Kolyma Tales (48 page)

The young peasant cannot but be struck by this. It begins to seem to him that the criminals possess the truth of camp life, that only by imitating them will he tread the path that will save his life. He sees, moreover, that there are people who can live even on the very bottom of existence. And the peasant begins to imitate the conduct of the criminals. He agrees with their every word, is ready to carry out all their errands, speaks of them with fear and reverence. He is anxious to adorn his speech with their slang; no member of either sex, convict or civilian, who has been to Kolyma has failed to carry away from Kolyma the peculiar slang of the criminals.

These words are a poison that seeps into the soul. It is this mastery of the criminal dialect itself that marks the beginning of the non-criminal’s intimacy with the criminal world.

The intellectual convict is crushed by the camp. Everything he valued is ground into the dust while civilization and culture drop from him within weeks. The method of persuasion in a quarrel is the fist or a stick. The way to induce someone to do something is by means of a rifle butt, a punch in the teeth.

The intellectual becomes a coward, and his own brain provides a ‘justification’ of his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything, attach himself to either side in a quarrel. The intellectual sees in the criminal world ‘teachers of life’, fighters for the ‘people’s rights’. A blow can transform an intellectual into the obedient servant of a petty crook. Physical force becomes moral force.

The intellectual is permanently terrified. His spirit is broken, and he takes this frightened and broken spirit with him back into civilian life.

Engineers, geologists, and doctors who have come to Kolyma to do contract work for Far Northern Construction are quickly corrupted. The sources of this corruption are many: a desire for money, rationalizations that the ‘taiga is the law’, cheap and convenient slave labor, a narrowing of cultural interests. No one who has worked in the camps ever returns to the mainland. He would be worthless there, for he has grown accustomed to a ‘rich’, carefree life. It is this very depravity that is described in works of literature as ‘the call of the North’.

The criminal world, the habitual criminals whose tastes and habits are reflected in the total life-pattern of Kolyma, are mainly responsible for this corruption of the human soul.

Aglaya Demidova was brought to the hospital with false documents. Neither her case history nor her convict passport was forged. No, these were in order. But the folder containing her papers was new and yellow – testimony of a recent sentencing. She arrived under the same name that she had used when she had been brought to the hospital two years earlier. Nothing in her situation had changed except her sentence. Two years ago her folder had been dark blue, and the sentence had been ten years.

A three-digit number had been added to the short list of two-digit figures listed in the column headed ‘Article of Criminal Code’. It was her medical documents that were forged – the history of the illness, the laboratory tests, the diagnosis. They were forged by people who occupied official posts and who had at their disposal rubber stamps and their own good (or bad – who cares?) names. The head of medical services at the mine spent many truly inspired hours inventing a false case history.

The diagnosis of tuberculosis followed logically from the cleverly invented daily records. It was all there – the thick sheaf of temperature charts filled out to mimic typical tubercular curves and the forms testifying to impossible lab tests with threatening prognoses. It was the work of a doctor who, as if taking a medical examination, had been asked to describe the progress of a tubercular condition which had reached the point where immediate hospitalization was essential.

The work might have been done out of a sporting urge – just to show the central hospital that people back at the mines also knew their jobs. It was pleasant to remember, in the correct order, everything you had once learned at medical school. Of course, you never thought you would have occasion to apply your knowledge in such an unusual, ‘artistic’ fashion. The main thing was that Demidova be accepted at the hospital – no matter what. The hospital could not refuse, had no right to refuse, this kind of patient, even if the doctors had a thousand doubts.

Suspicions cropped up right away, and Demidova sat alone in the hospital’s enormous reception room while the question of her admission was discussed in local ‘higher circles’. True, she was alone only in the Chestertonian sense of the word. The attendant and the orderlies didn’t count, nor did the two guards who were never more than a step away from her. A third guard was off picking his way through the thickets of the hospital bureaucracy.

Demidova did not even bother to take off her cap and unbuttoned only the collar of her sheepskin coat. She smoked hurriedly, one cigarette after another, tossing the butts into a wooden ashtray filled with wood shavings. As she paced about the reception-room from the narrow barred windows to the doors, her guards followed her, imitating her movements.

When the doctor on duty returned with a third doctor, the northern darkness had already fallen, and the lights had to be turned on.

‘They won’t take me?’ Demidova asked the guard.

‘No, they won’t,’ the guard answered gloomily.

‘I knew they wouldn’t. It’s all Kroshka’s fault. She knifed that woman doctor, and they’re taking it out on me.’

‘No one’s taking anything out on you,’ the doctor said.

‘I know better.’

Demidova left ahead of the guards, the outside door slammed, and the truck engine roared.

Immediately a door opened from the corridor, and the head of the hospital entered with a whole retinue of security officers.

‘Where is she? Where is Demidova?’

‘They’ve already taken her away, sir.’

‘That’s a shame, a real shame. I wanted to get a look at her. It’s all your fault, Peter Ivanovich – you and your jokes.’ And the director and his companions left the reception room.

The director wanted at least to get a glance at the famous Demidova, a thief with a truly unusual story.

Aglaya Demidova had been sentenced to ten years for killing a woman whose responsibility it was to make job assignments. Demidova strangled her victim with a towel for being too pushy. Six months ago Demidova was being taken from court to the mine. There was a single guard, since it was only a few hours by car from the local court where they tried her to the mine where she worked. Space and time are analogous in the Far North. Space is generally measured in units of time; such is the practice of the Yakut tribesmen, who calculate the distance from one mountain to another as, for example, six days. Those who lived near the main artery – the highway – measured distances by the length of time it took to get there by motor vehicle.

Demidova’s guard was a young ‘old man’ who had stayed on for a second hitch and who was used to the liberties and peculiarities of life as a guard, the total master of the prisoners’ fates. It was not the first time that he had ‘accompanied’ a woman, and this sort of trip promised a form of amusement that most soldiers in the North enjoyed only rarely.

The three of them – the guard, the driver, and Demidova – ate at a roadside cafeteria. The guard drank some grain alcohol to get up his courage (in the North only higher-ups drink vodka) and took Demidova into the bushes. Rose willow, aspen saplings, and willow thickets grow luxuriously around any taiga settlement.

When they entered the bushes, the guard laid his automatic rifle on the ground and approached Demidova. Demidova tore herself free, grabbed the rifle, and in two criss-crossing bursts riddled the body of the amorous guard with nine bullets. She then threw the rifle into the bushes, returned to the cafeteria, and hitched a ride on a passing truck. The driver sounded the alarm, and the body of the guard along with the rifle was soon found. Demidova herself was arrested a couple of days later only a few hundred miles from where her tryst with the guard had taken place. She was again brought to trial and this time sentenced to twenty-five years. Even before she had shown no willingness to work and had occupied herself with robbing her neighbors in the barracks, so the head of the mine decided to get rid of her at any price. The hope was that she would not be returned to the mine after the hospital but would be sent somewhere else.

Demidova specialized in robbing stores and apartments – a ‘city girl’ in the terminology of the criminal world. This world acknowledges only two types of women: thieves, whose profession, like the men’s, is stealing, and prostitutes, the men’s sweethearts.

The first group is considerably smaller than the second but enjoys a certain respect among criminals, who consider women to be creatures of a lower order. Their professional abilities and services, however, demand recognition. The female companion of a thief will, not infrequently, participate in working out the plans for a robbery and even in the robbery itself, but she does not take part in the male ‘trials of honor’, where criminals actually try and sentence each other for violating their own peculiar code of ethics. These special male and female roles have been dictated in part by a life where men are imprisoned apart from women – a circumstance that has influenced the lifestyles, habits, and rules of both sexes. Women are not as hard as men, and their ‘trials’ are neither as bloody nor as cruel. In a thieves’ den, the women commit murder less frequently than their male comrades.

Prostitutes constitute the second and larger group of women connected with the world of crime. They are the thieves’ companions, and they are the breadwinners. Naturally, they participate, when necessary, in break-ins, casing a building and staking it out, concealing the stolen merchandise, and eventually fencing it, but they by no means enjoy equal rights with the men of the criminal world. Any celebration is unthinkable without their presence, but they can never even dream of participating in ‘courts of honor’.

A third- or fourth-generation criminal learns contempt for women from childhood. ‘Theoretical’ and ‘pedagogical’ sessions alternate with the personal example of his elders. Woman, an inferior being, has been created only to satisfy the criminal’s animal craving, to be the butt of his crude jokes and the victim of public beatings when her thug decides to ‘whoop it up’. She is a living object, used by the criminal on a temporary basis.

When a criminal needs to ‘get to’ a camp official, it is considered quite normal and proper for him to send his prostitute-companion to the man’s bed. She herself shares this view. Conversations on this topic are always extremely cynical, laconic in the extreme, and descriptive. Time is precious.

The criminal code of ethics renders jealousy and courtship meaningless. Time-honored tradition permits the leader of a gang to select the best prostitute as his temporary wife. And if only yesterday this prostitute had been considered the property of a different thug, property that he could loan to his comrades in crime, today all his rights transfer to the new owner. If he is arrested tomorrow, the prostitute will return to her former companion. And if the latter, in turn, is arrested, she will be told who her new owner is to be – the master of her life and her death, her fate, her money, her actions, her body.

What place can there be for such a feeling as jealousy? It simply does not exist in the thug’s ethical system.

A criminal, they say, is human, and no human feeling is alien to him. It may be that he regrets having to give up his woman, but the law is the law, and those responsible for observing ‘ideological’ purity, the purity of criminal ethics (without any quotation marks), will immediately point out the jealous criminal’s error to him. And he will yield to the law.

There are instances when hot tempers and the hysteria characteristic of all criminals will make him defend ‘his woman’. On such occasions the question is taken up in a criminal court, and criminal prosecutors will cite age-old traditions, demanding that the guilty man be punished.

Usually the parties concerned do not come to blows, and the prostitute submits to sleeping with her new master. There are no
ménages à trois
in the criminal world, with two men sharing one woman. Nor is it possible for a female thief to live with a non-criminal.

Men and women are separated in the camps. However, there are hospitals, transit prisons, outpatient clinics, and clubs where men and women can hear and see each other.

One cannot but be amazed at the inventiveness of the prisoners, their energy in reaching goals that they have set for themselves. The amount of energy expended in prison to obtain a piece of crumpled tin which can be transformed into a knife to commit murder or suicide is incredible.

The energy expended by a criminal intent on arranging a meeting with a prostitute is enormous. The most critical factor is finding a place to which to summon the prostitute; the criminal need have no doubt as to whether or not she will come. The hand of justice will always find the guilty woman. She will dress in men’s clothing and have sexual relations an extra time with her supervisor – just to slip away at the appointed hour to her unknown lover. The love drama is played out quickly – the way grass drops its seed in the Far North. If seen by the overseer when she returns to the women’s zone, she will be put in a punishment cell, sentenced to a month of solitary confinement, or sent to a penal mine. She will endure all this with complete submission and even be proud of her actions; she has fulfilled her duty as a prostitute.

There was an instance in a large northern hospital for convicts when a prostitute was sent to spend an entire night with an important thug who was a patient in the surgical ward. The attendant on duty was threatened with a knife, and a stolen suit was given to the civilian orderly. Finally, the woman had relations with all eight of the criminals who were sharing the room. The suit’s real owner recognized it and presented a written complaint. Considerable effort was expended to conceal the affair.