In Siberia (35 page)

He burnt with a thwarted energy. He was a field archaeologist in his bones. But now he wanted time to read, to think. In this isolated town, his scholarship was long out of date. Often his reading had come to him by chance. He talked of Teilhard de Chardin…. ‘And the work of Moritz Wagner, a contemporary of Darwin, saved me from madness at that time. He explored the possibility of man's origins in a cold environment instead of a tropical one, and he valued stone implements–rather than bones–like I do.'

But stone, I thought cruelly, did not submit to radio-carbon dating. You could dream around it.

‘Some people say Diring Yuriakh may be as old as three million years. Yet others'–he gazed down, and I sensed that these others were the vital ones, the heavyweights of the West–‘well, others say it is 500,000 years old. Or less, even less.' Paula thrust her muzzle into his hand. He seemed to be caressing her loyalty. ‘Do you want to see the excavation video?'

We went into his sitting-room; it was crowded with kitsch, as the Academician's had been: Chinese seals, mammoths carved in mammoth ivory, cheap Buddhas, a bust of Peter the Great. He closed out the light, and the video flickered on. ‘It's a beautiful place,' he said.

It poised 120 metres above the east bank of the Lena, and looked like a sandy beach. His bulldozers had ploughed its terrace two kilometres square, but the permafrost began only six metres down, he said, and the work had been back-breaking. ‘But we dropped shafts to 40 metres, and still we found the same things. There was no doubt. You see the clusters there?'

I saw oval groupings of stones: an anvil, hammer-stones, flakes,
axes. ‘We found them again and again. They seem to form little workshops. The place was a town, certainly, a kind of town. In its day it was level with the Lena. And look, there's my dog!' Paula was often in the picture, cantering across the dunes. Then the camera strayed back over the circles of precious stones, while the bulldozers puttered behind. Down the excavation shafts the permafrost enclosed smears of red sand, like undried blood splashed against the walls. ‘It's beautiful,' he said, ‘and it's already falling in, vanishing. This was our last day.'

Workmen were wending down from the abandoned terrace, while he watched them beside me, in silence, in his slippers. Sometimes his camera wobbled off, beguiled by the watery mudflats of the Lena's west bank, by an elk swimming the river, by its hills at sunset. He was afraid of forgetting. At last he said: ‘Now that it's all over, I want to convene a world conference. Because what can be more important than the arrival of man on earth? How did it happen? Man is not an animal.' He stroked Paula apologetically. ‘Darwin was a fine scientist who knew about physiology, but the movements of peoples were not his field. That is what we need to discuss now. The origins of man.'

He was not a Russian chauvinist, I sensed, only fatally cut off from his peers. I promised to send him some articles he requested from Britain: on excavations in Pakistan which seemed to parallel his own. I was also to send him, with a heavy heart, the findings of American geoarchaeologists who had tested Diring Yuriakh. They had used the new technique of thermoluminescence, which can estimate how long quartzite has been buried by measuring the electrons trapped in its crystals, and they had come up with a site date around 300,000 bc. Perhaps Mochanov already knew of this, and could not bear it. He did not write back.

Yet the site was unique in its way. Mochanov's findings pushed back habitation of the Arctic edge to a time far more remote than had been supposed. Here, it seemed, some unknown people had slipped through a crack in the Great Ice Age, and made a fleeting life.

Before I left, Mochanov quaintly took my photograph and gave
me his interim report on Diring Yuriakh, published in 1992. He lingered in his doorway. With Russia's economy in the state it was, he knew his conference on the origins of man was a pipe-dream. But there was one thing he wanted to do, he said, while he still could. He wanted to fly to Kenya with his wife–‘we always used to fly together'–and to look down, at last, on the Rift Valley.

 

The only other passengers in my twin-engine Antonov were three soldiers wrapped in overcoats against the cold, with caps clamped over their ears. Beneath us the Lena, freezing over from shore to shore, still trickled steel-grey through its ice. But all its tributaries had frozen solid, and the floes drifting on its current were sticking on snow-blurred islands. I had hoped to find a truck going east to Magadan and the Pacific, but the single road was impassable, ruptured by permafrost, and this battered Antonov was the only way out. As it banked over Yakutsk, the wrecked collage of thousands upon thousands of snow-drowned cottages showed in pencil-line walls and the dark tracks around them. Once I thought I could make out the empty site of Sergei and Marfa's circus; then came the toy figure of Lenin in his square; then the chessboard of tenements where Tania waited for a future and Mochanov laboured over the advent of man. At last the clouds closed over them and we were heading east under a darkening sky.

