In Siberia (21 page)

The wine washed down sausage and black bread. ‘That's all we have now,' he said. ‘I used to be a machine-operator, but now I only trade in muskrat skins.'

The trapper smiled shyly: a glint of teeth between polished cheeks. He came from the most ancient native group, the Tungus-speaking Evenk, scattered between the Yenisei and the Pacific. He seemed to be seated lower than the rest of us, but in fact his thick body was retracted on its stool, and he was tense with bashfulness. He hunted squirrel and the rare sable, he said, but above all muskrat–and a pile of roan skins glistened under his stool. They were gutted whole, like long gloves, with two pinpricks where their eyes had been. ‘I lay traps at night,' he said. ‘Where their trails are. I see their trails.'

‘He hunts elk too,' the Buryat said. ‘Do you hunt elk in England? And are there sables? No? No?' His manic sparkle swept over me again. ‘How much is an English canoe? How much is a house?'

But slowly the confusions of choice, the perplexities of forestry and mortgages, the absence of
omul
-fishing in the Thames, began to depress him. His brightness leaked away. He said: ‘I suppose you find us very poor?'

‘There are poor in England.'

‘But you say the government gives to the unemployed.'

‘Family networks aren't so strong with us,' I said.

‘How can that be?'

From time to time the Ukrainian, perched ponderously beside me, offered insights into our differences, denied the existence of
Sherlock Holmes and revised my estimates of Western salaries upward, to everyone's alarm and wonder. His was a disconcerting presence. I imagined his informer's gaze or mind always on me, so that everything I said became suddenly suspect or odd. When I asked the Evenk about the price of muskrat skins, I imagined the Ukrainian thinking: this is industrial espionage on the fur trade. If I commiserated with the Buryat on his lack of work, the secret report might read: ‘He is fomenting disaffection among the unemployed.' I knocked back another vodka. This way paranoia lay.

When he drove me back at last into Severobaikalsk he enquired, as I expected, where I was staying. (Shamil's family had lent me an illicit flat.) I mumbled forgetfully. Then I asked him to drop me off in the town centre, and he did so without protest. Perhaps he understood. He wished me well, and refused any taxi money. We were on holiday, he said. I even imagined, in his parting handshake, a tinge of regret.

 

In late September, in the last mellow days called Lady's Summer, the road through the hills to the village of Baikalskoe blazed with changing forest. This was the fine-poised moment before the first cold wind would tear the colours down. The sunlight shone cleansed and delicate. The undergrowth spread like a forest fire, its berries outrageously crimson or blue, and the willows hung a gold confetti.

I hitch-hiked to a pass above the lake shore. From here, I hoped, I could look down on the City of the Sun in its bay. It should be complete by now. Solar-powered and unpolluting, its forty-five huts had been designed in sympathy with elusive psychic charges. Their layout–following the theories of Elena Roerich, wife of the mystic painter–would lend power and equilibrium to those living there, and the commune's founder, a local industrialist, had hailed their ‘sacred geometry' as the cure for Russia's ills. All the country's future cities, he said, would follow in their wake. So the commune would bask in the cosmic waves identified by the Academician. It would be grouped around something called a centre for cultural consciousness, where ecology would be studied
like mystic theology. It would save Russia and harmonise the world. In the post-Communist void, it seemed, God was a cosmic flux.

At the head of the pass, where the road turned inland, I found a straggle of pilgrims. Hanging above the bay–sacred to shamanism–a picnic pavilion and even a road sign were dripping with prayer-rags. Vodka bottles, coins, cigarettes, rouble notes and bunches of currants had been laid along the cliff-edge. The tree branches trembled with votive ribbons, and their trunks had turned to maypoles.

I gazed down on a gulf of blue and forest-bronze. Beyond it the headlands pointed to flocks of islands on glassy water, or withdrew to a gleam of lakes. But of Sun City, the blueprint for a redeeming future, there was no sign.

I waited there, dithering between relief and regret, but the pilgrims knew nothing about this lost salvation. They had come for the view's holiness. But that evening Shamil's brother said: ‘Oh, that Sun City! Its founder took to the Orthodox Church. It was never built. That's happening all over Russia now. Young people trying to escape the old mess, starting some farming sect or commune in the woods. But they don't come to anything. It seems we Russians have either to leave for the forest or go to America!'

