Into Thick Air (21 page)

Russian science eventually recovered, but like an old sailor tattooed with the name of a woman who left him long ago, the land does not forget. When I pedal back into the countryside, I pass subtle reminders of Lysenko's campaign against science. It's bright and breezy, with scudding cumulus, and I'm riding by a tree plantation. The pines are tall but skinny as flagpoles, because they're planted too close together and are hungry for light. It was Michurin's idea—he called it cluster planting. Lysenko, with Stalin's blessing, took Michurin's doctrine and in 1949 devised “The Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature.” The trees were supposed to
cooperate, with most seedlings sacrificing themselves for the good of the species, allowing a few to grow thick and strong.

Millions of rubles and hours were dedicated to the creation of vast forests. But trees knew nothing of class struggle. The Great Plan was a great flop because each tree looked out for itself—naturally. In the end it was not ideology but the forbidden genetics that controlled the urge to grow and reproduce.

Such urges are not unique to plants. At day's end, after reaching the city of Tambov and finding a hotel, I head out for an evening stroll. Just outside the entrance is a small park casually occupied by women either chunky and vivacious in an omnivorous way, or very skinny and even more plainly hungry. One of the latter quickly recognizes me as a solitary male. She sidles up and asks something in Russian. I don't understand.

“You give me cigarette?” she says in English. She's no more than twenty. “Where are you staying?”

I gesture to the hotel.

“This is not a good hotel.”

That is true—but it is the only hotel.

“Let us go sit on that bench over there.”

I look over
there
, to a lonely park bench in the shadows, and I get the willies imagining thugs dropping out of the trees. Or, less painful but more embarrassing, she' ll propose something I must refuse.

I like light, I say. We can sit here, on this bench.

“It is dirty here.” But still she sits. She smiles. Her lipstick has left red slashes on her gold tooth, like a vampire. “You must be cold in that shirt.”

No, I feel just fine, thank you. And I have other shirts, very warm shirts, in my room.

She runs her nails through the ruff of her coat and says, “I have fur of cat. Not house cat. Forest cat.” She purrs and drops her chin into the fur, up to her lips. “It feels good.”

Umm . . . I bet it does. But I really must be going. I'm a bicycle tourist, and I need to sleep.

“I understand. Good night.”

I like to think it was the bike that saved me.

ON A HAT-AND-GLOVES MORNING a day south of Tambov, I pedal an empty blacktop past road signs that ask the driver to
Look out for pedestrians at bus stops
and
Please don't light the forest on fire with your cigarettes
. Less common are signs that say where the road goes, so I'm lucky to have the fine map from Michurinsk, and without trouble I reach the town of Znamenka. The sole store is decorated with the familiar posters for Stimorol Original Chewing Gum. I love its classic appeal: it's what adventurers chew in the jungle, in rapids, on sailboats.

I opt for the semi-famous “Tula” gingerbread. Just one sweet cake has calories enough for at least ten miles of pedaling. Unfortunately, I've fifty miles of open farmland to the next store. I pass a sugar-beet factory the size of a steel mill and a half-dozen villages, but no stores—only tilted houses with peeling paint, and people leading bulge-eyed cows into barns or chopping wood with the measured determination of a marathoner.

I break open my emergency rations of Delta airline peanuts and cookies. Still hungry, I stop at a field of dried and bent sunflowers. The seeds are good, shell and all, but not as easy to get at as I'd hoped. A living sunflower beckons your touch, but a withered sunflower is as friendly as a cactus, with each seed topped by a prickle.

This is the province of Tambov, where people know hunger. Starvation, actually, following a drought in 1920–21. America and western Europe were aware of the famine, but as H. G. Wells wrote in his
Outline of History
, “None of the tolerance that had been shown to the almost equally incapable and disastrous regime of the Tsar was shown to the Marxist adventurers.” At the time, the only crime of the Bolsheviks against the West was their utter rejection of capitalism, but that was enough. While Russia starved, the West acted slowly or not at all, with fingers crossed.

