The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (23 page)

The general appearance of the city is magnificent, and he sees this as proof of what may be done with brick and plaster—though the surrounding country is very flat, dull, and marshy. The weather begins to be cold, and a stove within and a pelisse without doors are necessary.

He wishes to see the ice-hills and sledges, and the frozen markets.

He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake, thinking it is a French opera. Yet he expects in course of time to be able to converse with his friends the Sclavonians. He sees the Tauride, now lapsed to the crown, behind which is a winter garden laid out in parterres and gravel walks, filled with orange trees and other exotics, and evenly heated by a great number of stoves. The Neva is now blocked by large pieces of ice floating down from the Ladoga. Though the temperature has been down to twenty degrees Fahrenheit below freezing, that is not considered to be much at all here.

The Empress gives birth to an Archduchess. When the Court assembles to pay their respects the person who most attracts attention is Prince Hypsilantes, the Hospodar of Wallachia, and the Greeks of his train.

There is not much variety in his mode of life. He studies Russian in the morning.

He begins to be very tired of this place and its inhabitants: their hospitality; the voracious gluttony on every side of him; their barefaced cheating; their conversation, with its miserable lack of information and ideas; their constant fear of Siberia; their coldness, dullness, and lack of energy. The Poles are infinitely the most gentlemanlike, and seem a superior order of men to their Russian masters.

He won’t remain here as long as he had intended, but will purchase two sledge kibitkas, and other supplies, and depart, not for Moscow but for Archangel.

He imagines there must be something curious in driving reindeer on the ice of the White Sea.

He buys two sledges covered with a tilt, furnishes them with a mattress, and lays in frozen beefsteaks, Madeira, brandy, and a large saucepan. For the trip he dresses in flannel, over that his ordinary clothes, over his boots fur shoes, over the fur shoes a pair of fur boots, covers his head with a cap of blue Astrachan wool, wraps himself in a sable pelisse, and over it all throws a bear skin.

On the road there are no accommodations, so he sees inside the houses of the peasantry. The whole family lives in one room in suffocating heat and smell and with a number of cockroaches, which swarm in the wooden huts. The dirt is excessive. But the people are civil, hospitable, cheerful, and intelligent, though addicted to spirits, quarrelsome among themselves, and inclined to cheat. They are more like the common Irish than anyone else he has seen. Peter the Great has by no means succeeded in forcing them to abandon their beards.

In the cottage, people come to see him dine. Twenty or thirty women crowd around him, examining him and asking him questions.

He passes through Ladoga and Vitigra. Approaching Kargossol, he counts from a distance nineteen churches, most of which have five balloon-like domes, gilt, copper, or painted in the most gaudy colors, and thinks it must be a magnificent town, but the number of churches here almost equals the number of houses.

In Archangel the Archbishop speaks Latin very fluently, but does not know whether the Samoyeds of his diocese are Pagans or Christians.

His hostess is anxious to show that they, too, have fruit, and brings in some specimens preserved. Here they have in the woods a berry with a strong taste of turpentine.

The mayor comes in during the evening and makes a speech to him in Russian three-quarters of an hour long.

The temperature in Archangel is fifty-one degrees below freezing, both his hands are frozen, and Pauwells has a foot frozen. He goes northeast of Archangel, procures three sledges and twelve reindeer, and sets out over the unbeaten snow in search of a horde of Samoyeds. He finds them exactly on the Arctic Circle in an immense plain of snow surrounded by several hundred reindeer. They are Pagans.

Back in Archangel, the cold has increased, and he is forced to bake his Madeira in an oven to get at it, and to carve his meat with an axe. It is nearly seventy degrees below freezing, barely three points above the point of congelation of mercury.

Moscow is immense and extraordinary, after a journey over the worst road he has ever traveled in his life through a forest which scarcely ever suffered any interruption but continued with dreary uniformity from one capital to another.

He begins to be able to read Russian fairly easily, and speak it sufficiently. Poole has also picked up enough.

He sends his younger brother a Samoyed sledge and three reindeer cut out of the teeth of a seahorse by a peasant at Archangel.

The extent of Moscow is prodigious despite its small population because in no quarter of the city do the houses stand contiguous. The Kremlin is certainly the most striking quarter, and nearly thirty gilt domes give it a most peculiar appearance.

He is much interested by the passage of regiments composed of some of the wandering nations. One day there passed two thousand Bashkirs from the Oremburg frontiers on their lean desert horses, armed with lances and bows, some clothed in complete armor, some with the twisted coat of mail or hauberk, some with grotesque caps, others with iron helmets. These people are Mohammedans. Their chief is dressed in a scarlet caftan, their music is a species of flute which they place in the corner of their mouths, singing at the same time. They are almost always at war with the Kirghese.

A regiment of Calmucs passes through. Their features are scarcely human. They worship the Dalai Lama. He also sees a number of Kirghese of the lesser and middle hordes.

He continues his study of Russian, finds the language sonorous, but thinks it hardly repays anyone the trouble of learning it, because there are so few original authors—upon the introduction of literature it was found much easier to translate. The national epic poem, however, about the conquest of the Tartars of Casan, would be good if it weren’t for the insufferable monotony of the meter.

Proceeding along the frozen river, the postilions missed their road, came to a soft place on the ice, and the horses broke through. The kibitka in which he lay could not be opened from the inside and the postilions paid no attention to him, being concerned only with trying to save their horses. One of them woke Poole in his sledge to request an axe. Poole saw the vehicle half-floating in the water and had just time to open the leather covering. He jumped out upon the ice with his writing desk and the carriage went down to the bottom. One horse drowned.

In Petersburg, the Carnival was taking place: theaters erected on the river, ice-hills, long processions of sledges, multitudes of people, and public masquerades given morning and evening.

