Travels in Siberia Read online

  No matter how benign your surroundings, you can lie awake for only so long without going a little nuts. Worries about my satellite phone suddenly began racking me. I had plugged the phone in to recharge it, but I became convinced I hadn’t connected it right, and now nothing would do but I must unplug it and make a call home right away to see that it was working okay. I had not yet used the phone in Russia. I put on my trousers and took the phone quietly outdoors through a side door and a storage room into the village’s pale, dead-quiet dawn. I turned the phone on, found a satellite, dialed: no luck. Dialed again: ditto. Dialed another twenty times. My head was an implosion of frustrated cries and curses. Back inside the house I took out the satellite-phone manual and read it over and over. Had there been someone else available for me to blame for the nonfunction, I would have done so, but unfortunately the only fault here was that of my own denseness—a fact that aggravated me even more. Finally on the tenth reading of the manual I understood that I had been dialing one digit wrong in the international access code. I went outside again, dialed correctly, and found myself talking to my wife. We had a brief, affectionate, unsatisfactory conversation. With new respect for my own tech-support skills, I went back in and dozed successfully for a while.

  When Sergei and Volodya awoke that morning and set out to buy groceries and fuel, the van wouldn’t start. They strolled the village until they found someone with jumper cables. After a jump start they drove off and were gone for a long time. I sat around at Avdotia Fedorovna’s and fooled with my stuff and fumed. When they finally came back, they were all smiles. Sergei proudly showed me some of his grocery purchases, including the real prize—little cartons of yogurt from Finland. “Ahhh, from Finland!” he said, displaying a sample carton for my admiration on the palm of his hand. Almost as an aside he mentioned that they had been to a garage, and all the problems of the van had been cured.

  Unsurprisingly, that turned out not to be true.

  Before we left, Avdotia Fedorovna gave us a midday meal of beef-and-potato stew, salad with fresh garden tomatoes, homemade cookies, and tea. After it, I made her a present of my extra pair of knee-high rubber boots. She put them on immediately and walked all around her garden in them trying them out and growling happily. To Olya, her granddaughter, I gave a few Beanie Babies and a New York skyline snow globe. Olya kept shaking it up and down and watching the snow fall among the buildings. With the delays because of the van and then this final socializing, we didn’t get off until two in the afternoon.

  Back on the Vologda road we continued in the direction of Cherepovets, where, Sergei said, we would take a side road to a famous monastery. He said the monastery would be interesting for me. The monastery hadn’t been on my own itinerary, but I didn’t object. After not many miles, the warning light for the engine generator lit up on the dashboard, making a companion for the oil-pressure light, which had never gone off. I expected that soon every warning light on the dashboard would be glowing. I pointed out the generator light to Sergei, and to humor me he said that we would stop and have the generator looked at in Cherepovets.

  If that city consists of buildings, like a conventional city, you couldn’t prove it by me, because all I saw of it was complicated highway ramps among a forest of power-line towers. The towers were everywhere, many stories high, sometimes clustering right up next to one another like groves of trees all striving for the daylight. Of daylight itself there was almost none; a tarpaulin of gray clouds overlay the entire scene. Somewhere Sergei spotted a garage in a roadside expanse of mud and gravel and pulled up in front of the bay door. Just at that moment the garageman came out, yanked a rope, and pulled the bay door down. He informed Sergei that the garage was now closed for the day. Then the garageman hurried to his car and sped away into the power-line forest. Sergei returned to the van, reseated himself behind the steering wheel, and turned the key. From the engine came no sound of any kind.

  With this particular nonstarting of the van, we entered an odd zone—a sort of horse latitudes of confusion and delay caused by the mysterious problems of our vehicle. At low moments I thought I might bounce around in this zone and stay in western Russia forever. The episode comes back to me in flashes:

  Here are Sergei and Volodya and me pushing the van away from the garage bay door, and then heaving and straining from behind to build up enough speed in order to start the engine by popping the clutch. Finally, at our breaking point, Volodya runs up to the open driver’s-side door, leaps in, throws the gear shift into first, and the engine coughs alive.

