He does not say thank you; he does not say anything at all superfluous. The barmaid hands him the food, takes the money. Also without a word. She closes the cash register and looks at the next guest.
People here eat quickly, urgently, they swallow everything in seconds. Although several times I was the first in the bar, I was invariably the last to leave. Those who had arrived after me left long before I did. I do not know to what degree the specter of continually recurring famines, so deeply encoded in the collective memory, plays a role here — the subconscious fear that perhaps tomorrow there will be nothing to eat.
AN EVENING at Vladimir Fiodorov’s. Fiodorov, an ethnic Russian, is an eminent figure in the local cultural world. He is the editor in chief of the local bimonthly Zwiezda Vostoka, in which I read a report about a village in the Yakut countryside, Syktiach (in the summer, six days by ship on the Lena River to the north). Tuberculosis is raging in the village, whoever can is escaping; to get a loaf of bread one must ride two hundred kilometers over roadless wilderness, over snow, over the taiga — to the town of Kiusiur.
Fiodorov’s little apartment (for his wife, himself, two daughters) is very well cared for, tasteful, cozy, measures thirty square meters. But his family is away, and so we are spending the evening alone. Fiodorov was born in Yakutia, on the banks of the Lena; he knows the entire republic, has traversed it lengthwise and widthwise. He has experienced, and carries in his imagination, a world that to me is unknown and inaccessible. The taiga, rivers, lakes — I have never been there, I do not know what a man feels after he has killed a bear, or when he is walking around hungry and suddenly catches a large fish.
I continually have on the tip of my tongue a question about the Yakuts, but I somehow feel awkward about posing it. In Yakutia, the Yakuts are a minority — there are four hundred thousand of them. What are their relations with the Russians? The Russians have been here only since the seventeenth century. Does Fiodorov believe that something like a colonial situation exists? Colonial dependence and exploitation?
“How so!” Fiodorov would answer. Yakutia (in the fall of 1991, the Republic of Yakutia changed its name to Sacha) is his country; he was born and raised here; he lives and works here. It is the argument of Afrikaners in South Africa: they were born there, they have no other country! Besides, Russians and Yakuts are equally exploited here, a great state is exploiting them — the Imperium. It is the Imperium that takes away their diamonds and orders them to live in Zalozhnaya.
Yakutia is full of pain. There were many gulags here, mainly near the gold mines. If a prisoner turned in gold over and above the quota, he received for each gram of extra gold a gram of alcohol or a gram of tobacco or bread. Cheating proliferated, becoming epidemic among the overseers. But one of them, Pavlov, once gave out three hundred grams of alcohol for three hundred grams of gold, and the prisoners discovered that the alcohol was not diluted with water, was honestly high proof. News of Pavlov’s deed spread through the camps, he himself passed into legend, and this extraordinary episode is, as one can see, recounted to this day in the Republic.
Fiodorov speaks about terrible things. When criminals escaped, they would persuade one of the political prisoners — naive and unsavvy — to go with them. This they did as insurance against death from hunger, which was always a threat. At a certain point they would kill the victim and divide up his flesh.
When an escape took place, the NKVD would inform the local population, who understood the bounty system. It was enough to deliver to the authorities the escaped prisoner’s right hand; identity was confirmed by comparing fingerprints. For each prisoner “returned,” the reward was a sack of flour. Many died accidentally this way, many hunters, travelers, geologists.
Stalin ordered a road built between Yakutsk and Magadan. Two thousand kilometers across the taiga and the permafrost. They started building it simultaneously from both ends. Summer came, thaws, the permafrost melted, water underran the soil, turned the road into a quagmire, it drowned. Together with the road drowned the prisoners who worked on it. Stalin ordered the work to start anew. But it ended up the same way. Once again, he commanded. The two ends of the road never met, but their builders perhaps met in heaven.
KOLYMA, FOG AND MORE FOG
I WAITED FOUR DAYS at the airport in Yakutsk for my airplane to Magadan to take off. Snowstorms raged over Kolyma; everything was covered over, buried under, and for that reason scheduled flights were suspended.
This is what traveling around Siberia is like.
The majority of airports are poorly lit; the craft that fly through them are old and break down frequently; sometimes one also has to wait somewhere for fuel to be delivered to the airplanes from another part of the continent. The entire time he is traveling, a person lives in tension, with nerves, in fear that these unexpected stops and delays will cause him to miss a connecting flight, lose a reservation, and then — drama, disaster, catastrophe. For here one cannot be capricious, change tickets, select other times and routes. One can get stuck for weeks on end at an unknown and always crowded airport, with no chance of getting out quickly. (All tickets are sold out months in advance.) What then would one do with oneself, where would one live, what would one live on?
I now find myself in just such a situation in Yakutsk. I also cannot return to town, for what if the storm in Kolyma suddenly abates? If it does, the plane will take off immediately, so we have to hold on with all our might, because if it gets away — if it flies off — we are lost.
So the only thing to do is sit and wait.
OF COURSE, it is a dreadful sort of idleness, an unbearable tedium, to sit motionless like this, in a state of mental numbness, not really doing anything. But on the other hand, don’t millions and millions of people the world over pass the time in just such a passive way? And haven’t they done so for years, for centuries? Regardless of religion, of culture and race? In South America, we need only go up into the Andes or drive through the dusty streets of Piura or sail down the Orinoco River — we will encounter everywhere poor mud villages, settlements, and towns; and we will see how many people are sitting on earthen benches in front of houses, on rocks and stools, sitting motionless, not really doing anything. Let us travel from South America to Africa, let us visit the lonely oases on the Sahara and the villages of black fishermen stretching along the Gulf of Guinea, let us visit the mysterious Pygmies in the Congo jungle, the tiny one-horse town of Mvenzo in Zambia, the handsome Dinka tribe in the Sudan — everywhere we will see people simply sitting. Sometimes they will utter a word or two, in the evening they will warm themselves by the fire, but really they are not doing anything, only sitting idly and without motion; and moreover they exist (or so we can suppose) in a state of mental lethargy. And is it different in Asia? Driving along the road from Karachi to Lahore or from Bombay to Madras or from Djakarta to Malang — will we not be struck by the fact that thousands, why, millions of Pakistanis, Hindus, Indonesians, and other Asians are sitting idly, without motion, and are looking at who knows what? Let us fly to the Philippines and to Samoa, let us visit the immeasurable territories of the Yukon and tropical Jamaica — everywhere, everywhere that same sight — people sitting motionless, for hours on end, on old chairs, on bits of plank, on plastic crates, in the shade of poplars and mango trees, leaning against the walls of slums, against fences and window frames, irrespective of the time of day or of the season, of whether the sun is shining or the rain is falling, phlegmatic and expressionless people, as if in a state of chronic drowsiness, not really doing anything, living with neither desires nor goals, and also (one can assume) submerged into mental torpor.