Authors: Varlan Shalanov
Fleming never parted with his pot, the same pot which he had brought from the north. It was a talisman, a Kolyma talisman.
The criminal element in the psychological ward caught a cat, killed it, cooked it, and gave Fleming a portion as the traditional Kolyma tribute since he was the orderly on duty. Fleming ate the meat and kept silent about the cat. The cat was a pet in the surgical ward.
The students were afraid of Fleming. But whom didn’t the students fear? In the hospital Fleming was already working as an orderly, a staff medic. Everyone feared and hated him, sensing in him not only an employee of the secret police but also the master of some unusually important, terrible secret.
The antipathy grew, and the plot thickened after Fleming made a sudden trip to meet with a young Spanish woman. She was a real Spaniard, the daughter of one of the members of the government of the Republic of Spain. She’d been a spy, got involved in a web of provocations, was sentenced and sent to Kolyma to die. It turned out, however, that Fleming was not forgotten by his old and distant friends, his former colleagues. He had to learn something from the woman, to confirm something. But the patient couldn’t wait. She had recovered and Was being sent to a women’s mine. Interrupting his work in the hospital, Fleming suddenly traveled to the mine to meet the woman. He spent two days on the seven-hundred-kilometer road with its incessant flow of vehicles and a check-point every kilometer. Fleming was lucky, and he returned from the meeting safe and sound. The event could have taken place in a novel, a feat of camp love. Alas, Fleming didn’t travel or accomplish any feats for the sake of love. His was a passion much stronger than love, the highest passion of all, and it would carry Fleming safely past all the camp checkpoints.
Fleming frequently recalled the thirties and the sudden flood of murders and suicides. There was the death of the family of Savinkov, the former revolutionary and terrorist. The son was shot, and the family – the wife, two children, and the wife’s mother – did not wish to leave Leningrad. All wrote letters and left them for each other before killing themselves, and Fleming’s memory preserved lines of a note from one of the children: ‘Grandma, we’re going to die soon…’
The sentence Fleming had received in connection with the NKVD affair ended in 1950, but he didn’t return to Leningrad. He didn’t receive permission. His wife, who had retained their room all those years, came to Magadan from Leningrad, wasn’t able to make any living arrangements, and went back. Fleming returned to Leningrad just before the Twentieth Party Congress, to the same room he’d lived in before his disaster.
He had to do a lot of running around to get his pension of 1,400 old-style rubles that he was due for his years of service. His camp medical courses notwithstanding, he was not allowed to return to his old speciality as an expert on pharmacology. It turned out that all the former employees, all the veterans of these affairs, all the aesthetes who were still alive, had long since been put out to pasture – all of them, right down to the last courier.
Fleming got a job as a book selector in a second-hand bookstore on Liteiny Prospect. Although his relationship and contact with the Russian intelligentsia was such a peculiar one, he considered himself to be of its bone and flesh. To the end he refused to separate his fate from that of the Russian intelligentsia, feeling, perhaps, that only contact with books could help him preserve his skills, if only he could succeed in living till better times.
In the nineteenth century a captain in the ‘engineering troops’ would have taken vows and retreated to a monastery, as did the Russian writer Konstantin Leontiev. But the dangerous and lofty world of books was tinted with fanaticism for Fleming, and like any other infatuation with books, it served the function of a moral purge. The former admirer of Gumilyov and expert on both Gumilyov’s fate and his comments on verse could not become a night-watchman. Perhaps use his new profession of hospital orderly? No, better to be a used-book dealer.
‘I’m constantly running around, filling out forms. Bring us some rum,’ Fleming said, turning to the waitress.
‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.
‘How unfortunate, how inconvenient it is that you don’t drink. Katya, he doesn’t drink! You understand? I’m constantly working at it. I’ll return to my old job.’
‘If you go back’ Katya said with her blue lips, ‘I’ll hang myself or drown myself the very next day!’
‘I’m just kidding. I’m always kidding… I’m constantly presenting applications, running around the courts, traveling to Moscow. After all, they took me back in the party. But you know how?’
A wad of rumpled paper emerged from Fleming’s jacket pocket.
‘Read this. This is Drabkina’s testimony. She was a prisoner in my camp in Igarka. Later she published her memoirs under the title
Black Toast
.’
