Travels in Siberia Read Online Free PDF Page A

into the waffle treads of heavy boots—and fresh wet mud, and a lot of wet cement. Every once in a while, in just the right damp basement in America, I find a cousin of the Russia-smell unexpectedly there.
    We got into one of the lines for the passport booths. Katya is a compact, forceful woman unruffled in most situations, with a wide smile made wider and sunnier by the gap between her two front teeth. Now she looked pale, and the skin stretched tight around her eyes as she muttered to herself, “I should never have come back here. This was a stupid idea.” The light above the passport booth flashed green, and Katya went in. Some minutes passed, the light flashed again, and it was my turn.
    Again, I had never seen anything like this before. The bright, harsh lighting, the thick glass between me and the young passport officer, the lonely singularity of myself in the booth, the atmosphere of real-life no-fooling—all this rattled me. The passport officer gestured for me to take off my baseball cap. Later I would learn of the remarkable ability possessed by all Russians, even the sweetest and gentlest, to make theirfaces rock hard instantly when they want them to be. The young officer used the rock face on me, and it had its effect. When he looked down to examine my passport and visa, I noticed my reflection in the glass between us. My face had an expression of deep seriousness and fear that the moment did not, in reality, call for. When he looked up again to give me back my documents, he saw that I had relaxed, and he let a sly smile show through the rock. It was a kid’s grin, suggesting that we had only been playing a game, and I was now a point down.
    Beyond the booths, Katya found our luggage, and she asked me to stay with it while she went to the ladies’ room. In a few minutes she returned, shaking her head. “Why did I come back here?” she repeated. “This place is insane. The women’s bathroom is totally insane.”
    “Why is the women’s bathroom insane?”
    “In the women’s bathroom there is a woman doing her dishes. Where could she have come from? I have no idea. There are dishes and pots all over. She is scrubbing away. There are chicken bones on the edge of the sink.”
    We found a cart and put our bags on it and pushed it past a final set of officers, and then through heavy windowless doors, and suddenly we were outside in the muggy afternoon. A few feet from the doors, a crowd waiting to meet the arrivals strained against a low barricade. At the front of the press stood Katya’s older brother, Mitya Arnold, a physicist with dark, mournful eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard longer and fuller than Tolstoy’s. He leaped at Katya and took her in a hug. Next to Mitya was the driver he had hired, a man named Stas, as big and slope-shouldered and patient and jowly and put-upon as any Russian coachman I’d ever read about, differing from them only in the light-green Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt he had on.
    We drove from Sheremetyevo into the city. I remember all the details of our arrival in slow motion, because the whole event was a kind of epiphany. Even today Katya says she feels guilty for having exposed me to this contagion, the love of Russia that infected me. The shoulders of the road had been mowed incompletely or not at all. In places the weeds grew six and seven feet high beside the pavement. In other places they were lower; evidently the cows roaming the roadside had grazed them down. Openings in the greenery revealed sunlit trunks of birches, spotted like dalmatians, black on white. A woman in a babushka strolled theditch carrying a basket of peeled woven twigs—looking for mushrooms, Katya said.
    Closer to the city the traffic thickened. On the sides of buses and streetcars there were no ads, another new one on me. Those vehicles, and the trucks, and some of the cars were covered in a coating of road dust so matte and so thorough that they could have been made of adobe. Traffic cops