12.1 An Abyss of Bitterness

As the sun rose next day, that shaman woman entered the room holding a tray of hot soup and a roll of bun. Tyler Friesen opened his eyes and almost screamed to see this woman wearing a smile on a long and wrinkled face with clear-cut cheekbones under the sockets of deep flitting eyes. He separated his frozen toes as he felt them holding together under the socks. Tyler lay in a narrow wooden bed with a thick sheet of blanket thrown on him, crocheted in wool, grey in colour with a broad red stripe, embellished with glass beads and sequins that spilled in fragments on the mattress. Tomam belonged to the folks who spoke the Ket language…he learnt later. Very few of those indigenous people remained in Krasnoyarsk Krai in the Yenisei basin and fewer families left in this colony in Turukhansk. Rest of the folks looked white like Europids or Slavs and fewer identified as Cossacks; at one time an ethnic minority in this region.

All the interior walls were plastered white and a yellowish hue filled this little room in the log cabin. He cracked his joints and stretched his arms to reach a small window on the wall. He could see a picket fence painted white and birch trees with orange leaves even at this time of the year. Some green grass and dark soil covered the surrounding with a yellowish gloom filling the entirety. Through the foliage, Tyler observed a cloudy sky. Tomam spoke fluent Russian and much of the Ket traditions were censured in the Soviet era, replaced with new reforms of collectivism.

It was by all means his luck that he did not have to go knocking on doors for home hunting. A short man popped at the doorway to the Ministry of Interior where Tyler would attend every ten days to sign a book. He wore a nomadic regalia of a more contemporary material and headgear, his eyes greyish and staggered in strides, who proposed his place to stay. He could be a reindeer hunter or a harvester of furs who might be looking for a hand to work in his trade trapping minks, squirrels and foxes. He was Erkin, Tomam’s father, and his intention was purely generous, nothing else.

There were log huts under the birch trees rather scattered and green grass in the surrounding. There were no roads or automobiles but he noticed a yellow-painted phone booth and a post office nearby. To his knowledge, it could not support a call to Motherland Russia – not to mention long-distance. This was a neatly kept village with cables running over empty fields and a diligent folk as he suspected a little bakery in one of the huts. A vodka shop and a canned food shop, a small school and a local paper with a mail service during the summer.

A large shelter loomed somewhere and he was told that it was the Cossacks trading house as this region thrived in the 17^th century with expeditioners who came to exploit the land of taiga and tundra for furs of sables and walrus tusks to be sold in Scandinavia. Turukhansk was their last outpost and even after their defeat and the fires of Mangazeya, they held on to this fortress till 1822 when the uyezd town began to observe a rapid decline in its population.

Turukhansk was often a destination for political exile. Among them were Joseph Stalin, Suren Spandaryan, Julius Martov, Yakov Sverdlov and Ariadna Ephron.

Tyler had already seen the huts where Sverdlov and Spandaryan stayed in Turukhansk and the pantheon erected to Stalin in Kureika by Norillag prisoners – 100 km further north along the river. A huge building twelve metres high and walls covered with scarlet velvet, outside finished in light grey plaster with mica and marble chips. Inside this pantheon stood a squat log fisherman’s hut. All ships sailing along the Yenisei were required to moor at a local pier for two hours and passengers instructed to go down and visit this memorial. Nonetheless, Stalin died a year after it was built and the pantheon was closed. It still remained in pretty good shape however vandalised and portraits stolen. The monument raised to Stalin, ten metre snow-white sculpture that stood by the pantheon, was taken down from its pedestal in December 1961, tied to a tractor and dragged to the Yenisei River where it was drowned in an ice hole.

Tyler Friesen learnt all that from the Lithuanian who was exiled in 1935. “Stalin had an affair with a local girl called Lydia Pereprygina, fourteen-year-old orphan,” Lithuanian told him, “She gave birth to a son. Stalin never saw him.” Among those prisoners he met; two Germans, a Russian priest, a Eurasian migrant and a convict. Those murmurs of death, torture, rape and forced labour in the camps run by the GULAG were alarming.

Between the leaves of a notebook left in a small pile of books on the table, he discovered a photograph of a little girl wearing pigtails and clear eyes. On the back of the photograph, it was written ‘Ariadna Sergeevna Efron - 1926’ in black ink. Tyler wondered having his breakfast by the table draped with a piece of shiny red silk on the linoleum floor.

That bowl of hot soup gave him strength in the cool morning in midsummer to begin his life in the harsh nature of taiga on the mouth of the Tunguska River while exiled to a village dissolved from the map. It took three days to chase the wild Yenisei to the clay-cut shores, grey wooden huts, stunted fir trees and an endless spillage of water – its horrors and beauty of its own kind. There was no horizon to define sky and earth in this infinite abyss of bitterness – having drunk it so early.

The indigenous folks and their attitudes could not be invented. There wasn’t a door he knocked he was not refused. He fell on his knees realising that death was on his shoulder. Peasants lived an ordinary life and the women who drowned in vodka, wearing little red skirts and cotton panties, swear in drunken voices.

Following day, a man came and took Tyler to the MVD bureau. This Lithuanian was summoned. He wore a leather overcoat and a hoodie, glanced once and took his eyes away until he was called to help as an interpreter. He dropped his hoodie and joined. Long grizzly hair and a strong moustache, eyes brown, around seventy years of age. Tyler Friesen was offered a job at the primary school to teach English and Arithmetic. He would earn 50 rubles a week and it was a good start. That would buy him bread and wood to keep himself warm. That was how he came to know this Lithuanian, Jõnas Katinas.

Five days a week, Tyler attended the school and soon he discovered those kids able to read the alphabets in English and the numerals to a great extent. Tyler who never taught a class tried his own tactics. He wrote, ‘pen’, ‘den’, ‘hen’, ‘ten’, ‘men’ on the blackboard. When he read out the first word, his pupils could read the rest picking the phonetics and the sound of the consonants. He wrote, ‘ball’, ‘call’, ‘wall’, ‘fall’, ‘hall’ – it worked. Next, he taught how to write on single-ruled books. Tyler wrote the first line on every book and dotted the letters to begin the next line. The kids were able to fill the dots and complete the exercise on their own. They were too clever to grasp the operational methods of addition and subtraction.

One day he thought to teach something else and scribbled on the blackboard 1 to 10. He began to read in Deutsch of little he knew.

“Eins, Zwei, Drei, Vier, Fünf, Sechs, Sieben, Acht, Neun, Zehn…”

They laughed. They were enchanted and the kids asked him to do it again.