And the rest of the world carries on (unfortunately)

Travel is all about widening horizons and yet it’s a curiously solipsistic world, that of the traveller. I’ve been so engaged in just being in China, taking in new sights and sounds and tastes, trying to at least begin to understand the language, the culture (the languages, the cultures) that the rest of the world has receded into the distance.

I wave to my family on the Skype video and try hard to imagine snow and Christmas carols in England; I wish friends round the world Happy New Year, and learn that Sayana has fled Moscow because of racist violence and I ask stupidly – what’s happened? Something in particular apart from the usual background of racist violence…?

This is what happened. Sayana, who was studying in Moscow, is from Tuva, which became a Russian protectorate in 1914 and has been influenced by or a part of the Soviet Union/Russia ever since. Her passport is Russian; her face is Asian. She’s already been attacked once by skinheads in St Petersburg. Who can blame her for finally having had enough?

Another Tuvan friend, Saizana, is studying in Shanghai. In China everyone assumes she is Chinese, and it’s an effort for her to explain that no, she’s Russian despite her looks, that there’s this small place called Tuva that no one’s ever heard of… In China, no one glances twice at her (well, maybe they glance twice but that’s because she’s so pretty). It’s a safe country anyway, but for Saizana it provides the added protection of anonymity.

Not so in Russia, where Russian is her native language, where she’s lived most of her life. Saizana has just flown to Moscow to stay with her family for New Year. I hope she’ll be safe there. Sayana is wandering around Europe, looking for a safe haven; I hope she finds one.

In Tuva, one of the most famous shamans has just died. She was in her early forties – that’s the average life-span of a Tuvan. There they don’t die of racist attacks, but of alcoholism and related violence, poor medical services and a kind of terrible carelessness. I heard some details of how the shaman died; it’s too horrible to repeat here.

A sad post for the festive season… Sometimes it’s easier to let the rest of world recede far away.

Winter comes early in Siberia…

Photos again by the fabulous Mr K..

Tuvan ennui

Sayana tells us about Tuvan rustlers, chronically stealing livestock from neighbouring Mongolia, regularly getting caught and beaten to within an inch of their lives. They crawl home to their relatives, who patch them up. They lie around in the yard, all scabbing knife wounds and broken bones, drinking, getting more bored, til one of them groans to the others “If there’d at least be a war…”

Living in a fairytale part II

is what (we joke) we’ve been doing for twelve days, wandering the wilds of western Tuva. It’s so beautiful, so untouched, so free. Tuva is really like a fairytale, the original kind, violent and magical and strange, full of unexpected encounters and generosities.

It seems like a land time has almost forgotten; tucked away between Russia and Mongolia and Kazakhstan and China, not on the way to anywhere, as far as it is possible to go from the sea.

Antonina, a philologist who has studied Mongolian language and culture, tells us that the main difference between Tuvans and Mongolians is that Tuvans are insular, rarely travelling far from their home villages or herding grounds, let alone outside Tuva, while Mongolians are inveterate roamers.

Mongush Borakhovich Kenin-Lopsan, historian, living treasure of Shamanism and man of the century, says Tuva is one of the few places in the world to have preserved its original culture almost untouched, thanks to this remoteness, this stay-at-home mentality.

I’ve been reading a collection of Tuvan folktales and legends. The first one I read is about the son of a bear and a human woman. The details are Tuvan: yurts and larch trees, horses and grazing grounds – everything we’ve seen on our fairytale travel. But the shape, the essence of the story, is identical to a Scandinavian folk tale called the Three Princesses of Blue Mountain.

How has it come about that these people, whose language is Turkic, culture Mongolian and Siberian, geography Central Asian, mentality insular, have the same folk tale as the seafarers of the far north?

Uncultivated gardens

growing indefatigably on Tuvan plains and mountain passes, in tiny green velvet gardens at the foot of glaciers. The only flowers I can name are poppies and pansies and gentians (?) – anyone know any of the others?

(first and last photo by Mr Krupar – as you can probably tell by the improved quality…)

Space and light

“Kyzyl is a hole,” said our (Russian) taxi driver from Abakan. “Kyzyl is a criminal town. What do you want to go there for?”

