White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  Rinat in his front yard in Ufa.

  Minefields

  In the underpass there’s a condom vending machine. ‘For people who want to live’, says the sign on it. There’s also a small card stuck to it reading: OUT OF STOCK.

  ‘Here in Russia they say AIDS is a death sentence.’ Masha raises her eyebrows as if she were surprised. ‘But it saved my life. I even have a child because of it, and a husband. I will never cease to be amazed he wanted an awful drug addict like me with HIV.’

  ‘He just fell in love’, I say, as if I’m an expert. ‘What’s really strange is that you don’t use condoms. For him that’s an incredible risk, which they reduce by 90 per cent.’

  ‘He insists on not using them. I myself have no idea why.’

  ‘Because guys can’t stand using condoms. But to that extent?’

  ‘Why can’t they stand them?’ asks twenty-five-year-old Masha.

  ‘Because it’s the same sort of crap as decaffeinated coffee or alcohol-free beer. You’re sort of drinking, but it doesn’t give you a kick.’

  Twenty, thirty and forty-something years old. A Jewish woman, a Tatar, and a Russian. A drug addict, a gay and an alcoholic. Worker, farmer and intellectual backgrounds. Orthodox, Muslim and atheist. False, gold and black teeth. Everything about them is different. Except for the fact that all three live in Ufa, in the Republic of Bashkiria, on the eastern edge of Europe.

  And they all have a certain virus, which consumes CD4 lymphocytes. It is weak, so it dies very quickly outside the organism. It cannot even survive a warm shower, but somehow Masha, Rinat and Sergei all contracted it.

  LIFE THE FIRST TIME AROUND

  Masha’s mother was a geography teacher and her father wrote and performed folk songs. So one parent used to take her to the mountains, and the other to festivals – always separately, because they were divorced. She was the best pupil at her school.

  I would never have believed Rinat’s parents were collective-farm workers. He’s very handsome with a dark face, tall, lean and slender. Masculine even, you could say, if not for certain gestures. He drops his hand onto his hip, or props up his chin in a particular way. He has beautiful, long hands, one long fingernail and six rings. And about six gold teeth at the front.

  Sergei’s parents were workers. When he was in the fifth year, they bought him a guitar.

  ‘Workers in the Soviet Union understood their children’s needs’, he says with total sincerity. ‘They wanted me to be an artist, and the school helped the leading social class with that sort of thing. In the USSR anything was possible. I finished music school and got into the conservatory. I had enormous potential and a fine career ahead of me. But in the evenings I used to listen to rock music with my friends. Half the performers took drugs, but we loved them and we wanted to be like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix too. We were sure the authorities were cheating us out of drugs. They begrudged us, they were mean, like with everything. Like with jeans, Coca-Cola, trips to the West and music too.’

  So they started smoking anasha – that’s what they call marijuana in Russia.At once they realized that the authorities were refusing to give them a high, but wanted to keep it all for themselves.

  ‘Because drugs give happiness’, says Sergei. ‘And that’s the last thing they wanted to give us.’

  In the late 1980s the Soviet Union was already heading for its collapse. Everything was regulated. Even vodka, and happiness most of all.

  DEATH THE FIRST TIME AROUND

  In a chapter entitled ‘The battle for life and well-being’ a Soviet professor explains to the authors of the Report from the Twenty-First Century that in the new century all illnesses will be conquered for good and all, including cancer, mental illnesses, heart and vascular diseases, just as tuberculosis had been entirely eradicated.

  Now we’re in the twenty-first century, and Russia’s hospitals are bursting at the seams. In Irkutsk, to enter a swimming pool you have to have a certificate proving that you are healthy, or go through a medical consulting room between the changing room and the showers, where the doctor decides who may enter the water.

  In 1957 the world had no idea of the existence of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), although it must already have passed from the grey mangabey monkey to human beings. It never occurred to anyone that the twenty-first century would have its own plague, but of course there were prostitutes and drug addicts then too.

