In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  ‘Not even an alphabet!’ echoed Stalina.

  I asked grumpily: ‘What did you teach them?’

  ‘In those days it was the history of the Communist Party.’ No trace of irony or regret touched him. ‘I told them about our writers and cosmonauts and space engineers….’

  ‘Did they listen?’

  He looked blank, as at something irrelevant. ‘I went from group to group by helicopter or reindeer-cart with a cine-projector run on batteries–and we’d show them films of the Great Patriotic War. Sometimes we’d take their children to the Internat boarding-schools in Dudinka–aged seven, they were–and they’d be given an education, September to May, and then go back to the tundra for three months.’

  ‘We gave them education–free!’ His wife snuggled under blankets.

  ‘And if they wanted,’ Vadim went on, ‘they could go on to some higher institute, and they didn’t pay a thing! And there were special places kept for them, even if Russians were more deserving.’ His face was clenched with irritation. His wife spat out a sunflower seed.

  ‘What did they do in the tundra with your education?’

  ‘Some got training as vets, but most didn’t want to do a thing. Now they just come in to loaf about the town and get drunk.’

  ‘They weren’t prepared,’ I said. I imagined him flying in to these half-comprehending people, haranguing them on the October Revolution; and their children returning from a jobless Dudinka to a tundra they no longer knew. These Internats had spawned a whole generation alienated from its own culture and unfitted for any other.

  Through the porthole behind me I glimpsed the forests where the Ket people had once flourished. Every year, two centuries ago, they had sailed to a market fair in two hundred boats, and delivered their tribute of furs to the imperial agents. Within a century the vodka and diseases peddled by Russian merchants had decimated them.

  ‘Don’t you go near those people,’ Stalina warned. ‘They’ll do anything to you.’

  I wanted to snap back; but I was drinking their vodka, nibbling their piroshki. I felt a harsh frustration. ‘I’m interested in them,’ I said angrily. I would track them down somehow: a village, a nomad camp, anything.

  ‘We Russians cheated them when we arrived,’ Vadim said suddenly. ‘We took their pelts in exchange for a few brass pots.’

  Stalina snuffled ominously.

  I asked: ‘What’s happened now, out in the tundra?’

  ‘I don’t know what’s happpened out there.’ Vadim tossed back his vodka. ‘Except that the whole system’s fallen to bits. In town these people used just to take money from the government. Now they get nothing, and they’re unemployable.’

  ‘Things might be better for them in the tundra,’ I wondered.

  ‘Yes!’ they chorused. ‘Yes! They’d be better out there!’

  Night. We are wandering over a polished calm, under a sky cold with stars. I remember the Academician in Akademgorodok talking of magnetic power-lines streaming down from Dikson to our north. We are floating along them now. The Milky Way dissects the sky in a white scar, and Venus is so bright that it sheds a path over the water. I had promised the professor to be cosmically sensitive, but I have no idea how. So I empty my mind, and listen in to nothing. Beyond our prow the shores are pincers closing in on the river’s light. The foam of our wake diffuses soundlessly behind. Once an enigmatic lamp blinks from the forest, but otherwise we move across a darkness barely distinguishable from the sky. The pulse of our engine is the only sound.

  For two more days and nights we sailed downriver, while around us the deciduous green turned to bronze, and the birch trees massed along the shores were blackened by pines, and the crimson flares of aspen flickered out. The seasons were speeding up. Within four days we traversed autumn, until the leaves were falling, and a coniferous deadness began to spread.

  The villages grew even fewer, poorer. Their foundation in the late thirties betrayed them as Stalinist concentrations from lesser settlements, but now they too were half-abandoned, their inhabitants migrated to Krasnoyarsk or beyond. As we churned north towards winter, the produce on their wharves shrank to a few sacks of potatoes and carrots, or some buckets of cranberries.

  ‘Up to here you can grow vegetables,’ said the barmaid as we reversed from the jetty of Vorogovo. ‘North of here it’s just fish.’ We were on the 65th parallel. ‘And these villagers can’t sell things like they did. Folk used to come south to holiday up to two years ago, but now no one has money.’

