Lost and Found in Russia: Encounters in the Deep Heartland Read Online Free Page B

her. “You were quite right about that fellow,” she confided. “He’s bad news—seriously spooky. We were only just talking about him, before you came in. Can’t think what Benya’s doing keeping him around.”
    As I knew from my earlier travels, the transition from communism had brought to the surface all sorts of spiritual quackery. People were always talking about “energy fields,” “biorhythms,” dowsing, and long-distance healing. A hypnotist called Kashpirovsky became a popular idol because of his mass-healing séances on television.
    If this were a novel, the fleeting appearance of Benya’s extrasensor would serve as a warning of monsters ahead. But this is not fiction. Life’s little joke is that we are equipped for experiences only when they are over. The warning was one I would understand later on—too late to turn back.
    BENYA’S ARK
    After that I had a good time on the boat. Elsewhere in Russia my friends were living on bread, milk, and potatoes. Here every meal was a feast. Solemnly, we ate our way through cutlets, meat pies, trifles, soups, pastries, pancakes with sour cream and smoked fish, salads drenched in mayonnaise. As Benya’s guests we ate without ceremony, packing our bodies like suitcases before a long journey, preparing for a return to life in the wreckage of Russia’s empire.
    The star among my friends was the “Russian Edith Piaf,” whose concert had astounded the Dixieland trumpeter. With her long, dark hair and soulful eyes Elena Kamburova looked like one of those characters who gaze out from early Christian Coptic grave portraits, their eyes trained on eternity. The dying red roses in Olga’s suite were tributes from her concert the night before.
    Later on, back in Moscow, I would watch the reticence fall off like a cloak as she walked onstage. She seemed to live fully only in those moments of performance. For the time being, I watched her sing on the screen of a faulty video recording taken the night before. Though the image was distorted, the velvet-dark sound was undamaged. She was indeed the apotheosis of Russia’s great tradition of singer-poets.
    As we sat out on deck, Kamburova was sewing a present for Benya. It was a bearded cloth doll with multicolored clothes and pockets for his pens and pencils. “How else can I thank him?” she murmured. “Anything that money can buy he can get himself.” My new friends were devoted to Benya. It was all very puzzling. The cream of Russia’s creative intelligentsia, they were unlikely to accept hospitality from a mafia boss. But how to ask about Benya without making my misgivings rudely obvious? Was he a Party boss who had walked off with the funds? When all business dealings were illegal, the Party controlled the biggest scams. The richest oligarchs to emerge from the confusion of those years would turn out to have come from that background.
    Finally, angling for information, I asked Olga about the thugs who were lunching at the captain’s table. She burst out laughing: “Of course! You must’ve thought you’d landed in some mafia stronghold! Well, rest assured—Benya’s not like that.” Not long ago, those two young hoods had attacked him when he was carrying a huge sum of money, she explained. “Being Benya, he invited them to join him! We tried to dissuade him, but he reckoned that since he wouldn’t be able to shake them off, he’d try to convert them—that’s Benya all over. So far, it’s worked. He certainly needs protection. Times are changing, it’s becoming dangerous—at least they keep the others off.”
    Benya grew up in a mountain resort in southern Russia. Theater was his great love. The dean of a Leningrad arts college, on holiday in a resort, spotted him in some production and encouraged him to apply for a theater course at his college. All would have been well if Benya had not decided to redecorate his student room in Leningrad. Halfway through the job, he dragged a refuse bin in from the