Travels in Siberia (28 page)

The next day Sergei and Victor and I checked supplies, packed and repacked the van, and went over maps of our route. I participated mainly as an onlooker. When we were eating a midday meal at Sergei’s apartment, Volodya Chumak arrived, to comradely demonstrations of joy. Volodya is a slim, broad-shouldered man who usually wears neat work shirts and pants in shades of gray. He was fifty at the time, with a full head of graying black hair, blue eyes, and the thin nose and chiseled features of his Ukrainian ancestry. For our trip, Sergei had learned some English, but Volodya spoke none. His everyday Russian hung up now and then on a slight stammer, though after a few beers the words flowed out swiftly and copiously, as if a hand brake had been released. With Volodya was his son, a handsome fellow in his midtwenties who managed breweries in Russia for Labatt, the Canadian brewers. He was traveling for his job and happened to be in town.

Volodya and I spent that night at Sergei’s. Before bed, at what I thought would be an opportune moment, I presented both guides with their Swiss army knives. Volodya opened out all the blades and attachments, examined them, and slipped the knife into his work pants pocket. Sergei oohed and ahhed over the knife, feared to touch it, and put it in a place of honor on a high shelf in his apartment, where, as far as I know, it has remained ever since. Then I gave both guides one-third of their wages
for the journey. This executive act of mine distressed Sergei enormously. His brow furrowed and refurrowed, and disapproval beyond the power of his English to express clouded his eyes. He explained to me that all payments of trip expenses from now on should be made by him. I should give him all the money now, he said, and he would provide me a full receipt at the end. I didn’t go for this idea and tried to counterexplain why I thought all the money should remain with me. Awkwardness in each other’s language (Victor had gone home by then) caused an impasse. Finally, I gave him enough money to last us, I figured, about half the way. Neither of us liked the compromise.

Early on the morning of August 5, Sergei and Volodya brought the van to the back of Sergei’s building. We did our final loading, Sergei said goodbye to his wife and grandson, and we climbed aboard. With Volodya at the wheel, we drove to a meeting place on a highway along the Neva where Victor had come to see us off. We all got out and stood by the road and talked to him and his wife, Lena, for a while. Lena asked me in Russian if I was afraid. The optimism I had enjoyed on the airplane had vanished; I said I was, a bit. She asked the same question of Volodya and he replied, with a shrug, “
Na rabote
,” which means, approximately, “It’s a job.” Victor stood with Sergei and Volodya and me and shook our hands and wished us luck. He said he would see us again, “after your victory!” His eyes were shining, maybe with tears.

We drove off down the highway, Sergei leaning out the passenger-side window and videotaping Victor and Lena as they waved goodbye to us. Then we pulled over and Victor drove up beside us and Sergei handed him the video camera, and Victor and Lena stood beside the road videotaping us driving off while Sergei leaned out the window and waved goodbye to them. Then Victor drove alongside and returned the video camera, and we finally and actually said goodbye.

Setting out, I did not think about the enterprise before us or about our destination a third of the way around the globe. Instead I noticed that the rain, which had been sprinkling, had begun to pour, and the windshield wiper on the passenger side worked only intermittently. The driver’s-side wiper worked all right. The gray Neva beside us reproduced the overcast drabness of the sky and the speeding traffic threw up rooster
tails of spray. By the time we reached the city limits, the oil-pressure warning light on the dashboard had come on. I pointed it out to Sergei and Volodya. They said it was nothing.

The van had been built with the cargo area in the back lower than the front seats, which rested on a raised platform. In the seat Sergei had installed in the back, one therefore had to sit straight up and lean forward in order to see over the dash. For comfort this was not ideal, but I had no choice, because there were no windows on the van’s sides in the back. About the time the oil-pressure light came on I also smelled a strange burning odor, mixed with diesel exhaust. When I mentioned this to Sergei, he rolled his window partway down.

