Nevertheless, despite the fact that I am carrying several books in English (they are mainly textbooks for studying Chinese and Japanese), I am not the worst offender. The worst offenders are positioned at a separate table, a sort of second-class table. These are the locals, citizens of the Soviet Union, thin and slight people, in torn smocks and felt boots full of holes, dark-complexioned, slit-eyed Buryats and Kamchadals, Tunguses and Aynovs, Orochans and Koryats. How they were ever allowed to go to China, I don’t know. In any event, they are returning, and with them they are bringing food. I can see out of the corner of my eye that they have many little sacks of kasha.
And it is this kasha that is going to be at issue now. For clearly kasha belongs, beside books, among the products most under suspicion. Apparently there is something in kasha, some sort of ambiguity, some sort of perverse, insidious quality, some sort of deceitfulness, some sort of two-facedness; for yes, this seems to be kasha, but after all it can turn out that this is not completely kasha, that this is kasha, but not one hundred percent. That is why the customs officers are pouring all the kasha out onto the table. The table is beginning to turn gold and brown; it looks like a scale model of the Sahara spread out before them. The sifting of the kasha begins. A careful, meticulous sifting through the fingers. The fingers of the customs inspectors allow narrow little streams of kasha to pass through them, sifting, sifting, but suddenly — stop! The fingers stop and become motionless. The fingers have felt a strange grain. They felt it; they sent a signal to the customs inspector’s brain; the brain responded — stop! The fingers stand still and are waiting. The brain says, Try one more time, cautiously and carefully. The fingers, delicately and imperceptibly, delicately and imperceptibly, but very carefully, very vigilantly, roll the grain about. They investigate. The experienced fingers of a Soviet customs inspector. Skilled, ready to throttle the grain instantly, catch it in a trap, imprison it. But the little grain is simply what it is — meaning, an ordinary little grain of ordinary kasha, and what has singled it out from the million other grains strewn on the table in the border station in Zabaykal’sk is an uncommon, strange shape, the result of some sort of roughness in the millstone, which turned out to be warped, uneven. So, not contraband, not a trick, concludes the customs inspector’s brain, but it doesn’t give up yet. On the contrary, it commands the fingers to keep on sifting, keep on examining, keep on feeling, and even at the shadow of a doubt to stop — immediately!
Let us consider, after all, that this is the 1950s, and that the mills in China are already very old and ineffectual. Let us consider what problems this creates for the customs inspectors from Zabaykal’sk. There are an infinite number of grains with atypical, suspicious shapes. Almost every second the fingers are sending a message to the brain. Almost every moment the brain raises an alarm — stop! Grain after grain, handful after handful, little sack after little sack, Buryat after Buryat.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from this spectacle. I watched fascinated, forgot about the barbed wire and the lookouts, forgot about the dogs. Why, these are fingers that should be sculpting gold, polishing diamonds! What microscopic movements, what responsive tremors, what sensitivity, what professional virtuosity!
We returned to the cars in the dark; snow was falling; ice creaked under our boots. In Zabaykal’sk I received another kind of lesson, that the border here is not a line on a map, but a school. The pupils who graduate from this school will be divided into three groups. The first group — the absolutely enraged. They will be the most miserable, for everything around them will cause them stress, will reduce them to a state of fury, to madness. Will irritate, annoy, torment. Before they even realize that they can change nothing in the reality surrounding them, that they can improve nothing, they will be felled by a heart attack or a stroke.
The second group will observe the Soviet people and imitate their way of thinking and acting. The essence of this posture is resigning oneself to the existing reality, and even being able to derive from it a certain satisfaction. There is a saying that is very helpful in this, and which it behooves one to repeat to oneself and to others every evening, regardless of how terrible the day that has just ended: “Rejoice in this day, for things will never again be as good as they were today!”
Finally, the third group. They are the ones for whom everything is above all else interesting, extraordinary, improbable, who want to get to know this different world hitherto unknown to them, examine it, plumb it. They know how to arm themselves with patience (but not superciliousness!), and to maintain distance with a calm, attentive, sober gaze.
Such are the three attitudes characteristic of foreigners who have found themselves in the Imperium.
CHITA — ULAN-UDE
Looking through the window of the rushing train, I think: Siberia, so this is how it looks! I heard this name for the first time when I was seven years old. Stern mothers from our street cautioned: “Children, behave yourselves, or they’ll deport you to the Sybir!” (They said it in Russian — Sybir — for this sounded more menacing, apocalyptic.) Gentle mothers would become indignant: “How can you frighten children this way!”
It wasn’t really possible to imagine Siberia. One of my friends finally showed me a drawing in a book: in a heavy snowstorm walked a column of tattered and hunched-over men. Heavy chains with iron balls at the end were attached to their hands and legs, and they dragged these balls behind them over the ground.
Siberia, in its sinister, cruel form, is a freezing, icy space … plus dictatorship.
In many states there exist icy territories, lands that for the greater part of the year are frozen over, dead. Such, for instance, are vast stretches of Canada. Or take Danish Greenland, or American Alaska. And yet it doesn’t occur to anyone to frighten children with: “Wash your hands or they’ll send you to Canada!” Or “Play nicely with that little girl or they’ll deport you to America!” In those countries, quite simply, there is no dictatorship, nobody puts anyone in chains, nobody imprisons anyone in camps, dispatches him to work in hellish frost, to a certain death. In those frozen lands, man has one antagonist — the cold. Here, as many as three — the cold, hunger, and armed force.
In 1842, in Paris, the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz delivered two speeches at the College de France about the memoirs of General Kopeć. Kopeć fought by Kościuszko’s side near Maciejowice, and there was taken prisoner by the Russians and sentenced to Siberia. They drove Kopeć some ten thousand kilometers over the Russian and Siberian wilderness, to Kamchatka.
It was a real journey through hell.
They drove him, as the general writes, in a police wagon “which had the shape of a trunk, covered with skins, and inside with sheets of iron, with only a small window on one side for serving water or food.
“This trunk,” Kopeć continues, “was without a seat, and because my wounds had not yet healed, they gave me a sack with straw and I was designated a secret prisoner, with a number only, no name. Such a prisoner is for them the greatest criminal, with whom no one, under pain of the greatest punishment, can converse or even know his name or the reason he was taken captive.”