The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  – Sviatoslav Richter, Notebooks and Conversations

  ‘Siberia is an extensive and chilly land. I go on and on without seeing an end to it. I’ve seen little that’s interesting and novel, but on the other hand I’ve felt and experienced a great deal . . . I’ve had the kind of sensations you wouldn’t undergo for millions of roubles in Moscow. You ought to come to Siberia! Ask the Public Prosecutor to exile you here.’

  – Anton Chekhov, Letter to his brother, June 1890

  Epilogue: The Orkhon Valley

  ASTAY OF SEVERAL WEEKS on Sakhalin Island will bring on a kind of rheumatic sickness, wrote Anton Chekhov, the effect of so-called ‘climatic influences’ inducing ‘Febris Sachalinensis’. A contemporary Western authority on the Russian Far East, John J. Stephan, makes note of how during the Second World War, Japanese soldiers defending the Kuril Islands complained of ‘Kurilitis’ to describe an affliction brought on by being stuck too long in an isolated place and a cruel climate. The master of twentieth-century Siberian nature writing, Valentin Rasputin, remarks on another kind of illness induced by Siberia – an opening up of expanses you never knew were there.

  Siberia has the virtue of not startling or astonishing you right away but of pulling you in slowly and reluctantly, as it were, with measured carefulness, and then binding you tightly once you are in. And then it’s all over – you are afflicted with Siberia. After malignant anthrax [sibirskaia iazva, literally, ‘Siberian ulcer’], which apparently doesn’t exist anymore, this is Siberia’s most famous disease: for a long time after being in this land a person feels hemmed in, sad, and mournful everywhere else, tormented wherever he goes by a vague and agonizing sense of his own inadequacy, as if he’s left part of himself in Siberia for ever.

  I had only five days left on my visa when I headed home to England from Khabarovsk. I flew over the Yenisei River and Lake Baikal. Once I hit Irkutsk, my flight retraced the line that the nineteenth-century blind traveller James Holman followed out of Siberia on his way back to England. Despite his blindness, Holman’s presence in Irkutsk had put him under suspicion that he was acting as a British spy. He was quickly and forcibly escorted from Siberia on the orders of the Tsar. Poking around Russia’s terra incognita was problematic then, and it still is now.

  When Chekhov made his journey to Sakhalin, he claimed he was writing a thesis to support his medical career. He also said he was undertaking a census measuring the convict colony’s household groups. Suspicion was inevitably aroused. One prisoner, who had killed his wife with a hammer, thought Chekhov was counting convicts in order to send them to the moon. ‘My main aim in conducting the census,’ admitted Chekhov, ‘was not its results but the impressions received during the making of it.’

  When I applied for my Russian visa in London, I told the consulate my purpose of travel was to look for pianos in Siberia.

  The woman at the desk glanced at me as if I had lost my mind. As I left, another applicant held the door open for me.

  ‘That was the worst story I ever heard,’ he said.

  ‘Why are you going?’ I asked.

  ‘Football,’ he said.

  My original motives were genuine, but they had also kept expanding. ‘I’m interested to be where I was not,’ Richter told a local journalist, who was as bemused as anyone to find a Soviet megastar touring the Siberian back country. I shared Richter’s curiosity, to which I added a foreigner’s naïvety: I was interested in seeing those parts I had never known existed in the first place, which in an over-travelled world makes Siberia stand out. Catherine the Great had once reasoned that her Empire had expanded so dramatically under her rule because of the Russians’ ‘proclivity for adventure’. What she probably meant to say was the Empire had swelled so effectively because of the Russians’ love of a good fur, but still, I understood her point: Siberia is a very fine place indeed for travellers in pursuit of the adrenaline which truly adventurous travel imparts.

