butchered out the fish to filets, rubbed them with handfuls of coarse salt, and skewered them on sharp, thin pieces of wet cedar. He left the scales on and said cooking would burn them away. While he built a fire in a pit in his yard, Lizaveta gave us a tour of the house and garden. The house was a combination of wood-frame and logs, and it had nooks, lofts, and additions. A broad window above a desk in the study looked out on a wild panorama of river and sky. The study’s built-in bookshelves held an extensive library; Lizaveta said she had a degree in geography from Irkutsk University. I noticed a many-volume set of Herman Melville in Russian, and
Never Cry Wolf
(
Ne Kri Volki
) by Farley Mowat. By my own unscientific reckoning, in Russia Farley Mowat is the most widely read recent English-language author. Everybody there seems to know
Ne Kri Volki
.
The family’s garden was a wonder—raised beds, little wooden irrigation troughs, staked plants, trellises, sanded paths. All the fruits and vegetables were small, because of the short growing season. The carrots and red raspberries and currants Lizaveta gave us to try had the explosive flavor of their intense, brief summer. Branches of a small tree hung heavy with just-ripened Siberian cherries. The Siberian cherry is about the size and color of a cough drop and has a small stone. At the gallery we’d visited earlier in the day there had been a bowl of these cherries, and I had eaten them almost excessively.
For dinner we had Vladimir’s fish, and tomatoes and carrots and cucumbers from the garden, and boiled
omul
’ with scallions, and pieces of chocolate we’d brought, and a Chinese white wine served in glasses with leaves painted on them. I tried to look engaged as unknown subjects were discussed around me. Lizaveta brought tea and homemade strawberry jam, which was tastier, if possible, than the cherries. We sat outside, ignoring the flies. The sun began to go down and the endless scenery before us came right up to our toes. In the near distance a couple of guys on the riverbank horsed around. First they fished but didn’tcatch anything. Then they undressed to their shorts and swam, splashing and diving. Then one of them retrieved a bar of soap from his piled-up clothes and both had a thorough wash. Vladimir said the stouter of the two was the local Orthodox priest.
Vladimir and Lizaveta wanted me to sign a guest book, but they did not have it handy, and so brought me an invitation to the opening of a show of Vladimir’s fur pictures, and I signed that. I wrote how much I had admired the pictures, and the Siberian cherries as well, and I added something self-congratulatory about how far away I was from home that they did not understand when Katya translated it.
On the drive back to the place where we were staying, the microbus quit after an hour or so and rolled to a stop. We got out in the northern twilight on a straight road of gray-brown gravel built up and graded through a dense, swampy forest of birch. I walked back and forth along the road for a while, and made a short detour down into the woods, just to see what it was like. There I had my first taste of Siberian mosquitoes, or vice versa. Alyosha took out a vehicle manual and pored over it. At one end of the road, a pale full moon rose. Then he removed the engine cover, laid his tools on the car seat, and went to work. The rest of us sat in the vehicle or on the road and talked. As the twilight imperceptibly darkened, the ratcheting of his wrenches and the murmur of our conversations were the only sounds.
Later that evening, everybody who had come with Sasha, except for Katya and me, had to go back to Ulan-Ude. Sasha left us some Chinese beer, and instructions about who would bring us back to the city. We had moved to a new resort, one that offered more privacy in the form of individual cabins and locks the size of stage props to secure their doors. This resort had a sand beach on Baikal and its own
Never Cry Wolf
(
Ne Kri Volki
) by Farley Mowat. By my own unscientific reckoning, in Russia Farley Mowat is the most widely read recent English-language author. Everybody there seems to know
Ne Kri Volki
.
The family’s garden was a wonder—raised beds, little wooden irrigation troughs, staked plants, trellises, sanded paths. All the fruits and vegetables were small, because of the short growing season. The carrots and red raspberries and currants Lizaveta gave us to try had the explosive flavor of their intense, brief summer. Branches of a small tree hung heavy with just-ripened Siberian cherries. The Siberian cherry is about the size and color of a cough drop and has a small stone. At the gallery we’d visited earlier in the day there had been a bowl of these cherries, and I had eaten them almost excessively.
For dinner we had Vladimir’s fish, and tomatoes and carrots and cucumbers from the garden, and boiled
omul
’ with scallions, and pieces of chocolate we’d brought, and a Chinese white wine served in glasses with leaves painted on them. I tried to look engaged as unknown subjects were discussed around me. Lizaveta brought tea and homemade strawberry jam, which was tastier, if possible, than the cherries. We sat outside, ignoring the flies. The sun began to go down and the endless scenery before us came right up to our toes. In the near distance a couple of guys on the riverbank horsed around. First they fished but didn’tcatch anything. Then they undressed to their shorts and swam, splashing and diving. Then one of them retrieved a bar of soap from his piled-up clothes and both had a thorough wash. Vladimir said the stouter of the two was the local Orthodox priest.
Vladimir and Lizaveta wanted me to sign a guest book, but they did not have it handy, and so brought me an invitation to the opening of a show of Vladimir’s fur pictures, and I signed that. I wrote how much I had admired the pictures, and the Siberian cherries as well, and I added something self-congratulatory about how far away I was from home that they did not understand when Katya translated it.
On the drive back to the place where we were staying, the microbus quit after an hour or so and rolled to a stop. We got out in the northern twilight on a straight road of gray-brown gravel built up and graded through a dense, swampy forest of birch. I walked back and forth along the road for a while, and made a short detour down into the woods, just to see what it was like. There I had my first taste of Siberian mosquitoes, or vice versa. Alyosha took out a vehicle manual and pored over it. At one end of the road, a pale full moon rose. Then he removed the engine cover, laid his tools on the car seat, and went to work. The rest of us sat in the vehicle or on the road and talked. As the twilight imperceptibly darkened, the ratcheting of his wrenches and the murmur of our conversations were the only sounds.
Later that evening, everybody who had come with Sasha, except for Katya and me, had to go back to Ulan-Ude. Sasha left us some Chinese beer, and instructions about who would bring us back to the city. We had moved to a new resort, one that offered more privacy in the form of individual cabins and locks the size of stage props to secure their doors. This resort had a sand beach on Baikal and its own
Similar Books
