The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  We’re walking down into a funnel of earth. The ground has a mouldy-blue and rotten look – then takes on a yellowish tint changing to green, like a sponge resting against a wall, or a bad water stain, fungal bloom or tarnished enamelling on a bathtub. The rock beneath our feet is grainy and porous, it crumbles if you rub it between your fingers, and if you dig down into a hollow, it feels hotter to the touch. Here, you’re evidently touching something that’s in close contact with the earth’s core.

  Yelena stands there in her yellow T-shirt and bends over the steaming crevasses in the rock. In some places, groundwater is boiling and spraying up in little geysers, while in others it’s just simmering and seeping up as though through perforations. The predominant colours here are sulphur-yellow and rust, mixed with varicose vein-blue and lichen-yellow. The various blue hues of the soil are all washed out. The air into which Nastya is exhaling her cigarette smoke is mustily hot. In other places, smoke is coming out as though through nozzles. The grass on the stream bank is a poisonous green, and the hillside has a reddish glow to it; the higher members of the plant kingdom have given this place a wide berth. The ground here is raw, stressed and porous.

  Yelena looks at the seething spring and says:

  ‘It’s like in the fairy tale, a fountain of youth. You could dive into it as a mother and emerge as a young girl again.’

  ‘And how often have you dived in already?’

  She shakes her head thoughtfully:

  ‘We women from the North are preserved by the cold.’

  A rip in her jeans has been carefully darned, while the appliqué designs on her mustard-coloured T-shirt, which matches this landscape so well, have rubbed off, and where the fabric has become threadbare, it’s been patched up with new stitching.

  It might be like this: her shyness has driven her into the arms of the first person who recognized it. She’s learned everything from him and treats it now like secret knowledge. It’s probably not the case that she yearned for him and him alone. It’s just that now she didn’t want the others. Even now, in every moment of weakness she still clutches his hand. She likes the fact that he’s a soldier. A soldier is a respectable man and, in her eyes, is a bit like a modern knight.

  Kolya is originally a Belarusian, but he joined the army, spent a year in Ethiopia and finally returned to Russia, where he’s currently serving at a base in the northwest of the country. Although he tells his wife stories about Ethiopia, he keeps quiet on the subject of Ethiopian women. For at even the merest mention of them, she starts ranting about these women with their African morals. When he was there, in this Ethiopia place, she cried every night, apparently. But life’s good for her now, she says. Sure, they haven’t got much money, but they’re allowed to live on base with their two children. A friend who comes from Petropavlovsk recommended Kamchatka as a holiday destination and invited them to come and stay in his small flat there. But no sooner had they set off than he had to leave the city. Now they’re living in his flat outside Petropavlovsk, but have no one to tell them what they might get up to hereabouts. They’ve been into Petropavlovsk twice, but they both agree that it’s not exactly a pretty city.

  ‘So, what else have you done?’

  Yelena blushes.

  ‘We’ve been swimming.’

  That evening, when we drop the couple off at a miserable settlement of huts and she puts her hand up to her mouth, ashamed that everything here is so poor, she says:

  ‘Today’s been so packed with experiences that I don’t know how I’ll ever cope with it.’

  And Kolya gives us a very stiff and formal bow and says:

  ‘Thank you, Sir!’

  When I ask them whether they’d like to come out with us again tomorrow, he gives me a crisp salute with his fingers to his temples and repeats:

  ‘Thank you, Sir!’

  So the next day, we’re all back together again: Sergei, the ascetic with the shining eyes, a good knowledge of yoga, an endless fund of stories and a boundless enthusiasm for every hill; Kolya, the intellectual soldier, with his ridiculous outdoor hat, who pays more attention to nature than the society he’s living in, and who captures everything on film; Nastya, with the tied-back tuft of blonde hair, who’s always translating, rushing around all over the place arranging things, and who energizes the whole of the group with her mood; Yelena, with her calm, unwavering gaze, which in her embarrassment often flips over into a look of irony, and with the quiet voice which sometimes sounds a bit whiny; and finally Galina, a ladylike friend with a picnic basket, who is there to help us out in case we have any problems with the authorities. We eat our lunch on the tailgate of our jeep: salmon, tomatoes and gherkins, red caviar, sausages, white bread, smoked meats, and to drink some of the pure spring water that we filled our bottles up with on the journey, and kvass, a drink that’s fermented from rye bread.

