In Siberia (3 page)

I said: ‘How long have you been travelling then?'

He answered at once: ‘Thirty-four years. I began in Khrushchev's day, in the hard times.'

‘But those times were better than before.'

‘No, not better. Stalin's time was better! I've seen his villa on the Black Sea, where he used to sit in battledress smoking his pipe!' He swelled back on the sofa and bent his cheap cigarette
into an imaginary pipe. ‘That was a man who didn't insult the people! It's a lie that he made Russian life a misery. In his day a man in prison was better off than a free man now. And today the prisons are still overflowing. You can get sentenced for nothing.' He jabbed a thumb back and forth between us. ‘You steal my bag, and you go to prison! Five years!…
Errr
…I steal somebody else's bag, and–prison!'

I heard myself say: ‘You did that?'

‘Yes.' No change of tone interrupted him. ‘I sneaked off with someone's carrier-bag. I got five years. And that's the minimum, I might have got ten.'

I glanced up involuntarily at the trees. A wind had sprung up and was swinging the rotted carrier-bags in the branches, and rustling papers over the waste-tip. I said: ‘And now you have as many as you like?'

‘Oh those, yes.' But he went silent, as if wondering himself why he had hung them there. Then he said: ‘That prison was the cell system. I was in with rapists and murderers…. But others had done nothing.' He wiped a chipped plate with a rag, and speared me two potatoes. ‘It was like home.'

‘Home?'

‘Somewhere to sleep and get food. It was better there.' He was suddenly depressed. ‘You could watch television there. And here there's nothing. Here you have to find food.'

‘You watched television in prison?'

‘All night, sometimes, in the camp. I went on to a camp, where I worked at a lathe, then a metal press. After that I took to the road. I used to watch television through people's windows. Sometimes I did manual work to keep alive. But being on the move, that's the thing! Central Asia, Latvia, the Ukraine…I've been to all of them. But then the years came, and my legs swelled.'

I felt a naive surprise. So even in Brezhnev's time this gypsy life had continued, the life of people who moved beyond official sight, migrating with the seasons, by roads and systems of their own.

He poured me a tumbler of vodka. ‘Somebody wrote that to walk our Russian countryside is to see a land of miracles. Just like in Turgenev's time! I've been in parts like that, without even
tractors. Those were the good days, a century ago. People lived simply then, gathering mushrooms and berries….'

The vodka was tipping him into paradise, a bucolic summer that had never been. He filled my tumbler again. ‘To Turgenev!' Then he clambered to his feet and struggled over a ramp of garbage to hunt among the sticks and canvas of his fallen hut. At last he drew out a bunch of dahlias and handed them to me.

‘Where on earth did you get these?'

His eyes avoided mine. ‘Well, people grow them…then they…bring them.'

I knew he had pilfered them from the memorial cross. Pilgrims often left flowers there; on weekends, he said, wedding parties brought bouquets, and sometimes shared their vodka. Squatting like nemesis in the ruined garden, he stole the flowers overnight.

‘Here,' he said, ‘take them. Put them in your room.' He thrust them against my chest.

I said woodenly: ‘They were meant for the Czar's family.'

He blinked at me. ‘That family…they shot them all, didn't they?' He looked down at the dahlias as if they had turned to ash. He was very drunk. ‘They shouldn't have done that, the bastards. Children are the flower of life!' He tossed the bouquet stubbornly into my lap. ‘If people ask “Was the Czar a good man?” I always say “Yes! He gave the people food!” Wonderful man, the Czar was….'

The vodka closed his eyes, and he grew grateful for everything. The Czar might not measure up to Stalin, but he had become the benefactor of the poor and vagrant, and his dahlias still served. By the time I got up to leave, the hermit had reeled back on to the sofa, his beard and cigarette jutting at the sky.

I wondered what to leave him. I had brought from England some souvenir key-rings and two solar calculators. But this man had nothing to add up, nothing to lock up. I laid some money near his head, and went back through the trees. After a while his voice echoed: ‘You'll come back tomorrow? I'll make a proper campfire! You'll come?'

