Although the Boukreev children never heard their father complain about his disability, it caused hardship for the big family. The kitchen garden and orchard provided a crucial supplement to the family’s diet. Household chores fell on Anatoli and his two older siblings. The older boys hauled water and coal, Luba and Irina helped with washing and housework. There was never a surplus of food or money for luxuries. Their childhood privations marked the children in different ways; they were not all happy.
Anatoli, for his part, was never ashamed or angry about the hard work that denied him an easy childhood. His chosen lifestyle would effect a kind of loneliness. He required nothing from his family but the grounding of their honest affection, and as an adult he was that kind of friend. He took the time to write and made an effort to maintain important relationships. Like his father, he was a perfectionist. A pedantic attention to detail could be maddening when translated into the fast-paced lives of American friends, but in the mountains it kept him alive. He expressed an earnest concern and appreciation for others and a generosity that was startling in one whose life came to depend so much on his own initiative. I asked Irina, his younger sister, to describe him as a child. She remembered that as a boy he refused the money his father offered the children for ice cream, reasoning that “it was better for our family to buy bread.” That child became the adult who was satisfied to hand-wash the two shirts that served every occasion, who repaid every loan or gave you the biggest portion of food he had cooked after an exhausting day of climbing.
If Nikolai was the model for his manhood, Anatoli’s mother provided the stable, abiding love that anchored him in the world. Valentina gave her affection and acceptance equally to her children. She nurtured their differences, and no one was deprived of tenderness, kindness, or care. Until the end of her life she would be there to absorb their troubles. Her second son she christened Anatoli, “from the east,” and for a time after his birth, in recognition of his size and health, she called him “the giant slayer.” In those ways Anatoli said she put names on his destiny. Valentina protected his independence, nurturing the notion that his inner thoughts could shape the world around him. She defended his decision to become a teacher when his pursuit of a career in engineering or geophysics would have been more advantageous for the family. In 1979, when it became apparent that mountains and not physics were his first love, Valentina encouraged Anatoli to follow his dreams to Almaty, Kazakhstan.
Dreams and premonitions psychically connected them. The delicate golden crucifix Anatoli took care to wear around his neck was his mother’s talisman. He expressed guilt about the risks he faced as a source of stress for her. When his great efforts left him transparent with exhaustion and longing for human contact, he would go home to Korkino. For a few days he would absorb Valentina’s affection, feeding that place in himself that required the essential refuge of belonging. In May of 1996, while Anatoli struggled up Mount Everest to attempt to rescue Scott Fischer, his mother suffered a heart attack. In the weeks that followed she seemed to recover. Anatoli spoke with her often by telephone. During an especially poignant conversation on July 3, she seemed to try to prepare Anatoli for her death. We made reservations for him to fly home. A sudden complication sent Valentina to the hospital that night. Hours later, news of her passing shattered Tolya like a piece of glass.
Anatoli’s reserve was mostly shyness. As a child, to those outside the family he was “Buka,” a nickname that implied he was a bit aloof and too introverted. Even though he was a precocious reader, his first years of school were traumatic. Teachers ridiculed his inability to roll r’s, refusing to acknowledge Buka until he could speak properly. His pride made him internalize a complex of emotions; he became withdrawn and careful socially. In adult life, when pressed into some social situation in which he intuitively felt maligned or ridiculed, he would withdraw into a stony, intimidating silence. At home he lived in an imaginative world of his own creation. His closest friends were his two sisters, Luba and Irina; for them he was the pet and hero. For a short time when he was young, Valentina was the custodian in the local library. Anatoli enjoyed keeping her company at work: in the shelves of books he found his escape from drab reality. Irina told me they spent many hours on the warm shelf of the Russian stove in the living room, Anatoli lost in the pages of some adventure story. American authors O. Henry and Jack London were his favorites. Though his sensitivity and introversion were protected at home, the only freedom for such eccentricity, in the system that controlled Anatoli’s life beyond those walls, was coupled with academic excellence. He demonstrated aptitude for math and science, and by the seventh grade his diligence won him recognition as an academic prodigy.
