by Frazier
Ulan-Ude sooty and gray, as before, but now fiercely cold. Short cab ride from train station to Hotel Geser. Long wait at check-in; Sergei negotiated red tape, I watched Russian infotainment program on lobby TV. Interview with Sylvester Stallone, overdubbed in Russian, promoting new magazine, Stallone. Undeniable fact that Sylvester Stallone most popular American in Russia, maybe most popular there of all time. Hotel Geser unusually posh for Siberia. Large banquet hall, restaurant with dinner dancing, disco ball. At next table during breakfast, young couple by selves, saying grace. Woman had on sweatshirt said texas a&m. When she standing next to me at buffet, I asked if she an Aggie. She blushed and said she was. She and husband here to pick up baby they adopting from Ulan-Ude orphanage. Both husband and wife soft-spoken, born-agains. They had been in Russia just a day or two, would meet with Russian judge that afternoon. If all went well, flying back to Texas with new baby tomorrow. Both knew almost nothing about where they were. Intense, determined people, engrossed in their private moment, both just kids themselves.
In Ulan-Ude—to drop the telegraphic style—I made many calls to Sasha Khamarkhanov from the hotel phone but never managed to get through. Sergei tried, also unsuccessfully, and then when he was going out to do some errands he said he would call Sasha from a post office pay phone. In half an hour Sergei returned. He had called information and found that Sasha had a new number, and when he called it he reached Tania, Sasha’s wife. She told him that Sasha had died the previous December. She did not say what he died of, only that she was surprised his friends in America had not heard.
After that news I made an effort to call Tania myself but kept getting a busy signal and finally gave up. I had no confidence in my ability to offer condolences on the phone in Russian, anyway. Instead I wrote her a letter and asked Sergei to check it. Whether she ever received it, I don’t know. I mailed it from the same post office where I’d gone with Sasha and bought postcards of Ulan-Ude twelve years before.
In all my life I saw Sasha only twice and conversed with him only imperfectly, but somehow he is clearer in my mind than many people I see regularly. I still have the copy of The Secret History of the Mongols (in Russian and Buryat) that he gave me as a present when I left Ulan-Ude the first time. Inside its front cover he wrote, in English script, “That is history my tribe (clan).” I understand now that Sasha was a Mongol, of the peaceful, post–Mongol Empire kind. Back in the early thirteenth century, at the time The Secret History was written, the Mongols adopted Uighur script and so began to be literate even before they had taken up the various faiths—Islam, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity—that would mostly replace their own sketchy shamanism. I remember Sasha because in remote Siberia he was a devoted man of letters, true to his Mongol soul.
The giant head of Lenin in Ulan-Ude’s central square looked even weirder in the winter. In the summer, the green, well-tended plots of lawn and flowers and the enclosing hedges on either side of it softened the effect of its massiveness and gave it the appeal of a beloved, garlanded monster. But in the winter there’s just the snow-covered square, a few sticks of hedge, dark gray surrounding buildings and . . . The Head. Many city buses and vans begin their routes at that square, and I imagined that on a dark winter evening as you stood waiting for your ride home, that giant-featured face looming over you could wear on the nerves.
From Ulan-Ude, Sergei and I rode a bus six and a half hours north along Lake Baikal to the town of Ust-Barguzin. We woke up before six, packed, and made it to the Ulan-Ude bus station by taxi in plenty of time. We had presented our tickets and found seats on the bus when Sergei discovered he still carried the plastic room key card from the Hotel Geser in his pants pocket. He told me to tell the driver to wait for him and he went back to the hotel to return it. He’s sixty-one years old, no cabs in sight, so he runs the two-mile round-trip on icy streets in just under twenty minutes, and he’s back before the driver has started counting heads and making ready to leave. Sergei wasn’t even terribly winded. I told him that in America no one thinks twice about walking off with those keys. That’s what I would have done. Sergei said that the woman at the reception desk was very grateful to him because she would have lost her job for not making sure he had returned the key card when he checked out.
