INTERLUDE
A graveyard: the empty plots of Tommies who, war-exhausted, had not been demobbed at the end of the Great War but rather sent by Churchill to fight Bolsheviks in 1919, and who had died in the swamps and forests of the Russian north. There was a monument on the river to the Soviet victims of the ‘imperialist intervention’. These boys had played the part of villainous invaders in that narrative: the remains of some of them were now home, but others still grinned lip-less beneath cold, alien soil. Futile deaths, dismal to contemplate: ‘Your Prince Charles came here’.
An art gallery: icons displaying the cross of St Andrew, patron saint of Scotland, although in this context he watches over sailors, not my homeland. Apparently he endorses the actions of the Russian navy too.
A coffee bar: the cool kids of Arkhangelsk, pale and detached in the crossfire of neon against stainless steel, every now and then glancing over to study the old woman sitting with the much younger man near the bar. She is obviously not his mother, so who are they?
The street: across from the enormous swimming pool, men and women in thick coats, queuing to collect water from a truck. The cold has burst the pipes in their buildings. The same cold will freeze the contents of their tin buckets before they get home.
And so on: killing time with history and art, stripping Arkhangelsk bare until it was night, and we were back in Solombola, wandering once more through unlit smokeless streets towards the tower, which finally came into view, a jagged outline illuminated by the moon, everything inside it negative, a rip in space.
Except –
On the second floor, there was a light: a naked bulb behind glass, illuminating equally naked white walls.
Natalia was shocked. So was I. The hours we had spent wandering about in the freezing darkness had bred only scepticism and doubt. The emptiness of the village and the attitude of Sutyagin’s neighbour had seemed a part with the unconcealed scorn that had surrounded the whole expedition from the start. Nobody knew anything, nobody gave a shit. Sutyagin was nowhere to be found, his tower was rubbish. You’re wasting your time. Go home.
And now, finally: a sign. I could hardly believe it. But was it an indication of life, of habitation, or just a trick, something left on for security to stop Sutyagin’s enemies from trying to break in?
The light seemed cold to me. It was not the light of life but rather that of an illuminated storage space.
I walked up to the door set in the tall fence. There was no bell, no buzzer. It was impossible to make contact with the inhabitants of the tower. Whoever was in there did not want to receive unexpected visitors. Undaunted, I started pounding on the wood, but the window was too far away and my glove muffled the impact of my fist. The sound wasn’t travelling far enough.
‘Maybe we should go,’ said Natalia, who had suddenly lost her newfound enthusiasm for Sutyagin’s masterpiece. ‘It doesn’t look as though anyone’s home.’
‘Nahh …’ I said. ‘I’m not giving up yet. Maybe I should throw a stone at the window.’
I had seen it done in movies. A handful of gravel tossed upwards, and then a talking face – it was always that easy. But Sutyagin’s window was far away and located high above me. I would have to lob a rock at it to get the momentum I required. It would sail right through the glass, and that would just be embarrassing.
Suddenly I heard the sound of shuffling, of someone getting to his feet and walking across creaking floorboards. Had Sutyagin heard my violent knocking? But the sound was coming from the unfinished third floor of the tower which, without walls or windows, was entirely exposed to the elements. What was Sutyagin doing there? Was he insane?
I looked up. And suddenly I knew that the tower had all along been nothing but a smokescreen, a cover for Sutyagin-Moreau’s real project: the man-wolf, the fruit of his sinister experiments in fusing human and animal DNA. The uncanny beast stood upright on the edge of the third floor, staring down at me, fury in its yellow eyes, viscous slobber swinging from its jaws, which were snapping and snarling, hungry for flesh.
It was too late to flee: the beast leapt from its position above me, sailing through the air, swallowing my head whole, ripping it off and then landing on its feet, all in one movement. My body staggered on its feet, spurted a few hot jets of blood in the air before sinking heavily into a crumpled heap in the snow, like a puppet abruptly dropped by its master.
That’s all bollocks, obviously. In fact, it was just a big dog. I had forgotten the legend of Sutyagin’s five canines from the Caucasus, the savage creatures that had guarded over his creation while he rotted in a penal colony in the remote north. After a minute of intense barking, the hound calmed down; but it didn’t return to its resting place in the depths of the tower. It stayed up there, watching me, waiting to see what I was going to try next. I thought about all those nights spent alone in the darkness, whipped by Arctic winds. No wonder the pooch was angry.
‘Dan!’ Natalia whispered. ‘Let’s get out of here!’
I looked around. She had vanished. Peering into the darkness I eventually made out the lines of a human figure.
‘Come on!’
