In Siberia

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In Siberia Page 23

by Colin Thubron


  My compartment was monopolised by a Ukrainian porter who sprawled opposite his wife and sometimes stretched out a tattooed arm to pinch her cheek. Around us the bunks were occupied by sleeping Buryat girls, stacked up like dolls, who seemed more delicately in transit than the Russians. I felt I had grown invisible to them all: a down-at-heel Estonian. My boots now squealed as if they enclosed mice, but my snow-proof trousers and quilted jacket, I imagined, edged me into anonymity.

  I knew these trains by heart now: their bossy attendant provodnitsi, their clamped windows, their stench of urine, raw fish, sweat. I too now softened dried noodles with scalding water from the carriage boiler, brewed up cheap coffee and picked at salted omul as the train and the hours crawled on. At dusk I lay curled on an upper bunk reading a biography of Kolchak. A foot above my head a thin, unsteady graffito confided ‘Alya + Alyosha = love’. Then the dark came down.

  I tried to sleep. Somewhere beyond Chita the Trans-Manchurian Railway diverged south-east through China. An imperial venture forced on the Chinese in 1896–war-torn and bandit-ridden–it had completed the Trans-Siberian’s link to the Pacific. It was this line, and the track where we travelled, that the White warlord Grigory Semyenov terrorised with gangs of Cossacks, Chinese brigands and Japanese mercenaries, riding the rails in armoured trains named ‘The Destroyer’ and ‘The Terrible’.

  Long after midnight we stopped at Nerchinsk, in whose silver-mines Decembrists and Polish patriots had died, and in the darkness I missed the mouth of the Onon valley, birthplace of Genghis Khan. In its upper reaches, after a ravaged childhood, the conqueror gathered beneath him a fateful union of tribes, and in times of crisis would return to pray to the Sky God on the mountain at the river’s source. But I looked out on blackness. Genghis Khan’s memory haunts all central Asia; for decades it was a Soviet heresy to tell his tale or show his portrait, and his reputation still sheds a dark lustre over all the scattered Mongolian and Turkic peoples.

  The motion of the train was so slow, so quiet, as it munched away all night at the twelve hundred miles to Skovorodino, that when an anaemic dawn stole into our carriage I thought we had barely moved. I gazed out of the window to see bare trees flowing over broken waves of hills. It was an unlovely, charred-looking land, drifting into winter. The larches had wasted to leaden filigree, and the birches were ghosts. All day the vista scarcely changed, while I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed desolation seemed only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire earth. Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south, and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowding out all distances, any perspective, has driven people literally mad. Magnetic anomalies can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings uselessly. Others start walking in a mania to escape–this is the ‘taiga madness’–but return always to their own tracks, until they drop exhausted or lose themselves in quicksand.

  As we drew closer to the Chinese border along the northward swing of the Amur river, my Soviet map went empty, and nothing officially existed. But I knew, in fact, that even the static purity of the taiga was an illusion. Logging, especially by North Koreans, and the pollution and fires around gas-and oil-fields, had cut their swathe through it; the state-owned forestry camps along the track, notorious for wastefulness, had followed the economy half into ruin. Now, towards evening, the snow began pouring in grey, driven clouds over the woods, smearing them to shadows or to nothing. Soon its icy tempest was flying past the train, until we were climbing into blinding whiteness, and only hours later in the night did I remember that somewhere we must have tipped over an imperceptible watershed into the railway’s thousand-mile descent to the Pacific.

  I got off at midnight into piercing cold. In the near-empty station somebody said there was a hotel on the far side of the tracks, and I crossed a crumbling iron bridge and dropped into darkness. Skovorodino was an unknown dot on my map. Nobody went there. For all I knew I was in a military zone. I plunged down a path between locked buildings in pitch darkness, where people were walking. Their talk echoed round me. I asked the voices where a hotel was, but they passed by disembodied, drunk, and I lighted on the guest-house by chance. A sleepy youth blinked wordlessly at my documents, then found me a bed under a wall spattered with mosquitoes. I turned the soiled mattress, and slept.

  In the morning I realised by the street names–Soviet Street, Komsomol Street–that I was in the town’s heart. Skovorodino was an overgrown railway junction squeezed between hills. The temperature was barely -10°F, but the wind swept my face like cold acid, gusting up snow and dust together. Frozen leaves rasped along the tracks. In an outdoor market red-faced vendors in high woolly hats were selling fish and chickens frozen from their tables. A war memorial was splashed with crimson names: Siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, the Capture of Berlin…. Nothing seemed to have happened since.

