Suddenly they all fall silent and only one shaman can be heard, then they take up the choral singing again, though this time it’s a very beautiful, yearning, ethereal and unfathomable song that has trouble staying within these walls, virtually blows the hut apart, all but raises the roof and flies away.
One of the shamans falls to the floor. The others pick him up and get him back on his feet. His face is screened by dozens of little plaits, so I can only see his twisted, foaming mouth for seconds at a time, as a copious stream of thick saliva pours down his beard. They give him some vodka. The shaman drinks and spits, starts to thrash about, throw himself around the room, shrieking, raging and fuming like a spoiled child or a senile old man. But he isn’t old, although his legs and back have bent double, his hands have started to shake and his voice is going squeaky.
The shaman is in a trance, and thus he is Angun, the spirit that he has let into himself – the spirit of his ancestor, a very old shaman who died almost 200 years ago. People are falling to their knees, and in this position they are approaching Angun. Each of them asks about his own affairs, about children, money, the future, or health. The spirit knows everything.
I went up too, but with a camera, and I almost lost it, along with my teeth, because Angun took fright at me and aimed a mighty blow at me with his large cane, topped with a dragon’s head. He must have thought I was pointing a gun at him, the other shamans explained. He had never seen a camera. Apparently it came very close to him seizing my soul.
I retreated, and read a short essay stuck to the wall. The most interesting bit was about the shamanic illness. It starts when the spirits let the chosen person know he is to become a shaman, and he puts up resistance. The spirits break him, by sending all sorts of misfortunes, calamities and illnesses down on him. Usually mental illnesses, including alcoholism. The person loses his property, job and family. His loved ones die, and finally so does he.
CURSE
Viktor Dorzhevich Tsydypov was thirty years old when in 1984 bandits attacked him and smashed his head in with an iron bar. He was airlifted to Moscow for an operation, but it wasn’t a success and the doctors said he wouldn’t survive.
‘I didn’t give in’, he says. ‘I spent fifteen years travelling across the entire former Soviet Union to find the best hospitals and doctors. They couldn’t help me at all. I had the right tests, even neurological ones, and a CAT scan of my brain, but I couldn’t stand up, because I kept falling over. I could only walk on all fours, but after ten metres I would pass out from pain and exhaustion.’
Then he went to see all the famous monks, lamas, folk healers, miracle workers, shamans and energy therapists, of whom there are swarms in Russia. He even went to see the popular psychic healer, Anatoly Kashpirovsky. But still he kept on conking out.
‘During that time my father, my uncle, my brother Sasha and my cousin all died of cancer’, says Viktor. ‘My brother Lovka died of meningitis because he was bitten by a tick. How on earth did that happen? In February, when there aren’t any ticks! Loshka and Mishka died in an accident, and the last one, Seryoga, was killed by a piece of metal. I had five brothers, and now only the girls, a couple of grandparents and I are left.’
‘What do you mean, by a piece of metal?’
‘By a bullet.’
‘Bandits?’ I enquire further.
‘No – we were at war then. Chechnya.’
In 1999 Viktor was taken to see a very powerful Mongolian shaman. He let Angun come inside him, who said it was the shamanic illness, the curse of Viktor’s ancestor. The spirit had chosen him, and wanted him to become a shaman.
‘But why didn’t he choose Lovka?’ cries Viktor. ‘He studied the humanities, he wrote books and poetry, he’d have been more suited to a life with spirits, but I’m a mechanical engineer, a down-to-earth person who had never once been in a church or a Buddhist datsan before the accident.’
‘So you could say your ancestor has murdered your entire family.’
‘Yes. To make me become a shaman. There are thousands of people like me in the world. Half the people who populate all the mental hospitals.’
ANGEL
The day after, at the New Year ceremony, Angun entered into Viktor’s body. When he left it, as usual the shaman could not remember what had been happening to him during that time. He sits in his old armchair, extremely worn out, drinking revolting Mongolian tea with milk, salt and fat in it, and for several minutes more he still has one foot in the world of spirits. He can see more, hear more and feel more.
