Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  Later I wrote a long magazine profile of Komar and Melamid. After it appeared, Melamid and his wife, Katya Arnold, invited my wife and me to go drinking with them. We did, and had a great time, and the four of us became friends.

  Meanwhile in the Soviet Union events were occurring that don’t need to be retold. One big change followed the next, people sloughed off communism like an old skin, and the Soviet Union disappeared. Nobody knew where Russia was going, but for the moment, anyway, it seemed to be free. The exile that our Russian friends had chosen, and the separation from friends and family that all had assumed would be forever, no longer had to be that. With American citizenship and passports, Alex and Katya could now travel to Russia like anybody. When they had lived in Moscow, Alex, and Komar, had been kicked out of the Union of Soviet Artists; now a gallery in Moscow was mounting a show of their work, and they would go back to superintend. Katya, who would accompany them, would be seeing Moscow and her friends and family for the first time since she had left in ’78—fifteen years. She asked my wife and me if we’d like to come on the trip. In my family, I’m more usually the traveler, and we had a four-year-old daughter besides. I said I’d come along.

  The time of year was late July. Alex and his partner went over first and Katya and I followed a day or two after. We flew Finnair, on an evening flight that took seven hours to get to Helsinki, and we talked or read all the way. In Helsinki we ghosted around in that strange airport’s boreal no-time-zone, then boarded a smaller plane for Moscow. It’s hard, now that such journeys have become commonplace, to reconstruct how exciting the approach to Moscow was. From the looks of it, Russia was all trees. Sheremetyevo Airport, Moscow’s venue for international flights, appeared from the window to be in the middle of an endless, deeply green forest. The plane landed and sat on the runway for a while. Finally it came up to the terminal and the door opened. The mobile ramp that extended out to the plane door met it about a foot too high. We had to duck our heads and step up to get off the plane.

  From the ramp we went into a short hall. At its end was a sign saying Vykhod (Exit) with an arrow pointing to the left. We turned to the left, and after a few steps met a uniformed army officer in greatcoat and cap who wordlessly pointed us back the opposite way. Why they hadn’t simply used a sign pointing the exit to the right to begin with, thus obviating the need for the soldier, I could not grasp. We came down some stairs into a hall leading to Passport Control. On the floor at the foot of the stairs was a large, vividly red spill of liquid—possibly raspberry syrup, possibly transmission fluid. I tried without success to pick up its smell. Instead I was hit by the smell of Russia, one I’ve encountered often since, all over that country. The components of the smell are still a mystery. There’s a lot of diesel fuel in it, and cucumber peels, and old tea bags, and sour milk, and a sweetness—currant jam, or mulberries crushed into the waffle treads of heavy boots—and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement. Every once in a while, in just the right damp basement in America, I find a cousin of the Russia-smell unexpectedly there.

  We got into one of the lines for the passport booths. Katya is a compact, forceful woman unruffled in most situations, with a wide smile made wider and sunnier by the gap between her two front teeth. Now she looked pale, and the skin stretched tight around her eyes as she muttered to herself, “I should never have come back here. This was a stupid idea.” The light above the passport booth flashed green, and Katya went in. Some minutes passed, the light flashed again, and it was my turn.

  Again, I had never seen anything like this before. The bright, harsh lighting, the thick glass between me and the young passport officer, the lonely singularity of myself in the booth, the atmosphere of real-life no-fooling—all this rattled me. The passport officer gestured for me to take off my baseball cap. Later I would learn of the remarkable ability possessed by all Russians, even the sweetest and gentlest, to make their faces rock hard instantly when they want them to be. The young officer used the rock face on me, and it had its effect. When he looked down to examine my passport and visa, I noticed my reflection in the glass between us. My face had an expression of deep seriousness and fear that the moment did not, in reality, call for. When he looked up again to give me back my documents, he saw that I had relaxed, and he let a sly smile show through the rock. It was a kid’s grin, suggesting that we had only been playing a game, and I was now a point down.

