The Archipelago of Another Life: A Novel

I

AT THAT MOMENT IN MY YOUTH THE VERB TO LIVE TOOK ON a new meaning for me. Now it could really only be used when speaking of those two who had made it to the distant seas around the Shantar Islands. For all other forms of activity here on earth the word exist would suffice.

I had just set out to walk inland, away from the shore, when a helicopter disrupted the misty drowsiness of the morning. The only flight of the week for the little village of Tugur, a remote spot on the Pacific coast. The passengers disembarked, laden with suitcases, shopping bags, rolls of carpet … There was momentary confusion between those who had just emerged and those gathered on the landing strip, waiting to board the aircraft. A woman was describing her visit to the cinema (an event!); a man was stuffing a folding bed into his sidecar; a newcomer, shivering in her light clothes, was seeking information from the locals …

I decided to wait until everyone had left before setting off again. And it was then that I noticed this other man among the arrivals.

Seated at the foot of a rock, he was checking his pack, which had a hunter’s skis strapped to it. These were very short and broad, covered with kamus, the tough hide from the legs of reindeer. In these parts, snow could catch the traveler unawares even in summer. The traveler … I sensed that this man would not be stopping in the village, nor would he be joining the flight. His goal lay elsewhere.

This notion formed a bond between us, like a shared secret. We could both see the same ash-gray outline of the mountains, the sunlight on the fragments of seashells and, beneath a mass of weed, slabs of ice that defied the July warmth … I felt very close to this stranger. But there was a stubborn mystery about him—his was an identity more complex than that of a simple trapper from the taiga.

The helicopter roared, throwing up a cloud of pine needles, took off, and quickly became a tiny dot above the sea.

The man got up and shouldered his burden, dancing a little on the spot to balance it better, without noticing me watching him from a hollow in the dunes.

Stepping away from the strip of land between beach and forest that is so convenient in this terrain with no roads, he plunged into the taiga and instantly sought to make himself invisible. I followed in the wake of his passage—the snapping of a branch, a plant stem pressed down. He left few traces.

My arrival in Tugur, a week before, had seemed like a classic confirmation of the verdict the sovietologists of those days were given to pronouncing on Russia and her aging communist regime, at a time which coincided with our own youth.

At the end of the school year, our class was divided into two and an announcement was made: the first group would be trained as crane operators, the second as land surveyors … At the age of fourteen, we manifested differing aptitudes and, despite the leveling down of orphanage life, both exceptionally gifted students and dunces could be found among us, odious zealots as well as incorrigible idlers. An ukase from the Party smoothed over these differences. From central Siberia they shipped us off two and a half thousand miles eastward to the Pacific shores of the Soviet empire, where both apprentice crane operators and novice land surveyors were required on a construction site.

Totalitarian regimentation, the sovietologists would pontificate, the dictatorial denial of human individuality. Yes, no doubt … Except that this was not something we were experiencing in theory, but in every fiber of our young souls, both carefree and full of sorrow, hungry for love and nursing disappointed hopes. Our departure blended into the dazzling skies and vibrant smells of the taiga, where the sap was just rising. In rebellion against all doctrines, we had only one desire: to succumb to the intoxication of this new spring, convinced it would be the best of our lives.

The starting point for our apprenticeship was Nikolayevsk, on the left bank of the river Amur, just an hour from the Pacific, we were proudly informed. But we had no chance to see the ocean, we were stuck there on the shores of the estuary.

The only mental image I had of land surveying was of two men, one holding a calibrated pole, the other with his eye glued to an optical device mounted on a tripod. Our training period did little to enhance this basic notion. Making scant use of precision in their terminology, our masters would refer to their apparatus as the doodad, the whatchamacallit, or, more emphatically, all this goddamn stuff. Their pedagogical laxness left us plenty of time to explore the port and inhale the sea breezes, mild indeed, compared with the harsh, dry, continental air of inland Siberia.

After work we often chanced to see our instructors in an open-air refreshment bar facing onto the docks. One evening we surprised them there with a member of the fair sex: glamour had been added to the staunch duo, whom we had thought to be inseparable, by the presence of a woman with luminous blonde hair. And yet, she was visibly causing a rift between them, for the Big Guy and the Little Guy (as we called them) were now at daggers drawn. Two empty bottles lay on the ground beside the whatchamacallits and the tripod … They were sparring by flaunting their professional skills: each boasting of his exploits in land surveying. From the way they were talking, it sounded as if they had both of them completed topographical surveys all over Russia. A whole cavalcade of sites, each one more improbable than the last, paraded past: from a sports palace to a naval base; from an Olympic stadium to a rocket-launching site … Their guest sipped her wine with an enigmatic smile. And at last, we were learning the correct terminology! In their male competitiveness, our instructors were now holding forth about goniometers, tachometers, and theodolites …

It was hard for a woman to choose between them: the Big Guy was a fine figure of a man, but the Little Guy sported a leather jacket, something that in those days assured a Russian of real social status.

