Travels in Siberia (45 page)

This camping spot was so great we decided to stay another day. True, trains did go by almost constantly just the other side of some shoreline trees, but the sound was not bad for sleeping at all. In the morning, a fisherman who put his boat in at the mouth of the creek brought us some
omul’
he had just caught. To reciprocate, I opened my stash of presents and got out a New York City snow globe, some Beanie Baby stuffed animals, and two folding pocket mirrors to give to him. He liked the snow globe and he accepted the Beanie Babies, but he gave me back the mirrors, saying he had no use for them. This made Sergei indignant and he scolded the guy for being a rude person who didn’t know how to behave with foreigners. Chastened, the guy took the mirrors. I remembered I had a baseball cap with the logo of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society on it—the logo shows a leaping bass, in bright green—and I gave him that, too. He put it on and examined it in the mirror, and above his broad face and brown bib overalls it looked exactly right. I liked the idea that I had successfully launched a BASS hat on the waters of Baikal.

Volodya took the fish the guy had brought and gutted them, split them to the backbone, filled them inside with slices of lemon and garlic and handfuls of coarse salt, and tied them shut with string. At the end of the day he cut the string, removed the lemon and garlic and salt, scaled the fish, rinsed them quickly in the lake, and cut them into half-inch slices for sushi. They tasted wonderful, though you had to watch the bones.
“Esh’ akkuratno”
(Eat accurately), Sergei advised.

All day the lake was covered with the kind of whitecaps that indicate good sailing, but in late afternoon the wind dropped off to nothing. The whitecaps disappeared, and the waves, now forceless, kept rolling in. The sound they made when they landed on the small pebbles at the edge of the beach—a sound like setting down a canvas sack of change—started me thinking about when I used to hear the same sound on my grandmother’s beach on Lake Erie. Often in the evening the lake would get calm like this, and each wave would land just a bit more gently than the one before it, and the time for rounding up the children and preparing to go home would begin. Now the sun was going down across Baikal just at the angle it would be at my grandmother’s beach this time of year. I sat
on the stones and thought about my family of forty years ago and grew lonesome and melancholy.

Before we left the next morning, I took out my satellite phone and called my friend Jamaica Kincaid in North Bennington, Vermont. She said she was having a dinner party. We talked for a while and then she passed the phone around the table. I talked to Howard Cohen, her rabbi, and to Howard’s wife, Gail; to our friends Annie and Gordie Thorne; to Meg and Rob Woolmington, friends who live near Jamaica; and to her son, Harold. I could imagine the smell of the poached chicken on a bed of lovage that Jamaica had prepared, and the West Indian pastels of the walls in her kitchen, and the evening primrose opening its yellow blossoms in the dusk outside the windows. In fact, I could picture being there more clearly than I could picture being here on the stony beach where I was.

I waited a few minutes for my thoughts to reassemble themselves and then I tried again to call Sasha Khamarkhanov in Ulan-Ude. I had been hoping to see him when we passed through Ulan-Ude that afternoon. Every time I had dialed his number before, it had been busy, and I got the same result this time. I should have sent him an e-mail saying I was coming. I had forgotten to do that before I left home, and I hadn’t thought of it the last time I was near a computer, in Novosibirsk. I had not handled this intelligently at all. Even worse, now I had misplaced Sasha’s address. I knew Sergei would not want to tarry in Ulan-Ude, eager as he always was to get beyond urban areas. All the same, as we approached the city I insisted that I remembered where Sasha’s apartment building was and that we had to look for it.

Surprising both of us, I found the building almost as soon as we drove into Ulan-Ude. I recognized a street, a row of buildings, and the place where we’d loaded up the minibus for the trip to Baikal. I don’t know how that discovery happened because Ulan-Ude is not a little place at all. We pulled over. Walking around one of the buildings I saw a familiar-looking entryway. I went up several flights of stairs, saw what seemed to be the correct door, knocked. Tania, Sasha’s wife, opened it.