Lenin, the earnest revolutionary who dreamed of a just society, had in 1918 declared “war communism,” a policy that entitled the Bolsheviks to snatch a portion of every peasant's harvest for the cities. After the drought reduced the people of Tambov to hunting acorns, the Red Army unwisely persisted in taking the acorns.

Alexander Antonov, himself a revolutionary who'd fought the tsar, massed an army of tens of thousands of famished locals into the “Green
Army” representing the Union of Working Peasants. The Bolsheviks, hinting at the lethal bureaucracy to come, responded with the “Plenipotentiary Commission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Bolshevik party for liquidation of banditry in the Tambov Gubernia.” The Red Army cut the Green Army down, with artillery, armored rail cars, and, most horribly, poison gas.

My hunger is just a little thing, a tightness as I ride past fields of black clods bordered with yarrow and blue asters. I can see the town of Uvarovo long before I reach it, a tight cluster on a low mesa dropping on one side to the Vorona River. Along the shore, willows toss in the wind.

In the oldest part of town (Uvarovo dates back to 1699) is the most decrepit hotel yet, a sagging shotgun cabin of seven rooms. After I ring the buzzer and the woman recovers from her surprise, she leads me to the “administration.” The floor is freshly painted, and sunlight shines through lace curtains onto a vase of daisies. Her name is Tanya, and she somewhat gravely explains that the room will be twenty rubles a night—between one and two dollars.

Of course there's no hot water. There's not even water. Tanya must fetch it in a bucket. But it's only fifty feet to the outhouse, and meanwhile Tanya warms up a couple of gallons of water with a hotplate so I can sponge myself off. She cooks my ramen noodles, too. Brings me a table lamp, while rambling softly in Russian. Tonight there's no place I'd rather be.

With my east-facing room I expect an early rousing by the sun, but the next morning it's suspiciously dark. Pull open the curtain: rain is thrashing the streets. Feel the glass: it's freezing.

Tanya asks me to fill out the usual registration form. What, I ask Tanya, is the name of this place? Hotel, she says. What day is it? she asks. I don't understand. She points to a calendar, I point to the day, and she fills out half of the form before giving a little shrug that means, What's the difference? She points to my birth date and indicates that she was born the same year. We grew up with the same fears, which happen to be detailed in the only official poster in this hotel. It's instructions on what to do in the event of a nuclear war. Duck and cover, except in the Russian version you end up in a cellar with a barrel full of potatoes.

When the rain gives up I leave Tanya with an Arizona postcard and a little fanny pack I brought for just this purpose. It's not her birthday, but it's close enough. Like me, she's a Sputnik baby, 1957. Unlike me, she's staying put in Uvarovo. I ask her how far it is to the next town, Borisoglebsk. But she's never been there, and doesn't know the way.

 

TWO MILES OUT from Tanya's hotel is a sign no larger than a loaf of bread. Café, it says—and an arrow points to what looks like a prefab warehouse but is immensely attractive when it's 40 degrees outside. It's dark and quiet, and for my pleasure the owner hits both the light and the music. I have a tomato salad and tea while listening to the disco hit “I Need a Superhero Lover.” After my eyes adjust to the 25-watt bulb, I see that the walls are covered with Formica and shower curtains—all the easier, I imagine, to hose off after a boisterous wingding.

When I'm back on my bike and riding all day through one-cow towns where everything is so tired that the power lines are actually holding up the utility poles—well, then it's easy to get the impression that there's no reason for celebration in Russia. But people aren't just sitting around, waiting for a miracle. In a town not quite as big as its name, Novonikolainevski, I find the only café occupied by a party. I sit outside and bide my time, calculating that if any mother spies this skinny bicyclist . . .

Bingo.
Come inside and eat all this extra food! It's a wedding party!

Actually, it's the wedding rehearsal dinner, but my Russian is so lousy I don't understand. So I'm surprised when, the next morning, the bride's uncle finds me—in the only hotel in town—and escorts me back to the café and the big event. Newlyweds Ina and Volodya are young and blond and happy. The bride's mother, Lila, and her grandmother, the babushka, get to work feeding me while the others pass around a bottle of champagne for everyone to autograph. I'm soon surrounded by slabs of roast beef, eggplant topped with chives and red peppers, garlic bread and carrot salad and grilled fish and pickled watermelon. And that's only the plates I can reach.

A toast is made, and the vodka vanishes. An accordion player starts squeezing some life out of his instrument. Everyone else is fancied up in
suits or dresses; he, true to the international dress code of accordion players, appears to be from a neighboring planet. But he can make music. A woman sings, the old folk sigh, and the teens yawn. The tempo picks up as the bride and groom cut their cake and hand out slices in exchange for dropping some rubles into a hat. Another toast, and a woman starts dancing on a chair. I'm asked to make a toast. To the new wife and the new . . . but nobody hears the part about the groom. The party is taking off.

My glass is refilled by Sasha, a doctor with the hands of a serious gardener. He speaks enough English to make a toast, “America and Russia—friends!” Obviously, I have to drink.

Natasha is one of the women who speak to me from a distance never greater than six inches. Her face is flushed and her eyes are wide, but she's just friendly. “Please,” she asks, “please for the newlyweds . . . ” She flips through the pages of my dictionary and finds, to my horror, the word
sing
. “Please sing for the new man and new wife.”

I'm no singer, but after a few toasts I'm ready for the “Star Spangled Banner.” Yet at the moment the only song that comes to mind is “I Need a Superhero Lover.” The lyrics are within my grasp (“I need a superhero lover, super lover, super lover!”), but the audience reaction could be less than favorable.

Natasha is pleading “Sing, sing!” when the babushka decides that it's her duty to feed me. She butts in to say,
Sing? He needs to eat!
And not only does she set down another plate of veal cutlets, she actually forks one up and stuffs it into my mouth. I am so grateful. Natasha gives up and joins the dancing.

Ten minutes later, while the babushka is delicately sucking the meat off a chicken skeleton, I'm yanked out of my chair to join a dance that is just four women and me. They hold their hands high and snake them around like gypsies, they stomp their feet, they sing. When the song ends they explain it to me in English. “No love! Yes love! The story of life!”

The accordion gives out. The tape deck is commandeered by a young man in black, and the speakers jump with Disco Collection #1. The young will forget our parents' songs, and everything else will change, too.

Except weddings. No love, yes love, the story of life.

WHEN THE WORLD is wrapped in what looks like ice fog, it's hard to leave the great hot feast of a Russian wedding and pedal on. But I must reach the Caspian sooner or later. Probably later—I'm addled by too many toasts to the newlyweds, and can't find the little road out of town. It's shown on the map as a thin gray line, a reflection of the mapmaker's doubt that the road exists.

So I take the train, the slow and rocking local to the next town, which the map shows connected to a thick yellow line I hope is an actual road. The town is Frovolo, and it's the train conductor's hometown. He promises that the hotel is only a hundred meters from the train station. He's right—and he knows exactly where to find me the next morning.

Andrei wants me to come to meet his family. I want to take advantage of a sudden increase in temperature and ride on to the town of Log. Andrei wins, and in his 1994 Lada, which looks like a 1974 Datsun, he takes me to his home.

Andrei's wife, Irana, and her sister Natasha are young and supple and earthy in the Russian female way, with gold teeth and hair dyed in colors I'd believed were limited to minerals, like oxidized copper and gypsum crystals. The house was built in 1940 of what appears to be corrugated roofing. There's no plumbing. Nothing fancy, says Andrei, but it's rent-free: the house belongs to his grandmother, a nameless babushka who seems to live in the kitchen outbuilding.

The living room is intensely packed with oriental wall rugs and big black puffy armchairs and the usual color TV and VCR. Andrei pulls out a stack of photographs eight inches high, and I settle in for pictures of his red-carnation wedding, pictures of toddlers in sailor suits, pictures of pure white people on a Black Sea beach, and pictures of people buried alive in fur hats and thick coats, balanced atop snow drifts. I ask, Siberia? No—here, Frovolo.

Time to head south, but then Babushka silently delivers pickled mushrooms, dumplings, sour cream, and crab salad. Presumably she's taking very small steps in her shapeless house dress reaching to the floor, but the slow gliding effect is of an electric grandma on hidden wheels.