The next morning, in the hotel lobby, the fear of the unanswered texts was still visible in Pavel’s eyes, mixed with the naked terror that I would make the same proposal again directly to his face. He immediately introduced me to his mother, Natalia, and then before I could open my mouth, he was gone, heading out the door to the office where he worked.
Natalia was a serious-looking woman in her late forties who bore about as much resemblance to her son as he did to a victim of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s. Whereas he was physically huge but hesitant and shy, she was petite – and the two fierce pupils burning under her knotted brow suggested she was accustomed to slapping down much bigger men than I. ‘Well?’ she said. ‘Shall we go?’
I followed her out onto the street. She skipped over the ice, nimbly avoiding the oncoming traffic until she was across the road, waiting for me at a bus stop positioned directly beneath a billboard which displayed the enormous image of a curvaceous beauty wearing nothing except a red bra and panties and a Santa hat. Flakes of snow whirled around exposed cleavage and naked thighs. She looked terribly cold to me, and just happened to be sensuously reclining next to a sign for a medical clinic that treated problems most of which included the prefix urino- or vagino-.
Suddenly a vision unfolded in my head, of the diseased Arkhangelogorodetzi lying together on hard mattresses in dark, freezing rooms, fucking out of boredom and a hunger for warmth, moving from bed to bed, spreading infection and a sense of dull, frustrated satiety.
‘You look as though you’re deep in thought, Dan,’ said Natalia.
‘It’s just early for me,’ I said. ‘I’m still trying to wake up.’
The bus arrived: we climbed on. Natalia, faithful to the traditions of Russian hospitality, insisted on paying for my ticket.
Malye Karely is an open-air museum of wooden architecture located twenty-five kilometres south of Arkhangelsk. According to Natalia, it was an obligatory stop for any visitor to the area, one of the biggest ‘reservations’ of its kind in the whole of Russia, housing all kinds of wooden structures both sacred and profane, including huge forest-cathedrals built entirely without nails, the oldest of which dated back to the sixteenth century. I had been to a similar complex outside Novgorod some years earlier and the religious buildings, unlike anything I’d seen before, had blown the roof off my skull. I told Natalia this, hoping to impress her with my familiarity with and admiration for traditional wooden Russian architecture. In fact, she was disappointed. She had wanted this to be a completely new experience for me. ‘The Novogorod museum is smaller and less diverse,’ she said, a little sniffily. ‘Malye Karely is better.’
Natalia continued talking and I realised I had misjudged her. She wasn’t intimidating at all, but rather a highly cultured, witty woman with a sharp intelligence and an interest in life that kept her vital. If she didn’t think much of Sutyagin’s Tower herself, she at least understood that it was interesting to me, and indulged me a little.
‘You know,’ she said, ‘it’s so strange. I have lots of connections in our local media and I spoke to numerous journalists who are friends of mine, but no one remembers anything: neither how old Sutyagin is nor what he looks like …’
‘But it wasn’t all that long ago,’ I said. ‘Surely there are photographs, records …’
‘You’d expect that, yes. And Sutyagin was famous, very famous at one time. But now – it’s as if he’s just been erased from history. They couldn’t find anything – no phone numbers, no addresses, not one picture.’
‘Do you remember anything yourself?’
‘Oh yes. I was a journalist myself when it all happened, working for one of our newspapers. It was very controversial, what he did. Everybody talked about it. Because he didn’t have any architectural training whatsoever or even any permission to build, but still he started erecting the tower, and it just got higher and higher … And it was all completely illegal.’
‘How did he get away with it?’ But before the question was even halfway out of my mouth, I was embarrassed to have asked. I already knew the answer.
‘It was the early nineties,’ said Natalia. ‘The old laws were not working; the new ones were not yet fixed in place. We were in a new time, everything was in chaos. He took advantage of this situation, and that was that. And then there was all that business with the prisoner in the basement!’
‘Why did he do that? Pavel said it was a business dispute.’
Natalia laughed. ‘Maybe. I don’t know … It’s like something out of a Gothic novel, not real at all!’
I thought of the ark for the Slavs, but once again decided not to mention it. I was starting to think it was a piece of apocrypha, a later addition to the legend, an accretion tacked on by a journalist to give his story some colour. I would wait until I met Sutyagin to find out if it was true: until then I’d be agnostic on the question of its truth or falsehood. Anyway, the tower retained its allure without it. If anything, it became more inexplicable – less ridiculous and more mysterious.
