‘Look, look,’ said Sasha. ‘This is remarkable.’ He pointed to a Sumerian original, which resembled a pair of dragonflies, then he riffled through the sketches. I saw spirals, boats, dogs, phalli, suns, stick-men, flowers, stars. At last: ‘There!’ Someone in Stonehenge had come up with a hovering bird. ‘You see? You see?’ He was glittering with faith. Never mind that all the other sketches–page upon page–bore no relation to anything envisioned, or that only the dragonflies and the bird dimly corresponded. Sasha was smiling at them like a cherub. He scarcely needed proof. He already knew.
An old man sits in his dacha in the Golden Valley. These country homes are given only to the elite–he is an Academician–and all along the avenue their stucco facades rear from tangled gardens, until the road gives out against wooded hills. The Academician’s sitting-room is filled with kitsch: glass animals, sentimental pictures, statuettes of the Medici Venus, the Capitoline Venus, the Venus de Milo. But there are icons too, and tense, miniature landscapes painted by a Gulag prisoner. I wonder vaguely what these contradictions mean. Sasha, who has brought me here like a trophy, has gone silent. He listens to the Academician, his mentor, with hushed respect. So do the Academician’s wife and middle-aged son. The whole house smells of a damp dog which is hurtling through the undergrowth outside.
For a while we sit nibbling zakuski snacks and drinking vodka. The Academician hands me his latest book, Cosmic Consciousness of Humanity. Then they toast my future Siberian travels (‘It’s dangerous now, you know’) and I begin to squirm in my traveller’s disguise, because they want to convert me to their beliefs. Unnoticed I open the Academician’s book and read: ‘The total world human Intellect in its cosmoplanetary motion is neither derivative from nor some procreation of, the social movement (social-cultural historic development). It is a peculiar cosmoplanetary phenomenon in the organisation and motion of the Universe Living Matter in its earth-adapted manifestation….’
Fearing an attack of cosmophobia, I close it up, and now, impatient with the trivia of eating, of small talk, the Academician announces: ‘We must go upstairs and discuss.’
Years of deference, I suppose, have wrecked him. An old pedagogy and a new evangelism smooth his thinking to unchallenged monologue. In the study where we sit–his son, Sasha, myself–his books are stacked in avenues from floor to ceiling, all nestled in dust. While his wife stays downstairs, washing up, he explains how man’s spiritual and mental life is shot through by galactic waves, and I cannot decide if this idea is a vanity or humility (and the Academician does not take questions). He often lifts his finger as he advances point by point, and his message grows in urgency.
‘We are at a crisis in the world’s development. The West is powerless, blinded by materialism. It can’t see anything. It can’t think new. It is only Russia which can show the way. Point Three: she can do this precisely, and only, because everything has been taken from her, and she is open! Yes, open! This is the moment! We have just a brief chance–now! In a few years it will be too late. Now is the moment for classical thinking and cosmic thinking to converge. We must save the world–not only Russia!–and unleash new ways of thought!’
He speaks as if in an echo-chamber, and the message which he finds so new is resonantly old. It rings through the works of the nineteenth-century Slavophils, who half-mystically enjoined the ancient values of the Russian soul. It is the vision of Dostoevsky, Herzen, Tolstoy. Yes, Russia will save the Earth! Truth will rise through suffering! Europe–rational, individualist Europe–is benighted by affluence. Only impoverished Russia can touch the heart of things, and rescue mankind.
I start to lose the Academician’s thread. He seems to be talking about experiments with cosmic waves in a Thracian sanctuary in Bulgaria, and in the Arctic Circle north of Dudinka where I will be going. He drops sweeping abstracts and magisterial generalisations. His audience is solemn, grateful. Stray concepts surface in English, sink again. ‘…Spatio-temporal waves…Point Six…distant-image interaction…’ Then he says to me: ‘When you sail down the Yenisei, if you go with an open mind, you’ll discover a new Siberia! We conducted experiments in Dikson in the Arctic Circle, and you’ll find the magnetic channels between there and here are very powerful.’ He asks: ‘You’ve heard of Yuri Mochanov?’
