Free Ice Trilogy by Vladimir Sorokin­ Page B

heavy wings. I saw Siberian weasels and ermines several times. Scared by us, they shot up the trees in a flash and disappeared in the branches. There were two inveterate hunters among us: the driller Petrenko and the geologist Molik. At the first stop they set off for game and returned fairly quickly with a wood grouse. The large, beautiful bird was plucked, gutted, cut in strips, and boiled with wheat porridge, but its meat turned out to be tough and tasted like pine. During the first expedition Kulik had staked a lot on the local game, hoping to supplement the food with it. But he’d had no luck: during the expedition they had shot only an inedible fox and a few ducks. Our first night in the taiga wasn’t easy: we cut off pine branches and constructed beds for ourselves, lay down around the fire, and tried to fall asleep, covering ourselves with our outer clothing. But despite the warm summer weather an eternal cold was exuded by the stony, mossy earth, and it seeped through our clothes. From above, we were harassed by mosquitoes, which didn’t diminish in number even at night. Among the tribe of mosquitoes appeared tiny, nimble, furious individuals called midges. With a revolting whine they found their way up sleeves and crawled into the eyes and nostrils. It was impossible to fight them off. We took Kulik’s advice and rubbed our wrists and necks with kerosene. Soon the whole expedition began to stink like a kerosene shop. The next three nights were just as hard: people didn’t get enough sleep; they cussed and tried to escape the night cold and mosquitoes; during the day they shivered half asleep in their saddles. But Kulik was inflexible. He woke us at exactly six o’clock with the whistle he carried in his breast pocket, keeping the expedition on an iron schedule. He gave the commands for starting up and for stopping with this whistle. His main motto was: For the sake of a great goal you can put up with everything. In people he valued willpower and focus above all, and in the material world — books. Sitting with us at the campfire, he told us how Schopenhauer’s
The World as Will and Representation
helped him to stop smoking when he was in exile.
    “I had been reading it for days on end, and one morning I left my shack, walked over to the ice hole, and poured out an entire year’s supply of tobacco with the words: ‘Let the fish smoke. I — am a man of will.’”
    Like other social democrats who became Bolshevik, he lived for the future, piously believing in the new Soviet Russia.
    “Science should help the Revolution,” he would say.
    He thought GOELRO, Lenin’s plan to bring electricity to the whole country, was brilliant and prophetic, and that Stalin’s program of industrialization and collectivization was simply the dictate of the time. But his primary passion was still the Tungus meteorite. When he started talking about it, Kulik completely forgot about Stalin and GOELRO.
    “Just imagine, comrades, a piece of another planet, separated from us by millions of kilometers, broke off and is lying somewhere here, not far away.” Kulik paused, straightened his glasses, which reflected the flame of the campfire, and raised his head slightly toward the pale Siberian stars. “And in it is the material of other worlds!”
    This phrase gave me goose bumps: the familiar, beloved world of the planets surfaced in my memory. Falling asleep on a pile of pine branches, covering myself from the head down to escape the midges, I imagined that mysterious piece of other worlds in black airless space as it flew toward the Earth and shimmered with all the colors of the rainbow. It spun in my head. Plunging into sleep, I counted its corner s...
    Finally, toward the evening of the fourth day, swollen from midge bites and badly bruised from the jolting ride across the mounds, we approached Vanavara.
    A dozen new wooden houses clung to the very shores of the Stony Tungus River: a few years earlier the trading station at