Travels in Siberia (49 page)

All day the train moseyed on. During stretches where the track was really bad, it slowed to walking speed. It stopped, it started, it waited on sidings, started again, stopped. In our
vagon
, a temporary lobotomy seemed to have leveled everybody. Sometimes as the train sat awhile at a station I got out and walked around, never wandering too far, from fear of being left. Every station I observed was dark, cracked, in the process of being colonized by weeds, and with the lights of its platform broken.

People thronged the stations nonetheless—old ladies selling
pirozhki
(pies of cabbage or meat or mushroom), skinny guys with big bottles of foamy, off-color beer, girls displaying boxes made of birch and carved wooden shoes on pieces of carpet, vodka sellers with their bottles lined up in rows on folding card tables. Here and there, black electrical wires drooped above the assembly. The
khozyain
and the scuba diver, hopping down for quick vodka runs, were the only ones in our car who got off besides me. Volodya dozed in the van, and Sergei stayed in his sleeping bag on the roof hour after hour. At least he had stopped shivering.

The day went by, and again the twilight in the
vagon
dimmed to almost darkness. I ate an energy bar I’d brought along and experimented with new sleeping positions in the front seat. If I hit upon a workable one, I could get an hour or so of napping time, provided the train kept up its regular motion. When it stopped I grew restless and thrashed around.

During a long stop in the middle of the night, I emerged into consciousness with a sense of something being different now. I got up, opened the van door, walked to the passageway. As I stepped out onto
it, my awareness of space expanded enormously: our
vagon
was sitting by itself in a vast, irregularly lighted train yard. This must be Magdagachi. In half a minute the
khozyain
joined me, looking a bit rusty from the entertainments of his journey, and confirmed that we had arrived. Suddenly a beam of light swung down on us, backed up by a resounding diesel noise. Behind the light I could just make out, by shading my eyes, a train engine’s massive form. Out of the brightness, stepping onto the coupling at the engine’s front, the engineer appeared.

Without preamble the engineer began to yell an abusive stream of complaint or instruction at the
khozyain
, who yelled even more heatedly at him. Amounts of rubles were shouted back and forth. Then the
khozyain
went into his stateroom and reemerged, cursing, with a wad of bills. He handed it to the engineer, who counted it in the engine’s headlight, then put it in his bib. I was told to get out of the way. The engine was then maneuvered around and the
vagon
coupled to it. In another minute we had been pulled up to the unloading ramp. All the drivers in the
vagon
woke up, the sealed-shut back doors opened, and the vehicles rolled down the ramp into the Magdagachi night.

At the wheel of the van sat Sergei, a bit puffy in the face but feeling fine after his thirty-one hours on the roof. He told us that he had recovered completely. “I could not be sick,” he said. “I gave my body the message that I could not allow it to be sick, and it understood. I am better now.”

It was one thirty in the morning when we emerged from the
vagon
. We knew nothing about Magdagachi except its name. The hard-drinking dentist, father of fourteen-year-old Kira, told Sergei that he could lead us to a fuel station that he thought would be open, so we followed him there. He also said that he knew how to find the road out of Magdagachi, but after he had fueled up he drove off without waiting for us, and when we tried to make our way by the directions the fuel-station man had given us, we soon were meandering on roads and nonroads in Magdagachi. Finally we got so turned around we were driving on gravelly nothing zones between unlit buildings, and Sergei pulled over in a weed lot where we spent another few uncomfortable hours attempting to sleep in the van.

A little after dawn, we awoke and set out again, and with more people available at that hour to ask for directions, we did find the road. Driving in our dusty, exhaust-fume, no-shock-absorbers van seemed like carefree travel after the gloomy limbo of the
vagon
. A leisurely two hundred miles or so farther on we stopped in the early afternoon and camped on the banks of the Zeya River outside the city of Svobodnyi (Free). I had
not used my satellite phone since before Chernyshevsk, and I took it out and got a strong connection.

