It was a mid-July morning and I was wandering around Piskarovskoye Cemetery on the outskirts of St Petersburg in Russia, completing some research on a novel-in-progress. Already the experience had been wrenching. The cemetery is where the 600,000 dead from the Siege of Leningrad were buried in mass graves. The place inspired silence. Two mausoleum-like buildings formed an arc to the entrance. Inside were photographs of starving children, men digging mass graves, heroic women attempting to re-build the city, and a series of notes from a child cataloguing the death of her family. An eternal flame burned along a walkway which was lined with red roses. The mass graves (or "brothers graves") stretched in their dozens - mounds of earth a few feet high, carefully tended to by gardeners. Each contained a single plaque with only the year of the deaths - from 1941 to 1944 - set in bronze.
It seemed as if my Russian translator, Roman Gerasimov, and I were the only visitors to the graveyard and - beyond the wind through the trees - the silence tripled my emotions.
I had read a lot about the Siege in what the Russians call The Great Patriotic War and I had decided that, in my novel, one of my characters would be buried here in this same graveyard. Her name was Anna Vasilevna, inspired by a true-life character, Anna Udelstova. Udelstova had - in the early 1950s - been a teacher of Rudolph Nureyev's, who later became the 20th century's most celebrated dancer.
In the novel, I had manipulated and distorted Udelstova's life, but imbued the character with a dignity that I felt was appropriate. I was searching for an area of the graveyard where people would have been buried in 1959, the year of my fictional character's death.
Roman and I walked towards a copse of trees, east of the mass graves. I brushed through the long briars and bushes, past the elaborate gravestones, some of them still lovingly tended. Through the trees I spied an old woman bent over a gravestone, replacing flowers, and whispered to Roman that I would like to get a chance to chat with her. She seemed to be about 70 years old. She had short grey hair. She wore a beige skirt and an open-necked blue shirt with a tissue in the breast pocket.
"Good morning," I said through my translator.
"It's a fine day," she replied.
There was something about her that coralled me. She had a gentle, happy face, a stout girth, a playful stare. She was willing to talk. She had been born in Leningrad in 1931 and was evacuated to Moscow during the Siege when the Germans surrounded the city. Her father had been killed in 1942. Her mother, whose graveyard plot she was now tending, had stayed in the city and survived the war by eating flowers, rancid horsemeat, wallpaper glue.
"They were terrible years," said the old woman, "but it brought out the best in people. It was a miracle my mother survived. People aren't so good anymore, not like they were before. This country is falling apart."
"When did your mother pass on?" I asked.
"Nineteen fifty-nine," she replied.
I scribbled a phrase in my notebook: Curious coincidence - 1959 also.
"Please, ask me anything you like," the woman smiled.
She had lived a fascinating life - her youth spent wrapping hard-boiled sweets in a factory while she went to college at night. She became a cartographer and travelled the country on geological expeditions; then she married and settled down. Her husband had passed on, and now she lived in dire poverty on the state pension of $50 a month, over half of which went to rent alone.
It almost seemed as if she had the lived the life of the country itself - surviving the war, mapping the landscape, now living through the brutal poverty and disillusion since the fall of Communism. She was a Mother Russia of sorts.
And, in a strange moment, it struck me that this woman was physically close to the character I had described in my novel.
"What's you name?" I asked after I had thanked her for her generosity and time.
"Anna Vasilevna," she replied, her hands clasped behind her back.
I was the same name as the character I had invented. My knees began to buckle underneath me.
The job of a novelist is to be as honest as possible while creating a series of what could be essentially be termed elaborate lies. The novel I am currently undertaking - a false portrait of the dancer Rudolph Nureyev - has been my obsession for two years. I have vacillated and, on numerous occasions, contemplated throwing it in the bin.
As a final test, I had gone to Russia to research details to lay upon on a series of imaginative scenarios that had already been written. While Nureyev is the centrifugal force around which the novel spins, it is also a tale of 20th century lives - soldiers, exiles, housekeepers, celebrities, rent boys and dancers. In its conception, it takes place in a large international sphere including New York, London, Caracas, Paris and other locations, but much of it will also take place in the former Soviet Union.
It was my first trip to the country. It might sound strange that a writer would undertake to set certain scenes in a place he had never been, but it is, in fact, a thing writers do all the time - whether reaching for an emotion, or writing outside of gender, or stepping backwards in history. Novelists constantly strive for different levels of nar'rative consciousness. Poets are aware of the function of mystery. Playwrights create a setting for their marvellous fakes.
