Serafim was rather older than his manager, but he obediently did everything he was ordered to do, as far as the all-important vigilance and circumspection were concerned.
For a whole year, apart from what work demanded, he hadn’t even spoken a dozen words to the engineer prisoners. And he had never said anything at all to the orderly or the night watchman.
Every six months his salary as a contractor for the Far North was raised by ten percent. After his second raise, Serafim asked to be allowed a trip to the nearest settlement, a mere hundred kilometers away, so as to buy something, go to the movies, have dinner in a proper refectory, “see a bit of skirt,” and have a shave at the barber.
Serafim climbed into a truck cab, raised his collar, wrapped himself up as tight as he could, and the truck sped off.
About ninety minutes later, the truck stopped outside a small building. Serafim got out, screwing up his eyes as the spring sunlight was so dazzling.
Two men with rifles were standing in front of him.
“Papers!”
Serafim put his hand in his jacket pocket and suddenly felt a chill: he’d left his ID at home. Worse, he didn’t have a single document to confirm his identity. All he had was an analysis of the air in the mine shaft. Serafim was ordered into the hut.
The truck drove off.
Serafim hadn’t shaved, and his hair was cut very short. He did not inspire the officer with any confidence.
“Where have you escaped from?”
“I’m not an escapee—”
A sudden box on the ears knocked Serafim to the ground.
“Give me a proper answer!”
“I’m going to make a complaint!” Serafim yelled.
“Oh, you’re going to complain, are you? Hey, Semion!”
Semion took careful aim and with a gymnast’s practiced accuracy deftly kicked Serafim in the solar plexus.
Serafim groaned briefly and lost consciousness.
He vaguely recalled being dragged straight down the road somewhere and losing his hat. Then a lock clanged, a door screeched, and soldiers threw Serafim into a stinking shed. At least it was warm.
A few hours later Serafim got his breath back and realized he was in special confinement, like all captured escapees and repeat offenders who were the prisoners in the settlement.
“Got any tobacco?” someone asked in the darkness.
“No, I don’t smoke,” Serafim said apologetically.
“Damned fool. Has he got anything?”
“No, nothing. Do you think those gulls would leave anything over?”
It took Serafim a great effort to work out that he was the subject of this exchange, and that the gulls were what the guards were called because of their all-encompassing greed.
“I had money,” said Serafim.
“ ‘Had’ is the word.”
Serafim felt happier and fell silent. He’d taken two thousand rubles for the journey and, thank God, this money had been removed and was in the guards’ safekeeping. Everything would soon be sorted out, and Serafim would be released and given back his money. He became quite cheerful.
“I’ll have to give the guards a hundred,” he thought, “for safekeeping.” Though why should he? For beating him up?
In this confined, completely windowless hut, where the only source of fresh air was through the door and the cracks in the wall, which were packed with ice, about twenty men were lying on the bare earth.
Serafim felt hungry. He asked the man next to him when supper would be.
“What, are you really not a convict? You won’t get food until tomorrow. We get what the authorities allow: a mug of water and three hundred grams of bread is our daily ration. And seven kilos of firewood.”
Serafim wasn’t summoned; he spent all of five days there. The first day he yelled and banged on the door, but he stopped complaining after the warden on duty managed to smash his rifle butt into Serafim’s forehead. To replace the hat he had lost, Serafim was given a piece of crumpled material that he had trouble fixing onto his head.
On the sixth day he was summoned to the office, where the same officer who had taken him in was sitting; the laboratory manager was standing by the wall, extremely displeased both by Serafim’s absence without leave and by the time he himself had wasted traveling here to confirm his assistant’s identity.
Presniakov gasped quietly when he saw Serafim, who had a blue bruise under his right eye and a torn hat made of dirty, rough cloth, with no straps. Serafim was wearing a ripped quilted jacket with no buttons (he had been forced to leave his fur coat in the cell); he had grown a beard and he was filthy. His eyes were red and inflamed. He made a powerful impression.
“Well,” said Presniakov, “it’s him. Can we go?” And the laboratory manager dragged Serafim to the exit.
“How about my m-m-money?” bellowed Serafim, digging his heels in and pushing Presniakov away.
“What money?” the officer’s voice rang out like a piece of metal.
“Two thousand rubles. I had them on me.”
“You see,” the officer roared with laughter, “what did I say? Drunk, with no hat. . . .”
Serafim strode out and said nothing until they got back home.
After this incident Serafim began thinking about suicide. He even asked an imprisoned engineer why he, a prisoner, hadn’t committed suicide.
The engineer was struck dumb. For a year Serafim hadn’t said more than a couple of words. He stayed silent as he tried to understand Serafim.
“But how do you manage? How can you live?” Serafim whispered passionately.
