White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  And very often the phantoms that appear keep haunting the person for years – they’re always the same ones, personal, familiar, and awaited in terror after every drinking bout. Quite often they are long-dead people, whom the alcoholic wronged in some way, and now they’ve returned to torment him and get their own back. Or an angry God appears. Generally, in a white fever you see whatever you fear and loathe most, everything that disgusts you.

  The brain sends to the surface the blackest things in your soul and mind. And all that can happen after a few days on a bender?

  Yes. And it can last from a few hours to a whole month. But first you would have to become an alcoholic. It can happen in three years. I know fourteen-year-old boys who are addicted. A great deal depends on the quality of the alcohol.

  With the reindeer herders I drank diluted spirit.

  Well, that’s a lethal drink. So is home brew, but they usually drink the mash, which means they ingest the toxic substances that are produced in the fermentation process and that should be eliminated during distillation.

  Does every alcoholic reach a state of white fever?

  No. It depends on the level of cerebral trauma, potential illnesses and psychological damage. It’s known for example that if an alcoholic has kidney or liver disease, the white fever is far, far more likely to appear. Not to mention that if someone regularly drinks home brew, mash, or other concoctions, the fever is almost sure to affect him.

  In my Evenks’ village almost all the adults drink and the white fever affects most of them.

  Impossible. Of my 1757 patients, only seventy-eight have alcohol-induced psychoses. Almost 4.5 per cent. And that concurs with the scientific data.

  Maybe among the Evenks, the aborigines, it’s different?

  There is no such statistic.

  And when an alcoholic commits suicide, does he do it in a white fever?

  Most often yes. But he can also have a short, extremely brutal and violent attack of aggression, after which he immediately falls into a deep sleep. Afterwards he can’t remember anything at all.

  Sveta, an Evenk girl, told me that a few days after a major New Year’s Eve binge which she and her husband Slava held in their tent in the taiga, she woke up and found him lying next to her with a bullet hole in his head. She wasn’t drunk, but she can’t remember a thing.And she must have slept for ages, because her husband was completely cold.

  He could have committed suicide.

  He could, because he had tried once before, but why didn’t the shot wake her up?

  I don’t know.At a certain stage of the white fever terror can appear. Immense, panic-stricken, irrational terror. Inconceivable terror. The alcoholic doesn’t know what he’s afraid of. Maybe death, but where would it be coming from? He doesn’t know. The terror grows and changes into panic, in which the person entirely loses control of himself, and if he has a gun, he starts shooting blindly in all directions, most often at where the evil voices are coming from. The sufferer hides, runs away or attacks anyone they come across, seeing their persecutors in them.

  They told me about Yuri, who in winter, at forty degrees below, went running across the taiga for two days and nights without any clothes on. He ran 120 kilometres.

  He wasn’t running, he was fleeing. I’m sure he didn’t know from what or where to. I once had a patient who didn’t leave the outhouse for two days and nights. He said he had a snake in his belly, and absolutely had to get rid of it. He kept obsessively pummelling his stomach with his fists and twisting his fingers into his navel. Another man came to see me because he thought his mouth was full of maggots. He kept pulling them out, flicking them out onto the desk with his fingers, spitting on the floor and stamping, but there were more and more of them, pouring out in a stream . . .

  Thanks, Lyuba, I think that’s enough.

  I’m tired too. So now what? Come and have supper.

  I don’t know if I’m hungry. But shall we have a drink? I’ve got some excellent Dagestani brandy.

  And I’ve got some Armenian. Twenty years old!

  Beneath the wings of the aeroplane thousands of hectares of ripe wheat sail by. In the middle there’s a multicoloured carpet. It’s a state farm drowning in the greenery of orchards. But how did this beautiful oasis come to be here, in this semi-desert area? Where do the fields of wheat, the apple trees and oak woods get their sustenance – growing in this barren land, where nothing but sparse sticks of camel thorn used to grow?

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  A roadside stall near Amur in eastern Siberia.

