Travels in Siberia (36 page)

What I want in a city is partly a miragelike quality, an elusive shimmering you can see and dream on from afar. The old part of Tobolsk provides that, with the
kreml
visible at a distance and the humdrum structures of the city not prominent at all. The walls of the
kreml
are white, fifty feet high, with conically shaped towers at each corner. St. Sophia Cathedral, inside the wall, has a large central tower and three subsidiary ones, and their main domes are a light blue with gilded dots on them and gold filigree at the top and bottom, and above are smaller gold domes supporting tall Orthodox crosses. And above all that is the sky and its suggestion of limitless Siberian space, more breathtaking than any modern building could make it seem. As we parked in the parking lot near the
kreml
and walked toward it, I noticed that one end of the structure was under renovation, and the scaffolding erected for it was of planks supported by tall, narrow fir-tree trunks with their bark still on. When the
kreml
was first being built, the scaffolding used then probably looked just the same.

At the walled city’s completion, believers saw the vision made real— “A shining Christian city up in the air, with churches and a great ringing of bells.” The new dispensation had arrived, because Yermak’s victory over Khan Kuchum hadn’t been only that of Cossack over Tatar, but of Christian over Muslim. (Though just how Christian the piratical Yermak, or any of his men, really was is another question.) In a wider context, Russia’s expansion into Siberia can be seen as one of the many struggles between the two religions at the time, and its success partly counterbalanced the blow Christianity suffered when the Ottoman sultan captured Constantinople from Orthodoxy almost 130 years before.

Russian art and popular history tend to depict Yermak’s Tatar enemies generically, just as has been done too often with American Indians. Because of that, I had wondered who Kuchum and the subjects of his khanate really
were
. The Kraevedcheskii Musei (Regional Museum) within Tobolsk’s
kreml
complex offered some clues. Right by the entry were stone tombstones from after the time of Yermak; they commemorated the lives of Tatar noblemen departed into immortality, and they were in Arabic, with many flourishes and swirls, beautifully carved. Arabic is the liturgical language of Islam. Since the thirteenth century, most of the Tatars of Central Asia, including the Mongols and the Genghisite nobility descended from them, had been of the Muslim faith. Khan Kuchum was from a noble family known as the Shaybanids, who traced their lineage back to Shaybani, a brother of Batu. (Batu, you will remember, was the Mongol general and grandson of Genghis Khan who caused the Russians such misery between 1237 and 1241.) The Shaybanids often fought with the Taibugids, a non-Genghisite family also of western Siberia. Kuchum had killed the Taibugid khan, Edigei, and taken over the Siberian khanate not long before Yermak and his men arrived.

During the time of Kuchum, an Ottoman historian wrote a description of these Siberian Muslims. The historian, a man known as Seyfi Çelebi, reported that the leader of these people, Khan Kuchum, of the race of Genghis, was a Muslim of the Hanefite school. Hanefite teachings comprise one of the four schools of Islamic law and differ from the other schools in that they pay more attention to the law’s spirit than to its strict word. Thus the Hanefite philosophy is more congenial to non-Arab, far-flung parts of Islam because of its flexibility in accommodating local customs. Seyfi Çelebi said that near Khan Kuchum’s country there were bizarre people without religion, whose language no one could understand—he meant Siberian native peoples, many of whom would join Kuchum in his fight against Yermak—and he added that at certain times of the year in these lands the nights were so short that for twenty-four straight days it was impossible to finish evening prayer before the first rays of dawn appeared.

Yermak defeated the Tatars partly because his Cossacks had “arquebuses,” while the Tatars used mainly arrows and spears. In the climactic battle by the Irtysh River, Yermak’s men not only won, but then made a captive of the Tatar general, who happened to be Khan Kuchum’s nephew, Mametkul. Afterward, Yermak sent Mametkul under guard to Moscow.
I earlier described how Khan Kuchum rallied, defeated the Cossacks, killed Yermak, and drove the Russians out, only to lose these gains as the Russians came back and reconquered the strategic points of western Siberia one by one. Forced to flee, Kuchum took refuge among a northern tribe called the Nagai, who soon killed him.

