Kolyma Tales (9 page)

I had reached the stage of absolute indifference. I could not tolerate rosy-cheeked, healthy, well-dressed, full people. I curled up to protect my stomach, but even this was a primordial, instinctive movement; I was not at all afraid of blows to the stomach. Fadeev’s booted foot kicked me in the back, but a sudden warm feeling came over me, and I experienced no pain at all. If I were to die, it would be all the better.

‘Listen,’ Fadeev said when he had turned me face upward with the tips of his boots. ‘You’re not the first one I’ve worked with, and I know your kind.’

Seroshapka, another guard, walked up.

‘Let me have a look at you, so I’ll remember you. What a mean one you are…’

The beating began. When it ended, Seroshapka said: ‘Now do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ I said as I got up and spat out salty, bloody saliva. I dragged the log to the accompaniment of chortles, shouting, and swearing from my fellow prisoners. The cold had gotten to them while I was being beaten.

The next morning Seroshapka led us out to a site where the trees had been cut down the previous winter, to gather anything that could be burned in our cast-iron stoves. The stumps were tall, and we ripped them out of the earth, using long poles as levers. Then we sawed them into pieces and stacked them.

Seroshapka hung ‘markers’ in the few branches still remaining in the area where we were working. Made from braided dry yellow and gray grass, the markers indicated the area beyond which we were not permitted to set foot.

Our foreman built a fire on the hill for Seroshapka and brought him an extra supply of wood. Only the guards could have fires.

The fallen snow had long since been carried away by the winds, and the cold, frosty grass was slippery in our hands and changed color when we touched it. Hummocks of low mountain sweet-brier grew around the tree stumps, and the aroma of the frozen dark lilac berries was extraordinary. Even more delicious than the sweet-brier were the frozen, overripe blue cowberries. The blueberries hung on stubby straight branches, each berry bright blue and wrinkled like an empty leather purse, but containing a dark blue-black juice that was indescribably delicious. By that time of the year, the berries had been touched by frost, and they were not at all like the ripe berries, which are full of juice. The later berries have a much more subtle taste.

I was working with Rybakov, who was gathering berries in a tin can during the rest periods and whenever Seroshapka looked the other way. If Rybakov could manage to fill the can, the guards’ cook would give him some bread. Rybakov’s undertaking began to assume major dimensions.

I had no such customers, so I ate the berries myself, carefully and greedily pressing each one against the roof of my mouth with my tongue. The sweet aromatic juice of the crushed berry had a fleeting narcotic effect.

I never even considered helping Rybakov in his gathering, and he himself would not have desired such aid, since he would have had to share the bread.

Rybakov’s can was filling slowly, and we were finding fewer and fewer berries. While working and gathering berries, we had approached the border of the forbidden ‘zone’, without even noticing it. The markers were hanging right over our heads.

‘Look at that,’ I said to Rybakov. ‘Let’s go back.’

Ahead, however, were hummocks of sweet-brier, cowberry, and blueberry… We had noticed them earlier. The marker should have been hanging from a tree which stood two yards farther away.

Rybakov pointed at his can, not yet full, and at the sun, slowly setting on the horizon. Slowly he crept toward the enchanted berries.

I heard the dry crack of a shot, and Rybakov fell face down among the hummocks. Seroshapka waved his rifle and shouted:

‘Leave him there, don’t go near him.’

Seroshapka cocked his rifle and shot in the air. We knew what this second shot meant. Seroshapka also knew. There were supposed to be two shots – the first one a warning.

Rybakov looked strangely small as he lay among the hummocks. The sky, mountains, and river were enormous, and God only knew how many people could be killed and buried among the hummocks along these mountain paths.

Rybakov’s can had rolled far away, and I managed to pick it up and hide it in my pocket. Maybe they would give me some bread for these berries, since I knew for whom they were intended.

Seroshapka calmly ordered us to get in formation, counted us, and gave the command to set off home.

He touched my shoulder with his rifle barrel, and I turned around.

‘I wanted to get you,’ he said, ‘but you wouldn’t cross the line, you bastard!’

