Into Thick Air (20 page)

That may explain the mirrored ceiling in my room—I believe I've rented a kind of fitness center. The TV weather lady—displaying gorgeous maps with smiling suns in the general direction of the Caspian—inspires me to check out and hop on my bike. At a kiosk I pick up some ramen noodles, yogurt, and beer. Back into the farmland I ride, repelling a frothing dog attack with a squirt from my water bottle and a couple of rocks. At sundown, still close to the city, I pick my forest camp with extra care, avoiding even a footpath. Solitude is my wish. The last thing I hear is the dew falling plipplip from the toothed leaves of alder.

 

FOR A WAKE-UP, I prefer birdsong to gunpowder, but the next morning it's a shotgun that eliminates the need for a rousing cup of coffee. Hunters, I guess, out in the sunflower fields, and there's little to do except shake the dew off my bag and slice up a banana into a half-kilo of
The Taste of Sunny Fruits
yogurt. My spoon makes it only halfway to my mouth before I hear a rustling in the brush. It's an old couple in rubber boots and canvas coats slinking through the forest, carrying pails and poking with sticks under leaves. Mushroom hunters. They nearly walk through my camp, yet
scarcely glance at me while they forage with a determination that means winter's coming.

Yet today is warm and blowsy, the autumn weather the Russians call Woman's Summer. I share the road with other bicyclists and tractors towing disk plows and huge wagons full of cow manure that slops over, giving me an added challenge. I'm acclimated to the load and can steer with the slightest dip of my shoulders. After the first awkward days of the tour, the machine and I are mates again. Like the wife who finishes her husband's sentences, my bike seemingly anticipates my intentions.

Although I'm passing farm towns, where the yards of the old homes are endlessly mowed by a tethered cow or a goat, there are also 1970s housing blocks. During that decade S. V. Shevtsova wrote in
World Magazine
that “Soviet construction is well on the road to solving the housing problem—something never before attempted by any society or country. It is acquiring increasing know-how on the problem faced by all mass production countries—that of combining beauty and utility.”

Well, maybe utility. The farmhouses slump in a kind of dying glory, but the late-Soviet-era apartments were ugly from the get-go. Concrete joints are sloppily patched, rebar is poking from the landings, and huge exposed heating pipes with tattered insulation run down the streets. An administrative building is topped by a loud sign urging the residents to
March On!

But just down the road, when I stop to talk to a pair of girls selling potatoes from a roadside bucket, I get a chance to visit one of the apartments. I need water, and the girls' mother invites me into their place. It's a nicely padded pad. Rugs on the walls, gas stove, color TV, and, most important, a bathroom with hot water. The pipes that are such an eyesore are actually the main attraction of Soviet apartments—there's a central heating plant in every sizable town and city, and all winter long it provides abundant hot water.

Judging from the bright paint and flowers in front of the crooked old homes with lace curtains in the windows, their owners are proud to stay put. They are brave. I admit that after a few Russian winters of chopping wood, bringing water in from the well, and stomping through the snow to the outhouse I, too, might accept a warm apartment, even if I did see
March On!
from my window. Besides, when I stop at a nearby store I see that new propaganda has replaced the old. It's a huge poster for Stimorol Original Chewing Gum, showing devastatingly handsome men and their lithesome playthings chewing Stimorol on palm beaches.

Blessed by a tailwind, I ride sixty miles through flattish farmland and isolated clumps of forest, reaching the town of Ryazhsk well before sundown. It looks good, small and quiet, and I find a hotel equipped with the essential desk and electricity for my electronics. There's no hot water, but with the thin mattress and thick silence it's not so different from camping—there's nobody but me in the hotel. I go for a walk in the last warm slants of sunlight, past the flowers kept in the square beneath a larger-than-life aluminum statue of Lenin. Kids use the heaps of raked leaves to bury their Barbie dolls. Barbie rests in peace for just a moment, then bursts out for a change of wardrobe.

