Emptiness. Perhaps it is always going to feel like this now. I’ll get used to it and think it nothing out of the ordinary, normal.
We’re going hunting tomorrow. What will that be like?
The political instructor says he will find goats. We’ll see.
21 November 1935
At 5.15 a.m. I hear a train crossing the bridge with what sounds like a loose brake shoe knocking. I’m just dozing off again when the duty officer reports:
‘Crash at Kilometre 752!’
‘What kind of train?’
‘Don’t know.’
I leap out of bed.
‘Platoon Commander! Send four men to the accident and the rest to breakfast. After breakfast, send a relief shift.’
‘At once, Comrade Commander!’
The rear wheels of a flat wagon loaded with timber derailed on the bridge and the wagon broke all the railings. How the whole thing didn’t derail I can’t imagine. Having trailed along for over a kilometre, the part of the train with the broken wagon decoupled and blocked the track. The driver continued almost half a kilometre to the station and received the baton to proceed, but was stopped at the signal just out of the station. We dumped the timber, lifted one end of the wagon on to a trolley and shunted it into the siding.
It messed up our hunting, but the superintendent and I went anyway. Looking at a hill, you don’t see the snow because the grass is higher than a man. A swamp, full of goat tracks. It looked to be no distance but was 5 km. Walking through an oak forest in winter gives you the willies. It feels strange for someone from Russia. I didn’t even notice the two goats skipping past. The superintendent did but couldn’t shoot for fear of killing me.
I want to get to bed.
22 November 1935
Life just bowls along. We had to travel to Arkhara, although ‘travel’ is putting it too grandly. First we had to plod 5 km to the rise where the train slows down and you can jump aboard. We sped through the last 12 km on an express carrying firewood and timber. The political instructor was reminiscing about the Far North camp at Solovki, where the Solovki officials, not the Soviets, are in charge. Not Soviet but Solovki power there! The appropriateness of their methods for educating and rehabilitating the prisoners can be judged by the sentence passed on F.§§§ and some others.
You can find yourself in a stupid situation and the regulations are no help at all. I arrived wearing an Abyssinian-style cowl, and must have looked a right prick because the chief said, ‘What’s this in aid of?’ The political adviser, adjutant and entire HQ staff came out to take a look, even the political adviser to the head of the entire Armed Guards Unit. What could I say? They took the HQ clerk’s snazzy Red Army helmet from him and put it on me. I could see that cap meant a lot to the boy and made his life a bit more bearable. How easily his pride and joy was taken off him. The position I was in, as a commander. I would not have done that.
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.
I walk through a part of the site where women are working and hear long torrents of virtuoso abuse, with Siberian trimmings. To think that women can sink this low. They imagine gutter language is chic and raffish. They disgust me. This lot really do deserve the rough end of Solovki power.
And yet the countryside is enchanting in its wild beauty. The slope of a hill stretches further than imaginable and dissolves in the distant purple haze. Your body trembles as you take in the immensity, this sparsely populated landscape untouched by man. Beyond the nearest hill are others, and beyond them yet more, and more, and more, as many as you can picture, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. You feel as if you own all this space and that, if you wanted, you could come and live here, and sow, and plough, and reap to your heart’s content, with no boundaries, unfettered.
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 theatre set under the skilled hand of a lighting technician; as the action unfolds, it is painted every colour. 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 the former top shock worker 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?
25 November 193$
After work I went walking in the hills. There were lots of tracks but not a goat to be seen. The company commander arrived. He seemed to find everything in order with the platoon but couldn’t bring himself to say so.
26 November 1935
For a second day I feel fagged out. Today, we went hunting in the hills.
We walk for ages but see only tracks. We head up the path on the hill. I hear a rustle of dry leaves, look round, see two goats leaping. ‘Over there!’ I say to the hunter standing behind me. The goats hear and scarper. I take a potshot, miss. Miss a second time. He misses too. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen, and shot at, goats in the wild.
Back at the hostel they are winding up Armed Guard Sigitov:
‘They escaped only to die in Arkhara. What a place to choose! You should’ve ordered them to lie down first and then shot them!’
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 towards 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.
28 November 193$
It’s cold outside, it’s cold inside, and it’s cold and cheerless inside me. How can you do a job properly if you have no interest in it and no wish to do it? And why is that? Because you don’t have the bare necessities of life and culture. The top brass don’t even talk about these things. Today we are faced with the fact that there is no
firewood. I have to order people about. I don’t need all this. Why does it always turn out this way?
My hands are stiff with cold. Why is no one looking after us commanders? What do all the brave words amount to? If we had even a hundredth of what Voroshilov promised here, on the railway, we would at least have a little hope. All the talk is of The Second Five-Year Plan, Maxim Gorky, Klim Voroshilov. The USSR has unparalleled aeroplanes, but here we don’t have even the bare minimum. Oh, hell! The only consolation is that it was even worse at the front. Some comfort! I sleep under two blankets, a leather coat and a sheepskin jacket.
I just can’t find my place here in the Baikal–Amur Mainline system, probably because it doesn’t exist. It’s different for peasants. They get something out of it, learn new tricks, find out things they didn’t know. All I’m going to learn here is how to be a slob, not give a damn, and not get caught.
29 November 1935
More emptiness. Nothing worth noting down. Even my mood is empty. I don’t care about anything. If there is an escape I won’t go out. To hell with it all! I’m not bothered that the women’s team has made good progress on the ballast. I’m not moved to see a train speeding round the bends with steam billowing behind it. Even sighting a fox can’t rouse my hunting instinct. I no longer wince at the duff notes played on the balalaika. Who cares?
30 November 1935
A south wind brings warmth and now it’s only 16 degrees below. Clouds in the sky. I go hunting with the political instructor. The nearest hill seems no distance away, but it’s 5 km and that’s far enough to warm us up.