“Yes, a prisoner’s life is nothing but a series of humiliations, from the moment he opens his eyes to the beginning of a merciful sleep. Yes, all that’s true, but you get used to anything. Even here some days are better than others, days of despair alternate with days of hope. A man doesn’t live because he believes in something or hopes for something. He’s kept going by the instinct for life, just like any other animal. And any tree or any stone could say the same. Watch out when you find yourself struggling for life within yourself, when your nerves are stretched to the maximum, inflamed; watch out you don’t bare your heart or reveal your mind in any unusual way. When you focus what’s left of your strength to fight something, beware of a blow struck from behind. You may not have the strength for a new struggle, a struggle you’re not prepared for. Any suicide is the inevitable result of a double effect, of at least two causes. Do you understand me?”
Serafim did.
Now he was sitting in the soot-stained laboratory, remembering his trip with, for some reason, shame and a burdensome feeling of responsibility, which he was not going to get rid of. He didn’t want to live.
The letter was still there on the black laboratory table, and he was too afraid to pick it up.
Serafim could imagine the lines and his wife’s left-sloping handwriting. It was this handwriting that gave away her age, for in the 1920s schools stopped teaching children to slope their letters to the right and everyone wrote as they liked.
Serafim imagined the lines of the letter, as if he were reading it without opening the envelope. The letter could start “My dear” or “Dear Sima” or “Serafim.” The last of these was what he feared.
Supposing he just tore the envelope into shreds and threw it into the glowing red stove fire, without reading it? Then the spell it was casting would vanish, and he would find it easier to breathe—at least until the next letter came. But he wasn’t that much of a coward, after all! He wasn’t a coward in any case: the engineer was the coward, and he’d show him. He’d show everybody.
Serafim picked up the letter and turned it over to read the address. He had guessed right: it was from his wife in Moscow. In his rage he tore the envelope open and, going up to the lamp, read the letter without sitting down. His wife was writing about a divorce.
Serafim threw the letter in the stove, where it flared up with a white flame edged with blue and then disappeared.
> Serafim went into action, decisively and without haste. He took the keys from his pocket and opened the cupboard in Presniakov’s room. He took a pinch of gray powder from a glass jar and tipped it into a measuring glass. Then he dipped a jug into the water bucket and poured the water into the measuring glass, mixed it with the powder, and drank it.
His throat burned, he felt slightly nauseous, but that was all.
He sat there, watching the pendulum clock, not recalling anything, for all of thirty minutes. There was no effect, apart from the burning in his throat. Then Serafim made haste. He opened the desk drawer and took out his penknife. He opened a vein on his left arm, and the dark blood poured onto the floor. Serafim felt a joyful weakness. But the blood was flowing more and more weakly.
Serafim realized that he wouldn’t bleed to death, that he would survive, that his body’s defenses were stronger than his desire to die. He now remembered what he had to do. Somehow, using one hand, he got his fur jacket on—otherwise it would be too cold outside—and bareheaded, his collar turned up, he ran to the stream that flowed a hundred yards from the laboratory. It was a mountain stream, with deep, narrow flood hollows that steamed like boiling water in the dark, frosty air.
Serafim remembered the first snowfall late last autumn, when the river was covered with a thin layer of ice. And a duck, lagging behind in its migration, weakened by struggling with the snow, fell onto the new ice. Serafim remembered a man, a prisoner, running out, spreading his arms in a ridiculous way as he tried to catch the duck. The duck ran over the ice to the flooded hollow, dived under the ice, and reemerged in the next hole in the ice. The man kept running, cursing the duck. He was as exhausted as the duck but kept running after it from one flood hollow to the next. Twice he fell over on the ice and, cursing foully, took some time to clamber up onto an ice floe.
There were a lot of people around, but nobody came to the aid of the duck or the hunter. The duck was his quarry, his booty, and help would have to be paid for with a share. Worn out, the man crawled over the ice, cursing the whole world. It ended with the duck diving and not reappearing. Presumably, it was so tired that it drowned.
Serafim remembered that he then tried to imagine the duck’s death, as it flailed about in the water, beating its head against the ice and seeing the blue sky through the ice. Serafim was now running to the same spot on the river.
He leapt straight into the steaming, icy water, breaking the crust of blue ice with its dusting of snow. He was up to his waist in water, but the current was strong and Serafim was knocked off his feet. He threw off his jacket and put his arms together, forcing himself to dive under the ice.
People were now shouting and running up, however. They dragged boards and laid them over the flooded hollow. Someone managed to grab Serafim by the hair.
He was carried straight to the hospital, undressed, and warmed up. They tried to pour warm sweet tea down his throat. Serafim silently waved his head from side to side.
The hospital doctor came up to him with a syringe full of glucose solution but saw the torn vein and raised his eyes to meet Serafim’s.
Serafim smiled. They injected the glucose into his right arm. The old doctor, who had been through it all, parted Serafim’s teeth with a spatula, looked at his throat, and called for a surgeon.
An operation was carried out immediately, but even that was too late. Serafim’s stomach walls and esophagus were eaten away by acid. His initial calculation had been perfectly correct.
1959
A DAY OFF
TWO DARK blue squirrels with black faces and black tails were completely absorbed in what was happening behind the silver larches. I went up to the tree where they were in the branches and was close enough to touch the tree before they noticed me. Squirrel claws rustled over the bark, the blue bodies hurled themselves upward and fell silent only when they were somewhere very high. Then I saw what the squirrels had been examining.
