White Fever

by Jacek Hugo-Bader

Maybe, but my heart was so starved, I was so keen to love someone . . . He used a trick to propose to me.The TNT television channel was making a documentary film about me, so Ilya gave them the idea of getting me to marry. They loved the idea of two young, educated HIV carriers getting married, but as they’re always in a hurry with television shows, the year’s engagement we had planned was over in three months. First we had a civil wedding here in Kazan in front of the cameras, next day a reception in Moscow for HIV friends, and finally a church wedding in my family village. As a Tatar, Ilya was a Muslim, but I had him christened.

  And how did he contract the virus?

  Through sexual intercourse. The doctors said he must have contracted it during the past two years, so he made a list of the sexual partners he’d had in that period, and then they told him it must have been in the previous four years. So he tried to remember his partners from the past four years, but then the doctors changed their minds again and said they meant six years, or even eight. He managed to make a list covering the past three years.

  Lots of partners?

  Lots. A hundred.

  In three years?! What’s so funny? Aren’t you even a tiny bit jealous, not to mention the fact that he may have infected all those girls? A hundred young women! Did he try to find them or call them when he found out?

  He tried calling almost all of them, but it wasn’t clear which one he may have caught it from.

  Never mind who he caught it from. What matters is whether he infected them.They should have tests to make sure they don’t pass the virus on.

  Not one of them called him back. But he couldn’t have infected all of them, because at the start the concentration of the virus in the blood is so small that the danger isn’t great. But we were worried, because he could have been accused of deliberately infecting someone. We talked to the lawyers about it. Here in Russia there are two relevant legal articles which are mutually exclusive. Guilty or not, he could have been taken to court, and that’s not much fun. Besides, with the casual partners he always used a condom. He only went without one with his steady girlfriends. And there were only about fifteen of those.

  What do you mean steady? How steady is that? That’s an average of two-and-a-half months for each one. And he was unfaithful to them too, because he had about eighty bits on the side in that period! And you still find it funny . . .

  Because this isn’t Iran. Here in Russia that’s normal. People have that many partners.

  And that’s why they call Russia ‘the second Africa’. That’s why in Russia three in every hundred people are HIV-positive. And what about you, Sveta, how did you contract it?

  Also through sex of course. In 2003. I know who from. I was on holiday on the Black Sea coast and I had an adventure.

  Didn’t you use protection?

  It’s not so simple in this country.The women are extremely docile, timid and submissive. If a girl insists on using a condom, it means either she’s got some illness or she doesn’t respect the boy and has doubts about his sexual habits. For him that’s a mortal insult, a sign of lack of respect and trust. Russian men take it extremely badly.

  What arrogant bastards.

  A condom utterly reduces their sense of value, of virility. And sex without one is proof of love and affection. Not to mention that the girls often get pregnant as if by accident and trap men that way. Because then he has to marry her. At all my meetings I repeat ad nauseam that girls should have self-respect, and not put themselves about like that. They meet a boy at a club, and an hour later they’re making love with him. The situation here is tragic – especially in the countryside. There’s a dreadful slackening of morals, and common sense just can’t keep up with it.

  Sveta, for God’s sake! A short while ago you were proudly telling me about your husband’s sexual blitzkrieg, and now you’re complaining that Russian girls have no self-respect.

  Let them at least protect themselves! Bloody hell! You might think you’re talking to a happy young woman with a beautiful child and a future. But do you know, my own mother-in-law is terribly afraid?

  For you, her son and your daughter.

  Hell, no. She’s afraid of us! She’s scared of getting infected. It’s terrible! She’s ashamed and afraid of her own son, before the family and the neighbours – an educated woman, a lawyer. She won’t let anyone speak aloud and openly about AIDS in her presence. Every time she sees me she begs me not to give any interviews and tells us never to breathe a word to our daughter in the future.

  What about your mother?

  She’s a village, collective-farm woman. After I took part in a talk show on the television she burst into tears, hugged me and said she couldn’t and didn’t know how to give me much in life, but the Good God was watching over me, and thanks to this illness I have such a fine, interesting and unusual life.

