Travels in Siberia (68 page)

The mother told me they had lived in Khandyga for seventeen years and often made this trip to Yakutsk. I asked about the coal dust in Khandyga and she said it was a real problem because clothes got dirty so fast. She and her husband had moved there because of the military base, which back then had more than four thousand vehicles. Her husband was a mechanic, the best one in Khandyga or anywhere, and he believed in repairing vehicles as his mission in life. The village was poor now, with much unemployment, she said, and her children could no longer get a good education there. Sometimes there was not much food in the stores, the streets melted into the permafrost every summer and had to be repaved, and winter was dark and sooty and very cold. She said she loved Khandyga anyway, especially in the summer, a beautiful time of year, when she and her husband and children sometimes went on four-thousand-mile drives to see relatives in Kazakhstan.

After more tinkering by Sergei, the driver turned the key and the car started and ran at a rough idle. The mother from Khandyga exclaimed in joy, and I said, “What did I tell you?” Later I asked Sergei to describe how he had done it, and he said, “When the Uazik died at approximately four o’clock in the afternoon in the middle of the great Lena River in traffic, the driver opened the hood and found with horror that in a most
important part of the engine—the carburetor—a piece was missing. A screw had come off and the small rod that held the float regulating the gasoline level of the carburetor had fallen out and disappeared. Thus, the gasoline stream flew into the carburetor as if from a hose, gasoline was spilling on the ice, and naturally the car would not run.

“What was to be done? I looked all over on the ice road in the hope of finding our missing part. Instead of our part I picked up about half a bucket of other parts, but not the one needed. I then disassembled the carburetor and it appeared that all we needed was to find a piece of wire or a nail of the right diameter in order temporarily to replace that rod on which the float of the carburetor was set. I did find such a wire nearby on the ice, I cut off a piece of this wire, and I inserted it where the missing part should be. I found a bolt of approximately the right size belonging to some other machine under our car’s wheels, and with this bolt’s help I fixed the rod in place. In truth, the carburetor did not work so well as before, but nevertheless we were able to drive from the ice road and reach our hotel. Thus I was once again convinced that the Russian car is the most reliable in the world, because it is possible under necessity to replace any part in it with a piece of wire or with a nail.”

Sergei and I left Yakutsk for St. Petersburg at ten the next morning. First we flew to Irkutsk, where the plane developed mechanical problems. I had an aisle seat and the action happened to be beneath the floor next to me. A bunch of jumpsuited technicians came on board, took up the aisle carpet, and lifted a panel in the floor. They all looked down into the hole, then left in a body. Then one of them returned with a flashlight and peered around inside some more. Bored children had begun to wander the aisle, and as the technician was looking in, several boys squatted down by the hole and looked into it next to him. Some were asking him questions, which he answered patiently without shooing them away. Then he left again and returned with a part that resembled a microfilm reel, and he installed it out of sight in the hole. Then he replaced the panel, laid the carpet back down, and left. The plane took off after about another hour and a half.

At the next stop, Krasnoyarsk, we disembarked and sat in a large waiting room filled with silent travelers while no announcements of any kind were made. At my prodding, Sergei asked around and learned that
passengers for St. Petersburg were waiting for a plane that had been delayed from Kamchatka. I passed the time writing in my notebook. A girl with black hair and dark eyes and her head wrapped in a scarf was sitting next to me and observing me. When she asked me a question I didn’t understand I said,
“Ya Amerikanets”
(I’m an American), and she replied,
“Ya Azerbaijanka”
(I’m an Azerbaijani). She was nine years old, in the third grade at school, and on her way back to her home city of Baku with her father, mother, and sister, who were sitting on the bench nearby. She was small for a nine-year-old but she had great self-possession. She came around to where she could watch me writing and after a minute she said,
“Molodets!”
The word means something like “Good lad!” It’s what a teacher says to a student when he gives the correct answer.

After we’d endured more waiting and a risky meal of cutlets in the airport restaurant, the Kamchatka flight arrived. We boarded, sat a long while, and finally took off. Almost no one was on the plane and from my empty row of seats I looked out at western Siberia. Traveling in the same direction as the sun, we kept up with daylight for the whole five-hour flight. Late in the afternoon we crossed the Urals, which from this altitude resembled blistered white paint. At about seven in the evening, eighteen hours after leaving Yakutsk, we landed in St. Petersburg.

