Kolyma Stories Page 11

  While the deliveryman came nearer, each prisoner calculated which piece this uncaring hand would offer him. Each man had time for disappointment or joy, to prepare himself for a miracle or to plumb the depths of despair if he had gotten his hurried calculations wrong. Some would screw up their eyes because they couldn’t cope with the anxiety, and would open them only when the deliveryman jolted them to offer their ration of herring. Grabbing the herring with dirty fingers, stroking it, squeezing it quickly but gently to see whether it was a dry or a juicy portion (Sea of Okhotsk herrings are not always juicy, and this gesture with the fingers was another sort of preparation for a miracle), a man could not help casting a quick glance at the hands of people all around him who were also stroking and squeezing their pieces of herring, afraid to be too quick to swallow this tiny tail. A man didn’t eat the herring; he licked and licked, as the tail gradually vanished from his fingers. All that was left were the bones, and he carefully chewed them, chewed them thriftily, so that the bones also melted away and vanished. Then he would start on the bread—the daily ration of five hundred grams was issued in the morning—pinching off a tiny piece and putting it in his mouth. Everyone ate the bread immediately so that it wouldn’t be stolen or taken away; in any case, they didn’t have the strength to hold on to it. The main thing was not to hurry, not to wash it down with water, not to chew it. It had to be sucked, like sugar, like a boiled sweet. After that you could take your mug of tea, or rather warm water, turned black by adding burned bark.

  The herring is eaten, so is the bread, and the tea is drunk. You immediately feel hot and you don’t want to go anywhere; you want to lie down, but now you’ve got to get dressed, to put on your torn quilted jacket that has been your blanket, to take some string and tie soles to your torn soft boots, quilted with cotton wool, boots that have been your pillow. You have to hurry, because the doors are wide open again and the escort guards and their dogs are waiting on the other side of the barbed-wire enclosure. . . .

  We were in quarantine, in typhus quarantine, but we weren’t allowed to lie there idly. We were herded out to work. There were no lists, they just counted us by fives at the gates. There was a fairly reliable way of ending up each day with a relatively advantageous job. All you needed was patience and endurance. Advantageous jobs are always those where only a few people are taken on—two, three, or four men. Jobs needing twenty, thirty, or a hundred meant heavy labor, usually involving digging. Although a prisoner is never told in advance where he’s going to work, he finds out on his way there, and it is the people with patience who are lucky in this terrible lottery. You have to loiter at the back, joining other people’s ranks, move aside but rush forward when a small group is being assembled. If the group is going to be large, then the best job is in the stores sorting vegetables, or in the bakery, in other words, anywhere where the work is connected with food, future or present. It is there that you will always find leftovers, ends, offcuts of something edible.

  •

  We were lined up and led down a dirty April road. The guards’ boots cheerfully splashed as they passed through the puddles. We were not allowed to break ranks while within town boundaries, so nobody avoided the puddles. Our feet got wet, but nobody paid any attention, for they weren’t afraid of catching a chill. They’d caught chills thousands of times, and the most dreadful thing that could happen was pneumonia, and that would get you into the longed-for hospital.

  “To the bakery, do you hear? We’re headed for the bakery!”

  There are people who always know everything and guess everything right. There are also people who try to make the best of everything, and their sanguine temperament will find some sort of accord with life in the worst of situations. But for others, events get worse as they unfold, and these people distrust any alleviation as a mere oversight by fate. This difference in attitudes has little to do with personal experience; it seems to be determined in childhood for the rest of their lives.

  •

  The wildest hopes came true: we were at the bakery gates. Twenty men, their hands tucked into their sleeves, were shuffling their feet, turning their backs to the piercing wind. The guards stood aside to have a smoke. From a door built into the gates emerged a bareheaded man wearing blue overalls. He spoke to the guards and then came up to us. He slowly inspected us all. Everyone becomes a psychologist in Kolyma, and he had a lot to consider in just a minute. He had to choose two men out of twenty ruffians to work indoors in the bakery workshop. These people had to be among the strongest; they had to be able to drag trays of smashed bricks that were all that was left after the ovens had been reconstructed. But they mustn’t be thieves or gangsters, or else the working day would be wasted on all sorts of encounters and smuggled notes instead of work. They mustn’t have reached the point at which any man may be driven by hunger to steal, for there were no guards in the bakery teams. They mustn’t be inclined to attempt to escape. They must. . . .

  All that had to be read from twenty prisoners’ faces in a minute; a selection and decision had to be made.

  “Step forward,” the bareheaded man told me. “You, too.” He stuck a finger at my freckled know-it-all of a neighbor. “I’ll take these two,” he told the guard.

  “Okay,” said the guard, as if he didn’t care.

  Envious eyes saw us off.

