In Siberia (7 page)

‘Yes.' (I sometimes think I can.)

‘You know how many died!' Her voice makes a terrible music. ‘They died from weakness, from privation. If there was a blizzard, if there was cold, we still had to work. It wasn't enough to chop the coal from the rock-face, you had to load it into wagons and haul them. We had no pulleys, and it was only in 1942 that they sent down draught-horses. It was very heavy, very. And to remember how many fell down, how they succumbed just like that, hauling the wagons, and then how we dragged them out by the legs….'

Her voice has gone away from me, as if dreaming. I think: perhaps the dead have taken away the sense of reality with them. Nothing so strong, so sad, had happened since. Meaning has predeceased her.

Yet she gets up and surfs through the television channels with grunts of discontent, then switches it off. She says: ‘I am eighty-seven, but I want to live to see the future.'

On either side of the railway to Omsk the wheatfields shimmered in huge rectangles, and fescue grass spread a pinkish sheen over the pasturelands. In this immense sameness, isolated things–a duckpond, a well, a horse-cart–took on a lonely piquancy. I gazed with relief at terrain empty of coal or ruins, whose mounds were natural. A luxurious sense of freedom welled up. For the first time in Russia's history a foreigner could wander Siberia at will. At any little town where I stopped, I might alight and disappear, nursing my business visa–a scruffy paper inscribed with pro forma destinations–against police intrusion.

The exhilaration of this freedom never quite left me. Whenever I pulled out my map and imagined entering the mountains abutting Mongolia, or taking ship up the Yenisei river to the Arctic, I would be hit by euphoria, then disbelief. Something, or someone, would surely prevent me. That was how Russia had always been. I had slipped through a transient gap in the country's age-old xenophobia.

My train followed a wavering belt of dark-earthed steppeland towards Omsk. The retreat of the last Ice Age was enacted visibly beside it. At the rate of a mile a year the steppes were edging northwards into the taiga, which was encroaching at the same rate on the Arctic.

From its inception in 1891 the Trans-Siberian was built here in a hurry, with poor steel and untreated timbers. In these western stretches it was pushed across swamps and peat-bogs at the rate
of a mile a day, behind a vanguard of improvised dykes and artesian wells: within a few years the sagging ballast and buckled steel had turned the track to a roller-coaster where the passenger trains never exceeded 13 m.p.h.

A peculiarly Russian blend of fear and confidence drove it forward. The Trans-Siberian, it was hoped, would build up Russia's defences on the Pacific and bind Siberia for ever to the motherland; and it was powered by an old sense of spiritual privilege and mission: the railway would lay a thread of civilisation through Asia's heart.

 

The faintly clownish name of Omsk precedes the city with a lighthearted expectation. It lies where the railway crosses the Irtysh on a massive cantilever bridge, and you see the curve of the river under a line of stooping derricks as it heads out among sandy islets and meadows, touching the city with an illusion of peace. But beyond, the suburbs bristle with petrochemical plants, textile combines and oil refineries, and the pollution is so thick that driving at night has sometimes been forbidden. They sprawl for miles above the river. Marx Prospect, Lenin Square, Partisan Street: the veteran names follow one another in relentless procession.

Yet the city keeps a modest distinction. Whereas the Second World War razed western Russian towns to the ground, here in Siberia, untouched, they often attain a formal grandeur or rustic exuberance, and seem older than they are. I wandered the streets in surprise. The municipal flower-beds were all in bloom, and fountains played between provincial ministries. Close above the river, nineteenth-century streets dipped and swung in icing-sugar facades. The air in the parks clattered with pop music. Clusters of miniskirted girls paraded their irregular beauty, and children strolled with their parents in sleepy obedience; but their jeans and T-shirts were stamped with stars-and-stripes or Donald Duck. Every other pair of shoes or trousers sported a pirated Western logo. Fast-food restaurants had arrived, offering instant
pelmeni
–the Siberian ravioli–or anonymous steaks with stale mash, and
a rash of small shops and kiosks had appeared, selling the same things.

Yet a feeling of boredom, or of waiting, pervaded the city. All style and music, the new paths to paradise, seemed synthetic, borrowed. Real life remained on hold. The pop songs had the scuttling vitality of streams. The bus-shelters and underpasses, stinking of urine, were rife with graffiti: ‘Pomponius Nautilus–I love you!…Agatha Christie! Sepulchre! The Prodigy!' It took me time to realise that these were pop groups; other graffiti followed them, sometimes scrawled in English, the
lingua franca
of youth. ‘Jim Morrison lives! No!…I fucked the bitch!…Communists are all buggers….' Then, in Russian, enigmatically: ‘Why travel with a corpse?…The point of life is to ponder the cross on your grave….'

