TRAVELS IN SIBERIA Ian Frazier204 IAN FRAZIER. with them—dark green tree lines converging at a distant yellow comer af the fields, and the lower trunks of a birch grove black as a bar code against a sunny meadow behind them, and the luminous yellows and greens of vegetables in baskets along the road, and grimy trucks with only their license numbers wiped clean, their black diesel smoke unrav= ling behind them neross the sky. And everywhere, the absence of fences. I couldn't get over that. In America, almost all open country is fenced, azd your eye automatically uses fence lines for reference the way a hand feels for a banister. Here the only fenced places were the gardens inthe villages and the little pad docks for animals, Also, here the road signs were fewer and had almost 20 bullet holes. This oddity stood ont even more because the stop signs, for some reason, were exactly the same as stop signs in America: octago> nal, red, and with stop on them in big white English leters, Any stop sign in such a rural place in America (let alone a stop sign written ina foreign language) would likely have a few bullet holes. Because I knew the 1885 route of George Kennan, I generally had it in the back of my mind. Though the human geography had changed in 116 years, was confident Kenan had traveled quite near where T was right now. Kerman and George Frost, his travel companion and sketch artist, arrived in Ekaterinburg on June 13, 1885, and left there soon aft tox Kennan wrote, “When we passed through the gate of Ekaterinburg, We Were on the ‘great Siberian road—an imperial highway which 6x. tends from the mountains of the Ural to the headwaters of the Amur River, a distance of more than three thousand miles.” During Frost and Kennan’ first day on the Siberian road (also called the Sibitskii Trakt, the Moskovskii Trukt, or just the Tralt), they sav 1,445 freight wagons. The Trans-Siberian Railway had not yet been built, so the Tralet served as Siberia’s main artery, Traffic erowded it, espectally the tea caravans, which were among. its chief nuisances—the great throngs of carts and wagons loaded with crates of tea from China moving. in herd formation all over the roadway at the will of their driverless. horses loosely controlled by a few caravan masters, For centuries the tea trade enriched cities in Siberia, Tea that came overland was said to have amore delicate taste than tea that had suffered the mists and fogs of a sea journey. Of course, much of the Trakt’s eastbound traffic consisted of exiles, Shackled or not, sometimes accompanied by their families, abvays under TRAVELS IN SIBERIA 205 ssnard, parties of exiles journeyed to their various Siberian destinations (on foot for most of the way. In tsarist times, many thousands of exiles walked the Trakt every year, It officially crossed into Siberia 150 miles east of Ekaterinburg, where the province of Perm, a western Russian province, met the Siberian province of Tobolsk. A square pillar of stuc- coed or plastered brick marked the spot of this continental transition One side of the pillar bore the coat of arms of Perm province, and the other side that of Tobolsk. Of this marker, Kennan wrote: No other spot between St. Petersburg and the Pacific is more’full of painful suggestions, and none has for the traveler a more mel- ancholy interest than the little opening in the forest where stands this grief-consecrated pillar, Here hundreds of thousands of ex- ited human beings—men, women, and children; princes, nobles, sand peasants—have bidden good-by forever to friends, country, and home. Here, standing beside the square white boundary post, they have, for the lat time, looked backward with love and grief at their native land, and then, with tearblurred eyes and heavy hearts, they have marched away into Siberia to meet the unknown hardships and privations of a new life, No other boundary post in the world has witnessed so much human suffering, or been passed by such a multitude of people. ‘At this pillar, Kerman said, exiles were allowed to stop and make a last goodbye, to press their faces to the ground and pick up a litle of the arth of western Russia to bring with them, Beyond this spot they were, ina sense, jumping off into the void. Naturally 1 wanted to find this pillar and see what it looks like now: Tf I stood beside it, I would be in an exact place where the famous traveler had been. { explained about the pillar to Sergei aud we kept our eyes open. Kennan had said that the pillar was two days’ travel from Ekate- rinburg, between the villages of Markova and Tugulymskaya. I noted a large town named Tugalym on the map, but Markova was either too sinallo be included or didn’t exist anymore, Then about 145 miles from Ekaterinburg, on the right-hand side of the road, there it was: Markova, barely a hamlet, just some houses and a’sign. A short distance beyond it, tall markers announced the boundaries of two raioni, or distrits. The ‘marker facing westward said Tugulymskii Raion and the eastward-facing206 IAN FRAZIER ‘marker said Tapitskii Raion, We got out at the wide place in the road there. Pistachio shells and a Fanta Orange can littered the oil-stained ground, the trucks blew by, the trees leaned overhead. But no sign of Kennan’s fateful pillar could be seen, ‘Awoman in a roadside calé nearby told Sergei that the road we were on was the new road. The previous one, the original Trakt, used to nan through the woods just to the north. She had never heard of any pillar such as Kennan had deseribed. Following her directions, we went down abrushy lane until it ended at a collection of trash piles, and then Sergei and I continued on foot into deep forest with weeds and underbrush over ourheads sometimes. Rain had fallen the night before and our clothes swere soon soaked through, while grass sceds covered us all over: The ‘oman had said that exiles who died along the road were buried beside the old Trakt, and you could still see the mounds. We did find mounds on either side of a declvity among the trees, and its barely visible path could once have been a roudway. But the mosquitoes were coming at us so madly that we had to wave our hands before us like windshield wipers. on the fastest setting, and T soon decided that Kennan's pillar iit did perhaps exist somewhere in these thickets, would not be found by me. Back on the road, we drove slowly and asked people along tif they'd ever heard of the pillar—none had—and if they could show us sections of the old Trakt. Everybody we talked to pointed out pieces of the Trakt right away: Sometimes it was on one side of the new road, sometimes the other. Where it crossed grassy fields you could still sce the deep depres- sion the road had made in the ground. A man selling carrots on the new road told us that the Trakt had been the main street of a tiny village nearby called Maltsevo. Leaving the pavement and rambling along mud. paths, we came upon Maltsevo in its backwater where the new road as ‘woll as the railroad had passed it by. Every one of the dozen or so houses in the village was made of wood, and every piece of wood was the same shade of weathered gray. The houses’ logs, thin pieces of overlying lath, decorative scrollwork, and plank window shutters all seemed to be in a slow-motion race to see which would be the firs to fll completely down, ‘The single distraction that kept the village from epitomizing the dreary Russian peasant village of all time was the loud rock-and-roll anthem reverbing from speakers somewhere invisible but quite close by. I recog nized the song as “It My Life” (in English, the original) by Bon Jovi. AS ‘TRAVELS IN SIBERIA 207 tood on the towns one street, a small, unshaven, dark-haired man ‘ame walking along, He had on two sweaters whose several large holes almost did not overlap. We asked him where the Trakt used to be and he immediately sad, “Right here!” gesturing backhand at the ruts at his feet. “Also there,” he said and gestured far to the west. “And there!” This final gesture, to the east, was like an overhand throwing motion, and it panto- tnimed a hopelessness at even imagining how far the road went on. Ttumed to where he gestured—first, back to the west, where the old road came on shally but straight, a pair of muddy rutsin a wide and worn bed. The ruts entered the village, barely deigning to notice the weak at- tempt at domestication alongside, and then headed straight out of town. ‘Across another field they dwindled eastward to the horizon and forever. Thad seen some lonesome roads, but this one outdid them all. I stood looking at it with Sergei and Volodya and the man wearing two sweaters. ora moment I got an intimation of the sadness Kennan had been talking about—the deep and ancient sorrow of exile.