by Frazier
Boris had me practice situations I might find myself in on my upcoming journey. He and I also talked about Sergei, and the nuances of my relationship with him. Boris suggested I refer to Sergei as “moi collega” (my colleague) rather than “moi voditel’ ” (my driver)—a smart and tactful idea. At the end of the nine weeks, Boris and the other teachers gave me an oral exam like the one they give to State Department employees. The exam rates the student from levels one through five—one being no proficiency at all, and five being Native-Speaker Proficiency. I was hoping to achieve level three, which is General Professional Proficiency. I was doing okay until near the end of the exam when Boris was asking about my future trip, and he said, “If you are so sure you will come back safely, then what is that ghost I see standing behind your chair?” The word he used for ghost, prividenie (its meaning is sort of like “ghostly sight” or “apparition”), confused me by its similarity to Provideniya, the city I had visited in Chukotka, which I had just been talking about, so I bluffed an answer having to do with that. For my mistake, and for bluffing rather than asking what in the world he was talking about, he lowered my final rating from a three to a two-plus. He’d thrown me a trick question, but I think in any case I didn’t deserve a three.
At the beginning of March, I assembled my gear and went over it and started to pack. I got my satellite phone turned back on. A familiar excitement and dread began to build, with dread predominating. Boris’s remark about the ghost standing behind my chair stayed in my mind, while my Russian friends were again murmuring about the dangers. It is a disappointment to me now, going over my notes, to see how reluctant I was at the time to make this trip, and how eagerly I looked ahead to returning home. But in every book about Siberia the author must at some point be there in the winter, and be cold. On March 6, a breezy, almost spring day in New Jersey, I left for the airport and Vladivostok.
Chapter 24
Passage through the zone of airports—New York, Anchorage, Seoul—was as undifferentiated and dreamlike as usual. Because of the time we took off, we remained in darkness for almost twenty-four hours of flying. A weak daylight caught up with us during the Seoul-to-Vladivostok leg; the plane came out of gray clouds and descended over a landscape that appeared to be from before color TV. The scene revealed itself in shades of gray and broad patches of white. In the field just before the airport runway, snow had risen to the tips of the weeds, which stuck out like a two-day growth of beard. Grayish footpaths wandered across the field, and on one of them, maybe ninety feet below the wing, a woman was trudging along carrying a shopping bag with handles. She did not look up.
A stout woman employee all in white with a dark babushka drove the vehicle with the boarding stairs up to the plane door. A black dog with four white feet stood next to this vehicle; the dog waited as the vehicle waited to approach the plane, and when it advanced, the dog advanced also, just up to the plane and no farther. The stout woman, job accomplished, climbed down from the vehicle’s driver’s seat and walked back to the terminal, and the dog walked back to the terminal in step beside her.
Sergei was there to meet me when I came through customs, as I’d expected. We had planned for him to fly from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok before I arrived. But as I hadn’t expected, he was accompanied by Volodya. In all the e-mailing back and forth, neither Sergei nor Victor had mentioned that Volodya was living in Vladivostok now. Our 2001 trip had uprooted Volodya’s life. After getting deeper into his romance with Sveta, the pharmacist of the village of Olga, he had decided that he must leave his family in Sochi, and he had moved to Vladivostok in order to be closer to her. When Sergei filled me in on these details later he expressed sympathy for Volodya’s wife, whom he knew from university, and said he thought this move was a bad idea. Now Volodya was trying to find work in Vladivostok restoring building façades. He lived in an apartment in a high-rise on one of the city’s many hills, and we would be staying there.
On my previous trip I had sort of skipped Vladivostok, and I wanted to make up for that. I walked all over the city’s center, with the guys and by myself. The city’s older, more elegant part is walkable, with buildings of painted stucco and ornamental brick and a different aspect of the port at the foot of every hill. At one dock we saw a freighter being unloaded of those used Japanese cars that the cross-country drivers would speed back to more western parts of Russia for resale. Blackened ruts of ice ran down the middle of many streets and the sidewalks were all hard-polished snow. So many high heels had walked on this snow that it was riddled by the small round holes the heels had punched; it looked like a ceiling of acoustical tile. At a short distance from the city’s central part, the trash-strewn places began. Next to heaped-up trash bags that had been slashed open by beaks, all-black crows and ravens flipped through refuse scraps and croaked their raspy cries. Meanwhile the usual Russian Miss Universes, some in really unseasonal outfits, went step-stepping along.
