In Siberia Read online

  How fraught, I wondered, was that distance? Was it imposed by a fear of contamination, of some treason spreading like the camp typhus? Or by the complex danger of feeling sympathy? A guard’s fraternisation would condemn him. And the great terror, of course, was suppressed, unthinkable: that these people were all innocent.

  ‘Maybe they pitied us a little,’ she says, then adds stubbornly, defending them, somehow defending herself: ‘But work is work. You do what you have to.’

  I balk and say nothing.

  But it is easy to misjudge those times–to forget how isolated people became in a world infested by informers, and how all the organs of state control, all authority, reproduced Stalin’s paranoia: the obsession with conspiracy, the mass delusion of sabotage–until ascertainable truth became a dangerous rarity. The questioning or torture of each suspect, of course, produced a scream of new names. Often the charges were ludicrous. People were accused of plotting to blow up non-existent bridges, of spying for countries of which they’d scarcely heard. The very illogic of the accusations said: You have no rights, no mind. Logic is ours. And each confession, however absurd, subtly exculpated the inquisitor, secured him in some perverted illusion of rightness. It seemed to sanction the suffering of a whole people.

  ‘And you,’ I pursue, ‘did you ever imagine yourself guilty?’

  ‘No, absolutely not. Nor did the others with me. But I should have been released in 1948, and it didn’t happen. I spent another two years in the camps. After my release, when I wrote to the Public Prosecutor, they answered that I couldn’t have been freed earlier because I’d been against Soviet Power. And it’s true I was against Soviet Power because it was against the people. Then they told me that I was against the people. But I was a Party member, and the Party was for the people, and the Power…’

  I lose her down a great labyrinth. I can’t disentangle her shadows. But at last she says: ‘The Party was not guilty, absolutely not. I accuse…certain people…certain people….’ She goes vague. In some misty hierarchy, she has selected a scapegoat. She has displaced blame upward, until it all but fades away. She will not indict the whole system. No. Only somewhere, she knew, something had gone terribly wrong. A tragic fluke, it seemed. She sighs harshly. Were it not for this accident, all would have been well. Instead, paradise slipped away….

  She tries to explain, thumps the sofa in frustration. I notice her thick, working wrists. The hands on them are like delicate afterthoughts, just as her facial features look petite on the barrel of her neck. It is as if years of labour had bulked out a woman once frailer, more high-strung, and almost subsumed her.

  I say at last: ‘You didn’t return to the Party?’

  She says stoutly: ‘I never left the Party.’

  No, not in her heart. And on rehabilitation her membership was reaffirmed. In the absence of her anger, I find it rankling inside myself. ‘They should be asking you to rehabilitate them.’

  But she stares at me blankly. Perhaps she thinks she has misheard. In the oval of her mouth only three or four teeth remain, one hanging by a wisp of root. Then she looks back at the television, where a Mexican socialite pouts and tinkles a cocktail stick. ‘That Dulcinea,’ she says, ‘she’s going to the dogs…and her Jose can’t act, he just gazes….’ She cackles lightly. Then she says: ‘Why can’t people ever record the good things, the everyday things? If there were ordinary accounts of the camps people would understand how we couldn’t always weep, how we came up out of the mines into the wash-house, singing. You’re a writer, aren’t you, so why don’t you write that? How we smiled a little, danced and sang a little. Because people must live in hope….’

  Her voice had sweetened into a rhythmic patter, until the rhythm seemed to choose the words. ‘Once I got an illegal parcel–three kilos of sugar!–and I was secretly fermenting beer when an officer came into the dormitory and oh! it exploded all over him. I was terrified I’d be taken to the isolator, but instead, whenever we came to identity parade, he would name me as the drink-exploder, and everybody would laugh. So write this too. That it wasn’t all tears. Write this too.’

  ‘I will.’

  But something is plaguing me. I can’t bear her acquiescence. I say cruelly: ‘But what was the purpose in the end? To so much suffering…’

  She looks back at me, and suddenly her eyes begin to water. She glances away again. For the first time she seems unable to answer. She repeats: ‘Purpose?’

