Kolyma Tales Page 4

  “I promise you, sir, I don’t have anyone like that. You should go and see Soboliov and the nonpolitical convicts. These people are the educated ones, sir, and they’re nothing but trouble.”

  The man in the reindeer-skin hat, Aleksandr Evgeniyevich, stopped examining the workmen and turned to the foreman.

  “You foremen don’t know your men, you don’t want to know them and don’t want to help us,” he said hoarsely.

  “Whatever you say, sir.”

  “I’ll show you what’s what. What’s your name?”

  “Ivanov, sir.”

  “Now watch me. Hey, men, pay attention.” The man in the reindeer-skin hat addressed the brigade. “The administration needs carpenters to make boxes for carrying earth.”

  There was no response.

  “You see, sir,” whispered the foreman.

  Potashnikov suddenly heard his own voice: “Yes, sir, I’m a carpenter.” He took a step forward.

  Another man silently took a step from the right flank. Potashnikov knew him: Grigoriev.

  “Well,” said the man in the reindeer-skin hat, turning to the foreman, “you’re a useless piece of shit. You two, follow me.”

  Potashnikov and Grigoriev staggered after the man in the reindeer-skin hat, who halted.

  “If that’s how we’re walking,” he rasped, “we won’t arrive until dinnertime. I’ll tell you what: I’ll go ahead, and you go straight to the carpentry shop and see the construction man, Sergeyev. Do you know where the carpentry shop is?”

  “We do, we do!” Grigoriev shouted. “Could you let us have a cigarette, please?”

  “I was expecting that,” murmured the man in the reindeer-skin hat, gritting his teeth. Without taking the pack from his pocket, he pulled out two cigarettes.

  Potashnikov walked in front, thinking hard. Today he would spend in the warm carpentry shop and sharpen an ax and make an ax handle. And sharpen a saw, too. There would be no hurry. They would get their tools by dinner, order things, and find the store man. And by evening, when it was discovered that he didn’t know how to make an ax handle or to set a saw, he’d be thrown out and be back in his brigade the next day. But today he’d be warm. It was even possible that he could pass as a carpenter tomorrow and the day after, as long as Grigoriev was a carpenter. He would be Grigoriev’s apprentice. Winter was coming to an end. Summer was short, so he might somehow get through it.

  Potashnikov stopped, to allow Grigoriev to catch up.

  “Can you do this . . . carpentry stuff?” he managed to say, panting with sudden hope.

  “You know,” said Grigoriev cheerfully, “I have a postgraduate degree from the Moscow Institute of Philology. I think that anyone with higher education, especially in the humanities, ought to be able to carve an ax handle and set a saw, especially if this is to be done next to a hot stove.”

  “So, you aren’t either—”

  “That doesn’t matter. We can fool them for a couple of days, and then, who cares what happens then?”

  “We can fool them for one day. Tomorrow we’ll be sent back to the brigade.”

  “No, it will take them longer than a day to get us transferred to the carpentry shop. They have to hand over all the details, make lists. Then they’ll have to do the same when they transfer us back again.”

  The two of them barely had the strength to open the door, which had frozen shut. A red-hot iron stove was burning in the middle of the carpentry shop, and five carpenters, without jackets or hats, were bent over their workbenches. The two new arrivals kneeled in front of the stove’s open door, worshiping the god of fire, one of humanity’s first gods. They took off their gloves and held out their hands to the heat, almost shoving them into the fire. Their fingers, so often frostbitten, had lost their sensitivity and took time to feel the heat. After a minute, Grigoriev and Potashnikov took off their hats and undid their pea jackets but remained kneeling.

  “What are you here for?” the carpenter asked them in an unwelcoming tone.

  “We’re carpenters. We’re going to be working here,” said Grigoriev.

  “It’s on Aleksandr Evgeniyevich’s orders,” Potashnikov hastily explained.

  “So the construction engineer meant you when he said we were to hand out axes,” said Arnshtrem, an elderly toolman, who was in the corner, planing spade handles.

  “It was us, us.”