So I tramped along a bay untouched by any later sanctity, and reached Baikalskoe five hours later: a fishing-village where the road ended. Banked steep above the water and ringed by snow-mountains, it had been plucked from a Russian fairy-tale. The tallest building was its rebuilt church, a green-turreted sanctuary on a mound above the harbour, and the filigreed window-frames, shutters and eaves of its cottages were all merry in peasant blues and reds, like cuckoo-clocks. They looked at once quaintly old and spanking new. Cattle drank at the shoreline, and high-prowed black fishing-boats slept in the marshes.

I climbed a bluff high above the lake, to an old place of Evenk sacrifice. Beneath me Lake Baikal became an ocean. Its headlands multiplied to the south, fainter and fainter, while around me the whole northern curve of its water spread kingfisher-blue, edged
by a phantasmal range of mountains, sometimes a mile high. All colour, from here, had refined to this drenching blue–even the blue-tinged white of clouds–as if blue must be the colour to which all others purified in time.

It is the peculiar clarity of Baikal which elicits this. As the transparent and slightly alkaline water deepens, other colours are filtered from its light spectrum, until only blue, the least absorbent, remains. Lying over the fault-line between two tectonic plates, whose separation is gradually dropping its floor lower, the waters plunge to a depth of over one mile: by far the deepest lake on earth. Its statistics stupefy. It harbours nearly one fifth of all the fresh water on the planet: equal to the five Great Lakes of America combined, or to the Baltic Sea. If Baikal were emptied and all the world's rivers diverted to its basin, they would not fill it within a year.

It is, too, the oldest of all lakes. The sediment of its decomposed organisms goes down for another mile and a half. Steeped in its own ecosystem, it has endured since the Tertiary Era, for over twenty-five million years. Of the 2,000 species inhabiting its depths, 1,200 are unique to it. Many remain, it seems, from the ancient seas that once covered most of Siberia, and in the pure abyss of the lake retain a kind of evolutionary innocence. Sponges and primitive crustaceans survive almost unchanged. Some 250 aquatic plant types endure only here. But common fish which swim in from its rivers disappear into unexplained extinction. Its waters seem to cherish the strange, but kill the ordinary.

In part their intense oxygenation accounts for this. Even in their greatest depths, mysterious tides circulate the oxygen among organisms that thrive nowhere else. And the lake's purity is intensified by a unique species of
epischura
crab which cleanses the lake of protoplasm, thinning and distilling it to translucent blue. Nothing superfluous survives. Algae and plankton, bones and cloth, are all devoured. Drowned bodies vanish unrecovered.

You try to imagine this frenzy of self-purification while a solitary hydrofoil hurries you across the serene surface for ten hours to the lake's end. There are no connecting roads, so this is the only way. In front of you Baikal curves south-westward for
four hundred miles–the distance from Prague to Milan–and only in Siberia could its immensity seem lost. Fifty miles away, on the far shore, the mountains move in a grey-white shadow-play, but the boat hugs the western bank. Often the cliffs rise sheer for miles, scuffed with clinging trees, like a worn-out pelt. Sometimes they unfurl in promontories of schist and basalt. Forest spills from their defiles.

Only a few fishermen's shacks survive in their shadow. Every fifty miles or so a motor-boat filled with red-faced giants in waterproofs and muskrat hats roars up to starboard and hurls on deck some barrels of
omul
, already gutted, for sale in the south; and the crew tosses out thirty or forty empty barrels astern for them to fill next time.

The
omul
is the lake's staple fish: a delicately flavoured relative of the salmon. When it is hauled up, it emits a sharp cry. It spawns upriver, but returns in November, before Baikal freezes; in spring its newly hatched young are swept down into the lake, where their parents are waiting to eat them.

