Kolyma Tales (17 page)

I didn’t have to wait long. Romanov had already managed to change into the uniform of the NKVD, the secret police. He came running down the stairway and began waving to me.

‘This way, this way.’

Together with the assistant of the officer on duty we went upstairs, and in the corridor of the second floor stopped in front of a door bearing a plaque: ‘Smertin, Senior Supervisor, Ministry of Internal Affairs.’ ‘Smertin’ meant ‘death’ in Russian, and so threatening a pseudonym (it couldn’t have been his real name) impressed me in spite of my exhaustion.

‘For a pseudonym, that’s too much,’ I thought, but we were already entering an enormous room with a portrait of Stalin that occupied an entire wall. We stopped before a gigantic desk to observe the pale reddish face of a man who had spent his entire life in precisely this sort of room.

Romanov bent politely over the desk. The dull blue eyes of Senior Supervisor Comrade Smertin fixed themselves on me. But only for a moment. He was searching for something on the desk, shuffling some papers. Romanov’s willing fingers located whatever it was they were looking for.

‘Name?’ Smertin asked, poring over the papers. ‘Crime? Sentence?’

I told him.

‘Lawyer?’

‘Lawyer.’

The pale face looked up from the table.

‘Did you write complaints?’

‘I did.’

Smertin wheezed. ‘About the bread ration?’

‘That and in general.’

‘OK, take him out.’

I made no attempt to clarify anything, to ask any question. What for? After all I wasn’t cold, and I wasn’t working the night shift in the gold-mine. They could do the clarifying if they wanted to.

The assistant to the officer on duty came in with a note, and I was taken on foot through the settlement at night to the very edge of the forest. There, guarded by four towers and three rows of barbed-wire fence, stood the camp prison.

The prison had cells for solitary and group confinement. In one of the latter I related my past history, neither expecting an answer from my neighbors nor asking them about anything. That was the custom – so they wouldn’t think I was a ‘plant’.

Morning came. It was the usual Kolyma morning – without light, without sun, and in no way distinguishable from night. A hammer was struck against a rail, and a bucket of steaming boiling water was carried in. The guards came for me, and I said goodbye to my comrades. I knew nothing of them.

They brought me back to the same house, which now appeared smaller than it had at night. This time I was not admitted to Smertin’s august presence. The officer on duty told me to sit and wait, and I sat and waited until I heard a familiar voice:

‘That’s fine! That’s great! Now you’ll get going.’ On alien territory Romanov used the formal grammatical address in speaking to me.

Thoughts began to stir lazily in my brain. I could almost feel them physically. I had to think of something new, something I wasn’t accustomed to, something unknown. This – new thing – had nothing to do with the mine. If we were returning to the Partisan Mine, Romanov would have said: ‘Now we’ll get going.’ That meant I was being taken to a new place. Let come what may!

Romanov came down the stairs, almost hopping. It seemed as if he were about to slide down the bannisters like a small boy. He was holding a barely touched loaf of bread.

‘Here, this is for the road. There’s something else too.’ He disappeared upstairs and returned with two herring.

‘Everything up to snuff, right? That seems to be about all. Wait, I forgot the most important thing. That’s what it means to be a non-smoker.’

Romanov went upstairs and again returned with a small pile of cheap tobacco heaped on a piece of newspaper. About three boxes, I determined with a practiced eye. The standard package of tobacco was enough to fill eight matchboxes. That was our unit of measure in camp.

‘This is for the road. A sort of dry rations.’

I said nothing.

‘Have the guards been sent for?’

‘They’ve been sent for,’ the officer on duty answered.

‘Have whoever’s in charge come upstairs.’

And Romanov disappeared up the stairs. Two guards arrived – one an older man with pock-marks on his face and wearing a tall fur hat of the sort worn in the Caucasian Mountains. The other was a rosy-cheeked youth about twenty years old wearing a Red Army helmet.

‘This one,’ said the officer on duty, pointing at me.

Both – the young one and the pock-marked one – looked me over carefully from head to toe.

‘Where’s the chief?’ the pock-marked one asked.

‘He’s upstairs. The package is there too.’

The pock-marked man went upstairs and soon returned with Romanov.

They talked quietly, and the pock-marked man gestured in my direction.

