I thought, I have twenty-five years anyway.
I thought, No one will ever believe it anyway.
I thought, I am never going to allow myself to be tortured again.
I signed.
What the hell. They’ve got me anyway. Why didn’t I do it long ago, and avoid all that pain?
Then I thought, No, Alex, you gave them one hell of a run! And all they’ve got for their trouble is a pack of lies that nobody will ever believe.
And besides, they’ve lost interest.
It was true. A month ago they had been slavering over this show trial. Now they had lost interest. I could tell from Chichurin’s manner that something had changed, something had happened, perhaps another purge in his own bailiwick, perhaps someone has fallen out of favor, perhaps Chichurin told me at this point that Ryumin was the immediate number two to Viktor Abakumov, the minister of state security. Abakumov, of course, was Lavrenti Beria’s right-hand man. While I was rereading the protocols two more MGB officers came in and whispered to Chichurin. I overheard the name of Ryumin and of Minister Abakumov. There was reference to a telephone call. Chichurin picked up the protocols in an absent-minded way and walked out of the room in a daze. I never saw him again.
It had been a relief to sign. It was over. Maybe I could get back to—I laughed a bitter laugh at the word that had come to mind my comfortable life in camp. I thought of Atsinch, and assumed I would see him again, because it would be a long time before I could be let out of the hospital.
For a while I was in an etap cell with about a hundred others awaiting transfer.
One tall man in a ragged army uniform could not straighten his knees when he walked. They had hung him over a trapeze device, as a torture. They call it a triangle. It works in some way to dislocate the knee joint. He is the only person I have ever met who survived Sukhanovka.
This time the train went through the Urals by a different route and we stopped at Sverdlovsk. I was put in a cell with twelve or fifteen older urki. I was afraid that they would take what little I had left in my sack, including my good trousers, but when they saw the black Dzhezkazgan prison uniform with the numbers they treated me with respect and consideration. They had heard about Dzhezkazgan. They seemed more politically aware in this summer of 1951 than Valentin and his cohort a year ago. We had many thoughtful discussions about the system. They were more cynical. One had SLAVE OF STALIN tattooed on his forehead. STALIN had been partly obliterated but was still legible.
After Sverdlovsk there was a brief stop at Petropavlovsk, and then the train arrived at Dzhezkazgan in the sweltering heat. I was weak and still in pain but my morale was good. I was certain I had seen the last of interrogation rooms and the last of Moscow’s prisons. I began to wonder about the many friends I had made in those few short months in camp, Arvid Atsinch especially, of course, but also Effroimson and Feldman and Victor.
The etap was a small one. The few dozen others on the train were marched away from the station and a single guard waited with me. Soon the van came along. As I was helped into it, I had the strange awareness that for a moment I had found myself thinking I was back “home.”
Chapter 19
I was disappointed to find myself in a strange camp. It was still Dzhezkazgan, of course, and I had no good reason to think that of the six compounds in the area I had any proprietary rights over the one I had been in. But I was disappointed anyway.
This one was several miles from the first compound, and I had to resign myself to the probability that I would not see any of my old friends again.
In the quarantine barracks I met a young Muscovite with whom I felt comfortable and friendly from the first moment. His name was Edik L. He had been a student at Moscow University. Once in a study hall he overheard a group at a nearby table telling some of the anti-Soviet jokes that have always been around underground among students in Russian society. Example: A rabbit is caught trying to flee across the border. The MGB interrogate the rabbit. “Why did you want to leave the Soviet Union?” his interrogator asks him.
“Because,” says the rabbit, “I heard that all camels are going to be castrated.”
“But you are a rabbit!” remonstrates the interrogator.
“Sure,” says the rabbit, “but just try to prove that after they’ve castrated you for being a camel!”
This is the kind of thing these students were giggling over at a table near Edik’s. Three of that group were arrested soon after because the fourth was an MGB informer. Edik was arrested for not having informed. He was state’s witness on the first day of the trial. The next day they tried him. Fifty-eight point twelve. Failure to inform the authorities. Twenty-five years.
