In Siberia (26 page)

By the time we returned through the dark of his courtyard the dogs had gone to sleep. Our feet trailed through fresh snow. At his gate he suddenly demanded: ‘Do you always shave your head? You think that's right?'

Before leaving London I'd had my hair crew-cut, but now it lapped my neck. I murmured: ‘It's long….'

Aleksei shook his own locks and boomed: ‘I prefer to look like God the Father!'

Cynicism, righteousness, blasphemy, all mixed in him. And now, in parting, he lifted his hand above me. ‘Remember. Through this you will be saved. Do this.' His fingers cut the air with a schismatic cross. It made a momentary chill wind. I did not know if I had been blessed or cursed. I stepped away, and he became a silhouette in his courtyard, still holding up his fist under a sky ablaze with stars.

 

The land wrapped itself round us without comfort: waves of forest-blackened hills. Snow stormed in a grey dust across the farther peaks. Along the road the telegraph poles had been eased out of their stone buckets by permafrost, and hung aslant.

In this solitude of arid valleys the village of Kuytun stretched in fresh-painted cottages. They glowed like blue and green toys in the snow. Their streets made corridors of courtyard gates, undermined by the sallyports of dogs, and their windows were sleepy with cats and geraniums. The silver domes of a rebuilding
church brandished the Old Believer cross. The only truck I saw belonged to the farmer who dropped me here.

I sheltered under the walls of the half-built sanctuary, and was astonished for an instant to see Aleksei striding towards me. But his sturdy frame and chestnut beard were lit–as he came closer–by a pair of cloudless blue eyes which were not his, and he transformed into the warden of the nearby chapel. Sergei was Aleksei's mirror-image. In him Aleksei had been scrubbed clean and given another chance. A modest self-reliance animated him. In his open face Aleksei's lines had taken more innocent directions. His profile was Hollywood handsome. From time to time he would drop hoary maxims: ‘If you work, life will flower', or ‘He who attempts will reap…'. Within a few minutes he had asked me to his home.

Unconsciously Sergei began restoring to me the cliche Old Believer whom Aleksei had sabotaged. He had built his house of pine logs with his own hands. It was clinically clean. The same linoleum that had dirtied Aleksei's bedroom spread immaculate in Sergei's kitchen. His twelve-year-old son was coming top in school. And here I met the wife I would have guessed: blonde Galina with direct, round eyes and a cherry mouth. They belonged in Russian folk-tale. They owned a pig and four cows. A flock of white chickens scratched in a courtyard. In their storerooms the vegetables they had grown–sacks of carrots and beet–were piled alongside churns of maturing honey and the self-ground wheat from which Galina made a mealy bread.

Beneath their kitchen a trapdoor opened on a cellar just above permafrost level. From floor to ceiling it was stacked with rank on rank of bottled fruits and vegetables: red and purple currants gathered in the taiga, raspberries and strawberries, salads, gherkins, mushrooms (the finest in Russia grew here, they said), boxes of carrots preserved in sand, crates of the once-anathematised potatoes–all their own produce. Winter, they said, could last deep into May.

We roamed about their acre of garden, sniffing tomatoes and picking cucumbers in the greenhouse, and lifted the snow-clogged lids from hives to watch the bees crowding their cells. Once we
raised water by one of the spindly hoists which dipped and rose like aquatic birds from wells all over the village. Sergei even had a carpenter's workshop, and a shed full of farm utensils. But the old wood ploughs had all been destroyed in Stalin's day, he said, and the taboo on iron broken. From time to time, as if reassessing things, he would say simply: ‘Well, that's how we live, that's how we live.'

All day they lavished meals on me: dumplings, beef stew, currant juice and fresh raspberry jam. Before and after each feast they disappeared into the adjoining room, where I glimpsed them bowing to their icons, crossing themselves over and over with their fingers in order, in an extravagant, secret grace.

These icons had been given by their parents at their wedding: antique, lovely things, each older than the Schism. They glowed on their shelf in vermilions and polished gold. An image of God the Father fulminated just above the electric meter.

‘But some have been stolen,' Sergei said. ‘We've been burgled four times. Even the church, ransacked. These robbers come from Ulan Ude, not from here. Nobody here would do that.'

