Sibir (28 page)

When he had reduced all four of us, even Yura, to bruised and battered hulks, and deaf ones at that, he suddenly jammed on the brakes, sending poor Kola smashing into the window.

“POOR CLAIRE! I FORGET MYSELF! MAYBE YOU ARE A LITTLE TIRED? I TAKE YOU TO HOTEL!”

The hotel, of logs (“WE ARE BUILDING NEW ONE RIGHT AWAY – CONCRETE – ONE HUNDRED FIFTY ROOMS”), was simple, but we had a suite of two pleasant rooms which, it appeared, we were going to share with Victor. Having escorted us to our rooms he showed no inclination to depart but pounded over to the window, thrust out his big paw, and began waving at the distant landscape.

“FARLEE! OVER THERE WE MAKE NEW AIRPORT – BIG ENOUGH FOR JET PLANES – AND CLAIRE! LOOK THERE! WE MAKE NEW NURSERY SCHOOL.…”

Yura intervened. Somehow he manoeuvred Victor out the door – though not without a parting bellow.

“NOW YOU HAVE GOOD REST! LATER WE MAKE PLANS!”

The door swung shut and Claire fell on the nearest bed. I was a little shaky myself as I started to take off my boots. It seemed to me I could still hear Victor’s foghorn echoing inside my skull.

It was not an echo! It was reality. The door burst open.

“ULCERS ON MY SOUL! I FORGOT SO MUCH! YOU MUST HAVE FOOD! COME QUICK! COME QUICK!”

I tried to tell Victor we were not hungry, just exhausted, but I might as well have been Canute trying to turn back the tide. He swept us out of the room, across the frozen range of muddy mountains which might someday be a road, and into a restaurant presided over by a beautiful young lady by the name of Lydia, whose husband, Anatoly (she quickly told me) was an interior decorator working in the town.

Interior decorator? Here? Claire and I exchanged glances. But it was true enough and later we had a chance to meet Anatoly and to admire his work.

Lydia had prepared a modest snack. Twelve of us (people kept appearing as if out of the woodwork) sat down to it. The appetizer was pickled reindeer tongue. Next came Kamchatka crab, chocolate éclairs, dumpling soup, fish soup, cream puffs, reindeer cutlets, smoked salmon, stewed Ukraine tomatoes, cherry juice, strawberry jam and tea. The food was not necessarily served in that order, but since there was one bottle of cognac, one of vodka, one of spirits and one of champagne at
each
person’s place, I can be excused if I have somewhat jumbled the sequence.

Victor proved to be
the
tamadar of all the world. He leapt to his feet at least once every three minutes and every toast was bottoms up. It was at this first meal with him that Claire struck back. He insisted on learning a Canadian toast and so she perversely taught him to say “up bottoms.” He was delighted and, so he told me when I revisited him three years later, had no idea of its potential English meaning. However, during a visit to Moscow he was called on to help entertain a party of senior dignitaries from Great Britain at an official function. Beaming with affability and delight, he proposed that they should drink his Canadian toast, which he had unwittingly modified to:

“Up your bottoms!”

He told me this story somewhat ruefully, but without rancour.

“MOSCOW SEND ME BACK TO TCHERSKY IN DISGRACE! BUT I FORGIVE DEAR CLAIRE! SHE HELPED ME GET OUT QUICK FROM THAT CURSED TOWN!”

The last toast was drunk about 8 p.m. and we were almost literally carried back to our hotel. We were in no condition to resist when all twelve of our dinner companions crowded into our room and Victor sat down at the table, banged it so that it jumped clean off the floor, and announced we would now have a planning conference.

“HOW LONG YOU STAY WITH US? A MONTH? TWO MONTHS?

He seemed genuinely outraged when I timidly replied that we could not remain more than two weeks. He pounded the table until I was sure it would collapse and then he planned each of our days in the most minute detail – forgetting only to leave time for sleep.

I could see that Claire, who had unwisely allowed herself to get hooked on the spirit, was not going to be with the party much longer; so, in an act of unselfish heroism which she has never properly appreciated, I agreed (actually there was no way I could have refused) to accompany Victor to the makeshift Palace of Sport while he did his nightly work-out.