The phone had a feature providing free text messages up to 160 characters long that you could bring up on a display screen as soon as you made your connection. Every day my friend Bill in North Bergen, New Jersey, would e-mail me (via the satellite phone website) the punch line to a joke. Not the whole joke—just the punch line. Things like “And the kangaroo said, ‘So’s mine!’ ” or “Hell, find my car keys and we’ll
drive
out!” A half dozen punch lines had accumulated since I’d last looked. I read them over as the call went through to my family. After I was done talking to them, I gave the phone to Sergei and Volodya and they each called home, too. Neither had spoken to his family for a while and of course on the riverbank there were no public phones around.

From the Zeya we took a detour off the main road in order to see the Amur River and the city of Blagoveshchensk.
Blagoveshchenie
means “annunciation,” and the name is not too lofty for the city, which I thought the handsomest we’d been through since St. Petersburg. Blagoveshchensk is fortunate for two reasons—its light, and China. Something about the Pacific Ocean, maybe, gives a reddish-gold tint to light that spreads up the river and this far inland. The benign and hopeful sunniness of Blagoveshchensk reminded me somehow of Palo Alto, California. Blagoveshchensk and other Amur River cities could be the Golden East, as California was the Golden West. Or maybe this notion was just my homesick imagination. Still, the sun and blue sky and reddish-gold light as we drove around Blagoveshchensk struck me as imported, not quite Russian.

Second, China: the Chinese industrial city of Heihe is just across the Amur. Our radio had begun picking up Chinese radio stations. On the other side of the pale-brown, slow-moving, dauntingly wide Amur, the tops of the tallest buildings of Heihe could be seen. Like other Amur River cities, Heihe and Blagoveshchensk participate in an agreement that locally suspends certain visa and customs regulations for the purposes of encouraging trade. I saw several big buildings under construction in Blagoveshchensk, a rarity in these remote areas, and Chinese laborers working on them. The hard hats the workmen wore were made of wicker. A lot of the smaller structures in the city were new. Some had pagoda-style roofs. No thickets of
morkovnik
or other weeds grew along
the streets, and the usually omnipresent trash, in heaps or promiscuously strewn, seemed to be gone.

Sergei and Volodya were talking about finding a place in Blagoveshchensk to buy a pistol. Kolya, the scuba diver, had told them that someone had pulled a pistol on him a couple of weeks ago when he was in a store in Irkutsk oblast. For protection we already had Volodya’s shotgun, but maybe we needed a concealable gun to carry around, Sergei said. I said I didn’t think we needed to carry a pistol. Sergei said we probably would only buy an air pistol, just to frighten people with if necessary. I said he knew best, but I didn’t think we should buy one. He said he and Volodya would look for one that afternoon.

Again I made my first stop at the regional museum. Blagoveshchensk’s was full of Chinese tourists trailing behind Chinese-speaking Russian guides. These were young women, and when one tour group passed another, the guides exchanged glances and rolled their eyes. Unlike any other museum I’d seen so far, the Blagoveshchensk museum had a display about the region’s gulag camps. It said there had been several around Magdagachi, where prisoners had worked in cobalt and iron mines. A short biography of an Orthodox priest and pioneering mathematician named Pavel Florensky said he had died in 1937 after being imprisoned in a camp at Skovorodino. That was one of the stations where I had gotten out and walked around on the Chernyshevsk–Magdagachi run.

As I idled along, Sergei interrupted me, very stern in the face. We had to leave immediately, he said. Volodya’s tooth had suddenly become so bad that he must take care of it right now. I had thought that I would stay with the van, as Volodya had been doing, while he and Sergei went in search of a dentist. But Volodya hurried off on his own, Sergei stayed at the van, and I wandered Blagoveshchensk’s immense riverfront public square. From a distance I noticed a big memorial marker on the wall of a fancy redbrick building with arches and turrets near the shore of the Amur. The marker turned out to be a bas-relief bust of Chekhov wearing spectacles and holding a finger to his cheek as if in thought. Its inscription said,
HERE ON THE 27TH OF JUNE, 1890, A.P. CHEKHOV STAYED.
The building, formerly a hotel, now housed geology and hydrology offices of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Empty spaces nearby seemed to indicate that buildings contemporary with this one had been
torn down. The great writer’s single-night visit had evidently inoculated it against destruction.