‘Fine,’ Romanov said finally. ‘We’ll give you a note.’

We walked out on to the street. Next to the porch, on the same spot where the truck from the Partisan Mine had stood the previous night, was a comfortable ‘raven’ – a prison bus with barred windows. I got in, the barred doors closed, the guards occupied their spots in back, and we set off. For a while the ‘raven’ followed the central highway that slices all of Kolyma in half, but then we turned off to the side. The road twisted through the hills, the motor roared on the slopes, and the sheer, pine-forested cliffs with frosty-branched willow shrubs towered above us. Finally, having wound around several hills, the truck followed a riverbed to a small clearing. The trees were cut down, and the edges of the clearing were ringed with guard towers. In the middle, about three hundred yards away, were other slanted towers and the dark mass of the barracks surrounded with barbed wire.

The door of the small guardhouse on the road opened, and a sentry with a revolver strapped to his waist came out. The bus stopped. Leaving the motor running, the driver jumped out and walked past my window.

‘That really twisted us around. It really is a serpent.’

I was familiar with the name, and if anything, my reaction was even stronger than to Smertin’s name. This was ‘Serpentine’, the infamous pre-trial prison where so many people had perished the previous year. Their bodies had not yet decayed. But, then, they never would in the permafrost.

The senior guard went up the path to the prison, and I sat at the window thinking that now my hour, my turn had come. It was just as difficult to think about death as about anything else. I didn’t draw myself any picture of my own execution; I just sat and waited.

The winter twilight had already set in. The door of the ‘raven’ opened, and the older guard tossed me some felt boots.

‘Put these on.’

I took off my quilted boots, but the felt boots were too small.

‘You’ll never make it in those cloth boots,’ said the pock-marked man.

‘I’ll make it.’

He tossed the felt boots into the corner of the bus.

‘Let’s go.’

The ‘raven’ turned around and rushed away from ‘Serpentine’. From the vehicles flashing past us I soon realized we were back on the main highway. The bus slowed down, and all around I could see the lights of a large village. The bus stopped at the porch of a brightly lit house, and I entered a lighted corridor very similar to the one in Smertin’s building. Behind a wooden barrier next to a wall phone sat a guard with a pistol on his belt. This was the village of Yagodny, named after the head of the secret police. On the first day of our trip we had covered only seventeen kilometers. Where would we go from here?

The guard took me to a far room with a wooden cot, a bucket of water, and a pail that served as a toilet. The door had a hole for observation by the guard.

I lived there two days. I even managed to dry and rewind the bandages on my legs that were festering with scurvy sores.

There was a sort of rural quiet in the regional office of the secret police. I listened intently from my tiny cell, but even in the day it was rare to hear steps in the corridor. Occasionally an outside door would open, and keys could be heard turning in door locks. And there was always the guard – the same guard, unshaven, wearing an old quilted jacket and a pistol in a shoulder holster. It all seemed rather rustic in comparison with gleaming Khatynakh where Comrade Smertin conducted affairs of state. Very, very rarely the telephone would ring.

‘Yes, they’re gassing up. Yes. I don’t know, comrade chief. OK, I’ll tell them.’

Whom were they referring to? My guards? Once a day, toward evening, the door to my cell would open and the guard would bring in a pot of soup, a piece of bread, and a spoon. The main course was dumped into the soup and served together. I would take the kettle, eat everything, and lick the pot clean. Camp habits were strong.

On the third day the pock-marked soldier stepped over the cell threshold. He wore a long leather coat over a shorter one.

‘Rested up? Let’s get on the road.’

I stood on the porch of the regional office, thinking we would again have a closed prison bus, but the ‘raven’ was nowhere to be seen. An ordinary three-ton truck stood before the porch.

‘Get in.’

Obediently I climbed over the side of the bed.

The young soldier squeezed into the cab, and the pock-marked one sat next to me. The truck started up and in a few minutes we were back on the main highway. Where was I being taken? North or south? East or west? There was no sense asking and, besides, the guards weren’t supposed to say. Was I being transferred to a different district? Which one? The truck lurched along for many hours and stopped abruptly.

‘We’ll have dinner here. Get down.’

I got down.

We had come to a cafeteria.

