Travels in Siberia Read online

  With nothing else to do, I walked down some steps to the little road leading into the village. There were no tire tracks in the new snow, or tracks of any kind. The railroad-crossing barrier was stuck in the “down” position and its warning lights flashed a strong red in the landscape of gray and white. The houses in the village had no yards to speak of but sat hard by their fences along the road. The houses’ construction seemed to have been a cumulative process, with afterthoughts of small side structures stuck onto and obscuring their original frames, and the whole business sealed in place from above by its lavish and drooping cap of snow. As I came closer, I saw that there were indeed lights in some of the windows, barely more than peepholes in little angles of wall; also, that parsimonious breaths of smoke rose from two or three of the chimneys.

  In fifty paces I had walked into and out of town. Ahead, the road set off across blank fields through a scraggly avenue of birch trees, without signs or markers of any kind. I continued along the road to the top of a little rise. When I looked back, two women in long coats and head scarves were slowly pushing a cart from the village toward the station. Thinking maybe I had misunderstood when the train would come, I hurried back to the platform. The women had just finished wrestling their cart up the platform steps. I went over to them, said hello, and explained I had taken the wrong train. The women were unmistakably a pair. Both wore two head scarves, a light one underneath and a heavier, coarser one on top. One woman was thin and her long wool coat was brown. The other woman was stout, and sturdy-looking as a bollard, and she wore a wool coat of a particular red I have never seen except in displays of British soldiers from the American Revolutionary War. Both had weathered, wrinkled-shoe faces, multiple warts, and lively pale-blue eyes.

  They told me the right train to take to Peterhof and where on this railroad line to get it. The station I wanted was called Leninskii, they said. They were going to the market by Leninskii station themselves and would tell me when they were getting off. I asked them if they lived in this village, and they said they did. The village was called Little Verevo, they said, and it used to be an administrative center of Verevo oblast during Soviet times. There was also a South, an East, and a Big Verevo, they added. Having strained my conversational abilities almost to overheating, I thanked the women and moved down the platform, but in a minute the thinner one came to me and said I should stand with them, because only one door opened on this train, and it usually stopped with that door where they were standing. I rejoined them, and in another minute the train arrived. From the platform up to the train door was a giant step. I helped them get their cart aboard, lifting it from the bottom. The cart was amazingly heavy. The stouter woman told me that the station platform sank lower and lower every year.

  In the dawn light as we approached Petersburg, I noticed many of the same empty white fields that surrounded Little Verevo; then all at once the fields stopped and the city began. You could see the exact building where that occurred. Arrived at Leninskii station, I again helped the women with their cart, out of the train and then down a long flight of stairs to the street. They showed me the direction they were going, toward the Leninskii market. Afraid of seeming nosy, I didn’t ask what they had in that heavy cart to sell. Before setting out, the women told me again what train I should take and where at Leninskii station it would stop. As they walked away the thin one looked back at me and said, “S’Bogum” (Go with God). As soon as I reached the platform, I became convinced I had gone to the wrong one. I could still see the women proceeding slowly along the street, so I ran down and asked them again. They replied with some heat that I had the right platform and I should hurry back, because the train was about to come in a minute and there would not be another for a long time.

  The train in fact came as I ran back; it was just pulling out as I reached the top of the stairs. I waited an hour and forty minutes in the windy cold for the next one. While I stood there, people kept coming up to me and asking me when the next train to this or that destination would be. Maybe they chose me because of my boots—I was wearing the same ones Vladimir-the-guide had given me in Chukotka, and they may have made me look as if I worked for the railroad, or something. To each questioner I replied that I didn’t know, I was a foreigner. After an hour or so I had accumulated a group of five or six people standing in my vicinity who had previously asked me about the trains. When a new questioner would come along and begin to ask me something, the bystanders would cut him off, saying, “Don’t ask him—he’s a foreigner. He doesn’t know anything.”

