Black Dragon River

by Dominic Ziegler

  We were now on a rough road running through the western flank of the Sikhote-Alin forest, a couple of hours’ drive after leaving the last of Khabarovsk’s eastern suburbs, littered with dismal army camps. We forked left, and after some bumpy miles we drew up beside three Nanai—two men and a woman—standing by the road. Together, they were clutching haphazardly at a swaying motorcycle. They wished us to stop, and one of the men climbed in. We carried on, until we came to a settlement of wooden huts, where the drunk fell out. This was Sakachi-Alyan, and on the strand beyond the village, Nikolay Ruban had told me back in Khabarovsk, lay curious basaltic rock formations, with remarkable and very ancient carvings on them.

  In Sakachi-Alyan, we met a colleague of Nikolay Ivanovich’s, Svetlana Onenko. Sakachi-Alyan is a Nanai village, and Svetlana here ran a small extension of the Khabarovsk museum devoted to Nanai culture. The culture was once rich, but the drunkeness on the road seemed to suggest that it was struggling today. Yet Svetlana, in her fifties and with a natural elegance, exuded an intelligent optimism, the kind that holds crumbling communities together.

  On the flat sandy beach before the village, the boulders lay piled in a long line, soft-edged and golden in the low sun. Millions of years ago, a river of molten lava poured out here from under the earth’s crust, out of the caldera of a long-gone volcano. The basalt congealed to form a low cliff, now washed away by the river’s fretting. The boulders are the cliff’s remains, tumbled onto the shore. And here artists from a vanished people began to produce their petroglyphs. Before us, all along the strand, were dozens of reliefs: lightning zigzags; human and simian masks; stylized elks and bears, waterfowl and wood grouse; and wholly phantasmagoric creatures—deep grooves cut by early hands, countless blows of stone upon stone merging, over days, months, years, into lines and mesmerizing forms.

  One of the earliest to record and attempt to make sense of the petroglyphs was Berthold Laufer, an Orientalist who had acquired a dozen Asian languages in dusty German libraries but who in the late 1890s attempted a hugely ambitious ethnographic study of the Lower Amur. He thought the spiral eyes on the human faces might suggest “Chinese affinity,” and that the boulders might possibly prove to be burial sites. Laufer saw the petroglyphs in the spring, when snowmelt turned the Amur into a wild, swollen flood. Much that Laufer was eager to inspect was underwater. I was luckier. We were at Sikachi-Alyan at the end of the season, and the river’s edge had receded two hundred yards. And so Svetlana took me down to the beach. She had, she said, something to show me.

  On the riverward corner of one huge basalt fragment, bigger than the rest, and blackened, it seemed, by age and the elements, was an extraordinary relief carving. It was an underwater serpent, a Black Dragon, embodiment of the Amur itself. The serpent, with beard and with slanting, commalike eyes, faced downward. Etched lines trailed from each side of the body, like a comet tearing from out of the heavens into the depths. And, indeed, for millennia this dragon had sunk into the dark river every spring only to emerge again, reflected in the receding waters, as winter approached.

  For its creator, the dragon was a force giving life to the world about it. Svetlana talked of how Nanai tales still feature Mudur, a water dragon, a kind of cosmic serpent. The usual assumption is that the Tungusic peoples, of which the Nanai are one, imported the symbol of a dragon from the Chinese, perhaps a thousand years ago. But this dragon relief is much, much older than that. Could the idea flow have moved in the other direction instead, these northern peoples on the Amur filling the whole Chinese world with its dragons, that benign life force?

  • • •

  The decorative patterns of the peoples on the Lower Amur fascinated no one more than Laufer. He had come to the region as part of the biggest archeological initiative yet undertaken. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition had been launched under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History and orchestrated by Franz Boas, pioneer of modern anthropology. The purpose of the expedition (actually, multiple expeditions between 1897 and 1902) was to explore the relations between native peoples on each side of the Bering Strait in order to understand better the peopling of the American continent. The sites for the fieldwork—in North America, the Pacific Northwest and the Aleutian islands; in Asia, Russia’s easternmost possessions—remained among the least understood places on earth.

  Laufer headed the southern Siberian expedition. Boas seems to have surmised that the Lower Amur and the adjacent maritime regions had millennia before been both staging ground and melting pot for Asiatic populations passing to the American continent, either across the land bridge that is now the Bering Strait or, by boat, along the island chain of the Aleutians.