They brought a sort of personnel questionnaire around the quarantine barracks one day. I was determined to try for a pridurki job if possible, and failing that, a skilled job of any kind that would keep me out of the mines and away from the quarry. Conservation of energy is the first prison law, Orlov had told me.
So on the forms where my profession or trade was to be entered I put down boldly: PHYSICIAN. They had no way to check. Then, since we were offered three options, I put down MECHANIC as number two, and out of some strange whim I can’t explain now, except that it sounded like a nice, soft, sit-down job, LOCKSMITH as number three. I did know a bit about cars, which justified the mechanic, but I had never seen the inside of a lock.
Edik put down ELECTRICIAN as his first choice.
Through the grapevine we found out quickly that our camp was near a village called Krestovaya, and that it was one of three under the same box number and administration. Next to our camp was a KTR or katorzhane compound, reserved for people sentenced to extreme hard labor, most of them war criminals, which certainly meant they had been captured by the Germans, and probably meant that some of them had collaborated. Their numbers on the white patches were all prefixed with KTR. I still had CЯ 265.
On the second Sunday we were released from quarantine. I said so long to Edik and went out in search of the hospital before I was even assigned a barracks number.
Like the first camp compound, my new prison home had stone walls two meters thick and nearly six meters high. About one and a half meters from the wall there was a barbed-wire fence almost as high as the wall. Sloping down from the top of the fence on the inside was a kind of tent of barbed wire, which stretched to the ground at a point about nine or ten meters from the bottom of the fence. Two and a half meters farther in from the barbed-wire tent was a single thick wire on short posts, marking a forbidden area between the compound and the barbed wire. This area was known as the fire zone, and we were repeatedly told that anyone stepping over the wire into the fire zone would be assumed to be attempting escape and would be shot without warning from the watchtowers. In the space between the wall and the barbed-wire fence another thick wire was strung about five feet above the ground from wall to wall around the camp. Every night German shepherds were leashed to the wire as an additional precaution against escape.
Even if you came within a few feet of the fire zone, the guards on the watchtowers might yell at you and point their guns. Occasionally, it was said, a watchtower marksman had been known to relieve the monotony of his job by shooting down a prisoner who had strayed close enough to the wire for the guard to be able to tell his commanding officer that he had warned him to stop running into the fire zone before he shot him.
There was a closed gate in the wall between us and the KTR camp next door, which was really part of the same complex, and although there was no barbed wire along this dividing wall, the fire zone wire was there and the same warning applied.
The hospital was near the main gate, adjacent to the mess building. I made myself known to the physician in charge, a man named Shkarin, and within a few minutes he had brought his two colleagues, Kask and Adarich, to meet me and to examine me. I was still in appalling condition. They needed no excuses or mastyrka to hospitalize me. They were interested in my description of the training Atsinch had g
iven me, and discussed among themselves the possibility of adding to that training enough to qualify me as a feldsher because they badly needed additional help.
Kask was an Estonian who was known to everyone in his native country for the daily medical broadcasts he had made on the radio. He was the laboratory man: blood tests, urine tests, pathology, and so on. Kask did many of their autopsies. He spoke good English and on that basis we became friendly right away. The third man, Adarich, was a surgeon from Minsk who had been in camp since 1934. He was impressed by my scrotal hernia, but warned me that surgery might be a mistake until I was a lot stronger, and suggested I try to live with it for the time being. In addition to the hernia and general debility, I had an exudative pleurisy and a fever of nearly 39¡, so I qualified for admission.
There was a surgery, a lab, a therapy ward, some offices, and an out-patient clinic and dispensary. And a morgue. The hospital served all three camps in our group—our own, the KTR next door, and a ZUR two kilometers away, which was the Zone for hardened escapists, persistent malingerers, and so on. While I was mending in that hospital, Adarich began where Atsinch had left off, and on days when I was feeling up to it I went to the morgue with him and learned how to make an appendectomy incision and how to suture it up, how to amputate toes and fingers, which was common procedure in the winter because of frostbite, and so on.
