Kolyma Stories Page 13

  Money was never paid. Not a penny. Only the best brigades were paid, and they received trivial amounts that couldn’t give them any significant relief. In many brigades the foreman acted by ascribing the production to two or three men, so they had more than a hundred percent production and were entitled to a cash bonus. Then the other twenty or thirty men in the brigade were liable to get punishment rations. This was a cunning solution. If the earnings had been divided equally among everyone, then nobody would have received a penny. But now two or three men, chosen quite arbitrarily to figure in the certificate, often without the foreman’s say-so, would get something.

  Everyone knew that the norms could not possibly be achieved, that nothing was or could be earned. Yet people still followed the foreman, asking about the proceeds, or ran to meet the cashier or visited the office for information.

  What was going on? Was this a desire to insist that you were a hard worker, to improve your reputation in the bosses’ eyes, or was it a mental illness due to malnourishment? The latter is more likely.

  Now that they were here in the camp, the bright, clean, warm pretrial prison, which they had so recently and so infinitely long ago left, seemed to absolutely everyone the best place on earth. All the wrongs done to them in prison were forgotten, and everyone excitedly recalled listening to lectures by real scholars and to stories told by people who had seen a lot of the world. They recalled reading books, sleeping, and eating their fill, going to a wonderful bathhouse, getting parcels from relatives, feeling that their family was close by them, just beyond the double iron gates; they remembered speaking freely about whatever they liked (for doing that in the camp you could get an extra sentence), not fearing informers or wardens. The pretrial prison seemed to them freer and cozier than their family home. Quite a few, dreaming in their hospital bunks, would say, even though they did not have long to live, “Of course, I’d like to see my family, to leave here. But I’d like even more to get back to my cell in the pretrial prison. It was more comfortable and interesting even than home. And I’d tell all the newcomers what ‘clean air’ really was.”

  If you added to everything else the almost universal scurvy, which had turned, as in Behring’s times, into a terrible and dangerous epidemic taking the lives of thousands; as well as the dysentery, since people ate whatever they could find in their urge to just fill an aching stomach, gathering kitchen refuse from the rubbish heaps, which were thickly covered with flies; not to speak of the pellagra, an emaciating disease of the poor, which peels the skin like a glove off a man’s palms and soles, and makes the whole body a mangy mass of large round petals, like fingerprints; and lastly, the famous alimentary dystrophy, the disease of the starving, which was called by its real name only after the blockade of Leningrad. Before then dystrophy had various names—in medical diagnosis it was APE, which stood for acute physical emaciation; more often, it was polyavitaminosis, a wonderful Latin term describing the lack of several vitamins in a person’s body, but which reassured the doctors in that they had a convenient and legitimate Latin formula to denote what was just starvation.

  If you remember the unheated damp barracks, with a thick layer of ice filling all the crevices inside, as if a tallow candle had melted in a corner of the barracks; if you account for the bad clothing and starvation rations, the frostbitten digits (frostbite meant everlasting agony, even if amputation was not resorted to); if you imagine how frequent were the inevitable appearances of flu, pneumonia, all sorts of chills and of tuberculosis in these marshy mountains, so fatal for anyone with heart trouble; if you recall the epidemics of self-harming by chopping off a limb or a digit; if you also consider the appalling moral dejection and the hopelessness, then you can easily see how much more dangerous clean air was to human health than prison.

  That is why there is no point arguing with Dostoyevsky about the advantages of “work,” when you are sentenced to hard labor, over the idleness of prison life, or about the merits of “clean air.” Dostoyevsky’s times were different, and hard labor had then not reached the heights described here. It is difficult to form a true idea of this in advance, for everything there is too unusual, too improbable, and a poor human brain is simply incapable of conceiving concrete images of life there, a life of which our prison acquaintance, the Tatar mullah, had a vague, uncertain idea.

  1955

  MY FIRST DEATH

  I WITNESSED a lot of human deaths in the north—in fact, too many for one man to see—but the first death I saw made the deepest impression on my memory.