Our route that day followed the same road I’d been on with Sasha Khamarkhanov when we went to Lake Baikal years before. Now, though, deep snow had altered everything; I guessed that garbage in a landscape may not seem like such a big problem if it’s buried under snow for eight months of the year. The ride was uneventful, even though four kids who looked to be no more than fourteen were drinking two-liter bottles of beer in the backseat. When we stopped for a lunch break at a little café on the way, all four kids were still able to walk. They disembarked, and then got back on carrying more two-liter beers in their arms, their eyes bright with anticipation, like kids on a school trip to an amusement park. As the bus continued, two of the kids almost passed out, and the other two, although more functional, were keeping their comrades upright and requesting emergency stops so they could help them off to vomit. I was impressed at how quiet and relatively well organized they were.
Ust-Barguzin is a large village at the mouth of the Barguzin River, where it flows into Lake Baikal. The location is only about thirty miles from Barguzin, the village I’d visited before. Sergei discovered when we arrived that Ust-Barguzin has no restaurants and no hotel, so after everybody else had gotten off, he and I remained on the bus and asked the driver what he recommended we do. For a small amount of rubles he drove us around the village while Sergei kept asking people on the street if they knew of anyplace we could stay. Again, Sergei’s MC connections came in handy. The village, with its good harbor, has a large MC station whose main business is doing rescues on the lake. Even in winter, a lot of MC guys were on duty. We got out there. One fellow I talked to said that he was in Ust-Barguzin on a six-week assignment and that he lived usually in Chita. The MC guys made some calls and found a family who said we could stay at their house for the night.
Later, after I got back home, I sent a Christmas card to our Ust-Barguzin hosts, Sveta and Tolya Belov, so they could put it in one of the scrapbooks they keep of cards and photos they’ve received from people from all over the world who have stopped at their house while visiting Baikal. The guest book they showed me, only their most recent one, contained names and comments in many languages and handwritings. Just glancing through I noted that a Rose Bodette, of Toledo, Ohio, had stayed with the Belovs, as had a Mr. Nofziger, of Liberty City, Ohio. I would never have guessed Ust-Barguzin to be such a crossroads.
The Belovs’ house was several small houses grown together into a rambling big one. They had eaten supper already, and served us a meal of omul’ and pelmeni and pickled wild mushrooms and fresh-baked bread. Afterward, Sergei and I went to their backyard banya for a sweat and a wash. In the cooling-down room, the Belovs brought us a chilled beverage made of cranberries and water from a healthful spring. The rest of the evening we sat around their kitchen table and drank tea and talked. Tolya Belov was a truck driver who drove a regular route between Ust-Barguzin and Ulan-Ude hauling freight for a local home-furnishings company. Sveta ran an after-school program teaching kids about ecology. Tolya was big and barrel chested, she smaller and dark haired. The previous fall they had gone on a vacation trip by car to China, where they had filled their vehicle with fabric items they had bought for unbelievably cheap. Sveta showed us bath towel after bath towel. Tolya said it takes them several days to drive to Heihe, the Chinese city across the Amur River from Blagoveshchensk. He said he loves to eat in the restaurants there because the portions are so big.
I gathered that a part of the Belovs’ income also relied on out-of-nowhere travelers like us. Tolya told us about a Russian couple who were taking a Siberian motor trip the summer before, and as they passed along the shore of Baikal, a rock rolled down a cliff and hit the car and broke a part in the wheel. The couple hitched a ride to Ust-Barguzin, w
here they ordered a new part from Germany on the Belovs’ phone. They stayed with the Belovs for a night or two, then hitched back to their car and camped by it in the forest for a month until the new part arrived. The man installed it in the wheel and the couple went on their way.
Calls came for Sergei throughout the evening from his new friends at Ust-Barguzin MC. The next morning at seven, a four-wheel-drive jeep-style Niva, an official MC vehicle, pulled up out front with two drivers. Sergei had arranged for them to drive us on the ice road for two hundred and thirty miles to Severobaikalsk, a city at the north end of the lake. He loaded our stuff in the back of the Niva while I was still in the Belovs’ vestibule trying to pull on my extreme-cold Frankenstein boots. I just could not get them on. I fell over onto the cement floor in the attempt, but kept on pulling. Sveta came out while I was doing that, and she looked down at me in surprise. I guess that’s not how Russians put their boots on.