It’s a common enough reaction when I say I’m going to Tuva. (The other is “Oh, samovars!” so I have to patiently emphasize no, not TULA, TUVA…”

On the other hand, Oxana, who grew up in Mongu Taiga, the high Tuvan steppe bordering Mongolia, has brought her children back to Kyzyl, the Tuvan capital, from Moscow. In Tuva they can roam the streets freely, they can breathe clean air, drink clean water, she says; not like Moscow, where children never go anywhere alone.

Kyzyl is a criminal hole – so are most towns in Tuva. Nearly all the Tuvans I’ve met have lost someone to drunken violence, to livestock thieves or poachers’ guns, to medical incompetence or liver cirrhosis.

But out at Mongu Taiga we meet four girls riding bareback, plaits flying, cheeks red from wind and sun and high altitude. They can ride and ride and never get anywhere, there is so much space. They can see anyone coming for twenty miles. The Western Steppe Tuvans we meet don’t say hello or goodbye. It’s as if they don’t have any need for greetings, when they’ve watched you approach for the last hour, an ant creeping over a vast golden cloud-shadowed plain.

photo by Stanislav Krupar

Not even crossing the whole of Siberia have I experienced space the way it is in Tuva. You can see so impossibly far. Everything looks so unbelievably close. There is so little to give a sense of scale – trees, animals, people – just things that could be any size: mountains, lakes, clouds.

That slope there, that looks like olive-green-rose-pink velvet, I could reach out from here and stroke it. It will take me half a day to walk to it. I can walk in blue-skied Tuva watching bad weather brewing behind snowy peaks in China.

It’s something to do with the light, perhaps. Like looking through perfectly clear water, that magnifies the stones at the bottom of a pool so you think you can just reach in and pick them up, but really you have to dive deep, deep, deep.

Living in a fairytale

Is what the citizens of City of the Sun say they want to do. Convinced of the power of optimism and positive thinking, like Voltaire’s doctor Pangloss they want to believe that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

But since they are not fools and cannot deny that in fact this world is not the best one possible, they have fled their misfortunes and retired to their little corner of Siberia to make the best of it, like Candide, by cultivating their gardens.

photo by Stanislav Krupar

They bring up their children like the flowers of the field, theoretically innocent of greedy capitalism, war and conflict, suspicion and fear. No one tells the children never to accept sweets from strangers, because in the single family there are no strangers. At school they study the history of art and culture, not battles and revolutions. Reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace they [pan]gloss over Pierre’s descriptions of legs being blown off, and focus instead on Natasha’s feelings of love, explains Volodya, the Mountain’s de facto PR manager.

Well, wouldn’t we all like our children to experience only peace and harmony? But I don’t think PEACE (and a Tiny Bit of War), by Lev Tolstoy, would be a masterpiece of world literature. And when believers say they want to live in a fairy tale, I can only assume they mean the sanitised, Disney version.

The children of City of the Sun are a joy; open and friendly, interested and interesting. But they are not, in the surrounding villages at least, believers in Vissarion. They seem to be well-rounded, healthy human beings, undamaged by the decline and fall of communism that brought most of their parents here seeking to fill a spiritual void, or by the relentless positivism of the single family.

The first generation has already gone away to study in the nearest towns and cities. Their parents hope and expect they will return to the land of fairy tale.  I think they’re more likely to return (if they return at all) to pleasant, orderly, clean-ish villages, cultured enough, well-off enough (and maybe that’s enough of a miracle in Russia), but no longer isolated from the world’s harmful influences, definitely not the best of all possible worlds.

Meeting Aslan

I adored CS Lewis’ books as a child. It was my dream to live in Narnia like Lucy Pevensey, so much in harmony with nature that I could talk to the animals; I wanted a wise, benign, lovable if occasionally terrifying lion to answer all my questions, to be my inspiration and my final word.

Then I grew up.

And then, a few days ago, I met Aslan.

I was in Obitel Rassveta, Abode of Dawn, more commonly known as City of the Sun, or, to believers living in surrounding villages, The Mountain. This remote community in the deepest taiga is inspired by Vissarion, a former Russian policeman turned spiritual leader who attracted a large following after the Soviet Union’s collapse, and took the most dedicated with him to central Siberia to build a new world.

