Siberian village passing by
The next day I slept late and then joined Nikolai in his cabin. He was sharing it with a family of three, a father named Sasha, a mother, and a boy about ten years old named Igor. Nikolai let Igor listen to his walkman while we all talked. Sometimes the earphone jack would come out, and Igor would complain, “Nikolai, ne rabotaet” (it doesn’t work), and Nikolai would laugh and fix it for him. The family was from Blagoveshchensk on the Chinese border by the Amur River, still many days away. They had been visiting family in Novosibirsk. Sasha and I talked about our homes, about the weather, and about which Russian leaders were the craziest. He thinks Gorbachev and Yeltsin were crazy, Stalin was a nutcase, and Lenin was worst of all because he started the whole mess. As for Putin, like almost everyone else we asked, he said he didn’t know and we would just have to wait and see. I asked him if there were any Russian leaders he liked. Brezhnev, he said, was an OK guy. Unfortunately I didn’t know enough Russian to argue with him about that one.He said socialism was better for the country than capitalism because now the poor are getting poorer while Moscow is getting richer, and communal services like education and health care are going severely downhill. I read an article that said under Communism, at least there were enough medical supplies around to steal some when you needed to. These days there aren’t even enough sterile syringes to go around. Most people bring their own syringe if they go to the doctor. Russia will probably be better off in the long run, Sasha went on, but right now they’ve only been practicing capitalism for ten years and things have just gotten worse. The U.S., he reminded me, has had 200 years to work at it. We agreed we’d talk again in 200 years.
Later Liz came and joined us. I introduced everybody, and Igor’s mom prompted him to count to ten in English for us. He was reading some children’s books that were somewhat beyond my knowledge of Russian farm animals. Liz and I looked at the words in his books and tried to point to the corresponding pictures, and Igor would laugh because we didn’t even know what a horse was. So we compared farm animal noises instead. My favorite was the pig noise. They asked us what pigs said in America, and almost fell over laughing when we said “Oink oink.” They said, “No, in Russia, pigs say khru khru, khru khru,” and we laughed at the strange sound. But then again, what the hell is ‘oink oink’? They asked how we called cats, and we said the traditional high-pitched, “heeere kitty kitty kitty.” The proper Russian way is “kss kss kss.” Next time I saw a cat I tried calling it the Russian way, and it actually worked. Which is more than I can say for “here kitty kitty.”
Like almost everyone else we met, they asked us what on earth we were doing visiting Siberia in the middle of December. “Come back in summer!” people would say. “It’s so pretty and green. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to come here now.” I didn’t bother to tell them it was our only chance to come, and if we had come four months earlier we couldn’t have talked like this because we wouldn’t have known any Russian. I just promised them I’d come back some day.
After a while I went back to my cabin to let the family rest. Some time later Nikolai and Sasha came to our coupee. Nikolai was holding the thin black rope with his talisman on it. He had also strung his smertnik on the rope, and when he handed it to me, I didn’t know what to say. He smiled and told me to put it on. Sasha looked at me solemnly and said, “It is not a small gift.” I lowered my eyes to show I understood, even though I didn’t entirely. When they left, I looked at it and thought for a while.
I felt bad because I had nothing of equal value to give to him. I didn’t imagine my cowboy hat was as important to me as whatever meaning was attached to Nikolai’s talisman, but it was the only thing I had that was unique to myself. My grandpa had given it to me, and it had sat on my backpack throughout my travels, more than halfway around the world by now, and had started conversations with everyone from travelling Texans to drunken Siberians. I walked to their cabin and presented moy podarok (my gift) to Nikolai. He smiled and tried it on, and we talked some more.
That evening, Liz and Rob and I were supposed to get off the train in Irkutsk. Nikolai and I were sad, and he asked me to stay on the train with him to Vladivostok, but we both knew I couldn’t. He gave me his address and phone number and told me to look him up when I got to Vladivostok. I promised him I would.
When it was our stop, we all bundled up and got off onto the cold, dark platform. We talked and looked at the stars and the snow. Nikolai asked me if I had any American coins with me. I did, but I didn’t know where they were packed, and they were mixed with coins from about ten different countries by now. Then I remembered that I had some crisp American dollar bills in my money belt, and I got one out and handed it to him. Sasha held his hand out for one, too. I smiled and said, “Ya ne Uncle Sam!” (I’m not Uncle Sam!) They looked at me blankly. I shrugged and handed Sasha a dollar too, and he examined it under the harsh lighting. “Eto ne zelyonie!” he declared indignantly. (It’s not green!) I laughed and told him to turn it over, but he still wasn’t convinced. I guess we take for granted that’s it’s kind of green, but not as green as they imagine it to be in Siberia.
At one point, I was looking up at the cold, clear stars, and Sasha asked me something I didn’t quite understand. I thought he wanted to know if I knew the stars, so I found Orion and pointed it out. “Orion,” I said. He nodded. “Aw-ree-OWN,” he said rapidly with a beautifully rolled ‘r’. Orion is such a familiar thing, and it was comforting to find it hanging up there in the middle of Siberia. I don’t think I’ll ever look at Orion again without thinking about Sasha from Blagoveshchensk and my other Siberian friends, and wondering how they might be doing on the other side of the world.
We talked until the train started rolling silently away, and our provodnitsa laughed and yelled at them to hurry. They ran and caught it, jumping on it as it was moving, after Nikolai gave me one last quick kiss. We waved until they were out of sight, and that was it for Train No. 2. It sped away and left us alone with our baggage in a desolate and snowy place in the heart of Siberia. I was sad that Nikolai was gone, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I’d be in his hometown before long.
We could see a sign in the distance with red letters that spelled out UPKYTCK (Irkutsk), and we walked toward it and into a tunnel that led to the station. We caught a cab to the kamera (baggage storage) and on to the Amerikansky Dom (American House). The Russian woman who owned it had married a postal worker from Pennsylvania about 25 years ago. He had moved to Siberia to be with her, and their Soviet love story swept the major American magazines at the time. I think he has since passed away, and she now lives with her son in a big, cozy house in Irkutsk. She rents out each of the six spare beds for $20 per night including a home-cooked breakfast. It was the most we had ever paid for a hotel room in Russia, but it had a huge shower (it had been four days since we’d had that particular luxury) and an open kitchen, and it was warm and comfortable. It might as well have been the Ritz Carlton as much as we appreciated its amenities.
It was about 2:00 a.m. by the time we rolled in, and we were exhausted. After the hostess made arrangements for breakfast and a cab to take us to the bus station early the next day, we crashed into bed. It wasn’t a long sleep, but it was a hard sleep.
Day 5--Listvyanka and Lake Baikal