Leonid Lopatin has done the same. With no prospects in Sobolonye,
Denis Burukhin moved to Luchegorsk where a friend helped him get a job
at the power plant. The trapper-poet Tsepalev left, too, saying that if he
stayed, he would drink himself to death. Andrei Onofreychuk stayed in
Sobolonye; unemployed and debilitated by alcoholism, he hanged himself
in the fall of 2007. That winter, the village administrative offices burned
down. Baba Liuda, Irina Peshkova, Lida Burukhina, and the Pochepnya
and Onofreychuk families have all stayed on, captives of inertia and the
comfort of the known. Danila Zaitsev, alone, seems to have remained of
his own volition. A model of stoicism under duress, he continues to keep
the village generator running, and also works as a heavy equipment
mechanic for a private logging company where he is held in high regard
by his co-workers.
Vladimir Markov’s wife, Tamara Borisova, has remained as well, but
she has never fully recovered from Zaitsev’s terrible news that evening,
so many years ago. Her sons have stayed by her, and they see to her
needs, but her face is a mask of grief, and her loss seems to replay itself
daily in her mind. She spends her days fishing on the Bikin in all weather,
often alone. Her husband’s caravan is gone now, and so are his beehives,
but her boys have built a cabin of their own a hundred yards to the west.
In the eyes of the law, they are poachers, but there is nothing else and, in
the Panchelaza, poaching isn’t what it used to be. “They’ve logged a lot
of the forest,” said Markov’s son, Alexei. “The ecology has deteriorated.
The Bikin used to be a deep river, but now, you can walk across it.
They’ve built roads all over the taiga, and a lot of people are coming here
now [for hunting and fishing].”
Alexei wears boots identical to those his father died in, and he labors
over a motorcycle of the same make and color his father once had. Many
of Alexei’s happiest memories are of working with his father at his apiary
and, even as he approaches thirty, one can see in his eyes the sad vacancy
left by the man from whom he learned to love the taiga. Alexei has since
planted a Korean pine at the site where his father’s remains were found,
and surrounded it with stones. There is a cup there, as there is by his
grave, so that visitors can remember him with a vodka toast. “Whenever
ron
(Ron)
#1