Travels in Siberia (56 page)

Roman laughed. “Yes,” he said. “And they never repair either one.”

On the campus of Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, beside a busy highway, there’s a tall black statue of the poet Osip Mandelstam in a long overcoat. His eyes are closed, his head is raised, and his right hand is pressed to his breast. When we were there, a white Star of David defaced the statue’s base, spray-painted beside the days, month, and years of the poet’s life; Mandelstam died on December 27, 1938, at the age of forty-seven. The bare inscription did not mention the place of death—the Vtoraya Rechka (Second River) transit camp at the north end of the city. A similar mood of sorrow hung over the V. K. Arsenyev memorial museum, which occupies the middlesized frame house in an older part of Vladivostok where the writer and explorer lived with his family during his later years. The museum has several good photos of Arsenyev with Dersu Uzala, who was stocky and gnarled, about a foot shorter than his Russian
kapitan
. Arsenyev luckily died of heart failure in 1930, soon enough to escape the worst of the Stalin-era horrors (though by then he had been accused of being a Japanese spy and had himself accused others of having Japanese sympathies). After his death, his wife (also featured in museum photos) was imprisoned and then shot, and his daughter went to prison for ten years. The daughter died in 1970 at the age of forty-nine.

Thoughts of fate and finality made the stately old Vladivostok train station a somber place, as well. At the station’s main platform (so a prominent
sign proclaimed), 9,288 kilometers of the Trans-Siberian Railway came to an end. A paved walkway between two sets of tracks emphasized the sense of extremity: lampposts down the center of the walkway dwindled to smallness at the station’s distant end, where the walkway itself pinched to a point as the disappearing lines of tracks converged. The effect was to make one contemplate Russia’s deadly vastness, and the silent accumulation of crimes this railway had seen.

At nights I lay awake in Volodya’s apartment and listened to the little Japanese cars of his neighbors racing their engines as they struggled up streets of refrozen meltwater. The bass throbbing of the music on the cars’ speakers vibrated the apartment’s window glass and faded away. These occasional disturbances only heightened the night’s quiet; unlike in American cities, in Russian cities you almost never hear sirens at night. From Volodya’s balcony during daylight you could see two nearby hills and the hollow between them filled with low apartment buildings, scraggly trees, and a scattering of little garage-boxes for individual cars. On one hill, high-rise buildings perched right at the edge as if defying any earthquake to topple them, while on the other hill, radio and TV and power-line towers in sizes ranging from small to medium to skyscraper high clustered like a throng of black steel church steeples. The dark clouds moving over them had the rolling momentum of weather just come in from the sea.

Volodya had furnished his apartment with a basic bachelor functionality indicative of an expectation that he would usually be somewhere else. In this new life he still had his easygoing charm, but he was dealing with a lot of unwanted free time, it seemed, and he sometimes looked lost and forlorn. Once as we were walking downtown, he observed some workmen redoing a building front. He pointed out to me that they had their ladder set wrong, and then with professional courtesy he went over to inform his fellow building restorers of this fact. The boss guy among them quickly gave him back a sharp answer and told him to be on his way. Volodya rejoined me with a crestfallen expression.
“Ne deli dobra i zla ne budet”
(Do no good deeds and there will be no evil), he said. In his bare rooms in the evenings he made telephone calls to Sveta, still living in Olga. The conversations were long and (at his end) pained and explanatory; it didn’t sound as if things were working out.

Several times over the winter Volodya had gone hunting in remote parts of the Primorskii Krai for wild boar and
kosulya
, a small taiga deer. For our supper or dinner he fried up steaks from a
kosulya
he had killed, and told us his adventures. While hunting northwest of Olga in January, he said, he had come across the tracks of a tigress and two cubs in the snow. The tigers had approached very near to the village of Serafimovka and then had headed back into the taiga, where they made a circle six or ten miles around to hem in their prey. More recently, when he was hunting in the Nakhodka region closer to Vladivostok, he had seen the tracks of a male tiger. (The tracks of males are about four and a half inches long; of females, three to four inches, he said.) An American expedition just a month before had done a regional census and had counted 450 tigers in the Primorskii Krai. Volodya said that whenever he saw fresh tiger tracks he quit hunting, because he knew he’d be unlikely to find wild boar or
kosulya
if there were tigers around.

