In Siberia (5 page)

The past was closing in on her. She had stuck her family photo
graphs in albums at first, out of sight. Then one day it was not enough simply to leaf through them, as if visiting. She wanted them with her, always. So she tore them out and framed them along the shelf of the living-room, above the chest-of-drawers and the bed. She wobbled to her feet. ‘When there's nobody here, and life gets heavy, then I look at them.'

It was a gallery of the young–hopeful parents, blond children–but they looked far away. I asked dutifully: ‘How many children do you have?'

‘Four. But three of them are dead.' A white cowlick had loosed from under her headscarf and was knocking on her forehead. She looked like an ancient girl. ‘I had a daughter who fell ill and died at six months. And my eldest son–that's him, with his car and wife–he died four years ago, only forty-four, from a blood-clot in the head. He came to repair their new apartment in Tobolsk, and had been lying there a week before they found him.'

Only one son had survived. Yet Anfissa's grandchildren proliferated along the wall in a parade of cheekiness and summer dresses. Her eyes flickered over them and came to rest on a yellowing photograph at the end. ‘That's my youngest son.' A saturnine youth leaned towards the camera, unsmiling. ‘He was sixteen. He killed himself on a motor cycle.' Her tone of routine melancholy sharpened into living pain. ‘He had such a future.' His snapshot stood separate from the rest, enshrined. Her fingers trembled when she pointed at it. Above it she had plastered a saccharine print of the Virgin, and beneath it stood an icon, sooted by candle-flame, of the Mother of God cradling her Son.

‘There,' she said, ‘there.' It was the sound a mother makes as she soothes her child to sleep.

I went out into the night, brushing through the cow-parsley, and by the time I returned she had lit a candle beneath the icon and was contemplating her gallery again. I wondered why it comforted her to watch them: this regiment riddled by death. Perhaps in her mind the living and the dead occupied the same remote hemisphere, because none of them ever came to see her, she said, they were all too far away. Or perhaps she slipped back mechanically into the time before tragedy, when her husband had
worked a combine harvester all day, and there was flax in the fields, and children.

Before bed I wondered whether to pull the divan into the kitchen and sleep there. But she only said: ‘It's up to you. I'm an old woman. Nobody will talk.' She laughed gruffly. ‘That's all finished.'

Her bed stood under a garish wall-carpet, and for a moment, before I switched the light off, her stout body under its striped sheet lay framed in Persian glamour. Soon in the darkness her candle flickered and died under the Virgin and her sullen son, and only the lace curtains hung faint patterns of light in the windows. Anfissa's talk came quiet and disembodied in the dark. ‘You have a mother? How old is she?…So she's older than me…Does she
look
older?' An obscure vanity was surfacing.

I lied. ‘Yes, of course.'

Silence. Then: ‘Your flat in London, is it made of wood?…And do you have cattle or pigs?…Ah…ah…'A clock rustled on the wall above my divan. Time became audible. ‘But you have no children. How can that be? Think how quickly they die!' She stirred and groaned. ‘In England, do you have a war now or not?…No? There's always war in this land. And you, travelling here alone, aren't you afraid? It's become terrible in the towns. People are taking to killing now. In Tobolsk too. Last week a mafia boss was pulled from his car and murdered. I heard it on the radio. It's bad for you to go, very bad. You ought to be afraid…'

Her voice sank in sleepy misgiving. In her experience, men died young. Her sentences shrank to disconnected words–Alone…mafia…'–until the patterns in her curtains grew dim above my head, and she fell silent, or I ceased to hear.

 

At the bus-stop beside the Tobolsk road two drunks, who had dogged me out of the village, closed in to beg with whines and threats, and prodded at my rucksack. Nobody knew when a bus might come. As they became more menacing I grew more angry, and they retired to mutter plans in a nearby field. An hour went by. Then, close beside me, I heard a familiar, caressing voice and
turned round to see Viktor, tousled and weak-eyed, clambering towards me up the roadside embankment. ‘It's early…you're leaving early.'

