Travels in Siberia (48 page)

Shto Delat’?
had been partly a response to Turgenev’s
Fathers and Sons
; in turn, other important books of the time, particularly Dostoyevsky’s
Notes from the Underground
, were written in reply to
Shto Delat’?
Chernyshevsky’s theories of aesthetics, laid out in two widely read essays, would provide the basis for the Soviet style of writing, painting, sculpture, and cinema that was formally labeled socialist realism during Stalin’s time. Certainly Chernyshevsky played an enormous part in the intellectual turmoil of his era and after. But having read
Shto Delat’?
I can only say that the title is excellent, but the book goes downhill from there. One of Chernyshevsky’s biographers, trying to give him a fair hearing, nevertheless has to conclude, “He had some grasp on many things, but ultimately, Chernyshevsky’s thought was fudge.” Chernyshevsky’s life illustrates the unfortunate fact that a writer can hope and strive and suffer, and in the end even give his life, for work that turns out to be not good.

Beyond the statue, the platform’s broken asphalt stretched on and on, like those train platforms in movies that people run along while waving goodbye. A few tracks to the side, a line of olive-colored train cars with bars on their doors and windows sat as if waiting to be taken somewhere. In one of the windows, a man wearing a sleeveless undershirt took a drag on a cigarette and looked at me and blew a plume of smoke through the bars. At the platform’s end I left the station and turned onto the main street of the town. When I came to the town’s last house, I cut across an empty field and hiked into the low brown hills that enclosed Chernyshevsk from that angle. Nobody bothered me, and I was much less troubled by flies. Just being able to sit and think without low-grade harassment was a relief. I had brought along my sketchbook and I did a drawing or two. But the worry that the train would suddenly begin loading, and Sergei and Volodya not be able to find me, got me moving again. I walked along the side of the hill until I was close enough to the town center that I could see the vehicle queue. The van was still there, in the same place as before.

I sat down and began another sketch, but in this new spot I stood out more conspicuously, and the begging kids saw me and came bounding up the hill. Closely encircling me, they asked what I was doing. I showed them my drawing, and one of the older boys examined it, looked at the actual scene before us, then back at the drawing. “
Pohozhe
,” he said, meaning “It looks like it.” Then he and all the others stuck out their hands and demanded,
“Dai mne ruble!”

I asked them first to sing me a song, and they sped through a ditty about somebody named Yanni who gets
p’yanyi
(drunk). Then out came their hands again:
“Dai mne ruble!”
Inches from my face, each little hand was grimy as a curbstone. I took all the change I had in my pocket and parceled it out, ruble by ruble. At the end one little boy, smaller than the others, did not get a coin. I had to tell him that was all, I had no more. An expression of wrenching, almost grown-up disappointment contorted his kid’s face and he began to weep with large tears and wails of heartfelt misery.

Once the kids had discovered me, they kept coming back and swarming, so I had to return to the van. By then it was almost nine thirty in the evening; Sergei said he thought our train would be loading soon. But at about ten thirty, the stationmaster, a blocky woman with dyed red hair, a dalmatian-spotted blouse, and an orange workman’s vest, appeared among the vehicles and told us all that there would be no train tonight. Nor would there necessarily be one tomorrow, she added with keen enjoyment disguised as nonchalance. The quiet way she savored giving out this disappointing news was a wonder to see. Maybe a train would come along tomorrow night, she speculated; but then again, maybe it would not.

As we considered the prospect of spending the night in Chernyshevsk in the van, Sergei again showed his mastery of difficult situations. By distributing a small amount of cash to the drivers immediately in front of and behind us, he held our place for tomorrow. Then he backed out of the queue, sped away from Chernyshevsk, and found us a place to camp beside a quiet and clear and relatively untrashed stream a few miles outside town. I was so grateful for this smart move that I put aside any beef I had against Sergei. We set up the tents, ate supper by lantern light, and turned in for a good sleep. In the morning I took out my fly rod and caught a couple of little fish in the stream. Volodya made breakfast, then drove to Chernyshevsk to monitor what was going on. He returned in haste, saying the train was about to leave and we must get back there
begom
—“at a run.”

