The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

by Franz Nicolay

  Chekhov tells a sob story (“I’m having the most frustrating time”) about leaving Irkutsk for the Baikal shore to catch a steamer across the lake but finding no horses, missing the boat, and learning there wouldn’t be another for four days. “All we could do was sit on the shore until Friday, look at the water, and wait.” While grouchily wandering the bank, though, he saw a boat loading up, made a quick arrangement, ran back for his traveling party, and boarded: “People say that in the deepest places you can see down almost as far as a mile, and indeed I myself saw rocks and mountains drowning in the turquoise water that sent shivers down my spine. The trip across Baikal was wondrous, utterly unforgettable. . . . What ravines, what crags!”

  Olkhon Island is a barely disconnected bit of land off the west shore and about halfway up Lake Baikal. It graduated from peninsula to island at some point after the Ice Age, in a freshwater lake that at some point will itself join the sea when the continent splits. The island has been a shamanistic center since prehistory, and the Buryats worship it as the final resting place of Genghis Khan. The waters of the whole region are generally assumed to have medicinal properties. There was one ragged village, Khuzhir, dominated by a backpacker complex called Nikita’s Guesthouse. The eponymous owner was a former table-tennis champion. Maria had negotiated for a discount on the room and food in exchange for a concert at a local music school for children. The staff was a sheaf of willowy young girls in sandals and flowing skirts, shuffled and directed by an alpha yogi with a shaved head and a shawl over her shoulders. Giovanni, a shaggy and excitable college-aged Frenchman volunteering here in exchange for free board, showed us to our room. We speculated about intra-staff intrigue, and sure enough it wasn’t minutes before I spotted Giovanni in a spirited exchange with an aggrieved local blonde.

  The rest of the town was a ramshackle collection of wood houses and alternately dusty and muddy dirt roads riddled with potholes. Its centerpiece was a standing pool of stinking water. Townspeople had taken note of the success of Nikita’s and were engaged in a rush of construction. There was something of the coastal Alaskan fishing village about it, and also something African. The proprietress of the local general store, a Buryat woman, broke off her conversation as we entered, muttering, “Foreigners . . .” to her other customers.

  We rented mountain bikes and went on a torturous, though stunning, lakeside ride. The lake was ringed with hills, the water deep and eerily still. Just offshore, the water was pierced by crags that looked like stone icebergs, topped by short conifers decorated with the primary-color ribbons of Buddhist observance. Within a single kilometer the landscape morphed from sandy beach to grassland, with the occasional gnarled tree, to pine grove. I went to explore the highlands and found the forest floor covered in trash: punctured sacks of refuse, the fluttering snow of shredded plastic bags, a dead dog in a trash can, the corpse of a cow half-covered with a tarpaulin. The circular concrete foundation of a never-finished home had been repurposed for landfill. A kid leaned over its edge and yelled to his mother, “Hey look, our old couch!” This is what anarchy actually looks like: the absence of a local governing authority, the tragedy of the commons in stark material form. With no town dump, people just drive up into the woods and throw trash off the back of the truck for the wind and the elements to do with what they will. Acres of woodland in the middle of “Siberia’s jewel”—a national forest, in fact—covered in detritus, the rest thinned to a sandy meadow from logging for firewood and for raw materials for development. (“When I think of the consumption of wood in this country, both for the construction and warming of houses, I am astonished that any forests remain in the land,” wrote Custine in 1839.) This was the not-so-hidden back door of Russian capitalism. The power of the government limited itself to action on its own behalf and in its own defense. The rest of society, and the land itself, was left unregulated and, by all evidence, unmourned. The towns, large and small, were graveyards of abandoned and wrecked concrete, undemolished except by lassitude and time, slumped buttresses of a sense of collective failure despite individual innocence. When a state takes full control, it assumes full responsibility; the corollary is that individuals completely relinquish the same. When the state melts away or abdicates, there is no entity to handle the leavings. A communal original sin hangs over everything, beyond the lifetimes of the young people who nonetheless grow up in its shadow.

