Us Conductors (38 page)

TWO WEEKS LATER, I
received an envelope in the mail. Lydia F. had written my name and address in her unadorned hand. Lenin had sent me a
Mandat
—a card entitling the bearer to unrestricted travel on all of Russia’s railways. It carried a letter with his signature.
Go out
, he said in his note.
Show your works in Archangelsk, Kem and Samara
. I was instructed to lead a scientific tour, bringing electricity to the people.

Two months later, in May 1922, he suffered his first stroke.

On the night of January 22, 1924, I was working late at the institute. I had travelled by rail to Pskov, Minsk and Yaroslavl, showing the people my inventions. I had come home. The sky was inky in the windows. A charwoman appeared in the laboratory doorway.

She said, “Lenin is dead.”

She was ashen.

“What?”

“Lenin is dead.”

My mouth closed and opened. I felt as if winter had been let into the room. She held up a sheaf of newsprint. A drawing of his face, partly in shadow, bordered in black.

“Last night,” she said.

I put my hands flat on the bench. “Thank you,” I said. My eyes watered. The laboratory was quiet except for the buzz from one of the machines.

That night, instead of sleeping, I devised a plan to bring Lenin back to life. It was based on ideas I had had for years. We would freeze his body; we would perfect our techniques until we could repair the organs that had failed. I read and reread the reports of his death. His heart, his brain. We would proceed in a careful, considered fashion. In the morning I rang Rem Sarevko, a former graduate student who now lived in Gorky, where Lenin had expired. “We must save his body,” I said. “You must go to the place they are keeping him and explain.”

“It’s impossible,” Sarevko said.

“You are mistaken.”

But they had already removed his brain, Sarevko told me. They had cut open Lenin’s head and ripped out his mind and put it in a jar, covering it in poison, in alcohol.

“Why would they do this?”
I asked.

“They wish to preserve it,” Sarevko said.

ON THE TRAIN THAT
brought me from Butyrskaya prison to Vladivostok, on Russia’s Pacific coast, we were loaded like dead animals. They had brought us to the railway in a supply truck marked BREAD. The train car was wrapped in razor wire. They
ordered us inside, told us to lie down on three stinking shelves. When no one else could fit, they sealed the door. We lay in darkness. We lay forever, as if in a mass grave. At last, with a sickly sway, the train began to move. A pale light bulb clicked and went on. Around me, several men began to cry.

We were going east, across the entire country, through Omsk and Irkutsk, under mountain and over desert, past Ulan Bator, past China’s northern wilderness, forever, to the edge.

For thirty-eight days the rails went
clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack clack
and then we reached the sea and things got much worse.

They use boats to take prisoners to Kolyma. These boats are the most terrible places in the entire world. I did not know they would be terrible. I did not know the train would be worse than the prison, that I would ride for five thousand miles in thirst and suffocation, in a car of dying men. I did not know that the transit camp, Vtoraya Rechka, would be worse than the train, that I would squat in the dirt under sheer searing sunlight with ten thousand prisoners, ringed by dogs; that in Vtoraya Rechka you would be shot for standing, shot in the stomach, and dogs with red mouths would lap at your intestines. I did not know that the boats would be worse than the camp, that they are the most terrible places in the entire world. I left the mainland gladly, gliding away from Vtoraya Rechka’s wild, roaming cruelty. I thought I was leaving the gangs and the human, inhuman screams. Rifles pointed us up the gangways and onto the cargo ship and, through my wracking thirst, I was glad. I thought I was fleeing something. I was not fleeing anything. I was being poured down a horror’s maw.

Lenin’s Mandat was one of the items taken from me when I arrived at Butyrskaya prison. Just a piece of card. If it was not
burned, it is in Moscow somewhere, with a handful of buttons. May his memory be illuminated.

The steamer
Tovarishch Stalin
was originally an American vessel. It was covered in painted English words, PORT, AFT, DANGER, messages from a different time. The deck was mopped clean. There were little platforms for men and machine guns. A hatch led down to the hold. That is where the guards took us. At least a thousand prisoners pointed into the darkness. Because of the smell, several people began to vomit. There was very little air. The walls were slick wet metal or slimy grille, splitting the hold into sections. Already, experience had taught us habits: most of us sat or lay on the ground, setting out personal space. The floor was smeared with pitch, mud, feces, and vomit. More and more people were forced into the hold. We spread our legs, so other people could sit in front of us. We could hear the sound of men and women throwing up. There were no women in my section of the hold but you could hear them through the grille. As my eyes accustomed to the darkness I also realized that there was an upper level, a row of plank bunks raised over the floor. The zeks on these bunks did not look like the other men. They were
urki
—professional criminals. Prisoners like us, human cargo, but allowed to rule the camps. Power and deprivation turned these men into animals: cruel, powerful creatures, with tattoos on their chests. As I squinted in the darkness I watched an urka unfasten his belt and begin masturbating. He ejaculated onto the prisoners below. The journey from Vladivostok to Nagayevo took eight days. During this time, the urki spat and urinated onto those of us who sat on the floor. When we complained, they spilled down buckets of shit, fish heads, threats. I watched as a group of urki grinned under their peaked caps, nodding to one another, and slipped down like silverfish to steal a man’s coat, his boots, to break his collarbone.