  Nowadays in Russia about four million people take drugs as an addiction, the vast majority of them intravenously. At least the same number again are alcoholics. And in Moscow alone paid sexual services are provided by one hundred thousand women.

  SERGEI – THE DRAMATIC TENOR

  Sergei Yevdokimov studied at the conservatory, while also working at the Opera and Ballet Theatre in Ufa. He was the best dramatic tenor in the company, but he was taking more and more, harder and harder drugs. That ruined him financially, so when he happened to spot a briefcase belonging to the theatre cashier filled with cash to pay the entire company, he took advantage of the opportunity.

  ‘I had lost my mind’, he tells me, ‘because the cravings made me shake like a paralytic. I went and sat in the theatre restaurant, because for a couple of days I hadn’t had the money for a proper meal either, and that was where the manhunt organized by my colleagues from the ballet caught up with me. But I escaped before the militia arrived, and boarded the first train heading for Siberia.’

  At Abakan in Krasnoyarsk Krai he started working at the local philharmonic. They were in need of tenors. He did extremely well, because he didn’t know where to buy drugs. So he drank himself unconscious for a year, and once he got to know the terrain, he went back to heroin. Of course he knew that AIDS was raging in this city, as in all of Russia, but he didn’t worry about that at all. Sometimes at a party a single needle and syringe did the rounds of several dozen people.

  Sergei took drugs so intensively that he bungled several concerts and was fired from his job. He went back to Ufa and was immediately arrested. He spent three months in custody, and then got a suspended sentence of several years in prison for theft.

  ‘Did you have a family?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes. A wife and children, but I lost them. More than one family, more than one wife and lots of children. When I was in Abakan I received a document from my first wife saying that she was divorcing me. I started a family there too, but when it all fell apart and I went back to Ufa, there was another woman too.’

  ‘You were extremely amorous.’

  ‘What sort of love is that?’ Sergei claps his hand against his brow. ‘What room was there in all that for emotions? I only lived for drugs. But to do that you need a victim. To deceive and exploit, in order to have a flat, food, sex, protection and money for drugs. And unfortunately I was an excellent psychologist, added to which there were the superb acting skills I learned at the conservatory. I knew how to start crying, get angry or take offence to order. Neither work, nor love, my wife or children mattered – just taking drugs. I was getting older, but I wasn’t growing up. Spiritually I was a teenager in the body of a forty-year-old man.’

  ‘Did your third partner leave you too?’

  ‘Yes. She was an older woman, with grandchildren already, but she had a flat, lots of valuable things and money. I only had to make her fall in love with me, and with older, single women that’s not so hard to do. I’m a very good lover. That’s how I kept all those women hooked on me, and got myself stuck with another addiction, to sex, to regular intercourse several times a day. Finally, even my older partner threw me out and I ended up on the street. I lived in cellars and stairwells and on allotments. I became a terrible tramp. I slept on bits of cardboard and fed on garbage, so I got covered in filth and stank like dog shit. I used to rob holiday cottages, cars, the few friends who still let me into their homes, and my parents, because a mother will always take pity and open the door.You can even steal something to
sell from a drinking dive.’

  RINAT – ONLY WITH STEADY PARTNERS

  Rinat Shamilov is a Tatar. He is thirty-five. When he was in the ninth class he discovered he was gay. He was sixteen. He finished school and immediately ran away from the family collective-farm village to Ufa, because in the big city it was easier to find a partner and hide your preferences from the world. The Soviet Union was on the wane, but there was still an article in the penal code that stipulated a prison sentence for homosexual intercourse.

  ‘Did you use condoms?’ I ask subtly.

  ‘Yes, usually. I only didn’t with steady partners.’

  ‘But you weren’t their steady or only partner.’

  ‘I know’, he says gloomily. ‘Between men sex is the only thing that matters, but I needed more than that. That is definitely why I got married ten years ago. I can’t explain how it happened, but I fell in love with her, and she with me. She knew who I was. She is my first and only woman. Our relationship is very strong and we have two children.’

