Travels in Siberia (35 page)

Now that we were unmistakably in Siberia, I had got the idea that I should set about finding some prisons and had broached this possibility to Sergei. He had taken an even dimmer view of it than he had of my writing down the names on the monument outside Ekaterinburg. He folded his brow into its deepest furrows and winced and shook his head and gave me fragments of reasons why this search for prisons could not be done. Then he continued driving at sixty miles an hour. During our earlier, polite phase, I had had the illusion that I was in charge of this expedition. Now I began to feel that they were the ones taking the trip and I was along for the ride.

As we followed the banks of the Tura River going northeast, we came to the village of Pokrovskoye. I had wanted to check this village out because it was the hometown of Rasputin—not Valentin Rasputin, the writer, but the original unhinged self-described holy man Grigory Rasputin, abettor of the downfall of the Romanov line. The village was all gray wood and stretched along the river for miles. Sergei did not care to look for Rasputin memorabilia—an old church associated with Rasputin, perhaps, or a Rasputin museum. And unlike Ded Moroz, Rasputin was not the kind of celebrity whose homeplace seemed eager to claim him; no signs anywhere, including at either edge of town, mentioned his name.
Later I heard that there is a small Rasputin museum in Pokrovskoye, but you have to make arrangements in advance. Sergei drove straight through the village without a pause while I fretted and said nothing.

Rasputin, it was said, gave off a powerful odor of goat. What a museum you could make about a guy like that! Oh, well.

A few hours later we came to a river I’d long wanted to see—the Tobol. This is the river that Yermak, the almost-mythical conqueror of Siberia, traveled as he approached his decisive battle with the Siberian khan. The problem was, we could glimpse the river only off in the distance, because for most of its length it’s really more like a deeper part of a continuous swamp. Trying to get close to it in the late afternoon, we drove up on a small hill. Birch groves and a meadow of long grasses covered the hill, which on its far side ended at a cliff, descending steeply to the Tobol itself. Here the view swept far around a long continuation of the cliff, enclosing a wide swath of water made by a sharply turning river bend. This seemed an ideal camping place. Sergei parked the van back from the cliff, in a clearing in the birch woods, and set up the tents for the night.

Along the cliff a mile or so away, the roofs and smokestacks of a village mingled with the silhouetted trees. According to somebody we had asked on the road, the village was called Berezovyi Yar (Birch Cliff). A breeze rendered our supper pleasantly mosquito-free. After the meal, as the light was declining, Sergei and Volodya proposed that they walk over to the village, buy some bread, and find out information about the area. While they were there, I would keep watch over the camp and the van.

I did not like being left in camp, but I had brought that duty on myself. What with my awkwardness in the language, and the fact that I didn’t drink, I sometimes preferred to stay in camp and read a book while Sergei and Volodya were hanging out and socializing with people they’d met along the way. But that does not quite describe the problem, either. By now we were in remote places where the arrival of a vehicle with St. Petersburg license plates was news. Even the highway police, when they waved us over at checkpoints, were a bit wide-eyed as they examined our documents—“Where do you live in America? What do you do?” and so on. One young policeman, before he saw my passport, asked wistfully, “Is it expensive to live in St. Petersburg?” And this curiosity seemed to affect the local women even more strongly than it did the men.

I’m not saying that women paraded through our campsites wherever we happened to be, but they did show up occasionally, even when we
were camped far from any village. A few nights before, in a glade well off the road, I had just got into my sleeping bag when Sergei rousted me out so I could meet two women whom he described as schoolteachers eager to meet me. Dutifully I got up and emerged and made conversation with the schoolteachers for a while. They had wanted to see the American, and I think Sergei had felt compelled to prove that he really did have one. Then he and Volodya and the schoolteachers went off—to a birthday party, Sergei said—at a picnic spot nearby. I demurred and returned to my tent. The idea of chasing women in Siberia would have made me nervous even had I not been married. Sergei and Volodya found my reluctance mystifying.

