The Tiger (9 page)

The magnitude of such a move for a provincial like Markov cannot be underestimated. Beyond the language, nothing would have been the same, and many of his new acquaintances would have been outcasts of one kind or another. There was no tradition of serfdom in the Far East and, historically, the region has been a haven for a multiethnic rabble of bandits, deserters, poachers, fur trappers, and persecuted Old Believers (a conservative branch of Orthodox Christians), all of whom favored voluntary banishment over a wide range of unappealing alternatives. Add to this the exile population—both Russian and Chinese, and the Cossack soldiers sent by the czar to settle and guard this new frontier—and the results become uniquely volatile, more crucible than melting pot.

Today, the Bikin valley is seen by many outsiders as a place as dangerous for its human inhabitants as it is for its animals. It is dotted with small, isolated villages, many of which operate off the grid and outside the law. To a pair of foreign journalists, a friend of Markov’s once exclaimed, “You came here alone?4 Aren’t you afraid? Usually, outsiders only come in big delegations.”

Evidence suggests that Markov found this environment more liberating than frightening and, in Soviet Russia, liberty was a rare thing. In any case, Markov adapted and, ultimately, adopted this frontier as his home, and it may have been thanks to the army. According to friends and neighbors, Markov was trained in reconnaissance, and these skills—wilderness survival, orienteering, stealth, and the handling of arms—would serve him well in ways he never anticipated. Denis Burukhin, a young trapper from Sobolonye who knew Markov as Uncle Vova (a diminutive form of Vladimir), would later recall how Markov taught him to navigate the dense and trackless forest along the Bikin.

During his military service, Markov also became a paratrooper, maybe because he was strong and well coordinated, and maybe because—at five and a half feet tall (the same height as Stalin)—he had something to prove. If fate had taken one more twist, Markov and Trush could have been jumping out of planes together. Both men were in the army in 1969 and Trush was a paratrooper, too. Because he was eleven months older, he had already been assigned to a battalion in Turkmenistan, but after the Damansky clashes in the spring of 1969, his battalion was mobilized to Primorye. Only at the last minute were they recalled.

In the end, Markov never had to test his skills in battle, despite the fact that both Russia and China remained on a war footing for years after the Damansky incident.* The stakes were high enough that the Chinese and Russian premiers, Zhou Enlai and Alexei Kosygin, saw fit to meet personally in order to resolve the festering border issue. Although the meeting was considered successful, Moscow continued its Far Eastern troop buildup into the early 1970s.† By the time Markov was discharged from the army in 1971, his father was dead; ten years later, he lost his sister. Markov never returned to Kaliningrad (perhaps it was simply too far) and, according to his wife, Tamara Borisova, none of his surviving family ever visited Sobolonye. Had they taken the opportunity to do so, they probably wouldn’t have recognized the die-hard tayozhnik as their own.

* Nomenklatura, literally “list of names,” refers to the ruling elite of communist society who held key positions in all spheres of Soviet endeavor. The privileges they enjoyed and the proportion of the population they represented bore striking resemblances to those of the nobility under the czar.

* According to R. Craig Nation, the Far Eastern theater of operations during this period [1970s and ’80s] came to “absorb no less than one-third of Soviet military assets.”5

† Damansky/Zhen Bao was formally ceded to China by Boris Yeltsin in 1991.

The tiger answered, “Your son has been boasting. If he is the stronger, let him kill me; if I am the stronger, I will kill him. Tell him my command!”“The Brave Gilyak and the Grateful Tiger,”

COLLECTED BY L. Y. STERNBERG, c. 19001

IT HAD BEEN ANDREI ONOFRECUK, A SHORT MAN WITH NICOTINE-varnished fingernails and a stove-in nose, who had first discovered Markov on Thursday, one day prior to Inspection Tiger’s arrival. Onofrecuk was a regular at the cabin, and the two men had agreed to meet there to do some ice fishing. But Onofrecuk had gotten drunk and was late—by about a day. After hitching a ride to the turnoff, he had gone the last half mile on foot, arriving close to noon. The first thing he noticed was blood by the entrance road. “I didn’t quite understand at first what was what,” he recalled. “Maybe Markov shot some animal and didn’t clean up after himself. I was surprised. Usually, he is really careful about that kind of thing. The hunt is not legal after all, and you know there might be rangers coming. So then I started walking, thinking: what the hell is going on? Then I saw his hat. It was as if I’d been clubbed over the head. I stopped thinking clearly. I had a bad feeling, but I still couldn’t understand what was happening. Then I saw the tiger tracks.