  Even the most cautious specialists will give a limit of no longer than ten years. Cancer will be as trifling as a cold.

  Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.

  Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov

  Comrade Kalashnikov

  I can’t find him in the red Book of Soviet Geniuses of Science published in 1954, or on the list of residents at the registry office, or among the Heroes of Socialist Labour in the factory showcase. In the most recent Soviet encyclopaedia they didn’t even mention which republic he lives in, nor did they include a picture of him. Portrieta nyet – meaning it’s a secret.

  In 1949 Kalashnikov is awarded the Stalin Prize. He receives it from the very hands of the Generalissimus in person. In 1971 he becomes a doctor of technical sciences and a member of the Leningrad Academy. He never graduated from any institution.

  Izhevsk is an ugly city in the Urals. At the centre there is an enormous tower made of iron girders – Izhevsk’s answer to the Eiffel Tower. Until 1991 it was a closed city. That is a Soviet speciality – a city in the middle of the country, but for some reason you’re not allowed to go there, as if it were surrounded by a border. In Russia there are still cities like that to this day.

  Izhevsk is the capital of the Russian arms industry. Of course there is no tank, gun or armoured car factory. This is another Soviet speciality. Tanks are assembled here at a binding machine factory, missiles at a car factory and ordnance at a plant that manufactures knitting machines. Similarly, in Tula guns are made at samovar factories. One of the Izhevsk arms factories is where, despite having retired, eighty-eight-year-old designer Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov still works.

  THE DESIGNER’S SUIT

  ‘How should we start, Mikhail Timofeyevich? Maybe like this – which sub-machine gun is the best in the world?’

  ‘That’s like asking a mother which child is the smartest. Naturally she’ll say it’s hers.’

  ‘And what will the sub-machine gun of the twenty-first century be like?’

  ‘I don’t know. The Americans claim that until 2025 the Kalashnikov will continue to be the best one, and then we’ll see. I’m still working. And do you know why my automatic is so popular? Because it is a soldier’s gift to a soldier. The main thing is its simplicity, but not because I was ignorant, no. The hardest thing about a designer’s work is to make something that isn’t complicated. Complicated constructions are easy to design.’

  ‘Why did you adapt your rifle to 5.45 calibre ammunition in 1974?’

  ‘Because the Americans had started using that kind in Vietnam.’

  ‘But at the time there were protests against it all over the USSR. You said yourselves it was a barbarian, inhumane weapon. Its bullets explode inside the victim’s body and cause terrible mutilation . . .’

  ‘Oh, you see now why I don’t like talking to journalists? Because you all write nonsense.’

  Kalashnikov was getting upset. It’s true that he very rarely talks to journalists. He made a recent exception for the Russian features magazine Ogonyok, and now for the Polish newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza.

  ‘When I went to America they wrote that I do my own
cleaning at home. Is it a bad thing that I don’t have servants? Or that I don’t have a decent suit. He’s a great hero, he’s won so many awards, but he hasn’t got a suit. And why on earth write about that? Did you buy a new suit on your way to see me? I can see you didn’t, and you were right not to.’

  THE DESIGNER’S LOOK

  ‘What sort of conditions did you work in years ago?’

  ‘Don’t think I had an easy ride. I travelled a thorny road. Just imagine. A competition to design a sub-machine gun is announced and a fellow called Degtaryov enters it – a general – and Simonov, also a general, and Shpagin, a famous designer, and some humble little sergeant gets in the way of this august company.’

  ‘Did you plan the work yourself?’

  ‘Yes. I had no assistants, I made lots of prototypes myself, including the AK-47. I always regarded my work as work for the nation’, says Kalashnikov solemnly.

  The fatherland, the nation, work – these are sacred words for him. As he pronounces them he has a sort of proletarian look in his eyes. Although he’s small, in slippers and squeezed into a corner by the piano, he proudly shakes his upswept grey hair and gives me a rather superior look.

  ‘How did you feel in the Stalin era? Like a free man?’

  ‘The Stalin Prize was a great distinction. Anyone who won it mattered.’