  Is there a weaker sense of mutual civic responsibility in Russia? Are there, say, church groups for the common good, like you see in Protestant America, or is that an impulse specific to Puritan ideas of work and charity? Is it a result of a protective or apathetic passivity learned in the Soviet era, or is it older, descended from centuries of class immobility, in which no matter your achievements or your talent, you would never leave the world with more than you entered? Forgive my descent into florid language, when the question is so prosaic: who’s going to pick up the trash if it’s not specifically their problem?

  Twelve kilometers down the shoreline was a beach enthusiastically recommended as “slightly warmer than the rest of the lake.” At the first cove, the water was covered with a beige growth I hoped, but couldn’t quite believe, was an algae bloom rather than raw sewage. We pushed on, soggy with sweat, as it began to rain. I’d promised myself, as a reward at the end of this trailless, thigh-scorching ride, a dive into the deep freeze of the lake. As the rain picked up and I envisioned the two-hour ride home, I figured it was now or never, stripped down, dodged the dodgy algae, and plunged in. The skin on my shaved head went instantly numb, giving me the sensation of wearing a tight high-diver’s skullcap. After my heart restarted and I left the lake, we wheeled the bikes up a hill to a yurt-shaped shack labeled “Kafe” in the hopes of a snack, a drink, and a roof from the rain.

  It was a “kafe” in the sense that there were tables, but not in the sense that they had food. What they had were two garrulous drunks, shirtless Sergey and one-eyed Peter, sitting on a plank outside the kitchen, with a two-thirds-empty bottle of vodka between them. They were workers, they said, preparing the premises for the tourist season. Peter claimed, not entirely convincingly, to be the owner of the place, and he offered to fix us some bread and hot tea.

  We devoured some chocolates, shortbread wafers, and instant coffee in the café, which was otherwise stocked with fifteen bottles of vodka, five packs of cigarettes, and no food. (“The local population eats nothing but wild garlic,” grouses Chekhov. “There’s plenty of vodka though! Russians are such pigs. If you ask them why they don’t eat meat and fish, they will tell you that there are problems with supplies and transport and so on, but you’ll find as much vodka as you want even in the remotest villages.”) Sergey stuffed two dried whole fish (omul, the native whitefish salmon) in Maria’s bag and offered us some “Russian energy drink”—vodka, inevitably. He’d “frozen his balls” jumping in the lake that morning, he said, and then floated for a while on an inflatable mattress. The Russian energy drink did give me the heart to cycle home, dodging vans packed with new guests on their way to the hostel. We passed a kid in a convertible, blasting hip-hop. He wore a T-shirt printed to look like a Young Pioneers uniform, complete with faux red scarf and Lenin shoulder badge. Maria fed the dried fish to a stray dog, and we drank beers under an aluminum roof to the accompaniment of the dance-pop hits of the day. I was up all night, the tinnitus of anxiety ringing shrilly.

  A good percentage of the town came to the show the next night. We performed in a one-room schoolhouse, the crowd seated in rows of benches with the rest stuffed into standing room in the back. Teenage girls peeked in the windows and giggled. The scruffy guy in the David Foster Wallace bandanna who had booked the banya left after a few songs. An elderly gay French couple filmed the whole set on their iPad. Nikita, the courtly, white-haired and bent proprietor, comped our stay and invited us to the “VIP breakfast” buffet for staff and special guests. The next morning we headed back to Irkutsk.

  VI.

  The Hall of Sufficient L
ooking (Trans-Mongolian)

  Boat to bus, bus to train, station to station. The return bus from Olkhon delivered us to the train station, where we boarded for a two-day journey to Mongolia via the Buryat capital of Ulan-Ude, home of the hollow Lenin. Dima and Valeriy showed up in the rain to see us off, bearing a cedar air freshener and an Irkutsk refrigerator magnet by which to remember them. A low, thick fog hung like cotton batting over the Angara River.

