The Ends of the Earth

by Willemsen, Roger; Lewis, Peter;

  The people who share their collective fate are different from villagers and townsfolk elsewhere, those people who are caught in fine-meshed networks. Here the ways of reaching an understanding with others are short. People don’t wish one another a good day, but instead simply go up to one another boldly and start talking, and because there are few channels of information here, they set about exchanging rumours, just like in the Middle Ages, passing on reports by word of mouth, and interpreting what they see.

  The pierogi seller stands there well wrapped up against the chill breeze and says: ‘The travellers who come by sea now and pass through here are all red. It must be hot where they come from; at least, the sun must shine there a lot.’

  Our route today takes us in another direction. At one point, beneath a hill, we spot a Chum, the traditional tent of the native wilderness dwellers in this region, which is covered in birch bark. But mostly, after driving for hours, we find ourselves arriving in villages that are no less remote. These settlements comprise of three blocks of rented flats and a few half-improvised huts with their own patches of garden. We plunge into the gaze of people who look like they’ve been built into the façades, like these men here lying smoking on their windowsills with bare torsos or white vests on. When I was young, such people were still to be seen all over. In the meantime, it seems, they’ve all decamped to Russia.

  The few country roads hereabouts have rusty motorbikes with sidecars bumping along them, but their seats are ostentatiously upholstered with bearskins. Sometimes, residents will paint a single house entrance in a village in bright colours. This marks it out as the location of the regional store. Occasionally, they’ll also paint a frieze of flowers on the windowsill, but real flowers don’t make it as far as this. Many houses have already been abandoned, many windows nailed shut, while others have had plastic film stuck over them. In many places, the grass has grown halfway up the ground floor. All around are vast tracts of waste ground.

  A couple of old women trundle by carrying plastic bags full of two-litre beer bottles. Most men here sport the military look, because this kind of clothing is cheap and durable and doesn’t mark you out as belonging to any particular social class. The older men have also been known to appear on the streets in their dressing gowns. They all look like they’re embedded in the house frontages.

  In the first of the two shops in this settlement, they’ve run out of sugar, but in the next we’re able to buy it loose, in a small cellophane bag. A chainsaw is buzzing somewhere in the distance. The inhabitants of this little spot in the middle of nowhere all have winter faces, even in summer. Washing is hung out to dry against the back external walls of the flats, while kids play football round the front. Behind, there’s a row of old wooden houses with dark façades. They’re built like the chalets on allotments, but stand there as bonny and presentable as little ladies who take pride in their appearance. A tethered horse is grazing by the roadside while another is running free and trots off.

  Two women are sitting on an apartment balcony watching us. I start a conversation by calling up from the street:

  ‘How many people still live here?’

  ‘Less than a thousand.’

  ‘The winter’s just too long, right?’

  ‘Nine months of it.’

  ‘And how do you keep the cold at bay?’

  ‘We glue over the gaps. We’re at it all the time. If someone comes into a bit of money, the first thing they do is buy some modern European PVC windows, like those over there’ – saying this, they point at the neighbouring house.

  ‘How come no one farms the land here?’

  ‘Anyone who owns land does farm it, but most people don’t own any.’

  ‘So how do you all earn a living?’

  ‘Mostly from fishing in the river.’

  ‘Incredible!’

  They guffaw hoarsely. In fact, their lives are whatever they can wrest from a constant intake of alcohol, a form of survival in a barely habitable spot which they call their own.

  Later, at a kiosk, we discover a handwritten invitation to an evening that’s ‘For Adults Only’. How we’d love to be there when the itinerant stripper peels off her fur coat! There’s also a badly secured road sign by the side of the street, showing a man hanging upside down from a zebra crossing. There might well be a man hereabouts, but surely not a zebra crossing? One shop window contains an amateur painting on wood, badly faded by the sunlight. It shows a naked woman with a dog sitting on her lap. Beneath the shop window, great colonies of larkspurs are growing rampant.

