In Siberia (25 page)

Such sects saw themselves in flight from the decadence of European Russia. In Siberia, where worldly authority ebbed away, they could save their souls. For them, with the apostasy of the Czar and of the Church, history itself had died. Its sanctity and meaning gone, they lived outside it, in a tremulous limbo. Frugal and industrious like their Puritan counterparts in the West, the Old Believers, especially, came to form the majority in many Siberian regions. Their lives passed in a dream-filled restlessness, haunted by memories of the past and omens for the future. But in the present they could only wait. They took as their talisman the
legendary City of Kitezh, which had sunk beneath the waters of a lake during Mongol invasion centuries before, and would rise from them again when Russia was purified. True believers, it was said, could hear its church bells ringing in the depths.

As I pushed deeper into the valleys of the Transbaikal, I was entering a region where Catherine the Great had resettled 30,000 Old Believers in the late eighteenth century. The snow-clouds bursting over the mountains blurred the Selenga river to a grey welt. I stared ahead in misgiving. The Old Believers, I knew, were wary of all things foreign, including, I imagined, me. Foreign imports such as tea or potatoes (introduced by Peter the Great) had been shunned. Even iron ploughshares caused a rumpus, and communities split over the question of kerosene lamps. In the absence of a Eucharist the family meal, with its dietary taboos, became tinged with the sacramental, and a stranger could not expect to share it. Many products were consensually hated. The mechanical singing of gramophones could debase the Liturgy, and vaccination or property insurance scandalously pre-empted the will of God. Alcohol, of course, was anathema, and tobacco–like a Satanic cousin of incense–sullied the body against which the Cross was signed.

But when my bus clattered over a pass and descended to the town of Tarbagatai, I saw nothing I had expected. No grandly sashed and bearded patriarch stood outside his cottage; no multi-petticoated woman, necklaced in chunky jewellery, dropped her gaze at our approach. This was an ordinary town with its little square and war memorial and handful of bare shops. When I asked after Old Believers, people shook their heads. Those folk had almost gone, they said. Disconsolately I took a room in a run-down boarding-house and continued my enquiries into evening, until someone directed me to a blue-shuttered doll's house.

An old woman was standing in its courtyard clutching an axe. She was less than five feet tall, with a billowing skirt and outsize headscarf. ‘What do you want?' she yelled. She looked taut, furious. Snow was fluttering between us. I mumbled about an Old Believer chapel somewhere. ‘A chapel? There isn't one! This is my
chapel!' She brandished her axe at the door. She made as if to expel me, then changed her mind. ‘See my chapel, then!'

I went into two pin-neat rooms, all their furniture snowed under lace. ‘There!' She pointed to icons high on a corner-shelf. ‘That is the Mother of God and those are the angels. Now cross yourself!' She bunched her fingers in the Old Believer way. Her voice was still stony with unexplained anger. ‘Like this! Like this!' She rearranged my fingers. ‘Now cross yourself again!…Now pray to yourself!…'

She had lived here since childhood, she said. Her father had lost both legs in the war, and then died. Her husband had gone under a German tank in the year of their marriage. ‘Where have all the Old Believers gone?' she repeated, pushing me outdoors. ‘I don't know. To the cemetery, mostly! This was never our part of town anyway. You want Aleksei Akilovich! That's our part! Over the bridge, in Partisan and Lenin Streets…. That's where we are. Over the river!'

She slammed the door on me.

Beyond wasteland a wooden bridge arched over a stream, and the town fell quiet. Its houses leaned over alleys deserted in the dusk. The snow was thickening. I felt an intruder. I was probing a community that could not welcome me. Every door was shut, and there were no lights. My leftover gifts–some key-rings and a pocket calculator–might be insulting or even impious. My feet made lonely tracks in the snow.

Behind the tottering courtyard gate of Aleksei Akilovich a horde of mongrels snarled and jangled their chains. I knocked gingerly. After a while I heard someone tramping through mud, and bolts shooting back. Then the gate wobbled and parted. A mastiff on a snapped rope charged the gap and was kicked aside. A voice rasped out: ‘Who's that?' and I lurched forward to take someone's hand. But Aleksei stood big and suspicious with his back to the gate. His face was obscured under a battered hat. Above his high boots the trousers were gone at the knee, and stuffing spilt from his jacket. For a moment I could discern nothing of his face behind the coppery beard which deluged his chest. Then I made out his eyes narrowed in scrutiny. ‘What do you want?'

