Peking to Paris

by Dina Bennett

  Our Private Heaven

  TSAGAANNUUR-BIYSK-NOVOSIBIRSK

  Though Russia will soon make us crafty, like starving wolves on the prowl, in our first few hours in Siberia we’re lost in wonder at the flourishing green hills and bountiful farms of this isolated corner of Russia. I have a connection with Russia, part ordinary, part personal. I visited Moscow and St. Petersburg briefly thirty years ago, before glasnost, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Back then, the country was still the USSR, and it was a severe country with a political fist clamped down on the populace as tightly as a lid on a canning jar. I remember walking Moscow’s streets on those late November days, cottony snowflakes building a white blanket on my shoulders. By four in the afternoon it was already dark. My recollection is of store fronts through whose plate glass windows I saw nothing but empty shelves, and of women bundled in coarse black wool coats scurrying down the sidewalk, heads bowed, stout legs beating through the slush in calf-high rubber boots. During that visit I had the pleasure of meeting secretly with some Russian citizens, sitting in their apartment drinking tea and eating strawberry jam from tiny spoons. “Dina,” they said. “That’s a Russian name.”

  “Yes,” I told them. “My grandparents were from Russia.”

  “Ah! Wonderful. That is why you look the way you do! Where were they from, your grandparents?”

  “Near Kiev. Kremenchug. They left a hundred years ago though. I don’t think we have any relatives left here.”I’m more abrupt than I should be, but I don’t want to go into details. In fact, as my grandparents and their four children loaded bundles on a train, Prince Borghese was preparing to drive his Itala from Peking to Paris. To put it bluntly, my Jewish grandparents fled Russia to stay alive. They had survived the bloody wave of pogroms against the Jews that broke out in 1903, affecting towns throughout Ukraine and Bessarabia. Finally, in 1906, they gathered what they could and left for France. I don’t tell my hosts any of this. Our friendship feels fragile, something miraculous given the enmity of our two countries. It’s too precious to rupture with unpleasant family facts.

  Even without knowing my own family history, my high cheekbones and olive skin betray my ancestry to those inclined to pay attention to such signs. In the Rockies, the questions come from Native Americans curious about what tribe I belong to, rather than what part of Russia I stem from. Apart from how I look, my taste buds also are a dead giveaway of my heritage. My food vocabulary happily contains words like blinis and caviar, beets and potatoes, vodka and vodka. And then there’s the sound of the Russian language, which makes me dreamy in a way Mongolian or Chinese never did.

  Despite this natural affinity for things Russian, I know little about the country beyond recent history. It comes as a shock to me that we’re literally only on the other side of the Greater Altai range, which separates Mongolia from southern Siberia, yet the people here are completely different from Mongolia. Instead of flat faces with a broad nose, oriental eyes, and black hair, they have faces with high cheekbones, pale skin, and sharp features. Barely into Siberia I can hardly contain myself. “Bernard, have you noticed the people here? They’re tall.”

  “I know. And their houses. They’re made of wood.”

  I finish his sentence with, “Which means they’re not nomadic. There’s something else completely different here. Look at that river!”

  We both drink in the great rushing river along which we’re driving, its water pearly gray flecked with ivory foam, its banks rising to slopes covered in towering trees. Even this close to the border, every house has a vegetable garden. How can life be so vastly different just the other side of a ridge? Here, it’s like a century ago, but then Mongolia was like three centuries ago, so this seems to me to be a good sign of progress.

  We fall into ecstatic fits about cafes. They exist here.

  We pull in next to another Rally car parked in front of what at any other time I would describe as a slovenly loser of a roadside diner. It’s a low wood building, graced with some wretched geraniums struggling to survive in broken plastic flower boxes. It also has a fountain, left over from more prosperous or more hopeful times. In its present forlorn state, the blue and green mosaic that once decorated the fountain’s concrete rim is mostly a memory, or an enthusiastic entry in a Lonely Planet guidebook. Perhaps there used to be a charming statue in its center, burbling water from pursed, cherubic lips. Now there’s only a stubby black pipe spouting a thin stream into the algae-laden few inches of water in the bottom. To me, it’s a fairy tale wonder, the cafe is a palace, and I can’t wait to be served.

