The Rogov clan builds a haystack

April 21, 1995 In the front garden, there is a tree preparing to blossom, summoning all its forces of pale pink and white. There is a risk that a frost will come again, but for the past few days, it has been sunny and warm and full of spring bird song. I should be summoning my own forces for the next phase of work. Rogov rides by on his horse-drawn wagon, down to the now-broken ice to get water for the bath house, I suppose. Valentina Mikhailovna walks back and forth to the house of a little girl who died last night, bringing birch twigs and leaves "to make it soft for her in the coffin." We all had trouble sleeping last night. Alexei came in from the garden and announced that the girl had died, the uroditsa (deformed one). Alexei thought she was about 4 years old, but Ludmila told me this morning that she was older than 7. She was born with signs of deformity and never grew to be much bigger than a baby; she couldn't sit up, eat by herself, talk. She couldn't even say "mama." When Alexei announced her death last night he didn't show much emotion. He answered direct questions with neutrality: "This was not a person. She didn't die, she was born." I asked if people would cry for her and he said, "Why cry?" I asked him what he meant when he said that she had not died, she had been born, and he explained that you say that when someone who was living was causing pain and suffering to those around her. Ludmila came into the kitchen and her face fell. "Praise God," she said. She told me that she couldn+t sleep last night. "Anyway, it was a person," she said.

Residents of Anufrievo take a break from planting potatoes

May 3, 1995 Tamara kindly let me stay in her Belozersk apartment alone for a couple of days until I can catch some transportation back to Anufrievo; the roads are impassable again. I will enjoy the use of her bathtub. Maybe I'll move into it permanently. The other day, Kolya and Yura came by with vodka and I let them in but emphatically told them that they could just stay a short while and that I was tired of watching people drink.I had come to

Belozersk on a bus with a group of gravediggers who had gotten together to dig the grave of the latest man who had died in our village. The whole trip took five hours, and maybe the fact that they were gravediggers gave the whole thing a Shakespearean tragic-comic edge. I waited alone in the cold bus for them while they hacked away at the hard earth. Given the tradition that gravediggers are paid in vodka, by the time they finally lumbered onto the bus two hours later, they were all completely trashed. Black eyes, missing teeth, matted hair and all. The drinking only continued as the bus rolled along the frozen country roads... and I tried to make myself invisible. One man in particular wanted to share his ebullient state with me -- that same state that can so easily snap and darken into volatility. I managed to fend him off but found myself concocting bizarre escape plans just in case. It turned out that one of the men on the bus was a known rapist. He had paid off the family of his victim instead of going to jail (a practice considered more or less acceptable here). By the time I had arrived in Belozersk, my nerves were nearly shattered from the week behind me of death and drinking. So when Kolya and Yura wanted to drink more, I wasn't pleased. Kolya is a brilliant rock musician, and maybe his exceptional talent makes the tragedy of his heavy drinking more poignant for me. I suppose it shouldn't. There is something about this spring, even in its loveliest moments, that makes me feel the despair of the Russian young. July 20, 1995 Belozersk's statue of Lenin that has stood guard in the town square since forever was mysteriously covered in white cloth at the time of the city festival yesterday. He looked oddly like a mummy, and Zina and I sat around the table at dinner last night propounding theories about what the deal was. Was it finally Time? Why now? Zina wryly offered the hypothesis that "it's so that he doesn't disturb us" (after all, as the saying goes, "Lenin is with us"). Another dinner guest from Vologda went off on a tirade about how they dare to insult "the great figures of socialism," which only got more energetic when the real reason for the mummification came out: Lenin's head seems to have been lopped off in a Belozersk version of an act of defiance. "Vandalism is getting out of hand," said Alexei, trying to close the subject.

Villagers hop a ride on a truck back to Anufrievo