In Siberia (20 page)

But my mind wandered back to the village, where the life expectation of the Entsy had dropped to forty-five–and half of
them died violent deaths. Only Nikolai, with his optimism, his scant equipment and medication, his failing eyesight, saved them from worse.

‘And the parrot said…'

I asked: ‘When will things get better?'

‘They're already better! A few years ago these people couldn't even drink river water safely. They used to pump it up into a tank, and for years died of dysentery. Nobody knew why. The doctor at that time didn't realise. Then one summer the tank drained low and they discovered it was revolting. Now they get the water up by tractor, and in winter they gather snow and drink that. Things are better for the first time! Last year was the low point. I think it was the worst we'll have.'

So the people of Potalovo, I thought, were going to survive. They were Siberians, after all. They would adapt, cut down, muck in, suffer, wait.

‘Last year,' said Nikolai, ‘weeks would go by and we'd scarcely glimpse a boat. But this year, well, you've seen it. Here and there a cargo ship, a tanker. That's how you know the state of things. By the river.'

From outside came the crashing of drunks into his vestibule. Nikolai locked his door. ‘I know this lot,' he said. ‘If I open to them, there'll be a fight.' He yelled through the door: ‘Go away! No, I won't see you! The doctor isn't here! Come back tomorrow! No! He's away!'

The bangs and scrapings faded into the slur of feet over grass. Then silence.

‘Listen.' Nikolai reopened his book. ‘A duke and a duchess are out with their dog….'

 

In a window of the children's ward I catch sight of a man staring at me. His hair flies wild round a wind-burnt face. For a second I imagine him another village drunk. Then I realise it is not a window at all. It is a mirror.

For three weeks I have not seen myself. Lines slither down the reflection's cheeks and his eyes are hung with grey crescents. The jaw is ill-shaven and slightly belligerent. Confusedly I try to collate
the inner and outer person. I wonder if the mirror is distorting. If it isn't, something else must be. The face looks anxious now. I feel more kindly to anyone who has spoken to it, even the harshest villager. Then I turn away, disowning it.

 

They have lost their traditions, the doctor said, and even in the home of the octogenarian herdsman I found no pagan totems. People's memory of their nature spirits, and of the old, unapproachable Entsy deity whose son was the god of death, had dimmed away. Nobody any longer knew the oral epics, or the hero Itje, father of the bear and sworn enemy of Christ. The places of sacrifice had been left behind in the reindeer tundra.

Only in the cemetery–the last bastion of conservatism–the importance of death, I thought, may have kept the past alive. On the morning of my departure I discovered it on a hillside beyond the village, hidden among silver birch trees. The painted crosses and sodden wreaths were all I had expected: a people superficially Christianised. And a few headstones carried the Communist star.

But as I climbed higher I found other graves where bleached antlers lay. Their bier-sledges rested beside them, ritually broken; and the skulls of reindeer grimaced from the trees. On almost every grave–I saw this now–the offerings of enamel bowls and kettles had been turned upside down and gouged or split. A doll lay on the grave of a child, dismembered.

When I said farewell to the old herdsman, I asked about this, and it was as I had thought. The offerings, he said, were broken because the afterlife is the opposite of this one. Rivers there flow backwards from the sea. Things turned upside-down here become the right way up over there, and vice versa. Everything whole is broken, and everything broken becomes whole. Otherwise the dead will not find it.

In that inverted world, I thought, Potalovo will be paradise.

 

A motor-boat was waiting to take me to the steamer, and other craft swarmed about it in mid-river, while the owners tried to sell
fish. Only the imbecile Banana-skin was steering his boat in a manic daydream, round and round.

Nikolai stood beside me on the shore with a knot of others. ‘These are a good people at heart,' he said. ‘I asked around if anybody had anything to give to the Englishman before he left, and look! These are for you!' He handed me a big plastic bag. It was heavy with
omul
salmon. It carried with it a surge of reconciling warmth. Yet I felt somehow shamed, and a little stricken. They were useless to me. I stared out at the river, with a tightening throat. Then the motor-boat took me away.

