One Steppe Beyond by Thom Wheeler

Author:Thom Wheeler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789085241522
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 2010-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

8

Heartlands

“Space, in the end, may be all you remember of Novosibirsk.”

COLIN THUBRON

The morning after our arrival in Novosibirsk we headed for breakfast in an institutional Soviet-style canteen, a large characterless hall with faux stained glass windows and dusty chandeliers. Sleepily I approached the café’s confusing breakfast counter. A particularly happy serving lady caught me contemplating the strange mixture of food on offer: “Do you know this kind of breakfast?” she quizzed, as if her particular breakfast was somehow unique.

It was a type of breakfast I had indeed never previously come across: quite unique! Rice with cold frankfurters, heavily smothered in ketchup. This final touch was the sole responsibility of an irrationally enthusiastic man. Nothing about the breakfast that stared up at me seemed right at 7.30 in the morning, and my stomach was defiantly in league with my reason. I was bemused that in the six years I’d been away from Russia so little had changed that the average Russian was prepared to put up with such an early morning abuse on the taste buds. It reminded me of a warning I had received somewhere, to at all costs avoid the shashlik – which is regularly blamed for kidney infection. For shashlik it was too late – 1 had already acquired a taste for them – but it was not too late for this ‘breakfast’. I would not be taking any chances, and if it meant missing out on a unique experience, so be it. Despite the lack of breakfast we were refreshed after a heavy sleep, and made up our minds not to rush out of town, but to try to enjoy it with some sightseeing. Or at least I fancied a bit of culture…Jo didn’t, she opted to take the opportunity to write some letters and spend some quality time with Max.

I decided to visit the Novosibirsk State Art Museum in search of some Rerikh, the darling of the Siberian art scene. Nikolay Rerikh had lived from 1874 until 1947 and was both a painter (best known for his scenery for ballets) and a spiritual teacher. He was attracted by mountainous regions of Central Asia, finally settling in the Himalayas. He believed that ‘Shambhala’, a Buddhist paradise, could be found (and founded) in the Altai – a mountainous region south of Novosibirsk that has a foot in not only Russia but also China, Mongolia and Kazakhstan, sometimes referred to as ‘the navel of the world’ due to its similarity to a navel when illustrated on a map. Having connected with the region on a spiritual level, Rerikh set his sights on the creation of nirvana in the middle of Siberia. For one reason and another, this was never achieved, yet contemporary Russians still travel to the Altai to soak up the region that had so inspired Rerikh.

A one-time traffic policeman from Moscow woke up one day in the early nineties and decided he was the Messiah; he soon had over four thousand followers and a not insignificant mountain retreat just up the road in Tuva.

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