From Siberia With Love

by Ilana Cohen

  The Nizhnyaya Tunguska River is one of the rivers that drain into the great Yenisei River, close to the area in which it drains into the Arctic Ocean. The name Tunguska is related to the Tunguska meteor which fell in Siberia in the beginning of the twentieth century, somewhere in the area.

  The unfamiliar reality that had welcomed him in the rich land of the Inuits offered him new sights, and his thirst for knowing and experiencing more of what he had not known till then grew by the day.

  “Why is the dog barking ceaselessly and keeps running around the tree?” Alex asked the grocery store owner while returning an empty milk container after his dinner.

  “The dog is barking to let its owner know it captured a sable on the tree.”

  The sable is a rare animal with a highly valued fur, which inhabits the northern parts of Siberia. It is a carnivorous animal that feeds on birds, mice and smaller animals. Its elongated body and short feet enable it to nimbly climb trees, and find refuge at the top from other predators. It can easily jump from tree to tree but moves very slowly on the ground. The Inuit hunt it for its brown-red precious fur, which possesses a metallic glint. Tsars and government officials were among those who flaunt Sable-fur robes.

  “Good dog,” Alex remarked to the ears of the small and slanted-eyed man.

  “A very bad dog!” the man got upset. “We need to shoot this dog right away, this dog should die!”

  “Why are you saying that?” Alex was amazed by the man’s furious reaction and looked outside again toward the barking dog that briskly ran round the tree, ambushing the trapped sable.

  “Why kill it?”

  “Why? Because it chased away all the other sables in the pack that had reached our area with its barking.” The man realized Alex was demanding a reasonable explanation that would justify the killing of a beautiful northern Laika. The northern Laika is a beautiful dog breed, large and strong. Its fur is white, long and spattered with black spots. During the summer, such dogs roamed about freely in the settlement. More than once, Alex needed to step over them because they blocked his way by lying on the sidewalk and warming themselves in the sun. During the short summer months, the dogs rested and gathered strength and fat for the difficult winter ahead. They were used as the Inuit’s mode of transportation and pulled sledges laden with people and merchandise. The dogs helped hunters capture wild animals. In the winter, the dogs need to be fed, and the Inuits would put them to the test at the end of the summer and leave only the most fit, the strongest, fastest and cleverest. The rest of the dogs were simply shot down.

  “A good dog must guard its prey quietly and not allow the sable to run away,” the grocery store owner explained.

  The aircraft crews had received strict instructions not to bring the Evenks any cigarettes and alcohol. They were like little children, their characters weak and their addictions quick and absolute. They fermented every plant that could be fermented and made into alcohol, created an intoxicating alcoholic beverage and drank it no matter how poor its quality was. They would trade a two-pound bag of tea, from which they had also managed to produce alcohol, for fur shoes or gloves they had knit themselves. During the brief summer, especially green plants and bright-colored berries grow in Siberia. They break through the barrier of chill and grow beneath the intensive radiation of the sun which never sets in the horizon. Two months of summer in Siberia are the equivalent of four months of summer in another place in which the natural order of nights and days takes place. After two months of white nights, the weather rapidly changed. Frost covers the greenery. The grass and shrubbery freeze overnight and are preserved beneath a layer of ice, fresh and green, just like frozen foods kept cooked or fresh in the freezer. In the summer, the northern animals devoured the fish in the many lakes and accumulated new layers of fat to protect them for the coming winter. The animals there have long, strong claws with which they can scratch ice layers during the winter, and find their fresh food beneath them.

  The lakes and rivers provide the Evenks their main food source – fish – and they settled in these areas with the encouragement of the authorities. Their familiarity with the terrain assisted the geologists and engineers that were sent there to seek treasures. The Inuits aided them to build work camps and were hired to do digging and other manual work. In the farms, they raised wild animals, such as deer and arctic foxes. The arctic fox possesses an especially fine fur, white and gray, long and soft. The Moscow and Leningrad sewing factories used its rich fur to sew beautiful hats, gloves and collars for luxurious winter coats. It was impossible to cultivate the sable in farms because it they are wild animals which need freedom and constant movement in large areas. In order to grow a fine coat, they must constantly move about and jump from tree to tree.

