Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

The interrogator took Krist’s half-written application, tore it up and threw it into the fire. . . . For a moment the stove burned more brightly.

  “Sit at the desk. At the end.”

  Krist had a professional calligrapher’s handwriting, which he liked a lot, although all his comrades laughed at it, saying that it wasn’t like the hand of a professor or someone with a doctorate. It wasn’t a scholar’s, a writer’s or a poet’s hand. It was a storekeeper’s hand. People joked that Krist could have had a career as the tsar’s clerk, as in the story by Aleksandr Kuprin.

  But Krist wasn’t embarrassed by these jokes. He had gone on having his beautiful fair-copy manuscripts typed. The typists approved of him, but made fun of him in secret.

  Fingers that are used to handling a pickax or a spade handle have enormous trouble holding a pen, but in the end they managed.

  “Everything here’s a mess, chaos,” the interrogator was saying. “I realize that. But you can help me to put things in order.”

  “Of course, of course,” said Krist. The stove was now burning well and the room was warm. “I’d like a cigarette.”

  “I don’t smoke,” the interrogator said curtly. “And I don’t have any bread either. You’re not going to work tomorrow. I’ll tell the labor manager.”

  So it was that for several months Krist came once a week to the camp interrogator’s badly heated, uncomfortable accommodation to copy papers and stitch them into folders.

  The deadly winds of the snowless winter of 1937–38 had now got into the barracks in full force. Labor supervisors ran every night around the barracks with some list or other, looking for people to wake up and join a party to be sent out. Even before this terrible winter happened, nobody had ever come back from these “parties,” and now prisoners had stopped even thinking about these nighttime actions. A deportation party was a deportation party, and work was so hard that you couldn’t think about anything.

  The working hours were extended, escort guards were introduced, but the week passed and Krist, barely alive, would wend his way to the familiar place, the interrogator’s office, to endlessly stitch papers. Krist stopped washing, he stopped shaving, but the interrogator seemed not to notice that Kris was starving, nor that his cheeks were sunken and his eyes inflamed. Krist just kept writing, and stitching. The quantity of papers and folders kept on growing, and there was no hope of ever putting them in order. Krist was copying out endless lists that showed only surnames, while the top of the list was bent back and he never even tried to get at the secret of this office, although all he had to do was bend back the sheet of paper in front of him. Sometimes the interrogator picked up a batch of “case files” that had appeared out of nowhere in Krist’s absence, and he would then hurriedly dictate lists for Krist to write down.

  Dictation used to end at midnight, and Krist went back to his barracks and slept and slept. He was exempt from the next day’s roll call for work. Week after week passed, as Krist kept getting thinner and kept writing.

  Then one day, picking up the next batch of papers to read the next surname, the interrogator stumbled, looked at Krist and asked him:

  “What’s your first name and patronymic?”

  “Robert Ivanovich,” Krist replied with a smile. If the interrogator started calling him by his first name or any other polite way, he wouldn’t have been surprised. The interrogator was young enough to be Krist’s son. Still holding on to the folder and not uttering anyone’s surname, the interrogator turned pale. He went on turning pale until he was whiter than snow. The interrogator’s quick fingers leafed through the thin sheets of paper stitched into the folder—there were neither more nor fewer pages than in any other folder in the pile lying on the floor. Then the interrogator took decisive action. He opened the stove door, and the room at once became bright, as if his soul had been fully illuminated and something very important and human had been discovered at the bottom of it. The interrogator tore the folder into pieces and pushed the pieces into the stove. The light became even brighter. And, without looking at Krist, the interrogator said.

  “Bureaucratic nonsense. They don’t understand what they’re doing, they’re not interested.” He looked at Krist with a firm gaze. “Let’s continue writing. Are you ready?”

  “I am,” said Krist. Only years later did he realize that the folder has been his, Krist’s.

  By then many of Krist’s fellow prisoners had been shot. The interrogator too had been shot. But Krist was still alive and sometimes, at least once every few years, he would remember that burning folder, the interrogator’s decisive fingers as he tore up Krist’s “case file”: a present to one doomed man from another.

