‘Even when the body isn’t recovered’, says Dr Natalia Borisova, ‘as in the case of Sasha Yakovlev, who was dragged under the ice.’
Four hundred and eighty-seven people live in the village (or at least are registered here, because many of the herders and hunters only show up for a few days a year). Two hundred and eight of them are Evenks.The number of births is declining. In 2007 there were four, and in 2008 there were five.
I leaf through the register of deaths. On average there are ten to fifteen entries each year. For example, in 1992, when the Land of Soviets had just collapsed, Dr Borisova made ten entries. Three Russians died a natural death, and seven Evenks died tragically. Two died of alcohol poisoning, one was drunk and fell out of a boat, a twenty-seven-year-old girl died because she had ‘numerous breaks to the pelvis with injuries to the internal organs’, but Dr Borisova cannot remember what happened to her. It sounds like a car crash, but then there aren’t any roads around here. Fifty-six-year-old Lidia froze to death on a village street, forty-five-year-old Oleg hanged himself, and thirty-year-old Alexander was killed by a bullet.‘A shotgun wound to the head, dislocating the cranium.’
‘They always shoot under the chin’, whispers his sister Yelena sadly, a mature, well-groomed woman, beautiful in the Evenk way. ‘It’s the only way to do it with a rifle. My father shot himself that way. And my brother. They drive into the taiga, the vodka’s finished, they sober up, but that’s when the hallucinations start, the white fever.’
‘Did they drink less in the old days?’ I ask.
‘Not at all. But there were no reasons to do themselves so much harm. Nowadays life is poorer, so there’s a great deal of home brewing and they drink their own concoctions.’
‘Today I came back from the taiga, where I was treated to pure spirit.’
‘Which they know how to spice up to make it stronger, by adding Demerol, sedatives, for instance. There are a great many poisonings from that. They freeze to death, burn in their tents, grab their knives . . .’
‘The Russians drink a lot too.’
‘Sure, but they can drink a glass of vodka and then walk about normally – the Evenks fall over.’
‘And there’s also the hatred between the Russkies and the Evenks’, adds Dr Borisova. ‘Maybe it’s because of poverty? Because of the lack of hope, lawlessness and unemployment? Our young people cannot even sign on for unemployment benefit, because they have to register in the city, then show up once a month, and that’s a huge expedition, a two-day trip.’
‘How many patients do you have at the hospital now?’ I ask finally.
‘One. Lenochka Kolesova, the three-year-old granddaughter of Lena, with whom you’re staying. Her mother has been drinking herself unconscious for a few days now, so we took the little girl in for foster care. We always do that when the parents get sloshed. In the daytime the children are at playschool, and at night they’re with us. It’s a sort of village emergency shelter.’
For a while Dr Borisova was lost in thought.
‘At first I only recorded people over seventy or eighty in the register of deaths. Now there aren’t any. A fifty-year-old man is a patriarch, a freak of nature. The fifty-year-old women have senile dementia. Here people live to forty.’
SIX – THE CHEST
He shot himself with a rifle in the chest.That was on 21 March 1996. He was called Pavel Yakovlev. He was a widower with no children. He was not related to Volodya and Sasha, who died earlier. Almost all the local Evenks have one of five Russian surnames which were assigned to them in the 1930s.
Pavel was sixty-six and he was the oldest herder in the brigade.
A few weeks earlier he burned himself very badly with some boiling water, but didn’t have it treated, so the wound became infected. He came back to the village from the taiga but didn’t show up at the hospital. He lived like a beggar in huts and sheds – he had no home.
And then there were eleven herders left in Brigade Number One.
SEVEN – THE CHEST
Ten days later, at four in the morning, Sasha Markov fired a shot at himself in Bamnak. His wife ran to fetch Lena Kolesova, because in the taiga it is customary for the animal husbandry expert to treat people as well as reindeer.
