White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  ‘And can you talk to someone in that state?’

  ‘Yes. He’s a sober, seemingly normal person, but has strange, lifeless eyes, a mindless expression. Such huge, dilated pupils, even when he comes out into the light, onto snow. Once he woke me in the middle of the night, sat by the stove and asked me to talk to him so he couldn’t hear the goblins, those evil little people who were telling him dreadful things. Afterwards, once it had passed, he laughed at that, but I know he was dying of fear. So was I.’

  ‘And when you left with your son’, I ask, ‘did he come crawling after you, whimpering like a dog for you to return?’

  ‘Oh no! He adored us, but that’s not something they do. They’re people of the taiga. Terribly proud. I said: “It’s me or the vodka”, and he chose the vodka.’

  ‘And Sveta.’

  ‘A girl from the children’s home’, she says haughtily. ‘But she is an Evenk – I was never “one of us” because I’m a Russki! My son asked me, who’s he going to be when he grows up, an Evenk or a Russki? And I know the only chance for him is to get out of here.There’s nothing good here. But he’s already dreaming of going into the taiga. Of doing some hunting. Like his father! What the hell draws them to it?’

  FIFTEEN – THE HEAD

  In late 2004 the Udarnik state farm finally gave up the ghost. The state leases the land left over from the collapsed farm to a Russian oligarch from the provincial capital. Since then everyone has to pay him for every elk, reindeer or sable they hunt. Lena Kolesova says that like this the Russians have stolen the Evenks’ land.

  At that point Lena shared out the 276 remaining state-farm reindeer among the herders in Brigade Number One. One of the last seven was her son Slava.

  Shortly before the New Year began, he and Sveta set off into the taiga.They drank until NewYear’s Eve when their supplies ran out. She regained consciousness on 4 January. Slava was lying beside her. A bullet had ripped off his entire face. He had shot himself with a big game rifle.

  For another month Sveta lay with him in the tent on a single rug made of animal hides. She didn’t eat or even light the stove, because it turned out she’d been shot in the foot and couldn’t move.

  ‘I have no idea what happened’, says Sveta Kirova. ‘I was terribly drunk.’

  ‘Did Slava know you were six weeks’ pregnant?’

  ‘He did and he was very pleased. He enjoyed life. He was so gentle and quiet. He never even shouted, never swore, but he did suffer terribly because of his brother, because he was such a hooligan. That very same day when Slava committed suicide, his brother shot a Russian girl in the village. Strange things happen in the taiga.’

  Sveta was rescued by Slava’s uncle, who came to visit.

  She is a beautiful twenty-six-year-old woman, damaged by vodka. She has a sensual mouth and prominent cheek bones, and is extremely tall for an Evenk. But the most unusual thing about her are her lovely long hands, with delicate, fragile fingers. It’s hard to tear your eyes away from them, because how does a herder’s wife come to have hands like that?

  ‘They want to take your daughter away from you’, I say.

  ‘I’ve been given one last chance again.’

  ‘Lena says the little girl is like her father.’

  ‘But if she ever starts to sleep around and drink vodka, I’ll kill her myself.’

  From former Brigade Number One there were six herders left.

  SIXTEEN AND SEVENTEEN

  They were Vladimir Romanov and his wife Lidia Timofeyeva, parents of the Sasha who shot Sergei from their brigade, for which he was sentenced to death.

  In mid-2005 they came back to the village from their camp in the taiga. They stopped for a rest. They were found a year later. Their bodies had been torn apart by bears, and flies had done the rest, so it was impossible to establish the cause of death. The skeletons of their reindeer were found tied to a tree.

  People suspect that Lidia and Vladimir shot each other. They were both over sixty.

  There were four herders left.

  EIGHTEEN – THE CHEST

  The Evenk drinking den at the state-farm living quarters is different from other drinking dens around the world in that among the rags, bottles, crumbs, bits of paper and filthy dirty plates covered in cigarette butts there are fish heads lying all over the place.

