Perhaps I only want to justify my existence, but I don’t think of it like that. Let the clever chaps discover complexes according to Freud or Jung. I feel satisfied and fall sleep at last.
You can only sleep through dawn in the forest if you’re really tired. As soon as the sun peeps above the horizon, the birds begin twittering so loudly that it’s impossible to sleep. Although I don’t drop off until the early hours of the morning I awake in a strangely cheerful and optimistic mood. I’ve become a slightly different person and I feel something good will happen today.
Yura, on the other hand, is sullen. I wonder if he regrets his decision to take me with him. He pulls off his socks and sniffs them, then he lies down again like a dead man until I have brewed chefir, which revives him somewhat. I ask him not to touch the samogon for a while, explaining that I’m frightened of the dt’s.
Coming out onto the main road we start hitching. We decide to go to the bathhouse in Armavir. We stink of bonfires and hay and booze. You can’t get yourself clean in a river, even with soap. Besides which, a steam bath is always a treat. If the mediaeval world rested on three whales, the tramp’s rests on four: railway station; bazaar; police station; bathhouse.
A truck takes us as far as the town of Kropotkin. “We’ve got to keep out of the town,” Yura says. “The Kropotkin police chief doesn’t care for tramps. You’ve heard about him?”
I shake my head.
“He used to be head of a collective farm. Chased out three tramps one day. They snuck back and stole his geese. Then they wrote a request to Moscow radio ‘on behalf of the farm labourers of Armavir’ for the well-known and popular song: Goodbye geese, goodbye! A couple of weeks later the 500 voices of the Piatnitsky choir reminded the farmer that his geese had been nicked.”
“What did he do?”
“Left his farm and joined the Kropotkin police force. Now he takes his revenge on passing tramps.” Yura gives a rare smile. “Vagrants all over the country still send their requests to Moscow. Even those in prison.”
Yura and I are on the road for more than a month, wandering in a circle around the Kuban. The southern earth nurtures us like a kind mother. You can’t take a step without squashing a ripe apricot or a bunch of grapes. All around is a sea of corn and fields overflowing with melons that no one bothers to pick. After they’ve met government sowing targets farm managers relax and let the harvest take care of itself.
I do not listen to a radio or read a paper. I don’t care whether we have cosmonauts in space or receptions for Fidel Castro. My body feels rested and my soul is at peace. No one is nagging at me to work harder or stop drinking.
Then a chill, incessant rain begins to pour down. For three days we barely stick our noses out of a haystack. Once or twice we go up to the nearest farm, where peasants give us as much milk as we want. Yura drinks until his stomach barrels out so tightly you could snap fleas on it with your fingernails.
The rain gets me down. I suggest we take shelter by registering ourselves on a farm. We trudge six muddy kilometres to the nearest farm administration centre and are immediately hired. Yura is sent to tend the cattle while I, as an invalid with no documents except a certificate of graduation from the Novorossisk spets, am hired as a watchman. I patrol at night, shooting in the air to scare off the stray dogs that try to dig up carcasses of diseased cattle from their burial pit. I also have to drive the carthorses out from the stables when the farmers need to take goods to market.
The cattle live in terrible conditions. They don’t have enough to eat because feed is expensive. If they get fed at all it’s only because the farmers feel pity for the animals. It smites your heart to hear three hundred cows mooing from hunger while the cowhands lie paralytically drunk. In the morning farmers tip sugar beets onto the still-frozen earth of the cattle-pen. The starving cows push and shove to get at the food, trampling their own calves into the filth. When the sun rises and softens the ground the animals wallow up to their bellies in mud and excrement. Still, they’re not my responsibility and my job is easy enough.
The local Cossacks treat us cautiously at first. Like all country people they do not broadcast their scandals to strangers. I soon notice they steal everything they can carry. At five in the morning they stumble out of their huts, stuffing empty bags into their pockets. They pile into buses that roar off down the sawdust-strewn road. In the evenings they return with bags full of feed, corncobs, or what ever else they’ve been able to lay their hands on. They say that a wife won’t serve her husband dinner unless he brings at least a couple of planks or a piece of fencing back from work with him.
Looking at me sympathetically, one of the Cossack women sighs: “Oh, you poor man!”
“Why do you say that?”
“How d’you survive with a leg like yours?”
“I get by, always have and always will.”
“But you can’t ride a bicycle.”
“Why the hell would I want to do that?”
“But you can’t carry much away on foot!”
“But I don’t need anything.”
She gapes at me as though I was a simpleton. Later I learn that the first thing any peasant does is buy himself a bicycle. Then he goes to the driver of a combine harvester, slips him three roubles and fills up a bag of cut corn-cobs. Even one sack is hard to carry over the shoulder, but two or three can be hung from a bike. He sells the corn in the market for 15 roubles, making the bicycle a machine for printing money. If he does well he uses his profits to buy a motorbike with a side-car which enables him to steal a lot more.
They say that if you stick a shaft in the Kuban soil in spring you’ll have a cart growing by autumn. But this fertile agricultural region is going to waste because of the collective farm system. The more intelligent peasants leave the farm for the towns; the more artful join the Party and sit at conferences where they assure each other that everything is under control. The simpler people stay put and drink everything they can lay their hands on.
It is not true that people only work for money. If someone is paid to dig a hole every day and fill it in again he might work for a while but in the end he’ll rebel. That is why all our years of communism have produced only 200 million thieves and drunkards.
I sleep in a five-room hut with four other single down-and-outs, plus three families. One of these consists of a couple of drug addicts that we nicknamed Codeine and Codeina. This pair wander around the farm like somnambulists. They have a baby who sleeps all the time, probably addicted through its mother’s milk. The couple are supposed to work in the chicken sheds. At night when the birds are blind Codeina grabs half a dozen, binds their beaks with thread and takes them off to Slavyansk to trade for pills with pharmacists.
Codeine takes alternate shifts with me as a night watchman. He often comes over to play cards with us and drink chefir. He gives out pills to those he trusts. The codeine makes us itch and scratch ourselves compulsively.
Amongst us is a young man who is hiding out on the farm for some reason — you don’t ask why. Born a Carpathian peasant, he understands everything that concerns agriculture; as regards anything else, he’s as thick as a tree stump. Seeing us scratch ourselves, he goes into the next room and painstakingly examines his clothes for lice.
I wake up after a long card session and stumble out of the hut. Bumping into Klava, a neighbour from another hut, I ask her the time.
“Eight,” she replies.
“How come?” I’m surprised. The sun is already high in the sky.