  The cafe door, springless, slams shut behind us. The other crew is already inside. I recognize them but, even though we’ve been traveling the same route for eleven days, I don’t know their names. Still, we wave a friendly hello to each other and trade a few wry comments about what a novelty it is to order food in a restaurant. Shafts of daylight filter through dingy small windows. I squint around. It’s probably fortunate that I can’t see into the dark recess of the cramped room. What I can see is a man’s head, framed by an opening in the wall. He’s holding a small note pad, to take our order. On a slate board above him is a handwritten menu. It’s in Cyrillic, which I can’t read. Bernard, who relies on me to get food on the table, whether at home or traveling, stands behind me, hands in pockets, shuffling his feet about like an impatient school boy. I know what to do in this situation. “Go outside,” I command. “Sit in the sun, get some color on your face. I’ll take care of this.”

  Knocking on the kitchen door, I head in. There’s one person in the kitchen, a short buxom woman. She’s standing at a steel sink, her hair covered by a pink scarf tied at the back. A dingy apron which might once have been a matching color barely makes it around her portly waist. She straightens, startled, not sure what to think. I pat my stomach, gesture toward the pots, and then mime lifting lids and sniffing. At this she relaxes. We’re fellow foodies. “Sure, sure,” she gestures expansively. “Take a look.”

  “Goulash?” I ask, pointing at one pot. She nods. “Soup? Soopa? Soupski?” I say, hoping to sound vaguely Slavic while pointing at a tub of lumpy, pale green matter that looks and smells like split pea. Carrots and cucumbers sit in a chipped ceramic bowl on a grimy steel counter. The flies feasting on everything not covered by a lid or cloth are disconcerting, but I forge ahead, unwilling to be denied a meal simply because of a misplaced spate of fussiness. I make a chopping motion. “Salad?”

  “Da.”

  I see a crusty loaf on a cutting board and point to that, too. She beams. Not knowing how to end this session, I put my hands together at my heart and make a little bow, then back out of her domain. Bernard has followed my instructions and is sitting outside on the cafe patio in the sunshine. When the steaming soup bowls and plates of crisp vinegary vegetables arrive at our rickety table, accompanied by thick slabs of rye bread, Bernard’s radiant smile is all the thanks I need.

  We feed bread crumbs to some sparrows and soak up the warm rays of sun. As we’re sopping up the last of the goulash sauce, another Rally car pulls in. In a display of wanton joy, the driver leaps over the low door of his convertible roadster and bounds into the fountain, clothes, goggles, and all, cackling and making general mayhem with the few inches of water in the bottom. Even the putrid toilet stall, a long drop over the river, cannot dampen our delight. I know some things about Siberia. That it holds the 400-mile-long Lake Baikal, the largest freshwater lake in the world. That the Trans-Siberian Railroad has transported cargo and migrants across Siberia’s immensity since the turn of the last century. That its emptiness made it the perfect place for Stalin to construct his network of inhuman prison camps known as gulags. Now, for this one short span of time, I also know that Siberia is heaven.

  After lunch, we feel so optimistic that we indulge in another guilty pleasure: taking a break that has nothing to do with fixing the car. Bernard pulls off the road into a meadow of tall grass, so deeply emerald it hurts my eyes. In the cool shade of a thick-trunk
ed tree, a couple of drowsy black and white cows barely lift their heads when we parallel park next to them. Their warm breath fills the air with the scent of new-mown hay. “Ahh,” sighs Bernard, as he stretches his back. “This is the life.”

  “Yeah. If only . . . .” I don’t have to elaborate my longing to experience what Russia has to offer, and my wistfulness at what we have missed in Mongolia and China. Bernard knows exactly what I mean. Flies buzz industriously around the fresh cow patties. I love this smell, speaking as it does of everything earthy, of rich pasture, blossoming meadows, frothy fresh milk. The cow next to me flicks her tail back and forth, steady as a metronome. It’s hypnotizing. Intoxicating. I contemplate stretching out in the grass, that is if I can find a spot not already occupied by those pudding-y droppings. Just then several Rally cars whizz by, honking their horns as they pass. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot. We’re supposed to be driving,” Bernard says.

