In Siberia (15 page)

He said: ‘This is my coat.' He laid aside the tambour. ‘It is very
old.' It was long and black, dripping black tassels. He clashed some ribboned cymbals. Then he took the cloudy gold disc that he passed over patients' bodies, and touched it across his own like an astral stethoscope.

‘And this is my head-dress.' He held it delicately. From a circlet of gold plates which jangled and overlapped in his hands, there sprouted glossy black feathers. It looked barbarian. As he donned it, a cascade of attached black hair tumbled to his waist, and the vertical war-bonnet transformed him to a Sioux. He stroked it in delight. Then he thwacked his palm with a short, seven-thonged flail, and beat it at the air. ‘
Vor! Vor! Vor!
' He was laughing. ‘That is how I beat them!'

‘The black spirits?'

But even now he would not name them. His face set. ‘When I dance, I recognise them…and what I need to know, I know.' He whipped the air again. ‘They flee away!' Then he plucked up the tambour and struck it in a trilling burst. ‘When I dance, I chant to the music
manix-hu-ma
,
manix-hu-ma
'–he pointed to the ceiling–‘and power comes to me out of the sky!'

Next moment, as suddenly as he had taken them up, he laid the instruments aside and went back to the other room. We sat on the little chairs again. The ginger cat sauntered through. I asked: ‘Where can you practise?'

He opened empty hands. The sacred places were few now, he said, very few. But three years ago he had built himself a shrine in a secret place in the wilds, and there he danced.

What about the Association of the Tambour in Lenin Street, I asked?

He grimaced. ‘Those are very young people. They understand nothing. I don't know if they are really shamans at all, or what they are. I don't know.'

In parting, he gave me his Lamaist incense cup, and a colour snapshot of himself. I gave him a key-ring dangling a miniature London bus, which he examined with wonder. Then he walked back with me a mile in the still-warm darkness.

Clouds had spread from the west, where the evening star left a lone blur of light.

He said: ‘The real shamans, the true shamans, have almost gone now. The traditions have faded away. The customs aren't known. There was one old shamaness in a remote part, eighty-six years old. But she was the last. No more than that. And there used to be so many. And people need us.'

We tramped between the headstones and plastic flowers of the graveyard: tilting crosses and red stars. At the end of the path, he stopped. ‘Come back next year.' He bowed and clasped his hands. ‘Bring me walrus essence!'

 

His photograph is still on my desk. He is half-smiling. But I have not been back, and walrus is an endangered species, like him, and unexportable. In his snapshot he is wearing his head-dress, but it looks a little tacky. I see that the raven feathers are tied to its discs with old blue string. And he himself appears different, faintly mysterious, so that I want to ask him again how he travels among the dead.

From the hill-chapel of St Paraskeva you may look down on Krasnoyarsk in puritan disgust. A pool of slums separates you from its massed concrete, where the Yenisei glimmers dully, and from the west a vast suburb advances on the centre under a pall of smokestacks. The whole city cringes beneath clouds of carbon, coal tar and dust. Southward a bridge charges over the river to where the chimneys shoot up again, belching soot, or sending up wavering pillars of grey. Invisible beyond them, an immense dam and hydroelectric plant, the most powerful in the world on its completion in 1971, shores up a reservoir two hundred and fifty miles long above the drowned villages of 48,000 displaced people.

Where, you wonder, is the town admired by Chekhov, the spacious city of gold merchants? But Krasnoyarsk had swelled with reassembled factories during the Second World War, to become a metropolis of a million. Before 1991 it was closed to foreigners. The satellites surrounding it to the north–Soviet maps omit them–harbour a nest of underground military electronics plants and nuclear reactors, now converting in part to the manufacture of cassettes and Samsung televisions.