  Here we are in the city of Vologda, about eighty-five miles down the road, where Vyacheslav, the brother of a friend of Sergei’s wife’s, lives. Night has fallen. We are in a parking lot behind some buildings with our weakly idling van. Vyacheslav arrives. He is like a provincial nobleman from a nineteenth-century novel. He is tall and straight, with Tatar eyes, a round head, and Lenin-pattern baldness. He wears a well-tailored shirt of white, finely woven cotton; freshly pressed slacks; and polished brown loafers with silver buckles. His confident and peremptory manner shows not a particle of doubt. In the silvery aura of the headlights of his shiny new Volvo sedan, he says he knows an excellent mechanic who will repair the van tomorrow. For now, we will stay at his dacha, seventeen miles out of town. We will leave the van here in this parking lot overnight. Someone must stay with it to watch our things. This job falls to Volodya. He accepts it with a shrug.

  Here we are—Vyacheslav, Sergei, and I—rocketing out of Vologda in Vyacheslav’s car. He is going seventy-five miles an hour. He and Sergei are having a telegraphic conversation about mutual friends, impossible to understand. I am in the Volvo’s backseat, down in the soothing leather upholstery. Little interior lights on various control panels glow comfortingly. None signal impending engine failure. Outside all is dark.

  Here we are in Vyacheslav’s large brick dacha, in a densely packed village of dachas. Vyacheslav’s is set off from the others by a brick wall with a steel gate. On the other side of the driveway, but inside the wall, is a smaller dacha, which Vyacheslav has told me is the dacha of his security staff.

  Here we are rocketing back to Vologda in the early morning. The faithful Volodya, when we find him, is walking up and down unhappily in the parking lot. He looks a bit worn from his night in the van. Vyacheslav’s mechanic has been summoned and is on his way. Now, Vyacheslav tells us, we will go to a tennis exhibition put on by his son, a rising tennis star. Then we will take a tour of Vyacheslav’s factory. Meanwhile Volodya will stay and deal with the mechanic and the van.

  Here we are in Vyacheslav’s factory. He owns a company called Start-Plus; it bottles a mineral water called Serebrenaya Rosa, which means “silver dew.” The factory is a Soviet-era cement-and-brick pile reconfigured into a bottling plant, with many hallways, storerooms, catwalks. As we go through it, Vyacheslav tells me that he was trained originally as an engineer in metallurgy, but after meeting the founder of the first Russian bottled water company, he got the idea of starting such a business himself. With friends, he formed a company, hired a team of geologists to search for springs, found the water of one particular spring to be good-tasting and extremely healthful, and began to bottle it. The company’s success has been enormous. He attributes this to the company’s collective method of working, and to the water itself, which he says is better and purer than bottled water in America, where what is sold as spring water is actually fake—distilled, or piped from a public water supply. His bottled water is alive, he says, while bottled water in America is “dead water.” In office after office, he introduces me to his employees, who stand at their desks and smile and say they are pleased to meet me.

  Here we are in Vyacheslav’s own office. His desk extends toward me in a sweep of warm, dark wood. Sergei has gone to see what is keeping Volodya with the van. Vyacheslav tells me he would like my advice about something. He has a new beverage, a lime-flavored mineral water, and he does not know what bottle would be right for it. A manufacturer of bott
les has sent him five samples. Would I kindly examine the five samples and tell him which bottle I, as an American, would prefer to drink a lime-flavored mineral water from? Nothing loath, I look carefully at each sample bottle, examine them one more time, and gravely choose the bottle that somehow seems the best to me. Vyacheslav narrows his eyes thoughtfully, nods his head, and sets the bottle I have chosen to one side.

  Here I am taking a walking tour of the city of Vologda with Stanislaus, a vice president of the Start-Plus company. The van, which we hoped would be fixed by now, has apparently presented some new difficulties. Stanislaus is in his seventies, with thinning blond hair combed back, faded blue eyes, and an easygoing style. He seems to have done this kind of duty before. He shows me a cathedral that Ivan the Terrible got built in record time by denying food to the workers when they progressed too slowly; soon after the cathedral was finished, it began to fall apart, and it wasn’t consecrated for many years. Stanislaus also shows me the house of the first translator of Marx’s Das Kapital into Russian, and the building where Lenin’s sister lived while in exile, and a statue of Lenin that Stanislaus says is the only life-sized statue of Lenin in the world. It looks painful—as if the powerful Bolshevik had simply stood on a pedestal and been bronzed alive.

  Now here I am with Stanislaus and Vyacheslav in a restaurant in Vologda having a late lunch. No word at the moment on the van. Vyacheslav asks me about the writing business in America. For example, how much do my books sell for, and what percentage of that price goes to me? He will publish my books in Russia, he says. Today he is wearing an even more elegant shirt than the one he wore the night before. This shirt has a collar and cuffs white as new stationery, and on the rest of it, a pattern like fine blue lines on graph paper. I tell Vyacheslav that his shirt is extraordinary. He agrees that it is and says, “I bought it in Paris. I go to Paris every week to buy my clothes.”

  “Remarkable!” I tell him.

  “That is actually a joke,” he says.

  “A joke?”

  “It is not a joke that I bought this shirt in Paris. But it is a joke that I go to Paris every week to buy my clothes.”

  Here I am turning down a tumblerful of the liter of iced vodka Vyacheslav and Stanislaus have ordered with our lunch. My refusal puts Stanislaus in a thoughtful mood. “I had heard that Americans no longer smoked, but I did not know they had stopped drinking, also,” he says.

  Here we are back in Vyacheslav’s office. Sergei and Volodya have just arrived. The van is out of the shop and supposedly ready to go. A conference of the executives of the Start-Plus company has been assembled to determine what we travelers should do now. My own plan is simple: let’s go. Oh, but that is an overly hasty idea, I am told. The afternoon is almost gone. We should not leave now, but instead stay another night at Vyacheslav’s dacha. Sergei and Volodya both strongly favor this idea. What can I do but agree?

  Even more important is the second order of business: What route should we take tomorrow when we do leave Vologda? I want to go straight east and get over the Urals to Siberia as expeditiously as possible. Again, this idea is ill considered, the Vologdans say. A Start-Plus executive with a pouchy face and hair dyed a bright mahogany shade has maps and papers assembled to demonstrate the proper route—namely, up the Sukhona River from Vologda to that river’s meeting with the mighty Iug River, where the confluence of the two forms an even mightier river, the Severnaya Dvina. That, the executive says, is the route the early travelers to Siberia took. And, he adds, the city of Velikii Ustyug, at the confluence point, is one of the most beautiful cities in Russia and possibly in the world. A good road parallels the Sukhona all the way to Velikii Ustyug. Eventually, overwhelmed by popular opinion, I again agree.

  Here we are at Vyacheslav’s dacha that evening. Dinner has ended long ago, but still we are sitting at the table, drinking our fifth or seventh cup of tea; and I am thinking that Russians can sit at a supper table drinking tea and saying brilliant or ridiculous things longer than seems physically possible; further, this trait may explain Russia’s famous susceptibility to unhealthy foreign ideas, with the postmealtime tea drinking providing the opportunity for contagion; and further yet, I am wondering whether tea perhaps has been a more dangerous beverage to the Russian peace of mind, overall, than vodka. At about midnight Vyacheslav brings down his semiautomatic rifle and begins to tell us his adventures hunting bears.

  Here we are saying goodbye to Vyacheslav and his wife on the steps of his dacha the next morning. Perhaps tiring of my not-good Russian, he does an imitation of how dumb I sound. It is weird to hear myself imitated in a foreign language. Sergei walks over to the van. Against expectation, it starts. I am glad it has finally been repaired.

  Of course the van’s ills were not cured—not then, nor were they ever, really. As we continued our journey, and new problems arose, I sometimes raged inwardly at Sergei for attempting to cross the continent in such a lemon. In time, though, I quit worrying. I noticed that whatever glitch there might be, Sergei and Volodya did always manage to get the thing running again somehow. When the ignition balked, Sergei found a method of helping it along by opening the hood and leaning in with a big screwdriver from our gear. Soon his pokings with the screwdriver would produce a large, sparking pop, the engine would start, and Sergei would extricate himself from the machinery, eyebrows a bit singed.