  The German began his fieldwork on Sakhalin, living among the Ainu, Nivkh, and reindeer-breeding Evenki. He caught pneumonia, and he nearly drowned when his dogsled broke through the ice. But Laufer had found his passion, learning the native languages and gathering quantities of ethnographic material: everyday artifacts and ceremonial ones, amulets against disease, and insights into social organization, hunting, fishing, and shamanism. Laufer recorded on a wax-cylinder phonograph, setting down songs and tales. When one young Nivkh woman heard her song played back, she mixed amazement with envy: “It took me so long to learn this song and this thing here learned it at once.” Laufer had less success with phrenology, beloved of Victorian ethnographers. People would not consent to having their skulls measured, no matter the inducement. The sole person who submitted promptly fell to the floor, declaring that he would be dead by tomorrow. “Have some brandy and you will be all right,” said Laufer.

  After nearly a year on Sakhalin, Laufer crossed to the mainland in 1899, using Khabarovsk as a base from which to study the Nanai. A summer on the Lower Amur, Laufer wrote to Franz Boas, was more daunting than a winter campaign on Sakhalin: the heat, the insects, and “the loanly [sic] life in wilderness” were nearly intolerable. It had, he added, reduced him to an “extraordinary state of nervousness.”

  But that was the full sum of Laufer’s complaints to his boss. Laufer started with an accomplice on the fieldwork, an American archeologist, Gerard Fowke, who soon bailed out. Laufer seems delighted to have had the field to himself, and his passion for the study of the Lower Amur tribes grew in proportion to the material he encountered. Here were impressive boat-building technologies: birch-bark canoes, kayaks on light frames covered by the skins of sea mammals, and large planked boats, their bows extending into a small platform, like a platypus bill, that allowed you to leap ashore without getting wet.

  There were many and varied ways to fish, according to season and species (sturgeon, catfish, carp, salmon, lenok, char, grayling, and pike). The men caught fish at weirs, and in seine nets, floating nets, and dip nets; they took them also with hook and line. And there were as many ways to prepare the catch: smoked, salted, dried, fermented. Fish skins served for clothing and boots, for waterproof sled tarpaulins, for pouches and bags and as translucent windows in lieu of glass. Woodworking had advanced to a high art, thanks to tools acquired from China and, later, Japan. The bark of birch trees, gathered in the autumn, served to roof dwellings, and to make hunting blinds, summer bedding, tool bags, and baskets. Birch bark was—still is—a common material for appliqué embroidery for baskets, trays, and exquisite women’s hats. Above all, Laufer fell for, if that is not too strong a phrase to apply to a cerebral German academician, the extraordinary wealth and invention he found in the Amur people’s decorative arts, the Nanai in particular.

  Laufer later moved to Chicago, where he became America’s foremost Sinologist. But as far as the Jesup North Pacific Expedition is concerned, the sad fact is that his work was deemed something of a disappointment. The expedition spawned a prodigious literature, twenty-seven volumes in all. Vladimir Bogoras and Vladimir Jochelson, for example, authored multiple and muscular works on the Chukchi, the Koryaks, and the Eskimos of Siberia that are considered ethnographic classics to this day. Laufer’s cont
ribution was a memoir, a mere eighty-six pages long, that never got beyond the subject of the Amur tribes’ adornment.

  I have a copy of Laufer’s Decorative Arts of the Amur Tribes before me now. It is a folio edition, published by the museum in 1902 on sensuously thick but crumbling paper. I have had carefully to cut the unopened pages. Thirty-three plates, some in color, convey in exquisite detail the wealth of patterns and embellishments on wooden bowls, ritualistic spoons, hunting knives, shawls, coats, waistbands, silk-cloth embroidery, snow visors, and birch-bark stencils. The text flows among these riches, drawing the reader deeper into the patterns’ details and representations.

  The Amur decorative art that Laufer recorded is, above all, about pattern and repetition. These are not patterns configured from abstraction, but drawn from a rich natural and supernatural menagerie and plant life. Yet the menagerie is not always those of the Amur peoples: this time, the idea flow moves in the other direction, from China.

