SOLOMBOLA – the enormous blue letters, each one taller than two men, planted on a dirt island in the centre of the road, screamed that I had arrived somewhere memorable. But when I stepped past them, the tone of the letters changed from stridency to sheepish embarrassment – all right, so it’s not really SOLOMBOLA, maybe just SOLOMBOLA or even SOLOMBOLA. We were just having you on. Visitors don’t usually get past the sign, anyway.
In fact, to the naked eye, the only remarkable feature of Solombola was its radical juxtaposition of two customarily distinct traditions of shabbiness. On the left there was an unremarkable settlement of decaying concrete and brick buildings, on the right an unremarkable cluster of aging wooden villages that ran along the river. But for me, to whom the truth had been given, SOLOMBOLA was in fact home to something fantastical and I still trembled before those enormous blue letters as a portent of the awesome. For beyond them, concealed among the wooden huts and trees, somehow invisible from the entrance in spite of its enormous size, was the great wonder of Arkhangelsk, Sutyagin’s Tower.
‘Aren’t you afraid he’ll lock you in the basement?’ asked Natalia.
The unpaved streets were treacherous, covered with ice and snow, but Natalia guided me nimbly through them, until suddenly I had to stop. The tower had reared into view: it loomed in the distance, as jarring and outrageous as if Godzilla had risen from the depths to take a dump in a Russian village. I could see the twin tin roofs, the uneven walls, the openings, the black holes where windows should have been. ‘There it is,’ said Natalia. ‘But soon it will vanish again.’
And she was right: as we stepped forward, the tower somehow managed to duck behind chimneys and conceal itself. It didn’t seem possible. There were no other tall structures, and yet the laws of perspective had somehow ordained that it disappear from view, leaving us alone in a perfectly ordinary village.
‘But it is so quiet!’ said Natalia. ‘You know, Dan, I don’t think anyone lives here. Look – there’s no smoke coming from the houses and there is no light in any of the windows either. Maybe these are just summer houses, where people come to work in their gardens when the weather is good. There is no running water out here. You have to get it in the street. The toilet is just a hole in the earth. Conditions are not good for winter living.’
We walked on, and it seemed that Natalia was right. Not one of the houses we passed even hinted towards habitation, and that was not good, because if they were empty then the tower was more likely to be empty, and if it was, then how would I locate Sutyagin? Who would there be to ask? I could feel my confidence of the night before ebbing away, and began to hope for a sign, for some evidence that the village was not completely deserted.
None came.
But then a small girl stepped out from behind a fence, startling both of us. She was about nine, blonde, and was visibly shocked by the appearance of intruders in her private world. She eyed us warily, keeping her distance. The tower stood behind her, minded its own business.
‘Little girl,’ said Natalia. ‘Do people live here?’
‘Of course,’ she replied, and then ran off, like Alice chasing the white rabbit.
‘She must be very poor,’ said Natalia. ‘The conditions here are awful in winter.’
We didn’t see anyone else.
And then, after walking for about half an hour, following streets that appeared to lead towards it but terminated instead in a fence or a small house, we stood before Sutyagin’s Tower. And up close it was no less mysterious than it had been in the photographs or in my imagination. It was as alien as I had hoped it would be, and much more deadly, because now I could see clearly that almost all of the floors were unfinished, and that all the holes, absent walls, missing windows, doorways leading to nowhere and dead ends were signs not simply of a grotesque phantasmagoria, but also of an almost entirely uninhabitable death-trap, a weird skeleton resting on only two completed floors, that teetered and tottered upwards for eleven more storeys, without any signs of organisation or design, and which, with a single tap from God’s pinkie, would collapse and crush the homes which huddled around its base, annihilating their inhabitants in the process, ending their poverty and enthusiasm for kitchen gardening once and for all.
‘And this thing didn’t fall down in the storm?’ I said.
‘No,’ said Natalia. ‘It was a miracle. A bad miracle.’
‘Not if you’re one of the people living next door.’
‘Yes. We should hope that it collapses during the winter, when the village is empty, like now. Sutyagin’s neighbours will lose their homes, their belongings, but at least they will keep their lives.’
‘And the city just let him build this?’ I said, incredulous. Now that I was there, the scope of what he had done was overwhelming. ‘Without permission? They didn’t even try to stop him?’
‘Maybe they tried. But Sutyagin was rich, and powerful …’
‘But they threw him in jail. Didn’t they try to demolish it then?’
‘Maybe he bribed the city council. Or maybe they were scared of his dogs. Or maybe they were too lazy. Who knows?’
She shrugged. I was being terribly British. Terribly Western. I didn’t understand. But even by the standards of the chaotic and corrupt 1990s, it seemed a half-done, utterly cynical, botched job. What was the point of tossing Sutyagin in jail if you weren’t going to demolish his tower? It was like giving up on a burial halfway through, leaving the plot open, the corpse on view, rotting away inside, flies buzzing about its mouth, worms chewing on its eyes, the air filled with stench.
A fence, about three metres high, had been built around it. I peered through a crack and saw a set of steps leading up to a very ordinary door. They had been swept clean, so I knew Sutyagin or at the very least a caretaker had visited recently; but other than that there were no signs of habitation. The tower was mute. It was painful to be so close, and yet not close at all.
‘Look at this,’ said Natalia. She indicated tyre tracks in the snow that led away from a set of padlocked double doors located to the right of the entrance. It was a garage. ‘They’re fresh,’ she said. ‘Nobody has stepped in them. Someone has been here recently.’
We stood around, thinking of what to do next. I noticed too that Natalia’s attitude had changed. Gone was the scepticism and blasé indifference. She was enjoying playing detective.
‘Let’s talk to the neighbours,’ she said. ‘There must be someone living here apart from that little girl …’
So we walked around the perimeter of the tower, knocking on the doors of houses that were obviously abandoned, each time waiting a minute or two for confirmation of what we already knew: that nobody would answer. The village was even deader than Malye Karely, which at least had the excuse of being a museum piece.
But then, a couple of streets away from the tower, I saw a car. The boot was open. We rushed forward and saw that the front door of the house was ajar, leading into a small living room. Natalia knocked, and called for the occupant.
‘Leave the box on the step,’ said a gruff voice.
‘That’s not what we’re here for,’ said Natalia.
A head appeared in the doorway, shaved on top and bristling around the mouth. Its expression was very hostile.
‘Who are you?’
‘We’re looking for Mr Sutyagin. Does he live here?’
A pause. Pale eyes scrutinised us both. Then: ‘Yes.’
‘Still?’
‘Yes.’
‘Has he been at home recently?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘This young man is a journalist. He would like to talk to Mr Sutyagin.’
‘Do you know if he’ll be back tonight?’
‘No.’
He stared at us, steadily, with no abatement in hostility. I remembered Semyon’s astonishment in Petropavlovka: In my mother’s village, they wouldn’t just let strangers walk around like this. Someone would kick the shit out of us.
We thanked him and turned away from his step. He didn’t say goodbye.
‘He is protecting him,’ said Natalia. ‘He knows, but he’s not talking … So what now?’
‘Maybe Sutyagin will return tonight. Shall we try again later?’
Natalia’s attitude had changed completely from the day before. When she walked alongside me, the tower was transformed, and she saw it through my eyes. It was interesting now, to stalk Sutyagin, to try and gain access to his tower, his mysteries. More than that: it was strangely meaningful. But I knew that as soon as I vanished, it would become an ugly nothing once again. Without me there would be no transforming spell, no glamour. I knew what had happened.
Natalia had entered my reality.