I sat in the dust while the beggars circled round me, sensing competition, and beside me Viktor's gaze flickered up and down the road, his voice a corrupting whisper: ‘Pay me. Just a little…pay me…'

But roubles, I knew, would liquefy down his throat. I had already left money for Anfissa, and she had held the note in front of her a long time in astonishment–fifteen dollars was a third of her monthly pension–then turned away to wash something already clean in her sink, murmuring: ‘It's a great deal. I did not expect it.'

Now Viktor handed me a useless Soviet coin. ‘For your journey. Take it…' and the bolder of the drunks slunk to my other side and passed me a gold disc. I examined it sceptically. It turned out to be a Soviet maternity medal, awarded to women who had borne five children. But the man was not laughing. He said: ‘What will you give me? What?' Viktor was pressing me on the other side. ‘I'm ill,' he breathed.

I said: ‘Go to a hospital.'

‘A hospital can't cure my illness.'

‘I know.'

He tried to encircle me, excluding the other men. ‘Vodka is our medicine now.'

‘I don't have any.'

‘Then pay me….'

Each of us could hear the others, yet everything transpired in whispers. ‘Just a little…What? What?…Pay me….'

Then, far away down the cratered road, a ramshackle bus materialised, making for Tobolsk. As I climbed in, Viktor's face slithered into smiles, without resentment. ‘Remember me'–his stage whisper stroked my ear–‘your Rasputin.'

‘I will.'

The road cut through a slushy, formless land–the raw material of creation–easing into pasture where the hay was rolled up like bedding and tributaries of the Tobol river turned figures-of-eight
through the loamy soil. A band of forest crossed every horizon and sometimes shadowed the road with an evergreen dark, in which a few silver birches glimmered. From time to time we stopped for passengers to smoke–they crouched by the roadside, puffing with knit brows; and twice we passed road-blocks where the police were disembowelling lorries. ‘Drug searches,' said a man. ‘We never had that before.'

Three hours later we were wending through a labyrinth of wooden houses and decayed stone churches. On the heights above, behind the walls of a kremlin, the sleek white bodies of cathedral and bell-tower floated under their domes. Almost from the start of Russia's sixteenth-century invasion, until 1824, Tobolsk was the capital of Siberia. Near this site, in 1582, the Tartar centre of Sibir had been sacked by a band of Cossacks who muscled their boats over the Urals and inaugurated the conquest of the whole subcontinent.

The Cossacks' leader Yermak has endured in legend as a primitive paragon. A former river-pirate, he invaded at the instigation of the powerful Stroganov merchant dynasty, to push their fortunes east. Because he and his Cossacks were free men, he was later hailed by Communist propaganda as a hero of the people, who liberated lesser tribes from the Tartar yoke. In fact, Yermak was a brutal mercenary, and his Cossacks a medley of freebooters, itinerant labourers and criminals, and they went with imperial backing. During three years of warfare, with fewer than a thousand men, he shattered the Tartar khanate whose warriors–a remnant of the Mongol Golden Horde–were the most redoubtable barrier to Russian expansion. At the height of his success, Ivan the Terrible rewarded him with an elaborate suit of armour embossed with the imperial arms. But little by little the dispossessed khan Kuchum wore the Cossacks down. While bivouacked one night on a storm-swept island in the Irtysh river, they were surprised and butchered almost to a man. Yermak, it is said, hacked his way to the river-bank and plunged into the current, but the weight of his imperial armour pulled him under.

Instantly his legend spread. The Tartars said they recovered his body from the water, and that his uncorrupted flesh worked
miracles. Above his riverside grave sprang up a column of unearthly fire, and every midwinter an arm in golden mail reared like Excalibur above the water where he had drowned. Around the fugitive campfires of Siberia, ballads and folk-tales nourished and distorted him into a Slavic Parsifal or Robin Hood. The Church beatified him.

The Tartar khan Kuchum, a grander figure, continued to harry the Russians from his exile, although almost all his family had been captured or killed. He rejected the soft amnesties which the czars held out to him. He wanted his kingdom back. Still defiant in his blind old age, he was murdered by hostile tribesmen, but like Yermak he entered his people's heart, so that a century later revolts were still sparked in his name.

