Beneath their kitchen a trapdoor opened on a cellar just above permafrost level. From floor to ceiling it was stacked with rank on rank of bottled fruits and vegetables: red and purple currants gathered in the taiga, raspberries and strawberries, salads, gherkins, mushrooms (the finest in Russia grew here, they said), boxes of carrots preserved in sand, crates of the once-anathematised potatoes–all their own produce. Winter, they said, could last deep into May.
We roamed about their acre of garden, sniffing tomatoes and picking cucumbers in the greenhouse, and lifted the snow-clogged lids from hives to watch the bees crowding their cells. Once we raised water by one of the spindly hoists which dipped and rose like aquatic birds from wells all over the village. Sergei even had a carpenter’s workshop, and a shed full of farm utensils. But the old wood ploughs had all been destroyed in Stalin’s day, he said, and the taboo on iron broken. From time to time, as if reassessing things, he would say simply: ‘Well, that’s how we live, that’s how we live.’
All day they lavished meals on me: dumplings, beef stew, currant juice and fresh raspberry jam. Before and after each feast they disappeared into the adjoining room, where I glimpsed them bowing to their icons, crossing themselves over and over with their fingers in order, in an extravagant, secret grace.
These icons had been given by their parents at their wedding: antique, lovely things, each older than the Schism. They glowed on their shelf in vermilions and polished gold. An image of God the Father fulminated just above the electric meter.
‘But some have been stolen,’ Sergei said. ‘We’ve been burgled four times. Even the church, ransacked. These robbers come from Ulan Ude, not from here. Nobody here would do that.’
I had forgotten that people like Sergei and Galina existed. They seemed to belong in an older, half-mythic Siberia, now drowned under immigration. ‘This is the place to be!’ he said. ‘By December the snow reaches waist-high and the temperature can drop to -50°F. But the air is wonderful–very fresh and still–and the snow stays pure white. You never see that polluted look you get in western Russia. My wife comes from an Old Believer family in the Urals and there, she says, people were dying young because of radiation, and the river water was lethal. But not here! This is a beautiful land!’ It was not nature that had made Siberia Hell, he said. It was man.
I thought of his stolen icons, and mentioned those of Aleksei. But he burst out laughing. ‘Oh Aleksei Akilovich! I know him! He’s a drunk. He can hardly read. I don’t know if he was burgled or not, with all those watch-dogs. I think actually he’s a little mad.’ He twirled his forefinger in his ear. ‘He used to live in the woods and sell cedar-cones. And now he does anything.’
For hours Sergei took me round the village visiting friends. ‘Nobody knows when the Last Day will come but everyone here is prepared for it. People have made provision–food, clothes–because it will be preceded by a fearful night,’ he said. ‘That’s how we live.’
I remembered his brimming cellar, which I had thought stocked merely against the winter; but he and Galina had a more terrible winter in view. My mind flitted back to my empty London kitchen. I felt vaguely exposed.
In each house we visited the same scene greeted us: the scrupulous cleanliness, a whiff of candle-wax, bed-pillows mounded under a muslin veil, the brick stoves already warming, and always the shelf of icons to which Sergei bowed–because each home, in its way, was a chapel. Bearded patriarchs and stern-faced chatelaines unbent at our arrival, and brought out their cherished liturgies and hymnals. From sheaths of protective cloth the books emerged in chrysalides of split leather and cracked wood, their pages fortified with glued-on parchment. One woman laid on my lap a manuscript prayer-book from a century before the Schism, its ink smudged by rain or snow or tears. Its pages trembled in my hands. I wondered why its corners were charred, and imagined its journey east. Another woman held up the multi-coloured skirts and amber necklaces worn by her grandmother, and sighed a little.
