In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  ‘Nikolai, it’s too long ago to remember!’ But I had been looking for patterns, of course. I wanted their security. I wanted some unity or shape to human diversity. But instead this land had become diffused and unexpected as I travelled it. Wherever I stopped appeared untypical, as if the essential Siberia could exist only in my absence, and I could not answer Nikolai at all.

  ‘I didn’t expect anywhere as bad as here.’

  ‘This is extreme.’

  Perhaps Siberia’s essence was wilderness, I thought idly, and human witness destroyed it, like those light particles which the act of observation changes. So I was reduced to knowing it by glancing detail, snatches of talk, the texture of his fingernails.

  ‘And how did you land up here?’ I asked. I had longed to know this. I was conscious of heroising him, as if he had chosen this post from duty; but I feared some sadder reason, and had recoiled from asking him until now.

  But he kept his clarity, even grinned. ‘Well, at the time the Soviet Union split up I was an army doctor in Kazakhstan. That’s where I was born. In 1992 my unit was disbanded and I decided to become a civilian. I wanted my sons to attend good institutions, so I had to move to Russia, get Russian citizenship. And this was where I got offered.’ Then his pride welled up. ‘Now my elder son is in the naval college in St Petersburg! He’s doing fine. He’s even entertained British naval officers. My son with the Royal Navy!’

  So the boy was in still-resplendent St Petersburg, while his father eked out his life in a Siberian village, burning with pride. Nikolai had sacrificed himself for his children.

  I said: ‘How long might you be here?’

  ‘You have to stay a long time to be useful. You have to know your patients’ history.’ He lifted his chin to the pigeon-holes around us, each stacked with its quota of misery. His beard was salted with grey. ‘I only worry that my eyes are failing. I used to read books for pleasure, but now I can’t afford to.’ He showed me, a little wistfully, a Russian pocket edition of Rudyard Kipling’s poems, which he had loved. ‘I save my eyes for medical treatises now.’

  I felt alarmed for him, and an unfocused sadness. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I think it was the long nights. You see, for five months of winter we scarcely see sunlight here. Families just close themselves away, or fish through holes in the ice. I used to read and study for weeks, often by the light of paraffin lamps. But my eyes hated it.’ He put on his glasses again without self-pity. ‘Now could you just translate?’–pushing a last packet under my eyes: ‘Metoclopramide blocks the action of dopramine, thereby inhibiting prolactin releases….’ ‘Are you sure you’re quite well?’

  The only signs of the herdsman’s former strength are the gnarled hands clenched over his thighs. The swell of his cheekbones drops fiercely to a faltering jawline. He thinks he is eighty-six, but cannot be sure. He is not happy here.

  I stand hesitantly in his room. Its passage is heaped with coal and hung with the antlers of reindeer gathered long ago. He has spent his life with the herds on the far side of the river, but is too weak to sustain that now. The plaster is dribbling from the wattle of his ceiling. His door is locked against drunks.

  He says: ‘Life was hard over there, but it is better than here. I didn’t choose this.’

  Over there, in the end, you could live on the miraculous reindeer: eat even its ears and lips and bowel contents, resist the harshest cold in its skins, turn its bones to implements or tinder, ride it to new pastures. This, said the old man, was how things had always been. The reindeer could endure on its reserves like a camel, and possessed a third lung which kept it warm inside. Even after the Soviets collectivised the herders–a tragedy which ignored native knowledge–his people had migrated with their sledge-drawn tents between the Arctic Sea and the Yenisei hinterland. The reindeer could sniff the edible lichen beneath the ice, and paw it up. But unnoticeably, acid rain was depleting the pastures.

  The Entsy remembers this. Under his frosted scalp his face has shrunk to a gremlin watchfulness. He remembers the herds withering away.

  I have left his door open, and now a drunk Russian barges in and demands a cigarette and a glass of vodka. The old man has neither. The youth curses the prices in Dudinka and the fucking Yenisei and a fucking sturgeon that got away, and he leaves. The Entsy has stayed stoical, as if his eyes were retracted into his skull. Above his bed hangs a pair of thigh-length reindeer boots: sheaths of glistening topaz stripes. They shine like an heirloom. But he wears a vinyl jerkin and rubber shoes now, and picks at a salted omul.