‘Anyway,’ said Natalia, ‘I have organised for you to speak to Professor Barashkov. He is the chief architect of Arkhangelsk, a very clever man. He is an expert on wooden architecture and has written books on the subject. But he’s not just a narrow specialist. He is very creative and energetic. He was a deputy in the Supreme Soviet – not our local soviet, but the national one! He is a man of taste, he knows quality … Actually I remember once, I met him in the street while I was on my way to work. It was very early, the morning after a terrible storm that had torn up trees and destroyed houses. He looked very sad, very distracted. “What’s the matter, Professor Barashkov?” I asked. “Did the storm damage your property?”
‘“No,” he said. “But last night, as the wind and the rain raged, I was really hoping that Sutyagin’s Tower would be blown over and we would finally be free of that repulsive scar on the face of our town! I could hardly sleep for the excitement. So this morning, the first thing I did when I woke up was take the tram out there to see if it was still standing. Trees were lying in the road, homes had been smashed in and there was devastation everywhere. But Sutyagin’s eyesore – it’s still standing!”
‘He buried his face in his hands. He couldn’t believe it, that the half-completed tower, built by a man with no architectural training, had not been destroyed. I understood him. After all, it is terrible, terrible. Just a set of boxes, placed one on top of the other, bonk bonk bonk, like a child working with toy bricks, without any taste or skill …’
She couldn’t resist the dig. It was disappointing. Anger at a New Russian crook I could understand, but this was something different, reminiscent of the tone of the letter I had received from the all-knowing Russian émigré. But at the same time I wondered if there wasn’t something else at play in the dismissive, scornful attitude the locals had towards the tower. Being British, I am of course intimately familiar with the sour mash of resentment and anger that rots in the bellies of individuals without great fortunes or glittering destinies, which can erupt and flow towards those who seek to set themselves apart, to rise above their station, who presume to ‘give themselves airs and graces’. I was not immune to this dyspepsia myself, and thought I recognised its acrid tang on the bus …
I turned to look out of the window. Arkhangelsk slipped past, refracted by the mud and condensation smeared across the old glass into a metropolis of sludge.
The bell tower in the Kargopol-Onezhsky section, transplanted to the reservation from the village of Kuliga-Drakovanovo, dated from the end of the fifteenth century – and thus this apparently fragile wooden construction which stood rather modestly in a clearing pre-dated the founding of St Petersburg by over a century; the American Declaration of Independence by two centuries; the Russian Revolution by over three centuries, and the child’s swing across from it, on which the bloated, drooling, ape-like Boris Yeltsin had once performed a drunken caper, by almost four. All that history and yet for most of that time the tower had stood resolutely unwitness to any of it, obscure, lost in the forests of the Russian north among people so accustomed to the sight of it that it can barely have registered on their retinas. Now, however, it was an important relic, the oldest structure of its type in the country, and Natalia was appalled by the discoloration at the base that had occurred after Soviet restorers had treated it with the wrong substance, turning the wood green, and by the iron nails that so crudely pierced the wood, forcing into continued existence a structure that its unknown, ‘primitive’ builders had seamlessly slotted together with pegs and cunningly carved beams and logs.
Instinctively I agreed with her. But then I wasn’t so sure, and thought that this might just be knee-jerk Soviet bashing, and that she was probably unjustified in her criticisms. After all, the whole complex was an initiative of the Soviet era, and without the efforts of those early restorers, the tower would simply have rotted away and collapsed, and all the history it hadn’t witnessed would have rolled on without anyone ever knowing it had been there, and the work of all the unknown artisans, the men who were not architects and yet knew how to build a bell tower that could stand for four centuries, would have been lost for ever. The restorers had damaged it, yes, but everyone has to learn, and they did not repeat the same mistake with later additions to the complex.
Besides, the nails and the discoloured patches actually had a value of their own: as markers and indicators of a truth that preservationists usually seek to conceal – that this was not the same bell tower as it had been, and that by moving it, it had changed, in the same way a holy icon placed in a museum becomes mere paint on wood, or that an animal stuffed and placed in a zoological display cabinet is hardly an animal at all. These scars were the glass eyes, the comical grimace, the half-split seams holding together the belly of a sawdust mastodon …
A bridge linked Kargopol-Onezhsky to the other sections, 150 steps that seemed to stand unsupported in the sky. And so I strode across treetops to the main body of the reservation, where sample structures of three regions with the fine names of Mezensky, Pinezhsky and Dvinsky were preserved. The forest and severe climate had isolated the residents of the villages in each area so much that they had developed their own styles, and thus their buildings differed from each other to a far greater extent than a block of flats in Moscow and another in Vladivostok, seven time zones away, would.
