Siberian Wallpaper

“What made you come to the U.S.?” I asked my grandfather as we walked back toward the docks. I wanted to find out more about his life, to fill in the gaps between the family stories I’d been raised on. It struck me that when he left England to sail around the world he must not have been much older than I was now.

“Oh, that was quite by chance,” said my grandfather. “We went aground off Cape Hatteras in a storm.”

I was quiet for a moment. I’d never imagined how my grandfather’s life might have turned out differently. “But did you know you wanted to live there?”

“No, no. I was heading for the South Seas.”

“What about after the South Seas?”

“Well,” he said, “I wasn’t sure what to do. I had friends in New York and got a job teaching sailing for the summer. Then I met your grandmother. You know that story. She fell overboard during a boat race and I jumped in to rescue her.”

“But after you got married,” I asked, “how did you decide where to live?”

“Well, it worked out that the house in Brookhaven was free, and we took it.”

“You never wanted to move to the Seychelles, or New Zealand?”

“Oh, no,” he said seriously. “Think of the ospreys, and the Great South Bay. No, I’d never live anywhere else.”

We came to an Inuit settlement called New Cheblina just as the sun was setting. I stood on the bow with my grandfather and Igor Zoltikov, a glaciologist. After the revolution, Igor told us, the government forced many villages along the coast to relocate inland. “The old people,” said Igor, “they all died in less than a year.” From the bow we could see several dark mounds on the shore, and further back the squat houses. Beyond the houses rose more bleak hills, and then the shifting sky. The Soviet government paid extra money as incentive to work on the Siberian coast. Igor said he knew people who came intending to stay two or three years to make money and have never left. They still talk over dinner about how they should move back to warmer, more civilized places, but they stay.

At the beach a crowd of ragged, dark-haired boys helped pull our boats up. The mounds we’d seen from the ship were the carcasses of two gray whales, hacked nearly beyond recognition. The blubber had been cut off and piled in bloody fillets beside a scale. Parts of the carcasses had been burned, and the dark skin was charred. The stench was awful. The last red light of the sun shone on two small dogs with sharp faces tearing at a long blubber strip with their teeth. The intestines of the whales lay in a gleaming jumble, like thick, knotted rope or enormous sausages. I turned away. “A remarkable people,” my grandfather said. Before they had access to timber, he told me, the Inuit used whale bones to support animal hide tents.

Inland up a low slope the houses of New Cheblina stood in rows, with battered motorcycles parked behind them. The school principal and one of the teachers came down to talk with a group of us in English. They told us the town consisted of 550 or so inhabitants, over 100 of them school children. The one-story, wooden buildings had no central heating and no running water, and generally housed four families. “What do you do,” an American in a red parka asked, looking around the grim landscape, “you know, for fun?” The teacher looked surprised. There was basketball and volleyball at the community center, she told us. There were hot springs nearby. In winter they went fishing on the ice.

Our fourth day on board, news of a coup d’etat in Moscow came over the radio. Mike McDowell, the expedition leader, told us at dinner that evening that a state of emergency had been declared. Boris Yeltsin was calling for a general strike. People had already been killed in Estonia, and tanks were surrounding Moscow. Gorbachev was said to be “resting.” This didn’t affect our trip, Mike said; we had food and supplies for four months, easily, and fuel for six years. The officers and crew supported Yeltsin, but had voted not to strike until the cruise was over. Outside, a fog had come up, and we seemed self-contained and removed from the politics of the world. But then I thought of the crew disembarking at the end of the trip, not knowing if they had homes to go to.