Kolyma Stories Read online

  Somebody kicked the barracks doors open. Two soldiers emerged from a cloud of frozen mist. The younger one was the camp chief Kovalenko; the older one was the mine chief Riabov. Riabov was wearing pilot’s boots—could they have been mine? It took me some time to realize that this was a mistake and that the boots belonged to Riabov.

  Kovalenko rushed to the stove, waving a pickax he had brought with him.

  “Cooking pots again? I’ll show you what happens to cooking pots. I’ll teach you to foul the place up!”

  Kovalenko tipped over the pots of soup, bread crusts, cabbage leaves, and prunes and smashed a hole in each pot with his pickax.

  Riabov warmed his hands on the stovepipe.

  “If you’ve got pots, that means you’ve got food to cook,” the mine chief expounded with an air of profundity. “That, you know, is a sign of plenty.”

  “Well you ought to see what they’ve been cooking,” said Kovalenko as he trampled the pots flat.

  The chiefs left, and we started sorting out the crushed pots and picking out our own food: I got my prunes, Sintsov his shapeless soaked bread, Gubariov his crumbled cabbage leaves. We ate it all straightaway: that was the safest option.

  I swallowed a few prunes and went to sleep. Long ago I had learned to go to sleep before my feet got warm; at first I couldn’t do that, but experience is experience. Sleep was just like oblivion.

  Life recurred as a dream: the doors were flung open again—white puffs of steam kept to the floor as they ran to the far wall of the barracks, while there were people in white fur jackets that stank from being new and unworn, and something that didn’t move but was alive, grunted after it fell to the floor.

  The orderly struck a pose that suggested bewilderment as well as respect as he bowed down to the white sheepskin jackets of the supervisors.

  “Is that your man?” asked the guard, pointing to a bundle of dirty rags lying on the floor.

  “That’s Yefremov,” said the orderly.

  “This will teach him to steal other people’s firewood.”

  Yefremov spent many weeks lying on his bunk next to me before he was carted off to die in the buildings set aside for invalids. His “innards” had been smashed up; there were quite a few experts in the mines who knew how to do that. He never complained; he just lay there, quietly groaning.

  1960

  RAIN

  THIS WAS the third day that we had been drilling at the new site. Each man had his own prospecting shaft and by now none of us had gotten any deeper than half a meter. Nobody had yet reached permafrost, even though the crowbars and pickaxes were being repaired quickly. This was unusual, but the blacksmiths had no reason to hold things up, because ours was the only brigade at work. The basic problem was the rain, which had been pouring without a break for seventy-two hours. When the ground was stony you couldn’t tell if it had rained for an hour or a month. The rain was cold and fine. The brigades working next to us had been taken off the job and sent home some time ago, but these were brigades of gangsters, and we didn’t even have the strength to envy them.

  Our guard rarely appeared. He wore a soaking-wet enormous hooded canvas cloak that was as angular as a pyramid. The bosses were relying on the rain, the cold streams of water lashing our backs. We had long been wet through—not to our underwear, though, because we didn’t have any underwear. The bosses’ crude secret calculation was that rain and wind would make us work. But our hatred of the work was even stronger, and every evening the guard cursed as he lowered his wooden ruler with its markers into the shaft. The escort guards kept watch over us from under their “mushroom,” a well-known piece of camp equipment.

  We couldn’t climb out of the shafts, or we would have been shot. Only our foreman was allowed to move from shaft to shaft. We were not allowed to shout to one another, or we would have been shot. So we stood silently, up to our waists in the ground, in stone pits, a long chain of shafts that stretched along the banks of a dried-out stream.

