Travels in Siberia (6 page)

Our plane had touched down at Omsk and taxied to a stop on the runway. Through the windows nothing was visible but a distant, nondescript horizon in gray morning light. From my vantage, no buildings could be seen. Following the custom of Russian commercial aviation, the plane then sat, with nothing at all happening, for an indefinite amount of time. Eventually from the outer vagueness a motorized boarding ladder
emerged and drove slowly to the plane, its door finally opened, and the passengers disembarked. With pointing arm fully extended, an airline employee indicated a group of tiny buildings just barely within sight. These were the terminal. In a mass with some stragglers, the passengers began to walk in that direction. Katya and I found each other and joined the trek.

What I have to say next concerns the Omsk airport men’s room. I regret this. I’ve noticed that in books by Siberian travelers of the past they don’t talk about bathrooms, and that’s probably good. I reluctantly break with this tradition for two reasons. First, I am an American, and Americans pay attention to and care about bathrooms. The habit may show childishness and weak-mindedness, but there it is. Second, if the world really is going to become a global community, then some of our trading partners (I’m talking to you, too, China) need to know how far apart we are on the subject of bathrooms.

The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of a hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpugnable from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

Soon Katya appeared, also reeling, from her trip to the ladies’. The force of revulsion propelled us clear out of the terminal and into its
cracked and weed-surrounded parking lot, where we finally risked taking deep breaths again. First we washed with packaged detergent hand wipes. Then on our hands and the soles of our shoes we poured rubbing alcohol that Katya had brought along. Readers may think us squeamish. (And, in fairness to the Omsk airport, later we did discover the public bathrooms reserved for foreigners, which were upstairs in the terminal, and not as bad; also, for all I know, in the new Russian economy the Omsk airport has upgraded its facilities by now.)

But as I would find out, though the Omsk men’s room was especially awful, that kind of bathroom experience is more the rule than not in Siberia. Winter temperatures there often fall so low that in the outhouses, liquids freeze very quickly, and over the months a sort of stalagmite effect is created, growing up through the hole in the floor. As for the holes themselves, only in the nicer outhouses are they made with a jigsaw that cuts them into the conventional oval shape; more generally they are hacked with an ax into fractured parallelograms. In indoor bathrooms within the permafrost zone, the fragility of the plumbing means that toilet paper cannot be flushed away, and so it is disposed of separately, usually in its own plastic bucket beside the john . . . Again, I apologize.

Now that I’ve brought up a few of these details, however, and gotten the subject out of the way, I won’t have to refer to it again. In future descriptions of Siberian sanitary arrangements, a more than occasional bathroom along the lines of the Omsk airport men’s room may be inferred.

After a couple of hours and a second collection of tickets, the passengers bound for Ulan-Ude set out on another group hike across the runway, this time to a new plane. The day had become sunny and breezy, and I enjoyed the stroll. Seeing the plane parked by itself off in the distance and watching it grow in size as we approached it restored some of its miraculousness, a quality ordinary air travel takes away. You forget that a machine’s ability to fly is really an act of sorcery, until you observe the thing just sitting there before takeoff, gleaming in the sun. A common Russian word for airplane,
samolyot
(literally, “flies itself”), is not a coinage made to describe a new invention but has been around since the Arabian Nights, when
kovyor samolyot
meant “flying carpet.” As we came to the boarding stairs, the two pilots, neither much more than a teenager, stood
talking casually by the plane as if they’d just finished building it in their backyard.

On this flight, unfortunately, we sat in the same section as a bunch of mafia guys. I use the term for sake of convenience. I don’t know if they were really mafia. They wore dramatically tailored suits, they emitted strong fragrances of cologne, their women had on skimpy clothes and furs, and Katya said they were mafia guys. A small man accompanying them carried bags of expensive provisions, mostly alcoholic, like cognac and champagne, and foods that sent off odors to fill the plane. The group occupied many seats together, putting their belongings on empty ones and ignoring any passengers who showed up complaining that the seats were theirs. They also ignored everything they were instructed to do for takeoff, made no use of seat belts, did not remain seated, walked around the plane, drank and laughed and yelled, and (remarkably) did not pass out, frustrating passengers who were hoping they would. They kept the party rolling all the way to Ulan-Ude.

