Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  Yet with your back to the watchtowers, it was an idyll. The far bank was all woods and soft hills. Along the strand on this side, a sandpiper bobbed and whirred. On the river, the sun caught a hatch of caddis flies floating downstream as they dried their wings on their watery conveyor belt. Grayling were leaving little spreading rings on the surface as they kissed at the hatch.

  A white car pulled up and moved slowly along the strand, parallel to the prison’s rear wall. A shaven-headed young man was in the car. His window was wound down and the arm hanging out of it was a tattooed scroll of skulls and a naked woman astride an enormous penis. He gazed at the prison with what seemed, against the odds, to be a wistful air. Time appeared on his side. I walked up and said hello. I asked him what he was doing. I hadn’t expected his answer. Andrei came here for old times’ sake. He had, he said, just served time inside, for armed bank robbery. Now out, he had lost his purpose. The prison had become home to him. The men who were his brothers were still inside. Each day he came here, to remember the good times. Sometimes he exchanged words over the wall with the inmates. Or he called them: many also had mobile phones.

  Andrei asked what I was doing. He was stocky, but his young face had known pain. He had almost feminine eyes. I explained to him what I hoped for. On the train up from Mongolia to Irkutsk, Anya, with whom I had shared a compartment, had told me about this prison in Nerchinsk, famous for its cottage industry, a curious trade. It was common practice for outsiders to toss over the walls cigarettes, vodka, or caviar for the inmates. In return, convicts threw back a gift or two fashioned in the prison workshops—a small pocketknife was a favorite memento. On the river side, out of sight of the screws, this business flourished, Anya said. Perhaps the screws were in on the trade, I thought. Presumably that was why it was harmless.

  Andrei’s eyes lit up. I wanted a knife? he asked. Yes, I said. Could I put up a hundred rubles for it, about five dollars? It seemed wholly reasonable. “Then meet me in the main square this evening, at six o’clock.”

  I wandered back into Nerchinsk. Time seemed to have expanded to fill a continent. It was a town made up mostly of abandoned lots. The town square differed from the lots only by its size, and by an imposing stuccoed row that lined its northern side. The left half of the row was a charred shell, fireweed growing out of the roof. The other half had survived, and looked vaguely inhabited. I crossed the square, walking down the row, and turned the corner. Running north, a wide boulevard pointed out of town toward the countryside beyond. And here, at the back of the stuccoed row, stood a great arch, a triumphal arch, though its plaster and moldings had fallen in great scurfs, exposing naked patches of red brick. The arch led the way into another lot, the biggest lot of them all, a lot that unhinged the senses. For here before me was an endless garden, an Eden: rows of blooms—dahlias, lupines, cosmos, and zinnias—a riot of sky blues, carmine, and episcopal purple, and blasts of burned orange like cannon shot. Lush, broad-leaved sprays of ricinus, the castor-oil plant from the tropics, were planted in formal squares. Who had sown these in the depths of a Siberian winter and brought them on tenderly in some warm place? Parsley and lovage swayed in plumes down the paths. Here was an outward mark, the first I had seen in this region, that someone truly loved.

  Giddy, I passed through the garden, breasting the castor-oil leaves. At the bottom of the garden, in the far right-hand corner, a high wall met a line of derelict outbuildings. One building had stalls and dung drains, ring bolts and wrought-iron hay baskets: old stabling. Next door was a mighty brick furnace and boiler. Outside, the remains of a framed structure still leaned against the high wall, shards from glass panes lay scattered about. Manure, the furnace, and a glasshouse: of all things, here was a Victorian hothouse.

  Only one pineapple house had ever been built in Siberia, and it had been here in Nerchinsk, at the Butin Palace. Once, the remote palace had been famous. Michael Butin, with his younger brother, had been silver barons. The palace they built was part refinement, part ostentation. Some five thousand miles from St. Petersburg and the center of Russian taste, the palace groaned with tapestries, silk curtains, Persian rugs, marquetry floors, stained-glass windows, chandeliers, Flemish Old Masters, marble statues, gilt furniture, and accomplished portraits, while the conservatory was stuffed with lemon trees and rare orchids. The pineapple house was an extreme fancy, but it was not Butin’s wildest. Above all, he had had installed in his palace the largest mirrors that then existed.

