Kolyma Stories Read online

  At least Paramonov was polite to us. He wasn’t allotted any prisoners for prospecting, and getting five men to provide backup services was the most that Paramonov could get out of the authorities.

  We didn’t know each other when our names were called from a list and we left the barracks to be inspected by his sharp shining eyes. He was very pleased by the answers to his questions. One of us, Izgibin, a wit with a gray mustache, was a baker; he hadn’t lost his natural vitality in the camps. His skills were of some help to him, so that he wasn’t as emaciated as the rest. The second man was a one-eyed giant from Kamenets-Podolsk, a “stoker on a steam locomotive,” he told Paramonov.

  “So you can do a bit of metalwork,” said Paramonov.

  “I can, I can,” the stoker confirmed willingly. He had long ago figured out that working with free prospectors would be very much to his advantage.

  The agronomist Riazanov was the third man. Agronomy was a profession that delighted Paramonov. No attention, naturally, was paid to the torn rags the agronomist was wearing. In the camps people are not judged by their clothes, and Paramonov knew enough about the camps.

  I was the fourth man. I was neither a baker, nor a metalworker, nor an agronomist. But I was tall, and that seemed to reassure Paramonov; in any case, it wasn’t worth going to the trouble of altering the list for the sake of one man. He nodded at me.

  But our fifth man behaved very oddly. He mumbled the words of a prayer and covered his face with his hands, so that he couldn’t hear Paramonov’s voice. That, however, didn’t surprise the chief. Paramonov turned to the supervisor who was standing next to him with a pile of yellow folders—our so-called personal files—in his hand.

  “He’s a carpenter,” said the supervisor, guessing what Paramonov meant to ask. The induction was over, and we were taken to the prospectors’ camp.

  Later, Frizorger told me that when he was called on, he thought he was being singled out to be shot, so badly had he been threatened by the interrogator when he was still in the mines. We spent a year together in the same barracks and we never ever had an argument. That was rare among prisoners, whether in the camps or the prisons. Quarrels started over the most trivial things, and in no time cursing could reach such a degree that the next step, it seemed, could only be a knife or, at best, a red-hot poker. I had soon learned not to pay much attention to the florid cursing. The heat soon died down, and if both sides continued for some time to curse each other idly, that was only done for show, to “save face.”

  So I never had a quarrel with Frizorger. I think that this was thanks to him, because he was the most peaceful person on earth. He never disparaged anyone, he spoke very little. He had an old man’s voice, quivery, but the quivering seemed somehow put on, overdone. It was how young actors speak in the theater when they are playing old men. In the camps many men try (and often successfully) to seem older and physically weaker than they really are. They don’t always do so for any conscious purpose; it’s instinctive. The ironic trick played by life is that at least half of the people who exaggerated their age and underplayed their strength ended up in an even worse state than the state they were imitating.

  But in fact there was no pretense about Frizorger’s voice.

  Every morning and evening he would pray, too quietly to be heard; he turned away from everyone and looked at the floor. If he took part in the general conversation, it was only when the subject was religion, so he took part very seldom, since prisoners dislike talking about religion. Our beloved Izgibin, who always loved obscenity, would try to tease Frizorger, but the only response to his jokes was a smile so peaceful that his sallies were wasted. Frizorger was liked by all the prospectors, even by Paramonov, for whom Frizorger made a remarkable desk, which took him, apparently, six months to complete.

  We had neighboring bunks, so we often chatted; sometimes Frizorger waved his little hands like a child when he was amazed by my knowledge of popular Gospel stories, material that he was simpleminded enough to think was the preserve of a narrow circle of religious people. He giggled and showed great pleasure when I revealed such knowledge. It stimulated him into starting to tell me things from the Gospels I could recall only shakily or not at all.

  Once, however, Frizorger made a mistake when he listed the names of the twelve apostles. He included the apostle Paul. With the self-assurance of an ignoramus, I had always considered the apostle Paul as the real creator and theoretical leader of the Christian religion; I knew a little of Paul’s biography and didn’t miss my chance of correcting Frizorger.