Yet once inside the city, this squalor withdraws. Running in long parallels above the river, the streets are lined with the honey-coloured blocks built by Japanese prisoners-of-war, with Corinthian hulks and turn-of-the-century confections in plaster and stone, with the surprise of a wooden mansion here and there, or a nineteenth-century villa. The Yenisei flows grandly under them.
And you forget for a while the polluted and near-identical citadels of the poor which circle them, imagining that this is the city's heart.

The Yenisei mesmerised me. The slim torrent which I had seen at Kyzyl, flowing from the centre of Asia, had now swollen to a flood over a mile wide. And still it was just beginning. With its Angara tributary, it is the sixth longest river in the world, slicing Siberia into two unequal halves as it moves three thousand four hundred miles from Mongolia to the Arctic. I wandered its banks where the great bridge, built by a French engineer in the 1890s, leapfrogged its current south. A smart-looking steamer, the
Mastrov
, was tied up at the quay. I watched it revictualling. Then, feeling like a runaway boy, I bought a ticket to the Arctic Circle, a voyage to the edge of my map and expectation.

But hours would pass before it sailed. Downriver I came upon the paddle-steamer that carried Lenin into exile at Shushenskoe. It had been hoisted clear of the water, the machinery which drove its rusted paddles still oiled and intact. Inside, the museum once sacred to Lenin had diversified, and there I found a steel document-case once belonging to Nikolai Rezanov.

A young nobleman in the service of Grigory Shelikhov, the founder of Russian Alaska, he set out in 1803 with two ships on an imperial trade mission to America, and plotted to spread Russian dominion into California. While buying provisions in San Francisco, he fell in love with the beautiful daughter of the Spanish commandant, but religious impediments delayed their union, and Rezanov sailed home, promising to return within two years.

The legend survives in Siberia that he and his future father-in-law planned to create an independent California under the protection of the czar. But the following March Rezanov died of pneumonia in Krasnoyarsk, and was buried a few hundred yards from the quay where I walked. His fiancee waited. (Consuella's Rock, facing the sea near San Francisco, commemorates her.) Then, on the news of his death, she founded California's first convent and became its first nun.

For more than a century Rezanov's monument stood by the cathedral near the river. Then in the 1930s a parachute school
was built on the site, and the tomb, with its perilously pointed urn and spiked railings, was swept away.

 

As the three-decked
Mastrov
eases from the quayside, a burning expectation starts up. It is puerile, coloured by Conrad. But now the engines tremble the ship's body, and you weigh anchor from the world. On the jetty a small crowd of relatives is waving itself into obscurity. A few jokes carry across the 50 yards of water. Martial music sounds from the ship's loudspeaker, as if we were departing for the front. A small girl, standing on shore beneath her parents, is crying as her grandmother starts to dwindle over the water. Then, as the boat turns into the mainstream, the hand-waves broaden to semaphore and the crowd breaks up and is lost to sight.

The city drifts away from us. It resolves into important cubes and rectangles: the banks, the concert hall, the river station. Our foghorn booms lonely beneath a bridge. We thread between marshy islets where fishermen stand in black waterproofs and do not look up. A flight of duck is heading west. Our engine putters in near-silence. Moored along the quays, the barges barely rock in our wake. Even as we break clear of the last suburbs, long banners of smoke are streaming from unseen factory chimneys to our north.

Then even these vanish, and on either shore the hills flow down under a soft blaze of trees–birches turning amber, dark layers of cedar and pine gashed by the scarlet of mountain ash. Sometimes, when the river narrows, the cliffs steepen into serrated blades which drop sheer to the water. At others, the way smooths out into an island-studded calm, and the light falls flat and glassy on a meandering half-lake.

