Kolyma Tales (4 page)

‘Is it much farther?’ he asked in a whisper.

‘Some way,’ Bagretsov answered quietly.

They sat down to rest. They had nothing to say or even think of – everything was clear and simple. In a flat area at the end of the terrace were mounds of stone dug from the ground and drying moss that had been ripped from its bed.

‘I could have handled this myself,’ Bagretsov smiled wryly. ‘But it’s more cheerful work if there are two of us. Then, too, I figured you were an old friend…’

They had both been brought on the same ship the previous year.

Bagretsov stopped: ‘Get down or they’ll see us.’

They lay down and began to toss the stones to the side. None of the rocks was too big for two men to lift since the people who had heaped them up that morning were no stronger than Glebov.

Bagretsov swore quietly. He had cut his finger and the blood was flowing. He sprinkled sand on the wound, ripped a piece of wadding from his jacket, and pressed it against the cut, but the blood wouldn’t stop.

‘Poor coagulation,’ Glebov said indifferently.

‘Are you a doctor?’ asked Bagretsov, sucking the wound.

Glebov remained silent. The time when he had been a doctor seemed very far away. Had it ever existed? Too often the world beyond the mountains and seas seemed unreal, like something out of a dream. Real were the minute, the hour, the day – from reveille to the end of work. He never guessed further, nor did he have the strength to guess. Nor did anyone else.

He didn’t know the past of the people who surrounded him and didn’t want to know. But then, if tomorrow Bagretsov were to declare himself a doctor of philosophy or a marshal of aviation, Glebov would believe him without a second thought. Had he himself really been a doctor? Not only the habit of judgment was lost, but even the habit of observation. Glebov watched Bagretsov suck the blood from his finger but said nothing. The circumstance slid across his consciousness, but he couldn’t find or even seek within himself the will to answer. The consciousness that remained to him – the consciousness that was perhaps no longer human – had too few facets and was now directed toward one goal only, that of removing the stones as quickly as possible.

‘Is it deep?’ Glebov asked when they stopped to rest.

‘How can it be deep?’ Bagretsov replied.

And Glebov realized his question was absurd, that of course the hole couldn’t be deep.

‘Here he is,’ Bagretsov said. He reached out to touch a human toe. The big toe peered out from under the rocks and was perfectly visible in the moonlight. The toe was different from Glebov’s and Bagretsov’s toes – but not in that it was lifeless and stiff; there was very little difference in this regard. The nail of the dead toe was clipped, and the toe itself was fuller and softer than Glebov’s. They quickly tossed aside the remaining stones heaped over the body.

‘He’s a young one,’ Bagretsov said.

Together the two of them dragged the corpse from the grave.

‘He’s so big and healthy,’ Glebov said, panting.

‘If he weren’t so fattened up,’ Bagretsov said, ‘they would have buried him the way they bury us, and there would have been no reason for us to come here today.’

They straightened out the corpse and pulled off the shirt.

‘You know, the shorts are like new,’ Bagretsov said with satisfaction.

Glebov hid the underwear under his jacket.

‘Better to wear it,’ Bagretsov said.

‘No, I don’t want to,’ Glebov muttered.

They put the corpse back in the grave and heaped it over with rocks.

The blue light of the rising moon fell on the rocks and the scant forest of the taiga, revealing each projecting rock, each tree in a peculiar fashion, different from the way they looked by day. Everything seemed real but different than in the daytime. It was as if the world had a second face, a nocturnal face.

The dead man’s underwear was warm under Glebov’s jacket and no longer seemed alien.

‘I need a smoke,’ Glebov said in a dreamlike fashion.

‘Tomorrow you’ll get your smoke.’

Bagretsov smiled. Tomorrow they would sell the underwear, trade it for bread, maybe even get some tobacco…

For two days the white fog was so thick a man couldn’t be seen two paces away. But then there wasn’t much opportunity to take long walks alone. Somehow you could guess the direction of the mess hall, the hospital, the guardhouse – those few points we had to be able to find. That same sense of direction that animals possess perfectly also awakens in man under the right conditions.

The men were not shown the thermometer, but that wasn’t necessary since they had to work in any weather. Besides, longtime residents of Kolyma could determine the weather precisely even without a thermometer: if there was frosty fog, that meant the temperature outside was forty degrees below zero; if you exhaled easily but in a rasping fashion, it was fifty degrees below zero; if there was a rasping and it was difficult to breathe, it was sixty degrees below; after sixty degrees below zero, spit froze in mid-air. Spit had been freezing in mid-air for two weeks.

