In Siberia (27 page)

The letters of the senior priest, Edward Stallybrass, survive in the British Museum archives, unflinching in their faith. His handwriting, and that of his wife Sarah, converge indistinguishably in a beautiful, forward-flowing script. They seem never to have wavered, only to have underestimated fatally the Buddhism of the inhabitants.

At Mongol New Year, Sarah visited the chief lama temple ‘in order', she wrote enigmatically, ‘to gratify my eyes and affect my heart'. The feasting and ceremony, the masked plays and deafening music in this ‘Great Temple of the Idolators', put her in mind of Hell. But ‘I thought the day was perhaps not distant when the gospels in circulation among them would be substituted for their prayers; their instruments attuned to the praises of the Most High; and the great Chair occupied as a pulpit, by one of our devoted missionary brethren'. This vision never materialised. Only a little earlier the Buryats had brought thirty wagonloads of Buddhist texts from Tibet for the price of 12,000 cattle.

I descended into a village which looked half-abandoned. The river had a little withdrawn from it, leaving printless sand-banks. The enclosure and the graves had disappeared. On the site of the mission was only the breached cattle-pen of a ruined state farm, and a litter of rocks. A piercing wind sprang up. Close to the bank, under an icing of snow, I came upon a 20-foot obelisk of rough-hewn stone. Dusting the frost from its iron plaque, I read in Latin an inscription to Martha Cowie, ‘
Nata in Scotia in urbe Glasguae
', wife of the missionary Robert Yuille. She had died in 1827.

Stallybrass, too, lost his wife, to some unnamed illness. For a moment a heartbreaking loneliness breaks through his piety. ‘I can hardly believe that she is to open her eyes upon me no more,' he wrote to his nephew. ‘Yet it is true, I wiped the last, cold sweat from her face, and closed her eyes in death….' But instead of final words confirming her love of the Gospels, he wrote, she had only gasped a little, and died.

Beyond the obelisk, and the sheltering cliff, the river loosens
into a shining estuary which wanders away in multiple strands towards the south. From where I stood its course was speckled by forest islets, still golden, until the streams drew a watery line beneath wrinkled hills and turned at last towards Mongolia.

In the course of their twenty-two years the missionaries baptised nobody. Even their Buryat servants, wrote an unsympathising visitor, laughed at them behind their backs. The Russian Church hated them, and demanded that any convert join the Orthodox. Eventually, in 1840, it contrived the mission's closure. Within a few years the Buryats believed the place haunted. The bones of Martha Cowie, they said, sat inside her obelisk, awaiting resurrection.

So the missionaries had returned as ghosts, which was natural. They had, after all, left everything meaningful behind them: the pious dead, the impious living, the mirage of China.

A twelve-year-old boy is waiting with his mother in Ulan Ude station. He sits beside me in the lobby and asks: ‘Where are you going?' I look into a face of curious, empty sweetness. It is very clear and pale. On his far side the woman touches his hand, as if reminding him of something.

‘I'm going to Skovorodino,' I say. ‘Then on to the Pacific and Magadan.' It is my last destination.

The woman says: ‘I was eleven years in Magadan.'

‘Why there?' It is a place horrific in memory: once gateway to the Gulag empire of Kolyma.

‘I went there as a girl to work for the Komsomol. I thought it romantic–just reindeer and taiga!' She laughs at her foolishness. ‘But people are good there because of the harshness. If you're standing by the roadside in the snow, somebody will stop for you. Here they'll let you die. All Siberia is like that now–people just let you die.' Her words fall into a melancholy music. The boy echoes them with a sad smile. ‘I was a Communist believer then. My parents were too. They called my sister Stalina because she was born the day Stalin died. Stalinka, Stalinushka! Then when Khrushchev came to power, they changed her name to Tatiana. Then when Khrushchev was disgraced they changed it back to Stalina; then when…Her passport became a mess.'

‘But you left Magadan.'

‘I lost my belief there. I married and had two children, then we came to Kyzyl as teachers.'