  Beyond the booths, Katya found our luggage, and she asked me to stay with it while she went to the ladies’ room. In a few minutes she returned, shaking her head. “Why did I come back here?” she repeated. “This place is insane. The women’s bathroom is totally insane.”

  “Why is the women’s bathroom insane?”

  “In the women’s bathroom there is a woman doing her dishes. Where could she have come from? I have no idea. There are dishes and pots all over. She is scrubbing away. There are chicken bones on the edge of the sink.”

  We found a cart and put our bags on it and pushed it past a final set of officers, and then through heavy windowless doors, and suddenly we were outside in the muggy afternoon. A few feet from the doors, a crowd waiting to meet the arrivals strained against a low barricade. At the front of the press stood Katya’s older brother, Mitya Arnold, a physicist with dark, mournful eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard longer and fuller than Tolstoy’s. He leaped at Katya and took her in a hug. Next to Mitya was the driver he had hired, a man named Stas, as big and slope-shouldered and patient and jowly and put-upon as any Russian coachman I’d ever read about, differing from them only in the light-green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt he had on.

  We drove from Sheremetyevo into the city. I remember all the details of our arrival in slow motion, because the whole event was a kind of epiphany. Even today Katya says she feels guilty for having exposed me to this contagion, the love of Russia that infected me. The shoulders of the road had been mowed incompletely or not at all. In places the weeds grew six and seven feet high beside the pavement. In other places they were lower; evidently the cows roaming the roadside had grazed them down. Openings in the greenery revealed sunlit trunks of birches, spotted like dalmatians, black on white. A woman in a babushka strolled the ditch carrying a basket of peeled woven twigs—looking for mushrooms, Katya said.

  Closer to the city the traffic thickened. On the sides of buses and streetcars there were no ads, another new one on me. Those vehicles, and the trucks, and some of the cars were covered in a coating of road dust so matte and so thorough that they could have been made of adobe. Traffic cops with batons gestured one vehicle or another to the side—soliciting bribes, Stas said. Heavy, unfiltered exhaust hung in the air. Then suburban high-rises ascended around us, and then the buildings and onion domes of Moscow itself. We drove down streets, then lanes, then alleys barely wider than the car, until we stopped in the courtyard of the apartment building of Chuda, Katya’s best friend. Chuda and her husband, Kolya, were there to meet us, with more hugs and tears; from then all the conversation was in Russian, and I became a cat or a dog, understanding nothing except once in a while my own name.

  The staircase to Chuda’s apartment looked like a stone ramp into which feet had gradually worn steps over the course of a thousand years. The entry was so dark you couldn’t see, but there was more light as you went up. The lower half of the wall along the staircase had just been painted a bright policeman blue and the paint had an eye-watering smell like something junkies would sniff deliberately. Chuda opened the embossed, padded door to her apartment and we went into the front hall, my suitcase now streaked blue where it had bumped against the fresh paint. I did not understand that I was to take off my shoes. Chuda demonstrated for me by pantomime and gave me a backless pair of house slippers to put on. I stood around not knowing what to do, unable to make small talk, or any talk at all.

  In the kitchen, we sat down to a big meal Chuda had prepared. I ate delicious fried fish and drank icy-cold vodka, trying to project mute goodwill and gratitude. Her son Kolya
had been among the people who had stood with Yeltsin when he defied the generals’ putsch in August, just a year before. She said Kolya’s photo had been in the news—he was standing on a barricade in his white shirt like a hero of the War of 1812, she said. Katya translated fragments of the story for me. Neither she nor I had slept for at least a day, so after a while Chuda showed me a bed in her son’s room where I could take a nap. I lay down but didn’t sleep, or read, or even think. I stared at the ceiling, where a paper airplane hung from the chandelier. This paper airplane had sharp angles, and fins, and a strange projectile sleekness, like the elegant arrowhead-shaped MiG fighter jet. No one in America would have made such a paper airplane. It swayed in the breeze from the tall, narrow windows.

