Travels in Siberia (65 page)

In the village square, an obelisk commemorated the crash. It had occurred on May 25, 1943. The pilots were Pesnikh, Sivelgin, and Vedmitskii. Reindeer herders from Topolinoe had found the remains.

As we stood in the square, which was achingly bright with the morning sun on the snow, a troupe of thirty or forty children came running in a line from the school building and formed two concentric circles. They all had on traditional Even costumes of reindeer hide and fur, and reindeer boots with fur at the top. They presented themselves to Sergei and me, did a kind of curtsy, and began a back-and-forth, wheel-within-wheel dance to a song they sang. Sergei videotaped everything, circling around them, and I tried to remain inconspicuous behind a fixed smile. The Even schoolteacher in charge of the kids watched them closely and applauded when they finished. The kids seemed relieved at that. The sweetness of their smiles made me rebuke myself for how dull I had become. Then the teacher asked all the kids to tell us their names. Each said his or her last name first, followed by first name and patronymic.

An older Even woman named Kristina Mikhailovna Zakarova joined us after the dance. She was a Even poet, she told us, as well as a performer of Even songs and an author. She and Galina led us past the main government building, with its giant statue of a reindeer out front. We paused a moment to admire it. Continuing through the village, they then brought us to the apartment of the reindeer racer and his wife, whom we had met the day before. As we were ushered in I said to Sergei, aside, that we could stay only a little while. He shrugged to indicate helplessness
in the face of hospitality. Andrei, the reindeer racer, seated us on the living room couch and began piling framed diplomas in our laps for us to look at. Sergei exclaimed politely over them, but I had no idea what they were. On the living room walls from ceiling to floor hung thick carpets, and stuffed toys were piled around the room. Andrei and his wife then presented their two-year-old granddaughter, Regina, dressed in reindeer-hide hat, coat, and boots. They said the little girl had ridden on a reindeer for three hundred miles wearing those clothes just a few months ago. Regina posed and turned so we could see the outfit from all sides.

Tiredness and hunger had reduced my concentration to practically none, and I just wanted to sit in a daze. Andrei produced some of the prizes he had won for reindeer racing. There were elaborate medals and ribbons. When the prize had been an appliance, and he had given it away to someone in the village, he had kept the box it came in. In a storage room he had a number of these boxes, including one for a TV set and another for an Electrolux refrigerator. The Even poet, who had disappeared into another room, now emerged dressed entirely in reindeer-hide clothing she had sewn and beaded herself. We sat again in the living room as she began a speech that sounded memorized.

I was thinking that we would probably be here forever, that time had become stuck with us in it, and we would remain here until the sun finally burned out and this place got really cold for a change. The poet bowed her head and collected herself and then sang a mournful song about a bird. Her strong, pure voice filled the room. As I followed the plaintive halftones, the music’s risings and fallings carried me and caused the time-lock sensation to fade away.

Tea was ready. Sergei told Galina that we had to go, but she replied that we absolutely must stay for
obed
, lunch. We were brought into the apartment’s small kitchen and seated at a table; on the walls were posters of tropical fruits, in a close-up, color-enhanced view, hyperrealistically photographed. A platter of large grayish pieces of boiled reindeer was set before us. We were given plates, sharp knives, and forks, and told to cut ourselves a piece. Another platter held thick slices of home-baked bread. I took some bread, speared a slice of meat, and carved off a chunk. The reindeer was fresh and tender, completely delicious, and the bread accompanied it perfectly. I ate one big piece of reindeer and then a couple
more, as did Sergei. We’d had no real food for a while. Following the meat came the soup course—a clear reindeer broth, very hot, brimming with tiny noodles. To finish off we had squares of German dark chocolate and hot, strong
kitaiskii chai
, Chinese tea. Immediately my stupor lifted and I thanked our hosts many times. This was among the top two or three meals I ever had in Siberia. I enjoyed it all the more because from the first bite I knew I could relax in the certainty that it would not give me food poisoning.