  ‘Could you express your opinions in those days?’

  ‘Understand that only someone who knew how to infect the entire collective with his idea could be the chief designer. I succeeded in doing that.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Mikhail Timofeyevich, I’m talking about the fact that in those days the politruki, the political instructors, the commissars were in charge. That must have been the case in your office too.’

  ‘The Party took a guiding role in every field. I don’t see anything wrong with our Party’s guiding role. We believed in it. That’s how we were brought up, and I am still a communist to this day.’

  ‘I can see you worked in different conditions than the aeroplane designers during the Great Patriotic War.’

  ‘Well, you can’t compare me with aeroplane designers.’

  Kalashnikov has very bad hearing – a professional ailment. He went deaf from the constant shooting. We’re sitting at a table facing each other, but we’re shouting as if we were in different rooms. Often when he doesn’t understand something, or doesn’t want to understand, he pretends he can’t hear.

  ‘They worked in prison camps’, I press further. ‘Exclusive ones, but they were camps. In golden cages. Haven’t you heard about that?’

  ‘I was never at their workplace’, he cuts me short.

  HUNTING FOR THE DESIGNER

  So Mikhail Timofeyevich and I sit there and drink tea. But what a lot of bending over backwards I had to do to get to see him. For he is a secretive man. In the 1990s no-one in the city knew Kalashnikov lived in Izhevsk, and his family only found out what he did when the weapon started bearing his name.

  I spend two days besieging the machinery plant where Kalashnikov works – hours and hours outside the gate, in corridors, in rooms, offices and at admission desks. For four hours I loiter by the phone waiting for Viktor Nikolayevich, the chief engineer. Now and then I call and am told: ‘He’s just gone to find you, Comrade correspondent’.

  I don’t waste the time. I make observations to see what sort of people there are here. That one, for instance – the size of a mountain, a tight suit packed with meat. Dark face, stiff shock of hair, broken nose, bushy eyebrows – the fellow’s from the Caucasus. It’s immediately obvious he borrowed the suit from a friend, and usually wears army camouflage. He trudges from room to room, getting his business done. I go up and accost him. He has a large bag full of grey bits of paper.

  ‘What have you got there?’ I ask.

  ‘Money’, he replies innocently and smiles, showing his teeth. Oh my God! They’re all gold. And I thought he was a man of iron.

  They tell me: ‘Izhevsk is a mafia city’. Why? Because they make weapons here. And what about the spruced-up pretty boy in leather who drove up in a Ford not long ago and is now traipsing down the same route my gold-toothed Azeri just took? I accost him too. He’s from Odessa. He has come here from Tajikistan and is on his way to Moscow. He’s been to Poland before and even knows a few words of Polish.What does he do?

  ‘I’m in business.’

  They’re highly familiar with this sort of businessman in Russia. There’s a joke doing the rounds in Moscow that goes: ‘What’s the most dangerous animal in the world? A businessman in a BMW.’

  THE DESIGNER’S INCOME

  ‘In this picture’, I say, pointing,‘you’re standing next to a real American millionaire.’

  Kalashnikov has been to the USA several times.

  ‘That’s Stoner, designer of the M16. He invited me. Lots of people think I’m a millionaire too. Of course I am, but I don’t have those millions in my bank account, but in the Warsaw Pact. My millions are all the individual Kalashnikovs with which the entire Pact is armed, and for which I didn’t receive a single kopeck.’

  ‘You once said that if for every Kalashnikov produced they had given you just one rouble, you’d be a millionaire.’

  ‘It’s easy to calculate that it would be at least fifty-five million. But how much do I have? Nothing! When I was in America I felt like a beggar – I couldn’t even afford an ice cream. The factory management said it was a private trip and didn’t give me anything. Stoner has his own plane, but I can’t afford a plane ticket from Izhevsk to Moscow. I go by train – it takes twenty hours.’

  ‘How much do you earn?’

  ‘It’s hard to say. It varies by the month, but recently I’ve been getting a retirement pension of about 40,000 roubles [£800] per month.’