When a thin, tall, red-haired boy flawlessly presented his ideas concerning the significance of one of the local archaeological ruins for a geology science fair, the adult judges were so impressed that twelve-year-old Anatoli was invited to become the youngest member of the geology section of the Young Pioneers. Field trips to the crags in the Urals were his homecoming. The feelings fostered by his interactions with nature resonated with his deep-seated individuality. He confessed, “Membership in the club gave me an appreciation for life in the collective and rescued me from the potential to become an egoist.” The partnerships of climbing ended his social isolation, and the camaraderie around evening campfires cemented lifelong friendships.
One of his comrades from those days, Serge Segov, remembered Anatoli as “headstrong, argumentative, and fiercely competitive.” Everything he did, he did to win. Watching Olympic competitions with his buddies, he had no trouble projecting that he would wear the uniform of the USSR and compete on the world stage. He treated girls like his sisters; shyness and Old World manners prevented anything else. Stellar academic performance in geochemistry and physics courses earned him special opportunities outside the classroom. His field trips became longer, more involved. The biggest bonus hidden in the invitation to join the geology club was that the group’s twenty-five-year-old coach, Tatiana Dmitrievna Retunskaya, was a respected Soviet mountaineer.
Like all sports activity in the Soviet Union, mountaineering and rock climbing were regulated. A prescribed body of knowledge had to be mastered, and along with that good judgment, teamwork, and leadership skills were developed in practical application. Individual initiative and ability determined how far you went on the road from novice to Master of Sport. Aside from the skills needed for climbing, first aid, weather patterns and snow conditions, map reading, and geology were all components of a mountaineer’s education. Information became more complex with each grade. To advance a rating, one had to demonstrate dynamic mastery by applying practically new information and skill in climbing situations. The candidate was assigned an objective and given the leadership role in a team composed of more advanced climbers. An individual extended his personal limits protected by a safety net of experience. In a system of limited resources, the opportunity for advanced instruction was won by competition.
In Tatiana Retunskaya, Anatoli found the combination of mentor and friend who could channel his adolescent energy. She taught basic rope and climbing techniques during her field trips. Those opportunities and her personal interest in her new twelve-year-old protégé introduced Anatoli to the world that became his life. She encouraged him to take up cross-country skiing. His body was perfectly suited to the sport, and early success fed a competitive passion. Their relationship thrived on his achievements. He mirrored her passion for nature and revived her outgrown mountaineering ambitions.
She indulged the streak of independence in him, once covering up that he and his friend Serge Segov had ditched the bus that returned campers from a weekend field trip. The two adolescents ran wild in the wilderness for six days, surviving on bread and berries. “With Anatoli,” she said, “I came to expect such things.” She had an unfailing belief in his ability and his drive and went so far as to fudge the details on medical records that would have excluded him from climbing competitions. When a th
ree-month bout of meningitis threatened to end his career in 1981, Tatiana included him on a summer trip to the Caucasus Mountains and helped him regain his edge of fitness. Given free rein, he performed illegal solo speed ascents on the 5,000-meter peaks while she kept the rest of her team in line. For ten years she was his advocate. She focused his drive and ambition, pulling strings that provided him with the opportunities to climb higher.
In 1974 his skiing skills added the edge that earned him a trip to Talgar Mountaineering Camp in the Zaalyskiy Ala Tau near Almaty, Kazakhstan. The camp was located deep in the wilderness and surrounded by towering 5,000-meter peaks. Under the eye of Retunskaya’s old coach Irvand Illinski, Anatoli climbed real mountains for the first time. He came home to Korkino’s slag heaps dreaming of a life close to the craggy summits. Only the rare child in Korkino escaped some kind of work in the coal mines. As Illinski would remember, “Anatoli’s dreams were not castles in the air; his feet were always on the ground.” Friend Segov said, “His goals were concrete, and he was patient: for him it was just a matter of time.”
