White Fever by Jacek Hugo-Bader

Author:Jacek Hugo-Bader [Hugo-Bader, Jacek]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619021327
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

THE FOURTH CIRCLE – THE SUICIDES

I’ve seen various messes in my life, including more than one collective farm, but what I saw at Sarzhal passed all imagination. They say the nomad doesn’t respect his place, because no place is really his – tomorrow he’ll be leaving it and moving on.The Bolsheviks forced the Kazakhs to lead a settled life, but in more than ninety years they’ve never managed to get used to it. Even the very solid farmsteads that the Kazakhs bought from the Russian Germans when they left for the West (Stalin exiled them here in 1941), after three or four years were reduced to ruins. The gardens shrivel up, the paint peels, the fences and outhouses rot and fall over . . .

I spend the night at Daniar’s home. In the morning his cracked lip is still bleeding. We have breakfast – buckwheat with sour mare’s milk, known as rymchik, and we say farewell.

Here, although it’s a village, life begins somewhere around ten. They get up, do the milking and water the animals, if they have any . . . They move slowly, as if every day were Sunday. The men spend all day doing nothing, except changing the site of their confab – now on a metal bar sticking out of the ground for no reason, now on a fallen concrete pillar, a beam, or a heap of rubble . . .

The houses in the village are set out in several straight rows a good hundred metres apart – unusually broad for village streets. The idea was to chuck out the sewage from each private outhouse onto these very streets. Every few days a collective-farm bulldozer came along and in a single go cleared the entire street’s ‘output’ away from the buildings. But the collective farm has gone, and the broken bulldozer has been given away for scrap – though not all of it, because there was no way to lift it. Everything that could be unscrewed from it has gone for scrap. The rest stands in the middle of the street, buried in manure. It’s a veteran bulldozer, an exemplary worker bulldozer, a Hero bulldozer. It fell on the field of labour.

And so among the houses mighty slag heaps of sewage are rising, and even though we are on the icy, desert steppe, the entire village is covered in appalling, stinking mounds of frozen shit. Some people burn the tops of the mounds that have dried in the sun, but that doesn’t improve the situation at all, apart from making it harder to breathe.

Amid the piles of shit there are wrecked cars, pieces of concrete structures, piles of solidified cement in sacks, and rickety outhouses with wide open jaws, which every few days are shifted to perch above a different hole. There are lots of stray dogs everywhere, or rather dog skeletons coated in scabby skin. The cows and goats are let loose in the street to compete with them for refuse, children black with filth rummage with sticks in the rubbish heaps, while the men sit and stare.

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