Back over the littered earth, his cries sounding after me–‘God give you health! Good health!'–I tried to find sense in his presence
there, to believe it other than accident; but I heard instead the soulless twittering of sparrows in the branches among the carrier-bags, and somewhere in the thicket, from eighty years before, imagined other footsteps.

 

At the Paris Universal Exposition in 1900, visitors crowding into the Palace of Russian Arts could board a lavish replica of the half-completed Trans-Siberian Railway. Each compartment of the
wagons-lits
was served by a marble-lined washroom with a porcelain bath, and lounges done up in Louis XVI or Empire style adjoined Moorish or chinoiserie smoking-rooms. While multilingual waiters served caviar and bortsch in the restaurant-car, a diorama of Siberia, painted by scenic artists from the Paris Opera, was wound slowly past the windows in an illusion of snug villages and eternal forest.

Many of these luxuries never materialised. The hairdressing salon in white sycamore and the ice-box air-cooling system survived only in the Parisian memory, and travellers reported variously that poor food was doled out by clottish waiters, and that the only bath-tub was to be found in the baggage car, where it had been requisitioned for meat storage. Yet in general the de luxe wagons were ponderously palatial, and within fourteen years of the railway's foundation in 1891 they were rumbling along the Pacific. Reaching five and a half thousand miles from the Urals to Vladivostok, they travelled by far the longest railway in the world.

These vaunted trains, with their expensive cargo of merchants, diplomats and adventurers, were interspersed by others–more important–which went almost unrecorded. Chains of cattle-trucks, lugged by primitive, wood-burning engines, crawled over the Urals and far into the steppeland. Stacked on three tiers of shelves, or crammed into wagons labelled ‘40 people or 8 horses', went a horde of migrating peasantry. Some wagons became moving farmyards as three-generation families decamped wholesale with their cattle, fowl and angry dogs haunch-deep in
excrement. The few foreigners who glimpsed them described a verminous, pale-faced multitude huddled in fetid sheepskins, and whole wagon-loads of single men, barefoot and half-savage.

This onset of migrants before the First World War was the climax of an eastward trickle which had been going on for three centuries and which had given Siberia its peculiar personality. In the wake of the sixteenth-century Cossack bands trading in the ‘soft gold' of furs, came farmers and hunters, vagabonds and religious dissenters, whom European Russia either threatened or cramped. Sometimes encouraged, sometimes impeded, restless and ambitious peasants filtered into the limitless state lands to settle. Many were in flight from serfdom; others were in exile; but it was land-hunger, in the end, which drove most from the oppressive, sometimes famine-stricken central provinces in the west, and the abolition of serfdom in 1861 turned the trickle to a steady flow. For long months they laboured eastward beside horse-drawn carts heaped with household goods and sentimental treasures, and many died along the way. Only at the century's end did the railway ease their passage, and carried in such a tide of poorer peasantry that in less than twenty years Siberia's population had doubled to ten million.

So the region became Russia's Wild East. It was born out of optimism and dissent. The power of the landowning nobility and of the Church died over its huge distances, where the immigrant carved out all the estate he needed, sometimes subsidised by the Crown, and held it as his own. Serfdom was illegal here. The only landowner who tried to enforce it, wrote a traveller, was instantly murdered. ‘God is high up and the Czar is far off', the Siberians said, and their native aristocracy comprised not the corrupt bureaucrats sent out from St Petersburg (whom they despised as ‘ink-souls') but their own rustic, self-made, and sometimes vastly wealthy merchant-adventurers.

So the Siberians' solitude set them free. Like their American counterparts whose mythology they shared, they were hardy realists and egalitarians, self-reliant and open-handed. They were stupendous eaters and profligate drinkers, and if they came into money they might blow it all in a string of suicidal alcoholic
debauches, ending in penury or murder. Society was more flexible than in the west, and dangerous. The country had always been a dumping-ground for criminals, and a vigorous exile culture permeated it, from urban socialites with shadowy beginnings to gangs of escapees who garrotted wayfarers.

By the start of the twentieth century this was the burgeoning Siberia which the swifter population shifts and mass deportations of the future were to dilute. Its rough democratic society, warned the prime minister Stolypin in 1910, might one day come west and crush them all.

