Authors: Varlan Shalanov
‘It’s Thursday,’ I said. ‘The overseer said so this morning.’
‘There, you see? No, there is no way I can say mass. It’s just that it’s easier for me this way. And I forget I’m hungry.’ Zamiatin smiled.
I know that everyone has something that is most precious to him,
the last thing that he has left
, and it is that something which helps him to live, to hang on to the life of which we were being so insistently and stubbornly deprived. If for Zamiatin this was the liturgy of John the Baptist, then my
last thing
was verse – everything else had long since been forgotten, cast aside, driven from memory. Only poetry had not been crushed by exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations.
The sun set and the sudden darkness of an early winter evening had already filled the space between the trees. I wandered off to our barracks – a long, low hut with small windows. It looked something like a miniature stable. I had already seized the heavy, icy door with both hands when I heard a rustle in the neighboring hut, which served as a tool-shed with saws, shovels, axes, crowbars, and picks. It was supposed to be locked on days off, but on that day the lock was missing. I stepped over the threshold of the tool-shed, and the heavy door almost crushed me. There were so many cracks in the walls that my eyes quickly became accustomed to the semi-darkness.
Two professional criminals were scratching a four-month-old German shepherd pup. The puppy lay on its back, squealing and waving its four paws in the air. The older man was holding it by the collar. Since we were from the same work gang, my arrival caused no consternation.
‘It’s you. Is there anyone else out there?’
‘No one,’ I answered.
‘All right, let’s get on with it,’ the older man said.
‘Let me warm up a little first,’ the younger man answered.
‘Look at him struggle.’ He felt the puppy’s warm side near the heart and tickled him.
The puppy squealed confidently and licked his hand.
‘So you like to lick… Well, you won’t be doing much of that any more. Semyon…’
Holding the pup by the collar with his left hand, Semyon pulled a hatchet from behind his back and struck the puppy on the head with a short quick swing. The puppy jerked, and blood spilled out on to the icy floor of the shed.
‘Hold him tight,’ Semyon shouted, raising the hatchet again.
‘What for? He’s not a rooster,’ the young man said.
‘Skin him while he’s still warm,’ Semyon said in the tone of a mentor. ‘And bury the hide in the snow.’
That evening no one in the barracks could sleep because of the smell of meat soup. The criminals would have eaten it all, but there weren’t enough of them in our barracks to eat an entire pup. There was still meat left in the pot.
Semyon crooked his finger in my direction.
‘Take it.’
‘I don’t want to,’ I said.
‘All right,’ Semyon said, and his eyes ran quickly over the rows of bunks. ‘In that case, we’ll give it to the preacher. Hey, Father! Have some mutton. Just wash out the pot when you’re done…’
Zamiatin came out of the darkness into the yellow light of the smoking kerosene lantern, took the pot, and disappeared. Five minutes later he returned with a washed pot.
‘So quick?’ Semyon asked with interest. ‘You gobbled things down quick as a seagull. That wasn’t mutton, preacher, but dog meat. Remember the dog “North” that used to visit you all the time?’
Zamiatin stared wordlessly at Semyon, turned around, and walked out. I followed him. Zamiatin was standing in the snow, just beyond the doors. He was vomiting. In the light of the moon his face seemed leaden. Sticky spittle was hanging from his blue lips. Zamiatin wiped his mouth with his sleeve and glared at me angrily.
‘They’re rotten,’ I said.
‘Of course,’ Zamiatin replied. ‘But the meat was delicious – no worse than mutton.’
The orderlies lifted me off the scales, but their cold, powerful hands would not let me touch the ground.
‘How much?’ the doctor shouted, dipping his pen into the ink-well with a click.
‘One hundred and six pounds.’
They put me on the stretcher. My height was six feet, and my normal weight was 177 pounds. Bones constitute forty-two percent of a man’s total weight, seventy-four pounds in my case. On that icy evening I had only thirty-two pounds of skin, organs, and brain. I was unable to make this calculation at the time, but I vaguely realized that the doctor peering at me from under his eyebrows was doing precisely that.
