The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  It takes nine hours from Moscow to traverse the Russian continent by plane to the furthermost point of land, where, since time immemorial, people have known little of their masters in Moscow, and wish to know even less. So this is Kamchatka, then, a peninsula off the coast of continental Russia, at the farthest reaches of the country, of which for a long time even Moscow had only a very sketchy impression. A trio of volcanoes is the trademark of this region.

  Seven months in the grip of frost each year protects Kamchatka, at least temporarily, from the effects of its seismic energy. But, even so, fear of tsunamis, which are also a consequence of seismic activity, have among other things resulted in the capital Petropavlovsk Kamchatski being built inland from a large bay rather than on the broad, almost uninhabited coastal strip.

  The landing here made by the Cossack Vladimir Atlassov in 1697 is generally regarded as being the discovery of this peninsula in the Russian Far East. However, many other people whose names have not been recorded and who left no trace behind them – most likely fur hunters – must have arrived here before him. But it was only in 1724 when Czar Peter I summoned the Danish explorer Vitus Bering and commissioned him to find out precisely where the Russian Empire came to an end, discover where the landmass met the sea, and sound out the possibility of more land to be annexed, that the foundation stone was truly laid for exploration of the farthest reaches of the empire. Bering duly set out, but the czar died a year later, long before the Dane came back with the results of his expedition in 1730, which then failed to stir the interest of the Czarina Anna Ivanova or anyone else. Only Bering himself was more convinced of his mission than ever, and set about making preparations for the Great Northern Expedition, which he embarked upon in 1733, but never returned from. He died on the Commander Islands east of Kamchatka.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, several expeditions visited Kamchatka, driven at first by economic interests, primarily associated with sable hunting. Ultimately, though, like everywhere else, the indigenous people – the Chukchi – ended up being suppressed by a brutal campaign of conquest and exploitation by the empire until the twentieth century, when they were deemed worthy of ethnographic study just as they were dying out.

  Nowadays, if you climb one of the mountains near Petropavlovsk and survey the sweep of the bay with its wide port entrance, its scattered settlements and housing estates, which sprang up with no town planning regulation, and its utterly lacklustre appearance, then the green strip of the almost completely unsettled coast – which turns its face, unblemished by any cosmetics, to America – strikes you as being pretty much unchanged since the days when the first explorers set eyes on it.

  The first Kamchatka expedition of 1725 did not establish the settlement of Petropavlovsk. When it was founded in 1740, the future capital of the region was nothing more than a garrison town. Catherine II the Great tried settling farmers here. Those who arrived, however, preferred fishing and still do to this day. The czar’s bureaucrats despaired at the mentality of the unruly peasants, who failed to make any headway in either arable farming or sheep-rearing. Instead, they devoted their energies to salmon fishing, and even today nowhere else on earth has such rich stocks of all the various species of salmon as here, where wild salmon occur in such abundance that it is even used as pet food.

  Likewise, nowhere else on the planet has such a thriving population of bears. But whereas the early trappers battled their way through the harsh winters, through the deprivations of a life lived in woodland bivouacs and mud huts, the hunting parties of modern times arrive here on private planes from Moscow, sometimes even shooting their prey from helicopters, before disappearing back west again. Other hunters concentrate their efforts on obtaining bear gall-bladders, which in China are reputed to have aphrodisiac qualities. The result is that you will sometimes run across bear carcasses out in the wilderness which have only had the gall bladders removed.

  Less than twenty years have elapsed since Kamchatka was an inaccessible, forbidden territory, a military exclusion zone. In the Cold War, the largest submarine fleet in the Northern Pacific was based here, and the anchorage of the fishing fleet, cut off from the mainland, did not even have a railway connection to the rest of the world. At that time, then, it was a weird place, peopled by those with security clearance and separatists, a place without a public face.

