Kolyma Tales Page 7

  Our task was to make a clearing, and we boldly set to work. We sawed from sunrise to sunset, we felled timber, we cut it into blocks and piled it in stacks. We forgot everything else, we wanted to stay here as long as we could, we feared going back to the gold mines. But the stacks rose too slowly and by the end of our second day of intensive work it was clear that we had not done enough and that we didn’t have the strength to do more. Ivan Ivanovich made a meter-long ruler by measuring out five of his hand spans on a young ten-year-old larch he had felled.

  That evening the guard came, measured our work using a staff with notches, and shook his head. We had done only ten percent of the norm.

  Ivan Ivanovich tried to argue with him and took measurements, but the guard was implacable. He mumbled about “face meters” and “solid bodies,” which was way above our heads. One thing was clear: we were going to be put back in the camp precinct. Once again we would go through the gates with their inevitable official, government inscription: “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism.” It’s said that a quotation from Nietzsche was used over the gates of German concentration camps: “To each man his due.” By imitating Hitler, Beria outdid him in cynicism.

  The camp was a place where you were taught to hate physical labor, or labor of any sort. The most privileged group among the camp’s population were the professional criminals. Was it for them, perhaps, that labor was heroism and valor?

  But we weren’t afraid. On the contrary, by recognizing how hopeless our work was, how pathetic our physical capabilities were, the guard had brought us unprecedented relief, without upsetting us or frightening us.

  We went with the stream, and we were “drifting to the end,” to use the camp terminology. Nothing bothered us anymore; we found living according to somebody else’s will easy. We weren’t even concerned about staying alive, and if we slept, it was also to obey orders, the camp’s daily agenda. The peace of mind achieved by dulling all our feelings was rather like that “higher freedom of the barracks” that T. E. Lawrence dreamed of, like Tolstoy’s nonresistance to evil. Someone else’s will was constantly watching over our peace of mind.

  We had long been fatalists and never gave a thought to our life more than a day ahead. It would have been logical to eat all our food at once and then go back and serve the prescribed sentence in a solitary cell or go out to work at the pit face, but we didn’t do that. Any interference with fate or the will of the gods was improper, for it broke the code of camp behavior.

  The guard left and we stayed on to cut a clearing and make more stacks of wood. Now we did so more calmly, caring less. We no longer quarreled about who had to get under the butt of a beam and who would take the top end when it had to be carried to the stacks, or “skidded,” to use the forester’s term.

  We took more rests, we paid more attention to the sun, to the forest, to the high pale blue sky. We loafed.

  One morning Saveliev and I managed to fell an enormous black larch that had by some miracle survived storms and fires. We threw the saw down on the grass, it rang as it hit a stone, and we sat on the trunk of the tree we had felled.

  “Right,” said Saveliev, “let’s dream a bit. We’ll get through this, we’ll go back to the mainland, we’ll soon get old and we’ll be sick old men. We’ll get stabbing pains in the heart, or rheumatism will give us no peace, or we’ll have chest pains. Everything we are doing now, the way we’re spending our youth—sleepless nights, hunger, hard work for long hours, gold mining in icy water, cold in winter, beatings from the guards—all of that will leave its mark on us, even if we stay alive. We’ll be sick without knowing why, we’ll be groaning and going to outpatient clinics. Work that is beyond our strength will have given us incurable injuries, and in our old age our whole life will be one of pain, various unending physical and mental pains. But these terrible future days will be interspersed with days when we breathe more easily, when we are almost well, and when our sufferings stop bothering us. There won’t be many days like that. They will equal in number the number of days we will have managed to loaf while in the camp.”

  “How about honest labor?” I asked.

  “The only people who call on you to do honest labor are the swine and the people who beat us, cripple us, eat our food, and work living skeletons to death. They believe in that fiction even less than we do.”

  That evening we were sitting around our much loved stove, while Fedia Shchapov listened attentively to Saveliev’s hoarse voice.

