In Siberia (18 page)

After four hours the ship churned to a stop in mid-river, and through the porthole I saw the eastern bank rearing 80 feet in an eroded rampart, crested by wooden barracks. It was the Entsy village of Potalovo; it looked like a fort. We stumbled up on deck where the crew was winching a metal motor-boat into the water. Whenever they tried to float it, the current smashed it against the ship's sides. The captain clasped me against him, kissed my cheeks. He didn't like where I was going, he said. No, he'd never been there, nobody had ever been there, but he'd heard of it. He refused to accept any money from me–he whose pension would be bread and water. But would I write to him, he bawled down as I descended the ladder, tell him I'd got safely away? As the motor-boat clanged against the tanker's hull, he spelt out his address in bellowing letters above. A minute later, with two sailors, I was roaring towards the shore.

Only a scatter of beached fishing-boats showed that the place was still inhabited. I climbed the steep track up the grass-covered slope, the sailors behind me. There was no sound. The flagstaff above us looked as if nothing had ever waved there. On the summit we found an administrative building which appeared to have been boarded up for years. Dogs were scavenging in its foundations. But beyond, perched on a roof, a bearded gremlin in a woollen hat was hammering nails into shingles. The sailors
turned back to the ship with relief, as he shouted at me: ‘You want help?' He clambered down. He was the village doctor.

I would have imagined the doctor here a lonely time-server, sunk in drink and apathy, but Nikolai was a fifty-year-old optimist. The village had declined into barbarism, he said, and if I lodged with a family I could be knifed in a fracas, as half his patients had been. He'd give me a bed in his cottage hospital–there was nowhere else. He gestured behind him. A sea of decrepit shacks had opened up beyond the ridge of the river-bank. This was Potalovo, and it was dying. Duckboards sagged and wandered between its huts, and its tracks were all of compacted coal-dust, laid down against the shifting autumn mud. The air reeked of it. Rubbish lay everywhere, and long-broken tractors rusted in their own debris.

We started to walk. ‘It's got desperate here. This used to be a fur-trading village, and was a reindeer collective in Khrushchev's day. But you see it now!' A coal-black pond glistened with discarded vodka bottles. ‘The reindeer pastures have been ruined by acid rain. It comes down from the nickel-processing factories at Norilsk. And gas pipelines from the Taimyr peninsula too–the wild reindeer are afraid to cross them. So what can these people do? They just fish a bit, and sell their catch to passing steamers. The passengers buy because it's cheaper than buying in the towns. People here are close to starving.'

A few of them, wrapped in overcoats and waterproofs, sat by their doorways in the last of the year's sun. They had slow, bitter faces. Nothing grew here. Their yards held only coal-heaps and butts of river-water. As we passed, their chained dogs hurled themselves at us from ramshackle kennels–white huskies whose snarls choked in mid-leap. A glimpse through windows showed nothing among the sticks of furniture but items of winter survival–blankets, felt boots, clay stoves. A few sledges rotted in the grass. Of some five hundred villagers, the doctor said, those who remained were mostly Entsy–a Samoyed people–with a few Russians like himself.

‘But they've lost their culture. There are no household gods left, and nothing of shamanism. A doctor would know if there were!'
They stared after us through torpid eyes. Only Nikolai seemed to possess the energy to change anything. His wire-wool hair bounced at every step. ‘You'd think this place quiet, but it's the most troublesome in the world. When these people drink, they fight. They start with their fists, then stick knives into one another. It's vodka, of course. So there are ulcers and liver diseases. And if it gets too much I send them downriver for operations in Dudinka.'

His hospital was a low, wooden ark. Reindeer moss caulked the gaps between its logs, and it buckled at either end from permafrost. I looked at it with alarm. ‘How long do you think it'll last?'

‘Twenty years!' He laughed. His face was lined by a life-saving optimism. ‘Well, I say that. But you know the Uzbek tale of the teacher who promised the pasha that he could make a donkey speak within twenty years? He reckoned either he or the pasha or the donkey would be dead by then!'

