I came up behind him and said very formally in Russian, “Mr. S—!”
He turned around and looked at me curiously and not uncourteously. I immediately said, “You’re from Moscow?”
“Yes.”
“You worked at the American Embassy?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, so did I. My name is Alexander Dolgun—” and into the extended prayer, article, section, all the normal elements of first meeting.
After a while I said, “Listen, I heard all the time that this was a death camp, and I thought it was pretty horrifying when I first got here. But you look in good shape. How come?”
He laughed. “For some reason or other, my dossier was marked EXTREMELY DANGEROUS when I first came down to Karaganda. That was in forty-two, you know. There were no camps for politicals then. ‘Extremely dangerous’! I don’t know why. But they never dared let me out of camp to go to work. Pridurki from the first day. Always in camp, always a better chance to steal food. No copper mines. Different now. They know I’m not dangerous. So I get some hard assignments. But I know my tufta now. I get along.”
“Tufta?”
“Tufta means filling your work quota without really doing any work. Look, I can give you some hints, but mostly you’ll have to figure it out for yourself, depending on the job you’re on. If we work together sometime, you’ll never have to work at all, believe me. But you have to know how to do it, and if you don’t learn you’ll be dead before you’re out of school!”
Then he said, “Who’s your brigadier?”
“Vtyurin.”
“Well, I don’t know him. But you better make friends with your brigadier. That’s the beginning of successful tufta.”
I said, “I’ve only just met him, but I’ll take your advice.” Then I said, “By the way, I saw your wife just about two years ago. She thinks you’re shot, you know.”
Victor gave me a funny look, then a short bitter laugh. “Good,” he said. “Let her think it, if she really does. But the bitch will say anything if it serves her purpose.”
I was surprised at the bitterness. “But she’s been working as a Soviet clerk in the embassy and she drove us nuts weeping and complaining and asking for help.”
“Does she get it?”
“Well, they give her some food, or some money. They feel bad about what happened to you.”
“She takes food home from the embassy and the Organs don’t pick her up for black marketeering, is that it? And doesn’t that make you think?”
I had never thought about it before. “I guess because you were an employee there, the Organs think she has good reason… I don’t know,” I said a bit lamely.
“Of course she has good reason,” he said bitterly. “She’s on the best of terms with the bloody Organs. It was my wife who put them on to me.”
Victor S. had gone to Kuibyshev when the American Embassy moved there early in the war. He worked as a translator in the economic section. He was a Soviet citizen. He and his wife quarreled a good deal, as husbands and wives often do, but she was a vindictive woman and decided to have the ultimate victory. She told the MGB that Victor was a German spy. After all, he had a German name. They picked him up and gave him a rough time. He had nothing to confess to and so he was treated very roughly. But in the end, on no evidence at all, he was given twenty years for espionage.
It seemed strange standing there in the hot sun chatting easily with Victor, who was almost an old friend even though I had never seen him before. We talked in English. His English was perfect, and hearing and speaking my own language for the first time since well, when? I could not remember when, but it gave me an enormous boost. Despite the corpse wagon and the reputation of the camp and the stories of the terrible copper mines, I began to sense again that warm, good conviction that I could handle anything and that I must surely come out on top. After a while, although I hated to leave the sound of the English words, I told Victor that I wanted to get myself organized in the barracks, and get started making friends with Vtyurin, my brigadier. We shook hands warmly. I could see that we would be good friends. We promised to keep an eye out for each other and take every opportunity to get together and talk some more.
It took me some time to find Vtyurin. He was very matter-of-fact. He said that it was very hard work in the quarry and that he was very insistent about the quota’s being filled. He did not seem much interested in my being an American, unlike almost everyone else I had met up till now, so I thought I was not going to have much luck there. I fell into conversation with two Muscovites, Boris Gorelov and Vadim Popov, who were in for terrorism and propaganda because in their school days they had formed a group called the Black Guard; they had put out a few juvenile pamphlets proposing a new democratic power and pushed over a few kiosks in parks and knocked out some street lights. They were about sixteen when they did this stuff.