  Krist wrote in a lifesaving calligraphic hand.

  1964

  THE DUCK

  THE MOUNTAIN stream was by now in the grip of ice; in the rapids there was no flowing water at all. The stream began to freeze at the rapids and a month later there was nothing left of the summer water that roared so menacingly. Even the ice was trampled down, crushed to pieces and squashed by hooves, by tires, and by felt boots. But the stream was still alive and water still breathed in it. White mist would rise over the pools of unfrozen water and the thawed patches of ground.

  An exhausted tufted duck slipped with a splash into the water. The flock had long before flown south, but this duck stayed behind. It was still light out, and snowy. The snow covering the naked forest made it exceptionally light all the way to the horizon. The duck wanted to rest, if only for a little, and then take off and fly where the flock had gone.

  It didn’t have the strength to fly. Its wings weighed a ton and forced it to the ground, but in the water it felt support and salvation. The unfrozen pool water seemed to be a living river.

  Hardly had the duck looked around and rested than its sharp hearing caught the sound of danger. Not so much a sound as a rumble.

  From the snowy crust above, breaking his descent on the frozen hummocks that became even colder toward the evening, a man was running down. He had seen the duck some time before and had been tracking it with secret hopes. Now his hopes had come true and the duck was sitting on the ice.

  The man crept up to the duck, but missed his footing. The duck noticed him, and then the man ran without trying to hide; the duck was unable to fly, it was too tired. All it had to do was to rise up and then nothing but angry threats would have menaced it. But to rise skyward its wings needed strength, and the duck was too tired. All it could manage was to dive and vanish in the water, while the man, armed with a heavy branch, stopped by the pool where the duck had disappeared and waited for it to surface. After all, the duck would have to breathe.

  Twenty meters away there was another pool of water, and the man cursed as he saw the duck had swum under the ice to emerge in the next pool. But it was no more able to fly from there. It spent seconds resting.

  The man tried to smash and crush the ice with his feet, but his footwear, made of rags, was of no use.

  He struck the blue ice with his stick. The ice crumbled a little, but didn’t break. The man exhausted himself and, breathing heavily, sat down on the ice.

  The duck swam on the pool. The man ran toward it, cursing and throwing stones, and the duck dove down and reappeared in the first pool.

  They went on running back and forth like this, man and duck, until darkness fell.

  It was time to abandon the failed hunt and go back to the barracks. The man regretted wasting his strength on this crazy pursuit. He was too hungry to think properly, to make a rational plan and trick the duck. Impatience, caused by hunger, had suggested the wrong path to take, a bad plan. The duck remained on the ice, in its unfrozen patch of water. It was time to go back to the barracks. The reason the man tried to catch the duck was not to cook and eat it. True, a duck was a bird and therefore meat, wasn’t it? To be boiled in a tin pot or, even better, put in a clay pot buried in burning hot violet-colored ash or just chucked into a bonfire. The fire would burn out and the clay the bird was baked in wou
ld break open. Inside there would be hot, slippery fat. The fat would flow over his hands and solidify on his lips. No, the man was trying to catch the duck for quite a different purpose. Shaky plans were arising and taking a vague, foggy shape in his brain. To take this duck and offer it to the foreman as a gift, so that the foreman would cross the man’s name off the ominous list which was being compiled at night. The whole barracks knew about this list, and the man was trying hard not to think about the impossible, the incomprehensible, about somehow getting out of the deportation party, so as to stay here on this expedition. The starvation here could be endured a little longer, somehow, and this man knew that a bird in the hand was always best.

  But the duck was still there on its unfrozen patch of water. It was very hard for the man to take the necessary decision, to act, to do something that his everyday life had not taught him to do. He had never been taught how to hunt duck. That’s why his movements were useless and clumsy. He’d never been taught to think about the possibility of such hunting. His brain was unable to solve the unexpected quandaries that life posed. He had been taught how to live in such a way that no personal decision was needed, so that somebody else’s will determined events. It was extraordinarily difficult to intervene in one’s own fate, to turn it around.