Dinner is at the sole café/bar, where I attract a pair of eighteen-yearolds, Arthur and Sergei. They want to try my pipe tobacco. Without the pipe. They roll it into big clumsy tubes of newspaper, then happily suck as the embers fall onto the table. In return for my gift, they twice shoo off undesirables who desire my company. “Drunks,” says Sergei. “Prostitute,” says Arthur as they walk me back to my hotel. “Bums,” says Sergei as we pass in the park what appear to be some gypsy women in the shadow of Lenin. “Ryazhsk not so good,” they say in concert, echoing the lament of small-town teens around the world. “Nothing to do. Only Mafia has money.”

Russians love this word
Mafia
, which seems to mean any sort of corruption, with possibly violent consequences if you resist. I catch the scent of Mafia the next day, while riding to Michurinsk. I pass a dozen little towns where people are shoveling manure into their home gardens and selling mushrooms from baby buggies. But when I reach one named after the thirteenth-century warrior-saint Alexander Nevsky, I see that something is up. It reminds me of a certain place in Mexico, a town called Cosala, which seems richer than it should be. Likewise, Alexander Nevsky is bedecked in too many flowers. But it's the cops driving BMWs that really make me wonder.

On the other hand, the city of Michurinsk isn't faring so well. Three hundred miles south of Moscow, home to 130,000, it looks as if it has been
hit by a bomb that killed only cars. I've been in auto-free cities before, but only where the people ride burros. Michurinsk seems a city in hibernation. I ask a man in the street for directions to a hotel, and to my surprise he replies in English. After a few questions about my tour, he tells me with hesitant pride that he's invented a way to fix a flat bike tire with neither tools nor patches. This I truly want to know, but he excuses himself after delivering me to the hotel.

“I' ll tell you tomorrow morning,” he says.

 

HE'S WAITING FOR ME in the hotel café, a quiet place with fresh flowers in hacked-off soda bottles. Ryndiouk Konstantin. I like him straight away—he not only recognizes a genuine cactus in my Arizona postcard, but he also knows the Latin name of the saguaro. Over tea and hard-boiled eggs, this compact blond Russian of thirty-five tells me that he is not from Michurinsk, but from Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Tajikistan borders Afghanistan and China. It is gorgeous country if you like arid valleys in the shadow of ice mountains. Along with much of central Asia, it was conquered by the tsarist armies in the nineteenth century during the Great Game, a race against the British pushing north from India. By the 1880s the Russian Empire had swelled to three times the size of the United States. The Bolsheviks divvied it up in 1924 into the former Soviet—but now independent—republics of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. All are inhabited by Turkic-speaking peoples except for the Tajiks, whose roots lie closer to those of the Afghans and Persians. All made the 1990s move to independence without violence. Except the Tajiks.

“It is not a problem with the Tajik people,” Ryndiouk insists. “I had many Tajik friends. It was the nationalists. They made a slogan:
Asia for Asians—Out with the Russians
. The riots began in February of 1992. It was a horrible time. Everywhere there was automatic gunfire, tanks, and burning buildings. Many people were killed, and soon my mother and sister flee to the only place Russia will allow them to resettle. Here—Michurinsk.”

Ryndiouk stayed on with his tottering old man. He worked for an airplane leasing company, and once spent forty days in Nepal. He's intensely
proud of this brief period—a regular, respectable job that required English, which he taught himself by listening to the BBC and the Voice of America. He still has the documents identifying him as an emissary of the company, and today carefully opens a little manila folder to reveal a few typed pages that survived, with charred edges, the riots that by 1997 had killed 60,000. Ryndiouk lost everything in the fires except these papers and his father.

“I had no money. No passport, no extra clothes. Only a backpack. I had to leave my father. The only Russians in Dushanbe now are those too old and weak to leave.

“I walked at night—it was dangerous during the day. I knew I had to cross two mountain
perevals
—what is this word in English? Yes, pass. Two passes. Forty kilometers each day for six days. Then I was rescued by an Uzbek that fed me and gave me a ride to the train to Tashkent.

“After I arrive in Michurinsk, I have my mother and sister and nothing else. No friends, no job. What do I do?”

What to do in Michurinsk? I know nothing of the economic statistics of this city, but only fifteen people are staying at its sole hotel. There are 150 rooms, and the place seems a vast dark catacomb. With a consequently low workload, the desk clerk, porter, and maid were all quick last night to find a place to store my bike, help me with my bags, and, by way of apology for the lack of hot water, give me the key to the only suite that has an electric in-line water heater. It took them at least ten minutes with the instruction booklet to make the heater work, but their efforts put a dent in the Soviet reputation for dour service.

