Kolyma Stories Read online

  Our boss knew all the fine points about life here. Like Lycurgus, he made sure that his taiga state had two paramedics, two blacksmiths, two foremen, two cooks, and two bookkeepers. One paramedic would treat the patients, while the other would do physical labor but keep an eye on his colleague. If the first paramedic abused drugs by taking a bit of codeine or a bit of caffeine, then he would be exposed, punished, and sent back to do hard labor with the other prisoners, while his colleague, after drawing up and signing the inventory, would be installed in the medical ward. The boss was of the opinion that a reserve supply of specialists not only ensured that a replacement was available when needed but encouraged discipline, which would, of course, have lapsed if any single specialist were to feel he was indispensable.

  But the bookkeepers, paramedics, and foremen were replaced at a rate that was quite mad, and none of them would ever refuse a glass of alcohol, even if the man offering it was operating a sting.

  The blacksmith who had been selected by the boss as a counterweight to Moisei never even picked up a hammer, because Moisei was irreproachable and invulnerable; in any case, Moisei’s qualifications were too good.

  It was Moisei who on a path in the taiga came across a stray Yakut dog that looked like a wolf. It was a bitch with a patch of abraded fur on its white chest—evidently it had been a sled dog.

  There were no Yakut settlements or nomadic camps anywhere near us. The dog suddenly appeared in front of Kuznetsov on the taiga path, frightening him badly. Moisei thought it was a wolf and ran back, stamping his boots loudly on the path, to warn the other men following him.

  But the “wolf” lay on its belly and crawled toward the people, wagging its tail as it did so. They stroked it, patted its emaciated flanks, and fed it.

  The dog stayed with us. Soon it was obvious why it didn’t risk looking for its real owners in the taiga: it was about to have puppies. The very first evening it began digging a pit under a tent. It was in a hurry and barely acknowledged people’s greetings. Every one of fifty men wanted to stroke it, show it affection, and tell the animal of their own longing for affection.

  Even Kasayev, the chief of works, a geologist of about thirty who had just completed ten years’ work in the Far North, came out, still strumming the guitar he could not be parted from, to look at our latest inhabitant.

  “We can call it ‘Fighter,’ ” he said.

  “It’s a bitch, Valentin Ivanovich,” said Slavka Ganushkin, the cook.

  “A bitch? So it is. Then let’s call it Tamara.” And the chief of works went off.

  Smiling, the dog watched the chief leave; it wagged its tail. It very soon established good relations with all the right people. Tamara understood the importance of Kasayev and of the foreman Vasilenko in our settlement, and she realized how crucial it was to make friends with the cook. At night she settled in with the night watchman.

  We soon realized that Tamara would only accept food she was given, that she never touched anything in the kitchen or the tent, whether there were people there or not.

  These firm moral principles were what won over the inhabitants of the settlement, men who had seen everything and had had a tough life.

  They placed tinned meat and bread and butter on the floor under Tamara’s nose. The dog sniffed the food and always chose to take away the same thing: a piece of salted salmon, the most familiar, tasty, and, probably, safest food for her.

  Very soon she gave birth: six tiny puppies in a dark pit. We made a kennel for them and moved them into it. Tamara was anxious for some time, fawning, wagging her tail, but it must have been all right, for the puppies were unharmed.

  This was when the prospecting group had to move another three or so kilometers farther into the mountains, away from the base where the stores, the kitchen, the head office were, so they were about seven kilometers from their living quarters. We took the kennel and the puppies to the new place, and two or three times a day Tamara would run to see the cook and carry back in her mouth a bone that he had given her. We would have fed the puppies in any case, but Tamara was never sure of that.

  It then happened that a special operations squad came on skis to our settlement. They were prowling the taiga looking for escaped prisoners. People very rarely tried to escape in winter, but the squad had information that five prisoners had run away from a nearby mine, and they were combing the taiga.