At Tayshet, once a transit-camp for Gulag prisoners, the Trans-Siberian Railway branches south-east, and the long, lonely and disastrously expensive Baikal–Amur Railway drives on two thousand miles to the Pacific. Conceived grandiosely as an artery for opening up eastern Siberia, and running far north of the exposed route along the Chinese border, the BAM's single track traversed a region increasingly impoverished, and it never lived up to hopes.

But after Potalovo, I travelled it forgivingly. Its bunks overflowed with passengers' cheap merchandise, and its grimy windows were bolted shut. But I was on the move again. Whenever we crested a rise, the forested hills unravelled beneath us, until the red-gold flare of birch against pine seemed the natural state of half the earth. Once or twice some mammoth industry intruded, and at noon the Bratsk High Dam–once a showpiece of Socialist achievement–rumbled grandly beneath us: on one side a sprawl of lake and factories, on the other the gorge of the Angara river. But always the taiga closed in enormously again, its birch leaves drifting in silence through the massed dark of the conifers.

The only disturbance on the train was caused by me. I felt something move in my hair, and as I ruffled it, three or four squat black spiders dropped out. I had read that the Ixodes tick, which carries encephalitis, fades from the taiga in June, but I was wrong. ‘Dangerous! Dangerous!' cried the woman opposite me. She drilled the fingernails of one hand into her forearm. ‘They dig
themselves in. They murder you!' I gaped at them appalled. These ticks, I knew, could kill or cripple you for life, paralysing your neck and limbs. You are racked by atrocious headaches. But the woman was laughing–everybody in our compartment was laughing–as we trampled on them casually while they dispersed over the floor.

I thought back. I had just flown south from the grim nickel town of Norilsk, and near Krasnoyarsk, early that morning, I had walked innocently into broad-leaved forest. There, I knew, the ticks drop from the trees on to anything warm-blooded (even an Englishman) and might burrow fatally beneath the skin. Up to midsummer Russians only walk the taiga dressed in double layers of clothing.

For the moment, eased by the laughter around me, I gave up thinking about it. But that night I wondered how many more ticks were nestling in the creases of my clothing or body. Lying on my bunk, I began to feel them all over me, needling and burrowing. I imagined them wherever I itched. It was cold, but I started to sweat. The ticks dropped into my dreams. At every station the engine sighed to an unnerving silence, and I woke up. Then night passengers would come barging in under gargantuan packages, gasping and dragging things.

At last I locked myself in the lavatory and dampened my hair from a water-bottle. Then I scrutinised my scalp in a shaving-mirror, hunting for the tail of a buried tick. It would look like a protruding sunflower seed. After half an hour I transferred the inspection to my neck and shoulders. If I glimpsed a quivering tail, I had read, paraffin or salt was the answer. But by now people were battering on the lavatory door; I found nothing; and two hours later dawn was breaking over a new land.

A wash of cloud and stunted pines, their roots twisted about the scree, distilled the view to a Japanese painting, where a faint moon was printed on the sky. Grey rock had broken loose from the forest, and lifted to snow-lit peaks. Soon we were easing downhill. All across the horizon, a curtain of fanged mountains–brilliant and irregular–was glittering above the deepest lake on earth.

 

Severobaikalsk was built in virgin forest for railway workers at the northern tip of Lake Baikal. Its wooden settlement is still there, designed as a temporary town before the BAM builders could move into apartments. But the money dried up. The flat-blocks stopped in mid-construction. Here and there they wait in prefabricated sections, or stand half-finished like forgotten houses of cards. Yet the town remains more handsome than most, austere in its incompletion, a little rural.

A widower and his two sons lived in the wooden suburb. Quiet, preoccupied men, they ran treks into the hinterland and sometimes offered travellers rooms. The father, an engineer, had suffered a stroke; the sons were still at university. We settled down to talk about expeditions along the lake. The younger son, Shamil, was longing to go.

Then their door burst open and in strode two police officials. One was a slovenly officer in uniform, the other a stone-faced woman who called herself the Passport Office. I felt a chill of alarm blowing in from Brezhnev's time. The Passport Office yelled: ‘Is there an American living here?' She glared at me. ‘Is there an American?' She demanded to see my papers, then cited special laws in this province, Buryatia, requiring me to register at my first hotel. ‘Where are you staying?'

‘I don't know. I haven't chosen.'

‘You don't know! Why don't you know?'

