In Siberia

by Colin Thubron

  Yes, I said, they would leave it because it wasn’t the future. The future was geographical, and it had moved westward from under their feet.

  She went on: ‘If my daughter stays here, she may not find a job. But if she goes abroad she will lose her Russian ways altogether. She’ll lose them and forget us.’

  Abruptly she finished her coffee, wanting to go, afraid where these thoughts led: a faraway daughter, a husband dead at fifty-seven, and those old women multiplying in the streets. She shook back her hair. ‘Let’s go now.’

  The prostitute Therese–or somebody like her–knocks on my door towards midnight. I slide back its spy-hole and see a blonde primping up her curls on the dimness of the landing. Then I realise she has a companion. He has flattened himself beside the door, but the shadow of his head is thrown forward on to the wall. The woman simpers in the circle of my vision, opening her coat on her breast. While he waits.

  I return to my kitchen but for some reason I am unable to ignore them, and I pick up a heavy bottle. Later I hear that these night visits are a frequent ploy. Someone opens his door to the promise of a girl, then regains consciousness to find his flat robbed. But when I throw the door open, Therese and her shadow have gone. I hear only footsteps–light and heavy–hurrying down the stairs and away.

  A native legend tells that above the Khor river, fifty miles south of Khabarovsk, two sacred birds flying from the north and south collided and dropped their gifts of seeds. So in the Primoriye, the Maritime Province, the flora of temperate rain forest intermingles with Nordic pines and birches. Vines and lianas wriggle over conifers, and maple, acacia, walnut and a host of other broad-leaved trees start up, with jasmine and the aralia palm. In these misty hills the giant Ussuri tiger, endangered, roams among Himalayan black bears. Siberia fades away. Many geographers, who dispute its boundaries even along the Urals, designate the whole Pacific littoral a separate land. Siberia, it seems, cannot exist alongside grapes and roses.

  So I turned away from this semi-tropical province, where the Pacific Fleet was rotting in the harbour of Vladivostok, and flew north a thousand miles into a country inaccessible to foreigners until a few years ago. The Sakha republic is as huge as India, but peopled by barely a million inhabitants. Its coast fringes the Arctic for two thousand miles. At its heart Cossacks in 1632 established a fort which later became a roistering tangle of bars and brothels serving gold-rush miners in the Lena valley, and is now the Sakha capital of Yakutsk.

  I landed in a town of ice and twilight. All its buildings were raised above the permafrost a regulation four feet on concrete stilts. The air was frozen still. The apartment blocks hovered in yellow cliffs above the whiteness, and seemed recessed coldly into the sky. The marshes and inlets of the Lena were frozen under seamless snow. Snow turned everything else black. People trailed along the streets in black overcoats and black hats, like loosed shadows. By day the sun barely winched itself into the sky above the white hills.

  Between the tenements long streets of cottages dip and sway over the unstable earth. As their weight softens the permafrost, one side or another starts to sink, until their walls loosen to a wave of unaligned shutters. The permafrost may go down 1,300 feet. In the end its unseen stresses warp and split the planks until the houses shake apart.

  The Yakut people who inhabit this republic almost equal the Russian populace, and are multiplying. You hear their clipped tongue everywhere in the streets, see their trim physiques and neat, Turkic features which turn the Russians’ gross. A millennium ago some catastrophe pushed them northward from Lake Baikal into the barren middle Lena, and their language is still shadowed by the region and life they lost. It retains words for ‘write’ and ‘read’ from a time of interrupted literacy, perhaps, and remembers beasts and landscapes which the people themselves have forgotten. Its epics are roamed by tigers and eagles, and sing of a lush land where the white cranes never fly away.

  As the Yakuts migrated north they lost their sheep and camels, but their cattle and shaggy ponies adapted to the cold, and gave them the advantage over the scattered peoples round them. In time, like all others, these ‘horse people’ fell under the Cossack whip, but instead of being decimated by smallpox and syphilis, their enterprise and resourcefulness grew. Alone among Siberians they understood the making of pottery, and knew how to smelt iron. They intermarried with the Russians, sometimes absorbed them. Their leaders had aspirations to enter the czarist nobility. In nineteenth-century Yakutsk, Russian buildings in wood and stone intermingled with Yakut cow-dung cottages windowed in mica, ice or translucent cattle bladder. Their women rode oxen in the streets. Typically, in 1922, they were the first Siberian people to declare their region a republic, and for a heady moment they even raised the green-and-white banner of Siberian autonomy. In 1990 they declared their independence within Russia, announcing the sovereignty of their own laws over federal ones.