Volodya didn’t yet have his own car, so his friends Genia and Roman drove us around. The farther we went from Vladivostok’s relatively well-kept downtown, the stronger was the overriding sense of Russian chaos almost out of control. Proceeding along the coastline we passed a beach that was all trash, then miles of mysterious seaside slag heaps lining the road. Then there was a huge factory or power plant spouting smoke from sky-high stacks, and a compound triple-wrapped in razor wire, and a building with scorching around all the smashed-out windows, and ice-locked blackened yards beside tall black houses, and a water tower with a giant tuberous icicle leaking out its side, and clotted accumulations of power lines and insulators at black transformerlike convergence points, and more wires streaking out from them in every direction, and wires not even on poles but strung through the branches of trees. Long lines of gray-faced, black-clad citizens stood waiting to cram themselves into tiny marshrutka public transportation vans, amid trailing smoke and roadside mud spatter and engine noise.
Then more trash crowded close all along the road, and a whole huge shoreline of trash cliffs beetled down to the sea on our right, like the Trash Cliffs of Dover, with seagulls flying figure eights above. A few miles beyond the trash cliffs, Genia said he had something he wanted to show me. We pulled over at a much-used parking area of fragmented and flattened trash beside the road, and there was a sign: MUSOR NE BROSAT’ (Do Not Throw Trash). Just past the sign was a path leading to an ocean cove with a beach maybe two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. The beach was composed entirely of broken glass. Genia said it was called the steklyannyi plyazh, the glass beach, and it was a famous spot for Vladivostokians to visit. Every square foot of the beach was small, water-smoothed pieces of glass, mostly bottle glass by appearances, and most of it a seaworn bottle green.
How the beach had come to be I am not sure. Genia explained, but I missed some of what he said. I think he said people have been stopping at this cove to drink and smash their empty bottles since Vladivostok began. Whatever its origins, the beach was gorgeous, like a shattered church mosaic glittering in the light, constantly agitated at the water’s edge by the waves. Each wave as it curled on the shore picked up a load of water-smoothed, shiny-wet glass fragments and then tumbled them and set them down and spread them out. Green and amber and blue and pink and brown and clear glass fragments lay ankle-deep everywhere and lifted and fell in the waves, sand slowly returning to sand.
Genia was a heavyset man in his forties with straight dark hair and a drooping mustache. Roman, his younger associate, had a thin face and curly dark hair and wore a black leather coat and a leather driving cap. Usually when we rode in Roman’s car, he played American rap and rock music on tape cassettes that you might find in the 99¢ bin at an American flea market. He sometimes talked to me about the music he played. One afternoon as we were bouncing and zooming in his little car on a Vladivostok street broken to pieces by ice and thaws, he put on a cassette by Kid Rock. I would not have recognized the artist, but Roman told me who it was. “I love Kid Rock’s music,” he said, “
but I don’t know what his words mean.”
I listened for a while to the song. “Well, here he’s saying that he wants money in order to make his life better,” I explained.
“Oh, I understand,” Roman said. Then, “Kid Rock is a scandalist, yes?”
“Yes, I think so. He was married to Pamela Anderson, of Baywatch.”
“Ah, yes. I know Baywatch. Pamela Anderson—she is also a scandalist, I think.”
Just then the car hit a big bump and all of us ricocheted off the ceiling. Roman said, “Oh, these roads!”
“Dorogi, i duraki” (roads, and idiots), I said. (This is a famous saying, attributed to Gogol, who once noted that in Russia the two biggest problems were the roads, and idiots.)
Roman laughed. “Yes,” he said. “And they never repair either one.”
