Someone bangs on the log cabin door. “The bus is ready!” a voice shouts. I glance at my phone. Ten after six. We’re late. The voice is Andrey’s. Andrey is Galina’s son, ski instructor in the winter, tour guide in the summer. “The bus is ready. You have five minutes or we leave without you. No refunds!”
Initially, we had been so excited about an excursion to Olkhon that we placed a hundred-dollar deposit on the trip. Olkhon is a natural wonder, the largest of twenty-seven islands in Baikal. It has a 1,500-person population, a large part of which is Bury, the largest Aboriginal group in Russia. At the top of the island, the widest point, Cape Khoboy, it’s seventy-seven kilometres wide.
In this hungover state, my enthusiasm is dampened, but I don’t want to miss it. I jump up. “We’ll be right there,” I shout.
“Okay,” Andrey says through the door, and his footsteps clump down the stairs.
Igor lies sideways on his bed. Only his torso is actually supported. His feet are on the floor and his neck hangs back. His position suggests the limbo. I kick him. I punch him in the arm. The only vital sign is his snoring.
I shower, washing myself aggressively with the radioactive-coloured Axe anti-hangover. It does not work. My head feels like a hollowed-out stone.
“Dude, get up,” I say to Igor. He hasn’t moved. I dress and Andrey bangs on the door again. I open it. “I can’t wake him,” I say.
Andrey steps into the room and stands over Igor. Andrey has an impressive demeanour. He is tall and calm. He does not seem to be upset over our tardiness or our general condition. Certainly he is not surprised by it. “You don’t want to go to Olkhon, brother?” Andrey gently asks. Igor’s eyes open.
“Olkhon?” Igor says. “I want. Is it time already?”
“It’s time,” Andrey says.
Igor sits up, shakes his head. He stands and reaches for his back, wincing slightly. Then he walks directly out the door in the clothes he slept in, lighting a cigarette as he goes.
We climb in the four-wheel-drive van with automatic doors. In addition to Andrey, two couples and two blond women are already in the bus—seven respectable people and us. Igor greets everyone, apologizes for having kept them waiting. I charge to the back and collapse into a corner seat.
Igor introduces himself all around and asks where everyone is from. In clipped, one-word utterances, they all reply, “Moscow.”
“Jesus Christ, Jeff,” Igor says to me. “We are on a bus full of Muscovites!”
He begins chatting, partly to himself, partly to Andrey, the driver, who only nods and smiles in response. He speaks in generous helpings of mat.
Lena, one of the blond women, turns to him after a while. “Excuse me,” she says. “Is it possible for you to not use such language and also, if it suits you, as I’m certain it’d suit us, to stop talking at any point.”
“Of course, madam,” Igor says. “Your wish is my command.”
The drive is five painful hours from Irkutsk. The roads are mostly paved, but part of the excursion involves stopping at all the most magnetic places on the way so that the Muscovites can tie ribbons with wishes onto trees.
At one particularly magnetic place, Igor and I brace ourselves next to a fence post so that we don’t puke.
The Siberian sun burns a bright red. But countering the heat, there’s a constant and relentless cold blowing off Baikal.
We get out of Andrey’s van and board the ferry named Gates of Olkhon that takes us to the island. Andrey bids us farewell at the shore. After the short crossing onto the island, one of his partners meets us. He drives a UAZ, a bus that is nicknamed “loaf of bread” for its loaf-like shape. We pile in. As the loaf of bread wobbles up and down the washed-out dirt road, Igor announces, “I am starting to realize that we are on Olkhon.”
Perfect circles about six feet in diameter dot the fields on either side of us. Lena asks the driver what they are. “UFOs were coming,” he says. “They appeared more than two years ago. Before was burnt and now only brown grass.”
“Aliens visit Russia a lot, it seems,” I say to Igor.
“Some sort of it,” Igor says.
As we drive across the island, the landscape goes through spectacular changes. At one point it’s idyllic, like the Caribbean. Aqua water, sparkling sandy beaches. A little farther on, we’re traversing barely navigable roads through dense forests. Then, for twenty minutes, there’s such thick low-lying fog cover that we can’t even see the lake twenty metres away. We stop in the fog at a convenience store where a few Buryati sit around eating sunflowers. They sell us old bottles of water. There used to be a settlement here, but everything except the store burnt down. It’s like something out of a horror movie. A few kilometres down the road and we’re back to the Caribbean.
At some point, Lena takes out her wallet and I catch a glimpse of a NYC MetroCard. She just came back from there, she says in English when I ask her about it. She softens toward us a bit when she realizes I am a foreigner.
At our final destination on the tip of the island, the tour group wanders around.
By the natural law of groups and couples in groups, Igor and I end up paired off with Lena and her friend, Anya. They are stewardesses for a private airline. They flew a group of businessmen here and are now staying at the Hotel Mayak, the very definition of opulence in Listvyanka.