  Once after Volodya had accomplished a similar maneuver, I asked if he could explain to me just what was the matter with this car. He thought for a while and then said that what was wrong with the car could not be said in words. I recalled the lines by Tyutchev:

  Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’,

  Arshinom obshchim ne izmerit’;

  U nei osobennaya stat’—

  V Rossiyu mozhno tol’ko verit’.

  (Russia cannot be understood by the mind,

  She cannot be measured by ordinary measure;

  She has her own particular stance—

  All you can do is believe in her.)

  So we drove through Vyacheslav’s steel gate, which he closed behind us, and we retraced the seventeen miles to Vologda, and then we wandered in and near the city looking for the Velikii Ustyug road. Finally we found a northeastward-tending two-lane so level and straight that it had to be the right one. Seldom had I seen a more monotonous road. It ran without variation in direction or grade for hour after hour through an unchanging forest of birch and conifers. From the middle of the windshield, the view up ahead was an X: the lines of the highway made the letter’s bottom half, and the horizon of the trees along the road made its top.

  We were all happy to be going nonetheless. Volodya had replaced his gray work shirt with a brown T-shirt that said (in English) EXCEPTIONAL HIMALAYA EXPEDITION. And I had been pleased to find in my research notes the information that many early Siberian travelers had indeed gone by way of Vologda and Velikii Ustyug on their passage through western Russia. Evert Ysbrantsoon Ides, for example, went from Vologda to Velikii Ustyug by sled on his diplomatic mission to Peking in March 1692. The forest then must have looked about the same as it does today. Few villages interrupt its silence. The only billboards, popping up infrequently along the road, urge the traveler to visit Velikii Ustyug and see the birthplace of Ded Moroz. Sergei and Volodya explained that Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) is the Russian Santa Claus.

  When we reached Velikii Ustyug in the late afternoon, it turned out to be so lovely that I was sorry I had doubted the executives of the Start-Plus company for even a second. River-junction cities are often grand, and here the wide waters of the Iug and the Sukhona come together to form the Severnaya Dvina, whose name—literally, “Northern Double”—gives a notion of its amplitude. From this junction the river traveler from western Russia could go north to the White Sea, back to the south, or east toward Siberia. After the closed-in forest where we’d been, the openness of this place, with the pale sky spreading not only above but also reflected expansively at one’s feet, was like an unhooding. On a rise above th
e river, the city itself shone in a profusion of gold onion domes, which the smooth water also doubled, so that they seemed to span heaven and earth like an Orthodox mystic’s dream.

  In the city’s historical museum, the guide was a young woman whose occasional self-conscious smiles redeemed her rapid-fire, rote delivery. She told us there were forty churches in Velikii Ustyug. Many of their domes had recently been regilded, which accounted for their celestial gleam. In the seventeenth century, enriched by trade in Siberian sable and porcelain from China, Velikii Ustyug for a while became the greatest city in Russia. It has monasteries dating to the twelfth century. When Russians took to the forest to get away from the Mongols, Velikii Ustyug (then called just Ustyug) was one of the places they retreated to. Even during Stalin times, its remoteness helped save it; the fact that until 1970 no train line went here may have kept the more ambitious of the demolition-minded Soviets away.

  Near the river at one end of the city stood a memorial to the explorers who had come from Velikii Ustyug. The monument represented a ship’s prow with (confusingly) a modern cosmonaut in a space suit on the bowsprit. Among the honored names were those of Siberian adventurers like Vladimir Atlasov and Yerofey Khabarov, who could also be characterized as pirates and murderous thieves. According to the monument, Semyon Dezhnev came from Velikii Ustyug. (Actually, scholars say he came from a village on the Pinega River some three hundred miles to the north.) Almost certainly, Dezhnev passed through here in the 1630s and saw this river junction on his eastward journeys that would take him eventually around the Chukchi Nos on the farthest eastern tip of Asia.

  Deciding against a visit to the spot where Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa Claus, was born, I instead sat with Sergei in the van writing in my notebook while he added up how much we’d spent so far and Volodya went to the post office to call his wife. As we scribbled, not saying anything, one beautiful woman after the next walked by. We found we both were looking up every minute or so. I remarked on this phenomenon to Sergei and he agreed it was surprising. After half an hour I concluded that Velikii Ustyug has more beautiful women per capita than any other city in the world.