In Siberia (10 page)

We drank tepid tea in the dark. Sasha was fifty-six, but boyish, bursting with enthusiasm and trust. A pelmet of chestnut hair fell over his forehead and his eyes were brown and puppyish. He was sad that he could not measure my magnetic sensitivity on the Heath-Robinson machine beside us (‘No electricity!') but he hoped I would enter the hypomagnetic chamber next door. ‘You've seen these photographs?' He pointed to a cabinet. ‘Those detect energy flowing from a patient's fingertips after just three sessions in the chamber!'

I peered at them: they seemed to show a jelly-fish haloed in hair. I said doubtfully: ‘What diseases can it cure?'

‘It treats epilepsy, but the subject needs to be very sensitive. It's also helped with nervous paralysis and cancer.'

‘
Cancer?
'

‘Well, it's helped in diagnosis.'

‘But what does the chamber actually do?'

Even to myself I sounded peremptory, but Sasha was breathless with evangelism. ‘The chamber almost eliminates the body's natural magnetic waves! They decrease by six hundred times! And this allows
other things
to happen–purer waves. Things we can't be sure about. But before treatment we need to know your prenatal development in each of the weeks between conception and birth. The interplanetary magnetic field, phases of the moon and so on…'He looked at me as if I must have this data on me, perhaps in my passport.

‘I'm afraid…'

But he rushed on: ‘The field-structure of our organism is very dynamic. Sometimes it is closed, sometimes not. Recently, for instance, we had a conference in Martinique, and the people there were very open, very. Their magnetic sensitivity, when we tested them, was first-rate. People need to unlock, you see. To open up!'

I began to feel jittery. I stared down at myself, wondering if I would open up, but saw only a scruffy shirt and a prayer-belt. The magnetic waves to which I would be exposed owed much, it seemed, to the astro-physicist N. A. Kozyrev, who had set up telescopic mirrors to record starlight simultaneously from the past, present and future. Kozyrev was Sasha's god. The astronomer seems to have believed that the Universe was awash with a unified time-energy, in which intellect, matter and cosmic forces were bundled up in some Hegelian process that fascinated Sasha but eluded me.

‘It all depends on your responsiveness,' Sasha said, leading me to the next room. ‘The machine opens up psycho-physical recesses not normally explored.' We stood before two identical chambers: grey, open-mouthed tunnels for the patient to lie in. They resembled MRI scanners or huge, open-ended washing-machines, but were utterly plain.

I said stupidly: ‘There are two.'

‘Yes, but one is a dummy,' he said. ‘If you lie quietly in each, you will sense which is which.' He straightened the mattresses inside them. ‘Of course there are some people who stay closed up. Yes. There are, I should say, cosmophiles and cosmophobes. But 70 per cent are sensitive to it. Some get a feeling of flying,
others of being lifted out of themselves. It depends on your sensitivity.'

His trust invited mine. I was determined to be sensitive. I climbed into one of the tunnels, feeling like dirty washing, and lay down. ‘Lie quietly,' he said. ‘Meditate.' I tried to empty my mind, but instead found myself scanning the arc of ceiling above me for some tell-tale sign. Was this the dummy or the real one, I wondered? I thought I discerned a trickle of wiring under its plaster, but decided this was only a structural joint. I lay still. A mill-race of thoughts started up, subsided. I closed my eyes and concentrated only on the darkness under their lids, where an odd grey plasma was floating. The room was silent. My mind attempted a thought or two, then gave up. But I felt nothing. Nothing. After a while I stared down at the circle of light beyond my feet, hoping for some sensation, anything, but saw only Sasha's face peering in. ‘Relax. Meditate for five minutes. I have to check my fax machine.'

I meditated. But no, this was the dummy machine, I realised. I simply wanted to go to sleep. So I climbed out and confronted its twin. They both looked makeshift and somehow unreal, like stage props. But as I crawled into the second chamber, I felt a tremor of unease. Now I would be passing (Sasha had said) from Einstein's space into Kozyrev's space. Living matter would enter an immaterial dimension. Hesitantly I lay down and gazed up. I imagined a blank. A long time seemed to go by. I tried to float. But again, nothing.