The cheaper Trans-Siberian carriages–open dormitory-cars with bunk-lined corridors–bring to mind the untidy migrations of the past as I lumber east towards Tyumen. The railway moves along a gauge uniquely wide, and its wagons run high and tottering, like state rooms on the move. Instead of swaying, they gently, soporifically bounce, and lull the passengers into a slovenly torpor. The Siberians colonise wherever they are. Their clothes dangle from every strut and hook. Their picnics litter the cubicle tables in a jumble of bottled fruit, dried fish and tea.

I lie like an early migrant on a corridor bunk pressed close against the ceiling, and stare through its grimy window. The Urals are slipping behind us in forested shadows thrown low across the horizon, substanceless. Rain is falling like a mist. And slowly the West Siberian Plain surrounds us with the watery infinity that since the last Ice Age has slumbered here between the Arctic and Central Asia. Early Siberians imagined that in mid-creation this muddle of earth and water had been forgotten by God.

But beneath it lie the richest oil-fields in the world.

 

I sit above the Tura river, a distant tributary of the Ob, and think of Georg Steller, who died here. Behind me the wooden mansions and churches of the oldest town in Siberia, Tyumen, founded by Cossacks in 1586, nudge along the bank in a procession of rustic vanity. A few fishermen stand in silhouette under the bridge, and beneath me a glacis of unhewn stone shores up the curve of the river, where the current has bitten away the earth, and eaten Steller's grave.

Of all the prodigies nurtured by Siberia, this German naturalist, ignored in his lifetime, was one of the most brilliant. By the time he died–fanatical and friendless–after years of Arctic travel in the service of Russia, he had discovered and classified a host of new plants and shrubs, with an astonishing variety of hitherto unknown mammals, birds and fish. The spectacled cormorant which he annotated–an ungainly dumpling with useless wings–is now extinct, and Steller's White Raven has never been seen again. But Steller's Sea-Lion, Steller's Eider, the beautiful Steller's Jay and Steller's Greenling–an iridescent marine trout–still exist; and so, perhaps, does the white-headed Steller's Sea-Eagle, bigger than the Golden, although it has only twice been sighted since. But Steller's sea-monkey, which reared upright in the water and gazed at his ship's crew in the moonlight as they crossed the Bering Sea, was either a bachelor fur-seal or something still unknown.

In 1741, during Bering's Great Northern Expedition, Steller became the first white man to set foot on Alaska. Soon after the crew had been half decimated by scurvy, and Bering himself laid under the frozen soil, Steller was rigging up a driftwood shelter and notating in scrupulous Latin a colony of beasts now known as Steller's Sea-Cow. These giant manatees shared an ancient ancestry with the elephant, and were cousins to the dugong (and so to the mermaid). But they survive only in Steller's meticulous notes, for they were exterminated by hunters within thirty years. Wallowing among beds of weed, they grazed like cattle over the sea-bed, moving dreamily forward on hoofed forelegs, and gluttonously oblivous of danger, so that sometimes Steller could stroke them. They might measure up to 35 feet long, and weigh four tons, yet were touchingly anthropomorphic. In mating, he wrote, they embraced like humans, and whenever the starving crew harpooned one, the others would rush to its aid and try to snap the rope or dash out the hook with their tails.

But Steller never lived to see his name immortalised for the anatomical analyses he left behind. Hounded by a lawsuit from officials whom he had offended, haunted by the wild wife he had left in St Petersburg, and sick with alcoholism, he died in Tyumen
at the age of thirty-seven, and was buried on a bluff above the river. But robbers dug him up, leaving the body a prey to wolves, and a few days later some natives reinterred him beneath a boulder. Over many years the river, gnawing at the bank beneath my feet, undermined the grave and swept it into the Arctic, where Steller's Sea-Cow was already extinct.

 

I hitch a lift to the village of Pokrovskoe, sixty miles to the north-east. The truck-driver had never seen an Englishman before, and bellowed genially about Big Ben and Sherlock Holmes. Pokrovskoe was the village where Rasputin was born, but it looked deserted. The main street was a rutted cart-track scarred wide between cottages plunged in unkempt gardens. It was typical, I guessed, of half the villages ahead of me: rambling hutments which the surrounding emptiness seems to have shaken loose over the steppes. The next wind, I felt, might dust it from the earth.