1962
CALIGULA
A NOTE was delivered to the punishment barracks even before the twilight siren sounded.
The commandant lit the kerosene lamp, read the paper and hurried off to give orders. Nothing struck the commandant as strange.
“He’s not off his head, is he?” asked the duty guard, putting a finger to his forehead.
The commandant gave the soldier a cold look, which frightened the soldier and made him wonder if he had been too frivolous. The soldier turned his eyes to the road.
“They’re bringing it,” he said. “Ardatiev’s coming in person.”
Two escort guards with rifles loomed up in the mist. They were followed by a drover leading an emaciated gray horse. Behind the horse a big, heavily built man was striding over the snow. His white sheepskin jacket was unbuttoned, his Siberian sheepskin hat was tipped back over his neck. He was holding a stick and mercilessly beating the horse’s bony, dirty, sunken flanks. The horse jerked at every blow, but, too weak to change pace, it went on meandering.
At the checkpoint hut the guards stopped the horse. Ardatiev staggered ahead. He was breathing like an overheated horse, and fumes of alcohol came over the commandant, who was standing to attention.
“Ready?” Ardatiev rasped.
“Yes, sir!” replied the commandant.
“Drag it away!” roared Ardatiev. “Take it and do what’s necessary. I punish people, so I’m not going to let horses off. I’ll make it do its job. It hasn’t worked for three days,” he mumbled, poking the commandant’s chest with his fist. “I was going to lock up the drover. After all, the plan’s being wrecked. The pla-a-an. . . .”
The drover swore on his honor, “It’s the horse, not me, that’s stopped work.”
“I kn-now,” Ardatiev hiccupped, “I b-believe you. . . . I tell them, give me the reins. I took the reins, it wouldn’t move. I hit it, it still doesn’t move. I offer it sugar—I deliberately took some from home—it won’t take it. So, I think, you bloody swine, how am I going to make up for the working days you’ve lost? Go on and join the other layabouts, all those enemies of humanity: to solitary. Nothing but water. Seventy-two hours to begin with.”
Ardatiev sat down in the snow and took off his hat. His wet tangled hair was falling over his eyes. He tried to get up, swayed, and fell over onto his back.
The guard and the commandant dragged him into the booth. Ardatiev was asleep.
“Do we take him home?”
“No. His wife doesn’t like it.”
“How about the horse?”
“We’ve got to take it away. If he finds out when he wakes up that we haven’t locked it up, he’ll kill us. Put the horse in number four, with the intellectuals.”
•
Two prisoners who worked as night watchmen brought some firewood for the night into the hut and started stacking it around the stove.
“What do you say, Piotr,” said one of them, his eyes on the door to the room where Ardatiev was snoring.
“I’d say there’s nothing new about it . . . Caligula. . . .”
“Yes, yes, just like Derzhavin’s verses,” responded the other. Straightening his back, he recited with feeling:
Caligula, your horse in the Senate
Could not shine, however radiant its gold:
Only good deeds are radiant.
The old men lit up and the blue tobacco smoke drifted around the room.
1962
THE SPADE ARTIST
AFTER work on Sunday, Krist was told that he was being moved to Kostochkin’s brigade, to make up numbers on a gold-mine brigade that was rapidly losing men. This was an important piece of news. Whether it was good or bad news was not for Krist to consider, since it was ineluctable news. Krist had heard a lot about Kostochkin at that mine, but there were not even rumors about him in the mute barracks, insulated as it was from the outside world. Like every other prisoner, Krist didn’t know where the new people in his life had come from: some came for a short while, others for a long time, but in both cases people vanished from Krist’s life without saying a thing about themselves. Their departures were like deaths, their deaths were like departures. Bosses, foremen, cooks, quartermasters, the men in the next bunk, your wheelbarrow partner, your pickax team. . . .
Krist never grew tired of this kaleidoscope, this movement of countless persons. He simply never gave it a thought. Life didn’t give him the time for such thoughts. “Don’t get worked up, don’t think about new bosses, Krist. You’re just one man, but you’ll have a great number of bosses,” was what a joker and philosopher had told him. Krist had forgotten who the man was. He couldn’t remember the surname or the face, or the voice of the man who’d uttered these important jocular phrases to him. The reason they were important was because they were said in jest. There did exist a few people who dared to make jokes, to smile, if only a well-hidden, very secret smile, but still a smile, an unmistakable smile, though Krist was not one of them.
