Arctic Circle (or close enough)? I was starting to doubt it. But then suddenly Pavel broke off his narrative:
‘ … and if you look out the window on your right you will see Sutyagin’s Tower …’
And there it was, rising out of the harsh northern icescape, looming heavy and dark in the distance over a frozen world that extended from here to the tip of the earth.
‘ … but we shall talk about that later. It is too muddy to go today: the structure is located on a sort of island, and there are no roads there.’
The bus sped onward, leaving the tower behind, stuck in the swamp. A friend who had visited Arkhangelsk several times and yet never seen it nor even heard of it had suggested that perhaps it was located somewhere in the oblast, amid woods or tundra. I was relieved he was wrong.
Pavel installed me in the Hotel Dvina in the centre of town. It was pleasant and comfortable and priced reasonably. ‘Is it satisfactory?’ he asked. ‘There is another, more luxurious hotel on the banks of the river …’
‘It’s fine,’ I said. We stared at each other in silence for a moment, not sure what to do next. Pavel was the first to come up with an idea: ‘Shall we have lunch?’
But it wasn’t yet noon, and so it was too early to eat – or it was for me, at least. However, as I stood there in the hotel room I now realised that I had no plans for Arkhangelsk other than to find Sutyagin and talk to him about his tower, to find out exactly why he had built it, and what had happened to him after he had been imprisoned; but Pavel had ruled that out back on the bus – as far as today was concerned, at least.
‘Maybe we can walk around the centre,’ I said. ‘So I can orient myself.’
Outside the mist was thickening rapidly. Like explorers probing a frozen lake, we trod warily forward, cars, buildings, trees and people appearing and then disappearing in the shimmering polar haze. Even the normal noises of the city seemed dampened by the annihilating mist, and the extreme cold caused it to freeze on contact with the trees, coating each individual branch and twig with a crystalline shadow of itself. Immediately I was struck by a powerful sense of déjà vu: there had been identical weather conditions in Abakan the day we left. I remembered breaking off my MTV vigil in the hotel to go outside and pay tribute to the eerie beauty of the frostbitten trees, positioned like alien sentries around the concrete world of the airport.
And suddenly that silent, frozen planet was bleeding into this one, and the intervening time I had spent in Moscow seemed to vanish, as if I was waking from a dream to find that I had never left Abakan, and that Vissarion’s landscape and Sutyagin’s landscape were somehow one and the same and always had been. The three time zones and the thousands of miles that lay in between were irrelevant. This was the same place; I was on the same quest. Vissarion felt very close to me, as if his mountain were just on the outskirts of town, and he was still keeping vigil from his eyrie, and could still see everything – including me.
Pavel was showing me the half-collapsed wooden house of a pre-revolutionary merchant. He didn’t have much to say about it: just that ‘some rich guy’ had lived there a hundred or so years earlier. Apparently in the early 1900s Arkhangelsk had consisted entirely of wooden buildings, and was the largest city of its kind in the world. Wars and Sovietisation had seen most of the old town destroyed and replaced with concrete high rises.
There was, however, a recently built street of replicas in the centre, restrained and tasteful little houses in the old style that I knew I was supposed to approve of. But there were no signs of business or habitation, and they seemed as dead and awkward as a glass eye in a human face. Pavel didn’t want to linger: for him too, there was something not quite right about this theme-park reconstruction. The exuberantly grotesque tower of Sutyagin, that half-completed, half-rotted enigma, was far more vibrant, far more alluring.
And yet, as we walked away towards the central shopping street, I realised that this street of rubbishy pink and yellow Wendy houses shared something with Sutyagin’s structure – both were a response to Arkhangelsk’s lost history as a wooden metropolis, both had emerged from the same context. And now Sutyagin’s Tower no longer stood completely apart in my imagination as a bizarre, Arctic echo of earlier impossible buildings designed by utopian architects in the metropolis, but rather I saw that it had its roots in the life and soil of this region, that it was an extension and mutation of the traditional buildings of this part of northern Russia, something common filtered through an uncommon mind. It was becoming more real, more solid: not understood yet, but easier to understand.
I wasn’t sure if I liked that. Fortunately Pavel was feeding me with other data, and so I was able to think about other things. He had become an encyclopaedia again, reciting facts and details learned in school. He was trying hard, straining to think of things that might be interesting for an alien, but it was difficult for him, a local, to ‘see’ the city that he passed through every day. He showed me:
• The KGB HQ (conveniently located next door to a children’s play park).
• Residential Stalin-era buildings (in one of which he lived).
