The Udegeh hunters live for most of the winter in their individual territories. They depart the village in October, returning only for the New Year’s festivities.
1993
The Cold Wind
January, 1993
A few days ago, I pulled on a wool shirt, thick wool pants, a sweater, a polyester-fill vest, a quilted nylon parka liner, a U.S. Army Extreme Cold Weather parka, and my hat made from six sable skins, and walked down the street to the Far East Territorial Committee for Meteorology and Monitoring of the Environment. I wanted to know how cold and windy it got in Khabarovsk. But the chief meteorologist wouldn’t tell me unless I gave her 1,250 rubles (the cost of two kilograms of sausage). Never in my career have I paid a government agency for such basic information, I told her.
“This is outrageous.” I said. Then I gave her all the rubles I had in my wallet, 1,050 rubles. This is what she gave me in return: The average January temperature here is minus 22.3 Celsius (minus 8 degrees Fahrenheit) and can easily drop to minus 35 degrees Fahrenheit. Wind velocity is usually from two to five meters per second (4.5 to 11 mph) and mostly blows from the west. For no extra charge, she told me the ice on the Amur River is now one meter thick.
I thanked her and left the Far East Territorial Committee for Meteorology and Monitoring of the Environment with all the data needed to verify that this place is damn cold. Khabarovsk sits on the 49th parallel, about the same latitude as Paris. The westerly wind that warms Paris travels 5,000 miles before reaching Khabarovsk, passing over all of Europe and Asia. By the time it rattles my window, it has lost its European charm. Perhaps it lost it in Mongolia or Siberia. In any case, it has grown unruly and mean.
People here can’t hide from the wind. Most don’t own cars. They walk. Mothers wrap their toddlers in wool and fur and pull them down the sidewalk on sleds. Men undo the flaps of their fur hats, letting them hang over their cheeks so their heads look like half-frozen basset hounds. Young girls cover their noses with their mittens and hurry home. Because the buses and trams are poorly heated, the insides of their windows are caked with ice. Passengers scrape peepholes with their thumbnails.
Apartments offer no refuge. Many are cold. The entire city is heated with hot water boiled by three central power plants. The water is pumped through pipes buried below ground. Unfortunately, the pipes leak. This is why the hot water never reaches some radiators. It also explains why steam shoots from the ground everywhere, giving the impression that Khabarovsk is built on an active volcano. Be careful when walking at the streets here. Every few hundred yards there’s an open man hole. No one seems very concurred that these holes remain uncovered for months at a time. Try not to fall down one. Some of the holes are more than twenty feet deep, and once you reach bottom, you’ll find yourself trapped in the city’s heating system.
Yesterday, I went to the office of the deputy mayor to find out more about the system. When I arrived, two elderly women were waiting to see him. They had been waiting all morning. One said her water pipes had frozen and burst, flooding her flat with water. The same thing happened six times last winter, she said. The other woman told me her apartment is only zero degrees Celsius. She said her 94-year-old mother spent most of last winter lying in bed wearing all her clothes. By spring, she was dead.
“She had good health,” she said. “If it wasn’t so cold, she would be alive now.”
I was called in to see the deputy mayor. He looked tired. He told me Power Plant #3 suffered water pressure problems last week, leaving 500 apartments without heat for three days. The city’s power plants are poorly designed, he said, and 20 percent of the city’s pipes need to be replaced, but the city can’t afford it.
I tried to cheer him up with humor: “Please, I live at 7 Sheronava St., Apt. #128. Could you raise the temperature in my room by five degrees?”
He wrote down my address.
“No, no, it’s just a joke,” I said. “The temperature in my room is fine.”
The mayor, who had walked in during the interview, insisted I tell him the temperature in my room.
“It’s 18 (Celsius) degrees,” I said.
“That’s normal,” he said, laughing. He said he wanted to make sure that the city’s only American journalist stayed warm for the winter.