  296 hours

  For an hour and a half, covered in blood, I battle the cold, the snow and the blizzard by the roadside. No-one stops.

  Only the guy with the van, who saw my car somersault along the road. I went into a skid as I started to overtake him on a steep slope. I’ve come to a stop with the wheels in deep snow about fifteen metres from the road. A few minutes later I scramble out of the Lazhik by the back door.

  ‘Are you alive?’ he shouts from afar.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Then take care!’

  ‘Hey!’ I scream in horror. ‘Wait! Help me to get out of here!’

  ‘Coming! I’ll just switch off the engine’, he says, jumps into the cab and drives off.

  So why did he stop? Just to check I’m alive? What the hell for? If I weren’t alive, I wouldn’t need his help.

  I’m stuck waist deep in snow. I fetch out a spade and sweep enough of it aside to get the door open. I get dressed, switch off the lights and staunch the blood with snow. I’ve only got a cut lip, but I’m gushing as if I’d stepped on a mine. It was probably the large block of wood I’m carrying in the cabin, because it was lying on my knees after overturning.

  I dig out the car and excavate a passage to the road. I can’t shut the door on the driver’s side, so I use a hammer to straighten the roof a bit, which has bent inwards. I work away in the dark for an hour and a half. Now and then I’m caught in the headlights of a passing car, but no-one stops. Before I left Moscow my Russian friends warned me that at night, even if I scattered diamonds along the road, no-one would stop. Out of fear of the rekiet, they said, meaning highway robbers.

  The authors of the Report from the Twenty-First Century wrote that the highway of the future will guarantee absolute safety for traffic. It will never be slippery, it will clear itself of snow and dry itself. There was nothing about the white tarmac – compacted snow, as hard and slick as ice, which in winter is the greatest nightmare for Russian drivers, especially in Siberia. It was on that surface that I turned somersaults just outside Kansk.

  The twenty-first century road was supposed to drive the vehicle itself, or even power it with energy, because we were meant to be driving nothing but electric cars made of artificial materials, not huge metal ones made by UAZ that in these conditions guzzle more than 80 litres of petrol per 100 kilometres. There were meant to be cables installed above the road carrying a high-frequency current. Antennae fixed to the chassis of the car of the future were meant to catch energy from the magnetic field produced around the cables, and then convert it into a current powering the engine.

  Of the 13,000 kilometres that I drove from Moscow to Vladivostok, 3000 didn’t have any surface at all. And I don’t believe in fear of bad people on the road. It’s a symptom of a completely different social disease that affects the Russians – indifference. Dreadful, cold indifference, which in its acute form becomes deep, irrational and spontaneous contempt.

  Each evening on my solitary journey I wrote up my travel log.

  SUNDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2007

  On the road between Chelyabinsk and Kurgan.

  On the road from Ufa – the Urals, the border of Asia, and all of a sudden a radical change of weather. The temperature drops by more than ten degrees. Odometer: morning – 31,648 kilometres, evening – 32,337. I’ve driven 689 kilometres, average speed for the day 49 kmph.

  I set the alarm for 7 a.m., but didn�
��t change it to local time, so I woke up at 9 a. m. An awful waste of time. How humiliating. In Russia they won’t let you leave the hotel until they’ve inspected the room where you slept.You stand about in the reception like an idiot while they check to see if you’ve stolen the sink.

  I drive from 10.30 until half-past midnight. On the way a quick meal and forty minutes for chat and photos at the gateway to Asia. In the middle of the night I get a flat. First time. The tyre’s a write-off. I must have driven a long way with it deflated, but the road is so appallingly crappy that I didn’t feel a thing. I’ll have to buy two new tyres, and as soon as I reach the city I have to get the clutch bearing fixed, because that hasn’t escaped my notice – it’s already wailing like the devil and I’m afraid I’ll get stuck in the middle of nowhere.

