Kolyma Stories Page 14

  Auntie Polia died and was buried in the hospital cemetery. This was a big cemetery at the bottom of a hill (the patients used to say “to end up down the hill” instead of “to die”), with mass graves A, B, C, and D, and a few lines, looking like spinal columns, of single graves. Auntie Polia’s burial was not attended by her boss, the boss’s wife, or Father Piotr. The ceremony was the usual one; the hospital manager tied a wooden tag to Auntie Polia’s left calf. The tag bore a number, the number of her personal file. The rules stated that the number had to be written with an ordinary, not an indelible, black pencil, just like the topographical reference points foresters mark trees with.

  The usual gravedigger janitors covered Auntie Polia’s withered body with stones. The manager fixed a stick into the stones, bearing the same personal file number as the tag.

  A few days later, Father Piotr appeared at the hospital. He had been to the cemetery and was now causing an uproar in the hospital office.

  “You have to put up a cross. A cross.”

  “Like hell I will,” replied the manager.

  They swore at each other for a long time. Finally Father Piotr announced: “I’m giving you a week. If no cross is erected in that time, I shall complain about you to the chief of the administration. If he won’t help, I’ll write to the chief of Far East Development. If he won’t help, I shall complain about him to the Council of People’s Commissars. If they refuse to intervene, I’ll write to the synod.” Father Piotr was roaring.

  The manager had been a prisoner himself and was well aware of the “Wonderland” he lived in—he knew that the most unexpected things could happen. After pondering a little, he decided to put this whole business to the doctor in charge.

  The doctor in charge, who had once been a minister or a deputy minister, advised the manager not to argue but to erect a cross over Auntie Polia’s grave.

  “If that priest is so sure of what he’s saying, then there may be something in it. He knows something. Anything’s possible, anything’s possible,” mumbled the former minister.

  A cross, the first cross in that cemetery, was erected. It could be seen a long way away. Although it was the only one, the whole area now began to look like a real cemetery. All the ambulatory patients would come to look at this cross. It even had a board with a black frame nailed to it. An old artist who had been a patient in the hospital for more than a year was entrusted with inscribing the board. He wasn’t actually bedridden, he just had a bed assigned to him. He spent all his time mass-producing copies of three paintings: Golden Autumn, Three Knights, and The Death of Ivan the Terrible. The artist swore that he could do these copies with his eyes closed. His clients included all the bosses and chiefs in the settlement and the hospital.

  But the artist did agree to do a board for Auntie Polia’s cross. He asked what it should say. The manager dug about in his lists.

  “I can only find her initials,” he said. “Timoshenko, P. I. So write Polina Ivanovna. Died on such-and-such a date.”

  The artist never argued with his clients, so that is what he wrote. A week later to the day, Piotr Abramov, that is Father Piotr, reappeared. He said that Auntie Polia’s name was Praskovia, not Polina, and her patronymic was Ilyinichna, not Ivanovna. He gave her date of birth and demanded that it be included in the inscription over her grave. The inscription was corrected in Father Piotr’s presence.

  1958

  THE NECKTIE

  HOW CAN I write the story of that damned necktie?

  This is something true but peculiar: it is true reality. But this is a story, not a sketch. How am I to make it a piece of the prose of the future, something like the stories of Saint-Exupéry, who revealed the air to us?

  In the past and at present a writer needs to be someone like a foreigner in the country he is writing about if he wants to be a success. He has to write from the viewpoint—interests, vision—of the people he grew up among and from whom he got his habits, tastes, and views. A writer writes in the language of those in whose name he speaks. And that is all. If a writer knows his material too well, the people for whom he is writing won’t understand him. The writer will have betrayed them and gone over to the side of his material.

  You mustn’t know your material too well. Every writer in the past and the present had that defect, but the prose of the future demands something different. It will be professionals with a gift for writing who will speak out, not writers. And they will tell us only about what they know and have seen. Plausible accuracy is the force behind the literature of the future.

