In Siberia (13 page)

‘You used to hear about it,' Svetlana said, ‘but not any more. The Urals wanted it, in a way, but not enough.' She stirred uncomfortably. ‘I think nobody believes in these solutions now, or perhaps in anything…'

‘And you?' I asked. It was easier to ask in the dark.

‘Oh, I believed in things once!' Her voice wondered at the memory. ‘Yes, I wanted to build Communism!'

‘I didn't,' said her son from the bunk above. ‘Not for a moment.' His voice whined like a mosquito.

His mother went on: ‘I was just a village girl. I didn't know anything. But my father came back from the war minus an arm and half a leg. After two years he tore up his Party card and threw it away. He was very bitter. Nothing was done for him, they just let him rot. And he saw how people were starting to
disappear around him, taken away into the camps. Then he died. My mother never told me about his disillusion with the Party. She said nothing, while I grew up idealising it.'

She stopped. She sounded more amazed than angry. Hers had been the last generation to believe like that.

‘Then bit by bit I got disillusioned. I came to realise about our local Party, how corrupt they were….' That was how people lost faith in Communism, she said, how it collapsed at grass-roots–not through philosophic doubt or horror at Stalin, but because a local Party minion had purloined funds or wangled a holiday on the Black Sea. ‘Now I have nothing absolute to teach my pupils. Most of them believe in nothing. Only a few have ideals….'

Her son whined from above: ‘They must be thick.' He sounded proud of his generation's unbelief. He thought it their achievement.

‘I don't mean ideals about Communism,' she said. ‘None of that means a thing to them.'

‘Nobody's got ideals about anything,' he said. ‘Not one of my generation. Nobody. They just want jobs.'

I could not see him; but I remembered in daylight a pampered-looking youth with a slick of black hair and a shadowy moustache. His face was already fattening.

Svetlana went quiet a moment, then said: ‘It seems centuries ago. Sometimes I feel I've lived for centuries.'

The lights of a village flickered over us, and I saw that she had turned her face to the wall, while her son was leaning on his elbows cracking cedar nuts in his teeth. The gloom I felt was not theirs, I knew, but mine. I wanted them to have faith. Faith would paint a future. But instead I felt this regret, which was only foolish. After all, by not believing in anything defined, they had merely entered the modern age.

Out of the dark the upper bunk mewled: ‘Now the old Party bosses have just become mafia. They've grabbed everything. They've built mansions in the unpolluted parts of Krasnoyarsk–you can find whole regions of them. They're all into business.'

‘What sort?'

The two bunks chorused: ‘Everything!'

On the mafia, at least, they agreed. It was ubiquitous, ungraspable, the new repository of evil. ‘They own shares in the big companies,' said the lower bunk. ‘How do they get so much money?'

‘They may own a thousand shares apiece,' whinged the upper bunk, ‘and guess how many I own? One!'

‘They drive Mercedes….'

‘And how much do those cost in your country?' The cedar nuts clicked in her son's teeth. ‘They're beyond anything here….'

Silence again–the heavy, rhythmic rocking of the train–while I imagined their disparate pasts: she still coloured by hope, he the child of disillusion.

‘But things will get better! I'm sure of it!' Her words sounded a Chekhovian yearning, faintly comic. ‘People are better educated than they were in my day. My own pupils…I've only taught them literature, but that makes them richer in its way. In the end, everything will be better.'

‘Oh, education!' the cynical voice parroted above. ‘Oh, literature!'

 

Between 1897 and 1900 the young Lenin was exiled to the village of Shushenskoe for political agitation. Seventy years later, on the centennial of his birth, its centre was emptied and returned to its past. Lenin wrote that the village was a dung-heap, but now it has the informative sterility of an outdoor museum, spreading behind a high fence in ordered streets and spotless cottages. There is a reconstructed shop, a tavern, a smithy, a jail.

I am assigned a guide at the entrance. She is elderly and withdrawn. She speaks in an explanatory patter without worship or blame or any overt feeling at all. We walk down grassy streets. Every roof is intact, every balcony and fence immaculate. We are quite alone. The houses of poor or rich peasants have been furnished in period, fastidiously researched. Their courtyards are stocked with winter sledges and summer carts, and wooden tools for harvesting.

