Kolyma Stories Read online

  “I’ll cut the branches, and you sit down and pick the needles,” he told me. “And be lively about it, or we won’t meet the norm. I don’t want to be sent back to the mines again.”

  He chopped down a pile of dwarf pine branches and dragged the gigantic heap toward the bonfire. I broke off the smallest branches and stripped the needles and the bark, starting at the end of the branch. The needles and bark were like green tassels.

  “You have to work faster,” my partner said when he came back with another armful. “That’s no good, man.”

  I didn’t need telling that it was no good, but I couldn’t work any faster. I had a ringing in my ears, and my fingers, which had been frostbitten that winter, were aching again with a familiar dull throb. I stripped the needles, broke up whole branches into smaller pieces, trying not to strip the bark, and stuffed the result into the sack. But there was no way I could fill the sack. There was now a whole mountain of stripped branches, looking like washed bones, surrounding the bonfire, but the sack still had plenty of room and could take in more armfuls of needles.

  My partner began helping me. Things moved faster.

  “Time we went home,” he suddenly said. “Or we’ll miss supper. This isn’t enough for the norm.” Then he picked a big stone from the bonfire ash and shoved it into the sack.

  “They won’t untie the sack there,” he said with a frown. “Now we’ve met the norm.”

  I got up, scattered the burning branches, and raked snow over the still-red coals. The bonfire hissed and went out; it instantly became cold, and it was clear that evening was falling. My partner helped me shoulder the sack: I swayed under the weight.

  “Then drag it on the ground,” he said. “It’s downhill all the way.”

  We were only just in time to get our soup and tea. Men doing such light work were not meant to have a second course.

  1956

  FIELD RATIONS

  WHEN THE four of us had reached the Duskania spring we were so pleased that we almost stopped talking to one another. We were afraid that our journey had been a mistake or a joke on somebody’s part, that we would be sent back to the stone pit faces of the mines, so ominous, flooded with water from melting ice. Our prison-issue rubber boots were no protection for our feet, which suffered frostbite again and again.

  We had been following the tracks left by tractors, like the footprints of some prehistoric animal; then the tractor path ended, and we walked on a footpath that was hard to make out, until we reached a small log cabin with two windows and a door that hung from a hinge made from a car tire and fixed with nails. The little door had an enormous wooden handle, like the handles on restaurant doors in big cities. Inside the cabin were bare bunks made of whole floorboards, and a big, soot-covered tin can lay on the earth floor. Many cans of the same sort, yellow with rust, were scattered around the moss-covered cabin. This was the mining prospectors’ hut where nobody had lived for many a year. We had to stay here and cut a clearing, for which we had brought axes and saws.

  This was the first time we had been handed out field rations. I had the standard bag of grain, sugar, dried fish, and edible fats. The bag was tied at various places with odd ends of rope, just like sausages. There was sugar and two sorts of grain—barley and millet. Saveliev had exactly the same bag, while Ivan Ivanovich had two whole bags, which had been made with crude masculine stitches. The fourth man in our group, Fedia Shchapov, had foolishly filled the pockets of his pea jacket with pearl barley and tied granulated sugar in his foot bindings. Fedia used the pocket he had torn out of his jacket as a tobacco pouch, in which he carefully put away any cigarette ends he found.

  Rations meant to last ten days looked intimidating. We were reluctant to think that all this had to be divided into thirty parts if we were to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, or twenty parts if we were to eat twice a day. We had taken two days’ supply of bread, because a guard would be bringing more. It was unthinkable to let even the smallest group of workmen go without a guard. We weren’t interested in who he might be. We were told that we had to reach somewhere for him to stay before he came.