  We stop to have our picnic at the edge of a former cornfield. But instantly the sky grows black with midges and we beat a retreat in the face of the aggressive swarm that’s emitting a sound like a chainsaw. We drive back to the little village and, on the patch of grass right next to the fork in the roads, set up our table, with five chairs, and lay out white bread, gherkins, tomatoes, red caviar, qvass, seakale salad, dried plaice, Russian sweets, and biscuits on the tablecloth. We present a curious image of decadent townies who have come to one of the poorest places imaginable to feast, as the residents lean out of their windows and gawp uncomprehendingly at us.

  Sergei proceeds to tell us all about the various indigenous tribes of the region, paying special attention to – as he puts it – the lumpen, heavy-boned and libidinous women, and finishes by saying:

  ‘Unless you’ve had sex with a Koryak woman, you can’t say you’ve really seen Kamchatka.’

  Everyone keeps their thoughts on this to themselves. Yelena asks whether we’ve also got mushrooms in our forests in Germany.

  ‘Oh sure, and every autumn I always used to go out into the woods and collect them.’

  She beams at me and holds out her rough hand:

  ‘Have you got the White Mushroom with the broad white stem and the large brown cap?’

  ‘No, we don’t have that one. We’ve got the Birch boletus.’

  ‘But with the White Mushroom, the stem stays white even after cooking. And do you drink rosebay willowherb tea as well?’

  ‘No, we don’t.’

  ‘Here, we even turn tree fungus into a tea.’

  ‘That’s not something we do back home.’

  We agree that one day I’ll go and visit her in her garrison town in the north of Russia, and that she’ll bake cakes for me in the tiny kitchen of her apartment, that she’ll cook for me, and that we’ll go out in search of the White Mushroom, and …’

  ‘This lake is called The Dead Lake,’ Sergei says, pointing out of the window.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you never see anyone swimming in it.’

  ‘So why’s that?’

  ‘Because it’s called The Dead Lake.’

  All the same, Kolya strips off his clothes and flees from the next swarm of midges by diving into the shallow water. Sergei’s keeping a lookout for bears, so I decide to join Kolya. Silently, we swim next to one another out to the middle of the cold lake, whose brown surface is reflecting the mountain ridge, while, on the other side, the meadows ascend majestically between the hills. On the bank, Sergei starts singing a Russian song, and presently the women join in. After a hundred metres, Kolya decides that swimming any further would be too dangerous. He won’t brook any objection on my part. Like some imperious landlord, he determines that we must turn round now, and then announces that this is no place for women to swim. Yelena duly puts her trousers and blouse back on.

  ‘A man asks a Japanese visitor,’ Sergei pipes up when we’re all back in the car, ‘what it is he likes about Russia. The Japanese answers: the children. And what else? asks the Russian. The children, comes the reply again. But you must like something other than that! the Russian exclaims. No, says the Japanese guy, everything the Russians make with their hands goes wrong.’

  Yelena laughs her indulgent, knowing laugh. But her tone changes when she thinks of her own two children.

  In the evening, the four of us stand and survey the great indifference of th
e ocean. Three rocks, covered in seagull guano, are being battered by the surf, and when the waves reach the shoreline, they push their crowns of foam up onto the volcanic sand in an orderly fashion. There are no stones, mussels, bits of wood or other jetsam on this beach, and the sky has conjured up a few puffy clouds – just for decoration, it doesn’t mean anything serious. The bay is long and with no curve, just one huge horizontal, which only deviates at its far extremities. Behind us, we’ve got two volcanoes and a broad strip of low scrub and dwarf pines, and beyond it a sea of mixed wildflowers in a meadow. Yelena rolls her trouser legs up to her knees and says, before taking her first steps into the zone where the waves are breaking:

  ‘I’ve never seen the sea looking more beautiful!’

  Her mood is still oscillating between euphoria and solemn, introverted rapture. Then she snaps out of her reverie and starts running. Now she’s beautiful. Now she’s whooping for joy, for the first time in ages by the sound of it.