Movies and TV shows about gangsters expect you always to identify with those characters, and it’s fun to do that, and I try to. Sometimes, though, the fantasy falters, and I find myself identifying not with Tony Soprano and his friends but with anyone unlucky enough to be next to him in an enclosed environment like a plane.

The airport at Ulan-Ude lay in the middle of an immense flat space covered with low tufts of grass. Sasha Khamarkhanov and his brother Kolya met us at the gate. Sasha was a thin, shy, bespectacled man with the attentive manner of someone who always expects to hear something great. Kolya was of a comic-foil rotundity, almost oval, and wore a blue suit and shades. The luggage took about an hour to appear, and as we waited, Katya and Kolya and Sasha discussed our flight and the weather. Katya mentioned the heat, and Kolya said, “Yesterday was even hotter, and that was difficult for me, because I’m fat.” Finally the luggage came and we put it into Kolya’s English-made car and drove into Ulan-Ude.

The impressions of first-time visitors to that city often rise to and descend from their first glimpse of the sculpture of the head of Lenin overlooking Ulan-Ude’s central square. For me these impressions were: sooty, yellow-gray air, reminiscent of Akron, Ohio, in the 1950s; extensive industrial plants, with a silver aircraft or a monstrous black locomotive
with a red star on it poised on a platform by the plant gates; tiers of gray buildings, some connected to one another by aerial walkways; apartment-building roofs thick with antennae in every possible style, some like flowers, some like hot-dog grills, some like spirals, or asterisks, or radiators, or Afro combs; then a huge open square; and then, The Head.

It is said to be the largest head of Lenin in the world. Indeed, without even bothering to check, I’ll assert it’s the largest head of anybody in the world. (I’m talking whole head, now, and not just the face, as on Mount Rushmore.) The Head is gunmetal blue-gray, almost Mayan in its strong features and its upcurled top lip. Including its pedestal, The Head, with just a hint of neck, and no shoulders or body, rises about thirty-five feet above the ground. An open parade-type area spreads in front of it, and it’s flanked by rectangular, hedge-enclosed lawns. Government buildings of four and five stories, in predictable Soviet-era architectural styles, face the square on all sides. The first time I saw The Head I thought it creepy, like a sci-fi symbol that ranks of drone soldiers would goose-step before. On later trips to Ulan-Ude I noticed The Head only in passing, writing it off as just another odd thing that people in the long-gone past had built and left behind.

If I had been stunned in Moscow, I was even more so in Ulan-Ude. New data came at me like rapidly served tennis balls I could not hope to return. Mostly I sort of stumbled around in a daze and did a very indifferent job as a cultural representative of American literature. First we went to Sasha’s apartment and had a big meal prepared by his wife, Tania. We also met their teenage daughter, Arjenna, and their eight-year-old son, Tioshi. The meal involved several courses and featured
omul’
, the signature fish of Lake Baikal, and a traditional Buryat dish called
pozhe
, which are dumplings stuffed with ground lamb and chopped wild onions. We drank vodka, naturally, which Sasha put to his lips only after dipping the fourth finger of his right hand into his shot glass and sprinkling drops in four directions. Sasha’s colleagues from the Ministry of Culture, Zoya and Alyosha, showed up and joined us. Zoya was a short, competent-looking woman with big spectacles. Alyosha was not a Buryat but a very pale Russian-Russian, with three gold teeth and short red hair. During the meal he turned to me and asked me what style I wrote in and blushed violently. I said I wrote in a factual style.

