Read Online Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier - Free Book Online Page A

private spring of supposedly medicinal water that smelled of sulfur and iron. I was made a bit nervous, however, by the resort’s manager, a large, blunt-featured man in a thigh-length sport shirt, and especially by his habit of carrying a Kalashnikov assault rifle everywhere he went. He carried it any old way, however he happened to have last picked it up—by the barrel, by the butt, by the strap—as if it were some miscellaneous object he was bringing in from the car. Once passing by the dining hall I saw him clearingtables after breakfast as his Kalashnikov leaned muzzle-down against the wall nearby. Also, several horses roamed the resort grounds, and they loved to knock their heads against the cabins. You’d be taking a nap and—
thunk
—the head of a horse just outside would hit the wall.
    Alex arrived from Moscow, at last. He had gotten a ride from the Ulan-Ude airport with a young couple, friends of Sasha’s. His exhibition had gone well, he had drunk cognac and slept on the plane, and he appeared in a remarkably untroubled mood. For a few days we walked on the beach, built fires there, took hikes in the woods. I had never seen a forest of such variety, with sky-high larches, rank on rank of birches, poplars four feet around, and an understory full of blueberry, currant, and red raspberry bushes, along with ferns of many kinds and mushrooms soggy with rainwater and shot through with worms. The food in the resort’s dining room was neither good nor plentiful, so we added to it with fish Katya and I caught in a nearby river, the Maksimikha, using grasshoppers for bait. The fish were small, but wrapped in wet paper from Katya’s sketchbook and baked in the coals of our beach fire, they tasted fine. While improvising a fishing pole for Katya from a willow sapling, I cut deep into the ball of my thumb with my barlow pocketknife, and I made a fuss about that.

    (Considering the knife unlucky from then on, I wanted no more to do with it and gave it to Katya to keep permanently. For years she carried it with her. Then when she was on vacation in Barcelona, a thief grabbed her backpack and ran off with it, and the knife was inside. I had found the knife originally on the shore of Rock Creek, in western Montana. One of its blades had been stuck about half an inch into a log, and evidently it had been there for a good while, because the wood left a deep rust stain on the steel. I’d be curious to know where that peripatetic knife is now.)
    Some nights Alex and Katya and I sat on the beach until late and talked about weighty questions. Alex expatiated on what a con job the art world was and said all of American modernism was the result of artists in the thirties and forties sleeping with Peggy Guggenheim. He proved, by arguments I can’t reproduce, that Picasso was the worst artist of the twentieth century. Katya said it had been strange to see Russian friends again. She remembered when it became fashionable among her friends to take up religion in the waning days of communism, sort of as a defiant alternative; now she believed that religion had ruined the lives of some of them and had caused them to have too many children and do other constraining things. She said she feared religion and looked on its continuing revival in Russia with dread. She had decided, she said, that she didn’t believe in God, but in a basic goodness in people. I said maybe that was the same thing.
    In the middle of the discussion, a drunk came out of the darkness holding a big fish he wanted to trade for vodka. But we had only Chinese beer, and he didn’t want beer.
    I never did figure out what was up with that resort. Someone who worked at it told Katya many mafia came there. The oddness of the owner seemed to bear that out, as did some crude wooden mannequins dressed in shirts and trousers that we found in the forest; they had been thoroughly blasted with double-aught buckshot at close range. This made me think my nervousness was justified,