The second concert was an even greater success than the first, although that may be just in my memory because I was confident enough not to need a dip into the hospital’s pure alcohol supply beforehand. Zoya and I spent every second we could together backstage. Several times the guard came over and interfered.
He would say, “Cut out the monkey business now! You’ll get in trouble.” I would say, “What monkey business? We’re just talking.”
“You know what monkey business. Move apart now.,’
But every touch from Zoya inflamed me, and I could not believe it would be long before we would really be together. We even managed a real, deliriously marvelous kiss just before parting, with no one watching.
The next morning I could sleep in. It was my twenty-four hours off at the hospital. I was half asleep in the midmorning, daydreaming of Zoya’s soft lips for the two-hundredth time, when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes. It was a guard who had been fairly friendly because I had treated him for VD.
He said quietly, “Wake up, Doc. Prepare yourself for etap.”
I was out of bed in an instant. It was like a kick in the shins. I could not believe it. I had wiped all that out of my mind. My heart began beating wildly. I felt faint and terrified. I said, “Listen, Citizen. What is it all about, do you know?”
“No, I don’t, Doc. All I know is you’re supposed to go see the naryadchik.”
That sounded funny. The naryadchik was usually just concerned with labor assignments, not eta p. On the other hand, he was probably hand in glove with the godfather. I was shaking when I went to the administration office. My file was already on the desk. I could see the photograph Epstein had taken. It seemed to be fastened to some kind of card with official red stamps on it. I must have looked terrified hen I said to the naryadchik in a hollow voice, “Etap or where?”
He said, “Don’t look so gloomy, for God’s sake. t’s not a real etap. You signed up for a plumber, didn’t you?”
I looked blank. I’d forgotten about that.
“Nikolsky Project,” he said. “Here’s your pass. Here’s your work assignment.
You meet the convoy at the gates at two o’clock. There’s four hundred going from this camp so try to get there early.”
It was the strangest sensation. Half an hour before I had been indulging in lascivious dreams about Zoya. Now I might never see her again, and yet I felt happy because a moment ago I had imagined my life in ruins. The worst possibility was another trip to Moscow for horrors I refused even to think about, and now the horrors had dissolved like a bad dream. I was to be almost free! I would live in an area I had never seen before and once again have to tackle work I had absolutely no knowledge of. It was a scenario, I seemed to have read before. Suddenly I felt terribly excited. I was sad to be losing Zoya and sorry there was no way to communicate with her, but that was a feeling that got lost somewhere in a jumble of vibrant new hopes for the future.
By twelve noon I had claimed some bread from the kitchen. I stood eagerly at the gates as my new fellow workers began to appear from all directions, making each other’s acquaintance, gossiping underneath the shadow of those terrible watchtowers we were about to leave, perhaps forever, speculating with shining eyes and irrepressible excitement about the possibilities of the new life that lay just ahead.
What a resilient thing the human spirit is! No pay, no freedom to travel at our own choice, rations a North American worker would throw to the pigs, no evidence that more disaster was not right around the corner, and yet, if you had asked any one of those four hundred ragged souls gathering for muster at the same gates where corpse wagons used to pause for the ax, they would have said, “The future? Looks pretty good to me!”
That is what I felt, anyway.
Chapter 25
One by one we were led through the corridor in the wall that passes the guardroom. There was an arrangement at the guardroom window like a bank teller’s cage: a window with a slit. There all the necessary papers were passed out and checked against your prayer. Trucks were waiting outside. There was a mood of elation in the whole group.
As the day wore on and we waited and waited without moving, uncertainty and doubt began to grow in the group. Prisoners are conditioned to lies and disappointment in the Gulag Archipelago. Before long there were dozens who had begun the most morbid speculations: We were really being taken out to be shot; we were going to Siberia; we were going to an even worse Asian camp than Dzhezkazgan.
Cooler heads reminded each other of the photographs and the passes and the certain word on the parasha that Nikolsky Project was under way and would be employing thousands of prisoners. I was irritated at the wait but not anxious. It was a plumber named Margolinshch who had told me about the proposed new project, weeks before when he was briefly in the hospital. Now he was sitting right here in the truck with me. I counted on his showing me something about his trade before I was trapped into revealing my inexperience. Anyway, the fact that he was here somehow confirmed in my mind that we were really going to Nikolsky and that all was well.
Finally the trucks were all loaded. Two guards mounted the standing platform between us and the cab. They had no submachine guns! This was a marvelous symbol of good fortune. The trucks moved out. Some of the Ukrainians began to sing lively country songs. I moved over beside Margolinshch and told him I was counting on him.
“Don’t worry about a thing, Doc,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll show you everything I know. And if they give us any choice of partners, why don’t we just say we’ve always worked together? That way you’ll never have any problems.” Margolinshch was a skinny, good-humored guy; I thought it would be fine to work with him and I said yes to his proposal right away.