  The nights were too short to dry out our pea jackets; at night we nearly managed to get the tunics and trousers dry on our bodies. I was hungry and angry, but I knew that nothing in the world would make me commit suicide. This was when I began to understand the essence of life’s great instinct, the quality that human beings possess in the highest degree. I could see our horses getting worn out and dying—that’s the only way I can put it, there are no other verbs to apply to the horses’ existence. The horses were no different from the human beings. The north, the unbearable workload, the bad food, the beatings were killing them, and although they suffered only a thousandth of what the human beings suffered, they died first. I also understood the main thing: man was human not because he was God’s creation, or because he had an amazing thumb on both hands, but because he was physically stronger, more enduring than any other animal and, eventually, because he succeeded in making his spiritual side the effective servant of his physical side.

  That’s what I was thinking about for the hundredth time in this shaft. I knew I wouldn’t kill myself because I had tested my will to live. In a similar shaft, only a deeper one, I had recently taken out an enormous stone with my pickax. I spent many days carefully freeing its terrible weight. From this unkind weight, as the Russian poet [1] put it, I thought I could make something fine. I thought I could save my life by breaking my leg. This really was a fine intention, a purely aesthetic prospect. The stone was meant to tumble out and shatter my leg. And I would be a permanent invalid! This passionate dream depended on careful planning, so I took care to find the right spot to place my leg, and I imagined how I would make a slight twist of the pickax, and the stone would tumble down. I’d decided on the day, the hour, and the minute, and they came. I placed my right leg under the hanging stone, praised my own calmness, raised a hand, and, as if it were a lever, turned the pickax wedged behind the stone. The stone started moving down the shaft wall to the place I had carefully calculated. But I don’t know how it happened: I jerked my leg back. The shaft was tight, so my leg was squashed, and I had two bruises and an abrasion—a meager result for such a well-planned job.

  So I realized that I was no more suited to self-harm than to suicide. All I could do now was wait for small disasters to alternate with small successes, until the big disaster ran its course. The next success was the end of the working day and three mouthfuls of hot soup; even if the soup was cold it could be warmed up on the iron stove in a pan that I had made of a three-liter tin can. I could light a cigarette, or rather a stub I could beg off our orderly Stepan.

  That’s how I waited, mingling “astral” questions with trivia, soaked to the skin but calm. Were these reflections a form of brain training? Certainly not. This was all quite normal, it was life. I understood that my body, and thus my brain cells, were short of nourishment. My brain had been on starvation rations for such a long time, and this would inevitably result in madness, early sclerosis, or something worse. . . . I found it a cheering thought that I wouldn’t live that long, that I would never live long enough to get sclerosis. The rain poured down.

  I remembered a woman who had passed along the path near where we were working and who paid no attention to the guards’ shouts. We greeted her and thought she was beautiful. She was the first woman we had seen in three years. She waved to us, pointed to the sky, at some angle to the firmament, and shouted, “Not long, boys, not long!” We answered with a joyful roar. I never saw her again, but I have remembered ever since how she found a way of understanding and consoling us. When she pointed to the sky, she certainly didn’t mean the next world. No, she was just showing an invisible sun setting in the west, which meant that the working day would soon be over. In her own way she was repeating Goethe’s words about the mountain peaks. What I was thinking about was the wisdom and magnanimity of this simple woman, who was or had been a prostitute—for there were then no other sorts of women in these regions. The sound of falling rain was a good accompaniment to these thoughts. The gray stony riverbank, the gray
mountains, the gray sky, men in torn gray clothes—all that was very easy on the eye, very much in harmony. Everything had a monochrome harmony, a satanic harmony.

  This was when we heard a faint cry from the next shaft. My neighbor was a certain Rozovsky, an elderly agronomist whose fairly specialized knowledge, like those of the doctors, engineers, and economists, was wasted here. He was calling my name, so I responded, paying no attention to the threatening gesture coming from a guard, sheltering far off under his “mushroom.”

  “Listen,” Rozovsky was calling, “listen! I’ve been thinking for a long time. And I’ve realized that there is no sense in life . . . none—”

  Then I leapt out of my shaft and ran to intercept him before he rushed at the guards. Both guards were coming toward us.

  “He’s sick,” I said.

