Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  Using a place as punishment may or may not be fair to the people who are punished there, but it always demeans and does a disservice to the place.

  Chapter 15

  Eleven days from St. Petersburg we were well into the swampy flatlands of western Siberia. Now we were camping out every night. In a country without fences or No Trespassing signs, we had an abundance of camping spots, but every one required a certain amount of searching nonetheless. Sergei sometimes spent an hour or more in the evenings looking—stopping, getting out, walking around, then trying somewhere else. He wanted ground that was dry, not too low, not too many trash heaps, near water if possible, away from the road but not too difficult to get to. When he was satisfied with his find he would pronounce it a “khoroshoe mesto,” a good place.

  The country’s swampiness did not manifest itself in great expanses of water with reeds and trees in it, like the Florida Everglades. There were wide rivers, and reedy places, but also birch groves and hills and yellow fields. The way you could tell you were in the swamp was, first, that the ground became impassibly soggy if you walked at all far in any direction and, second, by the mosquitoes.

  I have been in mosquito swarms in beaver meadows in northern Michigan, in wetlands in Canada, and near Alaska’s Yukon River. Western Siberia has more. On calm and sultry evenings as we busied ourselves around the camp, mosquitoes came at us as if shot from a fire hose. Usually mosquitoes cluster in a cloud around their targets, but as Volodya made dinner I observed a thick and proximate cloud surrounding him head to toe, and then a whole other sort of candidate swarm around that inner swarm, and then more in all directions, minutely enlivening the sky.

  With such astronomical numbers, Siberian mosquitoes have learned to diversify. There are the majority, of course, who just bite you anywhere. Those are your general practitioner mosquitoes, or GPs. Then you have your specialists—your eye, ear, nose, and throat mosquitoes. Eye mosquitoes fly directly at the eyeball and crash-land there. The reason for this tactic is a mystery. The ear mosquito goes into the ear canal and then slams itself deafeningly back and forth—part of a larger psyops strategy, maybe. Nose and throat mosquitoes wait for their moment, then surf into those passages as far as they can go on the indrawn breath of air. Even deep inside they keep flying as long as possible and emitting a desperate buzzing, as if radioing for backup.

  Nothing short of a good breeze keeps Siberian mosquitoes down. They laugh at organic-based repellents. Strong repellent with DEET is disagreeable to them, but they work around it. Thick smoke can be effective, but you have to stand right in it. In past times, native peoples and Russians wove fine netting of the long hairs in a horse’s tail and wore the nets throughout the summer. Members of a tribe called the Tungus carried smoke pots with them wherever they went, while another native people, the Voguls, retreated into smoke-filled huts for the summer months and became dormant, doing most of their hunting and traveling in the wintertime. The sheer volume of mosquitoes might cause an observer not to mention the gnats, flies, and tiny biting insects (known as no-see-ums in America); there are plenty of all those as well. Sometimes in the evenings I imagined I could hear the great insect totality tuning up all around, a continent-wide humming.

  The mosquitoes kept tabs on us vigilantly everywhere we moved, indoors as well as out. Because all our campsites were just places along the road, the bathroom arrangements had to be of the walk-off-into-the-bushes variety. Tending to necessities while under insect attack was a real experience. I recalled what a Siberian traveler named Hans Jacob Fries had written about this problem more than two centuries ago: Fries was a Swiss doctor whose book, Reise durch Sibirien (Travel in Siberia), described a journey he made in 1776 and, incidentally, became one of the earliest books to use that serviceable title. Fries wrote that during his passage through western Siberia he was bitten on a “delicate portion of my privy parts . . . so severely by a horse fly . . . that for three days I didn’t know where to turn on account of the pain, and I had the greatest trouble to prevent the setting in of gangrene.” The recollection of Fries’s misfortune filled me with caution, not to say fear.