After lunch we left the village and headed back to Khandyga. This haste was my doing. For me the main purpose of the Topolinoe journey had been to see the abandoned prison camps along the Topolinskaya Highway. If we stayed too long in the village we would again traverse that road in darkness. I wanted to get to at least some of the
lagers
in the daylight, and I had told Sergei that several times. Evidently the message had gotten through. After finishing our tea we looked out the window and saw Aleksandr and his minibus waiting outside. This time the passengers, besides us, were the reindeer racer; our guide, Galina; the Even poet; and several other Eveny bound for Khandyga or beyond. Gavriil Sleptsov, the driver’s father, had dislocated his shoulder, and he was being taken to the clinic at Khandyga. Aleksandr asked if I would mind if his father sat in the front seat so he would have more room for his arm. The only way Gavriil Sleptsov could hold his arm without great pain was directly out from his body at shoulder height. I agreed and took a window seat in back. At each bounce in the road, the jolt to his shoulder caused his face to clench and contort, but he never made a sound.

We set out from Topolinoe with the sun still high. Evidence of prison camps began to appear at about twenty-five kilometers from the village. There were old fences and guard towers back in the trees, and small buildings. I was surprised at how much I had missed in the darkness the night before, even with the full moon. A building on the left-hand side close to the road had been the bakery for several
lagers
, Aleksandr said. We passed more guard towers, more small log buildings. At km marker 136—marker 53, measuring from Topolinoe—Aleksandr pulled over and said there was a
lager
just down the hill on the left. From the road all that could be seen was part of a snow-covered roof and the top of another guard tower. Sergei and I got out and started down the hill in the thigh-deep snow.

The
lager
lay in a narrow valley between sparsely wooded hills. The gray, scraggly trees, which did not make it to the hills’ higher slopes, grew more thickly near the
lager
and partly surrounded it; a few small birches had sprung up inside what had been the camp’s perimeter. Their bare branches contrasted with the white of the snow on the roof of the barracks, whose wall, set back under the eaves, was dark. In the whiteness of an open field, a guard tower tilted sideways like someone putting all his weight on one leg. A ladderlike set of steps still led up to it, and two eyelike window openings added to the anthropomorphic effect. In the endless and pristine snow cover, I saw no tire tracks, road ruts, abandoned oil drums, or other sign that any human had been here since the camp was left to the elements half a century before.

At first view the camp looked as I’d expected. There were the fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s, the ink-black barbed wire, the inch-long barbs shaped like bayonets. Some of the posts leaned one direction or another, and the barbed-wire strands drooped or fell to the ground; the fencing, and the second line of fence posts several yards beyond, and the low, shameful barracks with its two doors and three windows fit exactly with the picture of a Siberian prison camp that one has in the mind. Sergei had drifted off to the left to videotape the
lager
from the side. I went in by the front gate, which was standing open. When I was inside the perimeter, the camp lost its genericness and became instead this particular Russian structure of its own.

To begin with, the whole place was as handmade as a mud hut. The fence posts shaped like upside-down L’s weren’t factory stock that had been produced elsewhere, but plain logs, peeled and smoothed, with narrow boards atop them to complete the L. And the side of the barracks wall, which had appeared from a distance to be stucco, was actually a daubed plastering over thin strips of lath that crossed each other diagonally like basketwork. I broke a piece of the plastering off in my hand; at one time it had been painted a pale yellow and it crumbled easily. It seemed to be nothing more than a spackle of mud and river sand.

Aside from the nails and the barbed wire, I could see almost no factory-made product that had been used in the construction. Next to the windows were white ceramic insulators that had probably held electrified wire; no trace of mullions or window glass remained. The roof beam ran parallel to the building’s length, and along the slope of the roof at each end a facing board about five inches wide had been nailed. These boards covered the raw edge of the roof and extended from beam to eaves, and at the end of each board a very small swirl of scrollwork had been carved. The embellishment was so out of place it caught the eye. I wondered what carpenter or designer had thought to put a touch of decoration on such a building.