Vissarion teaches that his followers should never have a negative thought. They should live in absolute harmony with nature and with each other as part of a single family, rejecting any state system or government and relying instead on perfect spiritual understanding and his own absolute authority. Fifteen years on, his united family still lives on The Mountain with their Teacher, still building, still positive, still dreaming.

It’s quite a journey to The Mountain, along the roughest of roads, and then an hour-long climb on foot through thick forest to a plateau ringed by mountains. The entrance to the settlement is a huge wooden gateway hung with new-agey stained-glass lanterns and bearing the legend ‘Take hope, all ye who enter here’.

When Vissarion’s new world settlers arrived, there was nothing but forest. They have replaced the moss-draped Siberian pines and birches with dinky wooden houses, with lawns and marigolds, with a stone bridge that wouldn’t look out of place in a suburban garden and fountains and lanterns straight out of a garden centre. For people who have turned their backs on society as we know it, their taste is surprisingly bourgeois.

Or perhaps it’s not surprising. The members of the single family are former teachers and lawyers, army colonels and dentists. They are, almost exclusively, people who fifteen years ago knew nothing first hand about living off the land.

The names of the streets – a grand name for what are really little more than paths – are a good indicator of their reading matter: Milky Way, Crystal Gate, Eternal Search (the children living on this last one can see the joke when they’re looking for socks and pencil cases in the morning before school). Aesthetically as well as philosophically, Abode of Dawn’s inspiration seems to be not the fairy tales believers tend to go on about, but the lands of early 20th century children’s fantasy literature: Middle Earth, Mooninvalley, Narnia.

“You’re going to meet Aslan,” Adrian said, when my request for a personal meeting with Vissarion was granted. He was so respectfully pleased for me. I’d chatted about children’s literature with Adrian and Anya, the couple I stayed with. They talk about their Teacher with a sort of matter-of-fact awe. According to his followers (I didn’t quite have the courage to ask Vissarion if he also holds this view) Vissarion is the second coming of Christ.

It must be extraordinary to be living alongside your God, to help build his house, to have his telephone number, to teach his children. Terrifying and reassuring at once, I should think. Tanya, my friend who used to live on The Mountain, describes him as a kind of celestial hotline. One that actually answers.

So off I went up the hill. Vissarion lives apart from his followers, half way up the holy mountain (he used to live right at the top but has moved down – for convenience?) in a brick house his followers have built for him. Brick, when there is no road and the only building material for miles and miles around is wood. I was sort of expecting a cave.

I was nervous and excited; the awed delight and faint (but positive!) envy of the believers was catching. I entered the house, I climbed the stairs; I was Lucy Pevensey from Finchley.

Telling the winter away

It’s Russian Orthodox Christmas, and Russian Orthodox winter weather. I love weather this cold. It’s so perfectly clean and sharp and uncompromising. It’s too cold for the snow to melt into slush, only to harden into slick grey rivers of ice. When the sun sets the snowy fields seem to glow pink from the inside. The moon turns them absolute, pure blue.

It’s weather as it should be, as it is on the Christmas cards, in the fairy tales. When there is a warm house to come home to, hot crumpets and ginger tea; when father Frost, cracking his long fingers, wraps abandoned Marfa in furs and sends her home to her wicked stepmother with gifts of silver and gold – then it is more than bearable.

This is what Orthodox Christmas is like now in a tiny Ukrainian village, in temperatures lower than this, in a house pretty much identical to one built a hundred years ago, to a house in a Russian fairytale:

No sign of kolyadki (carols) or Christmas. The only people on the street are waiting for the bus, which trundles through all lit up and steamy-windowed and crammed with passengers in fat padded coats, like a little travelling fragment of civilization that all too soon passes on and leaves behind the introverted houses and empty ice-blown street and silent woods under their weight of snow. A wicked wind blowing, loaded with snow as fine as smoke, and yet there are drifts already piled knee-deep in corners. The cottages are curled in on themselves, doors and windows firmly closed, and I suppose inside them everyone is curled up on their Russian stoves like bears hibernating, waiting out the winter.

