by Frazier
Better to describe the Topolinskaya Highway as a transportational antique, a relic and a ruin from Stalin times. Building it had been Stalin’s idea. He had planned this and at least one other Siberian north–south route to continue past the Arctic Circle and clear to the country’s northernmost shore. Presumably he just drew a line on a map and left the details to subordinates. The Topolinskaya Highway was abandoned in 1954, after Stalin died, and the camps of the prisoners who built it were closed. For much of its route, the road—or what remains of it—follows the valleys of the Olchan and the Topo rivers and winds back and forth among them. Most of its bridges have fallen down, so for many years the road has been drivable only in months when the rivers and the creeks that run into them can be crossed on the ice.
If most Russian construction looks handmade, this road appeared to have been beaten into the earth by hands, feet, and bodies. Almost unaided, human beings had forced it through the wilderness. To the right and left, the roadside showed none of the healed-but-still-visible gouges you see along roads built by earthmoving machines. There were many steep drop-offs—and as we continued, the drop-offs got steeper and longer—but not a single guardrail. All the bridges, even the longer ones, were made of logs. Aleksandr Sleptsov, the driver, had been over the road many times and dared to try some of the bridges whose roadways had not entirely fallen down. He steered deftly along board tracks not much wider than the tires themselves. From my front-seat vantage I couldn’t always see the boards, but the gaps showed the ice and the rocks of the river below.
Sometimes we proceeded at little more than crawling speed. Attaining the next kilometer marker was an event. Particularly interesting kilometers got their own mention in my notebook. Near km marker 33 we came upon a tipped-over truck. I had been wondering what a vehicle with a smaller wheelbase-to-height ratio than ours would do about some of the deeper potholes, and here was the answer: trying to go around a washed-out place, a truck had put its right-side wheels too far up on the road bank and had tipped over on its left. It had been there awhile. The driver had unloaded its cargo of canned goods in cardboard boxes and now sat beside a fire of sticks he had made in the middle of the road. We didn’t stop to see how he was doing but swerved to the left, climbing into and out of the hole and going on.
At km marker 55 we descended from the road to the riverbed and stopped beside the biggest bridge so far. The boy who wasn’t feeling well had to get out, and I walked down to the river surface for a better look at the structure. The span of the bridge rested on high, square-sided, upward-tapering log cribs filled with boulders. Its overarching supports were also of logs, and their cross bracings had been carefully engineered. It resembled any large rural bridge you might see, except that instead of steel girders its main structural element was peeled gray logs. It vaulted over the canyon notch and stood out against the backdrop of dark firs with the hopefulness bridges often convey. Can an object created by slaves be beautiful? Unusable but still standing, this handmade log bridge from the early 1950s struck me as a road-building wonder of the world.
Sometimes the dark forest crowded around and met above the road as it burrowed a straight path through. Between km markers 77 and 78 I saw a sable. Or, rather, I SAW A SABLE!! The amazingness of this had me bouncing and almost hyperventilating in my seat. As the animal ran along the road ahead, I knew from a distance what it was. It moved as gracefully as a cat, though it had the overall shape of a squirrel. But it was substantially bigger than a squirrel, with a longer, bushier tail. Its fur gleamed a sort of bluish-brown, darker and more lustrous in the wild than on a hanger at Saks Fifth Avenue. As we came up on it, the sable sprang onto the snow berm and ran along parallel to the car. It looked like running gold.
Aleksandr pointed to it and said, “Sobol’!” I was shouting, “A sable! A sable!” to Sergei. For a few seconds it was right beside the car and I saw it clearly. In past centuries sables had the reputation of being merry creatures, maybe because of the wealth they possessed in their fur. This sable did seem to have a playful expression as it bounded briskly along, the arc of its tail duplicating its hops. Then it veered into the forest and was gone. The gigantic dimension of all the sable represented, historically and so on, was overwhelming me. I turned to Sergei and the Eveny in the backseats and tried to convey how wondrous seeing this animal was. They all smiled and nodded, indulgently, but I think they did know what I was talking about.
