Travels in Siberia Page 14
Our visit quickly became a mob scene. Crowds of Yndrekanute citizens of all ages gathered around us, thanking us for America’s help, saying hello, trying to sell us stuff, or doing all three. The faces that Karen was hoping to photograph had to be shot at extremely close range. With prompting, some of the subjects did see the problem and stood back a few feet and posed. I broke away on my own and with a dwindling entourage walked the side streets of the village, which was in better shape all in all than its Soviet-era leftovers had led me to think. Most of the houses were of stucco and lath construction, trim and cozy looking, with salmon hanging all along the eaves to dry, wooden ladders leading to outside attic doors, and neat yards. Some had front walks made of the old rubber drive treads of snow machines. Chairs in front of many houses faced the village’s sea view, a sweep of mountains and ocean widening eastward to a full Bering Strait horizon. I saw a row of chairs made of three linked folding seats, like in a theater, next to three stools made of whale vertebrae.
Along with photos, the Californians wanted souvenirs, and they had no trouble finding plenty among the crowd. Mittens, fur hats, toy dogsleds, sealskin boots—soon the Californians were loaded down. As they slowly wound their way back to the boats, they were a heavily laden parade, with villagers thronging around, bringing more stuff, laughing, calling out to one another. At the center of the excitement, Karen carried a set of reindeer antlers and wore her new hat of reddish-gray fox fur with big earflaps. She was smiling a triumphant smile.
We stayed at the fish camp another few days. We were there only about a week in all, but I felt I could have lived there for months. The routine of it suited me. I continued to keep an eye on the nets, and every so often I helped Ivan pull them and knock the accumulated seaweed off them with a tool like a carpet beater. I also read, ate Valentina’s good cooking, walked. Growing tired of my leaky Junior Outdoorsman tent, I asked Ivan if he had room for me in his tent, and he said sure. His was a two-man Russian army model of heavy canvas, which he had floored with furs artfully piled one upon another so that when you lay down your head was higher than your feet. It’s still the most comfortable tent I ever slept in. Another storm came, and the Russian flag he had erected on the beach nearby cracked like a whip as the wind swept by. I read by flashlight in the tent and drifted off.
On a morning when the sea conditions had moderated, we started back for Provideniya. I went in Gennady’s boat and marveled at the exactness with which he turned into each wave we crossed, heading the bow at an angle that brought the crest of the swell within half an inch of the gunwale, and then angling back the other way as we descended into the trough. When we reached the take-out point at the end of the fjord and had to wait for the others, Ivan sheltered beneath a turned-over boat someone had left there. Then he produced a blowtorch, lit it, applied its flame to a blackened teapot, and boiled water for tea. The same military vehicle with the same no-comment Russian driver had come to pick us up. The driver joined us for tea and in a low voice asked Ivan what these foolish Americans had done at the fish camp—sit all day in the cabin by the stove? Ivan told him that this American (pointing to me) had walked farther and found more mushrooms than he, the driver, ever could. The driver looked at me. He showed an unpersuasive grin consisting of metals of different kinds and said no more.
Back in Provideniya, I spent another evening at Ira and Edward’s watching videos and talking, as before. Edward told me that most people in Provideniya wanted to move to either Alaska or western Russia. He said it was possible to buy a big apartment in Provideniya now for just a couple of thousand dollars. Igor, their little boy, was ill with fever and did not come out of his room. In the morning I let myself out very early and walked the town—up Dezhnev Street, down Polarnaya, and along the waterfront. The tall row of cargo cranes by the docks stood rusting and idle; 150 ships used to come here every year, Tanya had told us, but this season the port had seen fewer than a dozen. And yet just outside the bay I could make out a long pennant of diesel smoke from an approaching cruise ship, part of Provideniya’s new tourist equation. I wondered what the tourists would find to do.
