For the next several months, Dmitri went on about his doctor’s duties in a state of stupor and total indifference to his fate. That was hardly wise, for he could easily run into trouble on a daily basis. Even for a trifling error, an imprisoned doctor could be stripped of his position and sent to general outdoor work at once.13
He had to be on guard at all times and be sure not to miss anything that was expected of him. To have enough time to visit the camp kitchen and taste the food, he had to get up earlier than the general prisoner population. Then he had to rush back to the dispensary and attend to the sick who had fallen ill during the night, as well as those who had been assigned the night before to have their temperatures checked, so that their diagnoses could be finalized. Then he had to show up at the prisoner lineup with a list of those who were excused from work because of sickness. After that, he also had to fulfill the functions of sanitary inspector, that is, to check for potential sources of infection all over the camp site: in the bathrooms, the garbage pits, and the morgue.
If a new prisoner transport was due to arrive, it spelled additional—and quite unpleasant—chores. As a rule, such transports carried a number of corpses of prisoners who had died en route. It was his responsibility to do the paperwork related to accepting the dead and to perform an autopsy on each to determine the cause of death. Then death certificates had to be filled out and signed, and the corpses had to be stored in the hall of the morgue, awaiting others to be buried in a specially dug ditch.14
Meanwhile, life in the camps was even tougher than before the war broke out. The camp food supply became even worse than before. Food shortages were the main cause of death for many prisoners. When working in the fields, they stole and ate whatever they could lay their hands on, including raw vegetables and even grass. As a result, they suffered stomach ailments, of which many died. But this didn’t seem to bother the camp authorities. They were required to have a thousand prisoners in the camp, and while camp prisoners died daily, sometimes at the rate of ten to fifteen per day, new ones kept arriving, thus keeping their quota in balance. During the year of 1942, the camp “resembled a pot on a hot plate: in exchange for evaporated water, fresh water was poured in, and the level in the pot stayed the same.”15
Actually, the prisoners died not because of hunger per se but because of kwashiorkor, a disease caused by lack of protein. Swollen or dried up prisoners were brought to special barracks for the dying. Their mental capabilities destabilized, they couldn’t move. They covered themselves, putting blankets over their heads, turned toward the wall, and died, one after another—“without moaning, without regrets or grumbling.”16
Of course, Dmitri was in a much better position than regular convicts, but he, too, was looking for a way to get some more food. For that purpose, he put his artistic talent to use. The town outside the camp had no facility for taking pictures, so he made pencil sketches of the civilian employees of the camp. He also catered his services to the fellow prisoners. Many of them wanted to send pictures home to their families, and they often asked him to embellish their looks. For example, one customer asked him to draw him not the way he looked at the time, emaciated and bald, but the way he remembered himself before his arrest—well fed, with a thick head of hair. One aging man asked Dmitri to draw the hands of a youngster in the camp, for they reminded him of the hands of the young wife he’d left behind. Pleased with Dmitri’s work, the prisoner then sewed the portrait into the front of his tunic. In lieu of payment, Dmitri received now a half ration of bread, now a half dozen cigarettes, now some goodies stolen from the kitchen—a couple of onions, a piece of salt pork. At one point the camp chief set up a shop producing children’s toys that he sold in the nearest town. He hired Dmitri to paint the toys, sometimes rewarding him with salted fish, sometimes with a few potatoes.17
But life remained dreadful. There was also a lack of fuel. Though there was plenty of peat nearby beyond the zone, the camp authorities didn’t bother to organize its supply. There was no electricity in the barracks; it was dark and cold. According to the camp rules, Dmitri had to perform autopsies on all prisoners who died without a diagnosis. He had to do dozens, sometimes hundreds, of them with a dull knife and without gloves. After losing both his wife and his mother, being put in charge of the barracks for the dying, and witnessing numerous deaths around him, Dmitri became increasingly depressed. In a state of constant dread, he became withdrawn, self-absorbed, and alienated. He began seeing things: a human hand, with its moving fingers coming toward his eyes, or some ugly faces. He couldn’t decide whether these were hallucinations, that is, psychopathological phenomena, or the result of an eye hemorrhage due to increased blood pressure. Occupied all day long with the dead, he saw them in his dreams. The images of life around him and those that came in his dreams were equally horrific.18
But, in time, Dmitri saw the truth of Dostoevsky’s observation about human nature, as expressed by Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment: “After all, a human being, scoundrel that he is, gets used to everything!” (Ko vsemu-to podlets chelovek privykaet!). Dmitri gradually adjusted even to the horrible conditions of the Gulag. Using the perks of his position as a camp dispensary doctor, he not only found a way to write but also, unexpectedly, found himself in a young woman’s arms.
