For two years he rampages about the minefield and ends up in the detoxification ward at a clinic for HIV carriers, but the drug dealers even get in there. There’s also plenty of vodka.
The senior registrar closes his eyes to it all, and organizes major booze-ups himself every few days, at which he chats up the female patients and sleeps with them in exchange for vodka and drugs. At one of these parties Sergei overdoes it with a mixture of alcohol and drugs, and ends up in intensive care.
There some people from a Narcotics Anonymous group come to see him. One of them is the head of a gangster outfit, whom Sergei knows from prison.
‘I thought I’d go to them, because it couldn’t be worse than it already was. I ended up at a rehabilitation centre where former junkies follow the Narcotics Anonymous twelve-step programme.’
From their research it appears that half the Russian addicts who find out they are HIV-positive stop taking drugs. The alcoholics come out not much worse.
RINAT – A NASTY BITCH
‘Were you infected by a partner?’ I ask Rinat.
‘No. By a doctor.’
‘Your partner was a doctor?’
‘That’s a good one! Not by, but at a doctor’s.’
‘That’s what all homosexuals say’, I reply, ‘to make it sound as if they are not responsible for AIDS along with the drug addicts and prostitutes – it used to be called “the gay plague”.’
A few months after his wedding Rinat came down with stomach ulcers. He had to have a gastroscopy, an unpleasant procedure involving sticking a thick tube with a camera at one end down the digestive tract. He had to have an HIV test to be admitted for the procedure.
Six months later he had to have another gastroscopy, but by then he already had the virus.
‘Jacek’, shouts Rinat, ‘I didn’t even sleep with my wife in that period! She was pregnant, but she was finding it very hard, so we didn’t make love to avoid causing complications. And I was faithful to her. My son was born on 12 February 1998, and the next day they gave me the diagnosis. The doctor at the AIDS clinic said I would live about another three years. She frightened me just for the fun of it.’
‘Maybe she doesn’t like gays.’
‘I didn’t tell her I was one.’
‘Sorry, Rinat, but it’s plain to see.’
‘If you have an expert eye. Nasty bitch! She told me to go and find a plot at the cemetery.’
Once he had pulled himself together, he went back to the hospital where they had performed the procedure. He wanted them to check who had had a stomach test before him. That person might not know he was a carrier. The specific feature of AIDS is that people live for years without knowing they have the virus, and in the meantime they infect others.
At the hospital they told Rinat they’d had a computer failure and the data hadn’t been saved. Just for that day.
‘That’s typical of our health service’, he says. ‘They never admit to making mistakes. In Voronezh, 215 people were given preparations made from infected blood. In my carriers’ support group there’s a girl who became HIV-positive after a blood transfusion. There are endless cases where they haven’t tested the donors’ blood, and in our country the main donors are tramps and homeless alcoholics who do it for the money.’
‘Why don’t they test it?’
‘Why on earth spend the money on testing when you can steal it and say it was tested? Before my friend’s operation we sought donors ourselves within the family and among friends, and we had them tested at our own cost, because otherwise he’d have been given suspect blood.’
‘Don’t you have voluntary blood donors?’
‘A tiny group of old people brought up in the USSR. In those days to give blood for your neighbour was an honour. In today’s Russia people are proud of their money.’
MASHA – DREAM NO. 2
She stopped taking drugs in December 2000, and in the spring it turned out she was sick with hepatitis B, the kind that spreads the same way as AIDS, via blood or sexual intercourse.
At the hospital they took a blood sample, and she turned out to be HIV-positive too. The doctor who filled in her form asked if she was a drug addict, or maybe a prostitute. She realized that ordinary people don’t fall sick with this. She was eighteen years old and she had thrown her life away.
For days on end she sat on a bench outside her mother’s house and cried. More and more often, a neighbour from the next staircase came and sat with her. He was ten years older. He said it broke his heart to see her crying. She was so small and thin, with very short hair, like a boy. He decided that this child wasn’t going to cry any more. He persuaded her to sign up for law studies. If she couldn’t be the new Okudzhava – he was a famous singer – why not realize her dream number two to work as a police detective?
He even went fifty-fifty with Masha’s mother to pay for her studies, and a year later he asked the girl to marry him.
They were married on 20 December 2002.
‘I desperately wanted to live’, Masha tells me. ‘I wanted to have a son with him, a wonderful, strong Ukrainian boy like him. So we tried, and I spent the whole of Christmas puking into the loo.’
‘You were pregnant? After four days . . .’
‘The Orthodox Christmas! In January.’
‘Is your husband HIV-positive too?’ I ask.
‘No.’
‘Then how did you do it? You have to have artificial insemination! Is he suicidal, or what?’
‘I asked him that too, and he said yes, he must be suicidal’, she says, laughing nervously.‘He didn’t want to do it artificially, into a jar, using tubes . . . He said he wasn’t afraid, and then, as we’d done it like that once, why not always? We don’t take precautions.’
‘Have you infected him?’