Popov, along with Gorelov and some other students, was turned in several years later when he was in the medical institute and confided his childish pranks to a girl he had fallen in love with. She turned him in. Twenty-five, five, and five. The girl got it too. Twenty-five, five, and five, for associating with known subversives. Popov thought that was pretty funny.
While Popov and Gorelov and I were talking, there were suddenly loud shouts from outside. The water tank truck was coming to fill the reservoirs. Everyone who had a cup ran out to catch drippings from the hose. I had no cup. I was thirsty all the time, those first weeks. Popov gave me some of his catchings. I think everyone was thirsty in Dzhezkazgan until much later when the water supply was improved.
About nine o’clock there was a loud ringing sound from someone banging a bar of iron on a piece of steel rail that was hung up in the center of camp. This announced the night count. Soon we were ordered out of the section by a bunch of shouting, hostile guards. The only one allowed to stay in was an old cripple, whose job was to stay in the barracks all day and keep it clean and empty the parasha, the urine barrel, and keep an eye on things. The rest of us were taken out, counted by fives, marched in, and counted again. The guards made up their count with strokes in pencil on a plywood board, which was then scraped down for further use. I do not know why they never used paper, but throughout the system a piece of board seems to be the preferred object to mark the count on. After we got inside again and the second count was made, there was a flurry of cursing from the guards and we all had to go outside again because the count did not tally. I got the impression that the guards were not too bright and had difficulty counting anyway. It took three counts, that first night in barracks number five. Finally we were locked in. It was ten o’clock. I scrambled up to the top bunk that Vtyurin had assigned me. I was very tired and even the flat boards felt good. I was cheered by the encounter with Victor S. I felt he was an ally. Effroimson, too. It was going to be all right. The four very bright bulbs in the ceiling were a nuisance, but I pulled my meager blanket over my face and stretched and sighed and yawned and felt the grateful approach of sleep.
Then I sat up with a start. I had been bitten on the leg. I threw off the blanket.
I could not see anything. Then, I felt a bite on the belly. I yanked at my shirt. A bedbug ran out and disappeared. Then I was bitten on the foot, then on the arm, then on the back, several bites. They kept coming. I began to thrash around. Bedbug bites sting me very severely, and the first bites on my arm and stomach were already swelling. My next-bunk neighbor sat up and said crossly, “What the hell are you doing?”
I said, “I’m going to kill these goddamn bugs!”
“Don’t be crazy,” he said. “Look at the wall.”
I stared at the whitewashed wall. It was not white anymore. A mass of black insects was migrating down the wall. I screamed and jumped off the bunk. Angry prisoners snapped at me to for God’s sake shut up. The wall seemed to move. It made me feel as though my eyes had gone wrong. I was a bit nauseated. I began to shiver again. The room was cool but not cold; there were enough bodies to
keep the temperature up, even though it was dropping outside with the darkness and the open windows were letting in the cooling air.
I went to the table by the door and the parasha. I pulled every bug that I could find off my body. I sat down at the table and stared at the bugs on the wall and crawling up the bunks. Every once in a while a prisoner would stir and try to wipe away a sting. But most of them slept soundly. Once in a while there was a moan or a cry; nightmares were beginning to play around the snoring barracks. I put my head on my arms on the table and tried to sleep. There was a sudden touch on the back of my neck, and I started up, terrified. I looked up. There were bedbugs on the ceiling above me, and some dropped off now and then on me and on the table. From time to time I dozed off, but even if I was not awakened by bites I would start up anticipating them, or imagining that another bug had landed on the back of my neck. It was a bad night. Around one in the morning, there was a huge commotion suddenly in one corner of the cell. Sleeping prisoners woke up angrily and then leapt from their beds. I watched from the table. I was quite puzzled at first. Then I made out from the shouts that there was a lethal spider in somebody’s bed, and they were trying to kill it. Shouts of triumph. Success. Then whispers: Get back to bed before the guards look in!
But it was too late. The door was flung open and two MVD stamped into the barracks. “All right! All right! Why is everyone out of bed? What is happening here?”
