Table of Contents
Title Page
Bonnet into the wind
NIGHT
DREAM
SPONSOR
KRUZAK
SKATES
SNOW
BED
MIENTY
HORSE
SPANNER
STATION
The loony’s exam, or a small and impractical Russian – English dictionary of ...
IS FOR . . .
(B) IS FOR . . .
(V) IS FOR . . .
Γ (G) IS FOR . . .
(D) IS FOR . . .
(ZH) IS FOR . . .
(Z) IS FOR . . .
(I) IS FOR . . .
IS FOR . . .
(L) IS FOR . . .
IS FOR . . .
(N) IS FOR . . .
IS FOR . . .
(P) IS FOR . . .
(R) IS FOR . . .
(S) IS FOR . . .
IS FOR . . .
(U) IS FOR . . .
Φ (F) IS FOR . . .
(H) IS FOR . . .
(CH) IS FOR . . .
(SH) IS FOR . . .
Rabid dogs
DIRTY RAP – THE PERFUME FACTORY
BLONDIE – THE RABID DOGS
PUNK ROCK – COLD-WAR STYLE
CHANSON – BANDIT MUSIC
ANARCHO-PUNK – BATTLEFIELD SYNDROME
HEAVY METAL – WHORES, MUSIC AND BOOZING
PATRIOTIC ROCK – A PRESIDENTIAL REIGN
OLD CHURCH ROCK – SELF-CENSORSHIP
ANDREI – A MIGHTY BLOW
GANGSTA RAP – FOR A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
MAZHORY RAP – PASSION AVENUE
Minefields
LIFE THE FIRST TIME AROUND
DEATH THE FIRST TIME AROUND
SERGEI – THE DRAMATIC TENOR
RINAT – ONLY WITH STEADY PARTNERS
MASHA – SCOT-FREE, SAFE AND RICH
DEATH THE SECOND TIME AROUND
SERGEI – MINDLESS WOMEN
RINAT – A NASTY BITCH
MASHA – DREAM NO. 2
LIFE THE SECOND TIME AROUND
SERGEI – COME INSIDE!
RINAT – SEX WORKERS
MASHA – THE BIGGEST TURF
Miss HIV
A CONVERSATION WITH 27-YEAR-OLD SVETLANA IZAMBAYEVA FROM KAZAN, RUSSIA’S MISS HIV-POSITIVE
Comrade Kalashnikov
THE DESIGNER’S SUIT
THE DESIGNER’S LOOK
HUNTING FOR THE DESIGNER
THE DESIGNER’S INCOME
THE DESIGNER’S TEARS
THE DESIGNER’S LONELINESS
THE DESIGNER’S LUSTRATION
THE DESIGNER’S SOUVENIRS
THE DESIGNER’S PRIDE
THE DESIGNER’S LIFE STORY
GOODNIGHT, DESIGNER
The study aids store
THE VESTIBULE OF HELL – THE CANCER HOSPITAL
THE FIRST CIRCLE – THE STUDY AIDS STORE
THE SECOND CIRCLE – KEEPERS OF THE PEACE
THE THIRD CIRCLE – GOLD FEVER
THE FOURTH CIRCLE – THE SUICIDES
THE FIFTH CIRCLE – ELEVENTH ON THE LIST
THE SIXTH CIRCLE – THE CONQUISTADORES
THE SEVENTH CIRCLE – THE STUDY AIDS STORE
THE EIGHTH CIRCLE – CHILDREN OF THE POLYGON
THE NINTH CIRCLE – THE ROOM UPSTAIRS
A small corner of heaven
I THOU SHALT HAVE NO OTHER GODS BEFORE ME
II THOU SHALT NOT TAKE THE NAME OF THE LORD THY GOD IN VAIN
III REMEMBER THE SABBATH DAY, TO KEEP IT HOLY
IV HONOUR THY FATHER AND THY MOTHER
V THOU SHALT NOT KILL
VI THOU SHALT NOT COMMIT ADULTERY
VII THOU SHALT NOT STEAL
VIII THOU SHALT NOT BEAR FALSE WITNESS AGAINST THY NEIGHBOUR
IX THOU SHALT NOT COVET THY NEIGHBOUR’S WIFE
X NOR WHATEVER BELONGS TO THY NEIGHBOUR
Black Square
A CONVERSATION WITH DEACON ANDREI KURAYEV, ORTHODOX PHILOSOPHER AND RELIGIOUS COMMENTATOR
My guardian angel’s plait
PRICE LIST
HOSPITAL
A LONG TIME AGO
MONGUSH
CLINIC
TRIP
LONG AGO
NOT LONG AGO
HEAVENS
LATELY
TRANCE
CURSE
ANGEL
White fever
A LETTER TO GOD
THE BRIGADE
ONE – THE LUNGS
TWO – THE THROAT
THREE – THE HEAD
FOUR – THE CHEST
FIVE – THE HEAD
THE REGISTER OF DEATHS
SIX – THE CHEST
SEVEN – THE CHEST
EIGHT – THE THROAT
NINE – THE SKIN
TEN – THE THROAT
AUNTIE VALYA
ELEVEN – THE CHEST
TWELVE – THE THROAT
THIRTEEN – THE NECK
FOURTEEN – THE HEAD
HOLE IN THE HEAD
FIFTEEN – THE HEAD
