It is the peculiar clarity of Baikal which elicits this. As the transparent and slightly alkaline water deepens, other colours are filtered from its light spectrum, until only blue, the least absorbent, remains. Lying over the fault-line between two tectonic plates, whose separation is gradually dropping its floor lower, the waters plunge to a depth of over one mile: by far the deepest lake on earth. Its statistics stupefy. It harbours nearly one fifth of all the fresh water on the planet: equal to the five Great Lakes of America combined, or to the Baltic Sea. If Baikal were emptied and all the world’s rivers diverted to its basin, they would not fill it within a year.
It is, too, the oldest of all lakes. The sediment of its decomposed organisms goes down for another mile and a half. Steeped in its own ecosystem, it has endured since the Tertiary Era, for over twenty-five million years. Of the 2,000 species inhabiting its depths, 1,200 are unique to it. Many remain, it seems, from the ancient seas that once covered most of Siberia, and in the pure abyss of the lake retain a kind of evolutionary innocence. Sponges and primitive crustaceans survive almost unchanged. Some 250 aquatic plant types endure only here. But common fish which swim in from its rivers disappear into unexplained extinction. Its waters seem to cherish the strange, but kill the ordinary.
In part their intense oxygenation accounts for this. Even in their greatest depths, mysterious tides circulate the oxygen among organisms that thrive nowhere else. And the lake’s purity is intensified by a unique species of epischura crab which cleanses the lake of protoplasm, thinning and distilling it to translucent blue. Nothing superfluous survives. Algae and plankton, bones and cloth, are all devoured. Drowned bodies vanish unrecovered.
You try to imagine this frenzy of self-purification while a solitary hydrofoil hurries you across the serene surface for ten hours to the lake’s end. There are no connecting roads, so this is the only way. In front of you Baikal curves south-westward for four hundred miles–the distance from Prague to Milan–and only in Siberia could its immensity seem lost. Fifty miles away, on the far shore, the mountains move in a grey-white shadow-play, but the boat hugs the western bank. Often the cliffs rise sheer for miles, scuffed with clinging trees, like a worn-out pelt. Sometimes they unfurl in promontories of schist and basalt. Forest spills from their defiles.
Only a few fishermen’s shacks survive in their shadow. Every fifty miles or so a motor-boat filled with red-faced giants in waterproofs and muskrat hats roars up to starboard and hurls on deck some barrels of omul, already gutted, for sale in the south; and the crew tosses out thirty or forty empty barrels astern for them to fill next time.
The omul is the lake’s staple fish: a delicately flavoured relative of the salmon. When it is hauled up, it emits a sharp cry. It spawns upriver, but returns in November, before Baikal freezes; in spring its newly hatched young are swept down into the lake, where their parents are waiting to eat them.
Baikal seems to breed such strangeness. In its shallows a grain-sized crustacean called the ‘Baikal horse’ inexplicably clutches two stones, as if for ballast. Farther out, 500-pound sturgeons take two decades to reach maturity and carry up to 20 pounds of caviar each. Minute, red-eyed gammarid shrimps live a mile down, sometimes packed 25,000 to the square yard, fondling the dark with preposterously long antennae. They share these deeps with the fatty golianka–some so translucent that you can read a book through them. The female is viviparous, giving birth to 2,000 ready-swimming young, and after birth may float dead to the surface. But once out of the cold and pressurised deep, her body explodes or simply melts away, leaving a pool of oil and an airy backbone, rich in Vitamin A. The Buryats once used the oil for their lamps.
Only birds commute out of this closed world. In autumn, geese, cranes, swans and a host of waders congregate in its marshes, and migrate south. Tens of thousands of ducks winter in its snowdrifts. And at some prehistoric time the ancestors of the little nerpa seal swam up the Yenisei and Angara rivers, it seems, and stranded their descendants here–now 60,000 strong–to become the only freshwater seals.
By noon the far shore has misted away, and as the hydrofoil enters the channel between the western bank and the long, volcanic island of Olkhon, you are sailing over silk. It is the last voyage of the year, and the boat seems almost empty. The island is bitter and rainless: an ancient stronghold of shamanism. The Evenk knew that the sea-god Dianda lived there, and the Buryats peopled it with an evil spirit, the voice of its seismic groaning. The shores are unloosened even here, without rock or weed, and leak out only a salt or mineral trickle. Olkhon is in fact a mile-high underwater mountain, and you are sailing over the lake’s abyss.