  “No, no,” said Frizorger, laughing. “You don’t know: listen. . . .” He started bending his fingers. “Peter, Paul, Mark. . . .”

  I told him everything I knew about the apostle Paul. He listened to me carefully and said nothing. It was now late, time to go to sleep. I woke up in the night, and in the flickering smoky light of the kerosene lamp I saw Frizorger’s eyes were open and I heard him whisper, “Lord, help me. Peter, Paul, Mark. . . .” He stayed awake until morning. Then he went to work early and returned late in the evening, when I was already asleep. I was woken by an old man’s quiet weeping. Frizorger was on his knees, praying.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, after he finished praying.

  Frizorger searched for my hand and squeezed it. “You’re right,” he said. “Paul was not one of the twelve apostles. I forgot about Bartholomew.”

  I said nothing.

  “Are you surprised at my tears?” he asked. “They’re tears of shame. I could not, should not have forgotten such things. That’s a sin, a great sin. A stranger has to point out an unforgivable mistake by me, Adam Frizorger. No, no, it’s not your fault at all. It’s me, it’s my sin. But it’s good that you corrected me. Everything will be well.”

  I had trouble reassuring him and after that (shortly before I dislocated my foot) we became even greater friends.

  Once, when there was nobody in the carpentry workshop, Frizorger took a greasy cloth wallet out of his pocket and with a gesture got me to come to the window.

  “Here,” he said, showing me a tiny cracked photograph, “look at this snapshot.” It was a photograph of a young woman with the casual expression you get on all snapshots. The yellowed, cracked picture had been carefully framed with colored paper.

  “That’s my daughter,” said Frizorger solemnly. “My only daughter. My wife died a long time ago. True, my daughter doesn’t write, she probably doesn’t know the address. I’ve written a lot to her and I still do. Only to her. I never show anyone this photo. I brought it from home. Six years ago I took it off the chest of drawers.”

  Paramonov came through the workshop door. He had not made a sound.

  “Your daughter, is it?” he said, after a quick look at the photo.

  “My daughter, sir,” said Frizorger with a smile.

  “Does she write to you?”

  “No.”

  “How can she forget her old man? Write me a request to search for her, and I’ll send it off. What’s wrong with your leg?”

  “I’m lame, sir.”

  “Well, if you’re lame, you’re lame.” Paramonov then went out.

  After that Frizorger was no longer secretive with me. When he finished his evening prayers and lay down on his bunk, he would get out the photograph of his daughter and stroke its colored frame.

  We lived like this, without incident, for about six months, and then they brought the mail. At the time, Paramonov was away prospecting, and his secretary, a prisoner called Riazanov, took delivery of the mail. (Riazanov turned out to be an Esperanto speaker, not an agronomist, not that this was a hindrance to him. He was very deft at flaying dead horses, at bending thick iron pipes by filling them with sand and heating them red-hot on a bonfire, and at doing all of his boss’s office work.)

  “Take a look at this,” he said to me. “Look at this declaration we’ve received about Frizorger.”

  The packet was an official statement with a request to inform prisoner Frizorger (ar
ticle of criminal code, sentence) of his daughter’s declaration, a copy of which was attached. Her declaration was a brief and clear statement that, being convinced that her father was an enemy of the people, she renounced him and asked that her relationship to him be annulled.

  Riazanov held on to the piece of paper and turned it over and over.

  “What a nasty piece of work!” he said. “What did she have to do that for? She isn’t joining the party, is she?”

  I was thinking of something else: why send declarations like that to your father when he’s in prison? Was it a peculiar sort of sadism, like the authorities’ habit of notifying relatives of a prisoner’s fictional death, or was it just a desire to do everything according to the rules? Or something else?

  “Listen, Vania,” I told Riazanov, “have you made a record of the incoming mail?”

  “How could I? It’s only just come in.”

  “Then let me have that packet,” and I told Riazanov what it was all about.

