The chief architect of Arkhangelsk lived in a brutalist concrete structure in the city centre. The few trees in front were still encased in frost. Pavel opened the door and we stepped inside: unlit steps led upwards to the lift. The artificial wood-panelled doors closed, a pulley creaked and the damp steel box reeking of piss lifted us upwards, shuddering to a halt on the fifth floor. We stepped out: a black metal door faced us. Pavel rang the bell.
A few seconds, and then the door swung open. Light flooded out into the corridor, and Professor Yuri Anatolievich Barashkov – former deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR (1989–1991), acquaintance of the celebrated dissident Andrei Sakharov, specialist in Russian wooden architecture and author of many books – appeared in front of us.
He was not what I had expected. He was in his sixties, but so youthful and energetic that I, at least thirty years younger than he was, suddenly felt old and decrepit in comparison. The silver hair cropped close to his skull stood to attention as if charged by the electricity that fizzed and crackled in his scalp. A clean and open face shone with a frank enthusiasm for life. He thrust out a hand: his grip was very firm.
‘Yura!’ he said, beaming from ear to ear. ‘How-do-you-do!’
I followed him into an open living area, sitting down in the sleek, comfortable chair he offered me. The room was full of flowers (‘It’s my wife’s birthday,’ he said, grinning), but they were not the source of its beauty, which so completely belied the dismal exterior of the building – that lay in the careful arrangement of space. The apartment was open but not cavernous, orderly but not obsessive, form always reflected function and there was nothing on display that was not beautiful or useful.
I was particularly impressed by the slim, sleek bookshelves, each one of which was lined with attractive volumes on art. There was no thematic repetition – one volume for the Bauhaus, one for constructivism, one for baroque, one for the Renaissance and so on – and so I knew that he had thought long and hard before authoritatively selecting the precise tome he required. I had been in lots of rooms containing glossy coffee-table art books, but this was probably the first time I thought the owner actually referred to his reference books, and genuinely understood exactly what each one contained.
I wanted to kick him out and move in. But I knew I would just fill all the nice clean space with bizarre junk, random scraps of paper, books, CDs and dried-up tea bags. It wasn’t a good idea.
At first Yura spoke in English, but his thoughts quickly became too complex for a second language and he switched to Russian, Pavel interpreting for us. I hardly needed to ask questions: as soon as I mentioned the name Sutyagin, the details started flooding out of him, and immediately I learned that everything Natalia had told me about the professor and Sutyagin in Malye Karely was false. Yura did not hate the tower. He loved it. Not only was he chief architect but he had been elected to the local administration, where he described himself as ‘Sutyagin’s only defender’. ‘Others want to tear it down,’ he said. ‘I am trying to protect it.’
I asked about the tower’s origin.
‘How did it start? Well, basically Sutyagin had made a lot of money in business, and he wanted to build a house for himself. At first he came to me and asked me to design it. I did as he asked and produced a plan for a traditional wooden two-storey house, but the final result – well, that’s entirely his fantasy!’
‘So he didn’t have a plan for a tower from the start, then?’
‘Not at all. He built the first two storeys according to the professional drawings. But then he decided that it wasn’t tall enough. So he designed another storey and had his workers add it. After this third level was completed, he thought it was still too low. So he added another. By this point he was working entirely alone. Even though he had no architectural training whatsoever, it was now entirely his project. Then he decided that the nine-storey buildings in front of his house prevented him from seeing the main shipping channel, and so he decided to continue building to get a view of the river. That was when he first faced seriously the problems of architectural design: because he could not carry on constructing it in the same chaotic, improvisational way as before. So he made a cardboard model of what he wanted and told his men to build that, without even knowing what it was for in the end.’
‘He really had no idea?’
‘None,’ said Yura, his face glowing, as if this fact pleased him more than any other. ‘And this, this is a manifestation of Russian character! He had the money; and he had to express himself in some way, and so he did, and he let nothing stop him! Not even the fact that he didn’t know what the tower was for. Only the top floor, which was originally designed as a room about the size of the one we’re sitting in, well, that was the only thing he knew he wanted from the very beginning. He decided that he would put sofas around this room, a table in the middle and that he would sit there smoking, tapping his finger on the cigarette and dropping the ash on the ground. He didn’t even bother to think about what the floors below it were for. He wanted to feel that everyone was below him. You know, like going to the toilet on an aeroplane – so he could feel like a big man by pissing on all the people and houses underneath him.’
The professor laughed, but there was no hostility in his tone.
‘What amazed me was that … well, I like architectural drawings. I have a collection of them. And at the start of the twentieth century there was an architect called Suslov, a professor in St Petersburg. He published an album of his drawings – fantasies on the theme of Russian architecture. They were impossible buildings, dream buildings, ideas that he knew would never be realised. And of course, Kolya Sutyagin knew nothing about this. I repeat: he has no architectural education whatsoever. I don’t even see any influence from our local wooden houses and churches. But as the tower rose, I couldn’t believe my eyes. It looks as though he had taken one of the impossible designs of Suslov and actually built it.’
