Friday, February 7, 2014

To wait (inspired by the Russian documentary about life in Siberia “Happy people”)

She gets used to wait. Once he told her this phrase and it stuck in her mind. Every time she feels worn-out and weak she just replays his words again and again in her mind. And it seems give her a strength to move on.
Our nature found a right place for everyone - animals, plants, birds, fish – but a man. We have to find our place and our calling ourselves. Those who found THEIR place on the Earth are happy people. That’s what he said. And it looks like he found it; he found the very spot and the very moment where he was destined to be. Otherwise how would he survive there, all alone with taiga for more than three months in a row?
Tatyana’s husband is not gabby at all – all hunters in taiga are more used to birds whistling and snow crunching than to human speech. But sometimes when he is a little moony or just can’t fall asleep at night after coming home from his hunting sector he talks. A wooden, firmly felled house seems to be too silent for him after last 90 nights in a tiny log cabin in the middle of a wild forest. He shares with her thoughts that passed through his mind during long days and nights with no one for hundreds of kilometers around. There are a lot of deep insights but there is never enough time to finish them. There is always something much more urgent to do – work, everyday survival in the cold, dogs, forest to take care of.
Hunters don’t carry with them all these fetishistic crap like photos, lockets, coins. Space in their luggage is very limited. He just remembers. He remembers the sound of his daughter’s laughing when he carried her on his back around the whole house. He remembers Tatyana’s warm breath on his callous hands when she helped him to unbutton his frosted coat.
Nobody ever asked him why he hunts, why he spends half of the year in taiga using every opportunity to get fish or precious arctic fox. Everyone knows the answer. A hunter has a family to take care of. So it was through hundreds of years.   
To wait isn’t the hardest thing to do. In fact, Tatyana never has time to torment herself over her husband when he is out of village, hunting somewhere in the impenetrable thickets of taiga. There is no energy left for it after the whole day of cooking, cleaning the snow, heating the house, taking care of kids and other millions of things to do in her big household.
However, painful moments are those skimpy conversations through the radio when she barely unscrambles a couple of words (all people in the village use the same radio line to talk to their relatives). He is ok, dogs are fine, and kisses to children. She waits for that call for weeks and it’s usually done in 2-3 minutes. If it works at all because the radio signal in taiga is mutable. And she is waiting again.
The hardest days are last three days before his comeback. Tatyana feels unable to settle down, her house fish pie gets overcooked and kids suddenly become naughty. She never knows when exactly he shows up because it depends on Yenisei River, on amount of snow, on weather, on his snowmobile and tons of other factors. It took her a while to get used to this uncertainty. She still winces every time she hears a drone of the motor from the street. Every minute she is ready to run out of the house to meet him.

But there are moments when she knows that they ARE those happy people he was talking about. When they sit side-by-side with all other villagers in the small, decorated concert room of their local school and look at their children singing and dancing in a circle around a New Year’s tree.  She hears their daughter’s joyous laughter and feels her husband’s protecting arm around her shoulders… It’s worth to wait. 

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