Travels in Siberia (17 page)

Once the sacks were ready, Ivan pumped up his little rubber raft and paddled into the waves, setting the nets perpendicular to the shore and adjusting them so that all the floats rode at the surface. There were four nets and he put them about a hundred yards apart. When he had finished with the last net, he was about a quarter mile upwind of where the rest of us were sitting on the shore; to return, he opened his cape wide with both arms, caught the wind in it, and sailed back, singing full-throated nautical songs.

The next morning the Californians awoke displeased. The night had gone badly. Rain had fallen nonstop. The tents leaked. High winds caused them to move around alarmingly. Then, trying to wash up with no facilities but the Bering Sea proved difficult. Breakfast was on the sparse side. On a walk across the tundra to the hot springs, Vladimir-the-guide showed us lingonberries, groundberries, and cloudberries of a lovely tequila-sunrise orange hidden among the greenery at our feet. Valentina identified a tiny wildflower, midnight blue with black pistils inside, as the
petushok
, a word that means a young rooster. The flower did look just like a rooster’s comb in profile. At the hot springs, Karen and Vladimir-the-guide
both swam, but the ground around the spring was so muddy it was hard to come out any cleaner than you went in. The party walked slowly back to camp, with the Californians’ frame of mind unimproved.

As we sat drinking tea in the cabin after lunch, Karen and Micky began asking Vladimir-the-guide pointed questions about the tour’s finances. Vladimir-the-guide said he had nothing to do with the money, he was just supposed to guide us in Chukotka. Karen persisted, and Vladimir said, “That’s not my business,” and stood up and went outside. With no other target handy, the Californians then for some reason presented their complaints to me: The tents, Micky said, were inadequate, and in fact were the kind children use camping in the backyard. We had been promised a visit to a reindeer camp, and no reindeer camp was now on the schedule. The food was not sufficient, and Micky’s low-cholesterol diet requirements had been ignored. On top of that, photography, the whole purpose of the trip, was almost impossible in this coastal fog.

I told them they were right about the tents, and right in general—but what did they expect? This was Russia. Misrepresenting my own experience somewhat, I said that judging by the many Russian trips I’d been on, ours was about average so far. My answer calmed them only a little. It seemed that what really rankled was the money. Nobody likes to be ripped off. Exactly what had our $3,000 apiece paid for? The plane ride had been a puddle jump. We had stayed in private homes in Provideniya. The food couldn’t have been that expensive, or the gas for the army vehicle or the boat ride. Where, they asked, had the money gone?

“That’s simple,” I said. “I’m sure most of the money was spent on bribes.”

The Californians looked at one another. Bribes. These were honest and decent American folks. Such a thought had not crossed their minds. I then explained about the many important people who probably had to be paid off for our easy entry into the country, maybe even for our unexpected journey to the camp here. I told them about the widespread reputation of Russian officialdom and the way business here is said to be done. I could see them feeling a little better with every moment that passed. After this conversation, and for the rest of the trip, I can’t say that they were exactly content, but the subject of where the money had gone did not trouble them anymore.

I was reminded of the old joke of W. C. Fields, famous comedian and drinker from the 1930s. Fields walks into a bar, and he says to the bartender,
“Did I spend a twenty-dollar bill in here last night?” The bartender says, “Yes, sir, you did.” “Oh, what a relief,” Fields replies. “I thought I’d lost it.”

During times when nothing else was planned, I walked the surrounding landscape for hours. I am susceptible to geography, and the idea that I was in a different country, continent, and hemisphere—with the United States forty-five minutes away!—stayed in the front of my mind. I felt I’d fallen down the rabbit hole, or stepped behind a secret sliding panel in ordinary life. Not that the scenery here on the other side offered much in the way of drama. Instead the fog, sea, beach, and tundra suggested drama of an undramatic kind, like the dull, flat paint jobs used to obscure the most expensive warplanes. I went high on the tundra hills, stepping from hummock to hummock in the rubber boots Vladimir-the-guide had provided me, and found thousands more mushrooms. This time I checked for water damage and tried to pick the newest-looking boletes, ones that maybe had popped up just that morning. Ivan Tanko, when I showed them to him, pronounced them
otlychnie grybii
—outstanding mushrooms—and Cenia, the young wife, strung them on thread and hung them from the beams of the cabin ceiling to dry.