‘Do you know’, he asks me in a weak voice, ‘that your guardian angel is a woman?’
‘How do you know?’
‘I can see her. It’s very rare for a woman to look after a man. I think it’s someone from your family. It must be your granny.’
‘Which one?’
‘How should I know? I don’t know your grandmothers.’
‘What does she look like?’ I persist.
‘She’s got . . . Our women don’t do that. Plaited hair.’
‘A plait! Long and thick? It’s Granny Irena. She died eight years before I was born. What’s she doing now?’
‘She’s smiling. After all, she can hear us. But I think she died with a wound in her heart. I wonder why she chose you?’
‘So why did she?’ I ask the shaman.
‘How should I know?’
With the help of radar a spacecraft will constantly monitor inner space. The moment it discovers a meteorite at a threatening distance and a collision proves inevitable, a powerful ray of energy will be fired in its direction. Under its effect the meteorite will reach such a high temperature that it will disintegrate into tiny pieces, which will evaporate from the heat.
Report from the Twenty-First Century, 1957.
Masha and Maxim in the taiga.The white fever is starting.
White fever
A voice grants the herder three wishes.
His first wish is a crate of vodka, and he gets it. His second wish is another crate of vodka, and his third is one more.
‘So you’re a golden fish, then?’ jabbers the herder.
‘No, man. I am the White Fever.’
Telling this joke is as low and tasteless as telling jokes about Jews, ovens and gas chambers.
But the Evenks tell it, and fall about laughing as they do so.
Because it’s about them. And vodka is their equivalent of Cyclon B.
Except that it works more slowly.
Now watch out. In this chapter the words ‘die’, ‘kill’ and ‘death’ appear more than fifty times. The word ‘rifle’ comes up eleven times, ‘vodka’ twelve times, and only once does the word ‘love’ appear, but in an unhappy context. If that doesn’t suit you, don’t read on.
A LETTER TO GOD
Before their very eyes the shamaness changes into a 100-year-old woman. She develops a hunchback, her legs bow beneath her, and her voice is as creaky as a coffin lid. She tells Lena to write down everything she needs from the spirits.
So Lena starts like this: ‘Dear Sovoki. At the start of my letter, I am writing to you with a humble request for the Russkies to vacate our land . . .’
The shamaness reads it and splits her sides laughing. ‘That’s how you might open a petition to the governor, not a letter to God.You have to do it in a purely human way, like writing to your brother.’
‘But I don’t know how’, says Lena. ‘All my life I’ve only ever written to officials.There was always “we demand”,“we require”,“our land”, and “we, the Evenk nation”.’ So she dictates, and the shamaness writes it down in a human way. ‘The first request is for the Russians to give back our land, then for the Evenk nation to stop drinking, and for a purpose to appear; for the young people to finish school, and for my Dima to be set free and never to drink again, and as well as him the same goes for my Yura, Svetka, Masha,Tinka, Borka, Tania, Maxim, Danka . . .’
There’s a lot of it. Two pages written out in fine script on both sides.
Then the shamaness says Lena has to sing the whole text in her own language, because the old woman who enters her during the rituals doesn’t know Russian, and only she can transmit the people’s requests to the spirits.
‘So I began to sing for the whole taiga’, says Lena. ‘And my nation was with us. The herders and hunters.’
The horror-struck people listen to Lena’s husky wailing. ‘Belekeldu! Belekeldu! Save us, good Sovoki, because we’re dying out!’ Shivers run down their spines, scratching like claws, and they’re seized with fear, as when they meet a bear in the taiga, or the devil himself.
