Travels in Siberia (30 page)

Here we are at Vyacheslav’s dacha that evening. Dinner has ended long ago, but still we are sitting at the table, drinking our fifth or seventh cup of tea; and I am thinking that Russians can sit at a supper table drinking tea and saying brilliant or ridiculous things longer than seems physically possible; further, this trait may explain Russia’s famous susceptibility to unhealthy foreign ideas, with the postmealtime tea drinking providing the opportunity for contagion; and further yet, I am wondering whether tea perhaps has been a more dangerous beverage to the Russian peace of mind, overall, than vodka. At about midnight Vyacheslav brings down his semiautomatic rifle and begins to tell us his adventures hunting bears.

Here we are saying goodbye to Vyacheslav and his wife on the steps of his dacha the next morning. Perhaps tiring of my not-good Russian, he does an imitation of how dumb I sound. It is weird to hear myself imitated in a foreign language. Sergei walks over to the van. Against expectation, it starts. I am glad it has finally been repaired.

Of course the van’s ills were not cured—not then, nor were they ever, really. As we continued our journey, and new problems arose, I sometimes
raged inwardly at Sergei for attempting to cross the continent in such a lemon. In time, though, I quit worrying. I noticed that whatever glitch there might be, Sergei and Volodya did always manage to get the thing running again somehow. When the ignition balked, Sergei found a method of helping it along by opening the hood and leaning in with a big screwdriver from our gear. Soon his pokings with the screwdriver would produce a large, sparking
pop
, the engine would start, and Sergei would extricate himself from the machinery, eyebrows a bit singed.

Once after Volodya had accomplished a similar maneuver, I asked if he could explain to me just what
was
the matter with this car. He thought for a while and then said that what was wrong with the car could not be said in words. I recalled the lines by Tyutchev:

      
Umom Rossiyu ne ponyat’,

      
Arshinom obshchim ne izmerit’;

      
U nei osobennaya stat’—

      
V Rossiyu mozhno tol’ko verit’.

      (Russia cannot be understood by the mind,

      She cannot be measured by ordinary measure;

      She has her own particular stance—

      All you can do is believe in her.)

So we drove through Vyacheslav’s steel gate, which he closed behind us, and we retraced the seventeen miles to Vologda, and then we wandered in and near the city looking for the Velikii Ustyug road. Finally we found a northeastward-tending two-lane so level and straight that it had to be the right one. Seldom had I seen a more monotonous road. It ran without variation in direction or grade for hour after hour through an unchanging forest of birch and conifers. From the middle of the windshield, the view up ahead was an X: the lines of the highway made the letter’s bottom half, and the horizon of the trees along the road made its top.

We were all happy to be going nonetheless. Volodya had replaced his gray work shirt with a brown T-shirt that said (in English)
EXCEPTIONAL HIMALAYA EXPEDITION
. And I had been pleased to find in my research notes the information that many early Siberian travelers had indeed gone by way of Vologda and Velikii Ustyug on their passage through western
Russia. Evert Ysbrantsoon Ides, for example, went from Vologda to Velikii Ustyug by sled on his diplomatic mission to Peking in March 1692. The forest then must have looked about the same as it does today. Few villages interrupt its silence. The only billboards, popping up infrequently along the road, urge the traveler to visit Velikii Ustyug and see the birthplace of Ded Moroz. Sergei and Volodya explained that Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost) is the Russian Santa Claus.

When we reached Velikii Ustyug in the late afternoon, it turned out to be so lovely that I was sorry I had doubted the executives of the Start-Plus company for even a second. River-junction cities are often grand, and here the wide waters of the Iug and the Sukhona come together to form the Severnaya Dvina, whose name—literally, “Northern Double”—gives a notion of its amplitude. From this junction the river traveler from western Russia could go north to the White Sea, back to the south, or east toward Siberia. After the closed-in forest where we’d been, the openness of this place, with the pale sky spreading not only above but also reflected expansively at one’s feet, was like an unhooding. On a rise above the river, the city itself shone in a profusion of gold onion domes, which the smooth water also doubled, so that they seemed to span heaven and earth like an Orthodox mystic’s dream.

