Travels in Siberia (5 page)

Later, other American intellectuals of Reed’s generation would get even more worked up (“The whole beautiful land is even more glorious than I thought, and no one should stay away from here a minute”), but by then the encomia were directly political, and all leftist. I think Russia-infatuation
may be like the messianic and other religious exaltations that sometimes seize visitors to Jerusalem. The contributing factors seem to be text (Bible, Koran; Tolstoy, Marx) plus the actual earthly location where the text was fulfilled, or is to be. The combination of holy writ and earthly realization may act as a kind of psychic force-multiplier to unhinge the mind.

In Reed’s case, his malady turned out to be fatal. The following year he returned to Russia and witnessed the October Revolution; back in America he holed up for two months in a rented room in Greenwich Village and produced
Ten Days That Shook the World
. After it was published to wide acclaim (Lenin himself admired it), Reed became a figure of the revolution in his own right and went to the new USSR to participate in the conferences and torturous political machinations of the day. While attending the Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku, he caught typhus. Trying to return to America, he ended up in prison in Finland, where his health deteriorated more. Returning finally to Moscow, he died there in 1920. He was not quite thirty-three. The Soviets buried him with honors in the Kremlin Wall. He is one of only two Americans buried there. His politics may have been crazy, and he may have gone overboard about Russia, but there never was a braver writer than John Reed.

On that first trip, after about ten days in Moscow, Alex and Katya and I continued on to Siberia. The story of how that came about is long. A few months earlier, Alex had received a letter from a friend he’d known in college named Sasha Khamarkhanov. Sasha was a poet, and a Buryat. The Buryat are an indigenous people of Siberia with their own republic east of Lake Baikal. The Buryat Autonomous Republic is part of the Russian Federation and its capital is Ulan-Ude (pronounced
OO-LAHN OO-DAY
). In his letter, Sasha said that he was now an official in the Ministry of Culture of the Buryat Republic, and that he was inviting Alex to come to Ulan-Ude, and bring any other American artists or writers who wanted to join him, for the purpose of cultural exchange. Alex wrote back saying he would certainly come. Afterward he asked me if I would like to go to Siberia with him, and I said yes. That plan, tentative and theoretical as it was, had existed before the later details about the gallery show and the trip to Moscow.

I half doubted the Siberia trip would really happen. In Moscow, trying to set it up, Katya made many phone calls at odd hours to find out when and from where flights left for Ulan-Ude. Such Western conveniences as reserving airline tickets over the phone had not yet become routine in Russia. Finally she found a flight, and one afternoon Stas drove us and our luggage out to Domodedovo Airport, Moscow’s main airport for domestic travel. When we arrived, the place was in near chaos, packed with people in the steamy heat, most of the passengers not standing in lines but mobbing the counters in throngs. We tried to work our way through them and onto a plane but gave up not very near the departure gate. Stas took us back to Chuda’s, where it turned out we could not stay because other houseguests had just shown up. Stas then drove us to Alex’s mother’s apartment. Alex’s mother, Lyudmila Borisovna, let us in, and when she heard we had just been at Domodedovo, she made us take showers immediately. “The last thing we need around here is cholera,” she said.

A couple of days later Katya and I (Alex would be taking a later flight) went back to Domodedovo and by pushing and persistence jammed ourselves into a Siberian-bound plane. The seats were like lawn chairs with a single piece of canvas for the back; one’s knees supported the spine of the passenger in front while one leaned on the passenger behind. For the first time I heard that characteristic sound of Russian departures, the clink of vodka bottles in plastic shopping bags. The plane waited for a while on the runway and the cabin became stuffy, so some of the male passengers removed their shirts and undershirts. Finally the plane took off and flew through the night, and the passengers slept all jumbled up with one another. An eight- or nine-year-old girl on my right slept on my right side while I sprawled on the uniformed man on my left. Just before dawn, the uniformed man woke up and looked out the window. As the plane descended to land at Omsk, he turned to me, gestured at the view, and said,
“Sibir’!”

