In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  For more than a century Rezanov’s monument stood by the cathedral near the river. Then in the 1930s a parachute school was built on the site, and the tomb, with its perilously pointed urn and spiked railings, was swept away.

  As the three-decked Mastrov eases from the quayside, a burning expectation starts up. It is puerile, coloured by Conrad. But now the engines tremble the ship’s body, and you weigh anchor from the world. On the jetty a small crowd of relatives is waving itself into obscurity. A few jokes carry across the 50 yards of water. Martial music sounds from the ship’s loudspeaker, as if we were departing for the front. A small girl, standing on shore beneath her parents, is crying as her grandmother starts to dwindle over the water. Then, as the boat turns into the mainstream, the hand-waves broaden to semaphore and the crowd breaks up and is lost to sight.

  The city drifts away from us. It resolves into important cubes and rectangles: the banks, the concert hall, the river station. Our foghorn booms lonely beneath a bridge. We thread between marshy islets where fishermen stand in black waterproofs and do not look up. A flight of duck is heading west. Our engine putters in near-silence. Moored along the quays, the barges barely rock in our wake. Even as we break clear of the last suburbs, long banners of smoke are streaming from unseen factory chimneys to our north.

  Then even these vanish, and on either shore the hills flow down under a soft blaze of trees–birches turning amber, dark layers of cedar and pine gashed by the scarlet of mountain ash. Sometimes, when the river narrows, the cliffs steepen into serrated blades which drop sheer to the water. At others, the way smooths out into an island-studded calm, and the light falls flat and glassy on a meandering half-lake.

  I stand on deck for hours. My fellow passengers, burly traders in vinyl caps, have blocked the lower deck with crates of peppers and tomatoes which mount to the portholes. Sometimes they stand staring at the river with hunched shoulders, like me, or play cards in the vestibule. But there is no communal life. The boat seems half-empty. Families returning from holiday keep to their cabins, asleep or munching picnics. The buffet is closed, the saloon is closed, the reading-room is closed. The boat appears to run on magic. But the public rooms are panelled in a lemony splendour of varnished pine, and brass fittings run riot. In the music-room (closed) I glimpse a white-painted piano and walls swagged with sashes and lyres. The dining-room curves with the prow, and flaunts silk curtains and palm-court columns. It serves smoked fish, chunks of fatty ham and black bread; then comes sweet coffee and a puny bill.

  Outside on the river, every few hours, the jetty of a village marks its link with the world. Bright-painted rowing-boats leave a broken kaleidoscope on the shore, and wooden stairways wobble up to the cottages cresting its bank. Occasionally a church, old and massive above the rooftops, raises a gutted bell-tower or a cupola shorn of its cross. Then we circle in to the landing-stage, where an avenue of peasant women waits behind their offerings of vegetables and preserves. The moment the gang-plank is lowered the passengers swarm out to buy, while a posse of stevedores shouldering sacks of vegetables charges the other way and heaps up the crates on deck still higher.

  Within twenty minutes the furious commerce subsides and we cast off again. We move over water which is like imperfectly set metal. The north wind pushes its surface back, while a deep counter-current foments it from below. The boat rolls faintly, sleepily, over its trouble. I gaze down distracted. The whole surface seems to seethe with a strange, molten cold. Steely circles and ellipses glide over it and appear to shimmer with the commotion of millions of aquatic insects which are not, in fact, there, while an oil-smooth sheen spreads black between the ripples.

  From the upper deck I watch the West Siberian Plain stretch to the sky in level forest, while on the other side stir the hills of a still huger East Siberia. The taiga seems to unite them, but in fact they are different countries, and the Yenisei cleaves them like a sword. The loamy plains of the west are still feebly warmed by the Atlantic. Their forests are wet with lakes and marshland, and their indigenous natives may speak languages close to those of Finland and Hungary. But the east is embalmed by a fearsome, static cold, and permafrost underlies it almost to the borders of China. The taiga thickens among mountains, and the western spruce and pines become infested by armies of tough larches which march to the Pacific. Its native groups are of ancient, more Mongoloid stock.

