Kolyma Tales (38 page)

‘But what about the rations? You had two left. Did you eat them?’

‘Damn right! I ate them right after I got bandaged up. The other two wanted me to break a piece off for them. I told them to go to hell. Business is business.’

In the gold-mine work gang, the easiest job was that of carpenter. He would nail boards together to make a walkway for wheelbarrows loaded with earth for the washer. These wooden ‘whiskers’ stretched out in all directions from the central walkway. From above, that is from the gold-washer, the walkway looked like a monstrous centipede, flattened, dried, and nailed for ever to the gold-mine’s open workings.

The carpenter had a ‘pushover’ job compared with that of the miner or the wheelbarrow man. The carpenter’s hands knew neither the handle of the wheelbarrow, the shovel, the feel of a crowbar, nor the pick. An axe and a handful of nails were his only tools. Normally the gang boss would rotate men on this crucial job to give everyone at least a slight chance to rest up. Of course, fingers clutched in a death grip around a shovel or pick handle cannot be straightened out by one day of easy work. A man needs to be idle for at least a year for that to happen. But there is, nevertheless, some measure of justice in this alternation of easy and hard labor. The rotation was not rigid: a weaker person had a better chance of working a day as a carpenter. One didn’t have to be a cabinet-maker or carpenter to hew boards and drive nails. People with a university education coped with the job quite well.

In our work gang this pushover job wasn’t evenly distributed. The job of carpenter was always filled by one and the same person – Isaiah Davidovich Rabinovich, former director of Soviet Government Insurance. Rabinovich was sixty-eight years old, but the old man was in good health and hoped to survive his ten-year sentence. In camp it is the work that kills, and anyone who praises it is either a scoundrel or a fool. Twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds died one after another, and that was why they were brought to this ‘special zone’, but Rabinovich, the carpenter, lived on. He evidently knew someone among the camp higher-ups, had some mysterious pull. He even got office jobs. Isaiah Rabinovich understood that every day and every hour spent some place other than the mine promised him life and salvation, whereas the mine offered him only death. There was no reason to bring pensioners to the special zone. Rabinovich’s nationality had brought him here to die.

But Rabinovich was stubborn and did not want to die.

Once we were locked up together, ‘isolated’ for the first of May. It happened every year.

‘I’ve been observing you for a long time,’ Rabinovich said, ‘and I was pleased to know that someone was watching me, studying me, and that it was not someone who was doing it as part of his job.’

I smiled at Rabinovich with a crooked smile that ripped open my wounded lips and tore my gums, which were already bloody from scurvy.

He said, ‘You’re probably a good person. You don’t speak degradingly of women.’

‘I hadn’t noticed, Isaiah Davidovich. Can it be that they really talk about women here?’

‘They do, but you don’t take part.’

‘To tell the truth, Isaiah Davidovich, I consider women to be better than men. I understand the dual unity of man and woman, of husband and wife, etc. And then there’s motherhood and labor. Women even work better than men.’

‘That’s true,’ said Beznozhenko, a bookkeeper who was sitting next to Rabinovich. ‘Every Saturday when they make you work without pay you’re better off not being next to a woman. She’ll work you to death. And every time you want to take time out for a smoke, she’ll get mad.’

‘That too,’ Rabinovich said distractedly, ‘probably, probably… Well, here we are in Kolyma, and a lot of women have come to find their husbands. Theirs is a terrible lot, what with all those syphilitic higher-ups exploiting them. You know that just as well as I do. But no man has ever come out here to follow a convicted, exiled wife. I wasn’t director of Government Insurance for long, but it was enough to get ten years. For many years I was in charge of the overseas division of Government Insurance. Do you know what that means?’

‘I understand,’ I said without thinking, for I had no idea what that meant.

Rabinovich smiled very properly and very politely.

‘Aside from my work for Government Insurance abroad…’

And glancing suddenly into my eyes, Rabinovich sensed that I was not interested in anything. At least not until dinner.

The conversation was renewed after a mouthful of soup.

