Abaddon - Chapter 2

Penny Simpson’s notes, May 11, 2010

Morning. Hotel room was cold. Modern 'duvet' technology has not yet penetrated this far east. Bed was made up with a gazillion blankets, each as thin as tissue paper and each wound round the mattress so tight I could scarcely breathe when I first got in.

Breakfast a thing they called ‘compôte’, and I called ‘a bunch of very old pears swimming in some very horrid syrup’. There were also boiled sweets, a bit like Pez or Lovehearts. There was something described as coffee. The boiled sweets, being virtually raw sugar, weren’t bad. I found they dissolved in ‘coffee’. Maybe they were supposed to.

Went for an early morning stroll around the metropolis. Doesn’t smell quite so bad in the early morning when nobody’s been for a shit yet. Eveywhere government restoration teams are prising up poor-quality Soviet tarmac to reveal gorgeous mediaeval cobblestones beneath. Govt. seems acutely conscious of the fact that tourism is the only reliable way to draw investment into Na.

(In the cold, the sewers actually steam. You can tell which buildings people have taken a dump in. Maybe getting obsessive on this point.)

Walked into Victory Square (Gzel Lziofang), enormous impressive poor quality Soviet tarmac thing with triumphal statues holding aloft hammers and sickles and submachineguns. Statues covered in anticommunist graffiti. At least one of the statues has a gigantic aluminium phallus, welded on to it by freshman art students, according to the Guide. Victory Square created to commemorate glorious Soviet victory against evil Nazi legions. The Guide goes on to admit the evil Nazi legions included at least one Leibstandarte Dacia, a sort of Vzeng Na Freikorps recruited from local fascist sympathizers. Victory Square a monument to the heroic struggle of the workers against capitalist etc., etc., and was created by bulldozing an acre of tenement housing.

At one end of Victory Square, the Bey’s Wall crumbles - most likely someone in the seventeenth century scored a direct hit with a cannon - and the Beglerbeg’s Wall is visible behind it. On the other side of that wall, signs warn in several languages, is ‘a drop’. Not ‘a ten foot drop’; not ‘a thirty foot drop’. Not ‘a thousand’. Possibly the greatest understatement I have ever seen on public signage. It’s at this end that the Americans from the University of Prague, Michigan are setting up their equipment. Their equipment is big and impressive. It has UNIVERSITY OF PRAGUE, MICHIGAN printed all over it.

Ran into one of the Americans. He’s a big black man called Wilson. He says Wilson is a common name back where his people from. I ask him where his people come from. He grins and says “Africa”.

He explains that the machine is really little more than a giant crane. “The hole’s been dug already”, he says, “we just need brave men to fill it.” He slams his fist to his chest to indicate he’s a brave man. Either that or a Klingon warrior.

I ask Wilson if he’s going to be filling the hole himself - he says “not unless the A team gets sick”. He points out the A Team, a white man working on what looks like it’s going to end up at the end of the Americans’ crane. It looks like a cross between a cable car and a wrecking ball, and I say this to the A team. The A team isn’t nearly so friendly. He’s far too interested in doing important boy stuff to talk to a girl. He seems to be checking the cable connection to the wrecking ball. Fair enough. if I was going down in the wrecking ball, I’d check the cable too.

I ask the A team what he’s going to wreck with his wrecking ball. I don’t even get a smile then. He just grunts 'If I’m Unlucky, Myself', and carries on with his checking. I shrug and stand back and take photos. The whole thing looks more like a naval cable-layer than a crane - after all, it is supposed to dangle things down, not lift them up. All the lifting it has to do is the two yards over the Beglerbeg’s Wall. After that, it’s downhill all the way. I notice that the wrecking ball looks to be made mostly of carbon fibre. I ask Wilson if it was expensive. He says it was paid for by a Japanese corporation, Komatsu. He says Komatsu make cranes. Their publicity department will be along later to get their pound of flesh taking pictures, apparently.

Ask Wilson if his giant crane has a name. He scratches his head, and says its name depends on whether you're asking the official Komatsu supercrane concept development team, or the team who are actually going to be using it. The official marketing name of the K2005 supercrane is, he says, "Vortox", because Vortox sounds impressive and means nothing in any language. I ask him what the team who are using the crane call it. "Mr. Lifty", he replies.