The train was not about to leave, as it turned out. To my surprise, though, it had arrived. We spent another afternoon in the vehicle queue waiting to load. I had understood that we would be going on a vehicle transport, the usual open-air affair, where we would just sort of hang out like train-hopping hoboes until we reached Magdagachi. But Sergei had something better in mind. There was a guy he had heard about who had his own train car. The guy, a short, dark-haired, bushy-eyebrowed, villainous-looking party, appeared at the loading ramp surrounded by a small entourage. Yes, he did have his own
vagon
—a long, windowless boxcar with room inside for four ordinary-sized vehicles. This
vagon
represented the high end of Chernyshevsk vehicle transports. Sergei negotiated to ensure that our van would be one of the lucky four, and the guy agreed, for $200.

For some reason I have never figured out, the $200, which Sergei hurriedly paid so as not to lose the place, seriously upset his economy. After concluding the negotiations, Sergei came to me and cried,
“Ty mne dolzhen dvesti dollarov!”
(You owe me two hundred dollars!). When I couldn’t understand why this was, he just kept repeating that I owed him $200. Finally I told him to calm himself and handed him ten twenties.

Then our van was locked in the guy’s
vagon
for a few hours while the train made up its mind about leaving, and we had to fend for ourselves in the Chernyshevsk train station with no vehicle to retreat to. I just kept moving, strolling and taking evasive action so as not to be swarmed on. Finally we were let into the
vagon
and it somehow got hooked up to the train; and later, hours later, sprawled in the van, I felt the first few blessed inchings of forward motion. When a conveyance you are riding in fails to move and fails to move, and you hope and pray and apply all your mental powers in an attempt to get it rolling, and it finally
does
move, that’s one of life’s sweetest feelings. When the train at last left the yards after all that time in Chernyshevsk, I relaxed as if the sedative had finally reached my veins.

Just before we started moving, I happened to look over at Sergei and he was pale and sweating. “I am sick,” he announced. “I have a high fever. I am sick, and I cannot be sick.” With that he took out his sleeping bag and, standing on the rear bumper, unrolled it on the roof of the van. Then he climbed up, got into his sleeping bag, and lay there in the three-foot space between the van’s roof and the ceiling of the
vagon
. From time to time he shivered so violently that I could feel the shakes in the front seat below him.

The
vagon
’s luxuries did not include interior lighting. Small planes of daylight came through narrow slots at the top of what might once have been windows; otherwise the space was completely sealed. Once darkness had fallen, everything in the
vagon
grew dim, except at the front end, where a glow came from an open door. Inside the door, the guy who owned the
vagon
—its
khozyain
, as he repeatedly instructed me to call him—occupied a sort of stateroom.

Past his room was a small between-cars passageway with doors on either side that opened at the top so you could look out. This place was great for fresh air, an antidote to the claustrophobia of the
vagon.
The
khozyain
kept his stateroom door open, and as I went by he would hail me, “Hey, comrade writer!” Sometimes we had short conversations. Generally he was drinking vodka from a large bottle while lying on a bed that fit into the stateroom’s corner. Beside him lay a blond woman so large and rumpled she seemed to be part bed herself. A TV sat on a shelf opposite them, playing a Russian movie, and they were passing back and forth a sunflower blossom the size of a party pizza, pulling seeds from the blossom’s center and chewing them and spitting the shells into cups.

Very late at night as I sidled past, the
khozyain
appeared in the doorway, maintenance-level drunk and in a confidential mood. “Comrade writer,” he stopped me, “you are writing a book about the Decembrists, right?” (At some point Sergei must have passed along this news.) I began my explanation about how the book would not be about the Decembrists only, but he cut me off. “I know many things about the Decembrists, comrade writer,” the
khozyain
disclosed in a gravelly voice, pointing his finger at his own chest. “I know many secrets about the Decembrists which other people do not know.” He beckoned me until I was leaning close to him in the half-light. “I know . . .” he said, “I know where is the grave of Mikhail Lunin. I—
I
—can take you to his grave.”

