In the afternoon I had tea and gazed out the window again. Birches, nothing but birches. Over my second cup of tea I chatted with Masha, not about the Siberian landscape but about Moscow and Tokyo. Then Masha went to another compartment, and I remained alone at the window. I was bored and began to get sleepy. Soon I was enjoying my boredom. The birches vanished before my eyes, leaving only the again-and-again of their passage, as in an imageless dream.
9
Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
Siberia, “the sleeping land” (from the Tartar: sib = sleep, ir = Earth), but it wasn’t asleep. So it really wasn’t at all necessary for the prince to come kiss the Earth awake. (He came from a European fairy tale.) Or did he come to find treasure?
When the Creator of the Universe was distributing treasures on Earth and flew over Siberia, he trembled so violently with cold that his hands grew stiff and the precious stones and metals he held in them fell to the ground. To hide these treasures from Man, he covered Siberia with eternal frost.
It was August, and there was no trace of the cold that had stiffened the Creator’s hands. The Siberian tribes mentioned in my book were also nowhere to be seen, for the Trans-Siberian Railroad traverses only those regions populated by Russians — tracing out a path of conquered territory, a narrow extension of Europe.
10
Something I told a woman three years after the journey:
For me, Moscow was always the city where you never arrive. When I was three years old, the Moscow Artists’ Theater performed in Tokyo for the first time. My parents spent half a month’s salary on tickets for Chekhov’s Three Sisters.
When Irina, one of the three sisters, spoke the famous words: “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow…,” her voice pierced my parents’ ears so deeply that these very same words began to leap out of their own mouths as well. The three sisters never got to Moscow, either. The city must have been hidden somewhere backstage. So it wasn’t Siberia, but rather the theater stage that lay between my parents and the city of their dreams.
In any case, my parents, who were often unemployed during this period, occasionally quoted these words. When my father, for example, spoke of his unrealistic plan of founding his own publishing house, my mother would say, laughing, “To Moscow, to Moscow, to Moscow….” My father would say the same thing whenever my mother spoke of her childhood in such a way as though she might be able to become a child again. Naturally, I didn’t understand what they meant. I only sensed that the word had something to do with impossibility. Since the word “Moscow” was always repeated three times, I didn’t even know it was a city and not a magic word.
11
Diary excerpt:
I flipped through a brochure the conductor had given me. The photographs showed modern hospitals and schools in Siberia. The train stopped at the big station at Ulan-Ude. For the first time, there were many faces in the train that were not Russian.
I laid the brochure aside and picked up my book.
A fairy tale told among the Tungus:
Once upon a time there was a shaman who awakened all the dead and wouldn’t let even a single person die. This made him stronger than God. So God suggested a contest: by magic words alone, the shaman was to transform two pieces of chicken meat given him by God into live chickens. If the shaman failed, he wouldn’t be stronger than God any longer. The first piece of meat was transformed into a chicken by the magic words and flew away, but not the second one. Ever since, human beings have died. Mostly in hospitals.
Why was the shaman unable to change the second piece of meat into a chicken? Was the second piece somehow different from the first, or did the number two rob the shaman of his power? For some reason, the number two always makes me uneasy.
I also made the acquaintance of a shaman, but not in Siberia; it was much later, in a museum of anthropology in Europe. He stood in a glass case, and his voice came from a tape recorder that was already rather old. For this reason his voice always quavered prodigiously and was louder than a voice from a human body. The microphone is an imitation of the flame that enhances the voice’s magical powers.
Usually, the shamans were able to move freely between the three zones of the world. That is, they could visit both the heavens and the world of the dead just by climbing up and down the World-Tree. My shaman, though, stood not in one of these three zones, but in a fourth one: the museum. The number four deprived him permanently of his power: his face was frozen in an expression of fear, his mouth, half-open, was dry, and in his painted eyes burned no fire.
12
Excerpt from my first travel narrative:
In the restaurant car I ate a fish called omul’. Lake Baikal is also home to several other species that actually belong in a saltwater habitat, said a Russian teacher sitting across from me — the Baikal used to be a sea.
But how could there possibly be a sea here, in the middle of the continent? Or is the Baikal a hole in the continent that goes all the way through? That would mean my childish notion about the globe being a sphere of water was right after all. The water of the Baikal, then, would be the surface of the water-sphere. A fish could reach the far side of the sphere by swimming through the water.
And so the omul’ I had eaten swam around inside my body that night, as though it wanted to find a place where its journey could finally come to an end.
13
There were once two brothers whose mother, a Russian painter, had emigrated to Tokyo during the Revolution and lived there ever since. On her eightieth birthday she expressed the wish to see her native city, Moscow, once more before she died. Her sons arranged for her visa and accompanied her on her journey on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. But when the third sun rose over Siberia, their mother was no longer on the train. The brothers searched for her from first car to last, but they couldn’t find her. The conductor told them the story of an old man who, three years earlier, had opened the door of the car, mistaking it for the door to the toilet, and had fallen from the train. The brothers were granted a special visa and traveled the same stretch in the opposite direction on the local train. At each station they got out and asked whether anyone had seen their mother. A month passed without their finding the slightest trace.
I can remember the story up to this point; afterwards I must have fallen asleep. My mother often read me stories that filled the space between waking and sleep so completely that, in comparison, the time when I was awake lost much of its color and force. Many years later I found, quite by chance, the continuation of this story in a library.
The old painter lost her memory when she fell from the train. She could remember neither her origins nor her plans. So she remained living in a small village in Siberia that seemed strangely familiar to her. Only at night, when she heard the train coming, did she feel uneasy, and sometimes she even ran alone through the dark woods to the tracks, as though someone had called to her.
14
As a child, my mother was often ill, just like her own mother, who had spent half her life in bed. My mother grew up in a Buddhist temple in which one could hear, as early as five o’clock in the morning, the prayer that her father, the head priest of the temple, was chanting with his disciples.