by Alex Dryden
He laughed awkwardly, as if to make light of foreign companies coming to Russia.
He realised he was caught now between portraying his tribe’s relatively primitive existence and a desire to show his family were also modern, or modern enough to live in winter in wooden huts at any rate. It made him feel uncomfortable for a moment.
‘These foreign oil companies are already coming to exploit the Kara Sea, in partnership with our Russian state companies,’ Petrov went on. ‘There will be far more pollution than ever. This is Russia, remember, where anything goes. Our state companies and your huge private companies have the technology to drill under the Kara Sea and right up under the North Pole. Or so they say. But I fear there’ll be more devastation of the ecology as a result. Russia isn’t too careful about cleaning up its pollution. You’ll see when we get further north.’
‘The Lomonosov Ridge?’ This was the second man, Sky, Petrov noted, who suddenly seemed animated.
Petrov laughed pleasantly, his big round face creased into a benevolence that he felt, for some reason, unnerved the Americans. ‘You know about the Lomonosov Ridge?’ he said. ‘Of course. It’s becoming an international incident. It’s a mountain range three miles beneath the Arctic Ocean that runs all the way from Russia, a thousand miles under the ice, beneath the North Pole and all the way to Canada and Greenland. And, of course, the Kremlin is saying it belongs to Russia. Putin had a Russian flag made of titanium planted on the sea floor under the North Pole three years ago.’ Petrov laughed at the absurdity of a flag on the sea bed. ‘Like you planted your flag on the Moon,’ he added.
‘Russia is only claiming the shelf all the way under the Pole,’ Eileen replied.
‘That’s right,’ Petrov agreed. ‘And your government, and Norway and Finland and Canada are disputing it in the international courts. But it’s the international courts that are saying the Lomonosov Ridge most likely belongs to Russia. A quarter of the world’s oil is under there, so they say.’
To Petrov, the stilted nature of the exchange suddenly seemed like a highly diplomatic and absurd attempt to resolve the international dispute on a ferry bound northwards along the Yenisei.
This wasn’t the way he wanted the conversation to go, he felt suddenly. It seemed to put him at odds with them, through the confrontation between their governments.
‘Who knows what will happen?’ he said, almost apologetically.
‘There’s more oil and gas there than anywhere in the world, if it can be drilled,’ Eileen said. ‘A quarter of the world’s resources, you say, but there are scientists who believe there’s more. America won’t accept a flag planted three miles under the sea.’
‘Yes,’ Petrov agreed. ‘So they say. Oil. Always oil. Oil and gas.’ He sighed with a genuine sadness. ‘When will they find something else?’
There was an awkward silence that Petrov’s sorrowful remark didn’t seem to dispel. Then it was Clay who spoke.
‘Are there still shamans up here?’ he said.
For the first time, Petrov saw it was the big man who had spoken. He could have been a member of a Russian special forces unit, Petrov thought, he was so well built, so fit. He looked like a military man to Petrov, or maybe he was just one of those pumped-up, American super-sportsmen.
‘Are there? Are there shamans among your people?’ Clay persisted.
Petrov paused and frowned.
‘They went underground in the Soviet period,’ he explained finally. ‘But there are still some, yes. Very few real ones now. It’s a thing that used to get passed down in families, to women as well as men. But when the Russians forced our people into their schools, they broke the connection. Maybe we can find you a shaman if you’re interested.’
He was glad they’d got off a subject that implied conflict. He brought the drum out from under the table. ‘This was made by a shaman, my grandfather. It was made with wood from a tree struck by lightning. That’s the way we make them, from those trees.’
‘I’d be interested to meet a real shaman,’ Clay replied.
Petrov wanted to buy them a drink, but he also felt that it would arouse their suspicions, suspicions that he was out to get something from them. He’d seen the way some Russians worked on foreigners and he was eager not to appear to be looking for any gain. And it didn’t seem the right moment to bring ‘muon catalysed fusion’ into the conversation, whatever it was. But he wanted to establish a bridge between him and them, something unthreatening.
He picked up their map, which was half open on the metal table, and began to point out villages along the river and give them a brief description. He also showed them the sites of two former Gulag camps they would pass, and a four hundred-mile rail line built by Stalin’s slaves in order to join the Yenisei and Ob rivers, but which had collapsed into the melting earth and was never used. It had cost the lives of more than ten thousand victims.
They seemed interested and began to ask questions. But he still noted a reserve in them and put it down once more to a suspicion on their part that he wanted something in return.
Finally he got to his feet. ‘If you’re interested in anything, just ask me. I’m on holiday, but my grandfather is dying,’ he added, and felt a sensation he hadn’t felt for a long time, of real freedom. ‘We’ll be on the boat for another day or two and I’d be happy to show you things. And I would be honoured to tell you more about my people, if it interests you,’ he added.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BY THE LATE afternoon of the third day the old, slow-moving Rossiya had reached Yeniseiysk. During the course of the fading non-day, grey and heavy with rain clouds that never quite shed their contents, the ship had passed several small settlements. There was a torpor on board that fitted the lowering skies. The mood of the passengers hung motionless like the weather, mirroring its weight and presentiment. A calm before the storm.
