White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  Aversion therapy. I’ve heard of it – the top achievement of Soviet psychiatry. You persuade the patient that if he gets drunk his testicles will fall off.

  That’s roughly how it works. With the collective-farm workers, herders and hunters I usually implant the chemicals for six months, or a year, and then the person doesn’t drink. After that he comes back, and I implant him with esperal again. That’s the life style – a cyclical one, like in nature. After winter comes spring, and after spring comes summer. They often arrange things so they’ll only drink in the winter when they haven’t any work to do. I have some regular clients who haven’t drunk for two or three years and who are putting money aside because they know that eventually they’ll go on a bender and end up at my surgery in a very serious state. They’re saving up for good treatment. They’re quite simply planning their drinking sprees. In Russia only drug detox is free and available to anyone on request, whereas treatment to cure alcoholism has to be paid for. All the more since I support it with bio-energetic therapy.

  Do you have the power?

  Yes. I can purify the patient’s energy fields. Of course I wasn’t taught that at medical school. It was only twenty years ago that I felt this power within me. And I’m fifty.

  It fits together perfectly, because that’s the same age as me and the book called Report from the Twenty-First Century, whose trail I am following. According to the authors, in the twenty-first century all diseases are supposed to have disappeared, including cancer, mental illnesses and cardiovascular problems, just as in those days tuberculosis had been entirely eradicated.

  What liars! Neither then, much less now has tuberculosis been eradicated. The TB hospitals are bursting at the seams, the mental hospitals too. They haven’t dealt with a thing. Russia is top of the world league for the number of murders and suicides. Every year 40,000 people drink themselves to death. The average citizen drinks seventeen litres of pure spirit per annum.

  The average Pole drinks more than nine. But for every bottle of legal alcohol the Russian additionally drinks four bottles of home brew, which isn’t accounted for in the statistics. And what are these photos? I can see that’s you. What about this one?

  That’s me too, but as a child.

  Good Lord! There’s a sort of glow all around you, like a halo. Like a saint in an icon.

  That’s an aura – a visible, very strong energy field that comes out on traditional photographic film but not on digital pictures. It’s around this man too. He’s a very powerful shaman from my native village, Krasny Yar, which is in the middle of the taiga on the Pacific. It all started when I took up hypnosis. I noticed that a doctor who puts a patient into a trance also changes his own state of consciousness. Around each person I can see an aura that . . .

  Wait a moment, or the paragraph will be too long. Go on.

  In some people the aura is thin, and in others it is thick and dark, or coloured, usually like a greenish, shimmering, transparent light. I tried, and the very first time I lowered my father’s blood pressure from 160 to 130. All I did was lay on my hands, and I cleared his kidneys of sand. I suddenly started getting wonderful responses from my patients. They’d arrive in a dreadful state, we’d have a chat, and they’d say they already felt better. No injections or pills, but the treatment was taking effect. I started exploring my ancestry. I got as far as the sixth generation back. In each one there was at least one powerful shaman.

  And what’s this?

  It looks like a talisman. As soon as you came in I saw, that is I sensed you had round your neck a powerful . . . As if you’d broken off a piece of the sun.

  You could have asked.

  Oh no! It’s not right to do that.We don’t ask about things like that. May I touch it? It’s burning!

  You don’t say! It’s some pebbles in a rag. And they’re not burning at all.

  You silly Christian! Because they’re yours!You were given them, so they protect you. Where did you get them?

  I was given them by a very powerful shamaness in the mountains in Tuva, southern Siberia. It was meant to protect me from ‘big metal’.That’s what she said.And two days later I had a terrible accident on the road. Some protection! I only just escaped with my life.

  What a silly Christian! If you hadn’t had it round your neck we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Don’t you believe me? Then throw it away!

  No way.

  You see? You’re afraid to!

  You awful witch. Better tell me about your shaman ancestors.

