Ice Trilogy Page 6

  “We leave tomorrow from Moscow station. We will travel by train to Taishet. There we will be met by thirty wagons, which will take us and the equipment four hundred kilometers along the horse route to the village of Kezhma on the Angara River, where we will change horses, saddle up, and ride over the taiga path another two hundred kilometers to the village of Vanavara on the banks of the Stony Tunguska. There is a Gostorg trading station in that settlement that supplies the Evenki with goods, gunpowder, and small shot in exchange for fur pelts. The last outpost of civilization, so to speak. The location of the meteorite’s landing is eighty kilometers to the north of Vanavara. We will get there on foot, following the reindeer trail. On passing into the forest blast zone and determining the exact place where the meteorite landed, we will build a barracks from the timber the meteorite has already felled for us, have a housewarming party, and begin our scientific activity. Any questions?”

  The plump astronomer Ikhilevich raised his hand. “How long might the expedition last?”

  “Colleague, don’t pose metaphysical questions,” Kulik retorted. “Until we find it!”

  “As long as the provisions last,” smiled the homely Trifonov.

  “Until the cold hits!” the small, fidgety driller Gridiukh added.

  A slouching student enthusiast with a barely distinguishable beard stood up. “Comrade Kulik, is it true that smokers...well...you don’t take them?”

  “That’s the genuine truth, young man! I cannot abide tobacco smoke. And I believe smoking to be a most harmful habit of the old world. You and I are building a new world. So make your choice — tobacco or the Tungus meteorite!”

  Everyone laughed. The student scratched his chin. “Well, I guess ...the meteorite.”

  “An excellent choice, young man!” Kulik exclaimed.

  Everyone laughed even louder.

  “Oh, God.” Masha shook her head. “How awful that he doesn’t take women on expeditions. It’s such a mistake! I would keep a journal...”

  “One more thing, comrades!” said Kulik, growing serious. “The local population that we will be working with — the Evenki and Angara peoples — prefer goods to money, and most of all gunpowder, shot, and alcohol. We have an abundance of ammunition, but we aren’t getting much alcohol. So if each of you could bring a flask of alcohol, it would noticeably hasten our progress across the taiga. Questions? No? Then — to work, comrades! Nikolai Savelevich will instruct you further.”

  “I’ll ask everyone to proceed to packing the baggage,” said Trifonov, standing.

  The group stood up and people began talking. Kulik took off his glasses and wiped them, squinting shortsightedly.

  “Oh, yes! One more thing...”

  Everyone immediately fell silent. Kulik put his glasses on and looked at me. “Among us there will be a person who was born at the moment the Tungus meteorite fell.”

  And I realized that Kulik had accepted me on the expedition only because of this. Everyone turned toward me with curiosity.

  “Where were you born?” asked Trifonov.

  “About thirty versts north of Petersburg,” I answered.

  “Kilometers, kilometers, young man!” Kulik corrected me. “Your mother heard the thunder during the birth?”

  “She did hear it. And she wasn’t the only one,” I answered.

  “It was heard all over Russia that day,” the glum geologist Yankovsky spoke up.

  “And what else were you told about the day of your birth? Was there anything else unusual?” asked Kulik, staring intently at me.

  “Unusual...” I thought a minute and suddenly remembered. “Of course. There was something. My family said that there was no night at all. And the sky was lit up.”

  “Absolutely right!” Kulik raised a long finger. “This phenomenon was noted along the entire coast of the Baltic Sea, in the northern parts of Europe and Russia — from Copenhagen to Yeniseisk! An anomalous luminescence of the atmosphere!”

  “Which Torvald Kohl and Herman Seidel wrote about,” nodded Ikhilevich. “A bright dawn and dusk, a massive development of silvery clouds...”

  “The mass accumulation of silvery clouds...” Kulik repeated in a loud voice. He grew thoughtful and suddenly banged his fist on the rostrum. “This time we are obliged to find the meteorite!”

  “We’ll find it! It won’t get away from us! That’s why we’re going!” Everyone began talking at once.

  “Sasha, Sasha, it’s so wonderful!” Masha turned her reddened face toward me. “Find it, find the Tungus meteorite!”

