Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  I half doubted the Siberia trip would really happen. In Moscow, trying to set it up, Katya made many phone calls at odd hours to find out when and from where flights left for Ulan-Ude. Such Western conveniences as reserving airline tickets over the phone had not yet become routine in Russia. Finally she found a flight, and one afternoon Stas drove us and our luggage out to Domodedovo Airport, Moscow’s main airport for domestic travel. When we arrived, the place was in near chaos, packed with people in the steamy heat, most of the passengers not standing in lines but mobbing the counters in throngs. We tried to work our way through them and onto a plane but gave up not very near the departure gate. Stas took us back to Chuda’s, where it turned out we could not stay because other houseguests had just shown up. Stas then drove us to Alex’s mother’s apartment. Alex’s mother, Lyudmila Borisovna, let us in, and when she heard we had just been at Domodedovo, she made us take showers immediately. “The last thing we need around here is cholera,” she said.

  A couple of days later Katya and I (Alex would be taking a later flight) went back to Domodedovo and by pushing and persistence jammed ourselves into a Siberian-bound plane. The seats were like lawn chairs with a single piece of canvas for the back; one’s knees supported the spine of the passenger in front while one leaned on the passenger behind. For the first time I heard that characteristic sound of Russian departures, the clink of vodka bottles in plastic shopping bags. The plane waited for a while on the runway and the cabin became stuffy, so some of the male passengers removed their shirts and undershirts. Finally the plane took off and flew through the night, and the passengers slept all jumbled up with one another. An eight- or nine-year-old girl on my right slept on my right side while I sprawled on the uniformed man on my left. Just before dawn, the uniformed man woke up and looked out the window. As the plane descended to land at Omsk, he turned to me, gestured at the view, and said, “Sibir’!”

  In Russian, the word—Sibir’—is pure onomatopoeia. A shiver begins with the first letter and concludes with the palatalized r at the end, which, combined with the bi preceding it, amounts to brrr. Only a cosmic Dickens of place-naming would have chosen a name with such a chilly and mysterious sound. And yet Sibir’, so resonant in Russian, is not of Russian provenance, but whispers of deepest Asia. In all geography, no name has the same magic: Siberia; Siberia; Siberia. After I got interested in it I wondered what the name meant and where it had come from. Farley Mowat, the Canadian author, says in The Siberians that “Siberia” means “the sleeping land.” That derivation has a ring to it, but I found no other source saying the same. Valentin Rasputin, the Siberian short-story writer and essayist, proposes that the word comes from the Russian sebe beri (take for yourself), contracted to se’ beri, which he translates as “take what you can, take it all.” Rasputin’s etymology is ironic; he is an environmentalist who writes often about the plundering of Siberia. Elsewhere he suggests, more seriously, that Sibir’ was originally the name of a town and that the word meant a center or meeting place.

  Among scholars who have studied the question, there is a consensus that Sibir’ referred to a town on the Irtysh River where the khanate defeated by Yermak and his Cossacks in 1581 had its capital. The town, or fortress, was also known as Isker, or Ibis-Sibir, or Abir-i-Sibir. As Russia enlarged itself across Asia, the original name of Sibir’ kept being reapplied to larger areas until it came to mean not just a locality but the whole place.

  Etymologists say that the word Sibir’ consists of two Turkic words that have close equivalents in Mongolian. The first word, su or si, meant “water,” and the second, berr or birr, meant “a wild, unpopulated land.” The naming pattern follows a common one of simple geographic description used by native peoples, whereby, for example, Baikal derives from the Turkic bey, big, and kul, lake. Sibir’, therefore, meant a wilderness with water. “Marshy wilderness” would come close to describing parts of western Siberia today.

