They weren’t allowed to go to church and they had to tear the story of Noah and his ark out of their French textbooks. Their reading primer was called See Citizen Spot Run. All Monopoly boards were burned. They were given classes in Marxism and told to hate the bourgeoisie. When they asked who the bourgeoisie were, they were told they were property owners. One group of Nureyevs smashed the window of a hardware store with rocks, thinking that the owner was an Enemy of the People.
They walked home in their oversized men’s boots and scratchy cable turtleneck sweaters. They curled up on their hay-filled mattresses, kissed their pet rock good night and then went to sleep. They fantasized about one day washing their hair with shampoo. They were a cantankerous group of little boys.
Indeed the citizens of Pas-Grand-Chose began to complain as loudly as the Nureyevs about some of the implementations of Project Siberia. All the inhabitants of the town were having their comforts curtailed, which was natural given the fact that they were supposed to be living in Ufa in the 1940s. The post office was shut down, as there was to be no communication with the outside world. Some of the town children wept bitterly. One girl had a subscription to Canadian Geographic, which she would never be able to get. Another boy was awaiting a shipment of sea monkeys that he had sent away for.
A row of new buildings was shoddily constructed. They had roofs that made them look like soft ice cream cones, like those of the Kremlin. This part of town became affectionately known as Little Moscow. This area became the closest thing that Pas-Grand-Chose had to a red-light district. Villagers, including the Nureyevs, would buy modern Western music in some of the shops in Little Moscow. The shop owners served hot dogs inside to regular citizens under the table, although they were supposed to be only serving borscht. Citizens squeezed in there to watch Eddie Murphy films and drink Coca-Cola at an underground theatre. They watched Rocky 4, in which Rocky defeats the Russian. They didn’t know which side to root for. They didn’t know what side they were on. The citizens didn’t even know where exactly they were.
Speaking today with some of the town’s residents about the past, however, you will note a marked nostalgia for life in the make-believe Soviet Union. Indeed, some aspects of life in Project Siberia seem quite lovely. There was a snow machine blowing snow year-round, and it was apparently wonderful to lie out on a beach towel on warm summer nights and watch the flakes falling like blossoms off a cherry tree. A reindeer would sometimes stroll by, the antlers on its head looking like the arms of a skinny diva, supplicating the heavens.
Almost every resident you speak to will mention the wolves. A scientist had read that Nureyev’s mother had to trudge for miles through the snow to bring back potatoes and she was surrounded by wolves one terrifying night. A group of three hundred large grey wolves was rounded up from rural Quebec and set loose in the town in the middle of the night. They lurked around town, behind trash cans and telephone booths. The villagers were all terrified of the wolves and regularly petitioned for their removal, but the Nureyevs seemed to take to the animals. One witness described seeing an eight-year-old Nureyev walking the most terrifying-looking wolf down the street on a leash, calling her Susie. The skinny wolf had a rib cage that resembled a xylophone.
The Nureyevs left out bowls of Kibbles ‘n Bits for the wolves. They tried to teach them to sit. None of the other children were allowed near the wolves. Their mothers put little cans of pepper spray in their lunch boxes, in case they encountered a wolf on their way home from school.
Then, in a move that seems strange even in light of all the other extraordinary occurrences, the scientists decided they couldn’t recreate a distinctly Siberian awakening without a Siberian tiger. It took quite a bit of paperwork to have one of these endangered tigers delivered. They wrote a three hundred — page grant proposal detailing their need for the animal. Nobody in Moscow wanted to read the ridiculously long proposal, so they put a tiger on a plane and sent it over.
The townspeople had to build a cage that seemed to be the size of a castle just to be able to contain the measurements of the beast that was coming.
There was great excitement the day the tiger arrived. For some reason everyone thought that the Nureyevs would finally feel the grandeur of their original’s past and begin performing. Everybody cited the day when the tiger came as being a happy one. The cage was taken off the plane, loaded onto a truck and driven through town to where they had built the makeshift zoo. Everyone who lived there had come outside onto the street to watch the procession. The children had written signs on pieces of paper that said the French version of things like “Go Tiger Go!” and “Welcome Home!” It was as if the tiger were a victorious football team returning home.
The hype surrounding the arrival of the Siberian tiger was almost religious. Everything else about Siberia seemed to entail some sort of deprivation. In this case, they would be granted something amazing. They were entitled to this tiger. It was their birthright.
Whenever a young Nureyev was feeling low or uncooperative, the school psychiatrist would send him home with a note saying that he should spend thirty minutes with the tiger. The Nureyevs would whisper things to the tiger through the bars of the cage. Or they would go and sit on one of the little chairs positioned in front of the tiger’s cage and cry in frustration. The bright-orange tiger looked like it had been covered in gasoline and set on fire, always in flames.
The Siberian tiger seemed to always be escaping. One witness saw a dozen young Nureyevs running down the street, being chased by the tiger. They were all laughing hysterically and clapping their hands and leaping off the ground, almost making sautés.
“They all had a dark, wicked little streak,” the witness said. “They were always plotting to let the tiger escape.”
This statement reveals the growing strain that the citizens were feeling toward the clones. How much of a burden it was to live in a place filled with so many Nureyevs began to be apparent to everyone. Many of the clones didn’t work. Some living off disability cheques they’d received after a class lawsuit was launched against the Russian government by the generation of Rudolf Nureyevs who had been forced at gunpoint to dance. Although they didn’t share the real Nureyev’s desire to dance, they did seem to share his temperamental and tempestuous nature.
Since there was no work for them in the town, many of the Nureyevs turned to crime and the jails were filled with them. There was some confusion over the matter of sentencing them, for identifying them in a lineup proved hopeless. They were forced for a while to carry passports and papers everywhere. This seemed to fit in with the aesthetic of Pas-Grand-Chose. But once again, they were indignant, and they all flushed their papers down the toilet.
After a while, the police tried their best to simply ignore the Nureyevs and their antics. It simply wasn’t worth the hassle. So the Nureyevs basically got away with all manner of things and terrible behaviour. Sometimes they acted like children provoking their parents, trying to see how far they could go. They would walk into a store, take a bottle of vodka off the shelf, hold it up to the clerk and say something like, “Mind if I take this? No, I didn’t think so,” and then walk out the door, laughing. One got on a bus, and when the conductor asked him to pay the fare, he simply told him to bugger off.