The Russians' advance eastward grew remorseless. They set out across the continent as other nations embarked over the ocean, and just as spices or silver tempted European empires into being, so Russian Siberia was the creation of the sable. A few pelts from this glossy tree-marten could make a man's fortune. Their revenue poured into the czar's hands. The invading Cossacks exacted an imperial fur-tribute from natives crushed by their firearms, and spread like a disease along the rivers, spiking their passage with log forts. No sooner was the sable hunted out in one region than the Russians advanced on another. In time-dishonoured imperial fashion, they exploited the tribes' disunity, and within sixty years of Yermak's death they had pushed clear across Asia and reached the Pacific.

Tobolsk was the springboard for this conquest. Its lower town is still restless with Tartars. The shells of great churches haunt the wooden streets. Their naves are littered with cattle-dung and broken farm machinery. From here the walls of the kremlin on its hill rear into view, while above them the cathedral domes bulge like overripe vegetables. From below, the cliff rampart looms over 100 feet and seems impossible to breach. Nothing shows but crenellated walls. Then as you draw closer a deep, man-made cutting opens in the hill, hewn out three hundred years ago by Swedish prisoners of war. You climb through concealing trees. From the battlements jut square and round towers topped off by
candle-snuffer turrets and flying iron flags. You pass under a heavy arch, pierced with the bolts of vanished gates, and creep cat-like along a sunken way. Above you there surge blue and spinach-green domes dusted with gold stars, whose lanterns bloom into a swarm of secondary cupolas and filigreed crosses. Nothing sounds but the scrape and clink of desultory repairs in the kremlin courtyard where they rise. A light rain starts to fall. You enter the court over rank grass: the heart of old Siberia, spacious and derelict. The seventeenth-century cathedral inherits the first bishopric in Siberia, founded in 1621. There is an episcopal palace and an old merchants' emporium. An enormous bell-tower hovers nearby. Everything is plastered white.

Stubbornly, insidiously, the past is returning. Tobolsk is the seat of an archbishopric again. Students from the reopened seminary walk in their dark jackets along the overgrown paths. But when asked if they want to revert to a theocracy, or install a constitutional czar, they look indifferent. And their priest points to a small tower where the first exile to Siberia was hung. This was not a man, but a 700-pound bell from Uglich, which rang an insurrectionary alarm on the murder of the imperial heir in 1581. The usurper Boris Godunov had the bell publicly flogged and its tongue ripped out, and ordered the citizens of Uglich to drag it over the Urals to Tobolsk, where it was forbidden to ring. The czars were full of madness, says the priest.

Tobolsk eased out of history. First the great overland Trakt road, then the Trans-Siberian Railway, bypassed it to the south. As you walk along the battlements the town heaves below you in a sea of mansions, soft with birch trees and its own decay. Its colours are gentle and dim: dark with weathered wood and rust, streets silenced by rain, a glint of gold where churches are resurrecting.

But it is not a healthy town to live in, says the priest: the flooded river erodes everything, and half the old houses are abandoned. The past is rotting away. You cannot live in it.

Six hundred miles north of Tobolsk, as the twin-engine Antonov crossed the Arctic Circle, the land transformed. The forest had gone, and in its place glimmered a treeless tundra whose earth was a silvery maze of lichen and fungi. No road or railway crossed it. For thousands of square miles the wilderness shattered into a jigsaw of ponds and streams, as if the whole continent had flattened to sponge, where the rivers wound fantastically upon one another, and splintered ten or twenty ways.

Yet a few feet underground the soil was set iron-hard in ice. For eight months of the year the snow seals it. Then out of the permafrost in spring evaporating water oozes to the surface, and these strange, transitory lakes and streams return. The rhythmic upheaval of the soil–its seasonal swelling and shrinking–deposits boulders and stones in mysterious, concentric rings, as if some pedantic intelligence were at work, and carves out circular pools. Yet the region is almost uninhabitable. It spreads like a protoplasm where nature is still forming, or has already disintegrated. To the west the Urals lift in naked stone.