We came out of the thick forest into a mountainous section where the road had more windings, and drop-offs that sloped uncomfortably from the outside edge. At km 96 we met another tipped-over truck. This upset seemed to have occurred at higher speed, and the damage was worse than the previous truck’s. The sides of the trailer were bent and the top split open. Again, the cargo of boxes had been stacked in the road. A Russian jeep had stopped to help. We did not, but kept our momentum and motored on.
At another stream crossing we paused again so the boy could get out. By now I had been rather shaken by the road’s apparent dangerousness and I used the stop to pen a farewell note to my family, just in case. I was scribbling in my notebook by the front-seat overhead light (darkness had fallen), and I didn’t notice the boy get back in. After a few minutes, Sergei said, gently, “Sandy, oni zhdut . . .” (They’re waiting . . .). I looked up and saw all the Eveny patiently gazing at me. In Russia, writing is so revered that no one had had the nerve to interrupt me in what might have been an act of literary creation.
At km marker 122 we passed a sable hunter’s cabin. It was a log hut with an overhanging roof and a stone chimney, set back from the road against the hillside. Tree branches hung low over it, its single window was dark, and no smoke came from its chimney. I don’t know why cabins in the woods in Russia have a more enchanted quality than their counterparts in America, but they do. A full moon had risen and it hung just above the low, treeless, snow-white mountains. A few last streams had to be crossed—some of the creeks flowed so fast they hadn’t frozen, and Aleksandr felt his way through the shallow fords, the water thrusting against the wheels—and then the road carved a narrow, curving terrace along the higher hillsides with the valley of the Olchan River beside us on our left.
At km marker 126 Aleksandr touched my arm, gestured to the valley, and said, “Lager’.” I leaned over and looked down and saw it. The fences, the barracks, and a few other smaller buildings occupied a level space in the crook of the river. All the structures in the long-abandoned prison were black, white-roofed with snow, and had not a light anywhere. Just the moonlight shining blue-white on the snow. The scene would have suggested the coziness of a ranch and outbuildings sheltered in some remote valley in the Rocky Mountains, except that wasn’t what it was. The coziness here was only additional cruelty, a further guarantee of the place’s inescapability. I wanted to get out and hike down to the lager despite the darkness, but no one else thought that was a good idea. The evening was late and the Eveny wanted to get home. I was told I would see more lagers on the trip back tomorrow.
Farther and higher into the mountains, the road went over pass after pass. Each unnerved me worse than the one before it. In my mind I still picture them—guardrailless, downward sloping at the outward edges, sidewalk-narrow above drop-offs of thousands of feet, with Tinkertoy wrecked vehicles at the far, far distant bottoms. (My fear may have supplied the Tinkertoy wreckage, though I’m sure I did see a lost truck or two.) Meanwhile, Aleksandr, growing bored, began making conversation by asking where I lived in America, where I’d been in Siberia, etc. He asked about this present trip and whether it was komandirovka, a business trip. I was glad I’d learned that strange word in Boris Shekhtman’s class. At a pause on level ground he told me that the village was now only five kilometers away. I asked, “Yest’ yeshcho pereval?” (Is there another pass?), in what I thought was a neutral voice, but my real feelings must have come through, because all the Eveny listening in the backseat laughed. He assured me there was not.
Our arrival in Topolinoe vi
llage set the dogs to barking. They were everywhere in the dark; as we went from one small apartment house to the next dropping off passengers, the previous barking dogs faded out and new ones joined in. By now it was about nine o’clock. No one had been expecting us, evidently. Our guide, Galina, had to go several places to find the key to the rooms where we would stay. Then Aleksandr brought us to what was presented as “the hotel,” and we unloaded our luggage in the forty-below night.
Galina led us through this establishment’s entryway, which was a cavernous unheated two-story room hung with icicles and frozen cascades as if it had been hit by an ice tornado. At the top of the staircase at this room’s far end she unlocked a door. Down a barely lit hall she unlocked another door and ushered us into our rooms. There was almost nothing in them except for heat, a feature that made up for a lot. After saying she would see us in the morning and wishing us good night, she disappeared.
