by James Raffan
After a walk through the main house, we headed out into an enclosed compound. With a showman’s flair, Eduard threw open the double door of the wooden outbuilding and ushered us inside. Before my eyes could adjust to the light, and before I could really absorb the visual feast of colour and frill and form against the backdrop of log walls, an ample woman with a beaming smile, in a brightly coloured kerchief, pearls, and an intricately embroidered Russian sarafan dress, swept forward from the group holding out a round golden-brown ceremonial loaf of bread. Set into a round hole cut into the egg-varnished and braided top of the loaf—called a karavay, as Slava later explained—was a ramekin of sea salt.
“Please,” she said, pushing the baked masterpiece toward me. With the eyes of several dozen villagers focusing on this tableau, I had a momentary flash of panic, not having a clue what to do. But one of the people just behind the woman stepped forward and pantomimed two movements. She put her hands together, rolled her thumbs apart, then held one hand flat and tapped it with closed fingers of the other. And that’s when it twigged: staff of life, salt of the earth. Welcome.
Still not really wanting to damage the perfection of the loaf, but with the urging of the crowd, I reached out and tore off a piece of the bread. My instructor was nodding vigorously and repeating the tap-tap-tap hand gesture. Following somewhat blindly but now getting swept into the energy of the place and the people, I tap-tap-tapped the torn morsel of bread into the salt and popped it in my mouth. People clapped and cheered. Others followed suit. A blessing was given.
“What the hell is going on here?” I whispered to Slava. “Have we just stumbled in on a day when something like this was happening?”
“Yes and no,” he replied conspiratorially. “Normally on the last day of Svyatki, of the Russian Orthodox Christmas season, which happens between January 7 and 19, there is a feast. This is to celebrate Epiphany, the day we celebrate the baptism of Jesus. On this day, all waters are holy. They are saying that waters connect all life. These people knew you were coming, so they just held off with their celebration for a few weeks. You have been welcomed with khleb da sol: bread, from wheat, the staff of life, and salt, a symbol of loyalty and friendship. The round loaf symbolizes the sun. Sharing these sacraments at the feast of Epiphany means that you, as a guest, have joined with the master of the house in friendly relations, to share your joys, troubles, and worries with everyone who shares in the meal.”
“Jesus!”
“Yes, James. Enjoy.”
And so we sat down and the toasts began.
“To the Russian frost,” called Eduard, who had changed into a ceremonial shirt.
“To the Russian frost,” was the communal response. Slava did his best to explain some relationship between vodka, which was 40 percent pure alcohol, and ambient temperatures in this area, which often approach forty below. Toasting the frost with vodka was somehow a way to revel in the hardships of Siberian life. Or something like that. But before I could delve any deeper into that mystery, the meal was served.
We began with czarskaya ukha (three-fish soup), which, Slava explained, must be served with vodka and the words of an elder. And from there, our culinary migration moved to boiled reindeer tongue, pressed rolled meat with pickle, and more beautiful breads. Then chunks of muksun, that succulent whitefish, some salted and some served fresh frozen in chunks, landed on the table. That was followed by pickled herring from downriver with cranberries from up on the ridge. Pickled cabbage from the garden, salted down and loaded with vitamin C. More toasts. More food. More laughter and stories. Then songs.
Just as the dancing began, there was a percussive rap on the door. And another. Without further warning or ceremony, in blew a host of young people in peasant dress, wearing masks and loud makeup. They yelled, cheered, sang, and twirled wooden clackers like ones you might see at an English soccer game. Like mummers in a Newfoundland home invasion—soulers, galoshins, guysers, gypsies—whatever they might be called, the needy had crashed the feast, and with them was a smallish person dressed as a bear. With aprons and skirts cupped up into baskets the mummers swished and swirled around the room collecting food and sweets, all the while insulting the hosts and berating the guest, all in good fun, of course.
It was a scene straight out of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Book Seven, where “Hussars, ladies, witches, clowns, and bears, after clearing their throats and wiping the hoarfrost from their faces in the vestibule, came into the ballroom where candles were hurriedly lighted. The clown Dimmler and the lady Nicholas started a dance. Surrounded by the screaming children the mummers, covering their faces and disguising their voices, bowed to their hostess and arranged themselves about the room.”
