Deity in Youth

Stas Rybkin: The grotto is at the far end of that same beach. Here, by the entrance to the cave, it is wonderful, so I decided after all to do a little filming outside before crawling underground.

Right in front of the entrance to the grotto there is a basalt table of natural origin. That is to say, simply a large flat stone in the shade of a gnarled and spreading casuarina. A strange assortment of offerings hangs on the casuarina. Several women’s dresses of a fairly large size in polythene covers. Several bracelets, one of which, I think, is silver. Bright shiny combs, hair clips. A multitude of women’s earrings and little rings has been tossed into the hollow of the trunk.

Am I understanding this correctly? These are offerings to some spirit of the female sex?

Oleg Batygin: Just so. But the reality is far more colourful. The female spirit for whom the offerings are intended dwells in the body of my wife.

Delphine personally refuses to accept any offerings whatsoever. So the cultists appointed this particular casuarina her deputy. And they bring their offerings to the tree.

The history and the substance of the cult in question are precisely what I intend to tell you about. So let us not get ahead of ourselves. Let us first take a look at the picturesque clearing in front of the grotto.

Stas Rybkin: Let us do that. To begin with, let us look about us. This place is very damp and shady. The cliffs run far out into the sea here, forming a long basalt headland. Its look is Oceanian through and through. The boulders are massive and rounded. In shape they call to mind plump square ladies’ buttocks.

We are at the very base of the headland. To our right runs a swift, deep stream. It is extremely clear. One can see the fish, the stones and the roots on the bottom. Further on, beyond the trees, this stream flows into the sea.

Massive gnarled casuarinas and arboreal figs hang over us. All of it is laced with heavy lianas. The sand is strewn with wet leaves. There is a sharp smell of damp leaf-rot. It is a very sensual, perhaps even sexual smell. The landscape is very feminine. It is entirely suitable as the dwelling place of a female deity.

In the shade of the casuarina decked with offerings lies the broad “stone table”, behind which is the entrance to the grotto. It is a narrow, slanting fissure in the rock, a human height and a half tall and about a metre wide. Oleg Batygin invites me to sit down beside it…

Oleg Batygin: Sit here. I think it will be more effective if I tell you a thing or two before you see what is inside the grotto.

Stas Rybkin: Very well. I like this place very much. It is marvellously cosy here…

Oleg Batygin: Well then… Solving the problems with electricity and the network took us almost two years. We worked very intensively. In parallel we built the workshops. We laid out the first fields. In those days we were still bringing in labourers from the mainland to work the vegetable plots.

One day, when we had electricity in abundance and I realized with delight that right here and now, on the island, I was playing “Duels of the Planeswalkers” over the network, I suddenly and unexpectedly fell into a gloom.

I had come down with the common disease of all inveterate achievers. A boundary that had seemed insurmountable had been crossed, and I felt apathy and emptiness.

I stopped walking up in the evenings to watch the sunset. I read practically nothing. I woke up in the mornings in a foul mood. And at a certain point I understood that I needed to air myself out. I decided to set off on a journey through the places of my past. To carry out a sort of geographical review.

No sooner said than done. A week later I was drinking strawberry beer in Treptower Park, remembering the astonishing Berlin club life right after the Wall came down.

Apparently I inherited the gene for being a beneficiary of periods of historical crisis from my father. He was one of the few Russian artists who did well out of perestroika.

I have absolutely no idea of the details of his business. But he handed me money for trips to Europe regularly. And I hung about in Berlin for months at a time. It was very cool. Tresor, UFO, the first Love Parades, Galerie EIGEN + ART, Lustprinzip… Though Moscow in those days was not yet the dullest city on the planet either…

From Berlin I flew to Rome, where in my youth I had also belonged to a band of raffish friends who later became contemporary artists.

Then I moved on to Corfu. It was there that the most important love affair of my youth once ran its exceptionally stormy course.

Next I set off for Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. I had and still have a great multitude of friends in Israel. Besides which, Edward Whittemore remains my favourite writer to this day.