  I fetch out the jack, place it under the back axle, turn it and . . . it doesn’t reach! It’s not the right jack for this car. I can’t elevate it! What am I going to do? No-one will stop here, no-one will help. I’ll have to spend the night on the road, but it’s minus twenty. I knew sooner or later I’d have to, but I’m not ready yet. The nearest people are in Kurgan, eighty kilometres east of here – I’ll never get there on a flat tyre. Bloody jack! It reminds me of the story about the Russian sailors whose ship sank in the Arctic Ocean. The crew escaped in a lifeboat. They had a good supply of water and tinned food, but they all died of starvation because earlier on someone had nicked the tin opener out of the lifeboat. They had nothing to open the tough Soviet tins with.

  And I haven’t got a stupid jack.

  KOLA

  I gave lifts in the car to everyone I happened to meet on the way, but in exchange they had to tell me their story and let me take their photo.

  I pick up Kola Nikolayevich Pefimenko of 8 Naberezhnaya Street on the Budagovo estate – that’s how he introduced himself – on the road somewhere between Krasnoyarsk and Irkutsk. His mother had thrown him out because he’d asked her for 200 roubles (£4), for school textbooks. He’s in the fifth year at primary school. At the start of the school year the teacher gave him some books on condition he brought the money by December. He didn’t, so she took them away.

  Kola’s mother drinks. She’s forty-seven and doesn’t work. Until now they have always lived together. Two hundred roubles is seven half-litre bottles of the cheapest shop-bought hooch. The boy doesn’t know who his father is. He wants to get to the Bulushko estate, where his granny lives, but first we’re going to his school. I said I’d pay for the books, but although it’s only one o’clock, apart from the janitor there’s no-one there. Kola says we can’t leave the money with him because he drinks. The teacher doesn’t live in their village, they have no church, and thus no priest, the man who runs the village council is also a drinker, and Kola’s mother has run up a large debt at the local shop, so it would be risky to leave the money for the textbooks there.

  As we drive to the boy’s grandmother’s house, he points out some people picking Indian hemp from under the snow in a roadside ditch and gives me a lecture on how to make hashish. He says that at school all his friends smoke marijuana.

  We part ways at a bar called U Druzyey (‘Friends’), where he is to wait until his granny finishes work. The woman is a porter at a mill. Kola and I have only known each other for a few hours and already he’s calling me ‘Uncle’. His huge round eyes are staring at me from across his plate as I vanish out of the door of the bar.

  TUESDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2007

  Petr’s Motel. Somewhere in the taiga near the city of Alzamai, west of Irkutsk.

  I drove out of Kansk at 1 p. m. and kept going until 8 p.m., but there was another time change, so in fact I’ve only been on the road for six hours. I’ve come 234 kilometres. Average speed 39 kmph. The proper road and surface has ended. The whole time it’s white tarmac on top of frozen mud across the taiga. Every few kilometres there’s a car in the ditch. I have switched on four-wheel drive for good, so I’ve got a rumble in the Lazhik as if I were flying a jet.

  After yesterday’s spill I wasted the whole afternoon at a car repair shop in Kansk. The car was vibrating dreadfully whenever I got to 50 kmph. It was impossible to drive. They realigned the wheels for me, but that didn’t help, so they removed and checked them. The front left wheel rim was bent. A write-off. I spent a few hours searching the city for a new one, but it’s not a standard size. If it fits the tyre, it doesn’t fit the wheel, and vice versa. A very comical Azeri helped me, who was at the same repair place with his nineteen-year-old Zhiguli. In our search for the rim we followed a strangely devious route around town, but as it turned out, mainly to avoid bumping into any militiamen. My helper is an illegal taxi-driver – he bought a roof light saying ‘taxi’ at a motoring shop, and what’s more he hasn’t had a driving licence for the past year because they took it off him for drink-driving. He refuses to accept any money from me. He’s the only nice cabbie I’ve met so far. Russian taxi drivers are bloody rapacious and aren’t even willing to tell you the way – they just instantly tell you to hire them and drive after them.