  •

  All five human senses never work at full intensity at the same time. I can’t hear the radio when I’m concentrating on reading. The lines begin to jump before my eyes if I concentrate on listening to a broadcast; although the automatic process of reading carries on and I let my eyes follow the lines, I will suddenly discover that I can’t remember anything of what I have just read. The same thing happens if you start thinking about something different when you’re in the middle of reading something: some inner switches come into operation. There’s a well-known folk saying: “When I’m eating, I’m deaf and dumb.” You could add “and blind,” since your visual functions when you’re eating eagerly are focused on helping your taste perceptions. When I grope for something deep in a cupboard and my perceptions are localized in my fingertips, I don’t see or hear anything, for everything is suppressed by the tension of palpation. This was what was happening now: once I crossed the threshold of the bakery, I stood, unable to see the workmen’s sympathetic and benevolent faces (former prisoners were working alongside current prisoners here), and unable to hear what the master baker, the familiar bareheaded man, was saying when he explained that we had to drag the smashed bricks outside, that we were not to visit the other workshops, that we mustn’t steal, because he was going to give us bread in any case. I heard none of that. I didn’t even feel the warmth of the overheated workshop, warmth that my body had longed for so desperately all that endless winter.

  I was breathing in the smell of bread, the dense aroma of the loaves, in which the smell of hot oil mingled with the smell of roasted flour. I had greedily tried to catch a minute part of this overwhelming aroma in the mornings, when I pressed my nose against a crust of my ration that I had not yet eaten. Here the aroma came in all its density and power. It seemed to tear my poor nostrils apart.

  The master baker put an end to my enchantment.

  “You’ve had a good enough look,” he said. “Let’s go to the boiler room.” We went down to the basement. My workmate was already sitting by the stoker’s table in the boiler room, which had been swept clean. The stoker, wearing the same blue overalls as the master baker, was smoking by the stove, and you could see through an opening in the door of the cast-iron stove the flame inside flaring and blazing—it turned from red to yellow, and spasms of fire made the boiler walls shake and hum.

  The baker put a kettle, a mug full of jam, and a loaf of white bread on the table.

  “See they have something to drink,” he told the stoker. “I’ll come back in about twenty minutes. But don’t drag it out, eat quickly. We’ll give you more bread in the evening, and then you’d better break it into pieces, or
it will be taken off you in the camp.”

  The baker left.

  “What a swine,” said the stoker, turning the loaf over in his hands. “Too mean to give you the seventy percent wheat, the sod. Hang on a moment.”

  He followed the baker out and a minute later came back, tossing a different loaf in his hands.

  “Nice and hot,” he said, throwing the loaf to the freckled lad. “Thirty percent rye. You see, he was trying to get away with a half-and-half! Give it here.” Taking hold of the loaf the master baker had left us, the stoker flung open the stove door and tossed it into the roaring, howling fire. He slammed the door shut and laughed. “So there,” he said happily, turning to face us.

  “Why do that?” I asked. “We could have taken it with us.”

  “We’ll give you something else to take home,” said the stoker. Neither I nor the freckled lad were able to break the new loaf in two.

  “Would you have a knife?” I asked the stoker.

  “No. What do you need a knife for?”

  The stoker picked up the loaf in both hands and easily broke it apart. Hot aromatic steam flowed out of the broken round loaf. The stoker stuck a finger into the soft bread.

  “Fedka’s a great baker, good man,” he said in praise.

  But we didn’t have time to find out who Fedka was. We’d started eating, burning our mouths on the bread and the hot water that we added the jam to. Hot sweat was streaming off us. We were in a hurry; the master baker had come to fetch us.

  He had brought us the carrying tray and dragged it to a pile of smashed bricks; he’d brought spades, and he personally filled the first box. We set to work. Suddenly it was obvious that the carrying tray was far too heavy for us, that it was stretching our sinews, so that our arms suddenly weakened and lost their strength. Our heads spun, we began to stagger. On the next tray I put half the load we had put on the first.

  “That’ll do, that’ll do,” said the freckled lad. He was even paler than me, or his freckles made his pallor look worse.

  “Take a break, lads,” said a baker who was passing by. He wasn’t being at all sarcastic, so we obeyed and sat down to rest. The master baker passed by but said nothing.

  After our break we got back to work, but after every two tray loads or so, we would sit down again—the pile of rubble was not getting any smaller.

  “Have a cigarette, lads,” said the same baker when he reappeared.

  “We haven’t got any tobacco.”

  “I’ll give you enough for a roll-up each. But you’ve got to go outside. There’s no smoking here.”

  We divided the tobacco and each of us smoked a cigarette: a long-forgotten luxury. I drew on it slowly a few times, carefully put it out, wrapped it in paper, and hid it under my shirt.

  “Quite right,” said the freckled lad. “I didn’t think of that.”

  By the lunch break we had gotten so accustomed to it all that we even took a look into the neighboring rooms that had the same baker’s ovens. Everywhere, iron bread tins and trays shrieked as they came out of ovens; on all the shelves there was nothing but bread, bread, bread. Every now and again a trolley would roll up and the baked bread was loaded and taken away, but not to where we had to return that evening—this was white bread.

  You could see through the broad, unbarred window that the sun was now heading for the west. There was a cold draft coming from the doors. The master baker came.

  “Right, stop now. Leave the carrying trays on the rubble. You haven’t done very much. It’ll take you slackers more than a week to move this heap.”

