For the moment, eased by the laughter around me, I gave up thinking about it. But that night I wondered how many more ticks were nestling in the creases of my clothing or body. Lying on my bunk, I began to feel them all over me, needling and burrowing. I imagined them wherever I itched. It was cold, but I started to sweat. The ticks dropped into my dreams. At every station the engine sighed to an unnerving silence, and I woke up. Then night passengers would come barging in under gargantuan packages, gasping and dragging things.
At last I locked myself in the lavatory and dampened my hair from a water-bottle. Then I scrutinised my scalp in a shaving-mirror, hunting for the tail of a buried tick. It would look like a protruding sunflower seed. After half an hour I transferred the inspection to my neck and shoulders. If I glimpsed a quivering tail, I had read, paraffin or salt was the answer. But by now people were battering on the lavatory door; I found nothing; and two hours later dawn was breaking over a new land.
A wash of cloud and stunted pines, their roots twisted about the scree, distilled the view to a Japanese painting, where a faint moon was printed on the sky. Grey rock had broken loose from the forest, and lifted to snow-lit peaks. Soon we were easing downhill. All across the horizon, a curtain of fanged mountains–brilliant and irregular–was glittering above the deepest lake on earth.
Severobaikalsk was built in virgin forest for railway workers at the northern tip of Lake Baikal. Its wooden settlement is still there, designed as a temporary town before the BAM builders could move into apartments. But the money dried up. The flat-blocks stopped in mid-construction. Here and there they wait in prefabricated sections, or stand half-finished like forgotten houses of cards. Yet the town remains more handsome than most, austere in its incompletion, a little rural.
A widower and his two sons lived in the wooden suburb. Quiet, preoccupied men, they ran treks into the hinterland and sometimes offered travellers rooms. The father, an engineer, had suffered a stroke; the sons were still at university. We settled down to talk about expeditions along the lake. The younger son, Shamil, was longing to go.
Then their door burst open and in strode two police officials. One was a slovenly officer in uniform, the other a stone-faced woman who called herself the Passport Office. I felt a chill of alarm blowing in from Brezhnev’s time. The Passport Office yelled: ‘Is there an American living here?’ She glared at me. ‘Is there an American?’ She demanded to see my papers, then cited special laws in this province, Buryatia, requiring me to register at my first hotel. ‘Where are you staying?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t chosen.’
‘You don’t know! Why don’t you know?’
‘I’ve only just arrived. I haven’t chosen.’ This word became tormenting to her, I could tell. I stressed it angrily.
‘Are you staying with these people then?’
I sensed this infringed some rule. ‘No.’
‘Why is your visa incomplete?’
‘It isn’t incomplete. It’s a business visa. I don’t have to have Severobaikalsk on it. And I don’t have to register anywhere for three days.’
‘You’re in Buryatia now! Our laws supersede those Moscow ones. They are for your own protection. In order that you don’t get lost.’
It was the old, spurious reason for supervision: the self-fulfilling notion that nobody, nothing, could survive without control.
Shamil said: ‘Those rules are idiotic. If a traveller comes and camps by the lake, how does he register? What is his address? How can you be responsible for him?’
His brother added: ‘And how would you know? And why should you? What’s the point?’
The Passport Office balked, then demanded Shamil’s passport. He tossed it at her. His father reprimanded her for her inhospitality in a mewing lecture, while the elder son went on eating shashlik contemptuously from a bowl, standing in front of the policeman with calculated unconcern. One of the officer’s insignia was unstitching from his shoulder.
The woman turned to Shamil. ‘You have a Novosibirsk passport! You should register!’
Shamil’s face was lumpy with adolescent spots and he wore thick glasses. He took these off as if he was tired of her. He had an awkward charm. ‘I’m a student in Novosibirsk,’ he said, as if talking to a child. ‘But this is my home. I’ve lived here all my life. I don’t have to register to be at home.’
By now I too had lost any fear of them. They appeared only ridiculous: the pantingly didactic woman and the doltish officer with his hat tilted back on his crew-cut head. I was starting to feel a bitter liberation, as if past humiliations were being avenged: the remembered torment of Russian friends. This anger was heady, and might go too far. These, after all, were only pawns. And now the policeman shambled out of the door, demoralised.
