Ice Trilogy (8 page)

The road lay through the hilly taiga, where a mixed forest grew. But the summits of these smooth hills, which the locals called mounds, were entirely covered in thick pine growth. These amazing virgin woodlands reminded me of the manes of sleeping monsters. The slender ship timber grew incredibly thick, and when the wind began to toss the trees, they came alive, and with them the whole mound appeared to awaken, and it seemed that a sleeping monster was just about to rise up, straighten himself out, and fill the taiga expanses with a powerful, resounding roar.

Despite the primeval nature of this region, we rarely came across actual animals: someone spotted a marten once, and a moose.

We traveled very slowly, taking almost a week, spending the nights in small villages that looked like northern Russian farmsteads. The endless taiga spread out around five or six isbas made of hundred-year-old pines, enclosed with high pike fences to keep out animals. The locals were always happy to see us. Simple-hearted people, inured to hardship by Siberia’s harshness, they lived primarily by hunting, fishing, and income from people passing along the “highway,” for whom a separate hut with a stove and bunks always stood ready. We paid them with gunpowder and alcohol. Soviet money was still rare here, and Stalin’s program of mass collectivization had not yet reached these wild places. The villagers fed us freshly caught fish, fried mushrooms, dried game, and the customary flour-meal soup, spiced with wild garlic, wild onions, dried carrots, and salted deer or moose. We slept side by side in huts, bathhouses, sheepfolds, and haylofts. But our undemanding drivers would place their carts in a circle at night, bring all the horses inside the circle, light campfires in a circle around them, and sleep on the carts, covering themselves, despite the summer weather, with the ever-present sheepskin.

On the sixth day our wagon train arrived in Kezhma.

A large settlement with a hundred or so houses stood on a high, beautiful bank of the Angara — a wide, powerful river. Dropping off sharply, the banks turned into a small shoal beyond which this mighty river flowed. The water in it, as in all Siberian rivers, was cold and unbelievably pure. The wooded shore on the other side stretched steeply into the distance.

The village was inhabited primarily by Russians, who were called Angars, and the rare, Russianized Evenki. Everyone worked in hunting and fishing. The hunted pelts were handed over to the government for very small sums, and fish, moose, and reindeer fed them reliably all year long. The Angars did not keep domesticated animals.

In Kezhma our expedition’s Gostorg credit kicked in: we received eight sacks of dried pike, muksun whitefish, and peled whitefish; three barrels of salted white salmon; a small barrel of lard; and a couple of bags of fish flour. Having bathed and sat in the Siberian steam bath, we gave ourselves over to the hospitality of the local leader, a former chairman of the agricultural soviet and local director of Gostorg. He treated Kulik like an old pal, showed him an article clipped from a Taishet newspaper about last year’s expedition. The fellow was most happy that we had “made it all the way here from Petersburg, where Ilyich set up a real carousel for the bourgeois.” A former Red partisan who had fought in the Urals, after the Bolsheviks’ victory they sent him to distant Kezhma “to carry out the Party line.” Arriving here with a cavalry squadron, he “definitively and irreversibly decided the question of Soviet power in Kezhma” over the course of three days: he shot twelve people.

“Now I understand — I should have shot more,” he admitted to us candidly over a glass of alcohol diluted with the cold Angara river water.

In Kezhma he had two wives — the old one and a new one — who got along wonderfully and made a real feast for us: the long, crude table in the director’s isba was groaning with victuals. Here, for the first time in my life, I tried dumplings with bear lard and
shangi
— little wheat cakes fried on a skillet and covered with sour cream. The boss knew only one thing about the meteorite: “Something crashed there and knocked the forest down.” He was categorical in his parting words, advised us not to stand on ceremony with the Evenki, and if necessary to “beat them between their slanted eyes with a rifle butt.” He attributed the failure of last year’s expedition entirely to the sabotage of the native population and Kulik’s “rotten softheartedness.” He referred to the Evenki as Tunguses and saw them as hidden enemies of Soviet rule.

“At first I thought: they live in tents in the taiga, eat simple, dress simple, shit in the open — of course they’ll support Soviet power. But it turns out they’re more kulak than the worst kulaks! All they do is count who has the most reindeer. They need their own revolution! A Tungus Lenin is what they need!”