  “I’ll try,” I muttered without much enthusiasm.

  I just wanted to travel somewhere. To travel and travel, as I did back then.

  The next day we left on the Leningrad–Moscow–Irkutsk train, in which we had been assigned an entire car. The four days to Taishet passed in conversations and arguments in which I was a passive listener. In our car, No. 12, they argued about topical questions: Communism, free love, industrialization, world revolution, the structure of the atom, and, of course, the Tungus meteorite. All this was accompanied by what was excellent food for that time, and endless drinking of tea with unlimited sugar, which for me, after my half-starved existence, was particularly pleasant. Having stuffed myself with horse sausage, Baltic herring, boiled eggs, and bread with cow’s milk butter, and drunk my fill of strong tea, I climbed onto the top bunk and, half asleep, looked out the window where the endless Vologodsky and Viatsky forests sailed by. After the low Ural Mountains, that view was replaced by the incomparable Siberian landscape. From Chelyabinsk all the way to Novosibirsk the depths of an ancient sea, according to Kulik, stretched in boundless breadth, overgrown with pine and larch. Gazing at these expanses I fell asleep.

  Relations among members of the expedition were good, everyone was friendly and well disposed. The mysterious meteorite, which the Soviet newspapers had begun to write about, thanks to Kulik, captivated and excited the imagination. I liked to think about it when I lay on the top bunk. But I always imagined it still gliding through the Universe. That way was even more pleasurable for me. Arguments about its composition, velocity, and size went on endlessly. Kulik infected everyone with his enthusiasm, which bordered on fanaticism. For this everyone forgave him his dictatorial manner, his everyday terrorism and intolerance in discussion. On the expedition he called everyone “comrade,” as a matter of principle, ignoring names and patronymics. After the victory of the Soviets in Russia, his “scientific Marxism” grew even stronger. Kulik deified “Stalin’s iron consistency” and believed in a coming Soviet economic leap capable of “proving to the whole world the dialectical objectivity of our path.”

  We arrived in Taishet in the morning.

  We were met by men driving solid Siberian carts, hot sunny weather, and clouds of mosquitoes. I had never seen such quantities of bloodsucking insects in the air before. Everyone was given a panama hat with cheesecloth netting, manufactured according to Kulik’s design, since he had a great deal of experience in dealing with the local mosquitoes. In these identical gray panamas we looked like Chinese peasants. Loading ourselves onto the carts, we set off for our distant destination along a tract that our drivers called “the highway” — a wide but uneven packed-earth road, pocked with ruts and potholes. Fortunately for us, June 1928 turned out dry in eastern Siberia, and the mud puddles on the road were entirely surmountable. The bridges over small rivers, however, were almost all in a sorry state and required repair. Some of them had been almost completely destroyed by the spring floods. We had to go around them and cross at a ford. When, once more pushing our carts over a shaky bridge in a hurry, Kulik would quote a French traveler: “And along the way we came across constructions that had to be circumvented, and which in Russian were called ‘Le Most.’”

  The road lay through the hilly taiga, where a mixed forest grew. But the summits of these smooth hills, which the locals called mounds, were entirely covered in thick pine growth. These amazing virgin woodlands reminded me of the manes of
sleeping monsters. The slender ship timber grew incredibly thick, and when the wind began to toss the trees, they came alive, and with them the whole mound appeared to awaken, and it seemed that a sleeping monster was just about to rise up, straighten himself out, and fill the taiga expanses with a powerful, resounding roar.

  Despite the primeval nature of this region, we rarely came across actual animals: someone spotted a marten once, and a moose.

  We traveled very slowly, taking almost a week, spending the nights in small villages that looked like northern Russian farmsteads. The endless taiga spread out around five or six isbas made of hundred-year-old pines, enclosed with high pike fences to keep out animals. The locals were always happy to see us. Simple-hearted people, inured to hardship by Siberia’s harshness, they lived primarily by hunting, fishing, and income from people passing along the “highway,” for whom a separate hut with a stove and bunks always stood ready. We paid them with gunpowder and alcohol. Soviet money was still rare here, and Stalin’s program of mass collectivization had not yet reached these wild places. The villagers fed us freshly caught fish, fried mushrooms, dried game, and the customary flour-meal soup, spiced with wild garlic, wild onions, dried carrots, and salted deer or moose. We slept side by side in huts, bathhouses, sheepfolds, and haylofts. But our undemanding drivers would place their carts in a circle at night, bring all the horses inside the circle, light campfires in a circle around them, and sleep on the carts, covering themselves, despite the summer weather, with the ever-present sheepskin.

  On the sixth day our wagon train arrived in Kezhma.

  A large settlement with a hundred or so houses stood on a high, beautiful bank of the Angara — a wide, powerful river. Dropping off sharply, the banks turned into a small shoal beyond which this mighty river flowed. The water in it, as in all Siberian rivers, was cold and unbelievably pure. The wooded shore on the other side stretched steeply into the distance.

  The village was inhabited primarily by Russians, who were called Angars, and the rare, Russianized Evenki. Everyone worked in hunting and fishing. The hunted pelts were handed over to the government for very small sums, and fish, moose, and reindeer fed them reliably all year long. The Angars did not keep domesticated animals.

  In Kezhma our expedition’s Gostorg credit kicked in: we received eight sacks of dried pike, muksun whitefish, and peled whitefish; three barrels of salted white salmon; a small barrel of lard; and a couple of bags of fish flour. Having bathed and sat in the Siberian steam bath, we gave ourselves over to the hospitality of the local leader, a former chairman of the agricultural soviet and local director of Gostorg. He treated Kulik like an old pal, showed him an article clipped from a Taishet newspaper about last year’s expedition. The fellow was most happy that we had “made it all the way here from Petersburg, where Ilyich set up a real carousel for the bourgeois.” A former Red partisan who had fought in the Urals, after the Bolsheviks’ victory they sent him to distant Kezhma “to carry out the Party line.” Arriving here with a cavalry squadron, he “definitively and irreversibly decided the question of Soviet power in Kezhma” over the course of three days: he shot twelve people.

  “Now I understand — I should have shot more,” he admitted to us candidly over a glass of alcohol diluted with the cold Angara river water.

  In Kezhma he had two wives — the old one and a new one — who got along wonderfully and made a real feast for us: the long, crude table in the director’s isba was groaning with victuals. Here, for the first time in my life, I tried dumplings with bear lard and shangi — little wheat cakes fried on a skillet and covered with sour cream. The boss knew only one thing about the meteorite: “Something crashed there and knocked the forest down.” He was categorical in his parting words, advised us not to stand on ceremony with the Evenki, and if necessary to “beat them between their slanted eyes with a rifle butt.” He attributed the failure of last year’s expedition entirely to the sabotage of the native population and Kulik’s “rotten softheartedness.” He referred to the Evenki as Tunguses and saw them as hidden enemies of Soviet rule.

  “At first I thought: they live in tents in the taiga, eat simple, dress simple, shit in the open — of course they’ll support Soviet power. But it turns out they’re more kulak than the worst kulaks! All they do is count who has the most reindeer. They need their own revolution! A Tungus Lenin is what they need!”

  Kulik tried to object, saying that the main problem of the backward peoples of the USSR was general illiteracy, which had been advantageous to the czarist regime for exploiting them; that the Party had already begun working on this, organizing isba reading rooms and schools for the indigenous people; and that the Evenki, like all the peasants and animal herders, would soon be collectivized. But the headman was unswayable.

  “Andreich, if it was my job, I’d collectivize them in my own way: into a cart, to the city with them, do the dirty work, the digging. The shovel will reeducate them! And I’d slaughter all the reindeer and send them off to the starving peasants of the Volga region.”

  “We conquered famine in the Volga region two years ago,” Kulik informed him proudly.

  “Really?” smiled the tipsy, red-faced boss. “Well, then, we’ll eat the reindeer ourselves.”

  In the morning we donned our backpacks, having placed in them only the necessary provisions, saddled up the local horses, and set off along a narrow path beaten down by the reindeer. From Kezhma to the Stony Tungus River we had another two hundred kilometers north to travel. The wagon train with the main baggage took off after us.

  The tract passed through hills and mounds. Uphill we rode at a walk, going down we drove our slow, broad-chested horses as fast as we could. They got extremely frightened when there was a long descent. Then — up a hill once again, and so on, endlessly.

