Travels in Siberia (70 page)

This trip I would be by myself—without the company of friends, a tour group, or guides. My own command of Russian would have to do. Luda Stiler, a travel agent at Margo Travel in Manhattan, handled visa and reservations, as she has done for me many times. Luda is a kind and friendly woman, born in Leningrad and uninterested in going back. She regards my desire to travel in Russia as a mystery. I had decided to go to Novosibirsk because I’d seen not much of it in 2001, and it’s relatively
easy to get to. In Novosibirsk I would stay in the Hotel Sibir, because of the name. Aeroflot offered the cheapest fares, New York–Moscow–Novosibirsk. To travel twenty-two time zones, there and back, cost $1,183.10.

I had not flown Aeroflot since the nineties. Now the complete absence of smoking, in accordance with revised policies, made a real change in the airline’s tone. Russians not smoking! I wanted to congratulate and console them. I was touched. Everything about the Boeing 767 we flew in was better than what I remembered of their former planes. Now they had real seats, not lawn chairs. Nothing about the interior looked beat-up or shabby. The passengers, almost all Russians, boarded with the happy boisterousness of people going home after a long time away. Many of them had been shopping. Amid all the Russian conversation, some of it deep voiced and sonorous, some of it shrill, they set about stowing their shopping bags in the overhead bins. Many of the bags were from Macy’s, whose design, for the 2009 holiday season, featured a single large red star on a white background. The Russians laughed and talked about one thing and another, stowing their red-star bags.

Some years ago, a British public relations firm did an overhaul of Aeroflot’s image. Thus the plummy-voiced British recording that gave the English translation of the Russian announcements. Thus the Scottish plaid of the blankets that were passed out, and the stitched floral pattern on the pillows, and the less hostile attitude of the in-flight personnel. The stewardess who served our aisle had refined her instinctive contempt for the passengers into something transcendent and soulful. She looked a lot like Babe Ruth, only with a slightly bigger hairdo, and she mugged like Chaplin as she indicated approval, disapproval, commiseration, and various other responses to each passenger she served. Sometimes she turned her face upward, saintlike, and rolled her eyes and sighed.

I felt I was already back in Russia just being on the plane: the way everybody ordered tea after dinner, and saved their dessert to have with it; the men going to sleep with the plaid blankets wrapped around their heads; the lustiness of their snores; the unmistakable hint of Russia-smell in the cabin’s recycled air . . . Not all the in-flight announcements were translated by the plummy-voiced recording or by the pilot and crew. One of the untranslated announcements informed passengers that this
Boeing 767 airplane was named in honor of the Russian writer Ivan Bunin.

No other country but Russia would name a commercial airliner after a writer. Just knowing I was flying on the
Ivan Bunin
gave me a small thrill. I recalled what had happened to Varlam Shalamov for saying, back in 1943, that Ivan Bunin was “a classic Russian writer.” On the airport runways after we landed, I saw Aeroflot planes named after Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, and Ivan Krasheninnikov (an explorer of Kamchatka who wrote a book about it). The plane I flew home in was the
Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin
. Naming planes after Russian writers may have been the British PR firm’s idea. If it was, it had the intended effect on me.

My layover in Moscow was ten and a half hours. In the waiting room at the Sheremetyevo 1 terminal, I sat and watched, and sat and did nothing. For a while a teenage girl next to me was reading a book of short stories by Somerset Maugham. In English. Then she put it away and began to read Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
(ditto). I hadn’t wanted to bother her, but finally I asked, in Russian, what grade she was in. She said she was in the tenth. Here is something that would happen seldom or never in American air travel: in millions of air miles, you would be unlikely to sit next to an American tenth grader reading, in any language, the stories of Somerset Maugham. I told the girl that. She seemed puzzled. “But it is very interesting for me,” she said.