  “Amazing what a ten minute break can do,” I reply, feigning a get-upand-go attitude I do not feel. “You realize we didn’t even have one of these in Mongolia? I love Siberia, don’t you?” We are both trying hard to be cheerful, but there’s no mistaking the tinge of sadness we each feel. Because it’s taken only a few minutes in this lovely, peaceful field to highlight how few such opportunities we had in China and Mongolia. The cars driving inexorably onward, despite the natural beauty around us, are a clear reminder that this trip is all about driving and not about the journey.

  The great traveler Robert Byron said it perfectly: “[One] can know the world only when [one] sees, hears and smells it.” (First Russia, Then Tibet 1933). It’s a bitter pill for me to swallow that I’m going to have so few of those magical meetings or impromptu conversations that make a journey rich and rewarding. This Rally is about one thing only: getting to the day’s end. Every day. If I think about this too much it’ll be unbearable, so I turn my mind to something infinitely more amusing: my propensity to get sick when I read too long in a swiftly moving car. I hadn’t thought about this at all in Mongolia, because we were moving so slowly it was more like we were sitting still. Now that we’re on pavement, our speed has tripled. I have to keep my focus on the route book, despite the rattling of the road. Things don’t bode well for me.

  We bump back across the field and set out on the 450 miles of winding, undulating pavement we need to cover to reach our night’s stop in Biysk. Looking up from the route book, everything I see delights me. On all sides are steep, forest-clad hills, broken now and then by granite cliffs. Through these thread white cascades, tumbling in free fall into the waiting arms of a frothing river. Fat pigs roam the roadside; now and then a tethered cow mows the grass on a quiet side lane. Occasionally, we slow to share the road with a filigreed, painted cart. The jauntily trotting horse pulling it down the highway is decorated, too, with jangling harness bells and a crocheted cap to whisk flies from its eyes. At an eddy among the rapids, a housewife dips two buckets into the river, then walks up to her house, buckets suspended from a long pole bridging her shoulders. Petunias display their pinks and purples to the sun. Sheets flap dry in the breeze. It’s so lovely I can taste it.

  After several hours, I turn to Bernard. “Have you noticed something’s missing?”

  He peers at me in alarm. “What? Did we leave something back there? What’s missing? What?!”

  The notion that we might have to drive three hours back is too distressing, and I’m immediately apologetic. “No, no. Nothing like that. It’s just that, well, usually by this time I’d have been complaining about something. No?”

  “You’re thirsty? I’m sure we have plenty of water in the back.”

  I’m toying with him now, but my pleasure is so great that I want to draw things out, revel in the marvelous feeling like a puppy rolling in a cow patty. “No, no. I’m fine. Get it? I’m fine!!!”

  “You’re fine? Me, too. This countryside is so beautiful.”

  I’ve got to love Bernard for this. The man is so literal, so straightforward, that he doesn’t get it. “Yes, I’m fine, as in, I’m not carsick. I’ve been reading through the route book for hours now, and I haven’t gotten carsick! Can you believe it?” I’m giddy, crazed with happiness, as if announcing I’ve won the Nobel Prize.

  “That’s true! Dina, cherie, it’s a miracle!” He swerves onto the grassy shoulder. By the time I’m out of the car he’s already to my side, sweeping me up in his arms. “You’re cured. You’re cured,” he shouts, swinging me around. We laugh and dance a jig by the roadside. A crow in a nearby tree caws in alarm at our antics. Who can say for sure how I lost my carsickness affliction. I like to think I just let myself get better.

  Fixers

  BIYSK

  This is the Rally, after all, and one can’t be optimistic for long. Somewhere along those miles of pavement, Roxanne’s latest shock absorber mounts prove too fragile even for asphalt. The shock absorbers break again, and Roxanne is reduced to dragging her sagging trunk the rest of the way to our first night’s stop in Siberia. By the time we arrive it’s mid-evening, which is weirdly appropriate since the organizer staff are being housed in a brothel. I can see the place is hopping with business, and it’s not just Rally business. We’re eager to finally get to a room, but the buses hired to take us from the fenced, guarded car park to the several hotels in which we’ll be housed haven’t arrived, and those hotels are a further hour away.

  I’m for trying to scrounge a room in the brothel, where at least we’ll be next to Roxanne and have the best chance of organizing repair assistance for her the next morning. It is, after all, a bustling center of commerce. Bernard’s having none of it. “Come on Dina, let’s just go to our hotel and figure it out there.”