In the city’s historical museum, the guide was a young woman whose occasional self-conscious smiles redeemed her rapid-fire, rote delivery. She told us there were forty churches in Velikii Ustyug. Many of their domes had recently been regilded, which accounted for their celestial gleam. In the seventeenth century, enriched by trade in Siberian sable and porcelain from China, Velikii Ustyug for a while became the greatest city in Russia. It has monasteries dating to the twelfth century. When Russians took to the forest to get away from the Mongols, Velikii Ustyug (then called just Ustyug) was one of the places they retreated to. Even during Stalin times, its remoteness helped save it; the fact that until 1970 no train line went here may have kept the more ambitious of the demolition-minded Soviets away.

Near the river at one end of the city stood a memorial to the explorers who had come from Velikii Ustyug. The monument represented a ship’s prow with (confusingly) a modern cosmonaut in a space suit on the bowsprit. Among the honored names were those of Siberian adventurers like Vladimir Atlasov and Yerofey Khabarov, who could also be characterized
as pirates and murderous thieves. According to the monument, Semyon Dezhnev came from Velikii Ustyug. (Actually, scholars say he came from a village on the Pinega River some three hundred miles to the north.) Almost certainly, Dezhnev passed through here in the 1630s and saw this river junction on his eastward journeys that would take him eventually around the Chukchi Nos on the farthest eastern tip of Asia.

Deciding against a visit to the spot where Ded Moroz, the Russian Santa Claus, was born, I instead sat with Sergei in the van writing in my notebook while he added up how much we’d spent so far and Volodya went to the post office to call his wife. As we scribbled, not saying anything, one beautiful woman after the next walked by. We found we both were looking up every minute or so. I remarked on this phenomenon to Sergei and he agreed it was surprising. After half an hour I concluded that Velikii Ustyug has more beautiful women per capita than any other city in the world.

That night we camped out for the first time. From a policeman who stopped us at a checkpoint—coincidentally, his name was Khabarov, the same as the explorer-pirate—Sergei learned of a good camping place on the river a few miles from town. Following Khabarov’s directions, we went from pavement to gravel to a deeply cut track that probably had been a dirt road for centuries. It also constituted the only street of the village of Esiplovo, a row of humble one-story houses with sheds and small barns attached to them and fenced enclosures that allowed the animals to drink at the creek out back. Sergei said that many northern villages were like this one.

Past the village, the road ended at the Severnaya Dvina River, and we turned into a field and drove along the bank to a bluff offering a broad overlook and a light, mosquito-dispersing breeze. The river stretched perhaps half a mile wide and seemed not to move at all as it reflected the lavender evening sky. The sun had approached the horizon and it burned a hole through the branches of a windbreak of conifers at the field’s far end. Sergei set up the two-man tent for himself and Volodya and the one-man tent for me, and laid out our sleeping pads and bags. Volodya started preparing dinner on a plywood board resting on two milk crates. I put on my swim trunks and went into the river with a bar of soap to
wash up. The water was warm and the bottom muddy to the point of inextricability. As I came out I found several ink-black leeches dangling from my legs. When I brushed them off, the holes they left bled impressively.

Farther along the riverbank, on the horizon, the onion dome of a church stood high above a grove of surrounding trees. Against the sky, the Orthodox cross and the silhouetted dome presided quietly in the evening light. No other structures anywhere around interfered with the impression this lone church made—the whole view was just church, fields, and sky. (At dawn the next morning I sketched this scene.) Volodya said dinner would not be ready for a while, so I bandaged the leech bites, changed into dry clothes, and hiked over to the church to check it out.

