Travels in Siberia Read online

  That night we camped out for the first time. From a policeman who stopped us at a checkpoint—coincidentally, his name was Khabarov, the same as the explorer-pirate—Sergei learned of a good camping place on the river a few miles from town. Following Khabarov’s directions, we went from pavement to gravel to a deeply cut track that probably had been a dirt road for centuries. It also constituted the only street of the village of Esiplovo, a row of humble one-story houses with sheds and small barns attached to them and fenced enclosures that allowed the animals to drink at the creek out back. Sergei said that many northern villages were like this one.

  Past the village, the road ended at the Severnaya Dvina River, and we turned into a field and drove along the bank to a bluff offering a broad overlook and a light, mosquito-dispersing breeze. The river stretched perhaps half a mile wide and seemed not to move at all as it reflected the lavender evening sky. The sun had approached the horizon and it burned a hole through the branches of a windbreak of conifers at the field’s far end. Sergei set up the two-man tent for himself and Volodya and the one-man tent for me, and laid out our sleeping pads and bags. Volodya started preparing dinner on a plywood board resting on two milk crates. I put on my swim trunks and went into the river with a bar of soap to wash up. The water was warm and the bottom muddy to the point of inextricability. As I came out I found several ink-black leeches dangling from my legs. When I brushed them off, the holes they left bled impressively.

  Farther along the riverbank, on the horizon, the onion dome of a church stood high above a grove of surrounding trees. Against the sky, the Orthodox cross and the silhouetted dome presided quietly in the evening light. No other structures anywhere around interfered with the impression this lone church made—the whole view was just church, fields, and sky. (At dawn the next morning I sketched this scene.) Volodya said dinner would not be ready for a while, so I bandaged the leech bites, changed into dry clothes, and hiked over to the church to check it out.

  When I got to within shouting distance, I saw that it was another ruin. The grove it occupied not only surrounded it but also sprouted from parts of the building itself. One of the lower towers had a broken dome and a good-sized birch tree growing straight up through it. The front steps had been trashed so thoroughly that going up them was like climbing a rockslide. On the wall of the narthex someone had spray-painted in Russian I STILL BELIEVE IN GOD. DO YOU? The church’s nave, which was high and narrow and ascended into the central tower, had been stripped of most of its frescoes. I recognized the stripping method that had been employed, because I had used it myself to expose the brick of an industrial loft where I lived in Manhattan years ago. Whoever had done the stripping here had used a broad-bladed chisel and a hammer and had chipped away the fresco plaster with blow after blow, leaving an array of chisel-blade lines on the brick.

  This kind of plaster removal is disagreeable work. You have to wear goggles to protect your eyes from the flying fragments, and stuff gets in your mouth and at the roots of your hair and inside your nose. Whoever had undertaken this task must have used a scaffold to reach the higher areas, and eventually he or they had abandoned the job. Toward the top, a faded saint or two the chisel hadn’t gotten to still held his hand up beatifically. But in the lower reaches, the chisel marks made a pattern of swerves and sworls, as if the wielder of the chisel had leaned into the work with real enthusiasm. Other than a lust for icon smashing, I could see no possible motive for the destruction. What a people—to devote all the energy and expense it must have taken to build this lovely church out here in the middle of nowhere, and then to spend such passion in destroying it!

  From the weedy, rubbish-strewn churchyard I saw Volodya in the distance waving his dish towel, so I started back for supper. When I turned around for one more view, the church’s onion dome and its cross looked so mild and benevolent against the pale sunset that I imagined somehow it had had the final word, in a turn-the-other-cheek kind of way.

  Chapter 13

  For days we motored eastward toward the Urals. Though the road went on and on, it never settled down and became what I would consider a standard long-distance highway. You never knew what it would do next. Sometimes it was no-frills two-lane blacktop for hours. Then without any announcement it would change to gravel degenerating into mud and enormous potholes, and I learned the word yama, meaning “hole.” Arriving in a village, the road might lead straight into an Olympic-sized mud puddle or lose itself among streets apparently based on cattle paths. Many stops to ask directions would be required before we could pick up its thread again.

  On long, desolate sections with no villages nearby, people sat along it selling things, or not. You might see a very fat and not-young woman in a bright yellow dress sitting on a folding chair and reading a newspaper, with nothing visible to sell; then a half mile later, a group of little boys with several buckets and a sign that said RAKI. I knew that rak means “cancer,” but Sergei said that here it was also the word for crayfish, which the boys catch in nearby creeks and swamps. Day after day men and women waited beside cardboard boxes filled with newspaper cones of mushrooms, gooseberries, strawberries, fiddlehead ferns, and cedar nuts. The term for these forest products is podnozhnii korm, Sergei told me; it means, literally, “feed found underfoot.” Regularly we passed women standing all alone and giving each passing vehicle a sideways, hangdog stare. When they realized the driver wasn’t stopping, they would turn away with their eyes cast down. They reminded me of fallen women from an old novel; I had never seen prostitutes acting ashamed before.

  Wherever we stopped to refuel, the stations were as minimal as could be. A couple of fuel pumps on a gravel apron and a sheet-metal kiosk with a glass or plastic pay window so thick and opaque you could hardly make out the attendant inside comprised the total of their amenities. No advertising banners, vending machines, drinking fountains, or restrooms cluttered up this just-the-facts approach. Of course no bucket or squeegee was available should your window need to be cleaned. We had entered a buggy part of the journey, and our windshield was usually covered with splattered insects. No problem: Volodya took some water from our supply, gave the windshield a few splashes, crushed an unfiltered cigarette in his fingers, and using the tobacco as a solvent washed the bugs from the glass with big sweeps of his hand. Sergei, meanwhile, removed the wiper mount from the windshield-wiper arm and with the blade of the wiper squeegeed the windshield dry and clean.

  One day—a Saturday—we drove through five weddings in the course of the afternoon. I couldn’t tell whether the bridal couples had actually been married on the highway or were just having their receptions there. In either case, a lot of participants and guests had showed up, their numbers perhaps swelled by curious passersby. The celebrants stood on the pavement and along the roadside, clutching champagne bottles by the neck, photographing one another, and shouting remarks. Late in the day we came upon the biggest and most sociable wedding yet. The bride and groom themselves were square in the middle of the road with the wedding party milling around them and backing up traffic in both directions. A young woman in a fancy dress came to the passenger-side window of our van and, talking fast, said we must give money to the newlyweds. Volodya handed her a few kopeks, and she said with indignation that that was not nearly enough. He asked how much and she said, “Ten rubles, at least.” He found a ten-ruble bill and gave it to her. She then handed in a tray of little plastic cups of vodka, which Volodya declined, saying we were drivers on our way to the Far East. She sang, “I don’t believe you!” and turned away. With some cajoling, Sergei finally got the party to let us through. In the opposite lane, a young man in a disarrayed tuxedo was holding back a semitrailer truck with his outstretched arms across its radiator grille and his feet spread and planted on the road.

  Volodya said we had been lucky to get by. Once in the Caucasus, he said, he had been stopped on the road and forced to drink at a wedding for an entire afternoon, and he had heard of people who had been taken off by weddings and
detained for days.

  Cities came and went—Kirov, then Perm. Both were big, gray, and industrial. We struck Kirov at rush hour. Everywhere, little groups of people were leaning from the tall roadside weeds to see if their trolleybus was coming. When we approached Perm, about a day’s drive farther on, we stopped outside the city and camped next to the Kama River, another wide and apparently unmoving stream. Hot and dusty from the road, we swam in the Kama and bathed in it. In the morning we used its tepid, gray-brown water to shave.

  In Perm itself we visited the city museum and saw, right by the door, a large exhibit about the terrible industrial pollution in the Kama, complete with formaldehyde jars of deformed fish and amphibians found in it. A case nearby displayed pieces of Francis Gary Powers’s U-2 spy plane, from the well-known Cold War incident. The plane had been shot down near Perm. Exiting that city after an hour or two, we covered a fair amount of it while searching for the right road. I remembered reading somewhere that the three sisters of the Chekhov play had lived in a provincial city based on Perm. Now the main motivation of the plot made more sense to me.

  For a while the scenery had been getting hillier. Sometimes the road ran on ridgetops above pine forests, and beyond Perm the land reminded me of the Rocky Mountain foothills along Interstate 90 near Bozeman, Montana. Just when I was expecting the sight of the mighty Urals themselves rising above their hilly prologue, we were on flat ground again. The Ural Mountains had been crossed. If there had been a moment when we crested the continent-dividing range’s summit, somehow it had slipped by me. Then almost immediately we were coming up on Ekaterinburg, considered the westernmost Siberian city; here the road did one of its quick-change acts to become a crowded and roaring multilane highway with furniture-store billboards alongside, and broken-down vehicles, and extralarge heaps of trash, and stooped figures poking through the heaps with old umbrella handles. In the midst of all the highway miscellany I glimpsed a monument, and thinking this a strange site for one I asked Sergei to pull over.

  He didn’t like the idea, and liked even less my darting across the four lanes to find out what the monument could be. He followed, yelling for me to be careful. And what it turned out to be, here beside this busy commercial highway on the outskirts of Ekaterinberg, was a monument to victims of Stalin’s Terror. The inscription read: “Here lie the remains of thousands of dead, our innocent compatriots who were shot. The truth of the places of the mass burials and the cause of death was hidden for many years. Slow your steps, bare your head before the fraternal grave.”

  When Sergei saw what the monument was, he told me I should not spend time on this sort of thing. His face assumed an expression of great displeasure and distaste, and as I began to write down the first of the thousands of names inscribed on the rows of sandstone plaques—

  AALTO, E. K.

  1906–1938

  ABAZAPULL, E. P.

  1907–1937

  ABAIDULLIN, SH. G.

  1897–1938

  ABAKULETS, I. S.

  1892–1938

  —I could feel him trying to move me by telekinesis back into the van and the hell out of there. I knew how angry he must be. I have felt the same way in America, especially out West, when I’ve encountered the reproachful glances of French and German tourists reading the inscriptions on monuments to American Indians massacred by my fellow citizens of the U.S.A. The foreigners’ condemnation was justified, of course, but on the other hand, what business did a Frenchman have in judging me? Or (worse!) a German? Then again, what business did I have here?

  ABAKUMOV, G. G.

  1872–1938

  ABAKUMOV, Z. A.

  1889–1937

  ABAKUMOV, I. P.

  1886–1938

  ABAKUMOV, T. G.

  1867–1937

  BAKUMOV, F. E.

  1916–1937

  ABATUROV, A. K.

  1906–1937

  I got no further in copying the list before Sergei’s intense and silent disapproval overpowered me and I retreated to the van.

  Having read a lot about the end of Tsar Nicholas II and his family and servants, I wanted to see the place in Ekaterinburg where that event occurred. The gloomy quality of this quest further depressed Sergei’s spirits, which had not rebounded from our stop at the memorial, but he nonetheless drove all over Ekaterinburg searching for the site. Whenever he stopped and asked a pedestrian how to get to the house where Nicholas II was murdered, the reaction was a wince. Several people simply walked away. But after a lot of asking, eventually Sergei found the location. It is on a low ridge on the edge of town, above railroad tracks and the Iset River. The house, known as the Ipatiev House, no longer stands, and the basement where the actual killings happened had been filled in. I found the blankness of the place sinister and dizzying. It reminded me of an erasure done so determinedly that it had worn a hole through the page.