Again I had arranged to stay in the apartment of my friend Luda. A friend of Sergei’s brought us in from the airport. After a long sleep in a bed with fresh sheets, I woke the next morning and took a stroll around the city, and a powerful new spasm of Russia-love came over me. There was no reason for it—I could think of plenty of good arguments against it—but I still could not stop a slide into exhilaration. In the cold sunlight, St. Petersburg seemed glorious. Everything about it aided the impression—the façades of the buildings in their faded Easter colors with their complicated veining of cracks, the strangely apt banners advertising superglues above the Nevsky Prospekt, the empty beer bottles frozen cheerily upright in the ice of the Griboyedova Canal, the brown haze of dust in the sky from the sand spread on the streets’ winterlong accumulation of ice . . .

Newly arrived from Siberia, I saw that St. Petersburg is not a European city but an Asiatic city with European architecture. Its physical structures imitate Europe’s, but its enormous sky is Asia’s. St. Petersburg is a stop, or a station like those wacky modernist railroad stations on the
BAM line beyond the middle of nowhere. Arrivals and departures are its point. It’s a caravanserai, like those cities (Tobolsk, Kyakhta) sprung up in the Asiatic emptiness where tea and silk caravans from China traveled, or like the sprawling tent cities the Mongols improvised on the steppes using felt from their animals and white linen they had plundered somewhere. Though far away, Siberia is an unavoidable part of this place. When Ivan Borisovich Pestel (father of the Decembrist) was governor-general of Siberia, he directed the affairs of his immense and distant province while comfortably ensconced in St. Petersburg. The joke about Governor Pestel went that one day when he and Count Rostopchin were dining with the tsar, the tsar looked out the window and asked, “What’s that on the church, the black thing on the cross?” Count Rostopchin replied that he couldn’t make it out, and then added, “You must ask Ivan Borisovich, he has wonderful eyes, for he can see from here what is being done in Siberia.” The story speaks to a psychological truth: with the huge sky and long-distance vistas in this city, it almost seems as if he could have.

St. Petersburg is also connected to Siberia by the tendency of wilderness to make people who are in it long for civilization. On this flat site beside the Neva, the city rises against the sky like the final realization of the mirage that travelers saw constantly receding up ahead of them as they crossed the Siberian wastes. I remembered how as a kid I discovered that the deeper I went into the woods, the more I wanted the most unwholesome and delicious foods at McDonald’s or Dairy Queen. Now I was experiencing a continental version of the syndrome: St. Petersburg may look unexceptional if you come to it from someplace else in Europe, but after Siberia it was sweet.

I went to a wonderful pastry shop on the Nevsky Prospekt with Luda and I overspent in bookstores. I took a day by myself wandering the Hermitage at random, and I decided that what makes that museum great is the bright, watery light from the Neva River that pours through its tall windows, and the endless profusion of paintings that were apparently acquired by wealthy, unschooled people who compensated for not knowing exactly what to collect by collecting everything. I checked out the Jordan staircase—the scene, I thought, of a struggle between Bolshevik supporters and palace guards during the October Revolution, and of Eisenstein’s recreation of that struggle for his movie
October
(based on John Reed’s
Ten Days That Shook the World
). Actually, the real-life struggle
took place on a different, less-impressive staircase. For its cinematic reenactment Eisenstein instead used these more majestic stairs, and a huge cast of extras, some of whom carried live ammunition, with the result that more people were shot in the filming than had been shot in the event. The plasterwork I examined along the wall revealed no bullet holes.

I asked at the information booth where the room was in which the bomb went off when terrorists were trying to kill Alexander II during a banquet in 1871; nobody knew. I also asked where to find the painting “The Holy Family,” by Domenico. I wanted to see it because in January 1826, my favorite Decembrist, Ivan Yakushkin, was held briefly in a room in which that painting hung. Before his interrogation by the tsar, Yakushkin had the cool-headedness to examine and admire that painting while a lesser official questioned him. Nobody in Information knew anything about the painting, either, except that it was not on display. Later I found out that Domenico Beccafumi’s “The Holy Family with St. John the Baptist and St. Catherine” is in the museum’s collection. I think they should put it up again, with a long label explaining about the Decembrists and Yakushkin.