In about half an hour we arrived at the town of Nikolsky. It was a jumble of half-constructed buildings. Piles of stone and brick and lumber, and wagons of cement bags, and lines of workers straggling back and forth. We passed a sewage or water trench and suddenly cheers went up from hundreds of workers digging with shovels and pickaxes. They were all women! Soon we realized that most of the workers already, on the project were women. A terrific buzz began to run through the truck. Soon we stopped outside a high barbed-wire fence with four watchtowers and no solid walls. Inside the fence there was a grouping of several two-story apartment buildings. These would eventually be part of the normal town that we had come to build, and as it turned out the buildings we were to work on were basically the same as the ones we were assigned to live in. But the apartments inside the barbed-wire fence were not for us. To our surprise we were sent across the road to another group of similar buildings that had no enclosure at all. I asked one of the guards what the barbed wire was for. He gave me a leer. “Women’s camp,” he said. “Women work with men here. But we wouldn’t let them loose at night with bastards like you around. They have to stay in there at night.”
That little piece of news went through our group like an electric charge, and within seconds private and shared plans were being developed for digging under the wire, climbing over it, finding legal ways to walk inside it and get out again intact. The prospect of working side by side with women was enough to set all those thin, drawn, normally impassive faces grinning and chattering like children. I was just the same:. I had already had a taste of it and it tasted pretty good.
In the meantime we were all assigned, four to a room, to completed apartment buildings. We had brought our own mattress bags and pillowcases, and the apartments had steel beds. Things were looking better all the time. I stuck with Margolinshch and we were put into a building with all the other plumbers, a whole brigade of plumbers, probably half of them somewhere near my level of skill. There were eight apartments in each two-story building. In the morning we were given our assignments. Two plumbers were to install cold-water plumbing for the eight apartments of one building in seven days. It meant nothing to me, but Margolinshch was shocked. “How they expect us to do such a thing?” he wanted to know in a thick Latvian ac
cent.
But there was clearly no time to sit around and grouse. We either had to get our norm fulfilled or work some pretty smart tufta, and for the moment we just got to work, measuring the run of the pipes, bending them on a crude hand-operated pipe bender set up on our outside workbench, hacksawing off the proper lengths, threading them, putting on the connectors with lead paint and caulking fibers, and so on.
At the end of the first day we had scarcely begun the first apartment and we were totally worn out. We got up at the first light on our own. We were convinced that the only way to hold on to these “free” jobs was to meet our norms or come pretty close. We had breakfast while it was still cold out. Margolinshch made tea you could float a nail in. He drank so much of it that by the time we left for work he was quite high and terribly cheerful.
“Wait till you’re catching on to it! Wait till you’re catching on to it! We never make eight apartments in one week, but we come damn close.”
But at the end of the first week we had completed only two apartments out of the eight in our first building, and we were beginning to feel too tired to go on. There was to be no day of rest, obviously. I began to wonder if we could apply some American production techniques to the job, as I had on the locks. I had no access to extra glucose and the ration was still the normal camp ration, so I could see a situation developing again where I would just blow around with the wind, as I had in the arc-welding yard, if we could not invent some way to be more efficient. I suggested to Margolinshch that we measure up five buildings at once—forty apartments—then cut all the pieces and mark them, and finally do all the assembly at once. I was sure we could increase our output considerably that way, and although it seemed pretty outlandish to Margolinshch, he simply poured himself another cup of opaque tea and said, “Let’s go then.”
We never came damn close or even a little bit close to a rate that would produce a full building in one week—neither did anyone else in the whole plumbing brigade. But we pulled well ahead of our first week’s miserable 25 per cent of the norm. We were so tired our original excitement over the presence of women virtually evaporated. Margolinshch talked a lot about women in the first few days. He would say, “Just wait! Just wait till a few days off come. We get ahead of norm a bit. Just wait!” But soon he stopped talking about all the wonderful things he was going to do to all the wonderful women he would find. I often thought of Zoya and I missed very much the sense of affection that had grown up between us, but at this stage I was so tired all the time that I knew if we were to meet somehow and somehow find ourselves a bed to get into together I would go right to sleep.
Gradually we arrived, Margolinshch and I, at an understanding that we could work only so much. We knew we were doing better than the other teams, because of our system, even though they would come in and report at night that they had completed so many apartments and we had none to report because we were spending all our days cutting and bending, getting ready for a blitz of assembly when we had our five buildings all ready to service. We began to take life a little bit easier then, for the sake of survival.
One day I found that there was a set of measurements that made no sense. Margolinshch said, “All right, Al, you made them, you better go back and measure again.” This was frustrating because we were beginning to swing along very fast in our routine of cutting and bending and even preassembling. But it was also a relief from physical work, so I was glad to go.
When I came to the building, the tired, thin women lugging plaster in through the door in a wheelbarrow refused to let me in. I would get in the way of their work, they said. I protested and yelled that their building would certainly not be much use if we could not get the plumbing done. One of the women pointed at the construction shack. “Go and see the brigadier,” she said. “If you get permission, then we can’t stop you.”
