To get to Kyzyl I use the online ridesharing platform BlaBlaCar. In this instance the “car” part is accurate; not, however, the “blabla.” The driver bears an uncanny resemblance to Burt Reynolds and his son looks like Andre Agassi. Neither of them seem to feel any need to communicate. We hardly speak on the five-hour journey. In between the cell phone dead zones, I try to plan the next stage of my travels, an activity with quite a high potential for frustration in Russia.
The direct flight from Kyzyl to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, which would have taken two hours, is no longer available. The next one is in a week, which is too late for me, so I have to switch to bus and train.
In Western Europe we’re used to road and rail networks that spread across all countries. Consequently there’s always a relatively direct way to get from A to B. In Russia it’s different. Here there are dead ends: one way leads there, and the only option is the same way back. Because of an obtrusive mountain range, to get to Irkutsk from Kyzyl by the overland route is like wanting to travel from New York City to Washington only to discover that there’s no direct way and you can only go via Toronto.
So I have to go five hundred miles by bus back to Krasnoyarsk (fourteen hours); from there I can get a flight to spare me from sitting on a train for an additional seventeen hours. At such times you begin to understand how big Russia really is. On the map the distances don’t appear to be particularly impressive.
Outside, dusk is falling. Burt Reynolds is driving like he’s in a live remake of The Cannonball Run. He takes the normal bends at seventy-five miles per hour, the sharp ones at sixty. He doesn’t seem to have any problems with coordination, as he is able to simultaneously smoke an Optima cigarette and type a message into his cell phone. When we reach Kyzyl in total darkness, I show the driver the address on Maps.me—Friendship Street 1, Apartment 77.
Naturally, I keenly observe the characters out and about on the streets. Shortly before our stop, I do indeed see a man lurching heavily and holding a bottle. I’m relieved that Reynolds drops me right in front of the door.
I thank him and call my host, who comes to the door. At last, a Russian in track pants. He has short black hair and Asian features. “Hi, I’m Yevgeni. Did you have a good trip? Here is the key,” he says, then quickly shows me around the three-room apartment on the second floor. No furniture, no kitchenette; two pine twigs next to the bathtub provide the only decoration. I feel more like a real estate buyer than a guest. “I have to go, maybe we could meet up tomorrow,” says Yevgeni.
And then I have an empty apartment all to myself. What I don’t have is a mattress, drinking water, or, apart from a few pine nuts, food. On the way here it didn’t look as if there were any shops open or even a takeout place in the vicinity. It’s irrelevant anyway, as I wouldn’t have dared leave the apartment on account of the drunken wrestling shamans. I spread out my thin sleeping bag on the parquet floor, fold my winter jacket into a pillow, and wait for daylight.
IN THE CENTER of Kyzyl three metal lions bear a globe out of which a colossal hairpin reaches for the sky. At its tip is a balancing stag. The fifty-five-foot-high monument is supposed to mark the central point of Asia; God knows how they figured that out. A place near Ürümqi in China, roughly 1,250 miles south of Kyzyl, also claims to be the center of Asia. The statue there, also featuring a globe, is sixty feet high, which doesn’t necessarily mean the supporting calculations are more precise. If you were to commission a hundred geospacial experts to come up with more accurate coordinates, there would probably be another hundred globe monuments scattered across the landscape.
Truth No. 16:
Geography is sometimes a matter of opinion.
Central point or not, I enjoy simply being a tourist for a day and just drifting around. To begin with I treat myself to an overdose of cookies in a “time café,” where customers pay not for what they consume but for the amount of time they spend there. In the cultural center, four musicians, named Mengi, Mergen-Cherel, Ayas, and Zhonchalay, are holding a concert featuring traditional instruments and throat singing. If you were previously unaware that human vocal cords can produce a sound resembling a didgeridoo, you must stop what you’re doing immediately and give throat singers a listen. In a moment of sheer enthusiasm I almost buy a doshpuluur, a three-stringed lute, with the carved head of a horse at the end of the neck and a sound box covered with goatskin. Unfortunately it won’t fit in my backpack.
What I also would really like to take home is some Scythian gold from the National Museum. A number of years ago a German–Russian team of archaeologists made a sensational discovery as they were excavating the royal kurgan burial site Arzhan II. They hit upon six thousand pieces of jewelry and mini sculptures made of gold: bracelets, necklaces, and a whole army of tiny panthers that served as garment ornaments. The most valuable artifacts are kept in a separate room behind a guarded armored door. My favorite pieces are the small stags, with their huge antlers and stumpy tails—2,500 years old and still pretty cute.
My phantomlike host doesn’t contact me (I do actually meet him once more, for one minute when I give him back the key before my departure). So I meet up with Ayu, someone I had also gotten in touch with before my arrival. We meet at 7:30 PM and it’s already dark.
Ayu is twenty-four, has long, dark hair, and is wearing a white blazer, a blouse with a floral pattern, and brand-new sneakers. She arrives with her mother, who is also very nice, but who leaves after five minutes. I conclude that I must not look like an ax murderer (too bad, actually, because if I did I would be able to scare the hell out of the local ultraviolent wrestlers. On the other hand, realistically, at this time of day they’re so drunk they wouldn’t know the difference anyway, and on top of that, the street we’re on is pretty dark).
I ask Ayu, who is a petite woman, how she has the courage to be out on the streets this late. “The only thing the drunks want from me is money for alcohol,” she says cheerfully. “I’ve never had a problem, even walking home at two in the morning.” She actually lives in Poznań, Poland, where she is studying Turkology, but returns home during the semester breaks to visit her family. She speaks fluent English, Polish, Russian, Mongolian, and Tuvan; she thinks quickly but walks slowly, speaks softly but sometimes with anger.
“We are victims of Russian propaganda that makes everything that happens in Tuva sound bad,” she rails. “If someone from Tuva commits murder they say, ‘Tuvan man commits murder.’ If a Russian commits murder in Tuva, then they say, ‘Murder in Tuva’ without naming the perp’s country. Sometimes they simply dig up old murder stories and circulate them again a couple of months later.” She makes the distinction customary in these parts of the country—“Russian” means the Slavs, and the minorities are called Chechens, Tuvans, or Yakuts, although, of course, on their passports they are equally Russian. “If I said that I come from Tuva and I have a knife in my pocket, people would immediately believe me,” says Ayu. “And if I said I own twenty reindeers, they’d believe that too. A lot of people’s perceptions have nothing to do with reality.” However, the times from which these impressions originate are not too long ago. Her grandma, whom she visited that afternoon, used to live as a nomad.