White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  Just like the lorry drivers, I liked stopping near their posts for the night, because it was safe there. These checkpoints are very often like miniature roadside fortresses with wire entanglements, road spikes, concrete barriers, sandbags and machine guns poking out of little firing slits. Sometimes they’re in the middle of a roundabout, which the cars are obliged to drive across in single file at a speed of five kilometres an hour, keeping a distance of twenty metres apart. Of course the militiamen are in bullet-proof vests and have machine guns.

  In Kuzbas, a large industrial zone known for atrocious banditry, there are armoured cars at most of the traffic police checkpoints.

  I only had to pay up once, though I had made a vow to myself that I would never give a bribe to a policeman or a militiaman. I’d rather pay the fines.

  It was on the busy M7 road, on the great, flat steppes between Kazan and Ufa. If there is an uphill stretch, it’s not steep, but it might go on for two or three kilometres, and there’s always a solid line the entire length of it, so you’re not allowed to overtake. On this sort of stretch there were two lorries, one pulling the other on a tow rope. Their wheels were hardly turning. They were definitely going more slowly than an old man on crutches.

  Along with all the other cars I overtook this convoy, and then a few hundred metres further on I saw a militiaman with binoculars.

  His colleague was stopping everyone who had done the same as I had. There were several dozen cars on the hard shoulder. Everyone was handing over a bribe of 1000 roubles each without protest, because in Russia for overtaking on a solid line you can lose your licence for six months.

  I paid up and drove off. But a few hundred metres later I stopped and looked back. The convoy with the broken-down lorry had just lumbered up to the highest point. There it quickly turned around, drove back down, turned around and, occasionally overtaken by other cars, started its laborious climb up the hill again.

  HORSE

  Battledress, a jacket underneath, and big boots that hardly fit in the stirrups. Behind him, on either side there are bicycle panniers, on his back he has a sleeping bag and a rucksack, and at the front of the saddle there’s a sleeping mat. His face is almost black, dirty and suntanned, dry and haggard. He has a sparse but long beard and moustache. He looks like a Mongol warrior, except the uniform and direction aren’t right for that. He’s going east.

  He has already begun to stink with poverty, dirt and hunger. The horse doesn’t look any better. Whenever they stop, it lunges for the dry stalks sticking out of the snow as if they were lush grass. And the rider even more voraciously consumes the dry stalks of sausage from my ‘iron rations’. They’ve been on the road for two months. They’ve travelled almost 3000 kilometres, they’re getting close to Novosibirsk and they’re barely able to stay upright.

  The rider is called Chin Li. He’s Chinese, a librarian who has lived in Moscow for twenty-seven years, but in September he left his job, used all his savings to buy the horse in Bashkiria, near Ufa, and set off for China. He paid 1000 dollars, as much as I spent on spare parts for the car. Chin is forty-five, and he has a wife and nine-year-old son.

  ‘And you’ve left them on their own for all this time?’

  ‘Yes’, he says in a resolute tone. ‘It’s tough, but between the fortieth and fiftieth years of life is the last chance to achieve something unusual. I want my son to be proud of me, to follow my example. And not just beer, vodka and cigarettes like the Russian boys.’

  ‘Why did you set off in winter?’

  ‘What’s the difference? I’ll be on the road for almost a year, so I’ll catch the winter one way or another. I want to reach Beijing for the opening of the Olympics, then go on to my home town of Wuhan on the Yangtze.’

  Chin is travelling without money. He sleeps under the open sky, eats when the locals invite him in for the night and offer him something. The horse digs out stalks from under the snow, and sometimes gets a slice of bread from his master or a handful of barley from the collective-farm workers. At the start they did as much as sixty kilometres a day, but lately only twenty at most.

  SPANNER

  It was stuck into her head.

  I had about 100 kilometres to go to reach Khabarovsk. Alexander’s car was lying in a ditch, and his wife was inside it with the spanner. A spanner for changing the wheel. A heavy, solid object, about forty centimetres of iron.