“So, I’m thinking: maybe he’s just hurt. Maybe I could help him. I walked some more, past pieces of his clothes. I saw the dog’s paw sticking out of the snow. I went a bit further, but the tiger didn’t let me any closer. I couldn’t see Markiz—neither him nor her. [In Russian, tigers are often referred to in the feminine, like ships.] But I heard her growling. I couldn’t figure out which direction it was coming from, but I knew then that she’d got him. Right there, that fucking carrion eater’s got her meat-head down, growling over him. So I stood for a little while, and then I slowly turned around. I was thinking, the main thing was not to start running because then she would run after me—eat me.”

Onofrecuk was unarmed. He made his way back to the cabin and started a fire in the cold stove. He was in shock. “My head became empty,” he recalled. “Like a vacuum. You know, it was hard to understand—he was my friend, after all. So many years out there together.”

He sat in Markov’s cabin, drinking tea and smoking cigarettes, one after the other, for a long time. It took him three tries before he could summon the nerve to leave the cabin to go for help. Onofrecuk was ten years younger than Markov and saw him as something of a mentor. While he was fond of reading, he was not ambitious and he lacked the skill and patience required for beekeeping or fur trapping. He was, primarily, a meat hunter and fisherman—often under the supervision of Markov—and he lived day to day. They shared the cabin and fought like brothers, but they always made up. Markov had been his best friend.

Nonetheless, that night, it fell to their mutual friend, Danila Zaitsev, to tell Tamara Borisova what had happened to her husband in the forest. Markov had not been home in nearly a month and Borisova was eager to see him. “The scariest thing was telling his wife,” recalled Onofrecuk. “I was afraid to go to her house by myself, so I asked Zaitsev to come with me. But I couldn’t go in. I stayed on the road. ‘Go,’ I told him. ‘Tell her.’ Because the image of him there—it was like I’d just seen him.”

Danila Zaitsev—skewed nose, furrowed brow, penetrating eye—is a tough and steady man, and he went in to face Borisova alone. He tried to be as gentle as he could, but who knows how to say such things? “I wanted to choose the words carefully,” Zaitsev explained. “I told her that a tiger had attacked him and, at first, she didn’t understand. She thought he had survived.”

So Zaitsev tried again while Onofrecuk stood listening on the dark and frozen road. He knew when Zaitsev told her by the screaming.

Borisova seemed to go out of her mind then: she was a maelstrom, grieving mad. She insisted on seeing her husband, demanding him in ways that were hard for his friends to deny. Wisely, they refused to allow it. They had sequestered Markov’s remains at the home of an old man named Kuzmich, a carpenter who lived alone at the edge of the village. Onofrecuk and Zaitsev gathered some planks of Korean pine for a coffin, and Kuzmich built it—full size. But Markov could not be buried right away because Borisova had ordered a new suit for him. That there was virtually nothing to put in it was beside the point. Borisova’s world was tilting badly and she needed some order; she needed her husband to be buried in a suit. Her friends obliged her, but the round-trip to Luchegorsk, the nearest shopping town, would take a day. In the meantime, Markov’s friends went to the village cemetery to prepare the grave.

The cemetery is laid out on a forested knoll about half a mile south of the village, where it is overseen by a massive, dead Korean pine. The cemetery is small, not only because Sobolonye is so new, but because the people hired to work for the company and thereby allowed to live in the village were generally too young to die. Nonetheless, some of them have and so there is a high proportion of small children and young people represented there—some by Orthodox crosses of crudely welded steel, others by crosses of brightly painted wood, a few by formal gravestones. If the family can afford it, an enameled photograph of the deceased will be mounted on the grave. Today, the graveyard is the only place one can view a likeness of Vladimir Markov.

Compact and solidly built, Markov had high cheekbones, melancholy-looking eyes, and an athlete’s chin. Both Onofrecuk and his wife, Irina, noted a certain “Gypsy” quality about him. Tamara Borisova put it a bit differently, saying, “He was a Russian, but there was something Armenian or Georgian about his face.” Its effect was not wasted on her: Markov was handsome, with olive skin; dark, wavy hair; and blue-green eyes. Short as he was, he was still exceptionally strong: before Sobolonye’s disco burned down, Markov used to help out there, and Borisova recalls him carrying 100-liter beer kegs (about 25 gallons) with ease (full, these weigh about 250 pounds).