High school academic performance earned him a physics scholarship at Chelyabinsk Pedagogical University. He was the first member of his family to attend college. The trip to Talgar had made it clear to him that a life indoors would be intolerable, but he knew that teaching would give him a winter holiday and summers free for the mountains. Wages as a night watchman in a trucker’s warehouse paid his bills. “Fortunately,” he said, “the only requirement for that job was that I had to be a light sleeper.” He began college studying physics six hours a day and training as a competitive ski racer for two, and he admitted that by the time he graduated in 1979 his passion and priorities had reversed. The dynamics of human endurance and speed fascinated him. He added courses in sports physiology to his schedule. “By the end,” he said, “I was grateful physics was only a four-year program.” When I inquired about girls, he laughed, saying, “I wasn’t much of a catch. All my energy was spent training. Studying filled up my nights, and when I did go to parties, I was usually so exhausted I fell asleep in the corner.” He graduated with honors, earning a bachelor of science degree in physics, and was certified to coach cross-country skiing. After four summers of college climbing, he became a candidate for Master of Sport in mountaineering.
Two years of mandatory military service awaited him after graduation. Tatiana lobbied Irvand Illinski, requesting that Anatoli be assigned to the Central Asia Mountaineering Unit he supervised. The sports club provided mountaineering training for the regular army soldiers who were headed for the Afghanistan war. Illinski pulled the necessary strings, and Buka joined the Sports Club of the Army as a military recruit. When his service commitment was over, Illinski invited him to join the club as a civilian.
The first time I saw him in action I marked to myself the huge potential he revealed with his initiative. No one could stand up to his standards of endurance and speed in the mountains. He was a fanatical sportsman, strictly training according to his own schedule. Several times due to accident or severe illness I thought his career was over, but always he came back. On our teams when complicated situations arose—those situations which are not always predictable or preventable in the high mountains—Anatoli always had the strength and willingness to help. His character was not simple; he was very thorough in everything he decided to undertake. With some he built very close relationships, but he could be obstinate and that antagonized others. Though Anatoli worked as an individual at mountaineering, he was a graduate of the old school. He was proud of that.
Soviet mountaineering had a respectable fifty-year history. In the 1950s the 8,000-meter peaks in the world were about as accessible as outer space. Everest and other high peaks challenged the imagination of individuals and nations. At the same time, training at high altitude was hard to come by. Americans, Europeans, and the British had to go a long way to find a mountain higher than five thousand meters. The Soviets had a great geographic advantage. Locked up behind the Iron Curtain, in the endless ranges of the Pamirs and Tien Shan Mountains, were unnumbered peaks higher than six thousand meters and five giants higher than seven thousand meters. By 1960 Soviet climbers had worked out the hardest routes on most of the highest ones. That bank of experience was passed on to Anatoli’s generation from veterans who became coaches in the main state-sponsored sports clubs. The Soviet Ministry of Sports sponsored competitions in all the mountain regions. Each year there was national recognition for the best team ascents in three categories—technical high-altitude climbing, classical high-altitude mountaineering, and technical mountaineering.
Physiologists and doctors kept track of the effects altitude and exertion had on sportsmen so that by 1980 a significant body of scientific data had been collected. When Nickoli Tchorny, the assistant head coach of the USSR’s second International Expedition, gave me his files detailing the Soviet training routines, he shook his head. “This information was once classified as top secret,” he said, and wondered aloud if anyone in the West knew it existed or the price Soviet athletes had paid for it. Soviet coaches incorporated the results of their basic research on acclimatization, diet, and rest into their training programs. Veterans like Tchorny, Irvand Illinski, Serge Efemov from Ekaterinburg, and Vladimir Shataev from Moscow were as respected and well known in the Soviet Union as the likes of Chris Bonington, Reinhold Messner, and Jim Whittaker were in the West.
Mountaineering was popular in the Soviet Union. In the eighties, summers found as many as thirteen thousand climbers with sports vouchers on holiday in the many International Mountaineering Camps. The support services provided in base camp included physicians who specialized in high-altitude medicine and special rescue units were available to assist with air evacuation in emergencies.
