• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

2

We have been in Russia for six weeks but our bell never rings. We live like rats in an Empire-style mansion block at the eastern end of St Petersburg's Nevsky Prospekt. The building's cast-iron front door is fastened with a combination lock: 279. Its tumblers grind like teeth and the door opens on to a gloomy stairwell. The hall light bulbs have been stolen but we can feel with our feet a sticky patch on the granite porch slab. A struck match reveals spots of blood carelessly left by the man on the fourth floor, a shipyard foreman who lost his job earlier this year and now comes out only at night to club stray animals on the landing.

Every day we climb three darkened flights of limestone stairs, reaching a steel shutter, which is the first door to our apartment. Behind it is another padded, wooden inner door. The gap between the two is just large enough for someone to be immured. There is nothing physically restraining us but we feel trapped in our flat around the corner from where the drunks fighting outside Hotel Oktobrsakaya are so blinded by vodka they can hardly see the old sign above them: Leningrad Hero City.

Occasionally the telephone rings. The socket is at the far end of the hall and we sprint to it, only for the caller to hang up. Outside in the city the libraries are closed. It is the end of January 2002 and the temperatures of minus 35°C have ruptured the pipes. No one seems to know what happened to Anatoly Kuchumov's private papers or (if there are any) the files on the Amber Room. The state, central, history, party and literature archives deny possessing anything connected to either and anyhow will not let us into the building until our applications have been cleared in an opaque process that has no real beginning and possibly no end. The city's chief archivists are said to be at their dachas beside Lake Ladoga, to the east, where housekeepers cheerfully tell us, 'No one's home.' And the director of the Catherine Palace has been trying to find a slot for us in his appointment diary for more than a month. So we sit and wait, trying to suppress the feeling that we are trapped like herrings in a Russian barrel, going over our notes from Kedrinsky, deciding on a strategy to break the deadlock, reading and rereading the history of Leningrad, hoping that we will not wake up on one of these cold mornings to find ourselves accused of a crime we did not commit.

There are at least nine Sovetskayas in an urban grid and we are renting in the seventh. Private ambulances touting for business in the new frantic free-for-all lurk on our street corner. Dozens of downpipes from the guttering high above randomly disgorge tubes of ice, the frozen projectiles hurtling towards the legs of unsuspecting pedestrians with such velocity that they can shatter bones. The road is buckled after decades of freeze and thaw and quickly becomes bogged down in a slick of brown snow, the detritus left by incontinent pit bull terriers dressed by their owners in canine combat jackets. And every afternoon on Sovetskaya 7, even when the cold becomes acidic, small boys scrub the salt off the new Mercedes parked along the kerb, polishing cars bought with murky wealth until their raw faces shine in the bodywork.

St Petersburg's residents have a favourite saying: 'Everything is forbidden but all things are possible.' It is an epigram loved by the flat-headed goons who waggle their guns outside the Golden Dolls erotic cabaret. And by the women with all-year-round Black Sea suntans who gorge on the new Japanese buffet at the exorbitant Tinkoff restaurant (a chopstick held in each hand with which to impale the sushi). For the people of Alexei Tolstoy's damned city, the motto describes a Russian confidence trick, the illusion of a transfer of power where one terrifying elite bows out to reformers who prove to be equally vindictive and greedy, people who will do anything for you only if you can name their price.

We call a friend of a friend, a retired professor from what was Leningrad University. She is said to be something