Baba Lena falls asleep at 6pm, so she can get up at an unmentionable pitch-black 3am to chop the pumpkin for the goats and feed the chickens who live in the hallway for the winter, fat and roosting in the darkness. She dreamed of piglets three days before we arrived, and guessed from it that she would be getting visitors. A frivolous dream for such a hard place as this. So we are the three little pigs.

The day slips past with excruciating slowness. The light outside the frost-patterned window turns briefly blue. Then night comes and with it the feeling that it’s time for bed – but it’s only five o’ clock. Reading even the best book palls. There’s nothing on the two channels the ancient TV picks up except glossy adverts for things so irrelevant to the village as to be incomprehensible – flights to distant countries, mobile phones, sanitary towels for immaculate young women in airports, bars, sparkling gyms. There is nothing to tidy, nothing to cook. The pack of cards contains only thirty-two cards. There are coloured chalks but no paper. You think of knitting socks, playing at riddles, of knotting rag rugs or stitching the embroidered linen sheets and towels that will one fine day be your dowry.

Outside, up and over the hill the winter and the woods stretch forever, inscribed with the paws of fox and hare, the dainty slots of deer, wide-spaced hoofs of elk, a crowd of cloven prints from galloping wild pigs.

Baba Lena tells us the story of the maddened elk that chased a hunter right into the village street before expiring on the doorstep of the korchma (pub). We are sitting on the stove top, luxuriating like Ilya Muromets in glorious soporific warmth, and this is how to get through the awful hardship of winter, this is what the winter is for: telling tales of devils and witches and wild beasts, bold black-browed girls and brave Cossacks, the unspeakable exploits of the neighbours and the village headman who once upon a time met Catherine the Great on her way to Crimea…

Everything has to be called something

I need to name a book, and I’m completely stuck.

I’m stuck partly because it already has a name. I’m not good at titles, and this is the first book I’ve written where I’ve known right from the beginning what I want to call it – It’s a Sweet Word, Kamchatka. It’s a quote from the song ‘Kamchatka’ by Viktor Tsoy and the Russian rock group Kino. The line for me sums up the whole romantic, fantastical dream of a place that drives the characters in the book to their wild journeys. Kamchatka is a sweet word; beautiful and mysterious. Try saying it. How solid it is, how satisfying, how suggestive.

It’s a sweet word that doesn’t, of itself, mean anything. The naturalist Georg Steller, who took part in an expedition to the Russian far East in the 1740s, wrote that Russian explorers called this whole peninsular on the Pacific Kamchatka, after one of the rivers there which the indigenous Itelmens had named after someone who lived on it. It’s hardly an etymology, more an account of laziness (although perhaps slightly better than the names given to the animals Steller saw and recorded on the expedition: Steller’s eider, Steller’s sea eagle…) No one knows what the indigenous people called the land now known as Kamchatka.

Meanwhile, the Kino song isn’t even about the peninsular; it’s about a St Petersburg boiler house where Viktor Tsoy worked in the 1980s, called, for no reason that I know of, Kamchatka. Everything has to be called something.

For me, as for my book characters, Kamchatka is a word that’s weighted with promise. But if you’ve never heard it before, never had anyone sing you the song, never pored over maps of coastlines half-way across the world, then maybe it’s just obscure. That’s why my publisher feels my book needs a new title.

I’ve been listing words and phrases in an attempt to sum up what the book is about and find a new name:

Bears. Journeys. Running away and coming back. Fish. Dreams. Shamans. Exploitation. Poaching. Memories. Friendship and family. Misunderstanding. Discovery.

Kamchatka.

The power of words over the imagination.

For the book’s main character, Masha, there are two words which define her story. There’s a word which other people call her mother; a name that she knows is bad even though she doesn’t really understand what it means. And there’s the name Kamchatka. The first word sends her away from home, the second one takes her on a huge journey. That’s the power those names have over her imagination.

So you see, it’s important to name things correctly. Maybe somewhere in that thought is the title I’m looking for…

here is Viktor Tsoy and Kino singing ‘Kamchatka’: