Travels in Siberia (39 page)

While that rebranding was going on, I walked around downtown Novosibirsk, which reminded me of Seattle with Lenin statues. At the Vladimir Mayakovsky Kinotheatre, two movies were playing:
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles
and
Scary Movie 2.
The air that gusted out of an entrance to the Novosibirsk metro when a train went by smelled just like the Moscow metro two thousand miles away. Then Sergei and Volodya picked me up in the van and we drove back to Akademgorodok for a last meal with Sergei Prigarin at the cafeteria at his institute. Afterward, we bade him farewell, he wished us safe travels, and we headed east from greater Novosibirsk under the flag of the Ministry of Extraordinary Situations.

Now, a short interlude of traveling music on the balalaika, and a few images from the road in no particular order, movie-style:

TRASH: The more of it I saw, the better I understood how it differs from American roadside trash. Russian trash has less paper. Paper plates and paper cups, especially, are almost never seen. The basic and most common item of Russian roadside trash is the handmade plastic drinking cup, which is improvised on the spot by cutting off the bottom quarter or third of a plastic bottle that formerly contained water, soda, or beer. Some of these bottle-bottom cups are neatly trimmed at the lip, but most look ragged and slapdash. The sturdier ones are made from bottles with thicker sections of black plastic reinforcing their bases. After use, the cups are naturally left where they were created, along the road or at the picnic grounds. In more frequented parts of Siberia from the Urals to the Pacific, you see these cups along the roads everywhere.

RAVENS AND CROWS: I have mentioned that the gray-and-black hooded crows, and their all-black companions, the ordinary crows and ravens, seem to be awaiting the return of Genghis Khan. For weeks as we drove, the flocks of ravens and crows remained a constant—ubiquitous in western Siberia no less than in St. Petersburg. On the Barabinsk Steppe, collections of all these birds sometimes wheeled in great numbers that vivified the blank sky above the wide-open horizon. Past Novosibirsk, however, it suddenly occurred to me that although I was still seeing black crows and ravens, I hadn’t seen any hooded crows for a
while. I began keeping a special watch for hooded crows and did see a few stragglers. But after another hundred miles or so, no more of them appeared. Beyond the city of Krasnoyarsk there were none, though the ravens and other crows continued all the way to the Pacific. As an observer of Siberian fauna I have nothing to add to the tradition of Müller, Pallas, Steller, and others beyond verifying or reverifying the fact that the hooded crow is not to be found in Siberia east of the Yenisei.

PRISONS: Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a prison, but invariably it went by too fast. Prisons cropped up in unexpected places on the outskirts of a city. Suddenly I’d see a guard in boots carrying a machine gun and standing on a catwalk directly above an exercise yard. But always, it seemed, we were in traffic and couldn’t stop. Outside Novosibirsk I saw derelict guard towers, tumbledown buildings, and drooping barbed wire in a broad, open place beside the road. Whenever I pointed to such a site, Sergei and Volodya would say “military” without even turning their heads. My ongoing search for prisons did not sit well with either of them. After a while I decided that pursuing it too much was impolite, and I let it drop for the time being.

PIGS: Although roaming herds of pigs were occasional in villages in western Siberia, east of Novosibirsk they became more common. Now every village we went through seemed to have big gangs of them. Because the weather was so hot, the pigs had generally been wallowing in a mud hole just before they got up to amble wherever we happened to see them ambling. Evidently, the wallowing technique of some pigs involved lying with just one side of themselves in the mud. This produced two-tone animals—pigs that were half wet, shiny, brown mud, and half pink, relatively unsoiled original pig. The effect was striking—sort of harlequin. The other animals that roamed the villages in groups were geese. When a herd of pigs came face-to-face with a flock of geese, an unholy racket of grunting and gabbling ensued. I wondered if the villagers ever got tired of the noise. Whether challenging pigs or not, the village geese seemed to gabble and yack and hiss nonstop. The pigs grunted and oinked almost as much, but always at some point the whole herd of pigs would suddenly fall silent, and their megaphone-shaped ears would all go up, and for half a minute every pig would listen.

BIRTHPLACE OF VOLODYA: About a half day past Novosibirsk we passed close by a village called Yashkino. Seeing it on our road map, Volodya remarked that he had been born there. His mother’s people
were originally from this area, he said. His father, a tank officer who had been stationed in the Far East at the end of the war, had met his mother while crossing Siberia on his way back to western Russia. Volodya was still a baby when he and his parents left Yashkino, so he had no memory of it; no relatives he knew of still lived there. He felt no need to go there.

