Travels in Siberia (38 page)

I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were on the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them.

After Sergei and Volodya came back, we drove in the once-again-functioning van to a historical park outside town. Sergei P. and his mother, who had suggested this outing, led us to it in their car. His fifteen-year-old daughter, Sveta, and her friend Maria came along. A few minutes after we all arrived and got out in the parking lot, an old lady, the park’s lone guide, hurried up the hill toward us, breathing hard and striding briskly as if she feared we might escape. Still panting, she introduced herself as Galina. She seemed not to have guided anyone in a while. Her hair was long and gray and unrestrained, but her prim blue blouse with white lace at the collar and down the front offset this rather wild look, as did her matching blue skirt and brogan-style walking shoes.

Eyes alight with excitement at what she was going to show us, she shepherded us to the park’s main exhibit—a tall, narrow church made of logs. It rose high and dark and somber above the sunny meadow that stretched all around. While unlocking the door, our guide swung into her narrative about how this church had been built in the town of Zashiversk in 1700 on the Indigirka River far to the northeast; and how in those days trade fairs for all northern Siberia took place in that town; and how after a fair a mysterious wooden trunk was left behind, and a local shaman warned the villagers that the trunk was cursed and they should take the trunk and cut a hole in the ice and throw the trunk in it, but the church’s
priest said it would be better to throw the shaman himself through the ice, so the people opened the trunk, and the curse came out, and the church’s entire congregation fell ill and died of smallpox, except for one girl who survived; and how the town was then abandoned, and soon only the church remained, perfectly preserved; and how the church was then discovered by A. P. Okladnikov, the famous anthropologist, and other scientists on an expedition from Akademgorodok in the twentieth century; and how the scientists had the church brought here in pieces and reconstructed so that everybody could see what a beautiful wooden church in far northern Siberia looked like long ago. To move and reassemble the church cost so much, she said, that each log might as well have been made of gold. Galina added that when the scientists were first taking apart the church, they found the body of the girl who had survived the smallpox, frozen in the ice beneath the altar. She was wearing a beautiful dress and many costly jewels.

The starkness of the church’s all-wood interior reminded me of old-time Protestant churches on the American frontier. And yet somehow the structure’s high central space, which rose from the nave like a big wooden chimney, did not inspire in me the soaring feeling Orthodox church naves often do. Centuries spent in the far north had left their chill in the old church’s bones, I imagined. Either that, or the dark of the winters, the long silence after the last prayer died, had leached into them like tannin. Frontier religion is sometimes the most desperate kind; and I am not the first to point out that harshness of doctrine and coldness of climate often keep each other company.

Our guide had no interest in any gloomy theologizing as she showed us the skill of the nail-free peg-and-groove carpentry and the plain-style beauty of the church when viewed from outside. Gradually her spiel began to move into areas of autobiography. Telling us again that her name was Galina, she pointed down the hill to where she said she lived in her own
izba
(cabin) with a small black dog and a milk cow. She asked us if we liked poetry. She wrote poetry herself, she said; now we would hear her read her poems. The next we knew we had been walked from the church down to her cabin, which was a tiny, rustic affair with grass growing on the roof and a door frame barely taller than she was. How she had emerged from such a primitive place looking so neat (except, perhaps, for the hair) was puzzling.

Still laughing and talking without a pause, Galina went into the cabin and brought out a big pitcher of milk that she said she had got from the cow just that afternoon. In her other hand she carried a plate of chocolate cookies and a thick sheaf of handwritten poems. None of us visitors were eager to drink unpasteurized milk, so we left the glasses she poured for us untouched. I ate a few of the cookies, though, and they were not bad. Meanwhile, Galina began to declaim her poems after first announcing to us the quality of each one. Some she described as “very good,” some merely as “good.” The sonorousness of her reading reverberated pleasantly in the little open-air roofed shelter where we were sitting, but the poetry’s style was antique and I couldn’t understand a word. After each poem she nodded her head appreciatively while we smiled and murmured praise.

The two Sergeis, from whom the rest of us were taking our cues, listened politely as she read. Rain, however, had begun to spatter on the shelter roof, and soon Sergei and Sergei interrupted Galina to tell her that, sadly, we had to be going. She walked us back to our cars, still reciting poems, still talking, still full of good spirits from the day. The rain was falling harder. A groundskeeper had locked the parking lot gate while we were down at the cabin, but fortunately Galina had a key. The rain was pouring now, so we jumped into the vehicles and started to leave. Galina, by now drenched to the skin and with her hair streaming, stopped us for a last word to me. I rolled down the window. “You are an American, so I want to tell you this,” she said through the torrent. “Two Englishmen were here earlier this summer, and when they were leaving, one of them said to the other, ‘That is an amazing church, and an amazing old lady!’ ” Still laughing, and shaking her head ruefully at how wet she was, she waved us on our way.

Sergei P. and his mother had warned us that the road would become more dangerous beyond Novosibirsk and farther into Siberia. Sergei P. said to me, “I think you will find as you continue your journey that conditions will become even more stochastic than those you have encountered so far.” This prediction worried me, coming as it did from someone not in Moscow or St. Petersburg but closer to the scene. When I mentioned my concern to the other Sergei, he said he had already thought of a plan. From here on, he said, we would travel under colors that would guarantee our safety.

Back in June when we were planning the trip, Sergei had told me that he and Volodya were members of an organization called M
C (an acronym pronounced “Em Che Ess”). The letters stand for Ministerstvo Chrezvychainym Situatsiyami, which means “Ministry of Extraordinary Situations.” M
C is a well-respected organization with branches all over Russia, and its mission is to provide rescue service and emergency assistance of all kinds. You have to pass demanding mental and physical requirements to be in M
C. Afterward, as I traveled, I met other M
C members and they all were tough and competent-looking fellows like Volodya and Sergei.

The M
C uniforms sort of resemble those worn by some emergency medical services staff in the United States. TheM
C jacket and pants are blue, with white and orange stripes. Sergei and Volodya had brought theirM
C uniforms along and they also had their identification cards. Now in Novosibirsk they would make their M
C affiliation clear by putting identifying markings on our van. From the local M
C office Sergei obtained the necessary symbols, emblems, and stripes for the van’s sides, and one morning he spent a long time carefully applying them to the vehicle as M
C rules prescribed. He said that should I need an M
C jacket, he had one for me, too. I saw the logic in all this—from now on we would be driving across Siberia in the apparent equivalent of a fire-department rescue vehicle—but I was kind of bothered by the semideception, too. We had no rescue equipment, per se, in the van. What if we actually had to save somebody? Sergei and Volodya were qualified, I had no doubt. But how would an unfortunate person who needed saving feel about having to depend, in any way, on me?