‘I heard there was an Old Believer chapel here.'

‘There isn't.'

‘Is there a priest?'

‘We have no priests. Nothing.'

We were both shivering with cold. He began to retreat through his gateway. Then, knowing the reverence of Old Believers for books, I said that I was a writer. His hat eased back a fraction. He hovered. The dogs howled and clanked behind him. ‘I have books too,' he said. He stepped back from the gates.

I came into the big, littered courtyard where his cottage stood. One of the dogs tore at my trouser-leg, another sank its teeth into my boot. His rooms were stark and filthy, the old pride gone. There was a butt for mixing honey and a table strewn with scraps of half-eaten food and chipped plates. Sections of bee-hive scattered the floor, with a rusty flat-iron. One of the tasselled belts worn at divine service curled discarded in the dust. The only concession to machinery was a tinny clock on a crate. In the second room, where an iron bed was heaped with apples and onions, I stared around at walls of bare log. But a rickety table gleamed with antique books.

Aleksei sat me down beneath a naked bulb. It glowed weakly over the scuffed book-leather and the gush of his beard beside me as he fingered each volume. ‘Look…look.' When he opened them their spines fell apart on mildewed endpapers and worm-eaten boards. Some were closed by thongs or gilded hasps which seemed all that held them together. Many were prayer-books for the home. They had been left him by old families whose children had lost interest, he said. His calloused fingers trailed along a Church Slavonic script indecipherable to me. ‘And this one! Look!' It was a massive liturgy printed in 1547, long before the Great Schism, preserved by the fugitive faithful. Its pages crackled under his hands, with their double Alleluias all in place, together with Old Believer quibbles about the Son of God's eternal reign. On its final page, a hundred years ago, someone had inscribed in faded ink: ‘
When the last day comes, the people's sins will have grown into mountains, good men will be few and will go unheard.
A great war will set father against son, and each person will believe only his own heart. Then the sun will darken….
'

Aleksei thrust this at me like a writ. ‘We ourselves will see this! It will come soon, very soon. This, because our century is a monster, it is perverted.'

I could see him closely now. He must have been about fifty. Under the glimmer of the bulb his head shook with a biblical mass of dishevelled hair, from which two mistrusting eyes gleamed out. Even in his fiercest confidences I glimpsed this lingering suspicion.

‘Everything has grown corrupt here, everywhere. Young people have lost all faith, and the old people are dying. Girls go about in those short skirts, even the daughters of our Old Believers, yes. You've seen them? Their legs…' His hands clenched and unclenched against his trousers. ‘Have you seen them? You see bare legs everywhere now.' But next moment he held up his fingers to form the Old Believer cross and cried: ‘At the Last Day those who do this'–his hand shook–‘they will be saved. Only they! The rest will perish.'

I supposed myself included in this holocaust, but he did not seem to notice or hear my ‘Why?'

‘Everybody drinks, everybody smokes.'

‘Even among you?'

‘Yes, there's been a great falling away. But if one of us smokes he is corrupting his faith. It's utterly forbidden. As for drinking, well, we can take a little wine…'

‘
Wine?
' I was astonished. Alcohol had always been anathema. ‘…and even a
little
'–he pinched his thumb and forefinger together–‘a very
little
vodka.'

I stared at him. He looked back with a kind of caressing duplicity. His eyes shimmered. ‘Just a
little
.' He hoped I would smile. He wanted my collusion in the sweet taste of sin. Yet the next moment he had become teacherly and almost angry again. ‘But the young people, they smoke drugs. Not from Afghanistan, no. They grow it here, in the fields, a kind of cannabis. They roll the leaves in their hands, and smoke them. And several of them have committed suicide afterwards. They've even drunk petrol
and set themselves on fire.' His hands exploded at his chest. ‘It's terrible to take your own life.'

