Travels in Siberia

The babushka agreed readily and took Vera’s place, where she chatted with the driver, perhaps about her recipes for boiling small children.

We know the Soviets killed or jailed people for offenses even more bizarre than any the tsars dreamed up. Biographical notes about Shalamov don’t say why he was sentenced to the Kolyma mines the first time, in 1937, but in 1943 he was given an additional ten years for, among other things, expressing the opinion that Ivan Bunin, a recent Nobel Prize laureate, was “a classic Russian writer.” People slaved in the gulag camps for five, ten, or fifteen years because they had used fake ration cards, or worked for the American Relief Organization during the famine that followed the First World War, or stolen a spool of thread, or perpetrated a “facial crime” (such as smiling during a serious party lecture), or inquired about the cost of a boat ticket to Vera Cruz, or studied Esperanto, or possessed a piece of Japanese candy (proof of spying for the Japanese), or danced the decadent Western dance called the fox-trot.

When Peter’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth, became empress in 1742, she lost no time in exiling Natalie Lopukhin, the French wife of a general in St. Petersburg, because Mme. Lopukhin was too beautiful and copied Elizabeth’s dresses. For good measure, Elizabeth branded her rival’s tongue. By the time her successor, Peter III, pardoned Mme. Lopukhin twenty years later, presumably that lady’s charms were not so threatening.

The houses’ logs, thin pieces of overlying lath, decorative scrollwork, and plank window shutters all seemed to be in a slow-motion race to see which would be the first to fall completely down.

Here the only fenced places were the gardens in the villages and the little paddocks for animals. Also, here the road signs were fewer and had almost no bullet holes. This oddity stood out even more because the stop signs, for some reason, were exactly the same as stop signs in America: octagonal, red, and with STOP on them in big white English letters. Any stop sign in such a rural place in America (let alone a stop sign written in a foreign language) would likely have a few bullet holes.

The bride and groom themselves were square in the middle of the road with the wedding party milling around them and backing up traffic in both directions. A young woman in a fancy dress came to the passenger-side window of our van and, talking fast, said we must give money to the newlyweds. Volodya handed her a few kopeks, and she said with indignation that that was not nearly enough. He asked how much and she said, “Ten rubles, at least.” He found a ten-ruble bill and gave it to her. She then handed in a tray of little plastic cups of vodka, which Volodya declined, saying we were drivers on our way to the Far East. She sang, “I don’t believe you!” and turned away. With some cajoling, Sergei finally got the party to let us through. In the opposite lane, a young man in a disarrayed tuxedo was holding back a semitrailer truck with his outstretched arms across its radiator grille and his feet spread and planted on the road.
Volodya said we had been lucky to get by. Once in the Caucasus, he said, he had been stopped on the road and forced to drink at a wedding for an entire afternoon, and he had heard of people who had been taken off by weddings and detained for days.

My attempt to join the Great Patriotic War conversation met with silence. America lost four hundred thousand people in the war, a frightening number; but Russia’s dead numbered about twenty million. To many Russians, America’s participation in the war was that of a bystander who holds the combatants’ coats and steps in at the end to finish off the loser.

Travel, like much else in life, can be more fun to read about than to do. When I’m reading a travel book and the protagonist sets out on a journey and the harbor lights drop behind, I imagine enviously what a grand feeling that must have been. In actual travel situations, however, I’ve noticed that moments of soaring consciousness are rare. Worries and annoyances and trying to remember which pocket the passport is in tend to deromanticize the brain

Later I would learn of the remarkable ability possessed by all Russians, even the sweetest and gentlest, to make their faces rock hard instantly when they want them to be.