The highway was the aorta and main nerve of Kolyma. Unguarded equipment was constantly being shunted back and forth. Food supplies were always guarded because of the danger of escaped convicts. The guards also provided protection (unreliable, to be sure) from theft by the driver and supply agent.

At the cafeteria one encountered geologists, mine explorers going on vacation with the money they’d earned, and black-market dealers in tobacco and
chifir
– the semi-narcotic drink made of strong tea in the far north. These were the heroes and the scoundrels of the north. All the cafeterias sold vodka. People would meet, quarrel, fight, exchange news, and hurry on. Truck motors would be left running while the drivers took a two- or three-hour nap in the cab. One also encountered convicts in the cafeteria. On their way up into the taiga they appeared as clean, neat groups. Coming back, the dirty broken bodies of these half-dead, no longer human creatures were the refuse of the mines. In the cafeteria were detectives whose job it was to capture escapees. The escapees themselves were often in military uniform. Past these cafeterias drove the black limousines of the lords of life and death – the lives and deaths of both convicts and civilians.

A playwright ought to depict the north in precisely such a roadside cafeteria; that would be an ideal setting. I used the idea later in a story, of course.

I stood in the cafeteria trying to elbow my way through to the enormous red-hot barrel of a stove. The guards weren’t overly concerned that I would attempt to escape, since it was obvious I was too weak for that. It was clear to everyone that such a goner had nowhere to run to in sixty degrees below zero weather.

‘Sit down over there and eat.’

The guard brought me a bowl of hot soup and gave me some bread.

‘We’ll be on our way now,’ said the young one. ‘We’ll leave as soon as the sergeant comes.’

But the pock-marked man didn’t come alone. He was with an older ‘warrior’ (they didn’t call them soldiers back then) in a short coat and carrying a rifle. He looked at me, then at the pock-marked man.

‘Well, I guess that would be all right,’ he said.

‘Let’s go,’ the pock-marked man said to me.

We went to a different corner of the cafeteria. Bent over by the wall sat a man in a pea jacket and a regulation-issue black flannel cap with ear flaps.

‘Sit down here,’ said the pock-marked man. I obediently sat down on the floor next to this man. He didn’t turn his head.

The pock-marked man and the unknown ‘warrior’ left, while the young one, ‘my’ guard, stayed with us.

‘They’re taking a break, you understand?’ the man in the convict hat suddenly whispered to me. ‘They don’t have any right to do that.’

‘They’ve long since lost their souls,’ I said, ‘so they might as well do whatever they like. What do you care?’

The man raised his head. ‘I tell you, they don’t have the right.’

‘Where are they taking us?’ I asked.

‘I don’t know where they’re taking you. I’m going to Magadan. To be shot.’

‘To be shot?’

‘Yes, I’ve already been sentenced. I’m from the Western Division – from Susuman.’

I didn’t like this piece of news at all. But then I didn’t know the procedures for applying capital punishment. Embarrassed, I fell silent. The pock-marked soldier walked up with our new traveling companion. They started discussing something with each other. Now that there were more guards, they treated us more roughly. No one brought me any more soup in the cafeterias.

We drove on for a few hours, and three more prisoners were attached to our group. The three new men were of indeterminate age – like all those who had gone through the hell of Kolyma. Their puffy white skin and swollen faces spoke of hunger, scurvy, and frostbite.

‘Where are they taking us?’

‘To Magadan. To be shot. We’ve already been sentenced.’

We lay bent over in the truck bed, our knees and backs touching. The truck had good springs, the road was well paved so we weren’t tossed from side to side, and soon we began to feel the cold.

We shouted, groaned, but the guard was implacable. We had to reach Sporny before morning. The condemned man begged to be allowed to warm himself even for five minutes. The truck roared into Sporny where lights were already burning.

The pock-marked man walked up: ‘You’ll go to the stockade and be sent on later.’

I felt cold to the marrow of my bones, was numb from the frost, and frantically beat the soles of my boots against the snow. I couldn’t get warm. Our ‘warriors’ kept trying to locate the camp administrator. Finally after about an hour we were taken to the freezing unheated stockade. Frost covered all the walls, and the floor was icy. Someone brought in a bucket of water. The lock rattled shut. How about firewood? A stove?