Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  Then, the gizmos we began to see! As we neared the terminal buildings, we passed lots of old, Cold War, formerly high-tech electronic stuff, antennae and whatnot, all of it silhouette black and leaning one way or another, disconnected wiring dangling from it, and poles holding up wires in such quantity that they had to be strung on circular frames at intervals to separate them from one another, and stumps of poles, and guy wires running diagonally, and corkscrew-shaped contraptions dark against the sky—the total effect was as if a mad scientist in an old horror movie had done some of his monster-animating experiments here, and then had been discovered by the villagers and chased off, and all his mad-scientist equipment had been left out in the weather to fall apart gradually.

  The colors, too, were of a different kind. Kennan had been right about that. Russia occupies its own universe, chromatically. Near where we taxied to a stop sat a Russian car of a particularly Russian version of green. I guess it was an apple green, but to call it that is to reimagine the apple. It was a bright, bilious, chemical-spill version of apple green. Russian colors sometimes make my gums ache. And on our right stood the Aeroflot terminal, a building that appeared to have been constituted entirely of shiny chrome. It resembled a hugely outsized bumper from an SUV, only an SUV transported, in design terms, back to about 1963.

  The plane door opened and two women soldiers in their twenties escorted us across the tarmac to the entry room for international passengers. The women wore camo jackets and square-heeled high heels with buckles in the shape of hammers and sickles. They were dark haired, pretty, and bored. (Of the beauty of Russian women I will say more later.) Strange bursts of gunfire, and louder explosions, sounded all around. Larry explained that the Russians were dismantling the military base and had begun to shoot off the extra ammunition rather than take the trouble to ship it out.

  When I entered the cold terra-cotta-tiled room where we were to fill out our customs declaration forms, I encountered an old friend: the smell of Russia. How do they do it? Here on the edge of the Bering Strait, five thousand miles from Moscow, almost within wafting distance of the U.S.A., the Russia-smell is exactly the same! I breathed it deeply. Yes, it was all there—the tea bags, the cucumber peels, the wet cement, the chilly air, the currant jam. About the only point of similarity between this smell and the one I’d just left in Nome was the overtone of diesel exhaust. But, still fresh from America, I understood that America’s essential smell is nothing at all like Russia’s. America smells like gift shop candles, fried food, new cars. America’s is the smell of commerce. The smell of Alaska that stays with me the strongest is that of the Cinnabon sweet rolls shop in the Anchorage airport; I’m sure the scent of Cinnabon is set adrift everywhere in that space intentionally, in order to ensnare passersby. The smell of America says, “Come in and buy.” The smell of Russia says, “Ladies and gentlemen: Russia!”

  And there at the top of a poorly lighted staircase (why not try using a bigger lightbulb every once in a while, guys?) stood an older lady, a customs officer, beckoning us along. She smiled. In the dimness, her single gold tooth flashed like a Russian Welcome sign.

  Provideniya, a city closer to America than Dallas is to Houston, was built mostly in the 1930s by slaves. Or “convict laborers,” as we were told by Tanya, the bibulous copper-blond former ballerina who introduced herself to us at the airport as our guide. The laborers would have been in the custody of Dalstroi, the giant prison and construction combine, a fiefdom of the KGB, that ran the entire Soviet Far East. Perhaps in revenge for how it was built, Provideniya was now falling apart sort of spectacularly. On our way from the airport we passed rows and rows of smashed-out windows, and cement buildings of four and five stories all abandoned and hollow eyed, crumbling like sand castles that had been rained on. From some entryways, small waterfalls flowed down the broken front steps and into the potholed road. Apartment buildings rose from the street front in long horizontal terraces, decay and disintegration apparent everywhere, with occasionally a window still intact and a sack of provisions dangling from it—evidence of someone still living there, Tanya said. She added that the city had not had coal for its central-heating boilers in seven months, since early February. I had been in a ghost town before, but never a whole ruined city.