SIXTEEN AND SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN – THE CHEST
SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY
NINETEEN – THE CHEST
TWENTY – THE THROAT
TWENTY-ONE – THE SKIN
DRESS REHEARSAL
The drunks’ shamaness
A CONVERSATION WITH DOCTOR LYUBOV PASSAR, UDEGE DOCTOR, NARCOLOGIST AND ...
296 hours
SUNDAY, 25 NOVEMBER 2007
KOLA
TUESDAY, 18 DECEMBER 2007
FROST
THURSDAY, 7 FEBRUARY 2008
IGOR
MONDAY, 18 FEBRUARY 2008
LYUBOV
TUESDAY, 19 FEBRUARY 2008
PARCEL
MONDAY, 25 FEBRUARY 2008
SASHA
LAZHIK
About the translator
Copyright Page
Chin Li, the wandering Chinese man somewhere near Novosibirsk.
Bonnet into the wind
My only prayers were not to break down in the taiga at night, and not to run into any bandits. I was ready for the first of these misfortunes, but not for the second. I must have been the only madman to travel across that terrible ocean of land without a weapon, and on my own into the bargain.
The locals’ favourite sport is shooting. They drive normally, on the right-hand side of the road, but they’ve got the steering wheel on the right too, because the cars are imported from Japan. They hold it in their left hand, so they can easily stick the right one out of the window and blast away, while on the move, with whatever weapon they have, at road signs, adverts and notice boards.
In eastern Siberia I didn’t see a single road sign that wasn’t as full of holes as a colander. Large and small bores, single shots and whole bursts, and even some huge holes made by a heavy shotgun.
And every few dozen metres there’s the wreck of a burned-out car.They must have broken down in the winter, at night too, and their desperate owners set them alight to keep warm.
There’s little chance this would have helped them to survive.
NIGHT
What idiots. Before leaving they should have found out how to survive a winter’s night in the taiga.
I always stop the car with the bonnet facing into the wind, just in case. If it’s blowing from another direction, it can pump poisonous exhaust fumes inside.
I keep the engine idling to warm the car up. It won’t run out of fuel, because it only uses about a litre an hour, and the tank is always at least half full.
This is the most sacred principle of travelling by car across Siberia in winter – keep filling up,
so you’ve always got at least half a tank of petrol. However, before lying down to sleep I always switch off the engine – there’s too big a risk of the wind changing direction during the night, in which case I’ll never wake up again. But I set the alarm in my phone to wake me every two hours, then I get up and start the car, leaving it running for ten to fifteen minutes. It’s not even to warm up the cab, but to keep the engine and the oil sump from freezing, and to charge up the battery. At minus thirty degrees you’ve no chance of the car starting in the morning without these manoeuvres, because the engine oil goes as dense as plasticine. I once tried adding it to the engine at that sort of temperature, and while I was about it, I tried to top up the brake fluid and the power steering fluid too. They were all so thick they refused to come out of the bottles.