At the end of a point of land, past a last crumbling high-rise, I happened upon a graveyard. Like many lonely places in Russia, it had weathered its share of drunken vandalism. Tiny pieces of liquor bottles that had been thrown hard against the stones gave a holiday sparkle to the ground. Memorial busts had been smashed, their noses broken off. Flower vases had been tipped over and cracked. Some of the grave markers bore enameled photo portraits of the deceased set into ovals in the stone. A picture of a woman named Elena featured those intense, empathetic dark eyes you sometimes see in young Russian women. She had been born in 1957 and had died at the age of thirty-six. Lots of the people in the cemetery had died in their thirties. At the foot of one marker, centered neatly on its broad stone base, sat a Russian military cap. It had a shiny black bill and one of those extrahigh fronts with an emblem on it—the kind of hat formerly seen on the heads of generals reviewing a May Day parade. I wanted to pick it up and examine it, but I let it be.
At Nina’s, the Californians were getting ready for departure, saying things like, “Has anybody seen my black bag?” Nina told me a long story about another of her daughters, an unlucky young woman whose husband, she said, had tried to kill her. Amid the confusion, six-year-old Igor suddenly appeared; he had stopped by, Nina said, to tell me goodbye. Igor stood very formally with the top button of his shirt buttoned and his mouth held in a straight line. I asked him if he had recovered from his fever and he said, “Konechno” (Naturally). We shook hands and I promised I would send him some Legos. After I was back home I did send him some, but I don’t know if they ever arrived.
At the airport, surprisingly, a line of people were already waiting at the outgoing customs checkpoint. Just ahead of our party stood some guys from Mason City, Iowa, who had obtained a quick-visit visa in Nome and had flown over in their own plane on a whim to see what Russia was like. They told us they didn’t think much of it. From some inner airport office V——, the Chukotka minister of tourism, emerged with a couple of aides. The minister had curly blond hair, blue eyes, and the personable manner of a casino greeter. He spoke English well and asked the people in line if they’d had a good time. He got to our party right before we went through the door. In his spotless blue warm-up jersey and pants highlighted with parallel white stripes on the sides, he shook our hands and listened with his head cocked inquisitively. Seizing the moment, Karen said to him, “V——, Sandy here [indicating me] told us that most of the money we paid for this trip was spent on bribes. Is that really true?”
V—— replied without hesitation. “Yes, that’s correct, bribes.” He raised his eyebrows and looked at her, mildly curious about what the point of such an obvious question might be.
PART II
Chapter 8
In the year 1220, a Taoist monk named Ch’ang ch’un received a summons from Genghis Khan. The Mongol emperor, ruler of more earthly territory than any human before him, had a curiosity about spiritual things. He had heard of Ch’ang ch’un’s reputation for wisdom and he wanted the monk to come to him so he could ask some questions. The rumor that the monk possessed medicine of immortality especially interested him. Ch’ang ch’un replied modestly, “I have grown old and am not yet dead. My repute has spread over all kingdoms; but as to my sanctity, I am not better than ordinary people, and when I look inwards, I am deeply ashamed of myself.” Any request from the khan had to be obeyed, however, so with an entourage of disciples, the seventy-three-year-old monk set out from Peking in 1221 on a journey to Genghis’s encampment far to the west.
Ch’ang ch’un and his companions went across much of Asia. Maybe they were in southern Siberia part of the way, maybe not. The disciples kept a diary; here is a sample: “There was a stony river, more than fifty li long, the banks of which were about a hundred feet high. The water in the river was clear and cold, and bubbled like sonorous jade.” (One of the best
river descriptions ever: bubbled like sonorous jade.) Crossing hot deserts in the cool of the night, they feared being charmed by goblins. The foods of the master’s diet—rice, meal, vegetables—could not always be found. By the time winter came on, they had reached the city of Samarkand, north of the pass through the mountains that led down to present Afghanistan. Genghis Khan and his army were there, camped on a plain between Kabul and Andarab. The chroniclers note that in those years Genghis was fighting “the Mohammedan rebels in the mountains.” The Mongols would not be the last army to give that exercise a try.
