Kolyma Stories
Page 15
I can’t bite or fight, even though I’ve learned all the tricks of fighting in prison. The limitations of space—prison cell, railway cattle car, tight-packed barracks—have dictated the ways you can grab or bite someone, or break their bones. But I no longer have the strength even for that. All I can do is growl and swear. I have to fight for every day, for every hour of rest. Every fragment of my body tells me how I have to behave.
I was called out on my very first night, but I didn’t do up my trousers, even though I had a piece of string, and I didn’t button my jacket.
The door shut behind me and I was standing in the lobby.
A brigade consisting of twenty men, the usual load for one truck, was standing by the next door, through which a thick frozen fog was oozing.
The supervisor and the guard sergeant were counting and examining the men. On the right there was another man, wearing a padded jacket, quilted trousers, a hat with earflaps, and waving about his fur gauntlets. He was the man I needed to speak to. I’d been taken off to work so often that I knew the rules to perfection.
The man in the gauntlets was the mine representative who took on people and had the right to refuse to take someone on.
The supervisor shouted out my name at the top of his voice, just as loudly as he had shouted in the enormous barracks. But I was looking only at the man in the gauntlets.
“Don’t take me, chief. I’m sick and I’m not going to work at the mine. I need to go to the hospital.”
The representative hesitated. Back at the mine he’d been told to select only those fit for work, and that the mine didn’t want anyone else. That was why he had come in person.
The representative took a good look at me. My ragged pea jacket, my grease-stained tunic that had lost its buttons, my dirty bare chest covered in sores where I had been scratching at the lice, the bits of rag I had bandaged my fingers with, the rope footwear (despite a temperature of minus sixty), my inflamed hungry eyes, my extreme emaciation: he knew very well what all that meant.
The representative took a red pencil and promptly crossed off my surname.
“Clear off, you swine,” the zone works manager told me.
The door opened again and I was back in the Lesser Zone. My place had now been taken, but I dragged off to one side the man who had taken it. He growled with annoyance but soon calmed down.
And I fell into a sleep that was very much like oblivion, but I woke up at the first slight noise. Like a wild animal, a savage, I’d learned to wake up without any intermediate state.
I opened my eyes. A foot in a slipper, which was worn to an extreme but was at least not a prison-issue boot, was hanging down from the top bunk. A filthy adolescent thief suddenly appeared in front of me and spoke to someone up above in the languid tones of a pederast.
“Tell Valia,” he said to this invisible person on the upper bunk, “that the artists have arrived.”
A pause. Then a hoarse voice from above: “Valia wants to know who they are.”
“The artists from the Culture Brigade. A magician and two singers. One of the singers is from Harbin.”
The slipper started moving and then vanished. The voice above said, “Bring them in.”
I moved over to the edge of the bunk. Three men were standing in the lamplight: two wearing pea jackets, one in a civilian “city” sheepskin jacket. Their faces all expressed veneration.
“Who’s the man from Harbin?” a voice asked.
“That’s me,” replied a man in an old-fashioned fur-trimmed coat.
“Valia says you’ve got to sing something.”
“In Russian? French? Italian? English?” the singer asked, stretching his neck upward.
“Valia said in Russian.”
“How about the guards? Can I do it quietly?”
“Don’t worry about them. Give it all you’ve got, like in Harbin.”
The singer moved back and sang “The Toreador Song.” Cold fog burst from his mouth with every breath.
There was a deep grumbling, and a voice from above: “Valia said, a song.”
The singer turned pale and sang:
“Rustle, my golden, rustle, my golden
My golden taiga.
Oh, wind, my roads, one or the other
Into our unbounded land.”
The voice from above said, “Valia said, good.”
The singer sighed with relief. His forehead, damp with anxiety, was steaming, forming something like a halo around his head. The singer wiped the sweat with his palm and the halo disappeared.
“And now,” said the voice, “take off that city jacket of yours. I’ll swap it for this.”
A torn quilted jacket was flung down from above.
The singer said nothing as he took off his city jacket and put on the quilted jacket.