It is rarely so tranquil. Every few months Baikal shakes. All natives feared and worshipped it. The lake was a divinity, and perhaps an explanation. It was both benign and evil, and they were born from its waters.
In 1861 an earth tremor set church bells ringing along the shores, and flung its waters eastward, creating an instant region of fissures and geysers, and drowning 1,300 people. For much of the year the surface is tormented by violent winds. (Baikalskoe’s cemetery is full of young fishermen.) The western sarma springs up out of nowhere, pulling the water into misty walls under a pall of dark. With hurricane force it pitches sheep and houses over the cliffs, and ices fishing-boats in freezing rain before sinking them.
Only winter brings a kind of peace. Then the lake freezes so solid that it becomes a lorry road. But without warning, during sharp temperature changes, a six-foot crack may open underfoot and streak for up to eighteen miles across the ice, pulling down trucks and bulldozers to join the tea-caravans of Bactrian camels engulfed a century back.
Beyond Olkhon, the way opens over a plain of ruffled blue, and the snow-mountains have gone. A few settlements appear, and rain. Here at the lake’s southern end, where a giant paper mill spreads and the Selenga river carries down effluent even from Mongolia, there lingers the threat of pollution. As long ago as the 1960s, when the factory’s cellulose waste began destroying the epischura, an infant environmental movement began. The salvation of Baikal became its flagship. The water-level had already risen behind the newly built Irkutsk dam, destroying the shallow feeding-grounds of omul, and bird-life was declining. The protesters–the Siberian novelist Valentin Rasputin among them–fought a war against a shifty and irresolute bureaucracy. Baikal became more than itself. As the Soviet empire crumbled, it transformed into the mystic heart of a beleaguered Russia. In one heady triumph, huge filtration systems were fitted to the two pulp and paper plants on the lake and up the Selenga. But the river still carries down urban waste with nitrates from the farmed soil, and the paper plants (according to late reports) still leak into this primordial frailty of sea.
More than 300 rivers and streams fall into Baikal, but only one flows out: the fast-flowing Angara. Past Port Baikal, declined under its cliffs to a station for old ferries, the boat rides the river to the drop of the Irkutsk dam, and makes landfall beside it.
Weeks of visual deprivation turn Irkutsk glamorous. What would I be feeling, I briefly wonder, if I came upon it in Umbria or Castile or New England? Futile questions. It is in Siberia. Its architectural variety and charm, its modest size (little more than half a million inhabitants) and some elusive grace, lend it an old intimacy. Once it was called ‘the Paris of Siberia’, and I walk it in leisurely euphoria: past the graceful 200-year-old White House of the governor-general of East Siberia (now a library); down the long axis of Marx Street; past the Opera House and the mansions built by exiled aristocrats and jumped-up gold merchants; and on down Lenin Street to the towers and crosses of restored churches, and at last the embracing bend of the Angara river.
Here the 300-year-old Church of Our Saviour sails like a clumsy battleship over parklands. Its six-storeyed bell-tower and eccentric whitewashed sanctuary, clotted with rustic decoration, now enclose an ethnic museum; but outside its apse, the Baptism of Christ and the canonisation of St Innokent, the first Bishop of Siberia, cover the wall in fad
ed murals; while alongside, a crowd of frescoed Buryats are undergoing mass baptism in a pool. Just to the east, above the onion domes and dunce-cap spires of the Epiphany Cathedral, a host of fretted crosses announce reconsecration.
Irkutsk grew up in a mood of rough enterprise. It was founded by Cossacks in 1652 as a garrison-town against the Buryats, but it straddled the burgeoning trade-route between Russia and China. Southward through Mongolia towards Peking went gold, sable pelts and mammoth ivory; northward into Russia came tea, silks and porcelain. The nineteenth century saw the discovery of gold and the intrusion of convicts: Irkutsk became a hub of the czarist prison empire. Small-time traders made suddenly good, peasants and ex-convicts struck lucky in the gold-fields, filled the town with turbulence and possibility. Grand boulevards swept across the boardwalks of mud-clogged lanes, fetid with pigs and open sewers, where palaces might replace hutches overnight. Sturdy, characterful old millionaires walked about in peasant dress. (One found his four-poster bed too beautiful to use. ‘I sleep under it,’ he said.) People’s speech was touched by an antiquated civility long gone from St Petersburg, full of affectionate, slangy diminutives. Parvenus turned themselves into tinsel aristocrats, then lost their fortunes gambling in a week.
