Travels in Siberia (55 page)

I wanted to see places I hadn’t been to before. I wanted to see the northern city of Yakutsk, on the Lena River, and the cloud of human breath that travelers said hangs over the city on the coldest mornings. I aimed to visit Oimyakon, the coldest spot in Siberia, northeast of Yakutsk by six hundred miles, where the temperature has gone down to −96°. I had heard about the north–south
ledyanaya doroga
, or ice road, on Lake Baikal’s frozen surface from December to April, and I wanted to drive on that. I wanted to ride the Baikal–Amur Magistral, or BAM, Siberia’s other cross-country railroad. The BAM runs roughly parallel to the Trans-Siberian an average of about three hundred miles north of it and reaches the Pacific about seven hundred miles north of Vladivostok. And this time, I had to be sure to see a few prisons. As with my 2001 trip, Victor Serov helped me plan. I told him to make clear to Sergei how important seeing prisons was.

With one thing and another, a year went by, so I missed the winter of 2003–2004. In the winter of 2004–2005, Sergei and Victor and I were e-mailing back and forth with scheduling details. They said the best month for the journey would be March, because by then the midwinter dark has lifted but the snow and ice and cold are unchanged. As with my
previous trip, I bought a lot of stuff. I asked Victor if Siberia had begun to have warm winters like other parts of the planet, and he said, “No, Siberia is still cold.” We would be in −40° temperatures for much of the journey. I bought French-made snowmobiling overalls, and Canadian-made long underwear of thick polyester-spandex, and skiers’ gloves, and snowmobiling mittens, and the heaviest down coat L.L. Bean had for sale. (The coat was, in fact, so stuffed with down that the weight of it pulled the shoulders flat, causing my top third always to become cold; a cinch inside the coat was supposed to counter this problem but I never managed to adjust it right.) From Sorel Boots I bought a low-temperature design called the Glacier Extreme, big and clunky as the shoes of Frankenstein’s monster, and a slightly less heavy boot called the Mounty. The best feature of the Mounty was its wide soles studded with dozens of rubber posts for traction. These snow-tire-like boots were the best single purchase I made, because the streets of Siberian cities in winter are all snow compacted to the slipperiest sheen, and walking on them in ordinary footwear is impossible.

On this trip, I would go the opposite direction from in 2001—east to west, rather than west to east. Retracing the route of my 2001 return, I would fly from New York to Vladivostok via Anchorage and Seoul. In Vladivostok I would meet up with Sergei, and we would proceed from there by various means of transportation to places mostly far to the north of where we went last time. Eventually we would wind up in Yakutsk and then fly to St. Petersburg. After a few days in St. Petersburg, I would fly home. The trip would take about a month. Because we would not be driving ourselves or camping out, one guide—Sergei—would be enough to handle everything.

For about nine weeks before I left, I worked on my Russian in an intensive course run by Boris Shekhtman, a virtuoso of language instruction who has taught scores of journalists and government employees. Boris lives outside Washington, D.C., and I began my study by staying in his house for five days. (After that I continued with teachers in his program in New York.) Boris is a hypersmart guy, with ears that listen so attentively they’re almost prehensile, and features as vivid as the masks of comedy and tragedy combined. To anything you say, the high drama of his expression in response works as a powerful mnemonic. I got to see a wide range of those responses when he picked me up at the train station
and we began by speaking only Russian. As I talked, he winced, his eyebrows shot up, his eyes narrowed in puzzlement, comprehension dawned, he winced again. After about ten minutes of this he switched to English. He said, “You know, I understood everything you said, and I think you basically understood me. But what is this Russian you’re talking? It’s not Russian, it’s
hooligan
Russian—and I don’t mean you talk like a Russian hooligan, either.”

Studying with Boris turned out to be some of the best fun I’ve ever had. We started with basic grammar and quickly moved forward into memorizing poetry and composing autobiographical paragraphs. Sometimes I worked with one of his assistants, Dina or Luda, or with both of them together, or with him and both of them. We acted out everyday situations—street encounters, hypothetical phone calls, pretend interviews. Once he paired me with another semibeginning American student. She had adopted a Russian child and wanted to learn the language so she could speak both English and Russian with him, and Boris told the two of us to carry on a “who are you, where are you from?” basic conversation in Russian, without using a word of English, as he and the other teachers looked on. My face turned red from the exertion and self-consciousness and oddness of the exercise, as did hers. I couldn’t remember the last time my mind had sped that fast.