COTTAGE CHEESE: Called
tvorog
in Russian, this was a favorite lunch of Volodya’s and Sergei’s. Usually it could be obtained in very fresh supply from the grannies along the road, who dispensed it in small sacks of clear plastic. Sergei and Volodya especially liked their
tvorog
drenched in
smetana
(sour cream). I got to like it that way, too. Sometimes we had
tvorog so smetanoi
not only for lunch but also for a snack later in the day. The only drawback to this diet was that it made us smell like babies. And as we were able to bathe only infrequently, our basic aroma became that of grown-up, dusty, sweaty babies—the summertime smell of Mongols, in other words.

TALK RADIO: There is talk radio in Russia just as in America, and call-in radio shows, and shock-jock hosts who say outlandish things. Sergei and Volodya enjoyed listening to these shows sometimes. Usually I understood nothing that was said on the radio, except for one time when the host told a joke that Sergei and Volodya both laughed at. I picked out the word “
Americantsi
,” so I knew the joke was about Americans. I asked them to tell me the joke, but they wouldn’t. I kept bugging them, but Sergei said the joke was not important. Finally when he was off doing something in the campsite I asked Volodya about the joke again, and he told it to me. The joke was: “Why do American men want to be present when their wives are in childbirth?” Answer: “Because maybe they weren’t present during conception.”

(Many Russian men think American men are unmanly for letting their women push them around with demands like helping with the housework and being present in the birthing room during labor. I believe this opinion is also common worldwide.)

I found the joke funny, too, after a fashion. Generally I regretted not being able to joke around more with Sergei and Volodya. Conveying humor in either direction across the language barrier was hard. Once I was riding in the back of the van and I happened to think of my friend Bryan DiSalvatore, a writer who sometimes did movie reviews for the
local paper in Missoula, Montana, and of his pronouncement that the latest
Beavis and Butt-Head
movie was “flawed.” The memory made me laugh. Volodya asked what I was laughing about. I tried to explain.

Until we left Novosibirsk we had seen none of the large-scale environmental damage Siberia is famous for. Then we hit the small, smoky city of Kemerovo in the Kuznetsk Basin coal-mining region. Russians don’t bother to hide strip mines with a screen of trees along the road to spare the feelings of motorists, as we Americans do. Beyond Kemerovo the whole view at times became the gaping pits themselves, sprawling downward before us on either side while the thread-thin road tiptoed where it could between. Strip mines are strip mines, and I had seen similar scenery in North Dakota and southern Ohio and West Virginia, though never quite so close at hand. Often through this Siberian coal region, the road strayed and forgot its original intention, and more than one fork we took dead-ended without warning at a city-sized strip-mine hole. We meandered in the Kuznetsk Basin for most of a day and drove until past nightfall in order to camp on the other side.

After the Kuznetsk Basin, a long interval of meadows followed. We saw dark-clothed people working the hayfields in big groups like in an old bucolic painting, or riding to or from the work in horse-drawn flatbed wagons whose hard rubber wheels bouncing on the uneven pavement made the flesh of the passengers’ faces jiggle fast. In this more peaceful region we camped one night on the banks of the Chulym River at a popular spot with a gravel bank more convenient for bathing and washing than the usual swampy mud. While we ate supper, a group of Christians waded in not far from us, some of them in flowing white baptismal clothes. The worshippers sang songs accompanied by a guitar, held hands in a circle, swayed. A man in the middle of the circle took another man and woman and two girls in his arms and then immersed them one by one.

More people and cars were scattered along the bank for maybe a half mile. At dark, almost everybody had gone. I walked into an adjoining field a distance away from our tents to call home on my satellite phone, and I had just begun talking to my wife when a guy who must have seen my face in the faint blue light of the phone’s display screen popped up from the
darkness beside me. Drunk and talking fast, he asked me a question involving his car. I went back to the tents and got Sergei. It turned out the guy wanted a jump start. Sergei agreeably drove the van over to the guy’s car and jump-started it. Meanwhile I continued a distracted conversation with my family. My whole body was still twanging. The guy jumping from the dark like that startled me almost out of my shoes.

