Sibir (27 page)

We had landed at Khandyga, a little log town in a taiga clearing on the shores of the Aldan River – the greatest of the Lena’s tributaries. A pretty girl, bundled up in an immense dog-skin coat, met us at the plane’s door and led us to a blissfully warm log hut where all except Claire were served huge plates of mashed potatoes, reindeer meat and gravy. Claire had vanished into the black night on urgent personal business.

We had almost finished breakfast before she reappeared, pushing her way weakly through the great double doors that guarded against the frost outside, and looking as if she had just escaped from an arctic version of the nethermost pit. It was some hours before she could bring
herself to tell me all the details of what had happened to her.

On the way to the café she asked the pretty guide where the restroom was, and the girl waved an arm in the direction of a tower-like log structure across the road. Claire raced for it, climbed a flight of outside stairs, pushed open a door and found herself in a large throne room containing nothing but a hole in the middle of the floor. It was a huge hole, black and menacing. Previous visitors had recognized its potential threat and had stayed far enough away from the edge to be reasonably safe. This had resulted in a build-up of ice which increased the dangers and caused still later comers to use even greater caution. When Claire arrived it was hardly safe to step inside the door without risking the possibility of glissading into that gaping hole.

Claire was not about to take such an appalling risk. She stayed where she was, barely inside the doorway … and at the critical moment someone else ran up the stairs and seized the outer handle of the unlocked – and unlockable – door.

Claire instantly grabbed the handle on her side; forgetting she had taken off her gloves; that the temperature was 40° below zero; and that the latch was made of iron.

She was now faced with a complex problem. She had to try and adjust her clothing with her left hand, while with her right hand she engaged in a tug-of-war with a stranger of unknown sex on the far side of the door. The situation was complicated by the hellish prospect that she might lose her precarious balance, slide down the icy slope, and vanish forever from human ken. She could not give up the struggle with her unseen antagonist in order to concentrate on saving herself because her right hand was frozen to the latch. Her agonized howls for mercy got her nowhere because the stranger knew no English.

Fortunately the door swung outward, else I might never have seen my bride again.

The exasperated customer on the other side gave one mighty heave – the door flew open and Claire was snapped out of her private purgatory like a released elastic band. Her hand came free of the latch in time to let her avoid being trampled underfoot by an irate woman of elephantine build, who had no time to indulge in polite amenities. Claire slunk down the stairs and over to the café, having lost only a little skin from her fingers but an incalculable amount of dignity.

I think what really hurt her most was the discovery she made when we boarded the plane again … a neat, clean little lavatory in the tail section, equipped with a lock that worked.

We departed from Khandyga in the first light of dawn and began to climb steeply into the northeast. I leaned over and asked Ivan where Tchersky was.

“On Kolyma River.”

“Yes, but where is that?”

“Across Verkhoyansk Mountains.”

“How
far
across?”

He shrugged. “I do not know. Never go there before.”

I gave up, looked out the window, and instantly forgot all about Tchersky.

We were climbing steeply but the earth was tilting skyward at almost the same rate. The taiga-covered plateau which I had come to associate with Yakutia had vanished, to be replaced in the dawn light by a stupendous upheaval of snow-dusted rock – a titanic wall at the end of the world, which our plane was labouring to overleap.

I have flown over many great mountain ranges but none as brutally violent, as bleakly hostile in appearance as the ranges of the massif which leaps skyward beyond the Aldan River. I have since crossed these mountains by air several times and have visited some of the rock-trapped little towns in their chill valleys, but these monstrous arctic peaks remain amongst the most awesome sights in my experience.

The Ilushin-14 whined higher and higher and the peaks, white-hooded now, kept pace until we cleared the first outlying range at an altitude of fifteen thousand feet. Beyond lay a chaos of broken mountains. The one sign of life was a frail fringe of leafless trees at the bottom of the deepest valleys. We flew over the Verkhoyansk Mountains for an hour; then almost imperceptibly the image began to change, softening into a mountain terrain of less terrifying character. The plane banked to the right and a frozen river came into view in the bottom of a well-wooded valley. Beside a meander in the river several score wooden buildings smoked blue plumes into the brilliant morning sky.

