Travels in Siberia (16 page)

After much driving around (still in the video), the guys stop near a declivity thick with low-lying bushes, possibly willows. One guy walks into the bushes with a gun and then comes out carrying by the ears a tundra jackrabbit almost half as long as he is. More laughing, more vodka drinking, more firing of rifles into the air. The rabbit is skinned and cut up somewhere offscreen while the guys make a fire in half an oil drum. The rabbit reappears, now skewered on sticks, to be cooked as
shashlik
(like shish kebab). Edward paused the tape to tell me that if I wanted, he could provide a
vezdekhot
for me to drive, and that obtaining one would be very simple. I would have liked to try it, but I thanked him and declined. Vladimir had told us that vehicle tracks on the tundra take twenty-five years to heal. I figured it was okay if the Russians wanted to drive around out there—it was their tundra—but that wouldn’t apply to me.

From time to time, Vladimir kept us informed about the search for the missing boats and the six Yupiks aboard. So far no sign of boats or men had been found. He said that all Chukotka was worried about them, and that the native villages were also in mourning for the two who had drowned. U.S. Coast Guard C-130 radar planes had looked thoroughly on the American side of the border and were confident that the Yupiks hadn’t drifted there. Repeated offers on the Americans’ part to cross the border and search Russian waters had been ignored or refused. Chukotka’s governor, Aleksandr Nazarov, was said not to be sympathetic to the Yupiks’ misfortune. What resources he had assigned to the search remained unclear. The Russians had no radar planes in the area to match the C-130 and apparently only a single patrol boat was currently searching
the Russian side. Russian authorities had told the Coast Guard that another vessel was on its way from Vladivostok, but any ship that far off could not arrive for many days. Local seas were still rough and foggy, with a ceiling of a few hundred feet. Adding to the discouragement, no one could be sure that the lost boats hadn’t simply gone down the first day during the storm. Chances of finding the missing men seemed small.

One morning, for no known reason, the ban against sea travel as it pertained to foreigners had disappeared. We would be going to the fish camp after all. On the street in front of Nina’s building, the Californians and I loaded our luggage and their photographic equipment into a Russian military vehicle for the first part of the journey. This vehicle had an olive truck cab, a school-bus-yellow back with bench seats in rows, three sets of wheels as tall as my shoulder, and six-wheel drive. Its driver was a short Russian guy with a cap like a lid, and nothing to say. Sitting with us in the back were Vladimir and three Chukchis: Gennady, Ivan, and Valentina.

These Chukchis were so remarkable that they should be introduced with some ceremony. Chukchis are generally reindeer Chukchis or sea Chukchis. The former herd reindeer and live inland; the latter hunt sea mammals and fish for salmon and live on and around the coast. Gennady, Ivan, and Valentina did both, but they spent more time on and around the sea. Both of the men walked with the rolling, bowlegged sailors’ gait I had only read about in nineteenth-century nautical novels. They had killed whales. Gennady was a whaling captain and had the build of a middleweight boxer. He wore rubber boots, a black-and-bright-orange waterproof insulated jumpsuit, a blue Hollofil coat, and a blue denim porkpie hat with the front of the brim turned up. In his gear he carried a new palm-sized GPS navigating device, which he had received special permission, as a captain and guide, to own.

Ivan had served as Gennady’s first mate and harpooner on whale hunts. He displayed the qualities of competent chief assistant and wisecracking sidekick combined. His last name was Tanko (I never found out the other Chukchis’ last names). Ivan didn’t mind talking to me, despite my Russian. He had once been a local Communist Party official and had studied for three years at the Agricultural Institute in Leningrad. He wore blue jeans with the back pockets removed and then sewn over the knees for reinforcement, a short wool jacket under a heavy rubber rain cape, and a blue knit cap. He spoke in a low, hollow, hoarse voice, and he laughed hoarsely, too.

Valentina was the wife of Gennady. She was short and solid, but not heavy, with long hair and a round, pretty face. Whenever she noticed something in need of correction, she made a quiet comment about it in Chukchi to Gennady, or in Russian to Vladimir. She took care of her and Gennady’s equipment immaculately. Valentina had come along to accompany Gennady and to cook for everybody.