“Clear off now,” said the voice above. “Valia wants to sleep.”
The Harbin singer and his friends melted away in the barracks mist.
I moved back deeper in, curled in a ball, stuck my hands up my jacket sleeves, and went to sleep.
It seemed as if I was immediately woken by a loud, expressive whisper.
“In 1937 we were in Ulaanbaatar and a friend and I were going down the street. It was lunchtime. There was a Chinese restaurant on the corner, so we went in. I looked at the menu: Chinese pelmeni.[10] I’m from Siberia, I know what Siberian or Urals pelmeni are. And now, suddenly, there are Chinese ones. We decided to have a hundred each. The Chinese cook laughed and said, ‘Will be too much,’ and his mouth stretched from ear to ear. ‘All right, ten each, then?’ Loud laughter: ‘Will be too much.’ ‘All right, a couple each!’ He shrugged, went to the kitchen, and brought out pelmeni, each one as big as your hand, all covered in hot fat. Well, the two of us managed half a pelmeni each and we left.”
“And I. . . .”
It took all my willpower not to listen but to go back to sleep again. I was woken by the smell of smoke. Somewhere up above, in the thieves’ kingdom, people were smoking. Someone climbed down, a cigarette in his mouth, and woke everyone with the sweet, sharp smell of the smoke.
Then there was more whispering: “In our district committee in Severnoye, my God, my God, there were so many cigarette stubs. Auntie Polia, the cleaner, never stopped cursing. She was always sweeping them up. At the time I had no idea what a cigarette end, a fag end, a butt meant.”
I fell asleep again.
Someone was shaking me by the leg. It was the supervisor. His inflamed eyes had a vicious expression. He made me stand by the door under the lamp’s yellow light.
“Well,” he said, “you refuse to go to the mine.”
I said nothing.
“How about the state collective? A nice warm state collective, to hell with you, I wouldn’t mind that myself.”
“No.”
“How about roadworks? You can make brooms. Making brooms, think about it.”
“I know,” I said. “One day you make brooms, the next you’re pushing a wheelbarrow.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To go to the hospital! I’m sick.”
The supervisor wrote something in his book and left. Three days later a paramedic came to the Lesser Zone and summoned me. He took my temperature, examined the scars on my back left by carbuncles, and rubbed in some ointment or other.
1961
VASKA DENISOV, PIG RUSTLER
FOR TRAVELING after dark he needed to borrow a pea jacket from a fellow prisoner. Vaska’s jacket was too dirty and torn; he wouldn’t have made it two meters down the settlement without any free worker grabbing hold of him.
People like Vaska are only allowed to move around the settlement under guard, lined up with other prisoners. The free inhabitants, military or civilian, don’t like people of Vaska’s sort walking the settlement streets on their own. The only time Vaska’s sort doesn’t attract suspicion is when they’re carrying firewood on their shoulders: a small log, or as they say here “a stoveful of firewood.”
This time a driver he knew stopped his truck, and later, Vaska Denisov bent over the side and clambered down to the ground. He immediately found where he had buried the log; you could see even in the twilight that the bluish snow was a slightly darker color and a little bit compacted. Vaska leapt into the ditch and scraped away the snow with his feet. The log came into sight: gray, sharp-edged, like a big frozen fish. Vaska dragged it out onto the road, lifted it upright so as to knock the snow off; then he bent down, put his shoulder against it, and helped it up with his hands. The log swung sideways and settled on his shoulder. Vaska strode off to the settlement, changing shoulders every now and again. Because he was weak and emaciated, he warmed up quickly, but the warmth didn’t last long. However much he felt the weight of the log, Vaska couldn’t stay warm. The twilight was thickened by a white haze, and all the electric lights in the settlement came on. Vaska gave a laugh, pleased he had worked things out correctly. The white mist would make it easy for him to reach his goal without being noticed. He passed an enormous broken larch, a silver stump covered in hoarfrost: so it was the next building.