  Sergei had provided each of us with a special antimosquito hat, called a nakomarnik, that was draped with netting and resembled something a beekeeper might wear. When the mosquitoes were the worst, we wore those hats, and gloves, and we tucked our pant legs into our boots. Dressed this way we could move around and perform most essential activities. I found sketching and taking notes difficult with gloves on. Also, the no-see-ums got through the holes in the netting and were hard to swat once inside. A few mosquitoes always sneaked in, as well, and whined maddeningly. As Volodya cooked meals on the propane stove, mosquitoes attracted by the rising vapors flew over the pot, swooned from the heat, and fell in. When we ate our oatmeal in the morning there were often a few mosquito bodies in it. Most of them we just ate, but sometimes there were ones that had bitten somebody and were full of blood . . .

  Bugs are just part of the Siberian situation, as inescapable as distance and monotony. That long-suffering traveler Chekhov described a cockroach-infested room in the jailhouse where he spent the night in a tiny settlement on Sakhalin: “It seemed as though the walls and ceiling were covered with black crepe, which stirred as if blown by a wind. From the rapid and disorderly movements of portions of the crepe you could guess the composition of this boiling, seething mass. You could hear rustling and a loud whispering, as if the insects were hurrying off somewhere and carrying on a conversation.”

  Vladimir Arsenyev, the Russian army officer and explorer who mapped some of the most inaccessible parts of the Primorskii Krai north of Vladivostok, wrote about flies that fell so thickly that they put out his campfire; Dostoyevsky waxed lyrical about the blessed moment in the cool of predawn in the prison barracks when the fleas stopped biting and the convicts could sleep; and John Bell noted that his ambassadorial party bound for Peking changed its route across eastern Siberia partly because they were “much pestered by gnats and muskitoes.” The swarms afflicted animals, too—descending on young foals in such numbers as to kill them, suffocating reindeer in Yakutia by clogging up their nostrils, tormenting cattle on the Barabinsk Steppe so that the herdsmen had to paint them all over with tar. Some of my Siberian notebooks still have squashed mosquitoes between their pages. The Lonely Planet guidebook to Russia that I referred to before I went on my journey states, in the section about Siberia, “By August, the air has cleared of mosquitoes.” From my experience, this is no longer the case.

  After about two weeks on the road, Sergei and Volodya and I had been together enough that the official politeness among us had worn off and we were all acting like our ordinary selves. I sometimes withdrew into moodiness and silence; Sergei said nothing for hours at a time and looked grim around the eyes. I glanced at him every so often trying to detect his mood. Meanwhile Volodya leaned back in the passenger seat, comfortably unencumbered by a seat belt, eating hard candies and listening to the radio. He and Sergei often talked so fast and allusively between themselves that I could not extract a clue as to what they were saying.

  Now that we were unmistakably in Siberia, I had got the idea that I should set about finding some prisons and had broached this possibility to Sergei. He had taken an even dimmer view of it than he had of my writing down the names on the monument outside Ekaterinburg. He folded his brow into its deepest furrows and winced and shook his head and gave me fragments of reasons why this search for prisons could not be done. Then he continued driving at sixty miles an hour. During our earlier, polite phase, I had had the illusion that I was in charge of this expedition. Now I began to feel that they were the ones taking the trip and I was along for the ride.

  As we followed the banks of the Tura River going northeast, we came to the village of Pokrovskoye. I had wanted to check this village out because it was the hometown of Rasputin—not Valentin Rasputin, the writer, but the original unhinged self-described holy man Grigory Rasputin, abettor of the downfall
of the Romanov line. The village was all gray wood and stretched along the river for miles. Sergei did not care to look for Rasputin memorabilia—an old church associated with Rasputin, perhaps, or a Rasputin museum. And unlike Ded Moroz, Rasputin was not the kind of celebrity whose homeplace seemed eager to claim him; no signs anywhere, including at either edge of town, mentioned his name. Later I heard that there is a small Rasputin museum in Pokrovskoye, but you have to make arrangements in advance. Sergei drove straight through the village without a pause while I fretted and said nothing.

  Rasputin, it was said, gave off a powerful odor of goat. What a museum you could make about a guy like that! Oh, well.