  The journey that the mirrors made to Nerchinsk made of Michael Butin a Russian Fitzcarraldo. It was 1878, the year of the Paris Exposition on the Champs de Mars, an act of French defiance coming so soon after the humiliations of the Franco-Prussian War. Thirteen million visitors filed through the gates. It was by far the largest world’s fair ever staged. Among the exhibits was Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone. A sculptor, Frédéric Bartholdi, had just completed the head of the Statue of Liberty, which gazed down the fair’s central axis. And at the exposition, Butin bought the pier glasses—a set of four, each the height of a giraffe. The mirrors began the journey home. They were floated down the Seine to Le Havre. From there they left by sea, either around stormy Cape Horn or via the Suez Canal, newly opened. The following summer the mirrors passed through the Sea of Okhotsk and docked at Nikolaevsk, the raw, burgeoning port town at the mouth of the Amur River. Stands of larch were felled and a special barge constructed. An American-built paddle steamer was hitched to the barge, and the mirrors were towed more than two thousand miles up the Amur and Shilka rivers to Nerchinsk. Bumping over sandbanks close to the navigable limits of the river, the mirrors had been afloat for nearly a year. They were now installed in the striking ballroom, sixty-five feet long, with a gallery overlooking one end, reached by a sweeping staircase and crowned with an imposing orchestrion. The Butins’ lavishness was their undoing. Within a decade the palace fell into the hands of the receiver and lay empty, precursor to Nerchinsk’s general despond.

  From the top of the garden, by the house, someone was shouting, waving me over. A man in his thirties with a puppy face and a flop of blond hair stood with theatrical arms wide open, and with a huge sweet fragile smile that looked as if it might dissolve into tears. On a table stood an empty bottle. Seated at the table was a much older man, weather-beaten and in a patched jacket. He looked up at his companion with a sideways grin—indulgent and protective. He then tapped a soft pack of cigarettes on the table, pulled out the contents in one handful, and took all the filters off with one slice of his pruning shears.

  Alexander was the young keeper of the Butin Palace, which now belonged to the town. “A palace, but who visits? No one. I am an archeologist by training, but who pays for digs these days? No one. Get me out of Nerchinsk. I am dying. Of boredom. And poverty. Living here with just my garden, and Vassily, my dear caretaker.” He smiled sweetly at Vassily, who shot back a conspiratorial grin. Alexander’s mobile phone rang. “No, Mother, I am not drunk. How should I be? It is scarcely afternoon, and still you level charges at me.” Vassily grinned again.

  Come inside, said Alexander, and see our palace. I ducked through the back door into a kitchen, squalid enough, for the remains of meals lay about, and the lids of gherkin jars were crammed with cigarette stubs. In the passage to the main house were wooden crates, shovels and trowels, khaki canvas tents from another era: an archeologist’s gear. Alexander dived into a crate and pulled out newspaper-wrapped bundles. Inside were gray-fired tiles, curved like the roof tiles of Beijing temples. Alexander pressed three of them on me. I had to take them, he said, or I would forget him.

  The tiles were from a vast site he was uncovering—alone, in the brief summer months—southeast of Nerchinsk toward the Chinese border: Yesungke’s palace. Yesungke had been a Mongol warrior, one of Genghis Khan’s nine trusted generals, the great man’s confidant and nephew. I had heard something about Yesungke. But all I knew—all anyone except perhaps Alexander knew—came from a remarkabl
e memorial stone that an early-nineteenth-century Russian polymath, G. S. Spassky, had unearthed outside Nerchinsk. Spassky at first suspected an early Siberian civilization. But then some local Buryat lamas saw the stone and began to read from the vertical inscription, starting with praise for Genghis Khan—it was written in the old Mongolian script. Spassky wrote up his findings in the Sibirsky Vestnik, a newspaper that already was championing Siberians’ uniqueness, a Siberian identity indeed. But the publicity attracted the attention of the state, which requisitioned the stone. In 1832 the stone was transferred to St. Petersburg, breaking in two along the way.

  The stele is now in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, but I had seen a copy in the Mongolian National Museum in Ulan Bator. It had pride of place, and no wonder. It is a rare surviving monument of the tent-dwelling Mongols; it is, in fact, the earliest example of the Mongolian script. The illiterate Genghis Khan understood that if an empire was to be administered efficiently, it needed a written language. He gave the task of coming up with a new script to a captured Uighur scribe from Turkestan. As his starting point, this Muslim took his own vertical Uighur script, which in turn had come from Arabic. And so, a few years later near Nerchinsk, a Mongolian script that originated on the Arabian peninsula was put to use in praise of Yesungke, the local lord on whose lands the stele stood. The stone records that after Genghis Khan had conquered the Khorezm empire of Central Asia, he called a great gathering of Mongol noyans, chiefs, to celebrate with a naadam festival, with martial contests and feasting. Were it not for the stone, nothing would have been known of this supersized picnic somewhere near Bukhara and Samarkand, or of Yesungke’s prowess there. In translation, the inscription on the stone reads: “After Genghis Khan conquered the Sartuul dynasty [that is, the Khorezm] in 1224, all Mongolian noyans met on the Bukha-Sojikhai steppe. There, Yesungke, with a bow and arrow, hit a target from 335 sazhens.” A sazhen is a Mongol’s arm span, judged to be five and a quarter feet. Yesungke’s shot was 585 yards, a feat equaled but not beaten by modern archers with a compound reflex bow.

