In Siberia (16 page)

And sometimes, he said, he caught reindeer and elk in traps. I
winced at him, then asked about this, hoping to elicit an instant's regret; but he merely described it: iron leg-traps. He was a poacher.

This was the old Siberia too. The trappers had been merciless, the taiga strangely fragile. During the seventeenth century its sable had been virtually wiped out.

I asked in puzzlement: ‘Why won't you kill a swan?'

‘A swan!' He looked shocked, rubbed his heart. ‘I love them. They fly all the way to California, then back to us. They're beautiful. Oh, I couldn't touch a swan!'

Now the sun had gone. We made no commotion over the water. After a while a deserted village floated past us, its doors and windows blank over the marshland. ‘Those are the ruins Khrushchev left,' Vadim said. ‘He forced people into bigger units, he hated the little places. So you see them now, fallen to bits….'

In the last windows dim lights flickered, where people had returned, perhaps, to inhabit a remembered happiness. ‘My grandfather was exiled out here in 1921–yes, that early!–just for owning land. He had to live somehow so he became a merchant of sorts and settled in Yeniseisk, where I was born.' Vadim's hand thumped my shoulder again. ‘In Stalin's time, even in Brezhnev's, you and I couldn't have talked like this! You're my first Englishman!'

I smiled, despite myself. He had added me to his game-bag, along with the Canada goose and the reindeer.

‘As a young man I'd have thought you my enemy.' A vague wonder surfaced in his voice. ‘But one year I went to Germany with a Komsomol group, full of the idea that everything of ours was best. You know how it is. My father was a pilot in the war and died of wounds, escorting British convoys to Murmansk. All his three brothers were killed. I was ready to hate the Germans–but Hamburg! I didn't care about its wealth, but the people welcomed me. We were quartered with ordinary German folk, and they were good people. Good. After that I never felt the same about anything….'

He stood up with his back to the water. The Russian tricolour drooped on its pole behind him. ‘And now we have to be like them. In Russia these days a fellow has to work
on his own
.
Alone!' He thumped his chest. ‘We live in a new time. I'm a crane-operator in the Dudinka docks at present, but I can work as a mechanic, a book-keeper, a lumberjack. I earn more than any of my bosses. The temperature can dip to -50°F, but I can operate in that. And I'm free. Nobody tells me what to do! When one line of work fails, I switch to another.' He pointed his cigarette at the crates lapping the deck windows. ‘But this merchandising, just moving stuff about from place to place–that's no good. Russia has to
make
stuff. That'll be our future.'

‘Light industrial stuff,' I agreed. ‘Things ordinary people want.'

‘In the past we had seven bosses to every worker. One ploughed, as we say, and the others just lifted their spoons. But now we'll pick ourselves up!'

I wanted to hear this, to believe he was the future. I wanted to like him. His feet were planted four-square on the deck, as if he would ride a hurricane. I tried to forget the gin-traps.

‘Come to my cabin tomorrow and meet my wife!' He was suddenly striding away. ‘When I trap sable she makes them into hats!'

I lingered astern for a while in the cool dusk. A few stars had come out. The ship's bell clanged archaically. The darkening woods no longer seemed so empty. In daytime I had found the taiga silent, filled with a greenish light and cathedral peace. But it was empty only of humans. It rustled unseen with a wary life of its own: lynx, elk, fox. Now the brown and black bears would be gorging themselves on berries and seeking dens for semi-hibernation, and a host of birds was winging south and east. Sables and muskrats, with all the martens and rodents of the trees, would be laying in winter stores, and the black-capped marmot, glutted with fat, would be turning in for its fantastical, eight-month sleep. (Its temperature drops almost to freezing; its heart beats once in three minutes. Every three weeks it wakes, urinates, perhaps copulates, then nods off again.) Yet others–even the tiny nocturnal flying-squirrel–never hibernate at all.