  Instead of a tent like ours, the skiers were given the only log building in the settlement, the bathhouse. The ski squad’s mission was too important for anyone to protest, as our chief of works, Kasayev, explained to us.

  Everyone treated these uninvited visitors with the usual indifference and resignation. Only one creature expressed severe displeasure about their visit.

  Tamara the bitch hurled herself at the nearest special operations guard and bit through his felt boot. Tamara’s hackles were up, and her eyes were full of fearless hatred. It was hard to chase the dog off and restrain it.

  The special operations chief, Nazarov, whom we’d heard something about previously, was about to grab his automatic and shoot the dog, but Kasayev held his arm and dragged him off to the bathhouse.

  On the advice of our carpenter Semion Parmenov, we put Tamara on a rope strap and tied her to a tree. The special operations squad wasn’t going to be here permanently.

  Like all the Yakut dogs, Tamara couldn’t bark. She growled, and her old canines tried to gnaw through the rope. She was no longer the easygoing Yakut bitch who’d spent the winter with us. Her hatred was extraordinary, and it revealed what her past life had been. Everyone could see that this was not the first time the dog had encountered guards.

  What forest tragedy had fixed itself in the dog’s memory? Was this terrible past event the reason why the Yakut bitch had turned up in the taiga near our settlement?

  Nazarov could probably have told us a few things, if he remembered animals as well as he did people.

  About five days later three of the skiers left, while Nazarov and one of his friends were preparing to depart with the chief of works the next morning. They spent the night drinking, had a hair of the dog in the morning, and then left.

  Tamara growled. Nazarov turned back, took his automatic off his shoulder, and let off a round point-blank at the dog. Tamara twitched and fell silent. At the sound of the shots people were already running out of their tents, grabbing axes and crowbars as they came. The chief of works rushed to intercept the workmen, and Nazarov disappeared in the forest.

  Sometimes one’s desires are fulfilled; perhaps the hatred that fifty men felt for this squad leader was so passionate and powerful that it became an actual force and caught up with Nazarov.

  Nazarov and his assistant both skied off. They didn’t follow the completely frozen river, which was the best winter road to get to the highway twenty kilometers from our settlement. Instead, they went across the mountain pass. Nazarov was afraid of being pursued; the mountain route was shorter and he was an excellent skier.

  It was dark by the time they reached the pass. There was still daylight on the mountain peaks, but the deep ravines were in darkness. Nazarov started descending the mountain at an angle, where the forest became thicker. He understood that he had to stop, but his skis were sweeping him downhill, and he flew into the snow-covered stump of a fallen larch, which had been sharpened by the passage of time. The stump ripped open Nazarov’s belly and back, tearing through his greatcoat. The second special operations man was skiing much farther down the hill. He sped to the highway, but only managed to raise the alarm the next day. Two days later they found Nazarov hanging from the stump, frozen stiff in the pose of a running man, rather like one of those figures in a battle diorama.

  Tamara was flayed and her skin was stretched by nailing it to the stable wall. But it was stretched badly and the skin, when it dried out, was tiny, and you wouldn’t have thought that it came from a big Yakut sled husky.

  Very soon the forester came to draw up backdated certificates for the cutt
ing of timber that had been done more than a year before. When the trees were being felled, nobody gave a thought about the height of the stumps, and they turned out to be higher than the norm, so that the work had to be done again. That was an easy job. The forester was allowed to buy a few things in the shop, and was given money and alcohol. When he was leaving, he asked if he could have the dog skin hanging on the stable wall. He would tan it and make sledder’s gloves: gauntlets made from northern dog skin with the fur on the outside. According to him, the bullet holes in the skin didn’t matter.

