Kolyma Tales (54 page)

The blind was Kipreev’s pride and joy – his hope, albeit a weak hope. A report was given at a medical conference and also sent to Moscow. There was no response.

‘Can you make a mirror?’

‘Of course.’

‘A full-length mirror?’

‘Any kind you like, as long as I have the silver for it.’

‘Will silver spoons do?’

‘They’ll be fine.’

Thick glass intended for the desks of senior bureaucrats was requisitioned from the warehouse and brought to the X-ray laboratory.

The first experiment was unsuccessful, and Kipreev fell into a rage and broke the mirror with a hammer. One of the fragments became my mirror – a present from Kipreev.

On the second occasion everything worked out successfully, and the bureaucrat realized his dream – a full-length mirror.

It never occurred to the bureaucrat to thank Kipreev. Whatever for? Even a literate slave ought to be grateful for the privilege of occupying a hospital bed. If the blind had attracted the attention of the higher-ups, the bureaucrat would have received a letter of commendation, nothing more. Now, the mirror – that was something real. But the blind was a very nebulous thing. Kipreev was in total agreement with his boss.

But falling asleep at night on his cot in the corner of the lab and waiting for the latest woman to leave the embraces of his pupil, assistant and informer, Kipreev could not believe either himself or Kolyma. The blind was not a joke. It was a technical feat. But neither Moscow nor Magadan was in the least interested in engineer Kipreev’s invention.

In camp, letters are not answered, nor are reminders of unanswered letters appreciated. The prisoner has to wait – for luck, an accidental meeting.

All this was wearing on the nerves – assuming they were still whole, untorn, and capable of being worn out.

Hope always shackles the convict. Hope is slavery. A man who hopes for something alters his conduct and is more frequently dishonest than a man who has ceased to hope. As long as the engineer waited for a decision on the damned blind, he kept his mouth shut, ignoring all the appropriate and inappropriate jokes that his immediate superior permitted himself – not to mention those of his own assistant who was only waiting for the hour and the day when he could take over. Rogov had even learned to make mirrors, so he was guaranteed a ‘rake-off’.

Everyone knew about the blind, and everyone joked about Kipreev – including the pharmacist Kruglyak, who ran the Party organization at the hospital. This heavy-faced man was not a bad sort, but he had a bad temper, and – mainly – he had been taught that a prisoner is scum. As for this Kipreev… The pharmacist had come to the hospital only recently, and he did not know the history of the electric light-bulbs. He never gave any thought to the difficulties of assembling an X-ray laboratory in the taiga, in the Far North.

As the pharmacist phrased it in the slang of the criminal world that he had recently acquired, Kipreev’s invention was a ‘dodge’.

Kruglyak sneered at Kipreev in the procedure room of the surgical ward. The engineer grabbed a stool and was about to strike the Party secretary, but the stool was ripped from his hands, and he was led away to the ward.

Kipreev either would have been shot or sent to a penal mine, a so-called special zone, which is worse than being shot. He had many friends at the hospital, however, and not just because of his mirrors. The affair of the electric light-bulbs was well-known and recent. People wanted to help him. But this was Point 8 of Article 58 – terrorist activities.

The women doctors went to the head of the hospital, Vinokurov. Vinokurov had no use for Kruglyak. Moreover, he valued Kipreev and he was expecting a response to his report on the blind. And, mainly, he was not a vicious person. He was an official who didn’t use his position to do evil. A careerist who feathered his own bed, Vinokurov did not go out of his way to help anyone, but he did not wish them evil either.

‘All right, I won’t forward the papers to the prosecutor’s office under one condition,’ Vinokurov said. ‘Provided there isn’t any report from the victim, Kruglyak. If he submits a report, the matter will go to trial. And a penal mine is the least Kipreev can get.’

Kruglyak’s male friends spoke to him.

‘Don’t you understand that he’ll be shot? He has none of the rights that we have.’

‘He raised his hand at me.’

‘He didn’t raise his hand, no one saw that. Now if I had a disagreement with you, I’d let you have it in the snout after two words. Don’t you ever quit?’

