Travels in Siberia (53 page)

The morning was foggy. We broke camp and then drove through fog for a couple of hours to the Vladivostok airport, where I presented myself at the Korean Air window. Barely looking at me, the sallow-faced Russian woman behind the thick glass said she had never heard of my reservation, although it didn’t matter anyway, because all the planes were full. She advised me to come back in a week. At this, Sergei, standing by my side, leaned into the window and offered the woman 150 rubles, about $5. After a moment the woman told us she had searched again and this time had found my reservation after all. I handed Sergei the fare in dollars, he pushed it under the window, and in fifteen minutes she gave us the ticket—from Vladivostok to Seoul, from Seoul to Anchorage, and from Anchorage to JFK Airport in New York. To fly all that way cost $890.

Now I didn’t have enough cash left over to pay Sergei and Volodya what remained of their wages. Anticipating this, I had asked my wife to wire me money to Vladivostok by Western Union. We drove from the airport into the city. Vladivostok is hilly like San Francisco, and many of
its buildings recall the cast-iron architectural style popular in American cities in the late 1900s. In the middle of downtown we found a bank with a Western Union sign. The woman who took care of us—a lacquered, helmet-haired functionary with unflappable poise—drew out every part of the transaction to its maximum extent, even allowing herself recesses to chat with her colleagues. As this went on, Sergei said to me, “Sandy, we must hurry, because your plane leaves in two hours!” I, always the careful Russian student, looked at my watch, calculated, and said, “No, Sergei, my plane does not leave for three hours and forty-five minutes.” He glared at me; he had only been trying to hurry her along. She favored each of us with a small smile and continued taking her time.

After we finally finished there, we became lost looking for the road out of town and ended up back where we began, in the middle of the city. At the intersection of Svetlanovskii and Okeanskii Prospekt, maybe the busiest intersection in Vladivostok, Volodya double-parked and hopped out to ask directions. He then returned, explained to us the directions he’d been given, and turned the key in the ignition. The van did not start. He turned the key another dozen times. No dice. And recently it had been running so nicely! Doubtless this special last nonstarting was a farewell performance it had saved up just for this occasion. Through the obligatory raising of the hood, the tinkering, the application of the big screwdriver, and the turning and re-turning of the key, the van’s engine made a teasing click or two but no other sound.

Nothing to do but try a jump start. Unfortunately, Volodya had double-parked facing uphill on Svetlanovskii, one of the city’s steepest streets. Pushing the van forward would be impossible. We would have to jump-start it in reverse. To go in that direction would mean backing up into oncoming traffic. By now our distress had attracted the attention of a small crowd of well-dressed Vladivostokians amused at the sight of this supposed rescue vehicle helplessly broken down in the middle of the city.

Volodya took the wheel. Sergei and I went to the front of the van, ready to push. Volodya adjusted the outside rearview mirror, gauged the traffic, stepped on the clutch, put the van in reverse, and gave the signal. We pushed. The heavy van quickly picked up speed downhill. We kept pushing, and the oncoming cars swerved around us in a wailing of horns. Volodya popped the clutch. The van lurched, the engine started, the van accelerated faster into the honking, swerving cars. Volodya dodged
through them by rearview mirror until he was able to scoot around a corner into a quieter street, where by exquisite footwork he kept the engine alive. Running and out of breath, Sergei and I finally caught up with him. I describe all this in detail because it was the most outstanding feat of driving I have ever seen.

Back to the airport. In the parking lot we settled our accounts, and Sergei wrote me out a receipt the length of a mini-essay on a sheet of typing paper. I separated my stuff from the pile of gear in the back of the van. We stood around for a few minutes and took a few last photographs. Then I embraced Volodya and thanked him and said goodbye, and did the same with Sergei. With Sergei I even became emotional, saying what a good job he’d done even though I’d gotten angry at him sometimes. He beamed back at me, as if only happy thoughts remained. Across the lot I saw some guys disembarking from cabs at the entrance to the international building. By their bulk, their clothing, and the fact they carried fly rod cases, I guessed they were Americans. These were the first Americans I’d seen since St. Petersburg, almost seven weeks ago and more than six thousand miles away.

