Travels in Siberia (13 page)

He (the count) is indeed the same officer who had been the focus of Silvio’s jealousy and had eaten cherries during their duel. Some years ago he and the countess married, and immediately afterward they came to stay at this estate. One afternoon they went for a ride. The countess’s horse became balky, so the count rode home leading it, and she walked. When he got back he found Silvio in the library waiting for him. Silvio announced to the count that he had come at last to take his shot.

The count stood at one end of the room. Silvio paced off twelve steps and aimed. The count asked him to shoot quickly, before his wife returned. Silvio paused and said this seemed too much like murder. Another pistol was brought and loaded. They drew for the first shot. As in the first duel, the count won the draw. He fired at Silvio but missed and hit the painting.

Silvio aimed at the count. Just then the countess came in, saw what was going on, screamed, and clung to her husband’s neck. Her husband
told her not to worry, this was just a joke. Silvio said yes, this was much like jokes her husband enjoyed, slapping his face, shooting his hat, and shooting the painting just now. The countess threw herself at Silvio’s feet. The count shouted at her to get up, wasn’t she ashamed? After a moment, Silvio said that he had decided not to fire; now, he said, he was satisfied, having finally seen the count lose his nerve. Silvio turned to leave and, looking back, fired a shot through the painting right next to where the count’s bullet had struck.

Nobody ever heard from Silvio again. Rumor said that he died in Greece while fighting in the revolution against the Turks.

I put the book down and went out into Nome’s peculiar late-summer twilight. It arrived filtered through gray-white rain clouds that now were dropping a kind of floating mist. All the town’s colors were gray’s imitation of them—gray-red, gray-yellow, gray-blue—and yet the effect was still of twilight in summer, somehow. I’m not sure that the above summary of “Vystrel” makes it clear why Pushkin was great. I know that when I finished the story I was convinced that Pushkin was one of the coolest people who ever lived. Later I learned that in an actual duel Pushkin fought, he ate cherries from his hat while waiting for his rival to fire, just as his character does.

Across the street and a few blocks up from the motel, a neon Kirin Beer sign glowed fuzzily and vividly. The sign indicated the Szechwan restaurant where I ate most evenings. The place had good hot-and-sour soup, spicy double-sautéed pork, and a large television set that remained on all the time. I went in, sat, ordered. As I ate, I thought about Pushkin and watched network TV stars compete in group sporting events. One of the groups competing was Team Baywatch. Though I was, to outward appearances, still depressed, I had in some sense never been happier.

On the sidewalk on my way back, I passed several Native kids standing around by their bicycles and talking. A Native girl with frosted tips on her ginger-colored hair said to a slim boy, “I heard you were in an accident and had to be medevacked out.”

“Yeah,” the boy replied modestly. After a pause he added, “It was pretty cool.”

Another means of passing the time while socked in in Nome was to visit the office of the Chamber of Commerce on Front Street and read the local news stories it had collected in a file labeled
RUSSIAN EVENTS
. Many of these stories had to do with the adventurous or crazy people who travel through Nome en route (successfully or not) to or from the Russian side. Not many of the items predated 1987, the year the cold-water swimmer Lynne Cox swam the Bering Strait between the Diomede Islands and became the first American to legally visit Big Diomede since J. Edgar Hoover sealed the border in 1948. Her two-and-a-half-hour swim in 44° water left Lynne Cox more dead than alive when she reached Big Diomede. The feat attracted notice worldwide. At Gorbachev’s historic meeting with Reagan in 1987, the Russian premier said that Lynne Cox’s courage had shown Russians and Americans how close to each other they lived.

Item: Also around then, the ice in the strait froze thick enough that a Mexican illegal alien named Lazaro Castro, all on his own, was able to walk across. When he arrived in Big Diomede, the Russians arrested him, confined him, and afterward escorted him back to the United States, saying, “Next time . . . use the front door.”