Kruglyak was not really a bad person, and he certainly wouldn’t do as a bigwig in Kolyma. He agreed not to send in a report.

Kipreev remained in the hospital. A month passed, and Major-General Derevyanko arrived. He was second-in-charge to the chief of Far Eastern Construction, and he was the supreme authority for the prisoners.

High-placed officials liked to stop at the hospital. They could always find quarters, and there was no shortage of food, liquor, and relaxation.

Major-General Derevyanko donned a white coat and strolled from one ward to another to stretch his legs before dinner. The major-general was in a good mood, and Vinokurov decided to take a chance.

‘I have a prisoner here who has performed an important service for the state.’

‘What sort of service is that?’

The head of the hospital explained roughly what a blind was.

‘I want to request that he be granted an early release.’

The major-general asked about the prisoner’s background, and when he heard the answer, he grunted.

‘The only thing that I can tell you,’ the major-general said, ‘is that you should forget about any blinds, and send this engineer… Korneev…’

‘Kipreev, sir.’

‘That’s right, Kipreev. Ship him off to where his papers say he should be.’

‘Yes, sir.’

A week later Kipreev was sent off, and in another week the X-ray machine broke down, so that he had to be recalled to the hospital.

It was no joking matter now, and Vinokurov lived in fear of the major-general’s anger. He would never believe that the X-ray machine had broken down. Kipreev’s papers were again prepared for him to be sent off, but he fell ill and remained.

It was now utterly impossible for him to return to the X-ray laboratory. He realized this quite clearly.

Kipreev had mastoiditis; he had picked up the inflammation from sleeping on a camp cot. His condition was critical, but no one wanted to believe his temperature or the reports of the doctors. Vinokurov raged and demanded that the operation be performed as soon as possible.

The hospital’s best surgeons prepared to perform Kipreev’s mastoidectomy. The surgeon, Braude, was virtually a specialist in mastoidectomies. There were more than enough colds in Kolyma, and Braude had had the experience of performing hundreds of such operations. But Braude was only the assistant. Novikov, a well-known otolaryngologist and a student of Volchek, had worked for Far Eastern Construction for many years, and she was to perform the operation. Novikov had never been a prisoner nor was she after the hardship pay (commonly referred to as ‘the long ruble’), but there, in Kolyma, she was not condemned for her entrenched alcoholism. After her husband’s death, this talented and beautiful woman had wandered for years about the Far North. She would begin things brilliantly but then would lose control for weeks on end.

Novikov was about fifty, and there was no one more qualified than she. At this moment she was dead drunk, but she was coming out of it, and the head of the hospital allowed Kipreev’s operation to be held up for a few days.

Novikov sobered up, her hands stopped shaking, and she performed Kipreev’s operation brilliantly. It was a parting gift, a purely medical gift to her former X-ray technician. Braude assisted her, and Kipreev recuperated in the hospital.

Kipreev realized that there was nothing left to hope for and that he would not be kept in the hospital for even one extra hour.

A numbered camp waited for him, where convicts walked in rows of five, elbow to elbow, with thirty dogs surrounding a column of prisoners.

Even in this hopeless state Kipreev did not betray himself. The head of the ward prescribed a special diet for the convict-engineer recovering from a mastoidectomy, a serious operation. Kipreev declared that there were many patients more seriously ill than he among the ward’s three hundred patients and that they had a greater right to a special diet.

And they took Kipreev away.

For fifteen years I searched for engineer Kipreev and finally dedicated a play to his memory – an effective way of guaranteeing a man’s involvement with the nether world.

But it was not enough to write a play about Kipreev and dedicate it to his memory. A woman friend of mine was sharing an apartment in the center of Moscow, and it wasn’t until she got a new neighbor through an ad in the paper that I finally found Kipreev.

The new woman came out of her room to become acquainted with her neighbors and saw the play dedicated to Kipreev. She picked it up: ‘The initials are the same as those of a friend of mine. But he’s not in Kolyma; he’s in a different place.’ My friend phoned me. I refused to continue the conversation. It was an error. Besides, in the play the hero is a doctor. Kipreev was a physical engineer.

‘That’s right, a physical engineer.’

I got dressed and went to see my friend’s new neighbor.

