The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  The haze was at least partly due to forest fires in the national forest—though, as Ian Frazier pointed out, “Krasnoyarsk puts out an impressive smoke haze of its own.” The forest was infested with encephalitic ticks, which were beginning to migrate into town. Rumor attributed the ticks to the remnants of a Japanese biological warfare campaign.

  Yegor, we discovered, worked as a flight attendant on one of the legendarily dangerous Russian domestic airlines, after having gotten himself excused from army service for being underweight—he had starved himself for two weeks before his draft physical—and excused again later because he was the sole support for his pensioner mother.

  “You look like Michael J. Fox,” Maria told him, which was true.

  “Who?”

  “The actor, from the movie Back to the Future?”

  “Ah. He had a shitty car too.”15

  “Melancholy, disguised as irony,” Custine observed, “is in this land the most ordinary humour.”

  We were playing in the basement of a café that night, and the opening act was a bayan-fronted trio who did a credible Bowie cover. It was a fractious show with a raucous crowd. A tuning peg on my banjo exploded into shards of plastic, rendering the instrument unusable. My jacket and some cables disappeared from the back room. I lost my temper at the unresponsive local sound guy, and yelled my way through the set with all my excess frustration and aggression. “Fatigue,” said Custine, “renders a man almost as ungrateful as ennui.” We slept late.

  In the morning, Yegor found what they called a “guitar master”—a repairman—at a guitar/accordion store with some Soviet-era Jaguar and Jazzmaster knockoffs. He set to work carving a new tuning peg out of wood. Meanwhile, we went to the “city day” festival, a cluster of Uzbek food stalls and Buryat dancers. We picked up my banjo (one of Yegor’s friends paid for the repair, feeling badly about the missing cable) and boarded the seventeen-hour train to Irkutsk.

  There seems no end to the journey. There is little of novelty or interest to be seen, but I am experiencing and feeling a lot. . . . Between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk there is nothing but taiga. The forest is no denser than at Sokolniki, but no coachman can tell you where it ends. It seems endless. . . . When you are going up a mountain and you look up and down, all you see are mountains in front of you, more mountains beyond them, and yet more mountains beyond them, and mountains on either side, all thickly covered in forest. It’s actually quite frightening.

  —Anton Chekhov

  If pressed, I could describe Siberia with just a list of four natural items: birch, pine, purple wildflowers, and that mutant Queen Anne’s lace. The heat had broken, and the meadows and Easter-egg villages looked idyllic. Two teenage boys stopped by our compartment to hawk a dubious lottery-ticket scheme: “Ten rubles can feed ten babies.” The local train stations were encased in massive yards of tree trunks and rough-cut lumber.16 In fact, the only other train traffic at this point was the lumber cars and the oil trains, with slick spill stains down the sides of stenciled tanker cars.

  “American companies have tried to put together deals to harvest Siberian timber, but as a rule the deals go wrong,” wrote Ian Frazier. “Executives of these companies eventually give up in disgust at Russian business practices, particularly the corruption and bribery. . . . Some environmentalists say that Russian corruption is the Siberian forests’ true preserver and best friend.”

  The provodnitsy on this train were unusually young, and a few seemed to have their significant others along for a romantic ride. Or at least they had managed to cultivate a significant other in every port to come meet them for a few minutes at the platform. While one of the young men in uniform stood by the doors with his leather-and-wood signal flags, a bored girl in shower shoes uncoupled herself from him and stood aside as ticket-bearing passengers reboarded.

  One of the less plausible but most tenacious tropes of writing about trans-Siberian travel are sexual fantasies about the provodnitsy. In Carrère’s Limonov biography, the protagonist “hears the female conductor moaning as two little punks take turns doing her in her cubbyhole.” On the recommendation of one of the Siberian punks, I read the British writer John King’s Human Punk, a roman à clef (and endless tapestry of run-on sentences) of peripatetic summer-of-’77 punk youth, including a job in Hong Kong and a trans-Siberian ride from Beijing to Berlin. The youthful working-class violence of the early sections may ring true—I wouldn’t know—but the train romance with the blonde Slavic stereotype Rika is pure fantasy: “I see . . . Matron standing by the door of her cabin, trying to open a bottle. She asks me to help and I unscrew the top without any problem. She asks if I’d like a drink, and I don’t see why not. . . . For the first time I see her as a woman. . . . Before, she was the commandant, someone in a uniform off the films, a lifetime of cold Eastern Bloc women with thick calves and weightlifter faces, but now she’s Rika, with short blonde hair and nice legs.”

