Travels in Siberia (60 page)

Sergei and I had packed various nonperishable stuff to eat, like kielbasa and cookies and tea, but after a while our supplies began to run low and the packages they came in, brought out for the fourth or fifth reprise, looked less appetizing. At the train’s longer stops, Sergei made quick canvasses of stores in the station vicinity in search of fresh bread or other additions, but there wasn’t much to be had. Often he would come back having found nothing but bottled water of dubious origin or even-more-suspect kielbasa. At the Tynda station we had a longer stop than usual and he tried more shops. Most of them were closed, the rest almost empty, but he did find a few hard-boiled eggs, a small jar of mayonnaise, and two cans of pickled sea cabbage. He presented these finds to me triumphantly, then chopped the eggs, opened the tins of sea cabbage, and mixed these ingredients with the mayonnaise for a salad. The dish tasted only vaguely like food, but I was hungry, so I ate. Then I rebuked myself for my greed. Ever since I’d had food poisoning in St. Petersburg, I’d been afraid of getting it again, and now I’d walked into it with my eyes open. For a long while afterward I sat in the compartment waiting for the action to start. I pictured myself somehow rushed back to the Severobaikalsk
profilaktorii
, this time for real. After eight hours had passed without serious complaints, I figured I had gotten away with it.

The large town of Tynda is considered to be the capital of BAM, and the Tynda train station is another modernist fandango, its many bold architectural statements cramming themselves into one structure with an energy and incoherence difficult to summarize. Much clearer in my
mind is the station’s interior, which was a sort of mall of empty shops along hallways to nowhere radiating from the station’s busy and relatively crowded central area. The interior’s focal point was an improbable and elaborate fountain. In the middle of the Siberian winter, inside this not-warm train station, the fountain flowed and burbled. A water nymph, or maybe Venus herself, poured water from the fountain’s high point down a cascade and into its broad basin. At the edge of the fountain,
Sibiriaki
—Siberian guys—were standing around in their heavy, multilayered winter clothes. One was carrying a large steel ice auger, the kind used for drilling fishing holes.

At Tynda, the train turned north and took us another couple hundred miles to the coal-mining town of Neryungri, where it left the sleeping-compartment car by itself in the middle of a train yard. We sat there all night with no electricity, the coal fires dying in the corridor stoves, and the bathroom locked. I went out and made a few tentative explorations of the train yard in the dark; throbbing diesel engines hemmed us in like a sleeping elephant herd. In the lee of an engine I called my wife on the satellite phone. I had to take off my gloves to dial in the icy half-light; I found her running out to do errands on a balmy afternoon. The next morning another train came and hooked us to it and pulled us slowly north, although not all the way to Yakutsk, because the tracks don’t go that far. The last three-hundred-some miles to Yakutsk beyond the tracks’ end must be navigated by motor vehicle on a semiwilderness highway.

We took a cab from the town of Aldan, shortly before the end of the train line. A driver came into the train car while the train was stopped there, offered us a good price to Yakutsk, and the next minute we were loading our stuff in the trunk of his little Toyota. I sat in the middle of the Toyota’s backseat, Sergei on my right, and on my left a thin old woman with dark eyes and a beaklike nose. As we left the town she argued and complained about the fare with the driver, a good-natured guy in a black turtleneck and a black leather vest who called her “babushka” (grandmother) and parried her thrusts unperturbedly. In the passenger seat in front was a young Moldavian woman named Vera who was going to Yakutsk to visit her brother.

I had on my heavy down coat with its pockets full of notebook, sketchbook, disposable camera, documents, etc. After the babushka tired of
ragging the driver, she started in on how the fat American was crushing her. I was doing all I could to keep from leaning on her, but I had no seat belt and nothing much to hold on to, and the driver drove fast, and sometimes I lurched. A sign at the side of the road said yakutsk 490
KM
. The babushka muttered, complained, and groaned. Warming to her theme, she expounded at every swerve on how she was being pummeled, and what huge things I must have in my pockets, etc. About halfway to Yakutsk we stopped to get something to eat at a roadside café. While the others went in, I stayed outside for a moment, savoring the cold and the stars. The next day someone in Yakutsk told me it had gone down to forty below that night.

The café was a small cabin structure with steps leading up to it from the parking lot and an igloo-style entry chamber with an outer and inner door. When anyone opened the outer door, a big cloud of steam burst forth, and because of that a white horse-collar of fine-crystal frost had grown all around the door frame. I went inside, pulled the door shut, and opened the inner door. I found the babushka, my accuser, waiting for me. “There he is, the fat American!” she announced to the other diners. “See how big he is, in his big American coat? This is the one who crushes me! This is what I must endure!” and so on. Then she cackled a gap-toothed, beady-eyed old-lady laugh. I laughed, too. Everybody in the café laughed.

After supper, Sergei, Vera, the driver, and I were all in the car ready to go, but the babushka was not around. Then she emerged into the car’s headlights, stepping from the trees beside the parking lot. She looked into the lights with her head cocked to one side. “Baba Yaga,” said Vera, and with her skinny legs, knee-length coat, head scarf, and beaked nose the babushka did look like that witch from the children’s story. Back in the car she once again set up such a grumbling that the driver, who had been remonstrating with her, finally pulled over and considered what should be done. Vera, in a sweet and respectful voice, asked the babushka if maybe she would like to switch with her and ride in the front seat. The babushka agreed readily and took Vera’s place, where she chatted with the driver, perhaps about her recipes for boiling small children. Meanwhile, Vera and Sergei and I quit trying not to lean on one another and rode all bouncing around in the swerving car, which by now was following a nerve-racking shortcut atop the frozen Lena River, where the
swerves greatly multiplied. Vera told me not to worry about leaning on her, and Sergei said, “Don’t pay any attention to what the babushka said. You’re a normal-sized person.”