  That winter we found ourselves working the night shift. I saw a tiny light gray moon in a black sky; the moon was surrounded by a rainbow-colored halo that appeared when the temperature was very low. We never saw the sun at all; we got back to the barracks (not home, nobody called the barracks home) and we left them while it was dark. In any case, the sun appeared for such a short period that it didn’t have time even to take a good look at the earth through the thick white gauze of frosty mist. We had to guess where the sun might be; it gave no light or warmth.

  It was a long walk, two or three kilometers, to the pit face, and we had to pass between two enormous, six-meter-high walls of snow. That winter saw heavy snowdrifts and after each blizzard the pit face had to be dug clear. Thousands of people with spades came out to clear the road so that the trucks could pass. Everyone who worked on road clearance was surrounded by a shift of guards with their dogs, and they were kept at work for days on end, not allowed to warm themselves nor go anywhere warm to eat. Packhorses brought rations of half-frozen bread and sometimes, if the job dragged out, tinned food: one can for two men. The same horses took the sick and the exhausted back to the camp. Only when the job was done were people allowed to go back to sleep and then out into the sub-zero cold again to do their “proper” work. It was then that I noticed something remarkable: when you work for many hours on end, it is only hard and agonizingly difficult for the first six or seven hours. After that you lose your sense of time, you subconsciously watch out only for the danger of freezing to death; you stamp your feet, you wave your spade about, but you don’t think about anything at all and don’t hope for anything.

  The end of such a job is always unexpected, a sudden stroke of good luck that you seem never to have even dared to count on. Everyone is cheerful and noisy, and for a short time there seems to be no hunger, no deadly fatigue. Hastily lining up in rows, everyone happily runs “home.” On either side of us the enormous trench walls of snow rise up, cutting us off from the rest of the world.

  The blizzard had stopped long ago, and the fluffy snow had settled, compacted, and now was even more formidable and hard. You could walk on the top of the snow wall and not fall through it. Both walls were intersected at several places by roads that crossed them.

  At about two in the morning we got back for dinner and filled the barracks with the noise that people who have been freezing make, with the clanging of spades, the low conversation of those who’ve come in from outside, talk that only gradually quiets down and then is muffled as it reverts to ordinary human speech. Dinner at night was always in the barracks, not in the freezing refectory where the windows had no glass, a refectory that everyone hated. After dinner those who had tobacco smoked, and those who didn’t have any tobacco were given cigarette ends by their workmates. On the whole things worked out so that everyone managed to “have a drag.”

  Our foreman, Kolia Andreyev, once the manager of a collective’s truck and tractor garage but now a plain prisoner condemned to ten years under the fashionable political article 58 of the Criminal Code, always walked at the head of his brigade and walked quickly. Our brigade was not guarded. The explanation for the authorities’ trust was that at the time there was a shortage of guards. But knowing we were special, that we had no guards, was, however naïve it seems, of some importance. Everyone valued going to work unguarded; it was the subject of pride and boasting. The brigade did in fact work better than it did later, when there were enough guards and
the Andreyev brigade’s rights were reduced to the same level as all the others.

  On this particular night Andreyev was leading us along a new route, not down below but right on the crest of the snow wall. We could see the mine’s golden eyes flickering, the dark mass of the forest on our left, and the distant crowns of the bare hills merging into the sky. For the first time at night we could see from afar where we lived.

  When he reached the crossroads, Andreyev suddenly turned sharply to the right and ran downhill through the snow. Meekly repeating his inexplicable movement, a flock of people poured after him, their crowbars, pickaxes, spades all clanging (tools were never left at the workplace, where they would be stolen, and losing your tools incurred punishment).

  Two yards from the intersection a man in military uniform stood. He was bareheaded, his short dark hair was disheveled and sprinkled with snow, his greatcoat was unbuttoned. Farther off, its legs buried in deep snow, was a horse, harnessed to a light sleigh.