  The first appearance of the word Sibir’ in a written text was in The Secret History of the Mongols, composed in Central Asia probably in the year 1228. This epic, written in the vertical script adopted from the Uighurs by the previously illiterate Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan, describes Genghis’s mythic origins, birth, conquests, and the victories of his generals and armies. No original of The Secret History survives—document conservation not being a Mongol strong point—but several near-contemporary Chinese translations made their way into Chinese archives. Part of The Secret History tells of the campaign of Genghis’s son Jochi in 1207 against the People of the Forest. The campaign succeeded, and the People of the Forest submitted to Jochi, bringing him “white gerfalcons, white geldings and black sables.” The chronicler continues:

  After Joci had subjugated the People of the Forest from the Sibir, Kesdim, Bayit, Tugas, Tenlek, To’eles, Tas and Bajigit up to this side, he came back bringing with him the commanders of ten thousand and of thousands of the Kirgisut to pay homage to Cinggis Qa’an . . . Cinggis Qa’an favored Joci, saying, “You, the eldest of my sons, who only now for the first time have left home, you have been lucky. Without wounding or causing suffering to man or gelding in the lands where you went, you came back having subjugated the fortunate People of the Forest. I shall give this people to you.” So he ordered.

  In this context, Sibir’ seems to mean both the place and the tribe in it. The other names listed are of tribes to the west of the Mongols’ territory; “up to this side” means to where Mongol lands began. Jochi would be the first ruler of the expanded western part of the Mongol empire, an area that in the reign of his son Batu would include Kiev and Novgorod and other Russian principalities. (Jochi’s line, by the way, founded the Golden Horde, later ruled by Khan Mamai, from whom Ivan the Terrible traced his Tatar descent.)

  In about 1305, the Persian traveler and historian Rashid ad-Din, discussing the territory of the Khirgiz people, wrote of a land he called Aber Sibir. And in the Russian chronicles of 1406, mention is made of the killing of a famous and dangerous khan, Tokhtamysh, “in the land of Sibir, near the town of Changa.” (The Russian chronicles were church annals that recorded, in official and formulaic language, the important happenings of the year.) Those two mentions of Siberia are perhaps the earliest ones to be found in any text after The Secret History.

  The first known reference to Siberia in a book published in Europe appeared in a narrative called The Bondage and Travels of Johann Schiltberger, a Native of Bavaria, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, which was written (probably dictated) in about 1443 and published in 1473. Schiltberger led a tumultuous life of long journeys, narrow escapes, and face-to-face encounters with historical figures of the age. He was born in 1381, and at about age thirteen entered the service of a lord named Leinhart Richtaringen. When his lord joined other Bavarian Knights on the Crusade of King Sigismund of Hungary to the Holy Land, Schiltberger went along. King Sigismund quickly led his army into one of the great disasters of the Crusades. At the Battle of Nicopolis on the Danube River in present-day Bulgaria, an Ottoman Turk army led by Bajazet, the sultan, routed the crusaders, caused Sigismund to flee, killed Leinhart Richtaringen, and captured ten thousand prisoners, whom Bajazet ordered to be beheaded on the spot. The three men Schiltberger was roped to had their heads cut off, but Schiltberger, then only fifteen, was spared. He became the sultan’s slave.

  Bajazet afterward returned to besieging Constantinople, a favorite occupation of the Ottomans. Schiltberger first saw that city from the attackers’ side. Bajazet, however, soon had to lift the siege and go to war against a more deadly enemy, Tamerlane. This former Turkic tribal chief who rose to become the leader of a great Tatar army was the worst scourge of civilization since Genghis Khan. In 1402, Tamerlane met Bajazet at the Battle of Ankara in Asia Minor, defeated him, put him in a cage, and took plunder, including slaves. As a slave of Tamerlane for several years, Schiltberger was able to report on some of the notable atrocities of his master, such as his burning alive of thirty thousand people in a temple in
Damascus, his constructing of pyramids of human heads, and his trampling of children prisoners younger than seven beneath the hooves of his cavalry. Once when Tamerlane was besieging the city of Hispahan, he made peace on the condition that it lend him its archers; after twelve thousand archers were sent, he ordered his soldiers to round them all up and cut off their thumbs. He then entered the city unopposed and killed almost everyone.