  The Yakuts are the iron men of Russia’s north. In the past, their old people might ask to be killed beside their graves. They could survive on slabs of frozen milk and on the underbark of larch trees boiled with curd. They supplied the hardiest shock-troops of the Second World War, and lost nearly a quarter of their soldiers, and many women. In Yakutsk they inhabit a bitterly salinated earth, yet in the brief, nightless summer they grow vegetables. They live in a land of diamonds and gold–Sakha is the second greatest diamond producer in the world, with reserves vaster than South Africa’s–but they see almost none of it.

  At night, before I go out, the Russian concierge in my crumbling hotel tries to prevent me. ‘No! No, you mustn’t go!’

  I say: ‘But it’s not cold.’ It is only -20°F, which is not cold for here, and there’s no wind. Besides, I’m dressed in reinforced thermal underwear, two mountaineering fleeces and a wadded down jacket. I take up twice the space I used to, and find myself edging crab-wise through doors and waddling about knocking into things.

  ‘Of course it’s not cold!’ the woman cries. ‘But it’s Saturday night! There are drunks everywhere! You know the Yakuts–they only have to sip a mouthful and they’re blind drunk. Don’t you go.’ Her voice dies after me in the dark. ‘Don’t…. Don’t….’

  Over the half-lit pavements, compacted with snow and ice, discarded vodka bottles gleam. Dogs descend out of the shadows and flit across the snow like wolves. But when I reach Lenin Street, I find it lamp-lit and shining. Yakut girls are walking arm in arm, laughing and chattering under mountainous fur hats with silver fox-tails dangling saucily behind. They look absurdly pretty–their complexions clear and matt in the wan light. Everyone seems happy. A young couple have scraped the snow from a park bench and are kissing in the tree-shadow. In Lenin Square the leftover statue, its arm upraised in wooden largesse, is glazed in silver dust, its pate and moustaches glistening avuncular white. The only drunks are harmlessly crooning to themselves in the near-silence. No car or footfall makes a sound. A restaurant that somebody recommended is closed. The Yakut Drama Theatre is closed. The Russian Theatre is closed. Yet in the streets the faint, carnival atmosphere persists, like part of the thin air. A few worshippers are trickling out of a church reconsecrated after housing the Party archives. All around, the houses taper into darkness on their stilts like a range of phantom cupboards. This is Saturday night in Yakutsk. And the temperature is still falling.

  I wondered where the focus of Yakut identity lay, the selfhood of a people driven in czarist times from an ancient paganism to a superficial Christianity, then converted to evangelical Communism, then stranded in wilderness. I could not imagine an easy haven for them. Yet in Yakutsk the House of Folk Creativity was rumoured less the museum and folklore centre it appeared than the powerhouse of a pagan revival. Several people had heard of it, but nobody seemed to know where it was. Only after tramping the streets for hours did I meet a woman who took me there.

  Tania was a sturdy Yakut. The folklore centre would be as strange to her as to me, she said. She followed me in. A silent official unlocked a door
for us, and we found ourselves wandering ceremonial rooms. The first was frescoed with yurts and horses in pastel pigment, scattering an idyllic valley, the birthplace of some legendary ancestor. Along its walls the benches were strewn with animal skins and overhung by horse-tails and carved horse-heads, while across the double doors a painted shamaness surged towards the sun in a blaze of sanctity and flowers. The place reproduced a shrine under the open sky. But its windows were boarded over, excluding the real sun, and painted with tulips. It looked like a nursery school. In one corner two roundels of stone ground corn for ritual meals, and from their noise, said the man beside me, you could predict the future.

  He was a slight, aesthetic-looking scholar, elusive from the first: a student of ‘paganism’, he said. He worked here. ‘In this room we hold ceremonies. And in this one too….’ We walked into a hall whose fireplace held a witch-hat chimney above a crude mural of flames. I heard distant singing. The offices above us were creaking into life, but here were only two languid cleaners, chain-smoking, and Tania shadowing us in silence.