Once we had loaded up, we drove north from the city for an hour or so. For many miles beyond the outskirts of Provideniya we passed the ruins of military installations, with the now familiar collapsing fences of black barbed wire, chipped concrete structures, and ramshackle mad-scientist paraphernalia. Here and there along the road guard towers appeared. Tanya had told us there had been gulag camps near Provideniya until not long ago; no, all the sites we saw had been merely military, countered Vladimir. After a while, the surrounding landscape left almost all signs of people behind, and we went through bare hills marked with rock slides the color of graphite and long, narrow swaths of old snow fitting themselves into hillside contours. The overcast sky came down to an altitude almost an arm’s length above, and when the vehicle climbed to a stony pass through a range of hills, we got out and walked around in an assembly of clouds. Not fog, but individual white clouds like stage scenery, with edges you could touch and almost grab.

We continued down the other side, across open spaces that were gravel and sky and not much else, through a couple of small lakes about two feet deep, and out onto a long tongue of gravel that ended at a body of water like a fjord stretching out of sight. Families had set up tents and plyboard houses here, or were living in cars and vans, waiting for the start of the salmon run. We sat on some old concrete foundations and had a lunch of kielbasa, bread, and hot, sugared tea. The tea was served
in steel cups which the Russians held bare-handed without comment and which we Americans could pick up only by wrapping our hands inside our jacket sleeves.

At the gravel beach nearby, four small aluminum skiffs with outboard motors awaited us. The Californians and I looked them over skeptically. Micky, with his fear of boats, stood shaking his head. Out of our party’s heaped-up gear, I immediately chose a life jacket that looked new and dependable. Valentina saw this and came over and spoke to Vladimir; that life jacket, it turned out, was hers. I gave it up for a flimsier one, picturing the substitute bunched around my ears as I flailed and drowned. We stowed our bags and equipment and got aboard. Bill and I rode with a Russian-Russian guy and his wife, fish camp people we hadn’t met before. The boat sat low enough in the water that the sea was at our elbows. Bill reached over and felt its temperature. “This isn’t any colder than Tahoe!” he said. “I could water-ski this!”

We then bounced through medium-sized waves for about twenty-five miles. Foolishly, I had not brought along waterproof pants, and my drenched trousers were clinging to my knees. All around us, only blue-gray ocean and white cloudbanks could be seen. I preferred the cloudbanks with little strips of rock or beach showing at their bases; had it been up to me, and not impossible, we would have made this entire journey within fifty feet of land. For twenty minutes at a time we crossed long reaches of open water where the waves rose higher. After a while we were approaching a shore, where our boatman ran us up on a gravel strand with none of the other three boats around. This missed connection caused some alarm and the firing of a flare by the rest of our party down the shore a mile or two away. Our guy then set out again and dropped us off there, at what turned out to be the mouth of the Hot Springs River. Disembarked, we joined the three other Americans looking in puzzlement and suspicion at a surrounding landscape of nothing, apparently.

Or almost nothing. There was a long, tapering gravel spit, waves breaking on the seaward side of it, and a small bay formed by the river’s mouth on the other side. On the high ground of the spit, no more than a few feet above the water, grasses and mosses grew sparsely. Near the end of the spit was a cabin made of drift boards, a flattop structure smaller than a two-car garage. A radio aerial extended twenty-five feet above its roof, with a second, shorter aerial alongside. As the taller aerial moved
back and forth, it provided the only visible indication, besides the waves, of the force of the wind. A small drift-board storage shed flanked the cabin at one corner. Inland, a green tundra plain stretched away into the clouds and fog. At a cleft between two hills close by, where the river emerged, a steady breath of steam went up, evidence of the hot spring that gave the river its name.

On the gravel spit’s highest ground, Vladimir began to set up our tents. They were not promising and appeared to have been bought at a Kmart in Anchorage; they had names like “Junior Outdoorsman.” Bill and Micky and I helped him, Micky grousing quietly the while. He had not yet recovered from the boat ride—and now this. When we finished, I followed a path that led around the bay and onto the tundra. I had never been on actual Russian tundra before. First off, I found old
vezdekhot
tracks, a whole convention of them, wandering in different directions, and lots of the aluminum containers that Russian military rations come in. Also, inexplicable junk lying around: the handlebars and front-wheel fork of a bicycle, and a pile of heating-system radiators.