‘No. The whole time he’s had a negative result, and we’ve been carrying on like that for five years now. Our son is four. Only later did I find out that you have to prepare yourself for pregnancy, because the risk of infecting the child is 30 per cent, but if the level of the virus drops, it falls to 2 per cent. But our son is healthy.’
LIFE THE SECOND TIME AROUND
The risk of being infected with HIV through vaginal sex with a positive partner is one in 2000 for men, and one in 600 for women. Through anal sex the active partner has a one in 125 chance, and the passive partner one in thirty. The risk of being infected by a dirty needle is one in fifteen.
The only opponent of the anti-AIDS campaign in Russia is the Orthodox Church. It protests against programmes to exchange used needles and syringes for clean ones. The Church believes that by telling young people about condoms you increase the danger of an epidemic, because by doing this you are encouraging them to practise unrestrained sex.
In the view of the Orthodox clergy, AIDS is a punishment sent down on homosexuals, drug addicts and prostitutes for their sins.
Nowadays in Russia there are 450,000 registered carriers, but the authorities estimate that there are actually about a million. Three-quarters of them are drug addicts who were infected by a needle or a syringe, but most new cases are people who were infected through sexual intercourse.
UNAIDS, the United Nations anti-AIDS programme, estimates more realistically that the percentage of the population living with HIV in Russia is more than 2 per cent, and thus almost three million people. Russian non-governmental organizations were already talking of four million in 2005.Thirty per cent of them were or are currently in prison. The penal institutions are rife with terrible drug addiction. At the prison camps located in Siberia every third prisoner is HIV-POSITIVE.
SERGEI – COME INSIDE!
He hasn’t taken drugs for five years now, nor does he drink. He has just stopped having anti-virus therapy to help heal his liver, which has taken a battering from hepatitis, drugs and alcohol. The state of his liver worries him more than the HIV, but one therapy interferes with the other.
He still goes to Narcotics Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous group
meetings, because he has had both problems. It was at Alcoholics Anonymous that he met the beautiful Larissa, a forty-year-old divorcee whose husband took away their only child because she was drinking. From then on she drank even more, and chose Sergei to save her.
‘We have a principle’, explains the former junkie, ‘that if a friend needs help, you can’t refuse. That’s our philosophy. She wanted me to stay the night with her, because she only starts drinking at night and goes off on a bender, but I knew that if I stayed over, I simply wouldn’t be able to resist. Such a beauty! I didn’t want to exploit another woman who’d been ill-treated by fate. So I said no, because she had a nice flat, some income and a rich fiancé. But she preferred a former addict and criminal with HIV, hepatitis and heroin-blackened teeth. The first time we kissed was after a year.’
Sergei works at a non-governmental anti-AIDS organization. His workplace is the street, and his task is to find and stay in touch with active drug addicts.
‘Do you hand out needles and syringes?’
‘We’re not allowed to’, he says. ‘They hand them out in all the neighbouring provinces, but the authorities in our republic reckon it’s an encouragement to take drugs. They even refuse to allow us to exchange used syringes, though that would be a guarantee that an addict is going to shoot up safely, and won’t throw the needle into a sandpit where a child will find it.’
‘So what do you do with them?’
‘I tell them the awful story of my life. I show them that if you stop taking drugs, you get a home, a job, a family, a wife.’
‘Did you marry Larissa?’ I ask.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s your fourth wife now. Did she have the virus?’
‘No. We took precautions. Condoms’, says Sergei, ruffling his hair sheepishly.‘For the first year. Then we started using a method without condoms, but I didn’t come inside her.’
‘You withdrew?’
‘Yes, and I ejaculated on her belly.’
‘Christ – you must have known the virus isn’t just in the semen, but also in the seminal fluid.’
‘Sure, but I had this illusion that if I didn’t come, then . . .’ I can see he’s about to explode. ‘Fucking hell. Don’t torture me! It was she who begged me to come inside her! Get it? I was forty years old and I was in love for the first time in my life. And after two years she was a carrier too. Last year . . .’
‘You infected the woman you love!’
‘She wanted to have the illness. Because I had it.’
‘What sort of crap is that?’
‘It’s not crap.You completely fail to understand Russian women. For the man they love they’ll go to the ends of the earth and even to their death. In our country that’s normal. They love being devoted, making a sacrifice of themselves! I’ve met dozens of women like that!’
RINAT – SEX WORKERS
Knowing he was the carrier of a fatal illness made Rinat feel powerless against nature. He no longer had the strength to deny his gay side. Now, apart from his wife and two children, he has a regular partner whom he sees once a week.
‘Because that’s the way I am. Fuck it, that’s how I was born! And I don’t hide the fact that I’m HIV-positive. And sex is only with condoms. No question.’
He works on the side as a hairdresser. He goes to his clients’ homes or receives them at his place. He adores this job, because he can chatter away endlessly. And if that’s not enough, he does a shift at the AIDS clinic, where people find out they have the virus. Several people in their city have committed suicide on hearing this news. Rinat explains to the carriers that it is possible to live with it and that it isn’t a death sentence.
Like Sergei, he also works on the street, but with the so-called kaserki. Russians love new, foreign-sounding words, so they have even invented a more original one for prostitutes. Kaserki is an abbreviation of the words kamercheskiye seks rabotnitsy, which means ‘private-sector sex workers’.
