The Lost Pianos of Siberia

by Sophy Roberts

  The English nurse Kate Marsden ‘dressed’ for Siberia.

  My cabin-share, Mary, had no time for self-doubt. What an adventure this is, she said every time I offered her a hand getting up and down the stairs in a lurching Pacific swell. She explained that a birder never closes their list; it is a life’s work, because no list can ever be definitive. In the ornithology world, there is a phenomenon called ‘extralimital’ species to describe birds at the very limit of their range. There will be a score of far-fliers that may occur up here in the North Pacific, she said. Then there are the ‘escapees’ – exotics which have flown their cage to start a rogue population in a place where they would never normally migrate. That should give me hope, she said, that there might be the musical equivalent of a blue canary nesting in the bluffs.

  I adored Mary. She laughed in her sleep. She talked about blossom nomads – birds that chase the nectar – and the call of the eastern spinebill; back home in Canberra, one came into her garden to sing every day. ‘He brings his wife,’ she said, ‘but she’s not quite as brilliant as him.’ Mary was also mischievous. At breakfast she told the most competitive birder on the ship he had missed a ‘lifer’ (a new species he could have added to his list), which flew right past the ship’s bridge when he was on its stern. When we were back in our cabin she said she had been pulling his leg.

  She showed me the travellers, the migratory giants, who come this way to feed on upwellings from the ocean trench where the Sea of Okhotsk mingles with the warmer waters of the Pacific. These were the evolutionary champions, she said, travelling halfway around the world to get here, answering a hidden pull to do with the sun and the stars and the Earth’s magnetic field. Most of all I wanted to see the bar-tailed godwit, the concert grand of shorebirds. Tall and long-legged, the bar-tailed godwit is now thought to make the longest unbroken migration of any bird species on the planet. A wader with a broad-bean-sized brain, it is able to predict the weather forty-eight hours before a change in the wind. It can cover close to seven and a half thousand miles along the western side of the Pacific in nine days flat. It travels between the northern tip of New Zealand and north-east Siberia, the godwit’s monumental crossing almost double in length to the land-and-sea journey made in the eighteenth century by the explorer Vitus Bering, whose wife, Anna, left some of the earliest evidence of a clavichord in Siberia.

  In July 1741, Bering made landfall on Kayak Island in the Gulf of Alaska, only to founder on the shores of the Commander Islands on his way home. He perished within a few weeks of the shipwreck, his death recorded by George Steller, the expedition doctor and naturalist who survived nine months marooned on the Commanders living off the local manatees. Steller described these creatures as over seven metres in length, six metres in circumference around the belly, with meat which tasted like beef. They produced milk and buttery fat like a cow’s, a single manatee able to feed forty hungry sailors for two weeks. The so-called Steller’s sea cow was one ‘discovery’ on Bering’s trip;* the other was the American continent itself, which gave the Tsars the basis for later laying claim to their US possessions, from California to Alaska. In 1867, this territory was then sold to America in its entirety; but for reasons not altogether clear, Tsar Alexander II left the Commander Islands off the inventory. The oversight proved lucrative. The Commanders possessed healthy rookeries of northern fur seals, sea otters, and shores bristling with blue Arctic foxes. When Bering’s surviving crew returned to St Petersburg with their harvest of skins, wide-eyed fur trappers were not long in realizing the islands’ potential.

  The Medny fur trade, still going strong, c. 1930.

  When we arrived at Medny, winter’s mantle of sea ice had melted away, allowing us to anchor on the edge of a submerged caldera close to where a volcano had once exhaled. Surrounding the ship were high cliffs funnelled with waterfalls and crowned in milky fog. For a moment, this could have been Hawaii – the velvet greens, the moody swings of sun and shade, the sea a lumpy stew on one side of the bay and a glossy mirror on the other. Scores of northern fulmars skimmed across the undulating swell, using the ocean’s updraughts to help them fly. The birds wheeled in broad arcs, breasting the wind. Common guillemots lined up in rows, swooping off the cliffsides. The tufted puffins, with bellies like barrels, were silent at sea, but when they were nesting, they grumbled like old men.