  Finally, her husband ends up carrying her by piggyback from the beach, where she’s cleaned all the volcanic sand off her wet feet, and back to the car so she won’t get them dirty again, her little pudgy feet. It’s clearly done her, a mother, a power of good to be treated like a kid again.

  In the evenings, we no longer bother asking if the others would like to join us for the next day’s outing, we just ask what time they’d like to be picked up. On the final morning, Yelena emerges with a basket hooked over her arm. She’s spent the previous night baking pierogi and meatballs and salted noodles. She must have cooked everything she could lay her hands on, and when I bend down to greet her, for the first time, along with the cooking smell, I breathe in a faint aroma of a soapy perfume.

  Approaching midday, and we’re trudging through the monstrous scenery around Mount Avachinsky, crossing coagulated mudslides to reach the cooled lava bed left by the volcano’s last eruption in 2001. On that occasion, it began by spewing out ash, followed by lava. The ash hardened to form tufa, and the lava became basalt. Ahead of us lies an uninhabited valley full of boulders – porous frozen lumps of rock – which is fringed by the green slope behind, covered with lichen, saxifrages and dwarf mountain pines, and filled with the high-pitched chirrups of birds and insects. A band of clouds has formed over the mountainside, and the dingy snowfields look like they’ve been besmirched by the dirty clouds – a sight that seems to predate the creation of nature.

  Kolya, with his stout walking boots and the gait of a routemarcher who knows his way around mountains, has penetrated deep into the lava field. Sometimes, he crouches down for ages examining a plant down in the valley, and sometimes he’s filming the petrified lava flow, and then he suddenly disappears from view behind the massive boulders that have come to rest on the fringes of the old river bed.

  Yelena and I are left alone, and she touches my forearm. Her gaze has darkened from within and become more insistent, like it was wishing in this instant to be understood unconditionally, with no words being spoken. For the first time, there’s something conspiratorial yet, at the same time, urgent in her eyes, and as I hold her gaze questioningly, she pulls an envelope from her pocket. Right, I get it. I’ll take it, say nothing about it to anyone, and once I’m back home I’ll search out a Russian exile who’ll translate it for me, whereupon I’ll reply, and the seriousness of my response will be leavened by my mentioning the White Mushroom.

  However, she immediately withdraws the envelope and slips it back into her inner jacket pocket. But the imploring look hasn’t gone from her eyes as I look into them.

  ‘Idi sjuda,’ she says in Russian, which I take to mean ‘come with me’.

  We teeter across a boulder field. Nastya is sitting on a rock, smoking and engrossed in one of Sergei’s stories. Kolya has ventured so far down the cooled lava bed that he’s scarcely to be seen anymore, and so we clamber on, ever upwards, to the sound of the wind humming, the boulders clicking, and the chirping of individual birds, on past a subsidiary crater that is showing signs of activity in the shape of erratic little puffs of smoke coming from its fumaroles.

  This time I follow in Yelena’s footsteps, captivated by her sense of purpose and still in thrall to that look of hers, which was like a promise. All around the sulphurously steaming side crater with its springs and geysers, green algae and horsetails are growing in abundance. Whenever a little cloud of sulphur smoke wafts up over us, we wave our hands in front of our mouths to try and wave it away and emit hacking coughs. In truth, it’s just a shallow pit, a seething beige-yellow depression in the ground, on whose rim Yelena crouches, while the cloud of smoke billows around her. For a second time that day, she grabs hold of me, this time taking hold of my hand and pulling me towards her, and so I squat down next to her, while she, half whispering, recites a few lines of Russian verse, something formulaic or liturgical. I have no idea what she’s saying. The deaf-mute couple on the street in Petropavlovsk spring to mind.

