Travels in Siberia (29 page)

Hills rose above another part of town, and we hiked up into them on well-maintained asphalt lanes we had to share with young men and women speeding by on cross-country skis equipped with little wheels. I had never seen wheeled skis before and would not have guessed you could go so fast on them. The statuesque and sweat-glistening skiers thrusting powerfully with their rubber-tipped poles gave me a quick flashback to the state-engineered
Übermenschen
who were supposed to bury us during the Cold War.

Back at Avdotia Fedorovna’s garden, as she and Lena gathered gooseberries, raspberries, parsley, radishes, and little yellow potatoes for supper, they talked about the Soviet aerodrome that used to be near the village. Planes used to fly from here to bomb the Germans during the war. Lena said she remembered when she was a girl there were big reunions of pilots who had been stationed here, and they sometimes did air shows and flew low over the dairy barns. Putting in my two cents, I added that some of the planes those pilots flew during the war had been built in the city of Detroit, not far from where I grew up, and that they had been flown here from Alaska and across Siberia as part of the Lend-Lease program. My attempt to join the Great Patriotic War conversation met
with silence. America lost four hundred thousand people in the war, a frightening number; but Russia’s dead numbered about twenty million. To many Russians, America’s participation in the war was that of a bystander who holds the combatants’ coats and steps in at the end to finish off the loser.

Sergei and Volodya and I spent that night in the front room with the war memorials. For a long time I lay awake while Sergei and Volodya snored. The bare floorboards I spread my sleeping bag on were hard, but I liked the feeling of the house overall. It had the folk-art, personalized appeal of an object made completely by hand. The trimmed logs of its walls were chinked not with plaster, as in log homes in America, but with moss. I had noticed the pale-green chinking and asked Lena about it. She told me what kind of moss it was and where in the forest it could be found, and said that this particular kind of moss resists insects and rot and mold. The back of the house gave directly onto a haymow where Avdotia Fedorovna stored bales of hay for the milk cow and calf she kept in a shed out back. Stuck through the rafters near the hay were a hand-carved hay rake and a yoke of peeled wood for carrying milk pails. The sweet smell of dried alfalfa faintly pervaded the house.

No matter how benign your surroundings, you can lie awake for only so long without going a little nuts. Worries about my satellite phone suddenly began racking me. I had plugged the phone in to recharge it, but I became convinced I hadn’t connected it right, and now nothing would do but I must unplug it and make a call home right away to see that it was working okay. I had not yet used the phone in Russia. I put on my trousers and took the phone quietly outdoors through a side door and a storage room into the village’s pale, dead-quiet dawn. I turned the phone on, found a satellite, dialed: no luck. Dialed again: ditto. Dialed another twenty times. My head was an implosion of frustrated cries and curses. Back inside the house I took out the satellite-phone manual and read it over and over. Had there been someone else available for me to blame for the nonfunction, I would have done so, but unfortunately the only fault here was that of my own denseness—a fact that aggravated me even more. Finally on the tenth reading of the manual I understood that I had been dialing one digit wrong in the international access code. I went outside again, dialed correctly, and found myself talking to my wife. We had a brief, affectionate, unsatisfactory conversation. With new respect
for my own tech-support skills, I went back in and dozed successfully for a while.

When Sergei and Volodya awoke that morning and set out to buy groceries and fuel, the van wouldn’t start. They strolled the village until they found someone with jumper cables. After a jump start they drove off and were gone for a long time. I sat around at Avdotia Fedorovna’s and fooled with my stuff and fumed. When they finally came back, they were all smiles. Sergei proudly showed me some of his grocery purchases, including the real prize—little cartons of yogurt from Finland. “Ahhh, from Finland!” he said, displaying a sample carton for my admiration on the palm of his hand. Almost as an aside he mentioned that they had been to a garage, and all the problems of the van had been cured.

Unsurprisingly, that turned out not to be true.

Before we left, Avdotia Fedorovna gave us a midday meal of beef-and-potato stew, salad with fresh garden tomatoes, homemade cookies, and tea. After it, I made her a present of my extra pair of knee-high rubber boots. She put them on immediately and walked all around her garden in them trying them out and growling happily. To Olya, her granddaughter, I gave a few Beanie Babies and a New York skyline snow globe. Olya kept shaking it up and down and watching the snow fall among the buildings. With the delays because of the van and then this final socializing, we didn’t get off until two in the afternoon.

