JUNE 1994
1
“WE SHOULD HAVE STOPPED INVENTING THINGS AFTER DOGS,” said Val, once she’d drunk enough. She had barely touched her dinner, a meat dish ordered in ignorance that had arrived minced nearly into plasma. The menu was given in Russian and French, but she had only a sparse, grammarless knowledge of each language. Even if she’d been able to read its meticulous wine list and varieties of caviar listed by color, she wouldn’t really have understood.
All around her were rich people, rich foods, rich textiles. Red-faced businessmen newly wealthy from imports and government contracts; stately old party officials chewing morosely, giving off the perverse impression of aristocracy in exile; big wives in heirloom furs; little mistresses in Versace silk—none of whom made any attempt to hide their amusement at the mismatched newcomers. The candlelight was generous but shifting; heavy scents of butter, anise, and perfume hung about the room. Every detail seemed to have a secret meaning. But that was the way with all displays of culture, and she could steel herself against their judgment by taking an anthropological view.
The meat dish was harder to combat. She’d picked it because it was the second least expensive item on the menu. Her graduate thesis adviser, Dr. George Auberon, was paying for her meal along with those of her classmates, Mark Auchmill and Kit Lai. George would have noticed if she’d picked the cheapest option, as he noticed now that her meal was uneaten. But even the risk of offending George was not a great enough incentive to finish the meat paste. With an empty stomach, exhausted from the flight, unnerved by the trials of fine dining, she got drunk quickly.
“I mean, we should have made a conscious choice, as a species, to stop. Agriculture. Did that make us any happier? The wheel? Or . . . I don’t know?” She motioned around her at the interior of the restaurant, candlelit with gilt-edged china and brocade table-cloths.
They’d landed in Moscow that afternoon. In the morning they were set to board the Rossiya north to Siberia, to excavate a cave inhabited throughout the paleolithic era, so George took the team out to dinner at a little place he knew in Rublevka for a last taste of civilization. The little place had turned out to be a Michelin star restaurant with an imported French chef, a menu of horse, lamb, duck, and rabbit. This was not entirely surprising. Val knew George’s tastes well enough to pack a silky black dress along with her camping gear and excavation tools, and Kit always liked to dress for a nice dinner, but Mark had to be given a sports coat and tie from the restaurant’s closet before the maître d’ would let him in. The jacket, though of a high-quality charcoal wool, strained against his shoulders and clashed with his navy slacks. Val even felt a little bad for him.
“Really, besides dogs, I can’t think of anything else about this I’d like to keep.”
“Books?” Kit asked absently. She knew he was humoring her. He’d heard this speech before. “Art? Medicine?”
“Medicine, no. You see the way they string these poor old people along? Let them die. It’s grotesque, these nursing homes, life support. But I guess that’s the price. The march of progress. Progress toward what? But really, carving the wheel, how could we have known?”
“You’d rather be living in a cave then?” asked Mark. He had been an Eagle Scout and acted as if this made him more practical than the rest of them. In a way, he was right. She’d heard various stories about George’s years in the field: that he’d spent ten months traveling with North Asian nomads, learning about sacred sites both active and abandoned; that he had a photographic memory and could wander freely through the Siberian tundra without ever getting lost; that he’d talked his way out of KGB detention and even—though he never alluded to this himself and she didn’t quite believe it—that he’d killed a man once in self-defense. But she and Kit had both grown up in the suburbs of Toronto and would fare poorly in a paleolithic survival scenario.
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t really. You can’t even make a fire.”
“Not me now. I mean if I could go back to infancy and do it over, you know?”
“It’s stupid. You could die of a broken leg.” Mark adjusted his dinner jacket, though the act did little good. No amount of willpower would make it fit properly. Val watched his struggle impassively. The rest of them—George, Kit, and herself—might have been taken for a family if you blurred your vision: black hair, black eyes, straight backs under black clothes. A certain dignity to all of them. Mark, in this family, would be what her father called the “redheaded stepchild.” He
really did have red hair. It was the first thing anybody noticed about him. Or one of the first things. Simultaneously, a person might notice that he was gigantic—six foot five with broad shoulders and blunt, heavy limbs. His clothing was worn out, wrinkled, seemingly picked at random from a laundry pile, and his voice was deep without richness. He’d asked her on a date in their first semester of grad school, and they’d disliked each other since.
“Well,” said Val, “you could be hit by a taxi as soon as we leave the restaurant.”
“I look before I cross the street.”
“Maybe it’s the taxi driver from Taxi Driver.”
“Café? Dessert?” Their waiter had arrived again. He spoke in clipped French, addressing George exclusively.
“He doesn’t hit anyone with the taxi in Taxi Driver.”
“But he could have. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
“Café, pour la table,” said George.