I went over to the shack. I heard a tough, high-pitched voice inside giving orders to the women workers in a very no-nonsense way. It sounded like a man with a very high voice. I looked in. Here was a strong, broad-cheeked, fair-haired woman of thirty-five, handing out assignments as if she had been doing it all her life.
“Well, what do you want?” she asked brusquely when I came in. She was leaning way back in her chair. The chair was tilted back on two legs. She had her feet up on the desk. This looked particularly strange because all the women, this brigadier included, wore short skirts over long trousers, and this woman’s skirt was up around her waist.
I said, “I’m the plumber and I need to get into your building to measure it.” She said, “Well, you’re not going in now!”
She had a strong, brassy voice that was very appealing.
I said, “Why not?” But I said it less angrily than I might have. I found the spectacle of this interesting-looking woman very appealing—not in a sexual way, just as an interesting, vital person. I was in no hurry to end the conversation.
Neither was she, as it turned out. She answered, “Because it’s lunchtime. Go and get your lunch and sit here with me and tell me where you come from.”
We had a great talk. Her name was Galya Zaslavskaya. When the Soviet army was advancing into the Nazi-occupied Ukraine, where her home was, he was forcibly evacuated to Vienna, along with a lot of other Ukrainian young people. There she was forced to work in factories serving the Nazi war machine. During this period she became fluent in German and made many good friends among her Austrian fellow workers. After the war she stayed on in Vienna with her friends. She had a good job and was comfortable there, but she was homesick too. In 1948 she began to correspond with her mother in the Ukraine. The mother begged her to return. She told Galya that she had asked the authorities and had been assured that there was nothing to fear about coming home. Galya returned. She was arrested and charged with treason. The evidence? She had allowed herself to be forcibly taken to Austria by the Nazis. She got twenty-five years.
She was fascinated that I was an American. “I hear there is a girl somewhere in Nikolsky who is in love with an American prisoner. Do you know anything about that?” she asked.
Once before I had heard rumors of an American colonel captured in Korea who was supposed to be somewhere in Dzhezkazgan but I had never been able to find him. “Do you know any details?” I asked.
Galya said, “No. I’ll see if I can find out. But by God, I just remembered! We have an American girl here, too. She speaks Russian so well I completely forget sometimes that she’s American!”
Galya leaped up from her chair. I was so flabbergasted by this news I could hardly move. For a wild minute I wondered if it could be my sister Stella, even though I knew she was safely away in England. Galya Zaslavskaya said, “Come!
Come! Come and meet her! She’s from New York City, same as you!”
I rushed outside after Galya. We picked our way through piles of lumber and broken rock and all the usual junk that litters a construction site and finally came to a group of women sitting around smoking by a pile of cement bags.
Galya called out, “Hey, you! Meet your fellow countryman!”
A thin, dark-haired girl got up carefully and came over to me and held out her hand. She spoke perfect English. She said, “Hello; my name is Norma Schickman. I’m from Brooklyn, New York.”
It was a strange feeling. Oddly, although I had expected to be instantly attracted to and fascinated by any American woman, I felt nothing special for Norma Schickman, except that it was a pleasure to talk about home with someone who knew it. She had been teaching English in Moscow when she was arrested for espionage.
Her story was similar to mine: a father who was a technical expert brought to Moscow on contract and then drafted into the army. Norma and I became good friends and saw a good deal of each other then and later in Moscow, but nothing more came of it than that. I asked her if she knew anything about another American who was supposed to be somewhere in the area, with a girl here in Nikolsky, but she had nothing to offer on that subject. I shook hands with her as if she were a man a
nd went out to measure my building. I was sure we would meet again. She said she would keep her eyes and ears open for news of another American in camp.
After a few weeks it became clear to everyone that the approach we were making to our plumbing task was more efficient. There was talk of making Margolinshch a plumbing brigadier and imposing our system on all the plumbing teams. I began to relax a little about our norms. I began to feel a little easier about taking a noon break and spending a little time walking about Nikolsky to see what I could see and whom I could meet. Once in a while I took my bread with me and had lunch with Galya Zaslavskaya. One day she said, “You know, Al, you have quite a reputation around here. There is a lady poet in our library who is dying to meet you.”
“Are you joking? I didn’t even know there was a library.”
“Well, there is. Her name is Ruth—.”
So a few days later, when some plumbing trouble developed in the women’s camp and I was given a pass to go inside the fence and fix the pipes, I put a good pair of pants on under my work clothes, and took my lunch with me, and once I had the leaky pipe fixed I asked where the library was and went directly to the building that was pointed out.
I found Ruth inside, in a wing of the building that had been set aside as a tiny library. She was very gracious. She said she had heard that I was well read and had interesting things to say about America. I was very flattered and did not even think to ask her where she had heard these things. I assumed it was from Galya Zaslavskaya. Ruth said, “Will you do me the honor of taking lunch with me?”
An American in the Gulag Page 43