In Siberia (28 page)

‘Everything's terrible!' his father laughed. ‘These fields used to be full of wheat and cattle, and now look!' The land around had run to grass and stunted birches. ‘There's no funding from the centre. People are just growing things for themselves. In the good days, in Brezhnev's days, you could buy a loaf of bread for a few kopeks. And now? Four thousand roubles! For a single loaf!' But he was grinning.

‘Those weren't good days,' said his son.

‘Bananas now cost 14,000 roubles a kilo,' his father ran on. ‘Meat is 20,000 roubles a kilo!'

His son tapped my shoulder. ‘You don't have to listen to him.' He wanted to interest me in himself; he was ashamed of the weathered peasant at the wheel. ‘I've always been interested in history and religion, you know, always. When I left middle school I wanted to go to the Philological Institute in Moscow, but for that you need money, and with parents like mine…'

His father took no notice, went on driving furiously over the frozen gravel. I closed my eyes.

‘…soI went to college, and I passed my first exam high, yes. But then I had to go into the army….'

‘Should have done you good!' his father said.

‘…and after that I still couldn't go to Moscow, so I went back to technical college in Ussuriisk. It wasn't very good, but I got my diploma…look'–he thrust it into my hands–‘and then I went to Vladivostok and joined the fishing fleet as a kind of…restaurant manager.'

‘We've got a cow,' his father said. ‘That's something.' He milked a phantom udder.

‘Why do you have to say that?' his son bleated. He started up again: ‘My first fishing trip took two months, and I was sick every
day, but after that I got used to it. I saw Sakhalin and Kamchatka, yes, they were interesting….'

‘You can grow potatoes and cabbages, but that's it for this area.' His father jabbed a thumb at the abandoned fields. ‘The frosts get down to -47°F.'

‘…but my boat was laid off half the year, so I worked on shore in…restaurants, and the fishing-fleet shrank and I was…well, they couldn't keep me.' His talk sank to a litany of failure, purposeless, as if he couldn't stop himself. His slack mouth seemed to taste every grievance. ‘And I worked at whatever came up, in restaurants…and now I don't have anything. Maybe I'll find something in Blagoveshchensk. I've been out of work two years now….'

‘Three!' said his father. The car skidded, straightened itself. He beamed. ‘Don't worry. Me and this car are both pensioners! I bought it eighteen years ago! It cost only 15,000 roubles then. And what do you pay now? Three million!' He banged the dashboard. ‘What can a poor person do? Just stay at home and sleep! While those parliamentary deputies earn eleven million roubles a month! Then they stash the money in Switzerland, and get baby-doll mistresses!' His face danced with resentment and vicarious dissipation. He accelerated over sheet ice. I clamped my eyes shut again.

His son said: ‘The only work round here is at the military station upriver, or in the lumber-camp.'

‘You!' His father guffawed. ‘Lumber!'

I asked: ‘What about fishing?'

‘Twenty years ago you could pull up sturgeon by the dozen,' the old man said. ‘Now you hardly catch anything. It's those Chinese. They've got big, close-mesh nets, I've seen them. And they're polluting the river from factories….'

His son was staring at his boots with bowed head. He was starting to go bald. ‘We can't even get our own ecology right,' he said. ‘Look at Baikal. We're polluting as much as they are. Everybody's polluting.'

I began to feel sorry for him. He had longed to become one of those New Russians who people Moscow restaurants with their
ornamental mistresses and mobile phones. But now he would not even become a waiter there. Printed with the deepening defeat I saw on many urban faces, I imagined him returning again and again to the peasant family which so embittered and sustained him.

‘You can grow water melons,' his father said. ‘There's always water melons.'

We were weaving among the scattered cottages of Albazin now, and suddenly the Amur was beneath us. It coiled in a steely flood out of its desolation, dividing China from Russia with an unearthly peace. Making for the Pacific a thousand sinuous miles away, it already measured a third of a mile across, and curved below in a dark mirror, stained with the tannin of fallen trees.

We stopped by the earthwork of the Cossack fort above it. The old man wished me well; his son smiled and took my picture. Then they vanished in a cloud of black exhaust into the white land.