“None for me,” said Kit. He’d been moody since they met up at the airport, and there was no point in trying to cheer him up. At the start of dinner, he’d refused wine too, but George had insisted and asked him to make a toast.
“To life,” he’d said, holding up his glass reluctantly. The wine was a bitter red that clung to the teeth. A very fine vintage, according to George.
“To life? Surely we can do better than that.”
“Better than life?”
“To a successful expedition,” Mark said.
They had clinked glasses quickly and in silence, unsure what they were toasting to, and drank their blood wine. Val gave Kit a questioning look, which he ignored. He began to engage only when George mentioned, quite casually, that the Sakha nomads believed that the Malova Valley, where they were going to dig, was haunted.
Val had laughed, delighted. Mark looked more alarmed but, in a show of both strength and deference, said that perhaps the Sakha were responding to a sudden shift in altitude. Human beings were very sensitive to atmospheric conditions, even if they don’t realize it consciously. Kit asked George to elaborate.
“The Sakha place importance on natural balance, and the area where we’re conducting our research is said to be unbalanced.” He poured himself more wine and twirled his glass around with a subtle motion of the elbow, his wrist unmoving. The wine circled his glass as evenly as if a drain sat at its center. His hand was gentle around the stem, his fingers long and thin, a signet ring glinting gold in the candlelight. Mark tried to imitate the movement, but he twitched his wrist so erratically that the liquid seemed to jump.
“That’s not quite the same as haunted,” said Kit.
“They say that hunters go missing there.”
“A person could go missing in the Siberian winter easily,” Mark reasoned. “Get lost. Freeze to death. And this happens a couple times in the same place, and suddenly everyone’s sure there’s an evil spirit.”
“But it would have been nice to have learned this information before we flew out to Moscow,” said Kit. And everybody laughed, although he wasn’t joking.
In her hotel room that night, Val slipped off her dress in the dark, fell onto the full bed, and laughed. She had seventy dollars in her bank account, and her apartment lease would expire two weeks after the end of the dig. She was lying to everybody about her progress on her thesis. It was supposed to comment on prehistoric migration patterns through recurring and mutating motifs in cave art, though so far she’d only looked at slides now overdue at the university library. She’d made a fool of herself in front of George, argued with Mark all night, and spilled a drop
of wine on her nicest dress—rayon, but it passed for silk in the candlelight. She rolled over onto her stomach and said aloud, “Well. Oh, well.”
The walls were thin, and she could hear somebody pacing in the room next door.
2
THEY ARRIVED AT YAROSLAVSKY STATION EARLY IN THE morning, as the sun was rising. It was an old imperial building with a great arc of an entrance underneath a palatial roof. This was topped with what looked at first to be a gigantic wrought-iron tiara with a hammer and sickle grafted to the center. Inside, the high ceilings caused a draft to nip at their legs and an echo to follow their footsteps. Around them stood a scene of ruined splendor, twice over: chipped plaster moldings from the age of the czars, dull linoleum flooring from the sixties, black marble columns accented with gold, stark murals of soldiers and laborers. The halls were largely empty, besides a few cart vendors setting out the day’s newspapers, a napping vagrant, and a trickle of weary travelers. A church-like expectation of silence was generally understood. They passed through the building and onto the platform, where the Rossiya was waiting for them, a faded red train with blocky white Cyrillic lettering running down its flank.
The interior of the train had been refurbished in plastics and polyester sometime in the 1970s, though these were now scratched and stained, graffiti carved into the tables, dents on every metal edge. Val could still see the attempt at a bright, clean, modern decorating scheme. The imagined future of a hopeful past. Val entered with Mark, after a porter separated them from the others. Kit and George had both paid extra for first-class tickets, and now she was trapped in a four-person sleeper compartment with a person who seemed both to hate her and to go out of his way to engage her in conversation. But after she declined his help with her duffel bag, he sat down silently with a book.
The train choo-ed as its wheels began to turn, like in an old cartoon. She’d had two cups of coffee and no food, which gave a hypoglycemic thrill to these first creaky movements. Soon it began to glide. She looked out the window at a sky dyed gray by either fog or pollution, then down at the dregs of outer Moscow, sliding into suburbs, farms, evergreen forests not unlike the one she’d spend the next six weeks in.
Nature made Val nervous. She had no fond memories of family hikes or camping trips, only an urban suspicion of depopulated places. This wasn’t an ideal mindset for an archaeologist, and she kept it to herself. She liked action and variety, and often did unpleasant things just because they were interesting. And she loved the work. This seemed like enough to offset a lack of practical and spiritual connection with the natural world.
Besides, this was a wonderful opportunity. She and Kit kept repeating this to each other for days after they had been asked to go and again before their flight to Moscow. Kit, unexpectedly, was a nervous flier, and he’d babbled about the good this could do for his career for twenty minutes as the plane sat stalled on the runway, quieting abruptly when it began to taxi again.