That’s how we spent the day, moving from one hill to the next, one ravine to the next. It’s highly addictive. Spiralling goat tracks make patterns in the snow, loops, zigzags, triangles, all interlocking, mixed up together, sometimes forming a kind of oriental ornamentation, or something like the inscription on the tomb of an Ethiopian emperor. We must have walked for three hours, climbing hills, pushing through undergrowth, going down into ravines. Sometimes we came upon melted snow where a goat had been lying, but not the goats themselves. One might at least have skipped teasingly by.
Suddenly, just behind a projection, we saw a dugout and behind it a ramshackle cabin. There must have been a hundred beehives. We moved closer. Not only was there no lock on the door, but it wasn’t even tied shut. There were some bits and pieces under a shelter – carpenter’s tools, hive tops, cans, pottery and so on. It was warm in the hut and there were perhaps fifty cans of honey, scales, utensils, food. We could just go in and help ourselves. Here were the old Siberian customs and decency. And all around the forest were oaks broken by the storms, felled, collapsed from age, half-rotten, re-rooting in the ground. Freedom, space. We stalked for another four hours, to no avail.
We were both dog-tired. The political instructor barely made it back. Dinner, then relaxation.
The superintendent came in with good news: ‘The bathhouse is working.’ Cause for celebration.
31 November 1935
My day off. Went hunting again, and again bagged nothing. I didn’t even see anything to shoot at. Cold. Minus 29, with the wind searing my face and hands. The trees are beautiful, covered in hoar frost. Telegraph wires iced up and looking like threads of fire in the sun. No thoughts in my head. Well, perhaps just the one: some day I will make it back to Moscow.
I still have that hope. Hurray!
1, 2 and 3 December 1935
Wrote nothing in the diary: no time. Two days travelling round the sections. Escapes, and worse: in one phalanx someone caused an explosion.
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.
5 and 6 December 1935
On the 5th I was going round inspecting. If I keep this up who knows what’ll happen. Getting put away might get me kicked out sooner.
Morn catches fire above the hill
And fills with light the darkest creeks.
Blue the sky as lovers’ eyes,
Dawn the blush on lovers’ cheeks.
Only I’ve been sent an official report. Oh, hell!
*
14. 6–1 29. 6–2 . . . Seriously!###
Anger jeopardizes joy
Bile will flood, afflict the soul.
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. Knowledge which hasn’t been refracted through life’s practicalities is fairly useless. There’s no one here to talk to, joke or argue with. Feeling superior among inferiors is cold comfort. I need to feel I’m the best among equals. I need to be challenged, to have something to rise to. I need people to test me, goad me, and be able to hold my own. A year from now people will probably look down on me the way I look at this lot now. Awful, but a fact. Where’s my alternative?
8 December 1935
Thirty-three degrees below. Wind and snow. Our burzhuika stove is our salvation, our South Pole. How strange that in the era of the Second Five-Year Plan we should be using a word like that, and indeed using the mechanism itself in our everyday life. When it goes out, the heat is immediately gone too. Quite odd. You sit with a fur jacket over the arm towards the door, while your other side is blazing hot and sweating. When I am back home I may find it interesting to remember that, but right now it’s just really annoying.
Above the hills there are whirlwinds and snowstorms. Everything is milky white. The silhouettes of trees make it look as if they are walking towards 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 programme 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.
A message over the intercom to the railway station duty officer:
‘Comrade Duty Officer, a rail has broken at Kilometre 755. Hold the trains!’
They work quickly and efficiently. It’s just another job for the accident brigade. Silently and confidently, everyone does his bit and the passengers in the trains have no idea that their lives have been saved in this quiet, straightforward, businesslike, understated way. It’s a simple truth that, in many ways, people going about their daily work without a fuss are the real heroes.
I had to go all the way t
o Zhuravli. Murderously freezing. My fur jacket rigid in the cold, my felt boots like blocks of wood. Didn’t see a single bird.
10 December 1935
The water in our building has frozen so we can’t wash. When I splash water in one eye out of a mug, the other eye opens by reflex. Minus 45 degrees. The trains run slowly. Only the moon, with a superior air, glides serenely through the sky . . .
The moon looks down above the hills, two-horned and bleak and pale,
Reminding us it’s cold enaugh to make us quake and quail.
Centuries-old oak trees sway, their branches snap and break And forest creatures shun the chill until it’s time to wake.
I stay indoors all day, wearing outdoor clothing. The stoves can’t compete with the cold. My ink has frozen. I sleep in breeches and sports training top, my hair freezing to the cold sweat on my forehead.
What fun. That’s it! I’ve had enough.
11 December 1935
Today it’s minus 47. One cheek has puffed up and I have swelling on my forehead, near my eye. This kind of cold makes you swell up. The prisoners are working, hacking at part of the embankment. Still, knowing the right people is a good thing. How can we combat nepotism, and do we need to? Without it I might have caught pneumonia or worse, but pulling strings was my salvation: I got my felt boots re-stitched. Good, fast work. That’s all very well, but there’s no escaping the fact we now have three and a half months of frost ahead. We’ve got no lining for insulating the walls and no prospect of getting any. No caulking either.
I got a letter from the railway office. Civilians don’t know how lucky they are. When you are warm at your workplace and at home and have enough to eat, you take everything for granted. Everything is under control, so why bust a gut? Then you get bored. Things are different if you are constantly wondering when this is going to end, when you will get time to rest, when you will have the bare essentials, when you will even get a little time to plan your day, when you will no longer have the sword of the Revtribunal hanging over your head.**** I will hold life so dear when I can go out and buy whatever I want at any time I please. White bread, for instance. Right now I feel every passing day is another one I haven’t lived.
The Day Will Pass Away Page 5