Kola had faded, but Yura was still going strong. Together with the mayor, the newspaper editor and half a dozen others, we watched the incredible Victor bounce his 270-pound bulk around while he played two fast games of volleyball, worked for half an hour with the barbells, wrestled a couple of the biggest truck drivers in Tchersky, and then announced:

“I’M HUNGRY! LET’S GO AND HAVE A LITTLE SNACK!”

We drank the snack at the headquarters of the Tchersky Press, a dilapidated log structure out of another age boasting a modern rotary press which had been flown in from Leningrad to print the daily
Kolymskaya Pravda
. We also did a group show on the radio station which was
housed in the same building; although since it was then past midnight I doubt if anyone heard us except, perhaps, the polar bears on the arctic ice a few versts to the northward. I wonder what they made of my wobbly rendition of “The Squid Jigging Grounds.”

At 2 a.m. we were back in the hotel, but not to sleep. Someone had decided our winter clothing was inadequate and half the town had been scoured to find proper clothing. Claire was pried out of bed and, eyes still tight shut, was wrapped in an enormous dog-skin coat, hatted with an Evenk reindeer bonnet, booted with embroidered felt boots which went up to her thighs (Victor insisted on fitting these with his own hands), and gloved in sealskin mittens. She claims she has no recollection of the fittings.

During my absence at the Sports Palace the table in our room had miraculously sprouted several bottles of champagne together with baskets of fresh fruit and cream pastries. So we had another little lunch. At 3 a.m. Victor looked at his glittering Slava wristwatch and the voice of authority shivered the hotel.

“TIME NOW FOR BED! GET GOOD SLEEP! TOMORROW WILL BE BUSY DAY!”

Tchersky is at once one of the oldest and the newest of Siberian settlements. In 1644 the Cossack, Semyon Dezhnev, descended the Lena from Yakutsk, somehow navigated his way along the arctic coast to the mouth of the Kolyma, ascended it a few miles and built an
ostrug
, a tiny, crude wooden fort which came to be known as Nizhniye Kresty. Through the years and centuries it survived as a fur-trade station and one of the most remote and inaccessible outposts of the Russian empire. From it the Yukagir (then a strong and numerous people), the Evenk, and the Chukchee of the northeast coast were systematically bled for furs even as the Eskimo of North America were bled at a later time.

By the beginning of the twentieth century the fur-bearers
had all but disappeared – and so had most of the native people. Nizhniye Kresty remained alive, though barely so, as a place of exile for the most dangerous and desperate political prisoners in the hands of the Tsars.

After the Revolution the ancient settlement almost vanished and human life in the district shrank to a handful of native Russian trappers and fishermen, a few hundred Yukagir reindeer herders, and a score of Chukchee families.

Then, in 1960, Moscow waved her wand and Nizhniye Kresty was born anew.

The justification for the resurrection was gold – unbelievable quantities of it that had been discovered along the upper reaches of the Kolyma and its tributaries; and to the eastward in the Anyuyskiy Mountains of adjacent Chukotka. The decision was taken to develop this region as a valuta centre and to begin building it into one of the new far northern complexes. There was no gold at Nizhniye Kresty but it was ideally placed to become another Lensk – a transportation and administrative centre for the region.

In 1961, when the transformation was begun, there were thirty people living in ten ancient wooden houses on the river bank. In 1966, when I first visited it, there were two brand-new sister towns: Tchersky, on the old site, with a population of five thousand people and, four kilometers to the north, the sea and river port of Green Cape, with six thousand people. Tchersky had become the capital of the entire Kolymsky District, embracing an area the size of Denmark and the Netherlands put together, and it already boasted one of the most productive reindeer farms in the Soviet Union. The port city was receiving ocean-going ships of 15,000-tons displacement and the river had become the everyday highway, summer and winter, for a fleet of ships and trucks.

All of this had been accomplished by the unbridled enthusiasm and the unremitting efforts of people like Victor
Nazarov – people who were not motivated by the prospect of personal gain so much as by an idea and a belief.

It was my good luck to live for a little while in the midst of Tchersky’s atmosphere of sustained excitement. And to see something of the adolescence of a new world abuilding on the shores of the polar ocean.

B
Y EXERCISING
iron self-control, Victor managed to stay away from us until 6 a.m.; then the roar of his voice and the thunder of his feet as he pounded up the hotel stairs brought us unwillingly back to consciousness.

“COME ON!” he boomed. “WE GO SEE REINDEER HERD!”

