by James Meek
‘You told me last night that you’d been arrested on suspicion of being a terrorist. That you had a bomb,’ said Mutz. ‘I’d like –’
‘Mutz, Mutz, Mutz,’ said Matula, with his free hand over his eyes. He massaged the bridge of his nose and his pistol hand twitched. ‘Let the man tell his story. Don’t interrupt again. My spirits are very turbulent now.’
Mutz, who had been standing between Matula and the dock, pressed his lips together and stepped back to lean against the far wall. Samarin began to look from face to face. ‘With your permission, respected ladies and gentlemen, officers and men of the Czech Legion, Your Excellency, Comrade Bublik,’ he said. ‘In a few admirably concise words, Lieutenant Mutz has recounted the reasons for my arrest, and mentioned the bomb which I stole in order to protect a young friend from the consequences of her naivety. I propose to explain to you something of what I suffered in the prison camp to which I was sent, the White Garden, and the reasons for, and manner of, the escape which brought me here. Before I begin, I must repeat the warning I gave the lieutenant last night. I’m certain that the man who facilitated my escape, the thief I know only by his klichka, the Mohican, has pursued me to this first place of sanctuary from the wilderness. I’m certain that he is here, now, in Yazyk. I’m certain that he was responsible for the death of the shaman, and the mutilation – Captain Matula, I cannot tell you how sorry I am to hear of this despicable act – of your horse. Whatever my fate, you must all see to your locks and your weapons. The Mohican … no. Everything is not where it should be. Friends. Let me start with the river, the great middle river, the Yenisey.’
As Samarin told his story, making his careful rounds of the listeners, Anna wondered at how alive and guileless his pleading eyes seemed against the ugliness of the events he described. She became aware that she had already decided he was innocent, and wouldn’t change her mind; innocent, that is, of what Mutz was trying to chip out of him. She was surprised that she had reached a judgement so quickly, and realised there was nothing so convincing as a man who could feel all the richness of the world – its worst, so, presumably, if it could happen, its best as well – without losing his soul to any one part of it, and becoming attached to that part. Convincing was wrong. Perhaps what she had in mind was endearing. Sometimes, as he talked, when he parted with his listeners for a moment and seemed to dive within himself to fetch up memories, or when his voice changed and out of his mouth came the argot and pitch of the other convicts, she felt it was for her; that this was a man not only bargaining for his life but taking her with him, to show her what it was like to be him.
‘When I reached the railhead at Yeniseysk with my escorts, I still thought I was going to be exiled to a village in the hinterland,’ said Samarin. ‘I could imagine the kind of place they were sending politicals, somewhere a couple of days’ journey downriver, and you could probably make it to the railhead by cart, or by sledge in winter. There’d be a row of houses along the water’s edge, with a jetty and grazing land and the forest behind. There’d be a store where aboriginals and trappers would come for drink and supplies. I’d be given a room in a peasant’s house, next door to the cowshed, and light chores, chopping wood, teaching people to read, drinking tea with whoever fancied himself as the local liberal, keeping them company over samogon in winter, arguing over reports from Europe in old newspapers, going for walks in the forest, making notes for articles about the flora and fauna. They’d expect me to try to escape. It wouldn’t be difficult. I’d just walk out. But I wasn’t going to escape. I was glad not to have been hanged. I didn’t want to touch a bomb again. The empires were destroying themselves in the war in the west. They were tearing each other apart better than a lone terrorist could, and they were far away, on the other side of the Urals, with three wide rivers between them and me. I’d wait it out. Sitting on my box on the wharf, while my escorts were comparing papers with the local police, I dreamed I was going to be like the young Tolstoy, and Siberia was going to be my Caucasus. Some old dyadya would take me hunting in the forest, I’d have an affair with a local girl, my skin would get so tough in the heat and the cold I wouldn’t feel the mosquitoes any more except to help me know I was alive. This was five years ago, a little later in the year than now, but the sun was still out, the Yenisey was flowing in front of me, it was wide and slow. I saw fish snapping at the surface. There was time.
