The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017

by Sarah Vowell

  A raging wind drives the thunderclouds low. Autumn! The russet incline of the hill is hacked into a cliff face day by day, exposing layers of geology. Trucks drive up, and moments later drive away, shuttling without respite between hill and railway station. The people, like ants, are patiently, persistently destroying the hill, transforming its hump into a square in front of the future station. The gash widens: fifteen hundred workers are a mere sprinkling in the maw of the hill, but their crowbars and shovels are having an impact. They count the cubic meters, fighting for the right to live outside, to be free. They rush through everything, whatever the weather. There is a hunger to work and work and work.

  There are only statistics, statistics, statistics.

  Days, cubic meters, kilometers.

  If their strength did not give out, these people would work here night and day.

  They work a ten-day week.

  The USSR is impatient for the Second Track. The Soviet Far East is impatient for goods.

  The Second Track will open up this region, speed its development. And so on.

  29 October 1935

  Rain and slush. The clay has been churned into sludge, which makes walking tough. Today is a footslog day. Twenty kilometers to Phalanx 13.

  We’ve been invited to dinner by the section commander.

  We walk into the village and enter a huge Ukrainian-style house that has been plastered from the inside with clay then whitewashed. Icons are draped with embroidered linen. The bedstead is a trestle bed with a lacy coverlet and the pillows are in gray chintz pillowslips. Everything is incongruous: the rags stuffed in windows where the glass is missing, the Russian stove, the icons, the bed. Dinner is different too. We have borscht with meat from a goat slaughtered yesterday, then noodles in milk with white gingerbread, homemade with butter. The Ukrainians are in their third year here and have a smallholding with a cow, three pigs, ten chickens. Sometimes they even have honey. Life could be worse for them.

  The guards are permanently in a foul mood because their food is so bad.

  ‘They’re stashing food away for Revolution Day, so we get no fats.’

  The camp administration have everything: meat, butter, everything.

  In the evening we get an escape alert and everyone fans out. I walk along the track toward Ussuriysk. It’s very still. The sun hovers over a hilltop, its last rays playing over the russet brown leaves of the trees, creating fantastic colors that contrast with equally fantastic shadows. It’s exotic scenery for a European: a dwarf oak forest, the hills receding, one higher than the other far into the distance, their summits fanciful, humped animals. The haystacks look like the helmets of giants half rooted in the soil.

  Construction of the Second Track is nearing completion. Only yesterday this was a graceless, jagged precipice with gnarled shrubs jutting out of it, but today? Today a women prisoners’ brigade appeared and now for 150 meters there is an even, two-storey high embankment with regular lines and a smooth surface that is a sight for sore eyes.

  Hills are sliced through, marshes drained, embankments embanked, bridges straddle streams coaxed into drainage conduits. It’s the result of concrete, iron, human labor. Stubborn, persistent, focused labor.

  And all around, the taiga, the dense forests of Siberia. As Pushkin never said, how much that word contains! How much that is untouched, unknown, unknowable! How many human tragedies, how many lives the taiga has swallowed up. I shudder when I think about the trek to Siberia, to exile, to prison. And now here is Petropavlovka, a village whose buildings bear the mark of a past of direst penury, but where a collective farm now thrives.

  30 October 1935

  To the bathhouse, the miraculous bathhouse! It’s just a wooden shed, its inside walls pointed with cement, although you could stop up scores of cracks and still be left with as many again. There’s a layer of slime on the floor, a cauldron plastered in place on top of the stove. The bathhouse is warm now, but how will it be in winter? The roof leaks—but still, I have a good scrub. It feels so good after twenty days!

  I couldn’t help getting nostalgic over the bathhouse in Moscow. It would be so nice to have a proper night’s sleep too, but we are here to work. Nightfall brings disturbances, escapes, killings. For once, though, may the gentle autumn night extend its protective mantle over the captive. Two runaways this time. There are interrogations, pursuits, memoranda, reports to HQ. The Third Section takes an interest, and in place of rest night brings unrest and nightmares.