The boy gets up and wanders off to buy ice-cream, and she is staring at his back. ‘Then there was him.'

‘Your boy?' I ask. But she seems a little too old.

‘Yes, by mistake. He's a beautiful boy, very gentle. But he's not normal, you know.' She is looking at the place where he has vanished. ‘He has no memory.'

‘You mean he's slow?'

‘No, he used to be brilliant, two classes ahead of his age. Then when he was seven he had an accident bicycling down a mountain. He hit his head. Since then he can't remember anything for more than a few minutes.' Her voice fills with a stricken tenderness. ‘Things just slip away.'

‘Don't you get help with him?'

‘He's a pensioner. He receives a little over the minimum pension every month.' I wonder about his father, but she says nothing. ‘Kolya's coming back.'

He hands me an ice-cream too, a little wistfully, then settles down to play with a clockwork mouse. Sometimes he glances at his mother with the helpless adoration of a small child. While his contemporaries, I imagine, are following sport or wondering about sex, he can imitate all the Walt Disney animals.

They are travelling to St Petersburg, his mother says, in the hope of a new life. ‘Some people stay put, others are gypsies like us. That's how we are. Everybody nowadays is just after money, after self, there's nothing else. But God will see to us.' Her elder son lives abroad, she says, and her daughter is estranged from her. She ruffles Kolya's hair. ‘My duty is to him. He is my future.'

She gives a little sigh of burden or contentment. She will always have a child now.

 

For a thousand miles some geologic upheaval had sent the mountain ranges beyond Baikal drifting north-west, mirroring the crevice of the lake. In their peculiar aridity and cold they remained a limbo of tough mining and sheep-grazing. Their winters are thin-snowed, but bitter. For years their most successful beast was a shaggy dromedary which lived on frozen grass. By late October
sleet had stripped away the deciduous brilliance of their trees around dun-coloured foothills.

My compartment was monopolised by a Ukrainian porter who sprawled opposite his wife and sometimes stretched out a tattooed arm to pinch her cheek. Around us the bunks were occupied by sleeping Buryat girls, stacked up like dolls, who seemed more delicately in transit than the Russians. I felt I had grown invisible to them all: a down-at-heel Estonian. My boots now squealed as if they enclosed mice, but my snow-proof trousers and quilted jacket, I imagined, edged me into anonymity.

I knew these trains by heart now: their bossy attendant
provodnitsi
, their clamped windows, their stench of urine, raw fish, sweat. I too now softened dried noodles with scalding water from the carriage boiler, brewed up cheap coffee and picked at salted
omul
as the train and the hours crawled on. At dusk I lay curled on an upper bunk reading a biography of Kolchak. A foot above my head a thin, unsteady graffito confided ‘
Alya
+
Alyosha
=
love
'. Then the dark came down.

I tried to sleep. Somewhere beyond Chita the Trans-Manchurian Railway diverged south-east through China. An imperial venture forced on the Chinese in 1896–war-torn and bandit-ridden–it had completed the Trans-Siberian's link to the Pacific. It was this line, and the track where we travelled, that the White warlord Grigory Semyenov terrorised with gangs of Cossacks, Chinese brigands and Japanese mercenaries, riding the rails in armoured trains named ‘The Destroyer' and ‘The Terrible'.

Long after midnight we stopped at Nerchinsk, in whose silver-mines Decembrists and Polish patriots had died, and in the darkness I missed the mouth of the Onon valley, birthplace of Genghis Khan. In its upper reaches, after a ravaged childhood, the conqueror gathered beneath him a fateful union of tribes, and in times of crisis would return to pray to the Sky God on the mountain at the river's source. But I looked out on blackness. Genghis Khan's memory haunts all central Asia; for decades it was a Soviet heresy to tell his tale or show his portrait, and his reputation still sheds a dark lustre over all the scattered Mongolian and Turkic peoples.