  But I had come here for the Amur river, which flowed seventy miles to the south, with China beyond. A thin road on my map ended in faded print at Albazin, the site of Chinese–Cossack battles, which must have shrunk to a village on the banks of the great river. The Amur! It was one of those floods, like the Oxus or the Nile, which seem to flow free of geography and into dreamscape.

  In Skovorodino there was no petrol, but every other day a diesel engine went down a side-track towards the frontier, and by late afternoon I was crossing valleys of frozen streams in a train full of listless soldiers. We took four hours to cover sixty miles. The driver halted to buy candles at a lonely depot. The soldiers, like the police, seemed to look through me.

  It was night by the time we stopped. A few trucks were waiting to take people away, troops to barracks, others to Revnovo village in the forest nearby, and soon I was alone. The sky was starless. I waited where a soldier had said a bus would come for Albazin. The snow began falling in big, intermittent flakes, oddly comforting. Painfully, the train looped and turned back towards Skovorodino. The provodnitsa was leaning out of her door as it laboured past me. I shouted: ‘Has the bus gone?’

  She called back: ‘What bus? There’s no petrol! No petrol anywhere!’

  ‘Can I walk to Albazin?’

  ‘No! It’s eighteen kilometres! And…’–her voice faded through the trees–‘…there are…wolves.’

  I watched the train limp back through the pines, until its weak lights disappeared, and the dark and the cold intensified together. I had no idea what to do, only felt the dangerous confidence that something would turn up. For a while I lingered fatalistically, waiting for the bus that would not come. Then I trudged along the railway line towards the station hut. It showed two darkened windows, and I wondered whether to break in. These posts were sometimes obsolete, their lighthouse loneliness overseeing nothing. Tolstoy had died in one, fleeing domestic trouble. The snow was thickening in a luminous curtain before my torch-light. I tramped round the back of the hut, then stopped. Light glimmered under a door.

  I hesitated, then pushed through into a bath of hot air. Beaming pleasantly, warming his hands at a stove, Volodya was the kind of Russian heroised or satirised over centuries. He was the copybook peasant prince: an overgrown boy, innocently handsome, unscathed. A station-worker’s cap was pushed back on his yellow curls. He did not ask who I was or where I came from, but from his nest of log-books and telephones began to call people to take me to Albazin. ‘Misha…can you drive tonight? No petrol…Yuri, can you take…? Petrol finished…. Kolya…away…Petya, Oleg, Vadim–no petrol, no petrol, no petrol….’

  ‘One day petrol will come back,’ he said, ‘but it’ll be more expensive. That’s what happend to oil. The mafia manipulate the prices.’ He stood up and closed his timetables. ‘We’ll find somebody tomorrow.’

  ‘But who are these mafia?’ I was always trying to locate this ghost. ‘Are they the old Communists?’

  Volodya weighed me with his candid, rather simple stare. ‘They are wherever the power is.’

  His cottage was in the forest nearby. His wid
owed mother, her head bound piratically in a woollen scarf, was watching Santa Barbara on television. The soap opera had been going on for five years, three times a week, and it crowded her mind more urgently than Russia’s economic recession, the political chaos, or the passing trains. She seemed preternaturally old. All her family had worked on the railways, she remembered–her father a signaller, her husband a station-master, she a ticket-vendor, and now her son kept this lonely post at the end of the line. She did not regret it. For her the railway retained a pioneering afterglow, as the conqueror of the taiga and bearer of civilisation.

  After a meal of salad and bread we settled to the television again. It tyrannised all her days. Her cottage had no running water, but her television was huge and new. Volodya went silent before it. They received two channels from Moscow, and an evening one from Blagoveshchensk. In her isolation, it was replacing the world. ‘In Brezhnev’s years we were told that America was sinking,’ she mused. ‘Now half our people are out of work, and the Americans all seem to live in Santa Barbara. I don’t understand.’