Yura leapt up and ran over to the shelves, neatly lined with exquisite art books. Selecting one he came over and showed me a line drawing of a fantastical cathedral-skyscraper with multiple angles and domes.
‘So you see – how did Sutyagin do this? Where did it come from? It must be in the genes: his tower is a manifestation of the Russian soul in architecture …’
The professor froze momentarily, transfixed, a smile on his lips. He was lost in blissful contemplation of the russkaya dusha, that wild, free, most ineffably mysterious of God’s creations, which had erupted into reality so extravagantly and in such an unexpected form in the streets of Solombola. The tower was not just Sutyagin’s – it was his tower, it was the long-dead Academician Suslov’s tower, it was Pavel and Natalia’s tower … it was all Russia’s tower.
Which left me out, of course: because my soul, which was not Russian, could never truly understand the vast, enigmatic forces that had brought it into being. I could only stand back and admire it from a distance. And indeed, as the professor immersed himself deeper and deeper in the vast lagoon of his nation’s collective essence, I could feel my own thoughts moving in a Germanic-Protestant-rationalist direction.
‘But did he ever get planning permission?’ I asked.
‘Only for the first two storeys,’ said Yura, suddenly returning to earth. ‘As for the rest of the house, well, in building it he violated all existing constructional norms. The city authorities were aggressive towards him and wanted to tear it down. There was a war between the administration and Sutyagin; the tall fence and five Caucasian shepherds are a result of this confrontation. Not knowing how to stop him, the authorities invented a case to put him in jail for two years. This was not a difficult thing to do, because all New Russians started off as criminals. Just take a look at their dealings and you’ll find something.
‘He did do it, though – I mean, he did keep one of his colleagues locked up in the basement of the house, but beyond that I know nothing. Maybe the man stole money, or was in debt to Sutyagin. We are close acquaintances, but I never talk about it with him. It’s a very delicate subject. He was originally sentenced to a longer term, but he was released after two years for good behaviour. That was five or six years ago. While he was in prison he lost his business and that dried up the material resources for his ideas. Now he doesn’t have the money to finish it. That’s why the building is now in such a state, and it is quite probable that it will just collapse. Everyone in construction knows that such a building cannot stand unattended for so long. It should be protected from the environment. But in the tower, all the structures are exposed …
‘What do his neighbours think about it?’
‘The population of the village is also quite aggressive. Mostly they dislike him. They’re all afraid that the house will catch fire, or fall on top of them. One of his neighbours said to me, “I have already bought a grenade launcher, and I’m just waiting until he reaches the top, then I’ll burn it down.”‘ Yura laughed. ‘This is a good example of Russian psychology. If an American farmer sees his neighbour is doing better than him, he just buys a new tractor and starts working harder. But a Russian, well he decides to burn down the church and destroy the work of his rival.’
Yura now took flight, and I could feel him guiding me to his conclusion.
‘In fact, I am probably the only member of our administration and the only professional in the field of architecture protecting Sutyagin and the tower. Why do I do it? To me, the answer is simple: because this is something unique that does not exist anywhere else in the world. It could be entered in the Guinness Book of Records, because in Russia and around the world you only find wooden buildings that are two storeys high. In Finland I once saw an experimental three-floor building, but in fact it was about fifty per cent reinforced concrete mixed with some pieces of wood. So Sutyagin’s Tower is not just taller, but much taller than every other wooden building in the world.
‘But that’s not all. It is also a monument to the times when such a building could be constructed, to this period of wild capitalism in the 1990s. Some people laugh at it, others fear it. But if you look around the village, all the other houses have one floor and three windows – they are all identical. In Russian popular architecture, terror of the environment was very strong. A young man starts building a house, and he wants to do something different, but then some older man comes along and says, “You should do the same as this other building – look, see, it’s still standing. Yours will fall.” But people like Sutyagin, who ignore this terror – well, they make progress for architecture, even if it manifests itself in such strange ways, and in wild forms …
‘I’m working on a book about the history of world architecture for my students and the people of Arkhangelsk. There will only be one thousand copies. In it I have placed a chapter called the “Towers of Babel in the Twentieth Century”. And there I write that the skyscraper was invented by Americans. But the wooden skyscraper was invented by Sutyagin. So I will sing a hymn for Sutyagin because his house will be placed in the same chapter as the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building and other famous buildings in Shanghai and Kuala Lumpur!’
The professor had finished his disquisition on the significance of Sutyagin’s Tower. Theoretically the interview was over, but he was obviously a creative thinker, and so I sat there in silence, staring at him, waiting to see how he would fill the void. He was far too polite to tell me to piss off, and I was sure he would produce something interesting.