  Perhaps it was for the best if the duck died on the pool, and the man in the barracks.

  It was hard to warm his fingers, frozen and scratched by the ice, by putting them against his chest. First he put each hand, then both hands at the same time under his clothes, quivering at the throbbing pain in his permanently frostbitten fingers. His hungry body held little warmth, and he went back to the barracks, pressed himself close to the stove, and yet still could not get warm. His body was shaking with severe and unstoppable convulsions.

  The foreman looked in through the barracks door. He too had seen the duck and seen this corpse hunting down a dying duck. The foreman had no desire to leave this settlement. Who knew what was waiting for him in a new place? The foreman had set his hopes on a generous gift—a live duck and free-man’s trousers—to soften the heart of the clerk of works, who was still asleep. When he woke up, the clerk of works could cross the foreman off the list, him instead of the workman who had caught the duck.

  The clerk of works was lying down, crumpling a Rocket cigarette with practiced hands. He had been looking through the window and had also seen the start of the hunt. If the duck was caught, the carpenter would make a cage and the clerk would take the duck to the big boss, or rather the big boss’s wife, Agnia. And the clerk’s future would be assured.

  But the duck stayed on its unfrozen patch of water where it was to die. Everything went on as if the duck had never appeared.

  1963

  THE BUSINESSMAN

  THERE were a lot of men called Handyman in the hospital. Handyman was the nickname given to someone who had injured his hand, not who had had his teeth knocked out. Which Handyman? The Greek? The lanky man from ward seven? That’s Kolia Handyman, the businessman.

  The right hand: Kolia’s hand was shot off by an explosion. Kolia was a self-shooter, a self-mutilator. In the medical accounts self-shooters are listed under the same heading as men who chop their feet off with an ax. It was forbidden to accept them into the hospital if they didn’t have a high “septic” temperature. Kolia Handyman did have that temperature. For two months he struggled to stop the wound healing, but his youth won the battle and Kolia did not have long to stay in the hospital.

  It was time to go back to the mine. But Kolia was not afraid. What could a gold-mine pit face do to a one-armed man like him? The times had passed when one-armed men were forced to “trample a road” for men and tractors in the forestry areas, spending a working day in deep, porous crystal snow. The authorities did what they could to combat self-shooters, prisoners who blew up their feet, inserting a percussion cap into their boot and lighting a safety fuse by their knee. The fuse method was the most convenient. They stopped sending the one-armed to trample a road. Would they make him wash gold in a sieve—with one arm? Well, you could go and do it for a day or so in summer. If it didn’t rain. Kolia’s mouth opened in a broad grin showing his white teeth. The scurvy hadn’t affected his teeth yet. Kolia Handyman had already learned how to roll a cigarette with just his left hand. Almost well-fed, and rested in the hospital, Kolia just kept on smiling. Kolia Handyman was a businessman. He was always swapping something, taking forbidden herring to those who had diarrhea and getting bread from them in exchange. Those who had diarrhea also needed to get kept back, to put on the brakes in the hospital. Kolia swapped soup for porridge, and porridge for two portions of soup and he knew how to cut any bread ration he was entrusted with to exchange for tobacco. He got the bread from the bedridden patients, swollen scurvy sufferers, those who had serious fractures and were in the trauma wards or, as the paramedic Pavel Pavlovich used to pronounce it, “drama” wards, not suspecting the bitter irony of his malapropism. Kolia Handyman’s luck began the day he shot his hand off. Almost well-fed, almost warm. As for the foul curses of the bosses and the threats from the doctors, Kolia considered all that to be of no importance. And he was right.