Snow barely dusted the ramparts which crested the bluff in a rectangle of grassy earth. In the mid-seventeenth century this redoubt had marked the south-eastern reach of the Russian dominions as they touched the northern limit of the Manchu, and here the two empires clashed in mutual ignorance. Founded by Cossack renegades, Albazin became the spearhead of Russian colonisation on the lower Amur; but by 1685, after the Manchu resurgence, it was the last bastion left. Its commander, Aleksei Tolbuzin, hopelessly outnumbered, was forced to surrender, and with foolish magnanimity the Manchu granted his forces unmolested retreat, razed the fort and fell back to the south.

As soon as they had gone the Russians returned with over 800 men and twelve cannon, and rebuilt Albazin more formidably. They crowned the bulwarks where I walked with a log palisade, buttressed by corner-towers, and skirted it with a deep ditch and pits concealing sharpened stakes. A raised gun-turret turned their cannon in any direction, and the breastworks were lined with baskets of resin to illumine night attacks.

But in July 1686 the Manchu returned, angry and in force. I crossed the rumpled ground where they had dug in their long-
range cannon and locked the fort in a triple tier of earthworks. Their gun-boats sealed off the river. On the island opposite, their headquarters now lay sunk in sand and shrubs, among the ruins of a flooded fishing-village. For over a year they rained down cannon-balls and incendiary arrows on the fort, charged it with leather-coated siege-engines and fired its battlements with resin and straw. Once, the starved garrison mockingly sent out a 50-pound meat pie to the Manchu commander, to persuade him they were well provisioned. He asked for more. By the time Moscow sued for peace and the siege was lifted, Tolbuzin was dead along with all but sixty-six of his men.

In the Treaty of Nerchinsk which followed, Russia retreated from the Amur altogether, and Albazin was demolished. In China the Cossack prisoners-of-war became a company in the bodyguard of the Manchu emperor; their descendants intermarried with the Chinese and lost their Russian looks and language. Yet until the Communist Revolution a few still attended their church in north-east Peking, and lifted their lidless eyes to pray before the leftover icons of Albazin.

It was more than a century and a half after the stronghold's fall before the Russians returned under Muraviev-Amursky, thrusting down the river with a convoy of seventy-five military barges. As the site of the fortress hove into view, the soldiers fell silent, the band struck up hymns and the governor-general landed to pray beneath the overgrown ruins.

He had breached the Nerchinsk pact, of course, as China weakened. Thereafter its text would be unpicked and reinterpreted: the Chinese bitter at the Russian reconquest, the Russians–as recently as the 1960s–claiming that the treaty was exacted under duress. For hundreds of miles a wall of electrified barbed wire immunised the Soviet Union against China. It straggled eastward still intact, but had disintegrated in a rusty tangle across the bluffs where I went, and nobody had bothered to repair it. The hills of China lifted empty beyond. From a watch-tower a blank-faced sentry gazed across the river, his Kalashnikov on his back. Any communication with the Chinese was forbidden here, but to the east the
barriers were down, and traders were crossing the border points almost at will.

I dropped down earthworks into the redoubt of the fort. Here and there the ground rippled where a church or a barracks had stood. A few dead, recovered years later, lay in a common grave under a black cross. Otherwise nothing showed but bare earth. An icy wind was scything across the river. Inside the scarp, the earth walls still showed a trace of reinforcing stones. Their layers were the compacted history of Albazin. I probed them with frozen fingers. A queasy wonder overcame me. A foot beneath the surface a one-inch smear of ash wavered in a black artery, and grains of burnt wood fell out at my touch. Among them, where it had missed its mark over three centuries before, a tiny, corroded musket-ball trickled into my hands.

 

The house no longer matters to her. Its duckboards meander through derelict outbuildings to an earth closet and a smashed greenhouse. Two red stars over the gate, each bordered in black, commemorate two family members killed in the war. Agrippina Doroskova sits in a back room, writing. She is close to ninety. Beneath her cheekbones the flesh has caved fiercely in, and her mouth is thin and withheld. Yet until recently she walked half a mile every day through the snow to the Albazin museum which she started with her own funds: a collection of locally gathered weapons and fishing tackle, updated with gramophones, samovars and a Singer sewing-machine.

All day she labours at her four-volume history of Albazin. Her family is Old Siberian, seven generations back. She has finished writing the nineteenth century and is grappling with the twentieth. It is very hard. Because only after Lenin's death, she believes, did the system go wrong. Her face has withered round two dark-rimmed eyes, which gleam out bird-like.