  Snow was falling hard as I crossed the spacious sculpture garden, bigger than several parade grounds, that leads to the main palace at Peterhof. The snowstorm made the palace look even more looming and impressive, its ranks of tall windows sketching the principles of classical architecture like an old drypoint drawing. I might have imagined that the gardens and the fountains with their statuary and the palace façade in the background, snow-blurred as they were, exactly resembled what a visitor would have seen on a winter day almost three hundred years before; but the quick blue-white flashes from tourists’ cameras here and there restored the view to the present tense.

  Long lines were waiting patiently in the snow for admission. Through the palace windows, what little I could see of the inside seemed filled with tour-group crowds. I decided to go to one of the smaller palaces first and come back here later in the day. The guidebook I’d brought mentioned a modest-looking residence of the tsars, the Kottadge Dvorets (Cottage Palace), a little over a mile away on the Peterhof grounds. I set out for it and found it after some wandering around. The Cottage Palace is a small château sequestered in the woods and behind gates like a mafia don’s retreat on Lake Tahoe. I paid my admission, took off my snow-covered coat and hat, removed my boots, and put a pair of tapichki on my feet. (Tapichki are the slippers, often just boatlike pieces of felt stitched together at the ends, that many Russian museums require visitors to wear.)

  Almost no other tourists had made the journey to this little place, maybe because it’s no more impressive than a single-family house in a comfortable suburb. We few who did show up had the guide to ourselves. Not understanding much she said on the first go-round, I took the tour a number of times and with several guides. The Cottage Palace was built in the 1820s by Tsar Nicholas I, and he and the tsars who followed him spent a lot of time with their families here. The paintings on the walls depicted mostly humdrum seascapes, and the furnishings were nice but nothing the rich tastes of earlier tsars or empresses would have admired. Here, apparently, tsars of the nineteenth century indulged a longing to live like ordinary well-to-do people away from everybody else. And yet references to their vast and autocratic power could be seen even in the knickknacks. I was especially taken with an elaborate clock, presented as a gift to Tsar Alexander II in 1861; on the clock’s large glass face were sixty-seven smaller clocks, each showing the time in a different one of Russia’s sixty-six provinces and Alaska.

  The real spirit of the Cottage Palace resided in its view. Though the house sat on an eminence, it featured only one, northward-facing vista: an exhilarating sweep of open meadow (now snow covered, crossed by small cross-country skiers) down a long and gentle slope to the storm-blue waters of the Gulf of Finland. All the major rooms of the house had been designed around big windows that framed this view. On the top floor was a snug, comfortably furnished room called the Morskoi Kabinet. (The name means “Sea Office.”) This was like a study or an aerie for the tsar. Its intricately patterned parquet floor and the green trompe l’oeil curtains set off the soaring distance in its windows. Through wood-mullioned double French doors leading to a small roofed balcony, one looked both downward and dizzyingly far across the gulf. On a table before the French doors sat a long brass telescope and a speaking trumpet; sometimes the tsars directed naval exercises from the balcony, calling orders to aides who relayed them to the assembled fleet. When the weather was clear, the guide said, you could see all the way to Kronstadt from here.
Kronstadt is an island in the gulf, site of a Russian naval base and former customs station for ships entering and leaving St. Petersburg.

  Peter the Great built St. Petersburg to open Russia to the West and provide her a convenient port on the Baltic (of which the Gulf of Finland is an arm). In descriptions of St. Petersburg’s history, the epithet “Window to Europe” is often used. To me St. Petersburg seems more like a hole in the corner of a sealed-tight packing crate that Peter crowbarred open violently from inside. Once the breach was made, the light flowed in, and it continues to flow. That mobile and constantly incoming western light may partly explain the watchability of the St. Petersburg sky. Joseph Brodsky, the Russian-American poet, said that when he and his friends were boys in Leningrad, they used to look westward across the gulf and pretend to see Sweden, and they took hope from the proximity. In the speech he made to the Swedish Academy and other attendees in Stockholm when he received his Nobel Prize, Brodsky said, of his childhood bedroom, “Depending on the wind, the clouds I saw in my window were already seen by you, or vice-versa.” For Brodsky, Leningrad/St. Petersburg had kept its psychological status as a portal even in Stalin times.

