Concerning the Recent Unpleasantness

The most exciting thing that has ever happened to me happened this weekend. It was also the most terrifying.

PROLOGUE

Some of us had been planning to go to the island (or near-island) of Alhon for most of last week. These little excursions to various touristy villages scattered around Baikal are easy and ubiquitous. You buy a ticket for a bus or a microbus (8-12 dollars one-way), ride 4-6 hours, rent a little room or a couple of rooms at some local inn-thing, and then wander around in nature and go to banyas. Also you drink there because Middlebury has stupid obnoxious rules about not drinking when we’re on a Middlebury-led trip and trying to get home drunk in the city is scary, with all the stuff they’ve warned us about (the police, etc.).

I wasn’t gonna go, simply because I didn’t feel like it. But then I wondered what I would do in town, and people going seemed to want me to come along, so I changed my mind at like the last possible minute and went.

I am VERY glad I did. I would not have wanted to miss the trip this turned out to be.

PART 1: Arrival

We rode our little microbus to the village we were staying in on Alhon (I don’t know/remember the name). This was Saturday afternoon, and I had spent all that time on the little bus reading or listening to music (though my batteries died fairly soon – I have quite a collection of dead batteries in my backpack). When we got there we found a little inn to stay in, and set up there. Then we wandered over to this big rock sticking out of the lake and scampered around amicably thereon. It was one of the five poles of shamanism, apparently, and when I asked with incredulity about five poles, Vanya suggested, drily, that the others must be near by, since the particular shamanism of the Buryati probably did not get exported all that far.

We had a dinner of pelmeini, which I ate and sort of helped clean up from but did not help in preparing, because I am lazy and despicable. Then we settled down to drink some vodka we had brought with the Russians staying also in this tiny hotel. There were three Russians and one Buryati man. The woman who ran the hotel said they were cheerful and fun and worked as electricians on the island. They certainly were not boring, and at first things proceeded normally (jovial Russians make girls in our group uncomfortable while we sort of simultaneously have a good time, though I am on edge because I cannot think of a way to be of assistance to said girls).

INTERLUDE: Our Setting

A brief description of our accomadations will be important very soon.

The hotel consisted of a hallway which ended at the door to the building on one end and a sort of sitting room (where we drank and carried on) at the other. There were rooms on each side of the hall, six total, the first two near the door being the kitchen and a small store, then four rooms (two a side), then the sitting room, then two more bedrooms branching off from it. We occupied the two rooms before the sitting room, three boys in one and three girls in the other. The other guys there occupied the rooms attached to the sitting room. The bathroom was, as is custom, outside.

PART II: In which the action of the story is framed by two bathroom trips

We had, after a short time, begun the process of extricating ourselves from our friendly comrades. Leaving a group of Russian men with whom you have been drinking is invariably a long process, exponentially increased by the number of girls in your party. I went outside to the bathroom, figuring the others could uneasily mumble “No, we really have to go to bed now, we’re nothing without a good twelve hours of sleep.” over and over just as well without my help for a little while.

When I returned, progress appeared to have been made. Vanya and Joseph were in our room, and the girls were in theirs with the door shut. One Russian guy was watching TV. The others were no where to be seen, but I could hear some of them in one of their rooms.

Vanya quickly told me, looking a little confused, that Boris Andreivich was beating the shit out of the Buryati man. I, too, began to look confused. Joseph, clearly already on the adrenaline high we would all be joining him in soon, narrated in our language of broken Russian and charades that the Buryati guy had been talking about drinking more with them (Vanya and Joseph), when, for no apparent reason, Boris (about three hundred pounds and probably the friendliest-seeming, up till now) had arrived and driven him into the room the two of them shared with enormous punches to the face.

We moved into the sitting room in an attempt to sureptiously watch. The Russian there watching TV, one of two brothers so far not involved, was blase. I could see this Buryati guy, himself LARGE, richoceting off his bed and wall as Boris laid into him. Joseph reported that his jaw was sheeted in blood. We soon returned to our room, and things quieted down.

At this point, we heard a low growling noise, loud but distant. It sounded like it was in the yard or next door somewhere. It went on for a little while without us really acknowledging it (I thought to myself “haha, now there’s a chainsaw noise somewhere. what a creepy coincidence”). Then the noise cut out. For about two minutes.

