Travels in Siberia (52 page)

On the surface of this slow place there were a lot of round, black water bugs. They resembled water striders, but they hopped across the water rather than strode. When the circling fish occasionally exploded
directly beneath these water hoppers, I was sure I saw some of the bugs go under. I watched and watched to see if any of the bugs ever came back onto the surface from under it. As far as I could tell, none did. It is my opinion that no water strider or similar water-surface insect can return to the surface if it ever is unlucky enough to go under.

There were thousands of littler fish, too, hitting the surface constantly and leaving small round ripples like at the beginning of a rainstorm. Shorebirds ran along the bite-sized beaches the waves had cut into the birch and pine and swamp-maple forests that grew all the way down to the bay. Terns and gulls dove on the little fish with feathery splashes. Sometimes two mature bald eagles glided back and forth above. And as usual, we were under the supervision of a flock of crows and ravens, who walked more than they flew and provided commentary.

One afternoon Sergei and Volodya and I drove eighteen miles upstream on the Avvakumovo to explore. There the river ran through windings and pools of swimming-pool blue under old-growth taiga. The bottom was dark granite and gray gravel, devoid of all trash. This was a river you could have used on a fly-fishing calendar, with plentiful animal tracks in the sand and even a structure of sticks that could have been a beaver lodge at one of the pools. Volodya loaned me his hip boots and soon I was wading and casting flies to likely looking trout water for the first time on our journey.

For a while I fished deep and caught only a few brown minnows with big heads, similar to what we call sculpins in America. I had seen a few grasshoppers along the bank, so I switched to a large, bushy dry fly that I’ve had luck with in Montana during grasshopper season. My first cast with it produced an enthusiastic little strike. Laying the fly in a seam between fast-moving water and slow-, I got a swirl from what appeared to be a real fish. By the color on its side I knew it had to be a trout. A cast or two later I dropped the fly next to a half-sunken log and something sucked it in. The hooked fish veered out into deep and heavy current and held there awhile before I could lead it to the shallows. It was not huge—nine or ten inches at the most—but it was a trout, unmistakably. The name for it in Russian is
forel
, which is only the Russian version of the German
Forelle
, which means “trout.”

I held the fish just above the water on my wet palm. I had never seen such a fish. Its sides were a burnished silvery-gold and had big, almost
oblong patches of a pale camouflage-olive color, with little black dots along the back. The dots all leaned toward the tail, as if they’d been tilted in that direction by hydrodynamics. The fish’s sides changed color depending on how you looked at them—they appeared platinum-silvery when viewed from above, but greenish-silver when you saw them from below. The
forel
reminded me of the little optical-square toys that used to come in cereal boxes, those whatnots that showed one picture from one angle and a different picture when turned the other way. With this fish in my hand I felt as if I’d captured an imaginary creature, a living distillation of Siberian forest light. I unhooked it without damage and set it back in the Avvakumovo.

Basically I was marking time. After the attacks I had decided to fly home from Vladivostok at the first opportunity. But no planes were flying into or within the United States, so like many travelers all over the world, I waited.

My thoughts about what had happened on September 11 swirled around without settling anywhere or producing any insight, except for one or two blunt ironies. Some of my friends had told me before I left that I was setting out on a foolishly dangerous journey, and as I went across Siberia I kept waiting for the disaster I had let myself in for. But I had reached my destination and no disaster had occurred. Meanwhile, a real nightmare that history held in store hit just a few miles from my supposedly safe starting point, and thirteen people from my suburban town of Montclair died in the attacks; and Merle Gehman, the local Boy Scout leader, father of my son’s best friend, Christian, had gone to work in the south tower of the Trade Center that morning, and escaped after the plane hit, and lost his IDs, and the next day, as he and his wife were getting his driver’s license replaced at the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, my wife picked up Christian and our son after school, and Christian said, of his father’s escape, “He had blood all over him, but it was somebody else’s blood!”

Also, I remembered that when I used to live in downtown Manhattan, I often took visitors from Ohio to look at the city from the observation deck on the top of the north tower. The view from there was actually a bit disappointing, and nowhere near as good as the Empire State Building’s,
because from the lower end of the island you could see mainly water, and the unimpressive buildings of Wall Street, and the green of New Jersey across the Hudson River. But that was the direction my guests and I naturally looked anyway—westward, toward Ohio, and home, and the American continent stretching beyond. For us the building we were standing at the top of was the World Trade Center in the same sense that America’s baseball championship was the World Series. To us, “World” meant “American”; in fact, we thought not at all about the rest of the actual world.

But out in the rest of the actual world, people were thinking about us, in the larger sense, and specifically about this building. The attacks that targeted it represented not so much the beginning of a new war as a cruelly and ingeniously updated new wrinkle in an old, old war, one going back almost to the beginning of Islam. The recently ended Cold War, in whose ruins Sergei and Volodya and I had been wandering, would have been difficult to explain to ancient ghosts who knew nothing about twentieth-century physics. But the September 11 attacks would have made perfect sense to, say, Saladin: the flying machines, the proud towers, the slaughtered innocents, the suicidal believers, are a simple story that exists out of time. To Yermak and the other Christian conquerors of Siberia’s Muslim khan, September 11 would have been easily understandable, and perhaps a further inducement to victory, had they heard its story while gathered around their smoky Tobol River campfires.

Sergei and Volodya, those party guys, had met two attractive widows at a birthday picnic near our campsite. Sveta and Natalia lived in the nearby village of Olga. Sveta, a sturdy, dark-haired, vivid-featured woman with a musical laugh, was charmed by Volodya’s tales. As Olga’s pharmacist, she had a position of importance in the town. Natalia, ginger-haired and blue-eyed, taught kindergarten and resembled a soft-spoken suburban mom. She gravitated toward Sergei. Each widow lived alone in a large apartment in the village. After we’d been at the campsite for several days, they invited us to stay with them. Sergei and I went to Natalia’s, Volodya to Sveta’s.