  “Well, I refused to work. They drew up a statement, saying I was dressed ‘right for the season.’ ”

  “What does dressed ‘right for the season’ mean?” asked Fedia.

  “Well, so they don’t have to list all the winter things and summer things you’re wearing. They can’t draw up a statement in winter that you were sent to work with no jacket or no gloves. How many times have you stayed behind when there were no gloves?”

  “We weren’t allowed to stay behind,” Fedia said shyly. “The boss made us tramp down the road. Otherwise that would be called ‘stayed behind because improperly dressed.’ ”

  “Just what I meant.”

  “Go on, tell us about the metro.”

  And Saveliev told Fedia about the Moscow metro. Ivan Ivanovich and I also found it interesting to listen to Saveliev. He knew things that I, though a Muscovite, had never even guessed at.

  “Muslims, Fedia,” said Saveliev, glad to find his brain was still versatile, “are called to prayer by a muezzin. Muhammad decided that the voice was the best signal to call people to prayer. Muhammad had tried everything—a trumpet, a drum roll, a bonfire—and rejected them all. Fifteen hundred years later, when they tried different signals on the metro, it turned out that whistles, horns, sirens can’t catch the train driver’s ear as reliably and precisely as the human voice of a platform controller shouting, ‘Ready!’ ”

  Fedia gasped with delight. Of all of us, he was the best suited to forest life. Despite his youth, he had more experience than any of us. Fedia could do carpentry, he could make a simple log cabin in the taiga, he knew how to fell a tree and how to use branches to make a strong night shelter. Fedia was a hunter, too. In his home country people learned to use guns when they were children. But cold and hunger made all of Fedia’s qualities useless; the earth scorned his knowledge and his skills. Fedia didn’t merely envy the townsmen, he bowed down before them, and he could listen endlessly, despite his hunger, to stories about the achievements of technology and urban wonders.

  Friendship never arises in a state of deprivation or misery. The “difficult” conditions of life, which writers of fairy tales tell us are a precondition for friendship, are simply not difficult enough. If deprivation or misery ever gave people solidarity and friendship, then the deprivation was not extreme and the misery was not very great. Grief is not acute or deep enough if you can share it with friends. In the deprivation we underwent, all you are aware of is your own mental and physical strength, and you find out the limits of your capacities, your physical endurance, and your moral strength.

  We all understood that survival was a matter of pure luck. Oddly enough, in my younger days I used to have a saying that I repeated whenever I had bad luck or a failure: “Well, we’re not going to starve to death.” Every fiber of my body believed that phrase. And at the age of thirty I found myself in the situation of a man really starving to death, literally fighting over a piece of bread. And all that was before the war.

  When the four of us gathered at the Duskania spring, we all knew we weren’t there to be friends; we knew that if we survived, we wouldn’t care to meet one another. We would find it unpleasant to recall bad things: hunger that drove you mad, steaming out the lice in the pots you cooked dinner in, a constant stream of nonsensical talk around the fire, pointless daydreaming, gastronomical fairy tales, quarrels with each other, lonely dreams—for we all dreamed the same dreams: loaves of rye bread flying over us like fireballs or angels.
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  What makes a man happy is his ability to forget. One’s memory is always ready to discard bad things and retain just good things. There was nothing good at the Duskania spring, nor on the paths any of us had trodden or would tread. We were permanently poisoned by the north, and we realized that. Three of us had stopped resisting fate; only Ivan Ivanovich went on working with the same tragic devotion as he had before.

  During one of our cigarette breaks, Saveliev tried to make Ivan Ivanovich see sense. A cigarette break is the most banal form of rest, even for people who don’t smoke, since we hadn’t had any tobacco for a year, and yet we still had cigarette breaks. Smokers in the taiga would gather and dry black-currant leaves, and there were lengthy discussions, with all the passion that prisoners can muster, about whether bilberry or black currant had the nicer leaves. Connoisseurs considered that neither of them were any good, since your body demands poisonous nicotine, not just smoke, but one couldn’t help deceiving one’s brain cells with such an easy ploy. For cigarette breaks black-currant leaves were fine, since the concept of a “rest” from work was in the camps far too hateful; it clashed with the basic rules of production morality, rules that were inculcated in the Far North. “Resting” every other hour was a challenge to authority, a crime, but a cigarette break every hour was in order. Here, as in the rest of the north, what actually happened didn’t correspond to the rules. Dried black-currant leaves were natural camouflage.