To my surprise, I have. He is a Russian archaeologist whose excavations on the Lena have uncovered evidence of a prehistoric Siberian people. Controversially he has set the age of their stone tools at over 2,000,000 bc, matching Leakey’s Africans in the van of civilisation. He still worked in the town of Yakutsk in East Siberia, where I meant to find him.
The Academician is fired up. ‘A civilisation at least as old as Africa’s! So what does that do to Darwinism? Now the classic view is that man evolved out of Africa, then spread east and north into Asia. But the excavations of Mochanov and others prove something different. They prove that Intelligence emerged in several regions simultaneously–in Siberia, in Africa, in Central Asia. In fact Siberia was the first!’
It all fits beautifully, of course. Here in Siberia–the symbol and repository of Russia’s otherness–civilisation itself began. And here the cosmic flow, the great communion, will be reaffirmed. Not that the Academician repudiates science (although he lives in its ruins). In fact his finger is raised again. ‘I hold that cosmic influences accompanied by changes in the earth’s magnetic field were responsible for a sudden maturation in men’s brains at that time. These early civilisations were in tune with the cosmos, but due to various factors they could not, in the end, survive….’ His hands return comfortably to his lap. ‘Darwin, you understand, is nonsense.’
I sit opposite him, writhing with rebellion at first, then oddly sad. Sasha is glowing. But I see an old man in track-suit trousers and threadbare socks, who has gone off the rails. Sometimes I feel that he is talking not to us, but to himself, and that he is very lonely. I imagine him the victim of that self-hypnosis which sustained the great illusion of Communism itself–where ideas and dreams hover delusively over the wasteland of fact.
How quiet it is here. Young bracken is starting up in the woods, and the wind in the birch trees unlooses a shimmer of chromium leaves. Somewhere among the forests of Akademgorodok the Museum of Siberian Culture is kept like a private collection. It is small and choice. The iron head-dresses of shamans keep company with the fish-skin coats of Nivkhi tribesmen. The curator shepherds me round.
In the central room the tattooed mummy of a warrior lies beside his wood sarcophagus. He comes from the Altai mountains five hundred miles south on the borders of Mongolia. In this region rainwater, seeping through cairns and into the 2,400-year-old graves below, freezes solid with the first snows, and seals wood, leather, cloth, human skin in a cone of ice. The warrior had been entombed among sacrificed horses, whose bridles and trappings are encased nearby. His woollen coat–lined on the inside with marmot fur–is still serviceable.
Galina, the curator, is quick and proud: a small woman in green glasses. She points to another cabinet, and I peer down at air-thin slivers of gold, fragments from a dress. ‘That’, she says reverently, ‘is hers.’
There is only one She in Russian archaeology now: the Ice Princess of the Altai, excavated in 1993–a lone woman entombed in barbarian splendour on a remote plateau above China. Nobody knows who she was–shamaness, noblewoman, or bard–and a tempest of controversy soon brewed up about her race. Her mummy was brought to Akademgorodok and placed in a freezer which had once been used to store cheese. Soon fungi were crawling over the body, fading its delicate tattoos, and it was rushed to Moscow, where embalmers restored it. Slavic experts declared that she was Caucasoid, an early European. But the people of the Altai, who claim descent from her culture, protested that she was theirs, and a Swiss forensic pathologist supported them: she was Mongoloid, he said, close to the modern inhabitants.
Galina, a Russian brunette, is not having this. ‘In Moscow at our Gerasimov Institute they said that in early times the Altai region was b
asically “European”, but contaminated by the Chinese. Across the Chinese border they have excavated mummies which have never been shown to the public. They’ve kept them private. That’s another indication that the Altai was racially European.’ She is looking at me sharply: small, Slavic eyes. West or East, Europe or Asia–for Russians the debate about their own orientation never quite ends. She says suddenly: ‘Would you like to see her?’
I am momentarily astonished. I had thought her still in Moscow, awaiting resolution. But Galina unlocks a small, barred room and beckons me in. A display case stands against one wall, covered in sheets of brown paper. She plucks them off, and inside the glass I see a woman lying. She rests on her side, with her hands crossed over her pelvis. Her torso has caved in on a spine striated like a palm trunk, and her head is tilted back. Her embalmed skin shines like ivory. It is hard to look at her. She is turned to the wall, as if repudiating us.
‘Where will she go now?’ I am whispering.
Galina gazes at her. ‘There was an agreement with the museum at Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the Altai region, that we should study her here. I believe she’s ours.’ But her voice is making an angry music. ‘Now they want her back. Their curator–that Rima Yakimova!–she doesn’t even allow us to excavate in the Altai any more–and her people have no money to excavate, themselves. And now we’re making a present of our princess back to her!’ However she resents this, the political storm has raged beyond her control. We are looking down at Russia’s split identity. ‘We’ve done everything for the princess here. Her felt riding-boots, the raw silk shirt and red-and-white woollen skirt she was buried in–they’re being restored at this moment. Her jewellery, head-dress, they’ve all been photographed. Who else does she belong to?’
The princess had been buried with a sacrifice of six horses. On tables in her tomb-chamber archaeologists found a symbolic meal of mutton and horse-flesh. I stare down at her again. She must have been tall for her day. The indigo tattoos of deer or griffins are still clear on her shoulders and forearms. She has long, delicately boned hands.
‘That Rima Yakimova, her museum is too small! It has enough exhibits already, and there’s no space. They probably won’t be able to preserve the mummy in the right atmospheric conditions…. This is the last we may see of her.’
She had died in her mid-twenties, from some natural cause. They found her stretched in her sarcophagus facing the east, crowned by a three-foot head-dress decorated with golden cats, and round her neck a circlet of wooden camels, originally gilded. Most of her innards had been removed, and her body stuffed with peat and bark, whose tannin had preserved her. Her skull was filled with the fur of pine-martens; her eyes had been cut out.
We cover her over again. After two and a half millennia she exerts the potency of the recently dead. The archaeologists had asked her to forgive them.
I think in parting: this rancorous and depleted Akademgorodok is not the place for her mummy. I imagine its future journey back to Gorno-Altaisk, close to the wild valleys where the frontiers of China, Kazakhstan, Russia and Mongolia collide, and I mean to go there.
4
Borderlands
Within two days I was moving south into a land where the Siberia I recognised started to fracture. From trains and buses I watched the steppes wrinkle and undulate, until they lifted into the foothills of the Altai, and the stains of industry vanished. The natives here were Mongol-Turkic tribespeople, semi-nomadic herdsmen by tradition, who found their ancestry among those once-great peoples, now shrivelled and scattered, who formed the armies of Genghis Khan.
But by the mid-nineteenth century Russian farmers had crowded into their pasturelands and were pushing them into the remote valleys. As my bus crossed the region’s border to its capital, Gorno-Altaisk, a young tributary of the Ob, the Katun river, ran bright and fast alongside, and I imagined mountains bunching to the south-east: those obscure chains of the Altai and Sayan which separate Siberia from the plateaux of inner Asia.
Gorno-Altaisk was tranquil and run-down, squeezed in the river valley. I had nothing to do here. But in its museum, the future home of the Ice Princess, I went into the office of the notorious Rima Yakimova, and at once the voices of Asia and Europe were arguing again. Far from being small and overstocked, as Galina had said, Yakimova’s museum was big and half-empty. And she wanted her Ice Princess back.
‘In Moscow they say she’s Caucasoid, but she’s not. She’s Asiatic. Even her hairstyle was Asiatic. And she will be coming here.’ Yakimova was a native of the Altai: wide, Mongolian features, jet-black eyes. ‘All we need now is a glass case for her, but we can’t afford one yet: it’ll cost twelve million roubles.’ Her hands flickered emptily at the ceiling.
I said: ‘She’ll be kept at a special temperature?’ I was remembering what Galina had feared (‘This is the last we may see of her’).