  They guide me and save my life to this day. A few years ago my friend Dankan from Krasny Yar lost two children in a fire. But it’s a long story . . . All right, as you wish. So Dankan had suffered no physical effects, except that he started to die. He ended up in intensive care in hospital, where they kept him in a drug-induced coma to switch off his mind, but even so he was dying. His father came to see me and begged me to save him. I fetched him from the hospital and took him to our native village in the taiga. The old shaman was very unhappy that I was helping Dankan. Nevertheless, somehow I pulled him out of it. A few months later I myself started to die. They found some horrible worms in my lungs that develop and live inside large larvae filled with fluid.

  How ghastly. Where had they come from?

  Probably from animals.They’re lethal, deadly bugs. They were planning to give me an operation, but on the CAT scan I could see those disgusting larvae were quite close to my windpipe.As soon as they got into it, I’d be able to cough them out. And that’s what I did – just by thinking about it. The night before the operation I coughed up several litres of fluid which had those worms in it. Afterwards people told me it was a punishment from our shaman in Krasny Yar. They’re capable of things like that. I had betrayed the spirits of our ancestors, I had gone where I shouldn’t.

  Lyuba, for God’s sake! How can a doctor seriously tell such stories?

  Just after that our old shaman died. It was my fault. I shouldn’t have cured Dankan. He should have died, because it was his destiny. That’s why afterwards the person who saved him was meant to die, but I defended myself. So the old shaman took Dankan’s death on himself.

  Do you believe that?

  I know it for a fact. This world is ruled by balance. If something arrives somewhere, somewhere else something has to leave. In our world, in Krasny Yar, the man who was meant to leave didn’t go, so another one went instead. Our shaman.

  In Tuva I went with the shamaness to a children’s hospital. A child’s mother had asked her to save it, because the doctors were helpless. They let us in, on condition we wouldn’t give the child any shamanic medicines. It was a white, sterile ward, with nurses, doctors, IV drips, and there was this dirty old woman in a feather headdress, festooned in coloured ribbons, bird wings, animal and snake skins. She fumigated the bed with smoke, wailed to the beat of a drum and splashed milk on everything. The children were crying with fear.

  Siberian peoples cannot live without shamans.You can train to be a priest, but you have to born a shaman.

  The doctors told me they regard these rituals as a form of psychotherapy, mainly for the family. But we were going to talk about vodka and drunkenness among the aborigines. They have a predisposition, we already know that, but that doesn’t mean they have to drink a lot.

  But they do, because they live with chronic, long-term stress. This is the case not just in Russia but also in Canada and the United States among the Eskimos and the Indians. The races that came and settled among the aborigines outnumber them and dominate them in every other respect too. We are in our own country, but it’s as if we’re not. It’s a terrible situation. We’d like to break free, protest, rebel, raise our fists, but we don’t know what exactly to fight for.

  So in the meantime they say, come on, let’s down a few.

  That’s it! And at once it’s all fine. So the issue of entire races drinking themselves to death is not a medical, genetic or biological problem, but a social one. It’s a social disease. Wh
at’s to blame for all the drinking is the situation the aborigines have ended up in, through no fault of their own. The children who come out of the taiga, because they’re forced to go to school, learn to sit on chairs, sleep in beds, walk up stairs, eat with a spoon and a fork from a plate, and along the way they also learn to read and write, what’s more in a foreign language. It’s dreadful torment. They can’t manage, and from the very start they’re inferior. But it’s you who came to our land, where we lived in peace for thousands of years quite unaware of vodka. So come on, let’s have a drink or two. At once you feel better, a man becomes proud, strong, wonderful, invincible.

  Except that if anyone doesn’t share that view you grab your knives and rifles, which they’ve all got, because they live in the taiga. It’s strange that you only murder each other. You don’t shoot at the Russkies.

