The approach road to Dué Post wasn’t promising. The route separating the foreshore from a steep, treeless slope was still inscribed with the scars of the coal tracks used by the Dué mines. There was no coal glinting in the scree, as there was when Chekhov visited. Every fragment of fuel had been used up. All that was left was scavenged earth. Dragonflies with crisp, see-through wings milled about flowering weeds. Outnumbering all the other insects were hungry mosquitoes.
As for Dué itself, the carcass of an old coal store and landing stage marked the end of the beach, where a group of young men were lolling about drunk. Around me stood the mangled footings of topsy-turvy buildings overwhelmed by storms. Industrial machinery had long ago been stripped of anything that could be used. Gone were the ‘white spick-and-span cottages’ belonging to the prison governor, priest and officers described by early visitors. The wooden homes were caving in, their frames as tilted and bewildered as the teenagers pickling themselves in alcohol.
The further down Dué’s single street I ventured, the more tenebrous the feeling. The ground was being picked over by dogs with tails clamped between their legs. Two children ran across the street in flapping shoes. In concrete buildings, even the layers of graffiti had been licked by fire. Along the stretch of track where the road ran out entirely, there were a couple of apartment blocks. Pinned to their walls were a clutch of satellite dishes, and on the corner, some freshly painted white tyres sunk into the ground to mark off a sitting area. This was Dué’s social club.
I poked around for signs of life – in the last stop on my last day in the most feared Tsarist penal colony in Russia. A woman looked at me, then closed her door without dropping her stare. I watched an old man slip his head out of an upper window, then close it again like a badly played stage direction. When I found a coarse, pot-bellied fisherman sorting his nets outside a garage of scattered car parts, I asked if there was anyone with a piano. The man grunted a half-answer and pointed to the apartment block behind.
At the corner, a woman with blonde cropped hair was tending some flowers planted in two old tyres. My interpreter and she got talking. The woman – plump, smiley, dressed in leatherette leggings and a leopard-print top – said there was one person left in Dué who could help me. So we followed her past a puttering Russian flag into one of the apartment blocks. The main door to the stairwell was propped open with a child’s sledge. The woman clacked up the lightless steps, passing doors which looked like they hadn’t been disturbed in a while, the air heavy with cigarette smoke.
The woman took us inside her mother’s flat. There were three rooms: a bathroom, a main room and a small kitchen with an iron oven, three tin bowls and two tin mugs, a kettle and a single electric burner. Bread was lying on the sideboard, and six onions in a string bag hung from the wall. The main room was furnished with two beds, which doubled as sofas in the day, a cabinet, a chest of drawers and two chairs. A television was playing in the corner. On the wall hung a carpet, a Russian Orthodox cross and a torch. On the table sat a TV guide, an ashtray, various medicines and a simple glass vase of purple lilacs. In the middle of this modest flower arrangement stood the strong stem of a fresh narcissus.
The lady was called Lidiya – a woman as thin as a bird, her tracksuit bottoms hanging loosely off narrow hips. At first, her raisin eyes flickered between attention and trepidation. She moved around the room nervously, lost as a ghost, as if she had wanted to remember something, then had forgotten what it was. She rearranged an icon on the cabinet. She turned off the TV – the sound of a Russian game show replaced by the drone of a sleepy fly – then sat down on the edge of the sofa. She moved restlessly, rocking back and forth. Her back was hunched, her whole body arched over her rib cage, as if to protect her from too much breathing. When we explained the reason for my visit, the woman pulled herself closer. Bit by bit, she started to talk – fluidly, intelligently. She ran her hand through her hair, as if to help arrange her memories until bit by bit something inside her started to unfurl.
She said she lived in this apartment with one of her unmarried sons, though her roots were in Ukraine. Her grandfather had been a rich peasant, or kulak. He had wanted to move to Siberia, but his wife didn’t want to leave so he threw her from the top of a bell tower. Lidiya didn’t know in which town. She paused and began to rock more nervously. She waved off any attempt to be mollified, then started up again, talking more quickly than before.