‘Even here, in the thirties, they arrested sixty people. Decent, ordinary folk. Tractor-machinists, and others. Some were my friends. But people informed on them to the secret police, and the police had to fulfil their quota.'

Yet she cannot bring herself to indict Stalin. The red stars on
her gate commemorate her brother and sister, all she had, killed in the war Stalin won. Her fragility is deceptive. She has been a schoolteacher all her life, and wields a didactic energy. ‘Stalin may have been wrong sometimes, with all those arrests. But even those are exaggerated. I've read Solzhenitsyn and I'm not impressed. He could only write about what he knew, and that was limited. It gives him no authority to guess at numbers. Sixty million dead! Now the archives are opening, you'll find the numbers are less, far less than he says….'

I frown at her, and don't answer. I have not inhabited these horrors as she has. It is those who have inhabited them who may measure, mitigate, even excuse them. Twenty million dead, to Agrippina Doroskova, is far more forgivable than sixty million. To me both figures bulge towards the unimaginable. She pulls out yellowed heaps of manuscript. Her Stalin is still Lenin's heir. All the Soviet history she is penning seems to her like a long, tragic falling-off from a pure Socialism which she cannot quite locate in time.

‘Until look what we've got now!' A downward flicker of her hand consigns the government to oblivion. ‘I've already written it, about that Yeltsin. I've said everything I think.'

‘In Stalin's day you'd have been shot.'

‘No! I spoke as I pleased then! And I wrote what I pleased! I always have!' I look away from her. Has she already forgotten? ‘By 1938 the Soviet Union was cleaned up! Everything was all right! It may have been bad for some people, but for most it was fine. But who do we have to protect us now? Here in Siberia we're rich in wood, in gold. And the Americans and British, they wish we weren't here, so they could grab them. That's what they want!' She has forgotten, or never known, that I am British. Her eyes are angry. Her chin wavers forward. ‘In time our stupid young people will understand what I'm saying. In the West they're building up weapons, while ours are declining. What we need is a new Revolution. But we're afraid of the West invading. If we change politically, the Americans will send in an army and take power, and we'll become slaves….'

I listen numbly. The span of her experience is so far outside
mine, her language of power and slavery too strange. I recoil from her, from the whole world which haunts her. I feel glad she is so old, so past. And a little ashamed of my gladness. I notice how incongruous her hands are: hands that had belonged to an earlier, bigger woman, and been left behind on her lap.

‘But our people always overcome hardship!' Her voice is edged with hysteria. ‘Russia will be victorious! Simple people will take power into their hands anyway. Russia dies, then rises again!'

 

Leaning from my train window in the early morning, I saw a different country. All night we had pushed east towards Khabarovsk and the ocean, and now the forest had receded, and level snow-fields gleamed to the horizon. The whitewashed cottages of early Ukrainian settlers dissolved into this starker whiteness, and isolated larches made a frosty beauty in the sun, and the pines were silvered Christmas trees.

Beneath my berth the cubicle was humming with exercise. Six times a minute the sweaty deltoids of the man below emerged level with my head as he grunted through his pull-ups on the bunk-rail, and the burly youth opposite sat up and was rotating his shoulder-blades. Everybody seemed to be in training. Their pectorals quivered under T-shirts inscribed ‘Top Fit' and ‘Bulls'. A team of athletes, I thought–or perhaps a circus troupe–had boarded the train in the night.

Then I climbed down, and the fantasy dissolved. The man whom I'd imagined a shot-putter turned out to be an engineer on his way to Belogorsk, and the youth with the shoulder-blades was attending technical college. The lanky fellow in the bunk below (I'd made him a marathon runner) was out of work, and the nymphet who looked like a gymnast was the daughter of the man who wasn't a shot-putter.

Around noon they got off at different stations, leaving behind a whiff of illusory prowess, and my carriage filled up with others. The farther east we went, the more packed and boisterous it grew. A crowd of youths roamed the passages to argue, show off, pry,
flirt; and gangs of shaven-headed sailors were drinking their way to the Pacific. In my cubicle three Moldovan gypsies–fierce-looking teetotallers–were doing undiscoverable business between Belgium, Turkey and Vladivostok, and a full-skirted Old Believer was commuting between her fourteen children. Threading their way through the carriage, a pair of drunks preyed on all the rest. Their eyes tried to meet ours, build a moment's camaraderie, then they wheedled for cigarettes. Two railway police marched down the corridors and took one away.