I said I had heard that everyone was afraid to ride in the elevators in Mine 51 because they were so prone to mechanical failure.
“This one was the worst in a long time,” Lavrenov told me. “Twenty-seven people aboard. Only one survived, you know. He was hanging on to the bars of the roof. He had a lot of broken bones, but he’ll be okay, they think.
“By the way,” Lavrenov went on ironically, “there was a feldsher killed on that elevator, so you better be careful if they send you there.”
“I will,” I promised.
“Yeah,” Lavrenov said. “This guy—no, he wasn’t a feldsher. They lost their feldsher and borrowed a doctor somewhere. I’ll think of his name in a moment. His insides were wrecked. They brought him back to his own hospital and he begged his colleagues not to operate on him, can you imagine that? Knew he was going to die, so he said, Don’t, operate on me, boys, I’m going anyway.”
There was only one other hospital I could think of in the area. I had a chilling premonition. I said, “Try to think of his name, Citizen Chief.”
“A Latvian doctor,” Lavrenov said. I felt sick. “Atsinch,” I said.
“That’s it,” Lavrenov said. “Of course! I forgot. You were trained by him, weren’t you?”
In the space of a few weeks two of the people I had come to care for with an extraordinary intensity were dead, Arkadi and Arvid Atsinch. It made me feel hard. I felt hatred. Lavrenov was trying to be nice and could not possibly have understood the grimness in my face.
It got grimmer. Within a few days the camp naryadchik sent for me. The naryadchik is a prisoner, a trusty who makes work assignments and reports to the kum, the godfather, so he is presumed to be a stool pigeon whether he is or not. Since that is clear from the beginning nobody tells him anything and thus his life is never in jeopardy for informing.
This man called me into the administration office and got out my file. “You’re leaving the hospital,” he said curtly.
“Where will I be working?”
“Mine fifty-one. But take it easy, brother, you’re lucky. You’re to go as feldsher.”
“But listen!” I said hotly. “That mine is supposed to be closed. The elevator crashed. A friend of mine was killed in it!”
“Catch them closing the mine?” He snorted. “Anyway, the elevator is fixed again. It should last a week at least!”
So that was it.
The summer had come. Walking to the mine with my little satchel of supplies was the hardest part of the day, even though the mine was so close to the camp I could see the watchtowers and the mountains of crushed rock from the camp gates; it was often 1100 in the shade, and there was no shade. The hot sun turned my face and neck a dark copper color in a few days and my hair bleached almost to the color of wheat. I was well equipped. In my satchel I carried syringes, bandages, disinfectants, a couple of morphine ampoules, some cardiac medications like digitalis, smelling salts, and a lot of aspirin. And a rubber tourniquet. There was a scalpel and some sutures and clamps too, so that I could deal with deep cuts right on the spot. The mine was a big producer of accidents and had a high mortality rate. I expected to be busy.
It was a relief to go down the mine at first because it was cold at the 240-meter level, and I later carried my padded jacket to wear down there. I had a little niche next to the machine shop near the elevator, and I painted a big red cross on the little table and bench they gave me, and felt as though I was putting out my shingle.
Between shifts there were civilian explosives experts who came in and charged the holes drilled by the previous shift and set off the blasts. Then the first of the new shift went in with air pressure hoses to blow away the fumes and another crew strung work lights. Then the miners came in to dig away the copper ore until later in the day when the next round of drilling began, to prepare blasting holes for the following shift. The mine worked twenty-four hours a day. Outside there were huge man-made mountains of the tailings, a green rock that tumbled out of huge buckets coming up on a sort of chain, around a great wheel to dump their loads.
Silicosis had been the scourge of the mines before I came there, because of the dust that never settled from the air. But after Stalin’s death they introduced wet mining. A hose attached to the drilling machine sprayed throughout the drilling, so the dust settled out of the air and the incidence of lung diseases went way down. All the digging used to be by hand. Thousands and thousands of lives were lost to exhaustion. Now they had brought in huge, electrically powered scrapers that vastly increased production and cut down on deaths.