The foremen that Krist had had. . . . Either they were article 58 politicals, like himself, who had taken on a job far too weighty for themselves and would soon be dismissed, dismissed before they had time to turn into murderers. Or they’d be another article 58 like him, freiers, but beaten freiers, knocked about and with experience, so that they could not only give orders at work, but organize the work and even get on with the norm-setters and other various bosses, give bribes, talk people round. But these men too, article 58 prisoners like Krist, refused even to contemplate the fact that giving orders for camp work was the worst sin in the camps. In a place where scores were settled in blood, where men had no rights, to take on the responsibility of determining others’ lives and deaths at the whim of the authorities—all that was too great a mortal sin, a sin that was unforgivable. There were foremen who died with their brigade. There were also foremen who were immediately corrupted by this horrible power over someone else’s life—they wielded a pickax or a spade handle in order to facilitate any conversations with their comrades. And when they remembered such occasions, they would repeat, as if it were a prayer, the gloomy camp saying, “You die today, I die tomorrow.” Many times Krist’s foremen were not article 58 prisoners. More often than not, and always in the most terrible years, his foremen were nonpolitical prisoners sentenced for murder or employment crimes. These were normal people, and you could blame only the power of authority, as well as heavy pressure from above, a torrent of lethal instructions, for forcing these people to commit actions they would, perhaps, never have consented to in their former lives. The boundary between a crime and “a non-punishable act” in the articles of the law regarding employment was very subtle and sometimes indistinguishable. People were tried today for acts that they would not have been tried for yesterday, not to mention pretrial detention and the legal scale of nuances between an action and a crime.
The nonpolitical foremen were beasts because they were ordered to be. But the foremen who were gangsters were beasts regardless of orders. A gangster foreman was the worst thing that could happen to a brigade. Kostochkin, however, was neither a gangster nor an ordinary nonpolitical criminal. He was the only son of some major employee, either in the party or in a soviet, of the Chinese-Eastern Railway,[5] who was tried on the “Chinese-Eastern Railway case” and put to death. Kostochkin junior, who had been studying at Harbin and knew no other city, was at the age of twenty-five sentenced to fifteen years as an FM, family member. Brought up to a foreign life in Harbin, a life where innocent people were jailed only in novels, and those largely translated from a foreign language, young Kostochkin was not convinced at the bottom of his heart that his father had been wrongly convicted. His father had brought him up to believe in the NKVD’s infallibility. Young Kostochkin was very ill-prepared for any other belief. When his father was arrested and he himself was convicted and deported from the Very Far East to the Very Far North, young Kostochkin’s anger was directed at his father for ruining his life by some mysterious crime. What d
id Kostochkin know about adult life? He had studied four foreign languages, two European, two Asian, and was the best dancer in Harbin; he had learned every sort of blues and rumba from visiting professionals. He was the best boxer in Harbin, a middleweight who could also be a light heavyweight; he’d learned his uppercuts and hooks from a former European champion. What could he know about big politics? So if his father was shot, there must have been a reason. Perhaps the NKVD had overdone things, perhaps his father should have had ten or fifteen years. In that case, as Kostochkin junior, he should have had five, not fifteen years, if he had to be sentenced.
Kostochkin would repeat four words, putting them in a different order—in each case, they sounded bad and worried, “So there was something. . . . So something was there.”
The interrogators had achieved a major success by making Kostochkin hate his executed father and by giving him a passionate desire to free himself of the slur, of the curse on his father. Not that the main interrogator was aware of this. That interrogator, the one who had been in charge of Kostochkin’s case, had long before been executed after being named in yet another “NKVD case.”
But foxtrots and rumbas were not all Kostochkin had learned in Harbin. He had graduated from Harbin Technical Institute and had a degree in mechanical engineering.
When Kostochkin was brought to the mine he had been assigned to, he managed to get an interview with the mine chief, in which he asked for a job that matched his qualifications. He promised to work conscientiously, he cursed his father, he pleaded with the local bosses. “He can write labels for the canned food,” the mine chief responded curtly, but the local NKVD officer who was present at this conversation detected certain familiar tones in the young Harbin engineer’s voice. The bosses had a private chat, then the NKVD man had a talk with Kostochkin, and the pit-face brigades suddenly learned that one of their foremen would be a novice, a fellow article 58 political prisoner. The optimists interpreted this appointment as a sign that things would soon change for the better; the pessimists muttered something about new brooms. But both optimists and pessimists were amazed, apart from those who had long ago learned to be amazed by nothing. Krist was not amazed.
Each brigade has its own life, its own section of the barracks with a separate entry, and they meet other people from the same barracks only in the refectory. Krist had often come across Kostochkin, who was noticeably red-faced, broad-shouldered and powerfully built. His long-sleeved gloves were made of fur. The poorer foremen had gloves made of rags from quilted trousers. Kostochkin’s hat was also a “free” one, fur with earflaps, and his felt boots were genuine, not camp-issue string boots. All this made Kostochkin stand out. He worked as foreman for one winter month, which meant that he’d fulfilled the plan, or a percentage of it—you could find out from the board by the guardhouse, not that an old hand like Krist took any interest.
Krist assembled his future foreman’s life story mentally, while lying on his bunk. But he was sure he had got it right, that there could be no mistakes. There were no other ways that a lad from Harbin could have got a foreman’s job.
Kostochkin’s brigade was melting away, as were all the brigades working at a gold-mine pit face. From time to time—and that had to mean on a weekly, not a monthly basis—reserves were sent to Kostochkin’s brigade. Today the new man was Krist. “Kostochkin probably knows who Einstein is,” Krist thought, as he fell asleep in his new place.
