And Speaking of Asia

I gave up on the CIA just over half-way through, just after Beirut in 1983. It was like dragging myself through dust and barbed wire. The writing was good. But the subject - the criminally insane incompetence, the smugness, the politicrats' projections of their own violent madness - and the prospect of the weeks and weeks I would need to finish the account, were destroying the only heart I have.  

 - Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, Doubleday, New York, c2007. 

"It was early April and a warm rain pattered out of the sky. It polished the avenues to brilliant green, stirred stagnant ponds in the wells of numberless flat-blocks and hatched a swarm of pink umbrellas above the women. Whenever a wind blew, it seeped through the frames of my hotel window.

But little else entered the hotel. It was a parody of the self defeated Soviet world which had built it. It reeled across the sky in a cliff of balconies and porticoes. But inside everything fell to bits."

Who can resist writing like that - simultaneously evocative and incisive, subtle and energetic, open to all the winds that blow - the lovely sharp eyes, the fluent translation of blood and bone awareness? 

 - The Lost Heart of Asia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1994.

Later:
Some of the book is dry and hard as the land and poverty it describes. And then Thubron realizes the jeep is running along the old bed of the Amu Dariya, cliffs layered and smoothed by the immense flow of old water, and that image stays with you. You run the eyes of your mind along that long striped stone the way you rub the side of your thumb along the small still lake of the glass on your watch-face. It soothes you. And you need soothing; you're afraid again that you're bleeding out into futility in your cubicle.

Later still:
The book ends at the easternmost point of Kyrgzstan with snow-capped peaks “hanging in nothing,” the Tien Shan mountains narrowing, funnelling the traveller to China. Thubron says that Tamerlane came this way. Above the open mouth of a long-pillaged burial mound for some Scythian or Turkic chieftain stands a slope of many thousands of coloured stones, some of ochre, some grey. Local legend has it that on his way to China, Tamerlane had each man of his army place a stone on the slope and, as they retreated, had each man remove one. He describes these remaining stones as a memorial “to waste, by the wasted.”

It's his ability to unite past, present, landscape and emotional perceptiveness into moments of lighting revelation that makes his writing so rewarding.

Siberia next.... I remember the Russia of the Cold War: dark and evil twin to the United States, threat, enemy, enigma; producer of great literature, ballet, music, art; prison empire. So I'm happy enough to follow Thubron to post-Soviet Siberia – the unimaginable weight of the sky – and to find people making sense of rubble, repairing, moving away or failing to outmanoeuvre destruction. (Knowing the shape of reality, needing precise and illuminating description that is also analysis.)

Later again:  

All through Siberia Thubron finds collapse: Communism, the economy, the basis of its past (the landscape, lichen poisoned by acid rain, the retreat of the reindeer, old lives impossible to resume); finds Dostoievskian types, stereotypes, orthodoxy and the Middle Ages ready to rise from the weeds; roses planted in a restored monastery to memorialize the dead and metaphorically represent them, still, in a gentled landscape and new consciousness; Old Believers losing their young to the internet and the cities. He finds the rotting infrastructure of the gulag, the never-ending dimensions of the ruin created by Stalin and his successors. He always, insistently, goes where people tell him he shouldn't or can't.

Everyone asks him why he is there. It seems the only answer is that he has to see, to the furthest the extremity of what can be seen.

He ends the book a stone's throw from the Arctic Circle, at Magadan, a city near one of the most infamous of the camps, Butugychag. He especially has to see this camp: apart from its reputation and history, it will be bulldozed soon. The camp will disappear as surely as its prisoners. Erasure will be erased, as though that will suspend the radioactivity in the area, the ecological ruination of Stalinism, the displacement and destruction of populations, the mechanics of society, chemistry, time.

The iron frame of the camp gates stands redundant in the debris of its towers. Beneath the snow our feet snag on objects we only guess at, and drag up barbed wire. Rusted machinery pokes above the surface. Beyond, we stumble through the wrecks of barracks and prison cells. In the roofless rooms the guards' benches are still in place, with a range of hooks for their coats. The snow lies on platform beds in hard, crystalline piles. A pair of boots is discarded by a stove. Everything emits a hand-to-mouth rusticity and squalor, Skeletal iron doors still swing on isolation cells a few feet square. The slots survive where the prisoners' gruel was pushed through, and the barred windows remain intact, and the stove in the guards' sauna.

It was the same through much of Kolyma. The prisoners lived and died in tents. Despairingly they pressed insulating moss and peat between the thin layers of canvas, sprinkled them with sawdust, and stacked boards outside. Inside was a single cast-iron stove.

And now gently, insistently, the snow is falling. It drifts over the low stumps and covers the buildings with its pale indifference. It floats through the roofless passages, the guard chambers, the rooms of administration, of neglect, of boredom. It fills the valley with a sick translucence.

Yuri goes on kicking at the tent foundations, then looks up at me. “You know, my grandfather was a village postman, who spent years in the camps for making a joke about Stalin.” (pp. 276-277)

In Siberia, Colin Thubron, HarperCollins, New York, 1999.

Here, and in The Lost Heart of Asia, Thubron sees such reduction in the basic possibility of life, in its necessary foundations (soil, water, food, workable occupations) that it's hard to know how he bears it. 

I can only imagine it's the exquisite precision of his writing, and the occasional moment of hope he witnesses, that make it possible. Those, and the fact that he brings them to us for our contemplation, also, and so, perhaps, to a cure.