  “Listen, Ivan,” said Saveliev, “I’ll tell you something that happened to me. In the Baikal-Amur camp we used to barrow sand along the second rail track. It was a long way to deliver the sand and our norm was twenty-five cubic meters. If you didn’t make fifty percent of the norm, you got punishment rations: three hundred grams and gruel once a day. If you made the norm, you got a kilo of bread as well as something to cook up, and you had the right to buy another kilo of bread in the shop for cash. People worked in pairs, but the norms were impossible. So we found a way to get around it. One day the two of us would both barrow from his pit face and get enough for the norm. We then get two kilos of bread and my three hundred grams of punishment rations, so each of us gets a kilo and a hundred and fifty grams. The next day we work together for my norm. What’s so bad about that? The main thing was the guard was a softie. He knew, of course. It was even good for him, since people didn’t lose their strength so fast and the total production didn’t go down. But one of the bosses exposed this trick and that was the end of our good times.”

  “Well, do you want to try that here?” asked Ivan Ivanovich.

  “No, I don’t. We’ll just help you.”

  “How about yourself?”

  “We don’t care, old pal.”

  “In that case, I don’t care either. The sergeant can come as far as I’m concerned.”

  The sergeant, that is the guard, came a few days later. Our worst fears came true.

  “Well, you’ve had your rest, it’s time you stopped. You’ve got to let others have your job. Your work is more like a sanatorium or a relief team,” said the guard, joking grimly.

  “Yes,” responded Saveliev.

  “First convalescent centers, then the teams,

  A tag on your ankle, and now sweet dreams!”

  We laughed out of politeness.

  “When do we have to go back?”

  “We’re off tomorrow.”

  Ivan Ivanovich was calm again. That night he hanged himself from the fork in a tree trunk, ten yards from the hut; he didn’t use any rope—this was the first suicide of that kind I had seen. Saveliev found him—he saw him from the path and shouted out. The guard ran over but forbad us to remove the body until the “investigating team” turned up. He hurried us off.

  Fedia Shchapov and I got ready to go. We were very perturbed, for Ivan Ivanovich had good foot bindings that were still intact; he had bags, a towel, a spare calico vest, from which he had now steamed out the lice; quilted soft boots that had been repaired; and his pea jacket was lying on his bunk. We had a brief discussion and then took all these things for ourselves. Saveliev did not take part in sharing the dead man’s things. He kept walking around Ivan Ivanovich’s body. Outside prison, a dead body always and anywhere arouses a repressed interest—it has a magnetic attraction. That is not true in war or in the camps, where death is so banal and feelings are so dulled that a dead body holds no interest. But Saveliev was affected by Ivan Ivanovich’s death: it lit up and disturbed some dark corners of his soul and propelled him to make certain decisions.

  He went into the cabin, took an ax from the corner, and crossed the threshold. The guard, who was sitting on the mound of earth outside, leapt up and roared something we could not make out. Fedia and I rushed into the yard.

  Saveliev went up to the thick short larch beam that we used to saw firewood on; the beam was slashed by saw marks, and its bark had been chopped off. Saveliev put his left hand on the beam, spread out his fingers and swung the ax.

  The guard shrieked in a squeaky penetrating voice. Fedia threw himself at Saveliev: four fingers flew off into the sawdust, and it took time to see them among the branches and wood chips. Scarlet blood gushed from his fingers. Fedia and I ripped up Ivan Ivanovich’s shirt, made a tourniquet that we wrapped around Saveliev’s hand and bandaged the wound.