  By my fourth go-round on the Cottage Palace tour, the guides had become used to me, and one of them continued to guide me even as I put on my coat and boots to leave. I got the feeling she was glad to have a customer who didn’t yawn at this middle-class place after gorging on the splendors and eccentricities of Peter the Great. Outside, where she followed me, she pointed out the house’s vaulted windows in the Dutch style and the wild grapevines growing above them, and she described in some detail which improvements to the structure had been added by which tsar. Finally the cold affected her and she retreated back inside.

  Before she left she said I should walk down the meadow and look at the house from there. I followed the path she had shown me across the open and snowy field. When I turned around after about half a mile, the house all by itself on the ridgetop rose with a dramatic presence. At the head of its long meadow cut through the shoreline trees, its sky-reflecting windows with the tsar’s own window at the very top must have been hard to miss even from well out at sea. The Cottage Palace and the rest of the Peterhof complex is not as far west in Russia as one can go, of course. Still, for practical purposes, this place marked the symbolic westernmost point of Russia. And there at the western gate, in his Morskoi Kabinet with its commanding view, like a splendid sentry in a sentry box—the tsar himself.

  At the end of my January in St. Petersburg, I flew back to New York. I spent February at home in New Jersey. In March, I traded in my accumulated frequent flyer miles on Alaska Airlines for another ticket to Nome. In all my previous trips to that city I had never had good enough weather for a trip to the Diomede Islands (the reader may remember that the Diomedes, Big and Little, are the islands separated by the Russian-American border in the middle of the Bering Strait). The sight of Big Diomede looming from the sea like a Russian boundary stone had persistently eluded me. I wanted to give it one more try.

  First I flew from Newark to Minneapolis and from there to Anchorage; after a few days in Anchorage I caught an early-morning flight to Nome. The plane made a stop at Kotzebue, above the Arctic Circle. A Kotzebue resident named Roy Toruk sat beside me and we talked on the way. He knew two of the Eskimo evangelists whose snowmobile trip to Chukotka had aroused my interest in going to the Diomedes in the first place. As the plane descended to Kotzebue, I could not believe how little was there; all the works of man seemed as if they could be erased into the surrounding whiteness with one sweep of a hand. I asked Roy Toruk, “Does it ever get depressing, living here?” With a big smile, as if bragging of a remarkable local resource, he said, “It—sure—does!”

  After unloading and loading in Kotzebue, the plane continued on, over endless bare white hills, until we were approaching Nome. Before, I had seen Nome only in its muddy phase. Now the town and its surroundings were mostly white with blue shadows. On the sea before the town, chunks of ice threw shadows as long as jet trails in the flat light from the horizon-hugging sun. The pilot said the local temperature was one degree below zero, with a forty-mile-an-hour wind making it feel like fifty below. As I stepped from the plane door, the wind hit like a cutting torch that cuts with cold.

  On the phone in my old room at the Nome Nugget Motel, I began inquiring about flights to the Diomedes. I had two choices. A small Nome airline, Cape Smythe Air, flies to Little Diomede in winter when ice conditions permit. Unfortunately, so far this year the ice hadn’t been thick enough to make a good runway, the person at Cape Smythe told me. She said she didn’t think they’d be flying to Little Diomede this winter at all. The other choice, Evergreen Helicopter, also in Nome, provides service to Little Diomede whether there’s an ice runway or not. Evergreen Helicopter is a two-person operation consisting of the pilot, Eric Penttila, and his mechanic.

  Eric answers the phone himself. I had gotten to know him a little from previous planned-but-then-canceled trips to Little Diomede. I had gone out to the hangar where his shiny machines sat, rotors folded, between walls hung with flight suits, charts, and tools. Eric Penttila is a Vietnam War veteran. He had told me about his luck there when a helicopter he was piloting survived an attack while picking up troops on a battlefield. Several people in the helicopter were hit, and when he got back to base he found that the main control rod, a hardened aluminum tube, had taken an AK-47 round through its middle without snapping.

