Authors: Varlan Shalanov
I never did manage to boil water in time for dinner. But none of the workers (all of them had been convicts just yesterday) ever noticed if the water was boiling or not. Kolyma had taught all of us to distinguish only hot water from cold, raw water.
We were totally indifferent about the dialectic leap of quantity into quality. We weren’t philosophers but workers, and our hot drinking-water betrayed none of the important qualities of this leap.
I ate, indifferently stuffing into my mouth anything that seemed edible – scraps, last year’s marsh berries.
There were two shotguns in our tent. Grouse were not afraid of people and at first they could be shot from the tent threshold itself. Game was either roasted whole in the ashes of the campfire or it was boiled. Down for pillows was a sure source of income for the free masters of guns and forest birds. Cleaned and plucked, the birds were boiled in three-quart tin cans suspended over the campfire. I never found any remnants of these magic birds. The hungry teeth of free men ground each bone to nothing. This was another miracle of the taiga.
I never tried a piece of grouse. Mine were the berries, the roots of the grass, the rations. And I didn’t die. With increasing indifference and without bitterness I began to watch the cold red sun, the bare mountaintops where the rocks, the turns of the river, the trees were all sharp and unfriendly. In the evenings a cold fog rose from the river, and there was no single hour in the taiga day when I felt warm.
My frostbitten fingers and toes ached, hummed from the pain. The bright skin of the fingers remained rosy and sensitive. I kept my fingers wrapped in any kind of dirty rag to protect them from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus seeped endlessly from both my big toes.
I was awakened by a hammer-blow on the rail, and a blow on the rails also marked the end of the day. After supper I would immediately lie down on my bunk without undressing and, naturally, fall asleep. I perceived the tent in which I lived as if through a fog; people moved back and forth, loud swearing could be heard, there were fights interrupted by sudden silence before a dangerous blow. Fights died down quickly of their own accord. No one held anyone back, no one separated anyone. The motor of aggression simply died out, and there ensued the cold silence of night with a pale tall sky peering through the holes of the canvas, and all around were groans, snoring, wheezing, coughing, and the mindless swearing of sleeping men.
Once at night I suddenly realized that I heard groans and wheezing. The sensation was as sudden as the dawn and did not gladden me. Later, as I recollected this moment of amazement, I understood that the need for sleep, forgetfulness, unconsciousness had lessened. I’d ‘woken up’, as Moses Kuznetsov used to say. He was a blacksmith and a clever, intelligent man.
There appeared an insistent pain in the muscles. I can’t imagine what sort of muscles I could have had, but they did ache and enrage me by not letting me forget about my body. Then something else appeared – something different from resentment and bitterness. There appeared indifference and fearlessness. I realized I didn’t care if I was to be beaten or not, given dinner and the daily ration or not. The prospecting group was not guarded, so there was no one to beat me as in the mines. Nevertheless, I remembered the mine and measured my courage by its rule. This indifference and lack of fear cast a sort of bridge over to death. The realization that there would be no beatings here, that they didn’t beat you here, gave birth to new feelings, new strength.
Later came fear, not a strong fear, but nevertheless a fear of losing the salvation of this life and work, of losing the tall cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles. I realized I was afraid of leaving here for the mines. I was afraid and that was all there was to it. I had never striven to improve my life if I was content with it. The flesh on my bones grew every day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that returned to me. I envied my dead friends who had died in ’38. I envied those of my neighbors who had something to chew or smoke. I didn’t envy the camp chief, the foreman, the work brigade leader; that was a different world altogether.
Love didn’t return to me. Oh, how distant is love from envy, from fear, from bitterness. How little people need love. Love comes only when all other human emotions have already returned. Love comes last, returns last. Or does it return? Indifference, envy, and fear, however, were not the only witnesses of my return to life. Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.
As the weakest in this world of excavations and exploratory ditches, I worked with the topographer, dragging his rod and theodolite. Sometimes, to be able to move faster, the topographer would strap the theodolite to his own back and leave me with only the light rod painted all over with numbers. The topographer was a former convict himself. That summer there were a number of escaped convicts in the taiga, and the topographer asked for and received a small-caliber rifle from the camp authorities. But the rifle only interfered with our work. And not just because it was an extra thing to carry in our difficult travels. Once we sat down to rest, and the topographer took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch that had flown up to look us over and lure us away from the nest. If necessary, the bird was ready to sacrifice its life. The female must have been sitting on eggs somewhere near for him to have been so insanely bold. The topographer threw up the rifle, but I pushed the barrel away.
‘Put away the gun!’
‘What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?’
‘Leave the bird alone.’
‘I’ll report this to the chief.’
‘The hell with your chief.’
But the topographer didn’t want to quarrel and didn’t report the incident. I realized that something important had returned to me.
I hadn’t seen newspapers or books for years, and I had long since trained myself not to regret the loss. All fifty-five of my neighbors in the torn tarpaulin tent felt the same way. There was no book or newspaper in our barracks. The camp authorities – the foreman, the chief of prospecting, the superintendent – had descended into our world without books.
My language was the crude language of the mines and it was as impoverished as the emotions that lived near the bones. Get up, go to work, dinner, end of work, rest, citizen chief, may I speak, shovel, trench, yes sir, drill, pick, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, ration, leave me the butt – these few dozen words were all I had needed for years. Half of them were obscenities. The wealth of Russian profanity, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was not revealed to me either in my childhood or in my youth. But I did not seek other words. I was happy that I did not have to search for other words. I didn’t even know if they existed. I couldn’t have answered that question.
I was frightened, shaken when there appeared in my brain (I clearly remember that it was in the back of the skull) a word totally inappropriate for the taiga, a word which I didn’t myself understand, not to mention my comrades. I shouted out the word:
‘Sententious! Sententious!’