The woman tried to save some pride. ‘I demand that you register tomorrow,’ she said half-heartedly. ‘We need three dollars and two passport photographs.’ Her pen hung over her note-pad. ‘What’s your name again?’
She had trouble with the ‘Th’, as Russians do, and I did not resolve it for her. The youths went on bantering and confusing her. Their father turned his back. When at last she left, she apologised for disturbing us, with no glint of a smile.
‘Don’t you register!’ the brothers chorused. ‘It’s her problem. It’s people like that who make life impossible. Anyway, how did she know you were here?’
‘I don’t know. I came by taxi.’
‘An informer. What was the driver like?’
But I could remember only a shapeless Ukrainian, and a silver skeleton which dangled from his dashboard. ‘I thought Stalin was dead.’
‘He’s drowning in papers and rules,’ Shamil said. ‘That’s typical of this place. Here we were, about to go into the mountains, and these bastards arrive….’
We did drive into the mountains, all the same. Across bridges which we firmed up with logs, across scuttling streams in a temperature below freezing, we reached the snow-line. A military camp stood abandoned except for one bored guard watching a railway tunnel. A gang of other soldiers, toiling to repair an embankment, tried to flag us down for cigarettes. We tramped to the top of a pass against a battering wind, until we saw the snow-peaks.
Shamil’s nose and eyes were streaming, but he did not notice. ‘Yes, it’s beautiful, but it isn’t enough. If you want a life, you have to get out of here. Out of Russia altogether. Otherwise you’re caught in this bureaucracy. If you can’t make use of it, or understand its way of thinking, you sink. So you have to be like a spider. That’s how businessmen are here. Like spiders. They diversify, they know how to make contacts, give out gifts. They have to be flexible, because the rules are always changing. They spend half their energy avoiding them. But at heart nothing changes at all.’
He was starting to shiver. The wind burnt our faces. ‘Young people don’t feel connected with this country, because its system isn’t ours. It’s an old people’s system. It comes from another time. So we’ll go to America, or anywhere that will free us. It’s not that we don’t love Russia, it’s just that we have to live properly. We’re young men born into an old man’s world.’
I took a bus at dawn along the lake’s edge, then walked up valleys towards a ruined Stalinist labour-camp. The forest shed a sunless quiet. There was no wind. But the falling of the birch leaves sent up a collective, near-silent murmur. Their trees made golden columns against the mountains. Sometimes I pushed across a pulpy undergrowth of rotted trunks, whortleberries, blackened fungi, but emerged always into this melancholy descent of leaves–millions of them–drifting through the aisles of the forest. Then I entered a defile where pines had lost their grip in an avalanche of lichened scree. A shrike flew silent between the slopes.
The path died through the camp’s gates. One of its posts had crashed across the way, the other was reeling in a thicket of willows. A stream lisped in the glade below. A mist of birch leaves covered everything. The log barracks had been dug into the ground against the cold, and
their walls shored up with rocks and timbers for roofs now crashed in. Their doors and windows made ghostly frames on the undergrowth. Sixty years of forest had turned this Gulag to an opera-set, cruelly idyllic. Its ruins spread tree-sown above the river. Hell had been landscaped. I climbed about it on soft leaves. A watch-tower had collapsed in the shadows.
This had been a camp for the mining of mica, once used as insulation, and its prisoners had been taken away before the Second World War, when an artificial substitute was found. It had been abandoned as it stood. Wooden ore-buckets, tossed among the rocks, still traced the line of an overhead cableway. Their hasps and bands were intact, and one of the cramp-irons clanked grimly at my touch.
I noticed something silvery under my feet, and dug my hand into the earth. It came up clutching a translucent mass of flakes. For a second I gazed at them uncomprehending. They slithered through my fingers: mica. When I held the slivers to the sky, they separated like tissue-paper. The trees above their waste-tip already stood 40 feet tall.