  “Here you are,” Arnshtrem told them, after giving them a mistrustful look. “Two axes, a saw, and a saw-setting tool. Give me back the setting tool when you’ve finished. Here’s my ax—make me a new handle for it.” Arnshtrem smiled. “My norm for ax handles is thirty per day,” he said.

  Grigoriev took a block of wood from Arnshtrem and started carving. The dinner siren sounded. Still in his indoor clothes, Arnshtrem watched Grigoriev at work and said not a word.

  “Now you,” he told Potashnikov.

  Potashnikov placed a log on the chopping block, picked up the ax, and started hacking.

  “That’s enough,” said Arnshtrem.

  The carpenters had gone to dinner, and the three of them were alone in the shop.

  “Take these two ax handles I’ve made,” said Arnshtrem, handing two finished handles to Grigoriev, “and fit the ax heads to them. Sharpen the saw. You can warm yourselves by the stove today and tomorrow. The day after tomorrow go back where you came from. Here’s a piece of bread for your dinner.”

  That day and the next they warmed themselves by the stove; the following day the freezing cold suddenly let up. It was now only minus thirty, and winter was coming to an end.

  1954

  A PERSONAL QUOTA

  ONE EVENING the guard said, as he rolled up his tape measure, that Dugayev would be getting a personal quota for the next day. The foreman, who was standing next to them and had been asking the guard to credit them with “a dozen cubic meters until the day after tomorrow,” suddenly fell silent and moved his gaze to the evening star, which was glimmering over the crest of the bare hill. Baranov, who was Dugayev’s work partner and had been helping the guard to measure the work they had done, picked up his spade and set to clearing the pit face, which had been cleaned out long ago anyway.

  Dugayev was twenty-three years old and was more amazed than frightened by everything he had seen and heard here.

  The brigade gathered for roll call, handed in their tools, and, in the prisoners’ typical straggling line, went back to their barracks. A hard day’s labor was over. Dugayev didn’t sit down in the refectory; he drank the thin cold barley soup straight out of the bowl. His day’s ration of bread, issued in the morning, had since been eaten. He longed to smoke. He looked around, working out whom he could beg a cigarette end from. Baranov was by the windowsill, scraping into a piece of paper tobacco dust left after someone had emptied their tobacco pouch. After carefully gathering the tobacco, Baranov rolled a thin cigarette and passed it to Dugayev.

  “Have a smoke and leave some for me,” he offered. Dugayev was amazed, for he and Baranov weren’t friends. Not that any friendship could arise between hungry, cold, and sleepless men. Dugayev, despite his youth, understood how false were all the proverbs about friendship tested by misfortune and misery. Real friendship needed to have firm foundations laid before the conditions of everyday life had reached the extreme point beyond which human beings have nothing human about them except mistrust, anger, and lies. Dugayev never forgot the saying in the north, that there are three commandments for prisoners: don’t trust, don’t be afraid, don’t ask.

  Dugayev greedily sucked in the sweet tobacco smoke; his head began to spin.

  “I’m getting weak,” he said.

  Baranov did not reply.

  Dugayev went back to the barracks, lay down, and shut his eyes. Recently he had not been sleeping well; hunger stopped him from sleeping properly. He had particularly upsetting dreams: loaves of bread, rich steaming soups. . . . It took a long time for oblivion to come, and still Dugayev’s eyes were open half an hour before reveille.


  The brigade reached its workplace; everyone went to their pit face.

  “You wait here,” the foreman told Dugayev. “The guard will tell you where to go.”

  Dugayev sat down on the ground. He was already so worn out that he was completely indifferent to any change in his fate.

  The first wheelbarrows came thundering down the ramp; spades rasped noisily as they struck stone.

  “Come here,” the guard ordered Dugayev. “This is your place.” He marked out a cubic measure of the pit face and designated a piece of quartz as the boundary. “Up to here,” he said. “The ramp man will give you a board to join the main ramp. You have to barrow it to the same place as everybody else. Here’s your spade, pickax, crowbar, barrow: get a move on.”

  Dugayev meekly set to work.