From Jerusalem I flew to Moscow. I did not stay long. Moscow is possibly the only city in the world that grows worse with every new era.

Then I took the train to Nizhny Novgorod. As tradition demands, with a bottle of Moscow cognac on the compartment table. Nizhny is the only city in Russia that I actually like. I hung about there for a week or so. I have a great many friends in Nizhny as well. Journalists and men of letters for the most part.

Then I found myself in Tashkent, which hung like a dim cream-coloured ghost in the transparent haze of my childhood memories. From Tashkent I flew to Colombo.

Colombo is a fairly dodgy city. And coastal Sri Lanka as a whole is not, to my taste, the most blessed of places. It is the mountain Sri Lanka that I love. On that trip I spent a week or so in Kandy with Sinhalese friends and from there took the train to Ella.

At that very same time Delphine graduated with distinction. The charitable foundation that had paid for her studies allocated her a small sum for a post-graduation holiday. That foundation was on the whole somehow suspiciously humane towards her. But since no other charitable foundations had ever come her way, she decided this was in the nature of things.

There was very little money, and Del decided to take her holiday right there in Sri Lanka. In particular, she had long wanted to visit Ella. In those days it was rather good there for the international youth community. One might say that Del went to Ella to meet somebody interesting. And there she met me.

We got to know each other in Cafe Chill. A very vivid, hipster, showy sort of place. The appearance of Delphine simply astounded me. I had never before met a woman so attractive and at the same time so strange, so alien. I thought at once how well it would suit her to become the mistress of my island.

I planted myself brazenly at her table. Got drunk quickly. Jabbered something incoherent. But I was lucky all the same. We agreed to go bathing at the waterfall together in the morning. From that time on we were never apart.

Del turned out to be a thinking and well-read girl. With a multitude of strange ideas. With outlandish tastes in music, cinema and painting. Painting she felt and understood with exceptional subtlety. She was a genuinely great artist.

Besides which, Delphine, like me, adored mountains, motorcycles, waterfalls and tropical forests, and grew bored during small talk.

In the second week of our acquaintance I proposed to her. The wedding was cheap, improvised and quick. We drank several bottles of local whisky at the foot of a big waterfall in the company of five Lankan friends of ours.

All in all we hung about in Ella for nearly eight weeks. For a honeymoon that town is exceptionally well suited. And then we turned our steps towards the island.

Del was delighted with the island. She kept repeating that she had drawn the luckiest ticket there was. She had become the wife of the lord of a tiny but utterly paradisal land on which, at that moment, counting the two of us, four people lived.

One evening we were sitting on the shore with wine, and she said that her life was a chain of utterly improbable coincidences.

“At first I have terrible luck,” she said. “I end up in circumstances that leave no hope at all. And then somebody quite out of the ordinary suddenly appears. And that somebody changes my life in the most astonishing way.”

I asked her to tell me more about her life from that angle. Del began with the fact that she had been born into an absolutely spectacular poverty. In an island fishing village where people wore footwear made from old car tyres and never let the fire go out, because they had no money for matches or lighters.

Del told me a great deal about the strange, practically post-apocalyptic life of the village where she was born. I do not want to dwell on it too much, all the more so as Del brought out a book about her growing up a year ago.

She herself says that in childhood she was practically happy. She simply did not notice the poverty she was growing up in. There was food enough in those parts. The coast where she lived was green, picturesque and sunny. The family was close, caring and beloved. The parents respected. Del was the daughter of the head of the clan. A genuine princess.

The hut in which her royal family dwelt was of course squalid and stinking. But all the huts around were like that. Up to a certain age she simply did not understand that there was anything wrong with her village. And when she did understand, she was not especially upset.

The villagers worshipped a particular sea deity. Let us call him Olokun. In reality he was called something else. But to give his exact name would be to indicate too precisely the location of the island where Del was born. And she asked me very earnestly not to do that.