As a new man, Krist was given a place well away from the stove. The first men to join the brigade had the best places. That was the normal way of doing things, and Krist was perfectly familiar with it.
The foreman was sitting by a table in the corner, near the lamp, reading a book. Even though a foreman, being the master of his workmen’s lives and deaths, could for his convenience put the only lamp on his table and deprive everyone else in the barracks of light, they wouldn’t do so to read or talk. . . . You could talk just as well in the dark, not that there was any time to talk, or anything to talk about. But Kostochkin had moved up to the common lamp and he was reading, reading, sometimes arranging his chubby childlike lips in a smile, screwing up his big, handsome gray eyes. Krist was so taken by this peaceful scene, something he had not seen for ages, a foreman and his brigade all relaxing, that he quietly made up his mind definitely to stay in this brigade and to devote all his strength to his new foreman.
The brigade had a deputy foreman, too, who was the orderly, the short Oska, old enough to be Kostochkin’s father. Oska swept the barracks, fed the brigade, helped the foreman; everything was as it should be. As he fell asleep, Krist recalled that his new foreman probably knew who Einstein was. The thought made him happy and, warmed up by the cup of boiled water he’d just drunk, he fell asleep.
The new brigade made no noise at all when taken out to work. Krist was shown to the tool store and got his tools. He adapted the spade, as he had done a thousand times before, by knocking away the hateful short handle with a crossbar that had been fixed onto the American spade, then he used the back of his ax and a stone to make the blade a little bit wider, and chose himself the longest possible haft from the many hafts in the corner of the shed. He put the haft into the opening on the blade and fixed it firmly. Then he placed the spade at an angle, with the blade at his feet, measured it and made a mark, “notched” the haft at chin height and hacked it off at the notch. Using his sharp ax, Krist shaved and carefully smoothed the butt end of the new handle. He stood up and turned around. Kostochkin was standing in front of him, paying full attention to the new man’s actions. Krist had been expecting this. Kostochkin didn’t say a word, and Krist realized that the foreman was postponing judgment until work, pit-face work.
The pit face wasn’t far; work had begun. The spade handle quivered, Krist’s back ached, both his hands took up their usual position as his fingers gripped the haft. It was a little bit too thick, but Krist would put that right in the evening. And he would sharpen the spade with a file. His arms swung the spade again and again, and the melodic screech of metal against rock was accompanied by an accelerated rhythm. The spade screeched and rustled, the stone fell off the spade with each swing and fell to the bottom of the barrow, and the barrow responded with a wooden thump, and the stone replied to stone. Krist knew all this pit-face music well. The same barrows were all around, the same spades were screeching, the stones were rumbling as they fell off the lumps of rock undercut by the pickax, and the spades screeched again.
Krist put down his spade and tabbed the handles, then took over from his partner on “OGPU’s court of appeal: Just two handles and one wheel,” which meant wheelbarrow in Kolyma prisoners’ language. Not quite gangster slang, but something like it. Krist placed the body of the barrow on the board of the ramp, with the handles facing away from the pit face. Then he quickly filled it up, after which he arched his back, tensed his stomach muscles and, once he had his balance, wheeled the barrow to the sizing trommel, the ore-washing machine. When he came back Krist followed all the rules for barrowing that had been bequeathed by convicts in tsarist times: handles pointing up, wheel in front. Krist rested with his hands on the barrow handles, and then put the barrow back and picked up the spade again. The spade began to screech.
Foreman Kostochkin, the Harbin engineer, was standing, listening to the pit-face symphony and observing Krist’s movements.
“Well, I see you’re a spade artist,” he said, bursting into loud laughter. His laughter was as uninhibited as a child’s. The foreman wiped his lips on his sleeve. “What category were you getting where you came from?”
This meant the category of food, the “stomach scale,” which was meant to urge prisoners to work harder. Krist knew that these categories had been invented on the White Sea canal, where prisoners were “reforged.” The slobbery romanticism of reforging had a basis in calculations that were cruel and ominous, as was this stomach scale.
“The third,” Krist replied, his voice emphasizing as clearly as he could how much he despised his p
revious foreman for failing to value a spade artist’s talent. Because he understood the advantages, Krist was accustomed to a certain amount of deceit.
“I’ll see you get the second. Starting today.”
“Thank you,” said Krist.
The new brigade was in fact a little quieter than the others in which Krist had found himself living and working. The barracks were a little cleaner and there was slightly less foul language. Krist wanted to toast a piece of bread, left over from supper, on the stove. It was a habit he had acquired years ago. But the man next to him, whose name Krist didn’t know and never was to know, pushed him and said that the foreman didn’t like people toasting bread on the stove.
Krist went up to the iron stove, which was burning merrily, and spread his hands over the current of heat, sticking his face into a stream of hot air. Oska, the deputy foreman, got off the bunk nearby and, with his mighty arm, pulled the new man back from the stove: “Go back to your place. Don’t hog the stove. Let everyone get some heat.” On the whole, that was fair, but it was very hard to restrain one’s body when it longed for the fire. Prisoners in Kostochkin’s brigade had learned to restrain themselves. