Sibir (36 page)

Unfortunately the Georgian attitude is
not
a two-way street. A visitor is extremely ill-advised to even look sideways at a Georgian girl unless he is wearing a bulletproof vest or has a bodyguard.

There were some Georgians in Tchersky. One of them was the husband of a lady reporter from the
Kolymskaya Pravda
. I met her at a party held in John’s and my honour, and for some reason I attracted her amorous interest. She must have read Dorothy Parker’s dictum that candy is dandy but liquor is quicker, because she plied me with large glasses of cognac at five-minute intervals. I was able to slip these under the table to Yura, who nobly drained them and passed back the empties.

As I was to learn somewhat later, the lady’s husband worked a night shift at Green Cape harbour, which meant that his wife “had a house” each night until he returned in the small hours of the morning. Being unaware of these facts at the time I agreed to escort her home – not because I reciprocated her emotions, but from a true sense of chivalry. She could never have made it on her own.

It was a bitterly cold night, and whatever warmth might have been engendered in me by the modicum of cognac I had drunk was all gone by the time we reached the log house in which she lived. By then I only wanted to go back to my own apartment and get some sleep … an attitude which she found quite inexplicable. Nevertheless, I persevered and she finally let me go.

I was less than a block from her house when Victor Nazarov’s black Volga roared up behind me and slammed to a stop. Victor flung open a door, seized me by an arm, and dragged me onto the seat beside him. Without a word he grabbed my left leg and jerked my foot high into the air. For a moment he studied my boot, a standard felt overboot that I had borrowed. Then he relaxed; grinned;
bellowed amiably in my ear; and drove me back to the party from which I had hoped to escape.

Nothing was said about his odd behaviour until next morning, when Yura took me aside and told me about the Georgian husband.

“He very crazy, that one. Every dawn when he come home he walk all around his house and look for footprints in snow. If find man’s footprint, he follow just as good as wolf follow poor reindeer. When he find man who owns footprints, he has big argument with him. Only he argues with little hatchet.

“When Victor hear you leave party with girl, he very much nervous for you. Maybe very much nervous for himself, too. How he explain to Moscow he need state funeral for first Canadian visitor to Tchersky?”

Victor had been particularly concerned that I might have been wearing my Canadian sealskin boots, which had distinctively patterned rubber soles that left an unmistakeable track, the only one of its kind in Siberia.

It is a common complaint of western visitors that they are seldom invited into Russian homes. The implication, sometimes stated as a fact, is that Russians are afraid to make friends with foreigners for fear of reprisals from the
KGB
, or for similar sinister reasons. I suspect this is nonsense. I do know that some Russians are hesitant about taking foreigners home because they are afraid their houses won’t measure up to western standards and so will reinforce the contemptuous attitudes which are typical western reactions to the life styles of the Russian people.

I was a guest in scores of private homes, ranging from the tiny one-room cubbyhole of a young Leningrad artist and his wife to the palatial apartment of a renowned Georgian artist in Tbilisi; from the home of a truck driver in Magadan, to the luxurious quarters of a member of the
Soviet Academy of Sciences; from the snug, three-room establishment of a beginning Yakut poet, to the
ancien régime
dacha of one of Irkutsk’s most successful authors; from the tents of the Yukagir reindeer herders, to the ultra-modern apartment of a Moscow diplomat. The problem was never one of how to arrange an entrée into private homes; if there was a problem at all, it was how to survive the ensuing hospitality.

My best memories of the Soviet Union are of evenings spent drinking, eating, arguing, laughing and singing in the intimate atmosphere of Russian family life. Most of what I learned about the way people thought and felt, I learned on such occasions. What seemed then, and still remains, the most important element of all was the warmth and depth of friendship which was offered to me; friendship which took me behind the barriers of generic conclusions and crass generalities which so effectively shield people of different races and cultures from meaningful understanding of one another.