Vaska threw the log down by the porch, brushed the snow off his felt boots with his gloves, and knocked at the door to the apartment. The door half opened, and Vaska was admitted. An elderly woman, her hair hanging loose, gave Vaska a frightened, questioning look. She was wearing a short fur jacket, unbuttoned, over her body.
“I’ve brought you a bit of firewood,” said Vaska, who now found it hard to shape his frozen facial skin into a smile. “Can I see Ivan Petrovich?”
Ivan Petrovich, lifting up the door curtain, had already emerged.
“That’s good,” he said. “Where is it?”
“In the yard,” said Vaska.
“Just wait there, we’ll saw it up. I’ll get my clothes on.”
It took Ivan a long time to find his gloves. They went out onto the porch and, not having a saw bench, they held the log between their legs to raise it, and then sawed it up. The saw was blunt and needed resetting.
“Come back later,” said Ivan, “and you can set the saw. Now here’s the splitting ax. After that you can stack it, but bring it into the apartment, don’t leave it in the corridor.”
Vaska was dizzy with hunger, but he chopped up all the firewood and carried it into the apartment.
“Right, that’s it,” said the woman, coming out from behind the curtain. “Finished.”
But Vaska stayed where he was, shuffling his feet by the door. Ivan reappeared.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t have any bread at the moment, the soup has been taken to feed the piglets, so I haven’t got anything to give you at the moment. Drop in next week. . . .”
Vaska said nothing, but still wouldn’t leave.
Ivan poked about in his wallet. “Here’s three rubles for you. Just for you, for that firewood, but as for tobacco—you know how it is! Tobacco’s expensive these days.”
Vaska stuffed the crumpled banknote under his shirt and left. Three rubles wouldn’t buy him even a pinch of tobacco.
He was still standing on the porch, nauseous with hunger. The piglets had eaten Vaska’s bread and soup. Vaska took out the green banknote and tore it into shreds. The scraps of paper were snatched by the wind and whirled over the shiny polished covering of snow for a long time. When the last shreds had vanished in the white mist, Vaska got off the porch. Staggering with exhaustion, he walked on, not homeward but toward the center of the settlement; he kept walking and walking toward single-story houses, then two-story and three-story palaces. . . .
He went to the very first porch he saw and tugged at the door handle. The door squeaked and slowly opened. Vaska entered a dark corridor, dimly lit by a small lightbulb. He went past the doors leading to the apartments. At the end of the corridor was a pantry; Vaska put his weight to the door, opened it, and crossed the threshold. In the pantry were sacks of onions and perhaps salt. Vaska ripped open one of the sacks. It was pearl barley. Frustration spurred him on. He put his shoulder to the sack and moved it aside. Under the sacks there were frozen pig carcasses. Vaska yelled with fury. He didn’t have the strength to tear even a piece of meat off a carcass. But farther down under the sacks there were frozen piglets, and Vaska had eyes only for them. He tore a frozen piglet off the mass, held it in his hands like a doll, and left for the exit. But people were now coming out of their rooms, and white mist was filling the corridor. Someone shouted “Stop!” and threw himself at Vaska’s legs. Vaska leapt into the air, still hanging on to the piglet, and ran out of the building. The inhabitants rushed in pursuit. Someone was firing a gun at him, someone was roaring like a wild beast, but Vaska was blindly racing away. A few minutes later he realized that his legs were carrying him off to the only official building in the settlement that he knew of, the center for the vitamin expeditions: Vaska had worked for one of them collecting dwarf pine needles.
His pursuers were getting nearer. Vaska ran up the porch, pushed the janitor aside, and rushed down a corridor. A crowd of pursuers came crashing up behind him. Vaska dived into the office of the head of cultural work and then leapt through the next door, the Lenin room. He was trapped. Only now did Vaska see that he had lost his hat. He was still holding the frozen piglet. Vaska put it on the floor, turned the massive bench on its end, and used it to block the door. He dragged the speaker’s platform up to reinforce the bench. Someone shook the door, and then there was silence.
Vaska then sat down on the floor, took the piglet—raw and frozen—in both hands, and gnawed and gnawed at it. . . .