A man was praying in the forest clearing. His fabric hat, with earflaps, lay in a heap by his feet, and hoarfrost had already turned his short-cropped hair white. His face had an extraordinary expression, the expression of someone remembering childhood or something equally precious. The man was crossing himself with wide, rapid sweeps of his arm; the three fingers of his right hand seemed to be pulling his head down. I didn’t recognize him at first, his facial features seemed so very unfamiliar. It was the prisoner Zamiatin, a priest from the same barracks as me.
Still unaware of my presence, his lips, growing mute with cold, were quietly and solemnly uttering the words that I remembered from my childhood. It was the Slavonic form of the liturgy: Zamiatin was saying Mass in the silvery forest.
He slowly crossed himself, straightened up, and saw me. His face lost its solemnity and inner joy, and the usual folds on the bridge of his nose united his eyebrows in a frown. Zamiatin hated jokes. He picked up his hat, shook it, and put it on.
“You were saying Mass,” I began.
“No, no,” said Zamiatin, smiling at my ignorance. “How can I say Mass? I don’t have the wine and bread, I don’t have my priest’s stole. This is a prison towel.”
And he adjusted the dirty cellulose rag hanging around his neck. It did in fact look like a priest’s stole. The frost had covered the towel with crystal-like snow, and the crystals shone in the sun with all the colors of the rainbow, just like embroidered ecclesiastic cloth.
“In any case, I feel ashamed: I don’t know where east is. Nowadays the sun rises for two hours and sets behind the same mountain as it rises from. So where is the east?”
“Is it so important to face east?”
“Of course it isn’t. Don’t go. But I’m telling you I’m not saying Mass, and I can’t. I’m simply reciting, remembering the Sunday service. And I don’t even know if today is Sunday.”
“It’s Thursday,” I said. “The supervisor said so this morning.”
“You see, then: Thursday. No, no, I’m not saying Mass. I just feel better doing this. And I don’t feel so hungry,” said Zamiatin with a smile.
I knew that everyone here had his own “final thing,” the most important thing that helped him to stay alive, to hang on to life, which we were so insistently and stubbornly being deprived of here. If Zamiatin’s “final thing” was the liturgy of John Chrysostom, then my final salvation was poetry: favorite verses by other poets, which by some miracle I could remember here, a place where everything else was forgotten, discarded, expelled from the memory. This was the only thing that had not yet been crushed by fatigue, sub-zero temperatures, starvation, and endless humiliations.
The sun set. The hasty mist of an early evening in winter filled the space between the trees. I wended my way back to our barracks, a low, long, narrow hut with small windows—more like a miniature stable. Grabbing the heavy, ice-covered door with both hands, I heard a rustle in the next hut: that was the toolshed, a store where the mine-workers’ saws, spades, axes, crowbars, and pickaxes were kept.
On our days off the toolshed was kept locked, but there was no lock now. I went into the shed and the heavy door nearly slammed in my face. There were so many cracks in the storehouse that your eyes quickly got used to the semidarkness.
Two gangsters were tickling a big four-month-old German shepherd puppy; the puppy was lying on its back, squealing and waving all four paws. The older gangster was holding the puppy by the collar. They weren’t bothered by my entry; we worked in the same brigade.
“Hey you, who’s outside?”
“There’s nobody there,” I replied.
“All right, come on, then,” said the older one.
“Hang on, let me play with him a bit longer,” answered the younger one. “Look at him rolling about.” He felt the puppy’s warm flank near its heart and tickled it.
The trusting puppy squealed and licked the human hand.
“So you’re licking . . . you won’t be licking any more. Senia—”
Holding the puppy down with his left hand on its
collar, Senia pulled out an ax from behind him and in one fast, short stroke brought it down on the dog’s head. The puppy jerked, and blood splashed all over the icy floor of the toolshed.
“Hold him tighter!” Senia yelled, as he raised the ax again.
“No need to hold him, it’s not a rooster,” said the younger one.
“Take the skin off while it’s still warm,” Senia instructed him, “and bury it in the snow.”
That evening nobody could sleep because of the smell of a meat soup, until the criminals had eaten it all. But there weren’t enough criminals in our barracks to eat the whole puppy. There was still some meat left in the pot.
With a wave of his finger Senia invited me: “Take some.”
“I don’t want any,” I said.
“All right, then.” Senia surveyed the bunks. “We’ll let the priest have it. Hey, Father, have a piece of our mutton. But wash the pot after you.”
Zamiatin emerged from the darkness into the yellow light of the smoky kerosene lamp. He took the pot and vanished. Five minutes later he returned with the pot washed.
“That fast?” Senia asked, intrigued. “You get it down quick . . . like a seagull. Father, that wasn’t mutton. It was dog meat. The dog that used to go and see you, the one called North.”
Zamiatin looked at Senia but said nothing. Then he turned and left. I left too. Zamiatin was standing in the snow outside the door. He was vomiting. In the moonlight his face looked leaden. Sticky, clammy saliva hung from his blue lips. He wiped his lips on his sleeve and looked angrily at me.
Kolyma Stories Page 16