In Arshan, we stayed in a tall forest of rock cedars and pines at a small guest house close to the Kungarga River owned by a woman named Agafya. We soon began to refer to her as Baba Yaga, which was unfair, as she bore no resemblance to a fairy-tale witch, but had a straight back and a ruddy, smiling face, and the white kerchief she wore on her head made her look like the Cossack matrons of Siberia from whom she was, no doubt, descended. It was just that her fingernails were long and grimy (‘kogti-nogti Baba Yaga’ – ‘Baba Yaga, talon-nails’), and after we had eaten the omul cutlets she prepared for breakfast, lunch and supper, she had a way of putting her arms around our waists and pinching our ribs to check that we were plumping up as nicely as she thought we should. ‘You don’t get anything to eat,’ Chekhov said of Siberia, ‘and you end up feeling you have wings.’ If only it were still true.
On the long drive, Vanya had told us that Agafya’s house was the most restful and cleanest place he had ever known. (Pushkin fantasised in Eugene Onegin about a Russia filled with cosy inns for the weary traveller, and the dream has not died.) Cleaner than clean, Vanya said, the best place in the whole world to clean your soul. To reach the house, we had followed the course of an over-ground gas pipeline girdled in scruffy insulation that loops through the small scattered town of Arshan, passing the high walls of the Sayan sanatorium. Chickens strutted freely at the entrance to Agafya’s yard, which was a mess of timber and rubbish scattered between corrugated-iron sheds. Large cedars spread their shade over the whole property, on which were two houses and several outhouses: a banya, a kitchen with a brick-and-white-wash wood-fired stove and a gas ring attached to a canister, a WC (broken-down hut enclosing hole in the earth) and odd store-sheds. The guest house was her pride. She and her husband (who never emerged but occasionally spied on our comings and goings from the window of their house) had built it with their own hands, using timber of every age, so that some walls were close-grained light gold and others made of cold-blackened planks whose grain had roughened and wrinkled like weathered skin. Our room was furnished with two low wooden beds made up with clean linen sheets and blankets redolent of guests past. There were two other guest rooms in the one-storey building leading off a dark corridor.
Three pails of water drawn from the Kungarga were lined up outside the kitchen. As she showed us around, Agafya ostentatiously unwrapped a new bar of soap and laid it in a small contraption that hung beside the door: a wide dish with a long plug which, when pushed from below, released, like a tap, a trickle of water. The soap, we soon learned, was a gesture of hospitality intended for our exclusive use, for Agafya never touched it herself, preferring to wipe her hands on her apron after she had patted our cutlets into shape. Steaming in the dusty banya was rather like sitting in the smoking hollow of a burned-out tree. It never became truly hot like the stone banyas of the city, so we found it hard to bring ourselves to rinse off with the cold river water in the bucket beside the stove.
We ate on the verandah, and a little Buryat boy who lived next door would come barefoot through a gap in the fence to sit on an abandoned hubcap and watch our meals. Our first day in Arshan was hot, and by the evening midges had filled the yard and flies had gathered on the verandah, agitated by the sugar bowl and the remains of our omul, which Vanya had given to Agafya to lay out in a dish. On the second evening we suggested to Agafya that our smoked fish were finished, but she protested that there was still good flesh on their bones, and proceeded to pick them clean, dropping shreds on to our plates and swaying gently as she sang ‘Sacred sea, free Baikal’ with a cunning glint in her eyes. After supper, we took the path down to the Kungarga to step through the fast running water on its marble stones. Sitting on the roots of a cedar on its banks, in the lovely freshness of the evening air, I took up my companion’s smoking habit to kill the taste that lingered in my mouth.
Soon after we had fallen asleep on our first night, we were awoken by male voices on the verandah. There were sounds of bottles clinking, and Agafya setting out crockery. The noise kept up till around five, the men’s voices growing louder as they drank. (Agafya happily told us next morning that they were workers renovating the sanatorium who had come round unexpectedly for her food.) We envied Vanya his room at the back. I had with me a book from Sands’s library (which he did not appear to have read), a heavy volume appropriate neither for travelling nor for insomniac diversion, but I took it out, and browsed in its pages by torchlight, slitting open the odd uncut pages with my fingernail.
The book, which was published by the Academy of Sciences two years before Stalin’s death, was a volume of letters and other occasional writings by the Decembrist Ivan Yakushkin, sentenced to hard labour in eastern Siberia, like so many of the most educated and civic-minded men of his generation, for his part in the uprising against tsarist autocracy of 1825. ‘In the depths of the Siberian mines, keep your proud patience,’ Pushkin hailed his banished friends from Moscow. ‘Your bitter work is not in vain, and the high striving of your thought.’ I noticed that the series in which the book appeared was edited by Sergei Vavilov, who died in the year of its publication, so his name in the cover was cased in black. From its pages emerged a vivid geography of friendship, familial affection, sickness, endurance, loathing for slavery and injustice, and political hope: a geography traced across the towns of Siberia – Chita, Selenginsk, Kyakhta, Yalutorovsk, Tunka, Irkutsk – where Yakushkin and other Decembrist exiles spent thirty years of their lives, first in prison, later, under surveillance, in homes of their own. Some Decembrists had wives from their own class who followed them to Siberia. Others married local Russian, or even Buryat, women. The exiles set themselves to enlightened work: studying, educating local children, developing horticulture, drawing and cataloguing the flora and fauna of Siberia, and making watercolours of one another. They were touched by the landscape and they touched it in return. Were there comforts hidden in a book about these men (who were held up by the Soviet regime as proto-revolutionaries) for an intellectual like Vavilov, who lived so close to power under an infinitely more terrifying regime?
One of the longest of Yakushkin’s letters was written to his mother-in-law, Natalia Sheremeteva, from the ‘admirably well-built’ prison fortress near Chita, which the Tsar had commissioned to keep the politically dangerous noblemen together, and apart from everyone else. Yakushkin’s letter, perfectly uncomplaining and generous with simple detail, was the first and fullest account of the conditions of the Decembrists’ incarceration, and manuscript copies of it circulated among relatives and friends in Moscow and St Petersburg. Addressing his mother-in-law as ‘dear friend’, Yakushkin tells of his sometimes acute anxieties about the wife and children he has left behind, but confesses that in prison, when he sits alone in the evenings, thinking of the people he loves, he sometimes feels as happy as he has ever felt. Older in body, he is younger in spirit, and most importantly, free for his studies in natural sciences and the development of the classical school curriculum. In that classic genre of prison writing, he describes the interior of the room in which he is incarcerated. He familiarises Natalia Sheremeteva with his daily routine and the small room, warm and light, in which he has the solace of his own furniture (dark wood, which reminds him of his mother-in-law’s house), a samovar which he takes pride in cleaning almost as well as Stepan (one of the serfs he once tried to free), a porcelain dinner service, portraits of his wife and children, a crucifix and his books.