Travels in Siberia Read Online Free PDF

with batons gestured one vehicle or another to the side—soliciting bribes, Stas said. Heavy, unfiltered exhaust hung in the air. Then suburban high-rises ascended around us, and then the buildings and onion domes of Moscow itself. We drove down streets, then lanes, then alleys barely wider than the car, until we stopped in the courtyard of the apartment building of Chuda, Katya’s best friend. Chuda and her husband, Kolya, were there to meet us, with more hugs and tears; from then all the conversation was in Russian, and I became a cat or a dog, understanding nothing except once in a while my own name.
    The staircase to Chuda’s apartment looked like a stone ramp into which feet had gradually worn steps over the course of a thousand years. The entry was so dark you couldn’t see, but there was more light as you went up. The lower half of the wall along the staircase had just been painted a bright policeman blue and the paint had an eye-watering smell like something junkies would sniff deliberately. Chuda opened the embossed, padded door to her apartment and we went into the front hall, my suitcase now streaked blue where it had bumped against the fresh paint. I did not understand that I was to take off my shoes. Chuda demonstrated for me by pantomime and gave me a backless pair of house slippers to put on. I stood around not knowing what to do, unable to make small talk, or any talk at all.
    In the kitchen, we sat down to a big meal Chuda had prepared. I ate delicious fried fish and drank icy-cold vodka, trying to project mute goodwill and gratitude. Her son Kolya had been among the people who had stood with Yeltsin when he defied the generals’ putsch in August, just a year before. She said Kolya’s photo had been in the news—he was standing on a barricade in his white shirt like a hero of the War of 1812, she said. Katya translated fragments of the story for me. Neither she nor I had slept for at least a day, so after a while Chuda showed me a bed in her son’s room where I could take a nap. I lay down but didn’t sleep, or read, or even think. I stared at the ceiling, where a paper airplane hungfrom the chandelier. This paper airplane had sharp angles, and fins, and a strange projectile sleekness, like the elegant arrowhead-shaped MiG fighter jet. No one in America would have made such a paper airplane. It swayed in the breeze from the tall, narrow windows.
    I was thoroughly stunned. Love, with an assist from novelty, had blindsided me. I had been overcome, lost permanently. This kind of thing happens to people in middle age, I realize. It’s embarrassing. The feeling began the minute I stepped off the plane, with the absurd business of the exit sign and the correcting soldier.
    In the days that followed I went all over Moscow with Alex and Katya and Chuda’s younger son, Tisha, a high school kid then, who speaks good English. I saw the Kremlin, Katya’s elementary school, St. Basil’s Cathedral, Lenin’s tomb, Lenin himself (after viewing him I was able to read several books about him I would not have read before, because now I considered him a personal acquaintance). I visited churches on whose grounds people were cutting the lawn with scythes. I rode the metro, absorbed in the details of the subway cars, reminiscent of an American electric train set of the 1950s. I joined a tour of the Novodevichy Monastery and its cemetery and saw the graves of Chekhov, Khrushchev and his wife, Ilf and Petrov, Mikoyan (designer of the MiG), and Gogol. I spent longer than other people wanted to spend looking at the Rublev icons in the Tretyakov Gallery; and so on.
    One evening at Chuda’s apartment, she and her husband and Katya and Mitya and Mitya’s wife, Irina, and their daughter, and some other people and I were sitting around the large dining room table drinking vodka, and the moment came when the foreigner must account for himself. Through Katya they asked me questions about myself, my family, my work. Then they