I ask him where Prague is in Michigan, and mispronounce ‘Prague’. Apparently you say it ‘Praig’. It rhymes with the name of Wilson’s unfriendly colleague, which is apparently Craig.

Say goodbye to Wilson, but am forced to promise him a candlelit dinner for two with caviar and champagne before he’ll give me my hand back. Ho hum. Wilson claims to be African stallion but his belly like an old cart horse.

I get to the Museum of the Pit an hour early, wanting to poke around on my own before getting steered around by Ivan. He looks like a steerer. The Museum is entered via the arch in the Beglerbeg’s Wall, and is, even today, the only way for ordinary members of the public to get through to see the sights. The Beglerbeg probably put the wall up himself for that express purpose, and charged admission. Even in 1500, Early Renaissance peasants would have paid to stand and boggle. The Beglerbeg wasn’t daft.

The Museum of the Pit was bombed by both the Russians and the Germans in WW2, and half of it’s been rebuilt all postmodern. It looks horrid, like a handsome face with some really bad corrective burn surgery. The old half of it was once a public bath, perched right there on the edge where all the stinky water could easily be gotten rid of. Supposedly, it’s also built on the site of a genuine old Roman balnea. “In a building on this spot” (says the all-knowing Let’s Go Guide) “Heliogabalus himself might have stewed in his own juices whilst gazing out into a majestic mile of nothingness”.

At a loss to imagine how a mile of nothingness can look majestic, but walked in and paid the entrance fee to a minge-faced old babushkye. The rooms inside are yellow with years of fag smoke, and there are star shapes in the smoke where old Communist insignia have been removed. In the anteroom, there are models of what stood on this site in 200 BC, 200 AD, 1200, 1500, 1700, 1945, and 1962, all crafted with elaborate care and as much love as went into the saints’ faces on the cathedral. There are no English translations on the cases - unthinkable! - and I’m forced to fall back on an English guidebook which is an entertainment in itself, as it appears to have been translated from Maem Na or Russian into Mongol, Swahili and finally English using some sort of online crapulence engine. In the 200 Before Jesus, we are told, there was already being one church to Hades on this locality, and a Soothsayer like the Soothsayer on Delphi. Apparently peoples very important like kings and tsars swarmed to the Soothsayer to learn the future. In 200 AD, the Romanesque Empire conquered the neighbourhood, and builded a Romanesque church. Then followed the Dark Periods and the Barbaric Invasions, and the churches were destroyed. When Christianism came to the Barbaric peoples, they builded more churches, but this time to Jesus. Momentaneously, the Turkic peoples attacked and made this land a colony, but they got defeated by Christianists in the 15th Century, and the Austrian-Hungarians ruled this country then until the 20th Century, when the Big War freeed the peoples of Na. (I particularly liked the ‘freeed’). Unluckily (said the guide), after the Republic of Vzeng Na had been freeed, it then had the misfortune to be liberated by the Nazis and emancipated by the Russians.

The 1945 diorama of the Museum shows much the same drab grey streets I’ve already been out in, Nazi banners hanging from some of the buildings being torn down by victorious Soviet soldiers triumphantly raising the hammer-and-sickle on top of the catholic campanile. Defeated Nazis, still fighting a desperate rearguard, are exiting to stage left behind a huge tank half the size of the Museum building itself. Asked an old buffer standing by the door in a commissionaire’s outfit whether the tank was out of scale, and he said no, the Germans had had very big tanks, he had seen them as a child. One of the very big ones, he said, was still rusting in a square very near where it appeared on the diorama. It had weighed over 200 tonnes, and been called a ‘Mouse’. He finds this outrageously funny and laughs like he has a punctured lung. “I have a punctured lung”, he explains proudly, “although I am seventy-five.”

The 1965 exhibit, meanwhile, shows an enormous structure, pillarbox-red all over, occupying exactly the same place in Victory Square as the American crane is now. The structure is a crane, arching out over the drop, and unlike any normal crane, spans it totally; a gantry crane, I think it would be called. A rather pretty-looking old building on the other side of the drop from the square has been blown up to make room for one of the crane’s feet. It has three feet - a third foot is blocking the entrance to a street one hundred and twenty degrees around from the second. The impression is of a great red spider sitting brooding over the city. Or squatting over a potty.