In Russian, the word—
Sibir’
—is pure onomatopoeia. A shiver begins with the first letter and concludes with the palatalized
r
at the end, which, combined with the
bi
preceding it, amounts to
brrr
. Only a cosmic Dickens of place-naming would have chosen a name with such a chilly and mysterious sound. And yet
Sibir’
, so resonant in Russian, is not of Russian provenance, but whispers of deepest Asia. In all geography,
no name has the same magic: Siberia; Siberia; Siberia. After I got interested in it I wondered what the name meant and where it had come from. Farley Mowat, the Canadian author, says in
The Siberians
that “Siberia” means “the sleeping land.” That derivation has a ring to it, but I found no other source saying the same. Valentin Rasputin, the Siberian short-story writer and essayist, proposes that the word comes from the Russian
sebe beri
(take for yourself), contracted to
se’ beri
, which he translates as “take what you can, take it all.” Rasputin’s etymology is ironic; he is an environmentalist who writes often about the plundering of Siberia. Elsewhere he suggests, more seriously, that
Sibir’
was originally the name of a town and that the word meant a center or meeting place.

Among scholars who have studied the question, there is a consensus that
Sibir’
referred to a town on the Irtysh River where the khanate defeated by Yermak and his Cossacks in 1581 had its capital. The town, or fortress, was also known as Isker, or Ibis-Sibir, or Abir-i-Sibir. As Russia enlarged itself across Asia, the original name of
Sibir’
kept being reapplied to larger areas until it came to mean not just a locality but the whole place.

Etymologists say that the word
Sibir’
consists of two Turkic words that have close equivalents in Mongolian. The first word,
su
or
si
, meant “water,” and the second,
berr
or
birr
, meant “a wild, unpopulated land.” The naming pattern follows a common one of simple geographic description used by native peoples, whereby, for example, Baikal derives from the Turkic
bey
, big, and
kul
, lake.
Sibir’
, therefore, meant a wilderness with water. “Marshy wilderness” would come close to describing parts of western Siberia today.

The first appearance of the word
Sibir’
in a written text was in
The Secret History of the Mongols
, composed in Central Asia probably in the year 1228. This epic, written in the vertical script adopted from the Uighurs by the previously illiterate Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, describes Genghis’s mythic origins, birth, conquests, and the victories of his generals and armies. No original of
The Secret History
survives—document conservation not being a Mongol strong point—but several near-contemporary Chinese translations made their way into Chinese archives. Part of
The Secret History
tells of the campaign of Genghis’s son Jochi in 1207 against the People of the Forest. The campaign succeeded, and the People of the Forest submitted to Jochi,
bringing him “white gerfalcons, white geldings and black sables.” The chronicler continues:

After Joci had subjugated the People of the Forest from the Sibir, Kesdim, Bayit, Tugas, Tenlek, To’eles, Tas and Bajigit up to this side, he came back bringing with him the commanders of ten thousand and of thousands of the Kirgisut to pay homage to Cinggis Qa’an . . . Cinggis Qa’an favored Joci, saying, “You, the eldest of my sons, who only now for the first time have left home, you have been lucky. Without wounding or causing suffering to man or gelding in the lands where you went, you came back having subjugated the fortunate People of the Forest. I shall give this people to you.” So he ordered.

In this context,
Sibir’
seems to mean both the place and the tribe in it. The other names listed are of tribes to the west of the Mongols’ territory; “up to this side” means to where Mongol lands began. Jochi would be the first ruler of the expanded western part of the Mongol empire, an area that in the reign of his son Batu would include Kiev and Novgorod and other Russian principalities. (Jochi’s line, by the way, founded the Golden Horde, later ruled by Khan Mamai, from whom Ivan the Terrible traced his Tatar descent.)

In about 1305, the Persian traveler and historian Rashid ad-Din, discussing the territory of the Khirgiz people, wrote of a land he called
Aber Sibir
. And in the Russian chronicles of 1406, mention is made of the killing of a famous and dangerous khan, Tokhtamysh, “in the land of Sibir, near the town of Changa.” (The Russian chronicles were church annals that recorded, in official and formulaic language, the important happenings of the year.) Those two mentions of Siberia are perhaps the earliest ones to be found in any text after
The Secret History
.