A century and a half later, that is exactly what played out in Seliyarovo that Arctic winter evening. The visitors with corked eyebrows and mustaches (most of the Seliyarovo mummers seemed to be young women) stuffed their pretty little faces with handfuls of food on the fly as they harangued their way around the tables.
The room was infused with rhythm and energy, but instead of dancing inside, the instigators grabbed the Canadian guest by the arm, scooping up my coat, and whisked me out the door and into a frozen courtyard where music and singing blared from a pair of speakers that had been set up. Suddenly the courtyard was alive with bumping, turning, promenading, boogying revellers. At minus twenty-five, breath from fifty “perspiring, flushed, and merry faces” hung like smoke against distant gas flares and emerging stars in a deep blue Arctic sky.
At one point the chief mummer, a winsome woman in her twenties, in an outrageous curly blond wig and with lipstick smeared all over her face, hip-checked me into a snowbank, before reaching to yank me back into the action with a deft elbow swing and cackle of delight. Seeing that this was now an acceptable dance move, others did the same, and it wasn’t long before there were dancers wallowing in the snow and a friendly snowball fight was in full swing, all in time to the music, of course.
All too soon, it was time to say our goodbyes and reload the van. While we had been collecting our things to depart, Eduard had once again shouldered his accordion and, with a group of revellers who had spilled out through the fence surrounding the playground, was singing some kind of goodbye waltz, which everyone knew. Above them in the dim light fluttered a flag with Seliyarovo’s stylized crest showing reindeer antlers, a bird, a fish, a tree, and a spurting oil pipeline all in equal proportions. But it was the open faces and the energy of this still robust group that brought tears to my eyes.
Still psychically sated by all that had happened, I contemplated the realities of the continuing journey as I made plans to pack and move on. On the way to the airport for an early morning flight a few days later, I was concerned about the excess-baggage charges of travelling with winter clothing and lots of books, CDs, and bottles of maple syrup for gifts. Slava told me not to worry. “We’ll find someone who is leaving without luggage and they will take your extra bag.”
“Come on, Slava,” I replied. “What is the chance that somebody is going to be leaving Siberia in the middle of the winter with no luggage? And what about security regulations? I don’t think you are allowed to check anyone else’s bag, are you?”
“No, not technically,” he said. “Everyone does it. You will be fine.”
When we arrived in the ultra-modern airport in Khanty-Mansiysk, I got into line behind a group of tall handsome men in fancy red and blue embroidered parkas and natty warmup suits. “These guys are part of the Russian biathlon team,” Slava whispered. “There are five of them and their coach has a baggage allowance for eight. I told him you were Canadian. He agreed to take your bag. I hope you don’t mind—I just gave him the maple syrup you just gave me as a gift. Please give me your passport.”
There I stood, a passportless Canadian who had just foisted one of his bags onto the coach of the Russian biathlon team. I looked at the broad shoulders and slim hips of the willowy blond, clean-shaven biathlete who stood directly ahead of me in line.
This thick-waisted, middle-aged Canadian Viking would surely never be mistaken for an Olympian, even if the luggage tags matched. In the nick of time, Slava returned without the bag and gave me my passport. I was checked in without incident, through security and in the departure lounge.
The flight boarded on time, and by the luck of the draw I landed in an aisle seat next to two of my fellow team members, neither of whom had any idea that I was now one of them. Two others and the coach sat across the aisle. The flight was full and everyone was seated. But nothing was happening. Things started to get interesting when a police officer, with his braid and brass and distinctively upswept military brimmed cap, came aboard and conferred with the in-charge flight attendant. She consulted a list and together they started making their way toward the rear of the cabin. My heart missed a beat when they stopped at row 16. I was just about to offer a full confession, certain that our luggage ruse had been discovered, when the flight attendant turned the other way and asked one of the young athletes to come with her and the security officer. A few minutes later, the chap returned and spoke to his coach, whose gaze fell to me while he was speaking. Then he began speaking to me in Russian. Mercifully, Elena Gaisina from the Canadian Embassy was booked on the same flight and seated nearby, and it was she who intervened and clarified what the coach was saying.