  I was thoroughly stunned. Love, with an assist from novelty, had blindsided me. I had been overcome, lost permanently. This kind of thing happens to people in middle age, I realize. It’s embarrassing. The feeling began the minute I stepped off the plane, with the absurd business of the exit sign and the correcting soldier.

  In the days that followed I went all over Moscow with Alex and Katya and Chuda’s younger son, Tisha, a high school kid then, who speaks good English. I saw the Kremlin, Katya’s elementary school, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin’s tomb, Lenin himself (after viewing him I was able to read several books about him I would not have read before, because now I considered him a personal acquaintance). I visited churches on whose grounds people were cutting the lawn with scythes. I rode the metro, absorbed in the details of the subway cars, reminiscent of an American electric train set of the 1950s. I joined a tour of the Novodevichy Monastery and its cemetery and saw the graves of Chekhov, Khrushchev and his wife, Ilf and Petrov, Mikoyan (designer of the MiG), and Gogol. I spent longer than other people wanted to spend looking at the Rublev icons in the Tretyakov Gallery; and so on.

  One evening at Chuda’s apartment, she and her husband and Katya and Mitya and Mitya’s wife, Irina, and their daughter, and some other people and I were sitting around the large dining room table drinking vodka, and the moment came when the foreigner must account for himself. Through Katya they asked me questions about myself, my family, my work. Then they asked how I liked Moscow. I said that Moscow was the greatest place I’d ever been, and Russia the greatest country I’d ever seen.

  On one of my later visits to Moscow I was standing at Sheremetyevo Airport in a line at the ticket counter at Aeroflot Airlines waiting to buy a ticket to New York. The guy in front of me was speaking Russian, and after a minute I could tell by his accent that he must be an American. We began a conversation. He said he was a journalist originally from New York who had been living in Moscow for many years. Still in the grip of my infatuation, and wanting to hear it confirmed in someone else, I ventured that he must really like Russia to have lived here so long.

  “Like it?” he said. “I hate it! I hate this fucking country. Russia is the worst fucking country in the world!”

  I asked why he thought that.

  “My God! What are you talking about? This country is a total disaster! Nothing fucking works. The people treat each other horribly—oh, how they love to abuse each other! They’re schemers, liars, bribe takers. If you don’t know how to bribe people you won’t ever get anywhere here. Everybody’s working some stupid fucking angle. The place is filthy, trash all over . . .” He went on and on.

  When he finally paused, I asked, “Well, if you hate Russia so much, why are you flying Aeroflot?”

  He looked away, toward the floor. “Because they let you smoke,” he said.

  And indeed, he was certainly right about that. The woman who sold me my ticket was smoking, as was the flight attendant who took the ticket at the gate. So were most of the passengers. Through the airport window I saw two Aeroflot pilots squatting on their haunches in that way Russian men do, each enjoying a smoke on the tarmac not far from the planes. When I stepped into the cabin, the density of the fumes in there would have been sufficient to smoke meat. (Sometime after that I learned that Aeroflot had changed its policy; now, like other airlines, it does not allow smoking on its flights.)

  Eventually, of course, I came to understand that the guy had a point, and not just about the smoking. Trying to reconcile the passion I felt for Russia with the way Russia actually is took some doing. I employed various strategies. We all know of famous authors who gave the world great works of literature yet were not such good people themselves. I supposed maybe Russia was an entire country like that. Certainly, it had the great books to show. That explanation proving unsatisfactory, I tried a simpler formula: Russia as both great and horrible, or as the greatest horrible country in the world. I had other formulas and explanations after that one. More recently I have given up trying to reconcile or explain.