After goodbyes to the Belovs, Sergei and I climbed into the Niva’s cramped backseats. For a few miles we drove on a narrow trail through shoreline forest to the point where the trail came out onto the lake. Ahead was Baikal’s blank white surface with faint wheel lines on it running onward into the distance. We pulled onto the ice and stopped. Aleksandr, the driver, flipped down his visor against the glare and put a cassette of a singer named Mityaev on the tape player. We sat idling for a moment waiting for the tape to catch. The first song was “Zdorovo!” one of Mityaev’s hits. Aleksandr turned the music up and we sped off across the lake.
Chapter 25
“Zdorovo!” means “Cool!” It’s a general expression of approval, defined in older Russian-English dictionaries as “Well done!” or “Splendid!” Recently the more hip and casual meaning has taken over. The song’s chorus goes “Zdorovo, kak zdorovo . . .” (Cool, how cool . . .). The song is your basic pop earworm, upbeat and irresistible, a good driving song. But I thought I also heard deeper Cossack strains in it well suited to a day in a heavy-duty vehicle on a Siberian road of ice. The drivers replayed the song many times.
At first we headed west, to get around a peninsula north of Ust-Barguzin called Svyatoi Nos (Holy Nose). Then we turned northeast, paralleling the coastline. During parts of the day, snow and mist filled the air and we could not see land. At other moments we came in close to the shore and rambled around in coves and bays. Both drivers—I didn’t get the other one’s name; he was a stocky Buryat with a short beard, one missing tooth, and nicotine-stained fingernails—wanted to see the caves along the shore and talked a lot about them. From close up, the cave formations with their icicles like stalactites hanging down and folds of snow partly veiling their entrances suggested a complicated stage set for some Wagnerian fable. In most of the bays we explored we saw no tire tracks besides our own, and no signs of people among the tall firs and cedars on the hillsides.
Out in the middle of the lake the wind picked up; I remembered reading about horses in the old days that were pushed by strong winds for great distances across Baikal’s ice until they fell and slid into fissures and drowned. I did not understand how the Niva was maintaining traction on ice that looked sheer. But when I got out to examine the roadway, I saw that it had a more granular surface than I’d thought, and in its heavily traveled sections the tires had roughed it up, so I couldn’t slide on it if I tried. Just a short distance from the roadway on either side, the ice was pristine. Several times when we stopped, I lay face-first on it and looked down. Within the ice I could see planes like in a cracked cube of crystal extending for six feet or more, and milky white fracture lines, and bubbles the size of baseballs or peas, and somewhere deep below, the blue darkness of unfrozen water.
Baikal’s ice road usually lasts from mid-December until mid-April, so this one still had about a month left. Trucks passed us coming the other way; several were huge industrial contraptions with giant tires. At this stage of thickness no vehicle would be too heavy for the ice. But the surface also had occasional big cracks, some of them miles long and new enough that they had not yet refrozen. Water was sloshing out of them in places. These cracks made me nervous, especially when Aleksandr and the other driver got out and began stomping beside them to test the ice’s strength. We had reached the biggest one of these so far—they’re called treshchiny—and had stopped to examine it when a small bus filled with Buryats approached from the other side. The Buryats got out, reconnoitered, and then all but one of them jogged up to the fissure and hopped over. The remaining Buryat got back in the bus, backed it up, sped toward the crack, and jumped the bus across. After seeing this, we backed up and jumped it at the same spot.
Sometimes tree branches set in holes in the ice marked the roadway on either side. Maintenance of the road seemed to be handled by the travelers themselves. Certain of the smaller cracks had been bridged with scraps of carpet onto which buckets and buckets of water had been poured, creating ice-rug patches of surprising sturdiness. On the lake surface within sight of the main north–south road, a lot seemed to be going on. Often we passed little gatherings of cars clustered around ice-fishing holes. Other random locations had been used, apparently, as party spots, where a half dozen or more seats made of blocks of ice cut from the lake formed loose rings, and beer and vodka bottles were scattered around.
