I walked home through the drunken crowds, beneath a dark sky lit by grand firework displays, overcome by emotion. Russians had hungered for a classless society, for a proletariat Utopia, and so surrendered themselves to those who promised it. How could their moving story have ended in so many lies and so much misery?
In the tiny ground-floor bedsit I packed my bag for St Petersburg, and surveyed the reality of my surroundings. I was alone in a room crammed with unread books, old television sets (without leads) and a piano that no one played. The single sofa unfolded into the only bed. In the pale pink tiled bathroom, a swivelling spout served both sink and tub. Neither had a plug. My landlord – who’d lost his job some years ago and survived on sporadic Airbnb rentals – slept on a mattress on the kitchen floor whenever he had guests. On his kitchen table was a single set of cutlery and a bust of Putin.
Around midnight I heard the knocking. At first I thought it was the sound of fireworks, or a drunken Day of the City reveller, but the tapping was too controlled, too insistent, too good a beat. I looked through the grille and came face to face with familiar dark brown eyes.
‘Sami!’
I opened the padded security doors to let him in. As he stepped over the threshold he let out a gasp of relief, like a hunted animal returning to its lair. I hadn’t imagined that he could be any thinner, but he was. In a couple of weeks his slender face had become almost skeletal.
‘You look exhausted,’ I said.
There was no spring in his step, no cocky moonwalk. I grabbed him by the arm. He was shaking. He crumpled out of my grip and onto the floor.
The noise flushed my landlord out of the kitchen. I pressed money into his hand, told him that Sami was a friend and asked to use the cooker. I always travel with a small reserve of oatmeal – in case I arrive in a place after the shops and restaurants have closed – and quickly boiled it into porridge. I borrowed the only spoon.
Sami sat cross-legged on the floor and ate. Then he told me what had happened. After our parting he’d travelled to Minsk and bought passage to Europe. The smugglers had locked him and eight others in a refrigerated lorry, promising to drive them over the Belarusian border into Poland. In the lorry there was room only for them to sit down – no one could stand or stretch out – so all were thankful that the one woman was quite small. Pallets of potatoes had been loaded against a false partition. In the pitch black the refugees tried not to touch each other on the drive to the border.
Sami never discovered how the air vent became blocked, or how long it was until they began to suffocate. Fear had risen in the metallic air and in his throat. He’d pushed at the door as the walls had seemed to contract around him. Others, it was impossible to tell who in the darkness, had uncurled their limbs and started to kick at the partition, crying out for help.
The driver had heard the calls and turned off into the forest. He’d unlocked the steel door and told the survivors that they were in Europe. In the thick forest, at night, Sami was disorientated. The driver had pointed to a path and said ‘Poland’. The dead woman was dumped in a ditch.
Sami had run west, outrun the others despite his limp, jogged into Poland, he’d thought. But the driver had lied. On hearing the refugees’ cries he had panicked and abandoned them inside Belarus. They had not crossed the border. They had not made it to Europe.
‘All I hope for is to be safe,’ he said to me.
Every year an estimated 800,000 people are smuggled into Europe in a trade more profitable than drug trafficking. Most choose to leave home in a desperate attempt to improve their lives. Some fifty gangs handle the bulk of the world’s human traffic, earning millions of dollars in executing their heinous trade.
Sami had evaded arrest and made it back to Moscow, tracking me down again to a place of relative safety, on my last night in the city. In the sad little room he refused to take the sofa so I made him a bed of spare cushions. When I turned out the light, the moon cast the pattern of the security grille across the floor.
As we drifted towards sleep, Sami asked in a soft voice about Britain, bookkeepers’ salaries and Tottenham Hotspur. He added, ‘Michael Jackson played for Princess Diana. You know he dreamed of living in London.’
His hope – his faith – lifted me out of the broken day and the terrible story. I remembered Fyodor Tyutchev, the nineteenth-century poet, had warned that it was not possible to make sense of Russia, that the country was not amenable to reason, that to survive it one simply had to believe.
‘I will help you to reach England,’ I told Sami, in belief.
12
Sunday in St Petersburg
Autumn’s rains arrived as a sigh, stealing into the night, hissing into the warm earth, all but unheard by the city’s sleepers. By the million they shifted in their beds, rolled away from the window as if from the seasons, as if from the inevitable. Outside, the whispers turned to rattles, unbinding papery samara and drumming desiccated leaves down to earth. Startled birds shook their feathers, darted between drooping branches and tree tops. Seed heads and whirligigs twirled onto the pavement, washed into crevices and cracks, clogged the drains.
At dawn the showers stopped, leaving the streets carpeted with debris. The sleepers now pulled up their shutters, lit first cigarettes, walked dogs and cycled over the dappled curl of leaves, seed pods popping beneath their glistening tyres. Prams and skateboards then appeared in high-arched doorways. Young families emerged into the scrubbed air, tumbling past salmon-pink mansions and alongside grey canals. Elderly couples sauntered arm in arm around golden cupolas glazed with the slick of rain. In the Mikhailovsky Gardens, children rode docile ponies, danced around street musicians, begged to be photographed with the tame raccoons and doves. Their parents idled at open-backed coffee vans, ordered double espressos, scolded fox-nosed Shibas and spoilt miniature poodles. In Mars Field, the tsar’s old parade ground, teens played three-a-side frisbee near to the Eternal Flame. At trendy Bekitzer, young entrepreneurs chilled over Israeli street food or checked out the latest Co-op Garage pizzas (salmon with quail eggs, duck confit with rocket).
Russia’s imperial capital had something worldly about it, a noble seat at the edge of the continent, looking west across the Baltic to Europe. Peter the Great – the first tsar to venture beyond Russia’s borders – had created it in the early eighteenth century. He’d drained the swamps, raised sea walls and pressed 30,000 serfs, convicts and Swedish prisoners of war into digging hundreds of miles of canals. Italianate mansions came to line the River Neva. Baroque and neoclassical palaces rose around wide piazzas. Peter spoke French at court, banned boyars’ beards and imported locksmiths, shipwrights and even a Dutch vice-admiral.
In his determination to modernise the country, he also founded the Kunstkamera, the first public museum in Russia. He crammed its glass cabinets with curiosities: pickled Siamese twins with three arms, the skeleton and heart of the world’s tallest man, a unicorn horn (actually a narwhal tusk). In his hand he held a child’s shrunken head embalmed in Nantes brandy, distilled with pepper and spices. Peter wanted to rid his people of their belief in ‘diabolical spells through sorcery and the evil eye’, to debunk their superstitious dread of monsters, to show that even the world’s worst deformities were the Work of God. He wanted to banish fear. But he hadn’t reckoned on the mendacity of his successors.
Today St Petersburg is to Moscow as Edinburgh to Glasgow, San Francisco to LA, Bath to Bristol. Its light is soft, its shadows cool and its residents ever willing to ponder and debate. It is a place open to ideas, for whereas Moscow is all about money and power, St Petersburg is about beauty… money and power. Where better to despatch Sami to a new life?