A night-life of merriment and debauchery was sharpened by rampant crime. Fur traders and mining concessionaires crammed the vaudevilles and restaurants, or haunted the drinking-dens and gaming tables. Irkutsk became the murder capital of Russia. No day passed without one; sometimes there were over 200 in a month. The nights were bedevilled by professional garrotters; and sledgers would gallop out in blizzards to lasso lone pedestrians and murder them up side-alleys. Nobody interfered. (Poking your nose into others’ business was not sibirski.) The police were helpless. Householders would routinely fire a warning salvo from their bedroom windows before retiring.
In 1879 a spark in someone’s hay-loft started a fire which wiped out three-quarters of the town. Within a few years it was rebuilt, more handsome in brick and stone. It bloomed into a proud paradox. Old-fashioned, pretentious, opulent, squalid, cultivated –it was starting to confuse its visitors. All but the most jaded or sophisticated were surprised by its magnificence: by the libraries and picture galleries in the handful of finest houses; by the endowment of hospitals and schools; by the balls ablaze with military decorations, Paris fashions and regimental bands playing in the galleries. Upper-class Siberians were starting to commute between their Irkutsk palaces and St Petersburg.
But other travellers reported little but indolence and social pretension. It was bon ton, apparently, to have your wardrobe laundered in London, even though you lost sight of it for a year. And the galas, some said, were stereotyped, provincial affairs, attended by the same crowd: the governor and administrative officials, some rich civilians, army officers, and a few classy political exiles.
The merchants, meanwhile, had become a powerful, homemade aristocracy. They financed exploration and sometimes swayed policy under a near-independent governor. And the influx of cultured exiles–especially the 1825 revolutionary Decembrists, and Poles after their failed 1863 uprising–had brought a charge of gentler energies. Gradually the drawing-room pianos were beginning to tinkle, and the library books to be read. After the street-fighting and fires of the Revolution, the remains of these libraries were picked out of the frost and gutters by furtive bibliophiles. Along with charred liturgies donated by old women who had saved them from churches, their skeletal collections now occupy the bookshelves of obscure municipal archives, with the names of half-remembered families on discoloured labels beneath: Yagin, Kazanzevy, Smirdin….
Splendour and rusticity still mingle in the street facades, along with outbursts of pomposity and fuss. I gaze at the rare beauty of stone instead of concrete, comforted by buildings older than myself or than the century, the classical orders trying for grace again. Here and there some playfulness or barbarism erupts in swagged pilasters or columns run amok. But they do not seem to matter. I go down streets where wooden mansions are sunk to their windows in the earth, or mount in tipsy storeys to preposterously scalloped friezes: the homes of peasant princes.
Their gaiety or pride overlaps into the streets. Young women are promenading arm-in-arm again, irregularly beautiful in their shiny tights and lace-up boots. The parks are full of students. Perhaps it is my illusion, but poverty here seems more gently worn, the people more integrated, less transient. They say they inhabit the jewel of Siberia.
Across a tributary of the Angara the white walls of the Znamensky Monastery spread under turquoise domes. Its garden was awash with hollyhocks and sunflowers, and the graves of Decembrists lay lapped in marguerites. Beside them I found a young priest receiving his flock. Standing frail in his black cassock, his black hair tied back from a black beard, he whispered consolation to men twice his age, and from time to time a nun would kneel to kiss his casually proffered hand.
The monastery had just been restored, he said, and out of a sickened world the faithful were returning. He himself was the son of an ardent Communist father, but his mother had been a Christian. He spoke easily of this, while his supplicants drifted away. ‘She was half French and half Bessarabian. Even when I was little she took me to church. I remember her singing….’ His eyes swam over the graves beside us, as if she were dead (but I did not ask). ‘And my father’s Communism, I believed in that too. It was only as a conscript in the army that I lost my Communism. In the army men get very close, you know, talk very intimately….’