Inside the building was a simple range of three-bed wards, a kitchen and a consulting-room. It had no running water, and its lavatory was a hole in the ground. Between the double windows the sealing moss had fallen in faded tresses. It was almost without equipment. But the rooms were all washed white and eggshell blue, and three part-time nurses tended the five children in its narrow, iron beds, while a woman recovering from premature childbirth lay silent in another.

Nikolai pointed me to my ward, then left. I wondered how long I'd be here. The only way out was the river, where days or weeks might go by before a steamer passed.

I edged open my ward door to see a little bow-legged Entsy perched on the far bed. He looked incalculably old. Around his mouth and nose the flesh had hardened into ridges and knolls, and his chin dribbled a wispy beard. Mongoloid blood had pushed his cheekbones wide, and his hair remained pitch-black. ‘Hullo….'

His voice was so small, and his Russian so forgotten, that he was hard to understand. ‘My home burnt down, I don't know why. So I'm here. And now my eyes are going.' He rubbed his
bloodshot right socket and pulled down its eyelid: he thought I was a doctor. ‘I can't look at the sun now.'

‘You have glasses?'

‘I used to. They were stolen from my pocket when I was asleep, drunk.' His tone was matter-of-fact. ‘I've not seen things close since then.' He reached out and tried mine. ‘
Yay-aach
, yes, better, better.' But he took them off again and pointed inwards at his temples. ‘The pain comes here…and here…like knives. The doctor can't do anything. I went to the hospital in Dudinka, where people die. It's better here in this one.'

‘Can you stay here?'

‘I've nowhere. My house burnt too easily. Another one burnt down a while ago, and the people died. And another on the other side of the village. A man and wife, they were drunk. And they died. All my clothes were finished, except what I had on. I had time to run in once, before it was too late. Only once.'

What had he carried out, I wondered, in those few seconds? Had he salvaged a few hoarded roubles, a precious garment, a sentimental photograph? ‘What did you save?'

I strained to catch his voice. It came tiny, self-satisfied: ‘My
passport
.'

He pulled it from his jacket as if to be sure it remained. His name, I saw, was Stepan, and his age, to my astonishment, was only sixty-seven. It was a sensible choice to retrieve, I knew; but I felt his degradation. His hand was trembling, until I held it in mine. And I realised I was angry: angry that even into this remote life Moscow had intruded its ossifying order, grounding and claiming him. Without his passport he could not move, did not live. He had risked fire for it.

I sensed something odd about the hand in mine, and looked down to find its forefinger missing. ‘What happened there?'

‘Somebody crushed it. A tractor maybe.' He was smiling. ‘I was lying in the road, I was drunk.'

I got up and emptied my rucksack over my bed in a jumble of clothes and bottles. Two of the worthless-looking bottles contained dollars, and the hospital, I sensed, was porous: people loitered here. But I could think of no other way to safeguard my
things than a show of despising them. And Stepan had less than I did. He kept his money and socks under his mattress like a schoolboy. The handful of chattels donated to him–some underclothes and two tin mugs–hung on the wall in a plastic bag. That night I realised that he used one mug for tea and the other for spitting and snorting. He slept in a pair of faded crimson pants.

But who would rebuild his home, he did not know. Only one of his children had survived, and she was far away in Dudinka. ‘My wife is over there.' He waved to the north, at the cemetery. ‘So I've nothing now.' He laughed and wheezed.

Occasionally by day he went on walks around the hospital fence, letting out hoarse, unanswered cries as something occurred to him. More often he wandered between our dormitory and the consulting-room, his face creased by a frown of unbearable concentration, as though it took all his attention to stay alive. An elastic band which he bound around his head prevented it, he said, from flying apart.

Sometimes he sat in the vestibule, as if waiting for somebody who did not come.

 

My days in Potalovo multiplied timelessly. Often it seemed deserted. Roaming its streets, I would hear nothing but the chain-rattling dogs or the cries of seagulls flying in, wheeling away. Its utilities were all in ruins. The rail by which goods had been winched up from the river lay derelict, and two months ago the power plant had gone up in flames. A network of poles, tilted askew by permafrost, still carried intermittent electricity from a pocket generator.