‘If you like, I’ll tell you about myself. I lived abroad a lot, and everywhere I’ve been – in the hospital or the barracks – they always ask me to describe one thing: how, where, and what I ate over there. A sort of culinary motivation. Gastronomic dreams and nightmares. Would you like that kind of story?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good. I was an insurance agent in Odessa. I worked for the Russia, an insurance agency. I was young and tried to work well and honestly for the owner. I learned languages. He sent me abroad. I married the owner’s daughter. I lived abroad right up to the revolution. The owner was like Savva Morozov;
^*
he was laying his bets on the Bolsheviks. I was abroad during the revolution with my wife and daughter. My father-in-law died an accidental death; it had nothing to do with the revolution. I knew a lot of people, but none of them had any influence after the October Revolution. Do you understand me?’

‘Yes.’

‘The Soviet government was just getting on its feet. People came to see me. Russia, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, was making its first purchases abroad and needed credit. But the word of the State Bank wasn’t sufficient collateral for a loan. A note from me, however, my recommendation, was enough. So I fixed up Kreiger, the match king, with the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. After a few deals like that they let me come home. And I had some delicate problems to work on here at home as well. Have you heard anything about Spitzbergen and how the deal was paid for?’

‘A little.’

‘Well, I was the one who loaded the Norwegian gold on to our schooner in the North Sea. So aside from handling foreign accounts, I had a number of assignments of that sort. The Soviet government was my new boss, and I served it just as I had the insurance agency – honestly.’

Rabinovich’s calm, intelligent eyes peered directly at me.

‘I’m going to die. I’m already an old man. I’ve seen life. But I feel sorry for my wife. She’s in Moscow. My daughter’s in Moscow too. They haven’t been picked up yet as members of the family… I guess I’ll never see them again. They write to me often, send packages. How about you? Do you get packages?’

‘No, I wrote that I didn’t want any packages. If I survive, it’ll be without anyone’s help. I’ll be obligated only to myself.’

‘There’s something noble in that. But my wife and daughter would never understand.’

‘Nothing noble at all. You and I are not only beyond good and evil, we’re also beyond anything human. After all that I’ve seen, I don’t want to be obligated to anyone – not even my own wife.’

‘I can’t say that I understand that; as for myself, I write and ask for more. The packages mean a job in bookkeeping for a month. I gave my best suit for that job. You probably thought the director felt sorry for an old man…’

‘I thought you had an “in” with the camp administration.’

‘So I’m a stool-pigeon? But who needs a seventy-year-old stool-pigeon? No, I simply gave a bribe, a big bribe. And I’m not sharing the rewards of that bribe with anyone – not even you. I get my packages, write, ask for more.’

After that first of May we returned to the same barracks, and our berths, something like those in a railroad car, were next to each other. I had accumulated a lot of experience in the camps, and the old man, Rabinovich, had a young man’s curiosity for life. When he saw that my rage could not be contained, he began to have a certain respect for me – nothing more than respect. Maybe it was an old man’s longing to talk about himself to anyone he might meet on a train, about the life he wanted to leave behind him on earth.

Lice did not frighten us. Precisely when I met Isaiah Rabinovich, my scarf was stolen. It was only a cotton scarf, of course, but it was, nevertheless, a real knitted scarf.

We were being led out to work. The method they used to hurry things along was called ‘last man out’. The overseers would grab people, and the guards would push them with their rifle butts, driving the crowd of ragged men down the icy hill. The last man would be grabbed by the hands and feet and thrown down the hill. Both Rabinovich and I tried to jump down as quickly as possible and get in formation on the area below, where the guards were already dealing out blows to speed up the process. Most of the time we managed to roll down the hill without anything happening to us and to reach the mine alive. Once we got there, it was up to God.

The last man in formation was tossed from the icy hill, tied to the horse-sleigh, and dragged to the work site. Both Rabinovich and I were fortunate enough to avoid that fatal trip.

The camp zone was selected so as to force us to climb upward when we returned from work, scrambling up the steps, grabbing at the remains of naked, broken shrubs. One might think that after a day in the gold-mine, people would not have the strength to crawl upward. But they crawled – even if it took them a half-hour to reach the camp gates and the barracks zone. The usual inscription hung over the gates: ‘Labor is honor, glory, nobility, and heroism.’ They would go to the cafeteria and drink something from bowls. From there they would go to the barracks to sleep. In the morning it would all begin again.

