Travels in Siberia (7 page)

Zoya led us to a grave in the cemetery’s corner and said it was that of a famous Decembrist named Mikhail Karlovich Küchelbecker, a man famous, actually, at one or two removes. Mikhail Küchelbecker’s older brother, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, was a poet and a friend of Pushkin’s who turns up often in stories of that poet’s action-filled life. Kukhla, as the elder Küchelbecker was called, even fought a duel with Pushkin, after Pushkin wrote some verses that said that reading Küchelbecker’s verses brought on a malady called “küchelbeckorrhea.” Kukhla challenged Pushkin, Pushkin accepted, Kukhla shot at Pushkin and missed. Declining to return fire, Pushkin threw his gun down in the snow and went to embrace his friend. Kukhla angrily insisted that Pushkin fire. Pushkin protested that his gun was now jammed with snow, and nothing came of the duel in the end.

Barguzin’s Küchelbecker, Mikhail Karlovich, was exiled here after serving an eight-year sentence of solitary confinement for his part in the uprising of young officers against the tsar on December 14, 1825. In Barguzin, Mikhail Küchelbecker married the postmaster’s daughter, an ugly woman who mistreated him, and he eventually lost his mind and died. Zoya said that recent study had positively identified the skeleton in the grave as his from scoliosis of the spine, a lame leg, and the iron ring on his finger. Many Decembrists when finally released from their shackles had finger rings made from the links of their chains, she said; later, Decembrist shackle rings and bracelets became highly fashionable accessories in salons in St. Petersburg.

We walked around the village, took photographs, picnicked on a bluff over the river. Then we visited Barguzin’s museum and historical society, an old building consisting mainly of one big gallery with tall, curtain-draped windows and pictures made of fur on the walls. The museum’s curators, a couple named Lizaveta and Vladimir, showed us around. Lizaveta wore her hair up, nineteenth-century-style, above a long dress of dark red velvet with white lace at the hem and collar. Vladimir, a sturdy man
with blue eyes and a forward-thrusting, chestnut-colored beard, had made the pictures, mostly landscapes, which he had assembled by cutting and stitching various Siberian animals’ pelts. Some of the pelts he had obtained himself in the wild. Lizaveta led us around the gallery from picture to picture and explained how different kinds of fur represented different landscape shades; the deep blue-gray of the fur of the Baikal seal, for example, duplicated the color of Lake Baikal in a storm.

I had brought along my fishing rod, and Sasha had arranged for Vladimir and me to fish together in the river. After more admiring of the pictures, we drove by Vladimir’s house so he could get his stuff. He went in and in a few minutes came out; he wore hip boots, jeans, a white shirt with blousy sleeves such as one might wear in America to portray a pirate in a school play, a white mesh cap with a blue insignia, and a big hunting knife in a handsome cedar scabbard he had carved himself. I wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, bathing trunks (which I’d had on under my trousers), and sneakers. My fishing rod was a light four-piece graphite travel model to which I had attached a little open-face Shakespeare spinning reel. Vladimir looked at my rig and said, “Looks like American weapon.” His rod and reel looked like a Russian one, or maybe Czech—a telescoping metal pole as thick as a broomstick, a flat reel that called to mind an old reel-to-reel tape recorder, and thick, milky-colored monofilament line. I showed him the lures I’d brought, mostly copper spinners shaped like poplar leaves, and treble-hooked steel spoons painted red and white or inset with fake garnets for eyes. He showed me his spoons, some of which were actual soup spoons with a hole drilled at the end for the line and a large single hook welded where the handle used to be.

