In Siberia (19 page)

I said bleakly: ‘I don't think I can do this….'

‘But Nikolai, you're
English
!'

‘I know, Nikolai. But this leaflet has a language of its own.'

‘It's Hindi?'

‘In a way.'

But we struggled through it. He guessed the medical terms by way of Slavic borrowings, and after a while we had discovered our G.I. tracts and resolved the hypothalamus. Noisy triumph greeted each resolution. Our shared name cemented us. I became an expert on vomiting thresholds while he identified the chemoreceptor trigger zone.

Then, suddenly, he was staring at my hands. He removed his glasses, replaced them, looked abruptly serious. ‘Is your health quite all right?'

I wondered what he was seeing. ‘I don't know.'

‘Roll up your sleeve.' He applied a tourniquet and took my blood pressure. I realised with slight alarm that it had not been taken for years. Yet I had passed the terminal age for the average Russian male. Nikolai's frown deepened, either with perplexity or horror, while I kept silent. He peered down my throat through a giant magnifying-glass. The lines of his forehead puckered in a fleur-de-lys above his nose. My imagination broke free. Would he propose chemotherapy, I wondered, or prescribe Perinorm to restore my hypothalamus? Then he picked up my hand, fastidiously, by the wrist. ‘Your fingers…are they always like that? The nails.'

‘Just dirty?' I wondered.

‘No. They've got vertical lines. And they're very soft. They bend. They're red at the roots.' We stared at them together. I found them vaguely comforting. ‘Yet your circulation, your blood pressure, is normal….'

I felt a surge of relief, but I said: ‘I thought everybody's nails were like this.'

We took to examining his, which were opaque, clean and hard. He was smiling again. He said: ‘You'll survive, Nikolai!' So I wasn't ill, it seemed, I was just peculiar.

‘Perhaps it's the difference in our lives,' I said.

He looked at me as if the difference should be flagrant. I was dressed as shabbily as him, after all, and I was travelling in the Arctic on a shoe-string. But my nails were soft. He said: ‘So what are you doing here?'

‘I'm looking at Siberia.'

‘And what do you see?' He gestured out of the window. ‘Anything?' Into my silence he pursued: ‘What did you expect, Nikolai?'

‘Nikolai, it's too long ago to remember!' But I had been looking for patterns, of course. I wanted their security. I wanted some unity or shape to human diversity. But instead this land had become diffused and unexpected as I travelled it. Wherever I stopped appeared untypical, as if the essential Siberia could exist only in my absence, and I could not answer Nikolai at all.

‘I didn't expect anywhere as bad as here.'

‘This is extreme.'

Perhaps Siberia's essence was wilderness, I thought idly, and human witness destroyed it, like those light particles which the act of observation changes. So I was reduced to knowing it by glancing detail, snatches of talk, the texture of his fingernails.

‘And how did
you
land up here?' I asked. I had longed to know this. I was conscious of heroising him, as if he had chosen this post from duty; but I feared some sadder reason, and had recoiled from asking him until now.

But he kept his clarity, even grinned. ‘Well, at the time the Soviet Union split up I was an army doctor in Kazakhstan. That's where I was born. In 1992 my unit was disbanded and I decided to become a civilian. I wanted my sons to attend good institutions, so I had to move to Russia, get Russian citizenship. And this was where I got offered.' Then his pride welled up. ‘Now my elder son is in the naval college in St Petersburg! He's doing fine. He's
even entertained British naval officers. My son with the Royal Navy!'

So the boy was in still-resplendent St Petersburg, while his father eked out his life in a Siberian village, burning with pride. Nikolai had sacrificed himself for his children.

I said: ‘How long might you be here?'

‘You have to stay a long time to be useful. You have to know your patients' history.' He lifted his chin to the pigeon-holes around us, each stacked with its quota of misery. His beard was salted with grey. ‘I only worry that my eyes are failing. I used to read books for pleasure, but now I can't afford to.' He showed me, a little wistfully, a Russian pocket edition of Rudyard Kipling's poems, which he had loved. ‘I save my eyes for medical treatises now.'

I felt alarmed for him, and an unfocused sadness. ‘What happened?'