Her grandfather disappeared – she didn’t know whether he survived prison, or Siberia, or even the journey there – but he left behind a son born in 1908, who was taken in by a woman who had no children of her own.
‘That was my father,’ said Lidiya: ‘In the thirties, he left Ukraine and came to Dué as a free settler looking for work. He came to cut wood.’
Her father played all sorts of instruments, she said. He was self-taught on the mandolin, conducted a trumpet orchestra, a string orchestra and a male and female choir. A younger version of herself started to show, Lidiya’s joyful telling caught up in wet lungfuls of air. She didn’t remember a piano; instead she talked about the instruments her father had made when he was living in Western Russia. He would take hair from horse tails at night, then use it to string a wooden frame. In Sakhalin, he became the director of the club at Dué, which used to occupy a wooden building near the shore, close to the railway which took away the coal. Soon he was producing all the amateur performances. How marvellous they were, Lidiya recalled. She remembered one in which the musicians wore different costumes for the different republics of the USSR. She vividly described the brightly coloured outfits lined up backstage, as if they might still be hanging there now.
At home, when the radio was playing and music came on, her father would tell his children to stop talking. With his mandolin, he would play the same music he had just heard, repeating it by ear. He would often fix and tune the instruments that belonged to the local military station. Everyone in the village knew and respected her father, she said.
Back then, before the coal mine closed, there were five thousand people living in Dué. These days, there were only thirty-eight families left. The old club was gone, along with the house Lidiya had been brought up in – a wooden home built by the Japanese before the war. Its corridor had papered walls printed with flowers and beautiful girls in kimonos.
‘We tore down the paper and cut out the images and kept them,’ she said. ‘We loved the Japanese pictures, and the doors made of glass, which were too heavy for me to open.’
It was a happy childhood. Lidiya’s mother worked in the coalhouse. The sea provided them with fish. Her father netted herrings, which they carried in cotton bags her mother stitched. They sold the surplus, along with the crabs they collected at low tide. When there were heavy storms, the sea would throw sharks on to the shore. They took the liver, she said; she remembered how well they all felt whenever they drank the fish oil.
She went to the cabinet and pulled out a plastic bag of photographs. Among them was a crumpled black-and-white picture of her father in 1953. He was posing with employees of the club. His smile was wide, creasing his cheeks. He also had a slight squint, from an artificial eye.
‘My father had a great sense of humour,’ she said. ‘He gave us that. We like singing. We like parties.’
Lidiya was fifty-three when her father died. He was buried in the cemetery above the village. Then she stopped talking and started rocking again with her hands to her head, her face slightly flushed. My interpreter stopped asking questions. I let the silence hang, to ease the story out of a room of memories where only ex-Soviets can go.
Several Japanese people who lived on Sakhalin chose to stay after 1945, said Lidiya.* She talked about one man who taught them how to collect crustaceans from a sea cave – a delicacy unknown to Russians – and an edible green fern from the forest. The Japanese man spoke bad Russian, and lived in Dué. He was kind, gentle, polite. Lidiya’s father shared his fish with him.
Employees of the Dué House
of Culture, a kind of Soviet clubhouse – described as a ‘symbol of the state’s attempt at “enlightenment” and edification’ – in 1953.
Lidiya was still rocking. She seemed stressed, perhaps with the memory of those she had loved and lost resurfacing in the room. I couldn’t tell if the Japanese man was a secret, a stowaway. He was not. She was sad simply because happier days were gone, her grief perhaps more acute given it was Russia Day – a holiday soaked in nostalgia, and a reminder of the fall of the Soviet Union, when the whole country pays tribute to their nation. She said the Japanese man was buried in Dué’s old cemetery, in an unmarked grave. He lay near her father, and her beloved husband. Then her body crumpled, like that of an inconsolable child, the divide between her experience and mine as huge as the line of Solzhenitsyn’s: ‘Can a man who’s warm understand one who’s freezing?’