I stand on deck for hours. My fellow passengers, burly traders in vinyl caps, have blocked the lower deck with crates of peppers and tomatoes which mount to the portholes. Sometimes they stand staring at the river with hunched shoulders, like me, or play cards in the vestibule. But there is no communal life. The boat seems half-empty. Families returning from holiday keep to their cabins, asleep or munching picnics. The buffet is closed, the saloon
is closed, the reading-room is closed. The boat appears to run on magic. But the public rooms are panelled in a lemony splendour of varnished pine, and brass fittings run riot. In the music-room (closed) I glimpse a white-painted piano and walls swagged with sashes and lyres. The dining-room curves with the prow, and flaunts silk curtains and palm-court columns. It serves smoked fish, chunks of fatty ham and black bread; then comes sweet coffee and a puny bill.

Outside on the river, every few hours, the jetty of a village marks its link with the world. Bright-painted rowing-boats leave a broken kaleidoscope on the shore, and wooden stairways wobble up to the cottages cresting its bank. Occasionally a church, old and massive above the rooftops, raises a gutted bell-tower or a cupola shorn of its cross. Then we circle in to the landing-stage, where an avenue of peasant women waits behind their offerings of vegetables and preserves. The moment the gang-plank is lowered the passengers swarm out to buy, while a posse of stevedores shouldering sacks of vegetables charges the other way and heaps up the crates on deck still higher.

Within twenty minutes the furious commerce subsides and we cast off again. We move over water which is like imperfectly set metal. The north wind pushes its surface back, while a deep counter-current foments it from below. The boat rolls faintly, sleepily, over its trouble. I gaze down distracted. The whole surface seems to seethe with a strange, molten cold. Steely circles and ellipses glide over it and appear to shimmer with the commotion of millions of aquatic insects which are not, in fact, there, while an oil-smooth sheen spreads black between the ripples.

From the upper deck I watch the West Siberian Plain stretch to the sky in level forest, while on the other side stir the hills of a still huger East Siberia. The taiga seems to unite them, but in fact they are different countries, and the Yenisei cleaves them like a sword. The loamy plains of the west are still feebly warmed by the Atlantic. Their forests are wet with lakes and marshland, and their indigenous natives may speak languages close to those of Finland and Hungary. But the east is embalmed by a fearsome, static cold, and permafrost underlies it almost to the borders of
China. The taiga thickens among mountains, and the western spruce and pines become infested by armies of tough larches which march to the Pacific. Its native groups are of ancient, more Mongoloid stock.

Slowly, to port and starboard, and for hundreds of miles, an odd difference develops. The western bank runs level with the water, but on the east the shore rears up in a 50-foot earthen wall thronged by trees. The wake of our boat leaves a nervous parting between them. The Norwegian explorer Nansen, who sailed the river in 1913, ascribed the difference to the pull of the earth's rotation as it strengthens towards the North Pole. The phenomenon, once noticed, starts to absorb you: the glitter of young birch trees standing in the western water, the horse herds which amble down unchecked. And the eastern shore, like a closed rampart.

As the ship's prow noses towards the pole, you wait in childlike expectation. You imagine the globe of the earth steepening as all the lines of longitude converge in front of you, and that you can see its curve across the skyline. Soon, you conceive, the earth must level out under the crushing weight of sky, and through that slit in the horizon–where the river parts the forest–you will glide over the top of the world and begin to slide down into the south.

Instead, towards evening, the wind drops and we enter a golden vacuum. I think: this is that primal Siberia–elusive, endless–which lingered like a geographic unconscious behind the eyes of early travellers. Its seeming void was a clean slate to write upon. For centuries it courted hearsay and legend, conjured the ideal, elicited fear. Even its name–a mystical conflation of the Mongolian
siber
, ‘beautiful', ‘pure', and the Tartar
sibir
, ‘sleeping land'–suggested somewhere virgin and waiting. Hegel placed it outside the pale of history altogether, too cold and hostile to nurture meaningful life.