  “How about the letter?” he said hesitantly. “She’s probably going to write to him, too.”

  “You can intercept the letter, too.”

  “All right, take it.”

  I crumpled up the package and threw it through the open door of the stove, which was alight.

  A month later the letter arrived. It was just as brief as the declaration, and we burned it in the same stove.

  Not long after, I was moved somewhere else, and Frizorger was left behind. I don’t know what happened to him afterward. I often recalled him, while I still had the strength to recall anything. I could hear his quivery, anxious whisper: “Peter, Paul, Mark. . . .”

  1954

  BERRIES

  FADEYEV said, “Wait a bit, I’ll have a talk with him myself.” And he came up to me and put the butt of his rifle by my head.

  I was lying in the snow, my arms around a beam which had been on my shoulder and which I had dropped. I couldn’t lift it or go back to my place in the file of men who were going down the mountain; each man had a beam on his shoulder, “a stick of firewood,” some bigger, some smaller. Everyone was in a hurry to get home, guards and prisoners, everyone wanted to eat and sleep. They were all utterly fed up with the endless winter day. And there I was, lying in the snow.

  Fadeyev always used the polite form of the verb to prisoners.

  “Listen, old man,” he said, “I can’t believe that a bruiser like you can’t carry a log as small as that, a stick you could call it. You’re obviously a malingerer. You’re a fascist. When the motherland is fighting the enemy, you go and put a wrench in the works.”

  “I’m not a fascist,” I said. “I’m a sick, hungry man. You’re the fascist. You read in the papers about fascists killing old men. Think about telling the girl you’re going to marry about what you did in Kolyma.”

  I didn’t care. I couldn’t stand these rosy-cheeked, healthy, well-fed, well-clothed people, and I wasn’t afraid. I curled up to protect my belly, but that was an instinctive movement inherited from my Stone Age ancestors: I had no fear at all of being hit in the belly. Fadeyev’s boot kicked me in the back. I suddenly felt warm. It didn’t hurt at all. If I died, so much the better.

  “Listen,” said Fadeyev when he turned me on my back with the toe caps of his boots, “I’ve been working with people like you for some time, I know your sort.”

  Another guard, Seroshapka, came up.

  “Right then, show me your face, so I remember you. What a nasty ugly brute you are. Tomorrow I’ll shoot you personally. Got it?”

  “Got it,” I said, as I stood up and spat out salty blood and saliva.

  I dragged the beam along the ground while my fellow prisoners mocked me with whooping noises, yelling and cursing. They had been freezing all the time I was being beaten.

  The next morning Seroshapka led us out to work in a forest that had been hacked down the previous winter. We had to collect anything that could be burned in the iron stoves this winter. As the forest had been felled in winter, the stumps were high. We tore them out of the ground using levers and cables, and then we sawed them up and stacked them.

  Seroshapka hung up some marker bundles from the very few trees still standing where we were working. The bundles of yellow and gray hay marked out the zone we were forbidden to cross.

  Our foreman made a bonfire on a hillock for Seroshapka’s benefit—only the guard was allowed to have a bonfire during working hours—and brought him a supply of firewood.

  The snow had long been driven away by the wind. The dead, frost-covered grass was slippery to the touch and changed color on contact with a human hand. Low mountain briars froze on the hills; their frozen dark-violet berries had an extraordinary smell. The bilberries, a bluish gray, touched by the frost and overripe, were even better to eat than the briar hips. Blueberries hung from short straight twigs; they were bright blue, wrinkled like empty leather purses, but they contained a dark, bluish-black juice of an indescribable taste.

  At this time of the year, the frosted berries were quite unlike ripe berries when they are full of juice. They had a much more subtle taste.

  My comrade Rybakov collected berries in a jar whenever we broke off for a cigarette and whenever Seroshapka wasn’t looking in our direction. If Rybakov collected a whole jarful, then the guards’ cook would give him bread in exchange. Rybakov’s enterprise immediately became crucial to him.

  I didn’t have a customer like his, so I ate the berries myself, my tongue carefully and eagerly pressing each one to my palate. The sweet aromatic juice of each squashed berry intoxicated me for a second.

  I never thought of helping Rybakov to pick berries, and he would have refused any help, for he would then have to share the bread.

  Rybakov’s jar was filling up too slowly, it was getting harder and harder to find a berry, and, without having noticed, we were getting close to the limits of our zone. The markers were hanging over our heads.

  “Watch out,” I told Rybakov. “Let’s go back.”

  Ahead of us were tussocks covered with briar hips, blueberries, and lingonberries. We’d spotted these tussocks before. It would have been all right if the tree from which a marker bundle was hanging had been two meters farther off.

  Rybakov pointed to his jar, which was still not full, to the sun, which was now setting, and began slowly to approach the enchanted berries.

  There was the dry crack of a rifle shot, and Rybakov fell facedown between the tussocks. Seroshapka waved his rifle about, shouting, “Leave him where he is, don’t come near!”

  With a click of his bolt Seroshapka reloaded and fired another shot. We knew what that second shot meant. So did Seroshapka. There were supposed to be two shots: the first a warning shot.

  Rybakov lay between the tussocks. He looked surprisingly small. The sky, mountains, and river were enormous: God knows how many people you could have laid down on the footpaths between the tussocks in these mountains.

  Rybakov’s jar rolled some distance away, but I managed to pick it up and put it in my pocket. Perhaps I might get some bread for the berries: I knew whom Rybakov was picking them for.

  Seroshapka calmly assembled our small squad, counted us, gave the order, and took us home.

  He touched my shoulder with the tip of his rifle. I turned around.

  “I meant to get you,” said Seroshapka, “but you wouldn’t stick your head out, you bastard!”

  1959

  TAMARA THE BITCH

  TAMARA the bitch was brought from the taiga by our blacksmith, Moisei Moiseyevich Kuznetsov. Judging by his surname,[3] the profession was inherited from his forefathers. Moisei came from Minsk. Kuznetsov was an orphan, as you could tell by his first name and patronymic, for Jews have their father’s name only if, and always if, the father died before the son was born. Moisei learned his trade as a boy from his uncle, who was a blacksmith, as his father had been.

  Kuznetsov’s wife was a waitress in one of the Minsk restaurants; she was much younger than her fo
rty-year-old husband, and in 1937, on the advice of her close friend, an assistant in the restaurant, she wrote a denunciation of her husband. At the time this was a much more reliable way out than any plot or slander, even more reliable than sulfuric acid. The husband, Moisei, immediately disappeared. Moisei was no ordinary blacksmith. He worked in a factory; he was a master craftsman, even a bit of a poet. He was the sort of blacksmith who could make a wrought-iron rose. The tools he used, he made himself. These tools—tongs, chisels, hammers, sledgehammers—were especially elegant, which showed his love of his craft and his craftsman’s understanding of its soul. We aren’t talking of symmetry or asymmetry but of something deeper, more inward. Every horseshoe or nail forged by Moisei was elegant, and the mark of the craftsman could be found on every item that came from his hands. He was reluctant to end work on anything he was making; he always felt that it needed one more blow of the hammer to make it even better, even easier to use.

  The authorities valued him highly, although there was not much blacksmithery to be done on a geological site. Moisei sometimes played jokes on the bosses, but he was forgiven because of his good work. For instance, he assured the bosses that it was better to temper drills in oil than in water, and the boss ordered butter, naturally a very small quantity, for the forge. Kuznetsov threw a bit of this butter into the water and the tips of the steel drills took on a gentle shine that was never seen after the usual tempering. Kuznetsov and his hammerman ate the rest of the butter. The boss was very soon informed of the blacksmith’s trick, but no reprisals followed. Later, Kuznetsov, insisting on the high quality of tempering with butter, asked the boss to let him have the offcuts of rolls of butter that had gone moldy in the stores. He then melted down these offcuts into clarified butter that was just a little bit bitter. He was a good, quiet man who wished everyone well.