  “This is even better,” he thought. None of his fellow workers would be grumbling that he wasn’t doing his job. People who had once worked the land had no need to understand or know that Dugayev was new to the work, that he had gone straight from school to university, and then from the lecture room straight to this pit face. Everyone was on their own. They didn’t want or need to know that he had long been exhausted and starved, that he didn’t know how to steal. Knowing how to steal is the main virtue in the north and takes many forms, beginning with stealing your workmate’s bread and ending by defrauding the bosses of thousand of rubles in bonuses for nonexistent and impossible production achievements. Nobody cared if Dugayev couldn’t stand a sixteen-hour working day.

  Dugayev barrowed, pickaxed, filled his barrow, barrowed again, and pickaxed and filled again.

  After the lunch interval the guard came to look at what Dugayev had done and then left without saying a word. Dugayev pickaxed and filled his barrow again. The quartz marker was still a long way away.

  In the evening the guard reappeared and unwound his tape measure. He measured what Dugayev had done.

  “Twenty-five percent,” he said, and then gave Dugayev a look. “Twenty-five percent. Are you listening?”

  “I am,” said Dugayev. He was astonished by this figure. The work was so hard, the spade budged so little stone, and it was so difficult to use the pickax. Even the figure of twenty-five percent of the norm seemed to Dugayev to be very high. His calves ached, his arms, shoulders, and head hurt unbearably from constantly pushing the barrow. He had long ago stopped feeling hungry. Dugayev ate because he saw other people eating and something told him that he had to eat. But he didn’t want to.

  “Right then,” said the guard as he left. “Good luck to you.”

  That evening Dugayev was summoned to see the interrogator. He replied to the four questions: first name, surname, Criminal Code article, sentence—the four questions a prisoner can be asked thirty times a day. Then Dugayev went off to sleep. The next day he was again working with the rest of the brigade, but the following night he was taken by soldiers behind the stables and then led along a forest path to a place where a tall fence, topped with barbed wire, cordoned off most of a small ravine. At nights you could hear from this point the rumbling of tractors. Dugayev realized what was about to happen: he wished he hadn’t wasted his time working and suffering all this day, his last.

  1955

  THE PARCEL

  PARCELS were issued in the guardhouse. The foremen checked the identity of the recipient. The fiberboard broke and cracked in a special fiberboard way. Here, trees broke differently and made a different noise when they broke. Behind a barrier made of benches, men with clean hands and in exceedingly neat military uniforms were opening, checking, shaking out, and issuing things. The boxes the parcels came in had barely survived a journey of many months; they were thrown with practiced skill into the air so as to split open when they hit the floor. Pieces of sugar, dried fruit, rotting onions, crumpled packets of tobacco flew all over the floor. Nobody picked up the spillage. The addressees of the parcels made no protests; just to get a parcel was a real miracle.

  The escort guards stood by the guardhouse, rifles at the ready; unidentifiable figures moved around in the white frosty mist.

  I was standing by the wall, waiting for my turn. Those light blue fragments weren’t ice: they were sugar! Sugar! Sugar! In an hour I would be holding them in my hands, and they wouldn’t melt away. They would only melt in my mouth. A lump that big would give me two, even three mouthfuls.

  What about the tobacco? Real homegrown tobacco! Tobacco from mainland Russia. Yaroslavl Squirrel or Kremenchug No. 2. I’d smoke it, I’d treat absolutely everybody, everybody, above all the people who’d let me smoke their cigarette stubs all this year. Mainland tobacco! We did get tobacco as part of our rations, but it was so old that it had been written off from army supplies—that was a gigantic fraud, because any produce whose shelf life had expired was written off and sold to the camps. Now, however, I’d be smoking proper tobacco. And if my wife didn’t know that what was needed was the strongest possible tobacco, someone would have let her know.

  “Surname?”

  The parcel split open, and the box spilled out leathery fruit: prunes. Where was the sugar, then? And there were only a couple or so handfuls of prunes, anyway.

  “Soft boots for you? Pilot’s soft boots! Ha, ha, ha! With rubber soles! Ha, ha, ha! Just like the chief mining engineer’s! Here, take them!”

