Kolyma Tales (36 page)

Xvostov was precisely that sort of person. He fought with someone every day – either in the barracks or in the deep side trench that our work gang was digging. He was my
winter
acquaintance; I never saw his hair. He had a cap with torn earflaps of white fur. As for his eyes, they were dark, gleaming, hungry. Sometimes I would recite poetry, and he would look at me as if I were half mad.

Once, all of a sudden, he furiously began to attack the stone in the trench with his pick. The pick was heavy, but Xvostov kept swinging it hard and without interruption. This show of strength amazed me. We had been together for a long time and had been hungry for a long time. Then the pick fell to the earth with a ringing sound. I looked around. Xvostov stood with his legs apart, swaying. His knees began to crumple. He lurched and fell face down, his outstretched hands covered in those same mittens he mended every evening. His forearms were bared; both were tattooed. Pavel Mixailovich had been a sea captain.

Roman Romanovich died before my very eyes. At one time he had been a sort of ‘regimental commander’. He distributed packages, was responsible for keeping the camp clean, and – in a word – enjoyed privileges that none of us ‘fifty-eighters’ could even dream of. The highest post we could hope to attain was work in the bathhouse laundry or patching clothes on the night shift. ‘Special instructions’ from Moscow permitted us to come into contact only with stone. That little piece of paper was in each of our folders. But Roman Romanovich had been allotted this unattainable post. And he quickly learned all its secrets: how to open a crate containing a package for a prisoner and do it in such a way as to dump the sugar on the floor, how to break a jar of preserves, how to kick toasted bread and dried fruits under the counter. Roman Romanovich learned all this quickly and did not seek our company. He was primly official and behaved as the polite representative of those higher camp authorities, with whom we could have no personal contact. He never gave us any advice on any matter. He only explained: one letter could be sent per month, packages were distributed between eight and ten p.m. in the commandant’s office, etc.

Evidently some accidental acquaintanceship had played a role in his getting the job. But then he didn’t last long as regimental commander – only about two months. Either it was one of the usual personnel checks that took place from time to time and were obligatory at the end of the year, or someone turned him in – ‘blew’ on him, in the camp’s eloquent phrase. In any case, Roman Romanovich disappeared. He had been gathering dwarf-cedar needles, which were used as a source of vitamin C for convicts. Only real ‘goners’ were used for needle-picking. These starving semi-invalids were the by-products of the gold-mines, which transformed healthy people into invalids in three weeks by hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of heavy work, beatings. New people were ‘transferred’ to the work gang, and Moloch chewed on…

By the end of the season there was no one left in the work gang except its leader, Ivanov. The rest had been sent to the hospital to die or were used for needle-picking, where they were fed once a day and could not receive more than 600 grams of bread – a little more than a pound. Romanov and I worked together that fall picking needles. The needles were not only useless as a source of vitamin C but were even declared much later, in 1952, to be harmful to the kidneys.

We were also building a home for ourselves for the winter. In the summer we lived in ragged tents. We paced off the area, staked out the corners, and drove sticks into the ground at rather wide intervals to form a double-row fence. We packed the gaps with icy pieces of moss and peat. Inside were single-layer bunks made from poles. In the middle was a cast-iron stove. Each evening we received an empirically calculated portion of firewood. Nevertheless, we had neither saw nor axe, since these objects were guarded by the soldiers who lived in a separate plywood shack. The reason for this was that some of the criminals in the neighboring work gang had attacked the gang leader. The criminal element has an extraordinary attraction to drama and introduces it into its own life in a way that would be the envy even of Evreinov.
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The criminals decided to kill the work-gang leader, and the proposal to saw off his head was received ecstatically. They beheaded him with an ordinary cross-cut saw. That was why convicts were not allowed axes or saws at night. Why at night? No one made any attempt to find logic in camp orders.

How could logs be cut to fit the stove? The thin ones could be stamped on and broken, but the thicker ones had to be stuffed into the mouth of the stove – thin end first so they would gradually burn down. During the night there would always be someone to stuff them farther in. The light from the open stove door was the only light in our house. Drafts would sweep through the wall until the first snowfall, but then we shoveled snow all around the house and poured water over the snow, and our winter home was ready. The door opening was hung with a piece of tarpaulin.