  The street next to the site is called Karl Liebnecht Street. A building near where the house used to stand had a large green advertisement that said, in English, LG—DIGITALLY YOURS. On an adjoining lot a small log chapel kept the memory of the tsar and his family; beneath a marble-faced pedestal holding an Orthodox cross, peonies and pansies grew. The inscription on the pedestal read, “We go down on our knees, Russia, at the foot of the tsarist cross.”

  At a little gift shop connected to the chapel, I bought a book called The Last Act of a Tragedy, by V. V. Alekseev. It is a collection (in English translation) of original source documents and commentary having to do with the fall and execution of the tsar, and the fate of his and his family’s corpses and jewelry. The book came out in 1996. While Sergei and Volodya bought supplies and did other errands in Ekaterinburg, I read it with fascination. I found myself feeling sorry for the foolish, overmatched tsar, and particularly for his worries about Alexis, his hemophiliac only son, who was nine. The accounts of the men who actually committed the slaughter are full of detail. They describe how the tsar, unsuspecting, carried his son in his arms into the execution room, because the boy had earlier injured his leg; and how fierce one of the killers looked beforehand with three revolvers stuck in his belt (“We could not help smiling at his warlike appearance,” another killer recalled); and how surprised and dismayed the doomed ones were as they met their ends; and how in the finishing-up afterward a Red Guard soldier brought out Princess Anastasia’s lapdog impaled on his bayonet.

  Nobody can beat the Russians for horror combined with ghastly slapstick. What happened later to the bodies is a ghoul’s miniseries in itself. The corpses were partly burned, thrown down a well, taken out of the well, burned again, doused with acid, buried in the middle of a swamp road because the truck that was carrying them happened to get stuck there; I forget what else. Rumors and lies about the fates of the Romanovs clouded the question for sixty years.

  In the early 1970s, some of the bodies were discovered in a forest grave, and in 1991 the discovery was made public. Forensic work set about to determine if they actually were the tsar and the others, and DNA tests soon proved that the grave had contained the remains of nine of the eleven people murdered in the Ipatiev basement, although two of the tsar’s five children were still unaccounted for. More tests found out which fragment had been who. In 2007, the charred bones of the two missing children turned up in a grave about seventy yards from the first. Eventually the remains of Nicholas and his wife and children were given a ceremony of public interment in Sts. Peter and Paul Cathedral in St. Petersburg.

  The cruelty visited on the Romanovs, exceptional even in the history of regicide, provided an unmistakable hint of the horrors to come. From the sad piece of ground on Karl Liebnecht Street to the names of Stalin’s victims on the monument across town is a short and straight line. Whether Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders in Moscow directly ordered the tsar’s execution, or whether the hard-nosed Bolsheviks of the Urals acted mainly on their own, or whether the two somehow combined with the prevailing madness of the time, remains unknown. The Ural Bo
lsheviks definitely had been in communication by telegraph with Lenin and with Yakov M. Sverdlov, chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, in the days before the killings. Six years after the tsar’s death, the city of Ekaterinburg, named originally for the Empress Catherine I, received a new name: Sverdlovsk. The city remained Sverdlovsk for sixty-seven years, until 1991, when the name was changed back to Ekaterinburg.

  Beyond Ekaterinburg the road lay straight through grain fields like Nebraska’s or Iowa’s, and the sky unfolded itself majestically outward and higher. Vistas kept appearing until the eye hardly knew what to do with them—dark green tree lines converging at a distant yellow corner of the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unraveling behind them across the sky.

  And everywhere, the absence of fences. I couldn’t get over that. In America, almost all open country is fenced, and your eye automatically uses fence lines for reference the way a hand feels for a banister. Here the only fenced places were the gardens in the villages and the little paddocks for animals. Also, here the road signs were fewer and had almost no bullet holes. This oddity stood out even more because the stop signs, for some reason, were exactly the same as stop signs in America: octagonal, red, and with STOP on them in big white English letters. Any stop sign in such a rural place in America (let alone a stop sign written in a foreign language) would likely have a few bullet holes.