Overall, I couldn’t help but feel kind of sad for the guy. Volodya and I are about the same age. I know that as you reach your fifties, a powerful restlessness and longing can shake your life. That restlessness, or something akin to it, had agitated me to Russia, where my trajectory had assisted in knocking loose a fellow restless fifty-year-old from the place he had occupied before. But unlike me, Volodya had ended up living the lonesome consequences for real. I pictured him going out hunting by himself in a dark winter forest with tigers in it and then returning to this apartment. When Sergei and I departed Vladivostok, I accidentally left behind my brand-new fleece jacket. I berated myself for my carelessness, but later I was glad Volodya had the jacket, because we’re about the same size.

Flying out of Vladivostok took two tries, a not uncommon occurrence in Siberian air travel. When we went to the airport on a Tuesday afternoon for our scheduled flight to Irkutsk, no personnel of the airline seemed to be around. Eventually a guy showed up and put a sign in the ticket window that said rais otmenyon (Flight Canceled). A great deal of further waiting was required while Sergei attempted to find someone who would either rebook us on another flight or give our money back. Neither could be done. The airline, Kras Air, had no other available flights for a week, and it turned out that the tickets could be refunded only at the place of purchase, which was St. Petersburg. Eventually, from another airline, we bought tickets for an Irkutsk flight leaving in two days.

We knocked around Vladivostok for another forty-eight hours—I found the house that the young Yul Brynner had lived in, among other minor accomplishments—and on our next attempt the plane left when it was supposed to. The funny thing about forgetting my fleece jacket (to return to that subject) was that I actually forgot it twice. When we went to the airport for the first flight, the canceled one, I left it at Volodya’s, and after being upset with myself for that I somehow managed to leave the jacket at his apartment
again
when we went to the airport the second time. At some level that had to be intentional, I believe.

Flew to Irkutsk, vexed because two biggest drunks on plane sitting in front of me. For distraction, read review of Steve Martin’s latest book,
The Pleasure of My Company
, in arts section of
Konkurent
, a Vladivostok newspaper handed out to each passenger. Needed help of Russian-English dictionary for translation. Among new words and phrases learned:
khokhot
(laughter) and
spuskat’ shtany
(to drop one’s trousers). Review very favorable. From time to time, looked out window. Icy almost-all-white Siberian landscape below—corrugated hills, scattered wiry conifers. Little change in scenery for hours.

At Irkutsk airport, horrible taxicab guys. Drivers shouting back and forth in Russian slang sometimes known as
Mat’
, in which most vocab and syntax derive from three or four basic obscenities. Sergei chose least criminal-looking driver. Other drivers shouted to us as we loaded bags in trunk,
“Yob’ tvoiu mat’!”
(Fuck your mother!), with hearty good cheer.

Hotel Angara, Irkutsk. Marble facing of columns in front of hotel held on, in places, with clear plastic packing tape. Hotel guests mostly respectable types—Asian businessmen in suits, Russian technicians in shirtsleeves, a girls’ volleyball team. At buffet breakfast, volleyball girls tall and gawky-graceful as sandhill cranes in a grain field. In Irkutsk, finally, true Siberian cold (Vladivostok, by contrast, more temperate, with more southern location, ocean nearby). Angara River frozen three-quarters of way across: in sun, frozen part blinding white, open part vivid blue. New statue in riverfront park: Tsar Alexander III, much larger than life, in full military splendor, gleaming imperial black against the surrounding white. Also, at Znamensky Monastery, statue of martyred Admiral Kolchak, also new. Statuary Kolchak bareheaded, heroic, shoulders
back, in long coat, with White Army soldier and Red Army soldier supporting statue’s base. In our day of wandering, finally got to see inside of Trubetskoy Museum, closed when we in Irkutsk before. Prominent in Trubetskoy parlor: Miller foot-pump organ, made in Lebanon, Pa.