  A woman lay supine at this man’s feet. Her fur coat was open, her brightly colored dress was creased. A black crumpled shawl was lying by her head. The shawl had been trodden into the snow, as had her blond hair, which seemed almost white in the moonlight. Her thin throat was open, and dark oval stains showed on the right and left of her neck. Her face was white, bloodless, and when I had taken a good look, I recognized Anna Pavlovna, the secretary to the chief of our mine.

  Her face was familiar to us all; there were very few women at the mine. One evening about six months previously she had passed our brigade, and the prisoners’ delighted looks followed her thin figure as she passed. She had smiled at us and pointed to the sun, which was already heavy as it sank to the horizon.

  “It won’t be long, boys, not long!” she’d shouted.

  Like the camp horses, we spent the whole working day thinking only about the minute it would end. We were touched by the fact that our simple thoughts had been so well understood, and what’s more by a woman who was so beautiful (according to our ideas at the time). Our brigade loved Anna.

  Now she was lying there dead, strangled by the fingers of the man in military uniform who was looking around him with a wild, bewildered gaze. He was much more familiar to me: this was Shtemenko, the interrogator at our mine, the man who set in motion criminal cases against so many of the prisoners. He would interrogate relentlessly, and would bribe false witnesses and slanderers, recruited from the hungry prisoners, with a pinch of tobacco or a bowl of soup. He assured some victims that the state required them to lie, threatened others, and bribed the rest. He never bothered, before arresting a new suspect, to get to know him or to summon him, even though we all lived at the same mine. In the interrogator’s office any arrested man could expect ready-made statements and beatings.

  Shtemenko was the boss who had visited our barracks about three months previously and destroyed all the prisoners’ cooking pots, which they had made from old cans and in which they cooked anything that could be cooked and eaten. The cans were used to carry dinner from the refectory so as to heat it up over the barracks stove and eat it sitting down. A champion of cleanliness and discipline, Shtemenko ordered someone to give him a pickax and then personally smashed in the bottoms of the tin cans.

  Now he noticed Andreyev just two yards away. He grabbed his pistol holster but, seeing the crowd of men armed with crowbars and pickaxes, decided not to draw his weapon. But people were already tying his hands behind his back. They did so with such passion and tied the knot so tightly that it later had to be undone with a knife.

  Anna’s corpse was put onto the sleigh and taken to the settlement, to the mine chief’s house. Not everyone accompanied Andreyev; many made a beeline for the barracks and their soup.

  When he saw the crowd of prisoners gathered around the doors of his house, the chief took his time before opening up. In the end Andreyev managed to explain what the matter was, and along with Shtemenko, who was still tied up, and two other prisoners, Andreyev went into the house.

  Dinner took a long time that night. Andreyev was taken off somewhere to give evidence. But he came back later, gave us our orders, and we went off to work.

  Shtemenko was quickly sentenced to ten years for murder due to jealousy. The punishment was minimal. His trial was at our mine, and after the sentence he was taken away. In such cases, former camp bosses are kept in a special place. Nobody ever came across them in the ordinary camps.

  1956

  AUNTIE POLIA

  AUNTIE Polia died in the hospital of stomach cancer. She was fifty-two years old. The autopsy confirmed the diagnosis made by the doctor treating her. Not that the pathologist’s report often differed from the clinician’s in either the best or the worst hospitals.

  Only the office knew Auntie Polia’s surname. Even the wife of the boss whom Polia had served for seven years as an “orderly”—that is, a servant—couldn’t remember her actual surname.

  Everyone knows what an orderly, male or female, is, but not everyone knows what they can be: a trusted confidant of an inaccessible master of the fates of thousands of human beings; a witness to his failings and dark sides; a person who knows the shadowy aspects of the home; a slave, but a constant participant in the submarine, subterranean war for accommodation; a participant, or at the very least an observer, in domestic battles; a secret arbiter in quarrels between husband and wife; the master’s chief housekeeper, increasing his wealth, and not only by being economical and honest. There was one orderly who traded in cigarettes to make a profit for his master; he sold them to prisoners for ten rubles each. The camp chamber of weights and measures had decreed that a matchbox held enough tobacco to make eight roll-ups, and eight matchboxes of tobacco contained a total of two ounces of tobacco. These dry-matter measures applied to one-eighth of the territory of the Soviet Union—that is, all of eastern Siberia.