  MASHA – SCOT-FREE, SAFE AND RICH

  She started taking drugs twelve years ago. She was thirteen, and Larissa, her friend from the same block, was four years older. Larissa’s mother was a drug dealer, so the girl used to pinch her wares from a hiding place and hand them out in the yard. The kids used to play at being drug addicts. They weren’t able to inject themselves with heroin, so they used to drink it.

  ‘We kept playing that game, and every single one of us got hooked’, says Masha Pavlushenko gloomily.‘I was a sweet little rosebud of fourteen, top of the eighth class at an elite school specializing in the performing arts, a young poet and dancer in a folk song-and-dance band, and at the same time I was whacking deadly unpurified heroin into my veins. By then I knew how to shoot up. Before I got to the tenth class I was at the bottom, and had started dealing myself. The only reason they didn’t expel me from school was that my mother was a teacher.’

  Masha never had any problems with the militia. She paid them, so they gave her protection. In the entire post-Soviet world of legal and illegal business, you pay the mafia for protection, but it’s more often the so-called power structures – the militia or one of the state-run special services. A busker or a tramp pays a few hundred roubles to the local beat cop, and Gazprom gives financial support to the election campaigns of candidates from the FSB.

  There were even occasions when the militiamen were Masha’s suppliers, giving her drugs to sell that they had taken off other dealers. They split the income fifty-fifty.

  ‘Jesus Christ! They were getting cash for drugs from fifteen- or sixteen-year-old kids.’

  ‘Right’, says Masha. ‘In the late 1990s in a single day I used to earn about five thousand roubles (£100). Two thousand were for them, 2000 for new wares, and there was 1000 left for me. That was an awful lot for a sixteen-year-old girl.’

  ‘And for a cop?’

  ‘For them too. A department head earns 22,000 roubles a month.’

  ‘They don’t pay them much. A driver on the Moscow metro gets 30,000 (£600), and a girl at McDonalds gets 12,000.’

  ‘As a teacher my mother earns 7648 roubles a month’, says Masha. ‘Ordinary operational militiamen get 10,000 more.’

  ‘And they weren’t afraid to do business with such a child?’

  ‘What was there to be afraid of? If I’d spilled the beans they’d have locked me up or done me in. After that I no longer did the selling myself. I had a team who worked for me. The militia gave them protection too on my account – I paid for each of them, and if one of them trod on my toes by not paying for the wares, I shopped him to the militia and he ended up in the nick. There were even better tricks with the suppliers. They gave drugs on credit, so sometimes I ran up an enormous debt, as much as a hundred or two hundred thousand roubles (£2000, £4000), so I’d set my cops on them. I wasn’t worried about getting supplies because the place of one dealer was immediately taken by another one.’

  ‘Bloody risky’, I say. ‘They might have slaughtered you.’

  ‘There wasn’t much risk. How is a stupid Tajik from the other end of the world going to know who grassed him up when he’s got several customers? All the militiamen knew me, but who the hell’s he? The cops sometimes have to show a result too, so I used to give them this or that. A Tajik like that, in fact, an Azeri, a black Asian, a foreigner. I was scot-free, safe and rich, and I had as much dope as my heart desired. The only thing that agonized me was my mum’s suffering.’

  She threw her daughter out of the house. She said: ‘Get out!’ and wouldn’t open the door to her, not even when Masha just came to wash her hair. She reported her daughter dozens of times and tried to hand her over to the militia, but they explained to her that they couldn’t do anything because Masha wasn’t eighteen and was still going to school.

  ‘That wasn’t true of course’, the girl weeps. ‘But how was my poor mum to know? They made awful fun of her. All her love, respect, home and family lay in ruins . . . I had shat on it all. I ended up all alone, because in a drug addict’s life there’s no such thing as friends. I couldn’t trust the militia an inch either. It’s a terrible life. Such terrible emptiness.You stand before the mirror and you see a living corpse. Enormous eyes, sunken cheeks, skin white as paper. On top of that dry, knobbly knees, ribs and collarbone sticking out, sagging breasts. A terrible sight. The worst thing were the eyes. Large, blue eyes with little black dots instead of pupils. But what hurt most was my soul.’