The co-pilot came aft and leaned over us. “Oimyakon and the Indigirka River. We just called them on the radio. They have no passengers so we won’t stop today. Too bad, because they’re having a regular summer morning. It’s only minus 56° down there.”

I took advantage of the moment. “Excuse me, but just where is Tchersky?”

The young man grinned, winked at Ivan and Yura, and nodded toward the cockpit. “Just up ahead there. Not so far. I’d better get back to my job.”

I was beginning to catch on. There was a conspiracy on foot. Nobody was going to tell me where Tchersky was. I did not really care. Beyond the valley of the Indigirka the mountains went savage again, towering even higher than before and so violently jumbled that they seemed like the debris of a stellar explosion. They are known as the Tchersky Range, but they do not deserve such a civilized identity; they are a glimpse into another time than ours, a time of primal tumult beyond anything we, hopefully, will ever know. The 11,000-foot peaks of the Moma Mountains drifted past under a wing and there seemed to be no end to this weird wilderness. I suggested to Claire that our pilot must have gone the wrong way and this must be Tibet. The idea did not seem so unreasonable.

In all we flew more than six hundred miles in a direct
line across the massif and when the peaks lowered again toward a forested highland, it was not for long. To the eastward new peaks lifted to a white sky, marching beyond the most distant horizon to the ultimate northeastern tip of Asia. This mighty mountain complex represents nearly a quarter of the Siberian landmass, occupying almost the whole region east and northeast of the Lena valley. It is kith and kin with its Alaskan neighbours, but covers twice the area.

The aircraft let down in a gentle descent toward the wind-burnished ice of a big river that emerged from a gap in the mountains and flowed northward into a wide reach of stunted forest.

“Kolyma River!” Yura called to us, pointing down.

Claire jumped to her feet and scampered aft to the ladies room. Once bitten … twice shy. She regained her seat just as we came in to land. I reached for the luggage. Yura grinned from ear to ear.

“Not Tchersky yet. Zirianka. Stop for lunch.”

Once again we trotted across the snow to a log café, leaving a bevy of robust ladies to refuel the plane. Over bowls of soup and glasses of cognac, I confronted Ivan and Yura.

“Look,” I said, “a game’s a game. But just where in hell
are
we going, anyway?”

Yura tilted his glass, wiped his lips and sighed.

“Ah well, is too late for you to go back now, so I tell truth. Very many times you talk about Siberia for place of exile. So we make special exile just for you. Under Tsars most dangerous political prisoners sent to Tchersky. Nobody ever escape from there. Impossible! But you are very tough Canadian. We give you chance to try. Not necessary walk five thousand miles to Moscow from Tchersky – only you have to walk eight hundred miles east, then show passport to Yankees on Bering Strait.”

I laughed, but I was intrigued. Was I going to catch a glimpse of the Siberia which is the only Siberia that exists for most North Americans? Would Tchersky prove to be
the site of one of those dread “work camps” which, according to the writings of so many expatriate Russians and home-bred Russophobes, cover Siberia like a shroud of hopelessness? I decided not to ask but to possess my soul in patience. Meantime there was Zirianka to be examined.

Built entirely of squared logs, it is a charming little town of about five thousand people, almost astride the arctic circle. It is a district administration centre but is also the trans-shipment port for river traffic on the Kolyma. Two thousand-ton self-propelled barges serve it from Green Cape, a seaport near the Arctic Ocean; and the freight goes on southward in smaller craft into the Kolyma Mountains to supply a string of placer and hard rock gold mines in an immense aureiferous region which stretches east almost as far as the Pacific Ocean. In winter the frozen river becomes a truck highway, and convoys haul tens of thousands of tons of freight along it. Trucks and ships returning north down the Kolyma fill up with coal from surface deposits near Zirianka.

Zirianka is also an important agricultural centre. Its two state farms not only breed reindeer but also raise eating horses and beef and dairy cattle. I had noticed, as we came in to land across broad muskeg plains, little mounds in the many natural clearings. These were haystacks, harvested in summer and waiting to be brought in by horse- and reindeer-drawn sleds after the frost sufficiently hardened the muskegs.

Claire was a little apprehensive as we wandered around amongst the neat log houses; however, Zirianka offered her no traumatic surprises. We could not know it then but the little town was biding its time. Later it would find a way to give her cause to remember it.