By the time a squad of armed men had been called in and the doors had been opened and the barricade dismantled, Vaska had managed to eat half the piglet. . . .
1958
SERAFIM
THE LETTER was lying on the black, soot-stained table, like a shard of ice. The doors of the iron barrel stove were wide open and the coals were as red as the bilberry jam that came in cans, so the ice shard should have melted, turned into a sliver, and vanished. But the ice wasn’t melting, and Serafim was frightened when he realized that the shard of ice was in fact a letter, and a letter addressed to him, to Serafim. Serafim was afraid of letters, especially ones that had not been paid for and bore government stamps. He had grown up in the countryside where any telegram, received or sent (the term was “tapped off”), would be about some tragic event: funeral, death, serious illness. . . .
The letter was lying facedown on Serafim’s table, not showing the address. Taking off his scarf, unbuttoning his sheepskin coat, which was stiff from the freezing cold, Serafim stared fixedly at the envelope.
He had come all these twelve thousand kilometers, over high mountains, over blue seas, wanting to forget and forgive everything, but the past would not leave him in peace. A letter had come from the other side of the mountains, a letter from the other world, which he had not yet forgotten. The letter had been brought by train, by airplane, by steamship, truck, and reindeer sled to the settlement where Serafim had hidden himself away.
And here was the letter, in the small chemical laboratory where Serafim worked as an assistant.
The laboratory’s log walls, ceiling, and cupboards had turned black not from time but from the nonstop burning stoves, and the interior of the little building seemed like some ancient peasant cottage. The laboratory’s square windows were like the mica windows in the times of Peter the Great. The mines were sparing of glass, and the window frames were more like little grids, so that the smallest piece of glass, even a broken bottle, could be used for glazing. A yellow lightbulb in a metal shade hung from the ceiling beam, like a suicide. Its light would go dim or flare up, since the power was provided by tractor engines, instead of proper generators.
Serafim took off his outdoor clothes and sat close to the stove; he
still would not touch the envelope. He was alone in the laboratory.
A year ago, when what is called a “family breakdown” happened, he had refused to compromise. The reason he had left for the Far East was not because he was a romantic or a man of duty. The extra rubles didn’t tempt him, either. But Serafim considered, in accordance with the views of thousands of philosophers and a dozen local people that he knew, that separation would extinguish love and that kilometers and years would deal with the unhappiness love had brought.
A year had passed, but Serafim’s heart had not changed. He was secretly amazed by the firmness of his feelings. That may have been because he no longer spoke to women; there just weren’t any around. There were the wives of the big bosses, a social class above a laboratory assistant like Serafim. Every one of these well-fed ladies considered herself to be a beauty. Such ladies lived in settlements where there were more entertainments, and the men who appreciated their charms were somewhat wealthier. In any case, there were a lot of military men in the settlements, so that no lady felt she was in danger of a sudden gang rape by chauffeurs or convicted gangsters, something that constantly happened on the road or in small remote places.
For this reason the geological prospectors and the camp chiefs kept their wives in the larger settlements, places where a manicurist could earn herself a fortune.
But there was another side to all this: “Physical frustration” turned out to be a far less terrible thing than Serafim had thought when he was younger. You just had to think less about it.
The mines were worked by prisoners, and in summer Serafim had frequently watched the gray ranks of prisoners crawling into the main gallery and, when the shift was over, crawling out again.
Two prisoners who were engineers worked in the laboratory; a guard would bring them and take them away. Serafim was afraid to talk to them. They asked only questions to do with work: the results of an analysis or a test sample. When Serafim answered, he averted his eyes. Serafim had been warned off any contact when he was still in Moscow, being hired for the Far North. He was told that there were dangerous state criminals there. So he was afraid to bring his fellow workers even a piece of sugar or white bread. In any case, he was being watched by the laboratory chief Persikov, a member of the Komsomol, who was disoriented by the extraordinarily high salary and senior position he got immediately after graduating. He considered his main duty to be the political supervision (possibly, all that was demanded of him) of his colleagues, whether prisoners or free hired workers.