Past the city we turned onto the Murmansk highway eastbound. Its four lanes soon became two. Trucks were speeding toward us in the downpour. I thought Sergei was driving too fast but I couldn’t tell for sure, because the speedometer needle, which had been fluttering spasmodically, suddenly lay down on the left side of the dial and never moved again for the rest of the journey. After a couple of hours we came to the highway leading southeast to Vologda, and we pulled over at the intersection. The rain had let up by then. The intersection appeared to be a popular place to stop, with broad aprons of gravel beside the pavement and trash strewn around. We got out to use the facilities, which were bushes and weeds that had seen such employment before. Near the intersection stood a ruined brick church with grass and small trees growing from its upper towers and from the broken-off parts where the onion domes had been.

The Vologda road led through rural places with people selling potatoes along the narrow shoulder and irregularly shaped yellow meadows sometimes opening widely to the horizon. Then birch forest thronged close around, and Sergei said we were going into a huge swamp where many men had died in battles with the Nazis. People still go back in the swamp and find rusted grenades and skulls in helmets, he said. This conversation got Volodya talking about Ivan Susanin, the heroic Russian peasant who deliberately misled a Polish army deep into a swamp in order to save the life of the first Romanov tsar in the Time of Troubles, during the seventeenth century. The Poles, discovering the trick too late, killed Ivan Susanin before perishing themselves. He is the main character of Glinka’s opera
A Life for the Tsar
, Volodya told me.

(At later moments I would have occasion to remember Ivan Susanin, and wonder if perhaps the Polish army was me.)

The woods continued; now we came to a rotary completely enclosed by forest. On a pedestal in the middle of the rotary, pointing nose-upward as if about to swoop into the sky, was a bright silver MiG fighter jet. I had never seen a MiG up close. We had passed no airbases or factories that I recalled, so I couldn’t figure out what it was doing here. Sergei didn’t seem to know, either. The shiny MiG was a strange object encountered inexplicably in a dark forest, spaceshiplike.

The Vologda road had become a spill of pavement, untrimmed along its edges, with scalloping where the poured asphalt had flowed. Small villages followed one after another at regular intervals, roadside signs announcing their names. Often I looked up the names in my pocket Russian-English dictionary to see what they meant. According to my translations (verified by Sergei), that day we went through villages named Puddle, Jellies, Knee, New Knee, and Smokes.

All along the road, sometimes to heights of ten or twelve feet, grew a plant Volodya identified as
morkovnik
. This plant resembles a roadside weed in America called Queen Anne’s lace—except that
morkovnik
is like our modest, waist-high plant drastically and Asiatically enlarged. Queen Anne’s lace and
morkovnik
are in fact related, both belonging to the carrot family (
morkov’
means “carrot”). Along the route we traveled,
morkovnik
grows abundantly from one end of Russia to the other.

In a larger town, Pikalevo, we stopped to buy bread. When Sergei opened the van door, his cell phone, which he had said would provide a backup to my satellite phone, slid from the car seat and fell into a puddle. As far as I know, it never worked again. And when he returned with a loaf of bread tucked under his arm like a volleyball—in most Russian stores, you must bring your own shopping bags—he hopped into the driver’s seat, turned the key, and received not a sound in response. Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes. How could he not have done a better job of checking out this vehicle before we left? I held my tongue for the time being. He and Volodya persuaded the driver of a passing microbus to pull us for a jump start. They crawled under the bumpers, tied a rope to the frames of both vehicles, and with a quick tug we were running again. Volodya and Sergei acted as if this were just the normal way you start a car.

