Kolyma Tales (5 page)

Dugaev was twenty-three years old, and everything that he saw and heard here amazed more than surprised him.

The work gang gathered for a head count, turned in its tools, and returned to the barracks in uneven convict formation. The difficult day was over. In the cafeteria Dugaev, still standing, drank his bowl of cold, watery barley soup. The day’s bread, issued in the morning, had long since been eaten. Dugaev wanted to smoke and looked around to consider who might give him a butt. Baranov was sitting on the window-sill, sprinkling some home-grown tobacco shreds from his tobacco pouch, which he had turned inside out. When he had carefully gathered them all up, he rolled a thin cigarette and handed it to Dugaev.

‘Go ahead,’ he said, ‘but leave me some.’

Dugaev was surprised, since he and Baranov had never been particularly friendly. Cold, hunger, and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last border beyond which no human emotion was left to a man – only mistrust, rage, and lies. Dugaev remembered well the northern proverb that listed the three commandments of prison life: ‘Don’t believe, don’t fear, don’t ask.’

Greedily Dugaev inhaled the sweet smoke of home-grown tobacco, and his head began to spin.

‘I’m getting weaker,’ he said.

Baranov said nothing.

Dugaev returned to the barracks, lay down, and closed his eyes. He had been sleeping badly of late, because he was hungry all the time. His dreams were particularly tormenting, loaves of bread, steaming greasy soup… Unconsciousness took a long time coming, but he opened his eyes half an hour before it was time to go to work anyway.

When the work gang arrived at its site, the group scattered among the assigned test pits.

‘You wait here,’ the foreman said to Dugaev. ‘The overseer will give you an assignment.’

Dugaev sat down on the ground. He was already exhausted enough to be totally indifferent to any change in his fate.

The first wheelbarrows rattled along the board walkway, and shovels scraped against stone.

‘Come over here,’ the overseer said to Dugaev. ‘This is your place.’ He measured out the cubic area of the test pit and marked it with a piece of quartz.

‘Up to here,’ he said. ‘The carpenter will nail a board to the walkway for your wheelbarrow. Dump everything where everyone else does. Here are your shovel, pick, crowbar, and wheelbarrow. Now get a move on.’

Dugaev obediently began his work.

‘It’s better this way,’ he thought. Now no one could complain that he was not working well. Yesterday’s farmers did not have to know that Dugaev was new to this sort of work, that he had enrolled in the university right after school, and that he had now exchanged his student’s existence for this mine, where it was every man for himself. They did not have to understand that he had been exhausted and hungry for a long time and that he did not know how to steal. The ability to steal was a primary virtue here, whatever it involved, from taking the bread of a fellow-inmate to claiming bonuses of thousands of rubles for fictitious, non-existent accomplishments. No one would be concerned about the fact that Dugaev could not last a sixteen-hour working day.

Dugaev swung his pick, hauled, dumped, and again swung his pick, and again hauled and dumped.

After lunch, the overseer walked up, looked at Dugaev’s progress, and left without saying a word… Dugaev went on swinging his pick and dumping. It was still very far to the quartz marker.

In the evening the overseer reappeared and unwound his tape-measure. He measured the work that Dugaev had done.

‘Twenty-five percent,’ he said and looked at Dugaev. ‘Do you hear me – twenty-five percent!’

‘I hear you,’ Dugaev said. He was surprised at this figure. The work was so hard, the shovel picked up so little stone, and it was so difficult to swing the pick. Twenty-five percent of the work quota seemed an enormous amount to Dugaev. His calves ached, and his arms, shoulders, and head hurt from leaning into the wheelbarrow. The sensation of hunger had long since left him. Dugaev ate, because he saw that others were eating, and something prompted him that he should eat, though he did not want to.

‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ the overseer said as he left. ‘Good luck!’

That evening Dugaev was summoned to the investigator. He answered four questions: first name, surname, crime, sentence. These were the four questions that a prisoner had to answer thirty times a day. Later Dugaev fell asleep. The next day he was again working in the work gang with Baranov, and the following night soldiers took him behind the horse barns along a path that led into the woods. They came to a tall fence topped with barbed wire. The fence nearly blocked off a small ravine, and in the night the prisoners could hear tractors backfiring in the distance. When he realized what was about to happen, Dugaev regretted that he had worked for nothing. There had been no reason for him to exhaust himself on this, his last day.