  We were all sick of the barracks food. We could have wept every time we saw the big zinc cauldrons of soup being carried on long poles into the barracks. We were ready to weep from fear that the soup was thin gruel. And when by some miracle the soup was thick, we couldn’t believe it and were so joyful that we ate it as slowly as we could. But even thick soup in a warmed-up stomach left us with a nagging pain, so long had we been starving. Any human feelings—love, friendship, envy, charity, mercy, ambition, decency—had vanished along with the flesh we had lost during our prolonged starvation. The minuscule layer of muscle that was still left on our bones, and which allowed us to eat, move, breathe, even saw beams, fill barrows with spadefuls of stone and sand, even push a barrow up an endless wooden ramp in the gold mine, had only enough room for resentful anger, the most lasting of human feelings.

  Saveliev and I decided to eat our food separately. Cooking is a special sort of pleasure for prisoners. It gives you a satisfaction beyond compare to cook your own food with your own hands and eat it, even if you cook worse than a professional. Our culinary knowledge was minimal, and we didn’t know enough even to make a basic soup or porridge. Nevertheless, Saveliev and I collected and cleaned tin cans, heated them over a campfire, soaked and boiled various things, learning from each other.

  Ivan Ivanovich and Fedia mixed up their food. Fedia carefully turned out his pockets, checked every seam, and used his dirty broken fingernail to scrape out the grains.

  All four of us were well prepared for a journey into the future, to heaven, if not on earth. We knew what science dictated as the minimum nutritional requirements, and we knew our tables for comparing the value of different foodstuffs, which showed that ten liters of water had the same caloric value as a hundred grams of meat. We had learned to be meek; we had forgotten how to be astonished. We had no pride, no self-esteem or self-respect, while jealousy or passion seemed to us to be something only Martians might feel and, in any case, was nonsense. It was far more important to learn the skills needed to button up your trousers in sub-zero winter temperatures. Grown men would weep when they found they could not do that. We realized that death was no worse than life and we were afraid of neither. We were in thrall to total indifference. We knew we could put a stop to this life tomorrow, if we wanted, and sometimes we decided to do so, but every time we were stopped by some trivial thing that was part of life. Either we were going to get a “box,” a bonus kilogram of bread, today and it would be simply stupid to end such a day by committing suicide. Or the orderly in the next barracks would have promised to repay an old debt by giving us a cigarette that evening.

  We understood that even the worst sort of life is made up of alternating joy and grief, good luck and bad, and there was no point fearing that the bad luck would outweigh the good.

  We were disciplined and obedient to authority. We realized that truth and lies were twin sisters, and that truth on earth came in thousands of different forms.

  We considered ourselves to be almost saintly, thinking that we must have expiated all our sins by the years spent in the camps.

  We had learned to understand people, to foresee their actions and guess what they were up to.

  Above all, we understood that our knowledge of people was of no use to us in everyday life. What was the point of my understanding, feeling, guessing, foreseeing another person’s actions? All the same I couldn’t alter my behavior toward someone, I wouldn’t inform on another prisoner like myself, whatever he might be up to. I wasn’t going to try and get the foreman’s job, even though it gave you a chance of staying alive, for the worst thing in the camps was forcing another person, a prisoner like yourself, to bow to your will (or anyone else’s). What did it matter that I knew that Ivanov was a swine, that Petrov was a spy and Zaslavsky a false witness?

  The impossibility of exploiting the usual types of weapon made us weak compar
ed with some of our neighbors in the camp bunks. We had learned to be satisfied with little and to get pleasure from little things.

  We also understood an amazing thing: in the eyes of the state and its representatives, a physically strong man is better—and I mean better, more moral, more valuable—than a weak man, a man who is incapable of throwing twenty-five cubic meters of earth out of a trench in one shift. The strong man is more moral than the weak; he is fulfilling the “percentage,” that is, he is carrying out his duty to the state and to society and is therefore respected. That is why he is consulted and taken into consideration, invited to discussions and meetings that may have as their topic something quite unconnected with questions of throwing heavy slippery earth out of wet sticky ditches.

  Thanks to his physical advantages, such a man becomes a moral force in decisions affecting the numerous everyday questions of camp life. But he is a moral force only as long as he has physical strength.

  Tsar Paul I’s aphorism runs: “In Russia the man I am talking to is noble, as long as I am talking to him.” And it obtained a surprising new validity in the mines of the Far North.