‘I think it was the long nights. You see, for five months of winter we scarcely see sunlight here. Families just close themselves away, or fish through holes in the ice. I used to read and study for weeks, often by the light of paraffin lamps. But my eyes hated it.' He put on his glasses again without self-pity. ‘Now could you just translate?'–pushing a last packet under my eyes: ‘
Metoclopramide blocks the action of dopramine, thereby inhibiting prolactin releases
….' ‘Are you sure you're quite well?'

 

The only signs of the herdsman's former strength are the gnarled hands clenched over his thighs. The swell of his cheekbones drops fiercely to a faltering jawline. He thinks he is eighty-six, but cannot be sure. He is not happy here.

I stand hesitantly in his room. Its passage is heaped with coal and hung with the antlers of reindeer gathered long ago. He has spent his life with the herds on the far side of the river, but is too weak to sustain that now. The plaster is dribbling from the wattle of his ceiling. His door is locked against drunks.

He says: ‘Life was hard over there, but it is better than here. I didn't choose this.'

Over there, in the end, you could live on the miraculous rein
deer: eat even its ears and lips and bowel contents, resist the harshest cold in its skins, turn its bones to implements or tinder, ride it to new pastures. This, said the old man, was how things had always been. The reindeer could endure on its reserves like a camel, and possessed a third lung which kept it warm inside. Even after the Soviets collectivised the herders–a tragedy which ignored native knowledge–his people had migrated with their sledge-drawn tents between the Arctic Sea and the Yenisei hinterland. The reindeer could sniff the edible lichen beneath the ice, and paw it up. But unnoticeably, acid rain was depleting the pastures.

The Entsy remembers this. Under his frosted scalp his face has shrunk to a gremlin watchfulness. He remembers the herds withering away.

I have left his door open, and now a drunk Russian barges in and demands a cigarette and a glass of vodka. The old man has neither. The youth curses the prices in Dudinka and the fucking Yenisei and a fucking sturgeon that got away, and he leaves. The Entsy has stayed stoical, as if his eyes were retracted into his skull. Above his bed hangs a pair of thigh-length reindeer boots: sheaths of glistening topaz stripes. They shine like an heirloom. But he wears a vinyl jerkin and rubber shoes now, and picks at a salted
omul
.

‘You see how it is. That's what happens here. These people.' His only son died of a heart-attack in the tundra, he says. His wife is dead. (For the first time one of his hands moves: it gestures to the west.) But it is better over there, he remembers, and he wants to cross back over the river.

 

Beyond the village the tundra spread. Its only trees were stunted larches, which showered down a golden dust of needles at my touch. Its beauty was all underfoot, in a quilt of mosses, heathers, lichens, fungi. In late September–in this moment before snow–they shone in a patina of amber and scarlet. The wind scarcely stirred them. A fruiting of red and indigo currants–bilberries, blueberries, cranberries–hung from stems which were turning ruby, and between them, among lichens unknown to me, the
reindeer moss lifted minute, tangled fronds. Half the textures were unexpected. Solid-seeming hummocks gave way to spongy cushions, or sank into bog, while under my feet the moist-looking reindeer moss crackled like wood-shavings.

This wilderness girds the Arctic Sea for more than four thousand miles. After the squalor of the village, it spread a cleansing emptiness. I heard only the squeak of small birds and the sieving of wind through the grass. When I lay down I crushed out a lavender fragrance. Everything, I knew, had evolved in response to cold. The sward grew low against polar blizzards. Thrift and saxifrage clung to their dead but protective foliage through the winter. Other plants formed hair or trapped the sunlight in subcutaneous pockets, or refracted it on to their buds with the parabolic discs of their first leaves.

And because of the permafrost, nothing drained away. I kept slipping into bogs and swamp. Some looked like half-formed pools; mushrooms sprouted in their wells. Others seemed to be old ponds which were transforming to silt-fed clearings. Everywhere lakes broke out in circles and oblongs brimming level with the earth. Their water was auburn, uninhabited, darkly beautiful. Ferns lifted through its surface from a sediment of leaves. They were a little mysterious. Their geometric perfection–formed during the annual contraction and thawing of the ground–still happens unexplained.

