OLIVIER WILLEMSEN ROZA Sample translated by Moshe Gilula In memory of the Dyatlov group

Zinaida Kolmogorova Lyudmila Dubinina Alexander Kolevatov Rustem Slobodin Yuri ‘Georgiy’ Krivonischenko Yuri Doroshenko Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles Semyon ‘Sasha’ Zolotaryov Igor Dyatlov

Dyatlov Pass

Ivdel

Serov

Sverdlovsk

Soviet Union 1959 Oblast Sverdlovsk

Ural Mountains, February 1, 1959, 5:04 p.m.

The sun has just set as nine students settle down on the East Flank of Kholat Syakhl for the last night of their lives. Dark clouds accumulate from all directions and an icy wind is building up to ferocious force; a warning that must be taken seriously high in the mountains. As they spread their tarpaulin over a self-built framework of poles and crossbars the biting snow pelts their faces. There’s no time to lose. The temperature is quickly dropping below zero. The group manages to pitch the tent and one by one the seven men and two women enter it to take shelter. The next morning they are to resume their journey toward their destination, the peak of Otorten.

The , or the Northern Urals to be precise, where the group of Ural Polytechnical Institute students were on expedition, have for centuries been the domain of the Mansi, a nomadic people who subsist mainly on reindeer. These mighty beasts haul sledges, their flesh is consumed, their pelts offer warmth and shelter and their firm bones are used to make tools. The Mansi are also known for the mysterious signs they carve into tree trunks or paint on rocks. The symbols depict forest legends, at least for those able to decipher them, and provide information on the inhospitable taiga. Sometimes they warn about danger. The names of many of the northern mountain peaks come from the Mansi. The ancient word Otorten, for instance, means ‘don’t go there’ in Mansi. Kholat Syakhl means ‘mountain of bodies’.

When after two weeks the group still hasn’t returned to the university, alarm is raised. Family, friends, fellow students, police and eventually also the army, replete with helicopters and detection dogs, head from the city of Sverdlovsk, now called , for the Northern Urals. When they find the tent there they discover it has been slashed open on one side by a sharp object. Inside they find nine pairs of mountaineering boots neatly lined up in a row. On a small brazier in the middle of the sleeping quarters they find a copper samovar with a frozen lump of water inside and next to it a lidless can of cocoa. Open diaries lie on several of the pillows, a pen between the pages, waiting for a new entry. The tent seems to have been left hastily and the group is assumed to still be nearby. A trail of footprints in the snow leads the rescue party downhill to the taiga forest edge where, under an old cedar, the remnants of a campfire are found. It looks like someone had climbed up the tree: 5 yards up the branches are snapped or broken off. Were they climbing to safety? Or on the lookout for something or someone? In the vicinity of the campfire a gruesome discovery is made. The bodies of Georgiy Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko are lying lifelessly in the snow. They’re as good as naked. Yuri’s ears have been eaten away by the freezing cold and the tip of Georgiy’s nose is missing.

There are footprints leading from the forest back to the Kholat Syakhl. Halfway up the mountain a bare knee is jutting upward out of snow. The dogs start digging. The bodies of Zina Kolmogorova, Rustem Slobodin and Igor Dyatlov are then revealed. They too are barely clothed—underpants, a tattered shirt. Igor and Zina are lying close together. Igor is holding her picture. Considering where the three students were found, it is reasonable to assume they were on their way to the tent.

More than two months later, when the snow in the north begins to thaw, the last four bodies are found in a ravine. Lyudmila Dubinina is the last victim to be uncovered. She is lying on her knees, her head resting on a boulder next to a mountain stream. Lyudmila’s body is more mutilated than the others’. All her ribs are broken. One rib has pierced her heart like a bayonet. Her nose and jaw are shattered; her eye sockets are hollow and empty. And the rescue party discovers one more thing: her tongue is missing. At the autopsy in Sverdlovsk on Lyudmila, who was known to be the most independent of the group, such a vast amount of swallowed blood is found in her stomach that the coroner puts down in his report that her heart was still pumping blood at the instant she lost her tongue ‘to something or someone’.

