In Siberia (11 page)

Galina, the curator, is quick and proud: a small woman in green glasses. She points to another cabinet, and I peer down at air-thin slivers of gold, fragments from a dress. ‘That', she says reverently, ‘is
hers
.'

There is only one
She
in Russian archaeology now: the Ice Princess of the Altai, excavated in 1993–a lone woman entombed in barbarian splendour on a remote plateau above China. Nobody knows who she was–shamaness, noblewoman, or bard–and a tempest of controversy soon brewed up about her race. Her mummy was brought to Akademgorodok and placed in a freezer which had once been used to store cheese. Soon fungi were crawling over the body, fading its delicate tattoos, and it was rushed to Moscow, where embalmers restored it. Slavic experts declared that she was Caucasoid, an early European. But the people of the Altai, who claim descent from her culture, protested that she was theirs, and a Swiss forensic pathologist supported them: she was Mongoloid, he said, close to the modern inhabitants.

Galina, a Russian brunette, is not having this. ‘In Moscow at our Gerasimov Institute they said that in early times the Altai region was basically “European”, but contaminated by the Chinese. Across the Chinese border they have excavated mummies which have never been shown to the public. They've kept them
private. That's another indication that the Altai was racially European.' She is looking at me sharply: small, Slavic eyes. West or East, Europe or Asia–for Russians the debate about their own orientation never quite ends. She says suddenly: ‘Would you like to see her?'

I am momentarily astonished. I had thought her still in Moscow, awaiting resolution. But Galina unlocks a small, barred room and beckons me in. A display case stands against one wall, covered in sheets of brown paper. She plucks them off, and inside the glass I see a woman lying. She rests on her side, with her hands crossed over her pelvis. Her torso has caved in on a spine striated like a palm trunk, and her head is tilted back. Her embalmed skin shines like ivory. It is hard to look at her. She is turned to the wall, as if repudiating us.

‘Where will she go now?' I am whispering.

Galina gazes at her. ‘There was an agreement with the museum at Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the Altai region, that we should study her here. I believe she's ours.' But her voice is making an angry music. ‘Now they want her back. Their curator–that Rima Yakimova!–she doesn't even allow us to excavate in the Altai any more–and her people have no money to excavate, themselves. And now we're making a present of our princess back to her!' However she resents this, the political storm has raged beyond her control. We are looking down at Russia's split identity. ‘We've done everything for the princess here. Her felt riding-boots, the raw silk shirt and red-and-white woollen skirt she was buried in–they're being restored at this moment. Her jewellery, head-dress, they've all been photographed. Who else does she belong to?'

The princess had been buried with a sacrifice of six horses. On tables in her tomb-chamber archaeologists found a symbolic meal of mutton and horse-flesh. I stare down at her again. She must have been tall for her day. The indigo tattoos of deer or griffins are still clear on her shoulders and forearms. She has long, delicately boned hands.

‘That Rima Yakimova, her museum is too small! It has enough exhibits already, and there's no space. They probably won't be
able to preserve the mummy in the right atmospheric conditions…. This is the last we may see of her.'

She had died in her mid-twenties, from some natural cause. They found her stretched in her sarcophagus facing the east, crowned by a three-foot head-dress decorated with golden cats, and round her neck a circlet of wooden camels, originally gilded. Most of her innards had been removed, and her body stuffed with peat and bark, whose tannin had preserved her. Her skull was filled with the fur of pine-martens; her eyes had been cut out.

We cover her over again. After two and a half millennia she exerts the potency of the recently dead. The archaeologists had asked her to forgive them.

I think in parting: this rancorous and depleted Akademgorodok is not the place for her mummy. I imagine its future journey back to Gorno-Altaisk, close to the wild valleys where the frontiers of China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia collide, and I mean to go there.

Within two days I was moving south into a land where the Siberia I recognised started to fracture. From trains and buses I watched the steppes wrinkle and undulate, until they lifted into the foothills of the Altai, and the stains of industry vanished. The natives here were Mongol-Turkic tribespeople, semi-nomadic herdsmen by tradition, who found their ancestry among those once-great peoples, now shrivelled and scattered, who formed the armies of Genghis Khan.