But suppose the phone battery ran down and I didn’t wake up until morning? Then I’d have to light a bonfire. Of course no-one in their right mind travels across Siberia without an axe. You chop some firewood and pile it up, but you can’t even light it with petrol because it’s terribly cold and windy, and everything’s covered in snow. I took a jar with me containing a special mixture of petrol and engine oil in proportions of one to one. Even wet wood will catch light if you pour that on it.
However, suppose I got stuck in the steppes beyond Baikal, not in the taiga? There’s no kindling there. But I’ve brought some with me. I’m actually carrying a box of wood from Europe all the way across Siberia, not for warming my hands, of course. You have to put the bonfire on a shovel (which is just as vital as the axe) and stick it under the car to heat up the engine, and above all the oil sump. I can just as well do it with a petrol burner – it’s a very simple device, a bit like a small flame-thrower, which I bought at a scrap-metal shop for 600 roubles (£12).
But suppose the frost is so awful and you’ve slept so long that the battery has gone dead? Easy – I’ve got a second one, in the cab, where it’s much warmer. I don’t even have to shift it, because it’s joined to the first one by cables. I only have to flick a switch.
But suppose the engine that’s keeping you warm has broken down? You’ve got to survive at least until morning. In fact the Siberians have a saying that in their country you don’t even leave an enemy alone in the taiga, but that doesn’t apply to the road situation or nighttime. The traffic volume is much lower, though it doesn’t stop entirely, but there is no force strong enough to make the Russian driver stop after sunset. They’re afraid of bandits.
The best solution is a vebasto, an independent heater driven by a small combustion engine, which heats separately from the workings of the car. It costs 1000 Euros, so I didn’t indulge myself by getting one, but instead I have a small portable camping stove that I light in the cabin, and before going to sleep I turn it off, to save gas. At night I’m warmed by one or two candles that I stand on the floor. On the coldest night I spent in the car, the temperature at dawn fell to minus thirty-six degrees, but in the cab it was only minus fifteen.
Of course I’ve got a wonderful down sleeping bag and a down jacket, and I always keep enough food and drink for several days.
DREAM
In March 1957, possibly on the 9th at one in the afternoon, because Saturdays were when the science department of Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper held its weekly meetings, two reporters were given an unusual assignment by the editor-in-chief. (On that day and at that time, on the polished wooden floorboards between the kitchen and the bedroom in my grandmother’s flat at 62 Warszawska Street in Sochaczewo, rather unexpectedly, I made my entrance into the world.)
‘We must tell our readers about the future’, said the editor-in-chief. ‘Describe what life in the Soviet Union will be like fifty years from now, let’s say at the time of the ninetieth anniversary of the Great Socialist October Revolution.’
That meant in 2007.
The book written by Mikhail Hvastunov and Sergei Gushchev, the journalists working for Komsomolskaya Pravda, is called Report from the Twenty-First Century. The authors wrote that we would use electronic brains on a daily basis (nowadays we call them computers), miniature transmitting and receiving stations (mobile phones) and ‘biblio-transmission’ (i.e. the Internet), open cars from a distance (with remote control), take photographs with an electric camera (digital) and watch satellite television on flat screens.
They wrote about it at a time when in the house where I was born there was not even a black-and-white television set, a toilet or a phone to call the doctor.
Hvastunov and Gushchev spent most of their time in the Moscow laboratories of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and from there they made a mental journey into the future, setting off for Siberia in the year 2007 in a wonderful jet plane.
I decided to give myself a fiftieth birthday present, which was to travel with this book right across Russia, from Moscow to Vladivostok. But I wouldn’t take the plane like Hvastunov and Gushchev. I’d already been there several times by train.
Good God!, I thought – here was my one chance to repeat the exploits of Kowalski, American warrior on wheels, demigod and lone traveller, the last heroic soul on this planet, for whom speed meant freedom. That’s how he seemed in Vanishing Point, the famous American road movie that in the 1970s was the rebel manifesto of my generation. Finally here was a chance to make a dream of my youth come true, and, just like him, drive alone across an entire continent, except that my one was two-and-a-half times bigger than America, there was no road beyond Chita, and I was insisting on going in winter. I absolutely had to get a taste of the winter in Siberia.
‘In winter? If you’re not home for Christmas, don’t bother coming home at all’, said my wife, and I know she wasn’t joking.