  Because we drink together – not with the Russkies. It’s odd that our women become very aggressive too, but I admit I have no idea why that happens. Among the Russians only the guys beat each other up after drinking. Nor do I know why it is that the women don’t die in the process in such large numbers as the men, although from what I have observed they drink even more than the men do. Our women also succumb to alcoholism faster and more easily than the men, but they don’t kill and they rarely opt for suicide.

  But for the men . . .

  It’s a very easy, simple and rapid decision.

  In the Evenk village where I lived for some time, a nine-year-old boy committed suicide. He was grazing reindeer and one of them died.

  It’s a completely unresearched phenomenon, a big problem for science. We know that the further north you go, the more suicides there are among indigenous peoples, but we don’t know why that is so. Maybe because there’s not much light there, but the Russians have just as little. One thing’s for sure – almost every single suicide has some connection with alcohol.

  From the village I told you about every year they send a young Evenk to study in the city. Only one person has ever managed to complete the course. They can’t cope, so they go home or start to drink, and while I was there a twenty-year-old called Vanya hanged himself at his student hostel in Saint Petersburg. Apparently he was unhappily in love.

  We simply cannot live in cities – in an enclosed space, without our parents, without the taiga, without traditional food. I know it, because I come from Krasny Yar. For thirty years I’ve been living in Khabarovsk, a city of half a million people, but Moscow is quite unbearable for me. From the bio-energetic point of view, each person needs a certain amount of space in order to live. It shouldn’t be radically reduced, or increased. For the man of the taiga the space he needs is vast.

  That doesn’t make sense to me, because Russian children from the same village somehow manage to cope in the cities.

  That’s another mystery. I did some research on alcoholic aborigines in the Far North. My survey included an item called ‘readiness to commit suicide’. Ninety per cent of those surveyed had considered this option after drinking, and while sober too. Twenty per cent of the alcoholics surveyed had made suicide attempts, of whom almost half had done so while completely sober. These attempts are a cry of despair, a call for help.

  And what percentage of your Russian patients have suicidal thoughts?

  I haven’t done a precise count, but about 20 per cent. In Russia there is a strong, very deeply rooted culture of drinking. This misfortune began in the days of Peter the Great, who encouraged people to open inns and to drink as much as possible. He collected masses of taxes from it.

  Yesterday in Russia was Defender of the Fatherland Day, i.e. Soldier’s Day, which is celebrated all over the country as Men’s Day. On this day every citizen of the male sex is obliged to get drunk. Oddly enough, Women’s Day is celebrated in exactly the same way – all the men get sloshed . . . Are you laughing at me?

  No, at what you described. But you’re right. Do you know, I’ve never noticed the injustice in the way those holidays are celebrated before.

  If the women can’t see it, that means they’ve got used to it. They’ve come to terms with it.

  It’s not hard to get used to, because in Russia you won’t find a single family where this problem doesn’t exist. My husband doesn’t drink, we’ve brought up two daughters successfully, but I’ve been through a lot in life. I even chose to specialize in narcology because of it. My father drank. He was the head of a sports school, an educated, successful man whom everybody liked and respected. But in this country any sports contest involves a party. The training camps involve parties, the victories involve parties, the defeats involve parties, buffets, dinners . . .

  And so he fell victim.

  But in this country alcohol doesn’t get in the way of a professional career. There is immense tolerance for drinkers. Alcoholism doesn’t discredit a man, but in personal life someone like that is a curse. My childhood was hell. Whenever my father got drunk he was terribly aggressive. Luckily he died six years ago.

  Successful people are rarely drunks. It’s people with problems who drink.

  But he was an Udege.That wretched genetic, racial predisposition! I can see that my younger brother has exactly the same problem. He’s a forensic doctor, a leading expert. He has a job, a lovely family, money, everything he needs, but he drinks. It’s hard to understand it. I’m starting to believe in a genetic predisposition to drinking. Not even starting – I do believe in it deeply.

  Regardless of the genetic, racial predisposition.