He unlocked the desk drawer, carefully pulled out a thermometer, leaned over me, and gently placed it under my left armpit. Immediately one of the orderlies pressed my arm to my chest, and the other grasped my left wrist with both hands. Later I came to understand these carefully planned movements; there was only one thermometer in the hospital of a hundred beds. The value of this piece of glass was measured on a totally new scale; it was treasured as if it were a rare jewel. Only the very seriously ill and new patients could have their temperature taken with this instrument. The temperature of recovering patients was recorded ‘according to their pulse’, and only in instances of doubt was the desk drawer unlocked.
The wind-up clock on the wall chimed ten o’clock, and the doctor carefully extracted the thermometer. The orderlies’ hands relaxed.
‘93.7 degrees,’ the doctor said. ‘Can you answer?’
I indicated with my eyes that I could. I was saving my strength. I could only pronounce words slowly and with difficulty, as if translating from a foreign language. I had forgotten everything. I didn’t even remember what it was like to remember. They finished recording the history of my disease, and the orderlies easily lifted the stretcher on which I lay face up.
‘Take him to the sixth ward,’ the doctor said, ‘close to the stove.’
They put me next to the stove, on a wooden cot supported by saw-horses. The mattresses were stuffed with branches of dwarf cedar, the needles had fallen off, dried up, and the naked branches protruded menacingly from under the dirty, striped material. Straw dust seeped from the grimy, tightly packed pillow. A thin, washed-out cotton blanket with the word ‘feet’ sewn in gray letters covered me from the entire world. The twine-like muscles of my arms and legs ached, and my frostbitten fingers and toes itched. But fatigue was stronger than pain. I curled up on my side, seized my legs with my hands, leaned my chin against the coarse, crocodile-like skin of my knees, and fell asleep.
I awoke many hours later. My breakfasts, dinners, and suppers were on the floor next to the cot. Stretching out my hand, I grabbed the nearest tin bowl and began to eat everything in the order in which the bowls lay. From time to time I would nibble some of the bread ration. Other patients on similar wooden cots supported by saw-horses watched me swallow the food. They did not ask who I was or where I came from; my crocodile skin spoke for itself. They didn’t want to stare at me, but they couldn’t help it. I knew myself how impossible it was to tear your eyes from the sight of a man eating.
I ate all the food that had been left for me. Then there came warmth, an ecstatic weight in my belly, and again sleep, but not for long this time, since an orderly had come for me. I threw over my shoulders the only gown in the ward. Filthy, burned by cigarette butts, and heavy with the absorbed sweat of hundreds of people, it was also used as a coat. I stuck my feet into enormous slippers and shuffled behind the orderly to the treatment room. I had to go slowly, since I was afraid of falling. The same young doctor stood by the window and stared out at the street through frosty panes shaggy from the ice that had formed on them. A rag hung from the corner of the sill, and water dripped from it, drop by drop, into a tin dinner bowl. The cast-iron stove hummed. I stopped, clinging with both hands to the orderly.
‘Let’s continue,’ the doctor said.
‘It’s cold,’ I answered quietly. The food I had eaten had ceased to warm me.
‘Sit down next to the stove. Where did you work before prison?’
I spread my lips and moved my jaw – my intention was to produce a smile. The doctor understood and smiled in reply.
‘My name is Andrei Mihailovich,’ he said. ‘You don’t need any treatment.’
I felt a sucking sensation in the pit of my stomach.
‘That’s right,’ he repeated in a loud voice. ‘You don’t need any treatment. You need to be fed and washed. You have to lie still and eat. I know our mattresses aren’t feather-beds, but they’re better than nothing. Just don’t lie in one position for too long, and you won’t get bedsores. You’ll be in the hospital about two months. And then spring will be here.’
The doctor smiled. I was, of course, elated. An entire two months! But I was too weak to express this joy. I gripped the stool with both hands and said nothing. The doctor wrote something into my case history.
‘You can go now.’
I returned to the ward, slept and ate. In a week I was already walking shakily around the ward, the corridor, and the other wards. I looked for people who were chewing, swallowing. I stared at their mouths, for the more I rested, the more I wanted to eat.
In the hospital, as in camp, no spoons were issued. We had learned to get along without knives and forks while we were still in prison under investigation, and we had long since learned to slurp up our food without a spoon; neither the soup nor the porridge was ever thick enough to require a spoon. A finger, a crust of bread, and one’s own tongue were enough to clean the bottom of a pot or bowl.