He paused for a few seconds, sitting on the edge of the sofa with mild panic in his eyes, wondering why I wasn’t getting up to thank him and shake his hand. Then, when he realised it was because I had no intention of leaving, he suddenly flew off on a long and inspired riff on the history of Arkhangelsk and how his own personal history was interwoven with it, before segueing into his own theories on the origins of world architecture, Russia’s (unjustly neglected) place in it and his fascination for labyrinths, and in particular the numerous ancient labyrinths that were dotted around the Russian north.
‘Architecture,’ he said, ‘is the art of arranging space. We tear off a little piece of the cosmos and organise it around ourselves …’ But Yura did more than arrange physical space – as he looked around himself he was constantly arranging all aspects of the world, drawing it in, studying it, and then producing his own original interpretations and reinterpretations. Some of these were serious, others playful and provocative; but they were never frivolous. Finally, he returned to the tower: ‘You know, in the past I redirected all people curious about it to Sutyagin himself … I have his telephone number. You should call. He never rejects people who are interested in him.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ I said. ‘I’ve tried journalists and his neighbours. Nobody could tell me where he was or how to get in touch with him. Nobody can even remember what he looks like. He’s disappeared completely!’ I didn’t mention that I had spent ten minutes yelling at his window.
Yura shrugged. ‘Maybe he’s changed since prison. I’d call him for you, but … well, he’s a strange kind of man. I know him, I like him, but I don’t call him. I don’t want to reopen the connection. He’s from a different world. He’s an absolutely pure New Russian. One time, probably back in 1991 or 1992, I brought some Norwegian journalists round to see him. They had coffee. One of the journalists asked for a little cognac. Sutyagin moved his foot under the table. There was a whole box of very expensive, high-quality cognac down there. Just a heap of bottles. And Sutyagin just shifted the box towards the Norwegian with his foot. The Norwegian was shocked.’
‘How old is he?’
‘I’m not sure. He’s a lot younger than me. I’m sixty-seven; he’s somewhere in his forties. Maybe forty-two. He has a wife, a young daughter.’
‘Do you have a picture of him?’
‘No … I used to, but not now. I don’t even have a photograph of the tower now. What he’s doing these days I don’t know, and to be honest … I don’t want to. His world is a complicated place. There were a lot of dark rumours about him … He is a very strong man, naturally strong. Once, in his house I saw a videotape of a dogfight. It was disgusting. It’s illegal, of course, but this is the kind of thing that interests him. I mean, we have a good relationship. I even like him, but … I just don’t want to renew our contact.’
The professor looked sideways for a second, as another thought came to him.
‘Sutyagin wanted to go into politics. He asked me to “consult”, but I really didn’t see a politician in him. I am a Soviet man, a product of socialist reality, and in some respects I remain “Soviet” in my attitude to money. And people of this type – like Sutyagin, or Krupchak, our big local millionaire, all these New Russians … Well, at first I had a completely negative attitude towards them. Most people still do: they are attacked on all sides in Arkhangelsk. But I’ve changed. I realise that they are leaders. In any tragic situation, like the events in Russia at the start of the nineties, they are the ones who will find a way out, and who will help the nation to rise again. Of course they will commit crimes in doing so – but they have so much energy that they cannot stay within the boundaries of existing law, and the law meanwhile cannot keep up with them. Our society should support them by rejecting the excessive legal requirements for these people … in any crisis it will be enough to let them exercise their reasonable initiative and the situation will be improved.’
At last I got up to leave, and shook the professor’s hand. He handed me a piece of paper. ‘Here’s Sutyagin’s number,’ he said. ‘Call him. Tell him I vouch for you. He won’t turn you away.’
There was just one problem. My flight back to Moscow was scheduled to depart in three hours’ time.
Pavel switched off the mobile. ‘It rang out.’
‘Try again,’ I said. ‘Sutyagin might be hiding behind the sofa, waiting for the phone to stop ringing.’
He hesitated, but then punched in the numbers again. ‘Still no answer. Looks like you’re out of luck …’
‘Try again,’ I said. Pavel winced in pain: this was all too aggressive and alien to his peaceful nature.
‘Now the phone’s been switched off. Well, never mind, you’ll be in Arkhangelsk again, won’t you?’
‘Probably not,’ I said. ‘I have to see him now.’
‘Shall we have lunch …?’
‘No. I might need to go to the airport and cancel my ticket.’
‘Perhaps a meal would help you relax and to think clearly. We could call the airport from the Gross Vagon.’
I couldn’t think of a better idea. We had just turned in that direction when the phone rang: I listened to Pavel explaining who he was, who I was, and that we had just come from a meeting with Professor Barashkov. The conversation didn’t last long.