In every trip there is a hump that must be gotten over, a central knot to be worked through. For us that knot pulled tight in the Chernyshevsk–Magdagachi part of our journey. Through these days we took things minute by minute and sort of struggled along. First came the delay and vexation of Chernyshevsk, then Sergei’s sickness, then the twilit strangeness of the sealed car as the train progressed so slowly it seemed it might fail entirely and start slipping backward to Chernyshevsk. Sergei lay on the van roof with his teeth chattering. Whenever Volodya or I offered to get him something, he replied that he was doing all right. Volodya’s molar pain had let up a bit; he drank shots of vodka with the
khozyain
and one or two of the passengers and afterward dozed in the back of the van.

Being sealed in the
vagon
soon got to me. I mean, here were four vehicles parked inches apart in a closed space, maybe twenty gallons of gas in each vehicle, and there were no windows, no fire extinguishers on
the walls, no Exit signs, the
vagon
’s back doors secured tightly from the outside . . . Safety is never the Russians’ primary concern. Meanwhile the guy in charge of the
vagon
is drunk and watching TV. Of course I understood there was no point in mentioning any of this to anybody.

Besides our van, the
vagon
carried two Japanese-made SUVs driven by families on their way back to their home cities in the Sakha Republic, in northeastern Siberia, after their summer vacations. One family consisted of a hard-drinking dentist and his fourteen-year-old daughter, Kira. The other family was a mother and father, a young son, and a fourteen-year-old daughter named Olya. The two girls lived far apart and had never met before. They hung out together in the passageway and talked, and when they found out I was from America they had a lot of questions for me, mostly about Jewel (the singer), Sylvester Stallone, and the Hard Rock Cafe. Both girls said that Yakutsk, the capital of the Sakha Republic, was a really boring place. Olya gave me a piece of paper with her address and wrote “Write to me!” all over it; naturally I lost it soon after. At one point I was sitting in the van and I took a nervous look behind us—making sure no wisps of smoke were rising, signs of coming inferno—and Olya happened to sit up in the front seat of her car where she’d been napping, and she smiled at me so beautifully that all my malaise lifted for a while.

The guy in the fourth car, a Russian vehicle right in front of the van, was a scuba diver. He said he worked on oil platforms and also gathered shellfish off the coast of Sakhalin Island, to which he was returning. He was wiry haired and ruddy and he wore a vest of black leather. With other people and by himself, he drank vodka night and day. Our first morning in the
vagon
, after I’d slept pretty well on the front seat of the van complicatedly propped between the door and the steering wheel, I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The scuba diver woke at the exact same moment and got out of his vehicle rubbing his eyes. He saw me, broke into a huge grin, and made the do-you-want-a-shot-of-vodka? gesture, tapping his throat below the jaw with a flip of his fingers. From his car he pulled a half-full bottle of vodka to show me. I shook my head politely; it was about eight in the morning.

Quietly, I slid from the van and went to the passageway for a look outside. The sun had risen on a cool, clear day in early fall. Our train was making a steady twenty miles per hour through taiga mixed with hayfields.
During the night a heavy frost had covered the countryside. It rimed the leaves of the birch trees, some of which had already turned yellow, and made the needles and knobby branches of a tree I took to be a larch a soft white. At this speed I could see the trackside weeds curved like shepherds’ crooks by the spiderwebs attached to them, the frost on the web strands glistening in the sun. When the tracks went around a bend, the rest of the train was revealed extending far ahead. Our
vagon
was the second-to-last car. A broad hayfield we passed had just been cut. The short stubble, all frost-white, lay like carpet among the haystacks spaced regularly across it. In the cool morning air, the top of every haystack was steaming, and each wisp of steam leaned eastward, the direction we were going.