SEVENTEEN
Love Behind Barbed Wire
There would be no fortune for me, if misfortune didn’t give it a helping hand.
—RUSSIAN PROVERB
My dear one,
Take me along with you.
There, in a faraway land,
Call me your wife.
—FROM A POPULAR RUSSIAN SONG
One early spring day in 1942, late in the evening, as he was making last rounds in the camp, Dmitri was called to one of the women’s barracks to take away a body they had found on the floor. Dmitri checked for a pulse but found none. Small-postured and puny, with closely cropped hair and a face smeared with thick dirt, it was hard to tell either the sex or age of the deceased. He loaded the light body onto his back and carried it across the camp all the way to the morgue. It was raining and dark. He put the body down on the floor of the morgue and was about to leave, when he heard a quiet moan. Swearing in every language he knew, he hoisted the skeletal body back onto his back and lugged it to the other side of the camp, to the sick barrack. A few times he fell into the pits and clambered up only to fall again after taking a few more steps.
He carried his load to the barrack, washed it up with warm water, covered it with a blanket, and placed it near the stove. Soon, the man on duty in the barrack called him to report that his load was a teenage girl. Dmitri came to give her a shot of caffeine and camphor. Since she had no papers, when he recorded her in the ledger, he christened her “Liuonga”—the name of a girl he’d known during his time in Africa.1
He later found out the girl’s real name, Alenka, and that she was almost fifteen. An orphan—her father had been arrested in 1937 as an “enemy of the people,” and her mother had died two years later—the girl was adopted by a local collective farm and given a cleaning job at the creamery. One day, as some peasants working in the field passed by, they asked Alenka to give them a small piece of butter. She did. Someone reported her to the police, and as the daughter of an “enemy of the people,” she was sentenced to ten years in the camps for “embezzlement of Socialist property.” In the camps, she was drawn into the company of hard-core criminals. Then she fell seriously ill. To give her a chance to recuperate, Dmitri assigned her a prolonged stay in the sick barrack and went on about his camp life.2
A half year later, late on a summer evening as he lay in his cabin, somebody entered. Always on guard, he was relieved to see that the guest was a beautiful light-haired, blue-eyed teenage girl, whom he recognized as none other than Alenka. She told him she knew that he had saved her life and wanted to show her appreciation. She began mumbling something about being clean, just coming from a bath-house. Still weak from prolonged illness, she cried on his ch
est as he reproached her for this stupid way of expressing her gratitude.
Another six months passed, and the next winter Alenka called again. During the previous summer, Dmitri had recommended her as a cook’s assistant in the slaughterhouse, where prisoners worked preparing pig carcasses for delivery to the military. Always wary that the ever-hungry prisoners would steal pieces of pork by randomly cutting bits from the carcasses, thus spoiling them, the authorities allowed them to have pork scraps, which they could cook for extra nutrition. As a result of working there, Alenka gained so much weight that at first Dmitri had a hard time recognizing her. Now again she came to thank him for both saving her life and giving her the chance to regain her health. She began undressing, and pieces of cooked pork fell out from under her clothes. Dmitri was horrified: if caught, the girl risked another ten-year term for stealing state property.