‘That was a woman. I think she’s Sutyagin’s wife. She says he’s out, but she’ll have him call us when he gets back.’
‘How long will that be?’
‘She didn’t say. But they already know who you are.’
I pictured myself, standing in the dark, deserted streets of Solombola, yelling at the illuminated window. I still wasn’t sure if it had been a good idea. Pavel could tell what I was thinking about, and smiled.
‘Yes. My mother told me about last night’s … adventure.’
The Gross Vagon was too far from the centre of town; I needed instant access to a taxi. We turned back to the hotel. We were on the steps of Krupchak’s supermarket when the mobile rang. It was Sutyagin. The call was extremely brief.
‘He wants to know where you got this number. He’s going to check with Yura.’
I thought about the professor, so keen to avoid contact with his old acquaintance, Kolya Sutyagin, lest it open up a portal into that other world, of which he now covertly approved but nevertheless sought to know nothing about. I had just brought an abrupt end to that dream.
The mobile rang again.
‘He says you can come – if you’re not afraid of a big, unfinished house, that is.’
There was a row of taxis parked in front of the hotel. Pavel picked the one closest to us, a dirty cream-coloured Lada.
‘Where to?’ asked the driver.
‘Sutyagin’s house,’ Pavel replied.
No more explanation was necessary.
The driver took us through the darkening maze of streets, turning into dead ends and alleys that promised to lead to the tower but which terminated instead in little huts and kitchen gardens, until at last he reached the tall fence that surrounded it. The light bulb on the second floor was shining as it had the night before, as though it had been left on, to guide me home.
Pavel called.
‘He’s going to call off the dogs.’
We waited a few minutes, and then from behind the fence I heard the sound of a door being unbolted, two feet stepping forward in the night, a scrabbling on wooden floorboards, dogs rising to greet their master. There was a pause, then silence, then I heard the steps renewed, moving by some unknown route towards us. Snow was crunched underfoot and then the door in the fence opened and Nikolai Sutyagin stood before us in a shiny ski jacket and a woolly hat with a label on it, announcing its non-Russian origins. The twilight was thick around us, so it was difficult to make out his features: all I could establish was that he was of average height and neither fat nor thin. His eyes, however, glinting in the moonlight, darted rapidly back and forth between Pavel and myself, and I knew that he was shrewdly and sharply assessing these arrivals on his doorstep.
‘Which is which?’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Which one of you is Russian and which one’s the foreigner?’
‘I’m the Russian,’ said Pavel.
‘I’m the foreigner,’ I added.
‘Nice to meet you. Now follow me.’
Sutyagin darted ahead of us, flying up stairs and over piles of planks and logs and miscellaneous junk that lay around in big, dark, unfinished rooms until he came to a door which was pushed firmly shut, zealously guarding the warmth and light inside. He paused, and turned to us. ‘You do know that it’s not finished, yes, that there are piles of logs and dirt everywhere …?’
‘I know.’
‘Then come in.’
We stepped through the hall and into a very spare kitchen, furnished with simple wooden items. Sutyagin’s wife, a thin, tired woman in a puffy blue tracksuit, smiled briefly, weakly at us. Her hair, dark at the roots, stained blonde at the ends, was dry and brittle, ravaged by the cheap dye of the Russian provinces. We didn’t stop. Sutyagin, in a blizzard of movement, hurled us into the living room and then demanded to know what we wanted to drink.
‘A little vodka, perhaps?’
‘Tea’s fine,’ I said.
Sutyagin raised his eyebrows. He didn’t approve. ‘Suit yourself. And you?’
‘Tea,’ said Pavel.
Sutyagin turned to his wife. ‘Make them some tea,’ he commanded. Then he opened a cupboard, pulled out a torch and turned back to us. ‘She’ll bring you drinks and give you a video to watch. I’ll just step out for a minute.’
He disappeared back through the door that led into the tower. But as the Vissarionites had taught me, sound travels in wooden houses, and I could hear him stamping about, up and down steps, going in and out of rooms, switching on lights, preparing the tower for its visitors.
I felt like Howard Carter stumbling into Tutankhamun’s tomb – except that instead of marvelling at the treasures buried with an Egyptian boy-king to make his voyage to the afterlife smoother, I was gazing in wonder at the trinkets the equally extinct genus Homo novyrussky had amassed to smooth his passage through this world.
Every single object dated from the glory days of bandit capitalism in the mid 1990s, and was preserved intact, perfectly displaying the ostentatious vulgarity that had defined the tastes of the now vanished elite. The weird, shiny blue wallpaper and the luxurious sofas wrapped around the room were appropriately gaudy, and although I had no doubt they were expensive the overall impression was one of cheapness. The enormous black Hi-Fi system glittering in the corner (CDs and tapes only; it pre-dated the MP3 revolution), the colossal ‘Goldstar’ TV (cathode-ray tube, not flat screen. Goldstar was later renamed LG) and the VHS player under it (there was no DVD player) were all exactly the same age, and although they were once no doubt objects of great desire in Arkhangelsk, they were now museum pieces, with the same sad, bulky, useless look as all dated technology.