A low, continuous judder in the aeroplane kept me on edge (this, after all, was Aeroflot, and we had only two propellers). An air hostess handed out bowls of fizzy water and some stale sweets. In the seat beside me a woman was plaiting her daughter's hair. Suddenly below us, out of the tundra, shot up smokestacks and a black detritus of factories and ruins. It came like a physical shock: Vorkuta. For years the name had sounded a death-knell.
Coal was discovered here in the early twenties, and by 1934 the mines were sucking down an army of innocent convicts. Soon the place became an evil jewel in the Gulag crown. The numbers of dead ran into hundreds of thousands. Forty thousand alone died constructing the railway west. The last victims were released, sickly and redundant, only in 1959.

North of Vorkuta a loop-road still links its thirty mines, but only eleven pits are still working. That evening I roamed the town in fascinated unease. Its apartment blocks and offices were decomposing untouched, their walls dripping plaster, half the windows smashed. A river lisped over slag. I passed factories ringed with barbed-wire and searchlights, as if this were the only architecture anyone could remember, and every other street dribbled into a tundra hung with skeletal shutes and pit-wheels.

Here the only superfluity is coal. It lies in heaps along the roads, and litters every compound. The streets are laid on coal-dust. When it rains, the puddles shine black. It hazes the air and it worms under your fingernails. Eventually, it eats your lungs.

The cars make a wandering trickle between the pot-holes on Lenin Street. Cloth cap in fist, his statue still looks across Lenin Square at the Miners' Palace of Culture. The pool in front is awash with vodka bottles. Everywhere on ministerial facades the carved insignia survive: red stars and crossed hammers, torches and banner-dripping spears. Along the rooftops leftover slogans set up an archaic clamour. ‘To the masses of Vorkuta!' ‘The Miners are the Guardians of Labour!' There is no will either to remove or to replenish them. One by one their letters are dropping off.

I came upon some barracks built for convict miners which no one had bothered to demolish. The weed-sown earth crept half-way up their wooden walls, and the aisles where their bunks had been were filled with rubble. Sometimes the prisoners were packed so closely that they could barely turn in their sleep. At the end of each barracks the life-saving stoves had collapsed in cascades of brick, and garbled English graffiti spattered the walls from a later age. ‘Lucky Streik', ‘Kiss my Ais….'

 

A young girl stands in Lenin Square. It is almost deserted. She
looks about fifteen, but her black skirt barely descends below her hips, and her stockings stop half-way up her bruised thighs. How many days a year in Vorkuta can she dress like this? She appears pathetically tired and young; perhaps it is her first time. Jobs are hard in Vorkuta. But the palm of one hand is pressed against her cheek, as if to deny her presence here. Then a middle-aged man strolls up and says something. Haltingly, she follows him along the pavement. Her fingers keep slipping behind to pull down her skirt, to no avail. The man hails a car beneath the statue of Lenin, and she climbs tentatively in. By now her hand covers half her face.

 

My hotel was huge, half ruined and the only one left: a monument to Stalin which rang with my footsteps. Four policemen gazed stonily from an office across the hall, and concierges still slumped at their corridor desks. In the cavernous dining-room canned dance-music played for nobody.

I walked in the streets without knowing where to go. I wondered vaguely if I were being followed. The sallow people wandering the pavements could be thinking whatever you ascribed to them. It was oddly quiet. A populace of old men sat remote in the arid squares, and spoke with me in dislocated phrases and half-smiles. They were Latvians and Ukrainians, exiled long ago, and were taking the air with reticent surprise.

For it was warm, with a dense, midsummer stillness. By eight o'clock in the evening the sun was still high, and at eleven the sky held a limpid, refracted light, as if it were illuminating the town through black gauze. But not one in ten windows was lit. Lost in its suburbs, I had a fantasy that the past, like something viscous and unreconciled, was leaking back in, inhabiting abandoned rooms, reclaiming the factories. Those who had died here far outnumbered the living. They had built the city in chains, and lie beneath it. Yet at midnight people were still walking their mongrels in the roads, and reading newspapers.