  Alexander wanted me to take him to Smidovich, the nearest town, where we’d be sure to find a militia post. We couldn’t phone because we were out of range.

  Alexander’s car was a ‘Japonka’ – i.e. a Japanese one, with the steering wheel on the right. A white Honda Accord, on which the man had left lots of bloody hand prints.

  The woman was not wearing her seatbelt, but she hadn’t slumped torpidly off the seat. She was stuck, as if nailed, to the headrest. Her husband covered her with a jacket, locked the car and we drove off.

  He found a roll of toilet paper underfoot, tore off a piece and spent the whole journey wiping his hands.

  He’s from Irkutsk. He and his wife had gone to Vladivostok, because any car is roughly 1000 dollars cheaper there than in their city. On the way back they reached Khabarovsk safely, but once they left it, they realized there was another Honda driving after them. It had no licence plates. They started trying to get away, but the other car overtook them and stopped across the road. Alexander drove around it and raced on like mad.

  The attackers overtook them once again, turned around, and drove straight at them with tyres squealing. As they passed each other, Alexander heard a crash. Like in a slow-motion film he saw a huge spanner come flying through the windscreen of his Honda with the force of an anti-tank missile. He braked, went into a skid and flew into the ditch.

  ‘It was a bit of road with quite good tarmac’, he says. ‘I was going at about 140. They must have been too. I tried to pull that thing out of Larissa, but it was impossible. The other end had come out at the back of her head and stuck into the headrest. She was called Larissa.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a gun?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I have’, he said, taking a pistol from under his belt, and holding it the entire way. ‘It’s legal, because I work in security.’

  ‘Why didn’t you shoot?’

  ‘Because I couldn’t see them well. And they never shoot.’

  ‘Then why the hell do you all drive with guns?’

  ‘How should I know?’

  Criminals will always attack peregonshchiki who have bought cars in Vladivostok and are driving on transit licence plates along my route, but going west, homewards. It’s worst of all to the south of Khabarovsk. The bandits overtake anyone who doesn’t stop on demand and smash his windscreen with a rock. The point is for everyone to know it’s worth paying up, because a windscreen costs 300 or 400 dollars, but they only take 100 from a passenger car. Or 150, if the driver is going a long way, to Irkutsk for example, which means he has more money on him. Sometimes they check his documents.

  No-one ever has to pay twice. The criminals pass on information to each other by phone to say who has paid protection money, and sometimes they even issue a sort of receipt.

  The professionals who buy cars for resale drive home in big groups, and won’t let them get split up for anything in the world, even if they have to run the red lights in Khabarovsk. The bandits are a little afraid of them because they know that at least one of them is armed, so some groups manage to get through without paying.

  STATION

  I drove 13,000 kilometres across Russia and I used 2119 litres of petrol, because my Lazhik guzzled (as the Russians say too) an average 16 litres of fuel per 100 kilometres. Whenever I switched to four-wheel drive, it burned two litres more, and in the mountains it doubled again. It was shamelessly greedy, but luckily in Russia petrol is half the price it is in Poland. On my entire route it was most expensive in Tyumen province. That’s the Russian Kuwait, where most of the fuel in the country comes from.

  Russian pe
trol stations are usually tiny but solid buildings, where a single employee sits barricaded behind bullet-proof glass and metal bars, as if locked inside a safe. To hand him the money, you have to pull out a drawer in the wall, bellow into a hole or a speaker to say how much you want to pay for your petrol, toss the money in the drawer and push it shut. The employee switches on the right pump, which gives out only as much petrol as you have paid for.

  I always filled right up, so I usually left lots of extra money with the cashier, and then collected the change, depending how much fuel I had room for. It was a very complicated operation, all the more since my Lazhik had two fuel tanks and two petrol intakes, one on each side. After filling up one of them, I had to put down the nozzle, turn the car around and fill it up again.