Environmental grimness resumed the next morning as we approached the city of Achinsk. Never, under any circumstances, go to Achinsk. I’m still coughing Achinsk out of my lungs to this day, probably. During Soviet times, 95 percent of everything—buildings, roads, bus shelters, playgrounds, fountains, telephone booths, lampposts—was made of cement. A particular kind of five-foot-by-eight-foot cement panel often used in fences and walls seems to be the basic visual element of urban Siberia.

Well, all that cement, or a hell of a lot of it, is made in Achinsk. Achinsk has mineral refineries, too. The thick, dusty air of Achinsk coats grass blades to death and desertifies everything in a wide radius around the city. Still forty minutes away from it, we rolled up the windows and sweltered in the van rather than breathe the emanations of Achinsk. Skirting the city at a far remove, we never actually saw it but only its cement-dust cloud, which densified to a dark gray at what I took to be the city’s middle. For a second or two a haze-blurred smokestack could be seen.

Our passage through this almost-dead zone heightened the surprise a few hours later when we reached the river city of Krasnoyarsk. The name—from
krasnyi
, “red,” and
yar
, “cliff?”—refers to the red cliffs nearby the city that give the landscape with its broad valley a slightly out-of-context look, as if this place might be in eastern Wyoming or South Africa. The city occupies a prominence above the Yenisei River just upstream from where a series of mountainous, tree-covered cliffs along both sides of the river suddenly descend to level ground. Chekhov judged Krasnoyarsk the most beautiful city in Siberia, and he was right, from what I’d seen. Many buildings in the city center were from the later nineteenth century and of a style of brickwork done decoratively, almost whimsically. Recent renovations had emphasized a color scheme perhaps based on the earth-toned reds of the Yenisei cliffs, and with white or light blue trim for intensity. The downtown boutiques, restaurants, clothing stores, and
galleries called to mind shopping districts in any of a thousand gentrified antique-ish towns and small cities in America. And although a line of storefronts bearing the logos of Wrangler and Reebok and Benetton and Nike would not gladden me if I encountered it in New Jersey, seeing it in Siberia did, somehow.

Krasnoyarsk opens onto the Yenisei the way St. Petersburg opens onto the Neva. And the Yenisei here is huge, more like an estuary than a river. Many of Krasnoyarsk’s streets end at the water and route its amplified daylight into the city; I recalled a similar effect on the streets of older Mississippi River towns. To get a better look at the whole picture, Sergei drove us to a scenic overlook he knew of on some heights west of town. This particular vantage dominated a graffiti-covered stone outcropping above a small parking lot. As we climbed up to it, a wedding party was coming down with surprising agility in their tuxedos and high heels. The viewing promenade, when we reached it, was strewn all around with shattered champagne flutes from their just-completed toasts. While we stood there, a storm came up the river, and you could see almost its entire extent—the dark clouds, the advancing netlike pattern of smooth and rippled water beneath the clouds, the wispy paleness of the rain. The city itself, off in the distance, was only a thumbnail-sized patch of the scene’s immensity.

The long view also revealed that Krasnoyarsk puts out an impressive smoky haze of its own. During Soviet times, a lot of heavy industry relocated here. The first thing you see in the main hall of Krasnoyarsk’s regional museum is a banner with a slogan intended to inspire Krasnoyarsk’s factory workers during the Cold War. In large white letters on a red background, it reads,
DOGONIM I PEREGONIM AMERIKU!
(We Will Catch Up to and Overtake America!).

Sergei had been asked to say hello and deliver a present to a friend of Victor Serov’s wife, Lena. This friend lived on Krasnoyarsk’s main drag, Prospekt Mira. After driving us back to the city, Sergei carried out that errand while Volodya and I killed time downtown. I walked around for a bit, then sat in the van. Soon I saw a lissome blonde in tight pants with a beeper at the waist walking lissomely by to use the pay phone in a little plaza across the way. A few minutes later she returned to the phone with a dark-haired woman as attractive as she and made another call. The two had a girlish, conspiratorial air; whatever they were up to, they were having
fun. Looking around, I noticed that beautiful women were in fact walking everywhere, as if I had wandered onto the set of a science-fiction movie about a city inhabited only by beautiful women. The number of beauties in Krasnoyarsk would put even Velikii Ustyug in the shade.