  Of course, it’s not ridiculous that men traveling alone (and it’s all men who write these stories) would let their minds wander; fantasies about airline stewardesses or even motel clerks and cleaning ladies are even more common and fully international. King limits himself to the imagining. If Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar is to be believed, the author cornered a kitchen girl in an empty compartment somewhere east of Yekaterinburg: “I put my arm around Nina and with my free hand took off her white scullion’s cap. Her black hair fell to her shoulders. I held her tightly and kissed her, tasting the kitchen. . . . But the compartment door was open, and Nina pulled away and said softly, ‘Nyet, nyet, nyet.’”

  For our part, we experienced none of the clichés of trans-Siberian romance: no vodka shared with strangers, only a few hallway hawkers; no crowded, boisterous restaurant cars, just people going where they were going and trying to do it as simply as possible. At Ilyinskaya, we bought a bag of tart blue berries (later identified as “bog whortleberries”) from a baba on the platform and reboarded without incident.

  The flag of Irkutsk features an all-black cartoon of a Siberian tiger with the all-red corpse of a sable in its jaws. The aristocratic, anti-tsarist Decembrists, exiled to Irkutsk after their failed plot in 1825, made the city the cultural center of Siberia—admittedly a low bar in a region which was at the time home almost exclusively to prison colonies and nomadic herders. An entire generation of would-be liberal revolutionaries from Western-looking Saint Petersburg, fresh from the Russian defeat of Napoleon, thought they would cap the fall of a foreign emperor with the overthrow of their own, only to end up in Siberia. But more than the rebels Volkonsky, Trubetskoy, and their compatriots, it was their wives—who had voluntarily joined them in exile—who became icons and romantic avatars of loyalty. The men were acclaimed by the Bolsheviks as proto-revolutionaries, and the Volkonskys in particular were embraced by the literary world: Tolstoy reportedly based the character of Bolkonsky in War and Peace on Andrei, and of his wife, Maria, Custine commented, “Pushkin rhapsodized that her hair was more lustrous than daylight and darker than night.” Maria Volkonskaya hosted a famous salon in her log house, maintaining as best she could the cosmopolitan culture of her and her husband’s hometown in what must have seemed like the other side of the world.

  Ivan the bloody unifier, Peter the bloody modernizer, Catherine the bloody conqueror, Stalin the bloody globalizer—all iconic Russian leaders can share that adjective. It was around Irkutsk that the moral objection of the international liberal class to the Russian monarchy began to coalesce. They found in the Decembrists their aristocratic and intellectual peers, an empathetic face for the thousands who were poured into the near-infinite oubliette to the east as a pressure valve protecting a rotten regime. Custine was no democrat (“I went to Russia to seek for arguments against representative government, I return a partisan of constitutions”), but he saw in the Decembrists an elite of aesthetes with whom he could identify. Their fate appalled him and hardened his ultimate judgment against a tsar he otherwise respected. Likewise, for
George Kennan (whose 1891 book Siberia and the Exile System was called the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Siberian exile,” though that was a promiscuously applied honorific in the nineteenth century), exposure to the political prisoners in Siberia turned his erstwhile support of the government to disgust and condemnation.

  “The best of the Siberian towns is Irkutsk,” declared Chekhov—not much of a compliment since he complained about virtually every other stop on his journey.

  Irkutsk is a splendid town, and very civilized. It has a theatre, a museum, municipal gardens with music playing in them, good hotels. . . . I see a lot of Chinese [there remains a substantial, crowded Chinatown today]. . . . Last night the officers and I went and had a look round the town. We heard someone shouting for help about six times; it was probably somebody being strangled. We went to look, but didn’t find anyone.