  After drinking our fill, we lie back in the meadow and look at the clouds – the famous clouds of Kamchatka – like pictures in a museum. Some people come here just to see them, reputedly the most beautiful clouds in the world: the cauliflower clouds, the lenticular clouds, the UFOs that look like swollen sago, coarse grained with strong grey cell walls.

  Today, for example, the paintbrush-stroke of the foehn has distributed the clouds around the sky with a broad brush; only a few feathery clouds have escaped and are floating weightlessly, as though they were trying to transfer the landscape design to the sky. Snowflakes are lying in the midst of a lush green, while the meadows shine greenish-white. It sometimes looks like the volcano has spat out snow and it is flowing down to the valley between the lava ridges. Now the panoramas open up before us. We climb up a mountain where the high plateau is rocky and you can scarcely feel the sun, and from a single vantage point count no fewer than nine volcanoes, nine individuals, who sometimes appear dramatic and at other times inconspicuously beautiful. Inexhaustibly, Sergei expresses his awe at the beauty of both the extinct and the active fire-spewers, giving us their names, reading them out enthusiastically from a list, all twenty-five of the active ones along with all the countless dormant and extinct ones.

  Whenever you find yourself away from Sergei for a moment and then come back to him, he’s invariably in the middle of a story set in the natural world. Just now, he’s telling us one about a female cook in a camp who suddenly found herself alone with a bear. She screamed, and the bear withdrew. Hours later, she was still screaming, and kept on doing so for several more hours after that. When the camping party got back to base, she was still screaming, but more quietly; by this time she was completely drunk, having downed two bottles of Martini between the screams.

  We hear a cuckoo call.

  ‘Wait.’ says Nastya and starts counting. ‘How long are we going to live? Seventy, eighty, ninety …’

  It turns out we’re going to live to 120, and we start moving slowly across a high plateau. Sometimes, the path eats its way through two-metre high drifts of dirty snow. Then, at other points, the fields lie open to view, strewn with boulders. When the cuckoo falls silent there’s nothing to be heard but the whirring of insects, and every now and then bizarre bird calls, the like of which we’ve never heard, interrupt the sighing of the wind. Tall electricity pylons stride rustily across the mountain ridge, while beneath the overhead power lines channels of fast-flowing meltwater shoot past, their banks populated with plump birds that shake their feathers dry and then walk off through the fresh snowy air, which is tinged with the aroma of sulphur.

  As we walk along, Yelena tells me her thoughts on Nastya in pithy, gnomic utterances, such as:

  ‘Northern women absorb the silence of their native landscape.’

  In fact, that’s the only sentence she utters. It’s meant to lodge in my mind as some kind of aphorism, and I look at Yelena, her mysterious, slanting eyes set above her high cheekbones, her severe mouth, from which this sentence emerged, yet which when it voiced it was neither severe nor calm.

  Yelena and Kolya have been together for
thirteen years, then, but they still kiss one another like they’re attempting to fill an empty space. Even so, Yelena occasionally allows herself little playful allusions, which, given her secretive nature, she makes sound even more cryptic than they actually are. After I remark that Sergei’s swimming trunks look like a kitchen curtain, she laughs and replies:

  ‘It’s best living without any curtains.’

  And when I call Yelena Mischutka – ‘she-bear’ – she says:

  ‘I’m only going to become Mischutka tonight.’

  Saying this, and lost in thought, her gaze comes to rest on a point in the distance. It’s not where her husband is. It’s probably not where any man is, only some vague knowledge into which she’s not prepared to initiate anyone, a yearning only she knows how to deal with. Then – and this happens only very fleetingly – her eyes flit across at me to try and catch a reaction. As shy as she is self-conscious, she is the sort of woman who, underneath her shyness, is aware of her attractiveness – indeed, may even be conscious that her shyness itself is alluring – and combines the two with great dignity.

