In any case it was my turn not to care. The truffle was also having its effect on me. I slipped back inside the lobster-red tent. Light and shadow played across its polyester walls. I settled into an armchair. I closed my eyes and, as the rain beat out its rhythm, I fell into a trance.
5
Terrible Beauty
Beat of drums, crack of guns; the killing machines were on the move. On the outskirts of Moscow a dozen hulking T-90 battle tanks shook the earth, rent the air and caused a child to drop her banana ice-cream cone. A rank of spanking new T-14 Armatas, the world’s most deadly tracked combat vehicle, pushed into the column. Their 125 mm smoothbore cannon can fire a dozen Vacuum-1 rounds per minute, every one capable of penetrating one-metre-thick steel at a distance of two miles. Atop each turret stood a Russian tankman: proud, defiant and gazing ahead to victory, as well as at the unmarked pedestrian crossing. Spectators darted between the raucous machines, videoing them through the billows of diesel exhaust. Ground Forces soldiers in full battle kit jogged alongside them, and around a young mother jerking a pram through the track ruts.
I was spellbound, bewitched, deafened and blasted, especially when Anna, the raven-haired hostess, leaned forward in her seat and said, ‘Beautiful, yes?’
Msta-S howitzers and mobile rocket launchers followed the tanks onto the open plain, among them a vicious Buk-M2 surface-to-air missile system that could – according to my programme – ‘perform multiple missions with greater mobility and simultaneously engage a maximum of 24 targets’. In 2014 a similar Buk, with five-metre-long SA-11 guided missile, had brought down Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, killing all 298 passengers and crew.
‘Beautiful in their duty,’ she repeated as armour and infantry assembled in front of the grandstands.
I’d awoken with the morning half gone. The sun had shone into Dmitri’s gazebo and my eyes, as well as onto the flies that had hatched overnight in the dampened earth. I’d shifted in the armchair and they had risen in an iridescent cloud, turquoise heads and thoraxes tracing mad patterns around my head.
I couldn’t yet explain pipiska putina’s power. I knew that Siberian shamans had long used the fly agaric Amanita muscaria to reach a trance state. In Chin Dynasty China, herbalists recorded that the psilocybin mushroom ‘makes one laugh unceasingly’. Plato was said to have drunk its tea at the ancient Greek rites of Eleusis and similar fungi had roused Viking warriors to battle. But to my knowledge nothing had been written about truffles inducing delusions of invincibility, except in Russia.
In dreamy half-sleep, I wondered if Ascomycete fungus had inspired Lenin to pep up the hallucinatory power of the communist project? Perhaps it had fed Stalin’s mighty and murderous delusions? Could it even have led Tsar Alexander II to declare that scientific fact had never limited Russian certainties or faith? ‘All countries abide by the law but Russia abides by sayings and proverbs,’ he’d once said.
All I knew for sure was that a writer promises to tell a reader what he or she believes to be true. But what to do when one’s senses are all aflutter? How to square actual events with skewed memories of them? And isn’t every account of the past – whether or not animated by pipiska putina – eventually revealed to be a story, written as all histories, of and for their time? The truffle’s effect on me was at once invigorating and strangely subtle: clammy palms, racing heart, dilated pupils. I felt energised and level-headed at the same time. Certainly I was no cool and objective reporter, although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it had made me unreliable. In any case, I reasoned, truth has always been much stranger than fiction in Russia.
At some point in the night I’d woken to see Dmitri sprawled across the sofa like some Gogol caricature, deep in ‘that marvellous slumber which is known only to those fortunate beings who are bothered neither by haemorrhoids, nor fleas, nor overdeveloped mental faculties’. He had departed early, hell-bent on some secretive mission, leaving behind a Range Rover, a driver and Anna. She’d brought me a cup of black tea, explaining that she had been instructed to take me to the Patriot Park Army Show.
‘He said that we may do as you wish,’ she added in a soft monotone voice.
Patriot Park was Russia’s military Disneyland, a grandiose estate of glitzy exhibition halls and plush conference venues surrounding a mass of nasty military hardware. Hundreds of ultramodern tanks, futuristic mine-clearing robots and innovative Arctic hovercraft loomed over a vast courtyard the size of two football pitches. Around it salesmen from Arsenal Arms, Kalashnikov Industries and UVZ Uralvagonzavod demonstrated armed drones and Balkan grenade launchers. Children clambered over artillery pieces and Terminator fire-support combat vehicles. Grandparents struck poses at the controls of huge S-400 Triumph anti-aircraft missile launchers. On a Ural Typhoon’s dusty windscreen, a patriotic visitor had written ‘Russia’, irony not being a local virtue.
As well as a place for ‘family fun’, Patriot Park was Russia’s foreign arms sales bazaar. When Vladimir Putin opened the 13,500-acre park, he’d called it ‘an important element in our system of military-patriotic work with young people’. He’d also used the occasion to announce the addition of forty advanced ballistic missiles to the nuclear arsenal.
Anna and I had pushed through the crowds at the Berlin Reichstag replica, built for Yunarmia cadets to practise their assault techniques, and skirted the Innovative Weapons Technology tent to reach the vast Alabino range. The previous day’s rain had taken the sting out of the heat and both grandstands were packed with excited merry-makers: decorated veterans in waterproof shells, toddlers holding red and blue balloons, teenage girls wearing short summer dresses and souvenir army caps set at jaunty angles. Anna wore a silk shirt, black skirt and no make-up, except on her toenails which were painted pink. As we searched for our seats, she’d talked about herself, about life in Moscow and about the country itself.
‘Russia must educate its children,’ she said, nodding towards an animated school group sharing buckets of Robopop popcorn. ‘Or America will do it for us, as they tried in Ukraine. We must defend ourselves against US aggression and other terrorists.’
‘Terrorists?’ I asked.
‘Like those who killed my father.’
Martial music and black exhaust then cut across our conversation, spewing ‘The March of Soviet Tankmen’ into the air, filling it with boasts of courageous men and invincible armour. A column of fighting vehicles thundered past the grandstands at full speed, a T-80 turned on a rouble and a BTR-80 armoured personnel carrier released a squad of infantrymen. Next a T-90 forded the adjoining lake, with only its snorkel and cannon breaking the surface. Two TOS-1 heavy flamethrowers followed, blazing an arc of fire across our field of vision. When a Smerch multiple rocket launcher took aim at a distant target, and it erupted with an ear-splitting roar, I realised it wasn’t only my senses that were explosive. Live ammunition was fired at the annual show.
‘Thundering with fire, glinting with steel…’ enthused another patriotic song as a phalanx of Mi-35 Hind helicopter gunships appeared above our heads and paratroopers sailed down to the ground, forming up to advance swiftly on an imagined enemy.
On the field, television cameramen darted between the machines, moved in for close-ups, then set up for the ‘tank ballet’ where Bolshoi dancers pirouetted around a ring of T-80s. Their video feed was projected onto both huge screens around the park and the network.
Overhead the Swifts and Falcons aerobatic teams – flying MiG-29s and Sukhoi Su-30 fighter bombers – laid red, white and blue smoke trails across the sky, their loops, barrel rolls and fly-pasts accompanied by heavy rock music.