• The house (wooden, of course) where Arkady Gaidar, author of the Soviet children’s classic Timur and His Team had lived and worked.
• A tank sitting on the pavement outside a supermarket (which had some rare specifications I didn’t quite catch).
• The Lutheran church, which housed the second largest pipe organ in Russia (the largest was in Krasnoyarsk).
• The surviving eighth of Arkhangelsk’s Gostiny Dvor, the seventeenth-century covered market area where for hundreds of years foreign merchants had stayed on their visits to the city. Even that eighth was in bad shape, however, a semi-ruin of crumbling brick, decayed plaster and old wood that sat rotting on the chilly banks of the Dvina: ‘It used to be a museum, but it went through some hard times in the nineties,’ said Pavel.
• The river Dvina itself. I stared at the surface of the frozen river, rock hard and yet somehow dissolving into the white, white sky with the mist, obscuring the boundary between the elements. I wondered about the fate of the fish trapped under the ice. Was it too cold for them?
Pavel checked his watch. An hour had passed since we left the hotel.
‘Daniel,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘Shall we have lunch?’
The Gross Vagon was a German beer cellar, according to Pavel the best of its kind in Arkhangelsk. He reassured me that the quality of the food was ‘not worse than’ in similar establishments in St Petersburg or Moscow. The cold had sapped the warmth right out of my blood, however, and so I sat, gazing dully at a programme on Peter Jackson’s tedious remake of King Kong, trying to heat myself up. The images of the big cartoon monkey on the screen irritated me: Why? I wondered. Why is he doing this to such a great film? The new Kong wasn’t out yet but I knew it was going to be bloated, pompous and pointless, an absolutely monumental waste of time, money and celluloid. At the same time I also knew that I was still going to watch it, the same way I had watched those fucking awful Lord of the Rings movies and the Star Wars prequels …
But then my food arrived and I stopped caring. Once I had swallowed a few mouthfuls of charred animal flesh I even started to remember who I was and what I was doing in Arkhangelsk. It was time to raise the topic Pavel was so assiduously avoiding.
‘About Sutyagin …?’ I said.
‘Ah yes. My mother and I have spoken to some journalists …’
‘And?’
‘They have nothing to tell you.’
‘Nothing? What do you mean?’
‘They don’t know where he is. Nobody does. It would be a waste of time to visit their offices.’
That wasn’t good: I had expected that somehow the local newspapermen would have ‘ways and means’ of finding him. Whenever there’s a particularly good murder, or if a child is abducted, journalists are always able to find everyone involved in the story within twenty-four hours – except for the missing children and the actual killers, of course. So Pavel’s assertion that the journalists didn’t know anything didn’t sound right. Something was amiss.
‘But … maybe they can tell me something about the origins of the tower, or some of the stories surrounding it. I mean, is it true that he went to jail?’
‘Yes, but after that he disappeared. They don’t know what happened to him. Nobody knows.’
From Pavel’s tone I got the impression that it wasn’t that nobody knew where he was; it was that nobody cared. It wasn’t the first time I had encountered such indifference. A few days before I had left Moscow, the friend through whom I had ultimately made contact with Pavel had sent me a letter from his mother, who felt compelled to inform me that my quest was a waste of time: ‘Tell Dan this tower will probably be crap. This is the sort of story that’s interesting to foreigners, but not Russians, who are too busy trying to stay alive. Sutyagin is probably just a vulgar nouveau riche, building himself a very big dacha, the sort of thing you see in the surrounding suburbs.’
The letter irritated me. It had been written by a successful Russian émigré who had lived in the US for over twenty years and had never seen or even heard of Sutyagin’s Tower, even though she had passed through Arkhangelsk several times in the 1990s. In spite of her obvious detachment from her roots and her failure to notice something colossal on the skyline of the city, however, she had automatically made assumptions about both the tower and me that were extremely condescending. I had dismissed the contents of the letter out of hand as a tedious example of the snobbery you sometimes encountered among those more self-satisfied members of the Russian intelligentsia, who make such a fetish out of their education and reading, and look upon the thoughts and ideas of anyone who is not a member of their own subculture as so much shit on their shoe. But now, here I was in the place where it stood, and I started to get the impression that the locals might not see it all that differently …
‘But did they have any information, about the story of why he went to jail? I heard he locked someone in the basement of the tower …’
‘I can tell you about that,’ Pavel chuckled. ‘It was a business dispute.’
‘Business?’