Lena endears herself to Igor after their initial antagonism by saying that, to her ear, he speaks perfectly clear, if profane, Russian with no St. Petersburg accent. Lena wears a long, flowing black dress. Open in the back, the dress reveals some burn scarring along her back that somehow makes her even more beautiful. She has more than a touch of that Moskvichka arrogance. Anya wears a tight T-shirt and jean shorts cut such that half of her skinny ass hangs out. She hardly makes a sound. Igor and I speculate that she is on prescription drugs or something. She literally says nothing, just sits, smoking and looking uninterestedly about. Lena, once she has taken to us a bit, proves to be as chatty as Igor.
It is surprising to them, Lena tells us as we walk across the northernmost point of Olkhon together, that the two of us are travelling together. They look at us as if we are a true spectacle.
“We have known each other for ten years,” Igor says.
Igor blows out his flip-flops. He flings them off a cliff’s edge and the wind carries them into Baikal. He spends the rest of the trip barefoot.
We had been promised lunch on this excursion, but the driver doesn’t seem to know anything about it.
Igor and I and Lena and Anya seek shelter from the heat in the woods, where Igor befriends a group of Irkutsk locals cooking fish-head soup in a pot over a campfire. They invite us to join them around a small picnic table. They have plenty of plastic bowls and spoons, and bread for all of us.
“Have some ukha,” Igor says to me, using the generic name for fish soup.
“No,” one of the babushkas who offered us the soup says. “It is not ukha. Right now it is fish soup.” She goes into a Baggie and finds a plastic cup. Then she removes a bottle of cheap vodka and fills the cup. She hands it to Igor and they toast. “Now it is ukha!” she says.
As we wait for the ferry to return, Lena mentions that she in part learned English from reading Danielle Steel novels.
“More interesting than Pushkin?” I say.
“Sometimes, yes,” she says. “I can still quote it. Would you like to hear?”
“By all means.”
She clears her throat. “‘You think that just because I won’t have sex with you that I don’t like sex. Men think that the entire female race is frigid because at any given time she doesn’t want to have sex with one man.’“
“Bravo,” I say. Short of reading all of Steel’s oeuvre, which I won’t be doing, I have no way of verifying its accuracy, but it’s impressively recited.
Igor sees something floating in the water. He finds a stick and fishes it out. A German baseball cap promoting car racing. It reads Deutsche Vermögensberatung Michael Schumacher. He takes it as a souvenir from Baikal. “The island is giving me this hat for leaving flip-flops. Like cosmic trade.”
The next night, Igor invites the stewardesses and everyone staying at our place to visit the husky farm and then have a party at our outdoor kitchen. He mentions that the husky farm is kind of a mess so tells them to dress appropriately.
Lena and Anya take a taxi to our hotel. They arrive wearing short skirts and tank tops and stiletto heels five inches high.
Igor greets them. “What the fuck you are doing in these shoes?”
“You invited us to a party,” Lena says.
“You will sink into the mud of the husky farm.”
So the husky farm is scratched and we commence the party straight away. The girls are cold and unhappy that we’ll be sitting outside. Igor brings down one of his sweaters for Lena and a comforter from his bed for them to put across their legs.
A British guy living in Thailand named Paddy joins us, along with the Swiss guys, a real international soiree. There are some others from the hotel hanging out in the outdoor kitchen, but they keep to themselves.
Paddy asks for an explanation of the following: Every morning, he goes into the café down the street and sits down, and without giving him a chance to order, they bring him rice and eggs. He can’t figure out why it is brought to him or for that matter why anyone would prepare rice with eggs. He has tried to gratefully return it or to order something else, but with no success.
Lena suggests that Paddy learn a very useful Russian phrase that he might try in this situation and others: Da shto ty govorish!? This is roughly the equivalent of saying, “Right, say what!?” It is particularly useful, she says, in the markets. When someone tells him a price, he should say, “Da shto ty govorish!?” Igor counters that this will not do Paddy any good because he cannot follow it up with anything. Lena suggests that he follow it up with absolute silence and he will get a better price. Paddy agrees to try it, and he asks her how to say, “Please, whatever you do, bring me anything you want except just no rice and eggs,” in Russian.
“This will not work,” Lena says. “In Russia, you must show your strength—and where are huskies you promised us?” She swivels around to Igor.
“I already told you, you can’t go see the huskies in these icepick heels,” Igor says.
Lena and Anya seem surprised and disappointed.
“Something smells here,” Lena says. “I think it’s your sweater.”
“No,” Igor says, “it can’t be.”
“I smell something too,” I say.
An awkard silence obtains, punctuated by occasional sniffing.
“Sweater is clean,” Igor says. “Comforter is clean.” A moment passes. Then he reconsiders. “Take off sweater,” he says.