It was here in this shed that I found Roman Romanovich. He didn’t recognize me. The criminal camp has a very descriptive phrase to describe the way he was dressed – ‘like fire’. Shreds of cotton wool protruded from his quilted jacket, his pants, his hat. Evidently Roman Romanovich often had occasion to run for a ‘light’ for the cigarette of this or that criminal… There was a hungry gleam in his eyes, but his cheeks were as rosy as before, except that now they didn’t remind one of two balloons but clung rather tightly to his cheekbones. Roman Romanovich lay in the corner, wheezing loudly. His chin rose and fell.

‘He’s finished,’ said Denisov, his neighbor. ‘His foot rags are in good shape.’ Agilely, Denisov pulled the boots off the dying man’s feet and unwrapped the green footcloths that were still quite wearable. ‘That’s how it’s done,’ he said, peering at me in a threatening fashion. But I didn’t care.

Romanov’s corpse was carried out while we were lining up to be sent to work. He didn’t have a hat either. The bottom of his coat dragged the ground.

Volodya Dobrovoltsev, the pointman, died. What is that – a job or a nationality? It was a job that was the envy of every ‘fifty-eighter’ in the barracks. (Separate barracks for the ‘politicals’ in a camp for petty criminals and regular thugs were, of course, a legal mockery. Such arrangements protected no one from attacks or bloody settling of accounts by the criminals.)

The ‘point’ was an iron pipe with hot steam which was used to heat the stone and coarse frozen gravel. From time to time a worker would shovel out the heated stone with a ten-foot-long shovel that had a blade the size of a man’s palm.

This was considered a skilled job, since the pointman had to open and shut the valves which regulated hot steam that traveled along pipes from a primitive boiler in the shed. It was even better to be a pointman than a boilerman. Not every mechanical engineer could hope for that kind of work. And it wasn’t because any special skills were required. As far as Volodya was concerned, it was sheer chance that he got the job, but it transformed him totally. He no longer had to concern himself with the eternal preoccupation of how to keep warm. The icy cold did not penetrate his entire being, didn’t keep his mind from functioning. The hot pipe saved him. That was why everyone envied Dobrovoltsev.

There was talk that he didn’t get the job of pointman for nothing, that it was sure proof that he was an informer, a spy… Of course, the criminals would maintain that anyone who had worked as a camp orderly had drunk the working man’s blood, but people knew just how much such gossip was worth; envy is a poor adviser. Somehow Volodya’s stature increased immeasurably in our eyes. It was as if a remarkable violinist had appeared among us. Dobrovoltsev would leave camp alone – the conditions required that. He would leave through the guard’s booth, opening the tiny window and shouting his number – ‘twenty-five’ – in a joyous, loud voice. It had been a long time since we had heard anything like that.

Sometimes he would work near our work site, and we would make use of our acquaintance and would alternate running to the pipe to get warm. The pipe was an inch and a half in diameter, and you could wrap your fingers around it, squeeze them into a fist and feel the heat flow from your hands to your body so that it was impossible to tear yourself away to return to the mine face and the frost…

Volodya didn’t chase us away as the other pointmen did. He never said a word to us, although I know for a fact that pointmen were forbidden to let the likes of us warm up by the pipe. He stood, surrounded by clouds of thick white steam. His clothing became icy, and the nap of his coat gleamed like crystal needles. He never talked to us – the job was too valuable to risk just for that.

On Christmas night that year we were all sitting around the stove. In honor of the holiday, its iron sides were redder than usual. We could sense the difference in temperature immediately. All of us sitting around the stove were in a sleepy, lyrical mood.

‘You know, fellows, it would be a good thing to go home. After all, miracles do happen…’ It was Glebov, the horse-driver, speaking. He used to be a professor of philosophy and was famous in our barracks for having forgotten his wife’s name a month earlier. ‘I guess I should knock on wood, but I really mean to go home.’

‘Home?’

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ I answered. ‘I’d rather go back to prison. I’m not joking. I wouldn’t want to go back to my family now. They wouldn’t understand me, they couldn’t. The things that seem important to them I know to be trivial. And the things that are important to me – the little that is left to me – would be incomprehensible to them. I would bring them a new fear, add one more fear to the thousands of fears that already fill their lives. No man should see or know the things that I have seen and known.

