White Fever
Page 26
‘Because it’s their road’, she says. ‘Everything here’s theirs. They’ve got fifteen girls on this road alone, and I’m the first from the slip road.’
‘You said that with pride. Do you like this sort of work?’
‘Very much. You drink, you party, you get plenty of you-know-what, and money. But sometimes it’s dangerous.Worst is with drunken militiamen. They’re not afraid to drive after drinking, even in uniform. They’ve got an awful lot of money, especially the traffic cops. They’re terribly aggressive, even when they’re sober. They don’t like girls like me, and they hit you the most if you don’t agree to something.’
‘Were they the ones who knocked out four of your front teeth?’
‘What do you mean?’ the girl says, laughing. ‘They fell out on their own. I’m saving up for some new ones.’
‘But not gold ones.’
‘No, white. Nowadays if you’re young and you’ve got gold teeth it’s a sign you’ve been in prison. Some of the militiamen are awful perverts. I had one who wanted me to piss on him.’
‘In his car?’ I say in amazement.
‘Yes. Or in a hotel room, the sort you rent by the hour. But I can do anything. Even with gays. Sometimes they stop and want me to give them a blow job, or have a chat, spend some time together, and they’re not stingy. Sure they’d prefer to have a boy give them a blow job, but where are they going to find one? At least they don’t have to be ashamed in front of me, they don’t have to hide anything. I had a friend like that, just the one. He asked me to find him a young lad with a big dick. That’s how we met. He said that if the boy was embarrassed he could bring a friend. He’d pay them 3000 roubles each (£60) and give me the same amount too. I found a guy who was willing. He’s not gay, but round here no-one’ll turn down 3000.’
‘And how did you know he had a big dick?’
‘Because he was my ex – the one who got into drugs. And then they killed that gay friend of mine. One day he found himself a partner on the beach, they went into the woods to make love, and there were some young people there drinking, who saw them together. My friend’s partner ran away, but they caught him and they had him for fun. All of them, eight or nine. Real devils. And then they beat him until they killed him. In Russia they hate gays like poison. But in fact an awful lot of men here are . . . Well, you know. Sort of strange. Imagine a woman doing that! With a hand or a finger. And then massage that spot. Caress it. But I can do anything.’
‘Are there lots of men like that?’ I ask.
‘Four out of every ten . . .Yes, that’s it.’
‘And why are you so sad, Sasha?’
‘Everyone asks me that. I’ve got that sort of face.’
‘Are you happy?’
‘I don’t know. But I don’t feel sad.’
LAZHIK
It’s Saturday, 1 March 2008.Tomorrow I’m going home to Poland, and today I’m selling the Lazhik. In this city that’s not easy. Here everyone, including the militia, drives a used car from Japan, thousands of which are shipped across by Russian and Pakistani dealers. So I thought of sending my car back to Moscow by train, which costs 59,000 roubles plus 3000 for the insurance (a total of £1240) and takes well over a month. Grisha, who helped me buy the Lazhik, said he would sell it for about 160,000. I’d be 100,000 up.
But while I was still in Irkutsk I posted an ad on an Internet site for fans of off-road vehicles, saying I had a Lazhik to sell, and some buyers have come forward. They’re a very strange crowd. I hate this sort of stereotype, but as they’re three gloomy-looking fellows, one of whom is a Chechen, one is from Dagestan and the third claims he’s an ex-militiaman, I’m being cautious. And they’re always in a threesome, dressed in black, all very fluent in Russia’s incredibly complicated car formalities.
Surprisingly enough they’re not bothered by the fact that they won’t be able to register the car in their own names because it’s registered in Moscow to the man I bought it from. It was a notarial transaction without a change of number plates, but with the right to sell it on – but only in the same way, through a notary.
I’m sure this three-man gang is trying to pull a fast one. I hope it won’t be anything worse than a bank raid. The militia will have no problem finding Andrei, from whom I bought the car, and he’ll show them the notarial contract saying he sold the car to a foreigner, and there the trail will come to an end.We have agreed that they’ll pay me 70,000 roubles (£1400). That’s much less than the railway option, but I was extremely unhappy that the transport firm take not just the car but the entire sum in advance. These companies often vanish into thin air, taking the money with them, and sometimes the clients’ cars as well.
The four of us go to see a notary in their car. They sit me next to the driver, two of them get in the back, and then the door shuts. Automatically. I tell them to pay me the money at my hotel – on the couch at the reception desk, but my worries are unfounded.
Of the 228,000 roubles (£4560) that my Lazhik cost me in total, now I can subtract 70,000.That leaves 158,000 roubles (£3160) – that’s how much I paid for my dream of skipping across the world’s biggest continent by car.
I came to love that car with the sort of affection you might feel for a disabled child. Time and again, after ten or more hours of lonely driving across wild wastelands I felt as if I were part of this machine, without which I’d have been helpless and doomed to disaster, if not death. It was an uncanny feeling, so in my thoughts I had started to humanize it, talk to it, call it names, pay it compliments, saying it had a lovely voice, for example. Because it did.
‘Aren’t you afraid we’re cheating you?’ asked Valery, with whom I signed the agreement.
‘Just a little’, I replied sadly.
‘It’s a miracle they didn’t steal it off you on the road. What would you have done, you poor devil?’
‘I’d have hitchhiked. Or taken the train. Or I’d have gone somewhere else, or maybe stayed there, on the spot. It’s the journey that matters, not the destination.’
In the 1970s the combustion engine was ousted by the gas turbine. It competed with lightweight nuclear engines. Nowadays we travel in electric cars.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
About the translator
ANTONIA LLOYD-JONES is a translator of Polish literature whose published translations include fiction, reportage, biography, poetry and children’s books. She has translated several novels by Paweł Huelle, including The Last Supper, for which she won the 2008 Found in Translation prize. Her previous work for Portobello Books includes Like Eating A Stone by Wojciech Tochman, about the impact of the war in Bosnia on the personal lives of female survivors.
White Fever: A Journey to the Frozen Heart of Siberia Copyright © Jacek Hugo-Bader 2009 English translation copyright © Antonia Lloyd-Jones 2011 This paperback edition published 2012
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
First published in Polish in 2009 as Biała gora˛czka by Wydawnictwo
Czarne, Se˛kowa, Poland. This publication has been funded by the
Book Institute—The © POLAND Translation programme
Photograph on page 130 by Vladimir Vyatkin © AP/Press Association Images.
Reproduced by kind permission.
All other photographs by the author © Jacek Hugo-Bader 2009.
Map on pp. 2 – 3 copyright © Vera Brice and Leslie Robinson 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication is available.
eISBN : 978-1-619-02132-7
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