Moses Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, found the bitch, Tamara, in the taiga. Kuznetsov’s name means ‘blacksmith’ in Russian, and he evidently came from a long line of blacksmiths. Not only was Kuznetsov’s first name Moses, but so was his patronymic. Jews name a son in honor of his father only (and always) if the father dies before his son is born. As a boy in Minsk, Moses had learned his trade from an uncle, who was a blacksmith just as Moses’ father had been.

Kuznetsov’s wife was a waitress in a restaurant in Minsk and was much younger than her forty-year-old husband. In 1937, on the advice of her best friend who worked in the buffet, she denounced her husband to the police. In those years this approach was more reliable than any hex or spell and even more reliable than sulphuric acid. Her husband, Moses Kuznetsov, disappeared immediately. No simple shoer of horses, he was a factory blacksmith and a master of his trade. He was even something of a poet, an artisan who could forge a rose. He had made all his tools with his own hands. These tools – pliers, chisels, hammers, anvils – were all unquestionably elegant and revealed a love for his trade and the understanding of a skilled craftsman. It was not just a matter of symmetry or asymmetry, but something deeper – some inherent beauty. Each horseshoe, each nail that Moses made was elegant, and each object produced by his hands bore the mark of a master craftsman. He disliked having to stop work on any article, because he always felt he could give it one more tap, improve it, make it more convenient.

The camp authorities valued him even though a geological team had little use for a blacksmith. Moses sometimes played jokes on the authorities, but because of his excellent work these jokes were forgiven him. Once he told the authorities that drill bits could be tempered more effectively in butter than in water. The boss ordered him some butter – an insignificant amount, to be sure. Kuznetsov threw a little in the water, and the tips of the steel bits acquired a soft hue that one never saw after normal tempering. Kuznetsov and his hammerman ate the rest of the butter. The boss was soon informed of his blacksmith’s tricks, but no punishment was meted out. Later Kuznetsov continued to insist on the high quality of ‘butter’ tempering and talked the boss out of some lumps of moldy butter. The blacksmith melted down the lumps and produced a sourish butter. He was a good, quiet man and wished everyone well.

The camp director was aware of all the ‘fine points’ of life. Like Lycurgus, he took steps to ensure that his taiga state would have two medics, two blacksmiths, two overseers, two cooks, and two bookkeepers. One of the medics healed while the other swung a pick in the common labor gang and kept track of his colleague to make sure that he committed no illegal acts. If the medic misused any of the narcotic medical supplies, he was exposed, punished, and sent to the work gang, while his colleague composed and signed a statement indicating that he was the new guardian of the camp medical supplies. And he would move into the medical tent. In the opinion of the mine director, such reserves of ‘professionals’ not only guaranteed that a replacement would be ready if necessary but also strengthened discipline, which would have deteriorated rapidly if even one of these persons came to feel that he was irreplaceable.

In spite of all this, bookkeepers, medics, and foremen switched jobs rather heedlessly, and in any case never turned down a shot of vodka, even if it was proffered by a provocateur.

The blacksmith selected by the camp director as a ‘counterbalance’ to Moses never got the chance even to pick up a hammer. Moses was perfect, untouchable, and his skills were superb.

One day, on a path in the taiga, he came upon a wolfish Yakut dog. It was a bitch with a strip of hair worn away on her white breast. She was a hunting dog.

There were no villages or nomadic camps of local Yakut tribesmen nearby, and the dog frightened Kuznetsov when she appeared on the path. He thought she was a wolf, and he ran back along the path, splashing through the puddles. Other prisoners were coming up behind him. The wolf, however, lay on its belly and crawled toward the men, wagging its tail. It was petted, slapped on its emaciated ribs, and fed. The dog stayed with us, and the reason why she did not risk searching for her former owners in the taiga soon became clear.

She was about to have pups, and on the very first night she dug a pit under the tent. She worked hurriedly, paying no attention to attempts to distract her. Each of the fifty men wanted to pet her, show her affection, and somehow tell her of his own misery.

Even Kasaev, the thirty-year-old geologist who was our foreman and who had been working in Kolyma for ten years, came out with his ever-present guitar to look at our new resident.

‘We’ll call him “Warrior”,’ the foreman said.

‘It’s a bitch, sir,’ Slavka Ganusevich, our cook, responded with overtones of joy in his voice.

