Travels in Siberia (54 page)

The men who led the search for furs across Siberia were called
promyshlenniki
, a word that then meant “trader” and today is closer to “manufacturer.” It was easier to catch sables along the main watercourses than hunt for them in the hard-to-reach regions in the interior, so these men went from one Siberian drainage to the next, hitting the prime locations and moving on. Though they sometimes trapped and skinned the sables themselves, the more usual method was to find a convenient tribe of native people, capture hostages from them, and demand payment in sable furs for the hostages’ return. The natives naturally objected to this and resisted when they could. Semyon Dezhnev, the
promyshlennik
generally credited with the discovery of the separation of Asia from North America, described in a petition to the tsar the wounds that had been inflicted on him while he was pursuing the sable trade: Tungus arrows in his left knee and right elbow; one Yukagir arrow in his left shoulder, another in the muscle of his right arm, another completely through his left wrist; an iron-tipped Yukagir arrow in his head; and, as he was attempting to seize a hostage of the Chuvanskiye tribe, a knife wound in the chest. After Russian rule became more firmly established in Siberia, every able-bodied adult male native who had not converted to the Orthodox church was required to give the authorities a certain quota of sable skins annually, under a system called
yasak
. That word, from the Mongol, originally applied to the tribute Russians had to pay their Mongol overlords.

So headlong was the Russian hunt for furs that it had propelled the
promyshlenniki
as far as the Tunguska River drainage in central Siberia by 1626. In 1642—just sixty years after Yermak’s victory on the Tobol—839
men seeking furs passed through customs at the fort of Yakutsk on the Lena River about twenty-three hundred miles east of the Ural Mountains. By 1647, Russian fur seekers had gone all the way to the Pacific Ocean, where they founded the settlement of Okhotsk; Russia thus had an outlet on the Pacific before it had ports on either the Baltic or the Black seas. (Although Okhotsk, more than four thousand miles from western Russia, was not the handiest port in the world.)

When the
promyshlennik
Dezhnev sailed around the Chukchi Nos at the end of Asia, his purpose was to find new sources of sables and walrus ivory in the delta of the Anadyr River. During that voyage, Dezhnev’s party lost four vessels that were never seen again. In 1937, remains of a three-hundred-year-old settlement consisting of thirty-one dwellings of European origin were found on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. Historians have speculated that this site was settled by Dezhnev’s lost companions. Therefore, it is possible that Russia’s fur-seeking explorations in the first half of the seventeenth century deposited a Russian settlement as far east as North America, almost halfway around the world from Moscow and almost a hundred years before Alaska’s official discovery by Europeans.

Sables equaled money, literally; for centuries Russia was poor in precious metals and sometimes used furs as a medium of exchange. Only in the fifteenth century did silver begin to replace furs as currency. A large proportion of the sable furs coming out of Siberia ended up in the Kremlin, in the tsar’s sable treasury. By 1586, just a few years after Yermak’s expedition, the treasury received two hundred thousand Siberian sables. The
promyshlenniki
were obliged to give the tsar one sable out of every ten they obtained, and his agents could also buy any additional furs they chose, mostly taking those of the highest quality. On top of that, all furs collected as
yasak
also went to the tsar. During Ivan the Terrible’s reign and after, sable fur formed a main part of the wealth of the Russian state. One historian says that by 1660, a third of the state’s total revenues came from sable fur.

The exact worth of sable as a commodity back then is hard to assess. Certainly it was valuable out of all proportion to its bulk and weight. A bundle of forty sable skins—called a
sorok
, a
sorochek
, or a
zimmer
—would have been enough to make the fortunes of maybe half a dozen ordinary people. A hundred rubles was a fortune then, and each sable
fur, depending on quality, was worth from ten to twenty rubles. Sables provided the Russian state with its most in-demand and portable form of wealth. Diplomats took sables with them on foreign embassies to pay expenses and to give as presents. When Ivan the Terrible was pestering the young Queen Elizabeth I of England with letters and inquiries about a possible marriage to one of her relatives, he sent her a present of sable furs. In 1676, Tsar Alexei Mikhailovich, father of Peter the Great, paid ten
soroks
of quality sable furs for one unicorn horn. That horn, presumably from a narwhal, thus would have been enough to support eight hundred ordinary people for life.

