Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (73 page)

Snow, birches, huddled cottages, crows, distant ridges "eyelashed with firs," trackless snow all day, and then another night in the train. By now I was stuporous in the daytime and spent my nights dreaming, waking exhausted from the variety. Memorial services figured in two dreams, orations (by me) in one, flying (by me) in two, and in a memorable dream I was visited by my dead father, who explained, "I'm just checking in."

The previous night, my fifth on the train, we passed through Omsk, where Dostoyevsky had spent four years imprisoned. He'd written about it vividly in
The House of the Dead.

Staring at the dense pine forest—the taiga—I drowsed all day, intermittently writing about my father, knowing that towards midnight on this sixth day I would be getting off at the city of Perm. We passed Ishim, where there were tire tracks on the frozen rivers: in winter, Siberian rivers serve as thoroughfares for vehicles. At Tyumen around noon, I bought some chicken from an old woman on the snowy platform, and late in the afternoon, around five, at Yekaterinburg, city of regicide. Guided tours were advertised of the site where the czar and his family had been shot in 1918. Yekaterinburg was the first substantial city I'd come to on the line—it had been named Sverdlovsk on my earlier trip, when I'd arrived on Christmas Eve, at precisely the same time of day. Then, watching a boy hoist his dead father in a stretcher off the train, my depression was complete. This time, I thought: We're on time, we'll arrive in Perm at midnight, and—as I had not washed for a week—I'll probably have a bath.

***

"
PERM IS A MODERN INDUSTRIAL
city that most travelers could bear to miss," the guidebook said. But surely that was just as inaccurate as this same guidebook's rubbishing my
Great Railway Bazaar
as "caustic," with travel guide solemnity and philistinism. My visit to Perm was to be memorable and enlightening, especially in the snow-muffled silence of the Siberian winter.

"We were on a secret Pentagon list of Soviet cities to be destroyed!" a Permian man boasted to me soon after I arrived. Because of its rocket factories, its cannon plants, and its manufacture of explosives, Perm was closed to foreigners when I passed through in 1973. Perm was another transit point for Siberian slave labor—had been so since czarist times—and out of town had some of the largest and fiercest prisons in the gulag. Rocket-making, arbitrary incarceration, and torture were the industries in Perm until just the other day when, in February 1992, the prison here was closed and foreigners were allowed to visit, to attend the ballet, to eat juicy
posikunchiki
("pissing dumplings") in the good restaurants, to
wander the snowy streets, to watch the local fatties jump naked into holes chopped in icy ponds, to drive among the empty hills, the taiga, the mixed forest, through tiny wooden one-story villages, and to see the worst gulag, Perm 36—all of which I managed to do.

Tiny crystals of frost shone in the lights of the main station—not the same station that Yuri Zhivago detrains at in the second part ("Train to the Urals") of
Doctor Zhivago,
when he first sets eyes on the city. Perm looked much the same today: "It clung to the summit of the hill in tiers, house by house and street by street, with a big church in the middle of the top, as in a cheap color print of a desert monastery or of Mount Athos." Much of the action of that mournful fifty-year-old novel of love and struggle takes place in Perm, called Yuriatin, "another territory, a different, provincial world, which had a center of gravity of its own."

A city or a landscape that has been described in a novel, even in a distorted way, is made more visible and accessible, even hallowed, with a quality of everlastingness. So I was happy to be in Perm and off the train, but I had become so used to the train's vibrations and my narrow berth, I could hardly sleep in my hotel bed. I was like a startled child in a cradle that had ceased to rock.

In the dark early morning, I met my guide, Sergei, and his translator, Yelena. They'd brought a friend, Viktor Shmirov, an authority on the gulag system and one of its historians. We got into Sergei's car and began driving on the white streets of packed snow, under sulfurous streetlamps.

"Why does the guidebook write that about Perm?" Sergei asked when I mentioned the jibe. "This city is full of history. Dostoyevsky stopped here on his way to Omsk. The Diaghilev family is from here. Chekhov of course—this is the setting for
Three Sisters.
And Pasternak's book. The city is full of history!"