  Several times during those blissful months that Kolia spent in the hospital strange and terrible things happened. The hand that had been blown off by the explosion, although it didn’t exist, hurt as it had at the start. Kolia could feel all of it: the permanently bent fingers, still in the same frozen position as they had been at the mine, curved exactly to fit around a spade handle or a pickax handle. It was hard to hold a spoon with a hand like that, but you didn’t need a spoon at the mine: anything edible could be drunk “overboard” from the bowl, soup or porridge, milk pudding or tea. These permanently bent fingers could hold your bread ration. But Handyman had amputated them, blasted them off to hell. So why then could he feel these bent fingers just as he had at the mine, when they’d been shot off? His left hand, after all, had begun a month ago to unbend and bend right back, like a rusty hinge after it has had a touch of grease applied. That had made Handyman weep for joy. Even now, as he lay with his belly over his left hand, he was unbending the hand, and doing so freely. But the amputated right hand wouldn’t unbend. All this happened mainly at night. Handyman grew cold with fear, he would wake up, weep and not dare to ask even the men in the nearby beds about it. Perhaps it meant something? Perhaps he was going mad.

  Pain from the missing hand came more and more seldom, the world was becoming normal. Handyman was pleased at his luck. And he kept on smiling, as he remembered how neatly he’d managed to do it.

  Pavel Pavlovich the paramedic emerged from his cubbyhole, holding a fat roll-up that he hadn’t yet lit. He sat down next to Handyman.

  “Do you want a light, Pavel Pavlovich?’ Handyman said, bending over the paramedic. “Just a moment.”

  Handyman dashed to the stove, opened the door, and used his left hand to throw a few burning embers onto the floor.

  Deftly tossing up a smoldering coal, Handyman caught it in his hand and rolled the coal, which was now black, but still had a flame, desperately blowing on it to keep the fire going. Then, with a slight bow, he offered it right up to the paramedic’s face. The paramedic drew in the air hard, holding the roll-up in his mouth, and finally had his light. Puffs of blue smoke drifted over his head. Handyman flared his nostrils. Patients are woken up in the wards by this smell and desperately try to breathe in the smoke, not smoke, but a receding shadow of smoke. . . .

  Everyone realized that it was Handyman who would get the stub to smoke.

  Handyman meanwhile was working out that he would have a couple of draws and then take it to the surgical ward to a freier with a fractured spine. A nice dinner ration was waiting for Handyman there, and that was no small matter. If Pavel Pavlovich left more of his roll-up, then the butt could be turned into a new cigarette that would be worth more than a dinner ration.

  “You’ll be off soon, Handyman,” Pavel Pavlovich was saying casually. “You’v
e had a good break here, you’ve really put on weight, so it’s got to come to an end. . . . Tell me, how did you have the guts to do it? That might be something to tell my children. If I ever see them again. . . .”

  “I’m not trying to hide anything, Pavel Pavlovich,” said Handyman, still working out what to do. Pavel had clearly rolled his cigarette carelessly. Look at how he draws on it, takes the smoke in so that the flame moves and the paper gets burned. The paramedic’s roll-up wasn’t smoldering, it was burning like a safety fuse. Like a safety fuse. So he had to tell the story quickly.

  “Well?”

  “I got up one morning, got my bread ration, and put it in my secret pouch under my shirt. I go and see Mishka the Dynamite man. ‘How’s things?’ he says. ‘Got it,’ I say. I give him all my eight-hundred-gram ration and get a percussion cap and a length of fuse in exchange. I go and join the people from my parts in our barracks. They’re not really from my parts, we just say so. Fedia and Petro or somebody. ‘Ready?’ I ask them. ‘Ready,’ they say. ‘Hand it over.’ They give me their bread rations. I put the two lots in my secret pouch under my shirt and we toddle off to work.

  “At the workplace, while our brigade is getting its tools, we take a burning coal from the stove, go behind the earth mound. We stand as close as we can, each of us holding a percussion cap in the right hand. We light the fuse, bang and fingers are flying in all directions. The foreman yells, ‘What are you doing?’ The senior guard, ‘Quick march to the camp, to the medical center!’ We were bandaged at the medical center, but I had a temperature so I ended up in the hospital.”

  Pavel Pavlovich had nearly finished his cigarette, but Handyman was so carried away by his story that he nearly forgot about it.

  “How about those bread rations that you had left over. Did you eat them?”

  “Of course I did. As soon as I was bandaged, I ate them. My fellow countrymen came up and asked me to break off a piece. ‘Go to hell,’ I told them. This is my profit.”