At evening the breaking and dimming of sunlight over the lakes followed me dreamily back to the Yenisei. Clouds of mosquitoes rose and settled on my lips, eyelids, nostrils, their biting reduced to a trickle. I emerged a few miles south of Potalovo.

By the time I had climbed the intervening hill, the sun was dropping into the river and I found myself among a maze of freestanding galleries. At first I did not understand. They ran on stilts for 100 yards or more, and had half collapsed. Their flimsy doors slammed in the wind. The place seemed deserted. I heard only an odd clicking, as if a multitude of birds were pecking grain somewhere. Then, as I entered one of the corridors, a terrible screaming broke out. From their cramped cages scores of starved, long-bodied dogs were gazing at me and shrieking. The noise was at
once piteous and angry: a little human. I was in the ruins of the Arctic fox farm.

They had lost their wild beauty. Their claws splayed and unhooked painfully over the wire-mesh floor of their cages, and made the unearthly clicking. Their excrement dropped through the mesh on to trays below. They had barely room to turn round. It crossed my mind to release them–all 200 or so–but what would they do? They had known only a few square feet of wire, and impoverished humans needed them. Their heads were unnaturally big on their bodies, and their grey fur was turning white for the winter they would not see.

I turned back along the gallery through the gauntlet of their screaming. It followed me down the hill.

 

That night I was startled awake. Stepan, drunk, had blundered across the room and grabbed for his bag of belongings on the wall. In the frame of our window, blocking out the stars, the silhouettes of two men were beckoning him away. He lit a nurse's lamp on the floor, then dithered towards my bed. His ancient head seemed to surmount the body of a stunted youth, its muscles barely slackened around his stomach. His hand extended towards me, rubbing its remaining fingers against his thumb. ‘Money?…money?…' I closed my eyes. Then he let out a soft ‘
Ya-aach!
' and tugged on his pullover, a pair of split trousers, his hat. The faces outside were still pressed against the glass.

The next moment a nurse rushed in and seized him by the arm. ‘You've had enough drink!' she screamed. ‘You've had enough!' He wrenched himself free, but she seized him again and he collapsed on to his bed and started to sing in a plaintive alto, like a woman. The faces vanished from the window. For a long time I lay trying to sleep, listening to the whimpering of the awakened child, while Stepan's singing faded away.

In the dawn I went out to escape him, past the shuttered houses and growling kennels, to the river. A steamer was expected at noon, and I was hoping to leave. Half the day I waited among the thistles and grass on a high foreland, straining my eyes for the shadow of a ship. But the grey flood of the Yenisei suddenly
looked hostile, flowing between dead banks, and nothing came. There had been storms upriver, somebody said.

 

The richest people in Potalovo are the children. They drive tractors and bulldozers, own houses, sail ships. The fact that all these possessions are wrecked makes no difference. They are a simulacrum of the adult world. So the children keep house in burnt-out cottages, or climb into the cabins of tractors and roam the tundra on vanished wheels. Sometimes they man the bridge of the beached and derelict cargo ship, and steer for the Arctic Sea. Only when they stop being children do they realise that they are inhabiting a world in ruins.

At the age of twelve or thirteen, said Nikolai, they start to drink.

 

He hated the arrival of the boat-shop which plied the river. That afternoon it had opened its hold on a thin range of expensive goods–vodka, above all–and the villagers had sped out in their motor-boats to meet it. In his dim-lit clinic Nikolai looked through the window at the night and circled his arm. ‘Probably this whole settlement is drunk around us at this moment. Almost everyone.'

He dreaded the monthly arrival of pensions. ‘Single parents get an allowance for each child, so a man with five children and no wife can feel a millionaire! He'll drink himself sick while the children starve. The women do it too. Everybody. And when the vodka gives out they'll search for anything. There's an American machine oil which is bought galore here. Our machines are all broken, of course, but people drink this fluid by the bottle. Within two to three hours they're asphyxiated. If they get to the hospital I can save them, but they die in their homes or in the streets.' Then, with the hardiness of necessity, he cheered up. ‘Listen to this, Nikolai!' He had a Russian book called
A Thousand English Jokes
which he couldn't resist sharing. ‘Have you heard the one about the Englishman, the Russian and the parrot? Listen….'