Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (5 page)

We are being prepared for work in remote Siberian stations where there won’t be any phone connections. We’ll have to know how to repair our equipment when it breaks down. The more they tell us about the difficulties that lie ahead the prouder we feel of our profession. We look down on boys from other colleges; aren’t there already millions of fitters and lathe operators in this world?

For once in my life, everything seems to be going well. It’s my final spring at the college. Then, unannounced, they decide to
hold a room search and find a banned book among my things. The book is nothing special, just a dry work on atavistic memory lent to me by Valerka’s mother who is a librarian at the Academy of Sciences. Nevertheless, I am summoned to the director’s office.

“Where did you get this book?” the director bangs his fist on the desk. “Who gave it to you? I demand you tell me! Do you want to be expelled?”

My head spins. I don’t know what to do. I am honour-bound to return the book to Valerka. On an impulse I snatch it from the director’s hand and run out of the room. I give Valerka back his book. It would look bad for the college if I was expelled for reading banned literature so I escape with a reprimand.

The following Saturday I’m chatting to some girls from the bookbinder’s college when our new teaching assistant comes up. “Got any more subversive literature?” he asks me. Turning to the girls he says: “Our Ivan here really caused a scandal last week.”

“It’s none of your business!” I shout.

He laughs.

“Okay you bastard,” I swing a punch at him. I’ve already had a few beers and don’t stop to consider that the assistant is twice my size. He knocks me to the ground as easily as if I had been a flea.

“Take him away, lads,” he says to some of my classmates who have gathered to watch the fight. They pick me up and carry me off to my room. I remember that Rickets and I have hidden a bottle of vodka in his locker. I start the bottle by myself. The more I drink the worse I feel. Rickets still doesn’t return, and before I know it I’ve finished the bottle. Some boys appear at the door and begin to tease me. I fling the empty bottle at them, then climb onto the window-ledge and jump.

The ground slams into me. I can’t breathe. I lie with my face
in the cobblestones. I’ll keep still for a couple of minutes. It will give the others a fright. The smell of vomit fills my nostrils. I twist my neck to see one of my classmates throwing up in the gutter. I wonder why he’s doing that. Perhaps he can’t hold his drink.

“Don’t move, Vanya, we’ve called an ambulance,” says another boy in a shaky voice.

As they heave me onto a stretcher I catch sight of the teaching assistant. His face is pale.

“Excuse me for causing all this trouble,” I grind out the words with heavy sarcasm.

The ambulance drive to the hospital seems endless. Thirst sears my mouth all night. I scream and curse until I pass out on the x-ray table.

I come to in agony and confusion. Both my legs and my right arm are covered in plaster. I have a vague impression that my mother has been near me.

“Well, young man,” says the doctor, “you have eighteen fractures and your right kidney is damaged. It seems you broke your fall on some telegraph wires and that saved your life. Your mother was here. She stayed until we knew you were out of danger.”

I don’t want to live. Four shots of morphine a day barely help. I pleaded with a God I don’t believe in to grant me a break from the relentless pain for even five minutes. I can’t face the endless hours ahead, knowing there’ll be no respite until nightfall when the nurse brings my sleeping tablets. With a great effort of will I manage to save some of these tablets and store them until I have 14. Then I swallow them all at once. They resuscitate me and pump my stomach. After that a nurse watches as I take my medicine.

I stop eating. They rouse my appetite with wine bought with money the college has sent in for my food. When the money runs out they give me diluted surgical spirit.

My arm and left leg begin to heal and they remove the cast but the pain in my right leg intensifies until it pulsates in violent waves through my whole body. I plead with the doctors to take the plaster off. They ignore me: “It’s just the cast squeezing.”

When they finally remove it they discover that pus has eaten away the cartilage around my knee.

My doctor, Professor Jaegermann, won’t listen to my pleas to amputate my leg. He keeps draining the knee. It has swollen to the size of a football, while I can circle my upper thigh with my fingers.

I like morphine. It seems to wrap my pain in cotton wool and hold it at a distance, at least for a while. I ask for shots both before and after my dressings are changed but after a while they say I’m taking too much and refuse to give me any more. My pleas fall on deaf ears. An old French ward sister tells me that some of my shots were nothing more than saline solution. I send them all to hell and sulk, but I realise that if I’ve managed without morphine before I can do so in future.

I begin to mix with the other patients and my spirits lift. “Let’s see the champion of jumping without a parachute,” the TB sufferers say as they cluster round my bed to breathe in the smoke from my cigarettes. The men crack jokes and share cakes and vodka that their wives have sent in.

I sit up and do exercises. Professor Jaegermann tells me I’ll never be able to bend my leg again but I will eventually be able to walk without crutches.

A few months later I get an order to go out to work in Primorskii Krai. That’s beyond Vladivostock I am relieved. I want to bury myself in the taiga far away from human eyes. My friends have already left for their Siberian posts. Valerka went to Yakutia. I hear that Rickets fell under a tram in Omsk. His injuries were worse then mine and he was sent back to his parents. That is the last I hear of him.

The Moscow-Vladivostock express is packed with labour recruits
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desperate to make their pile of gold in the East. Some have spent years in prison camps; others are escaping collective farms. Old hands brag about the fortunes they’ve made in logging or mining and the adventures they had drinking up their pay.

By the time we reach Kazan we are on first name terms and sharing our food. Like every carriage on every long distance train in the country, ours has its joker, its card-trickster, its storyteller, and its drinkers. We’re even blessed with a pair of newlyweds. The husband Mitya is an unpleasant young Komsomol activist, so possessive of his wife that he forbids her to alight at stops to stretch her legs. His bride Lena doesn’t seem suited to him at all and we wonder what could have brought about their union.