  A few hours later we came to a river I’d long wanted to see—the Tobol. This is the river that Yermak, the almost-mythical conqueror of Siberia, traveled as he approached his decisive battle with the Siberian khan. The problem was, we could glimpse the river only off in the distance, because for most of its length it’s really more like a deeper part of a continuous swamp. Trying to get close to it in the late afternoon, we drove up on a small hill. Birch groves and a meadow of long grasses covered the hill, which on its far side ended at a cliff, descending steeply to the Tobol itself. Here the view swept far around a long continuation of the cliff, enclosing a wide swath of water made by a sharply turning river bend. This seemed an ideal camping place. Sergei parked the van back from the cliff, in a clearing in the birch woods, and set up the tents for the night.

  Along the cliff a mile or so away, the roofs and smokestacks of a village mingled with the silhouetted trees. According to somebody we had asked on the road, the village was called Berezovyi Yar (Birch Cliff). A breeze rendered our supper pleasantly mosquito-free. After the meal, as the light was declining, Sergei and Volodya proposed that they walk over to the village, buy some bread, and find out information about the area. While they were there, I would keep watch over the camp and the van.

  I did not like being left in camp, but I had brought that duty on myself. What with my awkwardness in the language, and the fact that I didn’t drink, I sometimes preferred to stay in camp and read a book while Sergei and Volodya were hanging out and socializing with people they’d met along the way. But that does not quite describe the problem, either. By now we were in remote places where the arrival of a vehicle with St. Petersburg license plates was news. Even the highway police, when they waved us over at checkpoints, were a bit wide-eyed as they examined our documents—“Where do you live in America? What do you do?” and so on. One young policeman, before he saw my passport, asked wistfully, “Is it expensive to live in St. Petersburg?” And this curiosity seemed to affect the local women even more strongly than it did the men.

  I’m not saying that women paraded through our campsites wherever we happened to be, but they did show up occasionally, even when we were camped far from any village. A few nights before, in a glade well off the road, I had just got into my sleeping bag when Sergei rousted me out so I could meet two women whom he described as schoolteachers eager to meet me. Dutifully I got up and emerged and made conversation with the schoolteachers for a while. They had wanted to see the American, and I think Sergei had felt compelled to prove that he really did have one. Then he and Volodya and the schoolteachers went off—to a birthday party, Sergei said—at a picnic spot nearby. I demurred and returned to my tent. The idea of chasing women in Siberia would have made me nervous even had I not been married. Sergei and Volodya found my reluctance mystifying.

  In any event, that night after supper on the banks of the Tobol, Sergei and Volodya trooped away single file down the narrow path along the river on their fact-finding mission to Berezovyi Yar, and I sat on a folding chair and read until the twilight became too faint. They had said they would be back by ten o’clock. I turned in and dozed for a while. At about midnight I stuck my head out of the tent. The campsite was quiet; no sign of the guys. From somewhere came the sound of singing. Restless, I got up and walked around the camp. Because of the clouds, no moon or stars could be seen. Darkness in rural Siberia is a serious business, with no streetlamps or brightly lit gas stations or city glows on the horizon to break the spell. All around was only dark, with the wind in the trees, and the soundless river flowing by.

  Maybe Sergei and Volodya weren’t coming back at all. Maybe at this moment they were plotting with confederates—somebody else they’d known back at university, now residing in Berezovyi Yar—to return to our camp when I was asleep and rob me. Maybe my Russian friends in America had been right, and I had naïvely walked into my doom. I know that I sometimes have a tendency to lose my head and think panicky things. I went back into the tent and zipped everything up tight and burrowed into my sleeping bag and tried to calm down. A few minutes later as I lay there, lights swept the top of the tent. Then a distant engine roar began, and grew louder. The lights vanished, then came back again on the other side of the tent. I put my head out the tent flap and caught a glimpse of headlights swooping and bouncing through the trees. There followed some whoops and more engine roars. It seemed someone was out in the birch forest at midnight driving around.

  The headlights approached, retreated, approached again. That part of the night passed slowly. I kept the tent flap open, prepared to bail out if it appeared that the car or cars were about to run me over. For a while the shouting became more intense, and the engine roared louder. I imagined that the car must have run itself into a wet place and bogged down. Finally the lights and the noises faded away, as if all had been swallowed by the swamp. The coal-cellar darkness prevailed again, and the river’s faintly lapping quiet. A dog barked and then howled. I couldn’t decide whether it made sense to try to sleep. I just lay there.

  Then there was a throbbing, a rumbling as if of something rising under the ground below me. The throbbing got more powerful. Suddenly the whole side of the tent lit up with a blue-white light that magnified the shadows of nearby weeds and sent them sprawling across the nylon. Wanting at least a glimpse of what was about to crush me, I looked from the tent and saw, coming up the river, a barge about a hundred feet long followed by another barge just like it, both of them pushed by a tugboat that was churning water in a surf behind; on the front barge, at its blunt bow, a searchlight the size of a tunnel entrance was swinging the white pillar of its beam over the river, right bank, left bank, trees, and sky.

  This floating apparition took a few minutes to pass. After the bow searchlight had gone by, I could see the flat, featureless surfaces of the barge dim in the beam’s shadow. No human forms could be distinguished anywhere. In the tug’s high pilothouse only a blue glow comforted whoever was within. As the tug came alongside, the throbbing of its engines filled the night. Then tug and barges receded, and the bow light could be seen careening through the dark in the distance for ten minutes or more, while the river continued to slosh at the bank below like a bathtub someone had jumped into. Then the dark and the quiet returned.

  When Sergei finally came back, at about three thirty, I yelled at him. Giving up on sleep, I had sat waiting for him in a camp chair getting madder and madder. At my tirade, he tried to soothe and reassure me. The memory is humiliating. Why did I let him see that I’d been scared? Rather than wait up, I should have just chilled and gone back to sleep. The chances of anything happening were remote. I should have understood that while I was basically semifearful and watchful most of the time on our journey, Sergei and Volodya were having a ball. In this land where I never stopped feeling strange, they enjoyed perfect ease and even a sense of glamour, of being welcome everywhere they went. When they said they were coming back at such and such an hour, they meant if no interesting opportunities arose. What did I expect? Sergei didn’t even wear a watch. I should have been happy to be the originator of their good time. Still, I had not liked being by myself in camp in the middle of the night.

  Tobolsk, our local destination—a must-see as far as I was concerned—was about an hour and a half away. In the morning Sergei announced that we would drive to Tobol
sk now, spend the day there, then come back here and camp for another night. (The main road, like the old Trakt and the route of the Trans-Siberian, runs a few hundred miles to the south of Tobolsk, bypassing and isolating the former Siberian capital, so we would have to go by here on our return to the main road anyway.) I gave the plan my okay. Rather tiredly, he and Volodya broke camp and packed the van. Then we drove off, with a first stop at the village, where three women were waiting for us. The youngest of them, a sturdy, round woman of about thirty with blond-streaked hair, came up to Sergei and took his hand. She seemed delighted with her luck in having met him. The other two women were in their late fifties or early sixties and did not appear to have been principals in last night’s socializing. These two women were sisters. One of them was the blond-streaked young woman’s mother, the other her aunt.

  Both the aunt and the mother had brown, deeply weathered faces. The mother wore a brown cloth Lenin-type cap, a dark gray overcoat-smock with holes in it, brown bloused pants with red-brown patches, and knee-high rubber boots. The aunt was dressed similarly, but she had a head of wiry hair dyed yellow-orange. Both carried big galvanized pails. They were on their way to pick berries, and we were going to give them a ride to the berry patch a couple of miles away. The mother started right in talking to me. Sergei must have told her that I was interested in Yermak, because she informed me that Yermak and his men had camped at the exact spot where we were last night. I asked how she knew this and she said, “It’s a fact, everybody knows it,” adding that the aunt had even written a paper about this subject. The aunt nodded her head in confirmation. The mother went on to tell us about the aunt’s paper, and what it said, and where it was published. With more verifying nods, the aunt backed up each detail. I asked the aunt what her job was. “She’s a philologist,” the mother said. With matter-of-fact pride the aunt nodded again.