In the evening, Luda and I got tickets for the ballet at the Mariinsky Theatre. With a Russian love of chicanery, Luda urged me to give her the money so she could buy both of us the low-price tickets reserved for Russians only. This was dishonest and cheesy of us, not to mention stupid. The old ladies who take tickets at the door of the Mariinsky are impossible to fool. They spotted me for a foreigner from ten feet away and indignantly turned me back. I had to go to the end of the long line at the foreigners’ ticket booth. I felt mortified.

Near the ticket booths there’s a small-scale model of the theater’s interior with tiny numbers on every seat so that purchasers can see what tickets they’re getting. Whoever made the model had a gift for that sort of handicraft. It is a gem in itself, and it accurately conveys the small-town intimacy and imperial elegance that the Mariinsky combines. Gilded tiers of box seats rise one above another on the theater’s back and side walls, with a large box formerly belonging to the tsar in the center at the back. The arrangement emphasizes and somehow makes more charged the small enclosed ocean of space between the audience and the dancers on the stage.

People who go to the ballet tend to look like one another, and when many of those people are Russians and thus look a bit like one another already, the effect is that of being at an extended-family reunion. Interspersed among the reunion attendees are foreign tourists speaking many tongues. In the crowd I heard, mixed with the prevailing Russian, bursts of French, Japanese, German, English-English, and of course American. Suddenly from the babel an American sentence would jump out: “I wouldn’t do law school, though I like the
idea
of law school,” or “I just discovered I’m wearing my T-shirt inside out!”

The Mariinsky is another excellent setting in which to remark on the beauty of Russian women, but I will pass up the opportunity, except to mention the woman in the box next to ours wearing the black top and midriff-baring pants who had long honey-blond hair to the middle of her back and a lithe ease of movement that was a distraction to be near. Before the lights went down, I noted the many varieties of Russian dress-up attire, something I’d seen almost none of in Siberia. Not too many women here wore plain furs, but there were plenty of dyed ones, often attached here and there to garments in erratic places, adding furry patches of purple or burgundy or blue. There was a lot of leather, most of it black, with silver chains used as decorations on vests or pants; also, many silver-gray-black techno colors, sequined fabrics, and weird, out-of-nowhere design motifs. I saw a woman in a brick-red sheath dress with the logo from the movie
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
printed on it over and over. The hard-to-avoid suspicion that international trademark and copyright laws had not been strictly adhered to in the creation of this garment gave it a certain extra Russian panache.

Because of my usual difficulties understanding and being understood, interactions involving the Russian language always involved frustration, like using a telephone with a bad connection. I got so accustomed to the frustration that I almost forgot it. But when the lights went down and the ballet began, I felt relief at the wordlessness of it. For the moment I could be sure that I and everybody else were experiencing what was before us in more or less the same way. The Mariinsky’s proscenium and its tiers of boxes give the impression of the theater’s being gigantically high, so the dancers perform in what appears to be a sky-high column of space. The ballet that evening was
Manon Lescaut
, with music by Puccini, which is about a woman who is so incredibly sexy that she ruins
other people’s lives and her own and then dies. In the opening scene, Manon arrives at a country inn, and the trees above the square where she gets out of the coach went up and up, more toweringly than real trees.

Russia-infatuated as I was, I looked up into all that vertical space and saw Siberia even in the ballet. I remembered the girl dancing before the large-screen TV to the theme music from
V. I. Warshawsky
at the resort on Lake Baikal; now I reflected that Russians might not be such fabulous dancers if their country did not include Siberia. Dance is bodies moving through space, and the Russians perhaps think of their own bodies in relation to their immense, continent-wide swath of it. Nureyev, the greatest dancer of modern times, was born on a train crossing Siberia. Mikhail Volkonsky racing across the country from Moscow to Irkutsk in fifteen days in a springless carriage was a kind of nonfiction Russian dance. The gallantry with which these people fling themselves at their big—too big, really—country is played out in how they dance.