  Was it all just a grand romance? A nostalgic, picaresque quest for the exotic? A chase for the object of desire rather than its achievement, marked by marvels, monsters and eccentric diversions? Or was it just another contribution to the annals of travel into the Siberian absurd? There was a good tradition in them. James Holman’s Travels through Russia, Siberia, Poland, Austria, Saxony, Prussia, Hanover, &c. &c. Undertaken during the Years 1822, 1823 and 1824, While Suffering from Total Blindness; John Dundas Cochrane’s 1825 Narrative of a Pedestrian Journey through Russia and Siberian Tartary, From the Frontiers of China to the Frozen Sea and Kamchatka; and Vagabonding at Fifty, written by two sedate, middle-aged American women, Helen Wilson and Elsie Mitchell, who made a baffling journey into the Altai in 1925. They came from the suburbs of Berkeley, California, dressed in khakis and panama hats, and were accompanied by a pet fox terrier. Their purpose was to join an international brigade of communists in Siberia, but when factory life wasn’t quite as they had expected, they took to the mountains for a holiday instead.

  I knew the entire endeavour had been inflected with a measure of madness. But then, if I had paused to read every dreadful story, real or fake, written about Russia, I would never have got on a plane to Siberia in the first instance. If I had let anxiety take hold, I wouldn’t have seen the many, many places which found a place in my heart, but not in the pages of this book. There was the magical Lake Numto, where I stayed with a family of forest-dwelling Nenets. There was the buzz of Tyumen, where I watched the oil men come and go with the kind of swagger you would expect in Moscow. There were the numerous musical performances from Novosibirsk to Khabarovsk – some very good, others as familiarly parochial as those I know from my own rural community on the sleepy English coast. And there was the outright weirdness of Birobidzhan, a Soviet experiment on the Russia–China border conceived in the 1930s to function as the USSR’s ‘Jewish Autonomous Region’. There were roadsigns in Yiddish, one rabbi, and no Jewish musicians I could find, aside from a visiting theatre group from Israel.

  In all these meanderings, one of the biggest challenges had been keeping on the right side of the authorities. Aside from working with local news channels to find pianos, I had been more or less successful in flying beneath the radar until I reached the Altai Mountains. I was called in by an FSB official to go over my paperwork. He worked for the state security service. He talked about Somerset Maugham and Joseph Heller, conversing in perfect English with a nimble intellect and a disquieting familiarity.* He knew my education, I assumed, from my visa application. His fascination with my time at Oxford made me suspect that we both saw each other through the prism of a James Bond movie. To me, he was the Russian baddie; to him, I was the entitled Englishwoman who might work for MI6.

  The next night my interpreter received a late-evening call from the same official. His continued attention was unnerving, as if he didn’t believe I was in Siberia to look for piano stories. I think the FSB man thought I was a little odd. I was confident I had the correct paperwork to be in this region, so when we parted, I decided to press on for the border post near Kosh-Agach, one of the last settlements before Mongolia.

  I wanted to spend a couple of days looking at this potential route out of Siberia – to see how good the road was, since this border crossing was one of only two in Siberia open to foreigners en route to Mongolia. I also wanted to immerse myself one last time in the landscape before abandoning it completely. The Altai was too beautiful not to see more of the mountains. Having encountered a tiger at the beginning of this journey, I had it in my head that it was worth trying to find a snow leopard. My book’s theme – a far-flung search for Russia’s remarkable survivors – turned around the rare and disappearing, which was enough to justify the diversion.

  My interpreter and Uncle Vitya made the necessary arrangements. My paperwork was signed off by the local officials. I hired a heavy-duty, off-road truck furnished with a stove and bunks. I would be accompanied by two wildlife rangers and a couple of snowmobiles. Uncle Vitya checked my wardrobe and insisted on so
me extra purchases. The temperature was dipping to minus twenty and below.

  That’s what I was doing – tipping off what felt like the End of Everything, every part of my body clinging to a gold-toothed wildlife ranger on the back of a snowmobile – when my luck slipped into free fall. From the top of a bald hill I could see Mongolia. A flock of argali sheep were moving across a treeless valley beneath me. The sheep were huge, their extravagant curled horns twisted like corkscrews and swept backwards as if bent by the wind. For a few long minutes, we pursued the flock through a whiteness that rolled out in every direction. Then out of nowhere, four armed border guards in white camouflage appeared on snowmobiles. While I had been following the sheep, they had been following me; they said that I had to go with them back to Kosh-Agach.

  The interrogation lasted the rest of the day. When I thought it was over, I was put in the back of a van, taken to the customs police, and fingerprinted. When I scrubbed my fingers, which were stained with ink, I looked at the whorls on my thumb and thought of the tattoos on the Altaian mummies. I stood against the wall. All I could do was press the small of my back into it to stop my body shaking.

