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[6] 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[7] 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.
7
The Udege are a Siberian people who live on the eastern seaboard of the Primorye region. In the 2002 census they numbered I,657. They were nomadic hunters until forcibly settled in the 1930s.