by Frazier
As I’d expected, Sergei was not keen on this hospital visit. He asked Tania where the hospital was and seemed unhappy to learn it was clear across Ulan-Ude. He drove us there a bit dourly; this was more entanglement than he’d bargained on. The hospital occupied a narrow ridge with a road running along it and open sky all around. Tania and I went in while Sergei and Volodya parked in a lot and waited. Families and patients, mostly Buryats who looked to be in bad shape, stood at the waiting room entrance and sat in little groups on the bare furniture inside. Some had dried blood and bruises on their faces and staggered around. The waiting room with its low-watt bulb was dim as a cave. On the wall, a phone from fifty years ago seemed to be the only way to reach the hospital’s interior. Tania picked it up, talked for a few minutes, then disappeared through a door and up some stairs. After a short while she and Sasha came down.
His face looked longer and thinner and he walked more like an old man. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, just as before, and not hospital garb. I didn’t notice any sign of doctoring on his hands. He seemed genuinely glad to see me and he spoke with the same diffident, cheerful demeanor I remembered. I would have enjoyed our meeting more if anxiety had not been distracting me. The fact that he was always kind to me even when I was not quite present due to interior static makes me like him even more in retrospect. I had to explain to him twice why my friends and I couldn’t stay for longer than this quick stop. Meanwhile, I was calculating: I could stay that night in Ulan-Ude in a hotel—clearly I couldn’t stay in his apartment, with the invalid parent there, and Sasha himself in the hospital—and Sergei and Volodya could camp somewhere outside the city, as Sergei would no doubt want to do, and then tomorrow evening they could come back in and pick me up . . . Nahh, too complicated. Anyway, truth was, I had the same traveling fever that gripped Sergei. I wanted to move on. And maybe the Khamarkhanovs would be relieved, afterward, not to have visitors to worry about just now.
Dropping in on people is always a mistake. I should have tried harder to get in touch with Sasha beforehand.
Still, he was glad to see me, and I him. I told him that I’d been reading about Mikhail Küchelbecker and Barguzin, and that thanks in part to him, Sasha, I’d begun working on a book about Siberia. We moved from the waiting room to the hospital’s front steps, a less gloomy place to talk. He asked after Alex and Katya and Vitaly Komar. I inquired about his children; Sasha’s daughter, Arjenna, had gone to Moscow to study. Tioshi, his son, was in school in Ulan-Ude. We began to walk to the van. Sergei and Volodya, who were standing in the parking lot and eating ice cream cones, did not immediately come over to greet us as we walked up. I wasn’t sure what, if any, social dynamics were going on.
In a minute they did walk up and introduce themselves to Sasha, and a rather distant and disjointed conversation ensued. I had to explain yet again that because of our schedule we needed to keep going and get back on the road before the end of the day. Sasha laughed and shook his head, as if quietly amused by it all. I told him and Tania I’d tried to call them, and showed them the slip of paper with their telephone number; I had a digit wrong. They told me the correct number and I wrote it down, and we did the usual business of exchanging addresses and e-mail. Sergei took a picture of me standing between the Khamarkhanovs. They gave us directions to the road, not nearby, that led east from Ulan-Ude. Tania said she didn’t need a ride back to their apartment, because she would stay with Sasha and take the trolleybus home. We said goodbye and I shook Sasha’s hand and wished him luck and good health. He wished us safe travels and waved his thin hand. They were walking back to the hospital as we drove off.
Navigating Ulan-Ude’s rush-hour confusion, we got lost almost right away. While we were meandering, the van, as if showing its new command of special effects, sprang a leak in the radiator and began to billow forth clouds of steam. But as usual it proved no match for Sergei. In the random tumbledown district into which we had wandered, he immediately found a radiator-repair place. It was really more of a radiator-repair hovel—a small corrugated steel structure filled to and beyond the doors with used radiators. Sergei and Volodya took out our busted one, put in a used one, paid what I am sure was a not-exorbitant price, and received directions to the eastbound highway. A few hours of light were still remaining when we reached the road we wanted and went spinning up the valley of Ulan-Ude’s wide and stately river, the Selenga.