  And perhaps this is the hardest to bear, the idea that all that suffering and labour, those deaths, were for nothing. Suffering had once had meaning. ‘Purpose?’ The word seems to torment her. Her eyes are brimming, so that I feel ashamed of what I have asked. Her hand alights on mine. ‘I feel bitter for all my life’s waste. We hoped for so much better. Look at what a city was founded here!–and now it’s destroyed. Schools have been demolished, libraries closed down, workers have gone months and years without pay. Can you trust a government which allows that? Now people just want to make money. They’ve lost all belief…. To think that it’s come to this!’

  ‘But this isn’t where it ends.’

  I feel she hardly hears me. ‘It’s never possible to forget those years. Never. It’s like an illness. I have not told you everything that happened, but you can imagine….’

  ‘Yes.’ (I sometimes think I can.)

  ‘You know how many died!’ Her voice makes a terrible music. ‘They died from weakness, from privation. If there was a blizzard, if there was cold, we still had to work. It wasn’t enough to chop the coal from the rock-face, you had to load it into wagons and haul them. We had no pulleys, and it was only in 1942 that they sent down draught-horses. It was very heavy, very. And to remember how many fell down, how they succumbed just like that, hauling the wagons, and then how we dragged them out by the legs….’

  Her voice has gone away from me, as if dreaming. I think: perhaps the dead have taken away the sense of reality with them. Nothing so strong, so sad, had happened since. Meaning has predeceased her.

  Yet she gets up and surfs through the television channels with grunts of discontent, then switches it off. She says: ‘I am eighty-seven, but I want to live to see the future.’

  3

  The Flight from Science

  On either side of the railway to Omsk the wheatfields shimmered in huge rectangles, and fescue grass spread a pinkish sheen over the pasturelands. In this immense sameness, isolated things–a duckpond, a well, a horse-cart–took on a lonely piquancy. I gazed with relief at terrain empty of coal or ruins, whose mounds were natural. A luxurious sense of freedom welled up. For the first time in Russia’s history a foreigner could wander Siberia at will. At any little town where I stopped, I might alight and disappear, nursing my business visa–a scruffy paper inscribed with pro forma destinations–against police intrusion.

  The exhilaration of this freedom never quite left me. Whenever I pulled out my map and imagined entering the mountains abutting Mongolia, or taking ship up the Yenisei river to the Arctic, I would be hit by euphoria, then disbelief. Something, or someone, would surely prevent me. That was how Russia had always been. I had slipped through a transient gap in the country’s age-old xenophobia.

  My train followed a wavering belt of dark-earthed steppeland towards Omsk. The retreat of the last Ice Age was enacted visibly beside it. At the rate of a mile a year the steppes were edging northwards into the taiga, which was encroaching at the same rate on the Arctic.

  From its inception in 1891 the Trans-Siberian was built here in a hurry, with poor steel and untreated timbers. In these western stretches it was pushed across swamps and peat-bogs at the rate of a mile a day, behind a vanguard of improvised dykes and artesian wells: within a few years the sagging ballast and buckled steel had turned the track to a roller-coaster where the passenger trains never exceeded 13 m.p.h.

  A peculiarly Russian blend of fear and confidence drove it forward. The Trans-Siberian, it was hoped, would build up Russia’s defences on the Pacific and
bind Siberia for ever to the motherland; and it was powered by an old sense of spiritual privilege and mission: the railway would lay a thread of civilisation through Asia’s heart.

  The faintly clownish name of Omsk precedes the city with a lighthearted expectation. It lies where the railway crosses the Irtysh on a massive cantilever bridge, and you see the curve of the river under a line of stooping derricks as it heads out among sandy islets and meadows, touching the city with an illusion of peace. But beyond, the suburbs bristle with petrochemical plants, textile combines and oil refineries, and the pollution is so thick that driving at night has sometimes been forbidden. They sprawl for miles above the river. Marx Prospect, Lenin Square, Partisan Street: the veteran names follow one another in relentless procession.