  Dying in a manner befitting his nature, Tamerlane fell into an incurable rage when he could not revenge himself enough on some people who had betrayed him. He went out howling, and after his burial was heard to howl every night for a year. Schiltberger then became the property of a series of Tamerlane’s sons and grandsons; just who owned him in this period is hard to keep track of. On a journey with one of his later masters, a khan named Tchekre, Schiltberger went north into what he calls “Great Tartaria.” There they met another khan who was planning an expedition “into a country called Ibissibur,” by geographic context clearly Siberia. Schiltberger’s master accompanied this khan, and Schiltberger devotes about a page to the journey, with a surprisingly accurate piece of ethnological data: “There are also in the above-named country, dogs, that go in carts and sledges; they are also made to carry luggage, and are as large as donkeys.”

  Schiltberger’s subsequent travels eventually brought him to the shores of the Black Sea, where, with five other slaves of the Muslims, he escaped and hailed a passing ship from Europe. The sailors asked the escapees to prove their identity as Christians by reciting the Ave Maria, the Paternoster, and the Credo. The memories of Schiltberger and his companions not failing them, the sailors then took them to Constantinople, where Schiltberger told his story to the Byzantine emperor, John VIII Paleologue, who cared for them and helped them on their way. After more plot twists, Schiltberger finally found himself back in Bavaria. He had been gone for thirty-one years. A Bavarian duke gave him a position in his retinue, and there, presumably, the much-journeyed Schiltberger stayed put for the rest of his life.

  Over the centuries to come, thousands of travelers, willing and otherwise, would see Siberia and write books about it. By his brief mention and description of Ibissibur, Johann Schiltberger became the first in a long literary line. If plot (as we are told) equals character, and vice versa, then maybe a similar equivalence exists between setting and genre. That is, perhaps the two presuppose each other, as in the sea story, the American Western, the English parlor mystery, etc. Schiltberger’s example leads us to expect that Siberia’s genre will be the travel story, not surprisingly, because one can’t begin to know a place that big without moving around. Sometimes the Siberian genre will also be the slave narrative, a personal account of bondage and suffering, also as per Schiltberger. His precedent also points to another, lighter Siberian genre, just as inseparable from geographic vastness—the picaresque.

  Our plane had touched down at Omsk and taxied to a stop on the runway. Through the windows nothing was visible but a distant, nondescript horizon in gray morning light. From my vantage, no buildings could be seen. Following the custom of Russian commercial aviation, the plane then sat, with nothing at all happening, for an indefinite amount of time. Eventually from the outer vagueness a motorized boarding ladder emerged and drove slowly to the plane, its door finally opened, and the passengers disembarked. With pointing arm fully extended, an airline employee indicated a group of tiny buildings just barely within sight. These were the terminal. In a mass with some stragglers, the passengers began to walk in that direction. Katya and I found each other and joined the trek.

  Chapter 3

  What I have to say next concerns the Omsk airport men’s room. I regret this. I’ve noticed that in books by Siberian travelers of the past they don’t talk about bathrooms, and that’s probably good. I reluctantly break with this tradition for two reasons. First, I am an American, and Americans pay attention to and care about bathrooms. The habit may show childishness and weak-mindedness, but there it is. Second, if the world really is going to become a global community, then some of our trading partners (I’m talking to you, too, China) need to know how far apart we are on the subject of bathrooms.

  The men’s room at the Omsk airport was unbelievably disgusting. Stepping through the door, or even near the door, was like receiving a blow to the face from the flat of a hand. No surface inside the men’s room, including the ceiling, was clean. There were troughs and stools, but no partitions, stalls, or doors. Everything done was done in full view. The floor was strewn with filth of a wide and eye-catching variety. At the urinal raised cement footprints offered the possibility of keeping your feet out of the flooding mire, but as the footprints themselves were hardly filth-free, the intention failed. Certain of this place’s images that I won’t describe remain inexpugnable from my mind. I got out of there as fast as was practical and reeled away into the terminal’s dim lobby.

  Soon Katya appeared, also reeling, from her trip to the ladies’. The force of revulsion propelled us clear out of the terminal and into its cracked and weed-surrounded parking lot, where we finally risked taking deep breaths again. First we washed with packaged detergent hand wipes. Then on our hands and the soles of our shoes we poured rubbing alcohol that Katya had brought along. Readers may think us squeamish. (And, in fairness to the Omsk airport, later we did discover the public bathrooms reserved for foreigners, which were upstairs in the terminal, and not as bad; also, for all I know, in the new Russian economy the Omsk airport has upgraded its facilities by now.)