Of the 437 rivers that are said to flow into Baikal (only one, the Angara, flows out), the Selenga is the principal stream coming from the south. Its origins are in the steppes of Mongolia. Genghis Khan made his capital, Karakorum, near a Selenga tributary called the Orkhon. The Selenga was the most authentic-looking Siberian river I’d encountered so far. Up to now I’d seen swampy rivers and ones bordered by mountains and trees; the bare hills along the banks of the Selenga and the wide-screen vistas of river and open country spoke of Asian steppes expanding to the southeast. After the busy streets of Ulan-Ude, we seemed to have crossed suddenly into a depopulated region. Again, the fencelessness of the land amazed me. At a place where wheel tracks led through the sparse brown grasses beside the highway we drove down a hillside and stopped beside the Selenga to make that evening’s camp.
The fact that the wheel tracks ended at the edge of the river should have tipped us off that this was a ferry crossing. We didn’t notice that until the tents had been pitched. Then from the other side of the Selenga arose the sharp rat-a-tat of an unmuffled engine whose sky-filling volume seemed out of proportion to the little craft that was its cause. In another few minutes the sound came nearer as a short, stubby power launch angled across the current with a small fenced raft in tow. On the raft sat a truck of the kind that carries troops, its box back enclosed by an awning. The launch approached and then executed a neat, sharp turn that swung the tow rope and the ferry raft at its end into an unfurling arc that ended with the front of the raft wedged against the shore. Someone undid the raft’s gate and the truck drove off onto the bank, and a dozen or so passengers jumped from the raft into the back of the truck. It revved its engine smokily for a few minutes and then motored away.
Meanwhile, a few cars had arrived to go aboard for the return trip. I pointed out to Sergei that this traffic was likely to continue into the night, so maybe moving camp would be a good idea. My chronic fear of being run over while asleep in my tent had begun to flare up. Sergei replied that we had nothing at all to worry about, and not wanting to be difficult, I went along. In fact the traffic did keep coming and going until late, and began again just at dawn, but its orderly rhythms didn’t trouble me. I even found them comforting, somehow.
While Volodya was fixing supper, I went a distance down the bank and sat on a camp chair and admired the view. To the north, or downstream, the river spread so far from bank to bank that it seemed more like a landlocked sea. Facing that way I did a sketch of the river and of the ferry launch arriving. In the other direction, upstream, a rock cliff came down to the water and cut off the vista that was beyond. I hiked a bit to get a look around the cliff and discovered only more cliffs and hills, and a narrowed river slipping out of sight among them.
In that direction—south—lay China. Here the Selenga used to be a highway. Travelers bound from Russia for Peking often went by river along this stretch until they came to the Chinese border. (Now it’s the border with Mongolia.) A city called Kyakhta grew at the border and flourished on the Russian-Chinese trade before faster routes replaced this one. The naturalist George Steller, while crisscrossing Siberia as part of the Bering expedition in the 1730s and ’40s, made a detour to the border to replenish his supply of paper. Past Kyakhta, travelers journeyed in a southeasterly direction for another fifteen hundred miles to Peking. First they had to cross the Gobi Desert, a tough six- or seven-week trek, and then for a couple of months they continued through a thinly settled outlying region before coming to the Great Wall. From the wall it was usually only another week’s travel to Peking.
Our
route didn’t lead south, toward China, but veered away from the Selenga and to the northeast. We spent the next day climbing out of its watershed through hilly country of mixed taiga and steppe. The many hilltop vantage points revealed one view after another, with endless uplands and ridges and low mountains; Sergei kept stopping and getting out to sweep the video camera slowly across the scene. Many trees in this part were dead and gray, I assumed from some infestation or disease. At first I thought the cause might be the pine beetle, as in similar forest die-offs in North America, but I saw many dead birches, too.