On the campus of Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, beside a busy highway, there’s a tall black statue of the poet Osip Mandelstam in a long overcoat. His eyes are closed, his head is raised, and his right hand is pressed to his breast. When we were there, a white Star of David defaced the statue’s base, spray-painted beside the days, month, and years of the poet’s life; Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, at the age of forty-seven. The bare inscription did not mention the place of death—the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp at the north end of the city. A similar mood of sorrow hung over the V. K. Arsenyev memorial museum, which occupies the middlesized frame house in an older part of Vladivostok where the writer and explorer lived with his family during his later years. The museum has several good photos of Arsenyev with Dersu Uzala, who was stocky and gnarled, about a foot shorter than his Russian kapitan. Arsenyev luckily died of heart failure in 1930, soon enough to escape the worst of the Stalin-era horrors (though by then he had been accused of being a Japanese spy and had himself accused others of having Japanese sympathies). After his death, his wife (also featured in museum photos) was imprisoned and then shot, and his daughter went to prison for ten years. The daughter died in 1970 at the age of forty-nine.
Thoughts of fate and finality made the stately old Vladivostok train station a somber place, as well. At the station’s main platform (so a prominent sign proclaimed), 9,288 kilometers of the Trans-Siberian Railway came to an end. A paved walkway between two sets of tracks emphasized the sense of extremity: lampposts down the center of the walkway dwindled to smallness at the station’s distant end, where the walkway itself pinched to a point as the disappearing lines of tracks converged. The effect was to make one contemplate Russia’s deadly vastness, and the silent accumulation of crimes this railway had seen.
At nights I lay awake in Volodya’s apartment and listened to the little Japanese cars of his neighbors racing their engines as they struggled up streets of refrozen meltwater. The bass throbbing of the music on the cars’ speakers vibrated the apartment’s window glass and faded away. These occasional disturbances only heightened the night’s quiet; unlike in American cities, in Russian cities you almost never hear sirens at night. From Volodya’s balcony during daylight you could see two nearby hills and the hollow between them filled with low apartment buildings, scraggly trees, and a scattering of little garage-boxes for individual cars. On one hill, high-rise buildings perched right at the edge as if defying any earthquake to topple them, while on the other hill, radio and TV and power-line towers in sizes ranging from small to medium to skyscraper high clustered like a throng of black steel church steeples. The dark clouds moving over them had the rolling momentum of weather just come in from the sea.
Volodya had furnished his apartment with a basic bachelor functionality indicative of an expectation that he would usually be somewhere else. In this new life he still had his easygoing charm, but he was dealing with a lot of unwanted free time, it seemed, and he sometimes looked lost and forlorn. Once as we were walking downtown, he observed some workmen redoing a building front. He pointed out to me that they had their ladder set wrong, and then with professional courtesy he went over to inform his fellow building restorers of this fact. The boss guy among them quickly gave him back a sharp answer and told him to be on his way. Volodya rejoined me with a crestfallen expression. “Ne deli dobra i zla ne budet” (Do no good deeds and there will be no evil), he said. In his bare rooms in the evenings he made telephone calls to Sveta, still living in Olga. The conversations were long and (at his end) pained and explanatory; it didn’t sound as if things were working out.
Several times over the winter Volodya had gone hunting in remote parts of the Primorskii Krai for wild boar and kosulya, a small taiga deer. For our supper or dinner he fried up steaks from a kosulya he had killed, and told us his adventures. While hunting northwest of Olga in January, he said, he had come across the tracks of a tigress and two cubs in the snow. The tigers had approached very near to the village of Serafimovka and then had headed back into the taiga, where they made a circle six or ten miles around to hem in their prey. More recently, when he was hunting in the Nakhodka region closer to Vladivostok, he had seen the tracks of a male tiger. (The tracks of males are about four and a half inches long; of females, three to four inches, he said.) An American expedition just a month before had done a regional census and had counted 450 tigers in the Primorskii Krai. Volodya said that whenever he saw fresh tiger tracks he quit hunting, because he knew he’d be unlikely to find wild boar or kosulya if there were tigers around.
Overall, I couldn’t help but feel kind of sad for the guy. Volodya and I are about the same age. I know that as you reach your fifties, a powerful restlessness and longing can shake your life. That restlessness, or something akin to it, had agitated me to Russia, where my trajectory had assisted in knocking loose a fellow restless fifty-year-old from the place he had occupied before. But unlike me, Volodya had ended up living the lonesome consequences for real. I pictured him going out hunting by himself in a dark winter forest with tigers in it and then returning to this apartment. When Sergei and I departed Vladivostok, I accidentally left behind my brand-new fleece jacket. I berated myself for my carelessness, but later I was glad Volodya had the jacket, because we’re about the same size.