  The first stop for the delivery of goods was a district called Yessey located on the banks of the Yessey River. Before the pilots would go out of the plane, they wore a special hat with a net for protection against the local mosquitoes and dipped their bare hands in a bucket filled with a mosquito-repelling fluid. They repeated this action every time they disembarked from the plane and headed to the open territories. It was well known that the native Evenks did not suffer from the mosquitoes. They must have been equipped with a mosquito-repelling gene.

  The crew’s job was to distribute food and equipment to the Evenks over the course of four days. They would normally finish their tasks after two days, and the guys amused themselves by fishing in the lakes for the remaining two days. They flew eastward in a tundra area covered with low shrubbery and an abundance of lakes. They landed the plane in the middle of one of the lakes, cast an anchor into the water and exited on the skis they had landed on.

  “Here, take a fishing pole and go catch us some fish for our dinner,” they said to Alex. He was the youngest of the group and naturally, the rest wanted to have some fun with the “child”.

  “Meanwhile, we’ll prepare other supplies so we could cook fish soup from the catch you’ll bring back,” his friends Vasily and Yevgeny tied Alex to the plane and equipped him with a large fishing pole with three hooks.

  “Come on, kid, let’s see you fish us some dinner, hurry up, we’re hungry already.”

  Alex, tied to a rope, walked on the airplane skis parked in the water, and threw a pole with a bait, a piece of metal glinting in the sun. Suddenly, the stillness and silence of the lake were disturbed and a few small alligators jumped toward the bait shining in the water. One alligator was immediately caught and began to wildly struggle and wriggle, pulling Alex forcefully toward the water. Only now did Alex realize why his cunning friends had tied him – they were afraid to return home without reporting a soldier that had fallen in the battle of the alligators.

  “Get the fish out of the water!” they screamed at him and jumped toward him to the skis.

  “The show is just starting, see what happens next!” Vasily took the pole from the hands of the frightened Alex and quickly released the fishing line on the stick he was holding to draw out the trapped fish. It was a fish with long alligator-like jaws that the natives called Tzashuka, equipped with rows of long, sharp predatory teeth.

  The fish dripping blood struggled and wriggled, Vasily released it and threw it back into the lake. The water around the injured fish was colored by its blood, and in a few seconds, hundreds of its breed lunged wildly out of the bushes. With their predatory teeth, they tore their friend to shreds and ate its flesh.

  Alex and his friends cooked preserved meat with some potatoes they had brought with them on the fire, and wetted their throats with a bottle of vodka. “Where’s the fish soup you’ve promised to cook?” Alex asked his friends angrily. He felt cheated, after all, they had scared him to death and laughed at him. “Tomorrow, kid, tomorrow is a new day and we’ll fly to the river, where we’ll catch some real fish and cook some wonderful soup from them.” But Alex had lost his appetite for the evening. He pulled himself together and went to sleep inside the plane parked on balloon skis on the lake, a plane t
ied to the low and bent trees that grew in the area.

  Alex, the youngest of the team, preferred to spend the nights sleeping on the airplane floor. During the bright northern nights, the cries of the wild animals could be heard throughout the night. The plane ceaselessly swayed on the skis that floated on the waters of the melting iceberg, and the wind constantly moved it to and fro.

  Siberia’s population is sparse and its rivers and deserts have no need of names. Labels and identities simply scatter in the northern winds and disappear in the boundless horizons.

  The winter chill in Siberia is so intense that while Alex would urinate, vapors rose from the brown liquid, and another stalagmite of ice piled up on the ground. Even spitting casually was considered dangerous, because the spit would immediately turn to sharp fragments of ice, and defecating was a complicated mission, because during the summer, one could go between the bushes where swarms of mosquitoes lurked and hurried to bite the buttocks. One could also crouch on the plane’s landing skis and do his business for all to see, straight into the water.