Now the speedy, channel-changing part began. Sergei helped me with my heaviest bag to customs, where the customs guys were so nice to all us Americans that the newness of it was disorienting; this was still during the period when people all over the world had sympathetic, kindly feelings toward Americans. Something about crossing the official boundary into the global, channel-changing zone made me almost go to pieces with intense jumpiness, and in the customs area I actually managed to lose the notebook in which I’d been writing my observations since Khabarovsk. One of the fly fishermen found the notebook on the floor among the X-ray machines, and he held it up and yelled, “Does this belong to anybody?” I consider losing my notebook almost a shooting offense, like an infantryman’s losing his rifle. I retrieved it in embarrassment. The fly fishermen were friendly, outgoing West Coast guys. They had caught lots of trout and sea-run salmon in Kamchatka and were still in the mellow mood that follows angling success.

The flight attendants on Korean Air treated us Americans even more gently than the Russian customs people had done. All the Koreans spoke
to us in the quiet, careful manner one uses with the recently bereaved. In a seamless rush, the flight from Vladivostok became the empty Seoul airport became an almost-empty 747 crossing the Pacific bound for Anchorage. My seat was way in the back of the plane with no other passengers for thirty feet around. As we approached American airspace, a shiver of patriotism pulsed through me and I began saying, quietly, “Self-evident! ‘We believe these truths to be
self-evident
!’ ” trying to give the phrase the same inflection Martin Luther King did in his “I have a dream” speech. In America there are still truths considered to be self-evident. Russia is older, crookeder, more obscure; not much in Russia is self-evident, certainly not to me.

In Anchorage we had to deplane and reclaim all our luggage so each piece could be searched. Then immigration officials interviewed each passenger individually. I had to explain why my passport showed no entry into any foreign country besides my many visits to Russia. My attempt to describe my spiritual-mystical attraction for that country puzzled the immigration guy. Then the handful of New York–bound passengers boarded another huge, empty plane for a nine-hour nap across Alaska, the Northwest Territories, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Minnesota. Eventually the in-flight screens showed we were over greater New York. Now special security measures sent us on a slowed-down detour out to the end of Long Island and back before we were cleared to land.

JFK Airport, when we deplaned, was semideserted, its bare hallways still giving off a post-apocalyptic feel. I strolled almost alone through places where normally you’d have to wait a half hour in line. Because of the time difference between here and where I started, I walked out of the Korean Air terminal and onto the curbside pickup area at about nine in the evening of the same calendar day that I’d begun by bathing in the Razdolnaya River east of Vladivostok.

Alfred, a driver for Black Car Service in Montclair, was waiting for me. Black Car is now out of business, but I always used to use it because its drivers were West Indian and I enjoyed talking to them. Alfred was a very big man in a shiny black suit and he drove a large black Oldsmobile. He greeted me with a grave West Indian politeness, which was perhaps the Caribbean version of the Russian
solicitousness and Korean tact I’d seen earlier in the day. I was happy to be home and I had a sudden upsurge of transnational affection for Sergei and Volodya and the Russian customs guys and the Korean flight attendants and the American customs guys and Alfred and everybody.

We stowed my luggage in the trunk and slammed it shut. I went to open the car door and then I stopped and looked around. The sun had set, but the heat of the day was still radiating everywhere. I smelled diesel fuel, bus exhaust, and a whiff of Jamaica Bay not far off. The speedy channel-changing in my head slowed to a stop, and all the ordinary JFK Airport surroundings seemed to settle on my shoulders like an old coat. In my gratitude I did not fall to my knees and kiss the ground. But for a moment I did squat down and touch the warm, black, grainy, pebbly asphalt with the fingers of one hand.