I had forgotten that people like Sergei and Galina existed. They seemed to belong in an older, half-mythic Siberia, now drowned under immigration. ‘This is the place to be!' he said. ‘By December the snow reaches waist-high and the temperature can drop to -50°F. But the air is wonderful–very fresh and still–and the snow stays pure white. You never see that polluted look you get in western Russia. My wife comes from an Old Believer family in the Urals and there, she says, people were dying young because of radiation, and the river water was lethal. But not here! This is a beautiful land!' It was not nature that had made Siberia Hell, he said. It was man.

I thought of his stolen icons, and mentioned those of Aleksei. But he burst out laughing. ‘Oh Aleksei Akilovich! I know him! He's a drunk. He can hardly read. I don't know if he was burgled or not, with all those watch-dogs. I think actually he's a little mad.' He twirled his forefinger in his ear. ‘He used to live in the woods and sell cedar-cones. And now he does anything.'

For hours Sergei took me round the village visiting friends.
‘Nobody knows when the Last Day will come but everyone here is prepared for it. People have made provision–food, clothes–because it will be preceded by a fearful night,' he said. ‘That's how we live.'

I remembered his brimming cellar, which I had thought stocked merely against the winter; but he and Galina had a more terrible winter in view. My mind flitted back to my empty London kitchen. I felt vaguely exposed.

In each house we visited the same scene greeted us: the scrupulous cleanliness, a whiff of candle-wax, bed-pillows mounded under a muslin veil, the brick stoves already warming, and always the shelf of icons to which Sergei bowed–because each home, in its way, was a chapel. Bearded patriarchs and stern-faced chatelaines unbent at our arrival, and brought out their cherished liturgies and hymnals. From sheaths of protective cloth the books emerged in chrysalides of split leather and cracked wood, their pages fortified with glued-on parchment. One woman laid on my lap a manuscript prayer-book from a century before the Schism, its ink smudged by rain or snow or tears. Its pages trembled in my hands. I wondered why its corners were charred, and imagined its journey east. Another woman held up the multi-coloured skirts and amber necklaces worn by her grandmother, and sighed a little.

Sometimes, in these pious households, I caught myself thinking of Aleksei Akilovich with heretical warmth, I don't know why. With his ripped-out icon-case and his disintegrating books, he seemed coeval with those wanderers and flagellants whose mingled licentiousness and belief were a quagmire from which the pious had withdrawn. It was easy to romanticise him. All that peasant slyness and naivety, the tarnished shafts of devotion, the never-to-be-fulfilled yearnings, gave an illusion of movement and change beside the stasis of the faithful. He came from the pages of Dostoevsky, they from the sermons of Luther. They were prepared for death or Apocalypse, almost complete. He comprised nothing but loose ends. And I kept thinking about him.

Outside, the snow began to fall, and people were sitting on benches in the street, laughing. ‘Winter's here! Autumn's over!'

Later Sergei and I went on to the hills and gazed down. ‘It's beautiful, my village!' It was. It shone foreshortened through his field-glasses, like a painted land: a horseman herding his cattle, a cart gliding over snow. Yet the place fell oddly into two halves, with pasture between, and long tracks lay empty which had once been bordered by houses.

‘Those farms fell into ruin. Hundreds of them. Their owners were shot or exiled in Stalin's day for being too rich. There were twelve hundred houses in my village then, and now only three hundred!' Their vacant spaces disturbed him. They were the village which should have been: the homes of the diligent and frugal. As we walked they took on a sad presence round us. He remembered their dates and names like a personal hurt.

A modest opulence had followed the Old Belief wherever its people settled. In 1917 they had numbered fifteen million–one tenth of Russia's population–and owned more than half the country's capital. Newly tolerated, they had prospered among the merchant-industrial class, the Cossacks and wealthy peasants. (Sergei himself came from the Don Cossack Pahle family.) They were ripe for Stalin's sickle.

Inside a broken corral two men asked us for cigarettes with the fawning of the chronically drunk. Sergei steered me away. ‘Yes, they were Old Believers.' We were wading fast through shin-deep snow. ‘Things here aren't like they were. There are five village families who are total drunkards. People are starting to live just for themselves. Our collective for livestock and wheat is falling to bits. We used to have seventy tractors, but now there are only sixteen. Its workers hardly ever get paid, so they pilfer. As for drink, if they can't afford official vodka, they make their own–just sugar, yeast and water mixed. It can kill you.' His eyes lifted to heaven. ‘More than half our villagers are pensioners. Young people have gone away to the cities, to Ulan Ude, hoping for work. We're becoming a village of the dead.'

