Travels in Siberia

by Frazier

  Rather than drive much farther, we made camp that afternoon in a nearby field with fresh haystacks in it. Leaning face-first against a haystack and breathing the hay smell restored my spirits completely, though I still trusted neither my stomach nor the next ingenious concoction Sergei might serve. For supper I had only tea with honey. Something about the picturesqueness of the haystacks in the long rays of the declining sun gave the campsite a Gypsy feel. After supper, Sergei, not usually one to recite poetry, started in on some verses he said were translated from an Islamic poet of the eighteenth century:

  Shto op’yanyaet sil’nee vina?

  Zhenshina, loshad’,

  Vlast’, i voina!

  (What intoxicates more strongly than wine?

  A woman, a horse,

  Power, and war!)

  Lying down to sleep, I recited the lines over and over to myself. I think of this as the poem of the haystacks camp.

  The hard-to-comprehend vastness of the Barabinsk Steppe, which we partly crossed the next day, kept the verses running through my mind. A man on horseback in such a landscape could hardly help but dream of women, power, and war—and, indeed, many former travelers here probably had. For hours at a time the land was so empty and unmarked that it was almost possible to imagine we weren’t moving at all, and I often had trouble staying awake. Lenin himself had declared this a land “with a great future,” but what I saw resembled more the blankness of eternity. And yet it was not like other flat places I’ve seen. The Great Plains of America tend to undulate more than this steppe does, and when the Plains are flat-flat, as in southwest Texas, they’re also near-desert hardpan with only stunted brush and trees. On the Barabinsk Steppe, by contrast, stretches of real forest appeared here and there, intruding into the flatland like the paws of a giant dog asleep just the other side of the horizon.

  In the place’s enormous vacancy, any signs of human presence seemed to take on extra significance. At an intersection, on top of an iron pillar about twelve feet tall, the drastically crumpled remains of a car sat totemlike against the sky. By the base of the pillar, two steel markers provided the unelaborated facts. One marker read, ZYKOV, ALEKSANDR VASILEVICH—24 X 1953–12 III 1996; the other, OLIFER, ALEKSANDR IVANOVICH—20 XI 1959–12 III 1996. The wayfarer who stopped to look could imagine the two men, maybe friends, maybe both called Sasha, maybe drinkers, and could almost hear the violence of the crash that had destroyed both of them one March day.

  The villages now were fewer, and their names seemed to reach new levels of strangeness. In far-apart succession we went through Klubnika (Strawberry), Sekti (Sects), and Chertokulich (hard to translate, but something like “Devil Bread,” according to Sergei). In the village of Kargat (meaning unknown, probably a Tatar word) we stopped for a break in late afternoon. I sat in the van with the window open and my feet up, watching. First a man went by on a motorcycle with a sidecar. In a few minutes he passed by going the other direction with the sidecar now full of hay. A flock of sparrows burst from a cluster of bushes by the corner of a house with a noise like heavy rain. A moment later a small hawk hopped from the bushes onto a nearby pile of firewood, looked around, hunched down, and flew off after them.

  A motorcycle again came by with its sidecar full of hay. I looked closely. It was definitely not the same as the previous motorcycle. This motorcycle’s driver was wearing an aviator’s hat with goggles, and the sidecar was blue, not brown. As I considered that, a tall, shapely woman came walking from a long distance up the road. She wore a plain dress and had curly black hair. She passed the van and I smiled at her. She did not smile back. Then a beat-up car lurched into sight towing an even more beat-up car. As the cars came near, I saw that they were connected back to front by a loop made of two seat belts buckled to each other. That was the only time I ever saw a Russian use a seat belt for any purpose at all.

