In Siberia (32 page)

‘In the end it was an accident that brought me to God. My unit was transporting lumber in the taiga–the army does those kinds of things–when my lorry crashed and I was knocked unconscious. I was six months in a hospital in Khabarovsk, stretched out immobile. I lay thinking of my past life, and of the future. And that's when it struck my heart. It was because of this'–he picked up a solar pocket radio. ‘I already knew the religious programmes, because I'd worked for six years listening in on foreign wavelengths. We had very sophisticated equipment, and anyone could pick up the American network FEBC from the Philippines.'

‘You weren't overheard by your chief?'

‘Nobody could tell what we were listening to. We wore earphones.' He shifted upright in his chair, as if back on duty. ‘In hospital I asked my wife to bring me a radio. It wasn't difficult to find the Philippines station. So I would lie there in the dark, listening to hymns. Sometimes I wondered how I'd survived the accident, and why. Then God entered my soul.'

As the Soviet Union started to tear apart, he had exchanged the failing certainty of Communism for this less earthbound promise. He had already been conditioned to a world in which dreams shrouded facts, and now he passed without cynicism from secular to divine revelation. ‘I joined the Orthodox Church at first. But it gave nothing to my heart. So in 1990 I became a Baptist. And my search was over. I'd been invalided out of the army with one leg four centimetres shorter than the other. Look.' He tossed off his socks and shoes and extended uneven legs. ‘But I still had to work. A pastor's wage isn't anything. So I got a job as a security guard. I go around checking windows at night. You've seen how all windows in Russia are barred. We still live in a prison!' Then he looked at me sharply. ‘So how have you found our people? It must seem we're in great darkness. You know Siberia was once a better place, more honest than Russia to the west. Are people turning to God?'

I struggled to answer. His God was not mine. Siberia had been simpler to define before I travelled there. People were finding different consolations, I said–as they did in the West–or finding none. Perhaps Russia, at last, was entering the age of post-
belief, or minority belief. The collective was splitting into private plots.

Boris frowned. Pluralism made him uneasy. It was too inchoate, would not be policed. He kept touching his fingers together fastidiously. ‘It's become chaotic,' he said. ‘Do you know how many churches there are in Komsomolsk alone?' He counted them off. ‘Two Baptist, two Seventh Day Adventist, five Pentecostal, one Charismatic, two Korean Methodist.' Then he smiled. ‘But we Baptists have churches all along the BAM. We've secured every big station.'

‘And what about the Orthodox?'

‘They have two churches and are building a third. But they prefer anyone to Protestants!'

I said: ‘I read about a new law restricting Protestant missionaries.' To me, at least, it had smelt of Orthodox prompting.

But Boris shrugged the law away. ‘I think it's just a law. Nobody understands it, or how it should be implemented, or even what it means. It's already washed out. President Clinton, you know, is a Baptist, so I doubt if we'll be pressured.' He laced his hands over his stomach. I imagined them, for some reason, interlaced like this on his desk at the Ministry of the Interior. Then his face grew bemused. ‘But he's a strange Baptist, allowing homosexuals into the army, and so on. In Sweden I've read they can even get married in church–and by a female bishop! She says animals have souls, so dogs and ants are welcome at her services. Well, we have two cats which are good mousers, but when they start running among the pews I lock them in the chapel kitchen.'

But he brooded a little about the new law. ‘Ours is not a government to love,' he said. ‘It is only the government we deserve.' He reached for the Bible beside him, and read out Romans 13.1–2. “‘
The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.
” ' His cavernous bass wreathed the words in divinity. ‘We believe that. And I think we Russians suffer the government we do because we rejected God in 1917. This is our punishment.
This present age. Only after we become a believing people again, after we return, will we have rulers worthy of us.'

 

A ferry crosses the Amur to the village of Pivan. The granite cliffs above the far bank loom in and out of blizzard, and for an unblurred moment I glimpse the railway tunnel high up in their face. By the time we reach the landing-stage the wind is lashing the snow from the shore in a frozen dust. The passengers squash their fur hats lower over their ears and muscle forward laughing into its blast. Their skin shines raw, their eyes narrow. They look as if it has been blowing in their faces for years. Soon we are wading through shin-deep drifts. The visibility drops to 50 yards, the snow falling so thick. A comical dog appears and bounds alongside with an expression of ridicule, its snout and whiskers pickled in snow. After a while a village of smothered dachas turns up. I ask the way before the final stragglers scatter into nothing, and am at last alone.

The tunnel was started in 1939 to link Komsomolsk over a giant bridge with a railtrack to the Pacific. Hundreds of convicts died in its blasting. But the war aborted it and afterwards the route was deflected upriver. I reach the tunnel down an abandoned cutting, unsure why I am exploring it. Its concrete ceiling runs through the mountain like the segmented intestines of a worm. The only rails inside it belong to the excavators' vanished trucks; they surface and sink under a litter of stones.

A hundred yards inside, where a vagrant has made his summer home and gone, a barricade of rocks had been raised to bar the way. Beyond, supposedly, it is dangerous. I crawl over the boulders, and drop into darkness. Behind me the outer world, ringed in the tunnel's semicircle, disappears. My torch-light flickers over pure granite. At first I hear the drip of water, then silence. In front, for more than half a mile, a jagged road pushes through the crystalline mountain. Sometimes, when the tunnel ceiling lifts, the trains come whistling and thundering through in my head; more often the track rears up in a stony mass which has never been blasted clear, and razor-edged rock glints close above.
Charred beams lie crashed across the way, or sunk in iron-stained puddles. Every few yards, I realise, an anonymous labourer died.

A pinprick of light hangs ahead. It seems quite near. But it is almost an hour before I am worming on hands and knees out of the last, shrunken tunnel. Then I clutch its walls in vertigo. I am 300 feet up on a cliffside. The blizzard is still raging. A flock of startled redwings whirrs up from the shrubs under my hands. Beneath me the water is lisping on powdered black rock. Beyond I imagine the unbuilt bridge over the grey running sea of the Amur, carrying its trains for over a mile and a half from the tunnel of wasted dead and into whiteness.

 

I trudged through the snow with the KGB major turned Baptist minister, to a chapel built with American dollars in Communism's City of the Dawn. Siberia was growing surreal. Although Boris himself walked with a stick, he felt a fastidious concern for me, as if I could not move without his help. ‘Watch out for the ice…don't hurry…. The snow's deeper here….'

Four pastors were waiting for us in the chapel kitchen. Their faces had converged into a childlike seriousness above their matching suits and ties. They looked glad to see me. My foreignness carried the aura of a far-flung Church. They were so trustful, so expectant, I felt ill at ease. My boots were still mewing and my Orthodox prayer-belt squeezed my waist like a heresy–but so worn that it resembled blue rope. When I pulled off my anorak I saw that its friction had drawn out a film of downy feathers from the quilted jacket below. Boris looked worried. ‘I think they're chicken feathers,' he said. I was afraid I was letting him down. As we processed into the church, he marched behind me, picking the feathers from my back, murmuring ‘Chicken…chicken….'

We trooped in before a congregation of 200. Among the sea of old women were some young office workers, a knot of students, three soldiers. The chapel was new and airy. There was no altar. The pastors and choir faced the congregation from a ramp of simple pews, backed by a fresco of Golgotha. Then the service began in a surge of prayers and hymns to the lilt of a harmonium.
Everyone participated. Impromptu supplications welled up, one old woman's plea rising to a tearful music, and two children sang a duet. There was a personal testimony which I could not follow. And a nervous woman was inducted formally among the faithful, clutching her handkerchief.

Nothing seemed further from the liturgy of the Orthodox, with its esoteric signs and hierarchies, and the mystical presence of all its sanctified and tortured past in the massed icons of saints and martyrs. In place of these mysteries, the chapel exuded democratic energy. Man was foremost. God dwelt, above all, in man. A moral force was abroad. The pastors studded the carefully orchestrated devotions with four sermons. First came a shy, youthful homily; then a hectoring bombardment from a visiting preacher; then an august elder bestowed homely prestige. Spontaneous questions rose from the congregation: somebody felt confused about divine grace, somebody else wanted to know how much drinking was a sin. And finally the chapel's pastor–a spirited optimist swirled in black hair–resolved all the rest in a plea that our hearts open, and that Christ march in.

Then, to my alarm, he announced the advent of an English writer amongst them. Boris nudged me to stand up and say something. I scrabbled in my head for the right thoughts, the right words. The chapel had gone silent. I got to my squeaking feet. In a rush of warmth and bad grammar, I stumbled out my gratitude and pleasure at being among them. But in the pew beside me Boris started cautiously picking at my back. ‘Chicken…chicken….' I realised my legs were shaking. I imagined myself feathered like Papageno. I hoped my prayer-belt with its distracting verses (‘He shall cover thee with his feathers' etc.) was undetectable. ‘Chicken….' But the sea of worshippers beneath me–old women and young men–went on smiling as I told them I would hold them in my heart after I had left, and would wish them well.

