Sibérie

"It was evening time and it was - 30 °C when I arrived at the little airport of Khatanga. But cold is something you get used to pretty quickly in the end, as well as to the night, which always comes around quickly in this season, from three o’clock onwards. Everything is grey though. Black silhouettes slip by, unsteady, drunk on vodka, hugging the walls of glum Soviet buildings, heads tucked into their shoulders under chapkas, wild-eyed: you’d think it was the night of the living dead. But later in the polar night, you can sometimes come across shadows that have nothing beyond-the-grave about them: they’re Russian pilots, looking like a pack of All Blacks: each weighing over 130 kg, there’s nothing reassuring about these guys either. My first impression of Yelena was a bit like this: she was imposing, tough, Russian-style…

But two bottles of vodka later, during an afternoon at her place, she proved to be fascinating, touching and fun, like a Dolgan… (…) The Dolgans, a mixed-race people who gradually settled in the Taymyr Peninsula from the 18th century onwards. Their nomad wanderings followed the migrations of wild reindeer that were the source of their survival and their wealth. Then, Stalinist administration set about making them sedentary, sending them off to kolkhoz and sovkhoz farms, even nationalising their herds. The Soviets also attempted to school them, only managing, ultimately, to drive them to drink. Barely 250 Dolgans took up nomadic life in the tundra again."

Extract from Zoé Zoé, Femmes du mondes, 2007, Éditions Gallimard