A pervasive frustration pronounced that freedom, once again, had proved illusory. Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slavemasters. The pavements were dotted with the new poor. Yet in this August sunlight I was touched by the traveller's confusion: the gulf between the inhabitant and the stranger. A little architectural charm, or a trick of the light, could turn other people's poverty to a bearable snapshot. The air was seductively still. Naked children were splashing in the polluted river.

I walked over the headland where the old fort had spread, but trees and terraces had blurred away the lines traced by its stockade, and only a stout, whitewashed gate remained. For four years Dostoevsky had languished here in a wooden prison, condemned to hard labour for activities in a naively revolutionary circle in St Petersburg. Sometimes he would gaze yearningly across the Irtysh at the nomad herdsmen, and would walk round the stockade every evening, counting off its stakes one by one as his sentence expired. He transmuted his life here into
The House of the Dead
, and it was here, among convicts who at first filled him with loathing but later with awe, that he experienced a half-mystical reconciliation with the peasant Russian people.

On the site of the vanished prison, fifty years later, rose a fantastical baroque theatre, painted white and green. Now it was showing
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, Alan Ayckbourn's
Season's
Greetings
and Shelagh Delaney's
A Taste of Honey
. The only prison building to survive was the house of the governor, a purple-faced drunkard and sadist in Dostoevsky's day, who would have his prisoners flogged for any misdemeanour, or none. His home has been turned into a museum to the writer he hated.

A century after Dostoevsky's incarceration, Solzhenitsyn was escorted through Omsk on his way to a labour camp in Kazakhstan. He and his fellow prisoners were interned in a vaulted stone dungeon whose single window opened from a deep shaft above them. He never forgot how they huddled together under a 15-watt bulb, while an elderly sexton sang to them, close to dying: how the old man's Adam's apple quivered as he stood beneath the mouth of the hopeless shaft, and his voice, trembling with death and feeling, floated out an old revolutionary song:

My hotel costs five dollars a night. The plaster falls in chunks from its corridor walls, and from the Stalinist mouldings of the ceiling. The night is close and humid. It is over 85°F. I lie on the bed and watch the full moon shining through a pattern of dainty flowers in the lace curtains. I cannot sleep. The sweat leaks from my chest and forehead. And this is Siberia.

 

Next morning, outside the big, unlovely cathedral, which in Stalin's day had been a cinema, I found a coach-load of pilgrims setting off for a rural monastery. They welcomed me on board. The monastic foundations were only just being laid, they said, and they were going to attend the blessing of its waters. In 1987 an excavator at the site–near the state farm of Rechnoi–had unearthed a mass grave, and the place was revealed as a complex of labour camps, abandoned at Stalin's death. The inmates, mostly intelligentsia, had died of pneumonia and dysentery from working in the fields, and their graves still scattered its earth.

As our bus bowled through ramshackle villages, the pilgrims
relayed the story with murmurs of motherly pity. They were elderly women, for the most part, indestructible babushkas in flower-printed dresses and canvas shoes, whose gnarled hands were closed over prayer-books and bead-strings, and whose headscarves enshrined faces of genial toughness. When a fresh-faced cantor began chanting a hymn in the front of the bus, their voices rose in answer one after another, like old memories, reedy and melodious from their heavy bodies, until the whole bus was filled with their singing.

We reached a birch grove on the Rechnoi farm. It was one of those ordinary rural spots whose particular darkness you would never guess. As the women disembarked, still singing, the strains of other chanting echoed from a chapel beyond the trees. It was the first of four shrines which would one day stake out the corners of an immense compound. Inside, a white-veiled choir was lilting the sad divisions of the Liturgy. As the pilgrims visited their favourite icons, a forest-fire of votive candle-flames sprang up beneath the iconostasis, and two or three babushkas shuddered to their knees.

