His plan seemed to be taking a long time to materialize. Sasha, when questioned, would say only that it was complicated. People used to point to a house close to the university park—a house where, according to a plaque, Tolstoy once visited his goddaughter for tea—and hiss, “The house of Mr. Jackson!” I hoped that the aging seeker after truth took comfort from this coincidence, for no doubt there was much in the progress of Russian reforms that was dispiriting.
Foreign investors had otherwise shown little interest in the city. Economic rationalization, the process by which Russia’s rusting plant was to be refashioned into consumer goods factories sweetly humming with activity, had not taken off. The glittering left bank produced at least some marketable goods. In this the city was better off than many that relied on armaments factories, like Tula; but still the Voronezh televisions gathered dust on the conveyor belt, waiting for the cathode tubes made in Tbilisi and circuit boards from the Baltic states.
“You know, they call this a transitional period,” said Mr. Uvarov to me one day, bitterly. “It’s like the early twenties. That was a transitional period too. All those Social Democrats and Social Revolutionaries, on the same side as the Bolsheviks, as they saw it, all working away to establish a socialist state. Then they were all massacred just a few years later. They had a transitional mentality, or something. That’s what they’ll say about us. ‘Of course, they tried, but they made unforgivable mistakes—victims of the transitional period, what could they do? It was their fate.’ And all the time this is our life…”
There were several attempts at joint ventures with foreign companies. An Italian firm set up a pizza restaurant: installed a shiny oven, trained a couple of chefs, and left, satisfied that one more city would now have access to civilization with extra pepperoni. For some months the pizzas were cheap, tasty, and fast. Mitya and I liked watching the chefs slapping the dough down onto the huge trays and sliding them into the oven. The restaurant was warm and bustling and although you could only stand at chest-high tables, it was always full. I seem to remember pontificating to Mitya about the advantages of the free market as we stood and ate.
“Oh, blah-blah-blah,” Mitya responded, crunching a pizza crust. We weren’t getting on so well. Also I’d refused to stop for a hundred grams of vodka on the way to the café.
Then certain types of pizza started dropping off the menu. The prices, of course, went up with inflation and the place began to empty. We still came, although we often had to wait ten minutes for the chef to appear behind his counter. Then the pizza dough turned gray and gritty and the toppings shrank to a smear of tomato and a few hunks of sausage. I don’t know what the story was: protection money almost certainly, difficulties with supplies, low morale, and perhaps just a sort of diffusion, an atmosphere that somehow smeared itself even on that shiny oven.
The Gastronom on Revolution Prospect where we collected our sugar ration was at the thin end of the diffusion process. We were given coupons for all the necessities: grain, meat, butter, eggs, household soap, and one bottle of vodka a month, but it was only sugar that was strictly rationed. Picking it up was bleak. We waited in line first to show our passports and sign the register. Then we lined up again, watching the assistant as she shoveled pinkish granulated sugar into bags. Her big arms were flushed with exertion and her mouth was grimly set. Bag after bag was whisked over the scales and dumped on the counter as she yelled, “Next!”
Nearby, old ladies hovered, looking mournfully at their ration and itching to weigh it again. But no one dared to speak up. That assistant was a bully. She was capable of taking back the sugar, emptying it on the floor, and demanding, “Happy now?”
Later, economic analysts would say, “People survived that winter because they still had savings accounts stuffed with rubles, as well as the vegetables and so on from their dachas.” That was not how it felt at the time. We went on from the Gastronom to the central market, which was half deserted. Most of the concrete display slabs were bare, and the pigeons fluttering and calling in the dome could be heard above the noise below. In one corner the honey vendors still beckoned, offering to dab the back of your hand with their stiff, yellow nectar. There was sour cream to buy from women wrapped and bandaged against the drafts, and on the opposite side of the hall stringy old men in aprons were selling pairs of pig’s trotters wired together and heaps of offal flecked with sawdust. But the toppling mounds of vegetables had dwindled away to potatoes and moonfaced cabbages, and what customers there were drifted between the counters, asking prices, nodding, and drifting on.
In the street outside, a row of pensioners stood in the cold. They wore their best coats and hats, and at their feet lay their prize possessions: a set of novels by Alexei Tolstoy, crystal glasses, shiny pairs of shoes that had been wrapped in felt since the sixties, a rug from the Caucasus. The goods looked strangely diminished in the open air.
“How much would you like for the shoes?” I asked an old lady.
“Whatever you’ll give me,” she answered faintly. “I’m a teacher, I’m not used to this kind of thing.”
She reminded me of Lisa, my great-aunt who had starved in Moscow at the end of the twenties. In those days, too, the middle classes had stood outside selling everything they owned. There are photographs of pianos and chandeliers in the snow being snapped up by the new Soviet bourgeoisie. Antiques in Russia do not have an easy time. Those same chandeliers were probably back out on the street in 1992.
As March began, torpor fell on the hostel. The days were short and dull and there was no light in the sky. We slept a lot. Jim appeared out of his room one day looking a little dazed, saying, “That makes one hundred and nine hours since I last left the hostel.” Some went traveling to shake off the sadness; one boy left for Mount Elbrus to learn to ski. He stayed so long that he’d qualified as a professional ski instructor by the time he returned.
Others were driven a little crazy. One of the English girls drank so much vodka that finally it poisoned her, and she lay shrieking in the corridor until a doctor arrived and gave her a shot of adrenaline. Peanut, trying to impress, kept attempting to climb up the hostel wall to his new girlfriend’s window and failing; he gave himself a black eye and gashed his leg, and no one was sympathetic. Parties were as likely to end with a group of girls sobbing together as dancing; one was in love with a bastard, another had had an abortion, and none of us were sure what we’d be doing in six months’ time. The year limped toward spring.
I escaped from it all, wrapping my head in a scarf, running across First of May Park, and banging on the iron door of Mitya’s shop. We’d spend the night there, sleeping fitfully on the sun lounger. In the mornings I was exhausted by a procession of busy, unpleasant dreams that were instantly forgotten. Only one stuck in my mind. I was standing in the stairwell of an apartment building in Voronezh. A woman opened the door to me, holding her robe around herself with one hand. In the grimy light she looked fat and forty and tired of life, but she managed an ironic little smile. “Hello,” she said. “You don’t know me.” At first it looked like Sveta, but as I woke, I realized it was me.