The Bread and the Knife by Dawn Drzal

Author:Dawn Drzal
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Published: 2018-07-30T16:00:00+00:00

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A cheerful troop of Russian day-trippers already stands jostling and laughing on the platform at Port Baikal when our sedate little tour group arrives. We all pile onboard the Matanya, the modern commuter train that traces the southern tip of Lake Baikal along Siberia’s old Circum-Baikal Railway. The train buffs in our group try resuming their quiet discussion of its engineering marvels, but they have to keep raising their voices to be heard over the soundtrack to the video loop—which will run for the next twelve hours—and the Russians, who sound on this hot Sunday in July like a bunch of kids let out of school for a field trip. The scenery is spectacular, and the train makes a couple of stops so we can photograph the famous viaducts and revetments. At Shumikha, where we cluster to admire an arched Italian stone wall, I notice several Russians taking long pulls from a passed bottle and suddenly apprehend the reason for their unnaturally high spirits. Not long after, we stop for lunch at Polovinny, the railway’s halfway point.

Although identified as a railway settlement, Polovinny from the platform appears to be deserted, its few tumbledown buildings sinking back into the earth. Loitering behind the others as they file down the trail to lunch, I spy a man in a cap pushing an ancient high-wheeled black pram through a field of waist-high grass to the door of an unpainted house. Who is he? Where did he come from? It is an image from a dream. The unprepossessing little trail ends, surprisingly, in an idyllic river valley, protected by low hills and larch trees that filter the light to warm greenish gold. The valley is strewn, however, with upturned rowboats, dilapidated sheds, and ramshackle outbuildings, giving the impression that when one is about to fall down, a rickety new one is built onto its side. Dotted here and there are a few well-maintained houses, shaggy brown cedar like the other structures but brightened with turquoise or green shutters. Clinging to its patch of earth like a mussel to a rock, Polovinny remains a settlement after a hundred years, seeming to defy the law of nature that says we must either grow or die.

Lunch is served from the one unequivocally cheerful building in the valley, a blue and green peacock of a shack on the bend of the river. Bedecked with petunias, with a bright red bench running along one side, it is an oasis of color in a desert of timber. A few rough tables have been tented with red oilcloth, whose lurid glow is tempered by the sunlight filtering through a stand of white birch at the far corner. I am the last to arrive, and our group squeezes together to make room on the bench. The massive proprietress puts before me a dish of Siberian meat-filled dumplings, known as pelmeni. The main course is soup, which everyone else is already eating. There is a line for seconds. The man at the

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