  Alexander led me beyond the passageway with the archeologist’s clutter, beyond the servants’ quarters of the Butin Palace and into a large hallway. I stopped involuntarily. On one side was a stately staircase; on the other, through high double doors, a huge parqueted room. The books were missing, and I looked in vain for the sixty-air orchestrion. But nearly everything else was there: the gilt-and-damask sofas and chairs, the portraits and the statues, and even the tropical potted plants. Above all, covering the whole wall opposite the double doors: four glorious gilded pier glasses, the biggest mirrors in the world. In them I caught Alexander’s eye as he beamed with enormous, innocent pride behind me.

  • • •

  Andrei was outside the Butin Palace, his tattooed arm hanging out of the window. He had a friend with him, Sergey, an open-faced lad, his best mate on the outside. Andrei opened a can of beer, which he drank in nervy swigs. We pulled up by the riverbank a distance below the prison. I handed Andrei my one hundred rubles. From the shore, he picked up a fist-sized pebble, river-smooth. He wrapped the ruble notes around it, and then covered the whole with a square he cut from an old plastic bag. Andrei turned the stone over the flame from Sergey’s lighter, heat-sealing the shriveling plastic with saliva-moistened fingers: an efficient, five-dollar projectile.

  Back in the car, we ran down the strand toward the prison, and along its long wall. “Fifth floodlight from this end,” Andrei said, as if to himself. We stopped by the floodlight and got out. Quick now, said Andrei. He let out a sharp whistle and launched the stone over the high palisade, over the inner wall whose razor wire we could see running parallel to the outer defenses. A muffled shout of acknowledgment, and a pause. And then, out of the prison, a reciprocal projectile was sailing toward us. It was bigger, much bigger. It looked like a stubby crucifix. It sailed up over the inner wall, turning slowly. Pausing midair, it then spun and dive-bombed against the inside of the palisade.

  Another silence. Then sirens wailed over the river, bouncing back off the wooded hillsides on the far bank. Floodlights turned twilight to noon. From opposing corners two files of guards with Kalashnikovs charged out to intercept us. A young guard was being pulled by a German shepherd. Before the dog hurled itself at me, I noticed that the guard bared the same snarl as his charge. Pinned to the ground now by a boot on my back and a muzzle to my neck, my face was in gravelly sand. I was handcuffed and had my own boots pulled off. Like me, Sergey thought not to remonstrate. But Andrei was taunting the guards. After muffled thumps, long cries of agony. Then silence, and the smell of cigarette smoke.

  A jeep bounced up and stopped. Slowly, I turned my head in the gravel and squinted up. An officer in visored hat stepped out, a colonel’s epaulets. He, too, lit a cigarette and turned and turned about, tut-tutting. By now, guards had collected the crashed package from behind the palisade. They were unwrapping it before him. No little memento, what emerged was a murderous thing, a fighting knife with a broad guard and an upswept blade a good twelve inches long. The colonel spun back toward me. What the hell had I to do with this weapon? Where was I from? What in Christ’s name was I doing here? “Hell and damnation! Don’t you know that half of this town are convicts and the other half are paid to guard them?” I was led away before Andrei and Sergey. I turned to look at them. I felt I had let them down. Andrei, just beaten to a pulp, winked and gave a huge broad grin.

  Later, inside the prison, once he had removed his huge hat, the colonel seemed to soften. He ordered my handcuffs removed. He said nothing bad would happen to Andrei and Sergey. He pushed a plate of biscuits across his desk. I would wait here while the Federal Security Service, the FSB, successor to the KGB, checked my papers. He could not speak for what the FSB would do, he said, but for now, I was his guest. We had time. Since I was a writer and curious about things, he said, we would talk about prisons. What, he asked, did I know about Russian prisons?

  I told him what I knew. That Russia locked up a greater number of its citizens—nine hundred thousand—than any Western country except the United States. That violence—by prison guards toward inmates, and among inmates—was extreme. That overcrowding, malnutrition, parasites, and disease were rife, that one in nine inmates had an incurable form of tuberculosis. But for all that, I had heard that the mortality rate for men inside was one third of that on the outside—a reflection, more than anything, of alcoholism and of vodka-fueled road accidents.

  “So you see,” said the colonel, smiling. “My charges are safer in here.” And then, serious: “But you also see the problems. So I ask you please: have pity on me. What am I to do? Does Moscow listen to requests for more money, for better conditions? Of course not. Have I not tried to improve things? I will tell you this, before God: I have built a chapel for the inmates. Write that down: I, Leonid Semyonovich Putatin, have built the first and only chapel in a Russian prison, purely for the good of the inmates, God help their souls.” Putatin the prison governor pulled out a sheaf of well-thumbed photographs of a summer’s day. Town officials were visiting, and a robed and bearded priest officiated, with rows of shaven-headed convicts behind: the dedication of the new chapel, a wooden hut in the prison yard, to Our Lady of Piety.

  The governor then searched for another photograph. He looked at it with a sentimental shake of the head, and he watched me as he slid it across. It was a crumpled picture, snapped in a corridor of flock wallpaper, of a young man, actually a mere boy. He had on an ushanka and an oversize greatcoat. A doorway was open behind him, which he was about to pass through. But first the boy had paused to look back, straight at the camera, vulnerable as the flash caught him. I felt the colonel’s gaze. The boy was familiar. It was Andrei. It was Andrei when he was much younger, when up until that point there had still been all to play for.

  The hours passed. I had missed a dinner appointment with Alexander and I wondered what he might be thinking. But at around eleven o’clock at night,
Alexander himself burst into the governor’s office, in a state of agitation, tears running down his cheeks. What oh what have you done, he asked? The governor said: Don’t worry, he’ll be out soon. The two appeared to know each other, perhaps very well. Alexander relaxed. He fluttered his eyelids. He smiled at me, full of indulgence. You must, he said, have been very, very naughty. But why did you never tell me? Alexander’s phone rang: “No, I have not. Another accusation that misses its mark, Mother.”

  At some point, Governor Putatin said things were in order for me to leave. He became stern and official once more. These things must be done properly, he said. Did I understand that? Tomorrow morning you will report to me at eight o’clock. I promised I would. Alexander would not hear of me returning for the night to the Excelsior sausage factory. One of the officious guards, the one who had ripped off my boots, drove us back to the Butin Palace. He and Alexander appeared to be great friends, too, and he left us with handshakes and a big open smile. In the kitchen, Alexander, Vassily, and I drank vodka and ate slices of salo, salted pork fat, and gherkins. Vassily sliced off the filters of another pack of cigarettes, and we smoked them all. Then, in the ballroom, at the foot of the mirrors, Alexander laid out three canvas-covered sleeping sacks, damp and greasy from years of archeological digs. In the morning I woke while the other two slept. Alexander was hugging my legs, a smile on his sleeping face. Soon, I was back in the prison. In the governor’s office, Putatin was behind his desk. He got up and stiffly handed me a cloth-wrapped bundle. I unwrapped it. It was the knife that yesterday had sailed up over the inner wall but had not finished its journey.

  I had been told that the town mafia were furious at Andrei’s beating, and that they might take it out on me. I would do well, the police said, to leave town. I did not know whether that was the truth, or simply that they were keen to see the back of me. I needed to go anyway, for Albazino was still far away, a good day by train to the nearest station, Skovorodino, and then an uncertain journey by jeep. The Trans-Siberian Railway ran twenty miles below Nerchinsk. A man on a bench in the police barracks said he would take me there. At the railway station, a cavernous hall in a small hamlet, no one knew when trains were next coming, up or down the line. The wait seemed interminable. But at last a train slid clanking to a halt, heading eastward. I boarded with one other man. Our reservations were for the same compartment. He was a young divorced father from Nerchinsk who worked in Blagoveshchensk, an Amur city five hundred miles to the east. He had spent some weeks back with his mother just outside Nerchinsk, seeing his daughter. Come, he said, and have lunch. He pulled out ham, salami, and a smoked chicken and began slicing them. God these are good, I said. The only good thing to come out of Nerchinsk, replied Konstantin. Excelsior: the only decent sausage in the region. Remember that brand, Konstantin urged. Blackflies swam before my eyes. I was not likely to forget, I said.