Lidiya agreed to show me the way to the old Dué graveyard. We drove past the burnt-out home that her late husband had refused to leave. He had died of a heart attack four years before, when most of Dué’s last hangers-on left the community entirely, or retreated into the newer apartment blocks. Then we turned up a stone track that wound through the taiga behind the sea. In Chekhov’s time, this was where women used to sell their bodies, and where escaped convicts would ambush the foolish. Not many people passed by any more. The undergrowth was too thick, the path treacherous with ruts.
At the cemetery, Lidiya took me to the graves of her father and husband. Both were marked by the same fresh narcissi I had noticed in her home. Both were clean, unlike the abandoned headstones on every other side, or the pits and hillocks Doroshevich described – graves of the unknown, marked with wordless sticks.
Lidiya pointed to a stately tree bursting like a shuttlecock out of the ground. Somewhere beneath its canopy were the bones of the Japanese man who had been their friend, rooted into the place that had been his home, living among the progeny of exiles and communist believers in a godforsaken place on the edge of a scum-scuffed sea. I had come to Sakhalin wanting to find Mrs E’s Becker, or at least something which spoke of Chekhov’s time when Russian piano culture had been thriving across the Empire. I had found love and humanity instead – in the last house at the end of the last street at the dead end of Russia, where at one point in history, there had been killing on the darkest scale. I left Dué in extreme discomfort from ravaging mosquito bites. I said goodbye to Grigory Smekalov, who on my drive back out to the train station said that people had been seen following me around town. Yet in spite of everything sinister about Sakhalin, I felt a profound affection for the image of a fiddle made with stolen horsehair, and Lidiya’s precious narcissus standing strong in a shaft of Siberian light.
________________
* Girev was in the search party that found the dead explorer. His favourite dog, Osman, lived out the rest of its life in a New Zealand zoo, according to a Wellington newspaper. Free Lance (August 1916).
* Following Japan’s defeat in the Second World War when they lost control of Sakhalin to the USSR, the repatriation process began from South Sakhalin, which had been under Japanese rule since 1905. Around 400,000 people left. The Japanese inhabitants who stayed on became known as the ‘remaining’ or ‘unreturned’. Taisho Nakayama, ‘Japanese society on Karafuto’ in Svetlana Paichadze and Philip A. Seaton (eds) Voices from the Shifting Russo-Japanese Border (London and New York: Routledge, 2015).
PART TWO
Broken Chords
1917–1991
‘Reality is incomprehensible and abhorrent, but there is always the hope that it is nothing but a filthy covering behind which is a high mystery. Perhaps the occasional glimpses of beauty in Nature, man and art are simply mysterious pointers towards something which exists eternally in some other sphere and beckons man to itself, filling him with hope?’
– Anatoly Lunacharsky, On Literature and Art
‘I am not sure that in the kind of world in which we are living and with the kind of thinking we are bound to follow, we can regain these things exactly as if they had never been lost; but we can try to become aware of their existence and importance.’
– Claude Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning
‘And someday in the future, this Archipelago, its air, and the bones of its inhabitants, frozen in a lens of ice, will be discovered by our descendants like some improbable salamander.’
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
8
The Last Tsar’s Piano: The Urals
IN ST PETERSBURG DURING the first winter of my search, I had gone to find a mid-nineteenth-century oil on canvas by Georg Wilhelm Timm depicting the 1825 Decembrist Revolt. Completed in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I to commemorate loyalist regiments, it was stored in the Hermitage Repository, a vast overflow of the state collections, in the city suburbs. Walking through dull grey corridors with security codes and cameras, I reached room B5, where the painting stood against the wall, surrounded by images of well-fed burghers, greyhounds and glossy thoroughbreds.
You could taste the savage cold in the canvas. The sky was brooding grey. Snow was being kicked up by horses galloping for the Senate, the public jostling for a view of the cavalry, including a man in a fur hat with a violin sticking out from his coat. The violence, however, was kept off stage. Timm’s painting depicted the Romanov regime as majestic, elegant and above all legitimate, the crowd patriotically doffing their hats to the Tsar’s protectors.
