by Frazier
Sergei’s camping spot was in a little regional park above the fishing town of Nikola. Centuries ago, eastbound travelers used to stop at the monastery there and pray at its church dedicated to St. Nicholas for safe passage across the lake. The park is on a hillside, and as Sergei navigated the van up its incline, he made a sharp turn that came within a breath of tipping the vehicle onto its side. He then stopped, backed down, found a less-steep route, drove to the campsite, and set up the tents without comment. This was the first “improved” campsite we had been in. Each site had a fire circle surrounded by stones, an iron grate for cooking, and two benches made of wood.
When I awoke the next morning, Sergei and Volodya were not around. Two young men and a woman at the campsite just across the way were shouting and playing loud music and drunkenly carrying on. I stuck my head out of the tent flap and saw one of the guys in the process of breaking up the benches in his campsite. Loud splintering sounds accompanied this. He then began to heap the more manageable fragments in the fire circle, where a few logs from the night before still smoldered. I crawled back into the tent and slept awhile longer. When I got up an hour or two later, Sergei and Volodya had not yet returned. I walked around and stretched. Then I took out my kit and hung my shaving mirror on a tree and began to shave.
I was about half finished when a young man in what I took to be a park ranger’s uniform walked up to me as I squinted in the mirror and asked me if I knew anything about the benches that had been destroyed. I saw his truck parked nearby. Evidently he had been driving by and noticed the pieces of the bench scattered around. I said I did not speak Russian very well and he should wait until my friends returned. In a tough-cop manner he asked me a few more questions; he seemed to find something fishy about me. Half covered in shaving cream, I pleaded ignorance of everything. After a while he gave up on me and went over to the tents of the neighbors, who had retired to sleep it off.
Hollering into the tent, the ranger flushed them out into the daylight. I heard his loud questions and their sullen-sounding replies. Suddenly the ranger grabbed one of the guys around the neck and began to beat him on the head. He slapped and cuffed and knocked him around like a boy pummeling his little brother. The victim covered his head with his arms and did not resist, as if this was just part of the drill. I guessed that being beaten by a public official was an experience he had been through before. After a few last boxes of the ears, the ranger went back to his vehicle and drove off. The guy and his companion then began throwing the pieces of bench out of their fire pit—the punishment for their vandalism being that they could not enjoy the results of it, apparently. Soon after that I saw them putting the pieces of bench back in the fire pit again.
Sergei and Volodya did not return until the day was too far gone for us to pack up and make the trip to Irkutsk we’d agreed on. This development was predictable enough that I didn’t even waste much time being mad. Sergei said that he and Volodya had spent all morning climbing the cliffs above Baikal, and these cliffs were so beautiful that I must see them immediately. After lunch he led me there. We climbed past the camp and well beyond the village to a point where pale, columnar cliffs rose spirelike above. Single-file, we started up. The rock had interstices and eroded places through which a hand’s-breadth of trail snaked, mostly along the side closer to the water. I admired Sergei’s quick footwork; mine was more uncertain, and at one or two places I got down on all fours. Lake Baikal, immensely blue, occupied the entire space on our right-hand side clear to the horizon. At the top of a spire we stopped, and directly below us, maybe fifteen stories down, a naked couple was swimming in water of a clear, almost tropical greenish-blue. We could hear the woman laugh; her figure was Rubensian. In another moment they ducked into a grotto, maybe realizing we were there.
At a distance in from the cliffs, a gravel lane ran along the lakeshore to a bluff where a gray-and-white observatory, all angles and planes, like a piece of modernist sculpture, leaned its notched profile to the sky. I said we should check out this observatory and Sergei said sure, so we hiked up to it and knocked on the door. An astronomer named Elena Kossumova answered and invited us inside. She had short, honey-blond hair, wore a white lab coat, and spoke the flawless English I now expect from every Russian in the sciences. Her colleague, Victor Trifonov, a thin man with prominent teeth and a big smile, wore a baseball cap with FSB on it and below that, FARMERS STATE BANK; he said he had been given the hat on a trip to Athens, Ohio, the year before.