The beast heard her, and responded with a renewed outburst of barking. Then, more heavy footsteps, and another monster from the depths, hitherto too lazy to get involved, appeared. It stood at the side of the other one, lunging forwards, looking for something to kill.
‘Really Dan, I’m scared … ‘
But now I was certain Sutyagin was in there, crouched under the harsh phosphoric glare of the light bulb, straining not to move, not to cast a shadow, holding his breath, listening, waiting for the beasts to attack or for me to leave, whichever happened first. He was behind that square of light, in his secret lair, a sinister count plotting revenge on the world that had wronged him …
‘SUTYAGIN!’ I yelled. ‘COME OUT! I WANT TO TALK TO YOU!’
I waited, waited … but there was no movement at the window, no new lights came on in the tower, and the village was still sleeping.
‘SUTYAGIN! COME OUT! I MEAN YOU NO HARM!’
Only the dogs responded. They were growing more enraged by the second. I cupped my hands to my mouth again:
‘SUTYAGIN! I WANT TO TALK ABOUT YOUR TOWER!’
Still no response. The dogs lunged as far forward as they could, snapping at the night, at the stars, at the cold and, of course, at the intruder below. I couldn’t tell if they were chained up or not. They looked free enough to me.
I yelled a few more times, and then stopped. Suddenly I saw myself, and who was I? Some guy, standing in the street at night, yelling at the window of a man who didn’t know him. Wasn’t there a word for what I was doing? Yes, there was: harassment.
It wasn’t that I was worried about the legality of what I was doing, or the police. But I knew that if someone had come to my tower in the Arctic and started shouting outside my window I would have reached for the nearest bucket of wet shit – or, if there was any to hand, boiling oil.
Then I remembered why the tower was unfinished. Sutyagin had gone too far, he had crashed through the invisible boundaries that restrain us all, and splattered against the hard rock of the world. He had been sent to prison. He had suffered. He had lost everything. The game of tracking him down had concealed the solidity of all that from me. Of course he didn’t want to talk. And even if I could have somehow forced him to, it would have been wrong to do so. If he wanted to die, to cease to exist, to withdraw completely, then that was his right. It was up to him.
I was, in short, acting like a right arsehole. Natalia thought so too. She had already gone. It was just me and the dogs now, and over there, Sutyagin, hiding.
I had followed the trail as far as I could, and it had just petered out. I did my best and that’s all anyone can do; you can’t win ‘em all – and all that jazz. But I had to face the facts: there was nothing left to do. Almost. I wrote a note, leaving him my mobile number, and put it inside a box on the fence. But I didn’t have any hope that he’d call.
I turned away from the tower and started walking back through the village towards Arkhangelsk. I wasn’t exactly leaping with happiness that it had ended this way, but at the same time I didn’t feel all that disappointed. The journey that had begun when I found the Digger’s phone number in the back of Residential Property Shit had finally resolved itself. And knowing that, I felt something close to relief.
But I was so close …
Natalia and I rode back into town on the bus. She was exhausted, freezing and wanted to go home. As for me, I was ready to return to the hotel. But I wanted to thank her, so I offered to buy her dinner in the Gross Vagon. She accepted.
Once we had thawed out a little she started asking about the book I was writing and the other places I had visited on my ‘research trips’. It was the first time we had talked about it. Until now, I had always been the guest, listening to facts about Arkhangelsk, receiving an education in what others deemed important. Perhaps if I’d been more explicit about my goals from the start my interest in Sutyagin would have made more sense to her, but I wasn’t as bold as Vadim, Edward or Vissarion and, aware that mine was an ‘unusual’ perspective, I had advanced under cover of vagueness. But now I talked about my excursion through the sewers of Moscow, the exorcisms in Ukraine and my encounter with the Son of God, elaborating upon the theme of ‘personal realities’ and my theory of the ‘line’ which everyone I had met was aware of but which only Sutyagin had crossed. She was very interested. And then suddenly I found myself continuing my thought in a new direction, which had been growing in me ever since my return from Siberia but which I had never fully articulated before. And it was almost as if the words were speaking me, and were forming in the air of their own volition, and all I could do was sit there and listen.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘a few years ago I read an article by an English critic, dismissing the entire literary output of post-Soviet Russia. His argument was that, as no new Dostoevsky or Tolstoy had emerged to capture the ‘spirit of the age’ since 1991, the contemporary Russian novel was a failure. I thought this was an outrageously pompous thing to say, of course. First, the critic wasn’t a Russian speaker, and as few contemporary Russian authors have been translated into English he could hardly have known what he was talking about. Secondly, it’s not a fair comparison. No other country has produced a Dostoevsky or a Tolstoy either, not in the last hundred years, never mind fifteen.