The chambers were connected by tunnels, and little electric trains with trolleys to a cable in the ceiling carried the ore from the chambers, sometimes a mile back to the elevator. A favorite trick was to hang some thin wires down from the trolley to give a newcomer a good electric shock. It was played on me. I felt I had been knocked down by a sledge hammer. The kind of privileged status I had enjoyed in the hospital, where everyone called me doctor and looked up to me, had vanished now. I was just another new joe to be kidded and treated like everyone else.
Most of my work was on crushed fingers. At home in America you would be hospitalized for a crushed finger. But all I could do was put a dressing on the mangled digit and give the poor slave a handful of aspirin. He had to go back to work. If a whole arm or leg was crushed the man would be excused from work, but unless I yelled and screamed that he was bleeding to death he would have to wait at the mine until the end of the shift and then go back to the Zone with everyone else.
Almost every evening I played guitar with Zyuzin, and my music was advancing well. My morale was excellent. I had no hard physical labor to do and I was continuing to learn medicine. I managed to borrow some medical books from Adarich and read pharmacy and physical medicine and even obstetrics and gynecology. The atmosphere in the camp grew easier every day. There were no drastic sudden changes, just a little easing of attitudes. Rations were still terrible. The less skillful at the craft of survival still died quickly, but fewer died, because survival took a little less skill.
As part of the “thaw,” the hours of work were shortened from twelve to ten and so, because people had more rest, the poor rations were more nearly adequate. And there, was more time in the evenings for rest and recreation. Tufta was practiced extensively in the mine, including a system whereby three prisoners would put their output into the quota of a single free worker, of which there were a fair number who had been lured to work in the mines by promises of high wages. With three prisoners helping him, a free worker could in fact produce super-Stakhanovite amounts of ore every day and get an immense wage. The prisoners got only a starvation wage, but that was all right with them because their free friend bought good food outside for them and they ate better than many pridurki.
My summer in the copper mine was not a summer of unusual events or memorable encounters. Edik L. was in the mine at that time, but I saw him seldom, and although I found some satisfaction at the steady work of healing and arguing with the MVD on behalf of my first-aid patients, I found the work repetitious and really lived primarily for the evenings of music and talk in the barracks.
With the fall and the sudden drop in temperature, the mine became very uncomfortable. Sometime in late October or November 1953 there was a series of power failures while we were below ground. The elevator was electrically powered. This meant a climb by ladder, 240 meters down in the morning and 240 meters up at night with no light but the meager carbide lamps in our helmets. The rungs of the ladder caught the drip from the walls of the shaft, and where the cold air swept down from outside it froze quickly so that the climb was a terrifying, exhausting nightmare in which you might lose your grip or your footing on the icy ladder at any moment, and the bottom of the shaft was a thousand feet below ground. There were several screaming, gyrating falls to the bottom, and even the guards found the whole experience unnerving.
Sometime in November I was notified once again that the naryadchik, the work-assignment
clerk, wanted to see me. There was a rumor that he had a friend in another camp who was a feldsher and had been eyeing my job for some time. When I went to see him I was expecting the worst, and I got it.
“You have been assigned to Zheldor Poselok,” he told me indifferently, as if he had had nothing at all to do with it. “Your brigadier’s name is Ivanov. You’ll be on construction. Hard labor. Extreme hard labor, in fact.”
Zheldor Poselok was a huge railway construction project and a notorious man-killer. The naryadchik seemed to take. pleasure in pronouncing the sentence. I was sure now that he was a tool of the administration. I said, “I’ll look forward to meeting you outside someday.”
He just stared at me coolly.
I said, “I’ve never heard of a brigadier named Ivanov. Are you sure such a man exists?”
“Didn’t I tell you extreme hard labor? Didn’t that mean something to you? Go pack your stuff and meet the convoy here in half an hour. You’re being moved to KTR!”
Extreme hard labor was the phrase for people who lived in Camp Number One, the KTR. I felt a real chill. The death rate from exhaustion was was spectacular in the KTR. And no wonder I had never heard of Ivanov. I knew almost nobody from the KTR.
