Chamber of Wholeness

What can I tell you about Sakhalin?

The weather on the island is perfectly normal.

If not for that astonishing, piercing draft that cuts right through everything, Sakhalin Island could probably be called a true earthly paradise. But every paradise, as we know, has its own peculiarities, and on Sakhalin this peculiarity has a very specific character.

The settlement of Ilyinsky, where I happened to live for four whole years in the 1990s, was affectionately, though with a certain doomed resignation, called by the old-timers “the settlement of seven winds.” The most interesting thing is that this endless, piercing draft was not always the full master of these places.

Local old-timers, whose memory still held stories from the prewar and early postwar years, recalled completely different times with almost reverence. They said that once, long ago, before the railway cut across the island, the climate here had been surprisingly soft and gentle. Juicy cucumbers and large, sun-filled tomatoes ripened in open ground with no special effort. The earth breathed warmth, and nothing disturbed that sleepy, fertile peace.

Everything changed when people decided to bring the harsh island nature under control and cut tunnels through the mountain ridges for the railway. Without knowing it, the builders created giant corridors for air masses.

The mountains that had once served as a reliable natural screen, protecting the lowlands from the icy breath of the sea, were pierced through. A colossal pipe effect appeared: because of the difference in temperature and pressure between the coast and the inner part of the island, the air began to move at a furious speed.

This draft had an astonishing, almost mystical quality: outside there could be absolutely windless weather, the sea could be calm as a mirror, but in the settlement itself, on that narrow strip of land, an invisible, narrowly directed current was always blowing.

It was different from an ordinary sea wind, which blows in a broad front and which the body quickly gets used to. This draft stitched through space like an icy needle.

It felt as if the cold air passed not merely through light summer clothes, but literally right through the body itself, making you shiver even under the first rays of the sun. Because of this man-made corridor, the microclimate of Ilyinsky changed forever.

Tomatoes and cucumbers in open ground became an unaffordable luxury, while the most popular element of clothing for the entire summer became a thick windbreaker or jacket. The villagers grew used to wearing warm clothes even in July, remarking philosophically that nature on Sakhalin has its own rules.

But what was most astonishing was that this piercing cold somehow coexisted with the incredible, overflowing life force of the island itself.

One only had to climb a little higher into the mountains or move to the northern part of Sakhalin, where the ridges had remained intact, and the draft would vanish almost magically, giving way to a real greenhouse effect.

There, safely sheltered between majestic hills, even true sweet grapes ripened. This sharp contrast — from an icy tunnel draft to soft grape warmth — became the first and main mystery of this astonishing land, cut off from the rest of the world, which the locals always called with special trembling and pride simply: the Island.

If you set aside the whims of the tunnel wind, Sakhalin’s nature amazed with its primal, almost prehistoric abundance.

It was an entirely different world, where everything alive grew with some unseen, fierce speed, as if trying to take everything possible from the short summer while there was still time.

The soil there was incredible — soft, airy, exactly like down. Ordinary shovels gathered dust in village sheds because nobody needed them: vegetable gardens were dug only with pitchforks. The forks entered the soil gently, without the slightest resistance, as if the earth itself were alive and breathing. Because of the extremely high humidity and frequent fogs, any crops had to be planted on specially formed high mounds; otherwise the seeds could simply suffocate in water.

But Sakhalin’s greatest blessing was the complete, absolute absence of the usual mainland pests. Nobody here had ever heard of the Colorado potato beetle, and there were not even ordinary aphids on the island. Plants developed in conditions almost completely sterile from harmful insects.

Add to this the pure ecology, the abundance of moisture, and the incredibly active, fierce sun, which, because of the closeness of the sea, seemed to burn straight through the clouds — and you get an ideal natural laboratory. Everything grew as if on yeast. Ordinary nettles, which on the mainland were used to being modest weeds by the fence, rose on Sakhalin far above human height, turning into impassable jungle. And burdock leaves reached such colossal sizes that local children never carried umbrellas with them during sudden summer showers. Why would they, if they could simply tear off one huge green burdock leaf that covered a child completely from head to toe, and then happily run under the warm streams of rain?