But somewhere ahead, where the taiga thins to conifers and the winter snow becomes a compacted, wind-blown dust, the wolves and reindeer multiply and the red fox gives way to the blue.
Arctic lemmings–nervous, overgrown guinea-pigs, snow-white or coppery–would be breeding even now. Every third or fourth year their numbers explode and they ripple across the tundra in a quivering plague. People imagined they swam the sea in quest of Atlantis, but in fact they were searching for cotton-grass. They never turn back, because they have already laid waste everything behind them. So they seem faintly tragic, impelled by madness. In a bumper lemming year, all the predators congregate. Everything, it seems, eats lemmings. The snowy owls hatch ten or more chicks in celebration, and the wolves become so fat that the reindeer graze in peace (and themselves eat the odd lemming). There is a bright green moss which grows only on lemming bones. Even in their river crossings they are not safe, but turn up in the stomachs of pike and salmon. I kept an eye out for them fording the Yenisei–they could swim several miles–but the river was filling with stars.

 

That night we were joined by the Angara, which had already flowed three thousand miles from its source beyond Baikal, and turns the Yenisei into one of the most powerful rivers on earth. Ahead of us at dawn, low mountains were shaking loose from the sky, and we could glimpse the waves of eastern hills as they started their long surge to the Pacific. The gold of the forests was laced darker now by conifers. The river had cut up under a cold wind, and a flock of seagulls was trailing us astern. By afternoon the cliffs of islands drifted past, and the Stone Tunguska river, already huge, wound from the east to meet us.

In his cramped cabin, heaped with sacks of potatoes bought cheap in Krasnoyarsk, Vadim plied me with tea and vodka, spurned my Romanian biscuits and produced
piroshki
cabbage pastries made by his mother-in-law. ‘Homemade! Better!' They were disgusting.

Then he talked politics. His wife Stalina (her father had fought at Stalingrad) reclined plumply on her bunk beside him, cosseted in a wool cardigan. Bulging cheeks had squeezed her eyes and mouth to pampered dots, and beneath a toppling pyramid of golden curls some cotton threads and wisps of her own black hair
floated free. While Vadim complained about the ingratitude of the Baltic states or demanded the crushing of Chechnya, she sent out little snuffles of agreement and censure.

‘Those people take everything from us,' he said. ‘Even in these parts you'll find native Kets and Dolgans and Entsy and God knows who, and they degenerate because they never do an hour's work. But if you want work in Dudinka, you can find it, and live well.' He appealed to Stalina. ‘We live well, don't we?'

‘We do, we do.' She was plucking the seeds from a dried sunflower-head and tucking them into her cheeks with moist fingers. I was starting to dislike them both equally.

‘During the seventies I worked eight years for the Komsomol,' Vadim said. ‘I went out into the tundra and gave lectures to these people in their huts or tents or just under the sky. It's we Russians who brought them education. They never even had an alphabet before. They couldn't even read.'

‘Not even an alphabet!' echoed Stalina.

I asked grumpily: ‘What did you teach them?'

‘In those days it was the history of the Communist Party.' No trace of irony or regret touched him. ‘I told them about our writers and cosmonauts and space engineers….'

‘Did they listen?'

He looked blank, as at something irrelevant. ‘I went from group to group by helicopter or reindeer-cart with a cine-projector run on batteries–and we'd show them films of the Great Patriotic War. Sometimes we'd take their children to the
Internat
boarding-schools in Dudinka–aged seven, they were–and they'd be given an education, September to May, and then go back to the tundra for three months.'

‘We gave them education–free!' His wife snuggled under blankets.

‘And if they wanted,' Vadim went on, ‘they could go on to some higher institute, and they didn't pay a thing! And there were special places kept for them, even if Russians were more deserving.' His face was clenched with irritation. His wife spat out a sunflower seed.

‘What did they do in the tundra with your education?'

‘Some got training as vets, but most didn't want to do a thing. Now they just come in to loaf about the town and get drunk.'

‘They weren't prepared,' I said. I imagined him flying in to these half-comprehending people, haranguing them on the October Revolution; and their children returning from a jobless Dudinka to a tundra they no longer knew. These
Internats
had spawned a whole generation alienated from its own culture and unfitted for any other.

Through the porthole behind me I glimpsed the forests where the Ket people had once flourished. Every year, two centuries ago, they had sailed to a market fair in two hundred boats, and delivered their tribute of furs to the imperial agents. Within a century the vodka and diseases peddled by Russian merchants had decimated them.