Sometimes, in these pious households, I caught myself thinking of Aleksei Akilovich with heretical warmth, I don’t know why. With his ripped-out icon-case and his disintegrating books, he seemed coeval with those wanderers and flagellants whose mingled licentiousness and belief were a quagmire from which the pious had withdrawn. It was easy to romanticise him. All that peasant slyness and naivety, the tarnished shafts of devotion, the never-to-be-fulfilled yearnings, gave an illusion of movement and change beside the stasis of the faithful. He came from the pages of Dostoevsky, they from the sermons of Luther. They were prepared for death or Apocalypse, almost complete. He comprised nothing but loose ends. And I kept thinking about him.
Outside, the snow began to fall, and people were sitting on benches in the street, laughing. ‘Winter’s here! Autumn’s over!’
Later Sergei and I went on to the hills and gazed down. ‘It’s beautiful, my village!’ It was. It shone foreshortened through his field-glasses, like a painted land: a horseman herding his cattle, a cart gliding over snow. Yet the place fell oddly into two halves, with pasture between, and long tracks lay empty which had once been bordered by houses.
‘Those farms fell into ruin. Hundreds of them. Their owners were shot or exiled in Stalin’s day for being too rich. There were twelve hundred houses in my village then, and now only three hundred!’ Their vacant spaces disturbed him. They were the village which should have been: the homes of the diligent and frugal. As we walked they took on a sad presence round us. He remembered their dates and names like a personal hurt.
A modest opulence had followed the Old Belief wherever its people settled. In 1917 they had numbered fifteen million–one tenth of Russia’s population–and owned more than half the country’s capital. Newly tolerated, they had prospered among the merchant-industrial class, the Cossacks and wealthy peasants. (Sergei himself came from the Don Cossack Pahle family.) They were ripe for Stalin’s sickle.
Inside a broken corral two men asked us for cigarettes with the fawning of the chronically drunk. Sergei steered me away. ‘Yes, they were Old Believers.’ We were wading fast through shin-deep snow. ‘Things here aren’t like they were. There are five village families who are total drunkards. People are starting to live just for themselves. Our collective for livestock and wheat is falling to bits. We used to have seventy tractors, but now there are only sixteen. Its workers hardly ever get paid, so they pilfer. As for drink, if they can’t afford official vodka, they make their own–just sugar, yeast and water mixed. It can kill you.’ His eyes lifted to heaven. ‘More than half our villagers are pensioners. Young people have gone away to the cities, to Ulan Ude, hoping for work. We’re becoming a village of the dead.’
The chapel is a consecrated cottage. It stands in the ashes of its predecessor, ruined in the thirties. Its church bell was retrieved from a Museum of Atheism. Studiously Sergei shows me the old psalteries, translating their dates from the Julian calendar; he lights a beeswax candle to St Sergei and points out the pallets where the faithful strike their foreheads in prayer. The iconostasis is gay with peasant colours. After the Schism, when the established Church adopted the choir-loft, the Old Believers changed nothing. So choir and congregation sing unseparated and the disembodied polyphony of the elevated loft is never heard. Sergei, who serves in the choir of four, points to where they stand, just a step from the congregation.
‘We praise with one voice,’ he says. ‘We become one people.’ And suddenly he starts to sing. His baritone rings out in the austere monody of the older worship, preserved here for more than three centuries. His voice is easy and pure. It fills the domestic space with an ancient certainty. He spins out the end of each verse in a long, connective hum, like the chant of the Buddhist monks, a sound of waiting.
‘That’s how we live,’ he says. He still seems to be explaining his people, himself. In surety of justice, he implies, that’s how we live.
Our patience is not exhausted. Too much is at stake. So we gather our logs and vegetables. We prune the raspberry bushes
and cover them with earth until it’s spring. That’s how we live. Before winter we kill a calf, and reassemble our sledge to cross the snow-fields.
On Saturdays and Sundays we sing at the Liturgy. The whole church chants as one (remember this) and our ordained priest, who has even painted icons, leads us. And yes, everybody remembers the Old Slavonic, and sings the double Alleluia. That is the way to God’s forgiveness. That’s how we live.
We do not live like Aleksei Akilovich, so far from grace.
The price of beef is down now, because too many cattle are being slaughtered. But honey fetches a good price. Honey is the future.