Everyone in Barguzin apparently had gone to the river that day. Little brush and few trees grew along the river’s banks, so you could see the people along it both near and far. Some people swam, some washed pots, some did laundry. Suds from the laundering trailed on the brown water far downstream. Other fishermen had distributed themselves along the banks. One group brought their equipment and refreshments in a two-wheel cart with automobile tires drawn by a shaggy pony. Vladimir put me at what he said was a good spot, but I was afraid I might hook the young men swimming in their undershorts nearby, and so I waded far out, mud squishing up into my sneakers and the lukewarm muddy water
rising to my armpits. I cast and cast, using a spinner called an Abu-Reflex Shyster, which has brought me luck all over the United States and Canada, and eventually I caught a pike about sixteen inches long. I held it up and shouted to Vladimir, who looked back at me and smiled. Soon after that I saw him lift out of the water a pike longer than his arm. In the next half hour he caught another of about the same size.

Back at his house, he expertly butchered out the fish to filets, rubbed them with handfuls of coarse salt, and skewered them on sharp, thin pieces of wet cedar. He left the scales on and said cooking would burn them away. While he built a fire in a pit in his yard, Lizaveta gave us a tour of the house and garden. The house was a combination of wood-frame and logs, and it had nooks, lofts, and additions. A broad window above a desk in the study looked out on a wild panorama of river and sky. The study’s built-in bookshelves held an extensive library; Lizaveta said she had a degree in geography from Irkutsk University. I noticed a many-volume set of Herman Melville in Russian, and
Never Cry Wolf
(
Ne Kri Volki
) by Farley Mowat. By my own unscientific reckoning, in Russia Farley Mowat is the most widely read recent English-language author. Everybody there seems to know
Ne Kri Volki
.

The family’s garden was a wonder—raised beds, little wooden irrigation troughs, staked plants, trellises, sanded paths. All the fruits and vegetables were small, because of the short growing season. The carrots and red raspberries and currants Lizaveta gave us to try had the explosive flavor of their intense, brief summer. Branches of a small tree hung heavy with just-ripened Siberian cherries. The Siberian cherry is about the size and color of a cough drop and has a small stone. At the gallery we’d visited earlier in the day there had been a bowl of these cherries, and I had eaten them almost excessively.

For dinner we had Vladimir’s fish, and tomatoes and carrots and cucumbers from the garden, and boiled
omul
’ with scallions, and pieces of chocolate we’d brought, and a Chinese white wine served in glasses with leaves painted on them. I tried to look engaged as unknown subjects were discussed around me. Lizaveta brought tea and homemade strawberry jam, which was tastier, if possible, than the cherries. We sat outside, ignoring the flies. The sun began to go down and the endless scenery before us came right up to our toes. In the near distance a couple of guys on the riverbank horsed around. First they fished but didn’t
catch anything. Then they undressed to their shorts and swam, splashing and diving. Then one of them retrieved a bar of soap from his piled-up clothes and both had a thorough wash. Vladimir said the stouter of the two was the local Orthodox priest.

Vladimir and Lizaveta wanted me to sign a guest book, but they did not have it handy, and so brought me an invitation to the opening of a show of Vladimir’s fur pictures, and I signed that. I wrote how much I had admired the pictures, and the Siberian cherries as well, and I added something self-congratulatory about how far away I was from home that they did not understand when Katya translated it.

On the drive back to the place where we were staying, the microbus quit after an hour or so and rolled to a stop. We got out in the northern twilight on a straight road of gray-brown gravel built up and graded through a dense, swampy forest of birch. I walked back and forth along the road for a while, and made a short detour down into the woods, just to see what it was like. There I had my first taste of Siberian mosquitoes, or vice versa. Alyosha took out a vehicle manual and pored over it. At one end of the road, a pale full moon rose. Then he removed the engine cover, laid his tools on the car seat, and went to work. The rest of us sat in the vehicle or on the road and talked. As the twilight imperceptibly darkened, the ratcheting of his wrenches and the murmur of our conversations were the only sounds.

