Riding the Iron Rooster (7 page)

We arrived at Irkutsk, after four and a half days of the Trans-Siberian's crossing the vastness of the steppes. The astonishing thing is not that it took so long to get there, but that for anyone who chooses to go on to Vladivostok, there are four more days of it, and they are much the same. It was like crossing an ocean.

It was nine o'clock at night when we arrived at Irkutsk, but we did not stay in the city. We were directed to a bus and driven to a hotel forty miles away on the shore of Lake Baikal. The Wittricks called it Lake Bacall, like the actress.

The lake was frozen solid, with great shoved-up ice slabs at the shore, because of the pressure. Baikal is the largest lake in the world—it contains one-fifth of the earth's fresh water, and the Russians suggest that there are monsters in it as well as fat seals and numerous varieties of fish. The ice is two meters thick, they boasted. You can walk the length of it—over 400 miles. Or take a sleigh across to Babushkin, which they do to save time in winter. They had amazing things here at Baikal. Natural wonders! Over at Bashaiyarischka they had fur farms—they raised ermine and lynx and mink, and made them into hats. They trapped sable—the little devils wouldn't breed in captivity, but there were plenty of them around and they fetched $1000 a pelt. They had coral in the lake, they boasted. And just down the shore at Listvianka they had a church. There was a priest in the church—a real one.

They never boasted about the hotels. In Moscow it had been a vast and dusty place, with straw mattresses and a shriveled floor, ragged carpets, blankets blackened with cigarette burns, and stinking bathrooms—leaky pipes, cracked cisterns. "The bogs are tragic," Richard Cathcart said. I thought that was about right. The hotel at Baikal was marble and mausoleumlike, and it was clean. But I had to be shown three rooms until I found one with hot water, and in the last there was no toilet seat, and none of them had curtains on the windows. The babushkas dusted and mopped, but apart from that there was no maintenance—not only in the larger sense of the drains working or the water running, but in details: knobs were missing from dressers, and the latches from the windows, which didn't open in any case; the locks jammed, the lamps were either dead or bristling with bare wires. Repairs were carried out with bits of sticky tape and pieces of string. It is true that every traveler has to expect to put up with discomfort, but there were huge areas of Soviet life that seemed to me not simply uncomfortable but downright dangerous.

The members of the group were not happy here: it was too cold, the hotel was a wreck, the food was dreadful, and why didn't these Siberians smile?

Honeymooners came to the hotel—some stayed, some merely stood in front and had their pictures taken, some roistered there. On my second night the room next to mine was occupied by a pair of newlyweds playing Russian rock and roll on a cassette machine until, at two in the morning, I banged on their door and told them to shut up. The groom appeared, drunken and drooling and a foot taller than me, but when he saw I was a foreigner he decided not to attack me. Behind him in the room, a young woman encouraged him. In defiance, they turned the music even louder for about ten minutes, and then they switched it off.

It was a custom for just-married couples to drive to where the Angara River flowed from the lake—it was all eider ducks and ice floes—and these newlyweds parked by the shore, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted each other, while the driver took their picture. The bride wore a rented dress of white lace, and the groom a dark suit with a wide red ribbon worn as a sash. In the course of one walk in this direction I saw four couples do this—have a ceremonial drink, then pose for a picture. The shore was littered with champagne bottles.

I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.

***

There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.

An Estonian rock group called Radar was playing in Irkutsk, a freezing wind blew across the river, the toilet seat in my room had been cut from a flat and splintery piece of plywood. How had these people sent rockets to Mars?

Young men and fox-faced women lurked on the promenade and importuned what foreigners they could find.

"Want to sell—"

They wanted to buy blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, sport shoes, watches, sweaters, sweatshirts, lighters. They paid in rubles—or else I could have Annushka for an hour. Did I have a radio? And what about a pen?

That night, listening to my little shortwave radio, I heard the news on the BBC World Service. It was the usual headmistress's voice, but the message seemed portentous.

"Swedish officials say they have detected high radioactive levels in the atmosphere," she said, "and they link these with other reports that Finland, Denmark, and Norway have also detected much higher concentrations of radioactivity than usual. At first, it had been thought that the radioactive material had leaked from a Swedish plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm. But officials from different parts of Sweden say they think the leak has come from the east, in other words from a nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Easterly winds have been blowing over Scandinavia for several days. According to one report, radiation levels are up to six times above normal level in Finland and half as much again as is normal in Norway."

This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It had happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Union—in Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.

In the morning we left Irkutsk for Mongolia. The people in the group complained that the train was three hours late, but that didn't seem bad—after all, it had come from Moscow, which was almost 4000 miles away. It was the direct Moscow-to-Mongolia train, following the route of the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan-Ude and then becoming the Trans-Mongolian Express when it turned south from there. It takes in the most rugged and beautiful part of Siberia, the mountainous region south of Lake Baikal called Buryatskaya, inhabited by the nomadic Buryats. The train skirts the lake, passing the ice fishermen at Slyudyanka and keeping to the shore, to Babushkin and beyond. To the southwest there is a tremendous mountain range, the Khrebet Khamar Daban, very snowy, and with great peaks, one behind the other like the Rockies, and rising to 15,000 and 16,000 feet. These mountains constitute the frontier and it is necessary to travel around them in the flat valley of the Selenga River in order to enter Mongolia.

The last time I was here I did not see anything. I was going west, and the westbound trains round Baikal at night. So this was all new to me: icy mountains in brilliant sunshine. The sleeping car had a punished and dusty look; written on its side in Cyrillic were the words
Mongolian Railways,
and there was the Mongolian state seal—a galloping fur-hatted horseman. When we stopped, scores of flat-faced Mongolians in blue tracksuits jumped out of the train and began running in place on the platform. It was the prize-winning Mongolian wrestling team, on their way back from a successful series of matches in Moscow. One of the wrestlers told me that the horseman on the seal was the liberator of Mongolia, Suhe Baator. The name means "Suhe the Hero."