  It was a compact old city and felt relaxed—it was a Sunday, and anyone not at their out-of-town dachas was at the market or on the waterfront. Promoter Valeriy and his ponytailed friend Dima took us down to the Angara River embankment. It was new, part of a development boom tied to the 350th anniversary of Irkutsk. “Well,” explained Dima, “the government did nothing for twenty years, and people were really complaining. So they had to build some things. Like a bribe, for people to calm down.” (Perhaps one of these buildings was the isolated, glass-fronted skyscraper on a bluff overlooking the city, where we went for oligarch-priced coffee in a spectacular, and completely empty, penthouse restaurant.)

  Yet it was a lovely riverfront, and a dance band played on the plaza under a statue (also new) of Alexander III. Old ladies danced in pairs with other old ladies. The sad demographic fact of Russia is that for a long time most men haven’t made it out of their fifties, largely due to alcoholism and World War II, which decimated the males of that generation, and the elderly population skews female by a large margin. On a small spit of land sat an angular white bandshell—“our version of Sydney Opera House,” said Valeriy dryly. “A miracle of Soviet architecture.” The bandshell was covered in graffiti and faced a rotting wooden dance pavilion beginning to grow over with grass. It stood on what they called “Youth Island,” across a small bridge, where artificial beaches for tanning and drinking encircled a bedraggled arcade. Youth Island could stand alongside Asbury Park and Coney Island in the esteem of any connoisseur of down-at-theheels amusement parks.

  “Here is the new bridge.” Valeriy gestured toward it. “We are very disappointed because it is such a boring bridge. Come on, it’s the twenty-first century, you can make a cool bridge!” Across the river, the bridge terminated at a black glass pyramid. “It was supposed to be an ice skating rink, but they ran out of money ten years ago and didn’t finish. It’s a typical situation in Russia—they can make more money starting to build and quitting”—and pocketing the balance, it was implied—“than finishing and selling.”

  We had an extended debate about relative tax rates while we rented a small motorboat and went on a ride around the river. Russia trumpets a 13 percent flat rate on income, but Dima and Valeriy said that so much is withheld for pensions and health care that it ends up adding up to a 50 or 55 percent effective tax rate. “Except in the U.S., you see something for your taxes. Here the roads never get better.”

  The boat ride over, we disembarked and walked past (another!) bar called Bar Akobama. I asked our guides if either of them had spent time in the United States. “We did work-study in Los Angeles,” Dima replied—the same work/travel program we’d heard about from others. “At first we had a job at Six Flags, but it was like slavery. Then we got a job in the warehouse at a 99-cent store, and that was much better. Hard work, but it was fine for us. Then we went to New York and we were buying weed from a guy, and he said we could stay with him in Brighton Beach, so that was good.”

  “Did you like New York?”

  “Honestly, I didn’t like New York as much as LA. It was more like Russia—like Moscow—everyone is closed off and depressed. Everyone said, ‘Oh no, LA, it’s so dangerous,’ but I think a bad neighborhood in the U.S. is like a good neighborhood in Russia. We lived in East LA, by Compton, it was no problem. I was ashamed of the Russians in Brighton Beach. It is a different kind of Russian. All the women only care about money, and I think the guys are bad guys.” (Brighton Beach, while a center of Russian expat life in New York, also has a reputation as a hub for Russian organized crime.)

  Just past the dam was the inevitable Lenin, in a pose I hadn’t seen before, palms up and beckoning. “There are infinite poses of Lenin,” Valeriy told us. “My teacher said in one city they made a Lenin with two caps, one on the head and one in the hand. In Ulan-Ude”—opposite Irkutsk, on the eastern side of Lake Baikal—“is a giant head [of Lenin]. In Soviet times they said it was hollow, so KGB guys could get inside and spy on people through his eyes.”

  Valeriy played in a band (that included a bayan) called Radio Mayak after the Soviet-era monopolist radio station. For a while, their practice-space neighbors were the local Mormon missionaries who are a noticeable presence in this part of the world and often the only Americans locals have ever met. “I used to drink a lot, and then I would tell them all my opinions.” He snickered. “It would take a while.”

  Anyway, Dima and Valeriy had met more eminent Americans while in the States. “We took off work [at the 99-cent store] one time to meet Tommy Chong at a bookstore. Our supervisor wouldn’t let us off, so we just didn’t go [to work]. It was important enough. He’s a good guy!”