‘I've only just arrived. I haven't
chosen
.' This word became tormenting to her, I could tell. I stressed it angrily.

‘Are you staying with these people then?'

I sensed this infringed some rule. ‘No.'

‘Why is your visa incomplete?'

‘It isn't incomplete. It's a business visa. I don't have to have Severobaikalsk on it. And I don't have to register anywhere for three days.'

‘You're in Buryatia now! Our laws supersede those Moscow ones. They are for your own protection. In order that you don't get lost.'

It was the old, spurious reason for supervision: the self-fulfilling notion that nobody, nothing, could survive without control.

Shamil said: ‘Those rules are idiotic. If a traveller comes and camps by the lake, how does he register? What is his address? How can you be responsible for him?'

His brother added: ‘And how would you know? And why should you? What's the point?'

The Passport Office balked, then demanded Shamil's passport. He tossed it at her. His father reprimanded her for her inhospitality in a mewing lecture, while the elder son went on eating
shashlik
contemptuously from a bowl, standing in front of the policeman with calculated unconcern. One of the officer's insignia was unstitching from his shoulder.

The woman turned to Shamil. ‘You have a Novosibirsk passport! You should register!'

Shamil's face was lumpy with adolescent spots and he wore thick glasses. He took these off as if he was tired of her. He had an awkward charm. ‘I'm a student in Novosibirsk,' he said, as if talking to a child. ‘But this is my home. I've lived here all my life. I don't have to register to be at home.'

By now I too had lost any fear of them. They appeared only ridiculous: the pantingly didactic woman and the doltish officer with his hat tilted back on his crew-cut head. I was starting to feel a bitter liberation, as if past humiliations were being avenged: the remembered torment of Russian friends. This anger was heady, and might go too far. These, after all, were only pawns. And now the policeman shambled out of the door, demoralised.

The woman tried to save some pride. ‘I demand that you register tomorrow,' she said half-heartedly. ‘We need three dollars and two passport photographs.' Her pen hung over her note-pad. ‘What's your name again?'

She had trouble with the ‘Th', as Russians do, and I did not resolve it for her. The youths went on bantering and confusing her. Their father turned his back. When at last she left, she apologised for disturbing us, with no glint of a smile.

‘Don't you register!' the brothers chorused. ‘It's her problem. It's people like that who make life impossible. Anyway, how did she know you were here?'

‘I don't know. I came by taxi.'

‘An informer. What was the driver like?'

But I could remember only a shapeless Ukrainian, and a silver skeleton which dangled from his dashboard. ‘I thought Stalin was dead.'

‘He's drowning in papers and rules,' Shamil said. ‘That's typical of this place. Here we were, about to go into the mountains, and these bastards arrive….'

We did drive into the mountains, all the same. Across bridges which we firmed up with logs, across scuttling streams in a temperature below freezing, we reached the snow-line. A military camp stood abandoned except for one bored guard watching a railway tunnel. A gang of other soldiers, toiling to repair an embankment, tried to flag us down for cigarettes. We tramped to the top of a pass against a battering wind, until we saw the snow-peaks.

Shamil's nose and eyes were streaming, but he did not notice. ‘Yes, it's beautiful, but it isn't enough. If you want a life, you have to get out of here. Out of Russia altogether. Otherwise you're caught in this bureaucracy. If you can't make use of it, or understand its way of thinking, you sink. So you have to be like a spider. That's how businessmen are here. Like spiders. They diversify, they know how to make contacts, give out gifts. They have to be flexible, because the rules are always changing. They spend half their energy avoiding them. But at heart nothing changes at all.'

He was starting to shiver. The wind burnt our faces. ‘Young people don't feel connected with this country, because its system isn't ours. It's an old people's system. It comes from another time. So we'll go to America, or anywhere that will free us. It's not that we don't love Russia, it's just that we have to live properly. We're young men born into an old man's world.'

 

I took a bus at dawn along the lake's edge, then walked up valleys towards a ruined Stalinist labour-camp. The forest shed a sunless quiet. There was no wind. But the falling of the birch leaves sent up a collective, near-silent murmur. Their trees made golden columns against the mountains. Sometimes I pushed across a
pulpy undergrowth of rotted trunks, whortleberries, blackened fungi, but emerged always into this melancholy descent of leaves–millions of them–drifting through the aisles of the forest. Then I entered a defile where pines had lost their grip in an avalanche of lichened scree. A shrike flew silent between the slopes.