‘I heard the badly oiled door of the steamship company office open and not close. Someone had come out and was standing in the doorway, watching me, a fat man in a steamship uniform, wrinkling his eyes and fiddling with beads. He studied me for a minute and without lifting his feet he turned round into the darkness of the office and called to someone I couldn’t see: “We could send them the political.”
‘Nobody answered for a while. Then I heard a voice, but I couldn’t make out what it was saying. The fat man looked at me and said: “What does your father do?”
‘I told him he’d been an architect before he died.
‘“No rank,” said the man to the inside of the office, and he spat. He said to me: “They must think you’re a great threat to society to have exiled you when they’re so short of cannon fodder for the Germans. I doubt anyone cares what we do with you.”
‘They put me on a steam launch with my guards. The launch was carrying a geologist and a crew of three: the captain, the engineer and the deck hand. They chained me by my ankle to a rail and left me and the guards to sleep on the deck overnight. In the morning we headed north with the current. I asked where they were taking me. The crew wouldn’t say. The geologist said it was a state secret. For the first few nights we stopped at settlements on the riverbank. Each time I thought they’d let me off and leave me, but the same thing always happened. A crowd with their dogs and cows waiting for us beyond the jetty, watching the boat being moored as if they were seeing a lost child come back, and hardly believing it. Then the geologist, the crew and the guards got off, and I stayed where I was, chained up like a dog, with a blanket and some dried fish and water, and only the stars and the frost for company. I could see the lamps shining in the windows of the cabins of the settlement, and hear them singing and toasting while they welcomed the guests with vodka. Sometimes the guards brought me extra food. Sometimes a villager would bring me tea or kasha or a piece of sausage, usually the old ones who’d been exiled themselves, or young ones whose parents had. They asked me about myself, and about politics, and about the war. They all had sons and brothers at the front. They’d end up shaking their heads, muttering “Lord My God” and wandering away, and I’d try to sleep in the cold, with the sound of the water on the hull, and no other sound once the singers and their beasts had fallen asleep.
‘The settlements thinned out and disappeared as we got further north. The trees and the nights became shorter and ice on the deck wouldn’t melt till the afternoon. The geologist, Bodrov, became excited. He was always in the prow of the boat. Whenever there were cliffs he would beg the captain to stop. He had his little hammer in his hand, he wanted to take samples. The captain shook his head. The closer we got to the Arctic, the quieter the captain grew, except to call down to the engineer for more power. He was afraid the river would freeze over and the boat would be trapped before it could return south. The quieter the captain became, the more Bodrov would talk. He shouted out one night when the northern lights appeared, like a shower of dust falling through a gap in the field of stars, and put his arms round the shoulders of my guards when they ran to see what was happening. He told them what makes the aurora, and counted off the names of the stars making up the constellations. One day we saw a Tungus mounted on a deer the size of a horse, watching us from the edge of the forest, holding a fish spear, and Bodrov began waving and shouting at him. The man turned his mount round and disappeared into the darkness between the trees. When we crossed the Arctic circle, Bodrov brought out a bottle of French brandy and got us all to drink a toast to the honour of the north star, and he sang student songs about how
“our goal’s the pole, boys, those Tungus girls make lovely wives, we’ll live in a tent, we won’t pay any rent and we’ll eat snow all our lives.”
‘The captain drank his brandy, went to the water bucket, chucked it over the side, brought it up full and threw it over Bodrov. We all felt the sting of the cold on our cheeks. The captain said: “That’s the being of this river. It flows north. It’s cold like death and it is death. This is the desert where nothing grows. No-one should be made to live here.”