‘Recently, though, I remembered that article and started thinking about it again. And now I’m starting to wonder if he wasn’t looking in the wrong place anyway. Of course, he was a literary critic so it was natural that he would greatly overestimate the significance of novels. But why should we expect the creative energies of a period in history to find their greatest fulfilment in the novel, or any art form for that matter? They could just as easily be expressed in other, stranger directions. My feeling now is that the collapse of Soviet reality, for all of the chaos and suffering it brought about, also led to a great liberation of personality and of dreaming, but that this has gone unnoticed because these manifestations of creativity rarely take the form of “objects” such as books or paintings, or if they do, those are secondary products. As a result, they’re much harder to quantify or pin down, or even to find as, for the most part, they exist entirely in people’s heads.
‘I’m not saying that the people I’ve spoken to are on a par with Dostoevsky in the genius stakes, of course. But they have produced remarkable work that is strange and fascinating and meaningful if you look at it properly and don’t just dismiss it with labels like “crazy” or “insane” or “eccentric”.
‘And now I think I finally understand why I’ve been so interested in these people. When I write my book it will be as a testament to what happened at a unique moment in history – when several remarkable individuals stepped from the ruins of the Soviet Union into a brand-new, chaotic world and the roofs of their skulls flew off and these visions of possible realities forced themselves out into the world … I will be a cartographer of the impossible, drawing maps of these creations so they don’t just disappear into oblivion. I can’t record all of them, of course – that would take years, and most of them would be impossible to locate anyway. These are just four of the most interesting ones that I found – or that found me.’
Natalia had let me speak without interrupting. I had grown quite impassioned as I went on, and now I wasn’t sure if she had the faintest idea what I was talking about or whether she had just been humouring me. But then she started nodding. She had been listening very closely.
‘And do you think this is a phenomenon unique to Russia?’ she asked. ‘Or are there people like this abroad?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Everyone “creates his own reality” to some extent. But in Britain, for example, where the government will supply you with money and a place to live if you don’t work, there’s much less risk involved. You can live in a dream world your whole life, eating pies and smoking dope, and though you’ll be poor, you’ll never starve to death. But here, perhaps because conditions are more …’ I paused, choosing my words carefully, ‘… severe, and there are so many talented people dissatisfied with the environment in which they live, but unable to do anything about it, well, perhaps the manifestations are more extreme …’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Russia is a perfect place for creating realities. And it is in our history: a tsar wills a European city to appear where a swamp exists, and it happens. It doesn’t matter that it’s impossible, or that there are other, far more habitable, fertile areas in the south. It must be done, and it is done. Other cities appear in Siberia, the flow of a river is reversed, deserts are forced to bear fruit …’
And now, for the first time since I had arrived, I wasn’t being treated like a naïve foreigner. On the contrary, I had made her see her own world with new eyes, I had rendered the familiar strange, and I could see that she was thinking.
Back at the hotel, though, the ‘relief’ I had felt when I decided to walk away from the tower left me. I couldn’t hide from the fact that I had failed. I still didn’t really know why Sutyagin had built it; in fact I still hadn’t found out what Sutyagin even looked like.
It was disappointing. More than that, it was a waste. The tower was too rich in symbolic possibilities. There had to be some way round this. After all, if I was writing a book about people who challenged the facts of the world that surrounded them, who worked so hard to create more satisfying alternatives, then why couldn’t I follow suit? Why should I be imprisoned by my ‘events’ and ‘facts’? Why not walk right up to Sutyagin’s door, have him answer, and welcome me in, as if he had been expecting me all along, and then reveal that the tower had been built as a sanctuary, and that here I would find Vadim, Edward, Vissarion and many others, working on their worlds. Then he would lead me up, up towards the highest point, to the room that looked out over the river, and he would open the door, saying, Come and see, Daniel, come and see, and we would step inside, and there I would find …
But no: it wouldn’t work, and there was a very simple reason why. I would know I had invented the ending. If I was going to deny the facts of what had actually happened and accept some other, alternative reality as true, then I needed that denial to bubble up from deep within me and sweep me away in a flood. And that just wasn’t going to happen.
I switched on the TV and flicked through the channels until, to my surprise, I saw someone I knew personally on the screen. It wasn’t some fat guy struggling to fulfil his adolescent fantasies of becoming a movie star in a Russian Die Hard clone, however – rather it was someone much more powerful, a woman with a lot of influence in her world. She was the owner of a construction company in Moscow who had been accused of taking money for apartments in towers that had never been built. Poor people had placed their faith in her and been left with nothing.
She denied everything.