  She looked heavy and tired. She worked behind the bar in the ship’s hold, where nobody much came, giving out plates of sausage and dry chicken-legs. Blonde curls bustled round her cheeks and neck. She had gentian eyes. Behind her glinted two shelves of champagne, sweet wine and ‘Sport-Cola’. She served here four months of the year, she said. It was the only job she could get. ‘I worked ten years as a computer engineer in Tyumen and Krasnoyarsk. Then things got very hard with us, you know, and I had to serve behind counters. The wages of a computer engineer in Krasnoyarsk became three times less than I’d earned in Tyumen. But I had a daughter by then, and I couldn’t let up.’

  She smiled hardily. On the sunk moon of her face her features seemed to have been touched in later, but formed an expression of half-frustrated tenderness. She’d been born in a village beneath the great dam near Krasnoyarsk, she said. Her parents had even helped to build it. ‘But we lived upriver, and our home went under. I was a child when we abandoned it. I used to walk in seven kilometres–aged just five, and alone–to sit and watch the dam being built, and to be near my parents. I didn’t know it would drown us.’ She had left her childhood under the water.

  For a while the father of her daughter hovered unmentioned round her talk. Then she said: ‘Things with us aren’t like things with you. If I was destitute, he might have to pay something. But he just writes sometimes, and I tell him everything’s fine. But life is so dear now. When I was my daughter’s age, everything got paid for. Now I have to find extra for her singing and dancing lessons–she loves them–and it breaks me. It’s odd, you know, but I think she’s becoming a Christian. She keeps crossing herself. Perhaps she picked up something at school.’ She made it sound like measles. ‘But when she gets to fifteen it’ll be more expensive still and I don’t know what I’ll do….’

  Meanwhile she hunted for winter jobs, and served cold chicken on the Yenisei, and sometimes, when the ship eased up to a jetty, she would stare through the portholes and feel sorry for the villagers.

  A traveller needs to believe in the significance of where he is, and therefore in his own meaning. But now the earth is flattening out over its axis. The shoreline is sinking away. Nothing, it seems, has ever happened here. So time slows into aeons, and history becomes geology. People lose their grip on it.

  The villages have no jetties, just a few cottages straggling along a bank. Sometimes weather-hardened men in tin motor-boats push out to sell sturgeon still slippery from their sacks, and hold up jars of yellow caviar. Dogs howl from the shore.

  So the world is fading away. Even on the east bank the forest thins behind a littoral of sand and scrub. The river has widened, calmed. You stare at it, because there is nothing else to see. Half-hidden currents shimmer over its surface, trembling with some obscure trouble. At other times the boat pushes through a river like black syrup.

  Four days ago you boarded ship knowing nobody. Now there are those you seek out, others you avoid. There is the music teacher from Norilsk with her French bulldog and two musical daughters–eager girls with the conservatoire before them (‘Maybe St Petersburg!’); the embittered trader selling lettuces in the dying town of Igarka; a sallow youth who is soon to be conscripted, but who longs instead to go to Italy; a Dolgan vet and her hyperactive son; a Ukrainian metallurgist who can’t go home (things are even worse in the Ukraine).

  During the fourth night, at some sad village, a Polish priest embarked. He was the first Westerner I had seen for a month: an elderly man,
lean and self-sure. He sat in a vestibule on the lower deck, where passengers loitered to watch him, and riffled through a portfolio of papers oblivious to them. I sat tentatively beside him. The white hair flowing back from his forehead to his nape lent him a silken aristocracy. For five years now he’d been travelling up and down the Yenisei, he said. ‘This is my parish, the Krasnoyarsk Krai–seven times the size of Poland.’ His voice was sharp, cultivated. ‘But these villages have grown terrible. They’ve nothing but fish, potatoes and grass. They’re saved by picking berries and mushrooms in the woods. And that’s everything. Also they’re lazy, and–I’m sorry to say this–stupid. Yes, grossly stupid.’

  They were around us now, staring. Their frosty eyes seemed less like organs of sight than of a slow, incontinent wonder. Momentarily, disconcertingly, I saw them as he did. Were they just stupid? A teenage boy stood gazing at him–at his trim white beard, at the dog-collar half-concealed by a high-necked cassock–and touched the silver crucifix against his stomach. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That’s the Son of God, child. He died for you, and He–’

  ‘Is he real silver?’

