Kolyma Tales (52 page)

The machine wailed and wailed and wailed… The alarm was summoning the hospital director, but the guests were already coming up the stairs. They wore white hospital cloaks, and the shoulders of the cloaks swelled from the epaulettes beneath. The hospital garb was too tight for our military guests.

Two steps in front of them all was a tall, gray-haired man whose name was known to everyone in the hospital, but whom no one had ever seen.

It was Sunday for those hospital employees who were not prisoners, and the hospital director was shooting pool with the doctors. He was winning; everybody lost to the hospital director.

The director immediately recognized the howling siren, rubbed the chalk from his sweaty fingers, and sent a messenger to say that he was coming – right away.

But the guests didn’t wait.

‘We’ll start in the Surgical Block…’ In the Surgical Block lay about two hundred persons. Two of the wards held about eighty patients each. One had straight surgical cases: closed fractures, sprains, etc. The other had infected cases. There were also small post-surgery wards and a ward for terminal cases with infections: sepsis, gangrene.

‘Where’s the surgeon?’

‘He went to the village to see his son. The boy goes to school there.’

‘Where’s the surgeon on duty?’

‘He’ll be here right away.’ But the surgeon on duty, Nurder (whom everyone in the hospital called ‘Murder’), was drunk and didn’t appear.

The higher-ups were shown around the Surgical Block by the senior orderly, a convict.

‘No, we don’t need your explanations or case histories. We know how they’re written,’ the official said to the orderly as he walked into the large ward and closed the door behind him. ‘And don’t let the hospital director in for the time being.’

One of his aides, a major, took up guard duty at the door to the ward.

‘Listen,’ said the gray-haired official as he stepped out into the center of the ward and gestured at the double row of cots standing along the walls. ‘Listen to me. I’m the new chief of political control at Far North Construction Headquarters. Anyone who has broken bones as a result of injuries he received either in the mines or in the barracks from foremen or brigade leaders, sing out. We’re here to investigate traumatism. The rate of injuries is terrible. But we’re going to put an end to it. Anybody who has received such injuries, tell my aide. Major, write it all down!’ The major unfolded his notebook and got out a fountain pen.

‘Well?’

‘How about frostbite, sir?’

‘No frostbite, only beatings.’

I was the paramedic for the ward. Of the eighty patients, seventy were there with that kind of trauma. It was all written down in their case histories. But not one patient responded to the appeal of the higher-ups. Later on you’d pay for it while you were still lying on your cot. If you shut up, they’d keep you in the hospital for an extra day as payment for your quiet nature and good sense. It was much more advantageous to remain silent.

‘A soldier broke my arm.’

‘A soldier? Can it be that our soldiers beat the prisoners? You can’t mean a guard, but some convict work gang leader.’

‘Yeah, I guess it was a work gang leader.’

‘See what a bad memory you have? My arrival here is not a run-of-the-mill kind of thing. I’m the boss. And we will not permit beatings! In general, rudeness, hooliganism, and swearing has to come to an end. I already gave a talk at a meeting of the Planning Board. I told them that if the director of Far North Construction is impolite in his conversations with the headquarters chief, and the headquarters chief permits himself to use obscene, abusive language with the director of mines, then how does the mine chief talk to the area heads? It’s nothing but a stream of obscenities. But those are still mainland obscenities. The area head chews out his superintendents, work gang leaders, and foremen for using the obscenities of the Kolyma underground world. And what’s left then to the foreman or work gang leader? All they can do is take a stick and beat on the workers. Isn’t that the way it is?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said the major.

‘Nikishov gave a talk at that same conference. He said: “You’re new people. You don’t know Kolyma. The conditions here are special. Morality is different here.” But I told him we came here to work and we will work, not the way Nikishov says, but the way Comrade Stalin says.’

‘That’s right, sir,’ said the major.

When they heard that the matter had reached Stalin, the patients fell silent.

Behind the door was a crowd of area supervisors; they had been summoned from their apartments and were waiting, along with the hospital director, for the speech to end.