Item: In 1989, a joint U.S.-Soviet expedition traveled by dogsled and skis from Anadyr, on the Siberian coast, twelve hundred miles northeastward across the strait to the Alaskan North Slope and Kotzebue. The international trekking team then came to Nome. During a celebration marking the journey, two Soviet journalists, Anatoly Tkachenko and Alexander Genkin, defected to the United States at Little Diomede.

Item: In 1992, a doctor from Austin, Texas, looked into whether he could drive across the strait in his four-wheel-drive vehicle. And in 1996, Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, an Englishman, listed in the 1984
Guinness Book of World Records
as the “World’s Greatest Living Explorer,” announced that he would cross the strait on foot. (No follow-up, however, on how the plans of these two aspirants turned out.)

Item: In 1996, Dmitri Shparo, of Moscow, Soviet explorer and folk hero, winner of the Lenin Medal, became stranded with his two sons on an ice floe off the coast of Chukotka while attempting to cross the strait from Russia to America on skis. After extensive searches, a Coast Guard C-130 aircraft located the party, and a Russian helicopter rescued them from the floe. The next year Shparo and one son tried again, encountered better ice conditions, and crossed successfully to Alaska.

(During one of my later stays in Nome, I happened to be there at the same time as two young Englishmen who had built an amphibious vehicle in which they planned to go around the world. Because they imagined that the Bering Strait crossing would be a tricky leg of the venture, the Englishmen were trying out their vehicle first here. It was a kind of pickup truck on pontoons, with screws that looked like giant crayons on either side to power it through the water, and a paddle wheel arrangement on the front to help it, they said, “walk” from the water up onto any floating ice they encountered. They took the vehicle to Wales, drove off into the strait, failed to make sufficient headway, and soon became tightly frozen in ice fifty yards from shore. Eskimos from Wales cut them free with chain saws and hauled them back to land. When I saw the Englishmen on the streets of Nome in their bright red coats and black trousers, and they smiled by lifting their upper lips to expose their top teeth, I understood that
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
had been simply a documentary.)

Most of the clippings in the “Russian Events” file were about the reopening of the border during the late Gorbachev and early Yeltsin years, and expressed the hopefulness of that time. In Wales, a sculptor named David Barr erected a big hand reaching toward the strait and Russia; he said he hoped to build an identical hand reaching toward America in the Russian coastal village of Uelen. In 1988, Alaska Airlines initiated its Russian Far East flights. That same year, a delegation of Alaskans journeyed to Provideniya on a “Friendship Flight,” met Russian dignitaries, and discussed plans for Russian-American business cooperation. Delegations of Russians made return visits that year and in later ones. Bering Air, a small Nome airline, began flying to Chukotka in 1989. Trans-strait telephone connections, which previously had to go around the world to end up across the strait two hundred miles away, now were sent by a more direct route, via a switching station in Fairbanks and then a satellite.

Soviet Young Pioneers from Provideniya paid a visit to the Boy Scouts of Nome. A burn victim in Chukotka needing special medical care was flown to an Alaska hospital. People in Russia and Alaska began to discuss creating an intercontinental nature reserve to be called the Bering Strait Land Bridge Park. Basketball teams and dance groups from Chukotka came to Nome. Concerned citizens of Nome, learning of the hunger in parts of the Russian Far East, devised various projects for sending relief
to their Russian neighbors. As the news stories moved closer in time to the present, however, the hope and anticipation evident in the events of the late 1980s seemed to have disappeared. The file contained no item later than 1995, presumably when the problems Vic Goldsberry had complained to me about became too great to ignore.

A story from
The Washington Post
of July 1, 1990, caught my attention. It mentioned the “palpable sense of giddiness” in the air in Nome since the border had been opened and quoted a lot from a Nome real-estate broker named Jim Stimpfle. He had all kinds of ideas. He described wonderful cruises from Nome to Chukotka that might be possible—a New Year’s package, for example, in which celebrants would sail to Provideniya before the holiday, enjoy a New Year’s Eve party in Russia, and then (thanks to the time change at the International Date Line, which here coincides with the Russian-American border) return to Nome for the repeat of New Year’s Eve on the following day. Because of the ice conditions at that time of year, a Soviet icebreaker would be required, but that was a mere detail to Mr. Stimpfle. “Imagine,” he told the
Post
, “you’re soaking in a hot tub on the deck, sipping Stolichnaya and listening to the strains of Rimsky-Korsakoff. The Northern Lights are out. Polar bears are frolicking on the ice. And you are smashing your way to the Evil Empire. It’s the last great trek on earth.”