Some of us then got in a boxy tan microbus with large tires and no springs and rode for hours on dusty roads to Lake Baikal. Alyosha drove, and Sasha, Zoya, Katya, Tioshi, a cousin of Tioshi’s, and I sat in the back. The ride went over such troublesome roads, and the seats were so hard, that I was reduced eventually to exhausted, brute irritability. At one point we switchbacked up a road only to find it blocked near the top by a piece of unoccupied earthmoving equipment; we then had to bounce all the way back down. Finally, late in the afternoon, we arrived at a four-story log
dom otdykha
(house of rest), a resort on Baikal’s western shore. Sasha installed us in small, bare rooms without locks on the doors. I undressed and lay down on the bed and tried to nap. Very soon a young woman, possibly a maid, pushed the door open and searched the room for some cigarettes she’d left there. After she closed the door, I dressed again and went out to sit by the lake.

Seeing how droopy I had become, Katya assumed the protective attitude of a fierce older sister. At dinner she found the food suspect and would let me eat nothing but tea and bread. She gave the rest of our dinners to Tioshi and his cousin, who quickly finished them. Sasha asked me questions about the similarity between writers’ unions in Russia and the National Endowment for the Arts in America, and I made such a hash of an answer, even in English, that Katya stopped translating. Sasha pressed vodka on us but I begged off. He said, “If you were in the company of only Buryats, you would be
forced
to drink,” but his tone was mild, and I did not take offense. He told us that most Buryats knew the list of their ancestors by heart to far back in the past, and that he could recite his father and his father and so on back to a brother of Genghis Khan. He said that Buryats became ill if they did not eat enough horse meat, and that some families in Ulan-Ude kept a side of horse frozen on the balconies of their apartments in the winter. He added that you could buy canned pony year-round in Ulan-Ude.

The next morning all had been prepared for me to take a
banya
—a Russian steam bath. The bathhouse I was directed to had once been the hull of a wooden fishing boat. Soon after I went in and sat down and started sweating, it caught fire. I wondered if the heavy smoke coming through the wood paneling on the ceiling was part of the program. Then I heard shouts, grabbed a towel, stepped outside, and saw flames leaping up and a workman in overalls prying at the roof boards with a long crowbar.
Katya appeared and told me to run and jump in the lake, as one traditionally does after a
banya
. I ran, jumped, and nearly seized up from the shock. Baikal is quite cold.

After breakfast, when our plates had just been cleared, the cook came out of the kitchen and asked Katya what was the matter with the two of us that morning. Katya said that we were not feeling well. The cook looked at us, puzzled. “But last night you ate
very
well,” she said.

For that day’s excursion, Sasha piled us back into the microbus and we set out on another long haul, to the village of Barguzin, on a large river of the same name that enters Baikal from the northeast. Barguzin is more than 350 years old and has been almost
the
classic village of Siberian exile since tsarist times. All kinds of people have been exiled there, from Decembrist revolutionaries in the 1830s to Katarina Breshkovskaya, the “little grandmother of the Russian Revolution.” There is even a Russian folk song about exile called “Barguzin Wind.”

All I knew then about Barguzin was how lonesome it looked at the first view, sitting on a plateau above a broad green floodplain extending to distant mountain ranges. Somehow that encircling open space seemed to imply judgment, as if at any moment a huge finger might point down at the village out of the sky. Almost nowhere in America anymore do you see a village like that, with no outlying development, just landscape all around. To reach the village, the road crossed a high bridge over the Barguzin River, where Alyosha had to stop the microbus and honk the horn and race the engine and make feints, attempting to induce a large herd of cattle standing on the bridge to move. They had chosen that spot, no doubt, because of the river breeze, for relief from Barguzin’s plentiful flies. Siberian cows are hard to scare; these looked as if they’d just as soon be run over as not.

Along Barguzin’s bumpy streets of dirt and sand stood many dark brown log houses with elaborate wood trim on the eaves and around the windows, and several big brick-and-plaster houses with columns and gates and yards. The village had once been among the fanciest places in Siberia, Zoya said, back when its merchants traded furs and gold by caravan between China and western Russia. In the village square, a Lenin statue, silver from head to foot, strode forward into space. We stopped
first at the old cemetery, where Zoya had been doing historical work with the eventual goal of restoration. Again, cows disinclined to move loitered here and there. The village had once had a large Jewish merchant population, Zoya told us. Many of the inscriptions on the headstones in the cemetery were in Yiddish. Almost every headstone had been knocked sideways or down.