I followed their trail up a slope and stumbled on the mouth of the mine. It opened in a near-vertical chasm, where gangway timbers had loosened and plunged into the flooded pit. Iron-bound ore-boxes and winches littered the entrance, one still attached to its tackle and holding a glinting sediment. I looked down 30 feet at a coppery pool and the start of passageways. I could hear water dripping. Gingerly I clambered down the pit-side, clinging to the timbers for as far as I could go. The beams, and the whole rock-face, glistened with a dust of mica. Then the galleries vanished underwater.
I returned through the camp feeling a resurrected unease. A cold wind was sifting through its ruin. Its time seemed neither yesterday nor yet in any reconciled past. It had not been destroyed in shame, but left to decay. Why, I wondered, was there so little Russian outrage at the Gulag? Why did its perpetrators live on unpunished? I became dogged by the idea of a helpless national collusion, in which everyone was guilty, everyone innocent. The iron bucket-handles still moved in their sockets.
Months later, after I had returned to London, some silver flakes spilt from my pockets on to the floor, and glittered strangely.
Across the lake at evening–twenty-five miles over placid water–the ranges of Barguzin began. From this northern end the mountains curved south-west under a parapet of frozen clouds, until the haze thickened and they withdrew to a disembodied pallor floating above the lake.
As I stood there a taxi pulled out from a lane, as if it had been waiting for me, and I climbed gratefully in. Then I saw the silver skeleton dancing from its dashboard. I was looking into the heavy features of the Ukrainian informer. Consciously I recomposed my face, smoothing away anger and a tinge of alarm. But beside him sat a Buryat friend–one of the Mongol people from whom the province is named–and on the roof was his newly tarred canoe.
They were on an outing, the driver said, but I noted him now: a burly man whose face, I thought, turned slowly sympathetic around a wedge of grey moustache and pale eyes. Beside him the Buryat glittered with urgency. His black gaze seemed to see only short-distance, but with a passion to pin down, penetrate. Some terrible brightness was in him. His questions stampeded out. Where was I from? How much did I earn? A month or a year? Had England ever had a Bolshevik revolution? What of Margaret Thatcher? Of Churchill, Princess Diana, Sherlock Holmes?
The newly caulked canoe was off-loaded in front of his house and ramshackle garden, and I was enticed in to drink tea, together with the Ukrainian and a young trapper carrying muskrat skins. We hung up our coats on elk horns in the hall. The tea became wine, the wine became vodka. The Buryat sprinkled a handful of both over the table. ‘That’s for God!’ He told me of a shamanistic shrine where he went each year to petition fortune for his family and himself. ‘My wife is Buddhist–she doesn’t go. But I stand and ask for these things to come from the sky. For a blessing.’ He couldn’t explain it, he said, he hadn’t thought about it. But he opened his palms to the ceiling and said almost angrily–because he thought I did not understand: ‘From the open sky! From the sky where God is!’
The wine washed down sausage and black bread. ‘That’s all we have now,’ he said. ‘I used to be a machine-operator, but now I only trade in muskrat skins.’
The trapper smiled shyly: a glint of teeth between polished cheeks. He came from the most ancient native group, the Tungus-speaking Evenk, scattered between the Yenisei and the Pacific. He seemed to be seated lower than the rest of us, but in fact his thick body was retracted on its stool, and he was tense with bashfulness. He hunted squirrel and the rare sable, he said, but above all muskrat–and a pile of roan skins glistened under his stool. They were gutted whole, like long gloves, with two pinpricks where their eyes had been. ‘I lay traps at night,’ he said. ‘Where their trails are. I see their trails.’
‘He hunts elk too,’ the Buryat said. ‘Do you hunt elk in England? And are there sables? No? No?’ His manic sparkle swept over me again. ‘How much is an English canoe? How much is a house?’
But slowly the confusions of choice, the perplexities of forestry and mortgages, the absence of omul-fishing in the Thames, began to depress him. His brightness leaked away. He said: ‘I suppose you find us very poor?’
‘There are poor in England.’
‘But you say the government gives to the unemployed.’
‘Family networks aren’t so strong with us,’ I said.
‘How can that be?’