Potashnikov woke each morning with the hope that the cold had let up during the night. He knew from last winter’s experience that no matter how low the temperature was, a sharp change was necessary for a feeling of warmth. If the frost were to weaken its grip even to forty or fifty degrees below zero, it would be warm for two days, and there was no sense in planning more than two days ahead.

But the cold kept up, and Potashnikov knew he couldn’t hold out any longer. Breakfast sustained his strength for no more than an hour of work, and then exhaustion ensued. Frost penetrated the body to the ‘marrow of the bone’ – the phrase was no metaphor. A man could wave his pick or shovel, jump up and down so as not to freeze – till dinner. Dinner was hot – a thin broth and two spoons of kasha that restored one’s strength only a little but nevertheless provided some warmth. And then there was strength to work for an hour, and after that Potashnikov again felt himself in the grip of the cold. The day would finally come to a close, and after supper all the workers would take their bread back to the barracks, where they would eat it, washing it down with a mug of hot water. Not a single man would eat his bread in the mess hall with his soup. After that Potashnikov would go to sleep.

He slept, of course, on one of the upper berths, because the lower ones were like an ice cellar. Everyone who had a lower berth would stand half the night at the stove, taking turns with his neighbors in embracing it; the stove retained a slight remnant of warmth. There was never enough firewood, because to go for it meant a four-kilometer walk after work and everyone avoided the task. The upper berths were warmer, but even so everyone slept in his working clothes – hats, padded coats, pea jackets, felt pants. Even with the extra warmth, by the morning a man’s hair would be frozen to the pillow.

Potashnikov felt his strength leaving him every day. A thirty-year-old man, he had difficulty in climbing on to an upper berth and even in getting down from it. His neighbor had died yesterday. The man simply didn’t wake up, and no one asked for the cause of death, as if there were only one cause that everyone knew. The orderly was happy that the man died in the morning, and not in the evening, since the orderly got the dead man’s ration for the day. Everyone realized this, and Potashnikov screwed up his courage to approach the orderly.

‘Break off a piece of the crust,’ he asked, but the orderly cursed him as only a man whose weakness lent him strength could. Potashnikov fell silent and walked away.

He had to take some action, think of something with his weakened mind. Either that or die. Potashnikov had no fear of death, but he couldn’t rid himself of a passionate secret desire, a last stubbornness – to live. He didn’t want to die here in the frost under the boots of the guards, in the barracks with its swearing, dirt, and total indifference written on every face. He bore no grudge for people’s indifference, for he had long since comprehended the source of that spiritual dullness. The same frost that transformed a man’s spit into ice in mid-air also penetrated the soul. If bones could freeze, then the brain could also be dulled and the soul could freeze over. And the soul shuddered and froze – perhaps to remain frozen for ever. Potashnikov had lost everything except the desire to survive, to endure the cold and remain alive.

Having gulped down his bowl of warm soup, Potashnikov was barely able to drag himself to the work area. The work gang stood at attention before beginning work, and a fat red-faced man in a deerskin hat and a white leather coat walked up and down the rows in Yakut deerskin boots. He peered into their exhausted dirty faces. The gang foreman walked up and respectfully spoke to the man in the deerskin hat.

‘I really haven’t got anyone like that, Alexander Yevgenievich. You’ll have to try Sobolev and the petty criminal element. These are all intellectuals, Alexander Yevgenievich. They’re a pain in the neck.’

The man in the deerskin hat stopped looking over the men and turned to the gang foreman.

‘The foremen don’t know their people, they don’t want to know, they don’t want to help us,’ he said hoarsely.

‘Have it your way, Alexander Yevgenievich.’

‘I’ll show you. What’s your name?’

‘My name’s Ivanov, Alexander Yevgenievich.’

‘Just watch. Hey, guys, attention!’ The man in the deerskin hat walked up to the work gang. ‘The camp administration needs carpenters to make boxes to haul dirt.’

Everyone was silent.

‘You see, Alexander Yevgenievich?’ the foreman whispered.

Potashnikov suddenly heard his own voice.

‘I’m a carpenter.’ And he stepped forward. Another man stepped forward on his right. Potashnikov knew him; it was Grigoriev.