The faint, continual vibration of the aeroplane kept me awake, vaguely alarmed. From time to time, when the clouds parted, a frozen desolation of mountains glimmered below, with no sign of life. And this wilderness continued for six hundred miles. Seventy years ago, along its single track, a few traders from Yakutsk brought brick tea and contraband vodka to depleted tribes, and returned with mammoth ivory, furs and a few girls to the brothels of Yakutsk, sold by their clans for the price of a poor reindeer each.

Below us now the valleys were black with stunted larches, where the rivers lay inert. Soon we seemed to be flying over pure
glacier, knotted with peaks and clefts. Its icy stillness filled our cabin. The soldiers were muffled asleep, and I gazing down, numbed.

Within living memory this emptiness had become a continent of death-camps. In 1931, a few years after huge gold deposits were discovered, a region embracing all north-east Siberia beyond the Lena–a land vaster than Mexico–fell under the agency named Dalstroy, which soon became a branch of the Ministry of the Interior and the secret police. Dalstroy was a law unto itself. In its zone the Soviet constitution did not hold. It ruled a waking nightmare.

This country of Kolyma was fed every year by sea with tens of thousands of prisoners, mostly innocent. Where they landed, they built a port, then the city of Magadan, then the road inland to the mines where they perished. At first the convicts were peasant kulaks and criminals, then–as Stalin's paranoia heightened–imagined saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries from every class: Party officials, soldiers, scientists, doctors, teachers, artists.

They died in miners' tunnels from falling rocks and snapped lift cables, from ammonal fumes and silicosis, scurvy and high blood pressure, spitting up blood and lung tissue. In winter, when steam-hoses melted the gold-bearing sand, they wheeled its slag from the hot panning-sheds into temperatures as low as -60°F, and were dead of pneumonia or meningitis within a month. In less than ten years Kolyma was producing one third of the world's gold. Every kilogram, it has been computed, cost a human life. But the numbers of dead are in fact unknown. They have been guessed at over two million.

It was night by the time we landed fifty miles from the Pacific, at Sokol, where I slept in an empty rest-house. Two long-distance buses, I heard, still travelled into the hinterland when snowfall allowed, and by these–and some wary hitch-hiking–I went back into the Kolyma hills.

They had the monotony of the everlasting. They circled the road like echoes or reflections of one another, rounded like old tumuli. Sometimes the wind had dusted their summits to pates of brown rock. The whole land looked unformed, withdrawn into
some other geological age. And it was only half-lit. The sun struggled up a quarter of the sky, fell again.

The road I travelled past silent villages had at first connected Magadan for three hundred miles with an archipelago of gold-camps. People still call it the ‘Road of Bones'. Thousands of prisoners were hurled into its building at the start, but mud engulfed it, then frost tore it up. One mile of it alone consumed 80,000 wooden beams. By the onset of the first snows in 1932 the convicts were still living in tents and brushwood huts. It was one of the most savage winters in memory. Blizzards raged for weeks on end. Whole camps were frozen alive–prisoners, guards, even dogs. Out of many thousand workers, barely one in a hundred returned to Magadan next spring.

Dalstroy's first chiefs were shot as spies in 1937. Then a purer cruelty set in. The prisoners' fur clothes and boots were exchanged for canvas shoes and wadded jackets, which soon hung in tatters. The intention was now to kill them. Their diet was reduced to famine level: 800 grams of bread, with occasional scraps of salted fish or brined cabbage. They took to consuming animal carcasses, reindeer moss, wheelbarrow grease. Their work-day extended to fourteen hours, their sentences to twenty-five years. Their end was hastened by the setting of unreachable quotas. Work brigades laboured frenziedly to meet them, but their starved bodies could not hold up. As their output fell, their food was reduced in punishment, and they entered a fatal spiral of decline. Every evening and morning lists were read out of those to be executed or those who had already been shot, while the officer dusted the hoarfrost from his papers and after each speech a band of criminals played a little fanfare. The mines broke a man's health after three weeks, and killed him within a few months. Sometimes whole brigades were taken from the work-face and shot out of hand. The criminals among them were appointed overseers, armed with clubs, and murdered the politicals with impunity. (They executed a man, typically, by lifting him up and smashing him to the ground until his already decalcified bones were broken.) But mostly people faded unnoticed into death. Only a few commandants relished their task, and would empty their revolvers into the
paraded workers with shouts of joy. There were camps where nobody survived at all.