Albert pressed the seven. His chauffeur, who had driven us to Baycrest Residentials, an old people’s home just outside of Coos Bay city center, stayed to wait in the seating area near the elevator. ‘She has good days but mostly bad days,’ Albert said as the floor beneath my feet started to tremble and the round bulbs above the door lit up from left to right. He was staring straight ahead. I did the same and saw the blotches of our reflections in the metal door. ‘Sometimes she can’t even remember what she had for lunch but she can still recount the past in great detail.’ I didn’t come to America for any more than that. My heart started beating faster. I was nervous about meeting someone who had met the Dyatlov group in person and, besides, I also wasn’t too fond of elevators. On the seventh floor the door slid open and I saw before me a bright hall with a floor of cold vinyl. I wanted to get out of the elevator but Albert stopped me. He put his shoe over the laser that keeps the door from closing. ‘Before we go in,’ he spoke gravely, ‘I just want to tell you that I’ll be taking you somewhere else today. You’ll see why later.’ Albert was a sturdy guy in his forties and more than a head taller than me. He put one hand on my shoulder and held the other one out, inviting me into the hallway. ‘Fine. After you.’ At a door halfway he took a key out of his pocket. ‘She’s resting now,’ he said as we quietly entered the apartment. ‘She does it four times a day now on doctor’s orders.’ As Albert entered his mother’s bedroom I walked through the narrow hallway, a worn Persian carpet on its floor, to her living room. Many elderly people would cover their walls with pictures of family members and dear in-laws but this room was strikingly white and bare. It looked like his mother had no one, or at least no one she wished to be reminded of on a daily basis. There was just one small picture frame on top of the TV holding a portrait of Albert when he was about eighteen, a square academic cap on his head and a rolled-up diploma in his hand. Next to a set dining table stood a leather armchair. The chair faced a grand window stretching the full breadth of the room and offering a view of a lawn that sloped downward and was closed off at the bottom by a row of pine trees. In the middle of the lawn there was a flagpole with the Stars and Stripes. There was no wind, so it hung like a dishrag on a kitchen hook. ‘Come, mother.’ I turned away from the window and saw a thin little old lady in a bathrobe and pajamas shuffling into the living room on Albert’s arm. Next to his bulk she appeared even gaunter. ‘Look,’ said Albert loudly and clearly, ‘this gentleman has come all the way from Europe to meet you. He’d like to hear you tell about the past.’ I held my hand out to her. She sized me up and languidly shook my hand by briefly brushing her small fingers against mine. ‘Let’s sit,’ said Albert and accompanied his mother to the armchair.

I had gotten his phone number three weeks previously. It was almost midnight in Holland when an old fellow student called me from Oklahoma City. ‘Is it true what I saw on your Facebook page, that you’re making progress in your research?’ ‘Yes, there are some important developments. But I can’t say anything about it just yet.’ ‘Maybe I have some new information for you.’ The very same night, I contacted a man who called himself Albert Lewis Codd. Apparently, at the hotel bar during an ICT expo he had run off at the mouth to my acquaintance about the Dyatlov Pass mystery and especially about his mother who, it seems, knows more about the tragedy and who (and this made my heart skip a beat) had actually met the group of Russian students in the flesh just before their demise. Over the phone Albert said that his mother was not in the best of health. If I wanted to speak with her I should lose no time.

Albert picked me up from Portland International Airport. His chauffeur met me at the gate with a name sign. He took my shoulder bag from me and led me to the main entrance where Albert was waiting for me in a top-trim black Lincoln. With a smile he invited me to sit beside him in the back seat. The Lincoln then glided noiselessly over Highway 101’s spacious lanes along the Pacific coast. The view was breathtaking: a colony of sea lions was lazing on the rocks by the seaside and, on the other side of the road, the West Coast skyscrapers, the impressive Douglas firs and the sequoias were reaching high into the sky. Albert was a man of means. He had on an expensive pinstriped suit, a silk handkerchief peeking out of his breast pocket; a yellow gold ring with a bright blue stone adorned his finger. His clean-shaven face was angular and rugged like a Russian’s and his length didn’t allow much room between his bald pate and the car’s roof. He had made his money by purchasing and selling domain names, he told me while, outside, the ocean waves crashed on the rocks and splashed the imperturbable sea lions. With a dictionary on his lap he had created thousands of domain names for next to nothing in the nineties and then sold them to companies for the highest of prices. It seems he had owned www.music.com for a long time; he talked about it animatedly as though it were some metropolis he had once been mayor of. Besides his Lincoln, the name business had at least also provided him with a yacht because when after a long drive we rode into Coos Bay’s small harbor, Albert motioned his chauffeur to slow down. He opened his window and pointed to the largest of the boats moored to the dock. ‘That one’s mine.’ On the bow, in navy-blue letters, was written the name, ‘Langlois’.