In the south transept, meshed in scaffolding, an unfinished fresco of the Deposition from the Cross loomed above us. It was almost complete; but the flesh tints were still missing, as if the artist were afraid to touch too closely on Divinity, and pots of pigment lined the scaffold. So only the painted garments of the disciples semaphored their grief, while their hands and features were empty silhouettes in the plaster: here a face uplifted in dismay, there a blank caress on the unpainted body of Christ–which remained a ghostly void, like something the onlookers had imagined.

Sometimes, whimsically, I felt as if this scene were echoed in the nave where I stood, where around the great silence left by God the worshippers lifted their heads and hands, crossed themselves, and wept a little.

From outside came the squeal of bulldozers in a distant field. They were smoothing the earth of the labour camps into monastery foundations. I strained to catch the sounds, but our singing drowned them in the mournful decrescendos of the Russian rite.
And out of the mouths of these ancient women–whose sins, I imagined, could barely exceed a little malicious gossip–rose the endless primal guilt ‘
O Lord forgive us!
', over and over, as if from some deep recess in the national psyche, a need for helplessness.

The sanctuary curtains parted on an incense-clouded region inhabited by a very small priest. His hair shimmered down in a phantasmal jumble, like a Restoration wig, and melted into a droop of violet-clad shoulders. Occasionally, feebly, one of his arms swung a censer; in the stillness between responses its coals made a noise like suppressed laughter. As he intoned the prayers he constantly forgot or lost his place, until his chanting dithered into confusion, and three deacons in raspberry robes prompted his responses with slips of paper. He would peer at these through enormous spectacles stranded in his hair like the eyes of a lemur, and try again. But the cause of his panic was plain to see. Enthroned beside him, giant and motionless, sat Feodosy, Archbishop of Omsk.

Towards noon a procession unwound from the church and started across the pasturelands towards the unblessed waters. It moved with a shuffling, dislocated pomp. Behind its uplifted cross, whose gilded plaques wobbled unhinged, the Archbishop advanced in a blaze of turquoise and crimson, his globular crown webbed in jewels. He marked off each stride with the stab of a dragon-headed stave, and his chest glinted with purple-and gold-embossed frontlets, and a clash of enamelled crosses. He looked huge. Beside him went the quaint, dishevelled celebrant, and behind tripped a huddle of young priests in mauve, and the trio of raspberry-silk deacons.

I fell in line with the pilgrims following. It was oddly comforting. An agnostic among believers, I felt close to them. I too wanted their waters blessed. I wanted that tormented earth quietened, the past acknowledged and shriven. I helped the old woman beside me carry her bottles. My feeling of hypocrisy, of masquerading in others' faith, evaporated. As I took her arm over the puddles and our procession stretched across the wet grass, Russia's atheist past seemed no more than an overcast day in the long Orthodox summer, and the whole country appeared to be
reverting instinctively, painlessly, to its old nature. This wandering ceremonial, I felt, sprang not from an evangelical revolution but from a simple cultural relapse into the timeless personality of the motherland–the hierarchical, half-magic trust of its forefathers, the natural way to be.

I had already seen it. Every other market, airport or bus station was staked out by a babushka selling prints of icons and religious pamphlets, and nursing an offertory for the restoration of the local church or cathedral. Holy pictures dangled from the dashboards of taxis, decorated people's rooms. God had re-entered the vocabulary, the home, the gestures of beggars blessing themselves in the streets. Far away in Moscow the Church was growing fat on concessions to import tax-free alcohol and cigarettes; while here in Siberia, traditionally independent but conservative, this corrupting embrace of Church and State was paying (I imagined) for our monastery. But the cross wavered and glistened confidently among the birches. Authority, as always here, was salvation. It gave peace in place of thought.

Yet after the Communist hiatus, what had God become? Was he not now very old? And hadn't He lost too many children? On a road beyond the trees a troop of young men and girls were watching us from their parked cars, without expression, as tourists look at something strange.

How had these devotees survived? For sixty years scarcely a church was open in Siberia; the priests had been dispossessed, exiled, or shot. Even the oldest pilgrims trudging through these meadows could scarcely have remembered the Liturgy from childhood. How had they kept faith?

‘We had icons in my home, hidden in the roof.' The young priest was pasty and shy, with absent eyes. He had joined the procession late. ‘My father worked in the stone quarries of Kazakhstan, so we lived miles from anywhere. But parents pass these icons down to their children, you see, and my grandmother's family had kept theirs. That's how I came to God, through the icons, through my grandmother. Not suddenly, but out of the heart'–he touched his chest–‘bit by bit. God calls you out.'