The observatory’s purpose was to study the sun. It had been built here because this part of Baikal’s shore gets more than two hundred days of sunshine a year. Victor Trifonov had designed the telescope himself. This telescope sees the sun’s surface; another, in an observatory on the next bluff to the north, sees its atmosphere. Victor adjusted the eyepiece of the telescope so Sergei and I could look. First the bright red sun, a bit yellow in its outer margin, filled the view. Then an enlarged part of the sun’s lower left section emerged in more detail. Elena pointed out a solar flare, two or three times the size of earth, on that southern edge. She said that the sun becomes active with solar flares every eleven years. We were now in a very active part of the cycle, and when that happens, studies have found that there is more human turmoil on earth and more earthquakes and storms. A less active period was expected to return in about two years. She said that if people do unkind or violent things during a time of solar activity, it’s not really their fault, it’s the sun’s.
Possibly as a result of this visit to the observatory, later that afternoon Sergei and Volodya made the acquaintance of a lady geologist who lived in the village of Nikola. I think she was a friend of the astronomers. Anyway, this lady geologist had a friend, etc., and Sergei and Volodya stayed out that evening until the small hours. I woke the next morning at five thirty, took a bath in Baikal in the quiet dawn twilight with no one yet around, and agitated my sleepy guides awake much earlier than they wanted to be. I was not going to miss Irkutsk a second time. We had packed and were on the road by nine. Only a short way down the Irkutsk road, the van, perhaps growing bored with its everyday tricks, tried a new one and caught fire. The back filled with black smoke and a trail like that of a shot-down fighter plane could be seen in the rearview mirror streaming behind.
We pulled to the shoulder and I undid my seat belt and came hopping out on the double, remembering the two big tanks of propane we were carrying. I found a place to watch about a quarter mile away. Meanwhile Sergei braved the smoke to look under the hood and beneath the dash. Somehow the flames went out after a while and the smoke disappeared. Sergei explained that the fire had been caused by the automatic locking device on the steering column. After some tinkering, he assured me that he had completely fixed the problem and the van would not catch fire again; and he was right. That would be the only time it caught fire.
Seen close up, the city of Irkutsk resembled the Baikal cliffs’ ancient and weather-beaten windings. During its early centuries, Irkutsk had grown unplanned, like coral, and when civic improvement tried to bring some order to the confusion, the crews sent out for that purpose sometimes sawed houses in half to make crooked streets straight. In much of the city they still aren’t. A sense of almost microscopic embroidery fills the town’s windingest lanes, where log homes sunk halfway to their eaves in the permafrost draw your attention with decorative wood carving on shutters and doors and windows as ornate as the finest carved birch jewelry box. And yet almost every house also looked gray and older than old, though never as decrepit as the defiantly ugly high-rises that confront you whenever a big open space from Soviet times scissors across the network of lanes.
Elsewhere on my Irkutsk ramblings I came across the graves of Ekaterina Trubetskoy and three of her children at Znamensky Monastery. In the first years of the Decembrists’ imprisonment, Katya Trubetskoy had been everybody’s morale builder, with her good humor and levelheadedness, but after her children began to die and her own health failed, she became indifferent to l
ife, and she died about two years before the amnesty. Her death stunned her husband; when he went back to western Russia in 1856 he said goodbye forever to her grave.
In advertisements posted around the city I also noticed that Admiral Kolchak, the White Army leader whose attempt to overthrow the Bolsheviks ended in Irkutsk with his capture and execution, is now a beer. Admiral Kolchak Beer is brewed locally. I picked up an empty bottle of it that I found. The label has a portrait of the admiral in his white naval uniform and even provides the history-minded beer drinker with a brief bio, which plays up his heroism in the Russo-Japanese War and World War I, his polar explorations, and his contribution to the Russian navy, but makes no mention of his violent exit. A beer garden on Irkutsk’s Angara riverfront sports a long striped awning with the Kolchak Beer logo repeated prominently all along it; maybe the awning is within sight of the place where the corpse of the unlucky admiral was shoved through the ice back in 1920.