Kulik tried to object, saying that the main problem of the backward peoples of the USSR was general illiteracy, which had been advantageous to the czarist regime for exploiting them; that the Party had already begun working on this, organizing isba reading rooms and schools for the indigenous people; and that the Evenki, like all the peasants and animal herders, would soon be collectivized. But the headman was unswayable.

“Andreich, if it was my job, I’d collectivize them in my own way: into a cart, to the city with them, do the dirty work, the digging. The shovel will reeducate them! And I’d slaughter all the reindeer and send them off to the starving peasants of the Volga region.”

“We conquered famine in the Volga region two years ago,” Kulik informed him proudly.

“Really?” smiled the tipsy, red-faced boss. “Well, then, we’ll eat the reindeer ourselves.”

In the morning we donned our backpacks, having placed in them only the necessary provisions, saddled up the local horses, and set off along a narrow path beaten down by the reindeer. From Kezhma to the Stony Tungus River we had another two hundred kilometers north to travel. The wagon train with the main baggage took off after us.

The tract passed through hills and mounds. Uphill we rode at a walk, going down we drove our slow, broad-chested horses as fast as we could. They got extremely frightened when there was a long descent. Then — up a hill once again, and so on, endlessly.

On the mounds the taiga changed: pine gave way quickly to conifers, and the mixed forest crawled down into a valley; the land gradually became covered with moss and lichen. Animals could be seen frequently. The men met them with cries. Wild birds flew up from the thickets, flapping their heavy wings. I saw Siberian weasels and ermines several times. Scared by us, they shot up the trees in a flash and disappeared in the branches. There were two inveterate hunters among us: the driller Petrenko and the geologist Molik. At the first stop they set off for game and returned fairly quickly with a wood grouse. The large, beautiful bird was plucked, gutted, cut in strips, and boiled with wheat porridge, but its meat turned out to be tough and tasted like pine. During the first expedition Kulik had staked a lot on the local game, hoping to supplement the food with it. But he’d had no luck: during the expedition they had shot only an inedible fox and a few ducks. Our first night in the taiga wasn’t easy: we cut off pine branches and constructed beds for ourselves, lay down around the fire, and tried to fall asleep, covering ourselves with our outer clothing. But despite the warm summer weather an eternal cold was exuded by the stony, mossy earth, and it seeped through our clothes. From above, we were harassed by mosquitoes, which didn’t diminish in number even at night. Among the tribe of mosquitoes appeared tiny, nimble, furious individuals called midges. With a revolting whine they found their way up sleeves and crawled into the eyes and nostrils. It was impossible to fight them off. We took Kulik’s advice and rubbed our wrists and necks with kerosene. Soon the whole expedition began to stink like a kerosene shop. The next three nights were just as hard: people didn’t get enough sleep; they cussed and tried to escape the night cold and mosquitoes; during the day they shivered half asleep in their saddles. But Kulik was inflexible. He woke us at exactly six o’clock with the whistle he carried in his breast pocket, keeping the expedition on an iron schedule. He gave the commands for starting up and for stopping with this whistle. His main motto was: For the sake of a great goal you can put up with everything. In people he valued willpower and focus above all, and in the material world — books. Sitting with us at the campfire, he told us how Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation
helped him to stop smoking when he was in exile.

“I had been reading it for days on end, and one morning I left my shack, walked over to the ice hole, and poured out an entire year’s supply of tobacco with the words: ‘Let the fish smoke. I — am a man of will.’”

Like other social democrats who became Bolshevik, he lived for the future, piously believing in the new Soviet Russia.

“Science should help the Revolution,” he would say.

He thought GOELRO, Lenin’s plan to bring electricity to the whole country, was brilliant and prophetic, and that Stalin’s program of industrialization and collectivization was simply the dictate of the time. But his primary passion was still the Tungus meteorite. When he started talking about it, Kulik completely forgot about Stalin and GOELRO.

“Just imagine, comrades, a piece of another planet, separated from us by millions of kilometers, broke off and is lying somewhere here, not far away.” Kulik paused, straightened his glasses, which reflected the flame of the campfire, and raised his head slightly toward the pale Siberian stars. “And in it is the material of other worlds!”