‘Yes. He made a lot of money in timber in the early nineties. Somebody crossed him, maybe one of his workers or business associates. I remember reading about it in the papers …’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘Sutyagin was a businessman?’
‘Of course,’ said Pavel. ‘He was one of our New Russians. Lots of people worked for him. Timber is big money in Arkhangelsk. The hotel you are staying in, for example is owned by Krupchak, our local timber magnate. He owns the supermarket next door and many other businesses. Arkhangelsk has a satellite town called Novodvinsk, and Krupchak is “person number one” over there. You know, it’s not all that shocking that Sutyagin did what he did. It was the 1990s, the period of “wild capitalism” in Russia. Sutyagin was part of that wave …’
Suddenly I saw an image of Sutyagin as a flathead in a shell-suit, jangling the gold keys to his Mercedes 600. It made him into a tawdry figure, his alleged violence banal rather than mysterious. I felt cold, damp doubt seeping into my soul: Am I just wasting my time here?
But then I remembered why the tower had been built – as an ark for the Slavs. And that was obviously a visionary idea, an attempt to bring something truly impossible into the world on a par with Vissarion’s colony of righteous men and women. It proved that Sutyagin could not be defined strictly by the cliché ‘New Russian’ term, that even if he was some kind of entrepreneur, it was only one aspect of his personality. He clearly saw the world in his own, unique way. Yes, there had to be more to Sutyagin than I was getting from Pavel …
But then I looked over at the living mountain, and as he polished off the last remnants of his schnitzel I knew there was no room for an ark for the Slavs in his world. It would be embarrassing to ask; inviting another ironic smile like the one my friend Sergei had given me when I repeated the legend of the Diggers he had told me in the first place, the smile that had said: you think there’s a tribe of intellectuals living under the city? How naïve of you.
And now I doubted again, but it was much worse than before, as if the ground were opening up under me, and when I looked down I saw the jaws of drab reality, waiting for me to fall, to lock shut around my neck and trap me in a world where there was nothing more to life than paper mills, ‘business disputes’ and colourless reconstructions of wooden houses in heritage districts.
No: I knew that there was more to the tower than just this. I had seen it, and it was extraordinary, much more than a ‘big house’. It was an eruption of the unconscious, the world of dream made real. All the same, I knew that it was important to visit it as quickly as possible. Pavel’s it’s impossible today was the same it’s futile any day I had read in my friend’s mother’s note, and I knew that his scepticism, his outright disbelief, might become corrosive if I didn’t act quickly. I needed to see it, to touch it to bolster my belief. I needed Sutyagin to give me a sign.
‘Pavel,’ I said. ‘I really want to see the tower now … Is it absolutely impossible to go there?’
‘Yes.’
‘But –’
‘In this weather, we couldn’t reach it. It’s not possible.’
And that was that. Pavel wasn’t going to move. It was clear, in fact, that he didn’t want to go to the tower now, or ever. It was nothing to him; absolutely nothing.
‘Well, do you at least know if it’s still occupied? Do I stand a chance of meeting him if I go out there?’
Pavel nodded. ‘A friend of my mother’s lives near the tower. We phoned her. A few nights ago, she heard the dogs barking. There are four, maybe five dogs, and they are proof of his existence. If there was no Sutyagin there would be no one to feed them.’
It was only three o’clock and already the darkness was setting in. Arkhangelsk in December only saw a couple of hours of sunlight a day. Pavel wanted to go home; I needed to be alone too, but there was one thing he wanted to show me before he left me.
‘There are many prisons in Arkhangelsk,’ he said, leading me away from the river. ‘In fact, our whole region was initially settled as a prison. Ivan the Terrible exiled his enemies here, and the first gulag was opened in the monastery at Solovki on the White Sea. Actually, I am incorrect: this area was first settled by monks who established religious retreats here, around which a few villages later grew up. But the same conditions that made this region suited to monasteries made it suitable for penal colonies. As a result, our population is mixed: we have Tatars, Russians, Ukrainians, Jews … though most of our Jews have left now, and gone to Israel …’
We came to a set of high walls. Pavel stopped.
‘This is our local prison,’ he said. ‘A friend of mine lives right above it, in that building there.’ He indicated a block of flats. ‘In the morning, as she drinks her first cup of tea, she looks down and watches the prisoners exercising in the yard.’
‘Did Sutyagin serve his sentence here?’ I asked.
‘Oh no. Sutyagin was sent to one of the prisons far from the city.’
‘Which is worse.’
‘Of course.’