We wait for the end of the light. Only others will be taken by surprise. Sometimes we pray for the world, sometimes for ourselves. The dark can only purify us.
My bus ran south-west eighty miles to Novoselenginsk. The passengers huddled and chattered as the snow swirled about us. Beyond Goose Lake, an old Buddhist holy place, we laboured through a wilderness of jagged ridges and down again to the Selenga. The falling snow thinned away from a land it had left monochrome. The hills turned to ash, and the sky, above this sudden draining of colour, shone in a startling, artificial blue.
Novoselenginsk looked like the frontier-town it was. Its buildings stretched low along too-wide streets. Snow was gusting through them. There was no one to be seen. Over the asbestos rooftops loomed the wreck of a giant church. Russia petered out here, and nothing identifiable took her place. The land seemed to have pared and simplified itself out of ungiving rock.
Yet in 1818 it was to this antipodes that the London Missionary Society despatched three priests and their families. The Czar granted them a plot of land on the far river-bank from the garrison-town, and here, while learning Russian, Manchu and Mongolian, they laboured for twenty-two years to convert the elusive Buryats. Opposite them the town was being eroded away by the river, dropping piecemeal under its water.
But the mission station saw itself poised near the heart of God’s purpose. Just beyond the Mongol-speaking Buryats lay Mongolia itself, and the priests eventually translated the entire Bible out of Hebrew and Greek into Mongolian, and printed it on their own press. And Mongolia was only a stepping-stone. Beyond it spread the greatest prize of all–the ocean of waiting souls that had mesmerised Christian evangelists for generations: China.
The hill between the town and the river was a graveyard of farm machinery–tractors, harvesters, bulldozers–which gleamed indestructibly out of the snowdrifts. As I crested it, leaving Novoselenginsk in a shabby geometry below, there unravelled in front of me the long blade of the Selenga river sliding through its hills. On its far shore the original town had gone, eaten away by the river’s current. Only the white shell of its church rose far inland. Below me, a stockaded village lay above the vanished mission, where granite cliffs dropped sheer to the water. It had given up in 1840, and a few years later nothing remained but some outbuildings and a wall enclosing the graves of a woman and three children.
The letters of the senior priest, Edward Stallybrass, survive in the British Museum archives, unflinching in their faith. His handwriting, and that of his wife Sarah, converge indistinguishably in a beautiful, forward-flowing script. They seem never to have wavered, only to have underestimated fatally the Buddhism of the inhabitants.
At Mongol New Year, Sarah visited the chief lama temple ‘in order’, she wrote enigmatically, ‘to gratify my eyes and affect my heart’. The feasting and ceremony, the masked plays and deafening music in this ‘Great Temple of the Idolators’, put her in mind of Hell. But ‘I thought the day was perhaps not distant when the gospels in circulation among them would be substituted for their prayers; their instruments attuned to the praises of the Most High; and the great Chair occupied as a pulpit, by one of our devoted missionary brethren’. This vision never materialised. Only a little earlier the Buryats had brought thirty wagonloads of Buddhist texts from Tibet for the price of 12,000 cattle.
I descended into a village which looked half-abandoned. The river had a little withdrawn from it, leaving printless sand-banks. The enclosure and the graves had disappeared. On the site of the mission was only the breached cattle-pen of a ruined state farm, and a litter of rocks. A piercing wind sprang up. Close to the bank, under an icing of snow, I came upon a 20-foot obelisk of rough-hewn stone. Dusting the frost from its iron plaque, I read in Latin an inscription to Martha Cowie, ‘Nata in Scotia in urbe Glasguae’, wife of the missionary Robert Yuille. She had died in 1827.
Stallybrass, too, lost his wife, to some unnamed illness. For a moment a heartbreaking loneliness breaks through his piety. ‘I can hardly believe that she is to open her eyes upon me no more,’ he wrote to his nephew. ‘Yet it is true, I wiped the last, cold sweat from her face, and closed her eyes in death….’ But instead of final words confirming her love of the Gospels, he wrote, she had only gasped a little, and died.
