Kolyma Tales (50 page)

Any female thief or thief’s companion, any woman who has directly or indirectly entered the world of crime, is forbidden all ‘romance’ with non-criminals. In such cases the traitress is not killed. A knife is too noble a weapon to use on a woman; a stick or a poker is sufficient for her.

It is quite another matter if a man becomes involved with a woman from the free world. This is honor and glory, the subject of one man’s boasting stories and another’s envy. Such instances are not at all rare, but so exaggerated are the fairy tales surround them that it is extremely difficult to learn the truth. A typist becomes a prosecutor, a courier is transformed into the director of a factory, and a salesgirl is promoted to the rank of a minister in the government. Bald-faced lies crowd the truth to the back of the stage, into utter blackness, and it is impossible to make head or tail of the play’s action.

It is undoubtedly true, however, that a certain percentage of the criminals have families back home, families that have long since been abandoned by their criminal fathers. The wives must raise their children and struggle with life as best they can. Sometimes it does happen that husbands return from imprisonment to their families, but they do not usually stay long. The ‘wandering spirit’ lures them to new travels, and the local police provide an additional incentive for a speedy departure. The children remain behind – children who are not horrified by their father’s profession. On the contrary, they pity him and even long to follow in his footsteps, as the song ‘Fate’ tells us:

The cadre officers of the criminal world – its ‘leaders’ and ‘ideologues’ – are criminals whose families have practiced the trade for generations.

As for fatherhood and the raising of children, these questions are totally excluded from the Talmud of vice. The criminal automatically expects his daughters (if they exist somewhere) to adopt a career of prostitution and become the companions of successful thieves. In such instances the conscience of the criminal is not burdened in the slightest – even within the unique ethical code of the world of crime. As for his sons becoming thugs, this, to the criminal, is a perfectly natural turn of events.

All of us, the whole work gang, took our places in the camp dining hall with a mixture of surprise, suspicion, caution, and fear. The tables were the same dirty, sticky ones we had eaten at since we had arrived. The tables should not have been sticky because the last thing anyone wanted was to spill his soup. But there were no spoons, and any spilled soup was scraped together by fingers and simply licked up.

It was dinnertime for the night shift. Our work gang was hidden away among the night shift so that no one might see us – as if there were anyone to see us! We were the weakest, the worst, the hungriest. We were the human trash, but they had to feed us, and not with garbage or leftovers. We too had to receive a certain amount of fats, solid foods, and mainly bread – bread that was just the same as that given to the best work gangs that still preserved their strength and were fulfilling the plan of ‘basic production’: gold, gold, gold…

When we were fed, it was always last. Night or day, it didn’t make any difference. Tonight we were last again.

We lived in a section of the barracks. I knew some of the semi-corpses, either from prison or from transit camps. I moved together with these lumps in pea coats, cloth hats that covered the ears and were not taken off except for visits to the bathhouse, quilted jackets made from torn pants that had been singed at camp-fires. Only by memory did I recognize the red-faced Tartar, Mutalov, who had been the only resident in all Chikment whose two-storied house had an iron roof, and Efremov, the former First Secretary of the Chikment City Council, who had liquidated Mutalov as a class in 1930.

There too was Oxman, former head of a divisional propaganda office until Marshal Timoshenko, who was not yet a marshal, kicked him out of the division as a Jew. Also there was Lupinov, assistant to the supreme prosecutor of the USSR, Vyshinsky. Zhavoronkov was a train engineer for the Savelisk depot. Also there was the former head of the secret police in the city of Gorky who had had a quarrel with one of his former ‘wards’ when they met at a transit camp:

‘So they beat you? So what? You signed, so you’re an enemy. You interfere with the Soviet government, keep us from working. It’s because of insects like you that I got fifteen years.’

I couldn’t help butting in: ‘Listening to you, I don’t know whether to laugh or spit in your face…’

There were various people in this doomed brigade. There was a member of the religious sect,
God Knows
. Maybe the sect had a different name, but that was the one invariable answer the man ever gave in response to questions from the guards.