The path died through the camp's gates. One of its posts had crashed across the way, the other was reeling in a thicket of willows. A stream lisped in the glade below. A mist of birch leaves covered everything. The log barracks had been dug into the ground against the cold, and their walls shored up with rocks and timbers for roofs now crashed in. Their doors and windows made ghostly frames on the undergrowth. Sixty years of forest had turned this Gulag to an opera-set, cruelly idyllic. Its ruins spread tree-sown above the river. Hell had been landscaped. I climbed about it on soft leaves. A watch-tower had collapsed in the shadows.

This had been a camp for the mining of mica, once used as insulation, and its prisoners had been taken away before the Second World War, when an artificial substitute was found. It had been abandoned as it stood. Wooden ore-buckets, tossed among the rocks, still traced the line of an overhead cableway. Their hasps and bands were intact, and one of the cramp-irons clanked grimly at my touch.

I noticed something silvery under my feet, and dug my hand into the earth. It came up clutching a translucent mass of flakes. For a second I gazed at them uncomprehending. They slithered through my fingers: mica. When I held the slivers to the sky, they separated like tissue-paper. The trees above their waste-tip already stood 40 feet tall.

I followed their trail up a slope and stumbled on the mouth of the mine. It opened in a near-vertical chasm, where gangway timbers had loosened and plunged into the flooded pit. Iron-bound ore-boxes and winches littered the entrance, one still attached to its tackle and holding a glinting sediment. I looked down 30 feet at a coppery pool and the start of passageways. I could hear water dripping. Gingerly I clambered down the pit-side, clinging to the timbers for as far as I could go. The beams, and the whole rock-
face, glistened with a dust of mica. Then the galleries vanished underwater.

I returned through the camp feeling a resurrected unease. A cold wind was sifting through its ruin. Its time seemed neither yesterday nor yet in any reconciled past. It had not been destroyed in shame, but left to decay. Why, I wondered, was there so little Russian outrage at the Gulag? Why did its perpetrators live on unpunished? I became dogged by the idea of a helpless national collusion, in which everyone was guilty, everyone innocent. The iron bucket-handles still moved in their sockets.

Months later, after I had returned to London, some silver flakes spilt from my pockets on to the floor, and glittered strangely.

 

Across the lake at evening–twenty-five miles over placid water–the ranges of Barguzin began. From this northern end the mountains curved south-west under a parapet of frozen clouds, until the haze thickened and they withdrew to a disembodied pallor floating above the lake.

As I stood there a taxi pulled out from a lane, as if it had been waiting for me, and I climbed gratefully in. Then I saw the silver skeleton dancing from its dashboard. I was looking into the heavy features of the Ukrainian informer. Consciously I recomposed my face, smoothing away anger and a tinge of alarm. But beside him sat a Buryat friend–one of the Mongol people from whom the province is named–and on the roof was his newly tarred canoe.

They were on an outing, the driver said, but I noted him now: a burly man whose face, I thought, turned slowly sympathetic around a wedge of grey moustache and pale eyes. Beside him the Buryat glittered with urgency. His black gaze seemed to see only short-distance, but with a passion to pin down, penetrate. Some terrible brightness was in him. His questions stampeded out. Where was I from? How much did I earn? A
month
or a
year
? Had England ever had a Bolshevik revolution? What of Margaret Thatcher? Of Churchill, Princess Diana, Sherlock Holmes?

The newly caulked canoe was off-loaded in front of his house and ramshackle garden, and I was enticed in to drink tea, together with the Ukrainian and a young trapper carrying muskrat skins.
We hung up our coats on elk horns in the hall. The tea became wine, the wine became vodka. The Buryat sprinkled a handful of both over the table. ‘That's for God!' He told me of a shamanistic shrine where he went each year to petition fortune for his family and himself. ‘My wife is Buddhist–she doesn't go. But I stand and ask for these things to come from the sky. For a blessing.' He couldn't explain it, he said, he hadn't thought about it. But he opened his palms to the ceiling and said almost angrily–because he thought I did not understand: ‘From the open sky! From the sky where God is!'