Siberian Wallpaper

In the New Siberian Islands, mammoths have been found imbedded in mud and ice. The Yakut, Igor told me, believed they were animals that lived under the ground and rose to the surface when they died. Here, by a sandy beach overhung with tundra, we found an abandoned hut made of bricks of muddy permafrost and driftwood logs. The roof had collapsed above the door, but I managed to squeeze inside. Tufts of reindeer fur covered the floor, wet in parts and rotting. In one corner I found a pair of rotted leather boots. Warped goggles hung from a nail on the wall. At the back of the room stood a table and two stools. Outside, a pair of rough wooden skis leaned against the wall, surrounded by rusted tin cans, reindeer jawbones, the black rubber sole of a boot, upturned and overgrown with moss. We found a crate holding unopened jars of canned vegetables, and a mound of reindeer antlers. Broken jars full of dirt and moss were half-buried in the tundra, and among them I found a three-sided bottle of blue glass which still smelled of vinegar.

Behind this hut stood a small shed I took at first for an outhouse. Inside were clumps of decayed clothing. I unfolded a pair of thick pants and a musty canvas shirt. There were more crates of unopened food, still with weathered paper labels; sardines and yeast, according to Igor. Three large rolls of some material buckled against the wall in a far corner. I stepped over a crate and tore a piece off. It was paper, printed with stencilled roses. Wallpaper! Three rolls of it, in a deserted Siberian shack.

From the start of the trip I’d been amazed by the human presence in a landscape that desolate. Now we came to an island group called Severnaya Zemlya, which is so remote it was not discovered until 1913, two years after Amundsen had reached the South Pole, the year my grandfather turned eight. The land here is a black mass of rock half-covered in snow. On Bolshevik Island we found a meteorological station that looked uninhabited. With binoculars I could see rusted oil drums littering the beach. When we went ashore by helicopter, two weatherbeaten men and a scruffy white dog came out to greet us. None of them seemed particularly surprised. They ushered us into one of the worn buildings where a small, middle-aged woman set out fresh bread, jams, tea, and coffee. We stood in the narrow hallway and the dark living room which was lined with bookshelves on all four walls. A small TV in the corner was turned to the news from Moscow.

In the kitchen, Willy, the old German, was talking to the woman using the Russian he’d learned in the POW camp. A group of us clustered around the kitchen, eating bread and jam and listening to him translate.

“She says they do the work, the three of them, of six researchers here. Her father worked 30 years at polar stations. Now, she says, the people don’t want to work so far from the mainland. They want to stay close to the cities: Moscow, Leningrad, Archangel.”

The woman stopped talking and fumbled through a drawer. She brought out a handful of black and white photographs and passed them around, looking each of us in the eyes. She had thin brown hair and a worn face. The photographs were of polar bears and dogs. She spoke again in Russian, looking back and forth between us and Willy.

“These were taken just outside this building,” Willy told us. The woman added something, tilting her head sadly to the side.

“The gray dog fighting; he was killed by the polar bear,” said Willy.

“Oooh,” we said collectively, looking at the photo of the gray dog again and shaking our heads. The woman held out her hands, speaking rapidly.

“They must take the weather readings and send the information eight times a day,” Willy explained. “Every three hours, whatever the weather. Sometimes there are bears outside, and they have to carry a gun. In December and January there’s no daylight at all.”

There was a pause. I looked around the small kitchen. I tried to imagine a night two months long.

“No, she says, no one wants to do this work anymore. They want to live in the cities, on the mainland. It’s hard, a hard life.”

Then the woman smiled wide at all of us, showing her bad teeth. And Willy smiled too as he translated, “But she loves the aurora borealis.”