  The idea was that we would spend one night in Provideniya, visit the museum and the power station, and then travel by boat and off-road vehicle to a camp of Chukchi reindeer herders on the tundra, where we would stay in reindeer-skin dwellings called yurangis. From the reindeer camp we would continue to a Yupik fishing camp at the mouth of a river, where there were hot springs and a chance to observe interesting sea mammals. However, something had come up. In an office at the ethnological museum in the middle of the city, our real guide, Vladimir Bychkov, whom it turned out Tanya had only been filling in for, explained the problem to us.

  Vladimir Bychkov has brown eyes and a well-trimmed dark beard, and he looks maybe Persian. He is the son of a former Soviet army officer and was born in 1963 at the military base at Ureliki. A geography teacher during the school year, he is a mild, sensible, and intelligent man. In good English and with a serious expression he told us that the day before, a party of thirty-seven Yupiks from the village of Novo Chaplino in Chukotka, who had been visiting their American relatives on St. Lawrence Island on the U.S. side of the Bering Strait, had set out on the sixty-five-mile journey home. Their visas were about to run out, so they took a chance with the threatening weather. Soon after they left port, a storm came up (the same one that delayed us in Nome). Many of the Yupiks were in small aluminum boats with low-horsepower outboards, and the waves had been too much for them. Some had been able to jump to the large whaleboats of their companions, but two Yupiks, a father and son, had drowned. Their family name was Severov. Vladimir had known them. Most of the group had arrived in Provideniya thirty hours after they had started. They had thrown their belongings overboard to lighten their boats and thus lost the stuff they were bringing back from America, a big objective of the journey. Also, three boats carrying a total of six men remained unaccounted for.

  A few years ago, he continued, three American researchers at just this time of year had gone on the strait from the Russian side in a small boat and had swamped in a storm and drowned. In light of that, and because of this week’s tragedy, the governor of Chukotka had announced today that August sea conditions were too unpredictable for tourist travel in small boats. That meant we could not get to either the reindeer camp or the fish camp, as we’d planned, because both excursions required going by boat some of the way. We would instead find things to do and see in and around Provideniya, Vladimir said.

  The Californians and I were supposed to stay in the apartment of a woman named Nina. She lived a few blocks from the museum in a not-ruined building just like you might find in Moscow, down even to the English-language graffiti—RAP, and RAVE, and BREAK DANCING—in the dark, Russian-scented entryway. Nina, a large, blond, motherly woman with mournful dark eyes, had been the head chef at Provideniya’s only hotel until it closed a few years before. At the table in her small kitchen she served us a supper of borscht with beef, pelmeni in sour cream, red caviar on slices of hard-boiled egg with mayonnaise, and a many-layered birthday cake (the birthday was hers) with buttercream frosting. After we had finished, I told her that the food was better than at Moscow Gastronome in Brighton Beach. She asked me please to say that to Vladimir, the guide, and to the Chukotka director of tourism whom we’d also met briefly that day. Micky pointed out that the menu did not conform to the low-cholesterol diet that the travel company in Anchorage had assured him would be available. Nina didn’t know English, and I couldn’t translate that.

  After supper, both the California couples retired to their rooms. The room that was supposed to be mine, however, was unavailable, all its flat surfaces being covered with wet clothes and camera parts laid out to dry. Nina explained that a woman who had arrived early in the morning was staying there. My Russian quickly proved ina
dequate to understanding what was going on. Eventually I gathered I would be staying elsewhere, in the apartment of her daughter, or brother, or somebody. Miffed to have lost my spot, I took my bags and followed her out into the paths of coal soot between the buildings. There we were met by Ira, Nina’s daughter. Ira resembled a beautiful young woman in a children’s story—rosy cheeks, perfect skin, chestnut hair to her shoulders, dark eyes. She wore a V-neck aqua-colored fuzzy sweater, slacks, and high heels that made neat circular indentations in the black and oily ground.

  Nina said she would see me at her apartment for breakfast the next morning and wished me a quiet night. Ira led me into another building, a more run-down one, and through some narrow halls, and then into a luxury duplex flat. The place had a large-screen TV, a sort of staircase balcony overlooking a spacious living room, and a kitchen twice the size of Nina’s. Ira brought me up to the room on the second floor where I would sleep. I was understanding perhaps one sentence out of every ten she said. I couldn’t shake the misgiving that some dangerous mafia overboss lived here and would show up unexpectedly. Back downstairs, Ira asked if I’d like to watch a movie and I said yes. She put on a cassette she said she really liked. Its title was Bolshee chem Zhizn’. I looked at the box—I had seen this movie and liked it, too. In English the title is Larger Than Life. It stars Bill Murray and is about a man who inherits an elephant. My friend Roy Blount wrote the screenplay.