On Russian trains there are loudspeakers in all the coaches, sometimes broadcasting music, sometimes news or comment. The drone is always in the background, and the Russians appear not to notice it. It has a practical value, giving information about the next stop and how long the train will be there. In the past the volume could not be regulated—the knobs were removed from the volume control, and so it droned day and night. One of the improvements on Soviet trains has been the replacement of the volume control knobs. On Mongolian trains these knobs are missing, and the traveler is subjected to an ear-bashing in the Mongolian language.

"Isn't there anything they can do about it?" Miss Wilkie said pleadingly.

"I'd like to take an axe to that thing," Kicker said.

They petitioned the Mongolian attendant, a tough-looking woman, who waved them away—a don't-bother-me gesture.

"Maybe she doesn't have the knob," I said. "In which case, you're in luck. Because if you turn it off she won't be able to turn it back on."

A ducklike voice ranted from the loudspeaker.

"It's driving us nuts," the Westbetters said.

I made myself very popular with the group by showing them how to shut it off. I wrapped a rubber band around the metal stump and this rubber offered enough of a grip to shut the thing off. The beauty of it was that I could then take the rubber band away, and so it stayed off.

We crossed the Selenga, and it looked as though the wilderness went on forever. Mountain streams coursed out of the forest, and chunks of ice as big as cars floated on the river. The earth was brown and dusty, and though it was very cold, there were tiny buds on the trees. The Soviet city of Ulan-Ude sprawled in the wide, flat valley—low wooden houses and tall electric poles, and a marshaling yard full of freight cars loaded with tree trunks. It was a region of lumberjacks and trappers, though no one of this description boarded the train. In fact, from what I could see the train carried a great number of young Soviet soldiers.

Leaving the Trans-Siberian route and heading south, the train climbed the bare, brown hills and in the brown valley below was the river clogged with muddy ice and the hideous city smoking on its banks. Just a few miles south of Ulan-Ude the land is arid and desertlike, the
gobi
that is more or less changeless as far as China: big bushes rather than trees, and rough grasslands beaten by sand, and a few settlements, but even those few are sorry places. In many empty places, watching the train go by, was a man in a brown fur hat and padded jacket, smoking a cigarette. He was motionless and solitary, almost emblematic. How had he gotten there?

The great dune-shaped hills were covered with dust and yellow grass. There were no trees. Black goats browsed near some isolated cabins, and horses were tethered. The people did not show themselves. It seemed to me that almost nothing is known of these settlements—no foreigner is allowed in them, they produce no writing; they are mute. They were places of utter simplicity, too—their water came from holes in the ground, their heat from the firewood stacked against the cabin. It was a desolate part of the Soviet Union. It was as though we had already entered Mongolia. Outside the larger settlements were graveyards, each grave surrounded by a rectangle of fence, to prevent—what? Probably wolves from digging up the corpses.

At midnight we reached the Mongolian border, and spent several hours on each side going through formalities. The Russians and the Mongolians were equally rude. They searched luggage, they took beds apart and lifted the floorboards of the sleeping car.

"English books? English magazines?"

I showed them what I had, but they were not interested. Their great search was for pornography, I was told, which they considered vastly more dangerous than political propaganda. The Mongolians in particular felt pornography was evil.

Perhaps accustomed to outsiders not speaking their language, the Mongolians went about their business silently, hardly gesturing, only occasionally muttering—but when they muttered they did so in Russian. Mongolian men and women alike had boyish faces.

That was why I almost jumped out of my skin when the fierce attendant barked at me early the next morning. I had locked my compartment, but she had a master key. She knocked and an instant later whipped the door open and went "woof-woof!" She made me understand that she was saying
Get up
in her language. She wanted the bedding. But we hadn't been able to go to sleep until two in the morning—that was the hour we had left the frontier. It was now seven. We were due in Ulan Bator (Red Hero) at nine-thirty. I rolled over and went back to sleep.

Then this Mongolian attendant did an amazing thing—the sort of trick that clever adults attempt at children's parties. She reentered the compartment, barked softly, and seized the edges of my bedding in both hands. And in one swift maneuver ("Woof!") she jerked my bedding off me—sheets and blankets—leaving me shivering, and she hurried away on bandy legs.

We were traveling on long, straight tracks through the enormous expanse of grassland, among bulgey hills and smooth slopes. In sheltered and shadowy places there were crescent patches of snow. There was the occasional horseman, bundled up against the wind, making his way in the emptiness—no roads, no tracks, nothing but the circular tents known as yurts (the Mongols themselves call these
ghurrs).
It was an extraordinary landscape—pale yellow, under a blue sky—extraordinary because it was not a desert, but rather the largest pasture imaginable: here and there a herd of horses, here and there a camel, or a man, or a tent. It was inhabited, but with a sparseness that was impressive.

The Mongols reached the eastern limits of China. They rode to Afghanistan. They rode to Poland. They sacked Moscow, Warsaw and Vienna. They had stirrups—they introduced stirrups to Europe (and that made jousting possible and perhaps started the Age of Chivalry). They rode for years, in all seasons. When the Russians retired from their campaigns for the winter, the Mongols kept riding and recruiting in the snow. They devised an ingenious tactic for their winter raids: they waited for rivers to freeze and then they rode on the ice. In this way they could go anywhere and they surprised their enemies. They were tough and patient, and by the year 1280 they had conquered half the known world.