  And then the sheer strangeness of the place takes hold of you, and suddenly you’re far, far away, unreachably detached as though you’re in exile, with no possibility of an early homecoming, abandoned and shunned. It’s then that the strangeness envelops you; you keep on encountering it, and, whichever way you turn, it will always show you the same uncomprehending face. It will reject you and discard you, causing you to lose yourself in the great realm of apparitions, on paths that lead nowhere, between the houses with their peeling, blistering paint, the plaster eroded by salt water, in the grandiose sadness of a settlement that doesn’t wish to be housed but which, between its attempts to entertain, administer and feed its inhabitants, has found no language in which to communicate.

  The houses stand around haphazardly, as though they’ve simply been scattered over the land. Some of their façades have been given a pinkish-blue coat of pastel paint, possibly because nothing else here is pastel. On a piece of wasteland which looks like it’s been skinned, a funfair has taken up residence. But no one’s running the dodgems, and there aren’t even any lights on. In the four almost identical snack booths standing in a line, four saleswomen wait to serve customers four sorts of virtually identical salmon rolls. The city’s monumental buildings, which house the municipal authorities and various university departments, are unimposing in their grey concrete rendering. The most impressive edifices here, though, are the shopping malls, garish cathedrals to consumption, which are bereft both of people and of any common sense and which appear somehow intimidating, like satellites hijacked from another world which might one day lift off and fly away.

  Outside the city gates, disgruntled young soldiers are milling about aimlessly. They’ve recently been transferred here, and are trying to assuage their misery by downing large quantities of alcohol and staging nightly bouts of aggression. And when you visit a restaurant here, you’re inevitably confronted at the entrance by a stuffed brown bear, rearing up on its hind legs and with its cubs at its feet, set against an artificial habitat made of papier-mâché. Such grandiloquent manifestations of sentimentality come across as fits, as acute attacks of lyricism, that have taken the wrong form and become fantastically exaggerated, when all you want to do is give your own life some sort of structure.

  Seen from the outside, my hotel is a dull box with a peeling façade, but once inside, you step into a lobby which likewise contains a stuffed brown bear defending his painted domain with bared teeth. The rooms are furnished in the Old Russian style, with heavy gold brocades, and in the drawer of the bedside table there is a handbook proudly listing four services the hotel can offer its guests: a wake-up call, laundry, an iron and a shuttle bus to the airport. There follow five full pages of proscriptions and regulations, such as ‘Cooking of vegetable soup is forbidden’ and ‘Guests are not permitted to keep any birds in their room’.

  In summer, the city wakes at 5.30 in the morning. The air is clear at that hour, not yet laden with the smog produced by the heavy traffic, while the neon signs are still lit up, beaming their simple messages in crisp Cyrillic script out into the dawning day. At this time, the birds’ calls are still louder than the sound of little cars’ horns, and the first lights are coming on in the rows of dismal prefabricated houses on the estate that covers the hillside. But from the empty windows of housing projects that were never completed and have been left to go to ruin, black night still yawns as though it were truly at home here, and the pink light radiating from the morning clouds bathes this sad location in a glow of kitsch.

  The streets are populated with drunks tottering home, bleary-eyed taxi drivers and workers on early shift. These people a
ll seem thawed-out; emerging from a long, hard winter, they blink in the sunlight and blossom for a very brief spell before curling up and hibernating somewhere once more – in the sheds housing discos or in gyms or in the cinemas, whose brightly-lit frontages look like illuminated portals to the world.

  From 6.30 onwards you can get breakfast in the hotel, consisting of a fried egg with a topping of crab meat and red caviar, with white bread and the Russian version of ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca’ blasting in your ear, which sounds even crazier here than when it’s sung by Ricky Martin. Service is provided by a uniformed martinet, who stares at me through the serving hatch for minutes on end before she finally starts bringing over plate after plate, with glacial slowness. There are desserts on offer, too, all of them looking like they’ve been liberally dipped in the pots of make-up Russian women are fond of using.