Sasha had a small wound in his chest, from which no blood was flowing. He was sitting on the floor. The herders can’t stand domestic appliances. On entering their homes they don’t hang up their jackets, but throw them underfoot. They sleep and eat on the floor, and if they have to sit at a table, they squat on a chair with their knees close to their chins, as by the stove in a tent. Lena had the wounded Sasha taken to hospital, but Dr Borisova was not able to carry out the complicated operation he needed. Sasha died in the car on the way to town.
And so there were ten herders left in the brigade.
EIGHT – THE THROAT
Number eight was a woman, Lena Safronova, who was Sasha’s wife. A month after he died, in May, she drank herself to death. They had no children in common, but she had two from before she married, twelve-year-old Masha and fourteen-year-old Tania. They went to live with an aunt, then ended up at a children’s home. Both drink heavily. Last year a court placed Tania’s two sons in a children’s home.
‘One time we came to see her’, says Dr Borisova, who is a member of the village’s social committee, ‘and she was feeding her four-month-old baby a bottle of water left over from boiling noodles.’
Now there were nine herders left.
NINE – THE SKIN
On 19 June 1996 he burned alive in his tent. But he was terrifically drunk, because he had been celebrating his thirty-fifth birthday. He was called Gena Yakovlev, he was the stepbrother of Pavel, who shot himself three months earlier. Like him, he didn’t have a wife or children, so he was celebrating his birthday with no-one but a herder friend, and after that man had gone off to his own tent, the reindeer skins on the floor were set on fire by the stove.
And so there were eight herders left in Brigade Number One.
TEN – THE THROAT
Sasha Likhachev was twenty-eight. He too lived all alone in the taiga. He died of excessive drink in his tent in the middle of the worst year in the brigade’s history.
There were seven left.
AUNTIE VALYA
‘She was the object of our terror’, says Lena Kolesova, ‘a real monster. The worst teacher at the boarding school for Evenks.We feared her as much as an evil spirit from the taiga. I was eight years old when my parents took me to Bamnak and handed me over to Auntie Valya. I didn’t stop crying for two months. I didn’t know a word of Russian, and we weren’t allowed to talk in our own language.’
For the first few days the children went about in the clothes they’d arrived in from the taiga.They had unty – boots made of reindeer skin – on their feet, which shed hair copiously.
‘Auntie Valya liked to grab a small child by the scruff of the neck and sweep the floor with his head. She hated Evenks.Then they took everything away from us. Our jackets from the taiga, our unty, toys and keepsakes, and gave us children’s padded jackets, felt boots, school equipment and books. It was the same every year. When I was in the fourth class I ran away from the school in the winter and lived in my parents’ house, which was empty because they were away in the taiga. The people from the boarding school came and took me back there, but I ran away again, so then they boarded up the door and windows. I escaped once again, and prised off the boards, but they came and took me away again. And so on, a hundred times over. It reached a point where Auntie Valya used to tie me to the bed at night, so then I would escape from school during the day. They Russified us by force, and now they’re surprised we’ve lost our culture and forgotten our language.’
‘You don’t even know how to tan hides any more.’
‘Because they forced us into the state farm and un-taught us everything, gave us everything – clothes, housing, food – they even brought firewood to our cottages all neatly chopped and cut, so all we had to do was put
it in the stove.’
There are forty-five small indigenous races that inhabit Siberia, not counting the big ones, like the Buryats, Tuvans or Yakuts, of whom there are around half a million in total. In all, there are only two million indigenous Siberians, and everywhere apart from the Tuvan Republic they are an ethnic minority.
According to the 2002 census, there are 35,500 Evenks, but barely 15 per cent of them know their own language. It is one of the bigger nations, because for example there are only 237 of the Enets left, twelve Alutors, and eight Kereks; of the remaining 346 Oroks barely three can speak their own language, and none of the 276 Taz can.
Even Lena’s children can only speak Russian.
‘Why didn’t you let the little Evenks speak in their own language?’ I ask Valentina Tsaytak, also known as Auntie Valya, who following her retirement still lives in Bamnak.
‘I simply didn’t allow the Evenks and Russians to sit at separate tables in the canteen. I sat them so every second child was from the other group – six children per table.’
‘So they couldn’t chat in their own language?’ I guess.