Leaving my old barracks was a blow, too.
No more musical evenings with Zyuzin. No more long chats with Adarich.
Strange new faces and new routines to learn. Oh well, I thought, it’s been a lot worse.
I rolled up my blanket and emptied the wood shavings out of my pillowcase and mattress case. It was time for a new filling anyway. I said good-by to the crippled old man who looked after our empty barracks during the day, and went over to the storeroom to collect my personal belongings, which meant only my navy shirt and trousers. Everything else had gone, now, to Valentin, to Lavrenov. These were the only physical reminders of my American reality, and even though they were stained and torn I vowed never to let them go. I slung my sack over my shoulder and picked up my guitar, took a last look around, and went off to the gates to meet the convoy.
It was still early in the afternoon when I moved over to the KTR, which was adjacent to my old camp. I slung my sacks on the floor and waited for the work brigades to come back from Zheldor Poselok so that I could find Ivanov and be assigned a bed. When the convoys returned I was struck by the fatigue etched in the faces of most of the men. They just came in quickly and flung themselves on their bunks. There was little talk, except among small groups here and there who were obviously working a good deal of tufta and getting enough to eat and not too much work.
Ivanov was a bad-tempered, surly, black-haired man in his early forties. He just scowled when I introduced myself and told me he would find a bunk for me when he was good and ready. I sat at the table and waited. Suddenly I heard a loud familiar voice call out, “Well, look at that! It’s his honor the doctor!” I looked around and saw a pug nose and two merry eyes in a clown’s face on a clown’s body. Marusich! We ran and embraced each other.
“My dear Doctor!” he exclaimed. “What good fortune brings us together again?”
“I’m not sure it’s all good fortune, Marusich,” I said a bit glumly. “I’ve lost my medical status. I’m here on extreme hard labor for some reason. I’m assigned to Zheldor Poselok.”
“And so am I! And so am I! Cheer up! Cheer up! We old hands know how to manage these things, don’t we?” He winked a huge wink and grinned and slapped me encouragingly on the arm. “Come! Come!” he said. “You will be my bunkmate. I will ask someone to move down immediately.”
This was unheard of. Only brigadiers assigned bunks, and Marusich was not even in the same brigade as I. There were five brigades in the barracks and five brigadiers. But the man Marusich spoke to immediately agreed and showed great respect to Marusich, so I thought maybe things weren’t going to be so bad after all. Then I discovered that Marusich had been assigned as day cook, which meant he had sacks of coarse-ground grain to make porridge with and to give to his friends and to bribe the brigadiers. “Just come over to my brigade by noon,” he said. “I’ll see you get all you need to eat. What a great pleasure to see you, dear Doctor! What a delight!”
Marusich loved to sing and had a marvelous voice. Evenings I would get out the guitar and strum for him, and he brought tears to the eyes of his people with his sentimental Ukrainian songs. But as it turned out I did not spend as much time with Marusich as both of us would have liked. He was in constant demand. The barracks was full of Western Ukrainians, and Marusich was sought out as a sort of magistrate to settle disputes, and as the leader in whatever kind of plots against the Russians or discussions of anti-administration strategies were going on at any given moment. I was not fluent in Ukrainian, although I understood a good deal by now since there was such a large Ukrainian population in camp. I missed a lot of the whispered conversations that flowed around my new protector’s bed, but it was clear that he was a man of some substance in the brigade and barracks.
I never even saw Ivanov again that evening.
In the morning, when we got to the project Ivanov started handing out assignments. He was flanked by two real toughs, his assistants. I just walked off and found a place to hide for a while, in a tool shed. At noon I went out and found Marusich’s little field stove and had two bowls of thick, nourishing porridge, and then went back to my hiding place for a nap. When I got to the door of the shed, one of Ivanov’s toughs was waiting for me, a wiry, arrogant little man.
“That’s it!” he shouted. “You’re coming to work!”
“Go to hell,” I said quietly.