  Beyond the Barabinsk Steppe lay the city of Novosibirsk. Travelers who crossed Siberia before 1893 made no mention of any city at the place where Novosibirsk is now, because none existed. The settlement begun in that year at the point on the Siberian railway where a long and technically challenging bridge crossed the immense Ob River was originally named Novonikolaevsk, after Nicholas, the emperor. Novosibirsk became the city’s name in 1925. Most of its growth has been since the Second World War. Novosibirsk’s tall steel-and-glass buildings, including a strange blue one with sort of knobs at the top that give it the look of a two-pronged electrical plug, form an impressive skyline above the Ob’s eastern shore and its complicated crosshatching of cargo cranes. Boosters of Novosibirsk point to its domed opera house in the classical style, its up-to-date underground metro system, and its population of almost a million and a half. Here in the not-quite-middle of Siberia it is the third-largest city in Russia.

  Normally Sergei liked to stay clear of cities. Spending an hour or two in a city was okay, but after that he was eager to motor on and leave city headaches and city prices behind. I had suggested several times that we find a good, affordable hotel, just for a change of pace and the opportunity of bathing elsewhere than on a riverbank. But hotels meant cities, so Sergei would never agree. What changed his mind with regard to Novosibirsk was, first, he wanted to see a friend who lived eighteen miles outside the city in the prestigious “science city,” Akademgorodok; and second, in Novosibirsk he intended to carry out what might be called a plan of camouflage he had long had in mind.

  Sergei’s friend in Akademgorodok was a tall, careful-spoken mathematician named Sergei Prigarin. I’m not sure how the two knew each other. I think technically they were friends of friends. A professor at Novosibirsk State University, Sergei Prigarin looked the total scientist, with short curly hair and metal-rimmed spectacles and features as distinct as if rendered by a very sharp pencil. His English, spoken without effort or mistake, had a slight German accent. Prof. Prigarin’s field of mathematics is stochastic systems, i.e., randomness. Recently he had been working on stochastic simulations of waves on the sea. His book Spectral Models of Random Fields in Monte Carlo Methods is available in an English-language hardback edition from Amazon.com.

  You’d think in a place that must attract plenty of visiting academics you could just walk into a hotel and get a room. But no—finding a hotel, or the correctly priced hotel, took both Sergeis an hour or more. On various backstreets, they led us from one unlikely looking building to the next, conferring at each with people who appeared to be mere passersby. Finally we ended up in a hotel that showed no outward indication of being one. The first floor of the high-rise it occupied was a day-care center, the second floor a medical clinic, the third some kind of store. The hotel consisted of part of the building’s seventh floor and offered cabinet-sized guest bedrooms, a sitting room with a television and two chairs, and a communal shower. The beds were comfortable, though, and the older ladies who ran the place attentive and kind.

  After we brought up our bags and checked in, Sergei P. took us to a special luxury banya for scientists at his institute. For a pricey $50 or so, we travelers could have the use of it for two hours. Sergei and Volodya had been looking forward to this. They loved any and all banyas. I had become not so keen on banyas, myself. Being enclosed in a small space with large amounts of hot steam had begun to seem too culinary for me. This particular scientists’ banya had an electric heater shaped like a short and squat Soyuz spacecraft. Once activated, it glowed as if nuclear fuel were involved, and then began hissing and pumping out industrial quantities of steam.

  As it happened, my sore throat of the day before had become laryngitis, and now I could barely speak. Sergei and Volodya knew that the cure for this was honey, combined with a thorough, pore-cleansing banya. On the road to Novosibirsk they had bought an amphora-sized glass jar of honey from a roadside seller. To loosen me up, they first struck me repeatedly with leafy, freshly cut birch branches. Then they laid on the honey in big handfuls all over my neck, back, and chest. This honey was not your store-bought pasteurized product; it still h
ad bee legs and pieces of weed in it. I sat, honeyed and steaming, for some time. Then I was instructed to dive into a pool of icy-cold water in the anteroom, and I did, leaving a honey slick on the surface. Then I exited the banya chamber, showered, and drank mineral water in the return-to-normal room.