But by the mid-nineteenth century Russian farmers had crowded into their pasturelands and were pushing them into the remote valleys. As my bus crossed the region's border to its capital, Gorno-Altaisk, a young tributary of the Ob, the Katun river, ran bright and fast alongside, and I imagined mountains bunching to the south-east: those obscure chains of the Altai and Sayan which separate Siberia from the plateaux of inner Asia.

Gorno-Altaisk was tranquil and run-down, squeezed in the river valley. I had nothing to do here. But in its museum, the future home of the Ice Princess, I went into the office of the notorious Rima Yakimova, and at once the voices of Asia and Europe were arguing again. Far from being small and overstocked, as Galina had said, Yakimova's museum was big and half-empty. And she wanted her Ice Princess back.

‘In Moscow they say she's Caucasoid, but she's not. She's Asiatic. Even her hairstyle was Asiatic. And she will be coming
here
.' Yakimova was a native of the Altai: wide, Mongolian fea
tures, jet-black eyes. ‘All we need now is a glass case for her, but we can't afford one yet: it'll cost twelve million roubles.' Her hands flickered emptily at the ceiling.

I said: ‘She'll be kept at a special temperature?' I was remembering what Galina had feared (‘
This is the last we may see of her
').

‘No. The mummy has been treated. She can lie at room temperature. All we need is a vitrine.' The glass case would cost seventeen hundred dollars. It did not seem so much. ‘There is an idea too that she should be returned to the plateau where they found her. Just laid back in the grave. I'm torn about this. Among our people, the dead should never be disturbed. Never. Yet Russian archaeologists came and dug her up. To free her from the ice they poured hot water over her and she went black.' In the dark moon of her face her lips were full and angry. ‘They violated her. But these are our graves, our people. Our own archaeologists can work here. They won't pour hot water over corpses.'

‘But you have no money.'

‘But the dead will lie in peace.'

These were precarious memories. Perhaps it was the nomad heritage, more than any shared blood, which linked the incensed curator through the Mongol armies to the enigmatic princess. Within living memory the Altai people were still accompanied in death by their sacrificed horses. During the Civil War eighty years ago, before they were brutally settled and collectivised, they had searched their ancestral memory and proclaimed an independent state named Karakorum, after the capital of Genghis Khan. The Bolsheviks swept it away.

Yakimova said: ‘Power has always lain with the Russians. Everything discovered or dug up here went to St Petersburg or Akademgorodok. That Galina…' she murmured. ‘The Hermitage is stuffed with wonderful things from the Pazyryk culture, and all of them are
ours
. Why should our people go to St Petersburg to visit their own heritage? There are things in their reserve collection–hundreds of them–which have never been seen. And a mass were sold off to America by Stalin. He sold our past. And now we want it back.
Here!
'

Pazyryk: the word stands for a culture whose name is lost, the people of frozen tombs. I had seen its artefacts in the Hermitage that June: spell-binding things. And now, when I unfolded my map over Yakimova's desk, her finger shot down a long valley nearly three hundred miles to the closed Mongolian border, then jerked north into a desert of plateaux and streams splintered like nerve-ends. With a short sigh, she inked in ‘Pazyryk' there. ‘But you won't be able to go. It's too far, too wild.'

 

The road to Pazyryk trickled at dawn through a surge of hills along the jade path of the Katun river. The world had turned young. The flatness of the steppeland, and the sullen meander of its rivers, had sharpened into mountain freshness–a cold, unscented air and the chatter of glacial water over rocks. The farming villages were lush with orchards–apple, cherry, pear. Chrysanthemums and hollyhocks sent up a rainbow jumble under their cottage walls, where Russian vines multiplied and Russian children played.

Then the hills steepened. Birch woods spread a pale dust over their slopes. Sometimes the Katun forked and spreadeagled over meadows, or circled white-rocked islands, but as the mountains closed in it ran with a harsh brilliance. Its panicky descent turned it milky-green. Altai herdsmen were riding their stocky horses along its banks, and my bus emptied of Russians.