From time to time airport security guards walked by with German shepherds trained to sniff for illegal substances. Scent-trained dogs in America walk more or less normally when they’re working, but these dogs tracked their noses back and forth in the air and kept their bodies close to the floor, like snakes with legs. Flights departed for Samara, St. Petersburg, Chelyabinsk, Volgograd. The girl reading Maugham left, after saying a polite “Goodbye” in English. A middle-aged woman replaced her. When she got up after boarding was announced for the flight to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatka, I asked if she lived there. She said yes. I said, “That’s very far,” and she replied, “It’s nothing! A nine-hour flight!” At one of the gates the microphone didn’t work and the gate attendants were making the boarding announcements without it. A flight was leaving for Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk. It was strange, and moving, to hear the final summons for a place more than four thousand miles away called out by an unaided human voice.

Finally the flight for Novosibirsk began to board. It took off at about ten thirty at night. The plane was a brand-new Airbus 321, and its interior design featured Aeroflot’s updated color scheme of orange and blue, exactly like the colors of the New York Mets baseball team. I dozed off, then woke after a couple of hours. From my window seat I could see nothing but blackness below—probably clouds. Then I started seeing occasional small knots of silvery-blue lights here and there, the lights of towns. Then suddenly big reddish-orange lights appeared, dotting the land’s darkness in random profusion, often in clusters of twos and threes. I couldn’t figure out what they were. Then I realized they had to be oil well flares burning off natural gas—those new irruptions of light into the Siberian wilderness that I’d read about. I don’t know what oil field they were part of. I imagined how the taiga or swamp around them looked, weirdly illuminated in their flames. After a while they were fewer; then, none. For an hour before Novosibirsk the ground was mostly dark again.

I had wanted someplace cold, dark, remote, and hibernating. Novosibirsk at five thirty on a November morning seemed to be all of those. The temperature was −8°F. A layer of new snow covered everything, ready to stay. Around the airport, vehicles and workmen and the drainage grates in the runways all emitted steam. Along the top of the newly refurbished airport building (oil money, probably) ran a streak of midnight-blue neon that highlighted the blue-black of the sky. In the company of Anatoly, the bright-eyed, long-nosed, pixie-haired taxi driver who had claimed me, I came out the airport doors and into the parking lot, where other taxi drivers were standing around smoking cigarettes next to their idling cars. The hoarfrost in which each car was covered resembled a fur of white iron filings. My lungs filled with a familiar, delicious Siberian combination of secondhand smoke and bitter-cold air. One basic purpose had been accomplished. I had breathed the air.

Anatoly did not have enough left on his parking-fee card to get through the exit gate, so he had to back out, go to a lonesome kiosk in the lot, and buy a new one. While I waited in the backseat he bounded out of the car, bounded back in. Everything he said he delivered in the exclamatory rhythms of taxi drivers. “No problem! I’ll just get a new card! Please wait a moment! Do you think this is cold? To us this is completely normal! In Novosibirsk we are used to this! Where are you from?” and so on. The theatricality of it made his Russian easy to understand.

As we proceeded to the city, mercury lights along the highway held the darkness at arm’s length, just barely. On the long bridge over the vast, dark Ob River, it pushed closer on either side. An icy mist on the river’s far bank fogged and further dimmed the scene, and on the city streets, our headlights showed the few pedestrians only from the knees down. Tall fir trees along the Hotel Sibir’s entryway had been covered in holiday lights of the same locally popular midnight blue, to which the mist had added its pointillism. Bounding from the car, Anatoly carried my bag into the intimately lit lobby and saw that I got checked in. I had a comfortable room on the twelfth floor, with a view of the train yard and the Ob River.

During my first days in Novosibirsk I was in darkness most of the time. Daylight itself usually was tamped down under clouds and falling snow, but I was awake for only a few hours of it, my internal clock having been turned around by all the time zones I’d crossed. Unable to sleep, I put on my full cold-weather outfit and walked the city in the early hours. A bank display on Ulitsa Lenina showed the temperature to be −18° (Celsius) at 5:18 a.m.; a light wind coming down the packed-snow sidewalk reinforced the cold. Nobody was about, for good reason. In the clear sky, a thumbnail-paring of a moon sat just above the horizon. To see the Big Dipper I had to crane my neck far back. At a few degrees lower than directly overhead, the North Star hovered like the point of a pushpin.