Dostoyevsky was on his way to prison and had spent only one night here. Sergei Diaghilev fled the city and spent his life in Paris as a balletomane. For Chekhov it was the epitome of stifling provincial cities ("When can we go to Moscow?" the three sisters keep moaning), and Pasternak had been regarded as a literary pariah until fifteen years ago.

I mentioned that
Three Sisters
depicted Perm unfavorably, the stifled sisters longing to leave for Moscow.

"Because Chekhov had a problem," Sergei said. Sergei's English was not bad, but he preferred to speak Russian. Yelena sat behind me, translating. "He was turned away from a building because he was wearing the wrong clothes. He never forgave them for this."

This episode is not mentioned by any of Chekhov's biographers, only the fact that in 1890 he arrived by river in Perm at two o'clock one April morning and left the same day at six in the evening, on a train heading east. He was on his long Siberian trip—eighty-one days from Moscow to Vladivostok, on his way to the penal settlement at Sakhalin. Still, sixteen hours in Perm was enough for a genius like Chekhov to sum up the city as stifling.

"It's like this," Sergei said. "What if you went to a city and found a cockroach in your soup?" A big beefy man, he was hunched over the wheel, steering us through the snow. He turned heavily in his seat and faced me, his hands still on the wheel of the slowly moving car. "You wouldn't like that city, would you? You'd always remember it. 'Ah, Perm, that's where I had the cockroach in my soup!'"

"But we have no cockroaches," Yelena said.

"Five years ago, all the cockroaches left Perm," Sergei said. "Was it radiation? Did they sense trouble coming? The professors can't answer this question."

"And now we are passing Bashaya Smirti," Viktor said.

"The Tower of Death," Yelena said and pointed up ahead at a wide gray tower, like a silo with a sloping roof, attached to a gray, ecclesiastical-looking building pierced by small windows.

"There was a wave of repression in the early 1950s," Viktor said as we made a circuit around the grim-looking tower. "The Tower of Death was built then for the KGB. People were taken here for interrogation."

I asked who those suspects might be.

"People regarded as 'cosmopolitan,'" he said. "Westernized. Not patriotic. Also what were known as 'left radicals.' Anti-Stalinists."

The terrifying tower loomed like an oversized crematorium near the center of Perm, so I asked the obvious question: "Did people in Perm call it the Tower of Death?"

"They didn't say it out loud. They whispered it," Viktor said. "Under Khrushchev they said it a little louder."

I mentioned that my favorite writer about the gulag, a man who had been extensively interrogated, was Varlam Shalamov, the author of
Kolyma Tales.

"This is Shalamov's centenary," Viktor said, brightening. "His father
was a priest, but Shalamov wasn't religious at all. It's amazing that someone with such a huge experience of prison life didn't become a Christian."

"Unlike Solzhenitsyn."

"Yes, and unlike Solzhenitsyn, he did twenty-seven years in Siberia. At the end, he lived in great poverty in Moscow. He died in obscurity."

Solzhenitsyn was the West's most famous
zek,
or prisoner. Yet in her exhaustive history of the prison system,
Gulag,
Anne Applebaum writes that his prison time was not onerous: "[Solzhenitsyn] was an unremarkable prisoner. He flirted with the authorities, served as an informer before seeing the light, and wound up working as a bricklayer." And Shalamov's
Kolyma Tales,
which she praises, she also describes as "among the bitterest in the entire camp genre."

We had left the outskirts of Perm and were headed northeast, into the snow and pine forests along an unplowed road. Aside from a few cars and heavy trucks, there was almost no traffic. The early morning darkness had lifted; we were traveling through slanting snowfall under a low gray sky.

"I want to tell you a story about the organs of power," Viktor said, Yelena translating. "I once had a chance to interview a peasant woman in the northern Perm region. She told me she had never left her village, except once. She had gone to Chernaya, a biggish town. She was very impressed because it was so beautiful. She was sitting quietly, admiring the place, when she heard someone say, 'Apoga is coming.'

"She knew the name. Apoga was the chairman of the Emergency Committee of the Cheka."

The Cheka was one of the previous incarnations of the KGB, now known as the FSB. It has undergone nineteen name changes since 1919, yet it is the same organization, devoted to spying, torture, and murder.

