After receiving the message, we instinctively felt that there had to be something behind it, but I never dreamed I would ever get the chance to go to Siberia. A week before, Lin Yun informed me that she and I would travel to Russia with a technical advisory group. China and Russia, she said, had basically completed negotiations for in-China assembly of Sukhoi Su-30 fighters, and the advisory group was accompanying low-level representatives to Russia to work out the details. I would be the group’s sole lightning expert. Finding this an odd coincidence, I asked her how she’d found this opportunity, and she said mysteriously, “I exercised a certain privilege, one I didn’t use when looking for the mainframe. This time there was no other way.”
I didn’t know what privilege she was talking about, but I didn’t ask further.
After reaching Moscow, I found I had absolutely nothing to do in the delegation’s activities, nor did Lin Yun. We visited the Sukhoi Design Bureau and a few military-industrial assembly plants.
One evening in Moscow, Lin Yun asked for leave from the group leader and went out, only returning to the hotel late at night. I visited her in her room, where she was sitting woodenly, eyes red and face stained with tears, which surprised me because I hadn’t thought of her as the type to cry. She said nothing and I asked nothing, but for the next three days in Moscow she was depressed. This episode informed me that her life was far more complicated than I imagined.
When the delegation boarded the plane to fly home, we boarded a different plane headed in basically the same direction, but for a much closer destination. Novosibirsk wasn’t all that much closer to Moscow than to Beijing.
We found a taxi to Nekrasovsky Naukograd, which the driver told us was a sixty-kilometer drive. On either side of the snow-covered roadway was an endless swirl of snow and dark forests. Lin Yun could speak halting Russian and seemed to have struck up a rapport with the driver. He twisted his neck to peer at me, shivering with cold in the back seat, and, as if sympathizing with me being left out of the conversation, suddenly switched into fluent English and carried on talking to Lin Yun.
The driver told us Noksbek Naukograd was a Science City. “…Science Cities were a romantic idea of the 1950s, brimming with the purity and innocence of that era, and with idealism for creating a new world. But they weren’t, in fact, as successful as you may have heard. Far from metropolitan areas, transportation difficulties limited the radiant effects of science and technology. Insufficient population meant that metropolitan culture was unable to take shape, violating the human inclination toward urbanism, and, in a futile struggle with larger cities, they could only watch as scientists migrated toward more attractive locations.”
“You don’t sound like a taxi driver,” I remarked.
Lin Yun said, “He’s a researcher at the Siberian branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences. He is… what did you say your specialty was?”
“I’m engaged in studying comprehensive resource planning of undeveloped areas in the far-east economic region, a project of use to no one in an age of quick bucks.”
“Were you laid off?”
“Not yet. Today’s Sunday. I make more driving this cab on the weekend than I get in salary for the week.”
When the car entered the Science City, buildings from the 1950s and ’60s swept past on either side of us in the snow, and I’m certain I even saw a statue of Lenin. It was a city with a sense of nostalgia, something you didn’t get from ancient cities and their thousand-odd years of history. They were too old, old enough to have no connection to you, old enough that you lost all feeling. But young cities like these made you think about the era that had just passed away, the childhood and youth you spent there, your own antiquity, your own prehistory.
The car stopped at a five-story building in what could have been a residential area, part of a row of identical-looking buildings. Before the driver drove off, he left us with a memorable line through the window: “This is the cheapest neighborhood in the city, but the people who live here aren’t cheap.”
We went through the door into a dark interior of a residential building with ’50s-era high ceilings and several election stickers for various local political parties stuck to the lobby walls. Farther in, we had to feel our way forward. We used a cigarette lighter to check the door numbers up on the fifth floor. As we skirted the stairwell entrance in search of number 561, my fingers now getting scorched, I heard a man’s deep voice shout in English, “Is that you? For BL? Third door on the left.”
We pushed open the door and entered a room that gave two contradictory feelings: at first it was very dark, but then the ceiling lights glared. The room was filled with the stench of alcohol. Books were everywhere, and it looked chaotic, but not to the point of being out of control. A computer screen flashed for an instant before going dark, and the large man sitting at it stood up. He had a long beard, a somewhat pale face, and seemed to be in his sixties.
“When you’ve lived here for so long, it’s easy to tell who’s coming up the stairs from the sound. The only strangers paying a visit would have to be you two. I knew you’d come.” He took stock of us. “So young—like I was at the start of my tragic life. You’re Chinese?”
We nodded.
“My father went to China in the fifties as a hydroelectric engineer, to help you build the Sanmenxia Hydropower Station. I heard it only made things worse.”[3]
Lin Yun thought a moment before replying. “It seems you all didn’t account for the silt in the Yellow River, so the dam caused flooding upstream. Even now the reservoir can’t be filled to design levels.”
“Ah, another failure. The memories left to us from that romantic age are nothing but failure. Alexander Gemow,” he said by way of introduction. We introduced ourselves in turn. He took stock of us again, this time with a more meaningful look, and then said to himself, “So young. You’re still worth saving.”
Lin Yun and I glanced at each other in surprise, and then tried to guess the meaning behind his words. Gemow put a liquor bottle and a glass onto the table, and then began rummaging around for something. We took this opportunity to take a look at the room. I noticed a forest of empties flanking his computer, and realized the source of the peculiar paradox I’d felt upon entering: the walls were papered in black, so it was practically a darkroom, but age and water seepage had faded the color, bringing out white lines and blotches on the black walls.
“Found them. No one ever comes here, damn it.” He put two large glasses on the table, then filled them with alcohol, a home-brewed vodka, cloudy white. I declared I couldn’t drink that much.
“Then let the lady drink for you,” he said coldly, draining his glass and refilling it. Lin Yun did not protest, but drained her glass as I clicked my tongue, then reached over and drank half of mine.
“You know why we’ve come,” I said to Gemow.
He said nothing, simply poured more vodka for him and Lin Yun. They took turns drinking wordlessly for ages. I looked at Lin Yun, hoping she’d say something, but she seemed to have caught Gemow’s alcoholism. She downed another half glass and then looked him straight in the eyes. Anxious, I nudged my empty glass on the table beside her. She gave me a look, and then jerked her head toward the wall.
Again I turned my attention to the peculiar black wall, and noticed a few blurry images on the black paper. Going in for a closer look, I found that they were ground scenes of buildings and vegetation, apparently at night, and very blurred, largely showing up as silhouettes. But when I looked back at the white stripes and lines, my blood congealed in my veins.
This huge room was densely covered in black-and-white photos of ball lightning, on all the walls, and the ceiling too.
3
Plans for the Sanmenxia Dam, a gravity dam on the Yellow River in Henan Province near the border with Shanxi Province, were drawn up in the mid-1950s with the help of Soviet engineers. Construction lasted from 1957 to 1960, and the reservoir began to silt up immediately afterward, causing flooding on the Wei River that required decades of renovation work to control.