  But speculation may be irrelevant in this case, and the main thing is to try and remember, to remember in every detail Marusia Kriukova, a lame girl who took an overdose of veronal by saving up some tiny, shiny, yellow oval tablets and swallowing them. She got the veronal by swapping it for bread, porridge, or a portion of herring from other patients in her ward who had been prescribed the drug. The paramedics knew that veronal was being traded, and so they forced patients to swallow the tablet while they were watching, but the tablets had a hard coating, and patients could usually manage to tuck the veronal behind their cheeks or under their tongues and, once the paramedic had gone, spit it out onto their palms.

  Marusia Kriukova hadn’t worked out the right dose. She didn’t die, she just vomited, and, after she had received aid in the form of a stomach pump, she was discharged and sent to the transit camp. But all this happened long after the incident with the necktie.

  Marusia Kriukova arrived from Japan at the end of the 1930s. The daughter of an émigré who was living on the outskirts of Kyoto, Marusia, along with her brother, joined a union called Return to Russia, contacted the Soviet consulate, and in 1939 received a Russian entry visa. Marusia, her brother, and their fellow returnees were arrested in Vladivostok; Marusia was taken to Moscow and never saw any of her friends again.

  Marusia’s leg was broken under interrogation, and when the bone mended she was sent to Kolyma to serve a twenty-five-year term of imprisonment. Marusia was a superb craftswoman, a specialist in embroidery, and it was this skill that allowed her to support her family in Kyoto.

  The bosses in Kolyma immediately discovered Marusia’s skills. She was never paid for her embroidery; she would be brought a piece of bread, two bits of sugar, or cigarettes—but Marusia never learned to smoke. Her wonderful hand embroidery, worth several hundred rubles, stayed in the possession of the bosses.

  The woman in charge of the camp health service heard of Marusia’s abilities and admitted her to the hospital, so that from then on Marusia did embroidery for the chief female doctor.

  Then a telegram arrived at the state collective where Marusia was employed, instructing that all women with seamstress skills should be sent by the next vehicle going that way to X . . . for redeployment. The camp chief had been concealing Marusia’s existence, for his wife had a big commission for the craftswoman. But someone immediately wrote a denunciation to the higher authorities and Marusia had to be sent off. Where to?

  The central Kolyma highway stretches its winding path over two thousand kilometers, passing through bare hills, ravines, milestones, rails, and bridges. . . . There aren’t any rails on the Kolyma highway. Nevertheless people have never stopped reciting Nekrasov’s poem “The Railway.”[7] Why compose a poem when there is a perfectly apt text already in existence? The road was entirely built by pickax and spade, wheelbarrow and drill. . . .

  Every four or five hundred kilometers along the highway is a “director’s house,” a super-luxury hotel at the personal disposal of the director of Far East Development, who is equivalent to the governor-general of Kolyma. He alone may spend the night there during his travels over the district entrusted to him. Expensive carpets, bronze sculptures, and mirrors. Original paintings by quite a few first-rate artists, such as Shukhayev. In 1957 there was an exhibition at Kuznetsky Most [8] in Moscow of Shukhayev’s works, the story of his life. The exhibition began with bright landscapes from Belgium and France, and a self-portrait o
f the artist wearing a harlequin’s camisole. Then came the Magadan period: two small portraits in oil, one of his wife and one self-portrait in gloomy brown tones, all he had done over ten years. The portraits were of people who had seen something terrible. Apart from these portraits there were only sketches for theater decorations.

  After the war Shukhayev was released. He went to Tbilisi, south, south, taking with him his loathing of the north. He was a broken man. He painted a sycophantic picture called Stalin Taking the Oath in Gori. He was a broken man. There were portraits of shock workers, of leading production workers. A Lady in a Golden Hat. The radiance in this portrait shows a lack of balance; the artist seems to be forcing himself to forget the limitations of the northern palette. And everything else. He might as well have died.

  For the “director’s house” artists also painted copies: Ivan the Terrible Killing His Son, Shishkin’s Morning in a Pine Forest. These two paintings are classics of hack work.