My friendship with Lydia and Anatoly Gorshkov was a case in point. During our first visit to Tchersky, Claire and I saw Lydia quite often, since she ran the little café where we ate many of our meals. We met Anatoly on only two occasions; once when he showed us through a new shopping centre whose wall mural decorations were his work, and once at a party at Victor Nazarov’s flat. Nevertheless, when we left Tchersky, Lydia wept as she kissed Claire goodbye. Anatoly also kissed her; then he kissed me on both cheeks and shyly gave us one of his drawings.

“You must come back. If you do not we will suffer very much, because you are our dear friends,” said Lydia tearfully.

By North American standards we had hardly known each other well enough to justify a casual acquaintanceship. By Russian standards, we had known each other long enough to become close and enduring friends. Nor was this a social sham. When I returned to Tchersky in
1969 Lydia was away in Moscow with her three-year-old son, Mischka, who had a serious bronchial condition and was receiving specialist treatment. On the day of my arrival, Anatoly sent Lydia a telegram telling her that I had come and the next morning she left Mischka in her mother’s care and boarded a plane. She flew nearly five thousand miles so she and Anatoly could properly welcome me into their home. Neither she nor her husband saw anything extraordinary in this. After all, I was their friend.

This beautiful young woman did not fly back empty-handed. On the very evening of her arrival I went to dinner with the Gorshovs in their small flat in one of the new apartment blocks. Lydia fed me Turkestan honey melon, Armenian tangerines, Polish pickled mushrooms, Bulgarian chianti, and Bulgarian brandy – all rare and expensive delicacies; but … for a friend … nothing is too good.

She had not even room in her baggage for presents for Anatoly, whom she had not seen for nearly two months. Everything she brought with her from Moscow, except a small bag of her own clothing, was intended for my entertainment.

Anatoly cooked shash-lik on a fireplace he had built himself (after a ferocious battle with the housing authorities) in his tiny dining-living room. We ate and drank and talked until long after midnight, when Victor’s Volga came to take me home to my apartment in Green Cape, four kilometres distant.

I had barely gone to bed when there came a soft rap on the door. Standing outside, red-faced from the bitter cold, and hesitant about the reception they might receive at this late hour, were Lydia and Anatoly. They had forgotten to give me a basket of apples, pomegranates and grapes which Lydia had also brought for me from Moscow. They had walked the four kilometres with the gift, and after giving it to me and holding my hand for a moment, they left and walked back home again.

I spent as much time as I could with this loving young couple, and we talked as frankly and as intimately as if we had known each other since childhood. They were not atypical. On the contrary they were very representative of the many people I met in the Soviet Union whom I am happy to call my friends.

Anatoly was thirty-four in 1969. He told me that in his youth he had been a “wild one.” I could believe it. His lean, saturnine face still carried a devil-may-care stamp. “I did not know what I wanted as a youth, and nothing that offered itself seemed to quicken my heart. Moscow was my home, but it seemed like a dead city to me. Perhaps all cities seem the same and perhaps they are all dying. I did nothing at school. Then came my army stint – three years of it – and about halfway through I began to think I had been an idiot. I decided I should get an education, but it seemed a bit late in the day and I felt too old to go back to school. Instead I went out to Siberia, to Krasnoyarsk, and got a job on the dam there, knocking holes in the rock with a pneumatic drill. One lunchtime I was leaving the cafeteria when I ran straight into Lydia. I took one look into her face and the whole place exploded. Three hours later I asked her to marry me, and three days later we were married.”

“
I
am a
real
Siberian,” Lydia interjected, “born in Leninskaya; but when I was just a child I was taken to live in Moscow. I think I felt about the city the same way Tolia did. As soon as I was old enough I went to Krasnoyarsk for school, became a dietitian, and was starting on a managerial course when Tolia caught me. I could not resist him. He was a wandering man, an artist with the soul of a poet, and a wonderful lover. After two years in Krasnoyarsk we decided we wanted to go to the real north. We got as far as Lensk, where Tolia earned a living painting signs while he struggled hard to be an artist. Four years ago we moved on to Tchersky, looking for a wild place and a strong, exciting life.”