Quickly I read through the woman’s extensive testimony:
‘As head of the camp he treated the prisoners well and for this reason was soon arrested and convicted…’
I leafed through the dirty, sticky testimony of Drabkina which had passed through the careless fingers of government officials.
Bending down to my ear, his breath reeking of rum, Fleming explained hoarsely that he had been a ‘human being’ in camp, even Drabkina confirmed that.
‘Do you really need all this?’
‘I need it. It fills my life. Who knows, maybe I’ll pull it off. How about a drink?’
‘I don’t drink.’
‘For years of service. But that’s not what I need…’
‘Stop it, or I’ll hang myself!’ Katya shouted.
‘She’s got a heart condition,’ Fleming explained.
‘Take yourself in hand. Write. You have a good style. I know that from your letters. And a story or a novel is, after all, a confidential letter.’
‘No, I’m not a writer. I’m going to keep on working at what I started…’
And slobbering in my ear, he whispered something I could make neither head nor tail of, that supposedly there never was any Kolyma and that he himself had spent seventeen days on the ‘conveyor’ in ’37 and that his mind was not what it used to be.
‘They’re publishing a lot of memoirs now. For example, they just published Yakubovich’s
In the World of Outcasts
, his memoirs about his years in a czarist penal farm. Let them publish that stuff.’
‘Have you written any memoirs?’
‘No, but there is a book I want to recommend for publication. You know which one? I went to the Lenin Publishing House, but they told me to mind my own business…’
‘What book?’
‘The notes of Sanson, the Paris executioner. Now those are memoirs!’
‘The Parisian executioner?’
‘Yes. Sanson guillotined Charlotte Corday and slapped her cheeks, and the cheeks of the severed head blushed. One other thing: they used to give parties that they called the Victims’ Ball. Do we have that kind of ball?’
‘The Victims’ Ball had nothing to do with the Thermidor Period; it was part of the Post-Thermidor Period. Sanson’s notes are a forgery.’
‘What’s the difference if they’re a forgery or not? Either there was such a book or there wasn’t. Let’s have some rum. I’ve tried a lot of drinks in my time, but there’s nothing like rum. Rum. Jamaican rum.’
Fleming’s wife prepared dinner – mountains of greasy food that was almost instantly devoured by the voracious Fleming. An insatiable gluttony remained for ever a part of Fleming, just as thousands of other former convicts retained their psychic traumas for the rest of their lives.
The conversation somehow broke off in the early city twilight. I could hear next to me the familiar Kolyma chomping and slurping. I thought of life’s strength – hidden in a healthy stomach and bowels that were capable of digesting large quantities. That had been Fleming’s defensive reflex against Kolyma – an omnivorous greed. A lack of spiritual fastidiousness acquired behind the desk of a political investigator had also served to prepare him and cushion the shock of his Kolyma fall. As he fell, he perceived no abyss, for he had known all this even earlier and the knowledge saved him by weakening his moral torments, if such torments had even existed. Fleming experienced no additional spiritual traumas; he witnessed the worst and indifferently watched those next to him perish. Prepared to struggle only for his own life, he saved that life, but in his soul there remained a dark footprint that had to be obliterated, purged with penitence. His penitence was a slip of the tongue, a half-hint, a conversation aloud with himself – without regret or condemnation. ‘The cards just didn’t fall my way.’ Nevertheless Fleming’s story was an act of penitence.
‘You see this?’ he asked me.
‘Your party membership card?’
‘Right. It’s brand new! But it wasn’t simple, not at all simple. Six months ago the District Party Committee examined the question of taking me back into the party. They all sat around, read the materials. The secretary of the committee, a Chuvash, announced the decision in a flat way, almost rudely:
‘ “Well, it’s a clear situation. Write up a resolution: reinstatement with an interruption in membership.”
‘It was as if they threw hot coals on me: “with an interruption in membership.” My first thought was that if I didn’t immediately declare I was in disagreement with the resolution, they’d always ask afterward why I was silent when my case was being examined. I mean, that’s why you’re called in, so you can speak your piece in time, tell them… I raised my hand.
‘ “Whad’ya want?” That same rudeness.
‘I said: “I disagree with the resolution. I won’t be able to get a job anywhere without being asked to explain the interruption.”