  During one of the operations, Alex became ill and caught a cold. The hosts, the ice people, offered him an Inuit style occupational therapy as a cure. They offered him their daughters.

  “Go ahead, young man, pick one of our girls and go for it. Pour some sweat throughout the night like a man and you’ll wake up a new human being in the morning, strong and healthy.”

  They offered him their daughters not out of politeness or an ancient tradition of hospitality, but out of pure survival considerations. If the girl would get pregnant, new blood will flow in the child’s veins, blood that will enhance and improve their race, and if they’d be lucky and the new baby will be a male, he may grow up to be a strong deer hunter and bring the blessing of prosperity to the entire tribe.

  Alex had recuperated well during the course of a single night in the soft bosom of a little Inuit girl. In the morning, she sent him on his way with a piece of practical and useful advice, one that had proven itself in the course of her tribe’s survival struggle:

  “When your girlfriend will complain she’s cold, offer to warm her little hands on your testicles. You’ll see how she’ll warm up in a minute and her desire for you will be reignited as well. The male’s testicles always keep a steady temperature, they never get cold or warm, so that the sperm stored in them will remain unharmed.”

  The Inuit girl’s clever advice has brought with it many moments of comfort and magic. He used it during picnic walks in the forests or in little flirtations that were supposed to end with only a virginal kiss.

  Chapter 9

  First Steps in Love

  Many times during the night-flight back home, the plane would be almost empty, other than some sleeping passengers flying back to Siberia. Alex and his friends had made sure the cockpit was properly locked then the three of them crowded together in the flight attendants’ cabin. Behind the curtain, the two flight attendants modeled for him their perfect and sexy bodies, the finest lingerie fashion sold that season in Sochi: Bras, interesting underwear and garters made of brilliant satin and decorated with soft lace.

  “Alexander Yakobovich Rosengard, you can’t fly and be a pilot anymore.” The short-lived pilot career had suffered a surprising blow at the hands of an eye-doctor working for the airline.

  The pilots and crew members were required to undergo thorough medical examinations once a year in addition to the routine examinations before each flight. The crew members were required to report to the airport clinic two hours before takeoff so that their blood pressure and pulse could be measured. More than once, a crew member would be disqualified from boarding a flight because of a temporary abnormality in his health. The Soviet superpower was ready for any possible scenario. A few crew members were always on standby to replace a comrade whose pulse had missed a beat whose heart beat one time too many.

  Cute stewardesses worked on civilian flights to the west, dressed in elegant, airline-blue suits, a narrow skirt respectfully covering the knees and a tailored jacket with winged buttons, the airline’s logo – on the front, large buttons with large wings, and on the sleeves, a row of small buttons with small wings. Beneath the jacket, the stewardesses wore a white shirt tightened with a tie, and their elegant appearance was completed by a cute beret they wore on their heads.

  Two stewardesses worked on each flight, one male steward and five pilots. During the flight, five crew members sat in the cockpit: The captain on the left and on the right side sat his replacement, the copilot. Behind them were the navigator and the communication officer, who was in radio contact with the airport control tower. The last to sit in the cockpit was a technician, he was responsible for fuel, oil and possible technical malfunctions. In later years, there were hijacking attempts, and a security man was added to the team, sitting among the passengers armed with a gun and disguised in civilian clothes. People who wanted to escape from Russia to the west wouldn’t hesitate to kill in order to take over the plane. The pilots were ordered to lock themselves in the cockpit. They were allowed to go out only to the restroom, one at a time. Before the hijacking began, there was only one pilot behind the control wheel, and the others would freely walk among the passengers and have long chats with the stewardesses.