Albert had booked a room for me at the Merlin, a hotel with a fish restaurant opposite the marina. We agreed that he’d pick me up there the following morning and take me to his mother’s home. When, travel-weary, I looked out my hotel room window that first evening, I could see the whole bay all the way to the rocks in the distance. On one of the cape’s points, where the ocean entered the haven, there was a lighthouse. Before turning in I gazed at the light for a while. It glided across the horizon from left to right as if it were searching for something on the other side and would only stop moving once it had found it. Under my window sailboats were lying alongside the wharf. They bobbed on the waves, illuminated by the streetlights. Judging by the predominantly closed restaurants on the harbor street, the summers must be busy, but the off-season had succeeded in luring only a handful of tourists to Coos Bay. From my window I could also see Albert’s yacht that, due to its size, looked somewhat out of place in the small harbor.

It was six years prior to my visit to Coos Bay that I first came across what the Russians call ‘the Dyatlov Pass incident’. I, and several compatriots, had come to the Ural State Technical University in Yekaterinburg in the fall of 2010 to deliver an address on the Netherlands’ cultural history. My guest lectures were part of a one-off exchange between the Universities of Amsterdam and Yekaterinburg as a lead-up to the so-called Netherlands- Year in 2013. On one of my first days I was exploring the university’s main building during a break. In the auditorium my eyes fell on a wall that was covered with class photos and pennants. It was a wall displaying the school’s feats since its foundation in 1920. There were also a few trophy cabinets containing gigantic ice hockey cups, athletics medals and colorful ribbons. The pictures on the wall were hung in a timeline. Affixed in the middle, just before where the group portraits went from black and white to color, was a memorial: a plaque with a photo of ten youngsters side by side, posing with raised thumbs. Behind them was a school, under scaffolding, with children pressing their curious faces against the classroom’s windows. Engraved on the plaque was . January 24, 1959 followed by a death dagger and a few lines in Russian. ‘The Dyatlov group, our country’s best kept secret.’ Startled, I turned around. A slender woman, who I thought I recognized from the welcome meeting in the faculty lounge on my first day at the university, was standing behind me, a friendly smile on her thin, brilliant pink lips. She wore a cloverleaf brooch on her pullover. Unprompted, she started telling me, in perfect, accentless English, about the memorial. ‘In the winter of ‘59 a group of students went on an expedition to the Ural’s northernmost peak. Their trip’s goal was to earn credits, a common practice at the time. Upon their return to the campus they would be awarded the highest degree in mountaineering. Ten days after setting out they fled their tent in the dead of night. Why, is still a great mystery. Their bodies were found dispersed on a mountain pass. They were frozen, barefooted, some wearing only underpants. Forensic evidence showed that six of them had died of hypothermia. The cause of death of the others was severe internal trauma, which, according to the coroners, was caused by ‘indeterminable pressure to the chest’. One of the women was even missing her tongue. ‘Her tongue?’ I heard myself repeating it as I again looked at the plaque with the photo. ‘And that’s only the beginning of the mystery; there’s much more. For example, the tent they had slept in had been slashed open with a knife from the inside. And some of the clothes the students had on were measured to have suspiciously high radiation levels. The army immediately closed off the mountain and the north taiga for many years. ‘Oh...’ I said, as I gestured toward the nearest table in the auditorium. ‘Did the Soviet Army have anything to do with it?’