I thought: I must be cosmophobic. Perhaps I have no psycho-physical recesses. Or the dynamic field-structure of my organism is falling to bits. Maybe I never had one. Compared to the man-in-the-street in Martinique…

Then I heard a steady, rhythmic whirring. For a moment I could not locate it, then realised it came not from my head, nor from the tunnel ceiling above me, but from the next-door room. I thought: Sasha is pumping something, a generator perhaps. He is trying to activate my tunnel. So at least I know I'm in the right one. I lay down and tried again. The whirring continued, but instead of flying I seemed to be sinking into a bored catalepsy.
My next thought was: the Russian Academy of Sciences is actually
paying
for this stuff, has been paying for years….

After a few minutes, tiredly, I climbed out. Despite myself, an irritated sense of failure arose. I fought it off. I'm not cosmophobic, I thought grumpily, I'm just English. I scrutinised the chambers for any difference: a giveaway trail of cables or an extra metal coat. But there was none. The rhythmic whirring still sounded next door. I peered in and discovered its source: Sasha was riding his exercise bike.

‘How was it? How was it?' He jumped off, sweating and jubilant.

I hazarded a guess at which was the real machine, but got it wrong. ‘Maybe I'm tired,' I said. ‘I didn't feel anything.' I hated to disappoint him. Momentarily I wanted the world to be riddled with cosmic benevolence. ‘At least I don't think I did….'

I had fallen plumb into the insensitive 30 per cent. But Sasha brushed this aside. ‘Let me show you something else….' Mystatistic, I could tell, would be lost in his own certainty. He had a way of discounting failure. His wife and son, he had mentioned, lived far away in Estonia–she had returned to the town of her childhood. Yet he shied away from the word ‘separated'. They just were not together. He sealed the subject with a hazy smile. Sadness made him afraid, perhaps.

‘You know there are certain trajectories of extraordinary magnetic power….' He was burrowing among his files. ‘Just look at these, from Stonehenge. I find these most interesting.'

On to my lap he spilled sheafs of paper covered with random sketches. They were the result of an arcane experiment. Here in Akademgorodok one of his colleagues had sat encased in a curved aluminium chamber called ‘Kozyrev's Mirrors', constructed to heighten the transmission of his ‘time-energy waves'. While he concentrated his mind on a selection of ancient Sumerian images, other participants–sitting among the monoliths of Stonehenge over three thousand miles away–had attempted to receive and sketch his thought-pictures.

‘Look, look,' said Sasha. ‘This is remarkable.' He pointed to a Sumerian original, which resembled a pair of dragonflies, then he
riffled through the sketches. I saw spirals, boats, dogs, phalli, suns, stick-men, flowers, stars. At last: ‘There!' Someone in Stonehenge had come up with a hovering bird. ‘You see? You see?' He was glittering with faith. Never mind that all the other sketches–page upon page–bore no relation to anything envisioned, or that only the dragonflies and the bird dimly corresponded. Sasha was smiling at them like a cherub. He scarcely needed proof. He already knew.

 

An old man sits in his dacha in the Golden Valley. These country homes are given only to the elite–he is an Academician–and all along the avenue their stucco facades rear from tangled gardens, until the road gives out against wooded hills. The Academician's sitting-room is filled with kitsch: glass animals, sentimental pictures, statuettes of the Medici Venus, the Capitoline Venus, the Venus de Milo. But there are icons too, and tense, miniature landscapes painted by a Gulag prisoner. I wonder vaguely what these contradictions mean. Sasha, who has brought me here like a trophy, has gone silent. He listens to the Academician, his mentor, with hushed respect. So do the Academician's wife and middle-aged son. The whole house smells of a damp dog which is hurtling through the undergrowth outside.

For a while we sit nibbling
zakuski
snacks and drinking vodka. The Academician hands me his latest book,
Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity
. Then they toast my future Siberian travels (‘It's dangerous now, you know') and I begin to squirm in my traveller's disguise, because they want to convert me to their beliefs. Unnoticed I open the Academician's book and read: ‘The total world human Intellect in its cosmoplanetary motion is neither derivative from nor some procreation of, the social movement (social-cultural historic development). It is a peculiar cosmoplanetary phenomenon in the organisation and motion of the Universe Living Matter in its earth-adapted manifestation….'

Fearing an attack of cosmophobia, I close it up, and now,
impatient with the trivia of eating, of small talk, the Academician announces: ‘We must go upstairs and discuss.'

Years of deference, I suppose, have wrecked him. An old pedagogy and a new evangelism smooth his thinking to unchallenged monologue. In the study where we sit–his son, Sasha, myself–his books are stacked in avenues from floor to ceiling, all nestled in dust. While his wife stays downstairs, washing up, he explains how man's spiritual and mental life is shot through by galactic waves, and I cannot decide if this idea is a vanity or humility (and the Academician does not take questions). He often lifts his finger as he advances point by point, and his message grows in urgency.

‘We are at a crisis in the world's development. The West is powerless, blinded by materialism. It can't
see
anything.
It can't think new
. It is only Russia which can show the way. Point Three: she can do this precisely, and only, because everything has been taken from her, and she is open! Yes, open! This is the moment! We have just a brief chance–now! In a few years it will be too late. Now is the moment for classical thinking and cosmic thinking to converge. We must save the world–not only Russia!–and unleash new ways of thought!'

He speaks as if in an echo-chamber, and the message which he finds so new is resonantly old. It rings through the works of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, who half-mystically enjoined the ancient values of the Russian soul. It is the vision of Dostoevsky, Herzen, Tolstoy. Yes, Russia will save the Earth! Truth will rise through suffering! Europe–rational, individualist Europe–is benighted by affluence. Only impoverished Russia can touch the heart of things, and rescue mankind.

I start to lose the Academician's thread. He seems to be talking about experiments with cosmic waves in a Thracian sanctuary in Bulgaria, and in the Arctic Circle north of Dudinka where I will be going. He drops sweeping abstracts and magisterial generalisations. His audience is solemn, grateful. Stray concepts surface in English, sink again. ‘…Spatio-temporal waves…Point Six…distant-image interaction…' Then he says to me: ‘When you sail down the Yenisei, if you go with an open mind, you'll discover a new Siberia! We conducted experiments in Dikson in the Arctic
Circle, and you'll find the magnetic channels between there and here are very powerful.' He asks: ‘You've heard of Yuri Mochanov?'

To my surprise, I have. He is a Russian archaeologist whose excavations on the Lena have uncovered evidence of a prehistoric Siberian people. Controversially he has set the age of their stone tools at over 2,000,000 bc, matching Leakey's Africans in the van of civilisation. He still worked in the town of Yakutsk in East Siberia, where I meant to find him.

The Academician is fired up. ‘A civilisation at least as old as Africa's! So what does that do to Darwinism? Now the classic view is that man evolved out of Africa, then spread east and north into Asia. But the excavations of Mochanov and others prove something different. They prove that Intelligence emerged in several regions simultaneously–in Siberia, in Africa, in Central Asia. In fact Siberia was the first!'

It all fits beautifully, of course. Here in Siberia–the symbol and repository of Russia's otherness–civilisation itself began. And here the cosmic flow, the great communion, will be reaffirmed. Not that the Academician repudiates science (although he lives in its ruins). In fact his finger is raised again. ‘I hold that cosmic influences accompanied by changes in the earth's magnetic field were responsible for a sudden maturation in men's brains at that time. These early civilisations were in tune with the cosmos, but due to various factors they could not, in the end, survive….' His hands return comfortably to his lap. ‘Darwin, you understand, is nonsense.'

I sit opposite him, writhing with rebellion at first, then oddly sad. Sasha is glowing. But I see an old man in track-suit trousers and threadbare socks, who has gone off the rails. Sometimes I feel that he is talking not to us, but to himself, and that he is very lonely. I imagine him the victim of that self-hypnosis which sustained the great illusion of Communism itself–where ideas and dreams hover delusively over the wasteland of fact.

 

How quiet it is here. Young bracken is starting up in the woods, and the wind in the birch trees unlooses a shimmer of chromium
leaves. Somewhere among the forests of Akademgorodok the Museum of Siberian Culture is kept like a private collection. It is small and choice. The iron head-dresses of shamans keep company with the fish-skin coats of Nivkhi tribesmen. The curator shepherds me round.

In the central room the tattooed mummy of a warrior lies beside his wood sarcophagus. He comes from the Altai mountains five hundred miles south on the borders of Mongolia. In this region rainwater, seeping through cairns and into the 2,400-year-old graves below, freezes solid with the first snows, and seals wood, leather, cloth, human skin in a cone of ice. The warrior had been entombed among sacrificed horses, whose bridles and trappings are encased nearby. His woollen coat–lined on the inside with marmot fur–is still serviceable.