  We were given a loaf of bread each, which we broke into pieces and then stuffed into our pockets. But how much could we get into our pockets?

  “Put it straight down your trousers,” the freckled lad ordered me.

  We walked out into the evening cold of the yard. The work party was now forming ranks, and we were led back. Nobody searched us when we reached the camp guardhouse, nobody had any bread in their hands. I went back to my place, shared the bread I’d brought with my neighbors, and fell asleep as soon as my wet, frozen feet had warmed up.

  All night I dreamed of loaves of bread and the mischievous face of the stoker as he tossed bread into the stove’s fiery maw.

  1956

  THE SNAKE CHARMER

  WE WERE sitting on an enormous larch tree that had been knocked over by a storm. In the permafrost region trees have a very weak hold on the inhospitable ground and are easily pulled down, roots and all, by a storm. Platonov was telling me the story of his life here, our second life in this world. I frowned when he mentioned the Jankhara mine. I had been in bad and difficult places, but the terrible reputation of Jankhara resounded everywhere.

  “Were you at Jankhara for long?”

  “A year,” Platonov answered quietly. His eyes narrowed, his wrinkles deepened: I was looking at a different Platonov, ten years older than the first one.

  “Though it was hard just at the beginning, for two or three months. Only thieves worked there. I was the sole . . . literate man there. I’d tell them stories, ‘churn out novels’ as the gangster slang puts it. In the evenings I’d retell them Dumas, Conan Doyle, Wallace. In exchange they’d feed me, give me clothes, and I didn’t have to work too much. I expect you’ve benefited too in your time here from the unique advantage of being literate.”

  “No,” I said, “I haven’t. I always thought that was the ultimate humiliation, the end. I never retold novels in exchange for soup. But I know what you’re talking about. I’ve heard the ‘novelists.’ ”

  “So you disapprove of it, do you?” asked Platonov.

  “Not at all,” I replied. “A hungry man can be forgiven many things, many things.”

  “If I survive,” Platonov pronounced the sacred phrase that opens all reflections about any time further than the next day, “I’ll write a story about this. I’ve already thought of a title: ‘The Snake Charmer.’ Do you like it?”

  “I do. You just have to survive. That’s the main thing.”

  Andrei Fiodorovich Platonov, a film scriptwriter in his former life, died about three weeks after this conversation. He died the same death as many others did: he swung his pickax, lost his footing, and fell facedown onto the stones. Intravenous glucose or a strong heart drug might have revived him, for he went on rasping for an hour or ninety minutes, but he’d stopped making any noise by the time the stretcher-bearers came from the hospital, and his little corpse, a light load of skin and bones, was carried off to the morgue.

  I was fond of Platonov because he hadn’t lost interest in life beyond the blue sea, beyond the high mountains, from which we were separated by so many kilometers and years, and in whose existence we had almost stopped believing, or rather, we believed in the same way as schoolchildren believe in the existence of America, for example. God knows how, but Platonov had books and, when it wasn’t too cold, for instance in July, he would shun conversations on the topics that animated everyone else—what soup there would be or had been for supper, whether we would get bread three times a day or just once in the morning, whether tomorrow’s weather would be rainy or clear.

  I was fond of Platonov, and I’ll try now to write his story “The Snake Charmer.”

  •

  The end of work is by no means the end of work. After the siren you have to gather all your tools, take them to the store, line up, go through two of the ten daily roll calls, listening to guards’ foul curses and the pitiless shouts and insults from your own comrades, as long as they are stronger than you are, comrades who are also tired, anxious to get home, and angry at any delay. You have to endure another roll call, line up, and set off five kilometers into the forest to fetch firewood. The nearby forest was cleared and burned a long time ago. A brigade of lumberjacks gets the firewood ready, and the mine workers each carry home a big log. Nobody knows how to bring home the logs that are too big even for two men to carry. Trucks are never sent out for firewood, and all the horses are too sick to leave
the stables. A horse loses its strength far more quickly than a human being, even though the difference between their former and present living conditions is minimal, compared to what people undergo. It often seems, and perhaps it really is so, that the reason human beings rose to the top of the animal kingdom and became human, that is, became a creature that could think up such things as our islands, however improbable life there might be, is that humans are physically tougher than any other animal. The ape wasn’t humanized by having a hand, or an embryonic brain, or a soul; there are dogs and bears that behave more intelligently and morally than human beings. And the reason was not the taming of fire. All of that happened after the main requirement for the transformation was met. Given that other conditions were equal at the time, man turned out to be considerably stronger and tougher physically, and only physically. He was as hard to kill as a cat, but that saying isn’t quite accurate. It would be better to say that the cat is as hard to kill as a man. A horse cannot stand a month of life here in the winter, in cold stables with hours and hours of heavy labor in sub-zero temperatures. Unless it’s a Yakut horse. But Yakut horses aren’t used for hard labor. True, they’re not fed, either. Like reindeer, in winter they paw at the snow and pull out last year’s dried grass. Human beings survive. Perhaps they survive on hope? But they don’t have any hope. Unless a man is a fool, he cannot live on hope. That is why there are so many suicides.