  In the first months of his life in the mines, Ivan Ivanovich was a model hard worker. Now he’s lost his strength and fails to understand why everyone he meets hits him; it doesn’t hurt, but he still gets beaten by the orderly, the barber, the supervisor, the barracks chief, the foreman, the guard. Ivan Ivanovich was happy to leave all that behind for the job in the forest.

  Fedia Shchapov, an adolescent from the Altai, became a goner before anyone else because his body was half child, half adolescent, and it couldn’t cope. So Fedia weakened more quickly and lasted about two weeks less than the others. He was a widow’s only son, and he was convicted of illegally slaughtering sheep: He had slaughtered his only ewe, something forbidden by law. Fedia was given ten years, and the pace of labor in the mines, quite unlike agricultural work, was too hard for him. Fedia was bewitched by the easygoing life of the gangsters at the mines, but there was something about him that prevented him from mingling with thieves. This healthy peasant element, a natural love of labor, rather than a revulsion toward it, helped him a little. He was the youngest among us and he attached himself straightaway to the oldest and most positive, Ivan Ivanovich.

  Saveliev had been a student at the Moscow Communications Institute, and I had shared a cell with him in Butyrki prison in Moscow. Shaken by all he had seen, he wrote a letter from his cell, like the true Komsomol member he was, to the leader of the party, since he was sure that the leader was unaware of all this information. His own case was trivial (correspondence with his fiancée), the evidence for agitation (paragraph 10 of article 58) was merely the letters of two people about to be married, so that his “organization” (paragraph 11 of the same article) consisted of just two persons. This was in all seriousness recorded on the interrogation forms. Everyone thought that Saveliev would be let off with exile, even given the scales of punishment at the time.

  Shortly after he dispatched the letter on one of the days set aside for prisoners’ “petitions,” Saveliev was called out into the corridor and told to sign a receipt of a warrant. The chief prosecutor was informing him that he personally would be examining Saveliev’s case. After that Saveliev was called out just once, to be handed the special assize’s sentence: ten years in the camps.

  Once in the camp, Saveliev very quickly was in a world of his own. He still couldn’t understand the ominous punishment he had been dealt. We weren’t exactly friends; we just liked recalling Moscow, its streets, its monuments, the Moskva River covered with a mother-of-pearl-like oil slick. Leningrad, Kiev, and Odessa don’t have such admirers, connoisseurs, and lovers. We were capable of talking endlessly about Moscow.

  We brought the iron stove we had carried with us into the hut and, although it was summer, stoked it. The dry warm air had an extraordinary, wonderful smell. We all had gotten used to breathing the sour smell of worn clothes and sweat; it was just as well that tears don’t smell.

  On Ivan Ivanovich’s advice we took off our underwear and buried it overnight in the ground, keeping each shirt and pair of underpants separate and leaving just a corner unburied. This was a folk way of getting rid of lice; in the mines we had no means of fighting them. In fact, by morning the lice had gathered on the shirt corners that were left unburied. The earth, covered by permafrost, nevertheless thawed enough here to let us bury our underwear. Of course, it was the local earth, more stones than soil. But even this frozen stony soil produced thick forests of enormous larches, whose trunks took three men to embrace them, so powerful was the life force of the trees, a great and instructive example given to us by nature.

  We burned the lice by placing our shirts next to a burning coal from a bonfire. Unfortunately, this clever device did not exterminate the vermin, so that same day we spent a lot of time furiously boiling our linen in big tin cans, and this time the disinfection proved effective.

  Later we discovered the miraculous qualities of the land when we caught mice, crows, seagulls, and squirrels. Any animal meat loses its particular smell if you bury it in the ground before cooking it.

  We took special care to keep our fire going nonstop, since we had between us only a few matches that Ivan Ivanovich had hung on to. He had wrapped the valuable matches with extreme care in a piece of canvas and then in rags.