  Thus far we had been lucky to be off the regular tourist track—no longer. “A traveler’s worst nightmare,” wrote Theroux, is “meeting another traveler.” Proust agreed: “Most of the companions you chance to meet on the road are more an encumbrance than a pleasure.” For the first time, the train car was full of Americans—from here to Beijing, it became pretty clear that the Westerners were segregated into tourist cars. (The other cars, and the station benches and floors, were dominated by young Russian soldiers bent over their ration boxes, headed for a stint at the border. Civilian Russians, I suppose, had little business in Mongolia.) Between Irkutsk and the far eastern end of the line in Vladivostok lay three days of Siberian monotony—what Custine called “a forest without trees, interrupted by towns without life”—so most travelers choose the more romantic Trans-Mongolian branch, which swings south and east through Ulaanbaatar to Beijing. Tall, energetic, bearded men in sandals made each other’s acquaintance; serious women in glasses, traveling alone, fiddled with complicated cameras.

  I had another difficult night’s sleep. Touring is both a crucial component of most musicians’ annual income and the gathering sieve when prospecting for material for songs. It is also a waste of time, especially creative time, and of energy that could be spent on producing new work. I had a fresh album coming out in England in a matter of weeks, and organizing artwork, publicity, and logistics from Siberia was a challenge. Concerned about weight and security, we hadn’t brought laptops and were constantly borrowing other people’s to conduct pressing business.1 Yet a smartphone, given the etiquette of the day, makes a fantastic clandestine note-taking tool. If I was forever pulling out a pencil and notebook, it would be at a minimum distracting, whereas pulling out a phone in the middle of a conversation to tap out a few lines is scarcely even considered rude and draws no comment.

  Much of this book was written in the Notes app on our iPad or on my iPhone, leading to an entrenched battle with autocorrect, frustration that the apostrophe is on a different keyboard screen than the letters, and a manuscript that began life in a ludicrous font. I would almost rather have carted around a manual typewriter.

  I was up reading until about four, awake again by six. “Sunrise,” said Proust, “is a necessary concomitant of long railway journeys, just as are hard-boiled eggs, illustrated papers, packs of cards, rivers upon which boats strain but make no progress.” We got out at the Ulan-Ude station just long enough to use the bathroom. Since most public toilets are pay toilets, this left us with a stack of ruble coins we wouldn’t need much longer. In the weak light of sunrise, the frictionless alchemy of the market turned the coins into a couple of potato-filled puffs of oily fried dough and a piece of almond cake, and we went back to the train, to the bunks, and to sleep.

  The train turned south toward the Mongolian border, and the landscape contained barely enough detail to be describable: dry grassland, low mountains, the same brown wooden-shack village with pastel highlights and backyard garden plots endlessly repeating (“It may be said,” noted Custine, “that there is but one village in all of Russia”). We passed Lake Gusinoye, unexpectedly large, a power station looming foggily on the far shore. The birch and pines were now gone, and the land oscillated between the poles of positive marsh and negative desert.

  Besides the tourists, there were some practical and aesthetic differences between this train and the stolid Trans-Siberian workhorses of the past few weeks. The teacups on the Russian trains were glass, nested in pressed-tin holders; those on the Trans-Mongolian were paper and disposable. The mattresses and pillows were a vivid maroon and gold but so thin as to be merely decorative, and my primary sensory impression after a night of half-sleep was the itch of a wool blanket pricking through the sheet. Say what you will about the stained and indecorous bedding on the quotidian Russian lines, but it was thick and functional. This was the future of rail, though: in 2015, China announced that it would build a $242 billion high-speed line from Beijing to Moscow. It would cut the travel time between the two cities to forty-eight hours and render most of the legendary old line, and its languorous rides, obsolete.

  A German guy in his twenties set up court outside our door and bragged lordishly about his travels through Belarus, where “you can go to a club and get a table and a bottle of vodka for $20, and all the Belarusian girls come over and hang around you, huh-huh-huh-huh.” He had an ingratiating chuckle that took me about two iterations to detest, a guttural quatrain of hail-fellow condescension. “I think many people are coming to Russia for reasons like that, huh-huh-huh-huh . . .”

  In theory, it’s a four-hour ride to the border from Ulan-Ude, but ours was running six and counting. It was a fickle train, taking short stops at large towns and a long stop for no obvious reason where a lone mahogany stallion drank by a bend in the river, then again at the next bend where a dozen more simply stood, facing south, up to their fetlocks in the current.