He might have had better luck surrendering to the Russians; with many of the captured Tatar nobility, the Russians did as they had done with Mametkul and sent them back to Moscow. There the tsars took a lenient, even generous attitude toward their brother nobles from the East. Mametkul was made a general and survived to serve under Boris Godunov. Ivan the Terrible gave the Tatar princes revenues and estates, and many became the founders of Russian noble families. Of course a condition of the tsar’s largess always was that the captured Tatars renounce Islam and convert to Christianity.

The Tobolsk museum had a lot of cool stuff. Besides the replica of the Uglich bell, there was a display about Tatar villages that had existed in the Tobolsk area during the time of Yermak. At or near the site of Berezovyi Yar had been a village called Tarkan-Kala. A large case contained chains worn by Siberian convicts, such as the leg-and-arm chains, the
dvoinie kandali
(double chains), a contraption that must have weighed twenty-five pounds. Another exhibit detailed the life and career of Dmitri I. Mendeleev, the chemist who devised the periodic table. Born in Tobolsk in 1834, Mendeleev is the most famous person ever to come from that city.

In fact, Mendeleev is probably the most famous person ever to come from Siberia, period. After I learned about him, I was always on the lookout for other well-known Siberians, and I found that there aren’t many. Admittedly, Siberia’s population has never been large, but somehow I expected it to have more famous sons and daughters than, say, Cleveland, Ohio. The goatish and wicked Rasputin I have mentioned already; he falls into the “infamous” category. Many people know that Boris Yeltsin, Russia’s first elected president, came from Ekaterinburg. Raisa Gorbachev, wife of the father of glasnost, was from the city of Rubtsovsk in Siberia’s mountainous Altai region in the south. And on the still-active list of the politically inclined, Kim Jong-Il, the seriocomic dictator of North Korea, was born in 1942 in a wartime internment camp for Koreans near the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk.

Among famous people in the arts, the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev also qualifies technically as a Siberian. Nureyev was born in 1938 in the
vicinity of Irkutsk on an eastbound Trans-Siberian train. His parents, Hamet and Farida Nureyev, were Tatars, and Nureyev was raised Muslim. In later years he said that coming into the world while in transit contributed to his feeling of never belonging to any home or country. A more patriotic Siberian was Vasily Surikov, the nineteenth-century painter whose large-scale historical canvasses have become part of Russia’s cultural memory; Surikov was born and grew up in the city of Krasnoyarsk, on the Yenisei River. His dramatic painting of Yermak’s battle with the army of Khan Kuchum bristles with the generic Tatars I was talking about before.

The poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, whose work is closely associated with the 1960s and the warming of the Cold War, came from Zima Junction, a village on the Trans-Siberian about two hundred miles from Baikal. Yevtushenko has said that his nineteenth-century ancestors were exiled to Siberia for burning down their landowner’s house, and that his great-grandmother had also killed a village constable with a single blow of her fist. A lesser-known writer, Esphyr Slobodkina, the children’s book author and illustrator, was born in 1908 in the western Siberian city of Chelyabinsk. She immigrated to America with her family in the late 1920s. If you have children, you might know her book
Caps for Sale
. It’s about a monkey who steals hats from a hat peddler and goes up a tree. For a while, I was reading it to my kids almost every night.

Yul Brynner, the late stage and screen actor, is the only Siberian-born celebrity I ever saw in person. His grandfather Yulius Brynner was a Swiss merchant who owned a large trading company in Vladivostok. Yulius married a woman described by the family as “a Mongolian princess” descended from Genghis Khan, thus making Yul Brynner distant cousin to Vladimir Nabokov, Khan Kuchum, and half of Asia. People remember Yul Brynner mainly as the king in
The King and I
, a role he played for a record-breaking 4,633 performances, one of which I saw. In the sixties he met and palled around with Rudolf Nureyev, thus creating a very rare conjunction of Siberian-born celebrities. To resolve Nureyev’s passport problems, Brynner even considered adopting him, but nothing came of the plan.