“My great dream,” said Anatoly, “is to someday
sculpt a huge statue overlooking Bering Strait – a statue to Dezhnev, that brave Cossack who founded Nizhny Kolymsk and then went on in a little open boat to round Chukotka and sail south into the Pacific – the true discoverer of Bering Strait, and the first European to prove that Asia and America were not joined together.”

“He is full of such dreams … this grey wolf of mine!” Lydia said, running her hand through her husband’s hair. “Quite mad, sometimes. We will forgive him though. He is an artist and they must all be mad.”

Anatoly became an artist only after he met Lydia, and he had not had any formal training. He suffered many frustrations because of his lack of knowledge of technique. He was determined to acquire technical proficiency. “It is hard to think about it, but we must go back to Moscow soon. Next year at the latest – thirty-five is the top age at which I can enrol in art school. Then we will have to endure four years of city life while I study. It will be difficult. We will have five mouths to feed and Lydia will have to work. But in the summers we will go east again – out to the taiga and to the tundra; and when I finish my studies, we will go east and never return.”

“I do not know how we will endure Moscow,” Lydia added. “There is no freedom in the city. I don’t like the restraint crowded places have, the formal structure of society. I wish I could have gone north before the development began, just to see it and live in it as it was. In Moscow last week we were watching
T.V.
when one of our singing stars sang the Tchersky Song.
^*
I burst into tears. My relatives mocked me and said, ‘What is there in that cold and lonely place, when you could have Moscow?’ I could not answer them, because if they could ask such a foolish question they could never understand the answer. Here life is natural, friends are easy to acquire and they become so close and so dear. They are the
best things in life. Love is the one true reality – without it all the wonderful things men are doing will mean no more than words of regret carved on a tombstone.”

Lydia and Anatoly were amongst the crowd who saw me off on my final departure from Tchersky. We hugged each other, and as I climbed the ramp into the plane, Lydia called out:

“Do not forget us! Remember! You cannot forget your friends!”

No, Lydia and Anatoly; I will not forget my friends.

T
CHERSKY
was definitely a “white man’s town.” Ordained by Moscow, designed by Europeans and, for the most part, built by them it was typical of the new cities of the north. As such it was a good place in which to glimpse the inter-relationships between the natives and the new people.

Superficially all appeared well between them. Occasionally I met someone from the European regions who adopted a condescending attitude toward the natives; and there were those who, while proclaiming the essential equality of all peoples, were not very keen to provide equal social opportunities.

On one occasion even Victor Nazarov who, at all points where I could reach him, seemed resolved to do everything in his power for the natives, committed a major blunder. He held a big party for John and me in his new and sumptuous two-storey semi-detached house. The guests included many of the important people in Tchersky and Green Cape … but all were Europeans. The Chukchee Mayor (Chairman of the town soviet) was conspicuous by his absence. The only non-Europeans present were Yuri Rytkheu and Nikolai Yakutsky, who could hardly have been left out since they were members of my group.

Both were unhappy. Ignoring the convention which dictates that nobody proposes a toast until the tamadar
has given his approval, Yura got to his feet almost before we had settled ourselves at table and politely proposed a toast to those absent men and women in whose native country we were now enjoying ourselves. He then excused himself, and left the party. He could not, he said, “remain with my good friends here in the knowledge that my equally good friends of the Chukchee and Yukagir people are not with us too.”

His abrupt departure cast something of a shadow over the party, and it was not lightened when Nikolai was asked for a toast and gave us a speech instead. It was suavely done, but the unmistakeable import was that, although we were in Tchersky, we were also in the Yakut Republic, and the residents of Tchersky, regardless of their origins, should remember that they were citizens of that republic which was, and would remain, Yakutian. Nikolai concluded by proposing a special toast to “Our Republic” and he invited everyone to stand and drink it. Having made his point he relaxed into his usual amiable self. It was to be noted that for the balance of the evening he was accorded a rather too obvious respect.