  Our orderly would earn six hundred and forty rubles from each two-ounce packet of tobacco. But even this figure was not what you would call the limit. You didn’t have to pack the matchboxes fully. To the untrained eye there was no discernible difference, and nobody wanted to quarrel with the boss’s orderly. You could just roll your cigarettes more tightly. The roll-up’s contents were a matter for the orderly’s hands and conscience. Our orderly bought his tobacco from the boss for five hundred rubles a packet. The one hundred and forty ruble profit went into the orderly’s pocket.

  Auntie Polia’s boss didn’t trade in tobacco, and he didn’t make her do any underhanded trading. Auntie Polia was a magnificent cook, and orderlies who were culinary experts were valued especially highly. Auntie Polia could undertake—and she actually did so—to get any of her fellow Ukrainians an easy job or to get them onto a list for release. The help Auntie Polia gave her fellow countrymen was very substantial. She didn’t help anyone else, except perhaps with a word of advice.

  Auntie Polia had been working for her boss for more than six years, and she believed she’d serve her entire ten-year sentence with no problems.

  Auntie Polia was calculating but not avaricious; she rightly thought that her indifference to gifts and money was bound to be highly appreciated by any boss. Her calculations proved to be right. She was one of the boss’s family, and a plan for her release had already been drawn up—she was going to be registered as a truck loader at the mine where her boss’s brother worked, and the mine had put in a request for her release.

  But Auntie Polia fell ill; she got worse and worse and was sent to the hospital. The doctor in charge saw to it that she had a separate ward. Ten moribund patients were dragged out into a cold corridor to make room for the boss’s orderly.

  The hospital stirred to life. Every afternoon jeeps would arrive, as would trucks; ladies in sheepskin jackets and men in military uniform would get out of the cabs, all rushing to see Auntie Polia. And she promised each one that, if she recovered, she would put in a word for them to her boss.

  Every Sunday a ZIS-101 limousine would pass through the hospital gates,
bringing a parcel and a note from the boss’s wife.

  Auntie Polia gave all the treats to the nurses after sampling just a spoonful. She knew what was wrong with her.

  But Auntie Polia couldn’t recover. Eventually an extraordinary visitor, Father Piotr, as he introduced himself to the hospital manager, came to the hospital, carrying a note from the boss. It turned out that Auntie Polia wanted to take confession.

  This extraordinary visitor was Piotr Abramov. Everyone knew him. He’d even been a patient in the hospital some months previously. But now he was Father Piotr.

  The most reverend priest’s visit bewildered the whole hospital: apparently there were priests in our region! There was nothing but talk of Auntie Polia’s confession in the hospital’s biggest ward, ward two, where the time between lunch and dinner was taken up by one of the patients telling a story about food—not to stimulate the patients’ appetites but to meet a starving man’s need to have his dietary emotions stimulated.

  Father Piotr was wearing a peaked cap and a pea jacket. His quilted trousers were tucked into old boots made from kersey.[6] His hair was cut very short for a cleric, far shorter than the Elvis-style haircuts of the 1950s. Father Piotr unbuttoned his pea jacket and quilted waistcoat so that the blue peasant shirt and the big cross around his neck could be seen. This was no ordinary cross; it was a homemade one, the work of a skilled hand lacking the necessary tools.

  Father Piotr heard Auntie Polia’s confession and left. He spent some time standing on the highway, raising his arm whenever trucks appeared. Two trucks passed but did not stop. Then Father Piotr took a ready-rolled cigarette from under his jacket and raised it over his head. The very first truck braked and the driver hospitably opened the cab door.