Travels in Siberia (46 page)

Our route didn’t lead south, toward China, but veered away from the Selenga and to the northeast. We spent the next day climbing out of its watershed through hilly country of mixed taiga and steppe. The many hilltop vantage points revealed one view after another, with endless uplands and ridges and low mountains; Sergei kept stopping and getting out to sweep the video camera slowly across the scene. Many trees in this part were dead and gray, I assumed from some infestation or disease. At first I thought the cause might be the pine beetle, as in similar forest die-offs in North America, but I saw many dead birches, too.

Now we were passing fewer cars, people, and villages than at any previous stretch of the trip. I had rarely seen country this unused and empty anywhere. At midday we stopped in a village called Desyatnikovo to buy potatoes. An old woman there told us that this was an Old Believer village, but it was dying. She said that houses with the shutters closed meant that no one lived there now and the people who used to live there had died. She showed us her own house, a brightly painted cabin of trimmed logs on the central street with shuttered houses on either side. The old woman seemed to be in permanent mourning; she told us she was very sad. The somewhat younger guy we bought potatoes from said only old people lived in the village nowadays. There is no work, so young people move away, he said.

We kept climbing, descending, climbing again. One hilltop overlooked a span of the Trans-Siberian Railway on which a train consisting entirely of black oil-tanker cars stretched as far as one could see, west to east; it must’ve been two miles long. At about three o’clock in the afternoon, Sergei informed me that according to the map we had just crossed the divide between the watershed of central Siberia and the basin of the Amur River. The M-55 highway goes over this divide near the village of Tanga. From that point the road began to descend until it dropped into the broad valley of the Ingoda River—a familiar name. When the Decembrists were imprisoned in Chita, they bathed in the Ingoda.

In late afternoon we found a good place to camp on its banks. The Ingoda is a pleasant, small river with a brisk flow and a bottom of sand and gravel in the parts I saw. Some boys near our campsite who came by to check us out told Sergei you could catch plenty of fish in it using crickets. I set up my fly rod and tied on an all-around attractor fly. Casting into slack water below some riffles I got a lot of splashy strikes, but the fish were too small to fit their mouths around the fly. Finally I hooked a flipping and flopping six-incher. It had delicate yellow markings on its side like little reef fish I’d caught in Florida. I don’t know what kind of fish it was.

I showed it to Volodya and he said he’d fry it up for an appetizer before supper. Then I waded back into the river and cast some more. Far downstream, I knew, the Ingoda joined the Onon to make the Shilka, which joined the Argun to make the Amur, which eventually emptied into the Pacific, which extended all the way to Dockweiler State Beach, in Los Angeles, where my sister-in-law brought her children to swim. In theory, from here I could take the all-water route home.

I was becoming numb to scenery. My stock of landscape adjectives was running low. On the road paralleling the Ingoda, the panoramas just kept coming at us as if they were being brought to the windshield by a conveyor belt somebody had forgotten to turn off. The road was gravel and dusty, the sky blank and bright. From it a hawk flared suddenly right in front of us, its belly feathers white, and then was gone. In every direction the land rolled on—unfenced, untenanted, unvaried, still apparently unused. The idea of “scenery” implies a margin, a frame. What we were seeing had neither, and I couldn’t exactly situate it in my mind.

After a hundred miles or so we reached the city of Chita. The name is pronounced with a short
i
and the accent is on the final syllable: Chi-
TAH
. The sound itself is like a fading cry from far away—“Chi-
tahhhhhh
. . .” Perhaps as a symbol of how remote the city is from anywhere, its central square is huge; it practically has its own horizon. Overseeing the square at about the halfway point, a tall, dark-gray Lenin stands with the tails of his long coat flared to one side as if blown in that direction by the wind, or by the motion of the planet through space. In Chita, as usual, the plentitude of beautiful women overwhelmed and swamped description. I even gave up trying to decide if the number of beauties in Chita was greater than in Krasnoyarsk or Velikii Ustyug or anywhere. There were just a hell of a lot of them, is all. In straight lines that followed no pattern, they crossed the square’s vast concrete reaches, their stiltlike heels clicking sharply.

Since Irkutsk, Sergei had decided that the book I was writing was about the Decembrists. That is what he now started telling people. Maybe the Decembrists, as a subject, was easier to explain than if he had said “a book about Siberia.” In any event, when the van blew a radiator hose, or something, in Chita, and Sergei flagged down a passing M
C truck, and his brother M
C guys led us to a repair place, and they and Sergei and Volodya fell into conversation, Sergei told the M
C guys that I was writing a book about the Decembrists. The M
C guys responded to this with enthusiasm and told me I must see Chita’s Decembrist museum, the best of its kind in Russia. After whatever was wrong with the van this time had been dealt with, they escorted us there.

Because I was expected to, I went through the museum item by item and evinced interest in everything. I didn’t have to fake much. We never would have found the place had the M
C guys not told us about it; it was in a tall wooden church dating to 1776 that used to be the highest point in the city, though now your standard-issue high-rises ringed it around. It had also escaped the notice of my guidebook. The Decembrist prisoners in Chita had been housed just a short walk from the church and had used it for worship regularly. When state prisoner Ivan Annenkov married Paulina Gueble in this church, he was allowed to have his chains taken off, but only for one hour. Mlle. Gueble, a Frenchwoman, had made the journey to Chita to join her lover after receiving special permission and financial assistance from the tsar; later the couple would have many children, and later still they would provide Alexandre Dumas père with the inspiration for his (or his ghost writer’s) romantic novel
The Fencing Master.

I tried to explain to Sergei and the Chita M
C guys that my book would not be about the Decembrists only, though the Decembrists would be
in
the book, of course. I got almost nowhere with that, and the failure of communication worsened my already bad mood. All of us—Sergei, Volodya, and I—were out of sorts at the time. We had been on the road for four weeks. Travel weariness had set in. Our dirty-baby smell had worked its way into the seats of the car, into our sleeping bags. Washing in muddy rivers gets you only so clean, and the same goes for clothes. Little things had begun bugging me—for example, discovering while drinking tea in the morning that the cup I was using had recently held Gillette’s lemon-lime shaving foam. One of Volodya’s molars had started to ache and he was able to continue at times only because of
extrastrength aspirin. To make all this worse, I was fretting again about not seeing enough prisons. The worry seems dumb to me now, but somehow it kept enlarging itself in my mind. I could sense the stubbornness of Sergei’s resistance to the whole idea and that made me determined to be stubborn right back.