Pavel was especially impressed by the Hi-Fi system. He made the ‘devil horns’ sign of the Russian gangster. ‘A friend of mine had that stereo system,’ he said. ‘He was so proud … as if by owning it he had become a New Russian himself.’
O Sutyagin, what did they do to you? The tower, incomplete on the outside, was incomplete within too – time was frozen, destiny jammed, Sutyagin unable to move on. The room was a mausoleum; Sutyagin slept in it like Lenin, soft and pickled in a glass tank. And how quickly the New Russian, once the subject of countless asinine newspaper features, crap documentaries and Hollywood schlock, had slipped from the stage of history! He was as obsolete as the rock ’n’ roll records Soviet teenagers had once pressed on X-ray scans; as embarrassing as a futurologist in 1993 explaining that virtual-reality headsets were the technology of the future. Under Yeltsin’s debauched, anarchic misrule it may have paid to dress in a tracksuit and overtly advertise your propensity for violence. Now, however, it was necessary to wear an expensive suit and at least affect the language and pose of business. Those who could not play by the new rules were either dead, in prison or had somehow been frozen out, and were probably working as security guards in bazaars. The proud beast that had roamed the vast spaces of Russia stealing and pillaging was now a comical footnote – and no one had even noticed its passing.
The strangest thing, however, was that I realised Sutyagin had entered jail at exactly the moment when I had arrived in Russia. Time had stopped for him at precisely the point when it had begun for me. And so I felt as though I had somehow stepped back to my first arrival in the country, when I had been wandering around Smolensk on my own, knowing nothing more than what I had read in newspapers and books, unable to speak the language or read the alphabet. It was an unsettling feeling, especially as I was leaving the country in a matter of weeks, and for the first time in nine years I had not applied for a new visa, and did not know when I would be returning. There was a strange, unnatural sense of circularity, as if my presence here denied everything I had seen and experienced in all that time.
My reverie was broken when Sutyagin’s wife came in, poured us some tea and fed a black cassette into the VHS player.
Thumping, primitive techno music: the house appears, though at this point in time it is only half-built; the upper levels remain locked in Sutyagin’s mind. Perhaps he has not even visualised them yet (except for that top-floor room; Yura said he always knew what the top-floor room would contain). The camera zooms in on a jagged wooden crater, already towering above the neighbouring houses.
Inside, Sutyagin is sitting on a sofa. This sofa, in fact, in this very room. His hair is dark and he is wearing a suit – the very image of a biznesmen. A voiceover explains that he works in the timber business. Sutyagin explains the tower thus: ‘I like company. I am building this tower so I can have my friends around me.’ He responds to accusations that he is a gangster with a chuckle: ‘My reputation is such that I don’t need to cheat.’
Somehow that doesn’t sound so reassuring. There is something of waking up with a horse’s head next to you in bed about the man in the suit, who is otherwise so effusive, so cheerful: I’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse …
A few years have passed, and yet the same bad techno is playing as the camera zooms in on the tower, now as complete as it will ever be, though Sutyagin doesn’t know that yet. The room for pissing on the world has been built.
Sutyagin is still in this room, however, the one I am sitting in ten years later, surrounded by the same shiny blue wallpaper, sitting on the same sofa. On the screen, he is silver haired. The ten years that have elapsed since this piece of footage aired don’t seem to have aged him. If anything, he looks younger today, in spite of prison. The Sutyagin currently roaming through the tower, flicking switches, is blond.
Sutyagin is surrounded by his family: his wife, an old woman (his mother?) and a child. He seems very pleased, the model patriarch. The camera cuts and he is walking up wooden steps, higher and higher, passing through empty granaries until he reaches the room at the top. It is bare; there is no table, no armchair, no ashtray. Sutyagin explains that he wanted to get a view of the whole peninsula, and so the building rose higher and higher to accommodate his desire. But the view is grim: overcast, muddy, the master of Solombola gazes out upon a vast, rotting post-industrial complex. I note that the narrator, so much weaker and poorer than the master of the tower, rebels in his own snivelling way, referring to Sutyagin as ‘Kolya’ throughout the narration, thus denying the master of the tower the elementary respect of name and patronymic. He never does this to his face, of course.
Cut to Professor Barashkov, ten years ago, still smiling, though his hair is darker than it was two hours earlier. He is standing in Solombola, the tower in the background, talking excitedly about its uniqueness: ‘Like the Tower of Babel, it is a symbol of man’s desire to reach the heavens. I respect Sutyagin because out here, in the depths of the Russian north, he has transcended provincial mediocrity and built something unique!’