‘ “You’re a quick one,” the first secretary of the Party District Committee said. “You’re so pushy because you’re not hurting for money. How much is your pension?”
‘He was right, but I interrupted him and said that I asked for total reinstatement with no interruption in membership.
‘And he said: “Why are you pushing and getting all worked up? You’re in blood up to your elbows!”
‘There was a roaring in my head. “How about you,” I said. “Aren’t your hands in blood?”
‘The first secretary said: “This meeting is cancelled.”
‘ “And back then, in ’37,” I said, “didn’t you bloody your hands then?”
‘The first secretary said: “Enough of this running off at the mouth. We can vote again. Get out of here.”
‘I went out into the corridor and they brought me the resolution: “reinstatement in the party denied.”
‘I ran around Moscow like a crazy man, filling out forms, writing letters. The resolution was cancelled. But the original formulation stayed: “reinstatement with interruption of membership.”
‘The person who reported my situation at the Party Control Commission said I should have kept my mouth shut at the District Committee Meeting. I’m still working at it, filling out forms, going to Moscow, filing legal suits. Have a drink.’
‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.
‘This isn’t rum, it’s cognac. Five-star cognac! For you.’
‘Take the bottle away.’
‘I’ll do just that, carry it away, take it with me. You won’t be offended?’
‘Not in the least.’
A year after this Leningrad supper I received a last letter from the used-book dealer: ‘My wife died suddenly while I was away from Leningrad. I arrived six months later and saw her grave and a snapshot of her in the coffin. Don’t condemn me for my weakness; I have all my wits about me, but I can’t get anything done. I live as if in a dream and have lost all interest in life. I know this will pass, but I need time. What did she see in her life? Dragged herself from one prison to another with packages and legal certificates. Social contempt, the trip to be with me in Magadan, a life of poverty, and now this – the end. Forgive me, I’ll write more later. Yes, I’m in good health, but is the society I live in healthy? All the best.’
The fresh tractor prints in the marsh were tracks of some prehistoric beast that bore little resemblance to an article of American technology delivered under the terms of Lend-Lease.
We convicts had heard of these gifts from beyond the sea and the emotional confusion they had introduced into the minds of the camp bigwigs. Worn knit suits and second-hand pullovers collected for the convicts of Kolyma were snapped up in near-fistfights by the wives of the Magadan generals.
As for the magical jars of sausage sent by Lend-Lease, we saw them only at a distance. What we knew and knew well were the chubby tins of Spam. Counted, measured by a very complex table of replacement, stolen by the greedy hands of the camp authorities, counted again and measured a second time before introduction to the kettle, boiled there till transformed into mysterious fibers that smelled like anything in the world except meat – this Spam excited the eye, but not the taste buds. Once tossed in the pot, Spam from Lend-Lease had no taste at all. Convict stomachs preferred something domestic such as old, rotten venison that couldn’t be boiled down even in seven camp kettles. Venison doesn’t disappear, doesn’t become ephemeral like Spam.
Oatmeal from Lend-Lease we relished, but we never got more than two tablespoons per portion.
But the fruits of technology also came from Lend-Lease – fruits that could not be eaten: clumsy tomahawk-like hatchets, handy shovels with un-Russian work-saving handles. The shovel blades were instantaneously affixed to long Russian handles and flattened to make them more capacious.
Barrels of glycerin! Glycerin! The guard dipped out a bucketful with a kitchen pot on the very first night and got rich selling it to the convicts as ‘American honey’.
From Lend-Lease also came enormous black fifty-ton Diamond trucks with trailers and iron sides and five-ton Studebakers that could easily manage any hill. There were no better trucks in all of Kolyma. Day and night, Studebakers and Diamonds hauled American wheat along the thousand-mile road. The wheat was in pretty white linen sacks stamped with the American eagle, and chubby, tasteless bread rations were baked from this flour. Bread from Lend-Lease flour possessed an amazing quality: anyone who ate it stopped visiting the toilet; once in five days a bowel movement would be produced that wasn’t even worth the name. The stomach and intestines of the convict absorbed without remainder this magnificent white bread with its mixture of corn, bone-meal, and something else in addition – perhaps hope. And the time has not yet come to count the lives saved by this wheat from beyond the sea.