  1959

  CHERRY BRANDY [4]

  THE POET was dying. His big hands, swollen by starvation, with their bloodless white fingers and dirty, overgrown, curling nails, lay exposed on his chest, despite the cold. Before then he had held them against his naked body, but that body now had too little warmth. His gloves had been stolen a long time ago. Stealing was just a matter of shamelessness, and thieves operated in broad daylight. The dim electric lightbulb, covered in fly droppings and caged in by a round grid, was fixed high up near the ceiling. The light fell on the poet’s feet. He was lying as if in a box in the dark depths of the lower row of a continuous row of two-story bunks. From time to time his fingers moved and clicked like castanets, as they felt for a button, a loop, a hole in his jacket, or brushed away a bit of dirt, before stopping again. The poet was taking so long to die that he had stopped understanding that he was dying. Occasionally some simple, powerful thought would force its morbid and almost palpable way through his brain: that the bread he’d put under his head had been stolen. And this terrible thought burned him so much that he wanted to quarrel, curse, fight, search, argue. But he didn’t have the strength for any of that, and the thought of his bread died away. . . . At the moment he was thinking of something else: that everyone was going to be taken over the sea, that the ship was delayed and it was lucky he was here. And he had the same light fleeting thought about the big birthmark on the face of the barracks orderly. For most of the past twenty-four hours he had been thinking of the events of his life here. The visions he was seeing were not those of childhood, youth, or his prime. All his life he had been in a hurry to get somewhere. What was wonderful was that now he didn’t have to hurry, that he could think slowly. And he thought at leisure of the great monotony of deathbed movements, something that doctors had understood and described long before artists and poets. The features of Hippocrates, a man’s death mask, are familiar to every medical student. This mysterious monotony of deathbed movements provoked Freud’s most daring hypotheses. Monotony and repetition are the essential basis of science. What is unique about death was sought by poets, not by doctors. It was pleasant to be aware that he could still think. He had long been used to the nausea of hunger. And everything was of equal status: Hippocrates, the orderly with the birthmark, and his own dirty fingernails.

  Life was ebbing and flowing in him: he was dying. But life kept reappearing, his eyes would open, thoughts would emerge. Only desires failed to appear. He had long been living in a world where people often have to be brought back to life—by artificial respiration, glucose, camphor, caffeine. The dead became the living again. And why not? He believed in immortality, in real human immortality. He had often thought there were simply no biological reasons why man shouldn’t live forever. Old age is merely a curable disease, and if it weren’t for this still-unsolved tragic misunderstanding, he could live forever. Or at least until he was tired of life. And he hadn’t tired of life at all. Even now in this transit barracks, the tranzitka, as its inhabitants lovingly called it. This transit camp was the antechamber to horror, but it wasn’t horror itself. On the contrary, there was a living spirit of freedom here, and everyone could sense that. The camps were yet to come, the prisons were in the past. This was “peace on the way there,” and the poet understood that.

  There was another path to immortality, as set out by Tyutchev:

  Blessed is he who visits this world

  In its most fateful moments.

  But if he was apparently not fated to be immortal in his human form, as a physical entity, at least he had earned creative immortality. He had been named the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century, and he often thought that this was true. He believed in the immortality of his poetry. He had no pupils, but do poets put up with pupils? He had written prose, too—bad prose—and he had written articles. But only in verse had he found things that were new to poetry and important, as he always thought. His entire past life was literature, books, fairy tales, dreams, and only this present day was real life.

  All these thoughts took place not as a dispute but secretly, deep down in his inner self. He didn’t have enough passion for such reflections. Indifference had long taken possession of him. How trivial it all was, like mice scrabbling about, compared with the unkind weight of life. He was amazed at himself. How could he be thinking like this about verses when everything had been decided, and he knew it very well, better than anyone? Who needed him here, and who cared? But why did this all have to be understood, and he waited . . . then he understood.

  At the moments when life flowed back to his body and his half-open glazed eyes suddenly began to see, his eyelids quivered and his fingers fidgeted, then he was revisited by thoughts he didn’t think were his last ones.