‘They’re removing Nikishov?’ Baikov, director of the Second Therapeutic Ward asked quietly, but he was hushed up.

The chief of political control came out of the ward and shook hands with the doctors.

‘How about some dinner?’ asked the hospital director. ‘It’s on the table.’

‘No, no,’ the chief of political control looked at his watch. ‘I have to make it to the west area, to Susuman by tonight. We have a meeting tomorrow. But maybe… I don’t want to eat, but here’s what we can do. Give me the briefcase.’ The gray-haired chief took the heavy briefcase from the major’s hands.

‘Can you give me a glucose injection?’

‘Glucose?’ asked the hospital director, not understanding.

‘Yes, glucose. An intravenous injection. I haven’t drunk anything alcoholic since I was a kid… I don’t smoke. But every other day I have a glucose injection. Twenty cubic centimeters of glucose intravenously. A doctor in Moscow advised me to do it. Keeps me in great shape. Better than ginseng or testosterone. I always carry the glucose with me, but I don’t carry a needle; I can get a needle in any hospital. You can give me the shot.’

‘I don’t know how,’ said the hospital director. ‘Let me hold the tourniquet. Here’s the surgeon on duty; that’s right up his alley.’

‘No,’ said the surgeon on duty. ‘I don’t know how to do that either. That can’t be done by just any doctor, sir.’

‘Well, how about an orderly?’

‘We don’t have any non-convict orderlies.’

‘How about this one?’

‘He’s a convict.’

‘Funny. But what’s the difference? Can you do it?’

‘I can,’ I said.

‘Sterilize a syringe…’

I boiled a syringe and cooled it. The gray-haired chief took a box with ‘glucose’ from his briefcase, and the hospital director poured some alcohol on his arm. With the assistance of the party organizer, he broke the glass seal and drew the solution into the syringe. The hospital director attached a needle to the syringe, handed it to me, and tightened the rubber tourniquet on the man’s arm; I gave him the shot and pressed the place with a cotton wad.

‘I have veins like a truck-driver,’ the chief joked graciously with me.

I said nothing.

‘Well, I’ve rested; it’s time to get on the road.’ The gray-haired chief got up.

‘How about the therapeutic wards?’ asked the hospital director, afraid that if the guests had to return to examine the therapeutic patients, he would get chewed out for not having reminded them in time.

‘There’s no reason for us to visit the therapeutic wards,’ said the chief of political control. ‘We’re pursuing a specific goal on this trip.’

‘How about dinner?’

‘No dinners. Business comes first.’

The car of the chief of political control roared to life and disappeared into the frozen dark.

For many years I thought that death was a form of life. Comforted by the vagueness of this notion, I attempted to work out a positive formula to preserve my own existence in this vale of tears.

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself – frequently – and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.

Much later I realized that I had simply built myself a refuge, avoided the problem, for when at the critical moment the decision between life and death became an exercise of the will, I would not be the same man as before. I would inevitably weaken, become a traitor, betray myself. Instead of thinking of death, I simply felt that my former decision needed some other answer, that my promises to myself, the oaths of youth, were naïve and very artificial. It was Engineer Kipreev’s story that convinced me.

I never in my life betrayed or sold anyone down the river. But I don’t know how I would have held out if they had beaten me. I passed through all stages of the investigation, by the greatest good luck, without beatings – ‘method number three’. My investigators never laid a finger on me. This was chance, nothing more. It was simply that I was interrogated early – in the first half of 1937, before they resorted to torture.

Engineer Kipreev, however, was arrested in 1938, and he could vividly imagine the beatings. He survived the blows and even attacked his investigator. Beaten still more, he was thrown into a punishment cell. Nevertheless, the investigators obtained his signature easily: they threatened to arrest his wife, and Kipreev ‘signed’.

Throughout his life Kipreev carried with him this terrible weight on his conscience. There are more than a few humiliations and degradations in the life of a prisoner. The diaries of members of Russia’s liberation movement are marked by one traumatic act – the request for a pardon. Before the revolution this was considered a mark of eternal shame. Even after the revolution former political prisoners and exiles refused to receive anyone who had ever asked the czar for freedom or for a reduction of sentence.