My trip to Russia was intended to expose, and hopefully patch, weaknesses of description and intent in the first third of my book. I had read hundreds of other books (often poetry) and studied numerous photographs, films, historical documents. But I was also stepping back 50 years to a time in Russian history which, God willing, will never be repeated again in any human sphere: the war, the purges under Stalin, the Brezhnev thaw, the Cold War.
How was it possible to penetrate that era and draw narrative blood from it?
My trip took place during the months of June and July. At first, I travelled to Ufa in the Bashkirian Republic, where Rudolph Nureyev was born. The city was larger and more modern than I had imagined. Glass skyscrapers attested to a new oil and gas boom, but the wealthy were still few and far between. Old wooden houses with ornately carved shutters lined the streets. The backroads were muddy and rutted. Babushkas in their headscarves sold sunflower seeds outside the railway station. Young boys wore torn Nike sneakers.
Few people in the city knew who Nureyev was. He had returned only once in his lifetime, in 1987, when Gorbachev had allowed him a 48-hour visa to visit his dying mother. In my imagination I tried to ghost myself back to the 1940s and 1950s when he had plied these streets. I found his old schools, his haunts; yet I was acutely aware of not being a biographer, interested more in the texture than in the literal facts of his life.
In Ufa, I stayed in Stalin-era housing, ate in dingy cafes, walked everywhere. The bridge over the Belaya River was different than I had imagined - as trains went across it, it gave out deep thuds and pings from the stressed steel, and it occurred to me that in 1944 (when freight cars were carrying the wounded across the Soviet Union) the bridge might have sounded as if it were mourning in advance.
In small villages outside the city I ate horsemeat. I got roaring drunk on vodka (the Russians told me, quite beautifully, that I was "receiving its message"). At the local banya, the steambaths, Muslim men "invigorated" my back by whipping it with with birch twigs. One of the locals had slaughtered one of his sheep and prepared a banquet in greeting. A television journalist, Radik Kudoyarov, drove me around the city, showing me facets I never could have found on my own, including backstreets, mosques, and old communal apartments.
Everywhere I went the people were astoundingly friendly, open, inquisitive. Elaborate tables were laid out by families who could hardly afford it. Neighbours were called in to take photographs.
I seldom felt so blessed. My conviction was strengthened. Yet the novel - and my decision whether to continue or not - was still in the balance.
St Petersburg, where I spent most of my time, is well-known as a jewel of a city, the "Venice of the North". The light is astounding. Olive-coloured canals flow through the city. The streets are wide. Domed church roofs sparkle. Fabulous houses line the rivers. The museums are magnificent. On white nights, canal boats ferry tourists underneath the lifted drawbridges and, under the pale midnight sky, the city seems replete with possibility. In winter, the streets are blanketed with snow. It's almost a strange Amsterdam, stretched out, ravaged and yet seductive.
And yet this was not the city I had come to see. I was more interested in its underbelly and so I spent much of my time, again, walking. Every city has its secretive places, of course. The courtyards I passed through smelled of piss and vomit. In the markets I was jostled. On the outskirts - in the "sleeping quarters" - the soulless tower blocks seemed to absorb the country's disintegration. A line from Gorky rattled in my head: "Life will never be so bad that the desire for something better will ever be extinguished in men".
The city - and Russia itself - was becoming, for me, a place where the present bumped up violently against the past.
I watched the crummy sex appeal of the whores on Nevsky Prospect where Anna Akhamatova had once strolled. The bridge that I'd seen in an Eisenstein film was now patrolled by young girls hawking Camel cigarettes. Not far down from the new Barbie store, all gaudy pink neon, a group of young men in National Bolshevik armbands extolled the virtues of Stalin and Hitler.
By the Church of Spilled Blood, an old man was being taught how to bless himself - he stood in the middle of the street and kept touching his heart as he made the sign of the cross and a woman laughed sweetly at his mistake. A Mercedes blared its horn at him. Jet skis roared along the Fontanka. The most striking sight outside the churches was of the babushkas in their headscarves begging for kopeks - in Soviet times religion had been an underground practice and beggars were never seen on the streets.
As for direct research, I had been finding it difficult to get permission to go backstage in the Maryinsky Theatre, where Nureyev had spent much of his young life with the Kirov. I had seen a couple of performances - their tremendous beauty and violence - but could not negotiate my way into the wings.
And then, one afternoon, I noticed an old woman crying by a busy thoroughfare. The traffic lights were out and none of the cars were stopping for her. She was distraught. I helped her across the road, cars screeching around us, and then carried her shopping bags home through a maze of backstreets. When I bid goodbye to her I was amazed to find myself standing near the Maryinsky theatre, outside an Irish bar, the Shamrock. I sat down for an afternoon drink and, just as I was finishing, a lone customer came in and sat beside me. I looked up. It was Ilya Kuznetsov, one of the stars of the Russian ballet whom I had seen dance (brilliantly) the night before. We chatted in broken, vaulting English.