In the forests and across the endless hills, the soil was covered with astonishing moss. When you stepped on it, you felt as if you were walking across an expensive, incredibly soft Persian carpet with a very high, thick pile. Your foot sank gently into that green, while all around there was such abundance of berries and mushrooms that mainland people could not have dreamed of it even in their boldest dreams. Local champignons, for example, were so special, large, and fragrant that in cookbooks and conversations they were called exactly that — Sakhalin champignons.

The only real worry for gardeners in that blessed land was fighting weeds. The strength of the island soil was so great that if you missed the moment and failed to weed the beds in time, then a week later there was almost no point trying to find anything: the weeds would instantly pull the whole space under a solid green wall. Sakhalin’s nature demanded attention, but it also gave back a hundredfold, demonstrating an incredible scale of gigantism in everything — from conifer trees that grew twice as large as their mainland relatives to wild vines strangely wrapping themselves around ancient trunks in the taiga.

Among the many Sakhalin stories and legends, the old-timers of Ilyinsky retold one historical anecdote with special pleasure and an inevitable chuckle. It explained very precisely why life on the island could sometimes turn out so difficult. In Soviet times, when Sakhalin was still a strictly closed territory and its separation from the rest of the world was felt especially sharply, the local authorities decided to invite Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev himself to visit. A visit from the General Secretary was an event of planetary scale for a distant island, and everything had to be prepared perfectly. The regional leadership held long meetings, calculated the dates, and finally made a strategic decision: they would bring Khrushchev in the best, most fertile period of the year, which on Sakhalin is called the velvet season.

This astonishing period lasts on the island for almost nothing at all — at most, two weeks at the very beginning of August. At that time, nature seems to decide to apologize to people for all the fogs, drafts, and endless rains. The sky becomes piercingly blue, the sea calms, and the air warms to an ideal, comfortable temperature. The drafts fall quiet, the hills stand emerald-green, and the abundance of fish and berries reaches its peak. Khrushchev arrived exactly during those magical days. He was taken around model collective farms, shown giant burdock leaves, treated to red fish and caviar, and taken by boat across the azure sea.

The General Secretary, used to the capricious climate of central Russia, was completely charmed by what he saw.

He walked in a light shirt, turned his face toward the gentle Sakhalin sun, looked at the riot of greenery, and finally threw up his hands and exclaimed loudly: “Well now! What a paradise you people live in here!” The local authorities smiled with satisfaction, expecting praise and new subsidies. But Nikita Sergeyevich reasoned in his own way, purely as a statesman.

If the island had such a year-round “resort” and such abundance, why should the state spend enormous sums maintaining people in supposedly harsh conditions? After returning to Moscow, Khrushchev issued a decree canceling a whole series of substantial northern benefits and allowances for Sakhalin residents.

When, two weeks after his departure, the familiar icy fogs returned to the island, and the residents of Ilyinsky once again pulled on their thick jackets to save themselves from the tunnel draft, it was already too late. The benefits had sailed away to the “mainland.” Since then, this story has become a classic example of how Sakhalin abundance and a fleeting moment of natural beauty could play a funny, but very tangible economic joke on the islanders.

The separation from the rest of the world, which all local residents respectfully and wistfully called “the mainland,” left an indelible mark on the character, daily life, and culture of Sakhalin people.

Most of the population in the settlements consisted of descendants of exiles, settlers, and people of hard labor, which made the local way of life sometimes feel frozen in the previous century. Outsiders were not liked at first and were met with a wary, cold sideways glance. Adults knew how to keep their distance, and children expressed this attitude quite openly and without embellishment. But the most astonishing and colorful phenomenon on the island was the local “dialect.”

Sakhalin residents were not evil or aggressive at all. No. They were more like children who, long ago through some misunderstanding, had been allowed to swear loudly, and who sincerely believed that the more vividly someone could twist a phrase, the more solid they looked.

