A )   D E C E M B E R , 1 9 4 3   -   T Y P H U S ,   N O R D V I K   G U L A G ⋅

Peter Hesselbach encountered a number of shamans in the gulag who told him of their people’s plight. Since there were no shamanist churches or temples to pull down, persecution was aimed directly at the shamans themselves. In Siberia they were considered to be local leaders, class enemies hostile to the Soviet regime and were often sentenced to exile and sometimes dropped out of airplanes and challenged to fly.

Peter befriended one shaman in particular, a Buryat named Nootka who taught him his language and told him of Buryatia, the remote mountain-ringed kingdom that lies within the circular river. They made a pact to escape together and set out for this mythical land as soon as they could secrete enough supplies. Unfortunately Nootka did not survive the typhus epidemic that raged through the camp during February and March. Hesselbach himself contracted the disease and almost succumbed to it: “I wake up from typhus in my cot. Where am I, have I a fever? How long have I been here. My brain hardly functions, waves of consciousness. A Russian at my side. I happen to look down at my chest and found it scratched to one big sore, blood-stained and with the ribs almost bursting through the skin. Others with the typhus had been given a pill that would ease their pain and leave them dead in the morning, an effective way of stopping the spread of the disease. I prayed I had not been given such a drug in my ravings.”

During his illness in the gulag, Peter began to be tormented by recurrent nightmares: “China shop, Dresden. Stifling overcast twilight, standing on street looking through window at display of peculiar cups as allied bomber-gliders fly noiselessly overhead. Next to me a huge bear-like man in a homburg and dirty grey Ulster reads the paper while snoring, his rank breath suffocating me. ‘Bremenwelt!’ screams the headline. Cups start to rotate, exhibiting incomprehensible symmetries, plane glass window melts silently, unexpectedly. Bear-mensch sinks slowly to his knees and collapses, smell of fur-singe, taste of carbon. Pillars of fire descend from a man-flaming sky, heat so intense air blisters, boils and turns black, objects maintain form but burn from within, fissures of their molten innards appearing on their carbonized exteriors.”