  The priest turned to me. ‘You see, they’re stupid. Concepts are beyond them. And unfortunately they drink.’ He barely lowered his voice. Contempt, I thought, had made him fearless. I blenched for him. ‘But I’ve converted many in the past few years. Germans mostly, exiled here in 1941. But Russians too, and Poles.’

  ‘How did you find them?’

  ‘I just landed and asked.’ He was mysteriously buoyant: eyes shining black in his pallor. ‘Now we’ve six chapels along the Yenisei and a congregation in each village, sometimes only eight people, but sometimes forty. I’ve even baptised some native Entsy.’ He brought them the Mass as others might bring famine relief. He belonged to the venerable Melkite Church, which followed the Orthodox rite yet owed allegiance to Rome. Those whom he baptised would scarcely know the difference. But the authorities, of course, did.

  ‘The Orthodox bishop in Krasnoyarsk should be helping us, but he doesn’t. He’s hostile. He works for the secret police. Has done for years. Trying to preach in Russia now is like speaking to a country hit by the atom bomb. It’s been laid waste for two generations. It’s worse than working among heathen. The only source of hope is the children and the old women. The rest are blind.’ Through the window a small town loomed unlit above its quay. ‘And these villages are dying. They’re paying for everything that happened.’

  We walked out on deck into the cold night. On a hill above the harbour hung a white monastery. This was old Turukhansk, the priest said, a district centre, and corrupt. A century ago it had been famous for the bones of its saint, carried here from the once-great city of Mangazeya, ruined in marshlands far to the northwest. In 1913 Stalin, exiled in Turukhansk, had fathered a child by a native woman, it is rumoured–a boy who disappeared from history.

  The priest crammed a woollen cap over his head. He was shivering. ‘These villagers have had seventy years of Satan. Now they’re leaving here for anywhere they can find work, for anywhere else at all.’

  That night we crossed the Arctic Circle.

  The cold has crept up on us. The traders look piratical in high woolly hats and padded coats. I blunder about my cabin in a quilted mountaineer’s jacket, knocking things over. Women in crumpled dresses and socks are queuing up at the hot-water boiler. Seagulls scream round the portholes.

  The dawn has broken over a river three miles wide. On either shore the trees look dwindled and sickly, or are not there at all. The tundra is starting. The clouds lie in some stilled current of their own, making long, flat-bottomed flotillas across the blue. The eye searches for a focus, fails. Muffled up, I sunbathe on the poop, listening to the faint, slow heartbeats of the engine. The earth has smoothed into peace. Its vast circumference is inscribed meaninglessly around ourselves.

  That evening some forty people, mostly women and children, sat on gilded chairs around the music-room in the ship’s prow, while the priest celebrated Mass. He prepared the room with the confidence of one who knew that a line of potted ferns will mystically stand in for the iconostasis, and that the curved window (where a horned moon was rising over the Yenisei) is an apse enframing God’s creation. He handed out service sheets for the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, selected a woman to intone the responses, ordered me to wipe down a table, and unwound a scarf to serve as an altar cloth.

  Casually he donned armbands and a white robe. His patrician hair and aquiline rigour made me forget that he was barely five feet tall. But beneath his creamy commotion of silks, his mud-stained trainers squelched across the floor whenever he enacted a procession. To the faithful, none of this mattered. Some of them already knew the litanies, and when to cross themselves. The children sat in flocks at their mothers’ feet. Three surly youths shambled in and out. Nothing separated his liturgy from the Orthodox, except a single, fleeting mention of the Pope.

  ‘What we believe is not the same as what we see,’ wrote St John Chrysostom of the Eucharist, ‘but we see one thing and believe another.’ So the outward, however negligent, sets in motion the inward, and the Liturgy, to the unbeliever, may proceed like a string of spells. All its moments of solemnity–the entrance of the Book and Holy Gifts, the reading of the Gospel and the Epiclesis–were marked by the priest with cursory matter-offactness. In the absence of a bell he dinged a fork against a tin. In lieu of the Holy Gospel, he processed with an uplifted service sheet; in place of the chalice (since no one was expected to take communion) he cradled an egg-cup. His trainers squeaked with each duty. A kind of exalted arrogance held him up. Once, when he bowed to earth, his head hit a ventilator. He proceeded unmoved. And whenever the woman incanting the responses faltered–her baby was clambering over her legs–he would break in: ‘Come on! Read it! Read it!’

