The Lost Pianos of Siberia. Sophy Roberts

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      IN 1856, WHEN MARIA VOLKONSKY made her last visit to Lake Baikal, she described watching the forest animals coming in to drink as if Siberia were a Garden of Eden rather than her prison for the last thirty years. She was leaving Siberia. The new Tsar, Alexander II, had granted amnesty to the twenty-odd surviving Decembrist rebels. Some of the men had already committed suicide before the amnesty came through. Others had lost their wits. One or two were trying to make their living through teaching, farming watermelons, making opticals, or even drawing butterflies for German museums. Among those who stayed on voluntarily after the amnesty was Mikhail Küchelbecker, who was shackled to Siberia by an unfulfilled love affair with a local girl. His headstone stands on the eastern shoreline of Lake Baikal.

      I spent almost three weeks poking around the lake, making three different visits. But however hard I wished it, Baikal’s seductive lures – the winter ice, the summer sward crackling with crickets, the red-barked cedar trees arcing out from cliffs – didn’t deliver on the piano discoveries I needed. The settlements were too thin. There was more for me in Kiakhta, the old tea traders’ town on the Mongolia–Russia border depicted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as if it were one of the most important centres of nineteenth-century world trade. In Kiakhta, I had been told about a rare Bechstein grand piano.

      My tipster was the Mongolian opera singer, Tsogt, who used to stand at the door of the tent in the Orkhon Valley trying to fit into the narrow opening to listen to Odgerel play. He was a Buddhist and a Buryat whose ancestors, like Odgerel’s, had fled the Lake Baikal region in the thirties. His family ended up in Inner Mongolia, which is a part of China. He had trained in music in Beijing. He had also lived for a while in Ulan-Ude, the capital of Buryatia, one of the Russian Federation’s autonomous republics, and a half-day’s drive from Baikal’s eastern shore. A bear of a man, Tsogt wore leather boots designed with upturned toes so as to tread softly on the snow, and a traditional Mongolian felted del robe, belted below the waist, which made his belly look like a beer casket. We had travelled together across western Mongolia in 2001. Over the years, I had grown fond of Tsogt. I liked watching his tough front fall away in the presence of Bach. So I hired him early on to help look for pianos.

      For a while, I heard nothing. Then I received a short and intriguing email: ‘I’m back from Siberia. I find only one grand piano. C. Bechstein – Serial number 7050. Year is 1874. From very little place. No other people has old piano.’

      Given the Bechstein’s date, which was before a railway looped south beneath the lake, the piano may have taken a number of different routes. It could have travelled the rutted road running along the craggy south coast. It could also have crossed the lake by boat in summer, or by sledge in winter, or travelled on the Baikal, a British-built icebreaker. The ship, made of parts transported to Russia in pieces, sometimes took up to a week to make the winter crossing – from port to port, less than fifty miles – carrying twenty-five Trans-Siberian Railway cars on her specially designed deck. The carriages would be uncoupled at the water’s edge and shunted on to the ship’s on-board rails. In the depths of winter in 1904, when the ice was too thick for even the ship to break, a seasonal track was laid over Lake Baikal’s frozen surface instead. The first engine across plunged straight through the ice – a blank white canvas which these days is carved by the lonely movements of the few fishermen who still live along Baikal’s shores, the lake’s frozen surface scored with lines from snowmobile tracks and black dots where the fishermen have cut holes. The sweeps and curves look like the drawings of Wassily Kandinsky – an avant-garde, turn-of-the-century Russian artist obsessed by Russian ethnography, the ‘double faith’ combining paganism and Christianity, as well as the relationship between music and painting, between sound, points, lines and planes.