The Siberian Dilemma

by Martin Cruz Smith

  “I know.”

  He pulled a flashlight from his sleeve like a conjuror producing a rabbit from a hat.

  “I’ll wave this around like a madman.”

  “Do you know how many trains pass here every day?” Tatiana asked.

  “I forgot my timetable.” He smiled. Besides, every Russian knew that timetables weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. Trains could be days late, not just hours. They came when they came and they went when they went.

  Bolot continued to pace. Tatiana murmured in Arkady’s good ear, not so much words as vibrations through his bones. He didn’t care what she said, only that she was there. Darkness and cold came together. Arkady felt he was dying like mercury in a thermometer, slowly and by degrees.

  32

  The warmth of the train carriage was stuffy and drowsy after the cold. Eyes wide with curiosity watched as they brought Arkady in. Passengers pressed up against each other to give him space, making an exclusion zone around him in case his misfortune was infectious.

  A providnitsa commandeered a sleeping compartment for him, chased out the drinkers, and bustled around Arkady with her samovar and tea.

  “Ust-Kut,” said the providnitsa. “There’s a hospital in Ust-Kut.” Ust-Kut, a chant which the train’s wheels took up as they moved along the tracks. Ust-Kut, Ust-Kut, Ust-Kut.

  * * *

  Arkady’s life came in snatches, as if consciousness was a series of puddles he could jump through like a child. In and out.

  Now he was on a hospital bed. A strip light glared at him from the ceiling. Paint peeled off the walls exactly the way he imagined the bear had ripped the skin from his body. Tubes snaked from him up to clear bags held on poles. He was an octopus, sprouting tentacles from unlikely places.

  A nurse the size of a shipping hazard peered over him and smiled. Some of her teeth were missing, some were gold, and the sight was so unnerving that Arkady hoped he wouldn’t give her cause to smile again.

  A man with rimless glasses came into view. He was carrying a clipboard. Arkady watched the doctor’s hands, marveling at how hairy they were. The backs of his fingers looked like fur had been pasted onto them.

  “Investigator Renko? I’m Dr. Poloz.” Sounded like Bolot. This, too, pleased Arkady. Poloz and Bolot. Maybe they could be friends. “What can I tell you? You’re a lucky man.”

  Arkady didn’t feel particularly lucky, but he conceded that everything was relative.

  “Let’s see.” Poloz consulted his clipboard. “You’ve broken your right arm, so we reset it. That’s the only break, rather surprisingly, though we had to reattach a couple of tendons, and the nerve damage means you will need physical therapy and exercise to regain full use of that hand. Your vital organs are unharmed, which is good news. But lacerations are a whole different matter. Your back’s a disaster zone, there’s damage to your windpipe severe enough to stop you speaking for a few weeks, and your face, well, you’ll have a romantic scar on your forehead for the rest of your days. The biggest issue right now is infection. Bears are walking bacteria carriers from all those dead animals and carrion they feed on and the roots they dig up, so the wounds they inflict tend to be pretty filthy. Teeth or claws, it makes no difference. We’ve cleaned the wounds up as best we can, and we have given you antibiotics. Only time will tell.

  “He’s developed sepsis,” Arkady heard Dr. Poloz tell Tatiana and Bolot. “Probably inevitable even with the antibiotics. At the very least, the inflammation of the brain means he’ll be suffering hallucinations. Beyond that, I don’t know.”

  The nurse with golden teeth made a point of refilling Arkady’s IV bags with something different each time: vodka, of course, but also honey, and diesel fuel from a jerry can. Arkady was a shell and about as mobile as an upturned beetle. The nurses turned him when they had the time and inclination. He didn’t want Tatiana to see him like this, but he had no way of telling her.

  Arkady designed escape plans of staggering complexity; fire alarms, medical trolleys, air vents, and ambulances all were involved, but each time he attempted one, the nurses caught him and strapped him back into bed. The straps were real, he thought in a moment of clarity, so maybe his attempts had been too.