On the east bank of the Yenisei the taiga was thick with a close weave of trees that stretched for thousands of miles, an incomprehensible wilderness of forest. The huge expanse contained one quarter of the world’s timber. Perhaps the endless, grim impenetrability of the forest also added to the heaviness of the passengers. People talked about the ‘Siberian Madness’ that afflicted the Russians who’d settled – or been forced as prisoners – up here. And in the mid-afternoon they passed the first of Stalin’s Gulag camps in the region, the first of several they would pass as the ship headed towards the Arctic Circle.
The great, bleak land of Siberia itself seemed to have effortlessly absorbed the millions of dead, however. It seemed to have no memory. But some of those women on board whom Anna had spoken to in the hold were the daughters of the survivors of the death camps and they did have memories, even if only at second hand. These women were the people who had never been able to escape the place of death, people with neither the money nor the permission to move elsewhere in Russia, outside the krai of Krasnoyarsk. Permanent exile was handed down from parent to child like a genetic default.
And it was known by one woman she had spoken to that even the Rossiya itself had once been a transport for the Gulag victims. They were packed tight, the woman had told her, locked in its cargo holds like so much freight. Some of them had frozen to death on the way, or starved or been beaten to death before they’d reached the camps.
After her interrogation by the Wolf, when Anna had gone below to the hold where the women were, there was a deep air of suspicion at first. No one – historically – wished to be associated with the accused or those under suspicion.
But finally one old woman who was returning to Igarka as she did every year for the summer work camp – a daughter of a Gulag victim herself, who had been released in 1976 – came up to her and offered her a chunk of bread and some jam from a tin.
‘What did the bastards want?’ she said gruffly.
‘The man who hired us, Ivan…’
‘That dog!’ she spat.
‘They say he’s disappeared,’ Anna said quietly.
‘
Then good riddance.’
‘Some people saw me with him last night.’ She looked at the old woman. ‘He was trying—’
‘I can guess what he was trying. He’s a shit, that Ivan,’ the woman interrupted. ‘He’s no good and never was. God help him,’ She crossed herself four times in apparent regret at wishing him ill.
It was then they heard the anchor running out in the sheltered bend of the river where the current was slower, as the ship moored off the small port of Yeniseiysk.
Most of the women got to their feet and someone opened the metal door and a slow line of people shuffled up the staircase, like refugees from the light, out into the fading day.
Anna immediately saw the Wolf standing at the bow and looking down and across the water to a line of huts and wooden houses above the bank.
The old woman saw him too, and the OMON badge. She froze. Then she snapped at two men ten yards away from them who were standing on the deck waiting to disembark for the captain’s regulation two-hour stop. They both came obediently and waited in front of Anna and the woman.
‘These are my sons,’ she said, and looked at them superciliously. ‘Take care of this girl,’ she instructed them. ‘She’s called Valentina and she attracts much too much attention. Stay with her on the ship and onshore.’
The men nodded sheepishly, like children, even though Anna saw that they must have been in their late forties.
As the four of them descended the metal stairs down the side of the hull to one of the waiting boats, Anna saw the Wolf watching her from where he still stood up at the bow. The dread that still haunted her was that Ivan’s body was somewhere behind them in the river, and that it would slowly catch up with the ship in the current while they were stopped. She wished now that she’d had time to put a weight on it, sink him for good.
As they waited at the foot of the metal ladder to step into the boat, the Wolf was suddenly behind her. He boarded the same launch and they took off for the hundred-yard trip to the beach.
When the boat scraped up on the mud bank next to a small wooden jetty, he took her arm and the old woman and her two sons fell behind at once. The woman’s instruction to them was hopeless. Nothing would make any of them go up against a special forces officer from OMON. Their protection was futile against any all-powerful official of the state.
The Wolf guided her along the jetty and they walked up to the stalls and tables that sold the village’s few offerings.
‘What do you want here?’ he said conversationally. ‘Something to buy?’
‘I just wanted to get off the ship,’ she replied.
And it was then that she saw two more OMON officers, with the same wolf embroidered on their sleeves. They were standing in the twilight by some sheds at the top of a slipway.
The Wolf guided her away from them. ‘I’m not like that layabout Ivan,’ he said as if to reassure her. ‘I treat women with respect.’
They walked up into the village.
‘You’re probably wondering what I’m doing here,’ he said. ‘And those other two men back there.’
‘I don’t enquire about such things,’ she replied.
‘Very wise. But I’ll tell you. You might be of some assistance. We’re after some dangerous men. Terrorists. We believe they’re preparing some kind of sabotage.’