  As I read books about Russia, I took comfort in the discovery that Russia-love is an independent force out there in the ether of ideas, and that it had afflicted other vulnerable people before me. For example, John Reed, author of perhaps the best book ever written about Russia by an American, Ten Days That Shook the World. I feel a connection to Reed even closer than I do to Lenin, because Reed and I were on the same organization in college, a humor magazine called the Harvard Lampoon. Reed graduated in 1910, and I graduated sixty-three years later. Soon after college, Reed had a great success as a war correspondent following Pancho Villa’s armies in Mexico. When the First World War started, Reed went to France, sent back a number of dispatches from there, and then managed to get himself banned from the Western front. While doing some reporting, he wangled his way over to the German lines, where, for unknown reasons, he accepted the offer of a German officer to take a couple of shots at the French. Reed had returned to New York by the time word of this exploit reached the papers, and the French, understandably, afterward refused to allow him reentry into France.

  For his next war-reporting journey, Reed therefore had no choice but to explore the Eastern front instead. Entering via the Caucasus, Reed continued north through the war zone into Russia. He had not been there long before the infatuation struck. In a dispatch published in Metropolitan magazine in 1916 (and in Reed’s subsequent book, The War in Eastern Europe), he wrote:

  Russia’s is an original civilization that spreads by its own power. Loose and easy and strong, it invades the life of the far-flung savage tribes of Asia; it crosses the frontiers into Rumania, Galicia, East Prussia—in spite of organized efforts to stop it . . . And it takes hold of the minds of men because it is the most comfortable, the most liberal way of life. Russian ideas are the most exhilarating, Russian thought the freest, Russian art the most exuberant; Russian food and drink are to me the best, and Russians themselves are, perhaps, the most interesting human beings that exist.

  Later, other American intellectuals of Reed’s generation would get even more worked up (“The whole beautiful land is even more glorious than I thought, and no one should stay away from here a minute”), but by then the encomia were directly political, and all leftist. I think Russia-infatuation may be like the messianic and other religious exaltations that sometimes seize visitors to Jerusalem. The contributing factors seem to be text (Bible, Koran; Tolstoy, Marx) plus the actual earthly location where the text was fulfilled, or is to be. The combination of holy writ and earthly realization may act as a kind of psychic force-multiplier to unhinge the mind.

  In Reed’s case, his malady turned out to be fatal. The following year he returned to Russia and witnessed the October Revolution; back in America he holed up for two months in a rented room in Greenwich Village and produced Ten Days That Shook the World. After it was published to wide acclaim (Lenin himself admired it), Reed became a figure of the revolution in his own right and went to the new USSR to participate in the conferences and torturous political machinations of the day. While attending the Congress of the Peoples of the East, in Baku, he caught typhus. Trying to return to America, he ended up in prison in Finland, where his health deteriorated more. Returning finally to Moscow, he died there
in 1920. He was not quite thirty-three. The Soviets buried him with honors in the Kremlin Wall. He is one of only two Americans buried there. His politics may have been crazy, and he may have gone overboard about Russia, but there never was a braver writer than John Reed.

  On that first trip, after about ten days in Moscow, Alex and Katya and I continued on to Siberia. The story of how that came about is long. A few months earlier, Alex had received a letter from a friend he’d known in college named Sasha Khamarkhanov. Sasha was a poet, and a Buryat. The Buryat are an indigenous people of Siberia with their own republic east of Lake Baikal. The Buryat Autonomous Republic is part of the Russian Federation and its capital is Ulan-Ude (pronounced OO-LAHN OO-DAY). In his letter, Sasha said that he was now an official in the Ministry of Culture of the Buryat Republic, and that he was inviting Alex to come to Ulan-Ude, and bring any other American artists or writers who wanted to join him, for the purpose of cultural exchange. Alex wrote back saying he would certainly come. Afterward he asked me if I would like to go to Siberia with him, and I said yes. That plan, tentative and theoretical as it was, had existed before the later details about the gallery show and the trip to Moscow.