Beyond the obelisk, and the sheltering cliff, the river loosens into a shining estuary which wanders away in multiple strands towards the south. From where I stood its course was speckled by forest islets, still golden, until the streams drew a watery line beneath wrinkled hills and turned at last towards Mongolia.
In the course of their twenty-two years the missionaries baptised nobody. Even their Buryat servants, wrote an unsympathising visitor, laughed at them behind their backs. The Russian Church hated them, and demanded that any convert join the Orthodox. Eventually, in 1840, it contrived the mission’s closure. Within a few years the Buryats believed the place haunted. The bones of Martha Cowie, they said, sat inside her obelisk, awaiting resurrection.
So the missionaries had returned as ghosts, which was natural. They had, after all, left everything meaningful behind them: the pious dead, the impious living, the mirage of China.
8
To the Pacific
A twelve-year-old boy is waiting with his mother in Ulan Ude station. He sits beside me in the lobby and asks: ‘Where are you going?’ I look into a face of curious, empty sweetness. It is very clear and pale. On his far side the woman touches his hand, as if reminding him of something.
‘I’m going to Skovorodino,’ I say. ‘Then on to the Pacific and Magadan.’ It is my last destination.
The woman says: ‘I was eleven years in Magadan.’
‘Why there?’ It is a place horrific in memory: once gateway to the Gulag empire of Kolyma.
‘I went there as a girl to work for the Komsomol. I thought it romantic–just reindeer and taiga!’ She laughs at her foolishness. ‘But people are good there because of the harshness. If you’re standing by the roadside in the snow, somebody will stop for you. Here they’ll let you die. All Siberia is like that now–people just let you die.’ Her words fall into a melancholy music. The boy echoes them with a sad smile. ‘I was a Communist believer then. My parents were too. They called my sister Stalina because she was born the day Stalin died. Stalinka, Stalinushka! Then when Khrushchev came to power, they changed her name to Tatiana. Then when Khrushchev was disgraced they changed it back to Stalina; then when…Her passport became a mess.’
‘But you left Magadan.’
‘I lost my belief there. I married and had two children, then we came to Kyzyl as teachers.’
The boy gets up and wanders off to buy ice-cream, and she is staring at his back. ‘Then there was him.’
‘Your boy?’ I ask. But she seems a little too old.
‘Yes, by mistake. He’s a beautiful boy, very gentle. But he’s not normal, you know.’ She is looking at the place where he has vanished. ‘He has no memory.’
‘You mean he’s slow?’
‘No, he used to be brilliant, two classes ahead of his age. Then when he was seven he had an accident bicycling down a mountain. He hit his head. Since then he can’t remember anything for more than a few minutes.’ Her voice fills with a stricken tenderness. ‘Things just slip away.’
‘Don’t you get help with him?’
‘He’s a pensioner. He receives a litt
le over the minimum pension every month.’ I wonder about his father, but she says nothing. ‘Kolya’s coming back.’
He hands me an ice-cream too, a little wistfully, then settles down to play with a clockwork mouse. Sometimes he glances at his mother with the helpless adoration of a small child. While his contemporaries, I imagine, are following sport or wondering about sex, he can imitate all the Walt Disney animals.
They are travelling to St Petersburg, his mother says, in the hope of a new life. ‘Some people stay put, others are gypsies like us. That’s how we are. Everybody nowadays is just after money, after self, there’s nothing else. But God will see to us.’ Her elder son lives abroad, she says, and her daughter is estranged from her. She ruffles Kolya’s hair. ‘My duty is to him. He is my future.’
She gives a little sigh of burden or contentment. She will always have a child now.
For a thousand miles some geologic upheaval had sent the mountain ranges beyond Baikal drifting north-west, mirroring the crevice of the lake. In their peculiar aridity and cold they remained a limbo of tough mining and sheep-grazing. Their winters are thin-snowed, but bitter. For years their most successful beast was a shaggy dromedary which lived on frozen grass. By late October sleet had stripped away the deciduous brilliance of their trees around dun-coloured foothills.
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