  I stood there dumbfounded. What did I want soft boots for? Here you could only wear them on days off, and there were no days off. If only they were reindeer-fur snow boots, Yakut boots, or ordinary felt boots. Soft boots were far too fashionable. That wouldn’t go down well. What’s more—

  “Listen, you . . .” A hand touched my shoulder.

  I turned around so that I could see the soft boots, the box with a few prunes at the bottom, as well as the people in charge, and the face of the man holding my shoulder. It was Andrei Boiko, our warden at the mine.

  Boiko was whispering quickly: “Sell me the boots. I’ll give you money. A hundred rubles. You won’t get as far as the barracks carrying them. Someone out there will take them off you, snatch them.” Boiko pointed a finger into the white mist. “In any case they’d be stolen in the barracks. Before the night is over.”

  “You’d be the one who sent the thief,” I thought, then said, “All right, give me the money.”

  “You can see I’m good,” said Boiko as he counted out the money. “I’m not cheating you like others would. I said a hundred and I’m giving you a hundred.” Boiko was afraid he’d paid too much.

  I folded the dirty money double, four times, eight times and hid it away in my trouser pocket. I took the prunes out of the box and put them into my jacket lining; the pockets had long ago been torn out to make tobacco pouches.

  “I’ll buy some butter! A kilogram! And I’ll have butter with my bread, soup, and porridge. And I’ll buy sugar! And I’ll get a bag off somebody, a fabric bag with a rope handle: that’s what every self-respecting political prisoner has to have. Ordinary criminals won’t be seen dead with them.”

  I went back to the barracks. Everyone was on their bunks, except for Yefremov, who was sitting with his hands on the stove, which had gone out. Yefremov, reluctant to get to his feet and tear himself away from the stove, had his face against the last remnants of warmth.

  “Why don’t you stoke it?”

  The orderly came up.

  “Yefremov is on duty. The foreman said he can take the wood wherever he can find it, but there’s got to be firewood. Anyway, I won’t let you go to sleep. Go before it’s too late.”

  Yefremov slipped through the barracks door.

  “Where’s your parcel, then?” he asked.

  “It was all a mistake.”

  I ran to the shop. Shaparenko, the shop manager, was still doing business. There was nobody else.

  “Shaparenko, give me some bread and butter.”

  “You’ll be the death of me.”

  “Take whatever it costs.”

  “Can’t you see how much money I’ve got?” said Shap
arenko. “What use is a drip like you to me? Take your bread and butter and clear off.”

  I had forgotten to ask him for sugar. I had a kilo of butter and a kilo of bread. I would go and see Semion Sheinin. Sheinin used to be an adviser to Kirov, and he hadn’t been executed yet. We used to work together in the same brigade, but by a quirk of fate we’d been separated.

  Sheinin was in the barracks.

  “Let’s eat. Butter, bread.”

  Sheinin’s hungry eyes lit up. “I’ll go and get some hot water—”

  “There’s no need for hot water!”

  “No, I’ll be right back.” He disappeared.

  At that moment someone hit me on the head with a heavy object; when I got up and came to my senses, my bag was gone. Everyone was where they had been, looking at me with spiteful pleasure. This was the best sort of entertainment. Incidents like this gave double the pleasure: first, someone is having a bad time; second, it isn’t them. It certainly isn’t envy.

  I didn’t cry. I was lucky to be alive. This was all thirty years ago, but I can remember in detail the barracks in semidarkness, the spiteful, happy faces of my comrades, the unseasoned log on the floor, Sheinin’s pale cheeks.

  I went back to the shop. I didn’t ask for more butter, I didn’t ask for sugar, either. I managed to get some bread, went back to the barracks, thawed some snow, and set about boiling my prunes.

  The barracks was fast asleep: groaning, snoring, rasping, and coughing. Three of us stood by the stove, each doing our own cooking: Sintsov was boiling a crust of bread he’d saved from dinner so as to have it hot and sticky and then greedily drink the hot water made from melted snow, which smelled of rain and bread. The lucky, cunning Gubariov had taken a pot and pounded leaves of frozen cabbage. The cabbage smelled like the best Ukrainian borscht. And I was stewing the prunes from my parcel. None of us could help looking in the others’ pots.