THE BRIGADE
Lena Kolesova is a petite person with small but very rough, coarse hands, tinted glasses and an elaborate blond perm. She was born fifty years ago in the taiga and grew up in a tent, so she never feels the cold. All winter she goes about in an autumn jacket and unty – high boots made of reindeer skin. The problems she has with her knees are probably the result of her being overweight, which is rare for her nation. The Evenks are very thin, small and wiry. They have dark skin and hair, chestnut-brown eyes and an oily complexion. There is something tragic about their faces. The men in particular glower gloomily. They have flat, stubble-free faces with prominent supraorbital ridges and foreheads that are wrinkled from birth, making them look severe. If you offer one of them a friendly greeting, you can be 100 per cent sure he won’t snap back at you.
The women, old and young, although very slender, move heavily and awkwardly, as if carrying a great burden. They have small breasts and a straight waistline, but fortunately their slanting eyes do look as if they are just about to squint into a smile.
Lena is a widow who lives with her family in the village of Bamnak in the Amur district, eastern Siberia. She is the leader of the local Evenks.
In March 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union. Perestroika began, and Lena got a job as an animal husbandry specialist at Udarnik, the local state farm. Her brigade, Number One, included seventeen herders, two of whom were women, two were fourteen-year-old boys, and there were 3500 reindeer.
ONE – THE LUNGS
Six-and-a-half years later the Soviet Union collapsed, and in Brigade Number One Sasha Yakovlev was killed when the ice broke as they were driving the herd across a river.
Sasha graduated from flying school in the city, got married there and had a child. Then he divorced, returned to his home village and began to drink heavily. He was thirty years old.
There were sixteen herders left in the brigade.
TWO – THE THROAT
He was fifty-one. On 27 March 1993 he drank himself to death.Yuri Trifanov was foreman of the brigade and also Lena’s uncle. He left a widow, Tamara. The Evenks rarely register their marriages.They come to an agreement with a woman and move with her into their own tent or house. That is what their weddings are like. They never have a celebration to mark the event.
Yuri spent his whole life in the taiga. He didn’t even have a house in the village, like the other herders, but when he died Tamara moved there for good and drank non-stop until it paralysed her. She could no longer go to the shop or even raise a glass to her lips, and so she died. She left three children, who were not Yuri’s offspring, but from her first husband. Two of them died soon after. The third, young Yura, is a legendary figure.
He is a herder. One day he ran out of the tent in the middle of winter without his jacket and hat. He was entirely sober, but this was soon after a tremendous, four or five-day drinking spree. He ran blindly ahead without stopping for two days and nights. He had only a small loaf of bread with him, and at night the temperature fell to minus forty degrees. A Russian hunter came upon his footprints on his hunting territory. He was convinced it was a poacher, so he set off after him in a caterpillar-track vehicle. He drove 120 kilometres across the taiga in deep snow before he caught up with him.
Yura didn’t know why he had run like that or for how long. He thought he was running towards his own campsite, but the whole time he was getting further away from it. The hunter saw Yura’s huge, terrified eyes and his unnaturally dilated pupils, so he didn’t ask any questions. At once he recognized the white fever.
After the foreman’s death there were only fifteen herders left in the brigade.
THREE – THE HEAD
The herders’ deaths weren’t a problem, because after the collapse of the USSR subsidies for collective farms came to an end and the herd rapidly ebbed away. The two others had long since been killed off. The Udarnik state farm was dying.
The slaughter was always carried out at the winter encampment. In 1993 it was the same. On 29 November helicopters came to fetch the meat, and as usual they brought provisions for the herders. As usual, it was mainly vodka.
The starving herders drank themselves senseless, and in the morning they found the dead body of Sergei Safronov near his tent. The lad had got drunk, fallen over, hit his head and frozen to death. He was the youngest in the brigade. He was twenty-one. The new foreman spent three days carrying him across the taiga by sledge to the village. In Bamnak the local doctor discovered that Sergei had not frozen to death, but had died of a ‘cerebral and cranial injury, including broken skull bones and damage to the brain stem’, and thus he died of a blow to the head from a heavy object.