‘Our children, the Russian ones, couldn’t speak their language. And do you know how happy those little Evenks were when they got felt boots and could go about dressed like the other children?’
‘Why do so many Evenks kill themselves?’ I ask the old Soviet pedagogue.
‘Vodka! And they go straight for their knives. Even the women. Among them, if a woman doesn’t kill someone, she’s not a proper Evenk. Best of all kill a Russian. If she drinks blood, she’s one of us. An Evenk woman told me herself – my assistant at the boarding school. They knock out the windows in their houses, they smash everything, they destroy it all, then go to the state farm or the village council to get them to do the repairs for them. Or one of them has too much to drink, sits down in the middle of the road and stays there. The cars have to drive around him. One idiot got drunk and sat down just like that on the train tracks. He thought the train would drive around him too. A Bamnak lad. He spent all day driving to the main line, just to sit on the tracks.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘His legs were cut off ’, says Auntie Valya, laughing.
ELEVEN – THE CHEST
In early 1997, after serving a twenty-year sentence for murder, Sasha Romanov from Bamnak came out of prison. He drove straight into the taiga to visit his friends, and then shot them in a tent with a rifle he wanted to steal from them. He was very quickly caught. He was sentenced to death, but was not executed, because for some months a moratorium on the death sentence had been in force in Russia. One of the three people he killed was Sergei Romanov from Brigade Number One. He was twenty-six and lived alone.
The victim and the killer were not related.
And so there were six herders left in the brigade.
At this point the governor of the Amur district summoned Lena Kolesova, leader of the Bamnak Evenks.
‘And he says as I’m such an Evenk patriot’, Lena tells me, ‘I should take on the lease of the entire agricultural complex, including two farms, a hunting district and a herd of reindeer, of which only 700 were left. I didn’t really want a corpse like that and all its debts, where the managers and bookkeepers had stolen everything that could be sold, but I agreed, so that my people would not lose their jobs.’
First of all, she took on four young herders to join the decimated Brigade Number One.
Now there were ten of them again.
TWELVE – THE THROAT
But only for a few days. Because on 18 February Klim Romanov drove down to the village, a legendary figure who had once run out of his tent into the taiga in the middle of the night. He had been extremely drunk, but was already sobering up. He hadn’t put on his boots, so his two teenage sons rushed after him. They couldn’t find him, because Klim was hiding on an island in the middle of the river. The boys decided to come back in the daylight, but next morning there was a flood which swamped the entire island. For three days and nights they couldn’t get onto it, and when the water finally receded, the sons went to look for their father’s body. But Klim had survived. For three days and nights he had sat out the freezing cold in a tree; the only provisions he had was a bottle of water, and he was also holding his beloved dog in his arms.
He is a legendary figure for having no luck with women too, though generally it was he who brought them bad luck. The first was Zhenya, who brought her illegitimate son Vitya to the marriage, and then bore her husband a son called Arkady. Soon after, Klim caught his wife in bed, or to be precise on a pile of reindeer skins, with another man.
So he shot her, served a five-year sentence, and on coming out of prison married Anna, fifteen years his junior. They lived happily, but not for very long. A young vet called Andrei turned up at their campsite in the taiga, a Russian lad from the city. A tree that he cut down fell onto the tent and killed Anna.
Klim’s third wife was called Lidia. On 18 February 1997 she held a riotous fiftieth birthday party for her husband, but somehow the birthday boy couldn’t stop drinking, and on 23 February, Defender of the Fatherland Day, in the local hospital’s register of deaths, next to his name Dr Borisova wrote ‘Alcohol poisoning’.
It is a very odd holiday, celebrated in exactly the same way as 8 March, which in Russia is Women’s Day, in other words as a nationwide vodka-drinking contest. Only for men, of course.
Not long after, Klim’s third wife died.
Now there were only nine herders left in Brigade Number One.
THIRTEEN – THE NECK
But only for one day, because on 24 February, at the news of the death of his adoptive but much loved father, twenty-year-old Vitya Romanov hanged himself on a tree in the taiga.
Then there were eight.