  I kept putting forty litres in a single tank, though each held 37.5 litres. But they wouldn’t close, so several times I had petrol siphoned off at parking lots (the guarded ones), and as the fuel gauge didn’t work I had to count the kilometres as I drove to work out how much petrol I’d used, and when I ran the tanks dry I had to fetch the emergency canister out of the boot.

  Fifty kilometres before Shimanovsk, between Chita and Khabarovsk, there were some roadworks. The road was covered in large stones. There wasn’t much snow, but there was dreadful dust, and not a breath of wind, typical for Siberia when there’s a hard frost. I could only find my way thanks to the lights coming towards me. Even full headlights were hardly visible. My eyes were stinging terribly, so I put on skiing goggles, sealed them with a paper tissue, and tied a bandana over my mouth. I had a bundle of rags round my neck which was a talisman from the most powerful shaman in Tuva (it was supposed to protect me from large metal objects), and on my left foot I had a big felt boot, which for comfort I’d shortened by half with a knife. I had thrown the right one away, because it didn’t fit on the gas pedal, and in any case only my left foot kept freezing.

  ‘You, who are you?’ I was asked at the petrol station.

  There were three of them, and the question contained boundless amazement and disapproval – downright menace.

  It did not sound pleasant.

  ‘Just a bloke,’ I replied curtly, so they couldn’t tell from my accent that I was foreign, and slid the goggles onto my brow.

  ‘Who are you’, he said, seizing me by the sleeve, ‘to pour all that petrol into a Lazhik?’

  In a country that is one of the biggest producers of crude oil in the world, in the provinces they usually fill up for 100 roubles – about five litres of the cheapest, 76-octane petrol. I was pouring 92-octane petrol into the worst Russki car, right to the top.

  They hated me, as if I were feeding asparagus to a pig or sirloin steak to a dog.

  A superb machine, the 2007 model. We’re approaching a silver car the shape of a falling water drop. Its tapering rear end is like the tail of a jet plane. On its perfectly smooth surface there are no handles, bumpers or sunken windows – in short, nothing to protrude above the streamlined hull of this horizontally positioned droplet.

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  Til at his flat in Moscow.

  The loony’s exam, or a small and impractical Russian – English dictionary of hippy slang . . .

  . . . that I collected in November 2007 while waiting for the chance to buy my Lazhik on the cheap in Moscow and then having it adapted for the Siberian winter. Taking advantage of the opportunity, I decided to seek out my contemporaries, people aged about fifty, who must have been hippies in the 1970s, just like me.

  IS FOR . . .

  Askat’ – to beg, to con, to wheedle. From the English ‘ask’. The main source of income for most hippies.

  This is not ordinary begging, but creative deception by means of a tall story, an artistic way of taking in a sucker. For more than thirty years one of the most effective methods has been ‘the Estonian way’.

  You accost an old person in the street, and in a fake Estonian accent you say you are from Tallinn and that you are well aware the Russians can’t stand the Estonians. Anyone brought up in the USSR will vehemently deny it. You only have to do a little arguing about it, then finally ask for a few roubles because you haven’t enough for the ticket home. You’ll always get something, just so it won’t look as if Soviet people are nationalists.

  (B) IS FOR . . .

  Bitnitsy – rock ’n’ rollers, the golden Soviet youth of the late 1960s. In the USSR it was a very offensive word. They were the children of diplomats, senior officials and the Party nomenklatura. In Moscow they used to gather on Pushkin Square, in the little park around the poet’s statue. They didn’t do anything, they just sat on the benches and drank very cheap, sweet but strong plonk – Russian port wine.

  Volodya ‘John-the-Baptist’, known as ‘Bep’ for short, joined them in 1971. He was twenty-three years old.

  ‘Two or three years later we started calling ourselves hippies’, he says. ‘The militia never touched us because they were afraid of our parents. My father was an air force general. Only we had foreign books and newspapers at home, from which we found out all about hippies.’