I remember, of course, the sectarian’s name – Dmitriev – although he never answered to it. Dmitriev was moved, placed in line, led by his companions or the work gang leader.

The convoy changed frequently, and almost every new commander tried to find out why he refused to respond to the loud command – ‘Names!’ – shouted out before the men set out for work.

The work gang leader would briefly explain the circumstances, and the relieved guard would continue the roll call.

The sectarian got on everyone’s nerves in the barracks. At night we couldn’t sleep because of the cold and warmed ourselves at the iron stove, wrapping our arms around it and gathering the departing warmth of cooling iron, pressing our faces to the metal.

Naturally we blocked this feeble warmth from the other residents of the barracks who, hungry too, couldn’t sleep in their distant corners covered with frost. From those corners someone with the right to shout or even beat us would jump out and drive the hungry workers from the stove with oaths and kicks.

You could stand at the stove and legally dry your bread, but who had bread to dry? And how many hours could you take to dry a piece of bread?

We hated the administration and the camp guards, hated each other, and most of all we hated the sectarian – for his songs, hymns, psalms…

Silently we clutched the stove. The sectarian sang in a hoarse voice as if he had a cold. He sang softly, but his hymns and psalms were endless.

The sectarian and I worked as a pair. The other members of the section rested from the singing while working, but I didn’t have even that relief.

‘Shut up!’ someone shouted at the sectarian.

‘I would have died long ago if it weren’t for singing these songs. I want to go away – into the frost. But I’m too weak. If I were just a little stronger. I don’t ask God for death. He sees everything himself.’

There were other people in the brigade, wrapped in rags, just as dirty and hungry, with the same gleam in their eyes. Who were they? Generals? Heroes of the Spanish War? Russian writers? Collective-farm workers from Volokolamsk?

We sat in the dining hall wondering why we weren’t being fed, whom they were waiting for. What news was to be announced? For us any news could only be good. There is a certain point beyond which anything is an improvement. The news could only be good. Everyone understood that – not with their minds, but with their bodies.

The door of the serving-window opened from inside and we were brought soup in bowls – hot! Kasha – warm! And cranberry pudding for dessert – almost cold! Everyone was given a spoon, and the head of the brigade warned us that we would have to return the spoons. Of course we would return the spoons. Why did we need spoons? To exchange for tobacco in other barracks? Of course we’ll return the spoons. Why do we need spoons? We’re used to eating straight from the bowl. Who needs a spoon? Anything that’s left in the bottom of the bowl can be pushed with fingers to the edge…

There was no need to think; in front of us was food. They gave us bread – two hundred grams. ‘You get only one ration of bread,’ the brigade leader declared with a note of excited solemnity, ‘but you can eat your fill of the rest.’

And we ate ‘our fill’. Any soup consists of two parts: the thick part and the liquid. We got ‘our fill’ of the liquid. But of the kasha we got as much as we wanted. Dessert was lukewarm water with a light taste of starch and a trace of dissolved sugar. This was the cranberry pudding.

A convict’s stomach is not rendered insensitive by hunger and the coarse food. On the contrary, its sensitivity to taste is heightened. The qualitative reaction of a convict’s stomach is in no way inferior to that of the finest laboratory. No ‘free’ stomach could have discovered the presence of sugar in the pudding that we ate or, rather, drank that night in Kolyma at the ‘Partisan Mine’, but the pudding seemed sweet, exquisitely sweet. It seemed a miracle and everyone remembered that sugar still existed in the world and that it even ended up in the convict’s pot. What magician…?

The magician was not far away. We looked him over after the second dish of the second dinner.

‘Just one ration of bread,’ said the brigade leader. ‘Eat your fill of the rest.’ He looked at the magician.

‘Yes, of course,’ said the magician.

He was a small clean auburn-haired man whose face had not yet suffered from frostbite.

Our superiors, supervisors, overseers, camp administrators, guards had all been to Kolyma, and Siberia had signed its name on each of their faces, left its mark, cut extra wrinkles, and put the mark of frostbite as an indelible brand!