  Santa Barbara wasn’t typical, I said; Europe and America were full of the poor. But she only looked confused, and returned to the screen’s comfort. That flickering rectangle–where American soap operas and gangster films mixed with advertisements for cars, jewellery, trips to the Western sun–was starting to encompass all reality. Not that she conceived of bathing off St Lucia or of adorning herself with a necklace of Mirny diamonds. No. She seemed to watch everything with the same undreaming gaze, without envy, disconnected, as you might watch a cartoon.

  Only Volodya said: ‘You never see a programme about our lives here.’

  I slept on their sofa in a room whose carpet-hung walls stopped short of the ceiling, so that Volodya’s dreams from a nearby room punctuated mine with obscure cries.

  A seventy-year-old farmer with a toppling bobble hat and a cache of petrol arrived early in the morning to drive me to Albazin. The track was clear of snow and his Moskvich saloon skated over it, retching exhaust fumes. He complained about everything, then broke into cynical grins as if none of it mattered very much. In a back seat his portly son, already in middle age and jobless, was hitching a lift back to Skovorodino station. He had put on a heavy overcoat and a muskrat hat to go job-hunting in Blagoveshchensk to the east, but his bootlaces were frayed, and he looked beaten. Compared to his father’s tight, nut-brown face, his was flaccid and pale. He might have belonged to another race. From behind his thick-rimmed glasses a pair of heavy-lidded, hopeless eyes seemed to languish with dormant intelligence.

  ‘Everything’s terrible!’ his father laughed. ‘These fields used to be full of wheat and cattle, and now look!’ The land around had run to grass and stunted birches. ‘There’s no funding from the centre. People are just growing things for themselves. In the good days, in Brezhnev’s days, you could buy a loaf of bread for a few kopeks. And now? Four thousand roubles! For a single loaf!’ But he was grinning.

  ‘Those weren’t good days,’ said his son.

  ‘Bananas now cost 14,000 roubles a kilo,’ his father ran on. ‘Meat is 20,000 roubles a kilo!’

  His son tapped my shoulder. ‘You don’t have to listen to him.’ He wanted to interest me in himself; he was ashamed of the weathered peasant at the wheel. ‘I’ve always been interested in history and religion, you know, always. When I left middle school I wanted to go to the Philological Institute in Moscow, but for that you need money, and with parents like mine…’

  His father took no notice, went on driving furiously over the frozen gravel. I closed my eyes.

  ‘…soI went to college, and I passed my first exam high, yes. But then I had to go into the army….’

  ‘Should have done you good!’ his father said.

  ‘…and after that I still couldn’t go to Moscow, so I went back to technical college in Ussuriisk. It wasn’t very good, but I got my diploma…look’–he thrust it into my hands–‘and then I went to Vladivostok and joined the fishing fleet as a kind of…restaurant manager.’

  ‘We’ve got a cow,’ his father said. ‘That’s something.’ He milked a phantom udder.

  ‘Why do you have to say that?’ his son bleated. He started up again: ‘My first fishing trip took two months, and I was sick every day, but after that I got used to it. I saw Sakhalin and Kamchatka, yes, they were interesting….’

  ‘You can grow potatoes and cabbages, but that’s it for this area.’ His father jabbed a thumb at the abandoned fields. ‘The frosts get down to -47°F.’

  ‘…but my boat was laid off half the year, so I worked on shore in…restaurants, and the fishing-fleet shrank and I was…well, they couldn’t keep me.’ His talk sank to a litany of failure, purposeless, as if he couldn’t stop himself. His slack mouth seemed to taste every grievance. ‘And I worked at whatever came up, in restaurants…and now I don’t have anything. Maybe I’ll find something in Blagoveshchensk. I’ve been out of work two years now….’

  ‘Three!’ said his father. The car skidded, straightened itself. He beamed. ‘Don’t worry. Me and this car are both pensioners! I bought it eighteen years ago! It cost only 15,000 roubles then. And what do you pay now? Three million!’ He banged the dashboard. ‘What can a poor person do? Just stay at home and sleep! While those parliamentary deputies earn eleven million roubles a month! Then they stash the money in Switzerland, and get baby-doll mistresses!’ His face danced with resentment and vicarious dissipation. He accelerated over sheet ice. I clamped my eyes shut again.

  His son said: ‘The only work round here is at the military station upriver, or in the lumber-camp.’

  ‘You!’ His father guffawed. ‘Lumber!’

  I asked: ‘What about fishing?’