  By the time dawn has faded, I’m out on the streets again, passing under gazebos that are crammed as full as storerooms, with tin cladding protecting them on the side exposed to the weather. The market is full of people dressed in bright clothes and wearing garish make-up, as though they feel obliged to counter the gloominess of the city’s architecture with their own personal show of gaiety. But it only makes the buildings look all the sadder. It’s rumoured that wealthy citizens donated their gold teeth and jewellery so they could be melted down to make the gold cladding for the onion-domes on the new cathedral; and indeed, the new building that is rising from the foundations of a former theatre displays a misplaced magnificence that is only rivalled by the neon advertising signs.

  At the market, serried ranks of women stand by the barrels of salmon caviar that they’re selling. They stick little piles of the eggs on the backs of customers’ hands for them to sample. Each of the women here has her own recipe, which has to do with a particular salt content, or a special way of preserving the caviar. In terms of hygiene it all looks highly dubious, not to say downright dangerous, but then again would the market women have been plying their trade for the past thirty years if they’d been in the business of poisoning their customers?

  I’m looking at a deaf couple walking along the pavement. The man has stopped, let go of his wife’s hand and is refusing to go any further. She’s giving him a good talking-to, her silent lips moving energetically. He shrugs it all off. Their gestures become more expansive as they give vent to their feelings. The husband launches into a gestural tantrum, his pudgy hands scything through the air in broad sweeps. He seems to be an oddball in all sorts of ways. The woman recoils exaggeratedly, like in a silent movie, but he’s not finished yet. First he thrusts his fist up into the air, then, three times in succession, abruptly draws an imaginary line between himself and his spouse. Then he turns and walks away, leaving her standing there. But after just a few metres, he hardly knows which way to turn. Synchronised, they once more turn towards one another – separated, yet incapable of being so.

  Petropavlovsk is known to many people by the soubriquet of ‘the dirtiest city in Russia’. Small wonder, then, that everyone who lives here is constantly wanting to get out into the countryside. Yet there’s a fundamental difference between discovering a city from the countryside and vice-versa. No, Petropavlovsk is the way it is precisely in order to make the surrounding nature appear all the more captivating and unsullied. And since the whole of Kamchatka, which in any case is twice as big as Germany, only has a fragmentary road network totalling just 130 kilometres of tarmac roads and, after seven months blanketed in snow, only experiences a brief flowering during the Bacchanalian summer, the natural world looms large here. It begins immediately behind the city, in the form of groves of Erman’s Birch trees growing on marshy ground, low scrub and fir woods, which are home to the occasional Shashlik Café. In summer, the waysides are covered in dust, and even the tree by the silver-bearing spring, where people have tied little scraps of cloth for themselves, their wives, their lover or future wife, is permanently coated in a film of yellow dust from the road.

  But up on the slopes, they start sparkling again in all their glory, the birch trees, which are much loved in this dark region as bringers of light. The silver of their trunks is still shimmering through the dawn – a natural wonder that shines out boldly like some precious metal against the all-day twilight that prevails here.

  For days, we’ve been venturing out every morning into the wilderness of the vast, indifferent landscape with its isolated settlements. Busty women with blonde and brunette hair on one and the same head and wearing Mondrian print T-shirts wait at the blue-painted bus stops. If you talk to them, their faces open up and they launch into a gurgling Russian, which my interpreter Nastya translates into a richly coloured German for me, while at the wheel Sergei has proved to be ‘man of a thousand stories’, who has even rehearsed his punchlines in English.

  From both sides, the bushes crowd in on the carriageway, as if there was something worth seeing there. But all these dirt tracks do is lead to the horizon straight as a die, and sometimes an old boy will pass by on his bicycle, or you’ll catch sight of a soldier peeing in the undergrowth, in a cloud of mosquitoes. And then, suddenly, the view opens up onto massive valleys, their floors covered in vast tracts of uncultivated land as if the sole purpose of the landscape was to act as carpeting leading up to the foot of the volcanoes.