  She followed the dialogue, reading the Russian subtitles though she already knew it pretty well. We laughed mostly in the same places. She said that Bill Murray was funny, and I agreed. After the movie was over, she showed me some walrus-ivory carvings a friend of hers had done. The skilled and intricate miniatures represented a money bag with a dollar sign on it; the “annuit cœptis” pyramid and its single eye, from the dollar bill; a piggy bank with a coin sticking out; a change purse; and the cartoon millionaire from the Monopoly game wearing his top hat.

  In the middle of the night, thirsty from the caviar, I ventured downstairs in my pajamas to find a glass of water. At the kitchen counter I met Ira’s husband, Edward, a young man of perhaps twenty-five, sweet faced and not at all sinister-looking. This settled my mind considerably.

  Walking around Provideniya one couldn’t escape the notion that it had been destroyed in a war, as I guess it had. The constant gunfire and detonation of surplus explosives in the distance, like a skirmish in some tundra suburb, contributed to the effect. Tanya, again substituting for Vladimir as guide, gave us a tour of the sights: the empty community swimming pool, its lane ropes drooping to a few puddles on the bottom, formerly the best pool in all Chukotka; Provideniya’s last restaurant, recently destroyed by fire; a Baptist church, founded a few years before by some Americans, now also a burned-out shell, possibly the victim of arson; and a shiny statue of Lenin striding ominously (from America’s point of view) eastward from his pedestal on an eminence in the town. Tanya said there had been talk of pulling the statue down, but the citizens had decided that since Provideniya had no other statues they should keep this one and paint it gold instead.

  Tanya told us she had a degree in chemistry and worked testing water samples at the power station. Eventually she led us there. We had to go up and down a number of stiles that provided crossings over the many insulated steam pipes along the ground. Provideniya’s population used to be about seven thousand five hundred, she said, and the power plant’s central-heating system heated the whole place. Now barely a third that many inhabitants remained (three thousand five hundred people, by contrast, live in Nome). The power plant’s stack rose high above the surrounding buildings. Though out of coal, the plant was still burning oil for electricity. Inside, the works resembled an old Soviet poster of industry—huge pistons shiny with oil, hexagonal-headed bolts on sheets of steel, sharp lines of shadow, a sense of some further fire glowing within, and coverall-clad figures in antique hard hats manning the controls. The numbers and letters identifying various gauges had been painted in red enamel by hand. According to Tanya, nobody in her office had been paid in more than three years, and one of her coworkers had begun a protest, never leaving the office or eating any food for two weeks now. The money to pay them was there, she believed, but the boss would not part with it. With a careless toss of her head she said she did not know what would happen to any of them.

  Back at Nina’s apartment that evening for dinner, I finally met the woman who had taken over what I still considered, proprietarily, as my room. She was Heidi Bradner, an American photographer, and the reason her clothes and camera parts were wet was that she had come over from St. Lawrence Island with the Yupiks in the storm. While Tanya and the Californians drank tea and vodka in the kitchen, Heidi Bradner and I sat in the hall and she told me about the voyage. About ten days before, she had gone over to St. Lawrence Island from Nome to take pictures for a French magazine. When time came to leave, the Yupiks offered her a ride to Provideniya. She had doubts about their boats and so chose the most seaworthy-looking whaleboat and most competent-looking crew she could find. The group of boats hadn’t gone halfway across when the storm hit, with rain, fog, and eight-foot waves. Boats began to get separated from one another. None of the Yupiks had radios or GPS equipment, she said, because Russian bureaucracy makes it hard for Yupiks to own or use them.