My next job’s going to be with the Japanese, the Big Guy asserted, doing a survey for a wharf …

The shameless mendaciousness of this purported assignment infuriated the Little Guy.

You? With the Japanese? But you don’t know one end of a graphometer from the other!

This was a monstrous insult. The Big Guy rose to his feet, grabbed his rival, and hit him. The latter avoided falling over but slipped on a bottle and ended up performing a rather long and unintentionally obscene version of the jerk. The customers roared with laughter. The fair-haired charmer giggled. The Little Guy flushed crimson and the situation turned ugly. He seized the tripod that was equipped with steel spikes, uttered a hoarse yell, and shoved it into the Big Guy’s chest. The crunch of broken ribs was followed by an Ooh! from the audience, then silence. The Big Guy thrust aside the weapon that had now fallen at his feet, unbuttoned his padded tunic with a grave face, and plunged his hand inside. We stood up to get a better view of the mangled flesh and bone he was about to draw forth from within … His hand reappeared: it was holding a notebook whose imitation leather cover was marked with three deep indentations. The record book in which he used to note our results … The spectators felt vaguely disappointed. Then the Big Guy picked up the tripod, took off the legs, and suddenly, in a neat movement, trapped his adversary’s neck in the angle between them. The Little Guy collapsed, trying to remove this vise, struggled, weakened. With his wine-stained tongue protruding, he was at his last gasp. Knocking over their chairs, the men leaped up, the women wailed. And the lady of discord beat a retreat, leaving us, as she departed, with a cloud of sugary perfume and a dazzling flash of thigh through the slit in her velvet skirt … Already the stevedores’ heavy mitts were prying open the garrote. Beside these men, with their thick, knotty muscles and tattoos, the Big Guy looked like some refined intellectual.

We spent that evening re-enacting the brawl. Laughter, fisticuffs, lewd remarks about the blonde seductress … But what our antics really betrayed was a certain unease. There was no risk of our being traumatized by that pedagogical apocalypse at the waterfront bar—we were used to witnessing more brutal confrontations than that. But there was nevertheless a hidden agenda lurking behind the facade of that farcical duel.

That night the boy next to me in the dormitory (we were lodged in a former fishing net factory), a sickly lad, not very popular with the others, began sobbing, his face buried in his pillow. His tears, which contravened our strict codes of honor, might have provoked our scorn. But nobody moved a muscle. We knew his father had died in a camp, not so far from the site of our training session. Unlike the rest of us, who invented heroic career paths for our dead parents, this boy used to tell the truth: since the permafrost made it impossible to bury prisoners who died during the winter, they would be stockpiled like yule logs until the mild weather returned. Thus it was that his father had had to wait until the spring to be buried. He lingered on there among the living, our comrade must have mused as a child … Anyone could have gone over to him and woken him up. His tears that night had been set off by that ludicrous scuffle between our two masters—a life that was stupid and theatrical, one of insatiable desires, one that paid little heed to a prisoner asleep in his shroud of ice …

Such is the way the world works! In fighting over a woman, men would play all their aces: an athletic physique, professional status, banknotes with Lenin’s face on them, or, as the occasion demanded, that tripod crushing the Adam’s apple of a rival.

I had just grasped the crude machinery of existence. Our teachers had revealed it to us at their own humble level, that of two poor bastards of land surveyors who would stop at nothing to sleep with a peroxide blonde. And the rest of mankind? Naturally, the same game of conquerors and conquered. The Big Guy and the Little Guy had only their tripod as a weapon. Others had guns, wealth, power—and prison camps—at their disposal …

So everything in life revolved around a beautiful woman’s thigh—the universal drama of rivalry, seduction, mute hatred, and garrulous mendacity. Along with those pleasant moments of relaxation in a café bar on the banks of the Amur … And a child weeping for his father, unable to wake him from his ice-bound lethargy.

Such were the real lessons of my land surveyor’s apprentice- ship.