  ‘My kitchen is as small as the interior of this truck,’ she says, ‘and the cake that I’d like to bake for you would be larger than my oven could accommodate.’

  Like in a fairytale, she transforms her affection into cakes!

  Today, we’ve been underway for hours when we suddenly come across a barrier – another restricted zone, this time protecting the secrets of a brand-new kind of hydroelectric power station. Galina is the legal advisor of the firm that runs this plant, and as our chaperone, she holds up a piece of paper with a barcode on it at the checkpoint, until a voice crackles out deafeningly from this call-post in the middle of nowhere, and our car’s allowed to pass.

  We haven’t got far, though, before a violent shaking and swaying of the bushes by the side of the track betrays the presence of a hunting bear. As we stop, it crashes off deeper into the undergrowth, snuffling and grumbling. On impulse, all of us perform to gender stereotype: the three men in the car leap out and from the crest of a slope try for a while to follow the trail left by the bear as it makes its way through the thickets below, shaking bushes and the crowns of saplings as it passes. The women, meanwhile, stay in the vehicle, making noises of concern and alarm that fall on deaf ears. Even the bear seems to know its allotted role, and doesn’t do anything unpredictable, rampaging off into the distance.

  We follow the narrow, almost overgrown, track running through the compound until, after rounding a bend, an unimposing building comes into view. Behind the abandoned-looking company building, a solitary worker is sitting, his torso bare, and scaling a fish. His questioning eyes wander from face to face.

  ‘Hi Kostya,’ Galina calls over to him, ‘have you got another fish for us? Or even a couple, maybe?

  Without answering, the man reaches for a long-handled net, leads us all down to the weir and, sweeping it through the water against the current, fishes us out two netfuls of very young salmon, scarcely bigger than sprats, from the fast-flowing stream. As we are leaving, Sergei thanks him by handing him a two-litre plastic bottle of beer.

  We press on further into the compound until finally, tramping through heavy undergrowth in the midst of the wilderness, we encounter a waterfall. Walking across the rapids on stepping stones, across the smooth streams of racing water that only froth up briefly when they hit prominent rocks on the lip of the falls before plunging headlong into the abyss, we each find our own outcrop and sit there in silence on our separate rocks in mid-stream, each of them sparsely covered with moss. Yelena has rolled up her trouser legs and hasn’t ventured far from the bank. From his own perch in the middle of the rapids, Kolya takes a picture of her. She looks at the camera like a mermaid, but, for heaven knows what reason, asks me why he’s taking it. Sergei, meanwhile, is playing the gamekeeper, clambering onto a jutting ledge and scanning the bushes by the riverbank for any signs of bears. The rest of us teeter directly above the place where the river sweeps over the edge. Yelena only raises her voice to warn us, with maternal fervour, to watch our step.

  Later that afternoon, we will penetrate further into the wilderness and find a feeder lake for this waterfall, its waters calm and with low scrub along its shore. There, we stop and grill our little fish on an open fire, and enjoy a meal of rye bread with red salmon caviar, apple, biscuits and pralines. When we’ve finished, the men take a dip, while the women relax in the meadow; we’re all content that nothing happens but that everything simply is.

  Back in the car, as evening falls, the five women start singing, and find themselves in complete harmony.

  ‘This song’s about yearning for a true friend,’ Nastya announces, and pitches her voice way down low.

  I can hear the yearning in her delivery.

  ‘Now I’m going to do the song about the black cat that only brings bad luck to those who believe it’s an ill omen,’ says Yelena. ‘Wait a moment and I’ll sing it for you.’

  She starts off rather weakly, but recovers and ends up giving quite a strong rendition. The others clap along in time; even Sergei, at the wheel, can’t help joining in. The road running through the birch woods is so straight that you can easily drive it with no hands. He chooses and announces the next song:

  ‘This is the song about people who were born on a Monday, and now want to abolish Monday because it brings them nothing but bad luck.’