  It takes some effort to curtail my urge to snap at him severely. I would have preferred Bernard’s support on this, mainly because I am fatigued enough I want to be coddled and told “Don’t worry; I’ll take care of everything.” That I know he’s right makes it worse. Of course the hotel is the place to be, especially since it’ll have things we’re unlikely to find in the brothel. There’ll be showers, food, and all manner of modern conveniences, which, after eight days camping in Mongolia, are things to which I’m looking forward with more than ordinary longing. Still, I can’t stop myself from grousing a little. “Sure,” I say. “Let’s go to the hotel. What’s one more hour when we’ve already been on the road for twelve?”

  Our first hotel in Russia is a welcome sight only because it’s not a tent. The hotel, both outside and in, is illuminated by what must be 25-watt light bulbs, all two of them. So dim is the lighting and so dark are the recesses that I feel I’m in a John Le Carré spy story. The shower stall I’ve been dreaming of turns out to be a doorless, curtainless tiled pad tilted in the wrong direction so it discharges all its water toward the bedroom. The shower head is screwed to a rubber hose attached to a spigot on the wall. The hose is only two feet long. To get water on me, I have to squat. If I pull on the hose, hoping to get it to stretch, it separates from the spigot altogether. None of this diminishes the profound rapture I feel as a trickle of hot water splashes onto my head.

  An hour later when we enter the dining room, Gustav sees us. Too late we notice that he’s waved us over to join him and Laure for dinner. Not only that. We see that he’s seen us see him. After such a long day I can barely manage civil words in English, let alone in French. What I want is to sit quietly with Bernard, with whom I don’t have to converse if I don’t want to. Laure adds a weak wiggle of her fingers to echo Gustav’s invitation. She looks so frumpy and unhappy I don’t have the heart to say no.

  “Let me buy the wine, to thank you for your help,” Gustav says, almost with reluctance, as if he wished he really didn’t have to. Our dinner together is bleak, Bernard chatting valiantly, while I struggle to find bon mots to contribute. Laure sits silently. I can’t stop myself from thinking longingly, “Oh, where is Robert in my time of need.” As we walk back to the elevator after dessert, Gustav takes me by the elbow
and whispers conspiratorially, “I hope on our day off in Novosibirsk that you will go around with Laure. You will be able to explain things to her in French! Otherwise, you know . . .” and here he waves an arm around vaguely, “ . . . she will just sit in the room all day.”

  I’m as flabbergasted that he’s roping me into being his wife’s travel companion, and undoubtedly her psychotherapist, as I am desperate to avoid it. “Thank you, Gustav. But I normally help Bernard on rest days.”

  “Oh, Bernard doesn’t need you there,” he guffaws. “Go out and have some fun!”

  “Well, I have to tell you, we’re a team. So we like to be together.”Thankfully the elevator arrives, absolving me from having to say a pointed “No.”

  Breakfast next morning is in a room that must double as a ballroom dancing arena, our tables huddled like wallflowers in one drafty corner. Charming young girls in green micro-minis and yellow shirts waltz in, balancing four plates apiece. They set breakfast in front of us: two green peas adorning half a sliced hardboiled egg. How thoughtful to have waitstaff that match the food.

  Back at the car park, we confront a horde of desperate Rally crews trying to secure transport to Novosibirsk for their crippled vehicles. It makes me think of pictures I’ve seen of the fall of Saigon in 1973. Of course, we’re all here by choice, and nobody’s shooting at us, but the air fairly crackles with urgency and desperation. Not only are there twelve crippled Rally cars coming in on trucks, but none of those trucks will be available to help others, like us, whose cars didn’t fare well on the drive from the border. They’re Mongolian trucks, and they don’t do Siberia any more than they can help it. So leery are some of the Mongolian drivers of even being in Russia that one of them, in his impatience to turn around and get back to Mongolia, does the unthinkable. He pushes the Rally car he’s been hauling off his truck bed without ramps, while the owner dashes frantically around, waving his arms and shouting “Noooo. Stopppppp.” I could read the driver’s mind: “Why the worry? What’s an eight-foot drop to the ground to a car that’s already broken?”