After the army, Markov had gone to a technical school for logging and, from there, to work in the woods in southern Primorye, not far from a town named for the explorer Arseniev. Around 1980, when Markov was in his late twenties, he moved up to Sobolonye, which offered both better prospects and an opportunity to put some distance between himself and a failed marriage. Sobolonye had been carved out of the forest a few years earlier by the Middle Bikin National Forest Enterprise, a state-owned logging company that had been set up to log the old-growth poplar, oak, and pine throughout the Bikin valley. Primorye contains some of the biggest and most varied timber anywhere east of the Urals and, at the time, the middle and upper Bikin were largely unexploited.

Sobolonye is the last settlement at the end of a road that, when not buried in snow, can go from choking dust to sucking mud in the space of an hour. At its peak, the village was home to about 450 people who lived in small log houses built in haphazard tiers on a hillside above the river. The place has the feel of a North American mining town circa 1925, only with fewer straight lines. There are no sidewalks or paved streets, and no plumbing; the houses are heated with wood, and water is drawn from common wells. Telephones—of any kind—are a rarity. Electricity, which was viewed as a symbol of modernity by the Soviets and a means of keeping pace with the West, is provided by a diesel generator on the edge of town. Where the village ends the taiga begins, stretching away for miles in all directions.

For a certain kind of person, Sobolonye offered a life that was hard to improve on: decent housing, predictable employment, ready access to a river full of fish, and, for those who knew what to look for, a forest full of nuts, berries, mushrooms, medicinal roots, and wild game. In the summer, you could even grow watermelons. The logging company was as generous as the forest, providing a school, clinic, library, general store, recreation center, and even a hairdresser. Sobolonye, at the time Markov arrived, was a place of optimism and fresh starts, and the young people who settled there felt lucky. From their vantage, communism worked: here, it truly seemed that Man, Nature, and Industry could coexist for the common good. Most of these young men and women had arrived from other parts of the Far East, including Khabarovsk Territory and Sakhalin Island. Some had done time in the far north. They were a rugged, salty bunch, and many of the women worked, hunted, drank, and occasionally fought alongside the men. Markov and Borisova had met in the forest when she was working as a log trimmer and he was sorting logs. She was divorced, too, and she couldn’t believe her good fortune. “At first, when I was with him,” she recalled, “I felt as if I were in heaven. I would ask myself, ‘Could I be so lucky?’ He helped me with everything.”

They had a son together in 1982, raising the number of children under their roof to four. Her new husband’s affection for young children impressed Borisova deeply. “He was so unconditionally kind, it was almost painful,” she explained. “If someone’s child got ill, he would heat lynx fat and take it to him, even if it was the last drop. He would give you the shirt off his back.”

Like many people who live in small communities, Markov seemed to have a wide variety of jobs and skills. He was a competent welder, and even fabricated a Soviet Hammer and Sickle for the local school. In addition to this and forest work, he pulled shifts at the village generator station with Danila Zaitsev, and moonlighted at the disco in the rec hall. Markov had been trained as a log sorter, truck driver, and heavy equipment operator, but these are common skills in the logging industry. What set Markov apart was his personality: he was funny and charismatic, and people liked being around him. He could always wring the humor out of mundane situations, and there are a lot of those in a place like Sobolonye.

Irina and Andrei Onofrecuk told the following story one winter afternoon over a cup of gut-wrenching tea: “One time,” Andrei began, “Markiz spent the night here in our house. Our youngest son, Ivan, was very little—couldn’t walk yet—and Irina brought him into the room where Markiz was sleeping …”

“I put Ivan down in the chair,” continued Irina, “close to the bed, and Markiz’s hand is hanging like this [palm up]. I gave Ivan a bit of food and said, ‘Be careful, it’s hot.’ Well, he took a bite, and then he put the rest into Markiz’s hand.”

The food was hot enough that it woke him up. Without missing a beat, Markov emerged, joking, from a sound sleep. Playing on “Ivan,” as in Ivan the Terrible, he exclaimed, “Oh! Father Czar himself is feeding me.”