  We couldn’t find the wheel rim, so the only thing I could do was to transfer the bent one to the back wheel. It helped. The Lazhik only starts vibrating when that wheel falls into a hole, and only at a speed of 60 kmph. So I put away in the boot all the heavy objects I’m carrying in the cab. First of all the wooden block that smashed me in the teeth. I found it on the road and took it because I can only raise up the car by placing my too small jack on top of it.

  FROST

  Nansen said you can never get used to the frost; you can only survive it, endure it.

  I’m not sure that’s true.At Sludianka on Lake Baikal I visited Nadia and Boris, friends from years back. They had just had a baby. When I drove up it was above minus twenty, so they hadn’t lit the stove – because it was so warm, and Nadia had put the baby outside in his pram to get some fresh air. In Poland, in this sort of weather the schools are closed (in Yakutia that only happens when it’s minus fifty), so that means my Siberian pals have in fact got used to the cold.

  The first time I had to spend the night in the open air outside Kurgan, I thought it was time to die. I was terribly cold, although for a month before leaving for Siberia I’d slept every night with the window open and the heating off.That’s how polar explorers get used to the cold.

  That night the frost was like morphine; at times it sent me into a pleasant state of bliss. I realized to my horror that I was on the edge of hypothermia, and that this is the state in which drivers set fire to their own cars, when they break down on the road at night in the Siberian wastes. So I forced myself out of the bedding, heated up the engine and ran around the car. Three months later, in March, when I reached Vladivostok, I walked about bare-headed, in an open jacket, with no gloves, and wondered why the snow wasn’t melting. I checked the temperature – it was about fifteen degrees below zero. It turns out that someone coming from Europe can also adapt to an extremely cold environment, and despite widely held opinion, resistance to the cold is not passed on in the genes of people who live in the North.

  But the cold can be so bad that you start to have doubts about global warming, an inhuman, beastly cold, in which the hairs in your nose go hard and stab you like pins. Metal objects freeze to your hand if you incautiously touch them without gloves on, and your eyelashes freeze, so you can’t open your eyes without the help of a finger. It’s easier when the hairs freeze to your chin because you can unstick them with your tongue. From my observations it looks as if the border of life is minus forty degrees.That’s when the girls stop walking along the streets arm in arm, the boys no longer stand outside the shop with a beer, the athletes suspend their training, and the cars stop moving.

  The shock absorbers freeze, the suspension goes stiff as in a rack wagon, and all the electrical wires become as fragile as dry twigs. Better not touch them. The biggest problem is with the brakes. The pedals harden and won’t go into the floor, because the fluid in the cables has taken on th
e consistency of toothpaste. The car stops braking, and if you try to force the pedal down, the brakes lock like pincers and won’t let go. The only help for this is to get the car well warmed up before setting off, and then drive as slowly as possible, because the faster you go, the more you cool the vehicle. And use the brakes as little as possible. In Siberia it’s possible to do that because the roads are awful, there’s very little traffic and no intersections. I drove 300 kilometres to Shimanovsk without using the brakes at all (a day’s drive before Khabarovsk). The brake cable in my Lazhik had snapped, maybe from violently pressing the pedal in severe cold.

  The drivers of cars with diesel engines have enormous problems. In winter in Siberia they sell diesel oil with a guarantee up to minus sixty degrees, but you can’t give a farthing for such promises. On the road near Tynda I helped to put out the fire destroying a wonderful Land Rover Defender of a type adapted to arctic conditions. The maker had even thought of double glazing, but it never occurred to him that a Russian would buy the car, and that in his homeland diesel fuel freezes. To heat the fuel cables and the tank, the owner had lit a small bonfire underneath the vehicle, but the tank turned out to be made of an artificial material and the car had burst into flames.

  THURSDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2008

  The Hotel ‘Turist’ in Chita.

  Another wasted day. This time at the former state taxi garage. This is the only place where they can fix a Lazhik.The gearbox has fallen apart.Yesterday I drove the last 200 kilometres from Ulan Ude in third gear, because it wouldn’t go into fourth.