Established in the late sixties with Illinski as head coach, from the beginning Almaty Army Sports Club teams earned the highest of all Soviet mountaineering awards for their efforts above sixty-five hundred meters. Though Illinski had to be a bureaucrat to survive, Anatoli remembered “he was a sportsman at heart.” He was fair, had an absolute respect for excellence, and was not afraid to skate out onto the thin ice of what was not officially sanctioned. By the undeniable superiority of their performance, his climbers overcame the prejudice and favoritism that cornered opportunity for Moscow and St. Petersburg athletes.
Membership in the club committed Anatoli to a demanding training schedule: three sessions a week of two hours with weights, followed by long cross-country runs, and a weekend speed ascent of one of the local 4,000-meter peaks. It provided him with a $30-a-month reserve officer’s salary and covered his transportation and expenses on group expeditions. Within the club Illinski let men form climbing partnerships according to personal preference. There was no shortage of talent in the old guard; Zinur Halitov, Grigori Luniakov, Kazbec Valiev, and Andrei Seleschev represented Almaty on the Soviet’s first International Expedition to Everest in 1982. When Anatoli was invited to join the club in 1981, the roster included many rising Soviet stars: Valeri Khrichtchatyi, Vladimir Suviga, Rinat Khaibullin, and Yuri Moiseev. Illinski nostalgically recalled: “In those days I had fifty strong candidates, all men who could lead. My biggest problem was eliminating that group down to sixteen for an expedition.”
Anatoli arrived from the provinces with a reputation as a ski racer. Initially he was looked upon as an outsider. Rinat Khaibullin, his sports-club climbing partner until 1992, recalled the circumstances of their first meeting:
We were invited to join the Sports Club of the Army as civilians at the same time. This was a big honor for both of us as it had the reputation as one of the best in all of the Soviet Union; practically it meant our training expenses would be covered by the state. In the summer of 1982 we were required to take part in a technical climbing competition in the Fanskie Mountains in Kirgizstan. The rest of the team went to Artuch Base Camp before us. I was held up by my college exams, and Anatoli was delayed due to the demands of his coaching work. We mad
e arrangements to meet in Osh, ride to the trailhead, and hike to Base Camp together.
I knew Anatoli only as a skier. I was a rock climber; for my ego that was an important difference. Neither of us was familiar with the way to Base Camp, but we decided, being such strong men, that we could make a three-day hike in one day. We left the trailhead with towering backpacks full of mountaineering gear. Anatoli’s pace was punishing, but for the sake of my pride, I forced myself to keep up. At the last pass before camp, we stopped to rest. In silent disbelief, I watched Anatoli liberate a whole watermelon from his pack. There were two reasons for my amazement: as a rock climber we never carried more weight than absolutely necessary; and I had been struggling to keep up with him for more than eight hours.
By and large Anatoli’s personal ideology left him oblivious to the petty infighting for position in the club. He never spoke of it. Even among stars, he was different: “a white crow” they called him, making sure to add, “He is our white crow.” During a time when most of his peers treated vodka and cigarettes like vitamins, his knowledge of sports physiology influenced him to give up smoking. He was never a big drinker. His personal life set him apart. He remained single, preferred to live twenty kilometers from the city, did not drive a car, and did not socialize much. At times his fanatic commitment to training was perceived as strange and alarming, even to Illinski. Hearing his young protégé was running the mountain trails in winter in shorts and a tank top, Illinski suggested that even training was good only in moderation. That admonition did not faze Anatoli, who had his own ideas about conditioning. No one argued with his results.
To remain in the club after his service commitment was completed, Anatoli found paying work as a ski coach at a collective farm on the outskirts of Almaty. He bought an orchard and a small, dilapidated wooden house in nearby Mountain Gardener. Right outside his door was a vast pristine wilderness; trails laced the towering conifer taiga, crossed alpine meadows and ridges to the summits of four-thousand-meter peaks. For the next ten years he coached and climbed mountains.
Above the Clouds Page 4
