Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier

time I saw The Head I thought it creepy, like a sci-fi symbol that ranks of drone soldiers would goose-step before. On later trips to Ulan-Ude I noticed The Head only in passing, writing it off as just another odd thing that people in the long-gone past had built and left behind.
    If I had been stunned in Moscow, I was even more so in Ulan-Ude. New data came at me like rapidly served tennis balls I could not hope to return. Mostly I sort of stumbled around in a daze and did a very indifferent job as a cultural representative of American literature. First we went to Sasha’s apartment and had a big meal prepared by his wife, Tania. We also met their teenage daughter, Arjenna, and their eight-year-old son, Tioshi. The meal involved several courses and featured
omul’
, the signature fish of Lake Baikal, and a traditional Buryat dish called
pozhe
, which are dumplings stuffed with ground lamb and chopped wild onions. We drank vodka, naturally, which Sasha put to his lips only after dipping the fourth finger of his right hand into his shot glass and sprinkling drops in four directions. Sasha’s colleagues from the Ministry of Culture, Zoya and Alyosha, showed up and joined us. Zoya was a short, competent-looking woman with big spectacles. Alyosha was not a Buryat but a very pale Russian-Russian, with three gold teeth and short red hair. During the meal he turned to me and asked me what style I wrote in and blushed violently. I said I wrote in a factual style.
    Some of us then got in a boxy tan microbus with large tires and no springs and rode for hours on dusty roads to Lake Baikal. Alyosha drove, and Sasha, Zoya, Katya, Tioshi, a cousin of Tioshi’s, and I sat in the back. The ride went over such troublesome roads, and the seats were so hard, that I was reduced eventually to exhausted, brute irritability. At one point we switchbacked up a road only to find it blocked near the top by a piece of unoccupied earthmoving equipment; we then had to bounce all the way back down. Finally, late in the afternoon, we arrived at a four-story log
dom otdykha
(house of rest), a resort on Baikal’s western shore. Sasha installed us in small, bare rooms without locks on the doors. I undressed and lay down on the bed and tried to nap. Very soon a young woman, possibly a maid, pushed the door open and searched the room for some cigarettes she’d left there. After she closed the door, I dressed again and went out to sit by the lake.
    Seeing how droopy I had become, Katya assumed the protective attitude of a fierce older sister. At dinner she found the food suspect and would let me eat nothing but tea and bread. She gave the rest of our dinners to Tioshi and his cousin, who quickly finished them. Sasha asked me questions about the similarity between writers’ unions in Russia and the National Endowment for the Arts in America, and I made such a hash of an answer, even in English, that Katya stopped translating. Sasha pressed vodka on us but I begged off. He said, “If you were in the company of only Buryats, you would be
forced
to drink,” but his tone was mild, and I did not take offense. He told us that most Buryats knew the list of their ancestors by heart to far back in the past, and that he could recite his father and his father and so on back to a brother of Genghis Khan. He said that Buryats became ill if they did not eat enough horse meat, and that some families in Ulan-Ude kept a side of horse frozen on the balconies of their apartments in the winter. He added that you could buy canned pony year-round in Ulan-Ude.
    The next morning all had been prepared for me to take a
banya
—a Russian steam bath. The bathhouse I was directed to had once been the hull of a wooden fishing boat. Soon after I went in and sat down and started sweating, it caught fire. I wondered if the heavy smoke coming through the wood paneling on the ceiling was part of the program. Then I heard shouts, grabbed a towel, stepped outside, and saw flames leaping up