Novosibirsk is just that—
novyi
, new. A hundred and fifteen years ago most of the city site was virgin taiga. All its big buildings are from the recent era when it became okay for buildings to look strange. Novosibirsk has buildings in the shape of triangles, hexagons, spheres; also, there’s the one whose top is like a two-prong plug, which I mentioned before. In the middle of the city, on a traffic island on one of the main drags, is a small Orthodox chapel that is said to sit at the exact middle of Russia. Actually, the chapel originally built there was supposed to be the geographic center of the prerevolutionary Russian empire. Whether this spot is the geographic center of the Russian Federation as constituted
today is less sure. The original chapel was torn down in Soviet times and replaced with a monument to Stalin, which was torn down and replaced with the chapel that’s there now.

Like most Soviet cities, Novosibirsk has its Lenin Square. At some moment since the Soviet Union ended, city officials must have decided simply to leave their Lenin Square alone. A huge columned opera house like a domed mosque anchors the square at one end. White lights bathe the dome at night, and at this time of year the dawn comes up behind it. From the opera house stretches a long and wide promenade, and at its terminus Lenin stands on his high marble pedestal, facing forward, one arm upraised, commanding the encircling space. Nearby on his right and at a lower altitude, three soldier-workers back him up, casually holding rifles; on his left, two Soviet citizens, a man and a woman, lift their arms in heroic poses. This Lenin statue is of the genre in which the tails of his topcoat are blown sideways by the winds of history. Less grandly, meltwater had run down his front and then refrozen in small icicles at the bottom of his vest for an unfortunate pubic effect. Snow had accumulated on the statues’ shoulders and mustaches and in the crooks of elbows. The figures appeared to be stone but were actually rough, dark-gray steel, which gonged hollowly when rapped upon.

Six o’clock on a weekday morning and still almost nobody out. The subway began to operate, rumbling under the square’s emptiness, but the few dark-clad passengers who emerged seemed to dissipate and become microscopic as soon as they did. Two or three widely separated women in city-employee garb were picking up trash, sweeping snow from the subway entrance steps, and scraping at scabs of ice with shovels. In the rotary zone around the square where occasional cars and buses passed, men in orange jumpsuits near vehicles with blinking lights were scraping also. Russia does not use salt on its roads. Another ambient sound came from the square’s billboards, which changed their advertising every few minutes with a rustling of metal as the vertical panels turned. At the tops of buildings, a few international commercial logos in neon lights—
NOKIA, SAMSUNG, DOUBLETREE HOTELS
—added their usual cold comfort.

I wondered what other stars I might be able to see here. Across from the square I went into a city park where the snow on streetlights and fir trees was so picturesque as to seem fake. As I stared upward, not distinguishing
much—the rising dawn had already hauled most of the stars out of sight—I was thinking about an unusual incident that had occurred some months before. The reader will remember that on earlier travels in Siberia I had used an Iridium satellite phone. On clear nights I would sometimes pick out a satellite passing overhead and imagine that my call was going by way of that satellite back to New Jersey.

Well, on February 10, 2009, an Iridium satellite crashed into a Russian satellite over northern Siberia. Perhaps I should say that again: an Iridium satellite and a Russian satellite crashed into each other. The collision happened in an orbit 491 miles above the earth, at 72° 5' north latitude and 97° 9' east longitude, over the Taimyr Peninsula. The Iridium satellite weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian Cosmos, an inactive communications satellite, weighed about a ton. Each was going about seventeen thousand miles an hour. The collision produced more than one thousand nine hundred pieces of debris large enough to be detectable by radar (larger than a baseball). Experts think that the impact was glancing, and that the Cosmos’s long stabilizer boom probably hit the Iridium satellite’s array of solar panels. Before this incident, even with the tens of thousands of orbital objects now in space, there had never been a collision of satellites.