  On the mounds the taiga changed: pine gave way quickly to conifers, and the mixed forest crawled down into a valley; the land gradually became covered with moss and lichen. Animals could be seen frequently. The men met them with cries. Wild birds flew up from the thickets, flapping their heavy wings. I saw Siberian weasels and ermines several times. Scared by us, they shot up the trees in a flash and disappeared in the branches. There were two inveterate hunters among us: the driller Petrenko and the geologist Molik. At the first stop they set off for game and returned fairly quickly with a wood grouse. The large, beautiful bird was plucked, gutted, cut in strips, and boiled with wheat porridge, but its meat turned out to be tough and tasted like pine. During the first expedition Kulik had staked a lot on the local game, hoping to supplement the food with it. But he’d had no luck: during the expedition they had shot only an inedible fox and a few ducks. Our first night in the taiga wasn’t easy: we cut off pine branches and constructed beds for ourselves, lay down around the fire, and tried to fall asleep, covering ourselves with our outer clothing. But despite the warm summer weather an eternal cold was exuded by the stony, mossy earth, and it seeped through our clothes. From above, we were harassed by mosquitoes, which didn’t diminish in number even at night. Among the tribe of mosquitoes appeared tiny, nimble, furious individuals called midges. With a revolting whine they found their way up sleeves and crawled into the eyes and nostrils. It was impossible to fight them off. We took Kulik’s advice and rubbed our wrists and necks with kerosene. Soon the whole expedition began to stink like a kerosene shop. The next three nights were just as hard: people didn’t get enough sleep; they cussed and tried to escape the night cold and mosquitoes; during the day they shivered half asleep in their saddles. But Kulik was inflexible. He woke us at exactly six o’clock with the whistle he carried in his breast pocket, keeping the expedition on an iron schedule. He gave the commands for starting up and for stopping with this whistle. His main motto was: For the sake of a great goal you can put up with everything. In people he valued willpower and focus above all, and in the material world — books. Sitting with us at the campfire, he told us how Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation helped him to st
op smoking when he was in exile.

  “I had been reading it for days on end, and one morning I left my shack, walked over to the ice hole, and poured out an entire year’s supply of tobacco with the words: ‘Let the fish smoke. I — am a man of will.’”

  Like other social democrats who became Bolshevik, he lived for the future, piously believing in the new Soviet Russia.

  “Science should help the Revolution,” he would say.

  He thought GOELRO, Lenin’s plan to bring electricity to the whole country, was brilliant and prophetic, and that Stalin’s program of industrialization and collectivization was simply the dictate of the time. But his primary passion was still the Tungus meteorite. When he started talking about it, Kulik completely forgot about Stalin and GOELRO.

  “Just imagine, comrades, a piece of another planet, separated from us by millions of kilometers, broke off and is lying somewhere here, not far away.” Kulik paused, straightened his glasses, which reflected the flame of the campfire, and raised his head slightly toward the pale Siberian stars. “And in it is the material of other worlds!”

  This phrase gave me goose bumps: the familiar, beloved world of the planets surfaced in my memory. Falling asleep on a pile of pine branches, covering myself from the head down to escape the midges, I imagined that mysterious piece of other worlds in black airless space as it flew toward the Earth and shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It spun in my head. Plunging into sleep, I counted its corners...

  Finally, toward the evening of the fourth day, swollen from midge bites and badly bruised from the jolting ride across the mounds, we approached Vanavara.

  A dozen new wooden houses clung to the very shores of the Stony Tungus River: a few years earlier the trading station at Vanavara had been rebuilt. The biggest, sturdiest log house had the word GOSTORG inscribed on it in large white letters, and a faded red flag hung nearby. Around the settlement spread a marvelously beautiful landscape: the very high, sharply descending cliffs of the river’s shore were surrounded by thick taiga. The opposite, southern shore, on the contrary, was fairly low, and beyond it, all the way to the horizon itself, blue-green waves of hills scampered endlessly, flooded by the rays of the sunset. Eagles glided in the rosy-blue evening sky where the moon was becoming faintly visible. Their short cries were the only sounds that disturbed the absolute silence.