Mostly the tundra was low-growing birch trees that resembled ground vines, and hummocks of moss. I hadn’t gone far across it when I started to see mushrooms everywhere. These were plump, big boletes, the smaller ones a clean mushroom-white on top and the larger ones as brown as a perfectly baked loaf of bread. Once I had noticed them, I realized that this place was in fact a boletes bonanza, like an Easter-egg hunt for three-year-olds, with the prizes barely hidden at all. I took off my baseball cap, filled it with boletes, and then began to put them in my pockets. Russians love wild mushrooms, and boletes often are edible, even tasty. I thought I’d present these to the residents of the fish camp cabin who were to be our hosts. Picking up a boletus bigger than any I’d seen in my life, I hurried back across the tundra to the cabin. Everyone in our party had gone in there to drink tea and vodka and get warm. I walked in—the small room was lantern lit, fogged with coal smoke, and crowded by a propane stove, a sleeping platform, and benches along the walls—and presented my mushrooms to the pregnant young Yupik woman standing by the stove. She took one look at them and laughed and said, “
Starii
,” which means “old.” I examined the mushrooms more closely and saw that they were indeed completely soggy from the recent rains, and starting to decay.

A problem for anyone writing about Russia is the fact that all Russians have the same name. Or, rather, they have one of about six names. The owner or presiding occupant of the fish camp cabin was another Vladimir, whom I will call Vladimir-the-Yupik. He was a relative of some of the Yupiks who had been caught in the storm. When I went outside to throw the mushrooms away, I met him standing with Vladimir-the-guide by the storage shed and smoking a cigarette he had made from loose tobacco rolled in the torn page of a book. Vladimir-the-Yupik was a slim, quiet young man, thin faced and light eyed, with a wispy goatee and mustache. I asked him what book his cigarette paper had come from—sympathizing with the author, I suppose—and he seemed embarrassed out of all measure to have been caught in such an act of desecration; he sucked a last drag and tossed the butt away.

Vladimir-the-guide told him I spoke some Russian, so Vladimir-the-Yupik asked me where I learned it, and I said in New York, and he said, “Brighton Beach?” Even on the farthest shores of Siberia, they know Brighton Beach. Then he switched to English, which he spoke well. Vladimir-the-Yupik told me he comes to this camp to fish for salmon every year. He lives in the village of Novo Chaplino, his son had come with him, and his wife, Cenia, was the pregnant young woman inside. The son, he said, had found a float from a whaling ship that day. An orange rubber ball maybe three feet in diameter, it lay on the ground nearby. He said it had belonged to a Japanese ship and was worth a lot of money. Then he told me that the fish hanging to dry on the outside of his cabin wall were called antler fish and tasted very good boiled in seal oil. He also enjoyed eating young cormorants, which he catches before they have all their feathers and are able to fly. He had shot three Dall sheep, another tasty species, on the far side of the inlet last year. “I like this country,” he said, gazing reflectively at the foggy starkness around him and dragging on another book-paper cigarette. When he turned to go inside the cabin, I saw on the back of his softball warm-up jacket the words
POLARIS BAR, NOME, ALASKA
.

Supper was wild-mushroom soup, bread, and tea—not really enough, I thought. After it I walked on the ocean beach and watched Ivan, Gennady, and Vladimir-the-guide put out their salmon nets. The nets
were about seventy-five feet long and eight feet wide, with floats along the top edge every six feet. Burlap sacks filled with rocks would anchor the nets to the beach and to the ocean bottom. Ivan produced the sacks from among his gear, unfolded them, and began to fill them with rocks. He asked if I wanted to help. I said yes, and he held the mouth of a sack open while I grabbed rocks from the beach and tossed them in. As I did, a line from one of my favorite works of Russian literature occurred to me, and I recited it out loud:
“Pushkin lyubil kidat’sya kamnyami!”
Ivan laughed hard at this and repeated it to Gennady and Vladimir-the-guide, who also laughed and repeated it. As we filled the sacks, everyone was saying,
“Pushkin lyubil kidat’sya kamnyami!”

It is perhaps vain of me to mention this small linguistic triumph, but almost nothing is as satisfying as making someone laugh in a foreign language.
“Pushkin lyubil kidat’sya kamnyami”
(Pushkin loved to throw rocks) is from a piece by Daniil Kharms, the absurdist writer, who was killed by Stalin in 1942. The piece consists of seven short, numbered paragraphs and is called “Anegdotes from the Life of Pushkin.” (The misspelling of “Anecdotes” is intentional.) The sentence about the rocks begins anegdote #6.