Around us the trees lay at wild angles like giant spillikins, the oldest pines having fallen, rotted and fed the saplings that sprouted on their remains. Vasya vanished between them with the guns as the group split into pairs. In the open glades the air was wild with heat, cut through by darting horseflies. Dimitri and I walked together between the shimmering streaks of brightness and patches of shade, buckets in hand, with heads down.
Every Russian child knows the names of a dozen forest mushrooms. Boys and girls are said to be able to follow the rich musty fragrance into the darkest glades, and to recognise the tastiest, rarest and most poisonous fungi.
I, on the other hand, couldn’t stop thinking about the guns.
‘Lisichki!’ Dmitri cried almost at once, spotting a cluster of yellow ‘little vixen’ chanterelle. ‘My favourite.’
As we wandered further away from the vehicles, the frowning trees closed in again to shut out the sky. No sound disturbed the vast silence, apart from distant voices calling out their discoveries. On rising ground amid young pines we found small, oily maslyata. At the foot of birch trees grew brown-capped podberyozovik and – in a nearby stand of aspen – its orange-capped cousin podosinovik. In a stretch of open grassland the woman tripped over a plate-size, sweet-tasting champignon de Paris – Russians use its French name – which is said to erupt from the earth with such force that it can break through asphalt.
In a damp copse of firs, I kicked over a rotted branch and found a batch of belly. I called out but Dmitri told me that belly – a kind of massive white porcini – becomes poisonous at the end of a humid summer.
‘No pipiska putina?’ I asked him.
‘Not here, for sure,’ he answered.
It was hot and sweaty work, raking through the mouldering leaves, stumbling over fallen trunks, my eyes peeled for either honey-coloured opyonok or an imagined assassin. As we picked through the undergrowth, I recalled a theory that fungi exist in subtle symbiosis with a forest, weaving themselves into the tips of roots, sharing sugar, nitrogen and – remarkably – transmitting warnings of approaching diseases or aphid attack. If the web of roots and filaments beneath my feet were a kind of sylvan defence system, I wished it would give me a sign. If I vanished in the forest, no one would ever know.
Dmitri sensed my vulnerability and said, ‘I like you. You are ambitious. So I make you offer.’
‘What offer?’
‘I want you to write book.’
‘I am writing a book.’
‘Important book,’ he emphasised, lifting his voice. ‘Like Nineteen Eighty-Four. You write new Nineteen Eighty-Four.’
Dmitri claimed to have a thing about literature, although I doubted he read much other than the Frankfurt edition of the Financial Times. He waxed lyrical about Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and the importance of words but I suspected his real interest was posterity. His posterity. Even though I had no intention of reworking Orwell for him, I couldn’t resist asking, ‘What’s your book about then?’
‘Your book is about Europe, and me. It is, how you say, allegory. You write it. You put your name on cover. You win big Pulitzer Prize.’
‘And you?’ I asked, hardly believing my ears. ‘Are you the star of this book?’
‘I talk, for sure,’ he said. ‘I talk so you can tell my story. You hear much blah blah blah but you make it best possible.’
I groped for words. I thought of Orwell’s fear of ‘the very concept of objective truth… fading out in the world’. At last I managed to say, ‘Dmitri Denisovich, with all due respect I don’t think…’
‘Do not refuse me,’ he interrupted, stabbing a finger at me in a flash of anger. ‘You are my guest. You will honour me.’
Over the next hour we walked in silence, describing a broad circle through the woods, arriving together in a sun-chequered clearing as if on cue. Dmitri inspected the others’ spoils with approval. In the buckets were five or six kilos of chunky ceps, yellow chanterelles and brightly capped birch boletes with grey-flecked stalks. A good haul for the time of year.
Then Vasya handed out the guns. He gave the last AK-47 to Dmitri. Of all the men I alone did not have one. Beads of sweat rolled down my back. I looked around for cover, judging which way to run. The forest was silent apart from the babble of a nearby stream. Pointlessly I checked that my passport was in my pocket.
‘Now for fun,’ said Dmitri.
He lifted the Kalashnikov, and passed it to me. Only now did I see the rope, strung between the treetops and suspending a dozen swollen bin bags high above our heads. The woman started to laugh with sudden, girlish excitement. The men snuffed out their cigarettes and jostled for position beneath the bags. On a signal from Dmitri, they started to shoot. The woods crackled with rapid gunfire and in an instant the bags exploded, showering the party with cool fresh water, which had been syphoned from the stream by Vasya. Terrified birds took flight from the surrounding trees. Wood splinters and broken branches tumbled onto the forest floor. The air stank of cordite and pine sap.
‘To God’s great Russia,’ shouted Dmitri above the laughter, in a kind of blessing, soaked to the skin like the rest of us, ‘May it never die.’
4
Russia, My Russia
Rublyovka is Moscow’s Henley or Hamptons, an exclusive colony of multi-million-dollar dachas, fifty-room French chateaux and red-brick manor houses overlooking landscaped English parks. Vladimir Putin and Roman Abramovich own turreted villas on the river. Olympic ice skater Tatiana Navka shares her mini-palace with Kremlin press spokesman Dmitry Peskov.[1] Property magnate Vladislav Doronin built a spaceship-shaped home for supermodel Naomi Campbell there. Guests set down on private helipads, leave their fur coats in climate-controlled closets, swim in Carrara marble infinity pools, then step into surround-sound pulsar showers with a toy boy or two. At the local Barvikha shopping mall they can also pick up a Ferrari.
After blasting the bin bags, we backtracked to Rublyovka, swinging into the high-end enclave through its double-barrier security gate.
‘Your dacha is here?’ I asked Dmitri again, picking another splinter out of my hair.
‘Was here,’ he replied.
Moscow has more billionaires than any other capital in the world. Most own estates in Rublyovka but all that I glimpsed of them was the odd mock-Elizabethan chimney pot. In the gated citadel every building, every road, every glass-and-barbed-wire security tower was boxed in by seven-metre-high steel barriers. Our convoy cruised along its narrow, treeless alleys as if between parallel Berlin Walls. We slowed at a blind corner so as not to collide with a speeding Bentley Mulsanne. No one was on the streets, apart from a squad of groundskeepers sweeping the road with birch twig brooms.
‘Better than old Khrushchyovka box, for sure,’ said Dmitri, thinking of the Khrushchev-era prefabs in which he – and most Russians – had been raised.
As I could see no buildings, I didn’t disagree. Instead I wondered if Dmitri’s country home – given his propensity for bling and bluster – would be an ersatz-Thai palace with gopping Gothic tower? Or perhaps a Beverley Hills knock-off topped with Disneyland water slide? I didn’t know, but I didn’t have to wait long to find out. Vasya pulled up to a concealed entrance, the steel gate swung open and we drove onto an empty lot.
1
Peskov, one of Vladimir Putin’s right-hand men, is alleged to have controlled the dossier of