  It’s cold, it stinks and you’re too disgusted to sit down.

  There are three women, pissed out of their skulls, and four-year-old Vladik in felt boots. Raisa is the cousin,Vika the sister and Tina the fiancée of Oleg Zakharov from Brigade Number One.

  Some years ago, when Tina’s husband was knocked down in the taiga by a tree which he himself had felled, she and her son Vladik moved into Oleg’s tent. When he asked for her hand, she ran away to the village.

  In late December 2005 the herder came out of the tent and shot himself in the rib cage from the left side with a melkashka, a small-bore rifle for hunting fur animals. Oleg was forty-two.

  ‘But I hadn’t run away from him’, gabbles Tina. ‘I’d just sat on the stove, burned my bum and had to go to the doctor.’

  She is thirty-four, but she looks twice as old. For a year she worked at the local bakery, but whenever she went on a binge there was no bread in the village, so she was fired from her job.

  There were three herders left.

  SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY

  A sad morning. The fourteenth of February, Saint Valentine’s Day. At breakfast Lena gets news that Vanya Zatylkin is dead. He was doing teacher training in Saint Petersburg, but he hanged himself at the student hostel, apparently because of an unhappy love. He was twenty years old.

  The Evenks take distant journeys away from home very badly. They are especially poor at adapting to cities. When they go away to study, most of them don’t finish the course – they start to drink and come home without a diploma.

  So Lena and I are sitting in the kitchen over a salad of raw fish, quietly mourning Vanya, without any tears – because here never a month goes by without this sort of news arriving.

  Then Tania and Masha come by, the daughters of Lena Safronova from Brigade Number One, who drank herself to death twelve years ago. They and their family have driven down to the village for provisions and – as usual among those who live in the taiga – they all got furiously drunk and went on a bender, while Masha’s children ended up in hospital. Masha is desperate to drive them back to the camp in the taiga, because the militia have come from the city with a committee to take her daughter and son away to a children’s home. A year ago the same committee took away two of Tania’s children.

  In a few minutes Lena’s Lazhik is ready to go. At the wheel is Rostik, her adoptive son, and I’m sitting next to him with five-year-old Igor and three-year-old Katya on my knees. In the back are Tania with her husband Borka, and Masha with Danka and his brother Maxim, with the carved-up face. They’re all blind drunk or in a state of transition to a hangover.

  ‘Why the hell did you come for provisions in such a big gang?’ I ask Masha, as we drive onto the frozen river beyond Bamnak.

  ‘To take a break, drink some vodka. We hadn’t been to the village for eight months. But we’re going home quickly, or we’ll die here, because we’ll never stop drinking.’

  All day we keep driving along the river, but we stop once an hour, because the herders have to have a drink.They’ve got some pure spirit in a large plastic carboy, diluted to a strength of 30 per cent.They don’t eat anything. They pour the vodka down their throats thirstily, as if afraid of sobering up or putting an end to the binge; in fact Masha and Borka, who have already stopped drinking, look the worst. They have a terrified, vacant look in their eyes, which are wild, not even blinking.

  Their encampment is also a drinking den, but a nomadic, travelling one. All over the place there are big piles of dirty dishes, gnawed bones, horns, hooves, dog and human turds frozen solid. The frozen eyes of slaughtered reindeer stare out of the trees. As the brain, nostrils and eyes are the gr
eatest delicacies, the herders hang the heads on the trees by the antlers so the dogs can’t reach them.

  Before nightfall we’re all sitting in Masha and Danka’s tent. The girl is twenty-four and is already on her third husband. The previous one, Dima Yakovlev, father of Igor and Katya, was a herder in Brigade Number One. Following the collapse of the state farm he waged a private war against a powerful cartel of gold prospectors called Vostok.