Back on the Vologda road we continued in the direction of Cherepovets, where, Sergei said, we would take a side road to a famous monastery. He said the monastery would be interesting for me. The monastery hadn’t been on my own itinerary, but I didn’t object. After not many miles, the warning light for the engine generator lit up on the dashboard, making a companion for the oil-pressure light, which had never gone off. I expected that soon every warning light on the dashboard would be glowing. I pointed out the generator light to Sergei, and to humor me he said that we would stop and have the generator looked at in Cherepovets.

If that city consists of buildings, like a conventional city, you couldn’t prove it by me, because all I saw of it was complicated highway ramps among a forest of power-line towers. The towers were everywhere, many stories high, sometimes clustering right up next to one another like groves
of trees all striving for the daylight. Of daylight itself there was almost none; a tarpaulin of gray clouds overlay the entire scene. Somewhere Sergei spotted a garage in a roadside expanse of mud and gravel and pulled up in front of the bay door. Just at that moment the garageman came out, yanked a rope, and pulled the bay door down. He informed Sergei that the garage was now closed for the day. Then the garageman hurried to his car and sped away into the power-line forest. Sergei returned to the van, reseated himself behind the steering wheel, and turned the key. From the engine came no sound of any kind.

With this particular nonstarting of the van, we entered an odd zone—a sort of horse latitudes of confusion and delay caused by the mysterious problems of our vehicle. At low moments I thought I might bounce around in this zone and stay in western Russia forever. The episode comes back to me in flashes:

Here are Sergei and Volodya and me pushing the van away from the garage bay door, and then heaving and straining from behind to build up enough speed in order to start the engine by popping the clutch. Finally, at our breaking point, Volodya runs up to the open driver’s-side door, leaps in, throws the gear shift into first, and the engine coughs alive.

Here we are in the city of Vologda, about eighty-five miles down the road, where Vyacheslav, the brother of a friend of Sergei’s wife’s, lives. Night has fallen. We are in a parking lot behind some buildings with our weakly idling van. Vyacheslav arrives. He is like a provincial nobleman from a nineteenth-century novel. He is tall and straight, with Tatar eyes, a round head, and Lenin-pattern baldness. He wears a well-tailored shirt of white, finely woven cotton; freshly pressed slacks; and polished brown loafers with silver buckles. His confident and peremptory manner shows not a particle of doubt. In the silvery aura of the headlights of his shiny new Volvo sedan, he says he knows an excellent mechanic who will repair the van tomorrow. For now, we will stay at his dacha, seventeen miles out of town. We will leave the van here in this parking lot overnight. Someone must stay with it to watch our things. This job falls to Volodya. He accepts it with a shrug.

Here we are—Vyacheslav, Sergei, and I—rocketing out of Vologda in Vyacheslav’s car. He is going seventy-five miles an hour. He and Sergei are having a telegraphic conversation about mutual friends, impossible to understand. I am in the Volvo’s backseat, down in the soothing leather
upholstery. Little interior lights on various control panels glow comfortingly. None signal impending engine failure. Outside all is dark.

Here we are in Vyacheslav’s large brick dacha, in a densely packed village of dachas. Vyacheslav’s is set off from the others by a brick wall with a steel gate. On the other side of the driveway, but inside the wall, is a smaller dacha, which Vyacheslav has told me is the dacha of his security staff.

Here we are rocketing back to Vologda in the early morning. The faithful Volodya, when we find him, is walking up and down unhappily in the parking lot. He looks a bit worn from his night in the van. Vyacheslav’s mechanic has been summoned and is on his way. Now, Vyacheslav tells us, we will go to a tennis exhibition put on by his son, a rising tennis star. Then we will take a tour of Vyacheslav’s factory. Meanwhile Volodya will stay and deal with the mechanic and the van.