  ‘You see how it is. That’s what happens here. These people.’ His only son died of a heart-attack in the tundra, he says. His wife is dead. (For the first time one of his hands moves: it gestures to the west.) But it is better over there, he remembers, and he wants to cross back over the river.

  Beyond the village the tundra spread. Its only trees were stunted larches, which showered down a golden dust of needles at my touch. Its beauty was all underfoot, in a quilt of mosses, heathers, lichens, fungi. In late September–in this moment before snow–they shone in a patina of amber and scarlet. The wind scarcely stirred them. A fruiting of red and indigo currants–bilberries, blueberries, cranberries–hung from stems which were turning ruby, and between them, among lichens unknown to me, the reindeer moss lifted minute, tangled fronds. Half the textures were unexpected. Solid-seeming hummocks gave way to spongy cushions, or sank into bog, while under my feet the moist-looking reindeer moss crackled like wood-shavings.

  This wilderness girds the Arctic Sea for more than four thousand miles. After the squalor of the village, it spread a cleansing emptiness. I heard only the squeak of small birds and the sieving of wind through the grass. When I lay down I crushed out a lavender fragrance. Everything, I knew, had evolved in response to cold. The sward grew low against polar blizzards. Thrift and saxifrage clung to their dead but protective foliage through the winter. Other plants formed hair or trapped the sunlight in subcutaneous pockets, or refracted it on to their buds with the parabolic discs of their first leaves.

  And because of the permafrost, nothing drained away. I kept slipping into bogs and swamp. Some looked like half-formed pools; mushrooms sprouted in their wells. Others seemed to be old ponds which were transforming to silt-fed clearings. Everywhere lakes broke out in circles and oblongs brimming level with the earth. Their water was auburn, uninhabited, darkly beautiful. Ferns lifted through its surface from a sediment of leaves. They were a little mysterious. Their geometric perfection–formed during the annual contraction and thawing of the ground–still happens unexplained.

  At evening the breaking and dimming of sunlight over the lakes followed me dreamily back to the Yenisei. Clouds of mosquitoes rose and settled on my lips, eyelids, nostrils, their biting reduced to a trickle. I emerged a few miles south of Potalovo.

  By the time I had climbed the intervening hill, the sun was dropping into the river and I found myself among a maze of freestanding galleries. At first I did not understand. They ran on stilts for 100 yards or more, and had half collapsed. Their flimsy doors slammed in the wind. The place seemed deserted. I heard only an odd clicking, as if a multitude of birds were pecking grain somewhere. Then, as I entered one of the corridors, a terrible screaming broke out. From their cramped cages scores of starved, long-bodied dogs were gazing at me and shrieking. The noise was at once piteous and angry: a little human. I was in the ruins of the Arctic fox farm.

  They had lost their wild beauty. Their claws splayed and unhooked painfully over the wire-mesh floor of their cages, and made the unearthly clicking. Their excrement dropped through the mesh on to trays below. They had barely room to turn round. It crossed my mind to release them–all 200 or so–but what would they do? They had known only a few square feet of wire, and impoverished humans needed them. Their heads were unnaturally big on their bodies, and their grey fur was turning white for the winter they would not see.

  I turned back along the gallery through the gauntlet
of their screaming. It followed me down the hill.

  That night I was startled awake. Stepan, drunk, had blundered across the room and grabbed for his bag of belongings on the wall. In the frame of our window, blocking out the stars, the silhouettes of two men were beckoning him away. He lit a nurse’s lamp on the floor, then dithered towards my bed. His ancient head seemed to surmount the body of a stunted youth, its muscles barely slackened around his stomach. His hand extended towards me, rubbing its remaining fingers against his thumb. ‘Money?…money?…’ I closed my eyes. Then he let out a soft ‘Ya-aach!’ and tugged on his pullover, a pair of split trousers, his hat. The faces outside were still pressed against the glass.