The next day I lost all desire for conquest. The most aggressive members of our group won the privilege of continuing their training at Nikolayevsk, others were dispersed to nearby locations. I found I was the only one to be dispatched to Tugur, the least sought-after destination on the list.

Our educators no longer showed any signs of mutual hostility. No doubt they had arrived at an honorable peace over their last bottle … The Big Guy was calling out our names from his pierced notebook and, oblivious of the comic aspect of the situation, advising us to grease the spikes of the tripod liberally against rust.

TUGUR, TWO HOURS’ FLIGHT FROM THERE BY HELICOPTER, gave me visions of an endless, empty coastline opening out onto an awe-inspiring prospect, the rolling expanse of the Pacific. At our age we all had dreams of Mirovia, the legendary superocean, and the prehistoric waters of Panthalassa.

Since nobody came to meet me when I got there, I rushed down to the shore. The day was dawning and, unable to believe my eyes, I went galloping through the dunes, in search of the hoped-for vastness, a giddy encounter with the ocean itself …

In reality, Tugur was located at the head of an inlet squeezed between precipitous slopes which led, as I would later discover, into modest coastal waters. A small archipelago formed a barrier between these and the Sea of Okhotsk, which itself then opened out into the Pacific Ocean.

What lay before me was very beautiful: sandy beaches, the mouths of several streams, mirror-like pools … But no sign of Mirovia on the horizon!

That village of maybe a hundred inhabitants had no real need of a trainee. The team of land surveyors I was supposed to be attached to had been retained in Nikolayevsk, the town I had just left … They housed me in a shack partly occupied by a cutting tool maker’s workshop, showed me a canteen used by fishermen, and forgot about me.

In my first exploration I set off toward a headland where I reckoned I would finally be able to admire the ocean, the real ocean. But when I reached it, all I could see was the next headland—and the sea, still held captive by a series of bays, contained within sandbanks … Bounded waters hiding the boundless ocean from view.

After passing a week there, following my arrival, I felt I wanted to get away from these maritime optical illusions and revisit the taiga, a world I had always felt at home in since my childhood. In my bag I took with me some dried fish, one of those old-style tinder boxes, where the wick has nothing to fear from the wind, and a hatchet, borrowed from the cutting tool maker. He had also lent me an old padded jacket stained with grease.

Just as I was turning my back on the shore, the noise of a helicopter punctured the silence. A minute later I saw the passengers busying themselves amid the luggage. And close to a rock, that traveler, waiting until he could slip away without being seen.

Nothing distinguished him from the inhabitants of Tugur, apart, perhaps, from his leather hood. His tanned face was that of a nomad, but here, between sea and forest, nobody was a stay-at-home.

However, he seemed aloof from the regular workings of mankind, as I had come to understand them, thanks to that brawl between our masters: the interplay of desires, competing vanities, the whole charade of striking poses—everything that people believe to be life itself. This aloofness of his suggested time spent in unusual concentration and, with it, the gradual erosion of the names given to beings and objects …

Such thriftiness with words made me uneasy. I was impatient to identify this man. A poacher? Or one of those covert prospectors for gold sometimes encountered on the pathways through the taiga? Made feral by their solitary existence, and sensing danger at the least trace of any human presence, they were forever in pursuit of their cherished fantasy: to amass a stash of nuggets, to abandon this icy hell, to settle on the shores of the Black Sea, and to make love to all those tanned women, the succulent succubi who have haunted their dreams for so many years …

The helicopter sliced through the mist, took off, disappeared. The new arrivals, burdened with luggage, made their way toward the izbas of Tugur. One snatch of their talk reached me: a young woman, the newcomer, a native of Odessa, was telling them about her journey. The man sitting beside the rock must have been thinking, as I was: Odessa, the Black Sea … That’s six thousand miles from here …

He stood up, shouldered his gear and set off walking. And, as I followed his trail, I felt he was not a total stranger to me.

Walking in the taiga is only a manner of speaking. In reality, you have to pass through it with the suppleness of a swimmer. Anyone who tries to thrust, smash, and force a path through it quickly exhausts himself, reveals his presence, and ends up loathing all those waves of tree branches, underbrush, and heather as they break over him.

The man with the hood knew this. He bent double to pass through the thickets of young spruces in places where another person might have set about pushing their entangled branches aside and taken three times as long … Elsewhere, I saw him stepping along with rolling strides (it reminded me of a land surveyor’s cross staff), the only way to navigate a stlanik, one of the stretches of creeping woodland