  Slowly, to port and starboard, and for hundreds of miles, an odd difference develops. The western bank runs level with the water, but on the east the shore rears up in a 50-foot earthen wall thronged by trees. The wake of our boat leaves a nervous parting between them. The Norwegian explorer Nansen, who sailed the river in 1913, ascribed the difference to the pull of the earth’s rotation as it strengthens towards the North Pole. The phenomenon, once noticed, starts to absorb you: the glitter of young birch trees standing in the western water, the horse herds which amble down unchecked. And the eastern shore, like a closed rampart.

  As the ship’s prow noses towards the pole, you wait in childlike expectation. You imagine the globe of the earth steepening as all the lines of longitude converge in front of you, and that you can see its curve across the skyline. Soon, you conceive, the earth must level out under the crushing weight of sky, and through that slit in the horizon–where the river parts the forest–you will glide over the top of the world and begin to slide down into the south.

  Instead, towards evening, the wind drops and we enter a golden vacuum. I think: this is that primal Siberia–elusive, endless–which lingered like a geographic unconscious behind the eyes of early travellers. Its seeming void was a clean slate to write upon. For centuries it courted hearsay and legend, conjured the ideal, elicited fear. Even its name–a mystical conflation of the Mongolian siber, ‘beautiful’, ‘pure’, and the Tartar sibir, ‘sleeping land’–suggested somewhere virgin and waiting. Hegel placed it outside the pale of history altogether, too cold and hostile to nurture meaningful life.

  It spreads around us an illusion of vacancy. Yet as early as Herodotus there were tales of habitation. His account of a bald, flat-nosed race, and of a tribe which slept for half the year, seem to be rumours of Mongol and Arctic peoples. And as the Russians probed the Urals, they painted in their demons beyond. God had confined the natives in this wilderness because they ate their dead. There was a people who died every winter when water spilt from their noses and froze them to the ground. Others who submerged in the summer sea lest their skins split. Their eyes were lodged in their chests, and their lips between their shoulders; or their mouths opened upward in their skulls, so they ate their crumbled food by placing it under their hats and pumping their shoulders up and down. These people, it seems, had been here for ever. For in the unknown, time stops.

  But later a pagan beauty crept in. Siberia, exempt from religious surveillance, harboured magic cities. Surrounded by clamour, they could be reached only underground; but once inside their walls an unearthly silence fell. In its snowbound purity, its farness, Siberia became the repository of an imagined innocence.

  Yet by the nineteenth century other, countervailing images had long been in place: Siberia as a storehouse to be plundered by officials and hunted bare by Cossacks; and above all, long before the Gulag, as a limbo that could receive all the viral waste of the empire–criminal, vagabond, dissident. Through Siberia, Russia would purge herself. Its vastness could quarantine evil.

  The pendulum swung back years ago. As Moscow appears to sink deeper into the embrace of the West, so Siberia becomes enshrined in the Slavic imagination as the Russia that was lost, the citadel of the spirit. The mystique of a chaste, self-reliant Siberia rises again. Siberia is more Russian than Russia is, people say, as if it were a quintessential Russia, or the imagined country which Russia would like to be.

  Nobody shared my four-berth cabin. Low-wattage bulbs gave it the feel of a dim nest. So I went up and sat astern while the sun dropped, and listened to the cinnamon-coloured water rustling below. Beside me a thicks
et man seemed half-asleep. Then a flight of duck introduced us. As they passed, his arm lifted automatically and fired an invisible shotgun. ‘It’s wonderful sport here. You can see hunters’ dugouts all along this stretch. Look there…and out there….’

  I hadn’t noticed them before–the hollowed trunks ribbed with planks, just visible among the reeds. Vadim ached to be in one, or crouched in the marshes waiting for the Canada geese to fly in. He spoke of them with the disturbing affection of the hunter for his prey: how they winged down from the Arctic in autumn on their way to India. There were Brent geese and red-breasted geese too, and widgeon and coots from the tundra. And other, near-holy birds–cranes, swans–which no one shot.

  And what about the Great Grey Owl, I asked, with its five-foot wingspan and its head the size of a human’s? I longed to glimpse one in the dusk. It sports a white outgrowth of eyebrows and moustache, like a cartoon colonel, with facial discs as big as soup-plates, and it can hear a vole moving a foot beneath the snow. Yes, Vadim said, if you kept very still on a river-bank at evening, you would hear them calling to one another–he gave a clouded hoot–yet you never saw one.

  Once, he had walked the thirteen hundred miles from Krasnoyarsk to Dudinka which our boat was travelling. It had taken him fifty days, camping and hunting, following the river by tracks. He spoke of it with earthy nostalgia, his hand sometimes crashing on to my shoulder to confirm his shooting of a marten or fording a river. His eyes were steady in a gross, amiable face. He seemed to typify the old Siberia. ‘And I saw bears too! And they saw me. But if you don’t bother a bear, he doesn’t bother you. Only in winter, he’s cross if he’s hungry. And there were wolverines about. Now the wolverine, he’s big’–he circled his arms around an aerial heavyweight–‘and he has a funny habit of following you. You don’t often know it, but there he is, just following behind somewhere, and when you pitch camp he hangs around, the wolverine does. Then when you leave for a moment he empties your tent for you.’

  Vadim lived in Arctic Dudinka, but was restless for the forest. Hunting was his passion. He knew a place where wild reindeer crossed the Yenisei, and would shoot two or three a year, carving up their flesh where they fell. A forester lent him an isolated shack from which he would set out at night, and as the morning mist lifted from clearings rich in berries, he would shoot the elk which grazed there, and sell their carcasses on the sly.

  And sometimes, he said, he caught reindeer and elk in traps. I winced at him, then asked about this, hoping to elicit an instant’s regret; but he merely described it: iron leg-traps. He was a poacher.

  This was the old Siberia too. The trappers had been merciless, the taiga strangely fragile. During the seventeenth century its sable had been virtually wiped out.

  I asked in puzzlement: ‘Why won’t you kill a swan?’

  ‘A swan!’ He looked shocked, rubbed his heart. ‘I love them. They fly all the way to California, then back to us. They’re beautiful. Oh, I couldn’t touch a swan!’

  Now the sun had gone. We made no commotion over the water. After a while a deserted village floated past us, its doors and windows blank over the marshland. ‘Those are the ruins Khrushchev left,’ Vadim said. ‘He forced people into bigger units, he hated the little places. So you see them now, fallen to bits….’

  In the last windows dim lights flickered, where people had returned, perhaps, to inhabit a remembered happiness. ‘My grandfather was exiled out here in 1921–yes, that early!–just for owning land. He had to live somehow so he became a merchant of sorts and settled in Yeniseisk, where I was born.’ Vadim’s hand thumped my shoulder again. ‘In Stalin’s time, even in Brezhnev’s, you and I couldn’t have talked like this! You’re my first Englishman!’

  I smiled, despite myself. He had added me to his game-bag, along with the Canada goose and the reindeer.

  ‘As a young man I’d have thought you my enemy.’ A vague wonder surfaced in his voice. ‘But one year I went to Germany with a Komsomol group, full of the idea that everything of ours was best. You know how it is. My father was a pilot in the war and died of wounds, escorting British convoys to Murmansk. All his three brothers were killed. I was ready to hate the Germans–but Hamburg! I didn’t care about its wealth, but the people welcomed me. We were quartered with ordinary German folk, and they were good people. Good. After that I never felt the same about anything….’

  He stood up with his back to the water. The Russian tricolour drooped on its pole behind him. ‘And now we have to be like them. In Russia these days a fellow has to work on his own. Alone!’ He thumped his chest. ‘We live in a new time. I’m a crane-operator in the Dudinka docks at present, but I can work as a mechanic, a book-keeper, a lumberjack. I earn more than any of my bosses. The temperature can dip to -50°F, but I can operate in that. And I’m free. Nobody tells me what to do! When one line of work fails, I switch to another.’ He pointed his cigarette at the crates lapping the deck windows. ‘But this merchandising, just moving stuff about from place to place–that’s no good. Russia has to make stuff. That’ll be our future.’

  ‘Light industrial stuff,’ I agreed. ‘Things ordinary people want.’

  ‘In the past we had seven bosses to every worker. One ploughed, as we say, and the others just lifted their spoons. But now we’ll pick ourselves up!’

  I wanted to hear this, to believe he was the future. I wanted to like him. His feet were planted four-square on the deck, as if he would ride a hurricane. I tried to forget the gin-traps.

  ‘Come to my cabin tomorrow and meet my wife!’ He was suddenly striding away. ‘When I trap sable she makes them into hats!’

  I lingered astern for a while in the cool dusk. A few stars had come out. The ship’s bell clanged archaically. The darkening woods no longer seemed so empty. In daytime I had found the taiga silent, filled with a greenish light and cathedral peace. But it was empty only of humans. It rustled unseen with a wary life of its own: lynx, elk, fox. Now the brown and black bears would be gorging themselves on berries and seeking dens for semi-hibernation, and a host of birds was winging south and east. Sables and muskrats, with all the martens and rodents of the trees, would be laying in winter stores, and the black-capped marmot, glutted with fat, would be turning in for its fantastical, eight-month sleep. (Its temperature drops almost to freezing; its heart beats once in three minutes. Every three weeks it wakes, urinates, perhaps copulates, then nods off again.) Yet others–even the tiny nocturnal flying-squirrel–never hibernate at all.

  But somewhere ahead, where the taiga thins to conifers and the winter snow becomes a compacted, wind-blown dust, the wolves and reindeer multiply and the red fox gives way to the blue. Arctic lemmings–nervous, overgrown guinea-pigs, snow-white or coppery–would be breeding even now. Every third or fourth year their numbers explode and they ripple across the tundra in a quivering plague. People imagined they swam the sea in quest of Atlantis, but in fact they were searching for cotton-grass. They never turn back, because they have already laid waste everything behind them. So they seem faintly tragic, impelled by madness. In a bumper lemming year, all the predators congregate. Everything, it seems, eats lemmings. The snowy owls hatch ten or more chicks in celebration, and the wolves become so fat that the reindeer graze in peace (and themselves eat the odd lemming). There is a bright green moss which grows only on lemming bones. Even in their river crossings they are not safe, but turn up in the stomachs of pike and salmon. I kept an eye out for them fording the Yenisei–they could swim several miles–but the river was filling with stars.

  That night we were joined by the Angara, which had already flowed three thousand miles from its source beyond Baikal, and turns the Yenisei into one of the most powerful rivers on earth. Ahead of us at dawn, low mountains were shaking loose from the sky, and we could glimpse the waves of eastern hills as they started their long surge to the Pacific. The gold of the forests was laced darker now by conifers. The river had cut up under a cold wind, and a flock of seagulls was trailing us astern. By a
fternoon the cliffs of islands drifted past, and the Stone Tunguska river, already huge, wound from the east to meet us.

  In his cramped cabin, heaped with sacks of potatoes bought cheap in Krasnoyarsk, Vadim plied me with tea and vodka, spurned my Romanian biscuits and produced piroshki cabbage pastries made by his mother-in-law. ‘Homemade! Better!’ They were disgusting.

  Then he talked politics. His wife Stalina (her father had fought at Stalingrad) reclined plumply on her bunk beside him, cosseted in a wool cardigan. Bulging cheeks had squeezed her eyes and mouth to pampered dots, and beneath a toppling pyramid of golden curls some cotton threads and wisps of her own black hair floated free. While Vadim complained about the ingratitude of the Baltic states or demanded the crushing of Chechnya, she sent out little snuffles of agreement and censure.

  ‘Those people take everything from us,’ he said. ‘Even in these parts you’ll find native Kets and Dolgans and Entsy and God knows who, and they degenerate because they never do an hour’s work. But if you want work in Dudinka, you can find it, and live well.’ He appealed to Stalina. ‘We live well, don’t we?’

  ‘We do, we do.’ She was plucking the seeds from a dried sunflower-head and tucking them into her cheeks with moist fingers. I was starting to dislike them both equally.

  ‘During the seventies I worked eight years for the Komsomol,’ Vadim said. ‘I went out into the tundra and gave lectures to these people in their huts or tents or just under the sky. It’s we Russians who brought them education. They never even had an alphabet before. They couldn’t even read.’