  But the most amazing feature of the “house” was the embroidery. Silk curtains, blinds, portieres were all embroidered by hand. Rugs, pillowcases, towels—any piece of cloth was transformed into a thing of value by the hands of the imprisoned craftswomen.

  The director of Far East Development spent a night in one of his “houses,” of which there were several along the highway, two or three times a year. The rest of the time there were guards, a housekeeper, a cook, and a house manager, four hired free workers, who waited for him to arrive, and who got bonuses on their salary because they were working in the Far East. They waited, they prepared, they stoked the stoves in winter and aired the “house.”

  Marusia Kriukova had been brought here to embroider the curtains, pillowcases, and anything else they could think of. There were two other fine seamstresses whose skills and inventiveness were as good as Marusia’s. Russia is a country of checks, a country of monitoring. The dream of every good Russian, prisoner or free worker, was to be employed someplace where he or she could check up on someone else. First of all, “I am in charge of somebody.” Second, “I am trusted.” Third, “I’m less answerable for this work than I would be for my own labor.” And fourth, remember the attack on In the Trenches of Stalingrad by Viktor Nekrasov.[9]

  Marusia and her new friends were under the supervision of a female party member who issued their material and threads daily. At the end of the working day this woman took their work and checked what they had done. She herself did no work but was attached to the staff of the central hospital as a senior nurse in the operating room. She was a thorough overseer, convinced that she only had to turn her back and a piece of heavy blue silk would vanish.

  The seamstresses were long used to this sort of guard. And although it probably would not have been hard to pull the wool over this woman’s eyes, they didn’t steal. All three craftswomen had been sentenced under article 58 of the Criminal Code.

  The seamstresses had their quarters in the camp, in the zone over whose gates, as over all camp zones in the Soviet Union, were inscribed the unforgettable words: “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism.” The quotation sounded ironic, since it was an astonishing take on the sense and content of the word “labor” in the camp. Labor was anything you like, but not a matter of glory. As for the surname of the author of this quotation, in 1906, a publishing house that was run in part by Socialist Revolutionaries printed a booklet called The Complete Collected Speeches of Nicolas II. These were pieces reprinted from the Government Herald at the time of the tsar’s coronation and consisted of toasts he had offered: “I drink to the health of the Kekstolm regiment!” “I drink to the health of the fine young men of Chernigov.”

  These toasts were preceded by a foreword, written in chauvinist-patriotic tones: “These words, like a drop of water, reflect all the wisdom of our great monarch,” etc.

  The compilers of this collection were exiled to Siberia. What happened to the people who took the quotation about labor and raised it on the gates of the camp zones of all the Soviet Union?

  As a reward for their excellent conduct and success in fulfilling the plan, the seamstresses were allowed to attend the cinema when there were showings for prisoners.

  The showings for free workers had a slightly different arrangement than the prisoners’ showings.

  The projector was the same; there were intervals between the reels.

  Once the film shown was Enough Stupidity in Every Wise Man. The first reel finished, the lights, as always, came on, and then, as always, went out, and you could hear the projector crackling and see a yellow beam hit the screen.

  Everyone started stamping their feet and shouting. The projectionist had clearly blundered and was showing the first reel again. Three hundred people—including bemedaled soldiers from the front, distinguished doctors who had come for a conference—everyone who had bought a ticket for this free workers’ showing, was shouting and stomping their feet.

  The projectionist was in no great hurry. He let the first reel roll and then put the auditorium lights on. Everyone understood what was going on. The deputy chief of the hospital management, Dolmatov, had come in. He had missed the first reel, so the film was shown from the start again.

  The second reel began, and everything went normally. Everyone understood the Kolyma ways of doing things—the doctors very well, the soldiers from the front not so well.

  If tickets weren’t selling briskly, then there was a general showing for everybody, and the best seats, at the back, went to the free workers, while the front rows were for the prisoners—women to the left and men to the right of the aisle. The aisle thus divided the auditorium like a cross into four sections, which was very convenient for working out the camp rules.