Lena’s face turns to horror. “What?” she says. “I can’t touch it.” She reaches her hands to the sky.
Igor comes around and lifts the sweater off her. He buries his nose in it and throws it over the railing. “Fucking cat,” he says, indicting Dorofay, who apparently, after shredding our wallpaper job in the apartment, decided to mark the sweater before Igor packed it for the trip.
The Spice Girls come on the radio again, and Paddy says, “Ah, daughters of the UK!”
At first, Lena is a bit too prim to eat the fish, which you open like a zipper and eat with your hands. But after a while she tries it, and before long she has cleaned two of the endangered omul down to skeleton and head.
“Don’t you have any wine for the ladies?” Lena asks. We do not.
“We have vodka for you, Lenochka,” Igor says.
“Foo,” she says.
“What, do you want the foreigners to think that bears don’t roam the streets and women don’t drink vodka in Russia?”
“I don’t care what the foreigners think.”
Paddy goes to his room, where his wife, who is six months pregnant and with whom he’s travelling the length of the Trans-Siberian, is sleeping. He brings back a box of cheap wine and puts it on the table. Lena sits waiting for someone to pour a glass for her.
“Is anyone here a gentleman?” she asks. Paddy pours for them. “Thank you very much for the light consummation,” she says. She cocks her head, suggesting how proud she is of this turn of phrase.
Paddy’s face goes bright red. “I’m glad my wife is not here right now,” he says.
“It is a very nice thing to say. It is light consummation.”
“It’s very nice. It’s super-friendly,” Swiss Robert says.
“Does this come from Danielle Steel also?” I ask.
Lena looks embarrassed but unsure exactly why.
“This next is a toast for women!” Igor says. We all clink glasses.
Paddy teaches us toasts in Irish and Welsh.
Lena repeats them with seriousness. She says that these will be very useful should she ever encounter the Irish or Welsh on her flights.
One bottle of vodka disappears and then another. Igor and I run to the store for more, neglecting again to pick up wine for the ladies, and they are further displeased.
All night, across the outdoor porch, a girl with a short blond bob has periodically caught my gaze. She started out sitting with a group at another picnic table, drinking a bottle of whiskey and a can of Coke, and then her friends left her alone. Now the whiskey has begun to flow. She stares me down and eventually stumbles over and asks me to dance. Our companions all giggle, and I dance with her to some George Michael. She is wasted and steps all over my feet.
After our dance, I invite her to sit with us and everyone greets her warmly, and she tells us her story. Her name is Tanya. She lives in Irkutsk. She comes here sometimes with friends and sometimes alone. This time alone. The others were acquaintances from Irkutsk whom she’d run into here before.
“I am here to forget everything,” she says. “About my job, about my husband …”
Igor talks to her for a while. He gets the impression that she is downshifting just like us.
“You will come back and all these problems will still be there,” Igor says with tenderness and as if talking to himself. “Better to solve them than to run away.”
It appears that we are at an outpost that attracts characters of very different sorts: foreigners looking for adventure, regional residents escaping from the stresses of their everyday lives in the city, and Russians from the capitals, on business and not, looking for some meaning near a big lake.
Soon Igor and Tanya are dancing and making out. Some eighties music popular in Russia comes on. Bad Boys Blue. “You’re a woman / I’m a man / This is more than just a game.” But their dance is stunted. Tanya and Igor flow and wrestle, flow and wrestle. Occasionally she tries to steer, and they almost fall over.
“You will not lead. I will lead,” he says. At this, she breaks away, stumbles down the steps, and pukes to the side. She staggers to her room in the little blue house without looking back. Igor stands at the top of the stairs. Paddy and Lena are amused. Igor looks forlorn. It is as though we have just watched the entirety of their relationship—from burning hot young love to the inevitable bickering through to the culminating struggle that makes or breaks—play out in one song.
Lena and Anya call a cab to take them back to their hotel, and then the drinking switches into high gear. Though medical authorities have assured me that you cannot feel your liver, I am beginning to experience a small pain where I believe my liver should be.
Paddy has come to Russia, at least in part, to prove to some Russian that he can drink as much as him, and here Igor is. “Drink, Russian!” Paddy shouts to Igor, and he finally steps over the line.
“Relax,” Igor tells him. “We will drink.” Igor proposes that they arm-wrestle as well. Paddy stupidly agrees. Igor beats him twice.
It’s a stereotype, of course, but I have yet to see a Westerner who can hold his own drinking with a Russian. It is best not to engage in such seemingly false and potentially demeaning cultural generalizations. And to be sure, there are plenty of Russians who drink nothing or only very little. But if you compare the moderate drinking Westerner to the moderate-drinking Russian—or even the heavily drinking Westerner to the moderate-drinking Russian—there can be no comparison. Russians—and particularly, in my experience, certain Russian men—can absorb alcohol in quantities that would kill most American frat boys. Sadly, over time, it kills many of these certain Russian men also.