Now we were passing fewer cars, people, and villages than at any previous stretch of the trip. I had rarely seen country this unused and empty anywhere. At midday we stopped in a village called Desyatnikovo to buy potatoes. An old woman there told us that this was an Old Believer village, but it was dying. She said that houses with the shutters closed meant that no one lived there now and the people who used to live there had died. She showed us her own house, a brightly painted cabin of trimmed logs on the central street with shuttered houses on either side. The old woman seemed to be in permanent mourning; she told us she was very sad. The somewhat younger guy we bought potatoes from said only old people lived in the village nowadays. There is no work, so young people move away, he said.
We kept climbing, descending, climbing again. One hilltop overlooked a span of the Trans-Siberian Railway on which a train consisting entirely of black oil-tanker cars stretched as far as one could see, west to east; it must’ve been two miles long. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, Sergei informed me that according to the map we had just crossed the divide between the watershed of central Siberia and the basin of the Amur River. The M-55 highway goes over this divide near the village of Tanga. From that point the road began to descend until it dropped into the broad valley of the Ingoda River—a familiar name. When the Decembrists were imprisoned in Chita, they bathed in the Ingoda.
In late afternoon we found a good place to camp on its banks. The Ingoda is a pleasant, small river with a brisk flow and a bottom of sand and gravel in the parts I saw. Some boys near our campsite who came by to check us out told Sergei you could catch plenty of fish in it using crickets. I set up my fly rod and tied on an all-around attractor fly. Casting into slack water below some riffles I got a lot of splashy strikes, but the fish were too small to fit their mouths around the fly. Finally I hooked a flipping and flopping six-incher. It had delicate yellow markings on its side like little reef fish I’d caught in Florida. I don’t know what kind of fish it was.
I showed it to Volodya and he said he’d fry it up for an appetizer before supper. Then I waded back into the river and cast some more. Far downstream, I knew, the Ingoda joined the Onon to make the Shilka, which joined the Argun to make the Amur, which eventually emptied into the Pacific, which extended all the way to Dockweiler State Beach, in Los Angeles, where my sister-in-law brought her children to swim. In theory, from here I could take the all-water route home.
Chapter 20
I was becoming numb to scenery. My stock of landscape adjectives was running low. On the road paralleling the Ingoda, the panoramas just kept coming at us as if they were being brought to the windshield by a conveyor belt somebody had forgotten to turn off. The road was gravel and dusty, the sky blank and bright. From it a hawk flared suddenly right in front of us, its belly feathers white, and then was gone. In every direction the land rolled on—unfenced, untenanted, unvaried, still apparently unused. The idea of “scenery” implies a margin, a frame. What we were seeing had neither, and I couldn’t exactly situate it in my mind.
After a hundred miles or so we reached the city of Chita. The name is pronounced with a short i and the accent is on the final syllable: Chi-TAH. The sound itself is like a fading cry from far away—“Chi-tahhhhhh . . .” Perhaps as a symbol of how remote the city is from anywhere, its central square is huge; it practically has its own horizon. Overseeing the square at about the halfway point, a tall, dark-gray Lenin stands with the tails of his long coat flared to one side as if blown in that direction by the wind, or by the motion of the planet through space. In Chita, as usual, the plentitude of beautiful women overwhelmed and swamped description. I even gave up trying to decide if the number of beauties in Chita was greater than in Krasnoyarsk or Velikii Ustyug or anywhere. There were just a hell of a lot of them, is all. In straight lines that followed no pattern, they crossed the square’s vast concrete reaches, their stiltlike heels clicking sharply.
Since Irkutsk, Sergei had decided that the book I was writing was about the Decembrists. That is what he now started telling people. Maybe the Decembrists, as a subject, was easier to explain than if he had said “a book about Siberia.” In any event, when the van blew a radiator hose, or something, in Chita, and Sergei flagged down a passing MC truck, and his brother MC guys led us to a repair place, and they and Sergei and Volodya fell into conversation, Sergei told the MC guys that I was writing a book about the Decembrists. The MC guys responded to this with enthusiasm and told me I must see Chita’s Decembrist museum, the best of its kind in Russia. After whatever was wrong with the van this time had been dealt with, they escorted us there.