  Supper that evening was in Sergei P.’s mother’s apartment in a high-rise development among tall fir trees. We sat at a small table laid with pickles, herring strips wrapped around pieces of red peppers, cold sliced chicken breast with dill, potatoes also with dill, and plates of radishes and cucumbers from the family’s dacha garden. Tea after the meal came with the usual unbelievably delicious strawberry jam. I could eat that jam every day of my life. The conversation went off into realms social and philosophical, also as usual, interspersed with lively narratives from Volodya on the subject of the construction business in Sochi. Sergei P.’s mother—a pretty, red-haired woman, who looked almost too young to have grown-up offspring—spoke about the economic sufferings of the time. She also said that when she was younger, working on the Soviet space program, she and her colleagues had considered Americans the enemy. Something in her quiet, firm manner suggested that her views on this had not yet entirely changed.

  Seeing that I was disadvantaged by my low comprehension and not-yet-cured laryngitis, Sergei P. kindly provided a side commentary for me in English. “Some people here in Russia refer to the events of the last ten years as the Third World War,” he explained. “They say that Russia lost the war, and you Americans won. And if you just look around you almost anywhere in Russia, except in the biggest cities, it’s obvious that this country lost a war. Many people have left Novosibirsk, just as people are trying to leave all parts of Siberia. Some have even gone to America, of course. I do not have any interest in leaving, however. Life anywhere in Russia is more interesting than in the West, because here it is more unpredictable—more stochastic, if you will.”

  I croaked that Russia’s unpredictability must make it an ideal place for a mathematician of stochastic systems to live. Prof. Prigarin laughed briefly, as if excusing a pun. “Well, you could describe Russia itself as a stochastic system, definitely,” he said. “But I think stochastic systems develop probabilities as they increase in size, so in this sense you could say that I believe a greater order exists in the stochastic system that is Russia. The situation now in the country is not good, but I think it is tending in a direction that is better. I believe in an optimistic kind of stochastics, both for Russia and the world. Humanity, in my view, is only at the stage of a very young child who cannot yet see its parents. As we get older in civilization we will see that our parents created life and continued it, and are still watching over us, and won’t let things turn out badly.”

  “By parents, do you mean like . . . space aliens?”

  “That I don’t know, of course, but greater beings of some kind, yes. Beings that give form to my optimism. My belief, as much as I have one, is in a certain optimistic stochastics as the main force in the universe.”

  For simplicity’s sake I have been leaving out the various minor breakdowns and nonstartings of the van. Sergei and Volodya had dealt with them all in their unflustered way. In Novosibirsk, however, more serious engine problems arose. After a night in the hotel, Sergei woke up and told me, “Today we go to auto shop.” Then he disappeared with Volodya out the door. Later, as I was sitting on a lawn near the hotel building and sketching, I saw the van go by behind a tow truck. An hour passed, then two, then three. I sat on the bed in my room and wrote letters. In the early afternoon, still with no sign of the guys, I decided to wash some laundry in the sink in the communal bathroom. After rinsing and wringing out the clothes, I draped them on the railing of the porch outside the TV room to dry. But I had forgotten the wind, which in just a few minutes had blown the clothes off the rail, whence they had fallen six stories onto the roof of the building’s entryway.

  I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were on the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them.

  After Sergei and Volodya came back, we drove in the once-again-functioning van to a historical park outside town. Sergei P. and his mother, who had suggested this outing, led us to it in their car. His fifteen-year-old daughter, Sveta, and her friend Maria came along. A few minutes after we all arrived and got out in the parking lot, an old lady, the park’s lone guide, hurried up the hill toward us, breathing hard and striding briskly as if she feared we might escape. Still panting, she introduced herself as Galina. She seemed not to have guided anyone in a while. Her hair was long and gray and unrestrained, but her prim blue blouse with white lace at the collar and down the front offset this rather wild look, as did her matching blue skirt and brogan-style walking shoes.