He again tried to stop her romantic advances. She begged him not to reject her, for not only was it a matter of showing appreciation for what he had done for her, but it was also a way of protecting herself. He knew that she was telling the truth. At any given time in the lagpunkt where Dmitri served his term, female prisoners constituted no more than 20 percent of the camp population. Thus, women were always in demand. All of them, with the exception of old women and nuns, had sexual relations with men.3
They hardly had much choice. As in other camps, here, too, female prisoners were preyed upon by all males, whether they were the guards or the camp free workers or other prisoners. The pressure to cohabit was unrelenting, often accompanied by threats of physical attack, especially by hard-core criminals, complete with torture and humiliation. Those who resisted would be overwhelmed with back-breaking work, hounded by camp hoodlums, or cheated by the camp cooks of their rightful share of food, thus crushing them with hunger. A female prisoner was therefore forced to pick a sexual partner to save herself from these everyday threats. And no less important than anything else, if prisoners weren’t overly exhausted and on the verge of collapse, they were looking for true love; even platonic relationships flourished. As Dmitri remarks, “Despair, fear, and loneliness pushed men and women toward each other”; otherwise, “melancholy would drive them to the grave.” As another former camp prisoner, Frid, observed, such relationships “humanized” a prisoner’s life. “In that life where, from early morning until bedtime, women heard only obscene language and threats and saw injustice, disorder, high-handedness, and violence,” Dmitri recalls, “the only solution was cohabitation. And everyone who could do so took advantage of such an opportunity.”4
According to the unwritten moral code of the camps, once a woman made her choice, she was left alone and was considered under her partner’s protection. As other former camp prisoners testify, despite rampant rape and prostitution in the camps, women who had a camp “husband” were spared. Astonishingly, this unwritten rule was observed in the camps religiously.5
Neither he nor Alenka were exceptions. After all, camp life was first and foremost about survival. Responding to Alenka’s persistence, Dmitri finally gave in to her pleas. To be on the safe side, she asked him to list her as a syphilis patient, which would save her from men once and for all. To support the legend, she even learned to speak in a hoarse voice, imitating the voice of patients affected by that disease. Of course, it also meant she had to let go of her job at the slaughterhouse kitchen. But now strong and healthy, she was ready for it. They transferred her to a brigade working in the fields.
She and Dmitri became lovers. Now fully recovered and matured, Alenka became an eager and passionate lover. However, both she and Dmitri were aware of the temporary nature of their arrangement. As Dmitri explains it, such cohabitation was “rarely the result of calculation or physical need, but always, in all cases without exception, of the need of peace and quiet, for inner balance, for heartfelt kindness and friendship, for familial comfort. But camp liaisons lacked exactly these things. Surely the love of miserable people forbidden by the authorities couldn’t give them what they hoped for: embracing each other, both sides thought of those who had been left behind, their loved ones, and the inner closeness didn’t take root.” Soon, Alenka was sent to another camp. They said farewell to each other wholeheartedly. “Like two migratory birds, we came together for a time and parted forever,” Dmitri recalls.
But he was destined to see Alenka again. In December 1947, on his way to Moscow for possible retrial, he was crouched in the snow outside some railway station with a group of prisoners, when, among another group of prisoners sitting in the snow nearby and waiting for a different train, he saw a tall young woman, blue-eyed, with a proud demeanor, and recognized his former camp lover. As he learned from other prisoners in her group, she was now on her way to another camp, having received another five-year term for violating camp rules. She turned around, also recognized him, and shouted, “Doctor! My one and only joy!” But the locomotive whistled, and they parted again. This time, for good.
In the first lagpunkt of Suslovo Siblag, Dmitri began writing in earnest. Here he had enough comfort to do it. After making rounds in the barrack for the deceased and finishing the required paperwork, he sat down in his small cabin and took to the pen. The thought of keeping a record of his life had occurred to him back aboard the barge going upstream on the Yenisei River on his way to Mariinsk. Shocked by the appalling conditions of the prisoner transport, he kept telling himself, “You should remember this . . . Make sure not to forget that . . .” In the hold among the other prisoners was one dying man, whom Dmitri nicknamed the Librarian. The man told Dmitri that he should make it his duty to the country to record what was going on in the camps, because future generations of Soviet people must know about it. This gave Dmitri a tremendous boost of energy, for it gave his life new purpose and meaning.