“They tried to go down”, says the old man in weirdly accented Russian, “to the Discontinuity.”

“The Mohovoric Discontinuity”, I nodded.

“Exactly that discontinuity, yes.”

“What did they think they would find there?”

“What did the Americans think they would find”, said the old man, “when they went to the Moon?” He makes a sign on his chest. Not sure whether it is a cross or not. “A bad thing, a bad thing, to go down there.” He points at the Soviet stars on the model machine. “After they went down there, their empire fell. Heliogabalus”, he says, indicating the Roman exhibit, “his empire fell. Alexander”, he says, jabbing a finger at the Greek exhibit, “his empire fell.”

“Alexander’s empire”, says I, “was founded after he came here. The Soviet empire fell twenty years after they came here. And Heliogabalus’s empire fell two hundred years after he came here. Surely the lesson here is that empires fall.”

“Their empire fell”, warns the old man, still wagging his finger in my face.

“It’s a beautiful display”, I say. “It must have taken many people a very long time.”

“I built it”, says the old man, swelling so much with pride I think he’ll bust his buttons. “I built it all, myself.”

I was amazed. (Am not easily amazed). “How long did it take?”

He shrugged. “I am a very old man”, he said.

The old man’s name, as far as I can make it out, is Gviong - native Vaemna, short build, axeblade face, eyes like knifewounds in pork fat, the works. Says his family gave themselves all German names during the Great Patriotic War - his German name was Georg - but as soon as the wars were over, they went back to the names they were baptised with. (As if any self-respecting Gestapo officer wouldn’t have known a Vaemna at a hundred yards). The Vaemna were put into slave labour in the war, on the Germans’ pet projects. If the war hadn’t ended when it had, they’d probably have been exterminated along with the Jews and gypsies.

He shows me his arms proudly; no tattoos. He’s inviting me to be impressed by this. “I finished the war as a water carrier for the Leibstandarte”, he says. “I was too clever to go into the camps.” This says just about all you need to know about the Vaemna. They are survivors, not moralists. Surrounded by Germany, Hungary, Russia, Greece, Rome, Poland, the Cossacks, the Mongols and the Ottomans, after two and a half thousand years of recorded pig-in-the-middle, they are still alive.

“One year later”, he grins, “I was running errands for Zhukov.”

Beyond the anteroom, the Museum is full of glass cabinets containing stuff that has been excavated. Some of these are the actual stuff, some replicas, as the Soviets and Nazis took most of the originals, and they are only now beginning to be tracked down. Circa 50% of the exhibits are votive tablets (most broken). Chucked into the deep over the millennia, they are chipped into expensive marble in Classical Latin, scratched into half-baked clay in dog-Latin, glazed into Samian terra cotta in aristocratic Greek. The very oldest are scratched into aurochs scapulae in scripts philologists are still trying to decipher. Some of the earliest look like they should be in our own alphabet, but this is deceptive, as they’re some of the first surviving examples of the Phoenician character set. People have been writing prayers to their gods, things they wuld like to happen, letters to Santa or Satan, and lobbing them down into the dark here since before the time of Jesus. Archaeologists have only been hauling them back up, by comparison, since the time of Schliemann.

The newer tablets in the collection are made of porcelain, tourist trinkets from the nineteenth century, saying things like ‘God bless this house and all the little children’ in Romanian. The really modern ones are plastic or titanium, designed to survive the journey all the way down to, uh, whatever is at the bottom. Some of the titanium exhibits are written in Japanese, Hindi or Arabic.

Besides the tablets, there are more valuable items of swag. Scythian gold tinkets from a thousand years before the birth of Christ, sesterces, denarii, drachmas, minissimi, Byzantine necklaces made of amber that found its way to Byzantium on Viking boats picking their way cautiously down the Dnieper. The occasional Turkish dinar. A thing the plaque on its cabinet says is a paiza, a word that doesn’t exist in my Russian dictionary. For the record, a paiza looks like a big wooden coin and was apparently “only entrusted to the most loyal messsengers of the Tartar Khans” for some doubtless very good Tartar Khan reason. Soviet Patriotic War medals. An Iron Cross on which someone has scratched the words ‘Es sterbe Adolf Hitler’. A Rolex watch. A stone age Venus figurine with buttocks even more ample than my own. A Persian cylinder seal.