It would be the first extensive Western dig on Russian soil since the execution of the czar, though not for a lack of interest. The University of California had applied to dig in Siberia two years ago, just months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but its application to the Bureau of Land Management had been lost in the chaos of government restructuring and then promptly denied upon resubmission. Further inquiries were met with form letters.
George had seen a copy of the Americans’ grant proposal from a colleague on sabbatical, and he later told Val he was not surprised by the rejection. The California dig had been part of the larger, multi-pronged Russo-American Academic Freedom Project, encompassing the fields of economics, journalism, physics, anthropology, and archaeology. Though this endeavor claimed to promote peace and unity, its constant mentions of “the free marketplace of ideas” and “developing the voice of a newly uncensored Russian people” gave the impression of a blood-coated warrior parading through the streets of a conquered land with the severed head of its king.
A too-complete faith in liberty’s reach had been their downfall. Nobody in the newly formed Russian Federation’s government had bothered, in the end, to replace the gray apparatchik in charge of archaeological excavation permits, and if the Americans had listed even half as many inalienable rights in their Russian application as they had in their grant proposal, the apparatchik could never have had as much pleasure in denying a permit as he had the day he thwarted the Russo-American Academic Freedom Project, or at least the archaeological wing of it.
George’s own proposal was more modest. He would bring over a small group of graduate students for preliminary digs in a cave he’d noted as significant during one of his land surveys in the eighties. From there, if the site proved rich enough, battalions of unpaid Russian and Canadian undergrads would be sent for more thorough excavations. Though this seemed simple enough, George had been planning it for years. He’d told Val the whole story once at the faculty Christmas party, trying to look occupied to avoid talking to the head of the department.
He had been fascinated by Russia since childhood, by the land as much as the people. Like many boys, he’d liked military history and found it fascinating how the land had done as much to repel Russia’s enemies as its soldiers. It was the land—hard, cold, incomprehensibly vast—that had ground down the armies of Napoleon and Hitler.
The forbidden status of the country drew him in too. He was born under cooling relations between East and West, and grew up through a string of narrowly avoided nuclear wars and hysterical rocket-building contests, atom spies, NATO, NORAD, Bond villains, ice hockey brawls between the Russian and Canadian teams. He felt this must be a strange and terrible place. And it was very unfair that he couldn’t go see for himself.
His graduate thesis had been on totems in ice bridge cultures, with a focus on Alaskan artifacts, but his real interest lay across the Bering Strait. In the early years of glasnost, he had lobbied extensively for a visa to the USSR to conduct his research, and through a combination of charm and persistence, he had eventually managed to attach himself to an archaeological land survey of Krasnoyarsk Krai, on the western border of Yakutia. But when he arrived, the Russians had little use for him. His penchant for silk ties and romantic notion of cultural relativism made him seem like a dilettante. They’d give him wrong times for meetings and sometimes openly ignored him when he spoke. As he was bound to travel with the survey, however, they dragged him along with them through tiny villages in the mid-Siberian Krasnoyarsk Krai.
This was agony for George. He was an ambitious person. Truly ambitious people often pretend to be more indifferent than they really are, because true ambition is disturbing. It’s natural for a man to seek success, to do as well for himself as he can manage in order to live a socially and materially comfortable life. But to value a vocation over love and money, people and objects—this is unnatural and untrustworthy. It singles you out; a trait that would get you killed in the Spanish inquisition, the Salem witch trials, Stalin’s purges. George, luckily, had charm, so he didn’t need to pretend as much. “I would have sold my soul to the devil,” he told Val, “except the achievement wouldn’t count that way.”
“The closest thing most people experience to burning ambition is the painful pursuit of romantic love,” he’d said later on in the night. “And in a way, ambition is a perversion of love. But the pain of love passes quickly. Ambition does not.”
After months of fake smiles and cheery ploys, of being transferred through a maze of bureaucracy, he had finally acquired his golden visa only to be met with contempt. This caused his ambition to burn inward, to burn him up.
George picked languages up easily and had learned the basics of a number of Turkic tongues before applying to the survey. His job, ostensibly, had been to inquire among the Buryat villagers and nomads about possible man-made geographic features—funeral mounds and religious sites and the like—that they’d encountered in the area. He did ask this in each village, and while they told him nothing, the Buryats usually let him hang around until the survey dragged him away.
George’s discipline, which he’d thought of as an integral part of his personality, began to slip. He spent most of his time drinking vodka, home-brewed beer, or a beverage made from fermented mare’s milk called “tarasun.” This last drink was used only for ceremonies and special occasions, but the land survey took place during the summer, and there always seemed to be a wedding or a birth or some seasonal holiday to justify it. ...
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