  A predominant motif, the most common of any animal, is that of the rooster. This, Laufer noted, is odd. Domesticated chickens were unknown among the Nivkh, northernmost of the Amur tribes, and had only recently been introduced among the Nanai. Yet the cockerel came to be at the heart of Amur decoration. Laufer’s conclusion was that the pattern had long ago been absorbed from the Chinese, for whom the rooster is a life-giving symbol of the rising sun. Laufer’s proof of Amur borrowing from Chinese art is canny. Many Chinese designs are homonymic, a play on words. For instance, in Chinese, a “bat” is fu, which sounds like “good luck.” Meanwhile, a “butterfly,” die, is homonymous with “aged”; mei, “plum blossom,” sounds like “beautiful.” Combine these animals and plants, as Chinese artists do, and you symbolize the homonyms—a butterfly on a plum blossom might signify old age meeting beauty. But the Amur tribes, on the other hand, played magic with the forms while thinking little about their meaning—symbolism trumped by ornament.

  I make a plea for this slight volume to be restored to its position of minor greatness. Soon after Laufer, the Soviet Union destroyed native culture in order to raise Amur peoples to a supposedly enlightened condition. He got there just in time, and in his volumes he opens a hidden world. Laufer held strong views about how ornamentation holds the key to much else. The full significance of decorative arts, he said, can only receive its “proper explanation from the lips of their creators.” It is not simply a matter of collecting, Laufer seems to be saying; fieldwork really matters.

  PART EIGHT

  Nikolaevsk

  CHAPTER 17

  53°02.5' N 141°15.3' E

  You Russians and we Americans! Our countries so distant, so unlike at first glance . . . and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so resembling each other.

  WALT WHITMAN

  Once, not very long ago, the Amur River seemed to flow toward a Pacific destiny, and I now wanted to track it, at least to where it ran into the sands.

  It was still night when I stumbled down from the bluff above the river on which Khabarovsk was built, past the old offices of the Amur River Shipping Company, toward the jetty for the ferry to Nikolaevsk. I joined a silent flow of humans shuffling toward the sodium lights of the pier. People were wrapped up, and the men weighed down with shoddy bundles. Women in scarves carried last armfuls of summer: gladioli, and potted plants whose fronds waved up and down about their heads. During the day in Khabarovsk, the October sun still had the strength to warm. Now, before dawn, it was another season. Ice hardened in patches at the river’s edge. Very soon, great lumps of it would be sailing downstream. Soon after them, the ferries to the Amur’s mouth would cease. Ice would close off Nikolaevsk until the following May.

  The service was a hydrofoil from the Soviet era, lying motionless, head upstream, a long low bug-eyed beetle of a thing, not without appeal. We clambered aboard and spread ourselves about two cabins connected outside by a covered walkway. Two ancient diesel engines jarred into life beneath us, sending up bone-grinding vibrations through canvas seats. Soon the revs climbed, and we canted out into the Amur. When the main current caught the bow, we swung around downstream. Ahead of us was the Trans-Siberian bridge running into Khabarovsk from the western floodplains; on our right, on the bluff past which we were now slicing, Muraviev-Amursky jutted on his pedestal against a lightening sky. By the time we shot the bridge we were up on the foils and flying at exhilarating speed. A powerful current was at our back, and we left scarcely a wake.

  We raced north through empty country. At first, wide marshlands and lagoons stretched out to each side as the main Amur channel sluiced between shifting sandbanks, the whole river at this point perhaps a mile or two wide. I followed the topography on my map of the Amur. Back at the fisheries institute, Andrei Petrovich Shmigirilov had shown me where, on the left bank, he camped each summer, fishing and hunting for boar; and where, on the right, tigers came down to drink. Farther downstream, Sikachi-Alyan swung into view, and beyond the village, picked out by the sun’s low rays pouring across the river, were the warm, rounded basalt forms of the rocks with the phantasmagoric carved reliefs.

  All day we raced, four hundred miles under a pure-blue sky. All day, a low sun swung around behind us. At times the hills closed in, wooded flanks pouring down to the water, the larch and birch flaming yellow-red, flecked with dark blotches of Korean pine. Later, the vista opened out again, with the Stanovoy mountains, once the boundary between Russia and China, running far away to the left; and to the right, the alluring and largely uninhabited Sikhote-Alin range. The Amur was not one stream here but a filigree of rills, runs, chutes, spirals, and meanders. The waters had shunted whole sandbanks about, and spilled over into lagoons and marshlands, leaving behind placid oxbow lakes where once the main force of the river had run.

  Over the Amur, knots of wild duck—gadwall, teal, and tufted duck—came barreling down toward us, harbingers of the approaching freeze. Every fifty or so miles, a village, a collection of shacks, emerged from the blazing woods. Some of these settlements were pure Nanai, some Ulchi, and some predominantly Russian. All subsisted—precariously—on fishing. Flimsy skiffs were drawn up on the strand, beside bundled nets. At each settlement, an old covered barge served as the ferry terminal. Our hydrofoil slanted across the stream, touching briefly at the terminal to take on villagers with tired lined faces and to pick up sacks of dog salmon for the processing plant in Nikolaevsk. Then we spun back downstream, levitated, and resumed the magic carpet ride.

  Near one of these settlements, Sofiisk, hundreds of miles before the Amur’s mouth, the river appeared to make a break for the coast at the Gulf of Tartary, which at this point was only thirty miles away to the east. Here the river turned sharply inland, except that suddenly the outside, concave bank was gone, undermined recently (in geological time, that is) by the sheer force of the fast-running waters. They had sought out the lower-lying land beyond and spilled over to form a large body of water, Lake Kizi, two dozen miles long, that shimmered as we looked down it. Here, Muraviev had wanted to build his railway to De Castries Bay, almost the only useful anchorage on the Gulf of Tartary coast and a route to the Pacific. Penny-pinchers in St. Petersburg approved only a corduroy road built of logs over the lakeside marshes. Quickly the road was put to a grim use. Henry Lansdell, a missionary from Kent who visited prisons the way some English men and women visit country-house gardens, stopped in Sofiisk in 1879. He hoped to distribute biblical tracts. In the hamlet, to his surprise, he met two officers in charge of 150 prisoners bound for Sakhalin. The log road had become the shortcut to the empire’s new convict island for hard men and for those who chafed at the czar’s autocracy. Lansdell by this point had come to the unshakable conclusion that if there was anything wrong with the czar’s otherwise admirable penal system, it was that the convicts had too little to do. The improving reverend suggested the prisoners set about repairing the boardwalks, which, laid over the mud of Sofiisk, were in a lamentable condition. Sofiisk’s boardwal
ks never did improve, I found. But Lansdell departed satisfied, having left the men with a box of religious tracts, written, for unexplained reasons, in French.

  • • •

  Back on the Amur, in the hydrofoil’s aft cabin, the passengers huddled immobile, staring forward as at a movie showing in a very cold theater. Elsewhere aboard, a social life evolved. The smokers muttered and shivered in the open passageway. In the main cabin, a young woman, Yulia, a short Nivkh with pert nose, impish eyes, and a ponytail that always danced, introduced me to everybody else—Nikolaevsk’s small-town manners carried to this spot in the wilderness. Juliana was a teacher at a primary school on her way back from seeing her mother in the hospital. Several of the young men onboard, raw, strong-limbed half-castes, worked at the fisheries cooperative, or in the port of Nikolaevsk. They had also been seeing relatives, they said. Later they admitted coyly that really they had been looking for girls—Khabarovsk girls, it transpired, were snooty. An Armenian trader was returning with suitcases of cigarettes smuggled from China. We spread out food on a small counter by the samovar: sausage, soused herrings, rye bread, and gherkins.

  At one brief stop, the captain came down. He gestured me up to his pilothouse, reached through a narrow hatch up forward. It was like the cockpit of an old aircraft, except for the rumpled bunk stretched athwartships behind the captain’s swivel chair. The captain explained the controls—double throttles, trim-tab set inside the steering wheel. A battered pair of military binoculars rested against a grab-rail, next to a kind of pilot’s portolan, a much-thumbed book of charts for every section of the river. As we ran in wide sweeps between the sandbanks, occasional port- and starboard-hand cans, green and red, marked the channel. More often, large triangular wooden structures sunk upright into the bank served as leading marks. The captain showed how each season, after the summer floods, the main channel moved, whipping back and forth over the years like a fire hose run amok. The buoys and leading marks would then be moved too, those that were not swept away. The captain passed the long winter nights correcting his charts.