To RUSSIA with LOVE

Press, 27 July 1989, Page 13

To RUSSIA with LOVE

Concluding instalment of a two-part story

LOREN ROBB, an Auckland film producer, spent much of 1987 in the Soviet Union and developed a special relationship with Kolya, a boy living in Nakanno, an Evenki village near the Arctic Circle in Siberia, and away from his problem Yakut home. Robb, whose marriage had broken up and who had no children, yearned for a parental role. He returned this year to Nakanno and a few weeks ago came back to Auckland accompanied by Kolya for a two-month visit. Today Robb concludes his two-part story.

At THE AGE of 13 a boy is at an awkward stage. It’s a time of passage, the transition from young child to young man, a time when he seeks support and a model. Kolya, instinctively desperate for this, despite having a village of adults to choose from, had somehow chosen me. I talked to him myself about it later. “Kolya,” I said, holding on to his hands, “I heard today about your family.” Kolya sat grim and silent. “If you want, I can be like a father for you, but only while I’m here. Perhaps after I go we can write to each other.” Kolya stared at me and I couldn’t interpret what was in his eyes. He has a handsome young face, skin brown as autumn, large Orient eyes as black as birchbark. But it; gives away little. Without warning and without a word he stood up, pulled away his hands, anil walked out.

He came back late in the evening. He . was very tense, nervous, upset. "I want to talk to you,” he said grimly. I followed him outside into the chill dark. He waved at the forest all around the village. “I’m 13,” he ■ said. “I’m not a child. I go alone into the forest. It’s forbidden! for children.” I nodded. I knew this. The forest is dangerous, the domain of wolves.

“I’m brave,” he said. “I’m not a baby. I hunt and fish. By myself. If an animal attacks, I kill it.” He acted all this out in front of me, the solitary forest walk, the attack by a bear or wolf, his bravery, the kill. “I don’t think you’re a baby,” I said. “I know you’re big now, and strong.” “And brave,” he said. "I don’t need to have parents. 0.K.” “0.K.” I nodded. He stood facing me, almost trembling with the importance of what he was telling me. “You are my friend,” he said. His mouth started to wobble. “Not my father.” And then he began to weep. I folded him up in my arms and he held me terribly tight, shuddering with sobs.

“Sometimes,” I said, “It’s all right to be a child. Just to be a boy once more.” We didn’t talk about this again. I never mentioned the word "father” any more, and I never suggested we were anything but simple friends. Yet Kolya had walked into the gap I have held all my life for a child, and I’d walked into a gap in his life, too. The magnetism between those two gaps, like the attractive pulse of two awesome black holes in space, could be felt, irresistible between us.

A few evenings later we filmed the boys from the school in their weekly bath session. The children stoke up the wood stove in their own little bath house behind the school until it’s as hot as a Scandinavian sauna. There they frolic for an hour or more, soaping and rinsing each other until they shine. Then, hot and clean, they run naked out into the frozen night, rolling in the snow at an incredible temperature of minus 52 degrees. But what fascinated me more was that they washed each other. There’s a kinship between all these people which binds them like family. After the filming, Kolya asked me to stay back. “I want to wash you,” he said, when everyone had left. And quietly, with an almost Japanese grace and care, he proceeded to do that, lathering me from head to foot, and cleaning me with gentle affection, rinsing me with water he had delicately mixed for temperature. I think, for Kolya, this gift was a symbol of his fellowship with me. I tried to explain to him about my departure. He needed, I told

him, to accept our relationship as the necessarily brief one it was, though meaningful. He shook his head. “Now that we’ve met,” he said, “nothing can separate us. Only kilometres.” There’s a deep and simple wisdom about these people that I love. One day in the last week I was talking again to Kolya. He’d asked incessant questions about Western life, and seen many photographs. I made the comment that where I came from life was less risky than in Nakanno, less potentially threatening to survival. “Yes,” he said. “I think in your place you have no dangers now, from wolves, or from cold. And we do.” I agreed. We had

conquered most of that. “But I think,” he went on, rather unexpectedly, “that you have dangers from each other. And we do not.” In growing awe at the unconscious profundity of this statement I remembered the one amazing fact that seems now most relevant of all. This boy, this incisive, perceptive boy, is just 13 years old. But his wisdom is not unique, nor learned, or dependent on his age and experience. I think his wisdom is natural, a sense of simple truth which I - am calling humanity, and I think it was born in him as it is in all his Arctic people. All the time I was in Nakanno I thought that I was teaching Kolya about my life, my skills, and the technology of my world.

But I never realised until the end that he had been teaching me as well, not just the art of survival in his brutal environment, but a lesson far more important than anything I had to offer him. I saw now that I came from a society so skilled in technology that I was in constant danger of forgetting that there was anything else.

We can surround ourselves with material protections against real life. We can unwittingly become what we own, what we wear, what we buy. In Kolya’s village there are no protections. Life is raw and harsh. People are what matter, and people in that village know who they are. Not what they wear, for they all wear the same clothes. Not what they achieve

materially, for what they achieve is survival. Not how well they conquer nature, for they do not, rather they exist within it, in a natural harmony. Eighteen months ago I left Kolya in that village. I did not want to. And perhaps I needn’t have. Kolya himself made it a tough decision. Our departure day inevitably arrived. We heard the biplane, as you can in the still of a Siberian winter, 10 minutes before it was visible. When it landed, we were ready to get aboard. I hung around beside the aircraft, hesistant about getting on. The other villagers stood back from the biplane. There was a shout from inside for me. I pulled Kolya into me and hugged him. “You know that I’ll write,” I

said. He drew my head down and pressed his mouth to my ear, whispering at last the special word that had hung unsaid between us.

“Just be my father,” he breathed in my ear. In the days after I left, I found myself stitching together the pieces of a new story, a fiction about a Western man and a Siberian boy. I was trying, of course, to say something of what I am touching on here, about the difference between a vast technological society and a tiny human one. I think there’s an important truth in here somewhere, that as individuals, as societies, even as nations, we must begin, not to patronise one another but to love and to share one another, to give what we have. We can all teach what we know. We must also learn what we need to know. Admitting that is hard sometimes. The story is called “The Yatut Lesson” and it’s a personal story. I’ve been lucky it has attracted some attention. It’s planned now as a movie, a feature film, which will be the first co-production between New Zealand and the Soviet Union. Kolya’s gift to me then can be a gift to any audience who have the wit to see the truth. And luckily, too, this movie, or rather its development, has brought me back here. At last. I’ve been writing this for an hour or so now. I know that the village must be nearby, somewhere below us in the thawing winterland, this early Spring. I have spent the last 18 months back in New Zealand. Kolya and I have written to each other throughout that time. Recently I wrote and told him I was coming back. Best of all, I surprised him with other news — that I’d gained permission to take him to New Zealand for a holiday. His last school examinations

this year were on June 10. Soon, his northern school year over, he will fly with me to see my country, my culture, and my home. I feel like a father, gathering up my missing son. But I can’t help wondering what it is like for him. Does he feel like a son? Waiting for my arrival. Right now I imagine him, hearing this old biplane 10 minutes before he can see it, running out to the airfield, reliving perhaps that other moment when he stood there alone with the same plane tearing me away

from him into the sky. Now it is bringing me back. • At the end of June Loren Robb arrived in Auckland on a flight from Moscow. Kolya was with him. They will return together to the north Siberian autumn early in September in time for Kolya to start the higher education he has finally decided to pursue instead of leaving school at 15 to be a hunter.