In any event, that night after supper on the banks of the Tobol, Sergei and Volodya trooped away single file down the narrow path along the river on their fact-finding mission to Berezovyi Yar, and I sat on a folding chair and read until the twilight became too faint. They had said they would be back by ten o’clock. I turned in and dozed for a while. At about midnight I stuck my head out of the tent. The campsite was quiet; no sign of the guys. From somewhere came the sound of singing. Restless, I got up and walked around the camp. Because of the clouds, no moon or stars could be seen. Darkness in rural Siberia is a serious business, with no streetlamps or brightly lit gas stations or city glows on the horizon to break the spell. All around was only dark, with the wind in the trees, and the soundless river flowing by.

Maybe Sergei and Volodya weren’t coming back at all. Maybe at this moment they were plotting with confederates—somebody else they’d known back at university, now residing in Berezovyi Yar—to return to our camp when I was asleep and rob me. Maybe my Russian friends in America had been right, and I had naïvely walked into my doom. I know that I sometimes have a tendency to lose my head and think panicky things. I went back into the tent and zipped everything up tight and burrowed into my sleeping bag and tried to calm down. A few minutes later as I lay there, lights swept the top of the tent. Then a distant engine roar began, and grew louder. The lights vanished, then came back again on the other side of the tent. I put my head out the tent flap and caught a glimpse of headlights swooping and bouncing through the trees. There followed some whoops and more engine roars. It seemed someone was out in the birch forest at midnight driving around.

The headlights approached, retreated, approached again. That part of the night passed slowly. I kept the tent flap open, prepared to bail out if it appeared that the car or cars were about to run me over. For a while the shouting became more intense, and the engine roared louder. I imagined that the car must have run itself into a wet place and bogged down. Finally the lights and the noises faded away, as if all had been swallowed by the swamp. The coal-cellar darkness prevailed again, and the river’s faintly lapping quiet. A dog barked and then howled. I couldn’t decide whether it made sense to try to sleep. I just lay there.

Then there was a throbbing, a rumbling as if of something rising under the ground below me. The throbbing got more powerful. Suddenly the whole side of the tent lit up with a blue-white light that magnified the shadows of nearby weeds and sent them sprawling across the nylon. Wanting at least a glimpse of what was about to crush me, I looked from the tent and saw, coming up the river, a barge about a hundred feet long followed by another barge just like it, both of them pushed by a tugboat that was churning water in a surf behind; on the front barge, at its blunt bow, a searchlight the size of a tunnel entrance was swinging the white pillar of its beam over the river, right bank, left bank, trees, and sky.

This floating apparition took a few minutes to pass. After the bow searchlight had gone by, I could see the flat, featureless surfaces of the barge dim in the beam’s shadow. No human forms could be distinguished anywhere. In the tug’s high pilothouse only a blue glow comforted whoever was within. As the tug came alongside, the throbbing of its engines filled the night. Then tug and barges receded, and the bow light could be seen careening through the dark in the distance for ten minutes or more, while the river continued to slosh at the bank below like a bathtub someone had jumped into. Then the dark and the quiet returned.

When Sergei finally came back, at about three thirty, I yelled at him. Giving up on sleep, I had sat waiting for him in a camp chair getting madder and madder. At my tirade, he tried to soothe and reassure me. The memory is humiliating. Why did I let him see that I’d been scared? Rather than wait up, I should have just chilled and gone back to sleep. The chances of anything happening were remote. I should have understood that while I was basically semifearful and watchful most of the time on our journey, Sergei and Volodya were having a ball. In this land where I never stopped feeling strange, they enjoyed perfect ease and
even a sense of glamour, of being welcome everywhere they went. When they said they were coming back at such and such an hour, they meant if no interesting opportunities arose. What did I expect? Sergei didn’t even wear a watch. I should have been happy to be the originator of their good time. Still, I had not liked being by myself in camp in the middle of the night.

Tobolsk, our local destination—a must-see as far as I was concerned—was about an hour and a half away. In the morning Sergei announced that we would drive to Tobolsk now, spend the day there, then come back here and camp for another night. (The main road, like the old Trakt and the route of the Trans-Siberian, runs a few hundred miles to the south of Tobolsk, bypassing and isolating the former Siberian capital, so we would have to go by here on our return to the main road anyway.) I gave the plan my okay. Rather tiredly, he and Volodya broke camp and packed the van. Then we drove off, with a first stop at the village, where three women were waiting for us. The youngest of them, a sturdy, round woman of about thirty with blond-streaked hair, came up to Sergei and took his hand. She seemed delighted with her luck in having met him. The other two women were in their late fifties or early sixties and did not appear to have been principals in last night’s socializing. These two women were sisters. One of them was the blond-streaked young woman’s mother, the other her aunt.