Somewhere in our stuff we still had a lint-covered kielbasa from our train journey, and a few other semi-edibles. We made a supper of those, drank some bottled water, used the john (there was a john), and turned in—if that’s an accurate description of what I did, which was to lie carefully on a shaky thin bench a few inches too short for my legs and pretend it was a bed. No other furniture was available, so the bench had to do. Sergei applied his own imagination to the bench in an adjoining room.
All night the bench kept jolting me from sleep with wobblings that threatened to pitch me onto the floor. I would have just let it, and tried to sleep there, had the floorboards not been gritty with tracked-in mire. At first light, about five o’clock, I came awake permanently and lay on my back worrying about one thing and another. When the morning was full light, I sat up and examined the room. Floor-to-ceiling windows filled the wall opposite, showing a view of a hillside, a couple of small buildings, and many conifers bent over with snow. Snow glare cast a brightness on the room’s ceiling. On the wall behind me were many holes made by nails or pushpins, and a large, color-enhanced poster of a misty white waterfall falling into an impossibly green pool surrounded by palm trees. Contemplating it, I finally grasped a principle of Siberian interior decoration. The halls of our hotel in Yakutsk had been perked up by similar posters, and I had in fact noticed tropical-themed posters often on my travels. I believe the tropical poster is the most common indoor decoration in Siberia.
Without needing to, Sergei had refrigerated our remaining foodstuffs by putting them in the space between the indoor and outdoor windows in his room, and they had frozen solid overnight. Our breakfast was the same as supper the night before, only colder and crunchier. He broke off pieces of kielbasa for us to gnaw on. After this attempt at a meal I took the satellite phone outside to call my wife. She was sick, as were my son and daughter, all laid up with the flu. I couldn’t hear well because the dogs discovered me immediately and gathered around to bark and howl. Ignoring my wife’s difficulties, I moaned plenty about my lot, accompanied by dog howls. All in all, a regrettable performance on my part, and one my wife has not forgotten.
Overextended as I was, I suddenly lost my command of Russian. Even the simplest words had deserted me, I discovered. As Sergei and I set out on our schedule for the day, he noted my new aphasia and looked at me in alarm. Naturally our first visit, escorted by Galina, was at the office of the mayor of Topolinoe, whom I now learned I was supposed to interview. We went into his office, introductions were made, we sat at a long table, I opened my mouth, and nothing came out. Sergei was nudging me, whispering, “Say something! Ask him something!” Eventually I stuttered a phrase or two and like any competent politician the mayor began to hold forth. He was a middle-aged Even with abundant gray hair, and he wore a blue blazer and a gray shirt. People in the village were not making any money, a reindeer herders’ festival was to take place in the village in April, the village was working to get Internet access. On the wall behind the mayor was a very large portrait of Lenin done in different natural shades of wood inlay. The mayor stopped to draw breath and everybody looked at me for the next question. Luckily Sergei supplied it.
Next stop: the village museum. Its floor had just been painted and the paint hadn’t dried, but because of our importance we were allowed to walk on it anyway. Each step was like pulling your foot off a Band-Aid. Here my new tunnel vision centered on just one area—a small display case of objects found at the site of the crash of a Lend-Lease airplane in the tundra. There were headphones, bullets, a spark plug, a spoon, a flashlight, and a twisted metal label that said, “Briggs Manufacturing Co. Airplane Parts Division/Detroit, Michigan.” Unsticking my feet from the floor, I thought what a whirlwind the world is, to take that little piece of metal from Detroit and toss it way up here.
In the village square, an obelisk commemorated the crash. It had occurred on May 25, 1943. The pilots were Pesnikh, Sivelgin, and Vedmitskii. Reindeer herders from Topolinoe had found the remains.
As we stood in the square, which was achingly bright with the morning sun on the snow, a troupe of thirty or forty children came running in a line from the school building and formed two concentric circles. They all had on traditional Even costumes of reindeer hide and fur, and reindeer boots with fur at the top. They presented themselves to Sergei and me, did a kind of curtsy, and began a back-and-forth, wheel-within-wheel dance to a song they sang. Sergei videotaped everything, circling around them, and I tried to remain inconspicuous behind a fixed smile. The Even schoolteacher in charge of the kids watched them closely and applauded when they finished. The kids seemed relieved at that. The sweetness of their smiles made me rebuke myself for how dull I had become. Then the teacher asked all the kids to tell us their names. Each said his or her last name first, followed by first name and patronymic.