“A karakurt! A karakurt! We killed it!”—and one timid-looking man with baggy, too-large underwear flapping around his skinny frame brought the deadly specimen forward on a stick for the guards to see. The spider was put on the table beside me. It was about three centimeters long, long black furry legs, tan on top, black on the bottom with a perfect tan cross. Karakurt is Kazakh for “black death.” The guard picked up the spider gingerly on the stick, shooed everyone back to bed, and went out again. In ten minutes he was back with two captains and a major wiping the sleep from their eyes. I was shooed from the table. I could scarcely believe my eyes. They held an investigation, on the spot, into the killing of the spider! Someone speculated that they might have been afraid that the prisoners would extract the venom and use it for terroristic purposes. None of it made any sense to me.
The bedbugs seemed to thin out toward morning. I dozed off for a while with my head on my hands, and then the rail clanged with its powerful beats at about four o’clock, or four thirty. Guards opened the doors immediately and began to curse and yell “Podyom,” and threaten hard punishment to anyone caught still in bed in two minutes. Clearly they were serious because everyone leapt out of bed, cursing and scrambling into their clothes and rubbing their eyes and yawning. The sleep period was only six hours and these were men who worked hard, breaking rock and carrying timbers twelve hours a day.
The brigadier organized us for breakfast. One man was dispatched to the kitchen to get the bowls for our twenty-five-man group, another to the bakery with a list of live prisoners to collect the day’s allotment of 700 grams of bread per person. No one had died overnight, but someone told me to make sure that, if someone near me died, the death was concealed from the guards until the bread ration had been picked up.
Curiously, there was no head count in the morning. We were allowed to go to the toilet building more or less as we wanted to, and the brigadier was responsible for getting us into the mess hall when there was an empty table, getting our soup into us, and getting us out fast to make room for the next brigade. No spoons were issued. I had to borrow one from Gorelov after he finished his cabbage soup. That gave me another idea for an enterprise.
Some brigades were assigned to different projects every day, depending on special needs. Others, like mine, were on permanent assignment. By a quarter to six we were forming columns of five inside the gate, and the sorrowful orchestra was beating out its up-tempo march. The column was marched out of the camp and halted again by the barrier. Here a head count was made and marked on the boards in pencil. Then the MVD in charge of the convoy called out in a loud voice, “Prisoners! On the way to the work site you will keep close column. Hands behind your back One step to the right or one step to the left will be considered an attempt to escape, and the convoy has orders to shoot without warning. Remember! One step to the right, or one to the left!”
And the prisoners intoned back, “Or one step upward.” No one paid any attention.
Dogs were yelping all around us, and as soon as the order was given to march, there began a torrent of commands and counterremarks from the prisoners: Pick up the pace. Slow down, we can’t manage! Get moving or you’ll get shot! Hold back and wait for the column to close in. Pick it up at the rear there!
A constant kind of bickering, enriched with the snarls and yaps of the excited dogs.
It was a long, long march. When we started out, the sun cast long shadows behind us. An hour and a half later, arriving at the work site, the shadows had shortened and the heat was beginning to be unpleasant. Five kilometers, perhaps five and a half. The first view of the quarry was a pair of watchtowers silhouetted against the yellow sky. Then the barbed wire, which was invisible from a mile away, began to appear, until I could see a fence that seemed to stretch forever in both directions. As we came closer, a gate of poles and barbed wire appeared between the two watchtowers, and more towers could be seen along the fence, which now seemed to curve away from us. There was still no sign of rock or tools or a pit or anything that resembled a quarry. Before the guards unlocked the gates, the entire column was counted by fives and then ordered to lie down on the ground, while the guards assigned to the watchtowers went off to their posts. This took nearly half an hour. I realized that some of the watchtowers were very far away. The rest was welcome. I was tired out by the walk and could not imagine digging rock. Then the gate was unlocked and we were led inside, counted again, and taken to the lip of the biggest excavation I have ever seen in my life. It must have been nearly two kilometers across, perhaps one and a half, and about one kilometer wide, oval in shape with a spiral truck road winding down to the bottom. The bottom was almost half a kilometer, 1,600 feet, below the surface. I was given a sledge hammer I could hardly lift and a chisel, and led to a rock face deep down in the pit. Here we had to break rock out of the quarry without chisels and pile it up ready for the dump trucks. The unbelievable daily quota was three cubic meters for each person. My heart sank. I knew it was impossible for me to break up three cubic feet, let alone three cubic meters.
I looked around me. Everywhere men were wearily lifting their picks and sledges and slamming them feebly against huge rocks. It seemed like the labors of Hercules. I could imagine the rocks doubling in size each time I broke one. I tried to lift the huge sledge and it slipped sideways and pulled me over with it. I lay panting on the ground. The brigadier’s assistant came over and started to yell at me to get up.
“I don’t think I can,” I said. I was not that weak. I just felt discouraged and wanted some time to think about a way out of this impossible task. The assistant got furious. He was about to haul off and kick me in the ribs when a man came up and took his arm and spoke in his ear. The assistant shrugged and went away without the satisfaction of his kick. Gorelov, my friend from the Black Guard, who had somehow been able to call off the brigadier’s goon, helped me to my feet again and took me by the arm.
“You better stick with me for the day,” he said. “Anybody in your shape who actually tries to lift a sledge is either crazy or too young to be outdoors by himself.”
We both laughed. “Anything you say,” I told Gorelov.
Chapter 16
Thank god for Gorelov that day! He had been lucky and had received some food parcels from home, and had strategically given more than half of what he got to the brigadier. This got him both a lower quota, and a blind eye to his tufta, his cheating on the quota. Gorelov had devised a way of building a hollow mound of stone that looked like three cubic meters, or six if he was in partnership with someone, but which really contained onl
y about a third of that amount. Working hard, he could do almost two cubic meters by himself, so that first day, taking pity on me, he built the hollow square mound, and when the sun became unbearably hot he put me inside in the shade to rest and went on working on his own. The sun made the rock so hot we had to wear gloves to avoid blisters. Gorelov built the square against the wall of the quarry, so he had to make only three sides and a rough roof. The roof was hardest, but he sloped the structure so that a few big stones across the top would do to close it in.
I had my own shirt under the black jacket, and sometime during the day, when we stripped in the heat, my shirt was stolen. There was a brigade of urki, and Gorelov went off to find their leader. This guy at first denied that any of his boys had stolen my shirt, but after we talked awhile he became friendly and promised to get it back for me before the end of the day. “I’ve got influential friends,” he said, and laughed, and went back to his urki. At noon we were led up to a higher level where there was a primitive field kitchen: an iron stove on wheels with a simmering kettle of porridge. It smelled delicious as we came up, but when it was ladled out it was so thin you could drink it like water. Gorelov explained that the field cook, a soft-job prisoner, was given an allotment of a third of a bag of crushed grain to make his porridge. Some he kept back for himself as a privilege of the job. Some he gave to his brigadier to keep things sweet in the barracks. The urki always managed to steal a little more. By the time he put water in the kettle to make up the noon meal, there was almost nothing left for the prisoners.
Gorelov had secreted a package of his own and shared it with me. White bread and fat, greasy smoked bacon, running with oil in the burning sun. The bacon made me anxious. I thought that it might have been too much of Valentin’s greasy meat that triggered my diarrhea the first time. But I had no choice: it was eat meat or starve and I chose to eat.
Back at work, we were joined by a young guy who was half Chinese. His father had been in Shanghai working for the East Chinese railroads. Stalin invited all Russian emigres in China to come home, and then arrested them. This boy got twenty-five years. No reason. He joined Gorelov and me, and together we began to enlarge our hollow stone structure to look like nine cubic meters. The half-Chinese worked very well, and by mid-afternoon we had an acceptable pile, and a good place to hide and smoke and talk in the shade. And by then my diarrhea had started up again, as I had feared it would.
An American in the Gulag Page 25