  ‘Reindeer always calve in the same place’, Masha tells me. ‘There’s no point telling them to do it somewhere else. They’ll always go back to the place where they were born and where they have always given birth.You can’t train it out of them. A hundred years ago or more they chose the river Yalda as the place to calve, but now that lot have started digging for gold there.’

  ‘And the Russki will murder anything that moves to stuff his gob with meat’, puts in her husband. ‘They pretend they can’t tell the wild reindeer from ours, although all the domestic ones have ribbons and stakes tied round their necks so they won’t wander too far.’

  ‘So my Dima goes to see them’, Masha continues, ‘and explains, even asks them not to kill our mothers, because they can only give birth there, but they just laugh, and that foreman of theirs, a big, beefy, revolting Russki guy, says we can’t prohibit them from doing anything they like because it’s Russki land, not ours. In the second year of this war we drove the herd 150 kilometres into the mountains, but even so seven of the mothers ran off to give birth on the Yalda. They killed every single one. Dima went crazy. He grabbed his rifle and raced to their camp. He smashed the foreman in the face and then started shooting, but only to scare them.’

  After this incident Dima hid in the taiga.The militia tried to catch him, and even used helicopters to hunt him down, but they had no chance of finding him because only a man of the taiga can track another one, and no-one was willing to act as their guide. The militia proclaimed that Dima was a dangerous killer. Fifteen years earlier he had shot his first wife.

  NINETEEN – THE CHEST

  One night at the end of 2006 Dima left his tent and shot himself in the chest.

  ‘He said he was going to relieve himself ’, Masha recalls. ‘He had no more strength to fight.’

  He left his wife and two small children. He was thirty-six years old.

  Two remaining.

  TWENTY – THE THROAT

  Meanwhile Vasily Yakovlev came back to his camp in the taiga from the village. He had been drinking heavily, so with the last of his strength he dragged himself there and then died. He was fifty.

  One.

  TWENTY-ONE – THE SKIN

  Towards the end of 2007 Igor Likhachev, the last living member of the herder brigade, was coming back from town across a lake. Halfway across the ice lay a dead crow. How had it got there? Had it flown and flown until it dropped? Had it died in mid-flight? ‘A lake that’s white, a bird that’s black – a sign that shows bad times are back.’Worried by this omen, he went to see Lena Kolesova to tell her about it. He took the opportunity to borrow four canisters of petrol.

  Next day he and a friend, Volodya’s brother and his son Dimitri, drove off into the taiga. They were drunk. They were smoking. They didn’t even have time to get the door open when just outside the village their car exploded. Some militiamen came from the town, but they were so drunk they couldn’t do any investigating.

  In the register of deaths Dr Borisova wrote: ‘Unfortunate accident, cause not established.’

  At the wake after the funeral the third of the Likhachev brothers drank himself to death.

  Igor was thirty-six. He lived alone.

  And so in sixteen years, of all the herders in Brigade Number One at the Udarnik state farm no-one was left alive.

  DRESS REHEARSAL

  It was an ice-cold night, disturbed by dogs barking because they sensed a stranger, by the children’s nocturnal fears and Masha and Danka’s drunken lovemaking. In the morning my host splits a reindeer head with an axe, because fried brains is the best cure for the white fever.

  ‘How do you shoot yourself in the chest with a rifle?’ I suddenly ask as we’re eating. ‘You’ve got to have terribly long arms.’

  Danka puts down his spoon.Without a word he picks up a rifle and goes out of the tent. He cocks it. He grabs hold of the barrel, rests it against his chest, hooks the trigger over a larch branch and pulls . . . Click! I felt . . . I felt shivers down my spine, even though it was thirty below freezing. It wasn’t loaded.

  He shows no emotion, as if he practised doing it every day.

  They have domesticated death like a dog or a reindeer. They live in a single tent. They drink, sleep and eat together. They even go for a shit together.