Persians? I do a double-take on this one. We are, after all, a long way from Persia. But in the days of Xenophon, Demosthenes and Alexander, the Persian Empire stretched to the Hellespont and, from time to time, beyond; and the fact that an entrance to Hell existed in a cold land beyond their borders interested the Great King enough, it seems, to merit a substantial Achaemenid presence here.

As for the replica exhibits, a highly imaginative and doubtless totally fanciful set of shelves details every single pagan idol that existed in the kingdom of the Danubian Ostrogoths, idols “sent down to join the Devil in the dark” when the Ostrogoth king converted. “The largest of these”, the plaque on the Pagan Idols cabinet proclaims, “was over two men high, sat on three legs, and possessed two heads which looked both back to the past and forward to the future, and a fire that burned eternally in its belly.” A likeness of the Ostrogoth idol has been produced for the museum by what looks like Vzeng Na Mixed Infants, who have tried to depict its barbarous splendour in bacofoil and papier maché. Looked like large-headed pig with big willy. (Willy, on closer examination, was third leg.) “This dreadful graven image”, said the cabinet plaque grandly, “has never been recovered.”

In the 1500’s, meanwhile, when the Turks took the town, all the golden crucifixes in its churches were melted down and cast into verses from the Quran in a faience lattice, which were then thrown into the pit “to send the word of God even down to Eblis”. When the Christians recovered the city a century later, the newly-appointed Bishop fired consecrated silver arrows down into the deep to wound the Devil, who the Christians of the town were convinced had been coaxed closer to the surface by Islamic evangelism.

But one thing the Christians, Moslems and Zoroastrians all seem to have been convinced of is this - the Devil is down there, somewhere. The Big D’s face jokingly rendered in the bathhouse murals all round the Museum walls - a grinning Satan, an imperious Eblis, a dark and terrible Hades carrying off a not entirely unhappy-looking Proserpina. The whole room recognizably a bathhouse - marble shelves round the walls used to be seats, a large depression in the floor where most of the larger cabinets stand is decorated with a delapidated mosaic of mermaids and tritons and obviously used to be the bath itself. (The mosaic is bomb-damaged at one end & has been repaired with what I found when I prised one loose with my toe to be little cubes of plastic not even the same colour as the original ceramic).

And at the other end of the room is the Picture Window.

The Window stretches from floor to ceiling, and from wall to wall. Its lintel is spanned by an RSJ thick enough to hold up a viaduct, just so bathers and museumgoers alike can have an uninterrupted oggle at what lies beyond.

The bathhouse walls must project over the edge. View goes straight, straight down. How far? Nobody knows. Radar does not return from down there. They say this could be because of scatter from the walls, or radar-absorbent muck (or magma!) at pit bottom. But the locals all know better. They know it goes down forever. Things dropped down it make no sound. Explosive shells fired down it do explode, but at wildly differing depths, implying that they are detonating on the abyss walls rather than on its bottom. Certainly the vent twists and turns as it descends, and spelunkers have so far explored only the first mile. The walls are difficult to climb, overhanging and slimy with bat guano. Aid climbing is necessary, and you have to make your own holes to put protection in; there are hardly any cracks in which to shove a nut or piton. The rock is metamorphic, volcanic rock that was tough to start with and has since been squeezed and fused in the Earth’s guts until it is hard as iron, smooth as glass.

There have been scientific attempts to explain the pit. Thales of Miletus, an Ancient Greek flat earth philosopher, believed it had originally been one of the entrances by which the sun rose each day from the underworld, and that it had simply dried up like an old channel of the river Euphrates when the Sun changed its course and began rising in the East. Nazi scientists believed it to be a possible entrance to the alien kingdoms they knew existed inside the hollow Earth (or, since their leaders cherished an idea that the Earth was hollow but that we were living on the inside, outside it). Soviet and German scientists alike theorized that, if not to the actual inside of the Earth, it might reach at least to the Mohovoric Discontinuity, the boundary layer between the Earth’s crust and its mantle. US scientists wasted millions trying to bore a hole down to the Discontinuity in the States in the 60’s. Here it seems Soviet scientists hoped they might be lucky enough to have found a ready-bored hole in their own back yard. Ufologists believe, in fact, that the pit is an abandoned alien Mohole project built by aliens for whatever purposes aliens build Mohole projects.