  1 November 1935

  Then there are prisoners who refuse to go out to work. They’re just the same as all the others, no less human. They get just as upset at losing that roving red banner as anyone else. They cry just as bitterly. They have the same psychology as anyone serving a sentence, the same oppressive thoughts about backbreaking toil, bad conditions, hopes for the future. The same faith that some day they will be free, the same disappointed hopes, despair, and mental trauma. You need to work on their psychology, be subtle, be kind. For them kindness is like a second sun in the sky. The competitiveness here is cutthroat. A foul-up in recording their work credits can drive them to attempt escape, commit murder, and so on. No amount of “administrative measures” help, and nor does a pistol. A bullet can only end a life, which is no solution, and a dead prisoner can cause a lot of grief. A wounded zek is a wild beast.

  4–5 November 1935

  Five hours’ sleep in the past forty-eight. It snowed during the night, icy cold. At five in the morning there’s a noise, a knock. I hear the duty guard reporting to the deputy head of GHQ that it’s not easing off. It’s as cold in the room as outside in the snow.

  We check out the huts. Oh, life! How can you do this to people? There are bare bunks, gaps everywhere in the walls, snow on the sleeping prisoners, no firewood. A mass of shivering people, intelligent, educated people. Dressed in rags filthy from the trackbed ballast. Fate toys with us all. To fate, none of us matter in the slightest.

  They can’t sleep at night, then they spend the day laboring, often in worn-out shoes or woven sandals, without mitts, eating their cold meals at the quarry. In the evening their barracks are cold again and people rave through the night. How can they not recall their warm homes? How can they not blame everyone and everything, and probably rightly so? The camp administration don’t give a damn about the prisoners and as a result they refuse to go out to work. They think we are all bastards and they are right. What they are asking for is the absolute minimum, the very least we are obliged to give them. We have funds that are allocated for it, but our hoping for the best, our haphazardness, our reluctance, or the devil only knows what, means we deprive them of the very minimum they need to work.

  10 November 1935

  This life is nomadic, cold, transient, disordered. We are getting used to just hoping for the best. That wheezing accordion underscores the general emptiness. The cold click of a rifle bolt. Wind outside the window. Dreams and drifting snow. Accordion wailing, feet beating time.

  12 November 1935

  An influx of juvenile delinquents: the zeks call them “sparkies.” We count them: five short. Count them again: still five short. We check them again: ten short, so another five have got away. We bring out extra security. Thirty sparkies are working; there is no way any of them can escape. We count again: twenty-nine. They cover themselves with sand or snow and, when everyone else has left, come out and leg it. Three more escaped during the night.

  I talk to their top dog.

  “Can you find them?”

  “Sure!”

  He did. They won’t do it again. It turns out he sent them off himself and they got drunk but they’re back now. Others will do the same tomorrow. I let a man out for a pee and he just disappeared. I saw a woman standing there. She pulled out a skirt she’d tucked into her trousers, put a shawl over her head, and before I knew it she’d vanished.

  13 November 1935

  I walked to Arkhara this morning. Twenty kilometers hardly counts here. We talked sho
p: someone got killed, someone else got killed. In 3 Platoon a bear ripped the scalp off a hunter and smashed up his rifle. They bayoneted it.

  I bought frozen apples. They were a delight to eat. I spent the day hanging around at the station, which is regarded as normal. What can you do if there are no trains? Hang around.

  16 November 1935

  It’s 26 degrees below zero and a gale-force wind is blowing. Cold. Cold outside, cold indoors. Our building seems to have more holes than wall. The building’s superintendent comes in and cheers us up:

  “Don’t worry, lads, it’s going to get twice as cold as this.”

  How wasteful human mismanagement is. Nobody thought to lay the sub-grade before the frost came and now the laborers are forced to dig a trench, thirty cm deep, into frozen clay as viscous as tin.