  One can imagine the prosperity that will prevail if nations cease to waste their strength on the arms race, but instead devote it to creating peaceable items. For example, growth stimulants will make it possible to achieve two potato harvests in a single year, or to cultivate cabbages more than a metre in diameter or carrots a metre long.

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  Doctor Lyubov Passar in the room in her clinic where she hypnotizes her patients.

  The drunks’ shamaness

  A CONVERSATION WITH DOCTOR LYUBOV PASSAR, UDEGE DOCTOR, NARCOLOGIST AND PSYCHIATRIST FROM EASTERN SIBERIA

  What does a narcologist do?

  He treats addictions. I specialize in alcoholism. I have 1757 patients. My surgery belongs to the psychiatric hospital in the city of Khabarovsk.

  But it’s an ordinary flat on the ground floor in a hideous, shabby block on the Nekrasovka housing estate.

  It’s been in the same place for twenty-two years.

  Have they ever renovated it for you?

  But my patients feel fine at my place! They’re not ashamed to come here, as they would be at a psychiatric clinic. For sixteen years I’ve also run a mobile practice. I travel all over the Russian Far East, to villages inhabited by indigenous peoples, Siberian aborigines.

  And what’s that like?

  I can see that they’re dying out. It’s extinction. Physical annihilation. Entire races are drinking themselves to death and disappearing from the face of the earth.

  You are a native Siberian too.

  Yes, an Udege.

  That’s a very small race. In my list of the indigenous peoples of Siberia it says that there are only 1657 Udege people left. That’s the entire race! Less than the number of patients at your surgery.

  There are smaller ones. And they all accept me as one of them—the Evenk, Even, Ulch, Nanai and Udege peoples.Working with them is not one of my duties. I go to them because my heart aches when I see what is happening to my people, and because they beg me for help. Of course the Russians drink very heavily too, but the indigenous people . . . It’s shocking. It’s a holocaust. What’s more, it’s the youngest group who are dying, who should be the ones with the greatest prospects, mainly men. They die in terrible ways. They drink themselves to death, or shoot or hang themselves, or lie down on the train tracks. We’re dealing with a plague of suicides. And murders. They fall out of boats in winter, or get run over by a car, set themselves on fire, freeze to death or just die of drink.

  So every single death involves vodka.

  Yes. It’s no longer a mystery that the indigenous races who live in the North have a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. It simply can’t be helped. For thousands of years we’ve been living in lands where because of the severe conditions not much grows, so we eat meat, dairy produce and fish, and in the process of evolution we have developed a protein and fat metabolism. You, like all people of Indo-European origin, have a protein and carbohydrate type of metabolism, because for hundreds, thousands of years your ancestors lived mainly on plant foods.

  And what does that have to do with vodka?

  The fact that like every alcohol it is made of corn, potato or fruits. To process it through the organism you need a particular enzyme, of which there is plenty in
your organism, but of which there is very little in mine, because I have a different metabolism. That’s the physiology.

  So what happens when you have a drink?

  My organism doesn’t metabolize the alcohol, like any other poison – it hardly even fights it, so the vodka does what it wants, mainly in the nervous system, in the brain. The person becomes very aggressive, emotional and expressive. But recently I had a heart-warming experience. I came back from the village of Ayamo, where I first went eight years ago. I had thirty patients. Of that group seven people still aren’t drinking to this day.

  That’s a great result. An almost 25 per cent success rate.

  The most important thing is that in this group there were several mothers with lots of children. In the meantime they have managed to bring up the children, although formerly they were roaming round the village like ownerless stray dogs, grubbing food out of dustbins. Treating such simple, collective-farm people is an extremely thankless task. There’s no question of using any fancy forms of psychotherapy, not to mention group ones. Usually, I switch on the patient’s most basic instinct – self-preservation. I do it with the help of a chemical called esperal.The patient knows that if he’s taking it, it’s impossible to drink. I create a chemical aversion to alcohol. I can also do it through hypnosis. We call it kodirovanie, ‘coding’.