  Just then we caught the distant sound of the siren, muted by the rain, and we started forming ranks.

  Rozovsky and I went on working together for a while, until he threw himself under a loaded wagon that was rolling downhill. He stuck his leg under the wheel, but the wagon just leapt over him, without even bruising him. All the same, he was charged with attempted suicide and tried for it. We then parted, for there was a rule that anyone convicted after a trial would be sent to some other camp. The authorities were afraid that the victim might take revenge on his interrogator or the witnesses. That was a wise rule. But there was no need to apply it to Rozovsky.

  1958

  PUSHOVER

  THE BARE hills were white with a bluish tinge, like loaves of sugar. Round and treeless, they were covered with a thick layer of packed snow, which the winds had consolidated. In the gullies the snow was deep and strong enough to hold a man, but on the hill slopes it was puffed up as if in enormous bubbles. These were bushes of dwarf pine that crept over the ground and flattened themselves for hibernation before the first snow fell. This pine was what we were after.

  Of all the trees in the north, the dwarf pine or cedar was my favorite.

  I had long ago understood and treasured the enviable haste with which impoverished northern nature, destitute as it was, strove to share its simple riches with human beings by producing all of its flowers as quickly as it could. It took only a week to bring everything into blossom, and in little more than a month after the beginning of summer, when the sun never set, the mountains would shine red with lingonberries and black with blueberries. The bushes of large, watery yellow rowan were so low you didn’t have to lift your hand. The honey-flavored mountain briar had rose petals, the only local flower that smelled of flowers. All the other flowers smelled only of damp, of marsh, and that fit with the silence of the birds in spring, the silence of the larch forest, whose branches were slow to grow green needles. The briar held on to its hips until the first frosts and would offer us its chewy wrinkled berries, with a hard violet skin concealing their sweet, dark yellow flesh. I knew the cheerful vines that in spring changed color many times from dark pink to orange to pale green, as if bound in colored leather. The larches stretched out their fine fingers and green fingernails, while ubiquitous thick willow herb covered the ground wherever the forest had been burned down. All this was beautiful, trusting, noisy, and hasty, but it happened only in summer when the old olive-green grass mingled with the new grass on the mossy rocks that shone in the sun and suddenly turned out to be green instead of gray and brown.

  In winter all this vanished: it was covered with porous, hard snow, driven by the wind into the gullies and packed down so hard that you had to cut steps with an ax if you wanted to climb a hill. You could see a man in the forest half a mile away, so bare was the landscape. There was only one evergreen tree, the dwarf pine or dwarf evergreen cedar. It forecast the weather. Two or three days before the first snow fell, when there was still an autumnal warmth in the air and the sky was cloudless and nobody wanted to think about the approach of winter, the dwarf pine would suddenly lower its enormous, twelve-foot paws and bend its straight black trunk, as thick as two fists, so as to lie facedown on the ground. One or two days would pass and a small cloud would appear; by the next evening a blizzard would gather and snow would fall. If in late autumn, low snow clouds gathered and a cold wind blew, but the dwarf pine did not lie down, then you could be absolutely sure that there would be no snow.

  At the end of March and in April, before there was even a hint of spring, and when the air had its wintry thinness and dryness, the dwarf pine would suddenly rise up, shaking the snow off its green, slightly reddish clothing. A day or two later the wind would change and warm streams of air would bring spring with them.

  The dwarf pine was a very precise instrument, so sensitive that at times it could make mistakes: it would rise up during a thaw, if the thaw was prolonged. It never rose up before a thaw. But before the thaw ended it would quickly lie down in the snow again. Occasionally something else would happen. If you got a hot campfire going in the morning so as to have somewhere to warm your hands and legs at dinnertime, you would put on as many logs as you could and then go to work. Two or three hours later the dwarf pine would poke its branches out of the snow and carefully straighten up, thinking spring had come. Before the fire had gone out, however, the dwarf pine would bed itself down in the snow again. In these regions winter has two colors: the pale blue of the high sky, and the white of the earth. In spring last year’s dirty yellow rags are revealed; for a very long time the earth is dressed in these pauper’s clothes, until the new greenery gets enough strength to start to bloom, hastily and violently. It is in the middle of this mournful spring and pitiless winter that the dwarf pine turns a bright, dazzling green and shines forth. What’s more, it produces nuts, tiny pine nuts. This is a delicacy that people share with nutcracker birds, bears, squirrels, and chipmunks.