  Eyes alight with excitement at what she was going to show us, she shepherded us to the park’s main exhibit—a tall, narrow church made of logs. It rose high and dark and somber above the sunny meadow that stretched all around. While unlocking the door, our guide swung into her narrative about how this church had been built in the town of Zashiversk in 1700 on the Indigirka River far to the northeast; and how in those days trade fairs for all northern Siberia took place in that town; and how after a fair a mysterious wooden trunk was left behind, and a local shaman warned the villagers that the trunk was cursed and they should take the trunk and cut a hole in the ice and throw the trunk in it, but the church’s priest said it would be better to throw the shaman himself through the ice, so the people opened the trunk, and the curse came out, and the church’s entire congregation fell ill and died of smallpox, except for one girl who survived; and how the town was then abandoned, and soon only the church remained, perfectly preserved; and how the church was then discovered by A. P. Okladnikov, the famous anthropologist, and other scientists on an expedition from Akademgorodok in the twentieth century; and how the scientists had the church brought here in pieces and reconstructed so that everybody could see what a beautiful wooden church in far northern Siberia looked like long ago. To move and reassemble the church cost so much, she said, that each log might as well have been made of gold. Galina added that when the scientists were first taking apart the church, they found the body of the girl who had survived the smallpox, frozen in the ice beneath the altar. She was wearing a beautiful dress and many costly jewels.

  The starkness of the church’s all-wood interior reminded me of old-time Protestant churches on the American frontier. And yet somehow the structure’s high central space, which rose from the nave like a big wooden chimney, did not inspire in me the soaring feeling Orthodox church naves often do. Centuries spent in the far north had left their chill in the old church’s bones, I imagined. Either that, or the dark of the winters, the long silence after the last prayer died, had leached into them like tannin. Frontier religion is sometimes the most desperate kind; and I am not the first to point out that harshness of doctrine and coldness of climate often keep each other company.

  Our guide had no interest in any gloomy theologizing as she showed us the skill of the nail-free peg-and-groove carpentry and the plain-style beauty of the church when viewed from outside. Gradually her spiel began to move into areas of autobiography. Telling us again that her name was Galina, she pointed down the hill to where she said she lived in her own izba (cabin) with a small black dog and a milk cow. She asked us if we liked poetry. She wrote poetry herself, she said; now we would hear her read her poems. The next we knew we had been walked from the church down to her cabin, which was a tiny, rustic affair with grass growing on the roof and a door frame barely taller than she was. How she had emerged from such a primitive place looking so neat (except, perhaps,
for the hair) was puzzling.

  Still laughing and talking without a pause, Galina went into the cabin and brought out a big pitcher of milk that she said she had got from the cow just that afternoon. In her other hand she carried a plate of chocolate cookies and a thick sheaf of handwritten poems. None of us visitors were eager to drink unpasteurized milk, so we left the glasses she poured for us untouched. I ate a few of the cookies, though, and they were not bad. Meanwhile, Galina began to declaim her poems after first announcing to us the quality of each one. Some she described as “very good,” some merely as “good.” The sonorousness of her reading reverberated pleasantly in the little open-air roofed shelter where we were sitting, but the poetry’s style was antique and I couldn’t understand a word. After each poem she nodded her head appreciatively while we smiled and murmured praise.

  The two Sergeis, from whom the rest of us were taking our cues, listened politely as she read. Rain, however, had begun to spatter on the shelter roof, and soon Sergei and Sergei interrupted Galina to tell her that, sadly, we had to be going. She walked us back to our cars, still reciting poems, still talking, still full of good spirits from the day. The rain was falling harder. A groundskeeper had locked the parking lot gate while we were down at the cabin, but fortunately Galina had a key. The rain was pouring now, so we jumped into the vehicles and started to leave. Galina, by now drenched to the skin and with her hair streaming, stopped us for a last word to me. I rolled down the window. “You are an American, so I want to tell you this,” she said through the torrent. “Two Englishmen were here earlier this summer, and when they were leaving, one of them said to the other, ‘That is an amazing church, and an amazing old lady!’ ” Still laughing, and shaking her head ruefully at how wet she was, she waved us on our way.