  Would they send a priest to give him last rites? Arkady hadn’t been to church in a long time, and he wasn’t sure how much of the liturgy he remembered. Did it matter? He couldn’t speak. He wouldn’t be expected to join in.

  The prospect of death focused the mind. Arkady had never wondered or worried too much about his legacy, such as it was. He had never felt the need to leave his mark on the world, either through achievement or progeny.

  There were those who’d be sorry to see him gone and those who’d be delighted. Given the identity of those in both camps, the latter was, in its own way, as much a compliment as the former.

  * * *

  Two weeks passed before the antibiotics finally did their work. Arkady’s infections and sepsis began to disappear.

  Bolot was sitting by his bed.

  “Raise your good hand if you can hear me. Good. Now listen. This place is a death trap. You don’t need me to tell you that. And I won’t lie, Arkady. You’re not in a good way. Our best hope—maybe our only hope—is to get you out of here. They’ll kill you here; you know they will. They won’t mean to, of course, but they will. Raise your hand if you agree.”

  Once more the hand went up.

  “I won’t tell you where we’re going, because you might think I’ve lost my mind. Tatiana did when I first mentioned it to her. But I convinced her. So here’s the question: Do you trust me?”

  “I have to,” Arkady said. “You’re my factotum.”

  33

  Slowly, painfully, Tatiana and Bolot prepared Arkady for the journey that lay ahead. Bandages stuck where wounds wept and cried for mercy. He had lost so much weight that new clothes hung off him like flags. Neither Dr. Poloz nor the nurse with the gold teeth tried to stop him. They clearly wanted his bed for the next patient.

  A digital clock with the day and date hung above the main door. It took Arkady forever to do the simplest calculation. It had been in fact two weeks since they’d set out with Boris Benz on his helicopter.

  The cold was a shock after being inside so long. Bolot and Tatiana laid him down in the back of an old panel trunk on blankets and pillows and covered him up. There was something to be said for this, Arkady thought, this outsourcing of literally every decision to someone else, this total lack of personal responsibility.

  “I’ve checked it over thoroughly,” Bolot said. “Snow tires, new spark plugs, oil, extra vodka for antifreeze. The good news is it hasn’t snowed for a week, the weather’s clear for the next few days, and we’re sticking to the main roads. The bad news is we’ve got a long way to go.”

  A black ribbon of road rolled out endlessly in the glare of their headlights. Kilometer after kilometer, hour after hour. For Arkady it was like watching the phases of the moon pass by.

  He slept most of the way, waking only to find Tatiana dabbing his mouth with a sponge. His stomach was so shrunken from two weeks without food that even a glass of water would come straight back up again. The hallucinations were now coming mainly in the form of nightmares, which made them slightly more manageable; but he shivered hot and cold, at one point throwing off the blankets and asking for an open window when it was fifteen degrees below zero.

  * * *

  Tall poles wrapped in sails of blue, yellow, red, and green snapped in the wind. Beyond them, a sheet of ice stretched to the horizon. Bolot gestured expansively toward it as though he were its first discoverer: “Lake Baikal… and this is Olkhon Island.”

  Arkady had heard of Olkhon Island. It was in the middle of Lake Baikal. But he didn’t remember them having taken any kind of ferry to get there, or even a smaller boat, and in any case the lake was a sheet of ice.

  “We drove across,” Tatiana said. “The ice is more than a meter thick in places. Perfectly safe.” Safer than most
roads, Arkady thought. So safe that even a drunk driver would find it hard to crash in several thousand square kilometers of frozen lake.

  They found a cabin where a wall of postcards spoke of summers full of tourists and backpackers. This time of year it was empty. There were three rooms: two bedrooms with bunks and one room with a table, benches, and a small woodstove. Bolot laid out hard-boiled eggs, cheese, curd, biscuits, and of course vodka. Arkady was allowed a hard-boiled egg and water.

  Bolot cleared his throat. “As to why we’re here,” he began, and then stopped suddenly, worried that Arkady would think this trek across Siberia had been a fool’s errand.

  “We’re here because Bolot’s a shaman,” Tatiana said decisively, “and he’s going to perform a healing ceremony on you to draw out any remaining infection.”