Baikal seems to breed such strangeness. In its shallows a grain-sized crustacean called the ‘Baikal horse' inexplicably clutches two stones, as if for ballast. Farther out, 500-pound sturgeons take two decades to reach maturity and carry up to 20 pounds of caviar each. Minute, red-eyed
gammarid
shrimps live a mile down, sometimes packed 25,000 to the square yard, fondling the dark with preposterously long antennae. They share these deeps with the fatty
golianka
–some so translucent that you can read a book through them. The female is viviparous, giving birth to 2,000 ready-swimming young, and after birth may float dead to the surface. But once out of the cold and pressurised deep, her body explodes or simply melts away, leaving a pool of oil and an airy backbone, rich in Vitamin A. The Buryats once used the oil for their lamps.

Only birds commute out of this closed world. In autumn, geese, cranes, swans and a host of waders congregate in its marshes, and migrate south. Tens of thousands of ducks winter in its snowdrifts. And at some prehistoric time the ancestors of the little
nerpa
seal swam up the Yenisei and Angara rivers, it seems, and
stranded their descendants here–now 60,000 strong–to become the only freshwater seals.

By noon the far shore has misted away, and as the hydrofoil enters the channel between the western bank and the long, volcanic island of Olkhon, you are sailing over silk. It is the last voyage of the year, and the boat seems almost empty. The island is bitter and rainless: an ancient stronghold of shamanism. The Evenk knew that the sea-god Dianda lived there, and the Buryats peopled it with an evil spirit, the voice of its seismic groaning. The shores are unloosened even here, without rock or weed, and leak out only a salt or mineral trickle. Olkhon is in fact a mile-high underwater mountain, and you are sailing over the lake's abyss.

It is rarely so tranquil. Every few months Baikal shakes. All natives feared and worshipped it. The lake was a divinity, and perhaps an explanation. It was both benign and evil, and they were born from its waters.

In 1861 an earth tremor set church bells ringing along the shores, and flung its waters eastward, creating an instant region of fissures and geysers, and drowning 1,300 people. For much of the year the surface is tormented by violent winds. (Baikalskoe's cemetery is full of young fishermen.) The western
sarma
springs up out of nowhere, pulling the water into misty walls under a pall of dark. With hurricane force it pitches sheep and houses over the cliffs, and ices fishing-boats in freezing rain before sinking them.

Only winter brings a kind of peace. Then the lake freezes so solid that it becomes a lorry road. But without warning, during sharp temperature changes, a six-foot crack may open underfoot and streak for up to eighteen miles across the ice, pulling down trucks and bulldozers to join the tea-caravans of Bactrian camels engulfed a century back.

Beyond Olkhon, the way opens over a plain of ruffled blue, and the snow-mountains have gone. A few settlements appear, and rain. Here at the lake's southern end, where a giant paper mill spreads and the Selenga river carries down effluent even from Mongolia, there lingers the threat of pollution. As long ago as
the 1960s, when the factory's cellulose waste began destroying the
epischura
, an infant environmental movement began. The salvation of Baikal became its flagship. The water-level had already risen behind the newly built Irkutsk dam, destroying the shallow feeding-grounds of
omul
, and bird-life was declining. The protesters–the Siberian novelist Valentin Rasputin among them–fought a war against a shifty and irresolute bureaucracy. Baikal became more than itself. As the Soviet empire crumbled, it transformed into the mystic heart of a beleaguered Russia. In one heady triumph, huge filtration systems were fitted to the two pulp and paper plants on the lake and up the Selenga. But the river still carries down urban waste with nitrates from the farmed soil, and the paper plants (according to late reports) still leak into this primordial frailty of sea.

 

More than 300 rivers and streams fall into Baikal, but only one flows out: the fast-flowing Angara. Past Port Baikal, declined under its cliffs to a station for old ferries, the boat rides the river to the drop of the Irkutsk dam, and makes landfall beside it.

Weeks of visual deprivation turn Irkutsk glamorous. What would I be feeling, I briefly wonder, if I came upon it in Umbria or Castile or New England? Futile questions. It is in Siberia. Its architectural variety and charm, its modest size (little more than half a million inhabitants) and some elusive grace, lend it an old intimacy. Once it was called ‘the Paris of Siberia', and I walk it in leisurely euphoria: past the graceful 200-year-old White House of the governor-general of East Siberia (now a library); down the long axis of Marx Street; past the Opera House and the mansions built by exiled aristocrats and jumped-up gold merchants; and on down Lenin Street to the towers and crosses of restored churches, and at last the embracing bend of the Angara river.