 

The chapel is a consecrated cottage. It stands in the ashes of its predecessor, ruined in the thirties. Its church bell was retrieved from a Museum of Atheism. Studiously Sergei shows me the old
psalteries, translating their dates from the Julian calendar; he lights a beeswax candle to St Sergei and points out the pallets where the faithful strike their foreheads in prayer. The iconostasis is gay with peasant colours. After the Schism, when the established Church adopted the choir-loft, the Old Believers changed nothing. So choir and congregation sing unseparated and the disembodied polyphony of the elevated loft is never heard. Sergei, who serves in the choir of four, points to where they stand, just a step from the congregation.

‘We praise with one voice,' he says. ‘We become one people.' And suddenly he starts to sing. His baritone rings out in the austere monody of the older worship, preserved here for more than three centuries. His voice is easy and pure. It fills the domestic space with an ancient certainty. He spins out the end of each verse in a long, connective hum, like the chant of the Buddhist monks, a sound of waiting.

‘That's how we live,' he says. He still seems to be explaining his people, himself. In surety of justice, he implies, that's how we live.

Our patience is not exhausted. Too much is at stake. So we gather our logs and vegetables. We prune the raspberry bushes and cover them with earth until it's spring. That's how we live. Before winter we kill a calf, and reassemble our sledge to cross the snow-fields.

On Saturdays and Sundays we sing at the Liturgy. The whole church chants as one (remember this) and our ordained priest, who has even painted icons, leads us. And yes, everybody remembers the Old Slavonic, and sings the double Alleluia. That is the way to God's forgiveness. That's how we live.

We do not live like Aleksei Akilovich, so far from grace.

The price of beef is down now, because too many cattle are being slaughtered. But honey fetches a good price. Honey is the future.

We wait for the end of the light. Only others will be taken by surprise. Sometimes we pray for the world, sometimes for ourselves. The dark can only purify us.

 

My bus ran south-west eighty miles to Novoselenginsk. The passengers huddled and chattered as the snow swirled about us. Beyond Goose Lake, an old Buddhist holy place, we laboured through a wilderness of jagged ridges and down again to the Selenga. The falling snow thinned away from a land it had left monochrome. The hills turned to ash, and the sky, above this sudden draining of colour, shone in a startling, artificial blue.

Novoselenginsk looked like the frontier-town it was. Its buildings stretched low along too-wide streets. Snow was gusting through them. There was no one to be seen. Over the asbestos rooftops loomed the wreck of a giant church. Russia petered out here, and nothing identifiable took her place. The land seemed to have pared and simplified itself out of ungiving rock.

Yet in 1818 it was to this antipodes that the London Missionary Society despatched three priests and their families. The Czar granted them a plot of land on the far river-bank from the garrison-town, and here, while learning Russian, Manchu and Mongolian, they laboured for twenty-two years to convert the elusive Buryats. Opposite them the town was being eroded away by the river, dropping piecemeal under its water.

But the mission station saw itself poised near the heart of God's purpose. Just beyond the Mongol-speaking Buryats lay Mongolia itself, and the priests eventually translated the entire Bible out of Hebrew and Greek into Mongolian, and printed it on their own press. And Mongolia was only a stepping-stone. Beyond it spread the greatest prize of all–the ocean of waiting souls that had mesmerised Christian evangelists for generations: China.

The hill between the town and the river was a graveyard of farm machinery–tractors, harvesters, bulldozers–which gleamed indestructibly out of the snowdrifts. As I crested it, leaving Novoselenginsk in a shabby geometry below, there unravelled in front of me the long blade of the Selenga river sliding through its hills. On its far shore the original town had gone, eaten away by the river's current. Only the white shell of its church rose far inland. Below me, a stockaded village lay above the vanished mission, where granite cliffs dropped sheer to the water. It had given up in 1840, and a few years later nothing remained but some
outbuildings and a wall enclosing the graves of a woman and three children.