"Apoga was a frightening name to the woman. And the idea of seeing him was just terrible. Everyone was scared by the prospect of seeing this man. The woman left as soon as she could—went back to her village and never left again." Viktor raised his hands. His face was fixed in an expression of helpless pain. "People could be imprisoned for nothing. That man's name, Apoga, represented terror and fear."

I said, "The paradox is that at exactly the same time—the 1950s—we had McCarthy in the U.S. persecuting people for sympathizing with the Soviet Union."

Sergei was clucking "
Nyet, nyet, nyet"
before I could finish. "I've been to America," he said. "I know about McCarthyism. The problems were not on the same scale."

I had to agree, though the motives, the witch-hunts, the betrayals, the stink of fear—of ruined lives and lost jobs and disgrace—that hung over McCarthyism were similar.

"Here's a story," Sergei said. "Viktor says people were afraid. It's true. I know it from my own family. My grandmother's family was from Kirov"—Kirov was on the railway line, about eight hours west of Perm—"and they had eleven children, seven girls, four boys. My grandmother was considered educated, because she'd graduated from primary school with honors."

Yelena said, "Is also a joke, Paul."

"I get it." I also understood that he kept referring to his grandmother as
babushka.

"Her father was a well-known butcher. This man was strong physically, a muscular man. Fifty years later he was still remembered in this province. At the time of the revolution," said Sergei, "my grandmother was seventeen. She got married at nineteen, and for eight years all was well. They were in that remote place. The secret police couldn't reach them.

"In the 1920s, Stalin wanted collectivization, so they came to my grandparents. Her father the butcher was a kulak"—a rich peasant, or one defying authority. "He had a beautiful house that he'd built himself. The inspector wanted the house for his own family. The house was very dear to the butcher.

"'Go to Siberia,' the government inspector said.

"What? Until then he had never worried about the powers of government. He was so upset he just lay down and died of a heart attack.

"His two sons—my great-uncles—ran away to fight against this unfair government. My grandmother stayed in the village. But she was scared. She knew the police were looking for her two brothers. At the same time, she was giving bread to her brothers when they sneaked home. The special police wanted to kill them. This was around 1930 or '31. A few years later they were found and shot by the police.

"My grandmother—her name was Matryona—wanted to bury her brothers but couldn't find their bodies. And her grief didn't end there.
After World War Two there was a big famine. As the daughter of a kulak, with primary school honors—ha!—she was made head of a farm. There were no strong men left. She was suffering from hunger.

"In 1946, her son—my seventeen-year-old uncle—went looking for food. They were so hungry they'd go to the fields to look for grains of wheat that had been left behind after the harvest. He found a few grains. And he was seen. He was arrested for theft.

"He screamed at the police, 'You are monsters! You have food and we have nothing!'

"For saying that, he was given a twenty-five-year sentence. He spent it in Magadan and Kolyma, washing gravel for gold. There was almost no communication with his mother. In 1954 when Stalin died, he was rehabilitated. He died three years ago and—you know?—he would never speak a word about his imprisonment.

"My grandmother was so afraid of the KGB that when the name was mentioned she made a face. The worst document she'd ever seen in her life was that of her son's sentence. Imagine, twenty-five years. He would have got ten years for theft, but he screamed 'You monsters,' so he got fifteen more."

Now we were in the deep countryside, no other cars at all, and the road was buried in snow. The landscape was like a charcoal drawing on white paper—the black woods and the smudged sky and the whiteness of the blizzard.

"There are thousands of such stories," Viktor said. "It's a story of terror. People were afraid of anyone in power. The system was cruel. The whole basis of it was that Stalin wanted slave labor."

All this time, Yelena was translating and I was writing in the notebook on my knee, which was easy because of the pauses between the men speaking and Yelena's translation.

"And you couldn't trust anyone," Sergei said. "I had a problem myself. I was on file, someone had betrayed me."

"What had you done?"

"Told political jokes," Sergei said. "But I found out about my file in a roundabout way. I was working for Komsomol"—the communist youth organization—"in the Political Education Department. It was the eighties. We were dealing with vets from Afghanistan. They had severe stress and trauma, and they found it hard to adjust to life.