In early afternoon we stopped at an informal rest area like the one at the intersection of the Murmansk and Vologda roads. Here for the first time I encountered big-time Russian roadside trash. Very, very few trash receptacles exist along the roads of Russia. This rest area, and its ad hoc picnic spots with their benches of downed tree trunks, featured a ground layer of trash basically everywhere, except in a few places, where there was more. In the all-trash encirclement, trash items had piled themselves together here and there in heaps three and four feet tall, as if making common cause. With a quick kicking and scuffing of nearby fragments, Sergei rendered a place beside a log bench relatively trash-free and then laid out our cold chicken lunch on pieces of cellophane on the ground. I ate hungrily, though I did notice through the cellophane many little pieces of broken eggshell from some previous traveler’s meal.

After lunch Volodya and I traded places and I rode in front. Getting the passenger’s-side seat belt to buckle took about ten minutes and the combined efforts of Sergei, Volodya, and me. (As for themselves, neither Sergei nor Volodya used their seat belts once in the entire journey,
though they sometimes draped them across their shoulders when we passed by the checkpoints of the Dorozhnaya Patrulnaya Sluzhba—the DPS, or highway police.) To my complaint about the broken speedometer, Volodya had responded by duct taping the GPS to the dash and setting the digital readout so that it showed kilometers per hour. I asked Sergei please not to drive any faster than about 90 kph (about 55 mph). He smiled politely and agreed. The next time I looked at the dash he was going 110.

The GPS registered that we’d come about five hundred kilometers (about three hundred miles) when we turned off the road late in the afternoon at a village called Pestovo. Driving up and down the dirt roads of the village we found one called Ulitsa Kosmonavta—Cosmonaut Street—and we followed it until we came to a small, neatly kept log house with verdant gardens on both sides and a well with a shingle roof and a little bucket that you cranked up, like in a fairy tale. This was the house of Avdotia Fedorovna, Volodya’s mother-in-law. Here we would spend the night.

Avdotia Fedorovna was a short, wide, fiercely smiling old woman who swayed from side to side when she walked. Probably she suffered from stiffness of the joints; she appeared to be about eighty years old. Usually she lived alone, but at the moment her daughter, Lena, and Lena’s daughter, Olya, had come from Kirov to visit her. Avdotia Fedorovna’s speech varied between a growl and a roar. Among these sounds I could pick out almost no words or phrases I recognized, with the exception of
Velikaya Otchestvennaya Voina
(Great Patriotic War) and
Baltiiskovo Flota
(Baltic Fleet). That gave me more purchase than you might think, though, because she used those phrases a lot.

The Great Patriotic War is what Russians call the Second World War. The almost-inestimable sacrifices the Russian people made in that war and the importance and greatness of their victory are facts everybody can agree on. Every Russian village and town and city has at least one memorial to the war, the way that every American town east of the Mississippi has its Civil War monument. The walls of the larger room in Avdotia Fedorovna’s house were the parlor equivalent of the outdoor memorials to the war. Swaying from side to side, she led me from one photo or medal or citation to another. Three of Avdotia Fedorovna’s brothers had died in the war. Pointing to each faded, milky portrait photograph, she told me his name and military record, and I’m not sure what else. The recitation had a singsong quality from many repetitions, but
her growly voice broke in tears nonetheless a couple of times. Next to the brothers were framed documents and ribbons having to do with her own service as an officer in the Baltic Fleet. A large photo of her in her naval uniform showed a young woman whose features, determinedly set for the photographer, made parallel horizontal lines. She did not look like somebody you would want to mess with at all.

Lena, her daughter, was a quiet blond woman of forty-nine, just a year younger than I. After Avdotia finished, or paused in, her remarks about the war, Lena led me on a tour of the village. Many of the streets had names associated with the Russian space program. I remember Ulitsa Gagarina, after the pioneer cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, and Ulitsa Tereshkovoi, after Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman cosmonaut. From a bridge over the river at the edge of town, we could see women and girls standing on a clothes-washing platform half submerged along the riverbank. They had their skirts up to their thighs and were splashing and treading barefoot on the clothes as the suds floated downstream. Lena showed me ruins of dairy barns and silos and said that agriculture in the region, which had flourished in her youth, had been disintegrating recently.