The first known reference to Siberia in a book published in Europe appeared in a narrative called
The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa
, which was written (probably dictated) in about 1443 and published in 1473. Schiltberger led a tumultuous life of long journeys, narrow escapes, and face-to-face encounters with historical figures of the age. He was born in 1381, and at about age thirteen entered the service of a lord named
Leinhart Richtaringen. When his lord joined other Bavarian Knights on the Crusade of King Sigismund of Hungary to the Holy Land, Schiltberger went along. King Sigismund quickly led his army into one of the great disasters of the Crusades. At the Battle of Nicopolis on the Danube River in present-day Bulgaria, an Ottoman Turk army led by Bajazet, the sultan, routed the crusaders, caused Sigismund to flee, killed Leinhart Richtaringen, and captured ten thousand prisoners, whom Bajazet ordered to be beheaded on the spot. The three men Schiltberger was roped to had their heads cut off, but Schiltberger, then only fifteen, was spared. He became the sultan’s slave.

Bajazet afterward returned to besieging Constantinople, a favorite occupation of the Ottomans. Schiltberger first saw that city from the attackers’ side. Bajazet, however, soon had to lift the siege and go to war against a more deadly enemy, Tamerlane. This former Turkic tribal chief who rose to become the leader of a great Tatar army was the worst scourge of civilization since Genghis Khan. In 1402, Tamerlane met Bajazet at the Battle of Ankara in Asia Minor, defeated him, put him in a cage, and took plunder, including slaves. As a slave of Tamerlane for several years, Schiltberger was able to report on some of the notable atrocities of his master, such as his burning alive of thirty thousand people in a temple in Damascus, his constructing of pyramids of human heads, and his trampling of children prisoners younger than seven beneath the hooves of his cavalry. Once when Tamerlane was besieging the city of Hispahan, he made peace on the condition that it lend him its archers; after twelve thousand archers were sent, he ordered his soldiers to round them all up and cut off their thumbs. He then entered the city unopposed and killed almost everyone.

Dying in a manner befitting his nature, Tamerlane fell into an incurable rage when he could not revenge himself enough on some people who had betrayed him. He went out howling, and after his burial was heard to howl every night for a year. Schiltberger then became the property of a series of Tamerlane’s sons and grandsons; just who owned him in this period is hard to keep track of. On a journey with one of his later masters, a khan named Tchekre, Schiltberger went north into what he calls “Great Tartaria.” There they met another khan who was planning an expedition “into a country called Ibissibur,” by geographic context clearly Siberia. Schiltberger’s master accompanied this khan, and
Schiltberger devotes about a page to the journey, with a surprisingly accurate piece of ethnological data: “There are also in the above-named country, dogs, that go in carts and sledges; they are also made to carry luggage, and are as large as donkeys.”

Schiltberger’s subsequent travels eventually brought him to the shores of the Black Sea, where, with five other slaves of the Muslims, he escaped and hailed a passing ship from Europe. The sailors asked the escapees to prove their identity as Christians by reciting the Ave Maria, the Paternoster, and the Credo. The memories of Schiltberger and his companions not failing them, the sailors then took them to Constantinople, where Schiltberger told his story to the Byzantine emperor, John VIII Paleologue, who cared for them and helped them on their way. After more plot twists, Schiltberger finally found himself back in Bavaria. He had been gone for thirty-one years. A Bavarian duke gave him a position in his retinue, and there, presumably, the much-journeyed Schiltberger stayed put for the rest of his life.

Over the centuries to come, thousands of travelers, willing and otherwise, would see Siberia and write books about it. By his brief mention and description of Ibissibur, Johann Schiltberger became the first in a long literary line. If plot (as we are told) equals character, and vice versa, then maybe a similar equivalence exists between setting and genre. That is, perhaps the two presuppose each other, as in the sea story, the American Western, the English parlor mystery, etc. Schiltberger’s example leads us to expect that Siberia’s genre will be the travel story, not surprisingly, because one can’t begin to know a place that big without moving around. Sometimes the Siberian genre will also be the slave narrative, a personal account of bondage and suffering, also as per Schiltberger. His precedent also points to another, lighter Siberian genre, just as inseparable from geographic vastness—the picaresque.