Flying out of Vladivostok took two tries, a not uncommon occurrence in Siberian air travel. When we went to the airport on a Tuesday afternoon for our scheduled flight to Irkutsk, no personnel of the airline seemed to be around. Eventually a guy showed up and put a sign in the ticket window that said rais otmenyon (Flight Canceled). A great deal of further waiting was required while Sergei attempted to find someone who would either rebook us on another flight or give our money back. Neither could be done. The airline, Kras Air, had no other available flights for a week, and it turned out that the tickets could be refunded only at the place of purchase, which was St. Petersburg. Eventually, from another airline, we bought tickets for an Irkutsk flight leaving in two days.
We knocked around Vladivostok for another forty-eight hours—I found the house that the young Yul Brynner had lived in, among other minor accomplishments—and on our next attempt the plane left when it was supposed to. The funny thing about forgetting my fleece jacket (to return to that subject) was that I actually forgot it twice. When we went to the airport for the first flight, the canceled one, I left it at Volodya’s, and after being upset with myself for that I somehow managed to leave the jacket at his apartment again when we went to the airport the second time. At some level that had to be intentional, I believe.
Flew to Irkutsk, vexed because two biggest drunks on plane sitting in front of me. For distraction, read review of Steve Martin’s latest book, The Pleasure of My Company, in arts section of Konkurent, a Vladivostok newspaper handed out to each passenger. Needed help of Russian-English dictionary for translation. Among new words and phrases learned: khokhot (laughter) and spuskat’ shtany (to drop one’s trousers). Review very favorable. From time to time, looked out window. Icy almost-all-white Siberian landscape below—corrugated hills, scattered wiry conifers. Little change in scenery for hours.
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sp; At Irkutsk airport, horrible taxicab guys. Drivers shouting back and forth in Russian slang sometimes known as Mat’, in which most vocab and syntax derive from three or four basic obscenities. Sergei chose least criminal-looking driver. Other drivers shouted to us as we loaded bags in trunk, “Yob’ tvoiu mat’!” (Fuck your mother!), with hearty good cheer.
Hotel Angara, Irkutsk. Marble facing of columns in front of hotel held on, in places, with clear plastic packing tape. Hotel guests mostly respectable types—Asian businessmen in suits, Russian technicians in shirtsleeves, a girls’ volleyball team. At buffet breakfast, volleyball girls tall and gawky-graceful as sandhill cranes in a grain field. In Irkutsk, finally, true Siberian cold (Vladivostok, by contrast, more temperate, with more southern location, ocean nearby). Angara River frozen three-quarters of way across: in sun, frozen part blinding white, open part vivid blue. New statue in riverfront park: Tsar Alexander III, much larger than life, in full military splendor, gleaming imperial black against the surrounding white. Also, at Znamensky Monastery, statue of martyred Admiral Kolchak, also new. Statuary Kolchak bareheaded, heroic, shoulders back, in long coat, with White Army soldier and Red Army soldier supporting statue’s base. In our day of wandering, finally got to see inside of Trubetskoy Museum, closed when we in Irkutsk before. Prominent in Trubetskoy parlor: Miller foot-pump organ, made in Lebanon, Pa.
After two days left Irkutsk, rode train twenty-four hours around southern end of Baikal to Ulan-Ude. Sergei and I in spacious sleeping compartment with big window. Ravens flying alongside train out of Irkutsk station like gulls escorting ship. Light glinted off lead raven’s hard black beak as it opened to cry. Outside city, in deep forest, snow whiter and whiter; its lavishness like on cover of album Peter and the Wolf, childhood favorite of mine. Through complicated high hills—most difficult part of entire Trans-Siberian to build—tracks followed serpentine route. Famous crossing of great valley (Angasolka Loop) took train far up side of one height, around turn, then far down side of other. Baikal often visible on left, sometimes immediately beside train. Lake stretching white to apparent infinity; across its foreground, tiny red auto inching along.