‘Well,’ said the man in the deerskin hat, turning to the foreman, ‘are you an incompetent asshole or not? OK, fellows, follow me.’

Potashnikov and Grigoriev stumbled after the man in the deerskin hat. He stopped.

‘At this pace,’ he said hoarsely, ‘we won’t make it even by dinnertime. Here’s what. I’ll go ahead and you go to the shop and ask for the foreman, Sergeev. You know where the carpentry shop is?’

‘We know, we know,’ Grigoriev said in a loud voice. ‘Please, give us a smoke.’

‘I think I’ve heard that request before,’ the man in the deerskin hat muttered and pulled out two cigarettes without removing the pack from his pocket.

Potashnikov walked ahead and thought frantically. Today he would be in the warmth of the carpentry shop. He’d sharpen the axe and make a handle. And sharpen the saw. No sense hurrying. He could kill time till dinner signing out the tools and finding the quartermaster. By evening they’d realize he didn’t know how to make an axe handle or sharpen a saw, and they’d kick him out. Tomorrow he’d have to return to the work gang. But today he’d be warm. Maybe he could remain a carpenter tomorrow and the day after tomorrow – if Grigoriev was a carpenter. He’d be Grigoriev’s helper. Winter was nearly over. Somehow he’d survive the short summer.

Potashnikov stopped and waited for Grigoriev.

‘Do you know how… to be a carpenter?’ he asked, holding his breath in sudden hope.

‘Well, you see,’ said Grigoriev cheerfully, ‘I was a graduate student at the Moscow Philological Institute. I don’t see why anyone with a higher education, especially one in the humanities, can’t sharpen an axe and set the teeth on a saw. Particularly if he has to do it next to a hot stove.’

‘That means you can’t do it either…’

‘It doesn’t mean anything. We’ll fool them for two days, and what do you care what happens after that?’

‘We’ll fool them for one day, and tomorrow we’ll be back in the work gang…’

Together the two of them barely managed to open the frozen door. In the middle of the carpentry shop stood a red-hot cast-iron stove; five carpenters were working without coats and hats at their benches. The new arrivals knelt before the stove’s open door as if it were the god of fire, one of man’s first gods. They threw down their mittens and stretched their hands toward the warmth but were not able to feel it immediately since their hands were numb. In a minute Grigoriev and Potashnikov knelt, took off their hats, and unbuttoned their padded jackets.

‘What are you doing here?’ one of the carpenters asked with hostility.

‘We’re carpenters. We’re going to work here,’ Grigoriev said.

‘Alexander Yevgenievich said so,’ Potashnikov added hurriedly.

‘That means you’re the ones the foreman told us to give axes to?’ asked Arishtrem, an older man in charge of tools who was planing shovel handles in the corner.

‘That’s us, that’s us…’

‘Here they are,’ Arishtrem said, looking them over sceptically. ‘Two axes, a saw, and a tooth-setter. You’ll return the tooth-setter later. Here’s my axe; make yourself a handle with it.’

Arishtrem smiled.

‘You’ll have to do thirty handles a day,’ he said.

Grigoriev took the block of wood from Arishtrem’s hands and began to hack away at it. The dinner horn sounded, but Arishtrem kept staring silently at Grigoriev’s work.

‘Now you,’ he said to Potashnikov.

Potashnikov put the log on the stump, took the axe from Grigoriev’s hands, and began to trim the piece.

The carpenters had all left for dinner, and there was no one left in the shop except the three men.

‘Take my two axe handles,’ Arishtrem said, handing the two ready pieces to Grigoriev, ‘and mount the heads. Sharpen the saw. You can stay warm at the stove today and tomorrow. After that, go back where you came from. Here’s a piece of bread for dinner.’

They stayed warm at the stove those two days, and the following day it was only twenty degrees below zero. Winter was over.

That evening the overseer rolled up his measuring-tape and said that Dugaev would get an individual assignment for the next day. The foreman, who had been standing beside them and asking the overseer to credit his work gang with ‘an extra ten cubic meters of earth till the day after tomorrow’, suddenly fell silent and stared at an evening star sparkling over the crest of the hill. Baranov, Dugaev’s ‘partner’, who had been helping the overseer measure the amount of work done, picked up his shovel and began to clean the already cleaned pit.