He picked up a short stick and came toward me holding it like a club. There was a half meter of concrete-reinforcing iron bar on the ground and I grabbed it up. I said, “That’s fine! If you want it, come and get it!” I danced around him on the balls of my feet like a boxer. I was in good shape, fresh out of the hospital, fast and trim and alert and agile. He looked a bit scared and backed off. I spent the day roaming around the work site, watching men lay bricks and mix cement and carry lumber. I tried to look as though I were on my way from one job to another and to keep out of sight of Ivanov and his thugs.
I did not see him again until we were back in the KTR. I came out of the toilet to find him and the two heavies waiting for me. The position did not look very good. Ivanov said, “Are you going to work?”
“When I feel like it. Not before. I may never feel like it.”
He looked thunderstruck. The three of them advanced on me. I just smiled. I said, “Before you do anything, I think you’d better listen to me for a minute. I have something confidential to tell you. Call off your thugs and step over here.”
I was very cool. I could see that my manner was getting to them. Ivanov waved the two tough guys back and stepped aside with me. “If you’re going to buy me it better be something pretty good,” he said, very menacing.
I smiled at him. I was enjoying the show a lot, and it was playing out my way very well. I said, “Listen, you’re in trouble, don’t you know that? If anything happens to me, anything, if these trained dogs of yours beat me up or you report me to the kum, or anything, do you think your head will stay on your shoulders very long? I have very influential friends, you know!”
He was taken aback. Even if it had been a bluff it might have worked because I was putting on a real performance. But it was no bluff. I said, “I suggest you talk it over with Marusich. So long, Ivanov.” And I just put my hands in my pockets and walked away.
Ivanov did not make a move to follow.
I told Marusich about it in the barracks. He laughed and slapped me on the back. “Good work, my dear Doctor. Good work! Your healing powers are quite magnificent. You can heal a wound before it is made. I am impressed. Now leave the rest to me, my dear friend, and I will look after it.”
“How?” I said.
Marusich laughed a merry laugh. “None of your business! None of your business! Leave it to me. Leave it to me!” He went off singing loudly in Ukrainian abo
ut love and roses and broken hearts.
So that was that. Ivanov was a Russian. The Russians in our barracks were outnumbered ten to one by Marusich’s Ukrainians. I felt that, for a while at least, I could do what I wanted. Marusich said, “If the godfather catches you, dear Doctor, you are on your own. In the meantime, please do not worry about a thing!”
The second day, roaming about the vast area of Zheldor Poselok, I stopped to help some guys who were struggling to lift a huge beam. When we got it up on the wagon they thanked me and offered me a cigarette and we sat down under the wagon, because it was snowing, and had a smoke. These guys were from Moscow. When I told them I used to work at the United States Embassy one of them said, “Then you’ve got a friend, brother. There’s a guy named Aksyonov here who used to work at the embassy too. I’ll tell him how to find you.”
I could not believe it. I remembered Aksyonov only vaguely—a young Soviet employee. I remembered that he had been born in London and spoke excellent English, but I was not even sure what his work had been at the embassy. Translator, probably. But there was something about the name that felt bad, and I soon remembered it. One of the protocols that Sidorov had shown me at the end of my first interrogation was signed by Artur Aksyonov. A very bad protocol. He claimed that he knew me intimately and that we had long political discussions in which I had spoken violently against the Soviet Union. I remembered that when I read that lying protocol I vowed to kill the man who wrote it. Now I thought, It’s not worth it. I’ll just beat him up and take some satisfaction. I did not wait for the Muscovite to send Aksyonov to me; I looked him up. He was a patient in the small clinic in the KTR. He had a bad case of scurvy. I went to the clinic in the evening and told the feldsher I had official business with this Artur Aksyonov and dropped a few medical terms and so on; so the feldsher assumed I was legitimate and went inside, and a few minutes later out came Aksyonov in his hospital underclothes. He recognized me right away. He said hello in a friendly way, but he looked a bit guilty.
An American in the Gulag Page 39