When the guards decided it was time to eat, they opened a hatch in the ceiling and threw down pieces of bread or salted fish. The prisoners clawed in the darkness. Even worse were the moments when they lowered buckets of water, water to quench our thirst; and we stood, gulping breath, following the slow bob of the bucket. I prayed that I would be able to tear through the others, to lap for a moment at whatever the guards had sent us.

Sometimes the urki would turn off the lights. They would descend with fists and knives. They spoke in slang, like nursery rhymes, like characters from folklore. I remember a man with gold in his mouth, the most unkind eyes. I watched him bribe a guard, who allowed a strand of men to pass through one hatch and into another. They raped three women. I knew it was three, because the women called to us, pleading for help, from the other side of the grille.

The boat bucked in the typhoons of the Okhotsk Sea. In seething effluent our bodies knocked against steel and bone, screaming, dying. I was seasick, violently seasick, clutching my ribs and holding a handful of rags to my face, my mouth crowded with bile.

It took eight days to reach a place called Kolyma, in the northeast of the country where I was born. On the journey I remembered you. I remembered Lenin. I remembered every meal I had ever eaten, every kind word or touch. There are no friends on those boats. There is no hope. I knew we were going somewhere, to some unimaginable camp, and I imagined that misery itself could drag our ship through the night. Kolyma, like a magnet, or like Einstein’s black hole, a place that draws every sadness toward it. Part of me is surprised that any sorrow can exist away from the camps. Manhattan is 136 longitudes from Kolyma and still we had the folly, there, to cry.

NAGAYEVO
is
A WIDE
beautiful bay surrounded by an unfinished circle of cliffs. The water is still and silver-blue. It is like a resting coin, a new dime, that reflects the sky.

We came into Nagayevo harbour and they stacked the dead on the pebble beach.

All of us walked away from the corpses. We climbed the hill, blinking in the daylight. The road was made of dirt and then there was a road made of rocks. We looked back at the bay and the
Tovarishch Stalin
sat so smally, so quietly, secreting smoke. It was just one ship in a vast harbour; it was just one ship in a vast harbour. You could found a city there, a little paradise on the sea. Guards pointed the way with rifle barrels. We came up over the rise and the country lay before us, limitless. We were marching at its edge.
Are there deer here?
I wondered.
Wolves?
Later, I learned that there are deer; there are wolves.

We marched until we reached the village of Magadan. It was a young place, tainted by its visitors. They divided us into groups. An officer gazed down at us from a plywood stage. It felt as though we were at the end of our lives, some in-between that follows death. A place of mud and scrub and clouding breath. “This is Kolyma,” he said. His voice scraped.

“You are here to work. You are here for crimes against the Soviet state and you will repay your debt with minutes, hours, years. You will repay us with blood and sweat. If you work hard, you will eat. If you do not, you will die. There are no tricks. We need the metal that is buried in the earth; it is your task to extract this metal. If you do not meet your quota, you are a traitor and a saboteur.

“The law is the taiga and the prosecutor is the bear. You will remain here until you leave here. No one escapes.”

The man looked us over once more. The sky behind him was endlessly blue. “That is all,” he said.

WE WALKED TO OUR CAMP
. This was a walk of two weeks. Every day they gave us a fish: a single cooked trout, like a thing from a surrealist painting. Some of us ate the fish at once and some of us ate it little by little, to last the day. We walked and then we slept and the sun crossed the sky. Sometimes it rained.

I remember waking one morning with fog spread over the plateau; it wreathed the sleeping prisoners and the low lichened rocks, the stunted trees, everything except the mountains. The mountains were not hidden and in a way they felt like allies, friends. Only they could not help, could not move. They had withdrawn, our allies. A group of forty-two human beings lay in the day’s cold mist.

One afternoon we arrived at the camp. It was near the mouth of a river and you could hear the water whispering over rocks. Mountains surrounded us. A frayed banner hung across the gate: “Work in the USSR Is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valour and Heroism!” My clothing was caked black and puke from our time on the boat. The colours had faded in the sun.

We had not died.

They counted us. They counted us again. We stood in uncomprehending formations. I said to myself:
I will remain here for eight years
. It was so cold and our clothing was black and puke and faded. Then they took us to the baths. We stripped naked. With doughy nurses’ hands they held us in place and shaved the hair from our arms, legs, from between our legs; they shaved our heads and the beards from our faces. “Lice,” they said, but I did not have lice. There was a stove, but we shivered. Then they
let us into the other room. We drew our bodies through tepid water. We were grateful even for this. I had never been so dirty. I had never been so deeply thirsty, or hungry. We dried ourselves on rough cloths and they led us to piles of clothes: long underwear, long tunics, quilted jackets and trousers, mittens, rubber boots, hats with ear flaps. These were dead men’s clothes. We searched for garments that fit. We looked like scarecrows, rag monsters. Then they took us back outside and they gave us warm broth.