that evening, Denis’s mother and father flatly forbade him going into the
taiga again. “He wanted to go,” said the huntress Baba Liuda, “but we
talked him out of it. We said, ‘Denis, you did not die in Chechnya. Your
mother cried day and night waiting for you.’ ”
Their neighbor Leonid Lopatin felt the same way about his son.
Lopatin is a rare Jew among the Slavs and natives along the Bikin. A
thoughtful man and a skilled hunter, he had worked as a truck driver for
the logging company before it closed down. Despite his rugged
circumstances, Lopatin’s ability to articulate psychological and
interpersonal nuance stands out among his blunt and forthright neighbors.
In the West, a certain level of psychological awareness—and the
language to go with it—is taken for granted now, but in Russia, with the
exception of some in urban, educated circles, this is virtually nonexistent.
Stoicism isn’t so much a virtue as it is a survival skill. Of the people in
rural Primorye, a longtime expatriate said, “Those folks are tougher than
nails and hardened from horrors.”^3 A Russian-American author once
quipped that what Russians needed after perestroika wasn’t economic aid
but a planeload of social workers, and this seems painfully true. One
reason people find it so difficult to describe how they feel is that they
have never been asked. It is understood that life is hard and men,
especially, are expected to suck it up and gut it out. If you need a
counselor, confessor, or escape hatch—that’s what vodka is for. Lopatin
makes his own and keeps it handy in a ten-liter milk can by his kitchen
table. “You’ve never had vodka like this,” he assures his visitors. “It
gives you better memories.”
Lopatin’s son, Vasily, was the same age as Andrei and Denis, and he,
too, had just returned from the army. Like them, he was an avid hunter
and trapper, but his father laid down the law: “As soon as I heard about
Markov,” Lopatin explained in his kitchen in Yasenovie, where he works
now as a scrap metal dealer, “I said to my son, ‘Vasya! We have no
business in the taiga any longer. It doesn’t matter how careful you are;
this animal can sneak up on you in the blink of an eye. Do not take one
step toward the taiga.’ My son was saying, ‘But we already put the traps