After the black darkness of the previous three hundred miles, the lights of the city of Yakutsk suddenly rose around us like fireworks in the sub-Arctic night. At about midnight we rolled up in front of the Sterkh Hotel, one of Yakutsk’s fanciest, and Sergei went in to check out the room rates. Vera got out to look for a pay phone to call her brother. She soon came back because none of the pay phones worked. She was at a loss. I took out my satellite phone and offered to try Vera’s brother’s number with that. At first I couldn’t make the phone work at all. Then somehow the satellite connection improved, I dialed again, and the brother answered. I gave Vera the phone and it vanished into the thick fur around her hood. Her happiness at hearing his voice was like a sweepstakes winner’s. Five minutes later the brother arrived in his car in front of the hotel and Vera said goodbye to all of us and left with him. I felt a small uptick of patriotic pride that I kept to myself. Bravo, American technology! Bravo, Iridium Communications, Inc., of Bethesda, Md.!

Yakutsk is the capital of the Sakha Republic, sometimes called Yakutia. The city lies between the latitudes of Anchorage and Nome. The Sakha Republic is about the same size as India, but has a population of one million compared to India’s 1.3 billion. That is, India has 1,299,000,000 more people than the Sakha Republic on about the same amount of land. Many of the people in the Sakha Republic are natives—Yakuts, Evens, Evenks, and Chukchis. Many native people live in taiga villages and follow their reindeer herds from place to place for parts of the year. Others have moved to Yakutsk and smaller cities. As we stood in the cold outside the Sterkh Hotel and Vera talked on the phone, young native women came and went, apparently from a party inside. The women wore short fur jackets, sparkly jeans, and leg warmers, and a few had glitter in their blond-streaked black hair.

When Wendell Willkie, the American politician, visited Yakutsk in 1942, he said it reminded him of Elwood, Indiana. Willkie grew up in Elwood and thus is another on the long list of Midwesterners who have traveled in Siberia. He came here because of the war. Although Willkie lost to Roosevelt in the 1940 presidential race, he was credited afterward with helping to unify America behind the war effort, and in that capacity he made a round-the-world tour in a U.S. bomber to represent his country and demonstrate the Allies’ mastery of the air. The part of Yakutsk that specifically evoked Elwood for him was the boardwalks on the bigger streets; his hometown had board sidewalks when he was a boy. Willkie also spoke more generally about the heartiness of Yakutsk’s citizens, the simplicity of their tastes, and the place’s “tremendous vitality.” He said, “The town itself seemed, in many ways, like a western town in my country a century ago.”

As possibly the only person on earth today who has actually seen both Yakutsk and Elwood, Indiana, I think I understand what he meant. The Yakutsk Willkie visited was a frontier city, as the Elwood of his youth was a frontier town. Both were lively settlements far from their country’s center (though the one, obviously, much farther than the other). Observers before and after Willkie noted the many similarities between the Siberian and the Western American frontiers—from the hogs running loose in the villages, to the smallpox epidemics that hit the natives, to the rumors
of tribes descended from the ancient Hebrews somewhere out in the wilds, to the environmental problems of overplowing and dust storms that came with development, and so on. Willkie’s trip also took him to Cairo, Baghdad, Moscow, and Peking; he stopped in Yakutsk partly because he was going that general direction anyway, and of all the cities he saw, this raw metropolis in the dark of the forest no doubt did look more like someplace in America.

But today I don’t think anyone who saw Yakutsk would be reminded of Elwood, or of anyplace like it. Elwood is another small American town that has passed through stages of early settlement, enthusiastic development, industrial boom, and recent decline. In those terms, its frontier years ended ages ago. Yakutsk, on the other hand, is still a frontier place, still hanging on to the writhing wilderness by its fingernails. The Lena River, which Yakutsk is technically on the left bank of, has moved away from most of the city, and even to get to the river heading due east from the center of town you have to cross a no-road zone of islands and former river channels and oxbow lakes. The river itself, once you do reach it, is at least four miles wide. There is no bridge across it at Yakutsk, nor is there any farther downstream; upstream, the closest bridge is more than seven hundred miles away. To travel from Yakutsk to Nizhni Bestyakh, just on the other side of the river, you go by ferry in the warmer months and by ice road in winter. When the river is not yet frozen but too dangerous for boats because of the floating ice, people either don’t go, or fly.

All of Yakutsk rests on permafrost, which extends thirteen hundred feet down. The city’s average winter temperature is −42°. “The climate of Yakutia is the severest of the inhabited world,” says the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Nome, Yakutsk’s almost colatitudinist, has a population of about 3,500; in 2002, the population of Yakutsk was 210,642. The city has Orthodox churches with shiny onion domes, and big hotels, and an expressway along the (former) bank of the Lena, and a branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and a university, and a public square with, in winter, giant ice sculptures (Great Patriotic War tableaux; knight of medieval Rus on horseback), and one of those enormous, skyline-dominating, two-and-a-half-times-the-height-of-anything-else TV-radio towers that Russian cities can’t seem to do without. This far north, in this drastic a climate, there is no other city of Yakutsk’s size in the world.