Travels in Siberia (62 page)

I asked our guides who the dark-featured nineteenth-century fellow in a large oil portrait was, and they identified him as V. A. Obruchev, the pioneer geologist of eastern Siberia. As it happened, I had read some of Obruchev’s memoir,
Moi Puteshestviia po Sibiri
(My Travels Through Siberia) when I was in St. Petersburg; at the time, I had the unachievable ambition of reading at least some of every known book with “Siberia” and “Travels” in its title. V. A. Obruchev first came to Siberia in the fall of 1888 to take a job with a newly established government department for geological explorations in Irkutsk, and he brought along his wife and seven-month-old son. The parents bundled the baby carefully for the journey in an inner sack of oilcloth and an outer sack of rabbit fur, with a down cap on his head. In the book’s photographs the faces of the Obruchevs are hard to make out in the depths of their winter clothing.

The paleontology museum, down another twilit corridor, brought to mind the controlled confusion of an auto parts shop, with various sections of fossilized mammoths instead of radiators and transmissions lying around. I have already mentioned the museum’s mammoth leg, with its well-preserved long hair, and the fossilized mammoth stomach cut crosssection to reveal the packed grasses of a last meal fossilized inside. There
were mammoth tusks curling like untrimmed parentheses, and mammoth teeth, and pieces of fossilized mammoth hide with fur still on them, and a photo on the wall of a famous “mammoth graveyard” along a riverbank, where thousands of specimens had been found. A big part of the room was taken up by the outsize skeleton of a prehistoric rhinoceros (
nosorog
, in Russian) that had been found in Yakutia and that represented, according to the curator, the most complete skeleton of this animal in the world. On the wall above the rhino hung a bison skull resembling in every detail (ghostly eye sockets, tapering nostrils, scaly horns) any bison skull one might see in an Indian museum in the American West, except this skull was at least half again as large. It had belonged to one of our American bison’s Siberian ancestors in the millennia before the species crossed the Bering Land Bridge, adapted to the American environment, and shrank in size.

I had wanted to go from Yakutsk to the village of Oimyakon, said to be the coldest place on earth outside Antarctica. After looking into the details of this journey, the two Sergeis advised against it. The distance to Oimyakon was about six hundred miles, many of them on difficult, mountainous roads, and by the time we got there the village would be in the middle of its
Polus Kholodnii
(Pole of Cold) Festival, which might create problems finding a place to stay. Time and money considerations seemed to put Oimyakon out of reach.

The Sergeis suggested that instead he and I go on that same northeast-bound highway out of Yakutsk, only not as far, and make our first stop at the village of Khandyga. From Khandyga we could continue to the village of Tyoplyi Kliuch (Warm Spring), where we could visit a museum about the gulag. Past Tyoplyi Kliuch, a smaller and less-traveled road branched off heading farther north. This road went about 125 miles to a village called Topolinoe, which was a Even settlement where we could see reindeer and native performances and dances. I agreed to this second plan. What decided me was that along the Topolinoe road, they said, we would pass the ruins of gulag labor camps.

At nine o’clock on a Wednesday morning, with the temperature at −25°F, a Russian-made jeep called a Uazik (after its initials, UAZ, which stand for Ulianovskii Avtomobilnyi Zavod, or Ulianovsk Automobile Works; the first word comes from Lenin’s original last name, Ulianov)
arrived in front of the Sterkh Hotel to take us the two-hundred-some miles to Khandyga. Of the Uazik’s driver, I find I have preserved nothing in my notes except his cigarette; the smoke and the diesel fumes in the jeep had me hacking for days.

Just outside Yakutsk, the road descended to the surface of the Lena River, and then it continued on the ice for about twelve miles. On Lake Baikal’s ice road, I recalled, we had seen other vehicles only occasionally. This Lena River ice road roared like a major highway, with a heavy traffic of cars and trucks going in each direction. Slowdowns at bumps or cracks made the flow bumper-to-bumper sometimes. Baikal’s frozen surface could have been a salt flats or an endless snow-covered parking lot, but on the Lena, with its windings and the way the land was, you never forgot you were on a river. No matter how slow the traffic, almost no cars veered from the established roadway to take shortcuts across the ice.