  Every evening we placed two burning coals together so that they would smolder until morning without going out or flaring up. Three coals would have burned up. Saveliev and I had known this principle since we were at school, while Ivan Ivanovich and Fedia had learned it as children at home. In the morning we would blow the coals into life, a yellow flame would flare up, and we would put a nice thick lump of wood on the burning fire.

  I divided my barley into ten portions, but found that too frightening. The operation of feeding the five thousand with five loaves of bread was probably easier and simpler than a prisoner’s division of his ten days’ ration into thirty portions. Rations and ration cards were always for ten days. In the mainland they’d long given up on five-day periods, ten-day periods, and nonstop working weeks, but here the decimal system was kept going far more thoroughly. Nobody here considered Sunday to be a day off. Prisoners who got their days off long after our spell as lumberjacks were eventually given three days a month at the whim of the local prison bosses, who had the right to designate rainy days in summer or excessively cold days in winter as prisoners’ rest days, official days off.

  I poured all the barley back, being unable to stand this new torment. I asked Ivan Ivanovich and Fedia to let me go in with them, and handed my rations over to the common kitty. Saveliev followed my example.

  All four of us in concert took the wise decision to cook twice a day. There certainly wasn’t enough food for three meals a day.

  “We’ll gather berries and mushrooms,” said Ivan Ivanovich. “We’ll catch mice and birds. And for one or two days out of ten we’ll just eat bread.”

  “But if we’re going to go without food for a couple of days before we get supplies,” said Saveliev, “how can we stop ourselves eating too much when they do bring something to cook?”

  We decided to eat twice a day, whatever the consequences, and, if we had to, to make the soup as thin as we could. After all, nobody here was going to steal anything and we were getting the full norm. We had no drunken cooks or thieving store men, no greedy overseers or thieves who grabbed the best food for themselves; we had none of the countless bosses who deprived the prisoners of food and clothing, and who were deterred by nothing, for they had no fear and no conscience.

  We had our full ration of fats in the form of a lump of hydrogenated fat; our sugar was less than the gold dust I washed out with my pan; the bread was sticky and astringent, since it was produced by the great, inimitable experts at makeweight, who also fed the bosses of the bakeries; the grain in twenty different sorts—millet, kibbled wheat. All that was extremely mysterious, and frightening, too.

/>   Fish, which according to some secret scale of values was substituted for meat, came in the form of rust-colored herring and was meant to make up for our increased loss of proteins.

  Unfortunately, even the full norm was not enough to nourish or satisfy us. We needed three or four times as much; our bodies had been starving for a long time. We didn’t then understand this simple truth. We trusted the norms, but we didn’t know of the familiar cook’s observation that it is easier to cook for twenty than for four. There was only one thing we were perfectly clear about: we didn’t have enough to last us. This amazed us more than it scared us. We had to start working, we had to smash a clearing through fallen trees.

  In the north trees die lying down, like people. Their enormous bared roots look like the claws of a giant predatory bird caught in a rock. From these gigantic talons thousands of tiny tentacles, whitish offshoots covered with warm brown bark, stretched down into the permafrost. Each summer the permafrost retreated a little and a tentacle-like root would then immediately use its fine hairs to pierce and anchor itself in each inch of thawed ground. Larches reach maturity at three hundred years, slowly raising their mighty, heavy bodies on weak roots that are spread all over the stony ground. A powerful storm easily fells these weak-kneed trees. Larches would fall on their backs, with their heads in the same direction, and they died lying on a thick soft layer of bright green and bright pink moss.

  Only the twisted, crooked, low-growing trees, exhausted by constantly turning toward the sun for warmth, stayed obstinately on their own, keeping their distance from one another. They had kept up this intensive struggle for life for so long that their tortured, crushed heartwood was of no use. A short, many branched trunk, covered all around with terrible growths, like the scarred bark when a branch has been broken off, was unusable for construction, even in the north, where nobody was fussy about the quality of house-building materials. These twisted trees could not even be used for firewood, since their resistance to the ax could exhaust any workman. This is how they avenged themselves on the whole world for the damage the north had done to their life.