eighteenth-century engraving of an indigenous Siberian fur trapper. The indigenous people were heavily exploited, earning a copper kettle in return for the equivalent skins they could squash inside the vessel.
Bit by bit, Aleksandr began to reveal his motivations for protecting a species he feared could no longer protect itself. It didn’t matter that he rarely found a tiger. Like the researcher Sooyong Park, who has written so eloquently about his years sleeping in hides waiting for Siberian tigers, Aleksandr was content looking for its tracks and trying to reason with the loggers damaging the habitat on which not just the tiger but also its prey depend. Aleksandr was fascinated by the tiger’s status in Russian culture. He described all sorts of superstitions around tigers – like the one about a priest who in Tsarist times wore a tiger skin under his cassock to avoid being bitten by the town’s stray dogs – and gruesome true stories. A few years ago, a good friend – a game warden – woke up to fresh tracks, recorded the sighting in his diary and then set out for another winter cabin. Along the way the tiger ambushed him.
Then Aleksandr grabbed my hand, squeezed it and stopped the van. On the ground ahead of us was a perfect line of pugmarks – each wide pad fringed with four round toes. As I cautiously stepped out of the truck and put my hand against the pugmark in the snow, the scale became real. The front paw pad measured nine centimetres at its widest point. A six-year-old tiger, said Aleksandr, and probably a male.
For another mile, the tracks followed a straight line then looped off the road, where the tiger had wandered off to add its scratch marks to a tree. Aleksandr said we mustn’t follow. If a tiger has prepared itself for an attack, there is no way a man can act quickly enough. Tigers are clever, with a capacity for premeditated revenge. They like walking in our footsteps, said Aleksandr, preferring the feel and efficiency of compressed snow.
We drove on at a crawl, until we came to the impression where the tiger had been sleeping and left its barrel-shaped belly pushed into the pack. Golden strands of hair were still embedded in the white. A few steps beyond, there were scarlet specks of blood, the stain so fresh that the colour was still bright with life. This would have been enough – to touch the blood from a Siberian tiger’s kill – until we turned another bend in the track. The tiger was sleeping, perhaps eighty metres distant, in the middle of the road. When he raised his head, I could see the dazzling stripes, the crystal snow falling off his back, the poise of his long tail, which had nothing to do with fear.
That night, I had difficulty sleeping. When a log hissed then snapped in the fire, I thought of the single bite it takes a tiger to break the neck of a deer. But it wasn’t fear that was keeping me awake; it was intoxication. Part of me wanted to leave Durmin and the discomforts of Siberian life – the anxious nights, the frozen meat hung up in the porch waiting for a clumsy hacking from the Uzbek cook – but a far larger part of me wanted to stay.
There was something bewitching about the taiga now I was inside the forest, something which ran deeper than those glinting incisions of curling waterways you see from the air, the forest scrawled with tightly folded S-bends as if the land is whispering somehow. There is a covert charm to Siberia, like the maps by Semion Remezov, who drew up the first significant cartographic record of the region at the end of the seventeenth century, when Peter the Great posted him to the Western Siberian town of Tobolsk.*
Remezov had a cartographer’s eye for the dimensions of the land, and an illustrator’s flourish. His maps are decorated with elaborately inked fortresses, sickle lakes and wooded copses. Many of Remezov’s manuscripts are dotted with Siberian creatures – flying horses, a pack of wolves, horned antelopes – and effortlessly fluid line-drawings of grand cathedrals, weaponry and soldiers. His work is still the most perfect distillation of Siberia’s lures, rendered in beautiful, calligraphic loops. Painted in watery blues, the tributaries reach across the pages like the veins of the Empire itself, each spur as finely drawn as a fishbone. Remezov drew Siberia with a delicacy that belies its ferocious reputation, from the fraying rivers spilling into lakes the shape of love-hearts, to forests hollowed out by lazy streams making their northern journey to the Arctic.
In my mind’s eye, Siberia began to burn with possibility, in the faults and folds of a landscape full of risk and opportunity. Names began to roll out of the emptiness: Chita, Krasnoyarsk, the River Yenisei, which is one of Siberia’s four great rivers, along with the Amur, Lena and Ob. I was captivated by how marvellous it would be to find one of Siberia’s lost pianos in a country such as this. What if I could track down a Bechstein in a cabin far out in the wilds? There was enough evidence in Siberia’s musical story to know instruments had penetrated this far, but what had survived?
On my last evening in the forest, I mentioned the idea to Aleksandr over another thin broth of dill and fish-heads with boiled white eyes – the notion of returning to Siberia to look for an instrument.
At first, Aleksandr didn’t address my idea. He talked about his personal history, and his father’s songs. In the Siberian village where Aleksandr was raised, his father had been a music teacher and accordion player; his melodies were well remembered. Aleksandr told me about a musician who ten years before had wanted help moving an old piano into his home in Khabarovsk. He described dragging it to the apartment block then up numerous flights of stairs. Then Aleksandr went back to scanning his camera-trap footage of tigers, leaving me to picture a piano being hauled across pavements of ice. Nothing more was mentioned about music until the last morning as we readied to leave the forest. Aleksandr reminded me of the tiger we had encountered on the path, and the snow pricked with blood. The sighting would be my talisman, he said.
‘You must give it a go,’ he urged. ‘The tiger will bring you luck.’
In my last hours with Aleksandr, a powerful attachment formed in my mind, that I might find as much enchantment in the historical traces of instruments through Siberia as Aleksandr did in the footprints of a rare animal. Instead of tigers, I would track pianos. By knocking on doors looking for instruments, I would be drawn deeper into Russia and perhaps find a counterpoint in music not only to Siberia’s brutal history but to the modern images of this country reported by the anti-Putin media in the West. Driving back out of the forest, I passed the spot where I had seen the tiger. If the silver birches were spirit trees, as the Nanai people believed, I wondered if I should have made a passing act of totemism to persuade Siberia to keep me safe.
When I returned to England, I started looking for good leads. I contacted Pyotr Aidu, a Russian concert pianist who had amassed a Moscow orphanage for abandoned instruments. In his collection, there was an 1820 English Broadwood, and a Russian-made Stürzwage wearing the scars of a firework detonated under its lid – a good brand, much overlooked, and one I should look out for, he advised. He said there were voices worth seeking out in old instruments. In his opinion, restored pianos have better sound than their modern counterparts.
Others disagreed. Numerous piano experts told me that all the reconstruction in the world wouldn’t necessarily make a dead piano sing again. I was told Siberia was a terrible place for pianos, especially because of the low humidity in winter. I was warned that there were strict laws to protect against artefacts of more than a hundred years old leaving the country; more than fifty years, and a piano would need, at the very least, special permission. I decided to home in on Siberia’s old trade routes, including the Trans-Siberian Railway towns that thrived in the nineteenth century, at the same time as Russian pianos spread east. I would use television adverts, social media and local radio channels to track down private instruments with stories. I would need Siberia’s piano tuners on my side. They would know best where history was still to be found in Russian homes. That was by far the most important part to me: gathering the stories, then seeing where they led.
As I marked up my map, I started to understand more clearly how the Tsars’ expansion into Siberia, and their establishment of the exile system, coincided with the state’s desire to bring European piano-making to Russia – and how instruments had trickled