  We chose an area on the windward side of the hill; we dragged a load of small and slightly larger branches; we tore up dry grass on the bare patches where the wind had driven the snow off the hill. Before we left the barracks, we had taken some smoldering coals from the stove, since there were no matches to be had.

  We carried the coals in a big tin can with a piece of wire for a handle; we took care to keep the coals alight on our journey. When I took them out of the can, I blew on them, gathered the smoldering lumps in a pile, raised a flame, and put them on the branches with some dry grass and twigs to make a bonfire. I then covered it all with bigger branches, and soon the wind drew forth a precarious bluish smoke.

  This was the first time I had worked in a brigade collecting dwarf pine needles. The work had to be done by hand, the dry green needles had to be plucked like game-bird feathers; you had to take as big a handful as you could, then stuff them into sacks, and in the evening you handed over your harvest to the guard. The pine needles were then carted off to a mysterious vitamin processing plant, where they produced a thick, sticky, dark yellow extract that tasted unspeakably foul. Every time before we had lunch, we were made to drink or eat this extract (you got it down the best way you could). The taste not only spoiled lunch and dinner but many people regarded this medication as just an extra way for the camp to get at you. You weren’t given your lunch until you’d downed a small glass of this medication; they were strict about that. Scurvy affected everyone, and dwarf pine needles were the only treatment approved by medicine. Faith conquers all things, and although this concoction was later proven to be utterly useless as a means of preventing scurvy [2] and then renounced, and the processing plant was closed down, in our time people still had to take this stinking rubbish, spitting afterward to get rid of the taste, as they recovered from scurvy, or, rather, failed to recover, or recovered from scurvy despite not taking it. There were rose hips to be had everywhere, but nobody processed them or used them to combat scurvy, since rose hips were not mentioned in the instructions issued in Moscow. (A few years later they started importing rose hips from the mainland, but as far as I know, nobody ever thought of processing the local ones.)

  The instructions considered pine ne
edles to be the sole source of vitamin C, and I was now a producer of this valuable raw material. I had lost my strength, so I was transferred from the gold-mine pit face to pick pine needles.

  “You’ll go and gather dwarf pine needles,” the supervisor told me one morning. “I’ll give you a pushover of a job for a few days.”

  “Pushover,” or kant, was a widespread term in the camps, meaning something like a temporary break, not a complete break (for that the term was “a swell”—someone would be “swelling” for a day); pushover meant work that didn’t exhaust you, temporary light work.

  Dwarf pine work was considered not merely easy but in fact very easy. It was prized because you had no guards on your back.

  After many months of work in icy open pits where every stone, shining with frost, burned your hands, after the clicking of rifle bolts, the barking of dogs, and the foul cursing of the guards behind you, working with dwarf pines was an enormous pleasure that was relished by every single tired muscle. Normally, people were sent to work while it was still dark; for pine needles you were sent off later.

  It was good to warm your hands on a can full of smoldering coals, to amble slowly to the hills, which were so impossibly far away, I used to think, as I climbed higher and higher, all the time relishing my isolation and the deep silence of the mountains in winter as an unexpected joy, as if everything bad in the world had vanished and there was only yourself and your comrade and the endless narrow dark path in the snow, leading high up to somewhere in the mountains.

  My comrade didn’t approve of my slowness. He had been gathering pine needles for a long time and quite rightly suspected that I would be a weak and incompetent partner. The work was done in pairs, and the results were shared equally between us.