Here we are in Vyacheslav’s factory. He owns a company called Start-Plus; it bottles a mineral water called Serebrenaya Rosa, which means “silver dew.” The factory is a Soviet-era cement-and-brick pile reconfigured into a bottling plant, with many hallways, storerooms, catwalks. As we go through it, Vyacheslav tells me that he was trained originally as an engineer in metallurgy, but after meeting the founder of the first Russian bottled water company, he got the idea of starting such a business himself. With friends, he formed a company, hired a team of geologists to search for springs, found the water of one particular spring to be good-tasting and extremely healthful, and began to bottle it. The company’s success has been enormous. He attributes this to the company’s collective method of working, and to the water itself, which he says is better and purer than bottled water in America, where what is sold as spring water is actually fake—distilled, or piped from a public water supply. His bottled water is alive, he says, while bottled water in America is “dead water.” In office after office, he introduces me to his employees, who stand at their desks and smile and say they are pleased to meet me.

Here we are in Vyacheslav’s own office. His desk extends toward me in a sweep of warm, dark wood. Sergei has gone to see what is keeping Volodya with the van. Vyacheslav tells me he would like my advice about something. He has a new beverage, a lime-flavored mineral water, and he does not know what bottle would be right for it. A manufacturer of bottles has sent him five samples. Would I kindly examine the five samples and tell him which bottle I, as an American, would prefer to drink a
lime-flavored mineral water from? Nothing loath, I look carefully at each sample bottle, examine them one more time, and gravely choose the bottle that somehow seems the best to me. Vyacheslav narrows his eyes thoughtfully, nods his head, and sets the bottle I have chosen to one side.

Here I am taking a walking tour of the city of Vologda with Stanislaus, a vice president of the Start-Plus company. The van, which we hoped would be fixed by now, has apparently presented some new difficulties. Stanislaus is in his seventies, with thinning blond hair combed back, faded blue eyes, and an easygoing style. He seems to have done this kind of duty before. He shows me a cathedral that Ivan the Terrible got built in record time by denying food to the workers when they progressed too slowly; soon after the cathedral was finished, it began to fall apart, and it wasn’t consecrated for many years. Stanislaus also shows me the house of the first translator of Marx’s
Das Kapital
into Russian, and the building where Lenin’s sister lived while in exile, and a statue of Lenin that Stanislaus says is the only life-sized statue of Lenin in the world. It looks painful—as if the powerful Bolshevik had simply stood on a pedestal and been bronzed alive.

Now here I am with Stanislaus and Vyacheslav in a restaurant in Vologda having a late lunch. No word at the moment on the van. Vyacheslav asks me about the writing business in America. For example, how much do my books sell for, and what percentage of that price goes to me? He will publish my books in Russia, he says. Today he is wearing an even more elegant shirt than the one he wore the night before. This shirt has a collar and cuffs white as new stationery, and on the rest of it, a pattern like fine blue lines on graph paper. I tell Vyacheslav that his shirt is extraordinary. He agrees that it is and says, “I bought it in Paris. I go to Paris every week to buy my clothes.”

“Remarkable!” I tell him.

“That is actually a joke,” he says.

“A joke?”

“It is not a joke that I bought this shirt in Paris. But it is a joke that I go to Paris every week to buy my clothes.”

Here I am turning down a tumblerful of the liter of iced vodka Vyacheslav and Stanislaus have ordered with our lunch. My refusal puts Stanislaus in a thoughtful mood. “I had heard that Americans no longer smoked, but I did not know they had stopped drinking, also,” he says.

Here we are back in Vyacheslav’s office. Sergei and Volodya have just arrived. The van is out of the shop and supposedly ready to go. A conference of the executives of the Start-Plus company has been assembled to determine what we travelers should do now. My own plan is simple: let’s go. Oh, but that is an overly hasty idea, I am told. The afternoon is almost gone. We should not leave now, but instead stay another night at Vyacheslav’s dacha. Sergei and Volodya both strongly favor this idea. What can I do but agree?

Even more important is the second order of business: What route should we take tomorrow when we do leave Vologda? I want to go straight east and get over the Urals to Siberia as expeditiously as possible. Again, this idea is ill considered, the Vologdans say. A Start-Plus executive with a pouchy face and hair dyed a bright mahogany shade has maps and papers assembled to demonstrate the proper route—namely, up the Sukhona River from Vologda to that river’s meeting with the mighty Iug River, where the confluence of the two forms an even mightier river, the Severnaya Dvina. That, the executive says, is the route the early travelers to Siberia took. And, he adds, the city of Velikii Ustyug, at the confluence point, is one of the most beautiful cities in Russia and possibly in the world. A good road parallels the Sukhona all the way to Velikii Ustyug. Eventually, overwhelmed by popular opinion, I again agree.