Regions of deep cold preserve antiquities just as hot deserts do. Had the climate here been temperate, moisture and vegetation would have consumed this structure long ago. But in northern Siberia, with only a dozen or so weeks of reprieve from intense cold every year, and nothing below but permafrost, the old prison camp had hibernated into the present more or less unchanged. Around it, like a bubble of prehistoric air frozen inside a glacier, a familiar atmosphere of 1954 endured.

Maybe one reason I am susceptible to the dread Russia-love is that Russia evokes childhood for me. In the 1950s, when I was a boy, adults talked and worried and wondered about Russia all the time. For anyone who grew up then, Russia might have been the only other significant country in the world. I was six years old in 1957 when the Soviets launched Sputnik, and I remember the interest my father took in that event. Dad was a chemical engineer and he had a keen admiration for mechanical ingenuity of every kind. After Sputnik first went up, he used to bring my younger siblings and me into our front yard at night before bedtime to try to show us the satellite as it passed by. At his research lab
in Cleveland—he worked for Standard Oil of Ohio—he and his colleagues rigged a radio dish on the roof of the building so they could pick up Sputnik’s transmissions. Some evenings after dinner, Dad would put on his long coat and his fedora—the style of hat almost every man wore then, from Eisenhower to Clark Gable to Vyacheslav Molotov—and he would drive back to his lab for a night of listening for the satellite. The air of mystery and excitement he gave off as he left made an impression on me. I could tell he got a kick out of this, like a do-it-yourself spy—and in fact, with the Cold War secrecy surrounding Sputnik, the tracking data he and his colleagues compiled was for a while the only public information about Sputnik available in the United States. When he explained the satellite’s orbit to me, I thought about Ohio’s actual location on the planet for the first time.

The day the Soviets sent up the rocket carrying Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, I came in from playing in the yard with my friends on that spring afternoon and found my father dejectedly hanging up his coat in the front hall closet. I asked what was wrong and he said the Russians had just launched a man into space, and now we would never catch up to them in the space race. I asked why and he said because their scientists were so much smarter than ours, because their country was so much bigger than ours that they had many more brilliant scientists to draw from. Also, he said, their kids were better at science than our kids were. I took this last to be aimed at me; I had never been as good at math and science as he had hoped. My father always tended to give in to his bad moods and indulge them. He had a flair for gloom and doom.

Years later when I was walking in Moscow and I saw in the distance a big upward-swooping statue with a cosmonaut at the top, and the Russian friend I was with told me it was the Yuri Gagarin monument, I knew for sure that the date on the statue’s base would be a date in the spring. I remembered how Dad’s dejection had contrasted with the spring day. And of course I was right—Yuri Gagarin’s flight had occurred on April 12, 1961.

Dad used to tell my siblings and me—and my mother, too, I suppose—that we had no idea what the rest of the world was like. In our happy Ohio existence we would never understand the war, or the Depression (my mother had lived through the Depression, too), or countries not like America, or how people in places like Russia lived. The
word “sheltered” came up a lot. Dad could portray remoteness and imponderability better than anyone else I’ve known. His voice would become sort of furry with melancholy as he said, “You’ll never know how they live, or what they went through in the war. Life under somebody like Stalin is so totally removed from your lives.” He would shake his head at our innocence and say, “No, it’s not anything you’ll ever know. It’s another world.” And truly, in Hudson, Ohio, in the 1950s, a prison camp like this one in the fastness of northern Siberia would have seemed as remote from us as the grave of the
Titanic
at the bottom of the sea.

Sergei came wading through the snow on the other side of the barracks. He had stopped videotaping and was stepping quietly, almost tiptoeing. I knew he didn’t approve of my interest in this sort of thing, and I felt some guilt that I had made him see it. But his face as he approached showed no rancor, only a sort of wide-eyed, watchful awe. We didn’t say anything to each other. Slowly, simultaneously, we moved to see what the place was like inside. Sergei went in at a door. I stayed outside and looked in at a window. I didn’t want to seem to be poking around (though of course I was). Going in seemed to be something for him to do rather than for me; he was next of kin, in a sense, while I was merely a foreign observer.