Both the aunt and the mother had brown, deeply weathered faces. The mother wore a brown cloth Lenin-type cap, a dark gray overcoat-smock with holes in it, brown bloused pants with red-brown patches, and knee-high rubber boots. The aunt was dressed similarly, but she had a head of wiry hair dyed yellow-orange. Both carried big galvanized pails. They were on their way to pick berries, and we were going to give them a ride to the berry patch a couple of miles away. The mother started right in talking to me. Sergei must have told her that I was interested in Yermak, because she informed me that Yermak and his men had camped at the exact spot where we were last night. I asked how she knew this and she said, “It’s a fact, everybody knows it,” adding that the aunt had even written a paper about this subject. The aunt nodded her head in confirmation. The mother went on to tell us about the aunt’s paper, and what it said, and where it was published. With more verifying nods, the aunt
backed up each detail. I asked the aunt what her job was. “She’s a philologist,” the mother said. With matter-of-fact pride the aunt nodded again.

At the berry patch, the mother showed me what they were picking—a small, round berry growing close to the ground on a plant with leaves like strawberry leaves. It looked like a holly berry and was very sour but sweet, with a big stone. There were thousands of them. The mother said its name was
kostyanika
(the name means “stone berry”). She said they made a jam of it to put in tea.

As for her information about Yermak, later I read in a Russian chronicle from the late seventeenth century that the Cossack leader and his men, having fought one battle with the warriors of the khan of Sibir, “sailed on the 8th day of June down the river Tobol, fighting and living on the alert. When they reached the landmark of Berezovyi Yar [!] a great battle was fought lasting many days. The infidels were like sheep rushing out of their folds but with God’s help and the manifestation of heavenly hosts they too were defeated.”

The chronicle is called the
Remezov Chronicle
, after its author, Semyon Remezov, of Tobolsk (born 1648), who was also Siberia’s first cartographer. His account of Yermak’s conquests consists of small blocks of text, each of which is accompanied by a schematic and cartoonlike drawing of the action described. Downstream of Berezovyi Yar, Khan Kuchum and his forces barred the Russians’ way with chains across a narrow part of the Tobol. Yermak defeated this tactic by manning his boats with stuffed dummies, while he and his Cossacks detoured around on land and surprised the enemy from the rear. Farther down, the Tatars set another ambush along the shore, and the picture accompanying this text shows Jesus himself carrying a sword in the sky above Yermak’s boats: “then all the infidels saw how along that bank there appeared on clouds the great and wonderfully beautiful king in a bright light with many winged warriors flying and bearing his throne on their shoulders . . . O wonderful miracle! According to the infidels’ own accounts, the arms of those strong in archery who shot at him from afar went dead by divine fate and their bows were shattered.”

The chronicler notes that even before Yermak came, the Tatars had been afflicted by a disturbing premonition, in the form of “a vision of a shining Christian city up in the air, with churches and a great ringing of bells.” The site of this imagined city was the geographic eminence soon
to be occupied by Tobolsk. Now, as we drove toward Tobolsk from Berezovyi Yar, I had an envisioned city in my mind, too—something striking and celestial along the lines of Velikii Ustyug. Many cities today are just denser parts of a big sprawl, and dull to look at. The closer we got to Tobolsk, the more I feared that’s what it would be. Cement fences and cement-block buildings and the usual decrepit Soviet high-rises seemed to be all there were, until unexpectedly we passed through that zone and came to the
kreml
—the walled city—of old Tobolsk. It’s the oldest stone
kreml
in Siberia, built beginning in 1587, and on its promontory two hundred feet or more above the floodplain of the Tobol and Irtysh rivers it rises skyward like the fabled crossroads of Asiatic caravan traffic that it used to be.