I said good-bye to the mayor and the deputy mayor. On the way out of the office, I looked for the two old women in the waiting room, but they were gone. I walked home. I pulled my flaps down over my ears and covered my face with a scarf. A light snow was in the wind, which seemed particularly strong and biting. As usual, it blew from the west, from Paris.
At the Chinese Border
January, 1993
The road to China is as flat and endless as a Texas highway. To the west, snow-covered wheat fields extend to the horizon. To the southeast, on the other side of the Amur River, we can see low, rounded mountains — Chinese territory. We’ve been driving southwest from Khabarovsk for about five hours. In the past hour, two squads of Russian boarder guards armed with machine guns have stopped us to search our car and examine our documents. Our car bucks like a mule as our Texas highway turns to dirt. A few hundred yards away, a Russian army helicopter hovers low to the ground.
“It seems we’re at the edge of the world,” I tell my traveling companion Odajima Toshiro, a 43-year-old reporter for the Japanese newspaper, The Hokkaido Shimbun Press.
“This is not the edge of the world,” Odajima says. “This is the middle of everything.”
Since the Sino-Soviet split in the 1960s, this region along the Amur River has been one of the most heavily militarized areas in the world. In the late 1960s, not far from here on an island in the Ussuri River, Chinese and Soviet soldiers fought each other in a small battle that left dozens dead. Both forces withdrew from the island, which today belongs to no one. But the cold war between Russia and China is over. Russia now sends military equipment across the boarder in exchange for hard currency. And Chinese merchants, by the thousands, are crossing the border to sell candy, wine, beer, cookware, neon-colored down jackets, fake Adidas sneakers, grey Chinese army coats. You see the Chinese everywhere in Khabarovsk, groaning under their unimaginably large bundles of trading goods.
The Amur River, a ribbon of ice one and a half miles wide and 1,800 miles long, forms the border between Russia and China for much of its course. In the summer, cargo boats cross the river. In winter, trucks drive across on the ice. At the end of one of these frozen highways, near the village of Leninskoya, stands a small Russian customs office. Metal containers, filled with cement manufactured at a local factory are stacked in the yard. The cement — something Russia has a surplus of — will be exported.
About 40 Chinese merchants, their pockets swollen with cash, are waiting to go through customs. They’re heading back home. Their canvass bags, once filled with goods, are empty now. There’s not much to buy in Russia, so the merchants have little to declare, except for some toys and souvenirs. In Khabarovsk, the Chinese cover their faces when I photograph them. But they are relaxed here and even smile for my camera. I try to talk to them, but it’s impossible without an interpreter. Finally, I try a word they might know:
“Nixon,” I say.
“Mao Tse-tung,” replies a man in a grey coat and black fedora.
Custom officials here say trade through this border point, the third busiest in the Far East, has been doubling every year since the mid-1980s. Last winter, 50,000 tons of goods were driven across the ice. This winter, more than 100,000 tons will cross, custom officials predict. So many people want to cross — about 7,500 last year — that the Russian government is building a dock for a ferry boat. In winter, there’s a bus. It leaves for China every afternoon.
Odajima and I had hoped to see the Chinese customs office on the other side of the river, but the Russian border guards won’t let us walk on the ice. I try taking photographs of trucks parked on the ice, but the guards apprehend me, saying it’s illegal to photograph the border. My captors take me to their chief, a beefy, grim-looking man. The chief announces that I’m the first American to visit this border point. He shakes my hand and smiles. Half criminal, half celebrity, I’m allowed to go free. I bid the guards good-bye and head back to the river bank. I’m just in time to watch the bus drive to China. The bus heads up-river. I watch it for about 10 minutes, until I can’t see it any more.
I Find an Honest Man
FEBRUARY, 1993
Vladivostok is a lively place, with lots of cars and people running about, although I can’t say I saw much of the city, since I was always squinting and rubbing my eyes as I walked down its crowded sidewalks. Strong winds from the Pacific kept whipping up dirt and blowing it into my face. In search of shelter, I ducked into the Vladivostok customs office, which sits on the harbor overlooking the Russian Pacific fleet. That’s where I met Valentine V. Vashnov.
