Travels in Siberia (8 page)

The whole time at that resort and at the one before it, I barely noticed Lake Baikal. I had heard that it was beautiful; I looked at it once or twice and said, “Yes, beautiful,” and that was it. Luckily I would see Baikal again. But now, as it happened, I was due to teach a workshop in Montana in a few days, so I had to go. One morning I left a lot of my fishing stuff with Katya, said goodbye and many thanks to her and to Alex, and rode back to Ulan-Ude with the same young couple who had brought Alex from there. For some reason the drive down to the city was no problem compared to the bumpy and dusty journey the other way. My plane would leave the next evening. I spent my final night in Ulan-Ude at Sasha’s apartment. For dinner, his wife, Tania, again made
pozhe
, and this time, eating without the distractions of cultural confusion and jet lag, I understood that it is one of the great dishes of the world.

Before and after dinner, Sasha and I had a conversation about literature that went surprisingly far, considering my complete lack of Russian and the limitations of his spoken English. Like many educated Russians, he had read most of his country’s literature and a lot of ours. One by one, he showed me his collection of American writers, taking the volumes down carefully from his shelves: Frost, Kerouac, Hemingway, Melville, Thomas Wolfe. He said Wolfe was his favorite because he gave much more the flavor of being American. Sasha had translated many poems of Frost’s. He said that his favorite writer in any language was an early twentieth-century poet named Velimir Khlebnikov. When I admitted I had never heard of Khlebnikov, he fell into sadness and almost began to grieve, shaking his head and saying what a pity that was.

I could see that Sasha would have been a good friend to have in school; he understood what was going on even without words, he laughed to himself about the ridiculousness of life, and he had no desire to push anybody around. The only time I saw him in a coercive frame of mind was for a few minutes the next day, before he took me to the airport,
when we stopped at the post office to buy postcards. I found one I liked—it showed a red bus and a yellow bus going by Ulan-Ude’s central square—because it reminded me exactly of Cleveland, Ohio, when I was a boy. I tried to buy every copy the post office had, and Sasha, perhaps thinking my interest in the card campy and ironical (as I guess it sort of was), hustled me from the post office before I’d bought more than a dozen or so.

My ignorance of Khlebnikov seemed to shake his view of the world. How could such a great Russian poet be unknown in the United States? After our first conversation about Khlebnikov, he mentioned his disappointment and puzzlement a few times more. I felt bad about this, so when I returned I looked up the works of Khlebnikov in the New York Public Library. Most of its books by him were in Russian, and I sat down with a small volume of his verse from the early 1900s to see what I could make of it using a Russian-English dictionary. The success of my attempt can be imagined. Today I can tell you Khlebnikov’s years of birth and death (1885–1922) but not much more. Russian friends have said he often uses obscure language and colloquialisms, and is hard to translate even for someone who knows how. I still remain convinced that there must be something great about Khlebnikov, based on the passion that Sasha had.

My trip back to Moscow went off without complications, luckily. When the ticket taker at the Omsk airport briefly questioned the Omsk–Moscow leg of my ticket, I glimpsed the complete nowhere in which I would have found myself had any explanation been required of me. In Moscow, Stas picked me up at the airport and took me again to the apartment of the ever-kind Chuda and Kolya, who must’ve had about fifty houseguests that summer. Being now mostly without translators among all-Russian speakers threw me even farther into shock. Chuda later told Katya I had looked panicked and pale. At my departure for New York, Stas drove me to Sheremetyevo Airport and explained (I think) in careful detail what I should do at the customs inspection if they asked about silver jewelry I’d bought in Ulan-Ude. When I didn’t understand, he explained more slowly and carefully than before.

On the flight from Helsinki to New York, I sat next to a Swedish building contractor. Previously I had heard Swedish accents only in movies or comedy routines, and had half doubted that such an accent could
be real. This contractor was big and curly haired, with a single uninterrupted eyebrow. He told me stories of the building trade, and when descriptions of distance were required he tried to be as accurate as possible. He would stop, think, and then say that so-and-so had been about as far as from us to the cabin’s movie screen, or to a particular seat three rows away. A Haitian taxi driver brought me from Kennedy Airport to Brooklyn and home. Because of stomach trouble, I had been eating nothing but black bread and tea for the last few days. When I told the Haitian this and described my many meals of only bread and tea, he shook his head repeatedly and expressed his sympathy. While we were stopped at a cash machine so I could get the money to pay him, the driver went across the street to a Baskin-Robbins and bought himself the largest ice cream sundae they had.