After two days left Irkutsk, rode train twenty-four hours around southern end of Baikal to Ulan-Ude. Sergei and I in spacious sleeping compartment with big window. Ravens flying alongside train out of Irkutsk station like gulls escorting ship. Light glinted off lead raven’s hard black beak as it opened to cry. Outside city, in deep forest, snow whiter and whiter; its lavishness like on cover of album
Peter and the Wolf
, childhood favorite of mine. Through complicated high hills—most difficult part of entire Trans-Siberian to build—tracks followed serpentine route. Famous crossing of great valley (Angasolka Loop) took train far up side of one height, around turn, then far down side of other. Baikal often visible on left, sometimes immediately beside train. Lake stretching white to apparent infinity; across its foreground, tiny red auto inching along.

Ulan-Ude sooty and gray, as before, but now fiercely cold. Short cab ride from train station to Hotel Geser. Long wait at check-in; Sergei negotiated red tape, I watched Russian infotainment program on lobby TV. Interview with Sylvester Stallone, overdubbed in Russian, promoting new magazine,
Stallone
. Undeniable fact that Sylvester Stallone most popular American in Russia, maybe most popular there of all time. Hotel Geser unusually posh for Siberia. Large banquet hall, restaurant with dinner dancing, disco ball. At next table during breakfast, young couple by selves, saying grace. Woman had on sweatshirt said texas a&m. When she standing next to me at buffet, I asked if she an Aggie. She blushed and said she was. She and husband here to pick up baby they adopting from Ulan-Ude orphanage. Both husband and wife soft-spoken, born-agains. They had been in Russia just a day or two, would meet with Russian judge that afternoon. If all went well, flying back to Texas with new baby tomorrow. Both knew almost nothing about where they were. Intense, determined people, engrossed in their private moment, both just kids themselves.

In Ulan-Ude—to drop the telegraphic style—I made many calls to Sasha Khamarkhanov from the hotel phone but never managed to get
through. Sergei tried, also unsuccessfully, and then when he was going out to do some errands he said he would call Sasha from a post office pay phone. In half an hour Sergei returned. He had called information and found that Sasha had a new number, and when he called it he reached Tania, Sasha’s wife. She told him that Sasha had died the previous December. She did not say what he died of, only that she was surprised his friends in America had not heard.

After that news I made an effort to call Tania myself but kept getting a busy signal and finally gave up. I had no confidence in my ability to offer condolences on the phone in Russian, anyway. Instead I wrote her a letter and asked Sergei to check it. Whether she ever received it, I don’t know. I mailed it from the same post office where I’d gone with Sasha and bought postcards of Ulan-Ude twelve years before.

In all my life I saw Sasha only twice and conversed with him only imperfectly, but somehow he is clearer in my mind than many people I see regularly. I still have the copy of
The Secret History of the Mongols
(in Russian and Buryat) that he gave me as a present when I left Ulan-Ude the first time. Inside its front cover he wrote, in English script, “That is history my tribe (clan).” I understand now that Sasha was a Mongol, of the peaceful, post–Mongol Empire kind. Back in the early thirteenth century, at the time
The Secret History
was written, the Mongols adopted Uighur script and so began to be literate even before they had taken up the various faiths—Islam, Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity—that would mostly replace their own sketchy shamanism. I remember Sasha because in remote Siberia he was a devoted man of letters, true to his Mongol soul.

The giant head of Lenin in Ulan-Ude’s central square looked even weirder in the winter. In the summer, the green, well-tended plots of lawn and flowers and the enclosing hedges on either side of it softened the effect of its massiveness and gave it the appeal of a beloved, garlanded monster. But in the winter there’s just the snow-covered square, a few sticks of hedge, dark gray surrounding buildings and . . . The Head. Many city buses and vans begin their routes at that square, and I imagined that on a dark winter evening as you stood waiting for your ride home, that giant-featured face looming over you could wear on the nerves.