  ‘What are these ceremonies?’

  ‘The ritual changes. Every month holds a different meaning for us.’ The man motioned Tania and me to some painted chairs, pulled out a sheet of paper and started to draw. ‘Our year starts in June, the month of the horse….’

  He inscribed a cartwheel of months: for the harvesting of grapes, for the lakes, for the god of women. Tania had composed her face into a patient blank; behind their thick glasses her eyes settled on him unreadably.

  He explained gently, conscientiously. A wraith-like beard completed his fragility, and his greying hair fell over an eggshell forehead. The revival of paganism, he said, had started ten years ago with the work of a Yakut philologist. Out of the prolixity of surviving lore, nine moral precepts had evolved, and a neo-pagan calendar. They were already being taught in secondary schools. ‘With us there are nine gods above the earth in different skies. All through the year we pray to these gods, even in winter when the dark regions are closer. In summer we walk clockwise as we pray. But in winter we walk against the sun….’

  From under his hands an elaborate diagram was unfurling, like the backbone of a fish. From God the Creator at its head it plummeted through many skies to an underground seething with demons, hitting bottom where the ‘Terrible Fire Man’ dwelt. A side-ladder was full of evil white spirits which could be evoked to attack or divert the subterranean black ones. It was complicated.

  From time to time the scholar’s face would peer round to meet mine, yet seemed preoccupied, distant even from his own words. I had read of early Yakut beliefs, I said, in which the universe was horizontal. The Creator sat in the farthest west, with his gods and spirits spread before him; evil dwelt in the east.

  But the scholar only said: ‘That also is true,’ and went fastidiously on. Every month another god demanded a different ceremony. January belonged to the spirits who swarmed up through holes in the ice where hunters fished. February was dedicated to the god who decided the future, March to the birth of ponies. The only constant was fire. ‘It is through fire that all the gods and spirits are reached. First there must be fire.’

  My gaze swung bleakly to the muralled fireplace. Tania recalled how her parents used to feed the fire-god. ‘They would chuck something into the oven before meals,’ she announced. ‘Vodka, I think.’

  ‘In May,’ the man went on, ‘we celebrate the individual soul.’ He drew a fresh diagram. The Yakut soul looked elaborate, vulnerable. There was the physical kut and the psychic sur, and tym, the principle of breath. ‘God gives them to man,’ he said, ‘and man gives them to woman.’

  ‘How?’ I asked. ‘How can a man give a woman her soul?’ Women had always been viewed harshly by indigenous Siberians. No female Buryat could ever enter a holy place or attend a sacrifice; the Yakuts had denied women inheritance; to the Samoyed, death itself was a woman.

  ‘The man gives the woman her soul at conception,’ the scholar said levelly. ‘Through the gift of his seed.’

  Tania watched him like a black stone.

  I asked: ‘Do you take this teaching into the taiga?’

  ‘Yes, to the villages. But in many places they know nothing of their past. Old people sometimes talk about it–they remember, but they don’t do anything. There’s no worship, no rites. We are the true activists.’ He sighed. ‘But we are very few.’

  The villagers were sick of being told things, I supposed, they wanted food. Against that once spirit-crowded country, against the richness of Sakha’s oral epics, out of the diversity of their polytheism, this tidied religion would seem bloodless. Next door the singing rose in lonely chorus: elderly voices chanting the traditional toyuk songs, formal with quavers and glottal stops.

  Four years ago, the scholar said, after the republic wrenched new freedoms from Moscow, the neo-pagans’ hopes had run high. But that early euphoria had soured with economic misery. The republic’s half-Russian president was striving for unity, and pleas for a symbolic pagan tree and temple in the town’s heart had been refused. Neo-pagans accused the president of having a hole where his kut should be.

  ‘Those were hopeful times,’ the scholar said in parting. ‘But they’ll come again. And the temple will come. And the sacred tree will come.’