You lose your own eyes here, and start to imagine through those of the dead. You have no right to this country. It belongs to them. Is it sometimes beautiful? You cannot say. You only see signposts to atrocious places: Shturmovoi, Urchan, Oimyakon. The camps along the road have been pilfered away. Only a few barracks are being reused as warehouses, or have rotted to heaps ringed by stray concrete stakes. The watch-towers have fallen. Man-made mounds and trenches heave and wrinkle under the snow, the colourless shrubbery.

In the dark my bus stops among the floodlit tenements of Orotukuan: sixty years before, it was a snail-pace interrogation centre, littered with the frozen corpses of those who had waited too long. A girl sells you fruit-juice from an unlit kiosk. Forty miles beyond, a side-valley leads to Elgen, the women's camp where the newcomer Yevgenia Ginzburg joined a herd of robots with brick-red faces, and wept at what she would become. Even the camp overseers disdained to rape them.

At Yagodnoe I ran into a quartet of genial mafia who drove me around town in a Nissan jeep. ‘English! Not really? Then why here? Here is shit. Are you doing some kind of business? Then why, why?' It was past midnight and they were hunting prostitutes; but the place looked dead. They found me a bed in a workers' dormitory, paid the porter–‘Russian gift!'–and vanished into the dark.

I woke to a cold dawn and mountains shining under a porcelain sky. It was, yes, bitterly beautiful. In this half-deserted town my arrival had been noticed. Nobody sane came to Yagodnoe. Two local journalists drove me along the Horse river and south to Serpentinka. The road was lacquered with black ice, and the Kolyma tributaries sordid with the hummocks of old waste-heaps which followed them like the detritus of a mole. The vaster hummocks of mountains repeated them in the sky. Abandoned dredgers littered their banks. The convicts had gone forty years before, and prospectors had taken their place. But during the past few years half of these had drifted away, the journalists said. Here
and there a gutted settlement overlooked our route, or the shell of a factory or brick kiln.

On a spur above the road snaking down to the river, we came to Serpentinka. Pavlov and Garanin, the new lords of Dalstroy, had built it as a torture and execution centre. It was the black heart of Kolyma. In an overhang beside the isolation cells, two tractors would rev up their engines to drown the shots and screams of execution. In 1938, 26,000 prisoners died here, hundreds by Garanin's own hand. Their bodies were dragged behind its hill on tractor-sledges, or else they were led, alive and blindfolded, to trenches there, and shot in the head. Then, in line with Stalin's occasional policy of liquidating those in state security, Garanin was shot and all the personnel of Serpentinka with him, and the place razed to the ground.

We crunched through its void of snow. Our voices were too loud in its silence. A granite block, bound with barbed wire and a strand of plastic flowers, was engraved to the memory of the ‘tens of thousands' murdered by the state. It glistened with ice. Beyond it, a trail of mounds and dead-looking shrubs followed the ghost of a track into nowhere.

You gaze with their dead eyes, and see no hope. Nobody escaped. They called Kolyma ‘the Planet', detached from all future, all reality beyond its own. Desperate to escape into hospital, the prisoners injected kerosene under their skin, rubbed acid in their eyelids, hacked off their fingers, feigned madness. But bit by bit they were reduced to savages, famished and broken. They became the animals that the authorities had decreed them to be, so their death left no conscience. They descended into the walking dead, who lingered about camp on depleted rations, then slipped into oblivion. Frail from a characteristic high blood pressure, they longed only to see their families before they died. Their only forced labour was to bury one another. Sometimes nobody knew whose corpses these were. Young men became old within a few months. Their tooth-fillings might yield more gold than they had mined in life. They were tossed into mass graves.