  We approached the border, passing a home garden fenced on one side by the vertical, end-to-end carcasses of four dead Ladas. Actual fences made a slow stylistic shift from long logs laid lengthwise to a threnody of vertical twigs lashed together in the African style. The valley was verdant floodplain, though the central river seemed too meager to merit such a retinue. A German did a lengthy series of deep knee bends, blocking the hallway.

  We were released for two hours in the border town of Naushka, where we found a couple of decent vegetable stands and a sullen café. I ordered microwaved mashed potatoes and eggs. Someone stole my sunglasses. The one overgrown and under-watered park was home to two weathered statues cast in concrete and spray-painted silver: one looked like a moose but may have been two camels; the other was a classical female nude with both hands broken off to reveal rebar claws. In theory, border towns could embody the face a country would like to present to its neighbors. In practice, they are, like airports, often a drained, liminal breach—the space between two calloused palms, not the point of contact. We returned to the platform, through the station’s Zal Dosmotra, which Maria said probably meant “Inspection Hall” but read to Ukrainian eyes as “Hall of Looking Until We’ve Looked Enough” or “Hall of Sufficient Looking.” Having had more than enough of looking at Naushka, we reboarded the train.

  This was premature. Three hours into our wait at the Naushka station, the rest of the train had decoupled and we were the only car left on the track. The Russians had collected our passports an hour and a half earlier. The German was doing calisthenics again. One of the American girls strummed a ukulele. A genial Mongolian border guard strolled down the hallway with an adorable drug dog, a little black terrier. Only five hours later, we were on the move. For fifteen minutes.

  Sükhbaatar, the first Mongolian border town opposite Naushka, felt by comparison rather a happening place. (“One is apt,” said George Kennan, “upon arriving after a long voyage in a strange country, to form a more favourable opinion of its people and scenery than his subsequent experience will sustain.”) We passed through a few kilometers of marshy river valley, then past scattered white yurts like low, wide mushrooms ringed by sprays of bovine spores. On the east bank, a circle of spotlights illuminated a gold statue of something or other. Farther down the hill a silver globe sat atop an obelisk. As we pulled into the station, out walked a young dude—and “dude” is the appropriate term—in a tight black-and-gold outfit and equally tight hair. Behind him was another dude with big white headphones, a backwards Kangol hat, a Jordan shirt, one black Jordan sneaker with red highlights, and one white Jordan sneaker with red highlights.

  Th
e Mongolians were stylish. The older gentlemen wore suits with pants tucked into knee-high rubber boots and cocked pinstripe fedoras or cowboy hats, and had the bowed legs that come from a lifetime on horseback. It was a town full of Asian Tom Waitses. I saw an old woman with a crew cut and a Clint Eastwood face wearing capri pants over red wool socks tucked into heels.

  A Mongolian soldier saluted as the train pulled into the station, and my mood lifted just being there and out of Russia. A woman swept the taxi stand with a twig broom—they take care of their public spaces! The crummy public housing blocks were painted fresh pastel and seemed kept up! There were kids in the street! People seemed to be in (even at the time I realized how subjective this was, and how I was projecting) a fundamentally better mood. I hadn’t realized how weighed down I’d become by the underlying cruddiness of Russian provincial urban living.

  Twelve of the cities we had visited in Russia and Ukraine were included in a 2012 UN report on a list of the twenty-eight most endangered large cities in the world (based on productivity, quality of life, infrastructure, environmental degradation, social justice, and negative population growth through declining birthrates, increased mortality, and emigration). Dnipropetrovs’k, Donetsk, and Kharkov in Ukraine, and Russia’s Novosibirsk, Omsk, Perm’, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Ufa, Voronezh, and even Saint Petersburg were considered in danger of shrinking to the point of disappearing.2 And the overall list is dominated by Russia and Ukraine: of the twenty-eight endangered cities, eleven are Russian, five Ukrainian, three Italian, two South Korean, and one each in Armenia, Georgia, Hungary, Cuba, Liberia, Romania, and the Czech Republic. The population of Russia as a whole is also under threat: deaths exceeded births by 12.4 million between 1991 and 2007, and if projections hold true, by 2025 it will have lost 20 million people.