In May 1222, about a year and a half after leaving Peking, Ch’ang ch’un reached the camp of Genghis Khan. Out of respect for the Taoists, the Mongol courtiers did not make them fall to their knees and bow their foreheads to the floor—the practice called kowtow—as was customary. Genghis asked the monk about the medicine of immortality. Ch’ang ch’un replied, “There are means of preserving life, but no medicine of immortality.” Genghis praised him for his honesty. The monk also got away with refusing to drink koumiss (fermented mare’s milk), the Mongols’ favorite alcoholic beverage and a part of their court ceremonies. Eventually Ch’ang ch’un explained Taoist doctrine to the khan, who was “highly edified” by this, and “the discourse of the sage pleased his heart.” Ch’ang ch’un asked Genghis if he could go home now, and Genghis said they would travel together, since he was headed eastward also and had more questions in mind. After keeping the monk close at hand for almost a year, the khan finally let him begin his trip home in April 1223. Ch’ang ch’un was back in Peking by 1224. Genghis ordered a monastery to be built for him there. Ch’ang ch’un died three years later at the age of seventy-nine.
People think of the Age of Exploration as beginning in the fourteen hundreds, with various well-known voyages. In fact, its stirrings may be seen two centuries earlier, in epic pedestrian journeys like Ch’ang ch’un’s. Other monks—Christian rather than Taoist though no less intrepid—traversed Asia in that time to visit the Mongol khan. The Christians, of course, started from the west rather than the east. John of Plano Carpini, a Franciscan and a companion of St. Francis, traveled from Lyons in April 1245 on a missionary journey in the pope’s name. Carpini endured a hard trip, reached the khan in Mongolia, definitely did not convert him to Christianity, and arrived back in France in the fall of 1247. Six years after that, King Louis the Pious of France, hearing a report that some of the Mongols were Christians, sent another Franciscan, William de Rubruquis, with official letters requesting that Rubruquis be allowed to settle in Mongol lands and preach the gospel. Rubruquis took another couple of years in his travel and, like Carpini, did not succeed at all in winning souls. The most famous pedestrian explorer of the age, Marco Polo, made his trip to the court of Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, in 1271–75. In Polo’s book, many in Europe would read about travels in Asia for the first time. None of these journeys would have been possible without the Mongols. Genghis’s global conquests, and those of his sons and grandsons, not only opened up Asia but provided enough order so that people could travel there.
The Mongols were the last of the great solar-powered scourges who gathered strength on the grassland steppes of Central Asia and emerged in search of plunder and destruction. The invention of the bronze bit in about 800 BCE put the steppe dweller on horseback, and his mobility let him find new pastures to fuel ever-larger herds. Later advances in ironworking and weaponry made him a terrifying foe. The Greeks called these barbarians Scythians; Herodotus said they descended from Hercules’ son, Scythes, inventor of the bow and arrow. Another name for the barbarians—Sarmatians—came from the Greek for “lizard-eyed.” (Going by that description, there are still many Sarmatians in Russia today.) The Roman poet Ovid wrote of the dangerous steppe barbarians during his Black Sea exile in the first century AD: “When the fierce strength of the mighty Boreas fetters the waters, then at once the barbarian enemy rides along the Ister [Danube] . . . The enemy, mighty with horses and his swiftly flying arrows, lays waste the countryside far and wide.”
Scythians, Goths, Huns, Magyars, Avars, Khazars—the waves of nomadic peoples of the grasslands came and went. The ever-renewing Central Asian pastures, and their wild horsemen, constituted one of the hazards of the planet for more than a thousand years. Attempts to fence the steppe barbarians out by means of walls, of which the Great Wall of China was only the most dramatic example, never did solve the problem. In the end, all that really worked was shooting the mounted invaders with guns. By the fifteenth century, fortunately for civilization, the improved battlefield efficiency of firearms had moved military advantage to the defenders’ side.
But before the steppe barbarians receded into history forever, they produced a final, world-shaking spasm with the Mongols and Genghis Khan. The Mongols were originally one of many tribes on the eastern steppes and Genghis only a local tribal leader. He was born with the name Temuchin in 1167 on the banks of the Onon River in the grasslands between Lake Baikal and the Great Wall. His mother, Alan-Koa, was said to have been impregnated by the sky god Koko Tengri entering her tent on a moonbeam and penetrating her womb with a ray of light. The clot of black blood the baby was holding in his fist at birth augured his future and the world’s. By young manhood, Temuchin had fought and maneuvered his way to a chieftainship, employing remarkable gifts of organization and a knack for judging his comrades’ character and inspiring loyalty. In 1206, the kuriltai, or gathering of tribes, elected him the Great Khan; “Genghis” means something like “oceanic.” From that point his armies grew and added new and more-distant conquests every year.