  ‘The average pay in your factory’, I start to calculate aloud, ‘is about 20,000, in which case you must earn about 40,000, on top of which there’s your pension, and we’ve already got 80,000, which is about 3200 dollars a month. Who has money like that in Russia? Even in America for that money you could buy yourself a barrowful of ice cream, and here you could fly to Moscow and back five times. Oh, and at one time you had a deputy’s per diem too. There are worse-off people in Russia than you.’

  ‘Don’t think I’m complaining. My country hasn’t forgotten about me. I’ve been awarded lots of medals. I’ve twice been a Hero of Socialist Labour, and I must tell you, they only give these decorations for exceptional merit. Apart from that, for six years I was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, so I think I’ve been suitably rewarded, by our standards.’

  ‘You joined the Supreme Soviet when Stalin was still alive.’

  ‘Yes. Then I had a break, and then a few more terms in office. But don’t make the mistake of thinking that was the typical order in our country, that our designers – and not just I, but all creators of Soviet technology think this way – insisted on enjoying privileges in exchange for their passion, their commitment or ideas.’

  THE DESIGNER’S TEARS

  ‘What’s your dream, Mikhail Timofeyevich?’

  ‘My heart aches when I watch the television and see how my weapon has changed into an argument in debate. I dream of an end to violence in our Russia, and I think that is the dream of our entire working Russian nation.’

  The designer’s voice is faltering. I let him get a grip on himself.

  ‘The nations of the Soviet Union fight against each other using your gun.’

  ‘What is to be done? But perhaps we cannot say that if my gun didn’t exist, there would be none of those wars. Right? After all, I made the gun to defend the borders of our fatherland, and now former brothers are shooting at each other.’

  ‘But you’re still working and working and working and thinking up new, ever more perfect kinds of gun.’

  ‘I don’t know how to make junk.’

  ‘I’m sure you regard yourself as a patriot, right? Of what, if I may ask?’
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  ‘I understand what you mean. All my life I have worked for the Soviet Union, more than that, for the Warsaw Pact, and so I’m not indifferent to the collapse of our state. I’m not happy about it either. I am a patriot of my fatherland, and I see my fatherland as vast . . .’

  ‘Meaning?’ I ask in a whisper.

  ‘The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.’

  There’s a pause. A very long one.

  ‘The politicians have destroyed it all.’

  ‘Other nations are pleased about it – the Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Georgians . . .’

  ‘Let me tell you. I have travelled right round the borders of the Soviet Union twice, to all the military districts on the frontier. I wanted to be in touch with the soldiers. I was in the trenches. I embraced Kazakhs, Georgians, Chechens and all our children. And I had tears of joy in my eyes to find that we were together like that. Now when I see the same boys are shooting at each other, I’m weeping too.’

  Mikhail Timofeyevich sobs.

  ‘Now judge for yourself if I’m a patriot or not.’

  THE DESIGNER’S LONELINESS

  Mikhail Timofeyevich prompts ambivalent feelings. Sometimes it’s dislike, anger or even aggression, and at others sheer pity. He’s old, alone, surrounded by a pack of greedy, avaricious, grasping people, such as Viktor Nikolayevich S., chief engineer at the factory, who tried to feed off Kalashnikov by exploiting his merits to swindle me out of several hundred dollars for the interview.

  The old designer lives alone. His wife died thirty-two years ago, and about fifteen years ago his beloved daughter Natasha was killed in a car crash. He has two other daughters and a son. In his way he is certainly an honest, proud and honourable man. He uses a very limited vocabulary. He doesn’t understand a lot of words that aren’t in daily use, despite his various honorary doctorates. In conversation he occasionally deviates, or else forces it onto technical ground. He only wants to talk about his gun, about the modernizations, the variants, the blowback system, the trigger force and the diversion of gunpowder gases into a tube above the barrel. He speaks about current affairs in a cowardly way, and certainly wouldn’t dare to pass judgement on a bigwig, to say what he thinks about the changes introduced by Mikhail Gorbachev or the politics of Vladimir Putin.