And for all that we may share, there are, I have come to understand, certain physiological differences between us. Russians need to drink almost no water and can subsist, seemingly, on a daily diet of liquids that includes only diuretics, primarily alcohol and black tea. If I do not consume several litres of water each day, my lips chap and fingers crack. In the winter months, I have entered the subway in my down parka and stepped inside the subway car, which is stuffed full with others in down parkas or fur coats. The temperature in the metro car can be the approximate temperature of a Russian banya while outside it’s minus-twenty. But somehow, I am the only one drenched in a cold sweat.
As Paddy gets drunker, he eases up on the tough guy routine. He’s from the UK originally but lives in Bangkok, where he teaches biology. The trip thus far has been hard on him and his wife, harder than he’d imagined.
We ask his opinion, as a biologist, on the crop circles on Olkhon. What rational explanation might exist for them? His theory, after three bottles of vodka and two punishing rounds of arm-wrestling Igor? Sheep are peeing in perfectly round circles.
Andrey appears, back from some excursion or other, and counter-proposes that they are the product of a kind of plant or brown grass that deposits its seeds in concentric circles.
The next day, the Swiss guys leave after a bit of infighting. Two of them wanted to go to Irkutsk. Robert wanted to stay in Listvyanka. He almost defected, preferring to hang with Igor and me, and only at the final hour did he decide to stick with them.
With Paddy and the Swiss guys and the stewardesses gone, we are again seemingly alone with the bruising dogs of Krestovaya Pad.
As we’re wandering around, Anya calls on Igor’s cellphone. She’s called several times a day every day. He usually ignores it. This time he answers reluctantly.
“I had a bad dream last night,” she tells him. “Is everything okay with you? We need to talk seriously …”
“It’s spectacular,” Igor says after he hangs up. “One night I fall in love, and Anya dreams I’m murdered.”
“Fell in love? The last you saw that girl, you were shouting at her and she was puke-walking away from you.”
“She put her lips to my neck,” he says. “It means a lot, man.”
We stumble across a little church, St. Nicholas Orthodox, famous because the Decembrists, soldiers involved in an early revolt against czarist rule, once worshipped here. The church is supposedly built without nails. Russian Orthodox churches, even the most provincial ones, go heavy on the gold. The icons, like all good icons, I suppose, inspire simultaneously comfort and fear. Igor crosses himself as he walks in.
He leaves fifty rubles in the donation box and buys an icon, his name saint, Igor, Prince of Chernigov, the bearer of great sufferings.
The smell in the church is rich with incense. Several pensioners light candles, leaving them in front of the portraits of saints after whispering a prayer.
We sit on the church steps outside. “Well, man, there is something in the churches. Some atmosphere, something,” Igor says.
“Why did you buy the icon?”
“I don’t know. Actually, Mom is always giving me these things. I have, like, three or four at home.”
“So why’d you buy another one?”
“I don’t have this one. It’s some remembrance. It’s going to be a good memory.”
A phone call comes through. It’s Big Al calling from the south with good news. He’s arranged an in-person job interview for Igor at a resort near Sochi, where he’s working, on the Black Sea. It’s basically a sure thing if he can make the interview. Igor instantaneously agrees. He’s been waiting for an opportunity, and here it is.
We stop by the post office, which appears to be, from its window display, selling macaroni, and use the dial-up Internet access to sketch out a plan. He’ll take the Trans-Siberian with me to Krasnoyarsk, stay for a day or two, and then fly to Sochi.
“Big Al is already ordering deer meat for my arrival!” Igor says.
Soon Igor will be searching for a new life on the Black Sea, where we started this trip. I recall his having, miraculously, found a chicken heart on the beach as we were leaving. And now, just as he said, he’s going back.
When we return to the hotel, Tanya is up. She apologizes to us for her behaviour last night. We tell her it’s all okay. She tells us that she is returning to Irkutsk tomorrow, and we ask if she might be willing to give us a lift to the train station.
She agrees, and we spend that evening cooking macaroni bought from the post office with her on the outdoor porch. Another group arrives from Irkutsk, but they don’t seem interested in hanging out with us. At a certain point I leave Tanya and Igor alone, because it looks as though I should.
Igor comes to bed smitten. It makes me wonder what exactly he’s looking for. She’s thirty-two, no kids. Nothing like the sophisticated, materialistic, and gorgeous young city girls he’s dated since I knew him. Maybe that’s why he’s interested in the opposite? Or maybe he has no idea what he wants. As usual, he is less than forthcoming on the subject.
“Do you see some future with her?” I ask.
“You can’t see the future,” he says, “only live it.”