I was not the person she had been expecting to see standing there. She was amazed for a few seconds and then not amazed in the least. She
asked us in (Volodya had accompanied me while Sergei stayed in the van) and didn’t know what to do after that. She said she should make us a big dinner; I said we couldn’t stay long. Dropped in on as she was, she didn’t have the time or supplies to do very much anyway. When I had seen her before, I had been mute in her language and now I could talk a little. She asked if I still had that funny picture of my baby. On my previous visit I had been carrying a wallet-sized photo of my daughter at age eight months or so wearing a bright orange shirt-and-pants outfit and sitting in the corner of our dark-colored sofa. She had her arms akimbo and was looking up suspiciously. I told Tania I had forgotten to bring it with me.

“And how is your thumb?” she asked. “I remember that you cut it at Baikal while you were making a fishing rod, and you thought you were about to die!” I assured her the thumb was fine, and I showed her the scar, which she said she could not see.

Sasha Khamarkhanov, as it turned out, was in the hospital. Tania said he’d just undergone a small operation on his hand. Apparently he had other health problems, too, but I didn’t understand when she explained them to us. Later when I asked Volodya what she’d said about that, he wasn’t sure, either. Sasha’s condition remained a mystery. We could go and visit him if we wanted right now, she said. She would come along and direct us to the hospital. First she tended to an elderly parent—hers or Sasha’s, I’m not sure—in a little bedroom off the living room. Then she loaded a bag of things to take to Sasha, and she and Volodya and I went downstairs.

As I’d expected, Sergei was not keen on this hospital visit. He asked Tania where the hospital was and seemed unhappy to learn it was clear across Ulan-Ude. He drove us there a bit dourly; this was more entanglement than he’d bargained on. The hospital occupied a narrow ridge with a road running along it and open sky all around. Tania and I went in while Sergei and Volodya parked in a lot and waited. Families and patients, mostly Buryats who looked to be in bad shape, stood at the waiting room entrance and sat in little groups on the bare furniture inside. Some had dried blood and bruises on their faces and staggered around. The waiting room with its low-watt bulb was dim as a cave. On the wall, a phone from fifty years ago seemed to be the only way to reach the hospital’s interior. Tania picked it up, talked for a few minutes, then disappeared
through a door and up some stairs. After a short while she and Sasha came down.

His face looked longer and thinner and he walked more like an old man. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, just as before, and not hospital garb. I didn’t notice any sign of doctoring on his hands. He seemed genuinely glad to see me and he spoke with the same diffident, cheerful demeanor I remembered. I would have enjoyed our meeting more if anxiety had not been distracting me. The fact that he was always kind to me even when I was not quite present due to interior static makes me like him even more in retrospect. I had to explain to him twice why my friends and I couldn’t stay for longer than this quick stop. Meanwhile, I was calculating: I could stay that night in Ulan-Ude in a hotel—clearly I couldn’t stay in his apartment, with the invalid parent there, and Sasha himself in the hospital—and Sergei and Volodya could camp somewhere outside the city, as Sergei would no doubt want to do, and then tomorrow evening they could come back in and pick me up . . . Nahh, too complicated. Anyway, truth was, I had the same traveling fever that gripped Sergei. I wanted to move on. And maybe the Khamarkhanovs would be relieved, afterward, not to have visitors to worry about just now.

Dropping in on people is always a mistake. I should have tried harder to get in touch with Sasha beforehand.

Still, he was glad to see me, and I him. I told him that I’d been reading about Mikhail Küchelbecker and Barguzin, and that thanks in part to him, Sasha, I’d begun working on a book about Siberia. We moved from the waiting room to the hospital’s front steps, a less gloomy place to talk. He asked after Alex and Katya and Vitaly Komar. I inquired about his children; Sasha’s daughter, Arjenna, had gone to Moscow to study. Tioshi, his son, was in school in Ulan-Ude. We began to walk to the van. Sergei and Volodya, who were standing in the parking lot and eating ice cream cones, did not immediately come over to greet us as we walked up. I wasn’t sure what, if any, social dynamics were going on.

In a minute they did walk up and introduce themselves to Sasha, and a rather distant and disjointed conversation ensued. I had to explain yet again that because of our schedule we needed to keep going and get back on the road before the end of the day. Sasha laughed and shook his head, as if quietly amused by it all. I told him and Tania I’d tried to call
them, and showed them the slip of paper with their telephone number; I had a digit wrong. They told me the correct number and I wrote it down, and we did the usual business of exchanging addresses and e-mail. Sergei took a picture of me standing between the Khamarkhanovs. They gave us directions to the road, not nearby, that led east from Ulan-Ude. Tania said she didn’t need a ride back to their apartment, because she would stay with Sasha and take the trolleybus home. We said goodbye and I shook Sasha’s hand and wished him luck and good health. He wished us safe travels and waved his thin hand. They were walking back to the hospital as we drove off.

Navigating Ulan-Ude’s rush-hour confusion, we got lost almost right away. While we were meandering, the van, as if showing its new command of special effects, sprang a leak in the radiator and began to billow forth clouds of steam. But as usual it proved no match for Sergei. In the random tumbledown district into which we had wandered, he immediately found a radiator-repair place. It was really more of a radiator-repair hovel—a small corrugated steel structure filled to and beyond the doors with used radiators. Sergei and Volodya took out our busted one, put in a used one, paid what I am sure was a not-exorbitant price, and received directions to the eastbound highway. A few hours of light were still remaining when we reached the road we wanted and went spinning up the valley of Ulan-Ude’s wide and stately river, the Selenga.

Of the 437 rivers that are said to flow into Baikal (only one, the Angara, flows out), the Selenga is the principal stream coming from the south. Its origins are in the steppes of Mongolia. Genghis Khan made his capital, Karakorum, near a Selenga tributary called the Orkhon. The Selenga was the most authentic-looking Siberian river I’d encountered so far. Up to now I’d seen swampy rivers and ones bordered by mountains and trees; the bare hills along the banks of the Selenga and the wide-screen vistas of river and open country spoke of Asian steppes expanding to the southeast. After the busy streets of Ulan-Ude, we seemed to have crossed suddenly into a depopulated region. Again, the fencelessness of the land amazed me. At a place where wheel tracks led through the sparse brown grasses beside the highway we drove down a hillside and stopped beside the Selenga to make that evening’s camp.

The fact that the wheel tracks ended at the edge of the river should have tipped us off that this was a ferry crossing. We didn’t notice that until the tents had been pitched. Then from the other side of the Selenga arose the sharp rat-a-tat of an unmuffled engine whose sky-filling volume seemed out of proportion to the little craft that was its cause. In another few minutes the sound came nearer as a short, stubby power launch angled across the current with a small fenced raft in tow. On the raft sat a truck of the kind that carries troops, its box back enclosed by an awning. The launch approached and then executed a neat, sharp turn that swung the tow rope and the ferry raft at its end into an unfurling arc that ended with the front of the raft wedged against the shore. Someone undid the raft’s gate and the truck drove off onto the bank, and a dozen or so passengers jumped from the raft into the back of the truck. It revved its engine smokily for a few minutes and then motored away.

Meanwhile, a few cars had arrived to go aboard for the return trip. I pointed out to Sergei that this traffic was likely to continue into the night, so maybe moving camp would be a good idea. My chronic fear of being run over while asleep in my tent had begun to flare up. Sergei replied that we had nothing at all to worry about, and not wanting to be difficult, I went along. In fact the traffic did keep coming and going until late, and began again just at dawn, but its orderly rhythms didn’t trouble me. I even found them comforting, somehow.

While Volodya was fixing supper, I went a distance down the bank and sat on a camp chair and admired the view. To the north, or downstream, the river spread so far from bank to bank that it seemed more like a landlocked sea. Facing that way I did a sketch of the river and of the ferry launch arriving. In the other direction, upstream, a rock cliff came down to the water and cut off the vista that was beyond. I hiked a bit to get a look around the cliff and discovered only more cliffs and hills, and a narrowed river slipping out of sight among them.

In that direction—south—lay China. Here the Selenga used to be a highway. Travelers bound from Russia for Peking often went by river along this stretch until they came to the Chinese border. (Now it’s the border with Mongolia.) A city called Kyakhta grew at the border and flourished on the Russian-Chinese trade before faster routes replaced this one. The naturalist George Steller, while crisscrossing Siberia as part of the Bering expedition in the 1730s and ’40s, made a detour to the
border to replenish his supply of paper. Past Kyakhta, travelers journeyed in a southeasterly direction for another fifteen hundred miles to Peking. First they had to cross the Gobi Desert, a tough six- or seven-week trek, and then for a couple of months they continued through a thinly settled outlying region before coming to the Great Wall. From the wall it was usually only another week’s travel to Peking.