  But as I would find out, though the Omsk men’s room was especially awful, that kind of bathroom experience is more the rule than not in Siberia. Winter temperatures there often fall so low that in the outhouses, liquids freeze very quickly, and over the months a sort of stalagmite effect is created, growing up through the hole in the floor. As for the holes themselves, only in the nicer outhouses are they made with a jigsaw that cuts them into the conventional oval shape; more generally they are hacked with an ax into fractured parallelograms. In indoor bathrooms within the permafrost zone, the fragility of the plumbing means that toilet paper cannot be flushed away, and so it is disposed of separately, usually in its own plastic bucket beside the john . . . Again, I apologize.

  Now that I’ve brought up a few of these details, however, and gotten the subject out of the way, I won’t have to refer to it again. In future descriptions of Siberian sanitary arrangements, a more than occasional bathroom along the lines of the Omsk airport men’s room may be inferred.

  After a couple of hours and a second collection of tickets, the passengers bound for Ulan-Ude set out on another group hike across the runway, this time to a new plane. The day had become sunny and breezy, and I enjoyed the stroll. Seeing the plane parked by itself off in the distance and watching it grow in size as we approached it restored some of its miraculousness, a quality ordinary air travel takes away. You forget that a machine’s ability to fly is really an act of sorcery, until you observe the thing just sitting there before takeoff, gleaming in the sun. A common Russian word for airplane, samolyot (literally, “flies itself”), is not a coinage made to describe a new invention but has been around since the Arabian Nights, when kovyor samolyot meant “flying carpet.” As we came to the boarding stairs, the two pilots, neither much more than a teenager, stood talking casually by the plane as if they’d just finished building it in their backyard.

  On this flight, unfortunately, we sat in the same section as a bunch of mafia guys. I use the term for sake of convenience. I don’t know if they were really mafia. They wore dramatically tailored suits, they emitted strong fragrances of cologne, their women had on skimpy clothes and furs, and Katya said they were mafia guys. A small man accompanying them carried bags of expensive provisions, mostly alcoholic, like cognac and champagne, and foods that sent off odors to fill the plane. The group occupied many seats together, putting their belongings on empty ones and ignoring any passengers who showed up complaining that the seats were theirs. They also ignored everythin
g they were instructed to do for takeoff, made no use of seat belts, did not remain seated, walked around the plane, drank and laughed and yelled, and (remarkably) did not pass out, frustrating passengers who were hoping they would. They kept the party rolling all the way to Ulan-Ude.

  Movies and TV shows about gangsters expect you always to identify with those characters, and it’s fun to do that, and I try to. Sometimes, though, the fantasy falters, and I find myself identifying not with Tony Soprano and his friends but with anyone unlucky enough to be next to him in an enclosed environment like a plane.

  The airport at Ulan-Ude lay in the middle of an immense flat space covered with low tufts of grass. Sasha Khamarkhanov and his brother Kolya met us at the gate. Sasha was a thin, shy, bespectacled man with the attentive manner of someone who always expects to hear something great. Kolya was of a comic-foil rotundity, almost oval, and wore a blue suit and shades. The luggage took about an hour to appear, and as we waited, Katya and Kolya and Sasha discussed our flight and the weather. Katya mentioned the heat, and Kolya said, “Yesterday was even hotter, and that was difficult for me, because I’m fat.” Finally the luggage came and we put it into Kolya’s English-made car and drove into Ulan-Ude.

  The impressions of first-time visitors to that city often rise to and descend from their first glimpse of the sculpture of the head of Lenin overlooking Ulan-Ude’s central square. For me these impressions were: sooty, yellow-gray air, reminiscent of Akron, Ohio, in the 1950s; extensive industrial plants, with a silver aircraft or a monstrous black locomotive with a red star on it poised on a platform by the plant gates; tiers of gray buildings, some connected to one another by aerial walkways; apartment-building roofs thick with antennae in every possible style, some like flowers, some like hot-dog grills, some like spirals, or asterisks, or radiators, or Afro combs; then a huge open square; and then, The Head.