Her name was Veronika and I offered her a cup of tea. Her story intrigued me and I had some time to kill before resuming my lecture. Veronika was a linguistics lecturer. She told me that she was born in Kazakhstan but that after the Soviet Union’s dissolution she had moved, as did many other families, to Yekaterinburg, the nearest city, because the schools in the newly established home country taught only Kazakh grammar, a language that, especially in the new republic’s first years, offered little future prospects. After studying in New York, London and Oxford she eventually returned to Russia. ‘There are many theories,’ she said, ‘and their number grows every year. Avalanches, mist, blizzards. But there are also stories about escaped gulag prisoners or about bears and packs of hungry wolves. There are even people who believe American spies were involved or even more extreme: a attack or a UFO. The army has also been implicated: the group could possibly have witnessed a weapon test, the development of a new bomb or a long-range missile. Some people are convinced the students were lured to the mountain to facilitate a secret transfer of information. The oldest of the students is purported to have been a KGB spy. So to answer your question: yes, it’s possible the Soviet Army had something to do with it. For the past hundred years the taiga has not only been a depository for our criminals and dissidents but also the ideal grounds for hiding our secrets from the outside world. And maybe that’s still the case...’ She smiled guardedly. ‘Because to this day no one is foolish enough to openly suggest the government’s involvement in the incident. Before you know it your family will never hear from you again.’ Veronika glanced around apprehensively but practically all the tables in the auditorium were unoccupied. ‘There are even people who are convinced,’ she whispered with a flair for exaggeration, ‘that there’s a special secret service whose task it is to make sure the truth never becomes known.’ ‘Like the Priory of Sion?’ ‘Something like that, yes.’ Veronika explained that the files on the Dyatlov mystery were made public only at the end of the 80s during Gorbachev’s glasnost. In the many years following the incident, the stories, books and investigations took on a life of their own but none of them provided any evidence to what had happened on the Kholat Syakhl that winter night. ‘By now the puzzle has existed for more than fifty years. Every time a new book on the subject is published it becomes news and reminds us of the incident again. But with each new story the truth only seems to slip further away. A Moscow scientist recently published a paper about it. He claims the group fell victim to a so-called Kármán vortex street. That’s a whirling wind that blows in the mountains and the sound it produces is so low it can’t be heard by humans, but since it does vibrate the ear’s hair cells it can be felt. The phenomenon is also called infrasound and according to scientists it short-circuited the students’ brains causing them to panic and cut the tent open with a knife. And just a week ago there was an article in the Novaja Gazeta that created quite a stir: there’s an American who’s planning to make a movie about the incident. But he still hasn’t got permission to shoot in the mountain pass. The article said the movie’s going to be a thriller that puts the blame on our army. Americans dare do things like that. What we Russians do is divert attention away from the facts; invent stories to cover up other stories. And in the past few decades we’ve become pretty adept at it...’ A buzzer sounded, signaling that classes had resumed. Veronika stood up and put her plastic cup into mine. ‘If you want to know more about it I can take you to their final resting place here in Yekaterinburg later today. There’s also a monument for the students there.’

The Michailovsky cemetery was a fifteen-minute walk from the university. On the way there Veronika expressed surprise at my never having heard of the episode. ‘Everyone in Russia and especially around here knows the story. We tell it to little children to terrify them with tales of bogeys and creatures that prowl the Dyatlov pass at ungodly hours. Teaches them not to venture alone into the forests or mountains.’ She asked me, while flicking a lighter several times to light a cigarette, whether we also had similar mysteries. I told her about the Loch Ness Monster, the Mary Celeste, the flying saucer in Roswell. I said that not many Russian stories make it to the West and even if they do, nowadays we get only incomplete or electronically distorted versions. Veronika first abashedly dismissed my comment with a laugh but then put forth that the opposite was true for our stories. We concluded with a tinge of sarcasm that the Netherlands-Russia Year would most probably change all of that. ‘So you westerners also don’t know the story of the plane crash in the Kholat Syakhl?’ I shook my head. ‘That accident happened in 1991 if I’m not mistaken. It was a major item here in Russia. And especially due to the number of people that didn’t survive the crash...’ Veronika flicked her cigarette away and, as we passed through the gate, raised nine fingers.