‘The street girls’, he explains, ‘are almost 100 per cent intravenous drug users working to earn the money for their next fix. I’m sure almost all of them are HIV-positive, but they couldn’t care less. They never get tested. They say they use the condoms I hand out to them, but I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe if the client wants to, but everyone prefers to go without. It’s a known fact. Their clients are the dregs of society, brainless oafs who can only afford the lowest kind of prostitute for 150, 200 roubles (£3-4). Most of them have wives, and that’s how the virus spreads.’
Rinat is apparently the only AIDS-related social worker in Russia to be working in the gay community. He often visits the pleshka – the pick-up area where gays too seek opportunities for quick sex with a one-time partner. Here he has had his greatest success, because when he started working with them in spring 2007, hardly anyone used condoms, but now most of them don’t forget to, though they refuse to be tested. Men are cowards, they’d rather not know. That is why 75 per cent of the registered carriers in Russia are women. In Europe it is exactly half.
MASHA – THE BIGGEST TURF
In Russia, drug dealers usually set up their sales points in the stairwells near pharmacies. Each one has two or three needles. The customers either get take-aways or shoot up on the spot. Then the dealer wipes the needle on his trousers and hands it to the next one.
Anyone could get a supply of needles at the pharmacy, but that involves serious risk. There are often uniformed militiamen hanging about outside, and inside, worse yet, there might be some of their plain-clothes friends.You have to show your ID, explain yourself, and then pay them to let you go. If you haven’t got any money, they’ll lock you up for forty-eight hours to establish your personal details, or for being in a state indicating drug-taking.
Masha knows dozens of these places in Ufa, so after her student training at the militia, the heads of the department that fights against drug dealing offered her a permanent job. They needed an expert who knew almost everything about the world of drug addicts and dealers. They weren’t at all bothered by the fact that she herself had belonged to it, as they were perfectly aware.
‘I wanted to lock up all the dealers who’d made me waste my youth’, says Masha, ‘but I soon realized there isn’t any fight against drugs! Quite the opposite. The militiamen cultivate the drug dealing themselves and milk cash out of it. When I was a dealer I used to pay them too, but only now did I see that it works like a business. For example, in the gypsies’ yard, where for years there has been the biggest drug-dealing turf in Ufa, first thing the local cop comes along and takes 500 roubles (£10) from each dealer.Then off he goes and doesn’t show up again that day. After him come my colleagues from the anti-drugs unit.’
‘And they also get 500 each?’
‘A thousand each. And they’re gone.You won’t see them here again that day either. Finally, along come the guys from Gosnarkokontrol – state drugs control. They’re not militiamen, but a major power structure set up within the Ministry of Internal Affairs specially to fight drugs. They take a thousand each too. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. I held out for a year and a half, then asked the commander to let me go. Of course I didn’t tell him what I’ve told you.’
‘Why not?’ I ask.
‘He knows it all anyway. They all know. It happens quite openly.’
Now Masha is struggling to train as a lawyer and lives like anyone else. No medicines, psychotherapy, support groups or meetings . . . She has a normal sex life, eats whatever she fancies, has the occasional drink and when necessary stays up late. She even takes antibiotics when she falls sick, although they are terribly bad for the immunity.
‘And I go hiking in the mountains and to the caves again’, she says. ‘I go climbing, I ski, ride a motorbike and go parachuting. My husband’s the reverse – he loves his home, peace and quiet. He cooks, cleans, and sings lullabies to our son. And a month ago we had the child christened.’
‘How come? You’re Jewish, aren’t you?’
‘No, I�
��m Orthodox. Larissa is the godmother – that’s the girl who used to give drugs to the children in our yard.We met up again. Now she’s my only female friend. She’s given up drugs too and she’s HIV-POSITIVE too. Possibly she caught it from me. Or I caught it from her.’
By the twenty-first century we shall have conquered most of the illnesses that are still feared today, and we shall have done so radically. In fact the only ones that will not yet have succumbed to a complete cure will be cancer, mental illnesses and cardiovascular diseases . . . But there can be no doubt that in the early twenty-first century they will be no more dangerous that pneumonia is now.
So what will the doctors do then?
I think they will find nothing but preventative medicine, sanitaria and hygiene boring, so they will devise a new, very important task that will never be exhausted: they will take on the perfecting of the healthy human organism.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
Sveta and her daughter at her flat in Kazan.
Miss HIV
A CONVERSATION WITH 27-YEAR-OLD SVETLANA IZAMBAYEVA FROM KAZAN, RUSSIA’S MISS HIV-POSITIVE
Sveta’s mother got drunk and collapsed in the street – it was a fairly typical Soviet birth. Meanwhile in California the worldwide AIDS pandemic was just starting.
Hello, Sveta. I haven’t got a cold, sore throat, cough or ear infection, and my teeth are in good shape too.
Thank God, because we have to avoid any kind of infection at all costs.You can get over a cold in a few days, but it takes us two or three weeks. We take a lot of care to keep warm.
White Fever Page 9