“One of the bags belonging to the team has failed security screening,” she explained. “At first they thought it was the bag belonging to the first team member. But the bag was not his. They have come to the conclusion that the offending bag is yours. You will have to go with the officer. I will go with you.”
I stood up and began to wonder whether the rest of my natural life could be spent in the gulag. Without a word, Elena and I walked up the plane, feeling the stare of every eye on our backs. With one officer ahead and one behind, we were escorted up the jetway, back through the departure lounge, back through security, into the main concourse of the airport, downstairs to the departure area, where we had checked in, and through a locked door into the luggage sorting area.
Because this was the only flight leaving at the time, the luggage sorting area was completely bereft of luggage, except one piece, my camera case, which stood on a conveyor belt with a beautiful drug- and-bomb-sniffing German shepherd sitting beside it.
Blanch.
The senior of two more uniformed security officers spoke to me in Russian. “They want to know if this bag belongs to you,” said Elena.
I nodded.
And then, in English, the officer said, “Open bag.”
Referring to an X-ray image on a nearby console, the officer started rifling through the camera and recording equipment, pulling various things out, one by one, and asking what they were. Each piece, in turn, had to be powered up, powered down, and then taken apart until the officers were satisfied with its purpose and function. Eventually, near the bottom of the bag, they pulled out a small hand-sewn leather pouch containing my father’s chiming gold pocket watch.
“You are wearing a watch. Why do you need a pocket watch?”
“It belonged to my father, I carry it in his memory.” In truth, I carry it in my dad’s memory wherever I go. The daily meditation of winding it ties me back not only to him but also to the early days of exploration and navigation at sea. It was only after the invention of the chronometer that sailors could determine longitude with any accuracy. This chiming gold watch connects my travels to that tradition, but it also is a tangible connection to a very fine moment in the evolution of ideas and design. But as I stood on the cusp of certain arrest for a baggage misdemeanour, even with Elena translating, there was no way all that was going to be communicated without further misunderstanding.
No response. The officer kept digging. I thought of patting the dog to curry favour with that member of the security detail but thought better of it.
Directly under the watch was a plastic container that held twelve AA batteries.
“What is this?”
I motioned for him to pass it over and showed him a dozen spent batteries lined up like little sticks of dynamite, all lined up six-on-six. At that point I began to wonder if, in the X-ray image, the watch and this item had looked like a miniature bomb.
Cords, flashes, laptop computer, other batteries, lenses, camera bodies, digital recorder, notebooks, lens cleaning brush and solution, miniature tripods, gloves, lint-free lens cloth, extra glasses, traveller’s cheques and spare credit card under the lining were finally all removed and scattered around on the conveyor belt as if they had exploded from the waterproof black plastic Pelican case. The head man motioned for Elena and me to stand back as he turned and conferred with his colleagues. Then, with a wave of his hand, he indicated that I should return all of the gear to the case and move along.
Elena and I were escorted back upstairs to security, through the departure lounge, down the jetway, and back into the plane. By now, having had twenty minutes or so to talk among themselves, word would have spread about the Canadian terrorist aboard the flight. Eyes on both sides of the plane all the way back to row 16 said as much, or maybe it was just the beginnings of an adrenalin hangover. I know for sure that the coach of the Russian biathlon team won’t be doing anybody any favours with luggage any time soon. Nevertheless, it was a gesture of kindness I won’t soon forget—but a rough exit from Khanty-Mansiysk.
10: SHAMAN’S DREAM
As I had explained back in Moscow at the ambassador’s luncheon, one of the original discoveries compelling me to undertake this circumnavigation of the northern hemisphere was the around-the-world journey taken by Sir George Simpson in 1841–42. While I was writing a biography of Simpson, my curiosity was piqued by the many similarities—the Native people, the climate, the company infrastructure—between the North American fur trade and the Russian fur trade. The Russian-American Company, chartered as Russia’s first joint stock company by Czar Paul I in 1799, was not as old as the Hudson’s Bay Company, chartered in 1673, but it was every bit as robust, and Simpson was able to use its supply lines to travel from the port of Okhotsk, on Pacific waters, to St. Petersburg, just below the Arctic Circle on waters leading to the Baltic Sea.