  During the refrain, one of our tyres bursts. We skid into the gravel bed beside the road, our tracks swerving wildly as Sergei applies the brakes; there’s a strong smell of rubber. As a fine drizzle of rain sets in, Kolya changes the tyre, while Nastya has a smoke and Yelena looks at the sky like she wants to disappear into it. She strolls slowly down the road ahead, just occasionally waving her arms to ward off the mosquitoes.

  Sergei walks round the truck, giving it a professional once-over, but doesn’t pause for a moment in his storytelling. His stories are basically like those from the Decameron. They have titles like: ‘The time a friend challenged me to overtake him, but I declined’; ‘The time a priest slept through Mass’; ‘The time the kids planned to cheat at their schoolwork, but the teacher switched their assignments just in time’; ‘The time my first wife left me for another man’; and ‘The time my daughter was taken to be someone else’s because she’s so pretty’.

  ‘So, you were married once, then, Sergei?’

  He gives a comically theatrical sigh: ‘You know how highway-men say “Your money or your life!”? Well, women take both!’

  By the time the new wheel’s fitted, the sky has grown dark. Today, it looks as though Kamchatka is recuperating in the rain. The atmosphere descends from the firmament and covers the land.

  In these conditions, even the grey frontages of the buildings in Petropavlovsk are in tune with the weather. Lights are burning everywhere, and the exhaust fumes of adulterated diesel turn many of the falling veils of rain blue. When it appears, the sun looks as though it’s shining from the depths of a Gobelins tapestry. The city has spent a whole day growing light and only now has it really found its mark. Like it was never meant for bright sunlight.

  We drive to Petropavlovsk along the coastal strip, and enter the city just as the street lights are coming on. The way it looks right now, the city seems charming. So, I wind down the window and, mimicking the sounds of the words I’ve heard other people saying elsewhere, call out:

  ‘Kakaia brijälist!’

  Everyone in the car busts out laughing. ‘What does it mean?’ I ask.

  ‘It means something like “What a stunner!”’

  Fair enough, then. Under the trees outside their run-down apartment, we take our leave of Kolya and Yelena. I repeat the ritual of the previous day:

  ‘So, tomorrow would you like to …’

  Yelena beams at us in delight, while Kolya gives a laid-back salute and nods.

  ‘Strange couple,’ Nastya says as she’s driving me to the hotel. ‘Still so into one another after thi
rteen years.’

  ‘She still acts jealous, too.’

  ‘Right, though he’s the one who’d have cause to be jealous,’ Nastya replies.

  She’d asked Yelena about the death of her parents, apparently the result of an accident she only hinted at. This left Yelena all alone, far from Kolya on his exotic posting in East Africa. And then came the death of her friend. What friend, I asked? She’d just blurted it out under pressure, Nastya said. This male friend had been a comfort to her in the period when Kolya had been stationed in Ethiopia; he was a guy who lived without any visible means of support, and who like her had no friends or other relatives, and had become an accomplice, an enthusiastic companion on trips, a second man in her life – and a lover too? Had she got romantically involved with him? Had she wanted to break free of her marriage?

  In any event, Kolya came back from abroad, their marriage turned out to be solid after all, and three months after Yelena’s marriage had got back on an even keel, the friend had thrown himself under the local train. He’d only been cremated a couple of months before they came on holiday here.

  ‘So, did Kolya know …?’

  ‘Oh Christ, no, he hated the bloke right from the off, anyhow.’

  The next day, we set off in a more sombre mood. Kolya’s still wearing the American rapper’s hoodie, and Yelena’s still got her mustard-coloured top with the sewn and mended appliqué designs. Once we’re on the road, a grand succession of birch woods, heather-covered hills, grassy plains slip by, while in the tundra zones we see Swiss pines and Alpine groundcover plants.

  Time and again, nature retains its immensity through things that we humans are incapable of perceiving within it: the landscape which stretches to here from the distant wilderness, the zones of untrodden land that build up to this single spot, the foothills, the lines of ridges receding into the distance … Nature itself obtains this magnitude from the long time during which it is required to wait in the darkness of winter before the lush richness it now suddenly indulges in, and through human beings, who live bent double in their burrows and now emerge from them and straighten themselves up for two warm months. Stray dogs and ravens are also on the move. All movements ultimately come from this process of waking up.