New York City, near where I live, is like an international capital. I believe every place on earth has representation of one kind or another in New York. Every place has its own consulate there, or landscape paintings of it in the museums, or displays of its works of art, or scientific exhibits about it, or its own cultural center, or ethnic food store, or emigrants’ society, or some combination of these. The rule holds for Texas or Antarctica or Mongolia or Chad or anywhere. It’s less true, though, for Siberia. There are no Siberian wildlife exhibits, for example, in the city’s immense American Museum of Natural History. The best—and, as far as I know, only—New York spot connected to Siberia is the fur department on the second floor of Saks Fifth Avenue department store in Manhattan. When I want a local intimation of Siberia I go there and look at the stoles and jackets and floor-length coats made of Siberia’s oldest, most numinous export, the fur of the Siberian sable.

The depth of Siberia’s winters is in its sable fur. Animals in countries with the coldest winters produce the best fur, but that is only a small part of sable’s allure. When you hold sable fur in your hands and look into it, there’s an endlessness, an inward glimmering that pulls you. Like diamonds or gold, sable has a quality that locks into a strange susceptibility in human beings and half hypnotizes them. And yet sable isn’t mineral, it’s animal, like us, and affects not just our sight and our imaginations but also the senses of touch and smell and even hearing, in the ineffable soft swish
of it against your skin. Plus, sable is warm; for that practical reason, it has probably been beguiling humans for longer, historically, than gems or gold. And when, beyond that, you combine the beauty of sable fur with the loveliness of Russian women, you approach the region of fairy tale.

Around the sable coats of Saks Fifth Avenue, Siberia itself seems to materialize vaguely in the air. The first village I ever visited in Siberia was the trading and exile village of Barguzin; the highest-quality sable that Saks sells is known by the commercial name of Barguzin sable. A sable stole at Saks costs twenty-five thousand dollars, a jacket eighty-five thousand, and a full Barguzin sable coat one hundred and eighty thousand, marked down from two-twenty-five. I know fur trapping is cruel, but I can’t keep that fact in front of my attention when I’m staring into the deeps of Barguzin sable. If I had the money, I’d be grabbing hundred-dollar bills by the fistful from my shoulder bag and handing them to the sales clerk without taking my eyes away.

Books about Siberia often bring up the sable early on, mainly because of its usefulness for explaining how the region from the Urals to the Pacific was explored. The sable is a species of marten that lives also in the northern parts of western Russia and in Finland. It is about two feet long, with a tail half again its length, and it mostly eats smaller animals, nuts, and berries. Years when there is a good crop of cedar nuts—the small, husk-covered nut found in the cones of cedar trees—usually are good years for sables. The rich mahogany-brown of the cedar nut mingles with the blue-black of a northern night in the fur of the black sable, the most prized kind.

In trade, medieval Russia had little of value to offer the rest of the world besides slaves and furs. Most long-distance trade during the Middle Ages was in luxury goods. Along with sable, the furs that Russia exported included ermine, fox, beaver, and northern gray squirrel, known as miniver. Kiev, the chief city of medieval Rus, served as the center of the fur trade not only for Russia but also for the contemporary world. After the Mongols destroyed Kiev in the thirteenth century, it lost that distinction, along with much else, and the center of the fur trade moved north, first to the city of Novgorod, and then to Ustyug (later called Velikii Ustyug). With its prime water route location at the confluence where the Iug and Sukhona rivers combine to make the Severnaya Dvina, Ustyug remained Russia’s fur trade capital for more than two hundred years.

When Ivan the Terrible captured the city of Kazan from the Tatars in 1552, he opened the Kama, the river it controlled. Now fur-seeking adventurers could go up that centrally located river and follow it eastward to the Urals. From the Kama they could continue east on its tributary, the Chuvosia, then cross the Urals and drop down into the drainage of the Tura, and thence to the Tobol, the Irtysh, and the Ob, the westernmost great river of Siberia. Yermak followed some of that route when he led his Cossacks on the expedition by which Russia would take possession of Siberia. Ivan the Terrible’s initial anger at Yermak for stirring up trouble in that part of the world abated after he saw the captured supply of sable furs Yermak sent him.