  We were up by seven thirty to catch a seven-hour bus to the ferry to Olkhon Island, a backpacker destination in the middle of Lake Baikal, but Valeriy had forgotten to call a taxi to get us to the nine a.m. bus. We sat outside the apartment building for over an hour while he ran to various corners and called various numbers. When a car finally appeared, he got the bus company on his cell phone, saying, “Don’t go anywhere: I have two foreigners who are running late.” We arrived at the market, which was chaotic with unmarked buses—more accurately, small vans, crowded at a dozen occupants, with luggage racks on the roof. While Valeriy disputed with one van driver, another beckoned us across the street. We followed and flung our bags on the roof. He secured them with a rope net, the door closed, and we were off. So long, Valeriy. At least we had the backseat to ourselves.

  That relative bliss lasted all of five minutes, until the driver pulled over, got out, crossed the street, and lit a cigarette with other drivers. Amid general grousing, most of the passengers got out and started smoking as well.

  After another couple of minutes, the driver returned and told us all to get out, that we were being consolidated onto another bus. He ignored the bags on the roof and wandered off, so I clambered up myself and threw them down. A ruddy and malevolent drunk in a tracksuit wandered up to our new bus and negotiated himself a discount ride.

  “We’ll drop you at the highway,” the driver told him.

  When we got to the highway, the drunk reconsidered. “Ah, I’ll go all the way.”

  “You’re going to ride all the way there?”

  “I know a guy.”

  He began harassing a slight Swiss woman, part of a mother-and-son traveling pair who didn’t speak Russian. Some helpful fellow riders chipped in that he was drunk and an idiot besides. He offered the woman a plastic water bottle full of schnapps and wouldn’t let up until she gave him the window seat. There was general tittering.

  “This is the problem with this part of the world, with Russia, and Ukraine,” Maria fumed. “They just laugh at these drunks and let them get away with everything.” Dostoyevsky wrote in The House of the Dead, “Everywhere among the Russian people a certain sympathy is felt for a drunken man; in prison he was positively treated with respect.”

  Seven hours were left to drive. The drunk passed out with his arm slung over the (occupied) seat in front of him, and we finally rolled out of town. The first two hours were dull, grassy land reminiscent of Nebraska. Once I saw a mounted cattleman with a
herd. Otherwise there was no sign of life besides a cluster of white butterflies at the beginning of a long stretch of coniferous hills. The van struggled up them and coasted down. Forty kilometers north of Irkutsk, we passed a field full of (retired?) biplanes. AC units hung from the sides of yurts.

  The driver, it became obvious, was running a “drunk transport” for his friends. The first drunk got off and greeted a toothless and bearded friend across the dirt street. Another opened negotiations to board, but a local lady slipped quietly into the empty seat.

  “Local,” by now, was solidly Buryat, the Mongolian Buddhist people historically centered on the eastern bank of Lake Baikal. The outskirts of the villages were studded with ribbon-wrapped posts supporting frayed prayer flags. The altitude was apparent in the landscape: barren, rocky hills overlooking grassy valleys and scrub trees, wandering cows, split-rail fences, and exposed shacks. The treelessness exposed things that most communities hide, like the open valley that served as the town rubbish dump: you drove through a nominal gate but then dumped your trash anywhere, and the wind spread it over a couple of surrounding acres. Across the road was a neat and colorful cemetery, organized in discrete and fenced-in squares.

  Soon rock formations started to poke through the grasslands, and we reached the top of the highlands on a long plain. We passed some salty-looking ponds, and the asphalt disappeared. Picture driving the length of Montana on a one- (or one-and-change-) lane road.

  And then before I realized it was upon us, I saw past a hill the cold blue of the lake, gradient from ice-white by the shore through pine green to dark cobalt as it deepened. Baikal, wrote Edward Gibbon, “disdains the modest appellation of a lake,” claiming that native fisherman adhered to the fable that “the holy sea grows angry and tempestuous, if anyone presumes to call it a lake.” We boarded the ferry, the air impossibly clean after weeks of smoggy Siberian cities. Maria struck up a conversation with a woman with a mouthful of gold teeth who was from south of Vladivostok. It had taken three days on the westbound train for her to get here. Her husband was a fisherman on the Sea of Japan, which she said was beautiful but smelled of iodine.