Damn! That meant I’d have to hurry up. Just like Kowalski! Except I was hurrying for Christmas, while he had made a bet for a fix of speed. And he had a Dodge Challenger 1970 with a 4.4-litre engine that did 250 kilometres an hour.
SPONSOR
All travellers have had problems with them, not excluding Columbus, Amundsen, Livingstone and Nansen.
The head of the features department said there was no way he’d send me abroad for several months, because I’d eat up the travel budget for the entire department.
So I personally called and sent written proposals for a joint project to the marketing directors of all the Polish firms representing car corporations that I could find in the phone book. I told them I needed money and a car, arguing that it would be the best advertisement they could possibly have if it survived the journey to the other end of Europe and Asia with me, across the whole of Russia, from Warsaw to Vladivostok.
Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Suzuki, Subaru, Mitsubishi, KIA, all the Asian makes, and also Volvo never replied to my invitation at all. I didn’t call the French firms, Fiat or Ford, because my brother, who knows about cars, said he wouldn’t let me go in a car starting with an ‘F’. BMW, Mercedes and Land Rover had no ‘free vehicle capacity’. Jeep was prepared to give me a car, but without any money. The only company to agree to all my conditions was Kulczyk Tradex, importer of Audis, VWs and Porsches.
They were offering a powerful, luxury SUV, the Audi Q7. Four-wheel drive, a 4.2-litre petrol engine, 350 horsepower, from nought to a hundred in seven seconds, maximum speed 240 kilometres per hour – two-and-a-half tons of bourgeois excess for 350,000 zlotys (£70,000). In my mind’s eye I imagined driving up to the shop at the run-down ‘Ilyich’s Dream’ collective farm for some beer and chatting about life with the locals.
Winter was approaching, but I kept putting off signing a contract with the sponsor. I can sum up the entire philosophy of my work as a journalist in two words: blend in. Merge into the background, don’t stand out, don’t attract attention, slip through unnoticed, but with my Audi at the ‘Ilyich’s Dream’ collective farm I’d be about as inconspicuous as a Martian. Besides, my way of working is very safe, because it doesn’t attract the attention of baddies.
I called the sponsor and told him I’d take the money,
but I wouldn’t need the car.
And so we parted ways.
In desperation I went to see my editors-in-chief. I tossed a map on the desk, told them about my dreams, and that I had just got divorced from Dr Kulczyk (who owns Kulczyk Tradex), and said that if they wouldn’t give me the money, I’d have to get it off my wife (because she holds the purse strings), but wasn’t it a shame for a poor woman to have to sponsor a successful newspaper like Gazeta Wyborcza? And they gave me some cash. However, it wasn’t enough for a car, so my wife did have to fork out 25,000 zlotys (£5000).
I decided to buy a Russian car with local number plates in Moscow, because then I could quietly make my way to the Pacific Ocean without sticking out like a sore thumb. The only Russian vehicles with four-wheel drive are the Lada Niva – which the local experts say can’t be fixed properly beyond the Urals – and the ‘Lazhik’ jeep, which even the tractor driver at any collective farm would be able to repair for me with a hammer, because apparently it’s the least complicated car on earth.
KRUZAK
The UAZ-469 (UAZ is the Ulyanovsk Automobile Factory) that I was looking for is known as the Soviet jeep or the Russki kruzak, because that’s what they call all off-road cars, after the Japanese Land Cruiser. But the most common names for it are Ulaz or Lazhik, meaning a tramp, because it goes everywhere. This model has been produced the same way without change since 1972, but they also keep churning out an off-road microbus, known because of its shape as the bukhanka – the loaf of bread. Beyond the Urals they call it the tabletka – the tablet, or pill. It hasn’t changed an iota since 1958. Both models weigh two-and-a-half tons each, they have petrol engines of 2.4-litre capacity, four-speed transmission and almost 72 horsepower.
Lazhiks were sold to eighty countries, mainly in the Third World. To this day there are 70,000 of them registered in Poland that remember the Council for Mutual Economic Aid and the Warsaw Pact. In the 1970s the Russians conquered the Sahara in these vehicles and climbed a glacier up Mount Elbrus to a height of 4200 metres. There are two million Lazhiks on Russia’s roads.