As we were leaving the Tobolsk museum, an Englishman, overhearing me speaking Russian to Sergei, came up and asked in English where I
was from. I told him I was from London, England. He eyed me skeptically and asked where in London. I said from a little neighborhood down by the Thames that he’d probably never heard of. I didn’t even bother to put on an accent. He let that go by and asked what I was doing in Tobolsk, and I told him we were driving across Siberia, and so on. He asked me some other questions. I really enjoyed talking English with him. After a few minutes he smiled and said, “You know, I’m going to put you in my book!” I don’t know if he ever did. According to my notes, his name was Simon Richmond. I would not run into another anglophone for the next three thousand miles.

Sergei and I walked around old Tobolsk, looked at the hill beside the
kreml
that is said to have been the site of Yermak’s great battle, and attended part of an afternoon service at the St. Sophia Cathedral. The congregation consisted almost entirely of old women. Then we met Volodya back at the van and retraced our route to the previous night’s camping place at Berezovyi Yar. When we arrived there, Sergei and Volodya could hardly wait to finish putting up the tents and eating supper before taking off for the village. This time I didn’t pay their absence any mind. For one thing, the wind had died down and the mosquitoes of Berezovyi Yar exceeded all the Siberian swarms we had seen before. Mainly I kept moving, trying to create a slipstream effect that made it harder for the fiends to land. In the evening I did a sketch of the Tobol River, hopping and bobbing and feinting all the while. Then I noticed that the river’s surface was alive with little circles made by rising fish. Setting up my fly rod, I cast a tiny minnow imitation to a few of the rises and immediately caught several pike, none of them longer than five inches. As I was fishing, a Tatar family drove their car down to the shore and two of the men took out a seine net of monofilament woven into a very fine mesh. Casting the net, they began to haul in load after load of baby pike and then empty the pike into big plastic paint buckets. In Russia, people will catch and eat fish no larger than a little finger.

Later I stayed up and looked at the stars. I could not believe the depth of the sky. In modern-day, lit-up America, almost none of us sees the stars anymore. Here on the Tobol, the bright multitude of stars and planets overwhelmed me so that I’m not sure I even found the North Star. Every now and then I did see a satellite go over like a lone car on a remote stretch of road. For fun I took out my satellite phone and called home, where it was midmorning of the previous day, and I imagined that the call went streaking upward to the satellite I could just see coming into view. I found my wife and kids sitting around the house on a Thursday morning.

We talked about ordinary things. Here in this place that used to be beyond the beyond, I was having a conversation with my wife in New Jersey about getting our front porch steps repaired. My daughter told me about her dance class, and my son described his new video game, “Angry Angry Aztecs.” The conversations lasted for a long time, racking up a bill. Then I said goodbye and crawled into my tent and slept peacefully, with no interruptions or alarms.

The next days took us to and through the city of Omsk. I had been there twice before, but only at the airport. Omsk presented the usual row on row of crumbling high-rise apartment buildings, tall roadside weeds, smoky traffic, and blowing dust. For a moment we passed an oasis scene—a crowded beach beside the Irtysh River, kids running into the water and splashing—before the city’s grittiness resumed. Solzhenitsyn wrote that he spent time in an ancient prison in Omsk that had once held Dostoyevsky, and that the prison’s ten-foot-thick stone walls and vaulted ceilings resembled a dungeon in a movie. I had wanted to explore Omsk looking for this prison but forgot that idea entirely in our collective eagerness to get out of Omsk. We stopped just to buy groceries, then sped on.

We were hungry and wanted to pull over for lunch, but the roadside was strewn with trash for a long way outside the city. Finally Sergei chose a place that appeared from a distance to be less trashed but actually wasn’t. When we got out of the van and looked around, I noticed that the dumping here seemed to have been mostly industrial—empty spools of wire, frayed pieces of cable, broken fluorescent lightbulbs, and big heaps of curlicue-shaped steel shavings from a metal lathe mingled with the luxuriant ground foliage. There was also a felled telephone pole, convenient to sit on, so what the heck, we stayed and broke out the eats. The treat that Sergei had planned for us that day was thick slices of freshly baked
black raisin bread on top of which he put chunks of canned mackerel dripping with oil and garnished with peeled cloves of garlic cut in half. Raisin bread, mackerel, and garlic. As he handed me my portion, my stomach hesitated. I ate it all, however, and then washed it down with tinny-tasting canned orange juice from Georgia—in retrospect, another mistake.