On the Run in Siberia

3. Sable Furs for Sale

35 3 sable furs for sale One day in july 1999, I am tramping down the dry, dusty dirt road that serves as the main street of Nelemnoye . Almost three years after Uffe’s last visit in 1996, I am back in the village. I was here for the first time during the film expedition in 1993 and have come back twice since then, both times in winter. The fur project is more or less dead since Shalugin’s decline, and instead I am visiting the village to continue my field studies of the Yukaghirs and their spiritual culture. Like a Wild West town, the two-story houses stand peeling and dilapidated on each side of the street, surrounded by scrap heaps of ferroconcrete mesh, beams, rotten furs, and other garbage. In winter the refuse is covered in snow, but in summer it lies exposed on top of the permafrost, which is thawed down to a few inches’ depth, and the whole village stinks abominably of urine and kitchen waste. There are virtually no people to be seen. The air is too humid to stay outdoors . Only some poorly dressed children are playing in the middle of the road. They are throwing an empty bottle between themselves and yelling loudly. The temperature must be about 104 degrees Fahrenheit, and I am completely soaked in sweat. It is strange to think that the difference between the warmest and coldest temperature here is more than 180 degrees. Now I long painfully for the Siberian winter cold. The sun is roasting hot, and around my head swarm hundreds of mosquitoes : abnormally large, long-legged insects with needle-sharp stylets. It feels as if I am shut into a thermos flask full of insects. I have long A Vezdekhod, a Russian civilian tank. 36 . sable furs for sale since given up shaving, because my face is too swollen from the mosquito bites. Shalugin passes me in the street. He only barely salutes before hurrying on. When I arrived in Nelemnoye a month ago, I stayed in his house. But his wife Dusha’s shameless desire for my money got on my nerves, and I decided to move in with Ivan Danilov instead. Shalugin was of course extraordinarily offended, and now he does not speak to me anymore. I cannot help feeling pity for him all the same. After he was dismissed as obshchina director, he lost all his influence in Nelemnoye, and worse, people accuse him behind his back of drinking away all of the obshchina’s money. And who knows whether the powerful chiefs in Zyryanka—the mayor and police chief—also took their slice of the pie. But despite Shalugin’s tendency for corruption, I know that he did not act out of malice but out of a genuine desire to help the hunters to a better life. The problem was just that Shalugin could not handle the task. I myself feel a certain share of the responsibility for Shalugin’s sad fate. After all, I was the one who invited him and his family to Copenhagen. Besides, I was at least as intent as he was to start the fur project, which is now in ruins. In more than one way, Shalugin is my guilty conscience. To succeed Shalugin, the hunters have chosen Slava Shadrin, who is not just the new director of the obshchina but also a schoolteacher with a special interest in history and Yukaghir language and culture. I hardly know Shadrin and am a little surprised when he calls me to a meeting at the school. At the main entrance, I pass a white limestone bust of the Yukaghir author “Teki Odulok,” or Nikolay Spiridonov, as he was originally called. He is the one the hunters’ obshchina is named after. When I visited the school for the first time in 1993, a bust of Lenin stood there, but the Soviet “father figures” have been removed in accordance with the changes in the political climate. Teki Odulok was born into a poor Yukaghir family around the year 1900 but was sent by the Communist Party to Leningrad, where he was educated at the university. Later he had a prominent career as an author, in which he promoted the official rhetoric of the time, that the Soviet state had saved his people from eradication and brought them out sable furs for sale . 37 of their primitive, ignorant state...