  Using rubber dinghies, we landed on a beach of stones tinted copper-green. Among the driftwood were vertebrae from seals. The carcass of an Arctic fox was curled up on the edge of the grass like a dog waiting for its owner to return. Seeing the few tumbledown buildings, I wondered if the Russian border guards who once lived here might have demanded a piano for entertainment at some point in their history. Distractions of any kind would have been a necessity for survival, not least to dim the sound of the rattling windows in Pacific storms.

  The birders headed off to where nesting colonies streaked the cliffs. I walked the other way. A few brave flowers were showing – pale lemon primulas and anemones. The smell of seaweed rose from the tideline whenever the wind fell away. Abandoned machinery, oxidized by the weather, lay within three roofless buildings behind the shore.

  From 1826 until 1970, this was a village with a score of houses, a small church and a wooden cutter boat, the population including indigenous Aleuts originally imported from the Aleutian Islands to harvest the pelts. Then, in the Soviet era, descendants of these same indigenes were relocated to neighbouring Bering Island, which now has the Commanders’ only settlement, where around six hundred people live. Even Medny’s border-patrol post had been abandoned, following the hard winter of 2002. That year, twelve soldiers ventured out to find driftwood – the only source of fuel in this treeless place. They walked for days, roped their haul on to a raft, and floated themselves and the wood towards camp. But a storm pushed the raft out to sea in one of the last tragedies connected to this island’s lonely past.

  Once, this desolate speck of ground had given a good living. In the late nineteenth century, an American trading company leased the islands from the Russian government to harvest its sea otters. The fur trade on Medny was significant enough to merit the import of gravestones from San Francisco for employees. I stumbled upon marble blocks amid topsy-turvy crosses struggling to stand tall in the marsh. Disturbed earth revealed man-sized humps in the ground, including a stone memorial where two Aleut sisters had been interred together not far from where the island’s cheek toppled into the sea. Surf pushed up through holes in the rocks below. There was something magnificent about this brink of land, something mesmerizing about the churning power of the ocean below.

  Then out of nowhere, one of the birders came up behind me. He was carrying a small speaker, which rang with a recorded birdsong.

  ‘It’s how you pull them in,’ he said.

  He waited for a while for a living bird to respond.

  ‘Get good at this and you can bird by ear.’

  Back in my cabin, I checked with Mary if you could mark a bird off your list on the basis of hearing its song.

  ‘Aw, no,’ she said in her slow Australian drawl. ‘I don’t tick a bird unless I see it. Like anyone, I like a good song, but you gotta see a bird for it to mean anything.’

  We sailed on to Bering, where Valery Kravchenko came in 1969, his performance advertised on a billboard in front of the explorer’s statue on the shorefront of Nikolskoye village. Back in the sixties, times were good. There was a thriving mink farm, salaries were high, and the Soviet support-machine was beneficent. Valery’s recital took place in the House of Culture when the town’s population was more than twice the size it is now. He brought Chopin’s music to the island’s tiny community, just as his friend, David Lerner, had done in Kamchatka thirty years before when he had arrived in Petropavlovsk with the Ibach in tow.

  Since perestroika, however, things hadn’t been the same. The wharf was cluttered with broken boats. In Nikolskoye’s lower village, the soccer field was fringed with legless seats. On a windowsi
ll of a semi-abandoned home, even the silk flowers had shed their petals. So fragile were some of the buildings, it was as if it would take only a moderate storm to remove the last remains. It had happened before when the tail end of a tsunami caught the island off guard. Here, on the storm-chafed shore of Bering Island, Valery left the piano in the settlement’s wooden club.

  I visited the newspaper offices in Nikolskoye. The editor, who knew nothing of Valery’s instrument, said she would put out a notice in the next edition. I hurried up the hill to the new part of town and its modern House of Culture; there was little time, given the ship needed to press on with its birding itinerary rather than wait for me to find an instrument. The director said there was only one music teacher on the island, the wife of the priest. There were no old pianos, she said. Then I found a woman who remembered Valery’s instrument. There had been an electrical fire – maybe it was November, sometime in the eighties. She said the piano had disappeared, but Valery’s legacy remained. She used to listen to classical piano music on any records she could lay her hands on all the way out here, in these tiny blips of land separating Russia from America.