  The next moment a nurse rushed in and seized him by the arm. ‘You’ve had enough drink!’ she screamed. ‘You’ve had enough!’ He wrenched himself free, but she seized him again and he collapsed on to his bed and started to sing in a plaintive alto, like a woman. The faces vanished from the window. For a long time I lay trying to sleep, listening to the whimpering of the awakened child, while Stepan’s singing faded away.

  In the dawn I went out to escape him, past the shuttered houses and growling kennels, to the river. A steamer was expected at noon, and I was hoping to leave. Half the day I waited among the thistles and grass on a high foreland, straining my eyes for the shadow of a ship. But the grey flood of the Yenisei suddenly looked hostile, flowing between dead banks, and nothing came. There had been storms upriver, somebody said.

  The richest people in Potalovo are the children. They drive tractors and bulldozers, own houses, sail ships. The fact that all these possessions are wrecked makes no difference. They are a simulacrum of the adult world. So the children keep house in burnt-out cottages, or climb into the cabins of tractors and roam the tundra on vanished wheels. Sometimes they man the bridge of the beached and derelict cargo ship, and steer for the Arctic Sea. Only when they stop being children do they realise that they are inhabiting a world in ruins.

  At the age of twelve or thirteen, said Nikolai, they start to drink.

  He hated the arrival of the boat-shop which plied the river. That afternoon it had opened its hold on a thin range of expensive goods–vodka, above all–and the villagers had sped out in their motor-boats to meet it. In his dim-lit clinic Nikolai looked through the window at the night and circled his arm. ‘Probably this whole settlement is drunk around us at this moment. Almost everyone.’

  He dreaded the monthly arrival of pensions. ‘Single parents get an allowance for each child, so a man with five children and no wife can feel a millionaire! He’ll drink himself sick while the children starve. The women do it too. Everybody. And when the vodka gives out they’ll search for anything. There’s an American machine oil which is bought galore here. Our machines are all broken, of course, but people drink this fluid by the bottle. Within two to three hours they’re asphyxiated. If they get to the hospital I can save them, but they die in their homes or in the streets.’ Then, with the hardiness of necessity, he cheered up. ‘Listen to this, Nikolai!’ He had a Russian book called A Thousand English Jokes which he couldn’t resist sharing. ‘Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Russian and the parrot? Listen….’

  But my mind wandered back to the village, where the life expectation of the Entsy had dropped to forty-five–and half of them died violent deaths. Only Nikolai, with his optimism, his scant equipment and medication, his failing eyesight, saved them from worse.

  ‘And the parrot said…’

  I asked: ‘When will things get better?’

  ‘They’re already better! A few years ago these people couldn’t even drink river water safely. They used to pump it up into a tank, and for years died of dysentery. Nobody knew why. The doctor at that time didn’t realise. Then one summer the tank drained low and they discovered it was revolting. Now they get the water up by tractor, and in winter they gather snow and drink that. Things are better for the first time! Last year was the low point. I think it was the worst we’ll have.’

  So the people of Potalovo, I thought, were going to survive. They were Siberians, after all. They would adapt, cut down, muck in, suffer, wait.

  ‘Last year,’ said Nikolai, ‘weeks would go by and we’d scarcely glimpse a boat. But this year, well, you’ve seen it. Here and there a cargo ship, a tanker. That’s how you know the state of things. By the river.’

  From outside came the crashing of drunks into his vestibule. Nikolai locked his door. ‘I know this lot,’ he said. ‘If I open to them, there’ll be a fight.’ He yelled through the door: ‘Go away! No, I won’t see you! The doctor isn’t here! Come back tomorrow! No! He’s away!’

  The bangs and scrapings faded into the slur of feet over grass. Then silence.

  ‘Listen.’ Nikolai reopened his book. ‘A duke and a duchess are out with their dog….’

  In a window of the children’s ward I catch sight of a man staring at me. His hair flies wild round a wind-burnt face. For a second I imagine him another village drunk. Then I realise it is not a window at all. It is a mirror.

  For three weeks I have not seen myself. Lines slither down the reflection’s cheeks and his eyes are hung with grey crescents. The jaw is ill-shaven and slightly belligerent. Confusedly I try to collate the inner and outer person. I wonder if the mirror is distorting. If it isn’t, something else must be. The face looks anxious now. I feel more kindly to anyone who has spoken to it, even the harshest villager. Then I turn away, disowning it.