  17 November 1935

  Do you know what it feels like to be out in the taiga at night?

  Let me tell you. There are oak trees, perhaps three hundred years old, their branches bare, like giants’ arms, like tentacles, paws, beaks of prehistoric monsters, and they seem to reach out to seize and crush anyone they can catch.

  You sit round a campfire and the flickering shadows make all these limbs look like they’re moving, breathing, animated, alive. The quiet rustling of the remaining leaves and the branches tapping other branches make you think even more of the Cyclops or other monsters. You are overhearing a conversation you can’t understand. There are questions being asked and answers given.

  You hear melodies and rhythms. The flames of the fire pierce the darkness for five meters or so, and sparks fly like long glowworms in the air, swirling, colliding and overtaking each other. The face of your comrade opposite, vividly lit by the flames against the backdrop of the night, with shadows darting from his nose and the peak of his Red Army helmet, looks theatrically grotesque. You don’t want to talk loudly. It would be out of place. You want to sit and doze and listen to the whispering of the trees.

  23 November 1935

  One more day crossed out of my life in the service of pointless military discipline. What if the Third Section read these lines, or the Political Department? They will interpret them their way.

  24 November 1935

  Have you seen the sun rise in these hills?

  Something unexpected is the way the darkness disappears instantly. You look one way and it is dark, then you turn, close your eyes for a moment, and it is day. It’s as if the light had been stalking you, waiting for you to open the door so that it could slip in, as iridescent as mother-of-pearl. The sun has not appeared yet but the sky is already ablaze, not only on the horizon but everywhere. It is aflame, changing like a theater set under the skilled hand of a lighting technician; as the action unfolds, it is painted every color. Rockets explode, firing rays of light from behind the hilltop. There is a stillness, a solemn silence, as if a sacrament is to be administered that cannot be celebrated without it. The silence intensifies and the sky reaches the peak of its brilliance, its apogee. The light grows no brighter but, in an instant, from behind the hill, the fireball of the sun emerges, warm, radiant, and greeted by an outburst of song from the dawn chorus.

  Morning has broken. The day begins, and with it all the vileness. Here is one instance: there is a fight in the phalanx, a fight between women. They are beating one of the best shock workers to death and we are powerless to intervene. We are not allowed to use firearms inside the phalanx. We do not have the right even to carry a weapon. They are all 35-ers, but you feel sorry for the woman all the same. If we wade in there will be a riot; if they later recognize we were right, they will regret what they have done. You just get these riots. The devil knows but the Third Section doesn’t. They’ll come down on us and bang us up whether or not the use of firearms was justified. Meanwhile, the zeks get away with murder. Well, what the hell. Let the prisoners get on with beating each other up. Why should we get their blood on our hands?

  27 November 1935

  This is how we live: in a cramped room furnished with a trestle bed and straw mattress, a regulation-issue blanket, a table with only three out of four legs and a creaky stool with nails you have to hammer back in every day with a brick. A paraffin lamp with a broken glass chimney and lampshade made of newspaper. A shelf made from a plank covered with newspaper. Walls partly bare, partly papered with cement sacks. Sand trickles down from the ceiling and there are chinks in the window frames, door, and gaps in the walls. There’s a wood-burning stove, which, while lit, keeps one side of you warm. The side facing toward the stove is like the South Pole, the side facing away from it is like the North Pole. The amount of wood we burn would make a normal room as warm as a bathhouse, but ours is colder than a changing room.

  Will they find me incompetent, not up to the job, and kick me out? Why should I be sacrificed like so many others? You become stultified, primitive, you turn into a bully and so on. You don’t feel you’re developing, either as a commander or a human being. You just get on with it.

  4 December 1935

  Before I am even out of bed, another escape. I’ll have to go looking for him tomorrow. We should just shoot three in each phalanx to put them off the idea. Escapes disrupt everything. What a dog’s life, sniffing around like a bloodhound, browbeating everyone all the time. Banged one zek up for twenty-four hours.