Surly caretakers rouse themselves to unlock the two houses where Lenin was billeted. The rooms are polished, exact, austere.
Here are his high desk and wash-basin. Here are the two iron beds where he and Nadezhda Krupskaya slept, after they married in exile. Under the gaze of their wardens, the objects seem heavy with mana. Was this his teapot, his spoon? His ice-skates (made in Germany) dangle from a nail: his feet were small. Under that wattle arbour outside, drowned by hop foliage, he worked in summer on the articles which would become scripture. The floorboards creak with the warp of later years. I peer into his cracked mirror.

By contrast to the nightmare system which followed, czarist exile could be ludicrously lax. Lenin spent it in a white-heat of activity. He developed ideas for a radical Marxist party, and structured its newspaper. He corresponded with other revolutionaries, held meetings with them, and smuggled out articles to be published abroad. He grew thin with energy, wrote Krupskaya, who would sit beside him coding his secret letters. They were young and in love.

But when we walk in the streets now, the place is like a village for sale, awaiting its first occupants. Why is no one here, I ask?

‘Well, it's not busy in winter.'

‘But it's
not
winter,' I say, bewildered.

She looks at me ruefully, as if I were in breach of good manners. ‘Today there aren't so many people. But there is a school group coming.'

‘And what do they learn about Lenin here?'

She stops in the centre of the street, where no one can overhear. The needless manoeuvre belongs to the fearful past, the past which she upholds. ‘That's a delicate question. I don't know what they're taught any longer. There are people who think that Lenin was not a genius at all, that he was not even a very talented man. A while ago our President Yeltsin demanded that this museum be closed down.'

‘What happened?'

She lets out a pale smile. ‘We wrote in protest to him, and to everybody else we could think of. We said this was an exhibition of turn-of-the-century peasant life–and they let us stay open.'

But the cottage museum dedicated to Lenin's political activity
(‘Lenin's Ideas are Alive and Victorious') had closed down. In summer it staged folk-singing in traditional dress, prettifying the world he had striven to reform. It was possible to walk through the whole village unaware that Lenin had ever lived.

‘Look! Visitors!' The woman lights up. She has spied a cluster of schoolchildren at the bottom of the street. But as they come closer to us, giggling, her pleasure fades. Their teachers are telling them about peasant life under the czars.

‘This is very hard for us,' the woman says. Something hot and distressed is beating up under her voice. ‘We guides have worked here a long time, and this is our place. But suddenly we are told…well, for my part…' She turns her back on the children before they reach us. Then a hoarse whisper explodes from her: ‘
Of course he was a great man!
'

Was he? In my confusion, I agree. But perhaps I mean only that he changed the world, which is not the same.

The children trail past us, carefree. They wear pirated Adidas track-suits, and baseball hats labelled ‘Sport' or ‘California'.

‘I wonder what they think,' I say.

She answers wanly: ‘I don't know what they think.' We are emerging out of the despoiled theme park and into the world.

 

The slats were dropping from the ceiling of Shushenskoe's bus station, built for pilgrims who no longer came, and the floors were awash with rain. It trickled down the carved panels of Bolshevik heroes toppling the imperial eagle, and smeared the cheeks of the embossed Lenin. It dribbled between the windowpanes of my bus as it veered south-east, and erased the road a hundred yards ahead. Sometimes it would part like mist around a stack of dark hills, where pine forests stood bearded in parasitic lichen, or drift out of glades sodden with ferns and moss. We might have been underwater.

Over the western Sayan we were pushing into a strange, isolated republic, enclosed by the mountains which give birth to the Yenisei. A century ago, as the grip of the enfeebled Manchu empire slackened, this unseen region of Tuva was sucked from the orbit of China into that of Russia, which annexed it in 1944 while the
world was looking the other way. But its Turkic-speaking people–once an ethnic
melange
–had always looked to Mongolia. Mongolia had coloured their ancient shamanism with Buddhism, and had invested them with a shadowy history. Their remoteness, and their late entry into the Soviet empire, had left them a majority in their homeland, half-nomadic in many regions, clannish, poor.