And then the video stopped, dead. I knew what followed, however: disgrace, and jail. But there was no record of that, though it must have been reported on the local TV. And I remembered the words of Yura: ‘I never talk about it with him. It is a very delicate subject.’
The screen filled with hissing interference and then the video switched itself off. The TV started barking at us. There were some explosions in London. It had already reached the end of the story, however, and swiftly cut to images of verdant nature in Kaliningrad. Some old peasants were complaining that enormous houses were being built in a national park, on land that was supposed to be kept pristine, untouched. The camera showed us a settlement of huge lakeside ‘cottages’, a word which in Russian usually refers not to charming little abodes with thatched roofs but rather huge, candy-coloured brick atrocities bereft of charm or style. One St Petersburg businessman had allegedly paid a $300,000 bribe to build his; a leading police officer said that following an investigation it and the others might be torn down. I didn’t believe him.
Pavel shook his head: ‘Russia …’ he groaned, half in agony. The Kaliningrad fiasco was followed by a report on neo-Nazi groups beating up Tadjik Gastarbeiters. Pavel shook his head again.
‘Russia …’
Sutyagin returned and sat down in a chair on my left, leaning forward as if ready to clock me, should I irritate him. At some point between our arrival and his voyage through the tower he had located a pair of sunglasses and placed them on top of his head, though the sun was unlikely to emerge any moment soon. The tight white top he was wearing clung to a muscular physique. It was open at the neck, revealing a thin gold chain. Sutyagin was still a New Russian peacock, his years in jail notwithstanding.
Instantly he began negotiating – leaning yet further forward, gesturing rapidly with his hands, catching me off guard. Was I a writer or a journalist? He didn’t like journalists. He didn’t trust them. I said I was a writer. But this only made him mournful.
‘It’s a pity,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘Only foreign writers are interested in Russia! Russians don’t give a shit. We don’t read books any more, except for detective novels and shoot ’em ups …’ He made two fingers into a gun: ‘You know, bang bang!’
And then Sutyagin grilled me, really grilled me, about my aims, my goals, even the source of my financing. I knew that he was testing me, that he was probing for something: but I wasn’t sure what, and that made me nervous. I remembered the Digger, with his ever shifting conditions. It had taken weeks to get him to agree to anything. But at least then I had had weeks to spend on negotiations. Right now, I had one hour, after which I had to leave for the airport. There was no time for meta-discussions. I had to get Sutyagin to trust me, and fast.
But Sutyagin was shrewd, and wily, and paranoid. We danced around like this for a long time. Every time I answered a question it led to another question, as if he didn’t believe anything I said, as if it a priori couldn’t be true, and he was trying to force some confession out of me. I tried to figure out what he wanted, what he was listening for, but it wasn’t clear. And then it started to become unclear to me too. What was I doing in the tower? The ‘ark for the Slavs’ idea was obvious bullshit, long since lost to me. And as for ‘crossing the line’, well, there wasn’t any great mystery to it. He had lost everything: he had been stripped of power, and was now chained and muzzled, pacing back and forth in his tower, trapped within the rotting edifice of his uncompleted dream. So aside from fact checking some of Yura’s statements, such as the claim that Sutyagin had never known why he built it, all that remained really was my fascination with him as the architect. I just wanted to see him, to meet him, to sit in his tower, to hear him talk.
‘What do you know about me?’ he snapped.
Tired of providing explanations I tried the mystic angle. ‘I saw a picture,’ I said. ‘I came.’ Sutyagin sneered. He was a businessman; he didn’t even dignify my statement with a response. Then I repeated, in truncated form, what I had said to Natalia the night before. That was better, yet still not good enough: ‘But there’s lots of information about me, about my life. There’s a website. Have you seen it? It contains lots of stories. Most of them are completely false …’
‘No I haven’t,’ I said. We were down to about forty-five minutes now before I had to leave. It was getting exasperating. I had to get him to say something, to reveal some truth before I left. ‘Let’s assume I know nothing, and that’s why I’m here – to find out the truth from you.’
Sutyagin looked blank. ‘I don’t know if I’m interested in a book,’ he said, shrugging and sitting back. Then suddenly he had a thought. ‘Do you have any contacts with TV?’
I didn’t understand. Maybe he thought a book wasn’t important enough, that his life’s work deserved more recognition, a wider audience. ‘Would you rather be featured in a documentary?’ I asked.
‘Yes … No. I have a lot to say – about politics, about my experiences, about this house,’ he paused. ‘But it would be better if it were broadcast live.’
Now I was totally lost. Who did he think was waiting in the outside world to hear his words? Nobody had heard of him; nobody even knew his tower existed.
‘Live?’