  Masha whimpered for mercy outside her mother’s door and begged to be rescued. Earlier on, with the help of Masha’s grandmother, who is a doctor, her mother had given her detox treatment at home. The girl was terrified of going to a hospital, because there they would have registered her for life on the militia list of drug addicts, and that would mean she could forget her dream of studying law once and for all. So Masha’s mother sold her grandfather’s garage and paid for her daughter’s stay in hospital, because in that case you could be treated anonymously.

  DEATH THE SECOND TIME AROUND

  The first case of a USSR citizen with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was registered in 1987. He was a homosexual working as a military interpreter in Africa. The first Russian AIDS victim died the next year. The Russian to have carried the HIV virus the longest is sixty-year-old Kola Pinchenko from Saint Petersburg, who was infected in 1981.

  The pandemic has been spreading freely and very rapidly, mainly via the shared needles and syringes traditional among Russian drug addicts. Research shows that 83 per cent of drug addicts used to share needles on a daily basis.

  The epidemic peaked in 2001, when 87,000 new cases of infection were officially registered. World-wide, Russia is known as the second Africa; some say it will be swept from the face of the earth, and that in the twenty-first century it will die of this plague in the course of a few decades. But since 2006 financing for the fight against AIDS from state and international funds has grown from five million to 150 million dollars, and the situation has stabilized at a level of about 40,000 registered new cases of infection with HIV per year.

  Nowadays the situation appears to be worst in the places the virus reached the earliest, before anything was known about it or was done about it. These are Samara, Irkutsk, Orenburg, Saint Petersburg and the Kaliningrad district on the Polish border.

  The least serious situation prevails in the poor, neglected regions, because few people can afford drugs there.

  Out of poverty people in Russia drink vodka.

  SERGEI – MINDLESS WOMEN

  The Russian drug addict will do anything to avoid ending up on the militia’s list of addicts, because otherwise he can be deprived of parental rights. He almost automatically loses his job too, if he is employed in education, the health service, the state administration, the army or the militia. Professional drivers have their driving licences taken away, and it is a known fact that a huge percentage of taxi drivers take drugs and often deal in them too.

&nbs
p; Sergei was not afraid, as Masha was, of ending up on the militia’s list, because he had featured on it for years, ever since he stole the case full of money for the opera and ballet artistes. Roughly once a year he would appear at the hospital for detox treatment. They’d patch him up, feed him and let him sleep in fairly clean bedding. There in 2000 he found out he was HIV-positive.

  ‘I wasn’t shocked at all’, he says, pulling a face. ‘Of course I may have caught it through sexual intercourse, but drug addicts get it intravenously, from dirty needles and syringes. From then on I took even more drugs, as if I wanted to bring on my own death faster.’

  ‘Did you want to kill yourself?’

  ‘I thought about suicide, but I didn’t have the courage to do it with my own hands. I was afraid. All I had left of my entire humanity was the self-preservation instinct.’

  ‘It actually is an animal’s strongest instinct.’

  ‘You can see for yourself. I didn’t even have the strength to kill myself, so I was glad an illness had come along that would do it for me. Jesus! How I hated myself! How sick I was of this shitty life. The only way out was to dope myself to death. Or wait until I died of AIDS, hepatitis, cirrhosis of the liver – the booze would kill me, or another junkie whose stash I’d steal. So everything was as before – there were even times when some old woman still fell for me and let me into her home. I didn’t hide the fact that I was HIV-positive, but they’d say never mind, infect me, and we’ll be together for the rest of our lives. They asked me to infect them! I had several of these mindless women. They just closed their eyes and followed me, like going to their own death, like entering a minefield.’