 

Next morning I found a cheery Ukrainian to drive the twenty-mile noose-road through the mines. Vorkuta was a wonderful
town, Vasil said, because it was close to the Urals, and you could hunt. He'd lived here thirty years, and life had been splendid. ‘You should see the rivers and lakes there.
Hundreds!
And chock-full of fish! You can bribe geologists or soldiers to take you out in a jeep, and they drop you where you want. As for this'–he dismissed Vorkuta with a backhand–‘everything will get better! It's the worst moment now. Soon…'

But the town was slipping away, and before us unrolled a ghastly no man's land. For miles its grasslands bunched and undulated with the scars of vanished buildings; and some forgotten war, it seemed, had littered its surface with scrap-iron and ruin. All colour had drained away. Even the sky hung in thundery black and white. Pylons and telegraph poles cross-hatched half the land, while enormous hot-water pipes wormed below, their lagging spilt out over the discoloured grass.

Our car shuddered into pot-holes. We were quite alone. Vasil started telling me fishing and hunting tales, and drove more carelessly as he dreamt of salmon and Arctic fox. Ahead our horizon was bloated with slag-heaps and chimneystacks. Polluted tributaries of the Vorkuta river wandered about. Sometimes I could not tell if a mine were working or wrecked. We would pass a ruin with no man or truck in sight, its shutes snapped off and chimneys extinct; then its pit-wheel would start turning. Surely that was the wind! But no. Deep beneath those installations the earth was teeming with men.

Yet above ground, we were driving among ghosts. Every mine was shadowed by the traces of a prison camp or cemetery. They ruffled the soil with terraces, crashed-in barracks, rotted watch-towers. Sometimes I would leave Vasil and tramp away alone. My imagination was failing me. I wanted to shock myself into pity; but instead I felt a distant recoil and bewilderment. The ground seemed sick underfoot. I was afraid of what I might kick there. I walked lightly over its corrugations. I tried to remember any individual who had died here–a Mandelstam, a Babel. He might have stirred some sharp, particular loss. But I knew of no one. Only a nameless nation of the dead, whom I could not quite separate from its persecutors.

These camps were self-contained states. They evolved in a perverted reflection of the world outside. After Stalin's pact with Hitler in 1939, the mass of Russian and Ukrainian convicts were joined by tens of thousands of Poles, and as early as 1943 Russian soldiers recaptured from the Germans were incarcerated here as traitors. With the annexation of the Baltic states, the Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians poured in–those who'd fought against Hitler and Stalin indifferently–and by the war's end Vorkuta's patchwork of nations embraced Germans, Japanese, Nationalist Chinese, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Persians, several French and Americans, even a Tibetan herdsman who had strayed over the Mongolian border.

Inside the camps the swarm of guiltless politicals was tyrannised by the tight-knit criminal fraternity imprisoned with them. These
blatnye
lived by their own savage laws, conducted their own executions, seized whatever privileges were going. The camp administration ignored or used them. The guards could be as vulnerable as the prisoners. Any carelessness, any untoward mercy, and they might be shot. The pervasive feel was one less of sadism than of brute indifference. By overwork, half-starvation and piercing cold, the convicts were ground down into an animal mass. On a daily ration of porridge, three ounces of fish and a few drops of oil, they laboured under a quota system often impossible to fulfil. They perished of typhus, tuberculosis, pneumonia, or dropped dead of heart failure as they hauled the coal-trucks up the pit. Sometimes their comrades concealed their corpses so they could draw their rations; but within three days the bodies' stench betrayed them.

‘…And in winter you just cut a hole in the ice, drop in a line, and up they come–graylings by the dozen!' Vasil was anticipating his next expedition. ‘And later you get the big one, the salmon. In July last year I was on the Usa, not thinking of anything, and suddenly the rod's torn out of my hands. The creature weighed fifty kilos, I could swear–that's my wife's weight!–and it flashed round and looked at me….'

