I asked some Gypsies once, on a whim, if I could stay the night with them. They were camped on a piece of wasteland out toward the road to Moscow. Mitya and Edik were buying cigarettes. The woman I asked laughed, and said, “Better let me tell your fortune.”
“Let me just sit here and chat, then. We’ll drink tea together.”
She looked dubious. “I’ll have to ask my baron,” she answered at last. “Wait over there, and I’ll find him.”
I joined Mitya and Edik, who looked at me with disgust. “They’re dirty, Charlotte, what do you want with them?”
“Aren’t you afraid of diphtheria? And tuberculosis?”
At last a squat man in stonewashed jeans approached us. “You want to talk to the baron,” he stated flatly. “He’s away. He won’t be here today.”
“Come on, we have to go,” Edik broke in. “What’s interesting about them?” he said, as we got into a taxi. “They’re dangerous.”
And to most Russians, they were. Not just because of their thievery and their diseases but because of the breath of anarchy they released onto the streets. Like devils, they were, come to tempt us.
Anarchy was not new to Voronezh. As a border town, it had been barely controlled by Moscow until the end of the eighteenth century, inhabited by escaped serfs, schismatics fleeing persecution, and smugglers. The Cossacks, who bred their famous horses in the region, acknowledged no authority but their own. As late as 1765, when the bishop of Voronezh visited a village in his diocese, he encountered a procession bearing a beribboned young man—a representation of Yarylo, the god of fertility. The province was, a contemporary lamented, “half-pagan, half-barbarian.”
Even in the 1930s, during the purges, Mandelstam detected an underlying spirit of dissent that he considered “the free spirit of the borderlands.” In one village he found the members of a sect—the jumpers—who were persecuted in tsarist times. There was chaos in the village because a short time before his visit the jumpers, speaking in tongues, had announced the date on which they would with one holy leap reach paradise. Nadezhda Mandelstam described the scene: “The sectarians had fixed a day on which they would take off for heaven, and, convinced that by next morning they would no longer be of this world, they gave away all their property to their earthbound neighbors. Coming to their senses when they fell to the ground, they rushed to recover their belongings and a terrible fight broke out.”
In another village the Mandelstams visited, the villagers were descendants of eighteenth-century exiles and convicts. Although the streets were named after Soviet heroes, the villagers proudly repeated the old street names that commemorated their forefathers’ activities: Strangler’s Lane, Embezzler’s Lane, Counterfeiter’s Row.
This part of Voronezh’s history, however, was little known or appreciated by the 1990s. For many people, the rabble that had begun to appear on the streets since perestroika was proof that the so-called democratic system was dragging their country into shame and disorder. Their town suddenly seemed strange to them, and dangerous. The hissed warnings began: don’t take the bus at night, don’t walk the streets in the dark, don’t go to the market on your own, don’t talk to Caucasians. These people—good, responsible citizens all of them—even regretted the end of the propiska, the residence permit, which had more or less prevented free movement within the Soviet Union. They would tell you that Russians could only be ruled by the rod: Look at our history! We’re an Asiatic people, we’re not European, they would explain. Russia is a great country—we just need a strong leader to bring us order.
This explosion on the streets did, of course, mean misery to many. Old people suffered the most. The housing shortage made them vulnerable to New Russian property developers, who tricked them out of their apartments. An old woman appeared in the stairwell of a friend’s apartment one winter day—he saw her standing by the radiator as he left for work, waiting for someone perhaps. In fact she was homeless and sick. Later that day she went up to the top floor, lay down on the cold steps, and died. There were many like her.
And yet for other members of the underclass it was a time of liberation. Johnson the bomzh told me and Mitya, “A whole year’s gone by without prison.” He couldn’t tell us why, but he added wistfully, “I’m going to the Novosibirsk region. They say it’s beautiful there, with forests and lakes…”
His tone reminded me of the dreams of the Russian peasantry in the nineteenth century, of a utopia on the White Waters of the Altai mountains. Inspired by some omen, whole villages would suddenly set out toward these mythical lands, leaving their houses and fields behind. In 1856, not realizing that the Crimean War had already ended, thousands of serfs departed on foot for the Crimea in the belief that all those who fought in the campaign would be set free.
And indeed, similar stories began to circulate in Voronezh in 1991. The Americans were about to open a factory in Voronezh, and all those who worked there would be given visas to the United States. The government was going to announce an immediate redistribution of land. And it was funding investigations into alien landings in the Voronezh region, as there had been so many sightings. One had even been reported by the Tass news agency: humanoid giants, three or four meters high with very small heads, had landed in a vehicle like a shining ball right in the center of the city—Koltsov Square, or thereabouts.
Why not? Stranger things were happening all around. Anyone could see, now, that the gray materialism of the Communist regime was too tight to contain all of life. Chaos, passion, and the old superstitious Russian magic had burst the seams, and now reality was layered and raucous.
So I was hardly surprised when the Horse told me about the deaf and dumb people. It was late one night at the bar in the Theater of the Young Spectator. We were talking about Lapochka’s housemates when the Horse sloped toward me and swore me to secrecy.
“You mustn’t ever let them see you know,” he whispered. “But they can hear, really, and speak.”
“What?”
“The deaf and dumb people. In reality they aren’t. I drank with them one day, you see. We went out to the vodka bar on Koltsov Square. That’s where they all go, they call it the White Horse. And I bought them drinks and they bought me drinks and I think they must have put something in them, because I started feeling very hazy and you know that’s not like me… Everything was looking unsteady… and then one of them suddenly said, ‘You know I can talk if I want. But I don’t want.’ And another one said, ‘We’re underground, three kilometers underground.’ I particularly remember three kilometers.”
“Then why do they pretend?”
“They have their reasons,” said the Horse, shrugging. “Who knows why?”