Read Online Riding the Iron Rooster by Paul Theroux - Free Book Online
Authors: Paul Theroux
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by the shore, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted each other, while the driver took their picture. The bride wore a rented dress of white lace, and the groom a dark suit with a wide red ribbon worn as a sash. In the course of one walk in this direction I saw four couples do thisâhave a ceremonial drink, then pose for a picture. The shore was littered with champagne bottles.
I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.
***
There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.
An Estonian rock group called Radar was playing in Irkutsk, a freezing wind blew across the river, the toilet seat in my room had been cut from a flat and splintery piece of plywood. How had these people sent rockets to Mars?
Young men and fox-faced women lurked on the promenade and importuned what foreigners they could find.
"Want to sellâ"
They wanted to buy blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, sport shoes, watches, sweaters, sweatshirts, lighters. They paid in rublesâor else I could have Annushka for an hour. Did I have a radio? And what about a pen?
That night, listening to my little shortwave radio, I heard the news on the BBC World Service. It was the usual headmistress's voice, but the message seemed portentous.
"Swedish officials say they have detected high radioactive levels in the atmosphere," she said, "and they link these with other reports that Finland, Denmark, and Norway have also detected much higher concentrations of radioactivity than usual. At first, it had been thought that the radioactive material had leaked from a Swedish plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm. But officials from different parts of Sweden say they think the leak has come from the east, in other words from a nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Easterly winds have been blowing over Scandinavia for several days. According to one report, radiation levels are up to six times above normal level in Finland and half as much again as is normal in Norway."
This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It had happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Unionâin Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.
In the morning we left Irkutsk for Mongolia. The people in the group complained that the train was three hours late, but that didn't seem badâafter all, it had come from Moscow, which was almost 4000 miles away. It was the direct Moscow-to-Mongolia train, following the route of the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan-Ude and then becoming the Trans-Mongolian Express when it turned south from there. It takes in the most rugged and beautiful part of Siberia, the mountainous region south of Lake Baikal called Buryatskaya, inhabited by the nomadic Buryats. The train skirts the lake, passing the ice fishermen at Slyudyanka and keeping to the shore, to Babushkin and beyond.
I found this very depressing. Was it the ritual, or was it the fact that, because the Soviet divorce rate was so high, everything related to marriage there looked like a charade? It might have been nothing more than the cold: Baikal was freezing, and the lake looked like a plain of snow and ice in Antarctica. Well, after all it was winter in Siberia.
***
There were any number of people eager to explain why Irkutsk was the capital of Siberia, an education center, an Asiatic crossroads; but I thought Rick Westbetter had it just about right when he said, "Grand Rapids used to look like this, when I was a kid. Look, outdoor privies. We haven't seen those since the twenties." I told him that I had been reading Sinclair Lewis and that these Siberian cities and towns looked like tired versions of Zenith and Gopher Prairie: not only the wooden houses with the porches, but the main street and the old cars and the trolleys, and the wide-fronted department stores that looked as though they should be called The Bon-Ton Store. If there was a difference it was that the class system was probably more rigid in Siberia, and the local version of George F. Babbitt would be a party hack rather than a real-estate man.
An Estonian rock group called Radar was playing in Irkutsk, a freezing wind blew across the river, the toilet seat in my room had been cut from a flat and splintery piece of plywood. How had these people sent rockets to Mars?
Young men and fox-faced women lurked on the promenade and importuned what foreigners they could find.
"Want to sellâ"
They wanted to buy blue jeans, T-shirts, track shoes, sport shoes, watches, sweaters, sweatshirts, lighters. They paid in rublesâor else I could have Annushka for an hour. Did I have a radio? And what about a pen?
That night, listening to my little shortwave radio, I heard the news on the BBC World Service. It was the usual headmistress's voice, but the message seemed portentous.
"Swedish officials say they have detected high radioactive levels in the atmosphere," she said, "and they link these with other reports that Finland, Denmark, and Norway have also detected much higher concentrations of radioactivity than usual. At first, it had been thought that the radioactive material had leaked from a Swedish plant near Uppsala, north of Stockholm. But officials from different parts of Sweden say they think the leak has come from the east, in other words from a nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Easterly winds have been blowing over Scandinavia for several days. According to one report, radiation levels are up to six times above normal level in Finland and half as much again as is normal in Norway."
This was the first inkling of the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station, near Kiev. It had happened two days before, when I was in the Soviet Unionâin Baikal, cursing the Soviets for never bothering to fix leaky pipes.
In the morning we left Irkutsk for Mongolia. The people in the group complained that the train was three hours late, but that didn't seem badâafter all, it had come from Moscow, which was almost 4000 miles away. It was the direct Moscow-to-Mongolia train, following the route of the Trans-Siberian as far as Ulan-Ude and then becoming the Trans-Mongolian Express when it turned south from there. It takes in the most rugged and beautiful part of Siberia, the mountainous region south of Lake Baikal called Buryatskaya, inhabited by the nomadic Buryats. The train skirts the lake, passing the ice fishermen at Slyudyanka and keeping to the shore, to Babushkin and beyond.
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