On either side of us they continued: mine–graveyard–camp–mine–graveyard–all in ruins. Sometimes a village enfolded
the barracks where a few ex-prisoners or their descendants lingered, with nowhere else to go. But most places remained only in memory, like the brickyard where 1,300 politicals were executed in 1937 by the ruthless commandant Kashketin. (He was awarded the Order of Lenin, then shot.) But a grey obelisk commemorates them. The punishment camp of Cementny Zavod had shrivelled to a huddle of gaunt tenements and a vomiting smokestack. Pallid women waited outside shops or sat round a vacant netball-pitch. Even five years before, miners' strikes could rock the Kremlin; but now their pay was six months in arrears, Vasil said, and still the depleted gangs were going to work.

Then we reached the shell of Mine 17. Here, in 1943, was the first of Vorkuta's
katorga
death-camps. Within a year these compounds numbered thirteen out of Vorkuta's thirty: their purpose was to kill their inmates. Through winters in which the temperature plunged to -40°F, and the
purga
blizzards howled, the
katorzhane
lived in lightly boarded tents sprinkled with sawdust, on a floor of mossy permafrost. They worked twelve hours a day, without respite, hauling coal-trucks, and within three weeks they were broken. A rare survivor described them turned to robots, their grey-yellow faces rimmed with ice and bleeding cold tears. They ate in silence, standing packed together, seeing no one. Some work-brigades flailed themselves on in a bid for extra food, but the effort was too much, the extra too little. Within a year the first 28,000 of them were dead. A prisoner in milder times encountered a remnant of the hundreds of thousands who were sentenced between 1943 and 1947. They had survived, he said, because they were the toughest–a biological elite–but were now brutalised and half-insane.

Under the mine's disembowelled head-frame, the heaps of slag and rubbish were inhabited by vagrants scavenging for metal. A horde of vicious dogs was on the loose. I started along the pit railway through shrubs and swamps and an undergrowth of ruin. The rails along the track had been torn up yard by yard. I thrust past waste-tips snowed under flocks of gulls. Then I came to a solitary brick building enclosing a range of cramped rooms. The roof was gone, but the iron-sheathed timbers of their door-frames
still stood, and their walls were windowless. They were isolation cells. Solzhenitsyn wrote that after ten days' incarceration, during which a prisoner might be deprived even of clothing, his constitution was wrecked, and after fifteen he was dead. Now their concrete was splitting underfoot. Into each cell the skeleton of a door still swung. Outside, wild camomile lapped against the bricks.

I stumbled into a quagmire curtained by shrubs, and waded out again. In front of me the coal trains were wheezing and clanking over the tundra. I began to imagine myself here fifty years ago.
What would I have done?
But knowing how physical depletion saps the will, the answer returned:
You would have been no different from anyone else
.

I came upon a message scratched on a stone: ‘I was exiled in 1949, and my father died here in 1942. Remember us.'

 

‘They come in thousands! Flying south in autumn, that's when you get them. Geese, duck, teal! And there's a red salmon that descends the Pechora river from the Arctic into the Vorkuta….' Vasil swung the car past Mine 29, and we clambered out. The pit-wheels hung stark against the sky. A low hill, slushy with reeds and mosses, had sucked in its decayed camp. ‘Now this salmon carries a kind of caviar. One day last June…' But he never finished. As we plunged into the dank shrubbery it poured out mosquitoes. They were huge. They were the rearguard of the festering trillions called
gnus
–a miasma of midges, gnats, horseflies, mosquitoes–which breed in the tundra pools in summer. They came at us like helicopters. In the tundra they can put reindeer and cattle to headlong flight, and have suffocated foals (and even, it is said, reindeer and men) by clogging their throats and nostrils. They live for only a few days, and feed on nothing. Some species have no developed digestive organs at all. Yet they flew in with oblivious fury–almost harmless by mid-August–and bit us out of habit or spite. That night I discovered wide, fiery welts over my wrists and ankles–a thousand Lilliputian mouthfuls–which had vanished by morning.