  It was the sincerity in her voice that struck Arkady. Tatiana was the most rational person he had ever met. Life for her was facts and evidence, right and wrong, power and resistance. The Tatiana whom Arkady knew would no more have given credence to shamanic healing than to magic carpets. She would have dismissed shamans as charlatans, conjurors, neurotics, psychopaths, showmen.

  “For us,” Bolot said, “for the Buryat, the bear is lord of the forest. When the bear attacked you, it took your soul. Well, one of your souls. You’ve got three. The first is in your skeleton and vanishes when you die. At the same time, the second one transforms into someone or something else: a person, an animal, another living being. You’re not dead, though.” Not yet, Arkady thought. “So you’ve still got those two. It’s your third soul I need to find. It travels the world, sometimes in dreams, sometimes not. That’s the one you’re missing, and without it your body can’t function normally or heal itself.”

  It was this place, Arkady thought. Not just this island or this lake; this place. Siberia. He had felt it up in the snow around the oil wells. This was where strange things happened and stranger things were just around the corner. Bolot and his bear amulet, Saran and her monsters of the deep. It was a zone on the edge where planes of existence overlapped. Nothing was inexplicable. It was just that Arkady had not yet found a way to decipher it. How could he? He was a city boy, at home among buildings and people, among the endless scurrying, among everything man did to suppress what lay beyond. Tatiana was his friend; Bolot was his friend. That much he knew.

  That Bolot was a shaman was perhaps the least surprising part of it all. Of course he was a shaman. At some level Arkady had always suspected something like this. Bolot was too much a force of nature to be merely a factotum or even an entrepreneur. Bolot was an iceberg, all bright surfaces and hidden depths, and like an iceberg he rotated now and then to show a new face.

  Arkady smiled and nodded, and the relief on Bolot’s face was obvious.

  “How did you know you were born to be a shaman?” Tatiana asked.

  “I first fell into a trance when I was nine,” Bolot said, “but only as an adult was I initiated into the practice. The powers were too great for even the hardiest and most resourceful child to bear. Being a shaman is a curse as much as a blessing. I resisted it in the beginning, and the pressure drove me half-insane. I stayed in a tree for weeks and ran naked across the ice for two days, but I couldn’t flee the calling. So I journeyed into the underworld, where the Smallpox People cut out my heart and boiled it, and the Master of Madness stripped me of skin, the Master of Confusion stripped me of muscle, and the Master of Stupidity stripped me of organs. I was a skeleton wandering in the dark, not sure what I was seeking but somehow aware that I’d know when I found it. Then the Masters rebuilt me, and a silversmith made me eyes that could see new worlds, and a blacksmith pierced my ears with iron fingers to allow me to hear the plants talking. Now, if I wanted to, I could twist my head off.”

  Bolot hung a metallic circular mirror around his neck so it rested on his chest to absorb energy and deflect attacks from malevolent spirits.

  “Think of me as a spiritual doctor,” Bolot said, “and sometimes as a fishing guide.” He took a copper mask of a bear’s head and placed it over his face.

  The place Bolot had chosen for the ceremony was on the edge of the lake. It was called Shamanka, Shaman’s Rock. The story was that an eagle had traveled between the spirit world and the human one. There it lay with a Buryat woman, who conceived the first human shaman, from whom all other shamans were descended.

  An eagle flew overhead, tipping on a wing.

  “Excellent,” Bolot said. “This is a good sign.”

  “If you say so,” Arkady said.

  Bolot led the way to a stone shelf between twin peaks. He beat his drum upside down and Arkady felt it as much as he heard it. Bolot began to chant, a sound that seemed to come from a great distance. The wind picked up to announce the bear spirit’s arrival. Bolot moved in circles, treading the same loop over and again, jerking as though touching a live wire. His drumming grew louder. Bolot, with the copper bear’s face in the half-light, was now grunting and snuffling, and Arkady had the strange feeling that he was watching a man change his shape.