From time to time the Ukrainian, perched ponderously beside me, offered insights into our differences, denied the existence of Sherlock Holmes and revised my estimates of Western salaries upward, to everyone’s alarm and wonder. His was a disconcerting presence. I imagined his informer’s gaze or mind always on me, so that everything I said became suddenly suspect or odd. When I asked the Evenk about the price of muskrat skins, I imagined the Ukrainian thinking: this is industrial espionage on the fur trade. If I commiserated with the Buryat on his lack of work, the secret report might read: ‘He is fomenting disaffection among the unemployed.’ I knocked back another vodka. This way paranoia lay.
When he drove me back at last into Severobaikalsk he enquired, as I expected, where I was staying. (Shamil’s family had lent me an illicit flat.) I mumbled forgetfully. Then I asked him to drop me off in the town centre, and he did so without protest. Perhaps he understood. He wished me well, and refused any taxi money. We were on holiday, he said. I even imagined, in his parting handshake, a tinge of regret.
In late September, in the last mellow days called Lady’s Summer, the road through the hills to the village of Baikalskoe blazed with changing forest. This was the fine-poised moment before the first cold wind would tear the colours down. The sunlight shone cleansed and delicate. The undergrowth spread like a forest fire, its berries outrageously crimson or blue, and the willows hung a gold confetti.
I hitch-hiked to a pass above the lake shore. From here, I hoped, I could look down on the City of the Sun in its bay. It should be complete by now. Solar-powered and unpolluting, its forty-five huts had been designed in sympathy with elusive psychic charges. Their layout–following the theories of Elena Roerich, wife of the mystic painter–would lend power and equilibrium to those living there, and the commune’s founder, a local industrialist, had hailed their ‘sacred geometry’ as the cure for Russia’s ills. All the country’s future cities, he said, would follow in their wake. So the commune would bask in the cosmic waves identified by the Academician. It would be grouped around something called a centre for cultural consciousness, where ecology would be studied like mystic theology. It would save Russia and harmonise the world. In the post-Communist void, it seemed, God was a cosmic flux.
At the head of the pass, where the road turned inland, I found a straggle of pilgrims. Hanging above the bay–sacred to shamanism–a picnic pavilion and even a road sign were dripping with prayer-rags. Vodka bottles, coins, cigarettes, rouble notes and bunches of currants had been laid along the cliff-edge. The tree branches tre
mbled with votive ribbons, and their trunks had turned to maypoles.
I gazed down on a gulf of blue and forest-bronze. Beyond it the headlands pointed to flocks of islands on glassy water, or withdrew to a gleam of lakes. But of Sun City, the blueprint for a redeeming future, there was no sign.
I waited there, dithering between relief and regret, but the pilgrims knew nothing about this lost salvation. They had come for the view’s holiness. But that evening Shamil’s brother said: ‘Oh, that Sun City! Its founder took to the Orthodox Church. It was never built. That’s happening all over Russia now. Young people trying to escape the old mess, starting some farming sect or commune in the woods. But they don’t come to anything. It seems we Russians have either to leave for the forest or go to America!’
So I tramped along a bay untouched by any later sanctity, and reached Baikalskoe five hours later: a fishing-village where the road ended. Banked steep above the water and ringed by snow-mountains, it had been plucked from a Russian fairy-tale. The tallest building was its rebuilt church, a green-turreted sanctuary on a mound above the harbour, and the filigreed window-frames, shutters and eaves of its cottages were all merry in peasant blues and reds, like cuckoo-clocks. They looked at once quaintly old and spanking new. Cattle drank at the shoreline, and high-prowed black fishing-boats slept in the marshes.
I climbed a bluff high above the lake, to an old place of Evenk sacrifice. Beneath me Lake Baikal became an ocean. Its headlands multiplied to the south, fainter and fainter, while around me the whole northern curve of its water spread kingfisher-blue, edged by a phantasmal range of mountains, sometimes a mile high. All colour, from here, had refined to this drenching blue–even the blue-tinged white of clouds–as if blue must be the colour to which all others purified in time.
In Siberia Page 17