Ilya happily agreed to take me across to the Kirov and had me stand on the empty stage, explaining to me the rake of the floor. He guided me around the theatre, the changing rooms, the sauna, the canteen. I watched his girlfriend, Ira, a beautiful young dancer, rehearse. Later that night - through my translator - we talked for hours in the Shamrock: about art, culture, the moment of dance.
Just as the place was closing, a dozen Russian mafia - it was easy to see the way the guns shaped their jackets - came into the pub and demanded to be served.
By 3 a.m., I, my translator, a Russian ballet star, his girlfriend, and a group of Russian mafia men were drinking vodka, while outside the still bluish sky of St Petersburg drifted towards morning.
The gods, I knew, were being kind to me.
Many Russians these days are nostalgic for the days of oppression. The older ones often recall the Stalinist era as a time of surety and solidity. The purges and the terror seemed like faint echoes.
On a visit to a military hospital in the Baskirian Republic, old veterans from the second World War sat in the courtyard, wearing Adidas sweatpants and sandals on their feet. They recalled a time when everyone had a job and a place to live, one of the tenets of the socialist regime. "Everyone knew their place," a man said. "Nobody stepped out of line."
Another man shifted on his one leg. "After all, we're still alive," he commented, his logic suggesting that the days of terror weren't terror for everyone and, therefore, had a validity.
One of the veterans, Nikolai Pushkin, who had been a sniper during the Siege of Stalingrad, brought chills to my skin when he explained that his father had been murdered under orders from Stalin. The body had never been found. He pulled on his cigarette and said, deadpan: "We need someone like Stalin again in this country."
"How can you possibly feel this way when he murdered your own father?"
Nikolai threw up his arms and said: "Too many drugs, too little respect, this is not America."
And yet America - or the West - seems to be embraced ubiquitously in the former Soviet Union. Corporations such as McDonald's, Sony, Samsung hang their bright advertisements over the market squares. The younger generation happily embraces the discos, the gay clubs, the leather waistcoats, the provocatively short skirts. Hollywood films pack the cinemas. There are agencies now that make money from tours of the infamous gulags.
It could be an initial dizzying flirtation, but it seems to suggest a crisis of conscience. In intellectual circles, writers find it hard to get published anymore. Quite a few poets who used to write regularly for the underground samizdats find that their work is no longer read. Galleries hang trendy art from abroad, with few Russian artists exhibited. In the past, there was a single system to buck against. Now, the vast majority of people seem to struggle. Some truckers wear bulletproof vests. Virtually every cop is on the take. The statues of Lenin, Mayakovsky and Stalin have been largely taken down, but the pedestals have been left bare.
While it could be a wonderful time to be an artist - a nation re-making itself is always fine material - the younger people seem more intent on anger. "Gorbachev ruined us." "Yeltsin drank a bottle and 250 million people got a headache." "Putin puts a rifle in our mouths and says take this, it's a hangover pill."
For all its beauty and wonder, Russia seems to me to be a country without a theory. Now that the political system has been shattered, people are wondering (whether consciously or not) what their national purpose is. Their leaders are mostly criminals. There is a general consensus of fatigue, saying that neither art nor culture can re-invent a national idea. The new national ideas are wrapped up in cynicism and money - the new Russians have either lots of money or no money at all. A dark and dispirate sadness hovers over many of the potholed streets.
As a novelist, I had to question myself severely. Was it just pure arrogance to believe that I could write about these people, their history? Was it a sort of Western cultural imperialism to believe that I could penetrate the past when the present made so little sense to the Russians themselves?
In the end we all need a moment of magic to form a scaffold to our hearts.
Mine came halfway through my Russian journey, in Piskarovskoye graveyard, when the woman who so graciously talked to me turned out to have the same name as a character I had plucked mostly from thin air.
Since that moment, I have often listened to her voice on my dictaphone to make sure she was real. And, when I finally returned to my home in New York, I plucked up the courage to develop my photographs of her.
I don't believe in ghosts. I never have. But I was scared that her image - amongst the gravestones - would somehow not appear on the prints. But it did. And I felt vindicated and returned to my writing desk. Weeks later, I find myself still missing Russia, wishing myself back there, walking along the Fontanka River, or listening to the trains thud through the great forests.
As for my novel, it didn't quite come to me as a single pillar of light, but I've decided to continue.
Dublin-born Colum McCann is author of two novels and two short story collections, most recently Everything in this Country Must (Phoenix House, 2000)