Later that evening, everybody who had come with Sasha, except for Katya and me, had to go back to Ulan-Ude. Sasha left us some Chinese beer, and instructions about who would bring us back to the city. We had moved to a new resort, one that offered more privacy in the form of individual cabins and locks the size of stage props to secure their doors. This resort had a sand beach on Baikal and its own private spring of supposedly medicinal water that smelled of sulfur and iron. I was made a bit nervous, however, by the resort’s manager, a large, blunt-featured man in a thigh-length sport shirt, and especially by his habit of carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle everywhere he went. He carried it any old way, however he happened to have last picked it up—by the barrel, by the butt, by the strap—as if it were some miscellaneous object he was bringing in from the car. Once passing by the dining hall I saw him clearing
tables after breakfast as his Kalashnikov leaned muzzle-down against the wall nearby. Also, several horses roamed the resort grounds, and they loved to knock their heads against the cabins. You’d be taking a nap and—
thunk
—the head of a horse just outside would hit the wall.

Alex arrived from Moscow, at last. He had gotten a ride from the Ulan-Ude airport with a young couple, friends of Sasha’s. His exhibition had gone well, he had drunk cognac and slept on the plane, and he appeared in a remarkably untroubled mood. For a few days we walked on the beach, built fires there, took hikes in the woods. I had never seen a forest of such variety, with sky-high larches, rank on rank of birches, poplars four feet around, and an understory full of blueberry, currant, and red raspberry bushes, along with ferns of many kinds and mushrooms soggy with rainwater and shot through with worms. The food in the resort’s dining room was neither good nor plentiful, so we added to it with fish Katya and I caught in a nearby river, the Maksimikha, using grasshoppers for bait. The fish were small, but wrapped in wet paper from Katya’s sketchbook and baked in the coals of our beach fire, they tasted fine. While improvising a fishing pole for Katya from a willow sapling, I cut deep into the ball of my thumb with my barlow pocketknife, and I made a fuss about that.

(Considering the knife unlucky from then on, I wanted no more to do with it and gave it to Katya to keep permanently. For years she carried it with her. Then when she was on vacation in Barcelona, a thief grabbed her backpack and ran off with it, and the knife was inside. I had found the knife originally on the shore of Rock Creek, in western Montana. One of its blades had been stuck about half an inch into a log, and evidently it had been there for a good while, because the wood left a deep rust stain on the steel. I’d be curious to know where that peripatetic knife is now.)

Some nights Alex and Katya and I sat on the beach until late and talked about weighty questions. Alex expatiated on what a con job the art world was and said all of American modernism was the result of artists in the thirties and forties sleeping with Peggy Guggenheim. He proved, by arguments I can’t reproduce, that Picasso was the worst artist of the twentieth century. Katya said it had been strange to see Russian friends again. She remembered when it became fashionable among her friends to take up religion in the waning days of communism, sort of as a defiant alternative; now she believed that religion had ruined the lives of some of them and had caused them to have too many children and do other constraining things. She said she feared religion and looked on its continuing revival in Russia with dread. She had decided, she said, that she didn’t believe in God, but in a basic goodness in people. I said maybe that was the same thing.

In the middle of the discussion, a drunk came out of the darkness holding a big fish he wanted to trade for vodka. But we had only Chinese beer, and he didn’t want beer.

I never did figure out what was up with that resort. Someone who worked at it told Katya many mafia came there. The oddness of the owner seemed to bear that out, as did some crude wooden mannequins dressed in shirts and trousers that we found in the forest; they had been thoroughly blasted with double-aught buckshot at close range. This made me think my nervousness was justified, and the place lacked any redeeming higher qualities. But one afternoon I came into the dining hall to get some boiled water for drinking, and the VCR was playing
V. I. Warshawski
, a detective movie starring Kathleen Turner, on the extra-large-screen TV. The movie had just ended and the credits were scrolling on a background of bright blue. As the movie’s theme music
rose, a girl of about ten who was standing in front of the screen and staring at it began to dance to the theme music. The few people in the dining room drinking tea paid no attention, but I watched as she stepped and pirouetted in the blue light of the TV screen. The smells from the kitchen, the Russian voices, the American music, all hung suspended for a moment around the dancing of the girl. Another perhaps overgeneralized fact about Russians is this: Russians can really dance.