The motion of the train was so slow, so quiet, as it munched
away all night at the twelve hundred miles to Skovorodino, that when an anaemic dawn stole into our carriage I thought we had barely moved. I gazed out of the window to see bare trees flowing over broken waves of hills. It was an unlovely, charred-looking land, drifting into winter. The larches had wasted to leaden filigree, and the birches were ghosts. All day the vista scarcely changed, while I became mesmerised by the taiga. Its snow-glazed desolation seemed only to deepen its vastness: one fifth of the forest of the entire earth. Often it runs over a thousand miles deep from north to south, and the suffocating closure of its trees, crowding out all distances, any perspective, has driven people literally mad. Magnetic anomalies can doom even a sane traveller here, while his compass-point swings uselessly. Others start walking in a mania to escape–this is the ‘taiga madness'–but return always to their own tracks, until they drop exhausted or lose themselves in quicksand.

As we drew closer to the Chinese border along the northward swing of the Amur river, my Soviet map went empty, and nothing officially existed. But I knew, in fact, that even the static purity of the taiga was an illusion. Logging, especially by North Koreans, and the pollution and fires around gas-and oil-fields, had cut their swathe through it; the state-owned forestry camps along the track, notorious for wastefulness, had followed the economy half into ruin. Now, towards evening, the snow began pouring in grey, driven clouds over the woods, smearing them to shadows or to nothing. Soon its icy tempest was flying past the train, until we were climbing into blinding whiteness, and only hours later in the night did I remember that somewhere we must have tipped over an imperceptible watershed into the railway's thousand-mile descent to the Pacific.

I got off at midnight into piercing cold. In the near-empty station somebody said there was a hotel on the far side of the tracks, and I crossed a crumbling iron bridge and dropped into darkness. Skovorodino was an unknown dot on my map. Nobody went there. For all I knew I was in a military zone. I plunged down a path between locked buildings in pitch darkness, where people were walking. Their talk echoed round me. I asked the
voices where a hotel was, but they passed by disembodied, drunk, and I lighted on the guest-house by chance. A sleepy youth blinked wordlessly at my documents, then found me a bed under a wall spattered with mosquitoes. I turned the soiled mattress, and slept.

In the morning I realised by the street names–Soviet Street, Komsomol Street–that I was in the town's heart. Skovorodino was an overgrown railway junction squeezed between hills. The temperature was barely -10°F, but the wind swept my face like cold acid, gusting up snow and dust together. Frozen leaves rasped along the tracks. In an outdoor market red-faced vendors in high woolly hats were selling fish and chickens frozen from their tables. A war memorial was splashed with crimson names: Siege of Leningrad, Stalingrad, the Capture of Berlin…. Nothing seemed to have happened since.

But I had come here for the Amur river, which flowed seventy miles to the south, with China beyond. A thin road on my map ended in faded print at Albazin, the site of Chinese–Cossack battles, which must have shrunk to a village on the banks of the great river. The Amur! It was one of those floods, like the Oxus or the Nile, which seem to flow free of geography and into dreamscape.

In Skovorodino there was no petrol, but every other day a diesel engine went down a side-track towards the frontier, and by late afternoon I was crossing valleys of frozen streams in a train full of listless soldiers. We took four hours to cover sixty miles. The driver halted to buy candles at a lonely depot. The soldiers, like the police, seemed to look through me.

It was night by the time we stopped. A few trucks were waiting to take people away, troops to barracks, others to Revnovo village in the forest nearby, and soon I was alone. The sky was starless. I waited where a soldier had said a bus would come for Albazin. The snow began falling in big, intermittent flakes, oddly comforting. Painfully, the train looped and turned back towards Skovorodino. The
provodnitsa
was leaning out of her door as it laboured past me. I shouted: ‘Has the bus gone?'

She called back: ‘What bus? There's no petrol! No petrol anywhere!'

‘Can I walk to Albazin?'

‘No! It's eighteen kilometres! And…'–her voice faded through the trees–‘…there are…wolves.'

