Finding Zembla

[Here’s a little break from the news that keeps showing up on our doorsteps like a flaming bag of shit. Tomorrow I’ll return to the current situation and debut an exciting new project that LOLGOP (AKA Jason Sattler) and I have been working on for the last week. But for now, I hope you’ll enjoy this. It’s a strange ride unlike anything else you’ll ever read.]

I’ve long understood obsessions to be dangerous, but sometimes I can’t let one go. Which is how I wound up in a car careening through the Czech wilderness at the age of 43, wondering if I’d been kidnapped by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s interpreter.

I was writing a book about the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and wanted to visit his mother’s grave in Prague. A few months earlier, I’d realized my modest advance would cover train fare to the Czech Republic and two nights in a hotel.

I’d kept my day job while writing the book, so that I could use every cent from my publisher to cover photo licenses for family images and travel to the most important cities in Nabokov’s life. I’d flown to St. Petersburg in Russia, where he was born. I’d gone to Montreux, in Switzerland, where he’d lived for more than a decade at the end of his life.

My last trip would be to Germany, where Nabokov had fallen in love and married, where his father had been accidentally assassinated, and where his brother had died in a Nazi concentration camp just weeks before it was liberated.

Once I knew I would make a detour to Prague, I‘d reached out to a relative of Nabokov’s who was a professor there. He agreed to meet and talk about their family members who’d been trapped behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

That would leave me one free day in the city. Two months before my trip, I still had $400 of my book advance left. I knew what I wanted to do, and I was determined to try.

The king and I

It was at this point that I had to admit to myself the real reason I’d decided to go to Prague. To research Nabokov’s writing in any literary or historical context is to dip a toe in madness, to be buried in an avalanche of winks, allusions, and innuendo.

My particular fixation was Zembla, the mythical kingdom in Nabokov’s postmodern novel Pale Fire. As readers stumble their way through the book, they realize that Zembla is home to its deranged immigrant narrator, an itinerant professor who fully believes he’s the exiled king of a mystical northern land.

The king’s Zembla is a place completely unknown to the Americans around him, who regard him as a freak. And he’s like no other character in literature—a gender-bending moralistic vegetarian consumed by petty grievances and obsessed with his lost kingdom.

The Zembla he describes in the novel is an unbelievable fairy-tale setting of brutality and beauty. But it’s the only source of meaning for the unreliable narrator, who distorts every encounter and setting, and even literature itself, to point toward the secret story of Zembla.

Critics have known since Pale Fire’s publication that Zembla has a real-world twin: the High Arctic archipelago of Nova Zembla that sits north of the Russian mainland. Family legend held that Nabokov’s great-grandfather had gone on an expedition there, and that a river had been named after him.

To accompany the mysterious Zembla in Pale Fire, Nabokov referred to the real-world islands in a 1942 poem and in his 1966 autobiography. Wondering over the origins of his fixation, I delved into all the history about the islands that I could find.

I learned that some of the most dramatic history that ever happened on Nova Zembla had happened while Nabokov was working on Pale Fire. Story after story in those months of Cold War tension appeared on the front pages of the newspapers Nabokov read. The largest man-made detonation in history (then or since) took place there on October 30, 1961, when the Soviet Union tested its Tsar Bomba.

Nuclear testing definitely left aftershocks in the novel Nabokov wrote, but his 1942 poem mentioning Nova Zembla had been written decades before. The thought there might be an even deeper connection with the real-world islands haunted me.

I looked into what else had happened on Nova Zembla during Nabokov’s lifetime. After weeks of searching, I began to find articles in magazines and newspapers, from The New York Times to The Atlantic. Some mentioned political prisoners being sent into harrowing Arctic exile there by the ruling Bolsheviks in 1922. Later reports described a detention camp on the archipelago.

I Was a Slave in Russia, published in the U.S. in 1958, told the story of an American held in a Nazi camp liberated by the Russian Army, which then deported him to forced labor in the Soviet Union. He wound up in the Arctic mining town of Vorkuta, a grim outpost. He mentioned that the worst prisoners, the career criminals, were sent to Nova Zembla, the “place from which there is no return.” It was, he wrote in a story that ran as excerpts in The New York Times, the most brutal site of the Gulag, the U.S.S.R.’s monstrous concentration camp system.

Down the rabbit hole

Did Nabokov know any of this? Were these camps meant to be a veiled backstory for the mad refugee narrator from Zembla in his novel? The stories I’d found had appeared in newspapers he regularly read. It seemed possible. But how could I be sure?

At the Library of Congress, I took photos of every page of the emigre newspaper Nabokov’s father helped found in Berlin. Working with a native speaker, I combed each issue hunting for a story. He eventually found it: a brief report on Russians opposed to the Bolsheviks who’d been sent to die on Nova Zembla in the far North. The Russian community had written about it in the same window that newspapers in London and New York had covered it.