  ‘Twenty years ago you could pull up sturgeon by the dozen,’ the old man said. ‘Now you hardly catch anything. It’s those Chinese. They’ve got big, close-mesh nets, I’ve seen them. And they’re polluting the river from factories….’

  His son was staring at his boots with bowed head. He was starting to go bald. ‘We can’t even get our own ecology right,’ he said. ‘Look at Baikal. We’re polluting as much as they are. Everybody’s polluting.’

  I began to feel sorry for him. He had longed to become one of those New Russians who people Moscow restaurants with their ornamental mistresses and mobile phones. But now he would not even become a waiter there. Printed with the deepening defeat I saw on many urban faces, I imagined him returning again and again to the peasant family which so embittered and sustained him.

  ‘You can grow water melons,’ his father said. ‘There’s always water melons.’

  We were weaving among the scattered cottages of Albazin now, and suddenly the Amur was beneath us. It coiled in a steely flood out of its desolation, dividing China from Russia with an unearthly peace. Making for the Pacific a thousand sinuous miles away, it already measured a third of a mile across, and curved below in a dark mirror, stained with the tannin of fallen trees.

  We stopped by the earthwork of the Cossack fort above it. The old man wished me well; his son smiled and took my picture. Then they vanished in a cloud of black exhaust into the white land.

  Snow barely dusted the ramparts which crested the bluff in a rectangle of grassy earth. In the mid-seventeenth century this redoubt had marked the south-eastern reach of the Russian dominions as they touched the northern limit of the Manchu, and here the two empires clashed in mutual ignorance. Founded by Cossack renegades, Albazin became the spearhead of Russian colonisation on the lower Amur; but by 1685, after the Manchu resurgence, it was the last bastion left. Its commander, Aleksei Tolbuzin, hopelessly outnumbered, was forced to surrender, and with foolish magnanimity the Manchu granted his forces unmolested retreat, razed the fort and fell back to the south.

  As soon as they had gone the Russians returned with over 800 men and twelve cannon, and rebuilt Albazin more formidably. They crowned the bulwarks where I walked with a log palisade, buttressed by corner-towers, and skirted it
with a deep ditch and pits concealing sharpened stakes. A raised gun-turret turned their cannon in any direction, and the breastworks were lined with baskets of resin to illumine night attacks.

  But in July 1686 the Manchu returned, angry and in force. I crossed the rumpled ground where they had dug in their long-range cannon and locked the fort in a triple tier of earthworks. Their gun-boats sealed off the river. On the island opposite, their headquarters now lay sunk in sand and shrubs, among the ruins of a flooded fishing-village. For over a year they rained down cannon-balls and incendiary arrows on the fort, charged it with leather-coated siege-engines and fired its battlements with resin and straw. Once, the starved garrison mockingly sent out a 50-pound meat pie to the Manchu commander, to persuade him they were well provisioned. He asked for more. By the time Moscow sued for peace and the siege was lifted, Tolbuzin was dead along with all but sixty-six of his men.

  In the Treaty of Nerchinsk which followed, Russia retreated from the Amur altogether, and Albazin was demolished. In China the Cossack prisoners-of-war became a company in the bodyguard of the Manchu emperor; their descendants intermarried with the Chinese and lost their Russian looks and language. Yet until the Communist Revolution a few still attended their church in north-east Peking, and lifted their lidless eyes to pray before the leftover icons of Albazin.

  It was more than a century and a half after the stronghold’s fall before the Russians returned under Muraviev-Amursky, thrusting down the river with a convoy of seventy-five military barges. As the site of the fortress hove into view, the soldiers fell silent, the band struck up hymns and the governor-general landed to pray beneath the overgrown ruins.

  He had breached the Nerchinsk pact, of course, as China weakened. Thereafter its text would be unpicked and reinterpreted: the Chinese bitter at the Russian reconquest, the Russians–as recently as the 1960s–claiming that the treaty was exacted under duress. For hundreds of miles a wall of electrified barbed wire immunised the Soviet Union against China. It straggled eastward still intact, but had disintegrated in a rusty tangle across the bluffs where I went, and nobody had bothered to repair it. The hills of China lifted empty beyond. From a watch-tower a blank-faced sentry gazed across the river, his Kalashnikov on his back. Any communication with the Chinese was forbidden here, but to the east the barriers were down, and traders were crossing the border points almost at will.

 

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