  Eric seemed a peevish, worried, mournful fellow, knowledgeable about the world’s wickedness and striving thanklessly against it. He also told me that a while back he had received a call saying that a small aircraft carrying evangelist missionaries who were returning from Chukotka had gone down in the Bering Sea. With his mechanic and a Nome volunteer firefighter, Eric had flown immediately to the site of the crash and located the missionaries and the pilot hanging on to five-gallon gas cans. Maneuvering carefully, he had taken the chopper down into the swells, keeping his tail rotor just above the water, while his companions straddled the floats and pulled the people aboard. Nome-ites had previously reported this story to me as a tale of heroism; Eric described it as just another of the vexing things he was expected to do.

  Now when I reached him on the phone he allowed that he would probably be flying to Little Diomede on Wednesday, a couple of days away. He didn’t sound at all happy about the idea. A front was supposed to move in later in the week, so maybe it would cloud up by Wednesday; he added this last with the gloomy optimism of one holding out a faint hope. He would be making half a dozen shuttles back and forth between Wales and Little Diomede carrying passengers, mail, and supplies. On one of those shuttles he would have room for me, but on the Nome-to-Wales leg of the flight he was full, he said, so I would have to get up to Wales on my own. I called Cape Smythe Air, and luckily they had a seat left on their flight to Wales on Wednesday morning.

  During my many previous visits to Nome, the weather had never been remotely this clear. Now on the walks I took I saw geographic features up and down the coast that had always been obscured by clouds before. The only problem was the cold. It froze my pen tip when I tried to sketch or make notes, and if the wind caught me square in the face it almost flash-froze my eyes. Wednesday dawned completely cloudless and ten below. I called Eric Penttila at nine o’clock and he was still waiting for a weather report. In fifteen minutes he called back and said the weather would be clear all day, so he guessed he was going. This development annoyed him in the extreme. “Nobody should even be living out on that rock,” he said. “We maintain those idiots out there. They ought to abandon that ridiculous place and move back to the mainland. They always need help and we’re always ferrying people out there to help them. Today I’m taking a nun and a social worker and a physical therapist and I don’t know who else, all to help those idiots out there.”

  A flight of about forty-five minutes in a Cape Smythe prop plane deposited me at the Wales airport. This establishment consis
ted of two wind socks, a snow runway, and a steel shipping container in which passengers could wait out of the cold. A halfhearted gas heater kept the container’s interior above frostbite level, but its ridged steel floor, and the brown liquid—root beer?—frozen between the ridges, and the spoiled food smell, and the packing peanuts scattered around made it a place to go only as a last resort. I sheltered on its lee side and waited with the other passengers.

  Little Sister Mary Jo was the nun Eric had mentioned. She stood less than five feet tall. At first I thought “Little Sister” must be part of her name, but she told me that the Little Sisters are a Catholic order. She came from Belgium and spoke with a French accent and had formerly lived on Little Diomede full-time for nineteen years. This visit would be only a short one. Every Native person who saw her, in Wales as well as in the Cape Smythe waiting room in Nome, embraced her. She was quite old and walked on the snow and ice with practiced care.

  Passenger two, the physical therapist, was a young man named John who worked for the hospital in Nome. He had very red eyelids. He told me that a friend of his from the hospital had gone to Little Diomede earlier that winter just before a weather change and had ended up stuck there for thirteen days. The third passenger, a Native man named Erik, was the head of the tribal government on Little Diomede. He informed me I would have to pay a $100 arrival fee in cash at the tribal office when we landed. I was glad I’d brought that much with me. Under his coat he carried his son of about two years old. The little boy’s nose was running copiously and he looked sad. “We lost his mother here just last year and now I take him everywhere with me,” his father explained.