Sables were prized by non-Russians everywhere. The Chinese wanted them because of the lack of good fur-bearing animals in their country and traded the finest silks for them; silk was easy freight for trans-Asiatic caravans and highly valuable in the West. Turks accepted sable fur for prisoner ransoms. The Greek Orthodox bishop of Gaza, after requesting financial help from his Russian Orthodox brothers, received sables from them worth eleven hundred rubles. Representatives of the tsar paid sables to the Cossacks in the Ukraine who defended Russia’s border from Tatars, and bribed the Tatar khan of Crimea with sables to restrain his warriors after Cossack raids. When Emperor Rudolf II of Hungary requested the assistance of Tsar Boris Godunov in fighting the Turks in 1595, Godunov sent him 1,003
soroks
of sables, and tens of thousands of other furs, in lieu of soldiers and money.

The sable has been considered an almost magical beast throughout history. The learned Nicolae Milescu (also known as Spathary), leader of one of the first embassies to Peking from the tsar, believed the sable to be the actual Golden Fleece of classical mythology. A black sable cloak figures importantly in the story of Genghis Khan: his main and original wife, Börte, brought the cloak as her dowry at their marriage, and Genghis later used the cloak as a gift to solidify an alliance with another chieftain at a crucial moment in the unifying of the Mongols. Genghis’s grandson Kublai Khan was reported to have an audience tent lined with sable pelts; Vladimir Monomakh, Grand Prince of Kiev, whose city the Mongols destroyed, wore a crown of gold, jewels, and sable. The Caliph of Baghdad, Haroun al-Rashid, the most famous of all caliphs and the hero of the
Thousand and One Nights
, dressed in robes and shoes of silk edged with sable.

In 1189, before the Third Crusade, Richard I of England and Philip II of France vowed not to wear their sables or ermines on the campaign. They wanted to make clear the seriousness of their purpose and ensure that the knights would follow their example; any finery the king didn’t wear his inferiors couldn’t, either. In 1465, Edward IV of England decreed that no one below the rank of lord was allowed to wear sable. Similar laws regarding sable and other luxuries, called sumptuary laws, existed in many countries. Hans Holbein did portraits of both Thomas More and Anne Boleyn wearing sable. King Henry VIII, who ordered the execution of More in 1535 and of Anne in 1536, possessed a gown of damask and velvet embellished with 80 sable pelts, and a black satin gown to which were affixed the pelts of 350 sables. Kang H’si, the Manchu emperor whose geopolitical skills in the 1680s thwarted the Russians in the Amur River Valley, wore a “short loose coat of sable” over a tunic of yellow silk embroidered with five-clawed dragons, and received audiences while sitting cross-legged on a seven-foot-high throne covered with black sable furs.

According to a photographic history published in 1994, only six women in the world then owned coats of black sable: Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Onassis, Elizabeth II of England, and Valentina Tereshkova, the cosmonaut, who had received the coat as a reward from the Soviet government after she became the first woman in space (the two other women were not revealed). After protests against the wearing of furs began picking up speed, owning furs (at least in America and Europe) lost some of its glamour and took on a slightly unsavory, clandestine quality. Nowadays you almost never see a celebrity wearing a fur in a photograph. Mary Tyler Moore, an anti-fur celebrity best known for her TV sitcoms, donated a brand-new, $112,000 coat of Russian sable to PETA, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PETA then bedecked the coat with animal traps, electrocution devices, and other equipment of the fur processing business in order to make a point outside a show of fashions of Arnold Scaasi, a designer who sometimes worked in fur.

Saks Fifth Avenue keeps its fur department low profile, in a less-trafficked corner of the store. Tiffany’s, the luxury jeweler just up the avenue, doesn’t hesitate to show flashy gems in its store windows, but you never see a sable fur in the window of Saks. Whenever I stand at the racks
of sables admiring them, I have a sense of being elsewhere—in a Siberian winter, in the past, generally out of the modern mainstream. Most shoppers who walk by smelling the perfume samples recently sprayed on their wrists never stop to check out the absurdly expensive furs made from this little Siberian animal on which worlds have turned.

So far I had not actually been to Siberia in the winter. When I told people I had traveled there, they almost always asked, “Is it cold?” and I would answer that the Siberia I saw in August was hot, dusty, buggy, and so on. Then the next person I told about my recent trip would ask, “Is Siberia cold?” I had
seen
Siberia in the winter—that time I flew by helicopter from the Alaskan mainland to the Diomede Islands, when I got a brief view of Siberia’s easternmost end—and it certainly
looked
cold. But from firsthand experience that was the best I could do.

