Awe

Goyen had never been to Siberia before, and the crisp severity of the place pooled around him in his midnight stopover. This was the place, he knew, where trees exploded from the unbelievable temperatures, where the ice of the rivers thundered and pounded away at the pilings of city bridges. Standing on the tarmac in front of the Tupelov's engines, he marveled at the crunch of his step: the permafrost was buoyant, alive: as springy to the touch as the rubber asphalt he had run on as a teenage track competitor. When he exhaled, the cloud of his breath hardened and stood suspended for a moment, then fell crashing upon his boots like puffs of tossed up sand. This was the "breathing of the stars" he'd read of, and he tried it a couple of times before he heard the rising whine of whatever it was coming out of the mountains behind him. The man was running toward him out of the darkness; he was, after all, the only one who hadn't taken advantage of the warmth of the long, still lighted barge of the terminal lounge. The sound had risen to a peal. He felt the waves of it sloshing over him like an undertow. When they washed him out of the rims of the turbine his severed hand had a single finger raised, a nubbin of wonder.

Moveable City

Centenary Italo Calvino

We were at a primitive airport in the Altai region. The man in back of me was returning to Mongolia and put a hard-shell suitcase, end up, on the conveyor belt as he presented his ticket. I was through already, holding my boarding pass, and the security woman motioned me over to her X-ray monitor. Dozens of little men were sawing timber inside the Samsonite, stripping, planing and loading the white spruce trunks onto trucks whose beds they tightened with tiny fiber cables. These roads of labor twined up through frilly garment pockets and zippered inner compartments. Signs divided them. There were tunnels, pulleys, elevators bringing in fresh crews and taking the exhausted away. Men took off their helmets and wiped their brows, and when they resumed their faces were contorted with microscopic grimaces of pain. At the top a leader leaned out from the balcony of a shirt collar, surrounded by underlings with clipboards, giving directions with a stick no larger than a needle. The woman looked at the Mongol man. He smiled. He held up the forms whose "No" boxes he had truthfully checked for toxins, fruits and insects, liquid fuels, forbidden items.

Hoods

The warmth of the body is kept from escaping by headwear. Without one, you are inviting the ghost to give you up in advance of death. The most common is fur-trimmed, though there is great variety even among these. They can be loose and floppy or tightened like watch caps, but they are the sole, sidelong aspect with which everyone presents themselves, the signature silhouette. Women, young and old, drape themselves completely in fur: there is no political correctness here with respect to the lives of animals. A Siberian Muslim will wear his fez-like stocking cap of darkling, brain-like lines and textures, tipped jauntily forward, as if tipping him back into the world. Teenagers give the hood an Eminem rapper take: gnomelike, tattered, torturously bound in headphone wires. Children look out from bright dozens of them, swarming around your knees on the Novosibirsk metro: sparkling, darting fish, looking for ways back into the crevices.

Loved a Woman Who Wasn't Clean

Warner had no idea the Hubshi woman would occupy his dreams, and even the half-sleep shreds of waking life that slowly soaked him every night into unconsciousness. He'd recognized her as a Khasbass: the Tatar cheekbones, a thin blue wire necklace hung with yellowed wolf teeth. She ran the canteen on the road he drove to the new Siberian geological site. He'd hung around one night after she closed and they flirted, listened to Moscow rap stations on the jukebox, drank grain alcohol and Armenian cognac. They'd groped each other standing up against the stockroom door. He touched the wiry region underneath her toolbelt. The first night she appeared as if inflated in front of his window, her face encrusted with pufferfish-like spines, the blue necklace trailing his furniture like a kite string. Subsequent evenings had her face assembling itself in internally collapsing and reappearing segments of silver, like an escalator of weightless, persistent mercury. He knew a shaman had observed their tryst. All visitors to these roads were seen as conquerors, contaminating agents. By the third appearance, she was insubstantial, foggy, filling the column of air before his bed like a drape of crystals. The window wasn't completely closed and a breeze came in. She lifted and disappeared, leaving only a whiff of kerosene and pine-scented gravel.

Hisses

Many of the Buryat myths involved snakes. They had a devastating, sometimes tragic role in the rearing of children, and the Soviet commissioners often could do nothing until it was too late. Some of the parents practiced frontal deplanation of their newborns' heads. The idea was to bestow a reptilian flatness and triangular general head shape, like that of most crawling serpents. They bound up the newborn's pliable skull with weights. They believed snakes were sacred and that people with snake-shaped skulls would be more intelligent and creative. It had a positive motivating, psychological force on the parents, and the children became freer, more vibrant, intuitive, and original. We met a guide who told us he wished someone had had the imagination to do it to him when he was a newborn. He felt he would have gotten further in life, become a timber foreman perhaps, a party member. He said he wouldn't have minded having a crenellated face, the grossly distorted features. He moved the stuffed skull of a copperhead from one hand to another as he talked.

Aviatrix

Goyen watched the trails of jets. He had since he was a child. But in Siberia, it was especially important to know there were planes, even if you could not know where your next plane was. So inconceivably vast were the distances – like Southern Pacific or antipodal ones – that you had to know there was something powerful enough to get you from one world to the next. The sunset sky, the vremya, had grown the same violet as the plane trails. The great white and violet-turning mountain behind them, Goyen knew, was where the Aeroflot captain and his son had crashed an airbus full of 340 people, bound from Moscow to Hong Kong. The pilot had let his 15-year-old boy take the stick in celebration of his birthday. There was no first officer in the cockpit. His father had dozed off. There are no corrections or redundancies to controls that have been neglected, even for a second. Goyen had seen an Indonesian kid go forward once with his father, and Goyen thought nothing of it at the time.

But that was ten years or so before the crash here. Goyen wondered what everyone was thinking at the last minute, and looked up at the mountain. He remembers reading that it had been twilight.