  The Yupiks’ little outboards couldn’t do much in the waves, which were so steep that the propellers often weren’t in the water. High swells flooding in astern caused the engines to stall. Boats began swamping and going down. Everyone was drenched, bailing, hanging on. A boat came alongside, and two men jumped into her whaleboat just as their boat disappeared beneath them in the sea. Her boat, now heavily laden, was riding low and filling up. None of the Yupiks were showing how scared they were, except by the speed with which they pitched duffel bags and outboard motors and nets and walrus ivory and all kinds of other valuables overboard. During the last part of the journey, the storm let up slightly. Her boat reached Provideniya harbor after fifteen hours. Other boats took twice that long. Then the Russian authorities made the Yupiks wait for hours to clear customs, while their wives and children and other relatives cried on the beach, wondering who had or had not survived. After Heidi had been processed through customs, she came to Nina’s, where she dried off and made phone calls.

  Of course I then felt dumb that I had begrudged her the room. When she finished her story, I asked her how old she was. She looked at me to see if I was being fresh, then understood I wasn’t. “Thirty-five,” she said. “You are brave,” I said, and reached out and tapped her shoulder. When a person does that, after a good play in sports, or when a king knights somebody, you assume that the power goes from the one doing the touching to the one being touched, but actually the opposite is true. The person touching does so in the hope that a spark of the other’s bravery will jump across. Brave people are one of the glories of the world.

  Heidi Bradner has long, wavy red hair, a high forehead, pale skin, and a photographer’s large, long-fingered hands. She is five foot nine and slim, almost rangy. She grew up in Alaska; her father, Mike Bradner, was a state legislator and served as Speaker of the House. After graduating from Robert W. Service High School in Anchorage, she went to the University of Alaska, then traveled in Europe. During a trip to Moscow she decided she wanted to stay there awhile. The year was 1991, and what was going on in Russia then dazzled her. “It was like a huge treasure chest had opened,” she later told the Anchorage Daily News. “History was changing before my very eyes.”

  She was living in an apartment not far from the White House in Moscow in September 1993 when fighting began between supporters of Yeltsin and those of Vice President Rutskoi and the Supreme Soviet, which Yeltsin had dissolved. During the time the White House was under siege, she climbed into it through a window to take pictures of the defenders inside. She also witnessed the fighting for the Ostankino TV station, where she was under fire. A New York Times photographer was shot through the lung and nearly died.
“I was thinking I could not believe this,” she said. “There were a whole field of dead people out there.” Afterward, she traveled often to Chechnya to photograph the conflict there. For pictures she took in Chechnya and elsewhere in Russia she won the 1998 Leica Medal of Excellence, awarded by the camera company and Mother Jones magazine. Heidi Bradner lives in London now. She is one of the people I think of for reassurance when I reflect on my country’s failings and despair.

  Provideniya’s attractions unfortunately could not keep the Californians and me fully occupied for long. Nightlife was limited, though apparently there was a bar, which I did not go to. I liked the ethnographic museum and listened with interest to Vladimir Bychkov’s short lecture about the toggling harpoon point and its importance in history. The point, invented in the remote past by a forgotten Eskimo genius ivory carver, turns sideways on a kind of pivot at its base when it is embedded in a large sea mammal, so that the entire harpoon end is at right angles to the connecting line and thus holds the speared animal more firmly than a barbed point could. This invention led to an increase in the Eskimos’ food supply and an all-around improvement in their lives.

  The lecture, good as it was, did not give the Californians much to photograph. They preferred the performance of native dances and singing that three teenage Chukchi girls put on. One of the girls was green eyed, one had curly black hair, and one was tall and graceful with a heart-shaped face. The girls wore dresses of embroidered white reindeer hide and braids wrapped in ribbon with balls of white fur on the end. Some of their songs were tonal and some used only heavy breathing, or breathing and clicking in the throat combined. For a few of their dances they asked us to join in, but we were all too timid, until Bill stood up gamely and did a fair imitation of their moves. His hiking boots slowed him down a little, but still he looked admirable, striding on his long legs and concentrating to get the steps right. Chukchi girls dancing with a telephone lineman from California is a sight seen almost never, and then not more than once. For a moment the dancing caused the entire room to come into focus—the floors of bare wood, the beige curtains with their decorative pattern of cattail plants, and the cold silver radiators along the walls.