‘A bitch? Hmm. In that case we’ll call her “Tamara”.’ And the foreman walked away.

The dog smiled after him and waved her tail. She quickly established good relations with all the necessary people. Tamara understood the role played by Kasaev and Vasilenko, the other foreman in camp. She also knew how important it was to be on good terms with the cook. At night she would take her place next to the night guard.

We soon learned that Tamara would take food only from our hands and, if no one was present, would touch nothing either in the kitchen or in the tent. This moral firmness touched the residents of our settlement, who had seen a lot of things in their lives and had been in a lot of scrapes.

They would open a can of meat and put bread and butter on the floor before Tamara. The dog would sniff the food but would select and carry away the same thing every time – a piece of salted Siberian salmon. It was what she knew best, what she liked most, and probably the safest choice.

The bitch soon whelped six pups in the dark pit. We made a kennel and carried them to it. Tamara was excited for a long time, groveled, wagged her tail, but finally decided that everything was in order and that her puppies were not hurt.

At that time our prospecting group had to move into the mountains about a mile and a half away. That put us about four miles from the base with its storehouse, administrators, and living quarters. The kennel with the pups was moved to the new site, and Tamara would run to the cook two or three times a day to get them a bone. The pups would have been fed anyway, but Tamara didn’t know she could be sure of that.

It so happened that our settlement was visited by a detachment of soldiers on skis who were ‘combing’ the taiga in search of escaped convicts. Winter escape is extremely rare, but we knew that five prisoners had fled from a neighboring mine.

The group was assigned, not a tent like ours, but the only log building in the settlement – the bathhouse. Their mission was too serious for us to even think of protesting, as the foreman, Kasaev, explained to us.

The residents accepted their uninvited guests with the usual indifference and submissiveness. Only one creature expressed any displeasure.

The bitch Tamara silently attacked the nearest soldier and bit through his felt boot. Her hair stood on end, and her eyes gleamed with fearless rage. The dog was driven off and restrained with considerable difficulty.

The chief officer of the detachment, Nazarov, was a man whom we had heard about even earlier. He reached for his automatic rifle to shoot the dog, but Kasaev grabbed him by the arm and dragged him into the bathhouse.

On the advice of the carpenter, Semyon Parmenov, Tamara was fitted with a leather collar and tied to a tree. The guard detachment wouldn’t be with us for ever.

Like all Yakut dogs, Tamara did not know how to bark. She growled and tried, with her old fangs, to bite through the rope. She was no longer the gentle, peaceful Yakut bitch that had spent the winter with us. Her past loomed up in an extraordinary hatred, and it was clear to all that the dog had met the soldiers before.

What sort of forest tragedy sticks in a dog’s memory? Was this terrible past the explanation for her appearance near our settlement?

Nazarov could probably have told us something if he had as good a memory for animals as for people.

After about five days, three of the skiers left, and Nazarov prepared to follow the next morning with one companion and our foreman. They caroused all night, had a last drink at dawn to sober up, and set out.

Tamara growled, and Nazarov retraced his steps, took his automatic rifle from his shoulder, and with one burst shot the dog at point-blank range. Tamara shuddered and fell dead. People were already running from the tents, grabbing axes and crowbars. The foreman rushed to cut off the workers, and Nazarov disappeared into the forest.

Desire is sometimes self-fulfilling. Perhaps the hatred of all fifty men for this ‘boss’ was so passionate and powerful that it became a real force and caught up with Nazarov.

Nazarov and his assistant left together on skis. They did not follow the frozen riverbed – the best winter road to the highway ten miles from our settlement – but crossed a pass in the mountains. Nazarov feared a chase, and the mountain path was closer. Moreover, he was an excellent skier.

It was already night when they reached the pass. Daylight still clung to the mountain peaks, but the ravines were shrouded in darkness. Nazarov began to descend the mountain, but the forest became thicker. He realized he ought to stop, but his skis drew him on, and he ran into a long, thin larch stump that had been sharpened by time and hidden beneath the snow. The stump entered his stomach and came out his back, ripping right through his overcoat. The second man, who was already far below, reached the highway and sounded the alarm the next day. Two days later Nazarov was found impaled on that same stump, frozen in a pose of flight like a figure in a battle diorama.