I was surrounded by a dark, hardy people. The women's heads glinted in gold-threaded scarves. The machine-gun patter of their speech, snagged by sudden gutturals and glottals, grated and chirruped through the bus. Some of them were beautiful. The wide plane of their cheeks and foreheads, where shallow noses and bunched lips made no commotion, emphasised instead the feathery isolation of eyebrows so admired of the Chinese. A resurgent confidence had long ago given their children Turkic or Mongolian names, so that from time to time an order would go out for little Genghis to stop fighting or for Oirot to sit still.

Beside me a military policeman on his way to guard the Mongolian border slumped inch by inch across my chest, fast asleep and still clutching his truncheon. Frontier life was very boring, he said
on waking. You just waited for nothing. His people were closer to the Mongolians than to the Russians, he agreed, but his job was just a job. He wasn't guarding anything, really. And even here, I knew, in this so-called Altai republic of 200,000, the Altaisky were outnumbered by the Russians. In all Siberia, peopled by only thirty million, the indigenous natives numbered just 5 per cent.

As we crossed the Katun, the clouds came down. The river carved a cold corridor through mist and hills, then disappeared as if a water-colourist had washed it into the sky. The villages we passed became desolate, near-empty. Ground squirrels ran in the pastures. As we climbed higher, the mountains shut us in eroded walls where the pines moved in Indian file along the lee of ridges. Long, vertical arteries of grey and russet shale were inching down the valleys.

Amid the coming and going of farmers and herdsmen, a Turkic beauty in a woollen trouser-suit climbed on to the bus and sat among us for an inscrutable hour, varnishing her fingernails, then got off at a half-demolished hamlet.

‘Who on earth was that?'

Nobody knew.

At the head of the pass, and at springs along the way, the pine trees were dripping with rags in honour of the spirits. Spirits infested the waters and peaks of all this country. Neither Christianity nor Communism had dislodged them. They were too pervasive, and too old. The rags shivered in the pines–requests, tributes–and the river-beds glistened with coins. Here and there hundred-rouble notes caught among their stones, pulled free again, floated away.

Towards evening the bus veered north up a track. Behind us, above the Mongolian frontier, a skeleton of snow-peaks hung in the sky. We mounted into uplands burnished with autumn shrubs and spread with shallow lakes unblurred by any trees. The hillsides were littered with stones. Here and there along the valleys they traced faint circles and avenues, as if we were following some ancient migratory road.

Then, at sunset, cresting a pass, we looked down on a wilder
ness of mountains, where only cloud-shadows moved and a pale half-moon was stencilled on the sky. For a few miles more we travelled into tableland. Then the track and the world stopped, and the village of Ust-Ulagan was strewn around its river in a maze of cottages and horse-corrals. Duckboards made wavering paths over its valley, where buzzards coasted on white-barred wings.

I got out into a deserted street, still called Soviet Road. Cows were slumbering in its pot-holes. Angry dogs ran at my heels. The few shops looked permanently shut, their iron doors padlocked and boarded. Tractors decomposed in the grass. I hunted the streets for shelter, but the village had retracted into itself. Smoke was starting to rise from its chimneys into the dusk, and only a few herdsmen were about–stocky men with wind-darkened faces. When I peered into courtyards I saw that these once-nomadic people had raised yurt tents beside their huts; their circular walls rose nostalgically to windowless domes, where the people in summer deserted their Russian cabins and returned to their past.

I found a concrete municipal office. It was shut; but at its rear a door stood ajar on a room where a hunchback was cooking potatoes. He had come from Gorno-Altaisk to inspect the village budget, he said, but of course there was nothing to inspect. All infrastructure had gone. ‘Assess the budget! That's my job! To not assess a non-budget.' He was almost a dwarf, and his face too, knotted around a spread nose, looked out of true. He had rigged up some camp-beds beside the office because there was nowhere else to sleep, and he welcomed me in. ‘You'll sleep quietly. Nobody laughs or sings in this place.'