There were fourteen herders left in the brigade.
FOUR – THE CHEST
Sergei Trifanov was the new foreman. He was my Lena’s older brother, as well as being the nephew of the previous foreman. Sergei Safronov’s family placed the blame for the boy’s death on him. Trifanov drank in despair until the New Year, then sobered up, but early in January he set off into the taiga. In the hospital records it says: ‘Bilateral shotgun wound to the rib cage’. He was thirty-eight when he shot himself through the chest with his rifle.
His wife very soon remarried, but she drank heavily, so her husband used to beat her without mercy.
‘Because he was a Russki’, says her sister-in-law, Lena Kolesova. ‘A year later she died of all that beating. It was spring, there were ice floes on the river and we couldn’t take her to see a specialist in town – and so it all came to nothing.’
Lena’s brother and his wife left two little daughters, who were taken in by their mother’s friends.
There were thirteen left in the brigade.
FIVE – THE HEAD
The herders conducted their own inquiry, and it turned out that Volodya Yakovlev, the older brother of Sasha, who had fallen through the ice and drowned three years earlier, had killed Sergei Safronov. Volodya was an old village thug who had already served one ten-year sentence for murder. When things started to get hot for him, he hid in the taiga.
Some militiamen came from the town, but they hadn’t the slightest chance of tracking a real man of the forest, a native of the taiga like his grandfather and great-grandfather before him, so they declared that anyone who saw him had the right and duty to shoot him like a rabid dog or a wolf.
The Amur district is as big as Poland. It is almost entirely covered in uninhabited taiga, and the Udarnik state farm’s land covers almost a tenth of the province, some 3.8 million hectares, so the hunt for Volodya lasted an entire year. Only on 30 December 1994 did his colleagues from the brigade finally track him down and corner him. They did not even appeal to him to give himself up. He was fifty. He lived alone, with no family.
And then there were twelve.
THE REGISTER OF DEATHS
A drunken Evenk, Buryat, Mongol,Tuvan or Chukcha is an extremely painful sight. The first thing to say is that they are knocked off their feet by a dose of alcohol after which a Russian, a Pole or even a German would have no trouble driving a car – but they end up lying on the pavement. The peoples of Northern Asia have a very low level of alcohol tolerance. But the difference is not just quantitative. The Russians say that after vodka the northerners behave ‘inappropriately’, which is a very apt description. They start doing things that bear no relation to reality. They get
undressed in the freezing cold, jump off bridges into frozen rivers, or sit down in the middle of busy roads . . . Normally serious and introverted, they become very noisy, and laugh in a false way, as if forcing themselves to be happy. Normally abstemious, or even frigid, incapable of showing their emotions and intolerant of Slavonic affection and the way Russians are always kissing each other, after drinking vodka they become obscenely tactile, but only seconds later, without any provocation, they reach for the knives that traditionally they always carry.
Every time a drunken Evenk accosts me on the street in Bamnak, he always makes a request of lunatic idiocy – wanting me to take him with me to America, escort him to the Moscow train (there is no railway in this village), or give him 10,000 roubles (£200).Where else in the world does a drunk demand such a sum? When I try to find out where on earth he got that figure from, he cannot explain and resorts to violence.
The Russians contemptuously call all the non-Slav citizens of Siberia churki, meaning ‘blockheads’.They make up endless jokes about them, just as the English make jokes about the Irish and the Americans joke about the stupid Polaks. For instance, why do pilots dislike flying over Chukhotka? Because the locals like getting in and out on the move. Like most jokes, these too are derived from observation of everyday life – in this case the life of drunkards.
In Bamnak there is a tiny hospital with a small number of beds and one retired doctor – a paediatrician, who also delivers babies, pulls teeth, performs abortions, and determines the causes of all fatal accidents in the village and its neighbourhood. She records each one in the register of deaths that she has kept since 1964.
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