I tried to imagine him stuck in some remote penal colony in the Arctic Circle, but I still had no idea what he looked like, or even how old he was; and though I had read about life in Russian prisons, that experience was too far removed from my own. Never mind the ability – did I have the right to even speculate about that world of misery and isolation?
And so my imagination, reaching out to construct a Sutyagin, encountered only impenetrable darkness. I could see the tower but beyond it, nothing.
By the time I got back to the hotel in the late afternoon it was as dark as midnight. There was nothing to do, nothing to be discovered, and although I wanted to go to bed, it was far too early to sleep. The first day’s searching, meanwhile, had uncovered two things only:
(1) Sutyagin had been a businessman as well as a visionary.
(2) Everyone seemed to hate him.
I was going to have an even harder time finding him than I had anticipated. The help from the locals I thought would make the search easier I now realised might actually sabotage my plans instead. Their negative attitudes and total incomprehension of why I actually gave a shit were things I would have to fight against. The city had rejected him, it denied him – I was going to have to force Arkhangelsk to bend to my will and acknowledge that Sutyagin had a face and that he was real. And once I had done that, I was going to have to force the city to give him up to me.
But how?
Fortunately for me, a few months earlier I had been travelling in Ukraine with a man who often found himself in an analogous position, and when he did, rather than give up, he forced the world to give him what he wanted. And now I knew I had to be aggressive like him, tenacious like him, obsessed like him. More than anything, I needed to believe like him. Yes, I thought. What would Edward do?
Almost immediately I had an idea. I could get Pavel to work his way methodically through all the Sutyagins in the phone book, calling them until we found the one we wanted. Then, when Sutyagin answered I would persuade him to let me into his tower and there he would reveal the secret of why he built it, exactly how and why he crossed the line and what happened after he disappeared. Then I would go home and live happily ever after. Yes, it was brilliant!
And if Sutyagin didn’t want to talk, well, I’d find some way to persuade him. Edward always found some way to loosen tongues and Edward was now my master. I texted Pavel with my ingenious plan, and waited for him to reply.
And waited.
And waited.
And then, after an hour had passed, texted him again.
Well, maybe he’s busy, I thought. But more time passed and sitting in the hotel room, enclosed by the darkness and cold outside, made me nervous. I thought about doing it myself, but I didn’t think my language skills were adequate to the task. I would have to call up strangers and make a strange request sound very reasonable in a matter of seconds; but I knew that I expressed myself too directly in Russian, and had been told that I could make a request for a cabbage pie sound threatening. So it had to be Pavel. I thought about phoning him to propose the idea directly, but he was very shy, and I knew that if I put too much pressure on him he would probably back off completely. He barely knew me, and he had nothing invested in the success of my mission. There was absolutely no obligation for him to help, especially if it put him in a position he found uncomfortable. He was like one of Edward’s reluctant exorcists – I had to tread warily, carefully, and yet at the same time, refuse to take no for an answer …
I went out for a walk, resolving not to check my phone for messages until I was back at the hotel, in a couple of hours. That would give Pavel plenty of time to overcome his fear and agree to do my bidding.
Arkhangelsk was cold, eerie and abandoned, an excellent place for evil, especially down by the frozen seam of ancient space-ice that was the river. I followed its course to the Gostiny Dvor, trying to escape my thoughts, resisting the urge to check my mobile for messages, until I came to a single window in the wall that bled light into the vast night. Going closer I heard the faint sound of a female Russian folk-singing ensemble rehearsing a traditional song.
It was the only indication of life in a cold, cold cosmos. For a minute or two I stood under the light listening, but then a couple emerged from the darkness and, as they slowed down to stare at me, I suddenly felt very self-conscious. If I’d been Edward I would have greeted them heartily and said a few words about the beauty of the Russian north, of course. Instead I started to suspect myself, as if I had only just now remembered that I had come out to knife a stranger to death. And in fact, what exactly was I doing out there on my own in Arkhangelsk late at night in the middle of December? It was freezing.
Oh, that’s right: I was giving Pavel time to chew over my proposal before deciding that it was a brilliant idea and that he’d start working on it straight away, sir! Well, I wasn’t back at the hotel yet, but he’d had long enough to think about it by now. I pulled out my phone: no message. And there was still no message by the time I was back, thawing in my room, eating processed-cheese sandwiches and watching a rancid French ‘comedy’ about sex toys for the handicapped. Or hours later, when I finally switched it off and went to bed after having been awake in this city of mist, ice and darkness for far longer than was reasonable.
Pavel could ignore me all he wanted. I still believed.