I searched out mouths in the process of chewing. It was an insistent demand of my body, and Andrei Mihailovich was familiar with the feeling.
One night the orderly woke me up. The ward was filled with the usual nocturnal hospital sounds: snoring, wheezing, groans, someone talking in his sleep, coughing. It all blended into a single peculiar symphony of sound – if a symphony can be composed of such sounds. Take me to such a place, blindfolded, and I will always recognize a camp hospital.
On the window-sill was a lamp – a tin saucer with some sort of oil (but not fish oil this time!) and a smoking wick twisted from cotton wool. It couldn’t have been very late. Lights went out at nine o’clock, and somehow we would fall asleep right away – just as soon as our hands and feet warmed up.
‘Andrei Mihailovich wants you,’ the orderly said. ‘Kozlik will show you the way.’
The patient called Kozlik was standing in front of me.
I walked up to the tin basin, washed my hands and face, and returned to the ward to dry them on the pillowcase. There was a single towel for the entire ward, an enormous thing made from an old striped mattress, and it was available only in the mornings. Andrei Mihailovich lived in the hospital, in one of the small far rooms normally reserved for post-operative patients. I knocked at the door and went in.
A heap of books was pushed to the side on the table. The books were alien, hostile, superfluous. Next to the books stood a teapot, two tin mugs, a bowl full of some sort of kasha…
‘Feel like playing dominoes?’ Andrei Mihailovich asked, peering at me in a friendly fashion. ‘If you have the time…’
I hate dominoes. Of all games, it is the most stupid, senseless, and boring. Even a card game like lotto is more interesting. For that matter, any card game is better. Best of all would have been checkers or chess. I squinted at the cupboard to see if there wasn’t a chessboard there, but there wasn’t. I just couldn’t offend Andrei Mihailovich with a refusal. I had to amuse him, to pay back good with good. I had never played dominoes in my life, but I was convinced that no great wisdom was required to learn this art.
‘Let’s have some tea,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Here’s the sugar. Don’t be embarrassed; take as much as you like. Help yourself to the kasha and tell me about anything you like. But then I guess you can’t do both things at the same time.’
I ate the kasha and the bread and drank three mugs of tea with sugar. I had not seen sugar for several years. I felt warm.
Andrei Mihailovich mixed the dominoes. I knew that the one who had the double six began the game. Andrei Mihailovich had it. Then, in turns, the players had to attach pieces with the matching number of dots. That was all there was to it, and I began to play without hesitation, sweating and constantly hiccuping from fullness.
We played on Andrei Mihailovich’s bed, and I got pleasure from looking at the blindingly white pillowcase on the down pillow. It was a physical pleasure to look at the clean pillow, to see another man rumple it with his hand.
‘Our game,’ I said, ‘is lacking its main appeal. Domino players are supposed to smack their pieces down on the table when they play.’ I was not joking. It was this particular aspect of the game that struck me as the most crucial.
‘Let’s switch to the table,’ Andrei Mihailovich said affably.
‘No, that’s all right. I’m just recalling all the various pleasures of the game.’
The game continued slowly. We were more concerned with telling each other our life histories. As a doctor, Andrei Mihailovich had never been in the general work gang at the mines and had only seen the mines as they were reflected in their human waste, cast out from the hospital or the morgue. I too was a by-product of the mine.
‘So you won,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Congratulations! For a prize I present you with – this.’ He took from the night table a plastic cigarette case. ‘You probably haven’t smoked for a long time?’
He tore off a piece of newspaper and rolled a cigarette. There’s nothing better than newspaper for home-grown tobacco. The traces of typographic ink not only don’t spoil the bouquet of the home-grown tobacco but even heighten it in the best fashion. I touched a piece of paper to the glowing coals in the stove and lit up, greedily inhaling the nauseatingly sweet smoke.
It was really tough to lay your hands on tobacco, and I should have quit smoking long ago. But even though conditions were what might be called ‘appropriate’, I never did quit. It was terrible even to imagine that I could lose this single great convict joy.
‘Good night,’ Andrei Mihailovich said, smiling. ‘I was going to go to bed, but I so wanted to play a game. I really appreciate it.’