Because I was expected to, I went through the museum item by item and evinced interest in everything. I didn’t have to fake much. We never would have found the place had the MC guys not told us about it; it was in a tall wooden church dating to 1776 that used to be the highest point in the city, though now your standard-issue high-rises ringed it around. It had also escaped the notice of my guidebook. The Decembrist prisoners in Chita had been housed just a short walk from the church and had used it for worship regularly. When state prisoner Ivan Annenkov married Paulina Gueble in this church, he was allowed to have his chains taken off, but only for one hour. Mlle. Gueble, a Frenchwoman, had made the journey to Chita to join her lover after receiving special permission and financial assistance from the tsar; later the couple would have many children, and later still they would provide Alexandre Dumas père with the inspiration for his (or his ghost writer’s) romantic novel The Fencing Master.
I tried to explain to Sergei and the Chita MC guys that my book would not be about the Decembrists only, though the Decembrists would be in the book, of course. I got almost nowhere with that, and the failure of communication worsened my already bad mood. All of us—Sergei, Volodya, and I—were out of sorts at the time. We had been on the road for four weeks. Travel weariness had set in. Our dirty-baby smell had worked its way into the seats of the car, into our sleeping bags. Washing in muddy rivers gets you only so clean, and the same goes for clothes. Little things had begun bugging me—for example, discovering while drinking tea in the morning that the cup I was using had recently held Gillette’s lemon-lime shaving foam. One of Volodya’s molars had started to ache and he was able to continue at times only because of extrastrength aspirin. To make all this worse, I was fretting again about not seeing enough prisons. The worry seems dumb to me now, but somehow it kept enlarging itself in my mind. I could sense the stubbornness of Sergei’s resistance to the whole idea and that made me determined to be stubborn right back.
As we were leaving Chita, I got a chance to show how serious I was. We came around a bend, and on the other side of the road directly in front of us I saw a prisonlike accumulation of buildings and guard towers with a fence and barbed wire around it. I asked Sergei to pull over, grabbed my camera, and got out. Then I started taking pictures of the supposed prison, ignoring Sergei’s yelling from the van to stop. Perhaps to prove he wasn’t kidding, he drove off as if to leave me there, but a short distance down the road he pulled over again. As I approached the structure more closely, I saw warnings to stay away spray-painted on its battered steel gates. The place looked decidedly grimmer the closer to it I came. In another minute or two I jogged back to the van.
Sergei was shouting at me the moment I opened the door. He spoke harshly and yelled and gesticulated like a completely different person, someone I’d never me
t before. He said that what I had done was very bad and very dangerous and could get us all in trouble. I yelled back at him, but I forget what. Even Volodya, usually mild mannered, added his own accusatory comments and seconded Sergei with disapproving shakes of the head. Sergei kept repeating that I must never do anything like that again. I heard him out angrily but refused to say I would not.
Sergei and I were sort of not speaking to each other for a while after that. Following this incident, I became deeply uncertain of everything around me and briefly considered asking Sergei to drop me off at a train station so I could continue on my own. At the next police checkpoint where we were stopped, the DPS officers detained us longer than usual, and a strange, skinny woman hanging out with them asked if we could give her a ride. Sergei refused her. I wondered what that was about. I wondered about everything. I thought maybe I should take the film with the prison photos out of my camera and throw it away; in the next moment that seemed absurd, and then not absurd the moment after that. At the evening’s campsite, in a cow pasture near a village, Volodya silently endured tooth misery while Sergei and I went about our business close-mouthed and shut down.
This remained our general frame of mind the following afternoon when we reached Chernyshevsk, an important point on our journey. I had been half dreading Chernyshevsk, because beyond it the road became undrivably bad for the next five hundred miles. Due to the swamps and the lack of local population and the difficulty of maintenance, from Chernyshevsk to the town of Magdagachi, a long way to the east, there was in effect no vehicle road. Therefore, all cross-country drivers had to stop in Chernyshevsk (or, if westbound, in Magdagachi) and load their vehicles onto Trans-Siberian car- and truck carriers in order to traverse the roadless stretch by rail.