On my way out, the curator took me into his office, where paintings were piled in stacks. On the floor was a full-length portrait of Tsar Alexander II lying on its side. His face had been vandalized in the ferocity of the 1917 October Revolution, and never restored. I counted the bayonet holes in the canvas: one in his right eye, three in the forehead and a pierced throat. The violence was visceral and well preserved, each stabbing driven into the painting with an intent both utterly unknowable and profoundly present, a reminder that Russia could no more escape its past than I could escape the victim’s stare.
The end of the Russian Empire came more quickly than anyone could have predicted in a country creaking under the pressure of economic, military and political collapse. The 1905 Russo-Japanese War had cost Russia dearly. Pogroms – the organized killing of Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe – were running out of control in the Pale of Settlement, a giant ghetto in Russia’s Western Provinces where Jews had been forced to live under discriminatory laws since Catherine the Great. Russia’s ‘Little Father’, as Tsar Nicholas II was known by the devout, had earned himself a new nickname, ‘Nicholas the Bloody’, in response to his violent suppression of a peaceful protest in January 1905. This event stirred dissent on an unprecedented level. As a result, the ‘soviet’, or council, appeared, representing the rights of workers. A year later, Nicholas was forced to make concessions by opening Russia’s first elected assembly, the State Duma, even if this turned out to be more like lip service than a truly significant shift in power.
Close up of the mutilated portrait of the last Tsar’s grandfather, Alexander II. The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.
Politically weak-minded, the Tsar’s popularity fell even further the more his family pulled towards the Siberian ‘holy man’ and faith healer Grigory Rasputin – the Romanovs’ reviled confidant, who had risen to power through an uncanny ability to alleviate the discomforts of the Romanov heir, the Tsarevich Aleksei, whose haemophilia was so debilitating that even a carriage ride could trigger fatal bleeding. Rasputin had such an intensely intoxicating effect on the Tsarina, people feared his sinister influence all over Russia. Yet the Romanovs, still living in their gilded bubble, kept Rasputin closer to them than the country’s newly elected ministers until his murder in December 1916.*
Two months later, on 23 February 1917, more mass protests broke out in the capital – a people’s uprising driven by drastic food and fuel shortages compounded by Russia’s involvement in the First World War. On 2 March 1917, Nicholas was forced to abdicate. The imperial fa
mily were at first confined to their palace outside the capital, until the provisional government and its rival for power, the Petrograd Soviet, made the decision to remove the Romanovs from the gathering revolutionary ferment. On the morning of 1 August 1917, Nicholas, his wife, four daughters, the sickly Tsarevich, and forty-five retainers began their journey to Siberia. They travelled in a first-class carriage of the same company that operated the luxurious Trans-Siberian tourist trains, to spend the autumn and winter of 1917 under house arrest at the Governor’s House in Tobolsk.
Stuck in Siberia, the last Tsar therefore didn’t witness the October Revolution, nor Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ seizure of power from the provisional government. The family’s concerns turned towards their narrowing domestic world instead. The Tsarina played the piano. The Tsar cut wood in the garden. For fresh air, the children sat outside on the roof of their prison.
The last of the Romanovs, photographed in 1913.
As the Bolsheviks’ power increased, the family’s few remaining privileges were removed. Cases of wine sent from Petrograd were emptied into the river beneath Tobolsk by guards. The Tsar and his son were no longer allowed to wear their epaulettes. Visits to church were banned. As winter began to lock in Tobolsk with the seasonal freeze, the children put on plays, dreaming up fantastic worlds as news from outside became harder to come by under the darkening skies of a country’s violent disintegration.
Back in Petrograd, the American journalist John Reed described the meltdown of civil society. He wrote about electricity shortages, robberies, breadlines and servant problems. Waiters who had joined the class struggle were refusing tips. Revolution wasn’t the time to be eating out. Nor was it a time for music. ‘I know nothing greater than the Appassionata, I’d like to listen to it every day,’ wrote Lenin to the author Maxim Gorky. ‘It’s beautiful, superhuman music . . . But I can’t listen to music too often, it affects the nerves, makes you want to say kind, silly things, to stroke the heads of the people who, living in a terrible hell, can create such a beauty.’
The Lost Pianos of Siberia Page 12