That night we again slept near the shores of Baikal. This time, due to bad planning, we camped on the grounds of what was billed as a resort. It had a gate, cabins, picnic shelters, and washroom conveniences best left undiscussed. Its strewn heaps of trash were extreme, even for Russia. Somebody who saw this campground without context or explanation might come to the conclusion that a group of confused people had mistakenly gone on vacation at the town dump. The woman who ran the resort had been driven to a near frenzy by how awful it was. We discovered this when Sergei invited her to have tea with us after supper, and she told us, with great drama and forcefulness and scorching irony, about the difficulties of her job. By one o’clock her monologue had worn me out and I retired to my tent. Sergei had to evict her bodily at two thirty. At an even later hour than that, when he and Volodya were again off somewhere, I came awake to a loud conversation between two passing drunks who were debating whether to do something or other—I did not recognize the verb—to our tents. Fortunately, the milder of the drunks prevailed after a while and they went away. Cars then blasted up and down the resort’s dirt lanes for an hour or so, blowing their horns. Just after dawn, the Big Brother–like speakers of the public-address system wired to nearby trees began playing bad music from many different cultures while exhorting everyone to get up and exercise.
Sergei assured me he would find us a better place on Baikal, and the next day he did. We drove around the southern end of the lake and then followed the railroad tracks that ran between the road and the shore. At a place where a creek went under a railroad bridge there was enough dry ground on one side for the van to squeak through, and we emerged onto a beach of small, smooth rocks with no sign of people anywhere for two or three miles. Sitting on the beach with nothing to do but look at the lake, I finally got the point about Baikal.
I knew that it’s the largest body of freshwater in the world, that it contains about 20 percent of the world’s freshwater, that it’s more than a mile deep at its deepest, that it was created by continental landmasses moving apart, that it has species of animals found only here. But, beyond its facts, Baikal really does have a magic to it. Travelers who wrote ecstatically about it in the past were not exaggerating. Most of Russia’s inland water is sluggish, swampy, inert; Baikal’s is quick. For sparklingness and clarity it’s the opposite of swamp water. The surrounding hills and cliffs that funnel winds along it keep it jumping. It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.
When a wave rolls in on Baikal, and it curls to break, you can see stones on the bottom refracted in the vertical face of the wave. This glimpse, offered for just a moment in the wave’s motion, is like seeing into the window of an apartment as you go by it on an elevated train. The moon happened to be full that night, and after it rose, the stones on the bottom of the lake lay spookily illuminated in the moonlight. The glitter of the moon on the surface of the lake—the “moon road,” Sergei called it—fluctuated constantly in its individual points of sparkling, with a much higher definition than any murky water could achieve. Light glitters differently on water this clear. I understood that I had never really seen the moon reflected on water before.
This camping spot was so great we decided to stay another day. True, trains did go by almost constantly just the other side of some shoreline trees, but the sound was not bad for sleeping at all. In the morning, a fisherman who put his boat in at the mouth of the creek brought us some omul’ he had just caught. To reciprocate, I opened my stash of presents and got out a New York City snow globe, some Beanie Baby stuffed animals, and two folding pocket mirrors to give to him. He liked the snow globe and he accepted the Beanie Babies, but he gave me back the mirrors, saying he had no use for them. This made Sergei indignant and he scolded the guy for being a rude person who didn’t know how to behave with foreigners. Chastened, the guy took the mirrors. I remembered I had a baseball cap with the logo of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society on it—the logo shows a leaping bass, in bright green—and I gave him that, too. He put it on and examined it in the mirror, and above his broad face and brown bib overalls it looked exactly right. I liked the idea that I had successfully launched a BASS hat on the waters of Baikal.
Volodya took the fish the guy had brought and gutted them, split them to the backbone, filled them inside with slices of lemon and garlic and handfuls of coarse salt, and tied them shut with string. At the end of the day he cut the string, removed the lemon and garlic and salt, scaled the fish, rinsed them quickly in the lake, and cut them into half-inch slices for sushi. They tasted wonderful, though you had to watch the bones. “Esh’ akkuratno” (Eat accurately), Sergei advised.
