“Do you remember Smokey, Lapochka’s friend?” Mitya asked.
“He’s gone. He and a friend of his, Vlad, went to the Ukraine last week, and from there they’re going to try and get a boat to Bulgaria.”
“A summer holiday?” We were sitting on the Voronezh beach—a sandbank at the edge of the reservoir—and eating slabs of vanilla ice cream. The sun was so hot I was only half listening, wondering whether to move into the shade.
“Well, not exactly. They don’t have visas. From Bulgaria they think they can cross to Yugoslavia and fight as mercenaries for the Serbs.”
“What? Do they have some idea about the unity of the Slavs or something?”
“No.”
“Why then?”
“Why do you think? For the money.” Mitya was silent for a minute, then he added, “And to get out of here, of course.”
Everyone seemed to be leaving. The Horse was going to paint in St. Petersburg. Valya Uvarova was heading for the United States. Yuri, Emily’s boyfriend, Igor, and Lyuba all had places to study abroad. Sasha, the guy in the hostel who’d been in the Afghan war, had been wearing dark glasses for the past six weeks. He’d had laser surgery to correct his nearsightedness: good eyes were a condition of joining the French Foreign Legion.
“Seven years of service and then you get French citizenship,” he explained.
“Is it really worth it?”
“Of course it’s worth it. In seven years I’ll only be thirty-one.” He grinned. “If I make it.”
Even Lapochka was preparing to get out. He had scraped together ten dollars and an envelope containing articles from the Voronezh Courier that described him and the other Narcomen by name as degenerates. He was going to hitch to England with his ten dollars—he was sure he’d get there somehow—and demand asylum. The article proved that he was in danger in Voronezh from the growing influence of the “red-brown coalition”—the Communist and Nationalist parties, whose bigotry brought them together. What were the odds that such a plan would succeed? But a year and a half later I met Lapochka cycling down Upper Street in Islington as though he’d lived there all his life.
Our last weeks in Voronezh were astonishingly, gloriously hot. The sidewalks were dusty and ice cream sellers stood in the shade of the knobbly plane trees with their cans shaped like milk churns, mopping their foreheads and uttering faint enticements.
“Creamy ices,” they murmured as you passed. “Cool yourself… the healthiest, the purest.”
At weekends the city emptied and even during the week it seemed to have a lackadaisical, gone-fishing slowness. Shop assistants propped open the doors and sat outside; they fanned themselves and almost forgot to terrorize their customers. Other strange phenomena occurred, which everyone ignored completely. One June morning I woke up to see the sun blazing in a turquoise sky, and the air full of snowflakes.
“Oh,” Ira said, without even turning to see. “It’s pukh. When they planted all the poplar trees, they somehow got hold of the wrong sort, with seeds like snow. So every June the Soviet Union is full of pukh. It gives people terrible asthma.”
The pukh, like cotton wool, settled in drifts, and small boys amused themselves by setting fire to it. Meanwhile on the corner of Friedrich Engels and Peace Prospect, a crater seven feet in diameter appeared overnight and was fenced off with a little piece of string. Since the thaw, roads had been caving in and flooding all over town wherever a pipe had burst. On one occasion drivers waiting at a set of traffic lights suddenly found that their cars were standing in a foot of water. When they tried to drive away, their tires seemed to have collapsed. They stepped out of their cars and screamed: the water was scalding hot. Their tires had melted.
In the heat Emily and I began the task of packing up our lives. We staggered back and forth to the central post office, where an assistant wrapped our books in brown paper and sealed them with wax before sacrificing them to the Russian postal system. We took our bottles to the bottle bank and put the money into a fund for our farewell party. Then we sat for a long time smoking cigarettes and contemplating our room.
“You won’t be able to take it all with you,” Sveta commented, before we’d even started. “Anything you don’t want—”
“Yes, Sveta, we know who to give it to.”
“All right, calm down.”
Sveta tactfully withdrew; or so we thought, until she reappeared ten minutes later with a couple of boxes.
“These are for whatever’s left,” she stated. “Just put it all in there for me.” And she left again, quickly, having seen our expressions.
On the hottest day of all we took the elektrichka one last time and headed out into the woods for our leaving party. There was a crowd of us: almost all the English students, and the girls from Room 99, Yuri, Peanut, Yakov and Katya, Joe and Ira. The train was full of city dwellers with the same idea, and the air was heavy with sweat. With our bicycles, Mitya and I barely squeezed into the doorway at the end of the car. The conversation turned to the matter of going abroad; we’d talked about nothing else for weeks.
“It’s a two-year course,” said Yuri, who was going to England, “and then maybe I’ll stay there, who knows. If I can get a good job.”
“Don’t you think you’d miss Russia?”
“Well, yes, but if I have the choice between sitting in Voronezh with no money and dreaming about going abroad, or sitting in England with five hundred dollars in my pocket and dreaming about Voronezh, I know which I’ll take.”
“I can see exactly what you’re going to become,” said Tanya. “You’ll come back to visit us and you’ll be complaining, ‘Oh, this country is so filthy!’ ‘Oh, why do they have this ridiculous system of waiting in line!’”
Yuri laughed. “I’ll come back and we’ll have a huge party with as much of everything as we like.”
This was the first wave of purely economic emigration that Russia had seen; previously, exiles had left with a certain glow of heroism, whether they were fleeing tsarist censorship in the nineteenth century or persecution by the KGB in the twentieth. In Paris or New York they had dreamed and plotted revolution, so that they would be able to go home. On the face of it, however, nothing would stop these young emigrés from visiting Russia whenever they wanted. But in practice Tanya was right: the invisible frontier that separates the West from the rest of the world would keep them apart. The ones who left would find it almost impossible to return, just as it was impossible for me to stay, for me to be any more Russian than I was.
When we reached the station, Mitya and I rode on ahead with most of the provisions. The path seemed perfectly clear: down to the river and straight until we came to the tents that Viktor had been setting up since morning. But somehow we found ourselves pushing our bicycles through a patch of thorny hillocks, lost. After a while the strap on my sandal snapped and I had to go barefoot; then Mitya got a puncture. When we finally found the others, their mood was frosty. They’d been waiting for the food and drink for more than an hour.
“It’s just typical of you two,” we were told. “So selfish.”
As the sun set over the river, the mosquitoes formed great dusty clouds above our camp. We lit a fire and tried to raise our spirits with alcohol. It was a perfect summer evening; golden light lay on the water until almost ten o’clock, and the clouds glowed pink above us. But the atmosphere did not improve. We sat huddled in the smoke, irritably slapping the insects away and failing to get the fire hot enough to cook the meat. By the time the food was ready, the smell of roasting fat was enough to turn my stomach. I crawled into a tent and lay there, shivering.