He stopped and looked up ahead towards the end of the village, where the forest closed in around it like a devouring tide of green.
‘Saboteurs,’ he said, and she saw he was relishing the word, rolling it around his mouth.
Saboteurs. For a moment Anna’s mind reeled back to Soviet times, and the ever-present memory of Stalinist Russia. In those days ‘saboteur’ was a catch-all word for enemies of the state, anyone, in fact, who the state wanted eliminated. It was as if some small crack had opened to let in those dark times.
But all she said was, ‘What is there to sabotage up here?’
He looked at her sharply, but then his face relaxed.
‘Here? In this village? Nothing. But there are important state projects at the end of the river and this is the way an enemy of the state would approach. Norilsk, for example,’ he said slyly, ‘is a closed area to anyone without a permit. This river is the only way anyone could approach those areas without being automatically stopped.’
She didn’t reply to his inquisitive look, but she felt her heart freeze.
‘You seem a smart woman,’ he said, conversationally again. ‘You can use your eyes and ears.’
‘I will. Of course. For the Motherland,’ she replied.
There was a small, dilapidated wooden building at the end of the main street which served as a hospital. He led her into the building under a sloping wood porch and they waited in a room and listened to shouting and curses from the back. There was one doctor there and when he saw the wolf on the man’s shoulder, he nodded and led them through to the back.
There were a few filthy beds on the floor and the room seemed occupied solely by the mad and the drunk. One man was tied to an iron bed, quietly raving almost in a whisper and wild eyed. There was an ethnic Siberian sitting on the floor at the far end, silently nodding his head from side to side and in a circle. An Evenk tribesman, she thought. The Wolf looked around, as if hoping to identify one of the hopeless in the room as a potential saboteur. He looked disappointed.
‘This is what we get,’ the doctor said and shrugged. ‘But there’s no medicine. We ran out of everything except painkillers back in January.’
‘This country drinks too much,’ the Wolf said.
‘Maybe, but if people had something else…’ the doctor said.
But the Wolf had turned and left, bringing Anna with him by the arm.
Outside in the mud street, night had fallen, briefer than ever as they travelled further and further north.
When Anna and the Wolf boarded the launch to get back on the Rossiya the two other special forces officers she had seen by the slipway came with them. One of them looked at her lasciviously, the other didn’t acknowledge her presence at all.
‘You have other clothes?’ the Wolf asked once they were aboard the Rossiya.
‘Very little. Just jeans and a shirt,’ Anna replied. ‘So I can wash these.’
‘Wear them instead,’ the Wolf demanded. ‘I want you to join me for supper this evening,’ he insisted. ‘In an hour.’
‘You haven’t told me your name,’ she replied.
‘Dmitry Pavlovich. Call me Dmitry,’ he said, and smiled in a way intended to let her know it was not his real name.
When she returned dressed in different clothes, she saw the Wolf had apparently turfed the captain out of his cabin and taken it for himself. As Anna entered, he had a wooden table set for two, a bottle of vodka opened, and a dish of frozen fish and a few vegetables as a centre piece. There were just two plates.
‘I know you drink vodka,’ he said smiling, and poured them two glasses. ‘Sit down.’
He watched her. She was dressed now in more figure-hugging clothes and she felt self-conscious under his gaze.
‘What shall we drink to?’ he asked.
‘To Russia,’ she said.
He raised his glass. ‘Good. To Russia!’ He drained the glass and watched her drain hers. ‘Please,’ he said then, ‘help yourself.’
She forked some of the frozen fish, a Siberian delicacy, on to her plate and he filled the glasses again.
‘Tell me about your parents, Valentina,’ he said.
‘My father was born in Odessa, but came to Russia at the start of the Patriotic War when he was two years old.’
‘Jews?’ he said, suddenly alert.
‘No. Ordinary Russians. Good Communists.’
He seemed to relax.
‘His father – my grandfather – was transferred to the factories they were building east of the Urals,’ Anna continued. ‘My mother was from Bratsk. I don’t know how they met, but it was in Bratsk. Both my grandfathers died in the Great Patriotic War. I was brought up in Bra
tsk.’
‘You never left Bratsk?’
‘I went to Moscow once,’ she replied. ‘To visit my grandmother.’
‘Where did she live?’ he said keenly, and studied her face closely.
‘North of the city.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t remember the street. I was only five.’
‘And all these years you’ve been in Bratsk?’
Anna shrugged again. ‘You get used to anywhere.’
‘I’m sure you do,’ he replied. ‘You have a husband?’
‘I did once. He was a drunk. I threw him out.’
‘Children?’
‘No.’
She felt his pencil-thin eyes watching her face. But now she thought it was nothing more dangerous than that he wanted her.
‘You don’t have to stay down in that stinking hold,’ he said easily. ‘You can stay here. With me.’