In the thirties, not only were petitioners for pardons forgiven but also those who had signed confessions that incriminated both themselves and others, often with bloody consequences.

Representatives of the former unyielding view had long since grown old and perished in exile or in the camps. Those who had been imprisoned and had passed through the process of investigation were all ‘petitioners’.

For this reason no one ever knew what moral torments Kipreev subjected himself to in his departure for the Sea of Okhotsk – to Vladivostok and Magadan.

Kipreev had been a physicist and engineer at the Kharkov Physical Institute, where the first Soviet experiments with nuclear reactions were conducted. The nuclear scientist Kur-chatov worked there. The purges had not passed over the Kharkov Institute, and Kipreev became one of the first victims of our atomic science.

Kipreev knew his own true worth, but his superiors did not. Moreover, moral stamina has little connection with talent, with scientific experience, or even with the love of science. Aware of the beatings at the interrogations, Kipreev prepared to act in the simplest manner – to fight back like a beast, to answer blow with blow without caring whether his tormentor was simply carrying out, or had personally invented, ‘method number three’. Kipreev was beaten and thrown into a punishment cell. Everything began again. His physical strength betrayed him, and then so did his moral stamina. Kipreev ‘signed’. They threatened to arrest his wife. Kipreev knew endless shame became of this weakness, because he, an educated man, had collapsed when he encountered brute force. Right there in the prison Kipreev swore an oath never again to repeat his shameful act. But then, Kipreev was the only one who perceived his act as shameful. On the neighboring bunks lay other men who had also signed confessions and committed slander. They lay there and did not die. Shame has no boundaries. Or, rather, the boundaries are always personal, and each resident of an interrogation cell sets standards for himself.

Kipreev arrived in Kolyma with a five-year sentence, confident that he would find the path to early release to the mainland. An engineer had to be of value. An engineer could always earn credit for extra working days, be released, have his sentence shortened. While Kipreev had nothing but contempt for physical labor in camp, he quickly realized that only death waited at the end of that path. If he could just find a job where he could apply even a tenth of his technical skills, he would obtain his freedom. At the very least, he would retain his skills.

Experience at the mine, fingers broken in the scraper, physical exhaustion, and emaciation brought Kipreev to the hospital and from there to the transit prison.

The engineer’s problem was that he could not resist the temptation to invent; he could not restrain himself from searching for scientific and technical solutions to the chaos that he saw all around him.

As for the camp and its directors, they looked upon Kipreev as a slave, nothing more. Kipreev’s energy, for which he had cursed himself a thousand times, sought an outlet.

The stakes in this game had to be worthy of an engineer and a scientist. The stakes were freedom.

There is a brief ironic verse about Kolyma that describes it as a strange or wonderful planet; nine months is winter and the rest is summer:

This is not the only strange thing about Kolyma. During the war, people paid a hundred rubles for an apple, and an error in the distribution of fresh tomatoes from the mainland led to bloody dramas. All this – the apples and the tomatoes – was for the civilian world, to which Kipreev did not belong. It was a strange planet not only because the taiga was the law, nor because it was a Stalinist death camp. And it wasn’t strange just because there was a shortage there of cheap tobacco and the special tea leaves used to make
chifir
, a powerful, almost narcotic drink.
Chifir
leaves and cheap tobacco were the currency of Kolyma, its true gold, and they were used to acquire everything else.

The biggest shortage, however, was of glass – glass objects, laboratory glassware, instruments. The cold increased the fragility of glass, but the permitted ‘breakage’ was not increased. A simple medical thermometer cost 300 rubles, but there were no underground bazaars that sold thermometers. The doctor had to present a formal request to the head of medical services for the entire region, since a medical thermometer was harder to hide than the
Mona Lisa
. But the doctor never presented any such request. He simply paid 300 rubles out of his own pocket and brought the thermometer with him from home to take the temperature of the critically ill.