Fate weaves complex patterns. Why? Why did the will of fate have to be so clearly demonstrated by this series of coincidences? We seek each other little, but fate takes our lives in her hands.

Engineer Kipreev was alive in the Far North. He had been released ten years earlier. Before that, he had been brought to Moscow and had worked in secret camps. When he was released, he returned to the North. He wanted to remain there until he reached pension age.

Engineer Kipreev and I met.

‘I’ll never be a scientist – just an ordinary engineer. How could I return, stripped of all my rights and ignorant of what has happened in my field? The people I studied with are all laureates of various prizes.’

‘But that’s nonsense!’

‘No, it’s not nonsense. I breathe easier in the North. And I’ll continue breathing easier right up to my pension.’

Mr Popp was director of an American firm that was installing gasholders in the initial construction phase of the Berezniki Chemical Factory. It was a large order, the work was going well, and the vice-president considered it essential to be present in person when the equipment was to be turned over to its new owners.

Various firms were participating in the construction of the factory. Granovsky, the construction director, called it a capitalist international. The Germans were installing Hanomag boilers; the English firm Brown & Bovery was building the steam engines; and the Americans were installing the gasholders. The Germans were behind schedule; later this was declared to be sabotage. At the Central Power Station, the English were also behind schedule; later this too was declared to be sabotage.

At the time I was working at the Central Power Station, and I remember well the arrival of Mr Holmes, chief engineer of the firm Babcock & Wilcox. Holmes was met by Granovsky at the train station, but instead of going to his hotel, the English engineer went straight to where the boilers were being installed. One of the English installers helped Holmes out of his coat and gave him some working clothes, and Holmes spent three hours in the boiler listening to the mechanic’s explanations. That evening there was a conference. He responded to all the comments and reports with one short word which the interpreter rendered as: ‘Mr Holmes is not concerned with that.’ Nevertheless, Holmes spent about two weeks at the factory, and the boiler began to function at twenty percent of planned capacity. Granovsky signed a report to that effect, and Holmes flew back to London.

A few months later the boiler’s output began to diminish, and a Soviet engineer, Leonid Ramzin, was called in for consultation. Ramzin had been arrested and tried for conspiracy to overthrow the government. He had been sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to ten years’ imprisonment with confiscation of property. While serving his sentence, Ramzin was allowed to continue work on the development of a new water-tube boiler which he had designed in 1930, and he was also frequently called on as a consultant. His trial had attracted a lot of attention in the newspapers. Ramzin had not yet been released, had not yet received the Order of Lenin or the Stalin Prize. All that was to come later, but Ramzin already knew about it and conducted himself in a quite independent fashion at the power station. He didn’t arrive alone, but with a companion whose appearance was singularly revealing. When Ramzin was done, the man left with him. Ramzin did not crawl into the boiler as Mr Holmes had done but sat in the office of the station’s technical director, Kastenner, who had also been exiled and sentenced for sabotage in the mines of Kizel.

The nominal director of the power station was a certain Rachov. He had, in the past, been active in the Party, but he wasn’t a bad sort and didn’t interfere in matters he didn’t understand. At that time, I was working in the efficiency engineer’s office, and for many years afterward I carried around with me the written complaint the boiler stokers had sent to Rachov. On the letter, in which the stokers had listed their numerous requests, Rachov had scrawled a characteristically straightforward resolution: ‘To the head of the power plant. Look into the matter and refuse them as much as possible.’

Ramzin gave some practical advice but did not have a very high opinion of Holmes’s work.

Mr Holmes had always appeared at the station, accompanied not by Granovsky but by his deputy, the chief engineer Chistyakov. Nothing in this life is more dogmatic than diplomatic etiquette. Although Granovsky had all the free time in the world, he considered it beneath him to accompany the foreign firm’s chief engineer around the construction site. Of course, if the firm’s president were to come…

Mr Holmes was escorted around the site by the engineer, Chistyakov, a heavy, massive man of the type depicted in novels about the Russian gentry. At the factory Chistyakov had an enormous office opposite that of Granovsky. Chistyakov spent many hours there locked up with his young female courier.