Likewise, when I take a stroll with Ryndiouk to the bookstore, business is slim and we're helped immediately to an excellent map of the region. “Ten years ago,” says Ryndiouk, “you could not buy a map like this. It was a military secret.”

And the military did not trust their own citizens, who might let a map slip into enemy hands. There could hardly be a better measure of paranoia than a Soviet-era map: a chart of lies, with distorted distances and misplaced towns. Weather maps, too, were fictions, for even the temperature was a military secret.

We're the only customers at the Flamingo Café, where we lunch on goulash
and potatoes while listening to the Beatles' “Yesterday.” The meal is a treat for Ryndiouk—in four years he's never visited a Michurinsk café. I know why, and although it is perhaps cruel I bring up the future.

“You see that four years ago I work for the airline, leasing planes. Three years ago, I was a teacher in Michurinsk, for fifteen dollars a month. Now I sell herbs. Who knows what work I' ll have next year? I live in today.”

When it's time to part ways he says, “Wait—I forgot to explain my tire repair.” With pen and paper he shows me how you drill an extra valve hole in your rim, then install two tubes within one tire. If the outside tube goes flat, you pull out the thorn or glass, inflate the inside tube and ride on. He's really a very clever man.

Back in the hulking cinder-block hotel, I return to my writing. When I need to send off a story to Discovery, I can't get a bearing on the satellite from my room. I end up in a stairwell with the phone balanced in a window opened to the night sky. It's 1 AM, and I fear the consequences if the night watchman happens upon me in this compromising position: huddled in the dark, face lit by the computer screen, tapping in a password to access the satellite phone.

Nobody comes. Until the next morning. I suspect trouble when the hotel clerk asks for my passport and visa. “What are you doing here?” Journalist. Bicycle tourist. She returns my documents and says, “Wait in the café.”

Only fifteen minutes later they show up. A young woman and a young man, smartly dressed, she in a plaid skirt and silk blouse, he in a black suit and sporting a little walkie-talkie. They flip open wallets to reveal badges that identify them, I suppose, as official officials. “Visa, please.”

In a holdover from the Soviet era, when there were only a handful of “open” cities, the visa allots very little space to the trip itinerary. I'm passing through dozens of towns and couldn't possibly list them all. The man scans the little blue visa and says, “No Michurinsk.” The woman says, “Problem.”

Please wait, I say—and I trot off to fetch from my room my emergency documents. I return with the papers and fan them out across the table, as if I were revealing a four-of-a-kind. They can't beat the hologram seal of the Russian Consulate, the wink of very official permission. They can
scarcely believe it, but it's true—the man works for an American company, yet he's riding a bicycle! They set me free.

I walk through the city, under the shadows of slow clouds, and find Lenin standing above the park. In a former movie theater turned teen disco, a big mural features the Soviet symbols of progress—the dove of peace, the man of industry, the woman carrying a sheaf of wheat, the scientist holding in his palm a whirl of electrons, and the cosmonauts of the future. In the city museum there is an entire hall devoted to Ivan Michurin, the plant breeder whose name the city adopted in 1932, despite its having been known as Kozlov for four centuries.

Born in 1855, Michurin was a man of little education but considerable skill in crossbreeding fruit trees to survive the Russian winters. He was also a crank who rejected Mendelian genetics—the basis of inheritance—as well as the concept that competition provides an advantage to some individuals and not others.

Michurin should have become a footnote in Soviet history. But the notion that an organism's destiny was a matter of environment, not heritage, was adopted by a Bolshevik named Trofim Lysenko as a uniquely communist approach to agriculture. History, finally, was irrelevant. And without competition, there would be no “class struggle.”

Lysenko made his career by eliminating all methods but the Michurin method. This was during Stalin's reign, so “eliminating” meant just that—scientists who begged to differ were sent packing to Siberia, or shot dead for “trying to create a condition of famine in the country.” The science of genetics was dead until Stalin himself was dead.