I thought it somehow wrong that geography this momentous could begin without any sign or monument to commemorate the fact of it. Solzhenitsyn’s statue on the shoreline had been just a fantasy, and the reaching-hand sculpture in Uelen merely a plan. But couldn’t there be even a simple boundary marker of some kind? “Welcome to Asia,” or something? I had read that during the reign of Catherine the Great, iron markers bearing the Russian Imperial double-headed eagle were placed all along the coast of Chukchi-land. As I walked, I kept my eyes open. Who knew? Maybe a few of those double-eagle signposts were still out there.

One day after a few miles of wandering I saw a pole or post on a seaside bluff in the distance and went to check it out. To my surprise it was indeed a monument. What I had taken for a pole was actually an iron whaling harpoon, the kind that’s shot from a gun. It had a blunt-tipped, finned head, ugly as the point of a missile. A pedestal of rocks and cement supported the harpoon at the base, and an arrangement of whale ribs on the ground a pace or so away bracketed it. A plaque in Russian on the
monument read,
IN MEMORY OF THE WHALING FLOTILLA “ALEUT,” 1932–1967. ERECTED BY THE CREW OF THE “CELESTIAL,” SEPT. 1970.
A smaller plaque said,
HISTORY OF THE SOVIET WHALING INDUSTRY IN THE FAR EAST. 23 OCTOBER 1932 THE FIRST WHALE WAS TAKEN IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN
. A list of flotilla names followed. Waves broke against the stones at the bottom of the bluff and continued to the horizon in foggy obscurity. In the surrounding vastness of sea and hills I could not pick out a single other work of man. Never had I seen a monument in a lonelier spot.

Aside from the rain and wind and chill, and the chronically damp clothes, I enjoyed the fish camp. After salmon started coming to the nets, the food improved. Valentina made sautéed salmon steaks, and a soup of salmon heads and potatoes called
ukha
, and fried salmon liver and salmon milt with kasha, and salmon eggs and butter on thinly sliced black bread. For Valentina’s birthday, Gennady shot a spotted seal. Some of us went along in the boats to observe as he approached a small isthmus beside a bay, slipped ashore, concealed himself behind one of the special stone cairns built there for seal hunting, laid his rifle in a crenellation at the top of the cairn, waited for a curious seal to pop its head up from the waves, and shot the seal in that split second right in the head at a distance of more than a hundred yards. And all this with iron sights and not a scope! The dead seal drifted and its blood made a red plume in the blue water. Vladimir-the-guide zipped over in his boat and picked it up. When we returned to the camp, Ivan quickly and expertly butchered it—its cute seal face looked strange cut up and reduced to a cubist jumble—and Valentina fried its liver and boiled its meat with angel-hair pasta for the birthday dinner. Seal meat tastes like the beef of a cow fed on salmon.

Morning, noon, and evening I helped Ivan tend the nets. When the nets’ floats went under, the net was full and had to be retrieved soon or little crabs would eat the catch and reduce them to limp, emptied-out skin wrappings. We pulled the nets up on the beach, untangled the salmon, and threw them into a heap by Ivan’s salt barrels and cleaning board. Most of the salmon were of two kinds, king and humpbacked; there was also a shimmery, spotted char known in North America as the Dolly Varden. The nets also caught many strange, spiky little fish that
Ivan called
bychki
. Later I learned that these fish are a favorite Russian snack to have with vodka. They come in a can, with a distinctive tomato sauce. Ivan disdained them, so we threw them away.