  Life entered unasked, like a self-confident lady of the house. He hadn’t invited it, but it still came into his body, his brain, coming like verses, like inspiration. And the meaning of that word was for the first time revealed to him in its full sense. Verses were the life-giving force keeping him alive. That was it. He didn’t live for poetry, he lived by it.

  It was now so obvious, so palpably clear that inspiration was the same as life. On the verge of death he was allowed to learn that life was inspiration, inspiration alone.

  And he was glad that he had been allowed to learn this final truth.

  Everything, the whole world was comparable to verse: work, the sound of horse hooves, a house, a bird, a rock, love—all of life easily found its way into verse and settled there comfortably. And that was how it should be, for verses were the word.

  Even now stanzas arose easily, one after the other, and although he hadn’t written down any for a long time, and couldn’t write down his verse, the words still came without effort in a rhythm that was predetermined and, on every occasion, unusual. Rhyme was a search tool, an instrument for the magnetic search of words and concepts. Each word was part of the world, it responded to rhyme, and the whole world rushed past with the speed of some electronic machine. Everything cried out, “Take me! No, me!” You never had to look for anything. You had only to reject. There seemed to be two people here: the one who composes, who has got the wheel spinning at top speed, and the other one who makes his choice and from time to time stops the machine the first one has set in motion. Having seen that he was two people, the poet realized that he was now composing real poetry. What did it matter that it wasn’t written down? Writing down and printing was just vanity of vanities. The best was the unrecorded, what vanished after it was composed, what melted away without a trace; only the creative joy that he felt, and which could not be mistaken for anything else, proved that the poem had been created, that something fine had been created. Could he be mistaken? Was his creative joy infallible?

  He remembered how bad, how poetically feeble were Aleksandr Blok’s last poems, and that Blok apparently was not aware of the fact. . . .

  The poet forced himself to pause. Pausing was easier to do here than anywhere in Leningrad or Moscow.

  At this point he suddenly realized he hadn’t thought about anything for some time. Life was again ebbing away.

  For long hours he lay motionless, then he suddenly saw before him something like a rifle target or a geological map. Whatever it was, it was mute, and his efforts to understand what it represented were fruitless. Quite a lot of time passed before he worked out that he was looking at his own fingers. The tips of his fingers still had brown traces of ch
eap cigarettes that had been smoked, then sucked to the very end; the pads had a marked dactyloscopic pattern like a relief map of a mountain. All ten digits had the same pattern of concentric circles, like tree rings on a log. He recalled once upon a time in childhood being stopped on the boulevard by a Chinese laundryman, who worked in a laundry in the basement of the house where he grew up. The Chinese man casually took one hand, then the other hand, turned his palms up and excitedly shouted something in Chinese. It turned out that he was announcing that the boy was fortunate and had the marks to prove it. The poet very often recalled this mark of good fortune, especially when he had printed his first book. Now he remembered the Chinese man without any bad feelings or irony. He didn’t care one way or the other.

  The main thing was that he wasn’t dead yet. Actually, what did it mean to say “died as a poet”? There had to be something childlike and naïve about such a death. Or was there something preplanned, theatrical about it, like Yesenin’s or Mayakovsky’s death.

  “Died as an actor”: that made sense. But “died as a poet”?

  Yes, he had some inkling of what lay ahead for him. The transit camp had given him time to understand and guess a lot of things. And he was glad, quietly glad of his feeble state, and he hoped he would die. He remembered a prison argument from some way back: what’s worse, more frightful—camp or prison? Nobody knew anything for real, the arguments were speculative, and how cruel was the smile of a man who had been brought to that prison from a camp. The poet never forgot that man’s smile, so much so that he was afraid to recall it.

  Think how neatly he’d trick the people who’d brought him here if he died now. He’d cheat them of a whole ten years. A few years ago he had been in exile, and he then knew he had been permanently put on a special list. Permanently?! The scales had changed, and words had acquired new meanings.