Simpson had been particularly fascinated not only by what he had heard of the trade in furs in the Russian Far East but also by the trade in the precious ivory of woolly mammoths, being unearthed regularly by indigenous people who fished, hunted, and husbanded reindeer throughout what is now the largest Russian subnational jurisdiction, the Sakha Republic (also called Yakutia). “Sir George was impressed with the price of ivory on the Yakutsk market,” I wrote in 2007 in Emperor of the North, “as well as with the fact that Providence seemed to have provided an inexhaustible supply of this organic raw material. Yakutsk, after all, is almost at the Arctic Circle.”
Now, sitting in a private dining room in the Muus Khaya (Iceberg) restaurant in Yakutsk, I was thinking of Simpson being royally wined and dined by the governor of the city when my elfish translator, Ruslan Skrybykin, leaned over to me and said, “James … James, do you … do you know what you are eating?” (Ruslan, whose main income stemmed from teaching English as a second language, always said things twice, or three times, with pedantically careful enunciation.)
“Delicious rare tenderloin,” I said quietly. “You asked if I would prefer fish or meat, I said meat, so … I’m guessing this is …”
Unable to contain his enthusiasm for life in general, and for today’s main dish in particular, Ruslan interrupted. “It’s foal. F-o-a-l. You are eating foal, foal. Do you? Do you know what that is?”
“Baby horse.”
“Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Have you had baby horse before?”
“Not knowingly,” I told him, adding that there had been instances of horsemeat getting into fast food restaurants in Canada. By now, Ruslan had leaned well into my Western personal space and was staring intently at my mouth as I chewed.
“How do you? How do you like the taste? The taste?”
Our
host, the restaurateur Igor Makarov, who spoke a little English, had overheard enough of this side conversation to draw his full attention.
“Do you like it?” he inquired.
In truth, it was the best meat I’d eaten since the melt-in-your-mouth dolphin steak that Svafar Gylfasson had served me at the Krían Restaurant on Grímsey. Fine-grained, tender, juicy, and grilled to perfection. But I was also glad that, in contrast to the day we shot Flipper, I did not have to witness the demise of the doe-eyed little fellow before his journey to the table began.
Through Ruslan, Igor asked if horsemeat was available for sale in commercial supermarkets in Canada. I said no, but that there were specialty butchers who prepared it for certain ethnic customers.
“We have horses at home,” I went on. “My wife and daughters are competitive riders. They are horse lovers. Horses are a big part of our family’s life as well. But I’m not sure how they will react when I tell them that I enjoyed a meal of foal here in Yakutsk.”
“Here in Sakha, horses are sacred,” Igor explained. “They are part of who we are. They have been part of Sakha culture as long as anyone can remember. And, for my part, I can’t imagine loving a horse and not eating them.”
My arrival in Yakutsk had come with high expectations. This was the administrative centre of the largest Arctic republic in Siberia. Having connected through the RAIPON office in Moscow to the much respected Professor Vyacheslav Shadrin, I had decided this thriving Siberian city of 270,000 inhabitants would be a perfect next stop for my research.
But it is a long way from Moscow, the centre of all things Russian. Struggling with the five-hour time change during the six-hour Transaero flight that had delivered me to Yakutsk at five in the morning local time, I finally met Professor Shadrin, barrel-chested and over six feet tall, a gentle giant of a man in his early forties, at the airport. We took a taxi into town and I learned that he had been far busier on my behalf than the paucity of email communication had led me to believe. As a teacher at Yakutsk State University and the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the local indigenous council, he was very interested in helping a writer from Canada understand and appreciate what was happening with culture and climate change in Yakutia. What I did not know beforehand was that in addition to being a young academic of considerable intellectual heft in Yakutsk, he was also the headman of the Yukaghir people in Siberia, now numbering just over one thousand and living in pockets spread out over three time zones throughout the Russian Far East.