‘Bodrov wiped the water from his eyes, and was confused for a moment, but then he laughed and rubbed his face till it was red. “Look at your river!” he said. “Full of fish! The air’s full of birds and the forest of elk and sable. A few thousand Tungus with spears and axes, living in wigwams, they live well here, and you civilised men go running south at the first sign of frost. The rocks are full of gold, diamonds, platinum, rubies, there’s copper and nickel, there’s seas of coal and lakes of oil. Lakes of oil to light the world!” He was taking off his clothes while he said this, and he dived into the river and surfaced grinning, shaking his fists above his head. The captain swore, stopped the boat and threw him a rope. If they’d left him in he would have been dead in a couple of minutes. They took him below with a blanket round him, shivering. The captain looked at me and said again: “No-one should be made to live here.”
‘The captain had the chain taken off me and let me sleep in the boiler room, where it smelled of smoke and sulphur. Before that time I’d never in my life been so happy as when they brought me in from the cold and let me sleep there. There was nothing soft to lie on, and the deck was covered in ash and cinders and crumbs of coal, but it was warm. The warmth was so good, it was like a friend who’d missed me, and was going to miss me when I went away again.
‘The deck hand shook me awake, handed me a broom and told me to go up and clear the snow. It was morning, and the boat was moving against a blizzard. You could hardly see either bank of the river for the rolling clouds of it. The captain’s face in the wheelhouse was angry and frightened. He’d never come this far north so late in the year before. I cleared snow for hours, working my way up and down the boat till my back hurt. The blizzard lifted, the wind dropped and the snow fell in big, heavy flakes. At the water’s edge I could see what the captain was afraid of. There were delicate, curving blades of ice crystallising out from the freezing mud, half transparent, fragile and powerful. There were fewer trees now, they were further apart, and they were stunted.
‘Next day we turned east off the Yenisey onto a tributary. It meant steaming against the current, which slowed us down. The current was strong, though, the river was black and deep, which kept the ice back. The sky turned the colour of leather and the blizzards returned. When they cleared we saw steep mountains of grey rock patched with snow. Bodrov, in a wolf hat and a black lambskin coat, was in ecstasy. He said it was Putorana, and that the story of the world was written there.
‘They put him ashore to a log hut and promised to be back within four days to pick him up. He wasn’t listening to anyone. He wanted to get ashore with his hammer and his instruments and his snowshoes. Before we moved out of sight we could see him walking steadily up the slopes behind the cabin, making a trail between the trees.
‘I asked the captain what would happen to Bodrov if the steamer got frozen in upriver. The captain looked at me like a man seeing a dog juggling. He said: “He hunts, or he dies. But where you’re going you won’t be worrying about him.” Just after dawn two days later, we reached the White Garden.’
The White Garden
‘The White Garden is in the tundra, between the river and cone-shaped hills of rock, the foothills of the Putorana mountains. The hills have deep grooves, and the grooves are serrated; have you seen limpet shells? They’re like that. They’re only a few hundred metres high, but even in August there’s snow between the grooves. To the north of the hills are the mountains, glaciers, Taimyr, and the Arctic sea. The river bends, and the White Garden is on the promontory, so the river binds it east, south and west. There’s no human settlement except Tungus chumas for a thousand miles in any direction. In the summer you get moss and berries and flowers on the ground, and there are bushes, hard bushes. When they turn green for a few weeks it’s like barbed wire sprouting leaves. No trees. No grass. The earth’s always frozen under your feet. Out on the ice on the river in January you’ll get 70 degrees of frost. That’s when it’s still. When the black purga blows it can pile the snow higher than a ship’s mast overnight. It’s not our world. When I was a student we used to talk about how it might be possible to build a ramp high enough and long enough for a train to fly off the end into space, to the Moon, or Venus. The White Garden was a place like that, at the terminus of a journey from the sum of all our homes. In deep winter the air is another air, it hurts to breathe. The sun isn’t seen for weeks. You have to kick the pilings of the jetty to believe there’s any connection between the place you are and the place you were, and even when you see the boats hauled up on the shore, they seem like craft fallen by mistake from the astral plane, when the river’s frozen so solid it might be harder and older than the rocks themselves, and to believe it could melt and be water again takes an act of faith harder than any godbeliever’s. When the summer comes with its everlasting light it’s like the final passage into madness, the sun never going away. The barracks sat on a stretch of white quartz gravel. It used to reflect the sun for a few days in midsummer, sparkling like a dragon’s hoard, burning a pattern into your eyes that you’d see when you closed them. Up by the hills there was a waterfall, and when it wasn’t frozen it left minerals on the rocks where it fell, big white crystals shaped into trunks and branches like Christmas trees. The first time you saw them you thought they were pretty but later you got to hate them, as exiles do when souvenirs of their old lives turn out to be fakes. The first Europeans to see it saw the quartz twinkling and the mineral trees and called it the White Garden and thought there would be gold there. They kept us looking, digging into the hillsides with picks, spikes and hammers, trying to find veins of precious metal, or any metal, iron, nickel. We found nothing. We only turned solid rock into fields of broken rock, and every rock broken made you stronger or weaker, but either way it made you older.