The hills glistened white with a tinge of blue – like loaves of sugar. Round and bare of forest, they were smothered with a layer of dense snow compacted by the winds. In the ravines the snow was deep and firm; a man could stand on it. But on the slopes it swelled up in enormous blisters. These were shrubs of Siberian dwarf cedar which lay flat on the ground to hibernate through the winter – even before the first snow fell. They were what we had come for.

Of all northern trees, I loved the dwarf cedar most of all.

I had long since come to understand and appreciate the enviable haste with which poor northern nature shared its meagre wealth with equally indigent man, blossoming for him with every variety of flower. There were times when everything bloomed in a single week and when only a month after the beginning of summer the almost never setting sun would make the mountains flame red with cowberries and then darken with their deep blue. Rowan shrubs hung heavy with full, watery berries – so low you didn’t even have to raise your hand. Only the petals of the mountain sweet-brier smelled like flowers here. All the others exuded a sense of dampness, a swampy odor, and this seemed appropriate to the spring silence, both of the birds and the larch forest whose branches slowly clothed themselves in green needles. The sweet-brier clung to its fruit right into winter and from under the snow stretched out to us its wrinkled, meaty berries whose thick violet skin concealed a dark yellow flesh. I knew of the playful vines which again and again changed their color in spring from dark rose to orange to pale green, as if they were stretched with dyed kidskin. The slender fingers of the larch with their green fingernails seemed to grope everywhere, and the omnipresent, oily fireweed carpeted the scenes of former forest blazes. All this was exquisite, trusting, boisterous, rushed; but all this was in summer when dull green grass mixed with the glaze of mossy boulders that gleamed in the sun and seemed not gray or brown, but green.

In winter it all disappeared, covered with crusty snow cast into the ravines by the winds and beaten down so hard that to climb upward a man had to hack steps in the snow with an axe. Everything was so naked that a person in the forest could be seen half a mile away. And only one tree was always green, always alive – the dwarf cedar. The tree was a weatherman. Two or three days before the first snow in the cloudless heat of fall when no one wanted even to think of the oncoming winter, the dwarf cedar would suddenly stretch out its enormous five-yard paws on the ground, lightly bend its straight, black, two-fist-thick trunk, and lie prone on the earth. A day or two would pass and a cloud would appear; toward evening a snowstorm would begin. And if in the late fall low, gray snow clouds would gather accompanied by a cold wind and the dwarf cedar did not lie down, one could be sure that no snow would fall.

Toward the end of March or in April, when there was still no trace of spring and the air was dry and rarefied as in winter, the dwarf cedar would suddenly rise up, shaking the snow from its reddish-green clothing. In a day or two the wind would shift, and warm streams of air would usher in spring.

The dwarf cedar was a very precise instrument, sensitive to the point where it sometimes deceived itself, rising during a lengthy period of thaw. But it would hurriedly lie back in the snow before the cold returned. Sometimes we would make a hot campfire in the morning to last till evening so we could warm our hands and feet. We would heap on as many logs as possible and set off to work. In two or three hours the dwarf cedar would stretch its branches out from under the snow and slowly right itself, thinking that spring had arrived. But before the fire could even go out, the tree would again lie back into the snow. Winter here is two-toned: a high pale-blue sky and the white ground. Spring would lay bare the dirty yellow rags of fall, and the earth would be clothed in this beggar’s garb for a long time – until the new greenery would gather its strength and begin to blossom furiously. In the midst of this pitiless winter and gloomy spring, the dwarf cedar would gleam blindingly green and clear. Moreover, tiny cedar nuts grew on it, and this delicacy was shared by people, birds, bears, squirrels, and chipmunks.

Having selected an area of the hill shielded from the wind, we dragged a considerable number of small and large branches into a heap and gathered some dry grass where the wind had bared the mountain. We had brought several smoking logs with us from the barracks stove; there were no matches here.

We carried the logs in a large tin can with a wire handle attached, and had to be careful that they didn’t go out along the way. Removing the charred logs from the can, we blew on them and set the smouldering ends together. I kept blowing until they began to burn and then I set them on the dry grass and twigs. All this we covered with larger branches, and soon an uncertain tail of blue smoke trailed downwind.

I had never before worked in gangs that gathered dwarf cedar needles. We did everything by hand, plucking the green, dry needles and stuffing them into sacks; in the evening we handed them over to the foreman. The needles were hauled away to a mysterious ‘vitamin factory’ where they were boiled down into a dark yellow viscous extract with an inexpressibly repulsive taste. Before each dinner this extract had to be drunk or eaten – however a person could manage. Its taste spoiled not only dinner, but supper as well, and many considered this ‘treatment’ a supplementary means of camp discipline. But without a shot-glass of this medicine it was impossible to get dinner in the cafeteria; the rule was strictly enforced. Scurvy was everywhere and dwarf cedar was the only medically approved cure. It was ultimately proved that this preparation was completely ineffective in the cure of scurvy and the ‘vitamin factory’ was closed. Nevertheless, faith conquers all, and at the time many drank the stinking abomination, went away spitting, but eventually recovered from scurvy. Or they didn’t recover. Or they didn’t drink it and recovered anyway. Everywhere were enormous clumps of sweet-brier, but no one prepared it or used it against scurvy since the instructions from Moscow said nothing about sweet-brier. (A few years later sweet-brier was brought in from the ‘mainland’, but it was never prepared locally.)

The instructions prescribed cedar needles as the only source of vitamin C. On that day I was assigned to gather the precious raw material. I had gotten so weak that I was transferred from the gold-mine to needle-picking.

‘I’ll put you on dwarf cedar for a while,’ the job assigner told me in the morning. ‘It’ll be a pushover job for a few days.’

‘Needle-picking’ was considered not just an easy job, but the easiest of all. Moreover, it didn’t require the presence of a guard.

After many months of work in the icy mines where every sparklingly frozen stone burned the hands, after the clicks of rifle bolts, the barking of dogs, the swearing of the overseers behind our backs, needle-gathering was an enormous pleasure, physically felt with every exhausted muscle. Needle-gatherers were sent out after the others, while it was still dark.

It was a marvelous feeling to warm your hand against the can with the smouldering logs and slowly set out for the seemingly unattainable peaks, to climb higher and higher, constantly aware of your own solitariness and the deep winter silence of the mountains. It was as if everything evil in the world had been snuffed out and only you and your companion existed on this narrow, dark, endless path in the snow, leading upward into the mountains.

My companion watched my slow motions disapprovingly. He had been gathering cedar needles for a long time and correctly surmised in me a weak, clumsy partner. Work was done in pairs, and the ‘wage’ was a joint one, divided fifty-fifty.

‘I’ll chop and you pick,’ he said. ‘And get a move on, or we won’t fill our quota. I don’t want to have to go back to the mines.’

He chopped down a few branches and dragged an enormous pile of green paws to the fire. I broke off the smaller branches and, starting with the top of each branch, pulled off the needles together with the bark. They looked like green fringe.

‘You’ll have to work faster,’ said my companion, returning with a new armload.

I could see that the work was not going well, but I couldn’t work faster. There was a ringing in my ears, and my fingers, frostbitten at the beginning of winter, ached with a familiar dull pain. I yanked at the needles, broke entire branches into smaller pieces without stripping the bark, and stuffed the product into the sack. The sack wouldn’t fill. Before the fire rose a mountain of stripped branches that looked like washed bones, but the sack kept swelling and swelling and accepting new armfuls of needles.

My companion sat down next to me, and the work went faster.

‘It’s time to go,’ he said suddenly. ‘Or else we’ll miss supper. We haven’t got enough here for the quota.’ He took from the ashes of the fire a large stone and shoved it into the sack.

‘They don’t untie them there,’ he said frowning. ‘Now we’ve met our quota.’