  Tania and I stood outside under a sky mauve with coming snow. She closed the fur hood back over her face; her spectacles shone from it like the eyes of a bush baby. We began circling the imitation yurt in the courtyard. She said: ‘I don’t see the need for this new religion. There are enough religions around already. I didn’t like that man. He’s very closed. And so many gods! As a child we called half of them spirits, but now they’ve been promoted. I heard about those goblins that come up through the ice, when I was a girl. There was meant to be a swarm of them, very small. And now they’re gods!’

  Her cynicism came as an earthy relief. But disillusion had marked her early, I think. At twenty-eight, she was out of work, and single. As we emerged into the street, I asked her outright: ‘Do your people want real independence?’

  But she snorted. ‘What’s the use? There are less than half a million of us, and the Russians still outnumber us here. If we can get cheaper food imports and a better deal on our minerals, that’ll be enough. Nobody sane imagines separation. We’d be alone. There’ve been riots in the past, I know, and when Russian workers don’t respect our traditions, people resent them. But half our so-called nationalists aren’t that at all. They’re self-seekers. And now most people are too poor, too crushed, to care very much anyway. As for this…this paganism, it can never be a state religion.’

  Of course not, I thought. It was too rooted in secrecy, in rural isolation. You could not publicly teach it, put it on state display. All the same, I asked: ‘Why not?’

  She laughed. ‘Because there are too many people like me!’ But after a minute her lips quivered with faint self-reproach. ‘Nevertheless, it’s…rather touching.’

  In the Museum of History and Culture one of the most perfect mammoth skeletons in the world comes lumbering towards you. The tiny sockets in its skull, together with the rib-cage like broken sticks and the delicately splayed bones of the feet, lend it a melancholy vulnerability. It might have got lost in one of the corridors. Its enormous tusks curl inwards before it, as if to embrace something, and have to be separately supported on rods from the ground. It looks hopelessly incompetent. Its tank-like front tapers away to the tentative tread of stilt-like hind legs and a short, rather ludicrous tail. A stubble of skin and wool still dribbles about the skull.

  This is Mammuthus primigenius, the ancient denizen of Siberia. Some 20,000 years ago, during the last Ice Age, when the land bridge swelled between Asia and Alaska, vast herds of woolly mammoth trampled the northern hemisphere. They left their bones in the valleys of the Mississippi and the Thames, on the shores of the Atlantic and in the gravel terraces of Mexico. Then, as the ice receded, they mysteriously vanished, to be washed free in their thou
sands wherever the alluvial soil of Siberian coasts and rivers thawed and unsettled.

  Posthumously, the mammoths sowed confusion. In Siberia natives believed they survived deep under the earth, or lurked in mountain fissures and feasted on the dead. The Chinese imagined them a species of earth-shaking mole, which died when it surfaced to the light. Their fossils in Europe were rumoured to be those of giants or unicorns, and sometimes rested in the reliquaries of the great monastic houses. An outsize molar was revered at Valence as a relic of St Christopher, and the miracle-working thigh-bone of St Vincent, exhibited by monks in 1781, was a well-preserved mammoth femur.

  In Russia a rare trade started up. As long ago as the ninth century, it seems, the Caliph Haroun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne a mammoth tusk which remained for years in the Crown Treasury at Rheims. The Khan of the Golden Horde sat on a mammoth-ivory throne. By the end of the nineteenth century the tusks of some 45,000 mammoths–each weighing up to 200 pounds–had been traded out of Siberia and converted into caskets, powderhorns, knife handles and necklaces. One Russian official planned to distil the bone marrow and market it as the perfume Pommade a` Mammouth. But his fortune melted away when he carried his cache of fossils into an overheated house.

  By now mammoths had been found emerging from the permafrost with their flesh and hair intact, although gnawed by wolves and often dismembered by natives. In 1900, on the Berezovka river, a specimen was discovered which had crashed into a crevasse and died embalmed in ice. By the time scientists found it, wild animals had torn out its heart, lungs and liver, and eaten its trunk; but its frame was all but perfect. Traces of herbage were still stuck in the creature’s jaws, and when the scientists entered the walls of its stomach they found 30 pounds of grasses, thyme, poppies, gentians and buttercups from twenty millennia before. With winter approaching, they built a hut over the carcass and thawed it out, labouring for six weeks in the ammoniacal stench of its decaying fat, dismembered it, then packed it back in pieces to St Petersburg.