  They have lost their traditions, the doctor said, and even in the home of the octogenarian herdsman I found no pagan totems. People’s memory of their nature spirits, and of the old, unapproachable Entsy deity whose son was the god of death, had dimmed away. Nobody any longer knew the oral epics, or the hero Itje, father of the bear and sworn enemy of Christ. The places of sacrifice had been left behind in the reindeer tundra.

  Only in the cemetery–the last bastion of conservatism–the importance of death, I thought, may have kept the past alive. On the morning of my departure I discovered it on a hillside beyond the village, hidden among silver birch trees. The painted crosses and sodden wreaths were all I had expected: a people superficially Christianised. And a few headstones carried the Communist star.

  But as I climbed higher I found other graves where bleached antlers lay. Their bier-sledges rested beside them, ritually broken; and the skulls of reindeer grimaced from the trees. On almost every grave–I saw this now–the offerings of enamel bowls and kettles had been turned upside down and gouged or split. A doll lay on the grave of a child, dismembered.

  When I said farewell to the old herdsman, I asked about this, and it was as I had thought. The offerings, he said, were broken because the afterlife is the opposite of this one. Rivers there flow backwards from the sea. Things turned upside-down here become the right way up over there, and vice versa. Everything whole is broken, and everything broken becomes whole. Otherwise the dead will not find it.

  In that inverted world, I thought, Potalovo will be paradise.

  A motor-boat was waiting to take me to the steamer, and other craft swarmed about it in mid-river, while the owners tried to sell fish. Only the imbecile Banana-skin was steering his boat in a manic daydream, round and round.

  Nikolai stood beside me on the shore with a knot of others. ‘These are a good people at heart,’ he said. ‘I asked around if anybody had anything to give to the Englishman before he left, and look! These are for you!’ He handed me a big plastic bag. It was heavy with omul salmon. It carried with it a surge of reconciling warmth. Yet I felt somehow shamed, and a little stricken. They were useless to me. I stared out at the river, with a tightening throat. Then the motor-boat took me away.

  6

  The Great Lake

  At Tayshet, once a transit-camp for Gulag prisoners, the Trans-Siberian Railway branches south-east, and the long, lonely and disastrously expensive Baikal–Amur Railway drives on two thousand miles to the Pacific. Conceived grandiosely as an artery for op
ening up eastern Siberia, and running far north of the exposed route along the Chinese border, the BAM’s single track traversed a region increasingly impoverished, and it never lived up to hopes.

  But after Potalovo, I travelled it forgivingly. Its bunks overflowed with passengers’ cheap merchandise, and its grimy windows were bolted shut. But I was on the move again. Whenever we crested a rise, the forested hills unravelled beneath us, until the red-gold flare of birch against pine seemed the natural state of half the earth. Once or twice some mammoth industry intruded, and at noon the Bratsk High Dam–once a showpiece of Socialist achievement–rumbled grandly beneath us: on one side a sprawl of lake and factories, on the other the gorge of the Angara river. But always the taiga closed in enormously again, its birch leaves drifting in silence through the massed dark of the conifers.

  The only disturbance on the train was caused by me. I felt something move in my hair, and as I ruffled it, three or four squat black spiders dropped out. I had read that the Ixodes tick, which carries encephalitis, fades from the taiga in June, but I was wrong. ‘Dangerous! Dangerous!’ cried the woman opposite me. She drilled the fingernails of one hand into her forearm. ‘They dig themselves in. They murder you!’ I gaped at them appalled. These ticks, I knew, could kill or cripple you for life, paralysing your neck and limbs. You are racked by atrocious headaches. But the woman was laughing–everybody in our compartment was laughing–as we trampled on them casually while they dispersed over the floor.

  I thought back. I had just flown south from the grim nickel town of Norilsk, and near Krasnoyarsk, early that morning, I had walked innocently into broad-leaved forest. There, I knew, the ticks drop from the trees on to anything warm-blooded (even an Englishman) and might burrow fatally beneath the skin. Up to midsummer Russians only walk the taiga dressed in double layers of clothing.