  Yes.The one has come on top of the other.Additionally there’s also the cultural, Russian ritual of drinking at any opportunity, so a person is born and hasn’t got a chance. My brother and I swore that we’d sooner cut each other’s throats than make our children’s lives like that. Then the years go by, they put vodka in front of the lad and he drinks like his father. So it all starts over again. It makes me want to cry when I look at his children.Will they start drinking too? How can we break the endless cycle of drinking from generation to generation?

  To my mind there is hope. When I arrived here a couple of days ago, feeling terribly depressed after seeing my Evenks’ drunken village, and asked you for something to give me hope that your people are not dying out, you sent me to see Dankan – your Nanai friend from Krasny Yar, whom you tore from the grip of death when his children died in a fire.

  Right. The man’s working, giving work to others, earning good money, so he’s happy. Why should he drink?

  He no longer lives in Krasny Yar. In the village he has moved to he employs all the other inhabitants at his companies. Not just Nanais, but Russians too.

  Of course people drink there too, but they don’t drink themselves to death. There’s no holocaust going on there, because he’s a proper, wonderful leader who has built up his empire purely to make sure his people have an occupation. He has created the conditions for them to live like human beings.

  He told me that if a man hasn’t got work or money, but gets hold of it somehow, steals, begs or borrows a hundred roubles, then naturally he buys himself a bottle of vodka. But if after a month of hard, honest work he gets twenty or thirty thousand (£400 – £600) – and in Siberia that’s a huge amount – he isn’t going to drink it all away. He’ll have a beer, and then he’ll build a life for himself.

  But there are races who don’t manage to achieve that. They haven’t got a leader like that, and they’ve passed the numerical threshold, beyond which there’s simply no biological chance of regenerating the human fabric.

  How many is that?

  About 250 people.

  Then from my list of Russia’s small, indigenous peoples, of which there are forty-five, it appears that those with less than 250 representatives are the Alutors, twelve of whom are left, the Kereks, only eight, and the Enets people, of whom there are 237. The Taz are on the border of extinction, because there are only 276 of them. In all, including the large nations such as the Yakuts, Buryats, Khakass and Tuvans, there are two million aborigines
living in Siberia, and everywhere except in the Tuvan Republic they are an ethnic minority.

  A few years ago some foreign doctors came to see me. I travelled around all those places with them. Everywhere they told people about Alcoholics Anonymous associations. These days we know that method doesn’t work in Russia, because if in Khabarovsk, a city of half a million, it took great difficulty to found a single group, which has thirty members, that means this approach doesn’t suit our mentality. It’s a method for people with an at least slightly open mind, people inclined towards self-analysis.

  Could you say that once again, but in human terms.

  The sort of people who are aware that they are sick, that they are alcoholics with no control over their drinking and who need help. So there has to be a certain number of people who are more or less intellectually able. You can’t make reindeer herders, tractor drivers, lumberjacks and gold prospectors go to meetings and group therapies . . . Neither Russkies nor aborigines.You can cure an alcoholic if he wants to be cured, if he’s going to work on himself, but treating them in a group, in a community doesn’t work. They’d rather drink themselves to death than tell others about their hallucinations, worms, bugs, devils, maggots and goblins . . .

  Finally! You’re talking about the white fever.

  The technical term is delirium tremens, one of the most common alcohol-induced psychoses. It appears two or three days after the end of a drinking spree. It starts with insomnia and anxiety, and then come hallucinations. In some people they’re visual, in others auditory. They see strange, very active figures, creatures and animals.They hear voices that insult them, threaten them, call them names, accuse them or tell them to do something, for instance to commit suicide or take an axe and chop off their own hand.

  My Evenks told me about voices that told them to make holes in their heads so the terrible pain that comes with the hallucinations could fly out of them. So they took a gun and shot themselves in the head. It seems to me those voices are their own sense of guilt, because they always tell them how bad they are, how hopeless, stupid, ugly and worthless. And then the person who, let us remember, is entirely sober by now, says to himself:‘If I’m such scum I’ll hang myself.’