FOURTEEN – THE HEAD
Arkady Romanov, known as Arkashka, because he was so young and small, had lost his mother, father and finally his half-brother. He and Vitya were new brigade members and lived together in the same tent.
Arkashka was eighteen years old and dreadfully alone. On 24 July 1998 he shot himself in the head with a rifle – the same one his father had used years ago to shoot his mother.
There were seven left.
HOLE IN THE HEAD
‘Terrible’, I say, unable to stop myself, because I can’t bear to hear yet another story starring death as the main character.
‘You bet it’s terrible!’ wails Lena Kolesova. ‘It’s enough to drive you mad, but we have to live here! And that’s just one brigade – there were three like it! And it was the same in every single one! A few months ago a nine-year-old boy committed suicide! Because his reindeer died. And so many of the children live without their parents. In my home too. That’s why I’m in despair, because the inevitable is approaching and nothing’s been taken care of.’
‘Lena, you’re only fifty.’
‘But I can feel my health starting to go. I’m afraid.’ Because Alina is only twelve, Sashka is fifteen, and what’s more she’s started hanging about with a Russian boy. Because Vovka and Rostik spend all day huddling by the stove, smoking cigarettes and blowing on the ash pan. Then they gawp at the television until dawn, sleep until midday, and if there isn’t any firewood, they puzzle out where to get 2000 roubles from (£40), because that’s what a tipper truck of wood costs, although just the other side of the fence the spring flood has tossed thousands of lovely, great big tree trunks onto the riverbank. They’d only have to saw it up and chop it into firewood.
But they’d rather buy an old dog from a friend of theirs, and then they swap it with the Korean lumberjacks for wood that’s ready to burn – for them dog is a delicacy. They’d only have to hire a lorry and drive fifty kilometres into the taiga. So they spent ages totting it all up, and finally worked out it wasn’t worth it. It’d cost a bit less money, but they’d lose an entire day.
The boys are stepbrothers. One of them is twenty-six, and the other is twenty-four. They’ve been at Lena�
�s for twenty years, and the girls for eleven. They are all the early children of Lena’s three sisters, who drank, dumped their offspring and left the village in search of men. Sasha’s mother is no longer alive. She got drunk and fell asleep outside in the winter. There used to be another girl in the house too, but Lena has already married her off.
‘What about their fathers?’ I ask.
‘They don’t have fathers’, she says, pouting. ‘Not many of the Evenks do. They don’t live long. And Alina’s mother was my beloved sister Lila. She was five, and I was eighteen when our mother died. I brought her up badly – I should have smacked her and kept an eye on her so she wouldn’t go wandering, but I already had a job and two sons of my own. Now they’ve called from the hospital to ask me to take Lenochka too, my son Slava’s daughter, because her mother has been boozing again. But I haven’t enough time left to bring her up! I’m too old now, and Sashka is too young.’
‘So what will happen to her?’
‘She’ll go to the children’s home in the city.’
It may be that Rimma Salnikova, the hospital cleaner, will take her, Slava’s first wife, who has a nine-year-old son by him, whose name is Viktor.
‘You want to bring up her child?’ I ask. ‘She stole your husband!’
‘That’s nothing’, whispers Rimma. ‘I can’t have any more children, and like this, brother and sister would be together. They had the same father. I was with Slava for three years, and then I left him. He used to drive off into the taiga, disappear for three or four months, then come back and drink non-stop. He started when he was fourteen.’
‘Did he drink at home?’
‘What do you mean? Of course not – he used to go off somewhere. And then go and sleep at his mother’s house. He’d come back when he was sober – when the worst bit began. The white fever. It comes on later, after excessive drinking. The person starts seeing things, or hearing things . . . One time he had a dreadful headache, and something said into his ear: “Get a gun and make a hole in your head, then all the pain will fly out of it.” I managed to grab hold of the gun at the very last minute. Or a voice would tell him:“Go outside and run, run, run . . .” So he’d tear off and started shooting at animals that weren’t there. He could see devils. He used to see his father, who had died long before.’
White Fever Page 21