Del was bigger than the other children. She never once fell ill during the epidemics, and for some reason the mosquitoes did not bite her. Once, when she was two years old at the most, her parents took her out fishing. Del accidentally fell out of the boat into the sea. But she did not go under. Or rather, she went under first and then swam back up. These meagre facts proved enough for her to be recognized as Aje, the princess of the sea.

Aje, the daughter of the sea king Olokun, was the deity of wealth. All Del’s relatives discussed the situation that had arisen and decided that all they now had to do was wait, and Aje would infallibly make them rich.

Obviously it was not a thing to be spread about. So nobody called Del by her “true name”. But they respected her, nonetheless, in accordance with her divine status.

On account of that same status the family did after all send Del to school. Del was the only child in her very large family who attended school. At school she learned to speak, read and write in English. It was there, too, that she first tried to draw.

At about the age of twelve Del met on the beach a sixty-year-old cheerful and elegant British lady with an easel.

The lady’s name was Olivia, and she was entirely alone. Not long before, she had buried a wealthy and most loving husband who had left her all his money, thereby cutting out his grown-up children.

The situation described ended in a scandal, as a result of which the children stopped answering Olivia’s letters and calls.

I do not know exactly what the matter was there, but literally everybody close to Olivia turned away from her. And she decided that this was an excellent occasion to begin building her life anew in an entirely different setting.

Olivia bought a quad bike, scuba gear, a great many fishing rods and a bungalow on stilts a dozen kilometres from the village where Del lived. She had painted since childhood. Her pictures sold at a rate of one or two a year.

Olivia would make long trips along the shore on the quad bike, looking out for interesting subjects. One day she saw an astonishing black girl, very tall, thin and brittle, like a praying mantis, sitting above the sea against the sunset.

At first Olivia asked Del to pose for her, offering her a little money for it. Del agreed. To the next painting session Del brought her own drawings, which simply staggered Olivia. The girl had a genuinely great gift for painting.

For about two years Olivia worked with Del on painting, bought books for her, drove her about the neighbourhood on the quad bike. The elderly lady and the girl became very close friends.

One day Olivia placed Del’s paintings in some European youth art festival. Del won first prize. The chief reason for that was her fisherman’s, native background. Of course, her work was also very good.

With the papers confirming Del’s victory in that competition in hand, Olivia approached a wealthy charitable foundation that concerned itself with gifted children unlucky in their place of birth.

Olivia became the person who turned Del’s blunder over her place of birth into an advantage. The second “good wizard” to change Del’s life turned out to be a representative of that same charitable foundation. Or else somebody who passed himself off as that representative.

In his person the charitable foundation proved spectacularly kind towards Del. The poverty of Delphine’s family suddenly turned into the root cause of her social success. In particular, into the reason she was able to gain admission without competing to a fairly prestigious Lankan college, and afterwards to university.

Her studies were paid for, naturally, by the foundation. That same foundation replaced the stinking huts in which her clan lived with decent little houses on stilts, made the fishermen a present of new boats and nets, and set up a small but steady allowance for the family.

The foundation communicated with Del and her family through its single representative. And that representative never once asked anybody to sign a single sheet of paper. He simply brought food and medicines.

One day he brought a bank card into which the allowance began to be paid, and taught Del’s parents how to use it. Another time he drove up with an old but sturdy car as a present. And finally, one day, he turned up with the news that Del had been enrolled in college.

That was the last time Del saw the foundation’s representative in the flesh. The man’s name was Byung Min. When Delphine had settled into college and into the internet, she received an email from Byung Min, and from then on they went on communicating by email.

And so, obviously, the third person to turn Del’s deprivation into good fortune was me. Both at college and at university Del came up against the fact that her extraordinary appearance frightened young men off. She did not fit the image of the proper modest wife or of the prestigious good-time girl at all. Young men looked at the strange black giantess with wariness rather than with intimate interest.

Del sat in Ella for a week. There she was only once the object of an attempt at a “pick-up”, by a sweet and evidently loving couple of students from Britain. At another moment that might have struck her as interesting, but at the time her aim was to find a serious relationship and she did not want to be distracted by anything else. And then I turned up with my weed, my island and my fantasies.