Christian ‘scientists’ all around the world still believe, of course, that this is the hole made by Satan when he fell through the Earth from Heaven into Hell.

Certainly, it looks like you’d be motoring some before you hit pit bottom. Birds’ nests and bat colonies streak the walls with guano as far down as the eye can see, and undoubtedly further. Green grass tufts and the occasional tree cling to rocky prominences nearer to the sunlight. As you look further down, the grass grows yellow and eventually peters out altogether, replaced by deep-reaching tree roots, dead white ivy and and shelf fungus feeding off the walls. Some of the streaks round the rim, as most of the city’s sewage and waste water still drains into this one sink, must be human guano. It doesn’t smell from this side of the window, but am not sure it doesn’t stink beyond it, whatever Ivan says.

The official geologist’s term for the rock is abyssite. It is described by my Guide as a ‘schist rich in cryptocrystalline quartz’, which tells me little apart from the fact that I like the sound of the phrase ‘cryptocrystalline quartz’. Although identifiably a schist, it appears nowhere else on Earth in this precise chemical composition; hence it has its own name. One single slender column of abyssite strikes up from somewhere far beneath like a Stone Age spearhead. On top of this uncertain foundation, someone, many years ago, has chosen to build a church; how, I’m not sure. We’re talking about mediaeval engineering here, after all. The church is dedicated, controversially, to Abaddon, the creature mentioned in Revelation as the Angel of the Bottomless Pit. Detractors of the church point to the fact that only four angels, Raphael, Michael, Gabriel and Uriel, are officially mentioned in the O.T., and that this angel from Revelation might be a fallen one resident in Hell.

Then: “Don’t look into the abyss”, comes a voice from behind me, “or the abyss will look back into you.”

“You didn’t make that up”, I laugh. “That was Nietzsche.”

“Everyone in this city knows that quote”, says Ivan. “They say Nietzsche was holidaying in Na when he came up with it.” He is in uniform, and what a lot of silver buttons his uniform has on it too. Makes you just want to unbutton them all. He’s wearing a military-style beret - not on his head, but clipped to his shoulder epaulette. The cap badge is stylized enough to look like a heraldic bird, but I realize it isn’t. The wings are more like the wings of an insect, there are four legs, and the head of the creature looks human. He notices I’m looking at it.

“And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men”, explains Ivan.

“And they had a king over them, which is the angel of the bottomless pit”, I say back.

He taps the cap badge. “This has been the symbol of our city for over a thousand years”, he says. “Possibly even longer. Maybe over two thousand.”

I find this hard to believe. “Ivan, the Book of Revelation was written around 100 AD.”

He frowns. “Yes, and that’s the funny thing, you see. This shape, this image, appears on commemorative medals and votive tablets struck here well before the birth of Plato.” Then he grins. “Maybe it wasn’t our artists who took their inspiration from John, eh? Maybe John just wrote down a description of the devil based on the testimony of one of our own people who had seen him.”

“The Angel of the Bottomless Pit isn’t the Devil, Ivan.”

Ivan shrugs. “Lucifer was an angel, once.”

He steered me round the museum as expected. Gviong, the old commissionaire, winked at me as he did so. It transpires the paternal side of Ivan’s family are Russian, not Vaemna, as I might have guessed from the name. His mother’s family, meanwhile, are ethnic Poles, as are many of the shopkeepers and petit bourgeoisie of Na. “The Vaemna don’t breed with outsiders”, he says, and he’s looking at Gviong as he says it. I get the feeling this may be a sore point. Maybe Ivan has attempted to breed with a Vaemna in the past.

For Ivan, whose father was a KGB officer, the story behind the cabinets is different. The Russian troops in the dioramas are defending the motherland against Nazi aggression. When the Soviet era ended, he says, Russia withdrew voluntarily from Vzeng Na, if only because it would have been stupid for one tiny ASSR to remain a Russian island on the other side of Belarus. Russia’s efforts to unlock the earth’s Mohovoric secrets had brought prosperity and employment to the area in the 1960’s, as had the many Russian Army and Air Force bases. “But it is good now”, he says, “that the Russians are no longer here, I think. We must be free to make our own destiny.”