I watched the train limp back through the pines, until its weak lights disappeared, and the dark and the cold intensified together. I had no idea what to do, only felt the dangerous confidence that something would turn up. For a while I lingered fatalistically, waiting for the bus that would not come. Then I trudged along the railway line towards the station hut. It showed two darkened windows, and I wondered whether to break in. These posts were sometimes obsolete, their lighthouse loneliness overseeing nothing. Tolstoy had died in one, fleeing domestic trouble. The snow was thickening in a luminous curtain before my torch-light. I tramped round the back of the hut, then stopped. Light glimmered under a door.

I hesitated, then pushed through into a bath of hot air. Beaming pleasantly, warming his hands at a stove, Volodya was the kind of Russian heroised or satirised over centuries. He was the copybook peasant prince: an overgrown boy, innocently handsome, unscathed. A station-worker's cap was pushed back on his yellow curls. He did not ask who I was or where I came from, but from his nest of log-books and telephones began to call people to take me to Albazin. ‘Misha…can you drive tonight? No petrol…Yuri, can you take…? Petrol finished…. Kolya…away…Petya, Oleg, Vadim–no petrol, no petrol, no petrol….'

‘One day petrol will come back,' he said, ‘but it'll be more expensive. That's what happend to oil. The mafia manipulate the prices.' He stood up and closed his timetables. ‘We'll find somebody tomorrow.'

‘But who are these mafia?' I was always trying to locate this ghost. ‘Are they the old Communists?'

Volodya weighed me with his candid, rather simple stare. ‘They are wherever the power is.'

His cottage was in the forest nearby. His widowed mother, her head bound piratically in a woollen scarf, was watching
Santa Barbara
on television. The soap opera had been going on for five years, three times a week, and it crowded her mind more urgently
than Russia's economic recession, the political chaos, or the passing trains. She seemed preternaturally old. All her family had worked on the railways, she remembered–her father a signaller, her husband a station-master, she a ticket-vendor, and now her son kept this lonely post at the end of the line. She did not regret it. For her the railway retained a pioneering afterglow, as the conqueror of the taiga and bearer of civilisation.

After a meal of salad and bread we settled to the television again. It tyrannised all her days. Her cottage had no running water, but her television was huge and new. Volodya went silent before it. They received two channels from Moscow, and an evening one from Blagoveshchensk. In her isolation, it was replacing the world. ‘In Brezhnev's years we were told that America was sinking,' she mused. ‘Now half
our
people are out of work, and the Americans all seem to live in Santa Barbara. I don't understand.'

Santa Barbara wasn't typical, I said; Europe and America were full of the poor. But she only looked confused, and returned to the screen's comfort. That flickering rectangle–where American soap operas and gangster films mixed with advertisements for cars, jewellery, trips to the Western sun–was starting to encompass all reality. Not that she conceived of bathing off St Lucia or of adorning herself with a necklace of Mirny diamonds. No. She seemed to watch everything with the same undreaming gaze, without envy, disconnected, as you might watch a cartoon.

Only Volodya said: ‘You never see a programme about our lives here.'

I slept on their sofa in a room whose carpet-hung walls stopped short of the ceiling, so that Volodya's dreams from a nearby room punctuated mine with obscure cries.

 

A seventy-year-old farmer with a toppling bobble hat and a cache of petrol arrived early in the morning to drive me to Albazin. The track was clear of snow and his Moskvich saloon skated over it, retching exhaust fumes. He complained about everything, then broke into cynical grins as if none of it mattered very much. In a back seat his portly son, already in middle age and jobless, was
hitching a lift back to Skovorodino station. He had put on a heavy overcoat and a muskrat hat to go job-hunting in Blagoveshchensk to the east, but his bootlaces were frayed, and he looked beaten. Compared to his father's tight, nut-brown face, his was flaccid and pale. He might have belonged to another race. From behind his thick-rimmed glasses a pair of heavy-lidded, hopeless eyes seemed to languish with dormant intelligence.