  The guard took us all back to the camp. Saveliev was taken to the clinic to be bandaged and then to the criminal investigation section for the start of a case of malicious self-harm. Fedia and I went back to the same tent we had left two weeks before with such hopes and expectations of happiness.

  Our places on the top bunks had been taken by other men, but that did not bother us. It was summer now, and in fact the lower bunks were actually better than the top ones; by the time winter came there would be many, many changes.

  I went to sleep quickly but woke up in the middle of the night and went to the duty orderly’s table. Fedia had made himself comfortable there; he was holding a piece of paper. I read over his shoulder what he had written: “Mom, I’m living well. Mom, I’m dressed right for the season. . . .”

  1959

  THE INJECTOR

  From the head of the Golden Spring sector, L. V. Kudinov, to the director of mines, Comrade A. S. Koroliov.

  A REPORT

  IN ACCORDANCE with your instructions to provide explanations for the six-hour stand-down of the fourth brigade of prisoners, which took place on November 12 of this year in the Golden Spring sector of the gold mines under your management, I report:

  The air temperature in the morning was below minus fifty degrees. Our thermometer had been broken by the supervisor on duty, a fact that I have reported to you. However, it was possible to measure the temperature because a gob of spit froze in midair.

  The brigade was brought out to work in good time but was unable to start work because the injector on the boiler that serves our sector and warms up the frozen subsoil refused to work. I have on many occasions informed the chief engineer that the injector has been working badly, but no measures have been taken, and the injector has now completely fallen apart. The chief engineer refuses to replace it at the present time.

  Because the injector has been working badly, the earth has not been made ready, and we were forced to keep the brigade idle for several hours. We have nowhere to keep warm, and we are forbidden to start fires, while the escort guards will not allow us to send the brigade back to barracks.

  I have written to every authority I can that I am no longer able to work with an injector like this. For five years now its performance has been terrible, yet fulfilling the plan for our sector depends on it. We cannot cope with it, but the chief engineer refuses to pay attention and goes on demanding his cubic meters.

  Signed by the head of the Golden Spring sector,

  mining engineer L. V. Kudinov

  Across this report is written diagonally in clear handwriting the following:

  1) For refusing to work more than five days and causing a breakdown in production on the secto
r, prisoner Injector is to be arrested for seventy-two hours and not allowed to go out to work. He will be put in a squad working under intensive conditions. The case is to be handed to the investigative organs so that prisoner Injector can be held legally answerable.

  2) I notify chief engineer Gorev that there is an absence of discipline in production. I recommend replacing prisoner Injector with free hired labor.

  Director of Mines, Aleksandr Koroliov

  1956

  THE APOSTLE PAUL

  WHEN I dislocated my foot, by falling down a slippery pole ladder in the open pit, the authorities realized that I would be lame for a long time. As sitting idly was out of the question, they transferred me to work as an assistant to our carpenter Adam Frizorger, which both of us, Frizorger and I, were very happy about.

  In his first life Frizorger had been a pastor in a German village near Marxstadt on the Volga. We met at one of the big transit camps while we were being quarantined for typhus, and we came here together to prospect for coal. Like me, Frizorger had been in the taiga before, and he had been listed as a goner; he had been taken from the mines to the transit camp in a semi-insane state. As invalids, we were sent to prospect for coal. We were meant to provide backup since the workforce in prospecting was made up exclusively from free hired labor. True, these free laborers had in the recent past been prisoners, but they had just completed their “terms” or sentences, and they were known in the camps a little contemptuously as “freebies.” When we were transferred, the forty free hired men could barely scrape together two rubles when they needed to buy tobacco; all the same they were now a class above us. It was generally understood that in two or three months they would get decent clothes, be able to get a drink, receive ID papers, and, after a year, perhaps even return home. These hopes were brighter still when Paramonov, the man in charge of prospecting, promised them fantastic salaries and Polar Circle rations. “You’ll be wearing top hats when you go home,” the boss kept telling them. No such talk of top hats or Polar Circle rations was ever directed at us prisoners, though.