“Our government just kicked us again,” mumbled a clean-cut, boyish-looking man as his paced about the lobby. “They just raised the tax from 7.5 to 15 percent. Don’t they want good products for our people?”
Vazhnov is a Russian yuppie. He owns a company that imports cheap consumer goods from Hong Kong, and the tax hike wipes out his company’s profits, he complained.
I didn’t come to Vladivostok to write about taxes, however. I came here to write about what Western journalist usually write about when they come to Vladivostok — organized crime, corruption, prostitution, the general moral degradation of Russian life. This Far Eastern port city of 700,000 people is notorious for such things. But when I stumbled upon Vazhnov muttering in custom’s office lobby, I quickly realized I had found someone very unusual.
Some of my Russian friends tell me there’s no such thing as an honest Russian businessman, that the men who make money in this country are either involved in organized crime or were part of the old Communist Party apparatus. But Vazhnov does not belong with either group. He an “American-style” businessman — the kind who pays his taxes, goes to church, donates to charity, loves his wife, and joins the local chamber of commerce. Vazhnov, 31, smokes Camel cigarettes and eats Snickers bars. He speaks English with an American accent. The face of his watch is emblazoned with an eagle and the phrase, “In God We Trust.” He carries an American-designed .38-caliber revolver that shoots copper canisters filled with tear gas. (Real guns are illegal in Russia.) Vazhnov says he needs the gas pistol to protect himself from gang members who might try to extort him.
Vladivostok is a rough place to run a business. For 50 years Vladivostok was a closed city because it served as headquarters of the Soviet Pacific Fleet. But now the city has returned to its earlier character as a wide-open international port. Last year, 1004 people, including 32 police officers, were murdered in Primorsky Krai — the strip of Russia tucked in between the Chinese border and the Japanese Sea. In the region’s biggest city, Vladivostok, the word most often on people’s lips is not democracy but mafia. In some neighborhoods, only residents with friendly contacts with local criminal groups feel safe.
Vazhnov has learned about the American way of business from reading U.S. magazines and autobiographies of American businessmen. (His favorite is Lee Iacocca.) Hard work, honesty, obeying the law, and competing fairly — this is how businessmen should behave, he said.
“I’m proud I’m honest,” he said. “I’m proud to pay my taxes. If everybody would be this way, our country would change.”
I didn’t have the heart to tell Vazhnov about our savings-and-loan scandal, or the Wall Street scandals, or the decline of our heavy industry. He should be reading the autobiographies of Japanese businessmen, I thought to myself.
But I said noting. I just listened as he talked about his new business venture — importing food, vitamins and medicine from his favorite country, the United States.
He plans to ship $70,000 worth of U.S. goods to South Korea this summer and then have them transferred to another ship bound for Vladivostok. He said he’s already received approval from a bank for a $50,000 loan.
I spent a day with Vazhnov as he drove around town conducting business. Like a good American manager, he keeps a tight schedule and constantly glances at his “In God We Trust” watch. He does almost every deal in person, since there are few telephones in Vladivostok. Even meeting with his accountant, who works at another job, required a rendezvous at a parking lot at a prearranged time.
At the end of the day, I asked Vazhnov to drop me off at the bank that’s loaning him the $50,000. I wanted to talk to the bank director.
“Don’t mention the loan to him,” Vazhnov pleaded. “He doesn’t know about it yet.”
The bank director didn’t know about the loan, all right, and didn’t know much about Vaznhov, either. But he knew Vazhnov’s wife. She works at the bank. She’s in charge of the hard currency loan department.
When I later met Vazhnov outside the bank, I asked him about this $50,000 loan.
“I’ve got a meeting. No time to talk,” he replied , scampering to his car.
That was the last time I saw Valentine V. Vazhnov.
By American standards, Vazhnov wasn’t so ethical after all, I suppose. But to the Russia mind, he would be a fool not to take advantage of his wife’s position. Is Vazhnov an honest man? He is in Russia.