  Sometimes, in the villages, you’ll come across a line of eight women, one after the other, standing by their little trolleys with pierogi containing all kinds of filling – potato, bacon, cabbage, onions, minced beef, fruits of the forest or apple – kept warm under hot cloths. The lorry drivers saunter up to them, most of them bare-chested or in vests, or soldiers or weekend warriors in their camouflage fatigues. Somehow, all scenes round here take on the colour of the surrounding terrain.

  On the third day, we pick up two hikers, Yelena and Kolya, who are wandering along lost in the morning sun. She’s chubby-cheeked, enigmatically self-absorbed and shy; everything she says is delivered slowly, and even when walking along she’s deep in thought. He’s a gaunt, clever lad whose remarks are quick and brief and who has fine powers of observation. Yelena’s wearing a baggy flat cap, which takes on the form of her face, while Kolya has on a blue and white striped hoodie, a fabric more suited to kid’s clothing, and a rapper’s baggy pants.

  ‘Where are you heading?’

  Kolya points to a far-off hill. Where the power station is, he explains, he really wants to have a look round it.

  ‘That would have taken them days without a car,’ Sergei tells me when we’ve got out to stretch our legs by the roadside. ‘There’s no service stations, no food. Poor girl, her bloke’s a bit reckless.’

  We keep on winding up into the inhospitable volcanic terrain. The moonscape valley, where the yellow warehouse-like hall of the power station is situated, is surrounded by warning signs, corrugated iron huts, containers, rusty equipment and a few barracks for the workers, while further beyond the yellow block of a hotel for the more senior employees looms up.

  There’s no access to the site without permission, but Sergei wanders up, beaming and starting his patter even from a distance, to the barrier where the uniformed guard, in the company of his family and two dogs, has already begun laughing. The mood is that of a relaxed Sunday afternoon. Stories are swapped, the latest gossip bandied about and, before we know it, Sergei is in possession of the guard’s pass. Our little party duly makes its way down the dirt track to the facility, passing air vents belching steam and ponds for collecting waste water – dark murky pools and toxic blue ones, which drain into the nearest river. That river is now dead. By now, Sergei has reached the plant itself: the turbines are humming, and at three points columns of smoke are rising into the air.

  ‘I’ve visited here several times, and every time it’s beautiful in a different way. It always gives me good but different vibes.’ The plant is situated in an upland valley encircled by the amphitheatre of the volcanoes; a really secluded location even for a power station. Hydrants are sticking ou
t of the snow and pipelines are running in all directions. We step over pipes, go through a gate and descend a cinder slope; Yelena and Kolya are filming one another the whole time with both stills and video cameras. They’ve been together for thirteen years. When they’re not filming each other, they’re giving one another clumsy kisses or holding hands. Their mutual strength seems to be based on a shared weakness.

  Yelena has lost both parents. In fact, she’s so introverted that she only really likes to pull a single expression. She does it incessantly. Sometimes it’s directed in a well-meaning way at her man, other times questioningly at us. These differences barely register externally. Rather, we have to interpret them in their context, and only Yelena’s laugh is something where all nuances are neither here nor there, as she gives such unbridled vent to it.

  One day, her face will become stern, and a crease of permanent bad temper will take up residence above the bridge of her nose, you can see it coming already. But on the other hand, a sense of bonhomie will never totally abandon her face. Although it may sometimes seem to be visited and swamped by dark moods, it’s as much a mystery where they come from as her laugh, which is at its most candid when it seems to have no basis whatever.

  But when Sergei’s regaling us one of his anecdotes, which not even the arduous path we’re walking along can prevent him from telling, Yelena’s laugh comes across more as good-natured, maybe even a bit pitying, like she doesn’t want to be a spoilsport. One of his stories goes like this:

  ‘So this woman pushes her way to the front of the queue at the supermarket checkout, right, and announces: I’m pregnant. You understand: pregnant! Of course, the people behind start having a go at her, saying: we can’t see anything! The woman replies: well, I can’t help it if nothing starts to show after half an hour, can I?’