The cemetery was in a neglected state. Wet autumn leaves colored the footpaths yellow and brown and most of the gravestones were green from moss or algae. On some graves I saw pieces of bone in the earth; human remains that were brought to the surface through the years by tree roots and exposed by burrowing rodents. When I pointed to them disgustedly she just shrugged her shoulders. She led me to a lawn at the back, lined with thornbushes, where the group members’ graves lay side by side. All the headstones had the same date of death and at each one’s foot there was a candle in a glass lantern. Only those on Zina Kolmogorova’s and Igor Dyatlov’s graves were burning. Behind the tombstones I saw the monument Veronika had told me about in the university auditorium: a cement pillar with nine photos, the nine faces of the members of the Dyatlov group. In eternal memory of the Ural Polytechnical Institute mountaineers who came to their tragic end in the Northern Urals, Veronika translated the monument’s text. We stopped at each of the graves. In the distance cars were honking. I quickly got used to that sound in my first days in Yekaterinburg. The Russians weren’t particularly talkative but their cars chattered to each other till the wee hours. ‘Relatives are still in the dark about what happened to their loved ones,’ Veronika said as she picked some fallen leaves off Lyudmila Dubinina’s grave. She said that nowadays only a handful of people still go to the annual commemoration on February the 2nd, a ceremony in which all the grave candles are lit. A representative of the university is always present, she said. Before we left she took the candle out of Igor’s lantern and used it to light the rest.

Since that day I couldn’t get the incident out of my mind and during the rest of my stay in Yekaterinburg I spent my spare time gathering information about what could have happened in the mountain pass that night. With Veronika’s assistance there was plenty to be found in the university library. She helped me read newspapers from the time of the incident and scientific journals and I studied the fatal plane crash of 1991. All nine passengers had perished. The number became even more significant when I discovered that the area’s original inhabitants, the Mansi, had christened the Kholat Syakhl ‘the mountain of bodies’ because, according to legend, nine mountain nomads had died there a century ago under inexplicable circumstances. Three accidents, three times nine victims. In some articles the number 999 featured prominently and was often eagerly turned upside down to demonstrate that the devil is abroad in the Kholat Syakhl. Since the Dyatlov group originally had ten members when they set off on their expedition, one of my first questions was what had become of the tenth person. Veronika told me about Yuri Yudin. He had left the expedition due to leg problems before they went into the mountains; a decision that saved his life. In a deathbed interview Yudin, aged 75, gave to The Moscow Times, he said to a journalist: ‘if I shortly get a chance to ask God one question it would be what happened to my friends that night?’ I was asking myself the same question. Why would nine experienced mountaineers leave their only warm shelter in the dead of night, in mist and subzero temperatures? Two of them I could understand—possibly in search of some privacy. Igor had a picture of Zina on his person when his body was found and it turned out she had secretly written about him in her diary. But all nine? Something or somebody must have scared the group members so badly that they fled their tent abruptly and ran downhill to the edge of the taiga’s forest. How come no one has succeeded in solving this puzzle yet? Back in the Netherlands, after my semester in Yekaterinburg was over, my interest in the subject only continued to grow. The search even became obsessive; there was no practical reason for learning to make borscht but it felt essential to my research. Like a detective who tries to think like the suspect I started to delve into 1950s Soviet Union daily life, into that closed, enigmatic land’s secrets. A land in which the Kremlin could be shifted to the other side of the Moskva River without the West getting wind of it and, if it did anyway, its ever having stood on the other bank would be denied. I therefore would also have to consider the possibility that the incident didn’t even occur at the Dyatlov Pass. That the bodies were deposited on the East Flank of Kholat Syakhl as a deception even though the group members’ diary excerpts contradict it. But how credible were those excerpts? During all those decades of secrecy the reports could have been tampered with. An employee of the Dyatlov Foundation in Yekaterinburg had sent me the complete file. They are trying to get to the bottom of what happened in 1959 and are still quarrelling with the authorities about having the case reopened. The digital document was 452 pages long. I started a beginners’ course in Russian at the University of Amsterdam and with Veronika’s help, with whom I’ve been corresponding about my research since we met, I went into the autopsy reports and the statements made by the rescue team that had uncovered the bodies. I studied the photos the students had taken with a classic Zorki camera and all the diaries, by which I could accurately reconstruct the journey, from the university campus to that fatal evening. I judged each theory about the cause of death based on the facts in the file, hoping that in all those years someone had overlooked something.