  Only in his sermon did he take on a paternal and almost tender authority. His voice mellowed. He spoke of the Apostolic succession, as if confirming his right to be with us, a Pole preaching to Russians on a steamboat at the end of the world. His palms lifted in balance, in forgiveness, weighing grace against sin, while behind him in the window’s apse a crimson sun descended and an orange moon rose.

  A web of nine-storey blocks in storm-stained concrete, an arid anchorage ringed by naked shores: this is Dudinka. To build here is a technical hell. A few feet beneath the surface the ground is frozen iron-hard, but the slight heat exerted by any foundation will melt this permafrost until the structures above it tilt and come crashing down. So every building is raised four feet clear of the earth on a grid of concrete pillars, often sunk in buckets filled with cement and driven deep into the ground. To stoop through these maze-like basements is like wandering a series of primitive temples. The shafts look too thin and random to uphold the storeys massed above them. They become the haunt of children and lovers, strewn with beer bottles, condoms, broken toys. Above this perilous earth the whole cumbersome-looking town hovers light as a skater, barely touching the surface at all.

  Cold stamps it even in autumn. Its shops and offices are immured behind double and triple doors. The fat tubes of water mains, impossible to sink in the permafrost, blunder from block to block, lagged in rotting wood and tin, like arteries from some distant heart. Verandas and outdoor stairs sail free of the ground on iron struts. From anywhere in the streets you can see the stark line of the tundra.

  I toiled up from the docks, hunted for the only boarding-house, became lost. Around me the people looked too few, dressed in black or grey as if the town were in mourning, and half the buildings shut. Among the Russians went a sprinkling of indigenous natives, but in this urban anonymity they looked defaced. They were part of the early peoples–Turkic, Samoyed, Tungus–scattered all over Siberia and now half-annihilated or absorbed. In the local museum, run by one of those dedicated women (they were always women) proud of their stuffed polar bears and rock specimens, the native culture was being dutifully laid to rest in simulated yurts and reassembled s
haman costumes. Valentina understood my indifference to them, and my ignorant desire to locate a living settlement. She had heard of an Entsy fishing-village eighty miles upriver, she said, and knew the captain of an oil-tanker now in dock, who might drop me there next morning.

  Perhaps it was the high latitude, the fading sense of time, which detached me a little from the place and from myself. Valentina said the Entsy village was poor and violent, and my curiosity only increased. I remember roaming Dudinka–its desolate suburbs and port–as if it were another planet.

  Then I remember supper in Valentina’s flat with her drunken neighbour Misha. His wife was away, and Valentina’s husband working in Odessa: everybody separated. From time to time Valentina’s daughter–an eleven-year-old solitary with a round, dreaming face–ambled from her bedroom to stare at us. I remember the vodka glasses emptying too quickly, and how I had vowed not to fall victim to these orgies. I remember Valentina’s face motherly, sensual and blurring. And Misha’s voice wondering about the British. ‘The British are too cold and serious–except for you, hah! hah! How do you British get girls? How do you ever…Hah! hah! hah!…’

  Our talk slushed into monotone. Two vodka bottles emptied. Misha mistook me for his son. But I was fifty-eight, I slurred (beyond the life expectation of a Russian male). Misha didn’t believe me. Nor, in a way, did I. That was the panacea for growing older, you didn’t quite believe it. Your body became a mistake. We clasped each other, toasted Valentina. Her moon-faced daughter had escaped bed again and was pilfering the food. Mortality, Misha said, was a dirty trick. If I close my eyes, I thought, my head will spin away like a top. But if I keep them open, they are near-sightless. Valentina has become a silhouette somewhere to my left. In her daughter, the moon has grown legs and is walking about. I remember hoping that Valentina was less drunk than Misha or me, and that she would wake me in the morning to find the tanker captain. Then I stumbled up to Misha’s flat. In a moment of clarity, before lurching to his divan, I set my alarm clock, while he capsized on to a mattress with his German shepherd growling beside him.