But like all the other stories, this one had an underlying strangeness to it—a sense of heightened drama and an odd lack of specificity. In another story that made it into a history journal, the camp cook was so loathed and rations were so thin that the prisoners forced him into a pot before cooking and eating him. Even the longest, most detailed account I’d found had an air of unreality: When one prisoner froze to death, his friend simply broke his frozen body in half to pile it into a grave more easily. This was the stuff of fairy tales, but it ran in newspapers and journals.

While I suspected Nabokov would have accepted the worst reports about the Russian government that had chased his family from his native land under machine-gun fire, journalistic skepticism started to gnaw at me. I began to doubt that any of the stories were true. I wondered if Gulag administrative records mentioning Nova Zembla might exist.

Vast piles of Soviet papers were copied and brought out of Russia in the 1990s after the fall of the U.S.S.R. But they revealed nothing useful to me. Eventually, I located a Russian-language book at the New York Public Library that had collected the camps documents. Azat, my native speaker and intermittent research assistant, checked it out.

I found photos and logs of some prisoners who labored not far south of Nova Zembla, closer to the mainland. But neither of us could find Russian sources mentioning actual camps on Nova Zembla. Unlike nearly every other long-term Gulag site, there were no records of prisoner transports or food supplies being shipped to Nova Zembla—no account of the necessities of running any verifiable outpost. Outside of these strange stories I’d gathered, most of which had been relayed second- and third-hand, there was no reference to the camps and the dead of Nova Zembla.

Still, I couldn’t stop looking and spent my spare time searching online and going through archival records. One afternoon, I scrolled through a database of interviews with Gulag survivors. Scanning transcripts and looking for any reference to Nova Zembla, I found one prisoner held in the 1940s by the Soviets who mentioned, in passing, that he’d been sent to Nova Zembla. The interview was recent. He was still alive.

This former prisoner was the person I wanted to go to the Czech Republic to see. I hoped to talk to him face to face, to hear from someone who had seen this worst of the horrific camps of the Gulag, this camp that had left no records, this camp I suspected Nabokov had memorialized in Pale Fire.

I reached out to the nonprofit that had done the interview and was able to get an address from them. I drafted a letter to the former Gulag prisoner to say I wanted to meet. The brother of a friend was living in Prague. He translated my letter, and I mailed it off.

No answer came. I sent a second letter, to no avail. But to be a journalist is to be a little bit of an asshole. Silence, I thought, was no reason not to go.

Into the wilderness

By the time of my November meeting with the interpreter in Prague, I’d only talked with her by email. But the staff at my hotel had recommended her when I booked my reservation with them. She’d worked with movie stars who shot on location, they explained. Her skills had been exemplary. She was willing to spend the day with me and provide transportation for our ride into the Czech wilderness for the $400 I had left to my name.

I had a seven-year-old and a five-year-old at home, and we were short on money. But again, journalists are sometimes assholes. I booked the interpreter.

We met in the lobby early in the morning and shook hands. I handed the cash over, leaving myself just $20 in local koruna, which I hoped would be enough to get me to the airport.

She seemed professional and friendly enough. But as we went out the front door, she pulled me aside.

“I just want to warn you,” she whispered, “our driver is a little crazy.”

She pointed to someone not far away, about her age, who stood next to a midsize sedan, smoking a cigarette with a caged air. There was no time to ask her what she meant by “crazy.” I was not about to give up at that point anyway.

The driving was a little aggressive but not erratic. Less than an hour in, he began making sharp comments in Czech. She ignored him at first, but then started sniping back. She stayed chipper and warm with me, but they were clearly arguing.

He drove more and more slowly. At one point, we wound up on a gravel road at the edge of a small village, going farther and farther into empty fields.

I realized something was wrong. Either we were lost, or I was being abducted. It was a strange feeling to root for being lost. I asked what was going on.

“He is a terrible driver,” she said to me. “He cannot follow directions.”

They bickered some more at a volume that led me to interrupt.

“Is there a real problem?” I asked. "Should we stop and ask for directions?”

“Yes!” she yelled, this time at me. “This is what I was saying.”

All this only made the driver unhappier. He said something to her that I was sure included profanity. She looked sideways at me, to see if I’d noticed.

“It’s fine,” she said. “You have no need of worry at all. He’s my ex-husband. We used to be married.”

The driver turned the car around and went back through the little village a different way. We got on a bigger road. Nearly an hour passed in silence.

I could tell she was embarrassed, and was glad she might feel a little in my debt, because I was about to tell her something I’d been hiding, something I’d been waiting to say until we were more than halfway to our destination. She’d known the name of the little town we were going to, not far from the border, but that was all.