 

Before dawn the bus clatters to the railway station through awakening suburbs. Its seats are filled with workers, with punch-drunk faces under black caps. Outside I see mud and snow and fitful lamps. The banked lights of tenements go on and off in the dark
like a dingy quiz-show. On either side the undrained streets blacken to ice-rinks, or have turned to slush.

Maybe because I am leaving here–and leaving Siberia soon–I watch the passengers with a new attention, and an ache of ignorance. Who are they? I feel as if they have slipped from my grasp.

Perhaps it is my concentration which turns them to such strangers. Sometimes an individual brightens into sharper focus, yet remains alien. Who, for instance, is the youth with the pockmarked face and retrousse nose? Or the bigger man with a boxer's punished features? I don't know. I feel light-years from knowing. Ivan is here, of course, slouched in the seat beside me, and asks for a cigarette. He has grown older, greyer. And what of the theatrically pallid young woman, black-shawled like a widow in mourning, but chewing gum? Who is the child beside her with the blank face?

The train-wheels carry me away to Khabarovsk. I don't know…I don't know…I don't know….

The city of Khabarovsk trickles along three ridges where the Amur and Ussuri rivers unite and the border with China veers south. It was founded in 1858 by the belligerent governor Muraviev-Amursky during his push to the east, and was named after his distant predecessor, the merchant-adventurer Khabarov, who had savaged his way down the Amur two centuries before.

Flanked by boulevards running through valleys of silver birch and apple trees, Muraviev-Amursky Street courses along the central ridge to the river. As it goes west the skyline quivers into life: onion domes sprout up, with spiked finials, Russian gables, brick pediments, turreted windows, cupolas like Tartar helmets. The city accrues a spurious look of age. Transverse streets, scored with tramlines, dip and swing over the valleys. The people and the shops have dressed up a little. The concert hall is featuring Masha Rasputin, pop star. Among the gasping Ladas and Zhigulis the streets are scattered with Toyotas and Nissans: Japan is only three hundred miles away.

Yet I idled here with a sense of being in Europe, strolling west along the capricious street. I ate in the gilt cubicle of an 1890s cafe, where workers were furtively downing
pelmeni
among a fledgling
beau monde
. In the Geological Museum I gazed through a microscope at fragments of moon-rock scooped up by Luna 16: globules of accreted crystal and basalt, four and a half million years old.

Amursky Street ends at a square of broken grace. On one side
a derelict gateway opens on the site of a vanished cathedral. On the other you descend through parklands to where the river wraps itself round the western city. On its far bank some thin suburbs puff smoke, and a white circumference of mountains rises. A few steamships are plying the water. Beside you, sculptured high on a plinth above the headland, Muraviev-Amursky readies his map and telescope, looking towards Japan. His statue was installed in 1891–passing Russians would take off their hats to it–and although the Revolution toppled it, its moulds were by chance preserved, and in 1992 a plaster Lenin was ousted and a bronze Muraviev came back.

You reach the tower on the headland where a cafe´ enjoys a view of the Amur, and a pretty waitress in high-blocked shoes serves you ice-cream and coffee. A glacial wind blows across the river-sea. As you go out you look up and see from an inscription that sixteen Austro-Hungarian bandsmen prisoners-of-war were butchered here in September 1918. They had refused to play the czarist national anthem.

 

Suddenly I wanted peace. I rented a flat from a lugubrious tout outside the Hotel Sapporo, and settled down for three days. The dust had congealed over its two rooms, and inky water dribbled from its tap. Then I became prey to the telephone–calls are still free within Russian cities. It started late in the evening. I said to the blithe female voice: ‘I think you must have the wrong number.'

‘Why, it's you, isn't it?'

‘Yes, it's me…but I don't live here, I'm just–'

‘You're alone, aren't you? Are you Japanese?'

‘No. Who are you?'

‘I'm Therese. I'll come along now. That's okay, isn't it?'

I was very slow. But now I told her I was happy with my girlfriend.

‘Oh,' she said, ‘that's all right. I'm sorry.' She sounded, for the first time, attractive.

I hung up.