Now Moscow is very dull during the fast.

He plans to get a large boat, embark at Casan, and float down the Volga to Astracan sitting on a sofa. He will reach the banks of the Caspian.

The carriages he will use have not a particle of iron in their whole composition.

There is a sect of Eunuchs who do this to themselves for the kingdom of heaven. They had at one time propagated their doctrines to such an extent that the government was forced to interfere, afraid of depopulation. It seized a number of them and sent them to the mines of Siberia.

He is preparing for his journey, and he will be accompanied as far as Astracan by an American of South Carolina, Mr. Poinsett, one of the few liberal and literary and gentlemanlike men he has seen emerge from the forests of the New World.

He has hired a Tartar interpreter, whom his valet de chambre is somewhat afraid of and calls “Monsieur le Tartare.”

He is waiting for letters from Casan about the condition of the roads, but because it is spring and travel by both sledge and carriage is precarious, there is almost no communication between towns.

An edict has appeared forbidding conversation on political subjects.

In the Russian Empire, where perhaps of three men whom you meet, one comes from China, another from Persia, and the third from Lapland, you lose your ideas of distance.

Foreign newspapers are prohibited.

He has gone up to the top of a high tower at one in the morning to see the spectacle of Moscow with its hundreds of churches illuminated on Easter Eve.

Then he has been very surprised to see all the females of the family run up to him and cry out, “Christ is risen from the dead!”

When he sets out he and Mr. Poinsett will each be armed with a double-barreled gun, a brace of pistols, a dagger, and a Persian saber; each of the four servants also will have his pistols and cutlass. He will be sorry to leave Moscow.

The accommodations along the way are as they have been all over Muscovy: one room, in which you sleep with the whole family in the midst of a suffocating heat and smell; no furniture to be found but a bench and table; and an absolute dearth of provisions.

As he proceeds he finds the Tartars in the villages increasing in numbers, and the Russian fur cap giving way to the Mohammedan turban or the small embroidered coif of the Chinese.

He sleeps in the cottage of a Tcheremisse, with neither chimney nor window. The women have their petticoats only to the knee and braid their hair in long tresses, to which are tied a number of brass cylinders.

No man could suppose himself to be in Europe—though by courtesy Casan is in Europe—when he contemplates the Tartar fortifications, the singular architecture of the churches and shops, and the groups of Tartars, Tcheremesses, Tchouasses, Bashkirs, and Armenians.

An Armenian merchant promises to have a boat ready in two or three days.

The beauty of the scenery on the Volga is gratifying, the right bank mountainous and well wooded. After passing Tsauritzin, where both banks were in Asia, there is nothing on either side but vast deserts of sand.

He sees great numbers of pelicans. Islands are white with them. He sees prodigious quantities of eagles, too. He and the others eat well on sterlet and its caviar. The number of fish in the Volga is astounding. The Russian peasants won’t eat some of them for reasons of superstition. For example, he had too much of a sort of fish like the chad, and offered them to the boat’s crew, but they refused them, saying that the fish swam round and round, and were insane, and if they ate them they, too, would become insane.

There is some reason for refusing pigeons, too, and also hares.

Samara is the winter home of a number of Calmouks. Only during the summer do they wander with their flocks in the vast steppes on the Asiatic side and encamp in their circular tents of felt. The heat of the Steppe is suffocating. The blasts of wind during the summer immediately destroy the flocks exposed to them, which instantly rot. The Tartars and Calmouks make every species of laitage known in Europe and also ardent spirits they distill from cow’s and mare’s milk.

He comes upon a village as distinguished for the excessive cleanliness of the houses and the neatness of the gardens as the Russian habitations are for their dirt and filth.

The town of Astracan is inhabited by thirteen or fourteen different nations, each description of merchants in a separate caravanserai.

His next excursion before he proceeds to the northern provinces of Persia will be a short distance into the desert to the habitation of a Calmouk Prince. He wants to go hawking with his daughter the Princess, who with her pipe at her mouth hunts on the unbroken horses of the desert.

He is staying in a village inhabited exclusively by Tartars. He visits a Calmouk camp and enters the tent of the chief Lama. It is very neat and covered with white felt, the floor matted and strewn with rose leaves. The priest shows the idols and sacred books. He brings out the banner of silk painted with the twelve signs of the zodiac. Some banners are inscribed with prayers. These are placed at the door of the tent, in the wind: letting them flutter about is supposed to be equivalent to saying the prayers. The Lama orders tea: the leaves and stalks are pressed into a large square cake and this is boiled up with butter and salt in the Mongol manner. It forms a nauseous mixture, but he drinks it and then takes his leave, all the village coming out of their tents and going down with him to the waterside. At least a third of the men in the village are priests.

He proceeds through the desert, which extends to the foot of Mount Caucasus. How different it is from Archangel: terrible heat instead of terrible cold, a plain of sand instead of a plain of snow, herds of camels belonging to the Calmouks instead of flocks of reindeer.

The ground is so flat they have no trouble getting along in their kibitkas. But they are often fooled by the appearance of extensive ranges of hills on the horizons, which are actually merely small inequalities magnified by intervening vapors.

The careless servants lose most of the water they have brought along with them, and then they suffer from extreme thirst, for the pools are as salt as sea water: their bottoms and sides are covered with beautiful crystals exhaling a strong smell of violets.

The plants all taste of salt, the dews are salt, and even some milk he gets from a Tartar is brackish.

Then there are swarms of mosquitoes, and he can’t even talk or eat without having a mouthful of them. Sleeping is out of the question.

They cross a river where the water comes up to the windows of the carriage, which floats. They cross a marsh four miles broad and three or four feet deep.