At Natalia’s I saw TV coverage of the attacks. The images looked even more chaotic and bizarre on Russian television. The pictures veered and
tilted and went out of focus, with quick glimpses of familiar places and buildings careening by like objects being dumped into the trash. To judge only from the Russian coverage, you’d think the whole city had been destroyed. The Russian TV plotline seemed to be that the United States had started the whole problem in the first place by getting involved with bin Laden during the Soviet Afghan War. Then the station broke away to show President Putin’s speech to the Russian people about the attacks. Putin talked in subdued, concerned tones, as if he really did sympathize. He said that Russia was sending help to the United States immediately and that the two countries must work together to fight Islamic terrorism.

Natalia, with a schoolteacher’s patience, often took time to talk to me. She told me her two sons were serving in the military, one in Chechnya and the other I forget where. Her husband had been a school bus driver. She showed me his photo—he was a long, slim fellow with blurry features and straight brown hair. After his second heart attack he had quit his job and spent all his time at home making wood carvings of tigers and repairing clocks. The apartment was full of clocks he had fixed and they rang and buzzed and chirped at various intervals.

Natalia gave me one of his carved tigers as a present and I gave her my last two Beanie Babies for her grandchildren. I asked her, just by the way, if she had ever seen a real tiger in the forest. She said she’d never seen one in the forest, but not long ago a tiger had walked down her street in Olga. She had taken a photo of it. The tiger in the snapshot she showed was skinny and shambly looking, walking along the pavement with its head to one side. Natalia said the tiger was sick and the police had shot it soon afterward.

With groceries we contributed, the widows made us dinners of red caviar, blini, cabbage soup, borscht with beef, pelmeni with sour cream, carrot salad, beet salad, cake, and the unavoidable endless cups of tea. I was sort of a fifth wheel during these evenings, and when my comprehension of what everybody was talking about went blank, I just sat there and brooded or daydreamed. Then every so often I would understand something they were saying, and I’d pitch in an observation or two, and they would think I’d been understanding all along. Once Sveta’s cat jumped in my lap and began rubbing against me and purring, and Sveta said, “Oh, that’s very strange, because usually that cat only likes women
and doesn’t go near men.” I replied,
“Da, i Ya nastoyashchii mushchina,”
which means, “Yes, and I am a real man.” I mention this one-liner, self-indulgently, because it was only the third or fourth time in my life that I made Russian friends laugh in Russian when I was trying to.

The village of Olga seemed snug and cozy or bleak and end-of-the-line, depending on my mood. Woodsmoke hung in the air and the crowing of roosters echoed among the houses and small apartment buildings set at different levels on the hills above the harbor. From certain angles the village looked like a little port city from a former time. But many of its houses had been abandoned, with doorways burned out and windows boarded shut, and though the harbor’s good situation among flanking hills kept its waters glassy calm, I didn’t get a sense that it enjoyed much ship traffic, aside from vessels like the small cargo transport at a timber company dock being loaded with logs for (I was told) export to Japan. Along the waterfront I saw chickens scratching at an oily beach, and a truck or two going by, but not much that could be described as bustling activity. It was hard to imagine a passing ship stopping in today just for a visit and her passengers disembarking to make a social call on Olga’s commandant, as (the alert reader will remember) Mikhail Bakunin daringly did here in 1861 while sailing by during his globe-spanning escape from Siberia.

I took walks around the village, made a few sketches, visited the local museum. The museum director, who carefully marked her place in the translated Stephen King novel she was reading when I walked in, was a bespectacled woman of late middle age named Revolutsia. Her parents, ardent Communists, had given her the name; she said most people just called her Lutsia. Neither of us being in any hurry, she led me through a detailed tour of the museum’s three small rooms, one of which consisted mainly of drawings by Olga schoolchildren. Lutsia discoursed on the Stone and Iron ages in the Primorskii Krai, and on several stone sculptures from a Chinese empire that had extended this far north in the time of Kublai Khan, and on Olga’s all-time richest man, a nineteenth-century tycoon who made his fortune harvesting sea cabbage along the shore and selling it to Japan. I told her about our just-completed journey and she asked if she could write an item about it for her museum newsletter. Sergei, who had showed up, cheerfully obliged by describing some of our adventures and the book I was writing about the Decembrists.

At Olga’s post office, a room of wooden phone booths scarred by decades of use carried a distinct, lingering atmosphere of the old-time Soviet blues. Sergei and I stopped by there sometimes to phone Vladivostok and see what was happening with flights from that city or into the United States. The ban on U.S. air travel had not been lifted. My wife had been trying to get me a reservation from Vladivostok to New York via Korean Air, and I stayed in touch with her by satellite phone.

When, after a few more days, I finally did go home, it was with the dreamy swiftness of zipping through a half dozen TV channels at a single touch of the remote. My exit happened like this:

One evening I called home and my wife said planes were supposed to start flying again the day after tomorrow, and she had made a reservation for me on Korean Air. At the post office, Sergei called Vladivostok and confirmed it. We had a farewell dinner with the widows, and the next morning we packed the van, said goodbye to them, and drove all day on small roads through mountains to the Razdolnaya River, about thirty miles from Vladivostok. (
Razdol’naya
means “free,” as in “free and easy.”) We camped near a bridge over it, and early the next morning I washed in the Razdolnaya and dressed in the clean clothes I had saved for the plane. I told Volodya I couldn’t believe I would actually go home that day and he said he had no doubt I would.