When I got to within shouting distance, I saw that it was another ruin. The grove it occupied not only surrounded it but also sprouted from parts of the building itself. One of the lower towers had a broken dome and a good-sized birch tree growing straight up through it. The front steps had been trashed so thoroughly that going up them was like climbing a rockslide. On the wall of the narthex someone had spray-painted in Russian
I STILL BELIEVE IN GOD. DO YOU?
The church’s nave, which was high and narrow and ascended into the central tower, had been stripped of most of its frescoes. I recognized the stripping method that had been employed, because I had used it myself to expose the brick of an industrial loft where I lived in Manhattan years ago. Whoever had done the stripping here had used a broad-bladed chisel and a hammer and had chipped away the fresco plaster with blow after blow, leaving an array of chisel-blade lines on the brick.

This kind of plaster removal is disagreeable work. You have to wear goggles to protect your eyes from the flying fragments, and stuff gets in your mouth and at the roots of your hair and inside your nose. Whoever had undertaken this task must have used a scaffold to reach the higher areas, and eventually he or they had abandoned the job. Toward the top, a faded saint or two the chisel hadn’t gotten to still held his hand up beatifically. But in the lower reaches, the chisel marks made a pattern of swerves and sworls, as if the wielder of the chisel had leaned into the work with real enthusiasm. Other than a lust for icon smashing, I could see no possible motive for the destruction. What a people—to devote all the energy and expense it must have taken to build this lovely church out here in the middle of nowhere, and then to spend such passion in destroying it!

From the weedy, rubbish-strewn churchyard I saw Volodya in the distance waving his dish towel, so I started back for supper. When I turned around for one more view, the church’s onion dome and its cross looked so mild and benevolent against the pale sunset that I imagined somehow it had had the final word, in a turn-the-other-cheek kind of way.

For days we motored eastward toward the Urals. Though the road went on and on, it never settled down and became what I would consider a standard long-distance highway. You never knew what it would do next. Sometimes it was no-frills two-lane blacktop for hours. Then without any announcement it would change to gravel degenerating into mud and enormous potholes, and I learned the word
yama
, meaning “hole.” Arriving in a village, the road might lead straight into an Olympic-sized mud puddle or lose itself among streets apparently based on cattle paths. Many stops to ask directions would be required before we could pick up its thread again.

On long, desolate sections with no villages nearby, people sat along it selling things, or not. You might see a very fat and not-young woman in a bright yellow dress sitting on a folding chair and reading a newspaper, with nothing visible to sell; then a half mile later, a group of little boys with several buckets and a sign that said
RAKI
. I knew that
rak
means “cancer,” but Sergei said that here it was also the word for crayfish, which the boys catch in nearby creeks and swamps. Day after day men and women waited beside cardboard boxes filled with newspaper cones of mushrooms, gooseberries, strawberries, fiddlehead ferns, and cedar nuts. The term for these forest products is
podnozhnii korm
, Sergei told me; it means, literally, “feed found underfoot.” Regularly we passed women standing all alone and giving each passing vehicle a sideways,
hangdog stare. When they realized the driver wasn’t stopping, they would turn away with their eyes cast down. They reminded me of fallen women from an old novel; I had never seen prostitutes acting ashamed before.

Wherever we stopped to refuel, the stations were as minimal as could be. A couple of fuel pumps on a gravel apron and a sheet-metal kiosk with a glass or plastic pay window so thick and opaque you could hardly make out the attendant inside comprised the total of their amenities. No advertising banners, vending machines, drinking fountains, or restrooms cluttered up this just-the-facts approach. Of course no bucket or squeegee was available should your window need to be cleaned. We had entered a buggy part of the journey, and our windshield was usually covered with splattered insects. No problem: Volodya took some water from our supply, gave the windshield a few splashes, crushed an unfiltered cigarette in his fingers, and using the tobacco as a solvent washed the bugs from the glass with big sweeps of his hand. Sergei, meanwhile, removed the wiper mount from the windshield-wiper arm and with the blade of the wiper squeegeed the windshield dry and clean.