It had created its own brotherhood, I supposed, its own iconoclasm. ‘So you were left with your mother’s faith.’
‘No, that had already faded. But it was in the army that I began to feel my sin.’
I said hesitantly: ‘In what way?’
‘In every way. In my work, in my friendships, in my heart.’ He looked suddenly bashful: swimming eyes and girlishly parted hair. ‘The army can be cruel, you see, very rough. Drinking, swearing…and this terrible weight of sin grew in me. That is how I really came to God. Through my guilt.’
In the church, among a glimmering cluster of shrines, he bowed and crossed himself in a sustained fever of submission. An undergrowth of nuns–black cowls, black box-hats–pressed their lips to his hands, sometimes dropped to their knees, while I stood uneasily beside him. The old, nest-like Orthodox comfort intensified around us: a soft blaze of candles dimming the brightness of restoration, kindling the gaze of salvaged icons, gilding the iconostasis where an old woman was kissing her favourite saints (Surely they’re listening? Surely they understand?). And beyond this the doors of the sanctuary hung closed on eternal mystery, and from somewhere rose the antiphonal yearning of a choir.
We arrived in front of a casket as big as an altar. Above it hung a full-length icon of St Innokent, the miracle-working Siberian missionary who attempted the conversion of China before returning to die here in 1731. In memory, at least, he looked darkly benevolent, robed and crowned in cream and gold and clutching a pastoral stave. For almost two hundred years he had rested in peace, his body incorruptible, healing pilgrims from his silver sarcophagus in a monastery on the far side of the Angara.
‘Then the Communists took him away,’ said the priest. ‘In 1921 they destroyed that monastery and stole his casket–a beautiful thing–and buried him somewhere in Yaroslavl. But it was documented where he lay, and after perestroika he was dug up again and brought here. And his body uncorrupted! Just like yours and mine! The skin! The flesh!’ He was gazing at the sarcophagus. In the dimness his lemony skin shone creaseless, like a boy’s. ‘Still he can heal anything!’
Even as he spoke, a carpet was rolled out and the gilt lid levered back from a glass panel above the saint. In a swirl of black calico, nuns and acolytes were tumbling to their knees before it. ‘Come,’ said the priest. ‘Look.’
I approached with mistrust, my boots squeaking.
But what lay in the silver-lined coffin I could not tell. A pair of gloved hands was knotted over a s
well of vestments, and above them a mitre bulged like a jewelled onion from the white cloth covering someone’s face.
The priest was whispering close. ‘We can’t show his face, because the light would hurt it. But in December, on his name day, it is revealed…perfect!’
‘Will he stay here?’ I felt vaguely cheated.
‘I don’t know. He might be moved to the cathedral when it’s restored. But I think things will end before that.’
‘What things?’
‘All things.’ He became urgent. There was something I must understand, he said. ‘There’s going to be a war, a cataclysmic war. The saint has said so.’
‘When?’
‘Before his death, he declared it. That on the Last Day the world would be consumed in conflict. I know that it will be between Russia and China. The Chinese are godless, they have a bigger army than we do, they are hungry for land. We will all die by this.’
‘And America?’
‘America is godless. Nothing good can come from there. Only videos and that music, nakedness, AIDS, everything. America will not help us.’ His face had loosened and disintegrated in its fervour, and suddenly to my bewilderment I recognised there the dissolute conscript. The world was crumbling away, he said. He found virtue only in the old, the distant past. The present was licentious, the future unspeakable. He rambled about the ages of Churches–the Armenian, the Ethiopian. The older they were, the better. Beside Russia, he claimed obscurely, the only hope was Spain. Yet Rome was anathema to him; America was anathema; Moscow had become hellfire; Islam was a deformity; and most terrible of all, just to the south, seethed the soulless multitudes of China, who had not listened to St Innokent. From time to time, when the chant of a choir underscored his jeremiads, or he dropped into harrowed silence, I would picture a small boy standing beneath his mother, fluting ‘Oh Lord forgive me’, while back at home his father growled or drank, or perhaps laughed.
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