  We left the Commanders to sail south beyond the nose of the Kamchatka Peninsula, passing occasional shipwrecks, their hulls tossed aside in storms. Close to shore, the ships’ carcasses were wrapped in ghostly fog. We were headed for the Kurils. The northern islands are fierce. Angry squalls rip the top off the ocean to create spray like bursts of smoke, the sea rolling around basalt cliffs. The southern Kurils are more benign. They are covered with cedar forests, hot springs and groves of whispering bamboo.

  I had ten days ahead of me, weaving through this chain from top to bottom in the relative warmth of June. In winter, my journey wouldn’t have been quite so easy, said a former sea captain on Sakhalin Island, who had spent fifty years sailing a fishing trawler in the Sea of Okhotsk and the North Pacific. The ship would spend six months at sea, sometimes longer. In order to fill their time, the captain persuaded his crew to buy a piano – everyone chipped in with a share of their bonus – which then travelled into the Bering Sea, up and down the Kurils, even as far as the Russian Arctic. He talked about the pleasure the instrument gave them, and how he was a self-taught pianist. Once he spent nine months at sea without ever touching land. In winter, he said the storms could be so brutal that water would freeze to the side of the ship until it developed a dangerous tilt.

  Even in summer, our plans were dictated by capricious weather. We failed to land at Atlasov Island, the tallest volcano in the archipelago, because of a powerful northerly. We couldn’t get close to Matua because of a Notice to Mariners about a new exclusion zone. Every two hours our captain checked in with Russian authorities. This has always been sensitive border territory, with ownership of these islands oscillating in different sovereignty claims between Russia – the Kurils’ existence on Russian maps first drawn by the Tobolsk map maker Semion Remezov in 1700 – and Japan. During the Pacific War, Matua was turned into a labyrinth of trenches. The Japanese strike force set sail from the island of Iturup to launch their attack on Pearl Harbor. Even now, the sovereignty conflict bubbles on in the southern islands: Russia and Japan still haven’t signed a peace treaty since the cessation of hostilities at the end of the Second World War, when Stalin got the Kurils back from Japan and sent in new cadres of Russians to populate the land.

  While I was on the ship working my way through the New Zealander’s Siberian library, my interpreter was on Sakhalin Island, where I would meet up with her again a couple of weeks later. She was working the phones and local media, and also trying to trace the soldier’s instrument on the Kuril island of Kunashir. Eventually, a photograph of it arrived depicting the piano as it was now. All that remained was the instrument’s iron frame, a moribund piece of scrap metal drowning in the summer’s new bamboo. It was a Czech-made Rösler with a serial number dating the piano to before the October Revolution. The soldier said it had belonged to a Soviet musician who had come to the islands in the fifties. I contacted a local museum archivist, but no one recalled the pianist, from where he had come, or even his name. His story had passed into oblivion in a place Soviet historians used to call ‘the end of the world’, the finis mundi.

  We sailed south. The islands’ conical peaks appeared and disappeared. Sometimes their rocky spires were ribbed with snow, and sometimes they were bruised from lava. Then the mist closed in again and I could barely see more than a few metres in front. There was the smell of sea kelp, and malodorous gases from hidden volcanic vents. Tsunamis are common in the Kurils, when the Pacific sucks in its breath and swallows up whatever gets in the way of its killer waves. New islands are constantly being formed. Others are toppling, sagging and shifting their stance as the seabed groans thousands of metres beneath. The turn-of-the-century British fur-hunter Captain Henry James Snow described the sensation of being out at sea and below deck when his ship began to quiver. Then came a series of muffled booms which continued for two hours, even though the surface of the sea was barely agitated.

  I was standing alone on the ship’s foredeck when we seemed to stop moving altogether. It felt like a fermata, the moment in a piece of music when a note, or rest, is held longer than usual. The sea was flat, and a mysterious calm prevailed. Everything grew sad and dull, as if the ship were stuck in some kind of hole. Out of the silence, a gull looped in, wings stretched, coral-pink feet luminous in the melancholy glow. The bird almost struck me with its wing, before it tipped back into the gloom of the Pacific Basin, its wingbeat fading into a part of the world so remote that there have been times when the Kurils didn’t even make it on to the map.