The weather cleared and then lowered again; as clouds moved in at low altitudes, a fine snow fell, blurring the already minimal scenery. The Niva ran all right in the 5° cold, but its heating system was insane. Furnace-hot air from the dashboard and backseat vents blasted our top halves so we sweated and suffocated, while from hidden gaps in the vehicle’s lower parts, air as cold as the outdoors, or even colder because of our speed, shot at our legs and feet. The Russians did not find anything strange in this. I was glad for my Glacier Extreme boots, but no readjustment of my gear could warm my thighs, shins, and knees. In midafternoon we stopped for lunch and ate our kielbasa, bread, and hot, sugared tea off the Niva’s back bumper. In the wind the food tasted delicious, seasoned with cold and engine exhaust. I was glad to be standing up and moving around.
Not much daylight remained when we saw the skyline of Severobaikalsk on the shore ahead. Driving up from the lake into the regular streets of a city was a peculiar, abrupt experience, and mildly disorienting. Our drivers said they knew of a good resort where we could stay. It was several miles outside the city, in a forest. They took us there and we got out and unloaded our luggage, and Sergei paid the drivers $350 in American cash—a dollar a kilometer. They turned right around and started back to Ust-Barguzin. Sergei went in to the resort office and talked to the manager, who showed us the cabins he had. They were more like sheds—pretty rustic, designed mostly for summer, and not what we needed at all. We carried our gear to the highway and boarded a local bus going back to Severobaikalsk. Again Sergei gave the bus driver some money at the end of the route and he drove us here and there, finally depositing us at what he said was the best hotel in town.
In fact it was not a hotel but a profilaktorii—defined by my Russian-English dictionary as an “after-work sanitorium”—for workers on the Baikal–Amur Railway. This profilaktorii had doctors’ offices, a clinic, pools for hydropathy, an exercise room, a cafeteria, and quiet bedrooms, a few of which it rented to travelers when vacancies opened up. I’ve almost never stayed in a more restful place. Its atmosphere was calm and soothing, with a kind of low hum, like a test pattern on TV; even the entrees in the cafeteria were peaceful, down to the mild cream sauce on the cutlets and the vaguely sweet tapioca dessert. You couldn’t walk in the profilaktorii door without the lady security person telling you softly to stop and take off your coat and hat—as if all troublesome rustling must be left outside. And right next to the building, just below the window of our room, the train yard of BAM’s Severobaikalsk station gently sighed and creaked and rattled with trains moving back and forth all night.
Only one off note jarred the mood, and that was the safety posters in the halls. These posters warned against drunkenness
and other kinds of inattention on the job by showing their grim consequences, in the form of train wrecks. Such hair-raising photographs! There were engines crashed head-on into other engines, and jumbled-up derailments with shredded passenger cars accordioning into one another and bodies spilling out, and freight cars tumbled like toys in a deep ravine, and so on. It made a person think twice about going for a sightseeing jaunt on the BAM. You could understand why this railroad might need a sanitorium.
The M in BAM stands for ‘Magistral’, which means “highway,” “railway,” or “main line.” It’s a word of suitable grandeur for the Baikal–Amur enterprise. The idea of building a second railroad across Siberia to the Pacific dates from before Soviet times. As conceived (and eventually more or less built), the route of the Baikal–Amur Railway would begin at the city of Taishet in central Siberia, where the Trans-Siberian angles toward the southeast. Branching off from there, the BAM would head more directly eastward, go around Lake Baikal on the north side just as the Trans-Siberian does on the south, continue through remote and mountainous country until it intersected the northeastward-flowing section of the Amur, cross that river, and eventually meet the Pacific Ocean at the port city of Sovietskaya Gavan. This route would traverse fastnesses where even sending the surveying teams would be a challenge. Some surveyors had to be flown in, some traveled by reindeer. Only small progress in actual construction was made before the Second World War. A north–south line connecting the central BAM city of Tynda with the Trans-Siberian was completed in 1940, but in 1942 it was dismantled and moved west to provide ties and rails for tracks bringing Soviet trains to the Battle of Stalingrad. That Tynda section would not be reconstructed for thirty years.