Ivan was fun to fish with. He and I talked a lot. Whole five-minute periods went by during which I understood nothing he said, but that was okay. He also sang folk songs and rousing Communist Party anthems he had learned during his student days in Leningrad. Taking a deep breath and throwing his head back, he belted out,
“Lenin, yeshcho zhivoi . . .”
(Lenin, living still . . .). Sometimes when pulling the net he recited lines from great works of literature, matching the recitation to the action. A favorite went,
“Tyanem, po-tyanem / Vytyanut’ ne mozhem . . .”
(We pull, and we pull / We cannot pull it out . . .). He said this was from a fable called “Repka,” about people trying to pull up a huge turnip. He said it was written by Pushkin.

Some of the other lines he spoke or half sang he also said were by Pushkin, but I didn’t catch them or write them down. (“Repka,” it turns out, is an old fable, not Pushkin’s.) Maybe I had put Pushkin in Ivan’s mind because of the joke about throwing rocks. Still, I thought again of the poem Pushkin wrote based on Horace’s poetic claim, “I have built a monument more lasting than bronze.” The Russian poet’s prediction of his own literary immortality was in an unpublished work found among his papers after his death. That poem said he would live forever in his verses on the lips of living men, and his name would be remembered “wherever one poet is still alive.” Across Russia, he foretold, all would know him, including

      
I Fin, i nyne díki Tungús,

      
I drug steppéi Kalmík . . .

      (The Fin, and the now wild Tungus,
      and the Kalmik, friend of the steppes . . .)

What a grand prediction for a young poet in a still-young literature to venture! And I can affirm that as regards the Chukchi, the spirit of it came true.

The Arctic summer twilight lasted in the evening until about eleven thirty and returned in the morning about four. Sometimes, during the latest or earliest hours of light, we heard the sound of Vladimir-the-Yupik’s outboard motor growing louder or fading away. All six of the Yupiks missing since the storm remained unaccounted for; he kept going out to try to find them, the other Russians said. One morning just after dawn, he and his son came upon one of the Yupik boats washed up on a shore. No tracks on the beach or tundra indicated that any men had been nearby, so doubtless this boat had been among those abandoned in the storm when its owners jumped from it to another. Vladimir-the-Yupik towed it back to the fish camp and beached it on the gravel beside the cabin.

When I heard about it, I went to take a look. In its sea-battered state, the boat most resembled objects I had seen that were damaged by a bear. Its seat struts were broken, its seats crushed down, its oarlocks torn out, and its sides dented in. Pieces of Styrofoam-type stuff that had fit under the seats for added flotation had been knocked askew and shattered. Spills of gravel strewed the boat’s bottom, along with sea plants, and pieces of wire, and a few chunks of dried salmon that were white and waterlogged. Natural disasters produce a special grunginess unlike that of human-made chaos, somehow. Observing all this I got a sense that the terror the boat’s occupants had felt was still there.

On an afternoon jaunt with Gennady and Ivan and Vladimir-the-guide, I met more Yupiks who were searching for the missing men. The four of us had stopped at a calm, lee-side beach to have tea when two boats bigger than ours carrying six or seven native guys passed by. Seeing us they abruptly veered and came ashore. The sight of non-Yupik Russians whom they assumed to be on the same mission as their own cheered them, and they jumped from their boats and thanked us and shook our hands. Then they heard me say something in English to Vladimir-the-guide, and all did a triple take. Learning that we were in fact on an excursion of tourism, and not a search party, they cooled in their enthusiasm. But having pulled their boats up, they decided to take a tea break also. Gennady and Ivan joined them while Vladimir and I hiked along the strand to an ancient site nearby.

The site, as Vladimir explained to me, offered proof of the efficacy of the toggling harpoon point. Sea mammal hunters started living at an
encampment here about five hundred years ago, several centuries after the toggling point’s invention. On the long, grassy expanse above the seaside gravel, many large skulls of bowhead whales they had killed stood in an unevenly spaced line. Looking along the row from one end of it to the other, I absorbed the wordless impact of the site. In life these creatures would have been forty feet long and weighed fifty tons. The men who lived here pursued them aboard walrus-skin boats in water that was death even to fall into, and killed them with harpoons tipped with ingenious pieces of ivory. Vladimir said no one knew for sure if the skulls had had a ceremonial purpose, or perhaps simply served as stands on which to dry the skin boats and hold them ready for quick launching when whales were seen.