An older Even woman named Kristina Mikhailovna Zakarova joined us after the dance. She was a Even poet, she told us, as well as a performer of Even songs and an author. She and Galina led us past the main government building, with its giant statue of a reindeer out front. We paused a moment to admire it. Continuing through the village, they then brought us to the apartment of the reindeer racer and his wife, whom we had met the day before. As we were ushered in I said to Sergei, aside, that we could stay only a little while. He shrugged to indicate helplessness in the face of hospitality. Andrei, the reindeer racer, seated us on the living room couch and began piling framed diplomas in our laps for us to look at. Sergei exclaimed politely over them, but I had no idea what they were. On the living room walls from ceiling to floor hung thick carpets, and stuffed toys were piled around the room. Andrei and his wife then presented their two-year-old granddaughter, Regina, dressed in reindeer-hide hat, coat, and boots. They said the little girl had ridden on a reindeer for three hundred miles wearing those clothes just a few months ago. Regina posed and turned so we could see the outfit from all sides.
Tiredness and hunger had reduced my concentration to practically none, and I just wanted to sit in a daze. Andrei produced some of the prizes he had won for reindeer racing. There were elaborate medals and ribbons. When the prize had been an appliance, and he had given it away to someone in the village, he had kept the box it came in. In a storage room he had a number of these boxes, including one for a TV set and another for an Electrolux refrigerator. The Even poet, who had disappeared into another room, now emerged dressed entirely in reindeer-hide clothing she had sewn and beaded herself. We sat again in the living room as she began a speech that sounded memorized.
I was thinking that we would probably be here forever, that time had become stuck with us in it, and we would remain here until the sun finally burned out and this place got really cold for a change. The poet bowed her head and collected herself and then sang a mournful song about a bird. Her strong, pure voice filled the room. As I followed the plaintive halftones, the music’s risings and fallings carried me and caused the time-lock sensation to fade away.
Tea was ready. Sergei told Galina that we had to go, but she replied that we absolutely must stay
for obed, lunch. We were brought into the apartment’s small kitchen and seated at a table; on the walls were posters of tropical fruits, in a close-up, color-enhanced view, hyperrealistically photographed. A platter of large grayish pieces of boiled reindeer was set before us. We were given plates, sharp knives, and forks, and told to cut ourselves a piece. Another platter held thick slices of home-baked bread. I took some bread, speared a slice of meat, and carved off a chunk. The reindeer was fresh and tender, completely delicious, and the bread accompanied it perfectly. I ate one big piece of reindeer and then a couple more, as did Sergei. We’d had no real food for a while. Following the meat came the soup course—a clear reindeer broth, very hot, brimming with tiny noodles. To finish off we had squares of German dark chocolate and hot, strong kitaiskii chai, Chinese tea. Immediately my stupor lifted and I thanked our hosts many times. This was among the top two or three meals I ever had in Siberia. I enjoyed it all the more because from the first bite I knew I could relax in the certainty that it would not give me food poisoning.
After lunch we left the village and headed back to Khandyga. This haste was my doing. For me the main purpose of the Topolinoe journey had been to see the abandoned prison camps along the Topolinskaya Highway. If we stayed too long in the village we would again traverse that road in darkness. I wanted to get to at least some of the lagers in the daylight, and I had told Sergei that several times. Evidently the message had gotten through. After finishing our tea we looked out the window and saw Aleksandr and his minibus waiting outside. This time the passengers, besides us, were the reindeer racer; our guide, Galina; the Even poet; and several other Eveny bound for Khandyga or beyond. Gavriil Sleptsov, the driver’s father, had dislocated his shoulder, and he was being taken to the clinic at Khandyga. Aleksandr asked if I would mind if his father sat in the front seat so he would have more room for his arm. The only way Gavriil Sleptsov could hold his arm without great pain was directly out from his body at shoulder height. I agreed and took a window seat in back. At each bounce in the road, the jolt to his shoulder caused his face to clench and contort, but he never made a sound.