More than half the population was unemployed, and the rest–Entsy and Russians together–looked broken by the rigours of their fishing: sombre, hungry, weather-scarred. On a good day they landed big red sturgeon and
omul
, and there would be salted
muksun
for sale, or gang fish or char or northern pike. On other days, or in times of storm, the fishermen hunched in one another's cottages, brooding and dozing. But word had gone round that a Westerner had come, and many people had never seen one. One
man snarled at me to get off the duckboards passing his hovel, another ran out and poured berries into my hands. Knots of children yelled out English phrases.

From a gang of louts and mavericks I was dogged by a poacher. In winter, hunters would cross the frozen river and shoot reindeer from the depleted collective on the far bank, he said. ‘We get them when they're asleep. You can live off the frozen meat of one for months.' He tried to sell me their antlers, which he kept in a secret shed.

Others of his band were pathetic or desperate. There was an angry-looking Entsy youth (his Russian cronies called him ‘Banana-skin'), who pleaded with me to take him to England; an ex-paratrooper who had fallen from his bed while dreaming that his parachute hadn't opened, and had lacerated his face in deep, parallel wounds; a fanatic who had fled here from the Altai after serving time for killing his wife's lover.

The hospital gave no sanctuary. Once the doctor was gone, these outcasts would sidle through the doors and roam the passage, hunting for food, vodka, anything, ignoring the sharp-voiced nurses. Wheedling, clinging, they promised me furs or reindeer-skins in exchange for an advance of money. The prototype Ivan of my memory seemed to have multiplied and degenerated in them. He was everywhere now, and in despair. I pushed these men ruthlessly from the wards, crashed my door in their faces, and always afterwards, glimpsing from a window the retreat of their stooped shoulders and resigned backs, I was touched by remorse. It was all right for me, after all. One day a steamer would take me away.

I ate invalid's meals with Stepan in the hospital: thin soup and macaroni or a bowl of rice. On this diet he flourished, while I grew weak. At night the ledge running along the hospital wall became a gangway for huskies, which would cross the dim rectangle of our window in savage shadows. I lay awake to the whingeing of a child in aching pain, while Stepan retched and spat. Six or eight times a night he would get up to urinate, flicking electric switches uselessly. ‘No light…
Ye-ach!
…no light….' His breathing seemed to drop an octave with every exhalation
after he returned to bed, so that once or twice I feared he had died.

At evening the doctor escaped the small, chaotic house where his wife and teenage son wrangled, and lingered in his clinic to talk with me. Above us the walls were banked by pigeon-holes stuffed with patients' records, and a bare bulb flared and winked as the village generator fluctuated. In Nikolai I was reminded of those provincial doctors who inhabit the plays of Chekhov; only here there was no bourgeoisie, no cherry orchard, no voiceable hope. He was alone. These were quiet days, he said, but in a week the monthly pensions would arrive; then people would start to drink, and the clinic would fill up.

‘They're even losing their language here. I think this is the last generation that will speak it. They're taught in Russian, their parents know Russian. The children go to the
Internat
schools in Dudinka aged fourteen, or if their parents are out with the reindeer–and there are some still over the river–they leave here aged seven.'

I said: ‘I thought the reindeer were almost finished.'

‘They are. Even I can remember when there were 11,000 in herds on either side of the river. Now they're reduced to 1,000, and interbreeding has made them smaller. In winter poachers cross the river on sledges to shoot them, and wild reindeer lure others away. That whole way of life is vanishing.'

‘And nothing replaces it?'

‘Vodka.' He laughed. ‘And a few years ago an Arctic fox farm was set up here–3,000 there must have been–bred for their pelts. But when the river transport dried up it became impossible to feed them, and now they're nearly gone. The river's the only way in and out of here. Without it, there's no food but fish. And no medicine.' This jolted his memory, and he pulled some packets from a drawer. ‘Now look…. What is your name? Colin! That's Kolya, like mine. Nikolai! Now, Nikolai, sometimes I get English medicines and can't understand the instructions. Can you translate this? Here….'

He handed me a packet of something called Perinorm manufactured in Bombay, and I unfolded a leaflet of smudged directions:
‘
Metoclopramide has got central antidopaminergic effect in the hypothalamus and thereby raises threshold for vomiting at chemoreceptor trigger zone. Its effects on the G.I. tract are thought to result from blocking of dopaminergic receptors, potentiation of cholinergic effect
….'