In my adult life, no trip had ever made such a change in me. I couldn’t get over where I’d been and what I’d seen. I talked about the trip a lot, and when Alex and Katya came back I sat around with them and reviewed it down to the smallest detail. I began to read all kinds of books about Russia, at first ones about Lenin, and then moving on to Russian authors—Zoshchenko, Kharms, Bulgakov, and others—I hadn’t heard of before. I found a recently emigrated tutor in Brighton Beach and went back and forth on the subway in order to study Russian with her. I started putting notes about Siberia in folders. In a sense, this book is the distant result of an initiative for cross-cultural exchange proposed originally by Sasha Khamarkhanov of the Ministry of Culture of Buryatia in 1993.

One of my all-time heroes is a man I consider almost a relative, George Kennan. I’m not talking about George Frost Kennan, who died in 2005 at the age of a hundred and one. George Frost Kennan was a diplomat, an author, an expert on Russia, and the main architect of the policy of containment used against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I admire him, but I think the other George Kennan, who I sometimes call the original George Kennan, was a cooler and wilder guy. The original George Kennan was born on February 16, 1845, in Norwalk, Ohio. The reason I feel I’m almost related to him is that many of my relatives on my father’s side back to 1815 lived in that town. It’s safe to say that most of them from there knew or knew of George Kennan. A relative named Sam Wildman was George’s childhood friend. My three-greats grandfather, the editor of the local paper, was George Kennan’s first publisher. And some years ago, when I was interviewing a very old and distant cousin named Winthrop Wickham (born 1901), he told me that as a boy he took piano lessons from George Kennan’s sister. Some people who you read about you have a special affinity for; George Kennan I feel I know to the cowlick in his hair.

George Kennan, small-town Ohio boy, who Norwalk old-timers remembered getting a whipping from his father under the apple tree in the family’s backyard or walking along Main Street from the telegraph office to the newspaper with the latest dispatches in his hand, went on to
become the most famous Siberian traveler of the nineteenth century. Indeed, to this day, no traveler in Siberia has made a reputation to compare with Kennan’s. It happened like this:

In 1828, a man named John Kennan came to Norwalk to take the job of principal of the Norwalk Academy. Ohio had been a near wilderness just a dozen years before, and the local boosters hoped that a good secondary school would add distinction and substance to their town. A Vermonter by way of New York State, John Kennan had recently graduated from Hamilton College. The year after he arrived, he married a Norwalk girl, Mary Ann Morse. They would have six children, of whom George would be the second youngest. John Kennan was of a type common on the frontier in that he tried many careers. He soon quit being principal, then opened a law office, ran a daguerreotype parlor, served as county auditor, put out a short-lived newspaper, and in the 1840s became fascinated with the telegraph, which was just beginning to spread itself across the country. After the line reached Norwalk, John was hired as the town’s Western Union operator, a post he held for years.

John’s enthusiasms included a weakness for bad investments. Eventually the family’s finances declined to the point that George, who had shown an aptitude for the telegraph since he was small, left school at the age of twelve to help out at the telegraph office full-time. When the Civil War started, George’s youth and physical frailness kept him at home, but he did participate through the telegraph, that war’s essential mode of communication. In a letter of February 1862, Lucy Preston Wickham, one of the matriarchs of the town (and my three-greats grandmother), wrote, “George Kennan has just received a dispatch that Fort Donelson has been taken.” For my ancestors, all of them vigorous supporters of Lincoln and the Union, the fall of Fort Donelson was the first substantial good tidings in the war, and seventeen-year-old George was its bearer. As the first to hear important news, and especially to take down the fearful lists of casualties—Norwalk lost many boys in the war—the Kennans became figures of some moment in town. George’s skill at telegraphy soon won him promotions and transfers through the ranks of Western Union. He was sent to Cleveland, to Columbus, and to West Virginia. By the time he was nineteen he had been made an operator at the Military Telegraph Corps’s central Midwestern station in Cincinnati.