‘When I arrived I was given a bunk in a barrack hut with forty others, and assigned a foreman for a work detail which began the next day. Twelve hours a day, six days a week. Sunday was a rest day. I wasn’t ready for the White Garden. I came into the hut with a valise and a box of books, with my head shaven like a convict, but still wearing my student’s uniform. The other convicts looked at me as if I was a fat wallet someone had dropped, and it was only a question of making sure the owner was far enough away. I was there under the criminal code like them but not like them. It wasn’t that they hated me. There was no hate. It’s nothing to do with hate, except the hate you need to take like a drink before hitting someone. Here’s how little I understood: I thought the commandant, an aristocrat called Prince Apraksin-Aprakov, ran the camp, and I thought the guards were his means of controlling us. Of course he didn’t run the camp; he owned it. The guards were there to protect him and to make sure nobody escaped. The running of the camp was left to the most senior prisoners, mainly three criminal authorities, Avraam the Matchstick, Sergei the Machinegun, and the Mohican.
‘I began to doubt Prince Apraksin-Aprakov existed. For years, I never saw him, although he was said to be there. He had a house on the edge of the camp, up against the barbed wire. At night you saw lamps burning, and you could hear a gramophone. The only evidence of his presence was his warped decrees. Once Pchelentsev, the head of the guards, got us together at the autumn equinox and said the prince had been pleased to give us the honour of sculpting an ice replica of the Royal Pavilion at Brighton, England. Pchelentsev asked if any of us had ever been to England. Nobody said anything. Tolik Redhead, a recidivist chicken-thief from Kiev, said he hadn’t been to England but he knew a girl in Bro
vary whose underwear came from Manchester. The lieutenant gave him twenty strokes of the knout and stuck him in a cage for a few days till the snow was ankle deep. He lost a couple of toes. They turned black and the surgeon cut them off like a cook trimming a potato. Tolik said it was nothing terrible, he still had eight left, and the doctor gave him a swig of spirit before each one, so he asked him to take them all off, slowly, in return for 100 grammes of alcohol for each one and he’d settle for the pain to wash it down with, but the doctor said he hardly had enough spirit left for himself till the thaw came, and what would he do with eight healthy toes now that the ground was hard and he couldn’t bury them, he’d have to burn them. He was afraid they’d come back to haunt him, eight ghostly Christian toes pattering up to his mattress in the moonlight. The ice sculpture was never made.
‘I was robbed, cuffed, and mocked by some of the convicts, helped by others, left alone by most. For the first year, when there was a tolerable amount of food, steamers ran through the summer and deer teams made the winter run from the south to the White Garden, I could endure the labour. The Prince set quotas, but the foremen of the work gangs didn’t enforce them tightly. They cared that when they walked by your spot, your pick was striking rock, and they cared that their gang had altered a stretch of hillside by shift’s end, and because they cared, your neighbours cared and kept their eye on you.
‘It would have been in 1916 that it started to change. A military barge came and took the strongest and most generous convicts away to be slaughtered in uniform. The Prince was ordered to seek war metals, whatever that meant, and he doubled our quotas, with fewer men to work. At the same time our rations were cut.