  I had stepped across a line in a place I wasn’t meant to be. My questioners were polite. They were professional. They were cold as ice. They said I had trespassed into the wrong border territory, without permission. They fined me – I had committed an ‘administrative violation’ – and warned me that one more error and my visa allowing my return to Russia could be revoked. But when I found those rare argali sheep, I also experienced the thrill of discovery. There seemed to me something important about not letting anything scare me off from the quiet corners of Siberia to which pianos had come. Still, that incident also changed things for me: I needed to be careful.

  In February 2018, two years after deciding to take on this search in one of the most remote places on Earth, I started making enquiries about a piano for Mongolia. I did this with the help of the Novosibirsk tuner Kostya Lomatchenko. His family instrument – the Grotrian-Steinweg I had first encountered in the basement of the Novosibirsk opera house along with a papier-mâché pig – had drawn me in immediately, despite the broken sounds and missing keys. The Grotrian seemed to have everything ‘right’ about it, at least by the time I had worked out what ‘right’ might be: the instrument was private rather than state property; it carried an intimate meaning rather than national significance; it was one of the best uprights ever made, and more transportable than a grand. Eventually, I found space in our growing friendship to ask if the Lomatchenkos would let it go – the instrument bought by Kostya’s grandfather from an antiques shop in the sixties with the sale of his house.

  The Lomatchenkos agreed, since they all tuned instruments but no one really played. Under Kostya’s direction, Odgerel’s patron, Franz-Christoph Giercke, and I would buy the specialist parts from Germany, and a system to stabilize humidity in order to protect the piano in the dry air of Mongolia. Kostya and his father would then spend three months restoring the piano, which they did in the basement of the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre. Stanislav Dobrovolskiy, the tuner who had survived the Leningrad Siege, would help advise on paperwork for the relevant authorities. In return for his time and assistance, he had asked that I send him a copy of a 1958 vinyl record he was keen to hear: England’s Greatest Combo . . . The Couriers of Jazz! by Tubby Hayes and Ronnie Scott.

  In April 2018, I received news from my interpreter, Elena Voytenko, that the Grotrian-Steinweg, its action now able to withstand anything a dazzling virtuoso could throw at it, was ready to travel. By way of thanks, Franz-Christoph Giercke and I also agreed to pay for Kostya to pursue his dream: to fly to Germany and complete his advanced piano tuner training at the Steinway Academy in Hamburg. If successful, and accepted on to the course, this would help make him one of the best-trained piano tuners in Siberia. I gave Kostya my word: if he could get a piano to Mongolia, then I could surely get a Siberian to Steinway.

  On 18 May 2018, the Grotrian-Steinweg was packed with mattresses, ropes and foam to start its two-thousand-mile-long journey by truck and trailer from Novosibirsk to the Orkhon Valley in Mongolia. The delivery from Novosibirsk took eight days, via the River Yenisei and Lake Baikal, then through the Kiakhta border crossing between Russia and Mongolia. The Russian despatch party comprised Kostya Lomatchenko, Uncle Vitya – my lucky talisman and ‘security’ detail, who wanted to come along for the ride – and my Russian interpreter, Elena, whose extraordinary determination throughout my quest had made this final journey possible. The driver, Igor, was an athletic, blue-eyed subway operator from Novosibirsk.

  Unfortunately, the political climate had changed dramatically during the last few months of this book’s writing. Tensions were running high between the UK, the US and Russia. For this reason, I met the piano in Mongolia. I was joined by my friend the photographer Michael Turek and my twelve-year-old son, Danny. I had been feeling jumpy given my visa was marked. Perhaps I was being paranoid, but I was disappointed not to share fully in this closing mission when for good or for bad I had sought to transcend the notions of fear that exist around the idea of Siberia.