On the rosy face of the clean dark-haired little man there was still no spot, no brand. This was the new ‘senior educator’ of our camp, and he had just arrived from the continent. The ‘senior educator’ was conducting an experiment.

The educator insisted to the head of the camp that an ancient Kolyma custom be abolished: traditionally the remains of the soup and kasha had been carried daily from the kitchen to the criminal barracks when only the thick part was left on the bottom. This had always been given out to the best work gangs to support not the hungriest, but the least hungry work gangs, to encourage them to fulfill the ‘plan’ and turn everything into gold – even the souls and bodies of the administration, the guards, the convicts.

Those work gangs as well as the criminal element had become accustomed to these leftovers, but the new ‘educator’ was not in agreement with the custom and insisted that the leftovers be given to the weakest, the hungriest to ‘waken their conscience’.

‘They’re so hardened, they have no conscience,’ the foreman attempted to intervene, but the educator was firm and received permission to try the experiment.

Our brigade, the hungriest, was chosen for the experiment.

‘Now you’ll see. A man will eat and in gratitude work better for the state. How can you expect any work out of these “goners”? “Goners” is the right word, isn’t it? That’s the first word of local convict slang I learned here in Kolyma. Am I saying it right?’

‘Yeah,’ said the area chief, an old resident of Kolyma and not a convict. He’d ‘ploughed under’ thousands at this mine and had come especially to enjoy the experiment.

‘You could feed these loafers and fakers meat and chocolate for a month with no work, and even then they wouldn’t work. Something must have changed in their skulls. They’re culls, rejects. Production demands that we feed the ones that work and not these bums!’

Standing there beside the serving-window, they began to quarrel and shout. The educator was vehemently making some point. The area chief was listening with a displeased expression, and when the name Makarenko was mentioned, he threw up his hands and walked away.

We each prayed to our own god, the sectarian to his own. We prayed that the window would not be closed and that the educator would win out. The collective convict will of twenty men strained itself… and the educator had his way.

Not wanting to part with a miracle, we kept on eating.

The area chief took out his watch, but the horn was already sounding – a shrill camp siren calling us to work.

‘OK, you busy bees,’ said the new educator, uncertainly enunciating his unnecessary phrase. ‘I’ve done everything I could. I did it for you. Now it’s up to you to answer by working, and only by working.’

‘We’ll work, citizen chief,’ pronounced the former head of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with dignity, tying his pea coat shut with a dirty towel and blowing warm air into his mittens.

The door opened and in a cloud of white steam we all came out into the frost to remember this success for the rest of our lives – that is, those who had lives left to live. The frost didn’t seem so bad to us – but only at first. It was too cold to be ignored.

We came to the mine, sat down in a circle to wait for the work gang leader at the very spot where we used to have a fire, breathe into the gold flame, where we singed our mittens, caps, pants, pea coats, jackets, vainly attempting to get warm and escape the cold. But the fire was a long time ago – the previous year, perhaps. This winter the workers were not permitted to warm themselves; only the guard had permission. He sat down, rearranged the burning logs, and the fire blazed higher. Then he buttoned his sheepskin coat, sat on a log, and stood his rifle beside him.

A white fog surrounded the mine, which was lit only by the fire of the guard. The sectarian, who was sitting next to me, stood up and walked past the guard into the fog, into the sky…

‘Halt! Halt!’

The guard wasn’t a bad sort, but he knew his rifle well.

‘Halt!’

A shot rang out, then the dry sound of a gun being cocked. The sectarian didn’t disappear into the fog, and there was a second shot…

‘See, sucker?’ said the area chief to the educator, taking his phrase from the criminal world. They had come to the mine, and the educator did not dare show surprise at the murder, and the area chief didn’t know how to.

‘There’s your experiment for you. These bastards are working worse than before. An extra dinner just gives them extra strength to fight the cold. Remember this: only the cold will squeeze work out of them. Not your dinner and not a punch in the ear from me – only the cold. They wave their hands to get warm. But we put picks and shovels into these hands. What’s the difference what they wave? We set wheelbarrows, boxes, sledges in front of them, and the mine fulfills the plan. Puts out gold…