Free Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin­ Page A

whitefish; three barrels of salted white salmon; a small barrel of lard; and a couple of bags of fish flour. Having bathed and sat in the Siberian steam bath, we gave ourselves over to the hospitality of the local leader, a former chairman of the agricultural soviet and local director of Gostorg. He treated Kulik like an old pal, showed him an article clipped from a Taishet newspaper about last year’s expedition. The fellow was most happy that we had “made it all the way here from Petersburg, where Ilyich set up a real carousel for the bourgeois.” A former Red partisan who had fought in the Urals, after the Bolsheviks’ victory they sent him to distant Kezhma “to carry out the Party line.” Arriving here with a cavalry squadron, he “definitively and irreversibly decided the question of Soviet power in Kezhma” over the course of three days: he shot twelve people.
    “Now I understand — I should have shot more,” he admitted to us candidly over a glass of alcohol diluted with the cold Angara river water.
    In Kezhma he had two wives — the old one and a new one — who got along wonderfully and made a real feast for us: the long, crude table in the director’s isba was groaning with victuals. Here, for the first time in my life, I tried dumplings with bear lard and
shangi
— little wheat cakes fried on a skillet and covered with sour cream. The boss knew only one thing about the meteorite: “Something crashed there and knocked the forest down.” He was categorical in his parting words, advised us not to stand on ceremony with the Evenki, and if necessary to “beat them between their slanted eyes with a rifle butt.” He attributed the failure of last year’s expedition entirely to the sabotage of the native population and Kulik’s “rotten softheartedness.” He referred to the Evenki as Tunguses and saw them as hidden enemies of Soviet rule.
    “At first I thought: they live in tents in the taiga, eat simple, dress simple, shit in the open — of course they’ll support Soviet power. But it turns out they’re more kulak than the worst kulaks! All they do is count who has the most reindeer. They need their own revolution! A Tungus Lenin is what they need!”
    Kulik tried to object, saying that the main problem of the backward peoples of the USSR was general illiteracy, which had been advantageous to the czarist regime for exploiting them; that the Party had already begun working on this, organizing isba reading rooms and schools for the indigenous people; and that the Evenki, like all the peasants and animal herders, would soon be collectivized. But the headman was unswayable.
    “Andreich, if it was my job, I’d collectivize them in my own way: into a cart, to the city with them, do the dirty work, the digging. The shovel will reeducate them! And I’d slaughter all the reindeer and send them off to the starving peasants of the Volga region.”
    “We conquered famine in the Volga region two years ago,” Kulik informed him proudly.
    “Really?” smiled the tipsy, red-faced boss. “Well, then, we’ll eat the reindeer ourselves.”
    In the morning we donned our backpacks, having placed in them only the necessary provisions, saddled up the local horses, and set off along a narrow path beaten down by the reindeer. From Kezhma to the Stony Tungus River we had another two hundred kilometers north to travel. The wagon train with the main baggage took off after us.
    The tract passed through hills and mounds. Uphill we rode at a walk, going down we drove our slow, broad-chested horses as fast as we could. They got extremely frightened when there was a long descent. Then — up a hill once again, and so on, endlessly.
    On the mounds the taiga changed: pine gave way quickly to conifers, and the mixed forest crawled down into a valley; the land gradually became covered with moss and lichen. Animals could be seen frequently. The men met them with cries. Wild birds flew up from the thickets, flapping their