The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (14 page)

In the morning we were incapacitated by stomach cramps, which brought with them all the additional symptoms you might expect, and I considered calling ahead to cancel that night's show. Was it the water? The multi-fruit juice on an empty stomach? The zinc tablets? Who knows, but the effects were gone two hours later, and we made it back to Novosibirsk for the third time in three days. That night's show was at a chrome-andmirrors dance club called Lebowski Bar, with a mosaic of the titular character on the dance floor and murals from the movie on the walls. A group of teenage girls celebrating a birthday ran to the front of the room to clap for our faster songs, melted back into the shadows for the ballads, and called me to their table
afterward for shots of a hideous red, flavored vodka. The club stiffed us on the guarantee, and I slept poorly on the airless train.

Krasnoyarsk has a reputation as one of the more beautiful Siberian cities, and our approach confirmed that. There was more mountainous terrain than I'd seen in weeks, and my ears popped. When Chekhov reached this point in his journey, he wrote to his family:

            
In [my] last letter . . . I said that the mountains around Krasnoyarsk resembled the Don ridge, but this is not really the case: looking at them from the street, I could see that they surrounded the town like high walls, and they reminded me strongly of the Caucasus. And when I left town in the early evening and crossed over the Enisei, I saw that the mountains on the far bank were really like the mountains of the Caucasus, with the same kind of smoky, dreamy quality. . . . The Enisei is a wide, fast-flowing, lithe river, more beautiful than the Volga. . . . So the mountains and the Enisei have been the first genuinely new and original things I have encountered in Siberia.

It was another famous gulag town: Lenin spent a “couple of months” here during a period of exile, according to Ian Frazier, and “the research he did [in Krasnoyarsk] helped in the writing of his
Development of Capitalism in Russia
.”

Our handler Yegor, wearing an obscene shirt advertising the American punk band NOFX, had a deadpan idea of what constituted local landmarks: our first agenda item was a hike out to the
local hydroelectric dam, next to which was a truck parked atop a thirty-foot pedestal with the words “Glory to Work” painted on its side. Next he pointed out a twenty-four-story office building left incomplete in the late 1980s on which work had just begun again. The local council had been planning a metro as well, but then the government changed hands, and the new mayor “spent all the money on fountains instead.” Yegor pointed out a bronze sculpture of three elk, coated in leafy ivy like giant Chia Pets, and life-size “electronic trees” whose LEDs flashed in the night. “The mayor likes stuff like that,” he said. “Especially fountains.” But the mayor had just been elected to the Duma, the parliament in Moscow, “so probably he won't go to jail.”

Intrigued by Yegor's bluntness, I asked him what he thought of the recent anti-Putin protests, and he repeated the same glum assessment I'd heard elsewhere: the protests are just against Putin and only for the urban elite, there are no alternatives, all the other presidential candidates were “just part of the same gang,” allowed to exist by the Kremlin as a (so to speak) Potemkin opposition. Navalny, the opposition blogger who got a lot of attention in the Western press, was a “bastard” only in it for money and attention.

Were there, I asked, any politicians he liked? “Zhirinovsky”—the radical populist and xenophobic nationalist—“is the only one who says anything interesting, but he will never get elected,” he answered.
^14
14

We drove to one of the genuine landmarks of Krasnoyarsk, a chapel on a hill that appears on the ten-ruble note (alongside
the hydroelectric dam). “Here,” said Yegor, gesturing to his left, “are drugs.”

In those beautiful wooden houses?

“Well, rich people too, but also gypsies on drugs.”

The main road is Ul. Sovietskaya. It would be nearly impossible to get lost in any major Russian city, I thought: just ask for the intersection of Sovietskaya, Lenina, and Karl Marxa and you are guaranteed to find a train station and a giant square. Was there—to cross off the last box in Russian street-name bingo—also an Ul. Pushkina? Not in Krasnoyarsk, but, as if to make up for it, there was a Pushkin statue.

We passed the “Island of Sport and Recreation” and picked up Yegor's three cheerful and enthusiastic friends, who placed my guitar across their laps as they sat in the backseat.

“He”—Yegor indicated the guy sitting behind him—“loves to change guitars for drugs.”

Sorry?

“He sells guitars and buys drugs.”

The guy with my guitar in his lap?

“He used to make a living playing Internet poker, but they blocked Americans last year, and now it's harder for him to make money.”

The chapel hilltop looked out over a vista reminiscent of Los Angeles: hot, hazy, ringed with hills and apartment towers. Dozens of brides and grooms in shiny suits were posing for photographs. A pair of caged white doves, off duty as props, fluttered on the hood of a jeep. A peddler sold magnets, custom-stamped
coins, and heart-shaped locks that lovers could attach to the iron fence.

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
15

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
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.

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.