  Her eyes briefly seek mine. Now there’s something frenetic about her gaze, which has nothing to do with me. Then she puts her index finger to her half-open lips, pulls out the envelope again and tears it open at one end. Out of it she shakes a gossamer-fine cloud of ash into the breeze, some of which is carried down into the little crater, though most of it is blown beyond it, over the horsetails and algae, and scattered to the four winds. Yelena folds over the envelope twice and puts it back in her jacket. Finally she folds her hands, whispers a prayer, and it’s all over. The acrid sulphur cloud shoos us down the mountainside. We keep descending, and where the vegetation is coated with dust, we’re doubtless both thinking of what direction the ashes blew in, even though there was only a breath of wind. Then Yelena repeats her gesture, putting her index finger up for a second time to her closed mouth.

  When we join up with the others again, she immediately throws open her arms to hug the unsuspecting Kolya and folds him into her embrace. He looks so young and immature in her arms, clamping his lips to her thick earlobe and clinging on for several long moments. She pats him soothingly on the back.

  We spend our final evening together in the unused-looking surroundings of a hotel’s open air pool; the pool itself is in the process of being filled with sulphurous thermal water via a hose. We settle breathlessly into the water. Kolya dives headlong into the pool, as Yelena dons a black bikini and swiftly plunges her stocky body beneath the milky surface of the water, while Sergei tirelessly fans the general mood of bonhomie. We drink beer from plastic cups and rampage around a bit. One time, Yelena gives my hand a squeeze under the water.

  Piped music is switched on. Lots of instruments are involved, which sound terrible in their sheer jollity. They’re led by an accordion, followed by the skipping sound of massed strings. The evening resounds with this happy sound. Later on, we’re joined by a couple of Russian oligarchs; they’re corpulent but muscular, and are carrying plastic bags full of bottles of drink. They’ve also got a couple of pretty, purely decorative women in tow, who stretch and pose for one another by the poolside like nude models. When three more businessmen duly appear, all with white towels wrapped around their midriff, and start talking incessantly on their mobiles as they stand in the warm water, we decide it’s time to leave.

  Under the bushy trees on the poor estate where they’re living, we pause for a while before taking our leave of Kolya and Yelena. We stand around the car and the men embrace one another with hardly any body contact. When I open my arms to Yelena, she approaches, her skin glowing with a light golden tan, and presses herself into my embrace without reserve, like she belongs there and wants to stay there forever. Then she turns to Nastya and asks her to translate:

  ‘We’ve been through a period with lots of black stripes. We could never have imagined that we’d find such a white stripe here.’

  Then she favours me once more with her plump body, which she knows people like to embrace, and stays in my arms. Meanwhile, Kolya’s gone into the house to fetch some presents.

  ‘I’ll miss yo
u,’ I tell her.

  When I open the presents back in my hotel room that evening, I discover that they’re a pennant from Kolya’s submarine base, a green metal key fob with the unit’s emblem on it, and a blue and white striped sleeveless vest. It fits me all right, but looks like a wrestling singlet from a bathing resort on the Côte d’Azur in the 1920s. That’s her present, I realize. I wear it for a whole night and then another, until it feels beyond retrieval. Yes, I’ll miss her all right.

  Mandalay

  A Dream of the Sea

  I grew up in that hilly landscape which on maps is called the Voreifel, and which devotees of the area like to refer to as ‘Tuscany on the Rhine’. That’s long since ceased to be a way of talking up the place, and is now just downright misleading. Our village, which was still a very rural place at the time, goes by the name of Oedekoven, which, as the mayor once explained to me, supposedly derives from the Germanic god Odin. Legend has it that the god once stopped and rested a while, as even deities sometimes have to, in a nearby wood.

  The forest in question wasn’t far from our house, and from one point on the gravel path that traversed this mixed wood before emerging into a meadow, you could look down into the valley through the sparse trees and catch a glimpse of the outlying villages and ministerial settlements on the outskirts of Bonn, which was close at hand. One time, when I was about seven, and was walking along this path with my mother very early in the morning, we turned down into a dip, and such a dense shroud of dawn mist blanketed the valley that I began to suspect I hadn’t been told the whole truth about our village, and started grizzling:

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me we lived by the sea?’