It turns out that Mitya and Lena were at medical school together in Voroshilovgrad. When they graduated they were posted to Sakhalin, an island so distant it almost touches Japan. Lena has never been away from home before and she was afraid to travel such a long way by herself, so she took Mitya as her husband and protector.

A young sailor in our carriage takes a fancy to Lena. He confides in me as we stand smoking in the little space between
carriages: “Ivan, do me a favour and set up a game of chess with Mitya. I want to have a word with his wife.”

The sailor lures Lena into the smoking compartment where he drips words of honey and poison into her ear. They seem to work, for the clandestine affair continues through western Siberia and along the Amur. Lena probably doesn’t even notice Lake Baikal or the bust of Stalin carved into a mountain near Amazar. The rest of us do our best to keep the unsuspecting Mitya occupied.

Finally Lena makes up her mind. At Khabarovsk she hides in the next carriage with her sailor while Mitya alights alone. He weeps as he sorts out his belongings. I almost feel sorry for him. Still, no doubt he’ll forget Lena as he forges his Party career.

When we reach Vladivostock I say goodbye to Lena and her sailor. As I watch them walk away through the station I wonder if her suitor will live up to his promises. Then I put on my rucksack and catch a tram to the Central Meteorological Office.

They send me to work as second radio operator aboard the
Franz Mehring
. We sail to weather stations around the Sea of Okhotsk, bringing food, kerosene and alcohol. This spirit is 95 degrees proof, for normal vodka freezes in the Siberian cold. Drunk neat or mixed with a handful of snow, it’s the hardest currency in the region. A bottle gets you anything you want. At each station the meteorologists greet us like long-lost relatives and together we toast our arrival.

The station at Khaningda has been silent for a year. Not expecting to find anyone there, we’re astonished to see a woman waving to us from the shore as we approach. The woman is hysterical. We give her vodka to calm her but every time she opens her mouth she weeps. She has a young daughter with her. We take them
aboard and tell them they’ll get medical care at Okhotsk.

As we sail the woman, whose name is Marina, recovers enough to tell her story: “At the beginning of autumn three men arrived. They said they were fishermen who’d lost their net. We let them into the station but they had knives… they spared me and my daughter Anna. They had escaped from a Kolyma camp. They smashed the radio equipment, ate our food and made spirits from our sugar. They forced me to cook for them; they threatened to kill Anna if I didn’t.

“Vladivostock sent a rescue party, but the convicts saw it in the distance. They took us with them into the taiga and waited. The rescuers found our station abandoned and went away again.

“When the spring thaw came the convicts set off across the taiga to a railhead. They took most of the food stores with them, leaving us only potatoes and dried fish. Thank God neither Anna nor I fell ill.”

As Marina tells her story Anna sits in deep shock. She stares at us with frightened eyes, not moving a muscle.

At Okhotsk we learn that the convicts who held Marina and Anna prisoner at Khaningda finally gave themselves up. Defeated by the taiga, they begged to be allowed back to camp.

After reloading we sail south to Shikatan in the Lesser Kurile islands. The port is inhabited by a colony of women who process catches of fish from the Sea of Okhotsk and the Pacific Ocean. Some are labour recruits; others are former prisoners from the Kolyma camps. Conditions there are almost as bad as in the camps: the women live in bleak barracks and their clothes are always wet and filthy. Their lives consist of working, drinking and fighting.

I want to go ashore to find a bar at Shikatan, but we’re advised
to stay on board ship. They tell us sailors have been sexually assaulted by gangs of women who roam the town at night.

On its return voyage the
Franz Mehring
puts me ashore at Adimi point. I am to go inland to work as a radio operator at the village of Akza. An Udege
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called Viktor Kaza joins me, with a couple of meteorologists who are travelling even further into the taiga. We put our belongings on a horse and cart and set off on foot. I never dreamed it would be so hard to walk on crutches. Towards the end of the day I’m exhausted and throw away my heavy coat. Without a word Viktor goes back to fetch it for me.

Our first stopping-place, Samarga, is a miserable collection of moss-covered wooden huts strung out across an isthmus within a bend of the river. There’s a fishing collective, an elementary school and a hospital. The buildings are raised on stone piles to protect them from flooding. Long tables for gutting fish stand outside. The debris is eaten by gulls or washed away by storms. The air stinks of rotten fish. I used to think the cries of
seabirds
romantic, but in Samarga they remind me of the drunken beggar-women on Chapaevsk trains.

The fast-flowing Samarga river takes great skill to navigate. Victor Kaza arranges for a fellow Udege, Shurka the
Grouse-Catcher
, to guide us upstream. However Shurka is busy drinking up his pay from a previous voyage and a week passes before he’s sober enough to steer a boat again. Eventually we set out in an
ulmaga
, a long boat made from a hollowed tree-trunk. Its prow is flattened into a shovel-shape so that it glides over submerged rocks. At waterfalls we climb out and walk upriver while Shurka and his son carry the boat on their shoulders.

Shurka the Grouse-Catcher punts the boat from the prow while his wife paddles from the stern. Their son lies on the floor of the boat sucking lump sugar. I fear that at any instant the
ulmaga
will overturn or be split by a rock. Shurka deploys great skill in keeping it head-on into the current; if he misjudges an angle the boat will swing around and be swept off downstream.

Back in Samarga I watched Shurka sign his contract with us. The sweat stood out on his forehead as he struggled to steer a pencil across the paper. Yet with a boat-pole in his hand he’s a virtuoso, reading the river like a book. Unbothered by midges, he takes advantage of every break to catch fish or shoot grouse.

When we reach our destination Shurka comes to me in a temper because he had some money deducted from his pay ‘as a tax on childlessness.’