It spreads around us an illusion of vacancy. Yet as early as Herodotus there were tales of habitation. His account of a bald, flat-nosed race, and of a tribe which slept for half the year, seem to be rumours of Mongol and Arctic peoples. And as the Russians probed the Urals, they painted in their demons beyond. God had confined the natives in this wilderness because they ate their dead.
There was a people who died every winter when water spilt from their noses and froze them to the ground. Others who submerged in the summer sea lest their skins split. Their eyes were lodged in their chests, and their lips between their shoulders; or their mouths opened upward in their skulls, so they ate their crumbled food by placing it under their hats and pumping their shoulders up and down. These people, it seems, had been here for ever. For in the unknown, time stops.

But later a pagan beauty crept in. Siberia, exempt from religious surveillance, harboured magic cities. Surrounded by clamour, they could be reached only underground; but once inside their walls an unearthly silence fell. In its snowbound purity, its farness, Siberia became the repository of an imagined innocence.

Yet by the nineteenth century other, countervailing images had long been in place: Siberia as a storehouse to be plundered by officials and hunted bare by Cossacks; and above all, long before the Gulag, as a limbo that could receive all the viral waste of the empire–criminal, vagabond, dissident. Through Siberia, Russia would purge herself. Its vastness could quarantine evil.

The pendulum swung back years ago. As Moscow appears to sink deeper into the embrace of the West, so Siberia becomes enshrined in the Slavic imagination as the Russia that was lost, the citadel of the spirit. The mystique of a chaste, self-reliant Siberia rises again. Siberia is more Russian than Russia is, people say, as if it were a quintessential Russia, or the imagined country which Russia would like to be.

 

Nobody shared my four-berth cabin. Low-wattage bulbs gave it the feel of a dim nest. So I went up and sat astern while the sun dropped, and listened to the cinnamon-coloured water rustling below. Beside me a thickset man seemed half-asleep. Then a flight of duck introduced us. As they passed, his arm lifted automatically and fired an invisible shotgun. ‘It's wonderful sport here. You can see hunters' dugouts all along this stretch. Look there…and out there….'

I hadn't noticed them before–the hollowed trunks ribbed with planks, just visible among the reeds. Vadim ached to be in one,
or crouched in the marshes waiting for the Canada geese to fly in. He spoke of them with the disturbing affection of the hunter for his prey: how they winged down from the Arctic in autumn on their way to India. There were Brent geese and red-breasted geese too, and widgeon and coots from the tundra. And other, near-holy birds–cranes, swans–which no one shot.

And what about the Great Grey Owl, I asked, with its five-foot wingspan and its head the size of a human's? I longed to glimpse one in the dusk. It sports a white outgrowth of eyebrows and moustache, like a cartoon colonel, with facial discs as big as soup-plates, and it can hear a vole moving a foot beneath the snow. Yes, Vadim said, if you kept very still on a river-bank at evening, you would hear them calling to one another–he gave a clouded hoot–yet you never saw one.

Once, he had walked the thirteen hundred miles from Krasnoyarsk to Dudinka which our boat was travelling. It had taken him fifty days, camping and hunting, following the river by tracks. He spoke of it with earthy nostalgia, his hand sometimes crashing on to my shoulder to confirm his shooting of a marten or fording a river. His eyes were steady in a gross, amiable face. He seemed to typify the old Siberia. ‘And I saw bears too! And they saw me. But if you don't bother a bear, he doesn't bother you. Only in winter, he's cross if he's hungry. And there were wolverines about. Now the wolverine, he's big'–he circled his arms around an aerial heavyweight–‘and he has a funny habit of following you. You don't often know it, but there he is, just following behind somewhere, and when you pitch camp he hangs around, the wolverine does. Then when you leave for a moment he empties your tent for you.'

Vadim lived in Arctic Dudinka, but was restless for the forest. Hunting was his passion. He knew a place where wild reindeer crossed the Yenisei, and would shoot two or three a year, carving up their flesh where they fell. A forester lent him an isolated shack from which he would set out at night, and as the morning mist lifted from clearings rich in berries, he would shoot the elk which grazed there, and sell their carcasses on the sly.