Almost the only not-horrible thing about the Mongols was if you happened to be one yourself. Within the group they treated one another generously and fairly, following the legal code called the yasaq, laid down by Genghis Khan. Plus, there was the comradely fun of destroying and pillaging civilizations from Peking to Bukhara. A Muslim eyewitness to the invasion of the Irano-Mesopotamian borderlands told a Persian historian how the Mongols cheerfully mocked the Islamic cry “la ilaha illa allah,” shouting it when they were about to kill someone. “The massacre over, they plundered the town and carried off the women,” the witness said. “I saw them frolicking on their horses . . . they laughed, they sang in their own language, and they said: ‘la ilaha illa allah.’” After victories, the Mongols sometimes put boards on top of their prisoners and had drinking contests on them.
Genghis Khan told the peoples he conquered that he was their punishment for the soft, luxurious lives they had been leading. Certainly, the Mongols’ existence on the steppes had been the opposite of that. Physically, the Mongols were narrow waisted, small footed, with large heads; many had the bowlegs nomads acquire from growing up on horseback. The men shaved the crowns of their heads and left bangs hanging down in front and two long locks in back, which they braided and tied to their ears. They had thick eyebrows. Much of their lives was spent outdoors in the steppes’ fierce climate, almost always on horseback. They would mount up and ride whenever they had to go a distance farther than a hundred paces. Observers said the Mongols would eat just about anything—mare’s milk curds dried on rocks, roots, lice, dogs, rats, meat tenderized by being ridden on all day beneath a saddle. Marco Polo said they ate a lot of hamsters, which were plentiful on the steppes. Other observers noted that on long journeys Mongol riders would open a vein in their horse’s neck and fill a small bowl with blood, or drink directly from the vein. They could endure extreme cold or heat while riding, Friar Carpini said, and after two days with no food “sing and make merry as if they have eaten their bellies full.”
The heads of Mongol arrows were four fingers broad, to cause bigger wounds, and they kept them sharp with files. No Mongol soldier was without a file. Their arrows had very thin notches, too small for their enemies’ bowstrings, so the arrows could not be picked up and shot back at them. Their bows were of horn and sinew on a wood frame and took two men to string. They wore iron helmets and armor made of polished iro
n sewn on leather; one observer described an army clad in this armor shining like the sun. On the open steppes, they tended to get hit by lightning. Thunder terrified them. During their long campaigns they carried all kinds of belongings with them—whole houses made of felt, on giant carts—with their immense herds of horses and oxen providing the transport. In the summers, when the grazing was the best, they journeyed most widely. A historian has written that in battle the Mongols “made the fullest use of the terror inspired by their physique, their ugliness, and their stench.” Considering that in summer their diet consisted almost entirely of mare’s milk, and that the yasaq had strictures against ever washing their clothes, that last point sounds plausible.
By the time of Genghis’s death in 1227, the Mongols had subdued northern China, middle Asia, the Crimea, and the northern Caucasus; their empire stretched from the Caspian to the Pacific. In the process, they had killed tens of millions of people—more than eighteen million in China alone, over one and a half million in the Central Asian city of Herat, according to contemporary historians. A Persian chronicler said that in the Muslim countries Genghis invaded, “not one in a thousand of the inhabitants survived.” These estimates are perhaps exaggerated, but they give an idea of how contemporaries saw the calamity. Rashid ad-Din, a Persian who is considered to be perhaps the best ancient authority on Genghis Khan, quotes Genghis’s saying that the greatest pleasure in life is “to cut my enemies in pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those who are dear to them and to embrace their wives and daughters.” This, more than any Taoist precepts he might have acquired from Ch’ang ch’un, is the enduring wisdom of Genghis Khan.