“Does ‘we’ include the Vaemna?” I say, and he replies that over fifty percent of Vzeng Na’s population are now ethnic slavs - Poles, Russians, Byelorussians, Kashubians, Ukrainians, and so forth - which strictly is not an answer, but which, in another equally important sense, is. The Pan-Slavist Party has been in power in Vzeng Na since 1996, apparently. So it seems the Vaemna are, even now they have their independence, not in charge of their destiny.

Then Ivan steers me politely to the mysterious-looking cage at one corner of the room, which looks as if it might contain a dangerous animal. This is a new addition to the Museum; it cuts across the lines of mosaic on the floor. The cage is the only thing allowed to break the line of the big picture window as it crosses the room. A commissionaire dressed like Gviong is standing by it, almost like a sentry. This cage is evidently important. It is made of wrought iron, formed into fantastical art deco designs, and it’s a good few seconds before I realize it’s an elevator cage. The machinery for the elevator vanishes up into the roof. This was doubtless the lift assembly for some swank Na apartment before it was appropriated en bloc; above the lintel of the cage door is a quotation in what appears to be Italian.

“’Abandon hope, all ye who enter here’”, translates Ivan before I ask, and sweeps the steel louvres open before the commissionaire has time to. I am acutely, almost uncomfortably aware that Ivan is the local police chief. The museum staff may be terrified with dignity, but they are clearly terrified of him.

The elevator is very small. It has cagework sides through which little fingers can easily protrude and get chopped away. There is nothing to hold on to inside it.

Ivan slams the louvres shut and presses one of only two buttons on the control panel - a big red one marked, in Russian, BOTTOM. The lift jolts and grinds alarmingly, and sprocket teeth whirr above me in the darkness, finger-hungry. Then the cage begins a sedate and altogether quite pleasant descent into the floor, where I see not dark but daylight rising round my ankles.

“The Museum is built out from the edge”, says Ivan. “On iron girders. Look.”

Massive riveted nineteenth century buttresses project out from the cliff. It appears they are holding up the floor I had been standing on. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have walked so close to the window. Underneath them is twenty or thirty metres of fresh air. Underneath that, a narrow shelf projecting from the abyssal wall, looking knifeblade-thin next to the vast gulfs of nothing crowding in on it on either side. Remember thinking - if the cable snaps and we fall, will we hit it? Or will we fall further?

Like the webbing of a finger, the shelf connects the thin shard of abyssite that the Church of the Angel is perched on with the chasm walls. At this shallow depth, there is grass, manky and yellow, growing on it; even a tree, to which someone has fixed a portable ultraviolet light to help it grow bigger. The shelf is actually quite broad as we come closer - wide enough, even, for people to stand up on and move about. There are tents, quite large ones, women with no make-up, men with beards. One of them is grumpily sweeping away a clutter of plastic votive tablets, turning them over the edge of the cliff with a broom.

“Archaeologists”, explains Ivan. “They cannot understand that this place is a work in progress. They think only of unearthing yesterday, and complain when today rains down on them constantly.”

I notice the archaeologists were all wearing hard hats. I ask whether people still threw votive tablets down here. Ivan nods.

“I found a tablet asking both God and the Devil to kill me once”, he says. He shrugs and smiles, but this time his heart isn’t in it.

We are at the level of the grass, now, and still descending. Here, in the middle of all these archaeologists, someone has dug a small square pit exactly the size of our elevator, into which we disappear like a coffin being decorously lowered into an open grave. The inside of the grave has steep spade-cut sides and electric light.

“The Pit has formed here over centuries”, says Ivan. “All around the Abyss, people throw things in, but in places like this, where there are ledges near the top, the things collected. Sometimes the braver, poorer people who feared divine retribution less than hunger would wait until dark and climb in after them. People who did such things were considered anathema, like grave robbers or Indian untouchables. Even Vaemna”, he said, as if this was the crowning insult, “do not talk to such people.” I notices he says do not talk instead of did not.

“And so we have the Museum of the Pit. Archaeologists are obsessed with this location. Western archaeologists in particular pay big money to be allowed down here. But nothing ever leaves the site. Things either remain here or stay in the Museum, and only replicas tour exhibitions abroad. Nothing that enters the Pit leaves it”, he said, “apart from archaeologists, geologists and tourists.”