  Alex was dismissed from his job as a pilot during the spring, and the semester in the university he had registered would begin only during the fall. His father was a member of the airport’s management, and therefore he had the opportunity to earn some money during the holidays as a steward on civilian flights to western Russia. During the summer, people would go to the Black Sea to have their annual vacation, and flights departed regularly from Krasnoyarsk to the resort city of Sochi. The flights contained families from the city as well as passengers who had arrived in Krasnoyarsk on flights from the north, from the mining city of Norilsk and its surrounding area, Irkutsk and the North Sea port of Dudinka situated in the Yenisei delta, where the river drained into the sea. Goods were transported to Dudinka from Norilsk to be loaded on ships and transported by sea. The Russians dug out of the frozen ground heavy metals, such as nickel, magnesium, derivatives of aluminum and zinc, and precious metals, such as platinum and gold.

  The mood of the passengers on their way to vacation was excellent. People chatted cheerfully and laughed, children followed the stewards with curiosity and passengers would sometimes sing songs. The miners, laborers and engineers told each other dirty jokes and relieved the cough coming out of their polluted lungs with sips of vodka from flat bottles stuffed in the inner pockets of their festive coats.

  The flight from Krasnoyarsk to Sochi on the Ilyushin Il-18 airplane lasted eight hours. During the holidays, the plane was full of vacationers, and it was possible to fill up only half the fuel tank in order to maintain a safe flight weight. Midway, in the airport of Samara, a city situated on the Volga River, the plane landed for a layover in order to refuel. Two hours were needed for fueling and unloading airmail brought from the north. The Volga River crosses Russia and marks the intercontinental border between Europe and Asia.

  The plane arrived to its final destination, the Adler Airport in Sochi, toward evening. During the westbound flight, there was a time difference of four hours. The passengers were transferred with their suitcases to buses that drove them to the Sochi hotels and the pilots got off and headed straight to a small hotel dedicated to the pilots and situated in the airport, in order to rest and have a good dinner at the restaurant. The youngest members of the crew emptied the airplane and unloaded packages and mail. Alex and two stewardesses he had befriended did not go to the hotel after the flight, the three of them headed straight to the beach. Equipped with leftovers, portions they had withheld from the passengers, they marched about a half hour through the city of Adler. Alex always admired the beautiful family houses, built of brick and mortar and surrounded by spacious blooming gardens. During the summer months, the fruit trees were laden with fruit, peaches, plums and various kinds of pears. After the
landing, the captain would meet a local farmer who waited in the hotel lobby to receive lists of fruit and vegetables each of the crew members had written on a note during the flight. The residents of Adler were all employed by the airport. After they had received the order, all family members were recruited for picking fruits in their gardens. In the course of an entire day, they filled up buckets with fruits and fresh vegetables to be transported by the plane back to Siberia. On flights which were packed with passengers returning from their vacation in the north, there wasn’t any room left for importing fruits and vegetables. The baskets filled with goods were allotted a storage space by the captain at the back of the plane, next to the ignition engine. The crew had to balance the overweight by loading the passenger’s suitcases and baggage on the front part of the plane. At home, in the Krasnoyarsk airport, they landed on a side landing strip to secretly unload the forbidden fruits that turned ripe in the skies.

  Alex would normally share his shift with the same two stewardesses, Ola and Katia. Both were a bit older than him, about twenty five years old, and he was a young seventeen years old. On a rock strewn, moonlit beach, the three of them took off their sweat-drenched uniforms after a day of flights, then, naked and laughing, they ran to take a dip in the black sea. They had their fun in the fresh yet still warm water, after a warm, sub-tropical 113 degrees day. They dined on the beach and wetted their dry throats with some wonderful sweet Georgian Muscat wine they had bought from a store in one of the airports they had passed through. They had a wonderful time until the late hours of the night, and at two am, they returned to the hotel to sleep until noon, then they ate in the hotel’s restaurant and prepared for the flight back home. At nightfall, the next plane bringing vacationers from Siberia to Sochi landed. The wheel kept turning, the people who landed in the second airplane were told about the merchandise that could be purchased there, the types of fruit and vegetables and the prices the farmers were selling them for during that week.