There were giant cathedrals with domes that resembled enormous pine cones, izbas, chicken coops and little barns standing on squat legs to protect the contents from raids by rodents. These and the seven fantastical windmills that stood like sentinels around the territory looked like the natural habitat of flesh-eating witches, wish-granting goldfish and lazy peasants sleeping on magical clay ovens. Natalia, however, cursed with knowledge, insisted on explaining the distinctions to me, indicating how this horse-carving differed from that one, how the ornate window frames here were not the same as the ones over there, why this house had a pagan carving of the sun on it, and that one did not.
I took notes for a while, but then stopped. I didn’t want to know all this stuff, about an anonymous life spent eating porridge, sleeping next to pigs and growing turnips. Too much context stripped the structures of their mystery. It was like melting the ice around a frozen mammoth with a hair dryer, cutting it up with a chainsaw, and putting the clumps of old flesh in jars in a lab.
That work is necessary, of course, but I prefer to see the whole beast, intact in its block, and work my way around it with my hands and eyes, letting my imagination do the rest …
But Natalia’s narrative was not always so dry, and there were moments when she was able to breathe real life into these old husks. A small church stood close to a cluster of trees. She made me turn my back to the buildings that faced it and now, isolated on the edge of the forest, it looked as though it had been sitting there for centuries. Natalia led me onto the covered porch that ran all the way round it, breaking only at the staircase that led upwards to the front door.
‘Look at this,’ she said. ‘Do you know why they added this porch to the church?’
The question was rhetorical. She continued:
‘It’s very simple. Not every village had a church, and so some peasants had to walk for miles and miles through the forest to attend a service. It would take hours; and so they added this covered section so that those who arrived early could rest and shelter from the elements as they waited for the priest to arrive.’
The piety of these long-dead residents of the north held Natalia breathless. And it was easy for me to picture them, the men bearded, the women in headscarves, standing where I now stood, waiting patiently to cross over to another, higher reality where their lives were rich with transcendent meaning. For a second these phantoms Natalia had conjured up breathed again, and it was hard to believe that if I stepped inside I wouldn’t smell incense burning and see ancient icons gleaming in the half-light.
I tried the door: it was locked. And just like that, the phantoms vanished and the cathedral, flattened out, died once more. By the time we reached the end of the museum I was exhausted, and glad the buildings were uninhabited. I admired the builders who had reshaped the raw material of the forest into these cubes and domes and spires that had stood for centuries, but unlike Natalia, I felt no nostalgia for the world that had vanished.
The Gregorievskaya cathedral, the climactic centrepiece of the complex, dated from 1672; it had many domes and it was so tall I could barely frame it in the lens of my camera. ‘This one always reminds me of Sutyagin’s Tower,’ said Natalia.
This was the first time she had mentioned my whole reason for being in Arkhangelsk since the bus and, I now realised, it was the first time I had thought about it too. The museum had been too official, too serious, too representative of the ‘real Russia’ and the state-sanctioned, ‘approved’ past and I had automatically switched over to accepting it the way Natalia presented it to me, as representative of this style and that trend et cetera, et cetera. Sutyagin had no place here. Suddenly, however, it seemed obvious that I was wrong, that Sutyagin’s Tower was not just a refraction of Arkhangelsk itself, the onetime timber metropolis of the world, but consciously or unconsciously, it was also a mutation of all these fragments of a dead world, his peculiar and unique sensibility producing a fantastical continuation of the work of his ancestors in the same way that Vissarion had single-handedly produced a theological-mythological-ethical-cosmological-philosophical fusion. In both cases, if the results seemed crude or bizarre, that was understandable. Normally this sort of thing was the product of many hands and minds.
‘Maybe when Sutyagin was a schoolchild he came out here and was inspired by what he saw …’ I said.
‘Oh no,’ Natalia replied almost immediately. ‘Sutyagin is not so young. This complex was opened in the 1970s. He was already long out of school.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I don’t know … But if he had come here as a child that would put him in his forties. And he is older than that … And besides, he is not that sort of man.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘He is not cultured enough to appreciate this.’