After an hour or so, the traffic thinned out. We had left the river and were driving fast on a road of gravel covered with snow in a countryside sort of like Wisconsin’s, with white fields, gray forests, and low hills. And, of course, completely lacking in fences. A brown sleigh full of round hay bundles zipped along the snow beside the road, the hooves of the shaggy horses tossing up clods of dirt and snow. In some fields the same kind of horses, hippie-haired in the mane and equally shaggy on the sides and in their tails, grazed the snow-covered ground with their heads buried up to the ears. The few cows we passed looked cold and resentful, breathing out steam, while ravens with no apparent purpose hopped and made random miniflights along the roadside.

At about two hundred miles from Yakutsk we came to the Aldan River. Aside from the tire tracks on the river’s surface where we were about to drive across it, the Aldan showed no sign at all of human presence. Its wide floodplain, its long, uneven shoreline in the far distance opposite, and its border of dark or bare-branched trees in the winter haze could have been a Missouri River landscape from the days of Lewis and Clark.

We arrived in Khandyga at about five thirty in the afternoon and pulled up in front of the village’s central administration building, into which Sergei and the driver disappeared. I stayed in the Uazik, and after a minute a
marshrutka
public-transport van parked beside me. On the van’s sliding door was written:

      
Nu vy blin daete

      
khlopnesh’ Dverio
—

      
Umryosh ot montirovki.

With nothing else to do right then, I took out my dictionary and tried to translate that. Literally, it said, “Well you darn give a slam with the door—you die from being mounted.” When Sergei came back, I asked him about the last words and he said they meant “from being hit with a tire iron.”

Recently Sergei had started acting sullen and fed up again. We had been traveling together for almost three weeks; conceivably, I was getting on his nerves. I asked him if we were going to visit the gulag museum in Khandyga now and he said, “What gulag museum? Did you read there was a gulag museum here? Where did you hear there was a gulag museum here?” I said Sergei Shibaev had been talking about the Khandyga gulag museum yesterday. He said, “There is no gulag museum here. The gulag museum is another hundred kilometers from here.” In fact, I had forgotten that the museum was not in Khandyga but in Tyoplyi Kliuch, sixty miles farther up the road. The waspishness of his reaction caused me to worry I was being taken on a snipe hunt, and I would once again see no prisons or evidence of same.

Khandyga had been a major military base until a few years before, and part of the village was still set off behind high fences made of those prefab cement panels that are everywhere in Siberia. The Aldan River ran beside the town. A wide and much-driven-on ramp of ice-covered earth led from the village down to the river’s surface. On a stroll I took in the light remaining that afternoon, I went down the ramp and suddenly had to hop aside to avoid an empty coal truck as it sped around a corner. The truck descended the ramp and drove onto the roadway leading across the Aldan. Soon after that a truck came along in the opposite direction, crossing the river and climbing the ramp to the town. The incoming truck carried a full load of coal.

Khandyga ran on coal, it devoured coal. A tall brick stack above the village emitted, nonstop, a towering conical billow of dark gray, as one would expect on a −22° afternoon. The usual insulated steam pipes laced the village with their meanderings, and where the heat was escaping from the more run-down houses you could tell the location of the cracks
by the elaborate, pure-white excrescences of frost that had built up around them. Some of these frost blooms were huge, like an outsize bole or a clot of dried sap on the side of a tree.

Because of the constant fall of coal soot, the crust of the snow in the village was a crystal amalgam of ice, snow, and dust. Over the winter the snow had piled up until it was maybe four feet deep in the uncleared and untrodden places. Snow topped the village’s many abandoned cars with Elvis-like coxcombs. Where shoveling had dug pathways, you could see the individual snowfalls delineated like layers of sediment in a road cut. After every snowfall, evidently, enough coal dust had fallen to leave a black residue. Then the next snow had arrived, and atop that a new layer of coal dust had accumulated, and so on. Seen in cross section, the snow of Khandyga was striped black and white like a torte.