When it came on again, it was clear that this chainsaw was not running in the yard or next door. It was in the next room and moving through the building in our direction. Our door, perhaps a third of the way open, displayed a very surreal picture. Boris backed past it, hands out in front of him, in kind of a fighting crouch. Probably ten inches from his amble belly followed a running chainsaw, and following that came the shirtless, blood-covered Buryati manning the chainsaw. We watched, open-mouthed, in extremely honest shock.

Then they went down the hallway, towards the door to the outside. Joseph and Vanya and I all looked at each other. Joseph said something like “Hey did you guys just see that guy with a fucking chainsaw?!” I put both hands on my head in a hilarious half-mock display of comic panic and said, hoping for a laugh, “I don’t have this merit badge!”. Vanya remained calmly sitting on his bed, regarding us. Somehow, without seeming to discuss it, we decided to join the girls in their room (the door was still closed), there to barricade ourselves and perhaps make a plan.

My first thought was “passportwallet”, and my second, as I stuffed the first into one pocket was “where are those damn batteries I just bought?”. So I took my backpack too, with my CDs and player and new batteries. The three of us hustled down the hall – I don’t even remember if the Russians were still inside or not – and got the girls to let us in. We locked the door and began to speak English.

We debated how easy it would be to kick out the window, how to break the headpieces into our beds into weapons, whether or not the drunk chainsaw-weilding Russians would recognize our neutrality, where to go if we did successfully flee, and so on. All the while shouts and chainsaw roars continued outside (they were definately in the street in front of the house by this time). I reflected that it was nice to be breaking the Language Pledge for an actual emergency, and babbled on about organizing ourselves into the proper formation to bash attacking drunk chainsaw-murderers in the head with panks of wood.

After probably ten minutes, the sounds of fighitng stopped. I don’t remember the specifc order of events, but one of the two brothers came and talked to us, telling us things were alright. We got the impression that he and his brother had been trying to break up the fight. Periodically, shouts and sounds of a scuffle would resume, and then subside. Eventually the Russian guy left and Joseph went out to use the bathroom. Upon his return, he informed us that the end of the hallway by the door was covered in blood and Boris was cleaning up with a mop. The Russians claimed the Buryati guy had been subdued and was now in his room, unconscious or passed out.

I went to the bathroom this time, seeing only an ominously bare hallway slick with mopwater. Opening the door, I almost had a heart attack because Boris was there, smoking a cigarette and looking into the dark street. Also because the front stoop looked like the deck of an industrial fishing boat after a big haul – that’s the only analogy I have been able to supply myself for the amount of blood.

I went to the bathroom. When I returned, Sonya fairly forced me to drink some water. I had felt okay when I left the room (indeed I would characterize my feelings as excitement punctuated by little spikes of real terror throughout the experience), but I was pretty freaked out after that porch, and apparently looked it. I had also heard moans and yells coming from the dark in the street.

PART III: Aftermath

After this, the two Russian brothers, their hands and pant legs splattered with still more blood, periodically visited us. It was clear that they were still thinking primarily about getting a little, which is insane, but we stonewalled them (this is something that you pick up pretty quickly in Russia). All that means is that everyone keeps talking while you wait for them to get it through their heads that no one here wants to sleep with them. Then they cynically leave. This is what happened. It was about two in the morning at this point (I think this all started around ten or ten-thirty?) and we all agreed that things had been quiet for long enough that everyone felt good going back to their rooms.

Vanya and Joseph and I talked awhile, pretty predicatable unwinding stuff. Joseph and I eventually elected to go investigate the street (I had heard those moans and Joseph had actually talked to someone, but it had been too dark and the other guy too drunk for Joseph to understand him). We wandered around at the edge of where the light from the porch gave out for a little while, calling out, before our nerve deserted us and we fairly scampered back in side.

Then we went to bed.

Other stuff happened, but nothing that really rates, considering. The next morning we went on a little microbus trip around the island, looked at scenery, and talked to this Australian/British couple there with us. Sunday we came back. The end.

P.S. The next night the three Russians told us that the Buryati guy was okay, and had left. Who knows if that’s true? They were pretty subdued but we avoided the hell out of them anyway.