Archaeologists must obtain state permits, it seems. The Pit referred to in the Museum’s title is not the yawning chasm we are standing on the edges of, but this tiny excavation, only perhaps four metres deep.

The surface level, under the grass, is immediately gruesome. A skeletal head stares out at us from under a hairline of turf. There are femurs, jawbones, ribcages. One of the ribcages, in what I am sure is a piece of pure theatre on the part of the Museum staff, is wearing an Iron Cross.

“It is believed this layer of topsoil was added in the 1940’s after the Soviets slaughtered three hundred SS prisoners here”, says Ivan. I express my revulsion. He reminds me that the next level down consists of Russian and Polish bones, executed with Nazi bullets.

“The Nazis were trying to get to the centre of the world”, I say. Ivan laughs. “To meet up with their master, Satan”, he says. (Dante’s Inferno, I am reminded, is a popular school textbook in Na, along with Virgil’s Aeneid, Goethe’s Faust and Beckford’s Vathek. Their children must sleep really well at night).

Beneath the Nazi and Soviet skulls is a layer of shattered porcelain - “votive tablets”, says Ivan dismissively - and then a clearly visible layer of black soot containing three perfectly formed cannonballs. “The Magyars take the town from the Turks”, he says. “A lot of the town was burned.” Underneath the cannonballs and ashes, a layer of fine ash. “The poorer Turks scatter the ashes of their dead into the Pit”, says Ivan. Then still more soot and cannonballs. “The Turks”, announces Ivan, “take the town from the Magyars.”

The Turks and Magyars both seem to have taken the town twice, though in the deeper layers they don’t fire cannonballs any more. There follows several feet of porcelain of decidedly poorer quality. “Mediaeval”, says Ivan. Finally, more bones, some of them with clearly human teethmarks in them. Ivan sucks in his breath seriously. “The Mongol Khan Ogedei”, he says, “conquers Poland and Russia. He drives the inhabitants of the town of Na, who refused to capitulate when he first rode up to their walls, into the Abyss. Some of them, cushioned from the fall by the dead bodies of their former neighbours, survive the fall and live for many days, taunted by the Tartars far above, living on the abundance of rotting human flesh.” He pauses theatrically a monent, then adds in a whisper:

“Some says their descendants live down here still.”

Still further down, past pottery-shard gravel of steadily decreasing quality, shading from porcelain into actual earthenware, the omnipresent cross motifs on coins, plaques or rotting bits of fabric become ‘T’ shapes. “Worshippers of Thor and Pyerun”, says Ivan. “Back this far, the area is still not entirely Christian.” The quality of the earthenware begins to improve. Crosses reappear, though they are probably better described as swastikas. “The Roman period”, Ivan explains. Down here the quality of the goods thrown into the Pit is better than at virtually any time since. Gold and silver glitter among the litter, among gladii and spathae, denarii and oboli. There is an abundance of statues of Isis, Egyptian goddess of the underworld, popular with the Romans with their mix-n’-match approach to worship. And then, suddenly, the Isis statues become Proserpina - I can’t tell the difference, but Ivan convinces me one of them is holding a pomegranate - and the votive tablets are suddenly addressed rather than Dis Pater. And then, once the alphabets become confused, like the destruction of Babel happening in reverse, they break out into a mish-mash of Ancient Persian, Phoenician, Hittite, and Linear B. And even here, there are trinkets and articles of fabulous value to bronze age chieftains who doubtless inhabited the most palatial mud huts in their neighbourhoods.

We have reached pit bottom.

“Does it stop here?” I say.

Ivan shrugs. “Excavations continue”, he says.

He presses the green button for the lift to rise.

After the Museum, Ivan suggested food, but apologized for not being able to deliver it until the evening due to “work commitments”. Asked “if it would be acceptable to dine at the Hilton”. Have driven past the Hilton on the way in from the airport. Very big, built on the edge of town beyond the tangle of ancient architecture in the city centre. Lots of glass and steel, very swish. Wondered naïvely how it was that a policeman could afford to eat at that sort of place. Wondered even more naïvely and not a little hypocritically whether Ivan’s beautiful wife had been informed he was dining with another rather less beautiful woman.

Of course, said yes.