This phrase gave me goose bumps: the familiar, beloved world of the planets surfaced in my memory. Falling asleep on a pile of pine branches, covering myself from the head down to escape the midges, I imagined that mysterious piece of other worlds in black airless space as it flew toward the Earth and shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It spun in my head. Plunging into sleep, I counted its corner
s...

Finally, toward the evening of the fourth day, swollen from midge bites and badly bruised from the jolting ride across the mounds, we approached Vanavara.

A dozen new wooden houses clung to the very shores of the Stony Tungus River: a few years earlier the trading station at Vanavara had been rebuilt. The biggest, sturdiest log house had the word
GOSTORG
inscribed on it in large white letters, and a faded red flag hung nearby. Around the settlement spread a marvelously beautiful landscape: the very high, sharply descending cliffs of the river’s shore were surrounded by thick taiga. The opposite, southern shore, on the contrary, was fairly low, and beyond it, all the way to the horizon itself, blue-green waves of hills scampered endlessly, flooded by the rays of the sunset. Eagles glided in the rosy-blue evening sky where the moon was becoming faintly visible. Their short cries were the only sounds that disturbed the absolute silence.

But then dogs, spying us, began to bark, and people came out of the houses. They greeted Kulik and Trifonov like family. For this trading post isolated in the taiga, our arrival was an event. A bath was fired up in the bathhouse that stood below on the riverbank. They didn’t begrudge firewood for it, and the steam filled the room in thick whirls. When we had sat in the steam so long our skin was wrinkled and our eyes dimmed, we ran out on a little wooden dock and jumped into the cold Tungus. It was already getting dark. The northern white nights had passed, and a dark-blue sky scattered with stars hung over our heads. Turning onto my back and feeling the strong current of the river, I gazed at the stars. In Siberia they were higher up and seemed very far away.

They fed us fish stew and
shangi
and put us to bed. In the morning I looked over the trading post. Twenty-eight Russians lived there, along with sixteen Evenki, three Chinese, and two Chechens who had been exiled to Siberia during the czarist regime for a blood feud. Here they were blacksmiths. Gostorg bought up fur pelts from local hunters and the Evenki for a song, as it did everywhere in Siberia, and traded them for what was brought in by wagon train. During the winter, the pelts were taken to Kezhma on reindeer sleds.

Our wagon train arrived a couple of days later. It had had its share of adventures along the way: a horse had broken its leg and they’d had to shoot it, and two drivers had run off, taking three guns and a rucksack of ammunition with them. But Kulik wasn’t particularly upset: he was happy that they had brought the equipment and provisions. After our arrival in Vanavara, he had become quite nervous and often grew furious over trivial things. He yelled at me when I dropped a barometer, and he threatened two of the drillers with exile for carelessness with the baggage. Yakov Ikhilevich, the thirty-year-old astronomer, carried on constant professional “meteorological” conversations with Kulik. They almost always ended in arguments with raised voices, and Kulik was the first to explode, reproaching Ikhilevich for “narrow-mindedness and metaphysical thinking.” Ikhilevich had been educated as a mathematician; in calculating the fall of meteorites, he had come up with his own universal formula, according to which a meteorite larger than 248.17 tons could not fall to earth without breaking up into very small pieces. He was absolutely convinced that almost nothing remained of the Tungus meteorite and was in the expedition only to confirm his own theory. Kulik, however, longing to find “material from other worlds” fallen to earth in the form of a huge block, or many-ton pieces, had taken “the bore Ikhilevich” with him in order to “laugh at all the cabinet scientist-worms in the person of ‘the bore Ikhilevich.’” Falling asleep by the campfire, I could often hear Ikhilevich’s dull, nauseatingly detailed muttering and Kulik’s sharp, high voice through my sleep.

But in Vanavara the endless discussion with Ikhilevich came to an end. The moment the short Yakov Iosifovich Ikhilevich, resembling an owl in his pince-nez, opened his mouth about the “crumbling of the hyper-meteorite mass on impact,” Kulik interrupted him: “Colleague, if you have come with us in order to get in our way, I will send you back.”