His natural cynicism was being justified by events. The tragedy of Russia might drive others to drink or dream, but for him it only corroborated a conviction of the world's absurdity, and he had come into his own. The whole Altai republic was a shambles, he said. ‘The farmers in this place haven't been paid for
five years
. So of course they work as if they were independent. It's back to the family group now, back to the old ways.' He himself was half-Turkic, half-Russian. ‘Even us civil servants, our wages are slipping behind…. We'll end up like the rest.'

We ate his vegetable stew and my biscuits, then turned in early when the electric light failed. There was no running water, and the privy stank. In the dark he said: ‘If you die in this place and can't pay for your grave, they toss you into the street.' The idea gave him obscure pleasure. He let out a long, retrospective chuckle, as if he were remembering the follies of a whole week. As I was falling asleep he asked out of the blue: ‘And you? What are you doing here?'

What was I doing? My eyes opened on the night. I was trying to find a core to Siberia, where there seemed none; or at least for a moment to witness its passage through the wreckage of Communism–to glimpse that old, unappeasable desire to believe, as it fractured into confused channels, flowed under other names. Because I could not imagine a Russia without faith.

But I said to him: ‘I came to look at the grave-mounds of Pazyryk.' They had yielded the world's most intimate nomad artefacts. ‘They're only ten miles from here. You know of them?'

I heard a disembodied snort. ‘They don't need me. I don't need them.' He turned over to sleep. ‘I need my salary.'

 

Its true name is unknown. Perhaps it never had one. But the civilisation buried in the Pazyryk valley was the easternmost piece in the vast Scythian world which by the seventh century bc stretched from China to the Danube. The Scythians were Indo-Europeans: a tall, hirsute people who at their zenith tormented the Persian empire and subjugated the Medes. Ever since they touched the sphere of Greece, the fear or romanticism of historians staged them as barbarian nomads, wasters of all that was cultured, literate, settled. Even Herodotus, who knew them, said they had no towns.

But here in the Altai, at least, the Pazyryk people were only intermittently nomadic. Sometimes they built wooden settlements behind earth ramparts, like the Huns who followed them, and planted seasonal fields. They may once have been primitive farmers, for their semi-nomadism was a specialised choice, and their culture stood on the shoulders of others, among whom metallurgy in bronze and gold was already refined.

One day somebody–perhaps here in the Altai–conceived the idea of no longer driving a horse, but of sitting on its back. Then mobility became the Scythians' safety, their grace. They fought on stocky geldings, firing twenty poisoned arrows a minute at full gallop ambidextrously. They migrated in cattle-drawn wagons–sometimes even lived in them–and could transport their yurts wholesale. Their only permanence was in death, in the great stone-heaped tombs called
kurgans
. And at Pazyryk, by the action of water filtering into the underground chambers, they were frozen solid in Time.

Their close-cropped pastures spread unblemished as I climbed to the valley at dawn. All around me the herds and flocks of Ust-Ulagan were drifting over the hills, and their horsemen after them. Behind, in this cleansed light, the village looked frailer, stranger. Its corral fences interlaced it like a breaking spider's web. Already, in September, it was preparing for winter, its yards filling with fodder and firewood. Hopelessly remote, powerless to change or to rebel, it was enclosed on its own survival.

After an hour I reached a graveyard of farm machinery, glittering in the void: cannibalised tractors and bulldozers for fields now vanished. A man was there, tinkering with a harrow. ‘Russian things,' he muttered.

For a while he accompanied me. Outsiders no longer interfered much in his village, he said. People just bred their cattle, and got by. His face was pure Mongol, amber-yellow, young; a wiry beard and moustache increased its savagery in my history-tainted eyes. We passed a spring trembling under cloth-hung trees.

‘I don't know the name of the spirit here,' he said. ‘But when I built my house I chopped down wood in another place. Then I left prayers so the spirit there wouldn't be angry with me.'

His tone was crisply practical. He had apologised to nature, compromised; whereas the Russian way was to master, transform, or obliterate it. But their machinery lay in ruins on the track behind us.