  7 December 1935

  I have to admit, I am growing into BAM. Imperceptibly the environment, the way of doing things, the life are sucking me in. Perhaps inevitably.

  Tried studying Leninism but it only made me feel worse by rubbing in the kind of life we are living. What positive thing can I occupy myself with? Nothing.

  8 December 1935

  Above the hills there are whirlwinds and snowstorms. Everything is milky white. The silhouettes of trees make it look as if they are walking toward us as, now here, now there, the blizzard relents. But then there’s another flurry, and tongues of dry, prickly snow inflict thousands, millions of venomous snakebites. Branches as thick as your arm, thicker even, snap off readily in the icy cold.

  I sleep soundly and wake up refreshed. The air is clean and frosty and sometimes there is even a dusting of snow. My lecture program flaps on the wall. By lunchtime the temperature is down to minus 40 and the cold attacks every exposed part of my body. I stare longingly at a log of firewood, imagining the energy, the warmth within it. It’s so cold in the room that a wet hand freezes to the door handle. Soap doesn’t lather until the heat of my hand has melted it. Smoke from a steam engine doesn’t disperse but hangs in the air like tufts of cotton wool. It mixes with steam to form snowflakes, an impenetrable haze obscuring a window like nets.

  The lads have formed a jazz band with penny whistles and pipes, balalaikas and rattles. Music can also be warming, literally.

  Meanwhile, zeks are on the run. Freedom. Freedom, even with hunger and cold, is still precious and irreplaceable. They may get away for only a day, but at least they get out of the camp. I wouldn’t mind a day away from this job myself.

  9 December 1935

  Minus 42 degrees during the night and very, very quiet. The air chimes like crystal. The dry crack of a gunshot. It feels as if the air could break like glass and splinter. In places the ground has fissures as wide as my hand. It’s so cold that even the rails can snap, with a sound unlike anything I’ve ever heard.

  29 January 1936

  My neck has frozen up and I can’t bend or turn it. I have a headache and a runny nose. Went out to Territories 13 and 14. Squad Commander Sivukha goads his gray along at a gallop but my devil of a horse, snorting and twitching its ears and straining at the reins, doesn’t let me take the lead.

  My heart is so desolate, it alarms me.

  I feel as if I’m not living in the real world but in some weird, unearthly world in which I can live and think but can’t speak my thoughts. I can move, but everything is constrained. The sword of the Revtribunal hangs over everything I do. I feel constantly held back: you mustn’t do this, you mustn’t
do that. Although I feel solidarity with society, I feel cut off from it by an insurmountable, if fragile, partition. I’m aware of my own strength, yet at the same time feel weak and powerless, a nonentity. I feel hopelessness and apathy, almost despair, that so much cannot be achieved. I stumble blindly along the paths of this world, unable to work out what is allowed and what is not. The thought that drills into my brain is, “How long will this go on for?” A lifetime? I have at least ten years of life ahead of me and I’m not being allowed to live them like a normal human being. Must I despair? We have to fight for every stupid little thing: a visit to the bathhouse, sugar, matches, clean linen, and more besides. As for heat, firewood, we almost risk our lives for that. We, the armed guards, are powerless.

  5 February 1936

  The sun warms us more kindly, and is even quite hot. During the day it gets as warm as 15–18 degrees. Not long now until summer and more escape attempts. The shortages of food, shoes, and underwear are so tiresome. We are promised everything, and in the Center they clearly think we are living in a paradise. In reality, we are living in theories. We have theoretical semolina, butter, and new uniforms. Theoretically the Center is thinking about us. That’s supposed to be encouraging. For some reason I simply do not believe it. Perhaps I’m the wrong sort of person. I would like to be provided, simply and without rhetoric, with the basic necessities. Today we had dumplings and homemade noodles, etc. Tomorrow, it will be homemade noodles and dumplings, and that has been going on for the past month.