‘Prison is another matter altogether. Prison is freedom. It’s the only place I have ever known where people spoke their minds without being afraid. Their souls were at rest there. And their bodies rested too, because they didn’t have to work. There, every hour of our being had meaning.’

‘What a lot of rot,’ the former professor of philosophy said. ‘That’s only because they didn’t beat you during the investigation. Anyone who experienced that method would be of an entirely different opinion.’

‘How about you, Peter Ivanovich, what do you say to that?’ Peter Ivanovich Timofeev, the former director of Ural Trust, smiled and winked at Glebov.

‘I’d go home to my wife. I’d buy some rye bread – a whole loaf! I’d cook up a bucketful of kasha. And some soup with dumplings – a bucket of that too! And I’d eat it all. And I’d be full for the first time in my life. And whatever was left over I’d make my wife eat.’

‘How about you?’ Glebov asked Zvonkov, the pickman in our work gang, who had been a peasant from either Yaroslavl or Kostroma in his earlier life.

‘I’d go home,’ Zvonkov answered seriously, without the slightest trace of a smile.

‘I think if I could go home, I’d never be more than a step away from my wife. Wherever she’d go, I’d be right on her heels. The only thing is that they’ve taught me how to hate work here. I’ve lost my love for the land. But I’d find something…’

‘And how about you?’ Glebov touched the knees of our orderly.

‘First thing I’d go to Party Headquarters. I’ll never forget all the cigarette butts they had on the floor there.’

‘Stop joking.’

‘I’m dead serious.’

Suddenly I realized that there was only one person left who had not yet answered. And that person was Volodya Dobrovoltsev. He raised his head, not waiting for the question. From the open stove door the light of the glowing coals gleamed in his lively, deep-set eyes.

‘As for me,’ he said in a calm, unhurried voice, ‘I’d like to have my arms and legs cut off and become a human stump – no arms or legs. Then I’d be strong enough to spit in their faces for everything they’re doing to us…’

Late one night, Chris was summoned to ‘headquarters’. That was how people in camp referred to the small house at the foot of the hill on the edge of the settlement. In this house lived the investigator who handled ‘particularly important matters’. The phrase was a joke, since there were no ‘matters’ that were not particularly important. Any violation of the rules or even the appearance of such a violation was punishable by death. It was either death or a verdict of total innocence. But what man had lived to tell the tale of such a verdict?

Prepared for everything and indifferent to everything, Chris walked down the narrow path leading to headquarters. The path was beaten down thoroughly. A light was burning in the bakery – probably the bread slicer cutting up ‘rations’ for tomorrow’s breakfast. Would there be a breakfast or even a tomorrow for Chris? He did not know, and he drew pleasure from his ignorance. Chris came upon something that looked like a chunk of snow or a piece of ice. He bent down, picked up the frozen object, and realized it was a turnip skin. The skin thawed quickly in his hands, and Chris stuffed it into his mouth. There obviously was no sense in hurrying. Chris examined the whole length of the long, snowy path from the barracks, and he realized that he was the first to walk along it that day. The path led along the outskirts of the settlement to the investigator’s house. All along the way were frozen pieces of turnip that looked as if they were wrapped in cellophane. Chris found ten chunks – some larger, some smaller. It had been a long time since he had seen people who could discard turnip skins in the snow. It had to be a civilian, and not a convict. Perhaps it was the investigator himself. Chris chewed and swallowed all the skins. There was a smell in his mouth that he had long since forgotten – the smell of his native earth, of fresh vegetables. In a joyous mood Chris knocked at the investigator’s door.

The investigator was short, thin, and unshaven. The room contained only his desk and an iron cot with a military blanket and a wrinkled grimy pillow… The desk was a home-made table with rough-hewn drawers crammed with papers. A box of filing cards stood on the window-sill. The bric-à-brac shelf was also heaped with thick folders. There was an ashtray made from a tin can. On the wall a wind-up clock showed ten-thirty. The investigator was heating up the cast-iron stove with papers. He was pale – like all investigators. There was no orderly, and no revolver.