The 11-Day Itch
FEBRUARY, 1993
By Tom Bell
I feel an itch on my right thigh. And on the left side of my chest. And under my left armpit. And under my chin. I’ve just itched my left ear lobe. Now my stomach wants a scratch.
I’ve been scratching myself for 11 days, and I can’t seem to stop. Tiny, prehistoric-looking creatures — smaller than ticks but fatter than fleas — have been crawling over my body. Apparently, they burrow under my skin to lay eggs. I’ve squashed 17 and captured six. Last week, I brought some live ones to a doctor at the Khabarovsk Regional Hospital. She eyeballed my prisoners and the scabby-looking bumps that covered my body.”Chesotka,” she said, with a look of disgust.
I looked up “chesotka” in my Russian-English dictionary. It said, “scabies, mange.”
Christ. I was bound to get it, I suppose. There’s an epidemic of scabies this winter in Khabarovsk. Twenty-two public bath houses have been closed in the region. City officials estimate 80 percent of the people who live in college dormitories and workers’ hostels are infected. Scabies is new to Khabarovsk, perhaps the result of deteriorating living conditions. Entire neighborhoods here lose their water supply for days and even weeks, so people aren’t as clean as they should be, a city official said.
You can pick up scabies from pets and furniture. I suspect the parasites jumped on me while I was sleeping on the train. Unfortunately, there’s a shortage of medicine to treat the condition. My doctor friend, Andre, took an afternoon off from work to help me hunt down some medicine. We visited every downtown pharmacy but couldn’t find anything. Finally, I went to the City Disinfection Clinic, where a nurse led me into a little room heated by a hot plate. She gave me a bottle partly filled with white liquid and told me to strip off my clothes. “Smear the ointment over your body,” she said. “Use it with the highest economy. You can only use the minimum of ointment I’ve given you.” She left the room with my clothing. When she returned 20 minutes later, the clothes were warm — freshly baked from the disinfection machine. She said the clinic treats 40 to 50 people a day.
“All my family’s infected,” said one young man waiting for his share of the white liquid. “It probably comes from all those clothes that Chinese are bringing into Khabarovsk.”
When I told my host family that my body was host to parasites, they banished me from the apartment. I went back to my doctor, and she phoned them, trying to calm their fears. They agreed to let me back in, as long as I stayed in my own room and ate on my own set of plates. The medicine at the clinic helped, but it wasn’t enough. So I shaved all my body hair. I now look like a very tall 8-year-old boy.
Four days ago, when the creatures seemed ready to launch a new assault, I counterattacked with vinegar. I splashed the vinegar on my body and clamped my jaws down to avoid screaming. I turns out (and how would I know?) that Russian vinegar is 25 times more acidic than the American kind. Russians commit suicide by drinking the stuff.
I tried to wash the vinegar off my body by siting in a tub on turning on the water. But there was no cold water coming out of the faucet. On this particular day for reasons that are beyond my understanding, only steaming hot water was coming out of the faucet. So I splashed the steaming hot water over my body for as much as I could stand it.
But at least the buggers would die, I thought,
Now I’ve got large red blotches — burned skin — on my legs, hands and stomach.
And I still itch.
Maybe I’ll go back to the disinfection clinic tomorrow. If they don’t give me some white liquid, I don’t know what I’ll do. Maybe I’ll trade my word processor for the stuff. Maybe I’ll just DRINK the vinegar this time.
Is there anything that gives me hope?
Yes.
I look on my desk, and I see a box of Kellogg’s Honey Smacks. I bought the box today at the store. It’s the first breakfast cereal I’ve seen in five months. It’s made by the Kellogg Company of South Africa. It tastes wonderful. Maybe some familiar food will lift me out of my despair.
“Speel jy’s Snap, Crackle of Pop,” it says on the box. “Jy kan Tony, Coco monkey of selfs Smack die Honey Smacks Padda wees…”
“Die Honey Smacks Padda wees.” I don’t know what it means, or even what language it is. But it sounds right.
Die Honey Smacks Padda wees. Die Die.
People of the Tiger 