  Yet the city keeps a modest distinction. Whereas the Second World War razed western Russian towns to the ground, here in Siberia, untouched, they often attain a formal grandeur or rustic exuberance, and seem older than they are. I wandered the streets in surprise. The municipal flower-beds were all in bloom, and fountains played between provincial ministries. Close above the river, nineteenth-century streets dipped and swung in icing-sugar facades. The air in the parks clattered with pop music. Clusters of miniskirted girls paraded their irregular beauty, and children strolled with their parents in sleepy obedience; but their jeans and T-shirts were stamped with stars-and-stripes or Donald Duck. Every other pair of shoes or trousers sported a pirated Western logo. Fast-food restaurants had arrived, offering instant pelmeni–the Siberian ravioli–or anonymous steaks with stale mash, and a rash of small shops and kiosks had appeared, selling the same things.

  Yet a feeling of boredom, or of waiting, pervaded the city. All style and music, the new paths to paradise, seemed synthetic, borrowed. Real life remained on hold. The pop songs had the scuttling vitality of streams. The bus-shelters and underpasses, stinking of urine, were rife with graffiti: ‘Pomponius Nautilus–I love you!…Agatha Christie! Sepulchre! The Prodigy!’ It took me time to realise that these were pop groups; other graffiti followed them, sometimes scrawled in English, the lingua franca of youth. ‘Jim Morrison lives! No!…I fucked the bitch!…Communists are all buggers….’ Then, in Russian, enigmatically: ‘Why travel with a corpse?…The point of life is to ponder the cross on your grave….’

  A pervasive frustration pronounced that freedom, once again, had proved illusory. Scarce jobs and high prices were the new slavemasters. The pavements were dotted with the new poor. Yet in this August sunlight I was touched by the traveller’s confusion: the gulf between the inhabitant and the stranger. A little architectural charm, or a trick of the light, could turn other people’s poverty to a bearable snapshot. The air was seductively still. Naked children were splashing in the polluted river.

  I walked over the headland where the old fort had spread, but trees and terraces had blurred away the lines traced by its stockade, and only a stout, whitewashed gate remained. For four years Dostoevsky had languished here in a wooden prison, condemned to hard labour for activities in a naively revolutionary circle in St Petersburg. Sometimes he would gaze yearningly across the Irtysh at the nomad herdsmen, and would walk round the stockade every evening, counting off its stakes one by one as his sentence expired. He transmuted his life here into The House of the Dead, and it was here, among convicts who at first filled him with loathing but later with awe, that he experienced a half-mystical reconciliation with the peasant Russian people.

  On the site of the vanished prison, fifty years later, rose a fantastical baroque theatre, painted white and green. Now it was showing The Merry Wives of Windsor, Alan Ayckbourn’s Season’s Greetings and Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey. The only prison building to survive was the house of the governor, a purple-faced drunkard and sadist in Dostoevsky’s day, who would have his prisoners flogged for any misdemeanour, or none. His home has been turned into a museum to the writer he hated.

  A century after Dostoevsky’s incarceration, Solzhenitsyn was escorted through Omsk on his way to a labour camp in Kazakhstan. He and his fellow prisoners were interned in a vaulted stone dungeon whose single window opened from a deep shaft above them. He never forgot how they huddled together under a 15-watt bulb, while an elderly sexton sang to them, close to dying: how the old man’s Adam’s apple quivered as he stood beneath the mouth of the hopeless shaft, and his voice, trembling with death and feeling, floated out an old revolutionary song:

  Though all’s silent within,

  It’s a jail, not a graveyard–

  Sentry, ah, sentry, beware!

  My hotel costs five dollars a night. The plaster falls in chunks from its corridor walls, and from the Stalinist mouldings of the ceiling. The night is close and humid. It is over 85°F. I lie on the bed and watch the full moon shining through a pattern of dainty flowers in the lace curtains. I cannot sleep. The sweat leaks from my chest and forehead. And this is Siberia.

  Next morning, outside the big, unlovely cathedral, which in Stalin’s day had been a cinema, I found a coach-load of pilgrims setting off for a rural monastery. They welcomed me on board. The monastic foundations were only just being laid, they said, and they were going to attend the blessing of its waters. In 1987 an excavator at the site–near the state farm of Rechnoi–had unearthed a mass grave, and the place was revealed as a complex of labour camps, abandoned at Stalin’s death. The inmates, mostly intelligentsia, had died of pneumonia and dysentery from working in the fields, and their graves still scattered its earth.