 

Khabarovsk is a city of 600,000, but it sprawls as wide as St
Petersburg. I took a bus five miles into the suburbs to the chief market: a grid-town of corrugated iron. It was swarming with Chinese vendors. They had arrived overland or by river-boat from Harbin, pounding tensely ashore under massive loads. Down aisle upon aisle of canopied tin stalls they had settled–men and women together–into alert waiting. Their money-bags swelled like paunches under their pullovers. Cheap black and brown vinyl jackets festooned every booth, with artificial fur and sham sheepswool coats, and T-shirts stamped with the faces of
Dallas
starlets. They were selling all the consumer goods at which the Russians were so inept. Chinese had even reproduced the generous Russian bras. A shadowland of pirated logos and yearned-for cities pervaded their wares: New York, Paris, Milan. Fake Reebok and Adidas shamelessly abounded, alongside ‘London Fog', ‘New Trend' and misspelt enigmas ‘Aotive Sperts Line' and ‘CN Spcts'. Korean overcoats were stamped ‘Made in Italy', but nobody insisted it was true. The suggestion itself bestowed cachet. Towards evening the traders wheeled their goods away and locked them in steel sheds.

This alien presence was nothing new. By the end of the nineteenth century every town in south-east Siberia had a burgeoning Chinese quarter. They worked as builders, retailers, railway workers, and as dockers in Vladivostok where they outnumbered the civilian Russians. There were 200,000 Chinese farming rented land east of the Ussuri, and ruthless hordes of poachers. Only after the Civil War did the numbers start to decline, and in 1937–8 they suddenly withered away in an obscure and brutal purge.

But since 1989 the flood-gates have opened all along the border, awaking old Russian fears of a Yellow Peril. Siberians say there may be a million Chinese living illegally among them, including many criminals, and that a purposeful population shift is under way. Chinese poachers have returned to hunt out rare animals for traditional medicine, and traders to exploit a region which Moscow appears to have half abandoned.

China overtook Japan in 1992 as the leading economic partner here. Japanese tastes are flattered by special shopping complexes and restaurants. They occupy, even own, the more expensive
hotels. But the Chinese, it is feared, infiltrate and settle down. In return for their consumer goods and sometimes illicit labour, Beijing imports Russian arms, trucks, fertiliser and machine tools. There is a notion that the Russian Far East–perhaps all Siberia–might turn away from the west altogether and integrate with the Pacific rim: a future in which Russian raw materials, Chinese labour and Japanese expertise will spur the region to economic life. A Union of Sovereign Northern Republics has been fancifully mooted, minting a Pacific crown, with its capital tactfully located on the Tartar Straits, away from the old rivals Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. But a contrasting, reactionary fear imagines such a land despoiled of its riches in the service of Asia: a Siberia tainted by Chinese and Korean immigrants, polluted, lost to itself.

Yet the volatile Russian economy, along with managerial incompetence and corruption, creates a precarious ambience for exploitation. Even a century ago people were speaking of Siberia as the land of the future, but despite its vast western oil and gas deposits, and the mineral and lumber riches of its east, Siberia has proved too harsh, too guarded, too inaccessible, to comply.

 

Everybody wants to be blonde. In the street-side kiosks labelled ‘Olga' or ‘Katya' (but usually staffed by a Masha or Valentina), selling identical preserves, chocolates, contraceptives and fruit juice, half the dozing heads wear low-carat gold bouffants. Office clerks with peroxide chignons are betrayed by dark complexions, black eyebrows, black body hair, but at least for the moment, they feel, they are blondes. Blondeness turns its back on Asia. It is classically Slav (tinged, perhaps, by California). It is even ousting the traditional ginger henna of the middle-aged, or invading it in a red-gold compromise. Everyone seems to be mimicking the lustrous inhabitants of
Lisa
magazine or
Him plus Her
or
She
. The children's dolls are all blonde.

But Natasha was darkly herself: a handsome woman in middle age, black hair swept back from proud, rather delicate features. She was sipping coffee beside me in the Art Nouveau cafe. She joked that this was a luxury for a teacher with a husband who hadn't been paid for six months. Talking with a stranger, I think,
was a relief. ‘You know, all my younger life I never thought it would be like this. I just thought of my work and didn't consider the future. But now…now I'm afraid.'

The word struck a sudden chill. She looked capable, even stern. But she said: ‘I don't know how we'll live when I retire. My mother saved 6,000 roubles for her retirement–in her day that would have paid for a car. But now, after inflation and the Yeltsin years, it'll buy two loaves. Pensioners' savings were swept away overnight like that. So I've taken my mother in to live with us. I've even tried to save, myself, bought a few shares. But I call it funeral money.' She did not laugh. She was typical, she said, of all her middle-aged generation. ‘When Gorbachev came to power we were overwhelmed with hope. Then slowly we realised that it was only talk, talk, and that everything was running out of control. Then when Yeltsin took over we cautiously hoped again, but that only lasted a few months, and now…. I don't think it will get better in my lifetime.'

I glanced at her still-dark hair, her eyes and mouth barely pinched by lines. I found nothing to say.