Spent the rest of the day queueing in the Interior Ministry, trying to get permission to leave the elevator cage in the Museum of the Pit and wander around taking photos actually inside the mouth of the Abyss. National Geographic have done this successfully in the past, though I find out from talking to a backpacker in the queue next to me that this was only via smuggling one of their cameramen into an archaeological team. Get shunted round three separate ‘departments’ (this involving queueing in front of various different windows in the same office, often to see the same people) and am given three tickets of different colours. Get the colour of my ticket wrong at least once and stand in the parking fines queue, much to everyone else’s annoyance. Queueing is even more of a way of life with these people than it is in Britain, it seems. Am resoundingly unsuccessful in obtaining permit, despite my government connections. Am treated almost as if I’d wandered into the cathedral and asked for a permit to piss in the font.

Spend the rest of my afternoon shopping for clothes. Haven’t got much good stuff with me that Ivan’s not seen me in already. Shameless.

Ivan has a policeman pick me up from the hotel at nine, in a police car. Very nice, but cannot help feeling like a prostitute being pulled in off the street. Policeman says nothing to me all the the way there, doesn’t open the door for me like a taxi driver or a chauffeur, but smiles and waves at me as he pulls away, and is good enough not to leer. The Hilton is swank, as is only to be expected; full of smart suits conversing in German, English and Russian, tucking into fillet steaks and Caesar salads. There appears to be not a single Eastern European dish on the menu.

I have the monkfish (how far does the nearest monkfish have to travel to get here?). I also insist on paying for it myself (all right, insist on expensing it). Ivan pays for it anyway while I’m in the toilet. He knows the waitresses by name, though he doesn’t flirt with them. He listens attentively whilst I talk about myself - Roedean, degree in Modern languages, early desire to be a spy, hence the reason for learning Russian, never recruited at Oxford, hence the reason for currently being a journalist. Not married, no children, one cat fed most of the time by my neighbour, who he must be convinced by now is his actual owner.

Whilst Ivan laughs at my jokes, he doesn’t laugh uproariously, which is good, because I know they’re not that funny.

His own life story is Dr. Zhivago stuff. Grandaddy was a KGB lieutenant who slept with a local Polish shop girl to produce Daddy. As Grandaddy was already married to the daughter of his local party chief back home in Russia proper, Daddy couldn’t be publicly acknowledged, and instead had to be supported by ‘Uncle Ivan’, who paid for his upbringing and made sure he followed his uncle into the Service. He also made sure Daddy had a good Russian name, Mikhail - “though”, Ivan adds, smiling bitterly, “no Ivanovich”. Daddy, meanwhile, prudently made sure Ivan got both a Russian name and a Vaemna one. Ivan’s Vaemna name is Vaereng, which he says means ‘prosperous’. I tell him mine means ‘spinner’.

Ivan, unlike his father, was savvy enough to become an officer in the local police; thus, when the Russians left and the KGB became a dwindling memory, he still kept his job. “My father works as a security guard in a bank”, he adds cheerily. “But I make sure he gets a big package of vodka and salmon once a month”, he cackles, as if to prove he is not, after all, a monster. (I note, however, that Ivan sends his father fish, rather than teaching him how to; he is the sort of man who likes to keep others dependent on him).

Ivan insists on driving me back to the centre of town in his big police car. It is a Zil. “When I was a boy, I always wanted to drive one of these cars”, he says. “Now my junior lieutenants make fun of me for not driving a BMW.” I laugh. We both laugh. We are drunk. He is perhaps too drunk to drive. What, I wonder in my naïveté, if he gets arrested?

He drops me off just outside the the hotel, nice as pie, but as luck would have it, what do you know, he just happens to have the keys to a flat in town, a safe house, used by the police to observe drug traffickers. He is going there to sleep off the booze. He does not want to drive the twenty kilometres home in his condition. I laugh. He laughs. He suggests we go up there together and have a coffee, maybe a little nightcap, who knows?

End up sleeping with Ivan. He is a considerate lover, not half as drunk, surprise surprise, as he appeared to be. He also does not wait till I’m pretending to be asleep and then pretend not to know I’m pretending and slip quietly out of bed into his uniform and leave to drive home to his family. When he leaves, he leaves at daybreak, plants a kiss in the middle of my forehead, and orders a bouquet of flowers sent to my hotel to be there when I arrive.

Walk up the stairs to my room feeling dirty. Shower several times. Cry.