Noting, as I often do, whatever happens to be on the ground at my feet, I came across a piece of litter in Khandyga that I nominate for special international recognition. This particular item, which I picked up and saved like a botanical specimen, was a pill packet formerly containing individually wrapped pills, each in its own bubble of foil affixed to the packet’s cardboard backing. I know I can find a similar piece of litter—same cardboard (or plastic) backing, same little foil bubbles with the foil torn and the contents removed—anytime I want on the streets near my house in New Jersey. Because I’ve encountered it close to home, and all over Russia, and in Khandyga at the almost end of the earth, I assume that item of litter to be a globally universal thing. Its ubiquity has caused me to wonder what it is called. Among manufacturers of packaging, the name of this object is the “blister pack.” I believe the blister pack might be the most widely distributed single item of litter in the world.

Khandyga’s hotel turned out to be a long two-story building with a torte-snow roof and an abandoned car out front. Torn-open trash bags spilled their contents on the hard-packed street snow, attracting the customary businesslike ravens. Nothing about the exterior of this establishment identified it as a hotel, but inside it was warm and clean, and laid out more like a rooming house than a hotel. Men slept in one big room, women and young children in another. Each of these rooms had five or six narrow beds. A kitchen next to the men’s sleeping room provided refrigerator, stove, and cookware. The hotel also offered one or two single bedrooms, but they had already been taken, so Sergei and I put our
stuff in the men’s bedroom and claimed beds. We found nobody in there except a Yakut teenager drinking a Coke and playing a Game Boy as he sat cross-legged on his bed.

A stocky, blunt-faced young woman with short pale hair ran the hotel. We talked to her while Sergei made us dinner—frozen pelmeni that he bought at a local shop, boiled, and served with sour cream. I asked the manager what people found to do in Khandyga. She said she and her husband loved to fish and caught many fish in the summer in the Aldan. I was pleased to notice that she spoke with an accent, pronouncing some words differently and dropping the endings on others. I had known there were Siberian accents but had never been sure I was hearing one before. As I ate the pelmeni I found a thick black hair in it and added that, mentally, to the rock I’d bitten down on while eating a beet salad a few days earlier in Yakutsk. This latest surprise put me on a food-poisoning watch again. It would’ve been bad to get sick in this hotel, with twenty-some guests and only one bathroom. And throwing up, etc., outside would have been awkward, too, given the nighttime temperatures. Luckily no postmealtime consequences ensued.

In Sergei’s current brisk and uncheerful mood, he had stopped telling me what was going on. I was retaliating by not deigning to ask. We had discussed the route and the expense in proceeding beyond Khandyga, and I had given the okay for it. But just how this next leg of the journey was to be accomplished I didn’t know; the car that had brought us from Yakutsk had gone back to the city with a return load of passengers, leaving us without wheels. I knew Sergei must be planning something, from the calls he made at the phone in the hallway. I tried to eavesdrop on him, but he talked too fast. As far as I knew, when morning came we might be continuing on from Khandyga . . . or not. I sat on my bed writing in my notebook and trying to seem above it all. Sergei lay on his bed reading a Russian newspaper similar to the
National Enquirer
.

At breakfast he told me to be packed up by eleven, when our ride would arrive. I got ready, but then nobody showed. Sergei accepted this without comment and I made no inquiries as I waited in full cold-weather gear (minus coat and boots) and paged through my notes. At about eleven forty-five the phone rang; more negotiations about itinerary and price. Soon after, Sergei summoned me to the front hallway, where he
introduced me to the woman who would be our guide over the next days. Her name was Galina Dmitrievna Gotovtseva and she came originally from the village of Topolinoe, our final destination. Now she lived in Khandyga and had some official position in the village. She certainly looked official, even ambassadorial, with her high, arched eyebrows; long face; narrow, fitted red coat going all the way down to her ankles; and tall hat of black fur.

Galina Gotovtseva told us she was a Even; so were the other passengers we would be traveling with. The Even (pronounced Yev-
YEN
) are similar to the Evenk, though I couldn’t tell you the differences between the tribes. In former times the Even were called the Lamuts and the Evenk the Tungus. Both are reindeer-herding tribes. After we had loaded our stuff into the back of the buslike van waiting outside, Galina introduced us to the other passengers: first, Aleksandr Gavrilovich Sleptsov, the driver, an equanimous, broad-faced man in his midthirties; then Gavriil Dmitrievich Sleptsov, a rangy older fellow, the driver’s father; then Andrei Petrovich Struchkov, a smooth-featured, athletic-looking man in his late forties. All these she identified as reindeer breeders and herders. Andrei Struchkov, she added, was also a famous reindeer racer.