I got to know the hospital supply clerk, Kuznetsov. He complained that his greatest fear was that he would be given a sentence for theft on top of his political sentence. His spoon supply always dropped by the exact number of patients discharged on any given day, and he had a hard time replacing the spoons. He would buy them from prisoners for bread and sugar and other supplies, if indeed any prisoners had spoons to sell. Spoons are never issued in camp. You use your fingers or drink from the rim of the plate. Kuznetsov was sure that he would be caught short of spoons one day, or caught buying them with hospital rations, and that would be the end of him.
I resolved to steal a spoon too. I remembered my earlier notion of somehow getting into the spoon business if I could only get a supply. Bribe a guard in standard “colored” fashion? Imitate my friend the pakhan? I did not know what it would be, but I had identified one more critical shortage and I was sure I could make something out of it.
I was discharged from the hospital after two weeks. Adarich the surgeon said he was trying to find a way to get me assigned to the hospital, but he warned that it might take some time. In the meantime I was put on a construction brigade, working on buildings in a wired-off open zone not far from Krestovaya village. It was called DOZ, meaning a woodworking plant, although many other components of buildings besides doors and windows and furniture were made there.
At first it was very hard going. The days were characterized by a continuous hot, dry wind that blew dust and sand everywhere. Many of the prisoners were badly choked up by the dust. It settled on buildings and seeped through cracks into the barracks. It turned everyone’s short-cropped hair gray whenever their hair was not covered by the regulation cap. It obliterated the numbers within two or three days. At the gates of the camp as you went out each morning there were always two or three men with pots of black paint waiting to touch up your number. If a man was a painter or an artist by profession, he was assigned to paint numbers in the morning and to decorate the officers’ quarters with paintings of ruby sunsets or waterfalls or ships at sea by day. I regretted my inability to draw a straight line, let alone a picture.
My brigadier was an easygoing guy and had the tufta well organized at the DOZ. When he saw how feeble I was, he helped me to goof off for the first week or so, until I felt better. So I prowled around and acquainted myself with everything that went on in the DOZ. I watched men operating metal lathes and thought that that looked like a soft touch. I watched the arc welders, and it looked as if you could make a few rubles or extra grams of bread if you could think of some things to manufacture. I saw the locksmith’s shop, full at the time regrettably, but it looked like a soft touch too.
I saw that there was a very good supply of aluminum in the cables the arc welders used. I thought that if I could learn how to melt it down, I might be able to mold some spoons. I did a little talking around to some prisoners who seemed to know what they were doing with metal, and picked up some ideas without giving my own away. I also found some good hiding places where you could spend part of a day without being rousted out to work, and some other hiding places where you could conceal tools or bits of scrap aluminum wire.
I built two shallow boxes for my foundry, stole myself some scraps of aluminum wire, fashioned a rough crucible from some thin steel from the stove works, scrounged some good charcoal and diesel fuel to fire my forge, and was ready to get into business.
The, next day, which would have been two weeks or more after starting work at the DOZ, I brought my spoon with me when we were marched to work, and got some sand and cement and began to experiment with a foundry mold, using the spoon as my pattern. Now, I knew almost nothing about foundry work. It was like starting from scratch. If I had not been so determined to get into business for survival reasons, I would never have stuck with it. The bottom of the mold was all right. I would press the spoon into the moist sand and put the open-ended second box with guiding sticks on the sides on top of the first box, fill it with sand, push a stick through the sand (through which I planned to pour the molten aluminum later), compact the sand so that it would not fall out when I lifted the second box, remove the spoon and put it back in place. Of course the sand did collapse and fall out as well. Finally, whether by trial and error or divine inspiration, I hit upon a mixture of sand, cement, and soot that worked beautifully. The sand stayed in place! I melted a few grams of aluminum h my little crucible and when the first spoon came out of the mold, covered with grains of sand, rough and ugly, like a spoon that had measles, I was as proud as a new father. I found some emery cloth and polished it until it was perfect. The next morning before breakfast I took it to Kuznetsov. He was delighted. It was perfectly obvious that this was not one of his own spoons he was buying back. Two patients had died in the night and he had their bread ration. He gave me a whole ration, 450 grams, and said he could use all the spoons I could bring him. I was in business.