He hustled us across the street to Lydia’s. She had prepared a breakfast of hot boiled deer tongues, salad, chocolate cake, meatballs and fried potatoes, vodka and cognac. She apologized because there was no champagne!

It was still pitch dark and 33° below zero as our Bobyk bounced out to the airport and delivered us to an enormous
MIL-4
helicopter personally piloted by the assistant district chief of Polar Aviation, a big, bony and handsome man. His crew consisted of a co-pilot, navigator, radio operator, and engineer, and considering we were about to make a two hundred-mile flight into the tundra in what was effectively the middle of the night, I did not feel that any one of them was redundant.

Our own party numbered ten, but since everyone was bundled to the eyes in monstrous coats and fur hats, it was difficult to know just who was who. Only Victor was easily recognizable. His was the one voice audible above the roar of the engine as we lifted off.

Shortly before 9 a.m. the sky began to grey and we could see the featureless white ocean of tundra below us.
We thundered over it, and just as the sun tipped the edge of the horizon, a black smudge loomed far ahead on the now saffron-tinted snow. It grew and took on form until it became a solidly packed mass of deer, above which hung a silver cloud of glittering frost crystals condensing from the living warmth of this great herd.

We circled once at low altitude and I expected the milling mass of beasts to stampede, but they only flung back their heads so their antlers ranged the sky like a forest shaken in a gust of wind. They were used to helicopters, which visited them at least once a week, bringing mail and supplies for the herdsmen.

A few hundred yards to one side stood three large skin tents –
yarangas
. A handful of people came running toward us as we settled to the tundra.

They were the herders Nikolai Dyatchiv and Mikhail Kimirgin, men in their early thirties; Innokenty Khodyan, the chief herder, a man of fifty; and the wives of Khodyan and Kimirgin. All were Yukagir. They were dressed in ancestral garb, clad from sole to crown in reindeer skins. We were introduced and then with much grinning, shouting and some impromptu dance steps from Victor, made our way to the Khodyan’s yaranga. Our visit was unexpected, but on the tundra hospitality is always waiting.

The tent was constructed of double layers of deer skins with a vestibule for storing gear and to act as a heat-lock. We pushed through the double flaps to enter the Khodyan home and found ourselves in a spacious room, about twenty feet in diameter, with wall-to-wall carpeting of thick, soft reindeer robes. A small sheet-metal stove glowed red in the middle of the room, and beside it stood a table about ten inches high. There were no chairs. Everyone squatted or lay where they pleased.

Victor came in last, dragging a big burlap bag that clinked. Out of it he drew endless bottles and we hoisted a few “sun-risers” while snacking on chips of raw frozen fish. Glasses of heavily sweetened tea completed this second breakfast.

We shared it with Innokenty Khodyan’s grandmother who, at the age of 107 years, refused to stay at home in the comfort of the reindeer breeders’ permanent settlement but insisted on continuing to live the nomadic life of the herders. She told us how surprised she was to meet people from another continent – “across the frozen waters” – and she hoped we would remain at least until the spring as her grandson’s guests.

Her age-blackened and dessicated face turned toward a little girl who sat solemnly staring at us. The child was named Elizaveta (Elizabeth). She was the old woman’s great, great grand-daughter.

“I am too old to travel much anymore, but this little one may someday visit
your
yaranga. It is good for people who are from far away to visit each other,” the old lady told us.

While we breakfasted the two younger men slipped off to bring the herd closer to the camp. We went outside to find ourselves surrounded by the living host of the reindeer. Nearly three thousand of them stood passively about, staring incuriously at the helicopter, or pawing through the hard snow to snatch a mouthful of moss.

Armed with rawhide lassos, and with several silent, furry little dogs close at their heels, the three herders loped into the middle of the herd, which spread to let them pass and closed in again behind them. Deep in that maze of antlers they were looking for an especially fat deer with which to make a feast to celebrate our coming.

They lassoed several before they found a suitable one. Dumbly it followed them out of the herd. It stood braced against the rope while Khodyan gentled it and then with a flashing movement thrust his knife between its ribs. Slowly the beast sank to its knees, crumbling to the snow.

The men having done their job, the women squatted beside the animal, neatly paunched it, skinned it, and butchered the steaming meat. They worked without gloves despite the searing frost – the body heat of the dead reindeer keeping their hands from freezing.