Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
“Sergei, how is your family—Tania? Anton?”
“Really well. Thank you for asking, Rose.”
Sergei tells her about Anton's hope for a military draft deferment so he can complete his
residency program.
“Oh, Sergei. I'll keep my fingers crossed for him. He worked so hard. When we were in
Moscow, I feel like we never saw him sleep.”
Anton's future is clearly weighing on Sergei's mind. He tells me and Rose about his own
military service—which was a close call. In Soviet times the requirement was two years,
not just one. Sergei interviewed with a unit that was seeing call-ups to Afghanistan. It was
1981, and the Soviets were beginning an invasion that would end in failure and thousands
of casualties.
“Some of the men from that unit were sent. Some said they would see fifty guys—then
just five would be left.” Somehow Sergei was deployed instead to the Caucasus region as a
Soviet border guard.
“I guess you said the right thing in that interview.”
He nods, taking a bite of cake.
Hours pass. Rose and I do some reading and napping. Sergei is on his laptop, picking up
faint Internet signals here and there.
Finally our train pulls into Irkutsk. I am so excited to get in a taxi and get to Lake
Baikal. It's truly one of the world's natural treasures. Nestled in the mountains, the lake is
the deepest body of fresh water in the world. It resembles Lake Tahoe—in fact, the two are
considered sister lakes—but to my mind Baikal is even more breathtaking. In the summer-
time the lake reflects the green mountains and blue skies “like a mirror,” Chekhov wrote.
In the winter it's majestic in a different way—near the shorelines the surface of the lake
is frozen, a clear, reflective blue-green surface that looks like an abstract painting. Farther
out on the lake, snow—fresh, brilliantly white, untouched snow—extends like a quilt to
the tree-covered mountains that shoot up at the horizon. As I wrote earlier, seeing Baikal
was enough to lift the spirits—albeit briefly—of a gulag prisoner trapped in a boxcar, pee-
ing through a wooden crack. And the legacy of the Decembrists runs deep here. Local le-
gend has it that on their journey to exile some of the Decembrists stopped on the shores of
Baikal, waited for the lake to freeze, then rode across on horseback. Even today the freez-
ing of Baikal is a significant event. Once solid, the lake becomes a playground. People take
hovercraft across the ice—or even cars and trucks. The bravest ride across on bicycles.
We pile into a taxi in Irkutsk and head for the lake. History is on Rose's mind.
“Don't forget I always told you I'm like a Decembrist wife,” she says.
She did always tell me—half-jokingly—that escorting me to Russia for several years
and making the best of it was not unlike the women in the nineteenth century who, rather
than leave their husbands, followed them to their Siberian exile.
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