An old Udege known as Grandad Chilli drops in on me unannounced. I bustle about trying to make him comfortable, brushing cigarette butts and paper off a stool. He sits smoking roll-ups in silence. After half an hour he rises and walks out without a word. I’m worried, thinking that I might have done something to offend him. I don’t want to cross Grandad Chilli for I know he once killed a Russian teacher out of jealousy. When the police came for him he disappeared into the taiga for a long time. No one in the village denounced him.
I tell Dr Yablonsky about the old man’s behaviour. “Don’t worry,” he reassures me, “the Udege only speak when they want to sell you something or buy vodka. That was simply what they call ‘paying a visit.’ He must like you. If you ask him he’ll show you his piece of quartz that has a seam of gold in it as thick as a finger. Last year he showed it to some geologists who were passing through here. He said he knew a place where there were many more like it. They hired him as a guide in return for as many cans of condensed milk as could drink. He led them by the nose for a few weeks until finally he confessed he had forgotten the place. They went back to the coast and now he’s waiting for more prospectors this summer. The Udege know what’ll happen if geologists find gold in the region.”
After that I feel more comfortable with the taciturn Udege. We Russians are supposed to be civilized, and yet we waste so much effort on words which are at best empty and at worst cruel and deceptive.
In summer the clubhouse is finally repaired, and to mark the occasion Samarga sends up the film The Age of Love with Lolita Torres. For once the Udege show excitement, even bringing babes-in-arms and their beloved dogs to watch. The projectionist is drunk and mixes up the reels, but no one notices.
I’m hoping to save some money during my posting in the East but it proves impossible. As soon as I receive my pay I go over to Duzga to stock up on vodka. I decide to move to Yuge, the most remote station in the Primorye region. There is nowhere to spend money in Yuge so my wages will be saved for me in Samarga.
I set off with a convoy of sledges bringing the annual delivery of post and supplies. As there is a severe frost we all have a good drink before we leave and top up along the way. I can’t walk over the rugged terrain so I’m strapped onto a sledge. As it mounts an incline my horse stumbles and falls, dragging my sledge after it. The horse breaks its leg and has to be shot. The sledge rolls on top of me, leaving me grazed but otherwise unhurt, or so I think. They give me vodka and tie me to another sledge. By the time we reach that night’s resting place I’ve sobered up enough to realise that I have broken my leg. In the morning they send me down to hospital in Samarga.
The hospital has neither electricity nor plaster of Paris. It’s staffed by a doctor, a nurse and a medical assistant called Ivan Ivanich, who drinks continually out of homesickness. In the morning Ivan Ivanich’s hands shake so badly I have to light his cigarettes for him. The doctor refuses to let him help reset my leg. While the nurse shoves a phial of ether under my nose the doctor presses on my leg with all her strength. I pass out.
When I come round I see the two women lying unconscious on the floor. The inexperienced nurse must have inhaled the ether herself and somehow given the doctor a whiff of it too. My leg has to be put in splints again. It grows back curved like a sabre from hip to ankle.
My deformity makes me horribly self-conscious. I had been thinking it was time I got married but now my hopes are dashed. I can’t imagine any normal woman wanting to marry a man with a leg like mine and I don’t want to end up with a wife like Victor’s Lyuba.
HQ offers to send me to the coast but after all I’ve suffered I want to be as far from civilisation as possible. I insist on going to Yuge, so they send me up again on a sledge and I begin work there.
In Yuge I learn that insects truly are the scourge of the taiga. Our observation station is full of bugs and the grass outside crawls with encephalitis ticks. Each time I cross the threshold of my hut I have to strip off and examine myself from head to foot. Down by the river where there’s little wind the midges surround me in clouds, biting straight through gauze into my skin. They make mosquitoes seem as harmless as butterflies. The only way to live in the taiga is to be like Shurka the Grouse-Catcher and take no notice of midge bites.
Winter comes as a relief, but by now my tobacco has run out. I nearly go insane. Thoughts of cigarettes fill my days and my dreams at night. I pull out all the butts that have fallen between floorboards. I remember a place near the river where I tossed a half-smoked cigarette three weeks ago. When daylight comes I go out and fill a bucket with snow from that spot. I melt the snow on the stove and strike lucky, fishing out the soggy butt, drying and smoking it. I’ve never enjoyed a smoke so much in my life, but within ten minutes I’m prising up floor-boards again
I grow bored with life in the deep taiga. Work takes up no more than two or three hours a day and there is nothing to do for the rest of the time. There are no books. I even miss the society of Akza.
I start to think more and more about my pen friend Olga Vorobyova in Chapaevsk. We’ve been corresponding since my college days. Olga is a pretty, down-to-earth girl. Most importantly, when I write to her about my leg she doesn’t seem to be bothered. Her letters are full of questions about my plans for the future. I begin to think about returning to a normal life. Perhaps I’ll ask Olga to marry me. With the money I’ve saved here I’ll be able to rent a room so we won’t have to live with our parents.
My three-year posting comes to an end, much to my relief. I leave for Vladivostock, saying say goodbye to my acquaintances in Akza — those that are left. Yablonsky has been rehabilitated and returned to Leningrad. I never manage to apologise to Kryuchkov. With the first signs of spring he died, as TB sufferers often do.
I reach Samarga and collect 120,000 roubles in pay. This is a fabulous sum. Back home it would take a factory worker several years to earn that amount. I stay in Samarga for two weeks waiting for the sea-route to open. The shop has run out of vodka but there’s a good supply of champagne. When he goes home for dinner the shopkeeper locks the medical assistant Ivan Ivanich and me in the shop and we continue to work through the bottles. In the evening we count the empties and I pay. There’s no other way to pass the time. The local women don’t appeal to me: after years of fish-gutting their buttocks sag so low they have to lift them up with their hands when they want to sit down.
In the morning before the shop opens I chat to the shopkeeper’s paralysed son. He listens open-mouthed to my tales of Riga and Moscow.
“But why do they build the houses so tall?” he keeps repeating. “Why do people want to live on top of each other?”
My hair hasn’t been cut for three years and local kids follow me around, jeering as though I’m some sort of hermaphrodite. My first stop in Vladivostock is a barber’s. After I’ve cleaned up I go to a restaurant and soon I’m sending bottles to every table. I’m overjoyed to be back in civilisation again and spend a riotous month celebrating the event. At least I have the foresight to buy my ticket home before I blow all my wages. I arrive back in Chapaevsk with a blinding hangover and 68 roubles in my pocket.