When we departed from Zirianka I refrained from again asking where we were going, or how far it was. We flew straight north along the Kolyma valley with the mountains on our right and a plain of drowned taiga widening into the distance on our left.

Two hours later the co-pilot came back and drew our
attention to a brilliant white line on the horizon ahead.

“The polar sea! … And there is Tchersky down below.”

Beneath us was a haphazard sprawl of buildings. I searched for a stockaded enclosure but could not pick one out. Later, perhaps. The settlement was on a bald point of land jutting into the Kolyma. Beyond it the white and featureless tundra rolled north to the frozen ocean.

We landed on the river ice and taxied toward the town through an assemblage of parked aircraft which included at least thirty fixed-winged planes and a dozen helicopters. Clearly Tchersky did not lack the means of modern transportation. Our plane stopped beside a crowd of fur-clad figures and we descended the steps into the heart of a mob of welcomers, all of them jovially anxious to pump our hands. It was the kind of reception which would have warmed the heart of the most blasé politician. It assuredly warmed ours, and that was good because the temperature was close to minus 40°.

Our arrival was a real occasion. Claire and I were the first foreigners to visit Tchersky since the Revolution. Claire was the first foreign woman most Tcherskyites had ever seen. On top of that, we were Canadians, and as such were looked upon as being next-door neighbours, despite the fact that our homes were separated by the width of the Arctic Ocean.

A gleaming-eyed Chukchee, Nikolai Tourot (who began life as a reindeer herder and is now Mayor of Tchersky and a delegate to the National Assembly in Moscow) greeted me with a gentle handshake; but the District Party Secretary, Victor Nazarov, a bouncing brute of a man, embraced me with such fervour I gasped for breath. He had his eye on Claire as well, but she was too quick for him and took shelter in the middle of a group of Russian, Evenk and Chukchee ladies.

Yura rescued me from Victor’s grasp and introduced me to Simeon Kerilev, a tiny, sweet little Yukagir poet
and novelist whose most recent book,
Son Of An Eagle
, had just been published.

It was impossible to register all those who crowded around us. Their ardour was too overwhelming … but by far the most overwhelming was Victor Nazarov.

Victor is the sort of man who has to be seen and heard to be believed. Born in 1930 of Russian peasant stock near Tobolsk in west Siberia, he went to the Aldan goldfields of Yakutia with his parents after his father had “some differences” with the Stalin dictatorship. Following his father’s death during the war, Victor helped support the family by becoming a driver-mechanic. This was a job that suited him and one he loved. He wrestled trucks over most of northern Siberia, and in his spare time became a champion weight lifter. In the time he could spare from
that
activity, he took correspondence courses until he had the credits needed to enter university at Sverdlovsk, from which he graduated with a prize degree in industrial transportation. He joined the Party in 1955 (bearing no grudges for what was past), ran the truck transport network during the building of Mirny, and in 1962 was dispatched to the mouth of the Kolyma to apply his energies to the construction of the new arctic town of Tchersky.

Moon-faced, tug-voiced, hairy as a mammoth, strong as a cave bear and utterly and absolutely indefatigable, Victor Nazarov took Claire and me into his ebullient heart with such rampant enthusiasm that he nearly killed us both. I remember him, and always will, as the most generous, ingenuous and forceful man I have ever met.

Cutting our party out of the crowd of welcomers, he heaved us bodily into his Bobyk, a jeep-like little car (the nickname Bobyk means “little terrier”) and drove us into town over non-existent roads at fifty miles an hour. Not once did he stop bellowing in our ears. He had a lot to tell us and he was not the man to waste a moment. As the Bobyk skidded, leapt and crashed into and over obstacles, Victor’s massive left arm was flung out in a continuing
gesture, pointing to half-built structures, piles of mud, holes in the ground, even to white stretches of virgin tundra, and identifying these as: “APARTMENT HOUSE FOR FIFTY FAMILIES GOES THERE.… THAT IS BEGINNING OF BIGGEST SCHOOL IN SIBERIA.… PALACE OF SPORT, WE ARE BUILDING HERE.… POWER STATION OVER THERE.…”