Siberian Wallpaper

My grandfather Dennis Puleston is a naturalist and a painter. He grew up in an English fishing village on the North Sea watching the boats along the Thames Estuary. As a young man he saved enough money to buy a small sailboat. It measured 29 feet and had no engine. In 1931 my grandfather left England and spent the next six years sailing around the world. He managed a coconut plantation in the Virgin Islands, ate human flesh in the South Seas. In Samoa his arm was tattoed with shark’s teeth. During World War II he helped design amphibious landing craft and was awarded the Freedom Medal by President Truman. Later, on Long Island, he founded the Environmental Defense Fund. He is a modest man, and reticent about himself. I heard these stories from other people all my life, taking them for granted, as somehow inevitable.

Now he is in his late eighties. Since he retired from Brookhaven National Laboratory more than 20 years ago, he has traveled as a lecturer on expedition cruise ships. When Salen-Lindblad Travel chartered an icebreaker from the Murmansk Shipping Company for two trips in the Siberian Arctic, they asked him to be the senior naturalist on board.

He mentioned it over tea at home on Long Island. I’d been out of college for two years, moving constantly. At the moment, I was just back from California and unsure what to do next.

“Are you free in August?” my grandfather asked, “I’d like to get you on this trip. McDowell seems to think there might be room.”

I first traveled with my grandfather when I was 13, on a cruise that started in New Zealand, went up the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and ended in the Philippines. Since then he’s taken me with him to the Red Sea, to India, the British Isles, Iceland. “She’s only a child,” people said. “You’ll spoil her rotten.”

“Not at all,” my grandfather always answered. But maybe they were right. Now I move in vague migrations, spoiled, unwilling to settle.

“Of course I’m free,” I said.

My grandfather left three weeks before I did, and I called him from Cape Cod to say goodbye. “I can’t wait,” I said, “I’m counting the days.” In fact, it was impossible to imagine Siberia from the sunny porch where I sat, drawing question marks in the margins of the AWP guide to writing programs. Texas? Arizona? Michigan? I couldn’t imagine myself in any of these places.

I joined the ship in Providenya with the other passengers, tired and disoriented. We were ferried out to where it blazed in the dark harbor, hundreds of lights shining on the orange decks. The black hull blended into the water, so that the ship seemed suspended in the cold air. Deckhands in blue jackets called out in Russian and someone steered me out from under the lowering gangway. Onboard, I moved with the crowd through a doorway where a woman in a red-and-gold headdress offered salted bread while behind her a man in thick glasses played the accordian. Strange faces surrounded me, and then I heard my name, and a moment later my grandfather hugged me close.

I woke up in a cabin bright with sunlight and bolted up, sure it must be afternoon and that I was missing something. It was seven o’clock. I found my grandfather on deck. From the enormous bow of the icebreaker the town of Providenya looked small and grim, a jumble of apartment buildings, warehouses and a smokestack slapped at the foot of dusty hills. Ashore we saw that even up close the buildings all looked the same: houses, storefronts, schools. Later we found the cemetery, on a rocky hill overlooking the harbor. Wrought-iron fences surrounded the graves. A portrait of the deceased was etched into each tombstone, or attached on a ceramic plaque. The graves, the hills, the sea and sky were all gray. What a place to live and die, I thought. Between the dirt and stones people had stuck dozens of bright plastic flowers.