All day the lake was covered with the kind of whitecaps that indicate good sailing, but in late afternoon the wind dropped off to nothing. The whitecaps disappeared, and the waves, now forceless, kept rolling in. The sound they made when they landed on the small pebbles at the edge of the beach—a sound like setting down a canvas sack of change—started me thinking about when I used to hear the same sound on my grandmother’s beach on Lake Erie. Often in the evening the lake would get calm like this, and each wave would land just a bit more gently than the one before it, and the time for rounding up the children and preparing to go home would begin. Now the sun was going down across Baikal just at the angle it would be at my grandmother’s beach this time of year. I sat on the stones and thought about my family of forty years ago and grew lonesome and melancholy.
Before we left the next morning, I took out my satellite phone and called my friend Jamaica Kincaid in North Bennington, Vermont. She said she was having a dinner party. We talked for a while and then she passed the phone around the table. I talked to Howard Cohen, her rabbi, and to Howard’s wife, Gail; to our friends Annie and Gordie Thorne; to Meg and Rob Woolmington, friends who live near Jamaica; and to her son, Harold. I could imagine the smell of the poached chicken on a bed of lovage that Jamaica had prepared, and the West Indian pastels of the walls in her kitchen, and the evening primrose opening its yellow blossoms in the dusk outside the windows. In fact, I could picture being there more clearly than I could picture being here on the stony beach where I was.
I waited a few minutes for my thoughts to reassemble themselves and then I tried again to call Sasha Khamarkhanov in Ulan-Ude. I had been hoping to see him when we passed through Ulan-Ude that afternoon. Every time I had dialed his number before, it had been busy, and I got the same result this time. I should have sent him an e-mail saying I was coming. I had forgotten to do that before I left home, and I hadn’t thought of it the last time I was near a computer, in Novosibirsk. I had not handled this intelligently at all. Even worse, now I had misplaced Sasha’s address. I knew Sergei would not want to tarry in Ulan-Ude, eager as he always was to get beyond
urban areas. All the same, as we approached the city I insisted that I remembered where Sasha’s apartment building was and that we had to look for it.
Surprising both of us, I found the building almost as soon as we drove into Ulan-Ude. I recognized a street, a row of buildings, and the place where we’d loaded up the minibus for the trip to Baikal. I don’t know how that discovery happened because Ulan-Ude is not a little place at all. We pulled over. Walking around one of the buildings I saw a familiar-looking entryway. I went up several flights of stairs, saw what seemed to be the correct door, knocked. Tania, Sasha’s wife, opened it.
I was not the person she had been expecting to see standing there. She was amazed for a few seconds and then not amazed in the least. She asked us in (Volodya had accompanied me while Sergei stayed in the van) and didn’t know what to do after that. She said she should make us a big dinner; I said we couldn’t stay long. Dropped in on as she was, she didn’t have the time or supplies to do very much anyway. When I had seen her before, I had been mute in her language and now I could talk a little. She asked if I still had that funny picture of my baby. On my previous visit I had been carrying a wallet-sized photo of my daughter at age eight months or so wearing a bright orange shirt-and-pants outfit and sitting in the corner of our dark-colored sofa. She had her arms akimbo and was looking up suspiciously. I told Tania I had forgotten to bring it with me.
“And how is your thumb?” she asked. “I remember that you cut it at Baikal while you were making a fishing rod, and you thought you were about to die!” I assured her the thumb was fine, and I showed her the scar, which she said she could not see.
Sasha Khamarkhanov, as it turned out, was in the hospital. Tania said he’d just undergone a small operation on his hand. Apparently he had other health problems, too, but I didn’t understand when she explained them to us. Later when I asked Volodya what she’d said about that, he wasn’t sure, either. Sasha’s condition remained a mystery. We could go and visit him if we wanted right now, she said. She would come along and direct us to the hospital. First she tended to an elderly parent—hers or Sasha’s, I’m not sure—in a little bedroom off the living room. Then she loaded a bag of things to take to Sasha, and she and Volodya and I went downstairs.