Soon I learned to line the sand mold with a dusting of powdered ash, which prevented the sand from pimpling the spoons, and then I made a two-spoon mold, and was able to turn out two spoons almost every day.
One of the spoons I traded to an ex-German war prisoner for his German water flask. Then I sold spoons to Kuznetsov for cooking oil, which was always easy for him to dispense into my flask. We had such a terrible shortage of oils and fats in camp that people were always very tired from lack of calories. I soaked my bread in cooking oil and found it very tasty then, though it would not have seemed very good two years earlier. The body seems to be able to create a taste for substances that it needs.
One day I got into conversation with one of the painters at the gate who were always there to touch up faded number patches. His name was Pavel Voronkin. He had gone to China as a boy when his father was working on the Russian railroad to China in the early thirties. Like Gorelov’s Chinese friend, Pavel, now a grown man and established artist, was arrested after he came back in response to an official invitation to repatriate. Voronkin had casually told a Russian neighbor once about an American movie he had seen and been impressed by, a war movie, I think it was, starring Robert Taylor. There may have been a misunderstanding, or perhaps there was not, but in any case when he saw the protocol containing his charges and his conviction, it was for associating with a known U.S. agent, one R. Taylor! Later on in my development of the spoon business, after I had made and sold several hundred spoons and the market began to go a bit soft, I got Voronkin to sculpt a nude woman with provocative breasts and buttocks and belly, just the size of a spoon handle. He made it in wood, and I fastened a spoon bowl to it and began to cast erotic spoons, which sold very well.
It was not possible for my soft brigadier to protect me indefinitely. It would not have been fair to the others, he said, because tufta could stretch only so far. I would have to do some work. This turned out to be carrying stone for the masons, and it nearly killed me. I had forgotten how weakened I was. I knew I had to find something else as soon as possible. So I approached the brigadier in the machine shop, a man named Zyuzin. He was an accomplished guitarist, whose bunk was close to mine. I visited him in the evening and listened to him play the guitar. I expressed a strong interest in the music. I asked him to teach me to play. He was pleased and flattered. He began to teach me simple chords so that I could play what he called “dog waltzes”: rudimentary tunes like “Dark Eyes”—just the chords, of course. After we had made friends over the guitar, I expressed a sort of offhand interest in joining his brigade. He liked me very much by now, and thought the idea of my moving into his brigade was just fine; we could do music together every night and so on, and so somehow he was able to arrange the transfer. I told him I knew everything about machine shops.
My first job was threading nuts, big ones. This involved turning heavy taps into the rough-cast blank of the hexagonal nut, which was held in a vise. It looked easy and was terribly hard. But even before I had to tackle the hard steel with my weak hands, I ran into trouble when Zyuzin sent me to the supply room to get the taps for the nuts. “Go get the metchiki i vorot,” he said, “the taps and a tap-handle.” I heard metki u vorot, which means “the marks at the gates.” It made no sense. The supply room was baffled and sent me to the paint shop. They were no help. I tried the blacksmith shop. No help. I finally had to admit to Zyuzin that I couldn’t find any marks at the gates. He thought that was pretty funny. “But don’t be embarrassed, Alexander Mikhailovich. I knew you were putting on an act with all your fancy words about your machine shop experience. You’ll learn enough here. I’ll help you, too. Just be honest with me from now on so I can keep you out of trouble.”— So that was all right.
An American in the Gulag Page 30