  In the eighteenth century, the French explorer Jean-François de La Pérouse said the Kuril Islands’ only purpose was to provide a refuge for the shipwrecked. Franklin D. Roosevelt valued them as so utterly irrelevant, he signed over their switch from Japanese to Soviet rule during a session at the 1945 Yalta Conference that lasted for less than the time it took Winston Churchill to smoke his cigar. At one time in history, these far-off islands had been overseen by a prison governor in Irkutsk, with the arm of the Tsars still long enough to overwhelm the indigenous Ainu, who were ultimately pushed out or culturally absorbed either by Russians moving down from the Kamchatka Peninsula, or by the Japanese travelling up from the south. Hunters came for furs, reducing the Kurils’ sea-otter population to near extinction. Tens of thousands of seals, their skins peeled off like wet socks, were slaughtered in the Kurils’ breeding grounds.

  On the seventh night we anchored off Yankicha Island, halfway down the so-called ‘Fog Archipelago’. The anchor’s chain rattled into the sea. On the other side of the headland stood a cluster of lonely rock stacks. A pod of killer whales seemed to warn us off, circling close to our inflatable boats when we tried to enter a sunken caldera. Birds were starting to fly in under a dusky light. There were hundreds of thousands of them – first the crested auklets, then the whiskered auklets – floating on the water until the surface turned black. They swirled up in thick, balletic curls, like swarms of bees, to find their burrows away from the island’s poisonous fumaroles bubbling out of the beach. It was a mesmerizing show of life – a deafening cacophony inside the caldera’s walls, the swarms so thick they blocked the sun’s last light. This was nature without men, thriving on an island which was still being formed.

  The following day we continued to an island that felt like the opposite of Yankicha’s hidden Eden. Simushir was a former Soviet submarine base concealed inside a half-sunk caldera, the narrow opening to the sea plugged with a thick bank of fog. Once inside, the sky was clear and the turquoise water as still as a millpond. Military detritus littered the shore.*

  Receding into the land behind was a long run of three-storey housing blocks missing their windows, the glass blown out so they resembled skulls with empty eye sockets. A fuel depot had leaked oil. Vehicles and barrels picked up by storms had been tossed into hollows in the land and drowned in thickets of brush. Metal gu
ts were hanging out of the rusted bonnets of military jeeps.

  I went looking for clues about the people who might have lived here. But in all the clutter, there were no human faces. Nothing. Neither a cutting from a newspaper, nor a photograph forgotten in a drawer. I stumbled into what must have once been the hospital, with vials of powders and broken beds. I stepped around a dentist’s chair, among film reels and leather boots. A mural of a red sickle was peeling off the wall. Another fading image with bubbled paint depicted the Simushir caldera with a rocket launcher to one side. In what must have been a military briefing hall, a lectern stood above a room of toppled chairs as if the audience had just got up and left, tossing their seats to one side.

  I could hear the silvery music of songbirds. Trees were starting to grow through the crevices, their russet-coloured roots and branches reaching for clefts of light. Wild roses broke out of patches of disturbed concrete. Some nutcrackers were nesting in a corner, the young hatchlings safe in a bed of catkins and electric wires.

  Back on the ship, Mary told me about a Siberian ruby-throat she had found panting on the deck a few yards from where she stood. Tired from its journey, this tiny red-breasted robin was using our ship as a raft. It tickled her, that this little vagrant was hitching a free ride. She thought it marvellous that it had found us when it was flying so many miles off course. Mary was how I wanted to grow old. She was doing this trip with five clumsy stitches across a knee she had slashed in a fall two days before we sailed. She didn’t think my piano quest was lunacy. Nor did it matter that she couldn’t scramble up to the puffin nests. She may have even fibbed a little on the application form about her physical abilities in order to book herself a place on this cruise. But above all, Mary refused to shrivel up into a closed and diminished world. Listening to her chuckle in her sleep, I knew she understood better than anyone why we were both here, that even in a place as difficult as Siberia, there might be something magical hiding in the fog. My piano hunt and Mary’s vagrant robin had more in common than it first appeared: neither of us had come for the certainties, but for the outside possibility that a little marvel might appear.