Not everyone was hungry here – just why, I never learned. When it got warmer, in the spring, the white nights began, and they started playing a terrible game in the camp cafeteria called ‘bait-fishing’. A ration of bread would be put on the table, and everyone would hide around the corner to wait for the hungry victim to approach, be enticed by the bread, touch it, and take it. Then everyone would rush out from around the corner, from the darkness, from ambush, and there would commence the beating to death of the thief, who was usually a living skeleton. I never ran into this form of amusement anywhere except at Jelhala. The chief organizer was Dr Krivitsky, an old revolutionary and former deputy commissar of defense industries. His accomplice in the setting out of these terrible baits was a correspondent from the newspaper
Izvestia
– Zaslavsky.

I had my knitted cotton scarf. The paramedic in the hospital had given it to me when I was checking out. When our group reached the Jelhala mine, a gray, unsmiling face, crossed and criss-crossed with northern wrinkles and scarred with the marks of old frostbite, confronted me.

‘Let’s trade!’

‘No.’

‘Sell it to me!’

‘No.’

All the locals – about twenty of them had come running up to our truck – stared at me, amazed at my rashness, foolishness, pride.

‘He’s a convict like us, but he’s the group leader,’ someone prompted me, but I shook my head.

The brows shot upward on the unsmiling face. He nodded to someone and pointed to me.

But they lacked the nerve for open banditry in this camp. They had another, more simple way – and I knew it, so I tied the scarf around my neck and never took it off again – not in the bathhouse, not at night, never.

It would have been easy to keep the scarf, but the lice wouldn’t leave me in peace. There were so many lice in the scarf that it moved all by itself when I took it off just for a minute to shake myself free of lice and put it on the table beside the lamp.

For two weeks I struggled with the shadows of thieves, trying to convince myself that these were shadows and not thieves.

At the end of two weeks I hung the scarf, on one occasion, in front of me, turned around to pour myself a mug of water, and the scarf immediately disappeared, plucked away by the hand of an experienced thief. The theft, which I knew was coming, which I felt, which I foresaw, demanded so much of my energy that I was glad I no longer had to struggle to keep the scarf. For the first time since arriving at Jelhala, I fell into a sound sleep and had a good dream – perhaps because the thousands of lice had disappeared, and my body could relax.

Isaiah Rabinovich had observed my struggle with sympathy. Of course, he had not made the slightest effort to help me preserve the lousy scarf. In camp it was each man for himself, and I didn’t expect any assistance.

But Isaiah Rabinovich had been working for several days in bookkeeping, and he slipped me a dinner coupon to console me for my loss. And I thanked Rabinovich.

After work everyone lay down to sleep, spreading their dirty work clothes under them.

Isaiah Rabinovich said:

‘I want to ask your advice on a certain question. It has nothing to do with camp.’

‘About General de Gaulle?’

‘Don’t laugh. I’ve received an important letter. That is, it’s important to me.’

With my entire body I made an effort to drive away encroaching sleep, shook myself, and began to listen.

‘I already told you that my wife and daughter are in Moscow. They haven’t been touched. My daughter wants to get married. I got a letter from her. And from her fiancé – here it is.’ And Rabinovich took a package of letters from under his pillow – a package of pretty sheets with swift, precise handwriting. I looked and saw that the letters were Latin, not Cyrillic.

‘Moscow permitted these letters to be sent on to me. Do you know English?’

‘Me? English? No.’

‘This is in English. It’s from her fiancé. He asks permission to marry my daughter. He writes: “My parents have already given permission, and there remains only the permission of the parents of my future wife…” And here is my daughter’s letter. “Papa, my husband, naval attaché of the United States of America, Captain Tolly, asks your permission for our marriage. Papa, answer right away.” ’

‘What sort of delirium is that?’ I said.

‘It’s no delirium. It’s a letter from Captain Tolly to me. And a letter from my daughter. And a letter from my wife.’