Boris had me practice situations I might find myself in on my upcoming journey. He and I also talked about Sergei, and the nuances of my relationship with him. Boris suggested I refer to Sergei as “
moi collega
” (my colleague) rather than “
moi voditel
’ ” (my driver)—a smart and tactful idea. At the end of the nine weeks, Boris and the other teachers gave me an oral exam like the one they give to State Department employees. The exam rates the student from levels one through five—one being no proficiency at all, and five being Native-Speaker Proficiency. I was hoping to achieve level three, which is General Professional Proficiency. I was doing okay until near the end of the exam when Boris was asking about my future trip, and he said, “If you are so sure you will come back safely, then what is that ghost I see standing behind your chair?” The word he used for ghost,
prividenie
(its meaning is sort of like “ghostly sight” or “apparition”), confused me by its similarity to Provideniya, the city I had visited in Chukotka, which I had just been talking about, so I bluffed an answer having to do with that. For my mistake, and for bluffing rather
than asking what in the world he was talking about, he lowered my final rating from a three to a two-plus. He’d thrown me a trick question, but I think in any case I didn’t deserve a three.

At the beginning of March, I assembled my gear and went over it and started to pack. I got my satellite phone turned back on. A familiar excitement and dread began to build, with dread predominating. Boris’s remark about the ghost standing behind my chair stayed in my mind, while my Russian friends were again murmuring about the dangers. It is a disappointment to me now, going over my notes, to see how reluctant I was at the time to make this trip, and how eagerly I looked ahead to returning home. But in every book about Siberia the author must at some point be there in the winter, and be cold. On March 6, a breezy, almost spring day in New Jersey, I left for the airport and Vladivostok.

Passage through the zone of airports—New York, Anchorage, Seoul—was as undifferentiated and dreamlike as usual. Because of the time we took off, we remained in darkness for almost twenty-four hours of flying. A weak daylight caught up with us during the Seoul-to-Vladivostok leg; the plane came out of gray clouds and descended over a landscape that appeared to be from before color TV. The scene revealed itself in shades of gray and broad patches of white. In the field just before the airport runway, snow had risen to the tips of the weeds, which stuck out like a two-day growth of beard. Grayish footpaths wandered across the field, and on one of them, maybe ninety feet below the wing, a woman was trudging along carrying a shopping bag with handles. She did not look up.

A stout woman employee all in white with a dark babushka drove the vehicle with the boarding stairs up to the plane door. A black dog with four white feet stood next to this vehicle; the dog waited as the vehicle waited to approach the plane, and when it advanced, the dog advanced also, just up to the plane and no farther. The stout woman, job accomplished, climbed down from the vehicle’s driver’s seat and walked back to the terminal, and the dog walked back to the terminal in step beside her.

Sergei was there to meet me when I came through customs, as I’d expected. We had planned for him to fly from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok before I arrived. But as I hadn’t expected, he was accompanied by
Volodya. In all the e-mailing back and forth, neither Sergei nor Victor had mentioned that Volodya was living in Vladivostok now. Our 2001 trip had uprooted Volodya’s life. After getting deeper into his romance with Sveta, the pharmacist of the village of Olga, he had decided that he must leave his family in Sochi, and he had moved to Vladivostok in order to be closer to her. When Sergei filled me in on these details later he expressed sympathy for Volodya’s wife, whom he knew from university, and said he thought this move was a bad idea. Now Volodya was trying to find work in Vladivostok restoring building façades. He lived in an apartment in a high-rise on one of the city’s many hills, and we would be staying there.