“Here’s the address,” I wrote it down on a sheet of paper and gave it to her. “But he doesn’t know we’re coming.”

She looked at me big-eyed, maybe imagining her $400 disappearing, not yet knowing I was planning to let her keep the money either way. I explained that I had written letters to him about who I was and what I wanted, but had never heard back. He was very old, I said. Surely he would be at home.

She asked for his phone number, which I had. I read it aloud to her while she dialed. For fifteen minutes, she sat with the cell phone to her ear, her soothing operator-polite voice rising occasionally in anxiety. Then she hung up.

He had told her that we shouldn’t come. But she said she had convinced him that the history he had lived through was important to share. So he would let us visit.

The Arctic Gulag

When we got to their small home, the former Gulag prisoner’s wife opened the door. We shook hands. They offered us a platter of bread and butter and jam, with a little fresh fruit. We made small talk as I started recording. He talked about his arrest and his time in detention at hard labor, pausing every few sentences to let the interpreter translate.

It had been a shock being sent to Vorkuta, a vast city built from nothing in the Arctic to serve as a mining camp. From there, he said, he went to Nova Zembla, where he did more mining work, this time for something the translator didn’t know the word for in English. I think he meant bitumen, a mineral used in making asphalt for roads. I asked about sleeping arrangements, and food, of which there was of course never enough.

He hadn’t been on Nova Zembla long, he said. He’d also been sent to Kamchatka. He talked about the transports from place to place, some of them in airplanes, and later being released in 1942, with the agreement that he would join the Soviet Army. He showed me his uniform and decorations. He had served the Allied cause with distinction. After the war, he went home and got married.

Then his wife spoke up. She had been part of a forced-labor brigade during the war, taken from her home by the Nazis to work at a factory in Germany. After defeating Hitler, the British turned some concentration camps into camps for displaced persons, and she stayed in one while she waited to go home. She had an infant at the time, but there was no food, and the baby didn’t survive. She showed me a picture of the two of them.

In the end, we spent hours together. They wanted to talk so much; it was hard to make a graceful departure. But I offered our deep apologies, worried about our driver finding his way back in the dark.

It was a stunning feeling to finally meet a Gulag survivor who had been in a camp on Nova Zembla. I had spent almost four years on the Nabokov project by then, and all of it had led to that encounter.

Still, I couldn’t ignore a feeling I’d had that had grown across the visit. Some of what he said made perfect sense and fit everything I’d learned about the Arctic Gulag camps. But when he talked about Nova Zembla, I realized, something was different. Not that he was lying exactly—more that we had entered the realm I recognized from all the other Nova Zembla articles and tales. Zembla, not Nova Zembla. A land somehow separate from reality.

On our uneventful trip home, I praised the interpreter for her flawless work. Back in Prague, I thanked the driver, waving goodbye to both of them at the hotel door. The next morning, I flew out, still pondering whether it was ever possible to know anything at all.

A few days later, I wrote the nonprofit to thank them for their help and to let them know I’d gotten my interview. I asked, delicately, if they were sure that this prisoner had been in a camp on Nova Zembla. Did they have any evidence?

The answer came back that they also didn’t believe he’d been to Nova Zembla. They later forwarded his NKVD file, which showed his release from Vorkuta, the very real Arctic camp of the Gulag. That he had been in a harrowing camp in Russia during the war was in no way in doubt. It was even remotely possible that he’d been every place he claimed to have traveled. But just like with all the other stories about Nova Zembla, there was no evidence to place him or any other prisoner on the islands.

I ended up writing that the Gulag at its worst was so harrowing that perhaps in order to go on, it was necessary to believe that no matter how bad conditions got, there was someplace farther north where things were even more extreme, where life would be even crueler. Nova Zembla became so legendary, people felt grateful to know that at least they were not there.

A decade-long journey

When I’d gone to St. Petersburg in Russia, I’d visited early Gulag sites. In Germany, I did research at the Nazi camp site where Nabokov’s brother Sergei had died. I read obsessively about camps elsewhere. By the time my book came out, I knew as much about concentration camps as I did about Nabokov.

I’d been so frustrated by the lack of an overarching history of how concentration camps came into the world, I decided I would write it. That became my second book.

My third book would be a retelling of a story about stranded Dutch sailors I’d encountered while researching the history of Nova Zembla. Those men spent a winter and then some on the far northern shores of the archipelago, off the edge of every map, in the time of Shakespeare.

To write that book, I would learn to dogsled and go on three Arctic expeditions as research, the last one taking me to Nova Zembla itself. The search for Zembla has shaped all three of my books so far. It’s a mystery I still haven’t solved, a place it’s almost impossible to get to, one that’s even harder to escape.