By the time I came back, Volodya was sitting in the van’s front seat drinking a large can of malt liquor. He had found the name of a dentist by asking at a hotel, gone to that dentist, presented his passport, sat down in the chair. The dentist yanked the tooth and charged him 135 rubles, about $4.50. The extraction had cheered him up wonderfully. He opened another can of malt liquor and talked about the dental history of his family. As we drove out of Blagoveshchensk in its California evening light, Volodya said he didn’t mind losing teeth and was surprised to have so many of his own still remaining. His father and uncles had lost all their teeth long before they were Volodya’s age. He said losing teeth just ran in the family.

The tooth incident diverted the guys’ attention from buying a pistol. When I mentioned it to Sergei, he said that after thinking about it he had decided we didn’t need a pistol after all. I was relieved to hear this. We settled back for a few hours of driving in what remained of the day, but the road we were on—a major road, and in fact the only one here that continued cross-country, a road marked in red on the map—suddenly came to an end. It reached the Bureya River and just quit. Reexamining the map, I noticed that the red of the highway did become a dotted line for a very short span at this spot. There was no bridge, no nothing. I had never known a major road to do that before. After a bit of searching, however, we found a ferry landing, albeit sans ferry. The ferryman had apparently taken the ferry to the other side of the Bureya, and no one among the two dozen waiting cars knew when he might return. Sergei backtracked up the road to look for a camping spot, figuring we’d just wait till morning. All we could find were small openings in the thick woods where the weeds grew six feet high. Finally we plunged the van into an out-of-the-way opening, tramped down some weeds beside it, and pitched our tents.

At the ferry landing the next morning there were only a few cars, but still no ferry. Soon more cars and several trucks showed up. Always sociable, Sergei and Volodya circulated among the other drivers and made conversation, but they could learn nothing definite about when the ferry might come. I preferred to sit by the van and let the waiting bother me. Volodya noticed my mood and said, “Call your wife.” That was always
his solution when he saw me in the dumps. I took out my phone and called, a bit self-conscious because of the three or four waiting people nearby who came closer and stared at me. When my wife answered she was making dinner. I complained to her about having to wait for the ferry.

Finally it came, loaded a few cars and our van with great slowness, and slowly took us to the other side. A lot of other vehicles were waiting there for the return trip. I could not understand why this one river should be without a bridge; clearly, some of the people in the queue would be there all day. But we seemed to have entered a forgotten zone. As we continued on this alleged cross-country highway, it quit trying altogether and became little more than a swamp lane. On its rare paved stretches you couldn’t get too comfortable, because in another moment you’d have to slow down and negotiate mud holes in lowest gear.

Half a day of this brought us to the border of Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Under Stalin in the 1920s and ’30s, the idea of setting aside this region in the drainage of the Bira and the Bidzhan rivers for a Jewish homeland attracted support among Jews in the Soviet Union, America, and elsewhere. Here sparsely occupied land extending for two hundred miles along the Trans-Siberian Railway offered the advantages of plenty of room and no unwelcoming nationalities who needed to be removed. On the other hand, Birobidzhan is a swamp in the middle of nowhere. Although tens of thousands of Jews, including groups from America, did move here, almost all of them left within a few years. Today, Birobidzhan’s Jewish population is about 2 percent.

In Birobidzhan’s only city, also called Birobidzhan, we stopped to buy supplies. The place looked run-down and disheartened; a single figure on a bicycle teetered across a deserted square, and in the cement-gray storefronts I saw one Yiddish sign.

That evening we camped at an intersection of off-road tracks in an expanse of agricultural fields. Near where we pitched our tents, a field of squash had begun to bloom, their cream-yellow flowers abundant on the ground. At this campsite, the mosquitoes were the worst of anywhere on our journey except for the second night at Berezovyi Yar. We had to put on our beekeeper hats again, and gloves. Because it’s impossible to eat while wearing a beekeeper hat, we removed the hats for supper and could finish it only while pacing and dodging around. Though we zipped
up the tents tight for sleeping, the mosquitoes squeezed through tiny openings, no doubt forced by the pressure of the infinite mosquitoes behind them. Several times I woke up to smash mosquitoes on the inside of the tent by flashlight. They left bloody smears. The dish of eggs, potatoes, onions, and peppers Volodya made for breakfast in the morning had mosquito bodies sprinkled through it like coriander, and the harvesters in the potato field we drove through on our way out were bundled in thick, dark clothes despite the heat.