This choice, multi-story profanity on Sakhalin was not a sign of anger or quarrel — people simply spoke in it, expressing the whole spectrum of human feelings. I remember once walking down the street and seeing, ahead of me, a father and his eight-year-old son returning from fishing with their rods.

From a distance it seemed to me that the man was cursing the poor child in every possible way, using the most terrifying, curl-your-ears-up words. My heart clenched with pity for the boy.

But when I drew level with them and listened to the intonation, I realized what was happening: the father was telling his son with incredible pride, tenderness, and delight what a wonderful fish they had caught that day and how well everything had gone. The whole stream of swearwords was merely the wrapping around pure paternal joy.

An even funnier contrast could be seen in women’s culture. Sakhalin women possessed an astonishing sense of dignity.

An ordinary trip to the local village shop was, for them, equivalent to going out into society, almost to a real theater. They dressed to the nines. And if there was a school parent meeting, a woman prepared as if she had been invited to a private audience with the Queen of England.

And now imagine the scene:

There stands such a dazzling, perfectly coiffed, elegantly dressed lady, and with a sweet smile she discusses the latest village news with the shop assistant, using such rich, juicy profanity that an unaccustomed person could lose their breath.

At the kindergarten where I worked, the supply manager was a quick, tiny woman named Anka Arykova. One day she needed to speak with me about some work matter. She came in and delivered her usual tirade in her habitual “dialect.” Trying to be as soft and delicate as possible, I smiled and quietly asked her: “Anechka, please translate all of that for me into ordinary human language.” And then something incredible happened. Anka froze. She stood in front of me like a fish pulled out of water, simply opening and closing her mouth, but she could not find a single literary word. Her inner vocabulary was so tightly stitched together from island color that ordinary words simply refused to come to her. She only waved her hand and laughed merrily.

Life on Sakhalin in the 1990s was full of astonishing curiosities and everyday paradoxes. Because of the incredible abundance of fish in those years, there was sometimes so much of it that local residents, not knowing what to do with the catch, managed to fertilize their vegetable gardens with pink salmon — which, I admit, offended me deeply inside. And from huge crates of lingonberries gathered in the forest with special scoops rather than by hand, people brewed tons of homemade mash.

There were, it must be said, more than enough drinkers on the island. But whether the climate there was special or the mighty island health made itself felt, people practically did not get drunk the way people usually do on the mainland. They kept an astonishing steadiness and strength of spirit.

My neighbor in the village was already seventy-seven years old then. In Ilyinsky she had a funny and resonant nickname — “33 Knees.” She earned this nickname because as soon as the old woman had a little drink for mood, she began dancing incredible, dashing steps.

One day this neighbor invited me to visit her, promising to treat me to something special.

I politely thanked her and immediately warned: “Thank you very much, but you know I don’t drink alcohol at all.” The old woman lifted her eyebrows in surprise: “What do you mean, Anya, it’s just beer!” I smiled and explained that I did not drink beer either. Grandmother “33 Knees” froze in sincere astonishment, looked at me with such deep, genuine pity, and said: “Well, how do you even live like that?”

Another gastronomic discovery of the island for me was the famous Sakhalin fern. There was an unimaginable amount of it in the forests. Many times I tried to prepare from it that same famous, tender, incredibly tasty appetizer that local Koreans — a significant part of Sakhalin’s population — served to everyone. But no matter how much I conjured over recipes, I always ended up with ordinary, slightly bitter grass.

The secret of this delicacy, as it turned out much later, lay not in some special boiling or cutting technique at all.

The clever Koreans simply added monosodium glutamate to the dish — a substance that in those years was a curiosity on the island and worked real culinary miracles, turning a wild plant into an exquisite delicacy.

When the time came to leave Sakhalin, a kindergarten teacher came to see me off.

She cried and said, “You see, Anechka, you came here so easily, and you are leaving so easily.

And I have never once been to the mainland…”

At that moment I saw that the island holds its residents hostage because of their wasteful attitude toward themselves.

A true miracle island, where, despite all storms, its own normal weather always stood.