Those last words irritated me. My friend’s mother; the journalists; Pavel; and now Natalia – everyone dismissed the tower and its builder. It was clearly the resentment of provincials for the dreamer in their midst, an anger at the man of vision, the one who could create, for making those who could not feel small – mixed together with generous helpings of the cultural conservatism that was typical of the Soviet-trained intelligentsia and the universal condescension of intellectuals towards the efforts of an unschooled outsider.
‘Do you remember the storm I told you about?’ said Natalia.
‘Yes.’
‘It damaged this cathedral.’
‘Really?’
‘Sutyagin’s monstrosity wasn’t touched, but this was.’ She shook her head. ‘Unbelievable.’
We left the complex and waited on the bus, inhaling the scent of porridge wafting across the road from the New Malye Karely resort complex that faced the entrance to the museum. It had been built by Krupchak, owner of my hotel and so much else, the master of Arkhangelsk. Natalia told me that the restaurant inside was excellent, though she had never eaten there. But although I was hungry, I didn’t really want to eat. The cold had sunk through my meat and into my bones, sapping my jaws of the energy to chew and my stomach of the desire to be filled. If anything, I wanted to climb into that giant tureen of porridge myself, and be cooked on a low heat for several hours.
‘So, have I finally cured you of your interest in Sutyagin?’ asked Natalia flatly. I looked across at her, to see if I could detect any irony in her eyes, a smile curling at the edges of the mouth, perhaps; but no – she was serious. Deadly serious, in fact – the look I had noticed in the hotel lobby had returned. And so I knew now that the tour around the complex had been intended not simply to show me the ‘treasures of Arkhangelsk’ but rather to re-educate me, to remove the cataracts from my eyes and make me see the tower for the tottering mound of dried-up dog shit all the locals knew it to be.
Alas for Natalia, I was still blind. However well constructed the chicken coops were, they were still for keeping chickens in, and all the other buildings, whether blandly functional or grandiose and sacred, all belonged in this world, and resembled thousands of other buildings, and did not deviate from the collective norms of their times. They were, at the end of the day, familiar and easy to understand.
The tower, however, was different. It was impolite, gargantuan, grotesque; it served no apparent purpose other than as an expression of a man following his own idea to the end, regardless of whether it made ‘sense’ or not. Soon it would collapse, and no modern restorer would try to preserve or rebuild it, while the timeless masterpieces of the unknown builders of Kargopol and elsewhere would live on and be admired by generations to come. But Sutyagin had done something none of those old masters had managed – he had built something that had never existed before. His was the only wooden skyscraper in the world, and he had erected it in the face of almost universal opposition.
Natalia was waiting for me to answer. I did.
‘No.’
She was disappointed.
I spent the rest of the afternoon in Natalia’s flat, listening to her talk about the history of Arkhangelsk. She was fascinated by the Englishmen and Germans who had settled in the city prior to the revolution, some of whose descendants she knew personally, men with startling names like Igor Stewart and Vladimir Sherwood. Before I returned to the hotel she agreed to take me out to visit the tower the next day. Although it was enormous and visible from miles away, she still thought that it was probably too difficult for me to find on my own – the area surrounding it was a maze of unpaved streets lined with wooden houses. And besides, I was a foreigner, a stranger to Arkhangelsk, and she had promised her friend she would look after me, and that was something she took seriously.
That night, I stayed in my hotel room, writing and thinking. Whereas the night before I had been racked with doubt, I now felt confident and excited. I was on the verge of making contact with the tower and its enigmatic constructor. I would see inside it, and learn its secret, and unravel the mystery of the prisoner in the basement. There was no guarantee that Sutyagin would be in, of course, but that didn’t worry me. I would speak to a neighbour, to all his neighbours, knocking on their doors, irritating them until someone coughed up his whereabouts. Somebody out there had to know what had happened to him, where he was. Even if his image and the precise details of his story had vanished from the annals of the city’s newspapers, the folk memory would persist, I had faith in that.
Sutyagin was still a mystery, but not for much longer. Soon I would know what happened after you crossed ‘the line’. Let the locals pour scorn on him: locals rarely see their surroundings clearly. Once I stepped inside, I wouldn’t be disappointed.
Or at least that was what I told myself.