Somehow I got a feeling that in Mr. Stimpfle I had found a fellow sufferer of the dread Russia-love. I thought I should talk to this man. The lady in the Chamber of Commerce said that I might run into him in town anywhere and that he often had breakfast at Fat Freddy’s, next door to my motel. On that first visit to Nome, I didn’t see him, but on a later one, while eating reindeer sausage and eggs in Fat Freddy’s, I heard a voice rise above the breakfast clatter, just as buoyant and visionary as it had sounded in the newspaper story.

I introduced myself, asked a few questions, and then hung out with Jim Stimpfle for a couple of days. Mostly we talked and drove around. I also helped him move some furniture. We went by his house and I met his wife, Bernadette, an Inupiat from King Island, and their three children. I accompanied him to the Nome City Jail—“voted the best jail in the United States by
Playboy
magazine,” Stimpfle proudly informed me—so he could collect monthly rent from the warden, a house tenant of his. Stimpfle proved to be a rush-hour stampede of ideas for the betterment
of Nome and the improvement of relations across the strait. He looks a lot like the German film director Erich von Stroheim. He has a thick neck, a mostly bald head, and pale blue eyes that dart around in his glasses’ steel frames. He said, “I was named Alaskan of the Year by the Alaskan Chamber of Commerce in 1989! But I’ve set my sights even higher! I may be just a small-town Realtor, but I intend to win the Nobel Peace Prize someday!” Stimpfle’s laugh is a cackle of pure joy.

Born in Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City; father a dentist; raised in Washington, D.C., area; graduated from George Mason University with a degree in history, 1970; went through countercultural divagations standard for the time; married; moved to Fairbanks; lived in a tent-camper; had triplets (all boys); divorced; ex-wife went to work on the Alaskan oil pipeline; Stimpfle stayed in Fairbanks; raised sons; worked as janitor, forest-fire-fighter; trained as a drug and alcohol counselor (much success at that; was told, “Jim, if you can talk a person out of drinking, you certainly can talk him into buying a house”; agreed with this sentiment); met future wife, Bernadette, on a lunch line at the University of Alaska when both were presenting educational programs; married Bernadette; got real estate license; moved to Nome and bought house in 1981.

Stimpfle had always wanted to be a diplomat; many of his father’s patients were diplomats in Washington. Thus, Stimpfle took great interest in the first stirrings of Russian-American amity that began shortly after he moved to Nome. When Lynne Cox swam the strait, Stimpfle managed to be among the party accompanying her to Big Diomede, and there, with the help of Alaskan Natives in the group, he made a lot of contacts among Russian natives, and those led to communications with Soviet mayors and other officials. Stimpfle wrote letters to people across the strait and to officials in D.C. and received some replies. A man he knew in the U.S. State Department said Stimpfle was having more luck getting through to the Russians than official U.S. channels had achieved. The “Friendship Flight” to Provideniya was largely Stimpfle’s doing. In 1988, he made a rousing speech before top management at Alaska Airlines on the subject of why they should begin flying to the Russian Far East. The airline decided he was right. (So, in a sense, it had been because of him that I had happened to move to Missoula.)

Among Stimpfle’s many visions for the future, three stood out. Having seen the failure of the Nome merchants’ policy of accepting rubles
(he had accumulated, he said, fifty or sixty thousand worthless rubles himself), he thought travelers on both sides of the strait should use something called “smart cards,” a kind of credit card able to exchange goods and services internationally, value for value, without any money changing hands. He explained this idea to me at length, but I never got my mind around how it would actually work. Eventually he admitted that his friends and family had grown so sick of hearing about smart cards that they begged him not to bring up the subject anymore.