  I was equally despondent about the fact I was missing out on one of the great road trips of Central Asia: after making their drop-off in the Orkhon Valley, the Russians would return home through western Mongolia and the Russian Altai to complete a month-long circuit of three and a half thousand miles. I was envious of the fun they would have, with a third of this journey spent travelling roadless open steppe (they got lost twice and saved two German tourists headed to the 2018 FIFA World Cup who got stuck in a Volkswagen in a Mongolian river). My disappointment at not being part of this expedition soon faded, however, when the piano was finally unloaded into the ger. For a couple of days, Kostya worked privately with the piano, getting it to the tuning standard he wanted. It was during those days, when the piano was opened up, that I noticed the stamp of ‘Allenstein’ on the wooden key. Then finally, as the sun was going down on a crisp night in May, we heard Odgerel Sampilnorov play.

  The occasion was deeply moving. A group of herders gathered to listen to the premiere. Odgerel, who was nervous that she and the instrument might not get along, played the work of a contemporary Mongolian composer, Byambasuren Sharav. She immediately pronounced the Grotrian-Steinweg superior in sound to the Yamaha baby grand. Kostya Lomatchenko wept. Uncle Vitya shared his moonshine and his stories about yetis. Franz-Christoph Giercke brought out silver cups and gave Uncle Vitya, whom he adored, his English Lock & Co. black felt fedora hat. Igor collected flowers from the river to present to Elena, with whom he had fallen thoroughly in love.

  For the next few days, all of us came and went through the ger’s low door to listen to Odgerel play some more. It was like eavesdropping on two people getting to know each other for the first time. This was music at its best: intimate, pure and true. Russian, Mongolian, German – it didn’t matter whose; the music flowed so effortlessly it was as if it were revealing a shared and noble truth. Kostya and I would lie on our backs on the tent’s yak-hair floor. Both of us liked listening in. Sometimes Kostya cried, sometimes he smiled, overwhelmingly proud about the piano’s sound he had spent months repairing. I felt proud, too, not because I had put any trust in my musical judgement, but because all the searching had come together in this single moment – and powerful conviction – that people basically want the same thing: harmony, beauty, continuity.

  Throughout my journey, I had been asking myself: what is the point of music? Now we were all together in Mongolia, what was Kostya, with his extreme sensitivity, thinking about as he lay there with his eyes closed? Did he, too, wonder about the piece of green felt draped over the piano’s case? It had come with the instrument – a sort of slip laid over the keyboard to protect the ebonies and ivories. The felt was embroidered with flowers – stitched by one of the Grotrian-Steinweg’s previous owners before the Lomatchenkos had bought it in the Novosibirsk antiques shop. It was a personal memento �
�� a kind of coat to protect something that had been dearly loved by someone, somewhere, its history still unknown. Who was this person? Would they be glad to be weaving these invisible roses in the lives of those who came next? Was there someone still alive who remembered learning to play their first scales on this Grotrian-Steinweg before Europe was torn apart? Or was the piano’s wartime story a false trail? If only the threads could lead back. If only someone one day might claim this piano’s early history, there might be another chapter left to write.

  Next year, declared Giercke, we all needed to return to Mongolia to listen to Odgerel play the piano in concert with the horsehead fiddle, or morin khuur. He would organize a recital, he said – a grand performance in a clearing on a rocky outcrop in the steppe, a holy place which he had first encountered twenty years before. He said it was a day’s drive away from where we stood, with a small Buddhist temple at its top and the most perfect acoustics he had ever heard. With that final flourish of the beautiful eccentricity that had got me into this Siberian piano hunt in the first place, he sent us off with Kostya to make a sound check.

  ‘Tell me if I haven’t been hearing things,’ said Giercke. ‘The acoustics are so perfect, you can hear a pin drop.’

  We went, got the car stuck, listened to Kostya test the acoustics with a whisper, and all marvelled that Giercke was right: the sound rolled around the bowl of rock in the purest air imaginable. That night, which was to be our last all together in Mongolia, we made firm promises to each other – the most important oath being the one Odgerel gave to Kostya that his gift of a piano would be loved, and if there was ever a problem with it, or she could no longer care for it, she would be back in touch. We toasted each other late into the night. We said our goodbyes knowing there would be more toasts to come. The subway driver was falling deeper in love. Uncle Vitya again told his story about the yeti. The next day, Elena, Igor, Kostya and Uncle Vitya departed, their empty trailer enveloped in a plume of dust.