  The situation changed at the end of the 1970s with the advent of another, larger, generation of flower children. These were young people from normal educated families.

  ‘And without even knowing it, the hippies became a protest movement’, says Bep. ‘A not very active, passive movement refusing to take part rather than to fight.’

  These people did not inspire the militiamen’s fear.

  (V) IS FOR . . .

  Volosaty – the shaggies. That was what Russian hippies most often called themselves.

  The shaggies’ slang is based on a mixture of four elements. Most of it comes from English and youth jargon, with an injection of words from the southern USSR, to where the hippies used to hitchhike every summer on holiday for poppy straw and marijuana. The fourth element is prison jargon, because lots of shaggies have done time for drug offences.

  Vint – a screw, and in hippy language a militia round-up, custody, and the verb vintit’ means to nab, to bang up, to put in jail.

  The passengers in the Moscow metro are a terribly gloomy sight. I don’t know how they do it, but the ones who manage to get a seat fall asleep in seconds. The rest of them read or play with their phones. Like all Russians they are dressed in grey or beige, with some in dark blue, and to a man they all have desperately sad, tired faces. Even the young people are cheerless and joyless with no sparkle in their eyes.

  Until one day I heard a lively, clownish tune played on a flute. By the carriage door stood a shaggy little man with a wild beard. He was wearing a great big hat with a pompom, enormous boots and a sweater down to his knees. He had a red clown’s nose on a piece of elastic, a scarf several metres long wound around his neck and a big bag, from which he had fetched out the flute.

  And it was a miracle – the passengers looked up and their faces brightened. Several people even smiled, because the little man went on and on playing, and amazingly didn’t want any money.

  That was how I met Til, also known as Vitya Morozov, a forty-one-year-old hippy and professional clown, an itinerant, folk jester. The militia have nabbed him several dozen times, and once he even got a sentence.

  In 1989 he decided to try for a job as a night watchman at the military rocket-engine plant. He was planning to obstruct weapons production, but they took one look at him and it was clear he would never get the job. On his way out, he happened to notice a phone booth in the entry-pass office. He went into the booth, ripped the phone off the wall and hid it under his clothes.

  ‘I have no idea why I did it’, says Til, laughing fit to burst. ‘The sirens went off and they caught me. They said the phone had been connected to an alarm because it had been stolen five times already.’

  He got a year in prison, but he was escorted from the court room by a paramedic in a white coat. He ended up in a psychiatric institution for criminals, and on top of that ‘indefinitely’, which meant
he would spend at least a year there, but maybe two, five, or even ten years.

  Daniil Kaminsky, known as Dan, was banged up in 1980. Before the Olympic Games the authorities purged Moscow of its superfluous elements. Hippies, prostitutes and tramps were packed into buses and deported far from the city. They found some marijuana on Dan, so he got eighteen months in prison, and after serving the entire sentence they transferred him to a mental hospital for another eighteen months.

  Dan is fifty years old. He’s the sort of hippy who gives you a pair of slippers when you come to see him. He is a ceramicist. He has dragged an enormous kiln into his flat to fire his pots, and every time he does it he has a row with the upstairs neighbour who complains that the floor is burning his feet.

  Γ (G) IS FOR . . .

  Gerla – girl, from the English.

  Dan has had three wives. He was divorced from the first one after a month, and the third a month ago. He has three daughters with her.

  ‘It was me that got my second wife into shooting up’, he says. ‘I gave her the first injection myself.’

  ‘Was she a hippy?’

  ‘No. She was a civilian, but she went hippy and really got into the drugs. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.’

  Til spent a year at the mental institution. Then he spent six years looking for his own kingdom of heaven on earth. He lived like a tramp, sleeping in stairwells, in cellars and on park benches. For the next four years after that he lived in a hippy commune, and in 2001 he married Irina. She gave birth to Anna and Ilya, he spent the whole of 2005 in a mental hospital again, and when he came out he and his family moved in with his mother.