Elsewhere, in the big picture, telegraph technology of that era had hit an obstacle. Wires had proved cheap and easy to string on land and had
quickly crossed North America. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, however, presented a tougher challenge. In 1858, a competitor of Western Union had tried to lay an underwater cable from Newfoundland to Ireland, but it broke. As an alternative, Perry McDonough Collins, an energetic American entrepreneur and promoter of the advantages of trade with Russia, proposed linking America to Europe by running a line to Alaska, across the Bering Strait (a much shorter and shallower water crossing), through Siberia, and onward to the west. The Russian government went for the idea and gave the necessary permissions and promises of help. Western Union liked the plan, too, and in 1864 acquired Collins’s rights-of-way. As soon as George Kennan learned of this development, he wrote to his top superior and asked if he could join the expedition to survey and build the line.

In late September 1864, Kennan received a response asking if he could be ready to go to Alaska in two weeks. He had been declining mentally and physically in Cincinnati under the pressures of wartime telegraphy; he cabled back that he could be ready in two hours. Unfortunately, he then came down with typhoid fever and had to return to Norwalk to recuperate. His parents, still worried about his health, hesitated to give permission for him to go, but finally they did. Kennan sailed from New York to San Francisco in December, spent some months there, and in July 1865 embarked on a small Russian vessel bound for Kamchatka. By November he was driving dog teams across the tundra. He had not yet turned twenty-one years old.

Seldom has a trip had greater consequences. Work on the telegraph project was divided among a number of detachments, each assigned a section of the line. Kennan’s party—four men, under the command of a Russian nobleman and major, Sergei Abaza—had to find a route and construct it over about eighteen hundred miles of tundra and forest between the Bering Strait and the mouth of the Amur River. To cover the territory, the party further split up into individuals or groups of two. Sometimes Kennan spent months by himself with just an interpreter and Korak or Yakut guides. His main responsibility was a five-hundred-mile stretch between the Anadyr River and the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk.

Much of what we know about the expedition comes from a book Kennan wrote,
Tent Life in Siberia, Adventures Among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia
(1870), a lively account
whose good literary quality testifies to the soundness of the Norwalk primary schools, the author’s only formal education. In
Tent Life
, Kennan dodges danger and has adventures of thrillingness or awfulness on almost every other page. We see him galloping along a Kamchatka beach in a race with the incoming tide for thirty miles fenced in by sheer cliffs, and climbing into reindeer-herder dwellings that can be entered only by the chimney hole, and being dragged nearly to his death by a runaway horse, and dancing with every woman at a ball in the Siberian village of Anadyrsk in the middle of winter, and almost losing his life when a small sailboat he’s in becomes dismasted in the Sea of Okhotsk, and battling flights of mosquitoes that turned the tundra sky gray, and enduring a dogsled journey so cold and grueling that one of his comrades, having survived it, shot himself soon afterward. Despite all difficulties, Kennan’s team made good progress, and eventually had poles and supplies in place to begin building the line.

Then in late May 1867, after two full winters in Siberia, Kennan and his coworkers learned from the captain of a New Bedford whaling ship coasting along the Sea of Okhotsk that a new Atlantic cable had been laid the year before. “Does it work?” Kennan asked with trepidation. “Works like a snatch tackle,” the captain cheerfully replied. Not only that, but the previous, broken cable had been fished up and repaired, and it now was working, too. Kennan and the others understood what this meant. Some weeks later a Russian-American Telegraph Company ship arrived in the Sea of Okhotsk with the official announcement that the project had been abandoned and instructions that the parties in the field sell off all supplies, pay the remaining debts, and disband.

Kennan wound up the last of his business in the region and started for home across Siberia. First he traversed fifteen hundred miles of roadless wilderness to Yakutsk, then went by river to Irkutsk. In Irkutsk his route would join the Siberian Trakt, Russia’s great trans-Asian road for mail, goods caravans, prisoners, and exiles. Irkutsk and its attractions—the city was then known as “the Paris of Siberia”—appealed to him, so he stayed awhile. There’s no single moment in
Tent Life
when an overwhelming love of Russia bowls Kennan over, as it would later do under different circumstances to John Reed. Rather, throughout the book you sense Kennan’s engagement with the country and affection for it growing as he goes. He admires unreservedly his superior, Major Abaza, a
brave and funny guy, and describes the wilder-than-wild Siberian scenery with a grim relish, and gets a kick out of changing his worn-out American clothes for the hides and furs of the tundra. When he scandalizes the beautiful ladies at fancy dress balls in Irkutsk with his sled-driver version of the Russian language, he is definitely having a good time.