‘Yeah, you know, by satellite link. Unedited.’
Kolya Sutyagin was clearly a man of rare significance, on a par with the Pope, or the president of the United States. ‘Is he saying what I think he’s saying?’ I asked Pavel.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s crazy.’
‘I think he’s very worried. His words have been twisted beyond recognition so many times before, he thinks it’ll happen again.’
I tried to reassure Sutyagin, that I was interested only in his point of view, and that I wouldn’t distort it. He continued trying to arm-wrestle me into submission, and I could feel the force of his personality, and started to understand what Yura had meant when he had described him as a man from ‘another world’. Vissarion, the Son of God, had been easier than this: less opaque, less difficult. Sutyagin argued some more, frittering away another five minutes, until he finally told me about two ‘French guys’, filmmakers, who had visited him a few weeks earlier. He had rejected them. I nodded. ‘I see,’ I said.
And then suddenly, the urge to beat me into submission just evaporated into the air. He shrugged, and looked up.
‘OK. So what do you want to know?’
I pulled out my dictaphone. ‘Can I record this?’
‘Sure … wait – will that be checked when you leave the country?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘The tape – will it be checked when you leave?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Because I might say some things, you know and I wouldn’t want them to be intercepted …’
Not only was the Great Constructor, locked up in his tower, virtually a prisoner, a man on a par with the Pope, but when he spoke, he expected the world to quake.
Sutyagin took a deep breath, composing himself. I started recording.
But before I could open my mouth, Sutyagin had already asked a bizarre question:
‘How old do you think I am?’
It was such a strange thing to say I didn’t know how to answer. Was he looking for flattery? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Forty-two, forty-three …’
‘I’m sixty-two.’
I froze. ‘What did he say?’ I asked Pavel. I knew I had understood, but it seemed impossible.
‘He says he’s sixty-two.’
‘Is he taking the piss?’
And then I wondered if this wasn’t going to be a waste of time, if Sutyagin wasn’t just playing mind games to set me on edge and establish his superiority. Perhaps it was an instinct of his. ‘My reputation is such,’ he had said on the television, ‘that I don’t need to cheat.’ And then there were the dark rumours that Yura had hinted at: the dogfights; the man locked in the basement. Yes, the man locked in the basement. It was easy to forget about him while Sutyagin’s wife stood meekly in the kitchen preparing tea. This house was the scene of a crime. I didn’t think Sutyagin was going to try any psychotropic violence on me, but I knew that there were many areas of life he was familiar with that I had only read about. This was a man who had forged a kind of order out of chaos; and it was better not to dwell too much on how he had done it.
‘Sixty-two?’ I said. He could hear the disbelief in my voice.
‘Sixty-two,’ he echoed. And then I looked more closely, and although Sutyagin was built like an ox, with a barrel chest, his skin did seem old and pasty, and it was wrinkled around the neck. I still wasn’t sure if I believed him, though.
Sutyagin was pleased, and not only from a sense of satisfied vanity. He had subverted my faith not only in what he might say, but also in my own perceptions. He was in control now.
And then, and only then, did he start to talk. But not about the tower; or not much, at least. He had told that story too many times before, and the words fell lifeless around us, thudding to the floor like dead pigeons. The origin story was pretty much identical to what Yura had said, only with a few added details, some extra flourishes. At first he said he had started building it simply as a big house, so when businessmen came to visit they would not need to stay in a hotel, but would rather stay with him, where the hospitality would be much greater. But the house was too big, and when he added a roof, it looked like a giant mushroom. That was when it had started to grow upwards. At that point he seemed to be saying that he would gather all his friends together and everyone he knew would live in the tower with him, but it seemed like a rationalisation after the fact. The tower, as Yura had said, had simply happened, erupting out of the soil, and out of his mind. There was no plan, at least not in the early stages. After a while he had built a model of what he wanted. He still had it, lying around in a cupboard. It was a bit damaged now. He went to fetch it. It was indeed made out of cardboard boxes.
But really, he had more important things to talk about.
‘Do you know what perestroika is?’ he asked.
Another nonsense question: where was he taking me now?
‘Of course.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘In the mid eighties,’ I said.
‘Right. And who invented it?’
I looked over at Pavel. He shrugged. ‘Er … Gorbachev?’
‘Wrong. I did. Twenty years earlier. In 1966.’