‘Don't you go near those people,' Stalina warned. ‘They'll do anything to you.'

I wanted to snap back; but I was drinking their vodka, nibbling their
piroshki
. I felt a harsh frustration. ‘I'm interested in them,' I said angrily. I would track them down somehow: a village, a nomad camp, anything.

‘We Russians cheated them when we arrived,' Vadim said suddenly. ‘We took their pelts in exchange for a few brass pots.'

Stalina snuffled ominously.

I asked: ‘What's happened now, out in the tundra?'

‘I don't know what's happpened out there.' Vadim tossed back his vodka. ‘Except that the whole system's fallen to bits. In town these people used just to take money from the government. Now they get nothing, and they're unemployable.'

‘Things might be better for them in the tundra,' I wondered.

‘Yes!' they chorused. ‘Yes! They'd be better out there!'

 

Night. We are wandering over a polished calm, under a sky cold with stars. I remember the Academician in Akademgorodok talking of magnetic power-lines streaming down from Dikson to our north. We are floating along them now. The Milky Way dissects the sky in a white scar, and Venus is so bright that it
sheds a path over the water. I had promised the professor to be cosmically sensitive, but I have no idea how. So I empty my mind, and listen in to nothing. Beyond our prow the shores are pincers closing in on the river's light. The foam of our wake diffuses soundlessly behind. Once an enigmatic lamp blinks from the forest, but otherwise we move across a darkness barely distinguishable from the sky. The pulse of our engine is the only sound.

 

For two more days and nights we sailed downriver, while around us the deciduous green turned to bronze, and the birch trees massed along the shores were blackened by pines, and the crimson flares of aspen flickered out. The seasons were speeding up. Within four days we traversed autumn, until the leaves were falling, and a coniferous deadness began to spread.

The villages grew even fewer, poorer. Their foundation in the late thirties betrayed them as Stalinist concentrations from lesser settlements, but now they too were half-abandoned, their inhabitants migrated to Krasnoyarsk or beyond. As we churned north towards winter, the produce on their wharves shrank to a few sacks of potatoes and carrots, or some buckets of cranberries.

‘Up to here you can grow vegetables,' said the barmaid as we reversed from the jetty of Vorogovo. ‘North of here it's just fish.' We were on the 65th parallel. ‘And these villagers can't sell things like they did. Folk used to come south to holiday up to two years ago, but now no one has money.'

She looked heavy and tired. She worked behind the bar in the ship's hold, where nobody much came, giving out plates of sausage and dry chicken-legs. Blonde curls bustled round her cheeks and neck. She had gentian eyes. Behind her glinted two shelves of champagne, sweet wine and ‘Sport-Cola'. She served here four months of the year, she said. It was the only job she could get. ‘I worked ten years as a computer engineer in Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk. Then things got very hard with us, you know, and I had to serve behind counters. The wages of a computer engineer in Krasnoyarsk became three times less than I'd earned in Tyumen. But I had a daughter by then, and I couldn't let up.'

She smiled hardily. On the sunk moon of her face her features seemed to have been touched in later, but formed an expression of half-frustrated tenderness. She'd been born in a village beneath the great dam near Krasnoyarsk, she said. Her parents had even helped to build it. ‘But we lived upriver, and our home went under. I was a child when we abandoned it. I used to walk in seven kilometres–aged just five, and alone–to sit and watch the dam being built, and to be near my parents. I didn't know it would drown us.' She had left her childhood under the water.

For a while the father of her daughter hovered unmentioned round her talk. Then she said: ‘Things with us aren't like things with you. If I was destitute,
he
might have to pay something. But he just writes sometimes, and I tell him everything's fine. But life is so dear now. When I was my daughter's age, everything got paid for. Now I have to find extra for her singing and dancing lessons–she loves them–and it breaks me. It's odd, you know, but I think she's becoming a Christian. She keeps crossing herself. Perhaps she picked up something at school.' She made it sound like measles. ‘But when she gets to fifteen it'll be more expensive still and I don't know what I'll do….'