This answer always seemed to disappoint my questioners. How could I have gone to Siberia and not been cold? In people’s minds, the two things most closely associated with Siberia are cold and prisons. I had not really seen prisons, either. Any book about Siberia should have cold and prisons in it. I began to think about making a winter journey.

As I did, I kept going over my 2001 trip with Volodya and Sergei. By its end I had been pretty fed up with Sergei, and now I couldn’t decide whether to attempt another journey with him. After I had returned I had not e-mailed him for a while; I remembered his high-handedness, his evasiveness, his veiled or unveiled disdain. Going through customs at Vladivostok, I recalled, I had felt a great relief at finally being on my own.

In late May 2003, I returned to St. Petersburg to write a magazine article about the city’s three hundredth anniversary. I stayed in Luda’s apartment, as before, and she mentioned that just a week or so earlier Sergei had called to ask after me. By this time my anger was fading and I was recalling his good qualities—his all-around competence, his occasional sweetness, his love of adventure, his toughness. After the four-day tricentennial celebration was over, I stayed on in St. Petersburg for several days, and on one of them I gave Sergei a call. He responded effusively, said I must come to see him that very evening, said his wife would make a big dinner for me, said he’d been hoping I would call.

Late in the afternoon I rode the metro to the stop closest to his house and he met me at the top of the escalator. He embraced me, said he had been dreaming of this moment, said our trip together had been the greatest experience of his life, said over and over how happy he was to see me. He rejoiced like I was his long-lost son. At his apartment, his Luda had prepared a many-course meal and I ate a huge amount. Then we drank tea and watched excerpts of the videos he and Volodya had made of our journey (carefully edited, of course, to remove the widows and other women encountered along the way). We told each other stories (also edited) about our trip and generally had a fine time. At about ten o’clock he drove me back to the metro and we parted with promises to be in touch.

That night in Luda’s apartment I was by myself; she had gone to her dacha for the weekend. At about midnight, soon after falling asleep, I awoke in awful pain. At first I thought I was having a heart attack, but then the problem became vomiting, then diarrhea, then dysentery accompanied by chills and a high fever. The symptoms got worse and worse. At about five thirty in the morning I found the name of a nearby clinic for foreigners in an English-language newspaper I’d picked up somewhere, and during a respite between vomiting spasms I made my way to this clinic, walking shakily on the sunny, empty streets of early June. I presented myself to the nurses at admitting with the statement
“Dumaio shto Ya umeraio”
(I think I am dying). They took an imprint from my Visa card and admitted me; a doctor named Vyacheslav Zuev examined me and hooked me up to an IV. After some tests he informed me that I had either cholera or salmonella poisoning. He added that cholera was less likely, because they hadn’t seen a case of it at the clinic in about a week. I asked if I would live, and he said he thought so. Later he said it was definitely salmonella but he didn’t know which kind.

After my symptoms let up a bit, I spent the day lying on a comfortable bed with the IV in my arm, staring at the large clock on the wall. The bedsheets and pillowcases were of crisp, heavy white cotton, a kind seldom seen in America anymore, and the nurses wore striped blouses, white cotton aprons, and high, peaked nurses’ caps, Florence Nightingale–style. Their voices cooed mournfully as they drifted in and out. I knew they were beautiful without looking up and I carried on drowsy, simple dialogues with them. As I began to recover, my mood swung strangely
toward euphoria, tinged with revived Russia-love. At about ten in the evening I felt well enough to leave. Dr. Zuev recommended I stay until morning, but he agreed to discharge me. I returned to Luda’s, went to bed, and slept soundly through the night.

I didn’t know what had made me sick, but I suspected a kielbasa the color of machine grease that I’d scarfed down the previous afternoon. I’d gone for a stroll, had a couple of beers, and bought the kielbasa on impulse at a really unpromising shop. Or maybe I got sick from something I ate at Sergei’s. Whatever the cause, the salmonella episode erased any last bad feelings I’d harbored toward him. For some reason, after that illness I completely stopped worrying about him and how we had or hadn’t always gotten along. He was just who he was, a Russian guy—bad in some ways, worse in others, and totally clever and dependable under it all. He and I had driven across Russia together and had more or less accepted each other by now. After I got back to New Jersey, I e-mailed him and asked if he would like to go on a winter trip to eastern Siberia with me.