As we breasted the frontier pass the rain turned to sleet. Then, as if winter had come suddenly, in the first days of autumn, the sky was thick with snow. It fell incongruously, like manna. It frosted the half-tropical undergrowth, the ferns, the fat-leaved vines, and gusted across the road in small, angry flakes. On one side of us the cliffs threw down icy waterfalls, on the other the road dropped into space. Then we were over the pass and descending cold-lit foothills. We seemed to be entering a deeper wilderness. Above the gleam of bronze and amber undergrowth, the pine forests were dying. Still wrapped in killer moss, the trees fell all of a piece, their roots wrenched up like old cog-wheels, and spread a ghostly litter over the hills. Whole mountainsides were ashen with them.

But beyond us other ranges were unfolding. Our road descended uncertainly. We were crossing into Tuva between stiffening control-posts. Police rolled out iron-spiked cables across the way, boarded the bus, idly opened our baggage. I was only notionally legal here, depending on official whim, and retreated into a sleepy Estonian version of myself. ‘What's this?' The policeman prodded my rucksack with a baton. ‘A rucksack,' I revealed, and he moved on.

The land breathed out at last in treeless plateaux edged with clouds. We were crossing grasslands studded by
kurgans
, and the air was cold. Where the road roughened into craters, an articulated truck had jack-knifed and overturned. Beside it stood a police car and a crowd of men. The driver was spreadeagled dead over the tarmac. Our bus let out a wavering, collective sigh. Then our driver turned up his radio and we rolled on.

An hour later the little capital of Tuva–a Russian bridgehead named Kyzyl, founded in 1914–made a concrete blemish on the
plain. But once we were inside the town the land which it defiled shone seductively at the end of every street. I walked it uneasily. The Tuvans were in the ascendant now. Their country might lie in economic thrall to Moscow, but since gaining nominal sovereignty in 1991 they had been gathering strength: a sturdy people with high, burnished cheeks–trim women and crop-haired men. Racial riots seven years before had driven several thousand Russian workers home, and a suppressed violence was in the air. The police patrolled in threes. Twice I saw men searched, then arrested. In the desolate main square, where flower-beds were going to seed, Lenin still flung out a shaky arm at the local parliament. But a monumental fountain was adorned with Tuva's disparate animals–camel, reindeer, yak–and a white theatre hoisted a fly-tower strapped with Mongolian carvings.

If you take a bus down the long road two hundred miles towards Mongolia, you find it filled with men returning from market in thick felt boots, sometimes bruised, drunk, with matted hair; women visiting parental villages, their eyes widened by Russian make-up and their tresses drawn back in mother-of-pearl clasps. In between hamlets the grasslands are broken by knolls, where cairns are stuck with the rag-hung poles of an old worship, and herds of black and chestnut horses graze against infinity. A pair of Bactrian camels crosses the road, and somewhere to the east, out of sight, are the mountains of reindeer herders. Squashed beside a peasant woman who feeds the passengers her last sweet apples, I watch this land unfurl with bemused awe.

Only after a long time, the skyline crinkles and streams come slithering out of forested hills. Here and there the dome of a yurt hunches under a curl of smoke, while to the south the suspended snows of the Tannu Ola shine.

 

Without expectation, I stroll down a grassy avenue to the monument in Kyzyl which the Tuvans love: a granite obelisk mounted on a globe, to mark the geographical heart of Asia. Here the town stops dead, obscured by trees, and steps mount to a terrace. To the east, the Great and the Little Yenisei converge to form one of the mightiest rivers on earth. To the west, a landing-stage rocks
against the bank. The river flows at my feet, fast and strong. Beyond it the grasslands roll to naked hills, and above them, washed by unmoving cloud, the Sayan mountains gleam.

Perhaps it is the flow of the river out of emptiness, like something incarnate, time-bearing, at once peaceful and rather terrible, which tightens my stomach. Or maybe it is the idea of an anthropomorphic Asia: Asia with a heart, a womb, a memory. (An Arab once told me that the English, having no hearts, were always searching for them elsewhere.) I stand surprised in the clear light, the silence. The land looks irreducible, like bone. I stare for long minutes, confused, unable to leave. Asia: it has consumed my adult life.