Yet he looked covertly excited. Suicide by fire had once been a virtue among his people. Was he trying to tell me something? Was he even a little mad? I couldn't decide. And the suspicion in his eyes continued like a hard flame. ‘Nowadays suicides are interred in a cemetery with everybody else, but before, it wasn't so. In the better days, before Communism, they were buried somewhere unconsecrated. Those were called “black graves”, and their dead were “slaves of the Devil”.'

‘So they chose to die that way? By petrol…' These suicides seemed to mock the martyrs who had died in flames, and this too perhaps–the debasement and parody of the holy–signalled to him that the Last Day was imminent.

Aleksei closed up his books. ‘Our community is vanishing from here,' he said. ‘Many have gone into the cities, to other villages or into their graves. When a person dies I'm sometimes asked to read prayers and place candles by him–seven is usual. But now I've lost count of the dead. And their children don't believe. And I don't know how many of us there are left, I can't tell you. But on Sundays some of us gather here–this is our only chapel now. Here we pray.'

I glanced at the dust-filmed floor, the junk-yard furniture. It was hard to believe him. Beside his books the room's only object of sanctity was a single icon whose saint or Virgin had been worn to a cracked shadow. A board nailed to the wall was pocked with sockets where others had been, ranged round an eight-pointed Old Believer cross. All had gone. ‘I've been robbed too often. Many of my books were taken too. And my icons. I used to have beautiful icons.'

But I no longer felt sure of him, and my distrust echoed back. He never asked me anything, but his eyes were full of incomprehension and half-found questions. He discovered an illustrated book of icons, and hunted out those that had preceded the Great Schism. ‘Look! You see how the hands are?' He touched his third and fourth finger to his thumb and held them up to my eyes. Their black nails and roughened skin seemed to echo the nadir of
his people. ‘That's how it should be. And the circling of a church or a grave–never walk against the sun.' He thrust his fingers at me. ‘The cross! Remember!'

‘But why is that so important? Why?'

‘Of course it's important!' Yet he looked baffled that the question could exist. From time to time this happened. I would strike something ancient, immovable. Then his eyes would narrow in flagrant distrust, or he would teeter on the brink of anger. Now he almost shouted: ‘It's everything, everything! When the way of signing the cross was changed we called it the Victory of the Devil! Satan's triumph! Too many died for that! My ancestors, they died for that! There was a river of blood! Fire and blood!'

I said stubbornly: ‘I don't understand it.' But the words only hovered like self-accusation.

He went on to talk about the Stalinist repressions as if they were yesterday. In a village across the river his parents had kept their icons openly, defiantly, on a shelf in the room where he was born. As a boy he had loved the Mother of God. Now he lived alone, almost self-educated, and hunted mushrooms in the woods across the Selenga, and dealt in honey. He had never married.

But the idea of marriage obsessed him. ‘I think it's a sin not to marry. Even animals and birds marry.' He held up two fingers. ‘Two is godly, one is the Devil! But it's hard to understand them, women. All the same, I need one.' He glared round the dirty and chaotic spaces. ‘She would come like a gift!'

I tried to envisage a woman with him: cleaning, mending, making new, yet always confronted in the end by the quicksand of Aleksei.

‘I plan to marry an Old Believer,' he said. ‘Women of all ages come here to pray. There's one in particular I know, who has a good heart, and she's young…very.' His eyes shifted. Neither of us, perhaps, could tell how much he was playing.

I asked: ‘Can you fit her in before the Apocalypse?'

He let out only a sombre smile. ‘It's true there is little time. You know, when we first came here three centuries ago, the climate was harsh. But God sent his own climate to comfort us. Suddenly the summers were warmer and the winters less severe.
Before, you would never see birds here, but they came with us. Now the weather is growing hard again. It's changing. It is difficult to grow vegetables, or anything. We even have permafrost. This too is a sign.'

‘The collective farms have collapsed,' I said. ‘That's what's happened.'

But he was not listening. ‘The herald of the Last Day will be a Third World War. This is written.'

I remembered the priest in Irkutsk. ‘A war between who?'

‘Between the Christians and the Moslems. The Iraqi war was a premonition. A far greater war will precede the Last Day.' He stood up. ‘That is how we will know.'