And then Sutyagin revealed what had been building up inside of him, at least one of the truths he wanted to share with the planet. And although I cannot claim to have fully understood the process by which he had presaged the actions of the reformist leader of the Soviet Union by so many years, or the means by which he introduced his country to openness, freedom of the press and its first capitalist reforms from his position amid the penal colonies and barren towns of the frozen north, I can affirm that the story involved more than one stint in prison, and not only in the nineties, but much earlier, in the sixties and seventies, when he had been a much younger man. Yura had said jail was a sensitive subject for Sutyagin; he spoke about it to me openly, though his acts of violence had, of course, been committed in self-defence, and he had never served very long sentences. I can also affirm that perestroika involved timber, construction, and a complicated (and yet entirely legal) system of payment which he had discovered that had enabled him to reward his workers handsomely. He had made enemies among the communist establishment, of course, but by the time Gorbachev had caught up with the innovations he had set in place, Sutyagin had already become a rich man.
And so when the nineties arrived, and everyone else was making money, Sutyagin’s urge to acquire was already sated. This new reality, which was so exciting to others, was old to him. He had invented it, after all. Material goods, luxuries had lost their novelty. That was when he started to think about a tower.
But it was when he crossed into this new metaphysical realm, when he reached beyond the mere accumulation of wealth and power, and began to turn his attention towards the heavens, that events turned against him. The details were less clear now, but he had many enemies. One day he was shown a piece of paper with a list of names written on it, his among them. Today most of those names are chiselled on tombstones. His is not. He went to prison, he lost his business, his fortune, and all his friends deserted him – but Nikolai Sutyagin is still standing.
‘I am hard to kill,’ he said. From most people, of course, those words would have sounded like outrageous bombast. But when Sutyagin said them, he was merely stating a fact. It was less interesting to him than his condition for his age, or his invention of perestroika. It was like saying ‘I eat meat’ or ‘I drink vodka’. These were words from another, more dangerous world, one of violence and paranoia and sudden death. It was a world I didn’t know much about, the world that Yura Barashkov now believed held Russia’s salvation, but which he feared.
And so it continued, right up until the last minute, when I had to dash for the aeroplane that I knew was already sitting on the frostbitten runway in pitch Arctic darkness. Even as I stood up to get my coat the words poured forth, as he exposed the truth about his central place in history: for if he had invented perestroika then was not the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the opening up of the East to capitalism, democracy and NATO membership also down to him? He did not say as much. Perhaps modesty restrained him. But certainly this was implied by his words. I had met the Secret Architect of the Post-Communist World. And it was to him therefore that I owed a debt of gratitude for my own years of free movement within Russia, years which had been so rich in experience and encounters, in beauty and ugliness, in frustration, friendship and astonishment. I was sitting not simply in the world’s only wooden skyscraper, but at the nexus of epochal changes that had swept across the globe, transforming it and my own self for ever. And he, Nikolia Sutyagin, sat unheralded at the centre of all of this.
There was just one curious thing – for all the details he gave me about perestroika, he remained vague to the point of coyness about the man he had locked in the basement. When pressed directly, he chuckled, as if embarrassed. ‘Well that’s er … that’s … well …’ And then some kind of explanation followed, but it was rushed and mumbled. It probably wasn’t important anyway. And besides, my time was up. I had an aeroplane to catch.
‘But don’t you want a tour of the tower?’ he asked.
‘I really don’t have time,’ I said.
It was true; I didn’t. But there was more to my declining his offer than simply that. It just didn’t seem important any more. I had already penetrated the mysterious structure, and had just spent an hour in the mausoleum of its still breathing constructor. For me, that was enough. The rest of the building was only a skeleton chilled to its desiccated marrow, a mess of steps leading nowhere in particular and floorboards frozen by polluted air, all of it haunted by some sad dogs. The real tower lay elsewhere, and I had already explored it in great detail. This rotting, physical thing was not even its reflection, but a mere shadow of a shadow cast upon the snow.
Sutyagin shrugged. He didn’t care either.
The taxi was waiting for us outside, headlamps piercing the icy darkness. There was no time to waste, but still I hesitated. I would probably never breathe this air or see the tower again, and though I wasn’t feeling particularly sentimental, I knew that this last fragment of another too-long night on the edge of the Arctic Circle, this moment after the climax, was somehow precious. I needed to feel the hopeless void burn my cheeks if I was to fix it in my memory. So I tilted my head towards the sky, and as it was a clear night I could see deep into our cosmos, which was empty except for a few rocks and the dismal, slow light that blinked on and off in memoriam of some old gas that had annihilated itself in fire millions of years earlier. That was enough: I was ready now. I opened the cab door and climbed inside. The driver started the engine. We pulled away from the tower.
Yes, it was definitely time to leave these other worlds behind. Perhaps, even, to create one of my own. As for Sutyagin, Vissarion, Edward and the Digger, well – I had never been anything more than a combination of vibrating air particles in their ears and light reflected on the back of their eyeballs, a fleeting distraction, an interruption in the midst of their important work. They had already forgotten me. And now they continued to gaze through their strange telescopes at marvellous stars so distant that no one else could see them. They are still gazing at them today, as you read these words, and will continue to do so, long after you have closed this book.
And they are not the only ones.