The Humorless Ladies of Border Control (15 page)

“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.

Chekhov tells a sob story (“I'm having the most frustrating time”) about leaving Irkutsk for the Baikal shore to catch a steamer across the lake but finding no horses, missing the boat, and learning there wouldn't be another for four days. “All we could do was sit on the shore until Friday, look at the water, and wait.” While grouchily wandering the bank, though, he saw a boat loading up, made a quick arrangement, ran back for his traveling party, and boarded: “People say that in the deepest places you can see down almost as far as a mile, and indeed I myself saw rocks and mountains drowning in the turquoise water that sent shivers down my spine. The trip across Baikal was wondrous, utterly unforgettable. . . . What ravines, what crags!”

Olkhon Island is a barely disconnected bit of land off the west shore and about halfway up Lake Baikal. It graduated from peninsula to island at some point after the Ice Age, in a freshwater lake that at some point will itself join the sea when the continent splits. The island has been a shamanistic center since prehistory, and the Buryats worship it as the final resting place of Genghis Khan. The waters of the whole region are generally assumed to have medicinal properties. There was one ragged village,
Khuzhir, dominated by a backpacker complex called Nikita's Guesthouse. The eponymous owner was a former table-tennis champion. Maria had negotiated for a discount on the room and food in exchange for a concert at a local music school for children. The staff was a sheaf of willowy young girls in sandals and flowing skirts, shuffled and directed by an alpha yogi with a shaved head and a shawl over her shoulders. Giovanni, a shaggy and excitable college-aged Frenchman volunteering here in exchange for free board, showed us to our room. We speculated about intra-staff intrigue, and sure enough it wasn't minutes before I spotted Giovanni in a spirited exchange with an aggrieved local blonde.

The rest of the town was a ramshackle collection of wood houses and alternately dusty and muddy dirt roads riddled with potholes. Its centerpiece was a standing pool of stinking water. Townspeople had taken note of the success of Nikita's and were engaged in a rush of construction. There was something of the coastal Alaskan fishing village about it, and also something African. The proprietress of the local general store, a Buryat woman, broke off her conversation as we entered, muttering, “Foreigners . . .” to her other customers.

We rented mountain bikes and went on a torturous, though stunning, lakeside ride. The lake was ringed with hills, the water deep and eerily still. Just offshore, the water was pierced by crags that looked like stone icebergs, topped by short conifers decorated with the primary-color ribbons of Buddhist observance. Within a single kilometer the landscape morphed from sandy beach to grassland, with the occasional gnarled tree, to pine grove. I went to explore the highlands and found the forest
floor covered in trash: punctured sacks of refuse, the fluttering snow of shredded plastic bags, a dead dog in a trash can, the corpse of a cow half-covered with a tarpaulin. The circular concrete foundation of a never-finished home had been repurposed for landfill. A kid leaned over its edge and yelled to his mother, “Hey look, our old couch!” This is what anarchy actually looks like: the absence of a local governing authority, the tragedy of the commons in stark material form. With no town dump, people just drive up into the woods and throw trash off the back of the truck for the wind and the elements to do with what they will. Acres of woodland in the middle of “Siberia's jewel”—a national forest, in fact—covered in detritus, the rest thinned to a sandy meadow from logging for firewood and for raw materials for development. (“When I think of the consumption of wood in this country, both for the construction and warming of houses, I am astonished that any forests remain in the land,” wrote Custine in 1839.) This was the not-so-hidden back door of Russian capitalism. The power of the government limited itself to action on its own behalf and in its own defense. The rest of society, and the land itself, was left unregulated and, by all evidence, unmourned. The towns, large and small, were graveyards of abandoned and wrecked concrete, undemolished except by lassitude and time, slumped buttresses of a sense of collective failure despite individual innocence. When a state takes full control, it assumes full responsibility; the corollary is that individuals completely relinquish the same. When the state melts away or abdicates, there is no entity to handle the leavings. A communal original sin hangs over everything, beyond the lifetimes of the young people who nonetheless grow up in its shadow.