On my previous trip I had sort of skipped Vladivostok, and I wanted to make up for that. I walked all over the city’s center, with the guys and by myself. The city’s older, more elegant part is walkable, with buildings of painted stucco and ornamental brick and a different aspect of the port at the foot of every hill. At one dock we saw a freighter being unloaded of those used Japanese cars that the cross-country drivers would speed back to more western parts of Russia for resale. Blackened ruts of ice ran down the middle of many streets and the sidewalks were all hard-polished snow. So many high heels had walked on this snow that it was riddled by the small round holes the heels had punched; it looked like a ceiling of acoustical tile. At a short distance from the city’s central part, the trash-strewn places began. Next to heaped-up trash bags that had been slashed open by beaks, all-black crows and ravens flipped through refuse scraps and croaked their raspy cries. Meanwhile the usual Russian Miss Universes, some in really unseasonal outfits, went step-stepping along.

Volodya didn’t yet have his own car, so his friends Genia and Roman drove us around. The farther we went from Vladivostok’s relatively well-kept downtown, the stronger was the overriding sense of Russian chaos almost out of control. Proceeding along the coastline we passed a beach that was all trash, then miles of mysterious seaside slag heaps lining the road. Then there was a huge factory or power plant spouting smoke from sky-high stacks, and a compound triple-wrapped in razor wire, and a building with scorching around all the smashed-out windows, and ice-locked blackened yards beside tall black houses, and a water tower with a giant tuberous icicle leaking out its side, and clotted accumulations of power lines and insulators at black transformerlike convergence
points, and more wires streaking out from them in every direction, and wires not even on poles but strung through the branches of trees. Long lines of gray-faced, black-clad citizens stood waiting to cram themselves into tiny
marshrutka
public transportation vans, amid trailing smoke and roadside mud spatter and engine noise.

Then more trash crowded close all along the road, and a whole huge shoreline of trash cliffs beetled down to the sea on our right, like the Trash Cliffs of Dover, with seagulls flying figure eights above. A few miles beyond the trash cliffs, Genia said he had something he wanted to show me. We pulled over at a much-used parking area of fragmented and flattened trash beside the road, and there was a sign:
MUSOR NE BROSAT
’ (Do Not Throw Trash). Just past the sign was a path leading to an ocean cove with a beach maybe two hundred feet long and fifty feet wide. The beach was composed entirely of broken glass. Genia said it was called the
steklyannyi plyazh
, the glass beach, and it was a famous spot for Vladivostokians to visit. Every square foot of the beach was small, water-smoothed pieces of glass, mostly bottle glass by appearances, and most of it a seaworn bottle green.

How the beach had come to be I am not sure. Genia explained, but I missed some of what he said. I think he said people have been stopping at this cove to drink and smash their empty bottles since Vladivostok began. Whatever its origins, the beach was gorgeous, like a shattered church mosaic glittering in the light, constantly agitated at the water’s edge by the waves. Each wave as it curled on the shore picked up a load of water-smoothed, shiny-wet glass fragments and then tumbled them and set them down and spread them out. Green and amber and blue and pink and brown and clear glass fragments lay ankle-deep everywhere and lifted and fell in the waves, sand slowly returning to sand.

Genia was a heavyset man in his forties with straight dark hair and a drooping mustache. Roman, his younger associate, had a thin face and curly dark hair and wore a black leather coat and a leather driving cap. Usually when we rode in Roman’s car, he played American rap and rock music on tape cassettes that you might find in the 99¢ bin at an American flea market. He sometimes talked to me about the music he played. One afternoon as we were bouncing and zooming in his little car on a Vladivostok street broken to pieces by ice and thaws, he put on a cassette by Kid Rock. I would not have recognized the artist, but Roman told me
who it was. “I love Kid Rock’s music,” he said, “but I don’t know what his words mean.”

I listened for a while to the song. “Well, here he’s saying that he wants money in order to make his life better,” I explained.

“Oh, I understand,” Roman said. Then, “Kid Rock is a scandalist, yes?”

“Yes, I think so. He was married to Pamela Anderson, of
Baywatch
.”

“Ah, yes. I know
Baywatch
. Pamela Anderson—she is also a scandalist, I think.”

Just then the car hit a big bump and all of us ricocheted off the ceiling. Roman said, “Oh, these roads!”

“Dorogi, i duraki”
(roads, and idiots), I said. (This is a famous saying, attributed to Gogol, who once noted that in Russia the two biggest problems were the roads, and idiots.)