‘No. The mummy has been treated. She can lie at room temperature. All we need is a vitrine.’ The glass case would cost seventeen hundred dollars. It did not seem so much. ‘There is an idea too that she should be returned to the plateau where they found her. Just laid back in the grave. I’m torn about this. Among our people, the dead should never be disturbed. Never. Yet Russian archaeologists came and dug her up. To free her from the ice they poured hot water over her and she went black.’ In the dark moon of her face her lips were full and angry. ‘They violated her. But these are our graves, our people. Our own archaeologists can work here. They won’t pour hot water over corpses.’
‘But you have no money.’
‘But the dead will lie in peace.’
These were precarious memories. Perhaps it was the nomad heritage, more than any shared blood, which linked the incensed curator through the Mongol armies to the enigmatic princess. Within living memory the Altai people were still accompanied in death by their sacrificed horses. During the Civil War eighty years ago, before they were brutally settled and collectivised, they had searched their ancestral memory and proclaimed an independent state named Karakorum, after the capital of Genghis Khan. The Bolsheviks swept it away.
Yakimova said: ‘Power has always lain with the Russians. Everything discovered or dug up here went to St Petersburg or Akademgorodok. That Galina…’ she murmured. ‘The Hermitage is stuffed with wonderful things from the Pazyryk culture, and all of them are ours. Why should our people go to St Petersburg to visit their own heritage? There are things in their reserve collection–hundreds of them–which have never been seen. And a mass were sold off to America by Stalin. He sold our past. And now we want it back. Here!’
Pazyryk: the word stands for a culture whose name is lost, the people of frozen tombs. I had seen its artefacts in the Hermitage that June: spell-binding things. And now, when I unfolded my map over Yakimova’s desk, her finger shot down a long valley nearly three hundred miles to the closed Mongolian border, then jerked north into a desert of plateaux and streams splintered like nerve-ends. With a short sigh, she inked in ‘Pazyryk’ there. ‘But you won’t be able to go. It’s too far, too wild.’
The road to Pazyryk trickled at dawn through a surge of hills along the jade path of the Katun river. The world had turned young. The flatness of the steppeland, and the sullen meander of its rivers, had sharpened into mountain freshness–a cold, unscented air and the chatter of glacial water over rocks. The farming villages were lush with orchards–apple, cherry, pear. Chrysanthemums and hollyhocks sent up a rainbow jumble under their cottage walls, where Russian vines multiplied and Russian children played.
Then the hills steepened. Birch woods spread a pale dust over their slopes. Sometimes the Katun forked and spreadeagled over meadows, or circled white-rocked islands, but as the mountains closed in it ran with a harsh brilliance. Its panicky descent turned it milky-green. Altai herdsmen were riding their stocky horses along its banks, and my bus emptied of Russians.
I was surrounded by a dark, hardy people. The women’s heads glinted in gold-threaded scarves. The machine-gun patter o
f their speech, snagged by sudden gutturals and glottals, grated and chirruped through the bus. Some of them were beautiful. The wide plane of their cheeks and foreheads, where shallow noses and bunched lips made no commotion, emphasised instead the feathery isolation of eyebrows so admired of the Chinese. A resurgent confidence had long ago given their children Turkic or Mongolian names, so that from time to time an order would go out for little Genghis to stop fighting or for Oirot to sit still.
Beside me a military policeman on his way to guard the Mongolian border slumped inch by inch across my chest, fast asleep and still clutching his truncheon. Frontier life was very boring, he said on waking. You just waited for nothing. His people were closer to the Mongolians than to the Russians, he agreed, but his job was just a job. He wasn’t guarding anything, really. And even here, I knew, in this so-called Altai republic of 200,000, the Altaisky were outnumbered by the Russians. In all Siberia, peopled by only thirty million, the indigenous natives numbered just 5 per cent.
As we crossed the Katun, the clouds came down. The river carved a cold corridor through mist and hills, then disappeared as if a water-colourist had washed it into the sky. The villages we passed became desolate, near-empty. Ground squirrels ran in the pastures. As we climbed higher, the mountains shut us in eroded walls where the pines moved in Indian file along the lee of ridges. Long, vertical arteries of grey and russet shale were inching down the valleys.
In Siberia Page 9