‘Even the Japanese are withdrawing from Khabarovsk,' she said. ‘It's too risky investing here, too corrupt. And there's no help from Moscow. In fact whatever happens in Moscow happens very thinly all over Siberia. So there are just a few rich in Khabarovsk, all mercenary. But Moscow!' She made as if to spit. ‘If I was God the Father I would erase it from the earth!'

I ordered us more coffee, hoping it would not seem like charity. ‘And it's typical of my generation', Natasha quipped, ‘to be leaving things to God! That's Orthodoxy for you. For centuries it's inculcated obedience, always obedience. We're always on our knees. “Forgive me, forgive me!” we cry. What for, I ask? What for? For working thirty-five years and then getting no pension? You know, people still go into the factories and offices to work, even though nobody pays them. Why? Why do they do it? It's just habit, obedience. My husband still goes to work–and for over six months he hasn't been paid. Last year half his salary was just forgotten. And this spring he was paid in
glass
. Can you imagine it? Some customers had paid the firm in sheet glass, so it
was just passed on to the employees. I was furious. “Can we eat glass?” I asked. “Can we wear glass?” But my husband just accepted it. We're too patient, we Russians. It's our national failing. Any other country would be in revolt. But us? No. We just sit and hope. We get used to having less. People survive by reverting to their dachas and vegetable plots, or they go into the woods and pick berries and mushrooms. Old people are near death. After my mother paid her rent, she had enough left only for bread. And now you see them in the streets, these old women, begging. Men in Russia have a life expectation of fifty-seven, and that's just as well. But women go on to seventy, seventy-two. That's why they're out there, in the streets, when it would be better to be dead. I will be dead rather than beg.' She lifted her hands and shut her eyelids with their fingertips. ‘Better.'

I asked hesitantly, because she had not mentioned children: ‘What about relatives?'

‘Ah, that younger generation. My daughter's twenty, and do you know what she did? She went somewhere in Khabarovsk and bought herself an e-mail connection. So now she gets information from abroad.
E-mail!
When I was twenty I barely dared buy a stamp! Nobody moved or did anything without permission. But she and her friends simply see and feel things differently.'

They were the first generation without fear, I thought, the children of Gorbachev. ‘They may make a new Russia.' Yet it seemed far away.

‘I hope so, I hope so. But if things don't change fast enough, they'll lose heart, just as my generation lost heart in
perestroika
. They'll sink into bitterness or drink…or they'll go abroad. Our children are happier abroad than we are. I was once in Germany, and whenever I saw a silver birch–our national tree–I used to stroke it and ask “What are you doing so far from home?” Even our old songs, I love them. But my daughter's generation isn't sentimental like us. They may love Russia, but they can leave it.' She frowned at me, as if wondering for the first time why I was here, so far from my country. ‘Can you understand that?'

Yes, I said, they would leave it because it wasn't the future. The
future was geographical, and it had moved westward from under their feet.

She went on: ‘If my daughter stays here, she may not find a job. But if she goes abroad she will lose her Russian ways altogether. She'll lose them and forget us.'

Abruptly she finished her coffee, wanting to go, afraid where these thoughts led: a faraway daughter, a husband dead at fifty-seven, and those old women multiplying in the streets. She shook back her hair. ‘Let's go now.'

 

The prostitute Therese–or somebody like her–knocks on my door towards midnight. I slide back its spy-hole and see a blonde primping up her curls on the dimness of the landing. Then I realise she has a companion. He has flattened himself beside the door, but the shadow of his head is thrown forward on to the wall. The woman simpers in the circle of my vision, opening her coat on her breast. While he waits.

I return to my kitchen but for some reason I am unable to ignore them, and I pick up a heavy bottle. Later I hear that these night visits are a frequent ploy. Someone opens his door to the promise of a girl, then regains consciousness to find his flat robbed. But when I throw the door open, Therese and her shadow have gone. I hear only footsteps–light and heavy–hurrying down the stairs and away.

 

A native legend tells that above the Khor river, fifty miles south of Khabarovsk, two sacred birds flying from the north and south collided and dropped their gifts of seeds. So in the Primoriye, the Maritime Province, the flora of temperate rain forest intermingles with Nordic pines and birches. Vines and lianas wriggle over conifers, and maple, acacia, walnut and a host of other broad-leaved trees start up, with jasmine and the aralia palm. In these misty hills the giant Ussuri tiger, endangered, roams among Himalayan black bears. Siberia fades away. Many geographers, who dispute its boundaries even along the Urals, designate
the whole Pacific littoral a separate land. Siberia, it seems, cannot exist alongside grapes and roses.