  As our bus bowled through ramshackle villages, the pilgrims relayed the story with murmurs of motherly pity. They were elderly women, for the most part, indestructible babushkas in flower-printed dresses and canvas shoes, whose gnarled hands were closed over prayer-books and bead-strings, and whose headscarves enshrined faces of genial toughness. When a fresh-faced cantor began chanting a hymn in the front of the bus, their voices rose in answer one after another, like old memories, reedy and melodious from their heavy bodies, until the whole bus was filled with their singing.

  We reached a birch grove on the Rechnoi farm. It was one of those ordinary rural spots whose particular darkness you would never guess. As the women disembarked, still singing, the strains of other chanting echoed from a chapel beyond the trees. It was the first of four shrines which would one day stake out the corners of an immense compound. Inside, a white-veiled choir was lilting the sad divisions of the Liturgy. As the pilgrims visited their favourite icons, a forest-fire of votive candle-flames sprang up beneath the iconostasis, and two or three babushkas shuddered to their knees.

  In the south transept, meshed in scaffolding, an unfinished fresco of the Deposition from the Cross loomed above us. It was almost complete; but the flesh tints were still missing, as if the artist were afraid to touch too closely on Divinity, and pots of pigment lined the scaffold. So only the painted garments of the disciples semaphored their grief, while their hands and features were empty silhouettes in the plaster: here a face uplifted in dismay, there a blank caress on the unpainted body of Christ–which remained a ghostly void, like something the onlookers had imagined.

  Sometimes, whimsically, I felt as if this scene were echoed in the nave where I stood, where around the great silence left by God the worshippers lifted their heads and hands, crossed themselves, and wept a little.

  From outside came the squeal of bulldozers in a distant field. They were smoothing the earth of the labour camps into monastery foundations. I strained to catch the sounds, but our singing drowned them in the mournful decrescendos of the Russian rite. And out of the mouths of these ancient women–whose sins, I imagined, could barely exceed a little malicious gossip–rose the endless primal guilt ‘O Lord forgive us!’, over and over, as if from some deep recess in the national psyche, a need for helplessness.

  The sanctuary curtains parted on an incense-clouded region inhabited by a very small priest. His hair shimmered down in a phantasmal jumble, like a Restoration wig, and melted into a droop of violet-clad s
houlders. Occasionally, feebly, one of his arms swung a censer; in the stillness between responses its coals made a noise like suppressed laughter. As he intoned the prayers he constantly forgot or lost his place, until his chanting dithered into confusion, and three deacons in raspberry robes prompted his responses with slips of paper. He would peer at these through enormous spectacles stranded in his hair like the eyes of a lemur, and try again. But the cause of his panic was plain to see. Enthroned beside him, giant and motionless, sat Feodosy, Archbishop of Omsk.

  Towards noon a procession unwound from the church and started across the pasturelands towards the unblessed waters. It moved with a shuffling, dislocated pomp. Behind its uplifted cross, whose gilded plaques wobbled unhinged, the Archbishop advanced in a blaze of turquoise and crimson, his globular crown webbed in jewels. He marked off each stride with the stab of a dragon-headed stave, and his chest glinted with purple-and gold-embossed frontlets, and a clash of enamelled crosses. He looked huge. Beside him went the quaint, dishevelled celebrant, and behind tripped a huddle of young priests in mauve, and the trio of raspberry-silk deacons.

  I fell in line with the pilgrims following. It was oddly comforting. An agnostic among believers, I felt close to them. I too wanted their waters blessed. I wanted that tormented earth quietened, the past acknowledged and shriven. I helped the old woman beside me carry her bottles. My feeling of hypocrisy, of masquerading in others’ faith, evaporated. As I took her arm over the puddles and our procession stretched across the wet grass, Russia’s atheist past seemed no more than an overcast day in the long Orthodox summer, and the whole country appeared to be reverting instinctively, painlessly, to its old nature. This wandering ceremonial, I felt, sprang not from an evangelical revolution but from a simple cultural relapse into the timeless personality of the motherland–the hierarchical, half-magic trust of its forefathers, the natural way to be.