I roared with laughter.
‘Sententious!’ I shouted directly into the northern sky, into the double dawn, still not understanding the meaning of the word that had been born within me. And if the word had returned, then all the better! A great joy filled me.
‘Sententious!’
‘Idiot!’
‘He really is! What are you, a foreigner or something?’ The question was asked ironically by Vronsky. The very same Vronsky, the mountain engineer. Three shreds.
‘Vronsky, give me a smoke.’
‘Can’t, haven’t got anything.’
‘Just three shreds of tobacco.’
‘Three shreds? OK.’
From a tobacco-pouch stuffed with home-made tobacco a dirty fingernail extracted three shreds of tobacco.
‘A foreigner?’ The question shifted our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, investigations and lengthened sentences.
But I couldn’t care less about Vronsky’s question. The find was enormous.
Bitterness was the last feeling with which man departed into non-being, into the world of the dead. But was it dead? Even a stone didn’t seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, the trees, the river. The river was not only the incarnation of life, not just a symbol of life, but life itself. It possessed eternal movement, calm, a silent and secret language of its own, its business that forced it to run downhill against the wind, beating its way through the rocks, crossing the steppes, the meadows. The river changed its bed, leaving it dried by the sun, and in a barely visible watery thread made its way along the rocks, faithful to its eternal duty. It was a stream that had lost hope for help from heaven – a saving rain, but with the first rain, the water changed its shores, broke rocks, cast huge trees in the air and rushed madly down that same eternal road…
Sententious! I couldn’t believe myself and was afraid when I went to sleep that I would forget the word that had newly returned to me. But the word didn’t disappear.
For a week I didn’t understand what the word meant. I whispered it, amused and frightened my neighbors with it. I wanted an explanation, a definition, a translation…
Many days passed before I learned to call forth from the depth of memory new words, one after the other. Each came with difficulty; each appeared suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words didn’t return in streams. Each returned alone, unaccompanied by the watchful guards of familiar words. Each appeared first on the tongue and only later in the mind.
And then came the day when everyone, all fifty workers, dropped their work and ran to the village, to the river, climbing out of their ditches, abandoning half-sawn-through trees and the uncooked soup in the pot. They all ran quicker than me, but I hobbled up in time, aiding myself in this downhill run with my hands.
The chief had arrived from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On an enormous fir stump stood a record-player. Overcoming the hiss of the needle, it was playing symphonic music.
And everyone stood around – murderers and horse-thieves, common criminals and political prisoners, foremen and workers. And the chief stood there too. And the expression on his face was such that he seemed to have written the music for us, for our desolate sojourn in the taiga. The shellacked record spun and hissed, and the stump itself, wound up in three hundred circles over the past three hundred years, spun like a taut spring…
The wall lurched, and nausea welled up in my throat, sickeningly sweet. For the thousandth time a burned-out match floated past me. I stretched out my hand to grab the annoying match, and it disappeared. Sight had left me. But the world had not yet abandoned me – I could still hear the far-off, insistent voice of the nurse somewhere out on the street. Then hospital gowns, the corner of a building, and the starry sky flashed by… An enormous gray turtle with a cold gleam in its eyes rose up before me. Someone had broken a hole through its ribs, and I crawled into the hole, clutching and pulling myself up with my hands. I trusted only my hands.
I remembered someone’s insistent fingers skillfully easing my head and shoulders on to the bed. Everything fell quiet, and I was alone with someone as enormous as Gulliver. Insect-like, I lay on a board, and someone examined me intently through a magnifying glass. I squirmed, but the terrible glass followed all my movements. Only when the orderlies had transferred me to a hospital cot and the blissful calm of solitude had followed did I realize that Gulliver’s magnifying glass had not been a nightmare – I had been looking at the on-duty doctor’s glasses. This pleased me.
My head ached and whirled at the slightest movement, and it was impossible to think. I could only remember, and remote frightening pictures began to appear in black and white like scenes from a silent movie. The cloying nausea so similar to the effect of ether would not go away. I had experienced that sensation before… I recalled how, many years before, in the far north, a day off had been declared for the first time in six months. Everybody wanted to lie down, simply to lie prone, not to mend clothing, not to move… But everyone was awakened early in the morning and sent for firewood. Five miles from the village was a forest-cutting area, and we were each to select a log commensurate with our strength and drag it home to the barracks. I decided to go off in a different direction to a place a little more than a mile away where there were some old log stacks and where I could find a log I could handle. Climbing the mountain was exhausting, and when I reached the stack, I couldn’t find a light log. Higher up I could see collapsed stacks of black logs, and I started to make my way up to them. There was only one log there that was slender enough for me to carry, but one end of it was pinned under the stack, and I didn’t have the strength to pull it free.
After several attempts I became totally exhausted. Since it was impossible to return empty-handed, however, I gathered my strength and crawled still higher to a stack covered with snow. It took me a long time to clear away the loose, squeaky snow with my hands and feet. I finally managed to yank a log free, but it was too heavy.
I wore a dirty towel around my neck that served as a scarf. I unwound it, tied it to the tip of the log, and started dragging the log away. The log slid downhill, banging against trees, bumps, and my legs, sometimes even getting away from me. Octopus-like, the dwarf cedar grasped at the log, but it would tear itself free from the tree’s black tentacles, gather speed, and then get stuck in the snow. I would crawl down to it and again force it to move. While I was still high up on the mountain, it became dark, and I realized that many hours had passed, and the road back to the village and the camp area was still far away. I yanked at the scarf, and the log again hurtled downward in jerks. I dragged the log out on to the road. The forest lurched before my eyes, and a sickening sweet nausea welled up from my throat. I came to in the crane-operator’s shed; he was rubbing my face and hands with stinging snow.