  Bolot slumped to the ground and lay still. His chest rose and fell as he sank into a deep sleep.

  How long did they stay like this? Arkady couldn’t tell. Time was an abstract concept to him. It was day or it was night; that was all he knew.

  Bolot got to his feet and leaned over Arkady, so close that he was resting his head on Arkady’s chest, and then he shook his head so suddenly and violently that Arkady wondered if he was having a seizure. He shook his head and tilted it one way and then the other. He straightened up and pressed both his hands to the place on Arkady’s chest where his head had been.

  “I’ve put your soul back,” he said from behind the bear mask. “I can see you are skeptical.”

  Arkady apologized. “I can’t help it. I have a skeptical soul.”

  34

  Arkady knew when he woke up the next morning that he was on the mend. He was still weak, of course, as much from lack of food as anything else, but he knew that the worst was over. His hallucinations were gone, and the air was so crisp and clear that he could practically drink it. He even managed to say a few words, although his voice was rusty from lack of use.

  It was coincidence, of course. He must have been shaking off the infection even before he left the hospital, and Bolot’s elaborate ceremony had been nothing more than good timing and the power of suggestion.

  Tatiana tended to Arkady’s dressings and during the day, when he needed to sleep, rolled against him and read old travel magazines and brochures the trekkers had left behind. At night Bolot slept in the second bedroom, and in the bedroom closest to the fire Tatiana climbed up to the bunk above Arkady.

  “Why don’t you stay down here with me?”

  “You’re not ready.”

  “Who’s to say I’m not ready?”

  “Me.”

  He found it impossible to sleep, sensing her just three feet above.

  Each day he ate a little more: some soup, dry toast, and local fish. When he was stronger, Bolot and Tatiana took him on excursions through towering pines that reached down to the shoreline, where they watched the lake shimmer.

  One day Bolot and Arkady walked into the woods and glimpsed reindeer as they brushed their furry antlers against low branches.

  “They say that a hunter can chase a reindeer all day long only to find, once he has killed it, that the reindeer is a beautiful woman. It happens all the time.”

  “Really?” Arkady asked.

  “It’s what some people say.”

  Arkady didn’t want to contradict him.

  “I don’t know if Tatiana is a reindeer,” Arkady said. “I do know that she thinks she can escape hunters, and that’s a dangerous assumption.”

  * * *

  After the first week Arkady felt well enough to get back to Chita. Why he would feel duty-bound to investigate Benz’s and Georgy’s murders, he did not know.

  “A week,” Arkady said. “A week here and th
en I have to go.”

  “Now I know you’re on the mend,” Tatiana said. “You’re being unreasonable. Ten days.”

  The day came when she finished bandaging his wounds. She kissed his hand and began climbing up to her bunk.

  Physically he might be a wreck, but he found it easy to lift her off the ladder and onto his bed. He tasted her mouth and breasts. Her skin was salty and her eyes bright even in the dark. They stripped down to the heat of their bodies and clung to each other until the ache of anticipation was too much and she raised her body to meet him.

  This was why he had traveled so far. This was what he had suffered for. The heat that spread like a blush across her breasts. The way her fingers curled. His name on her lips. And then the languor.

  * * *

  Bolot drove them back across the ice road ten days later. Arkady gasped the moment they left the road and drove onto the ice, but once he felt the smoothness beneath the wheels, he relaxed.

  They were driving over a strange, hazardous, beautiful world. There were places he could see forty or fifty meters straight down through the ice, and he couldn’t look for more than a few seconds without feeling the vertigo rise from the pit of his stomach.

  “I can stay if you want me to, but I’m supposed to accompany Kuznetsov on the campaign trail when we get back,” Tatiana said.

  “Then you must do it. Once I find out who killed Benz, and I feel you will be safe in Chita, I’ll go back to Moscow and let you do your work.”

  “But then I’ll miss you.”

  “Just answer my calls.”

  35

  Bolot helped Arkady walk through the door of the Hotel Admiral Kolchak.

  Saran’s astonishment gave way to flustered embarrassment.

  “Thank God,” she said.