He had actually made his first attempts to write about his camp experience back in Norilsk. Quite in the spirit of his resistance to accepting reality and persistence in believing in the eventual victory of Communist ideals, there he composed something of, as he characterized it, a “heroic poem in prose, a hymn to living and fallen fighters.” For that purpose, he selected the most interesting prisoners’ life stories and added his sketches of them. In time, he compiled fifty of them, giving the manuscripts for safekeeping to a doctor who worked in the camps. But the doctor was transferred to another camp, and with him the writings disappeared without a trace.
Now, in Suslovo, under the impression of Alenka’s story, Dmitri began writing about women in the camps. He set himself a daily norm—do four pages in his tiny handwriting. As in many other camps, there was a shortage of both ink and paper. He stole some ink from the desk of the camp chief and mixed it with iodine. He used the backs of discarded medical records. When he ran out of these, he turned to pieces of plywood, scratching on them with a nail.6
Though writing in the camps wasn’t officially forbidden, describing the horrors of the Soviet camps was certainly a risky undertaking: if caught, he could get a new prison term plus a year of hard labor in the penal camp. Having a heart condition spelled a slow and painful death. But as in his young years, playing with danger still thrilled him. And his deep conviction in the historical value of his eyewitness reports gave him strength.
He mentally planned the forthcoming writing while doing other things, and by the time he had the opportunity to sit at his desk, he worked very quickly. If the writing session went without interruption and he succeeded in recording whatever he had planned, his morale was boosted. First, he reconstructed his notes about the Norilsk camp. Because of their potentially dangerous nature, he mixed these pages with other pages of writings and called the whole collection “Three Virginities.” If searched, such a title would give the impression that his writing was no more than some erotic fantasies. He cut out two pieces of material from his long johns and pasted them over the covers of two notebooks, one rough draft and one final draft of the first and second parts of his African travelogue, titled “Telliua, or the Beginnin
g of One Journey” and “Bubu, or the End of One Journey.” A prisoner working in the camp carpentry shop supplied him with glue. Dmitri adorned the covers with exotic-looking profiles of a girl and a savage to ensure that the camp censors would give the manuscripts an “OK” stamp.
But he had to be on guard all the time. At one point he panicked when he was called to report to the camp security officer (oper, in camp slang, short for operativnyi upolnomochennyi, “operative representative” of the security police). He thought that in his absence somebody had snuck into his cabin and denounced him for writing anti-Soviet pamphlets. What must he do now? One voice inside shouted that he must tear his writing into pieces: without hard evidence of the denunciation, he had a good chance of surviving. But it was too painful to destroy the labor of so many hours that was of such importance to him. He decided to wait and see the reason for his summons. Before leaving his cabin, he placed the notebook onto the oven door of the stove pipe so that with little effort he could slip it into the fireplace. And he ordered the man in charge of the stove to keep the fire going. Luckily, they called him in for the usual: to translate letters in foreign languages sent to the prisoners before censoring them.
One sunny day at the beginning of September 1942, a female prisoner patient came to seek his help. Her name was Anna Mikhailovna Ivanova. She had sad gray eyes and, though a light gray strand of hair covered her forehead, a youthful face. Dmitri noticed her beautiful legs, her whole small but elegant figure. Like many other newly arrived prisoners to the camps, she was wearing her own clothing, taken along from her home after her arrest—a ski suit and good shoes with thick socks. That day, with a group of other prisoners, she had been escorted from another camp unit, covering the distance of nearly twenty miles on foot. The trip took a toll on her. She asked the doctor to attend to her sore leg and to give her some medicine for her heart condition.
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