  A lame girl, noticeably lame even at film showings, had ended up in the women’s section of the hospital. No small wards had yet been built; the whole women’s section filled a single military dormitory of at least fifty beds. Marusia was sent to the surgeon for treatment.

  “What’s wrong with her?”

  “Osteomyelitis,” said Valentin Nikolayevich, the surgeon.

  “Is she going to lose a foot?”

  “No, why should she?”

  I used to come and bandage Kriukova, and I’d already told him about her life. A week later her temperature had gone down and the following week she was discharged.

  “I’ll give you a necktie, you and Valentin Nikolayevich. They’ll be good ties.”

  “Fine, fine, Marusia.”

  It was just a strip of silk taken from tens, hundreds of meters of fabric, which she had embroidered and decorated over several shifts in the “director’s house.”

  “How about the inspections?”

  “I’ll ask Anna Andreyevna.” That, apparently, was her supervisor’s name.

  •

  “Anna Andreyevna said I could. I kept embroidering, embroidering. I don’t know how to explain it, but Dolmatov came in and took it away.”

  “What do you mean ‘took it away’?”

  “He took what I was sewing. Valentin Nikolayevich’s was already finished, and yours was almost done. It was gray. The door opened. ‘Are you embroidering a tie?’ He searched my sewing box. He put the tie in his pocket and left.”

  “Now you’ll be sent away.”

  “Not me. I’ve got too much work still to do. But I did want so much to give you a tie. . . .”

  “It doesn’t matter, Marusia, I wouldn’t have worn it anyway. I suppose I could have sold it.”

  Dolmatov was as late for the camp amateur concert as he had been for the cinema. Overweight and potbellied, as if he were much older, he made for the first empty bench.

  Kriukova got up and waved her arms. I realized she was signaling to me.

  “The tie, the tie!”

  I managed to get a look at the boss’s necktie. Dolmatov’s tie was gray, patterned, high-quality.

  “It’s your tie,” Marusia was shouting. “Yours, or Valentin Nikolayevich’s!”
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  Dolmatov sat down on his bench, the curtains were drawn back as in an old-fashioned theater, and the amateur concert began.

  1960

  THE GOLDEN TAIGA

  “THE LESSER ZONE” means the transit camps. “The Greater Zone” means the camps run by the mining administration—endless squat barracks, streets for the prisoners, a triple barrier of barbed wire, winter-proof guard towers that look like starling nesting boxes. The Lesser Zone has even more barbed wire, more towers, locks, and bolts; after all, it houses passing prisoners, prisoners in transit who could cause all sorts of trouble.

  The Lesser Zone architecture is perfect: one enormous square barracks with four-story rows of bunks and a “statutory” room for no less than five hundred men. So, if need be, you can house thousands in it. But it is winter now, there aren’t many new trainloads of prisoners, and the interior of the zone seems almost empty. The barracks interior still hasn’t dried out; there’s a white mist and ice on the walls. At the entrance is an enormous thousand-watt electric light, which dims to yellow or flares up dazzling white—the supply voltage varies.

  By day the zone is asleep. At night the doors open and people appear in the lamplight. They are holding lists and they call our surnames in voices that are hoarse from the freezing cold. Those whose names are called do up all the buttons on their pea jackets, step over the threshold, and disappear, never to be seen again. Outside the escort guards are waiting for them, the truck engines are sputtering somewhere nearby, and the prisoners are taken to mines, to state farms, or to sections of road that need building. . . .

  I am also lying there, on the lower bunk not far from the door. It’s cold down below, but I’m reluctant to climb higher up, where it’s warmer, in case I’m thrown down by someone. The higher places are reserved for the strong, above all for the thieves. Anyway, I couldn’t climb on the rungs that are nailed to a pillar. I’m better off down below. If there’s any fight over a place on the lower bunks, I’ll crawl under them.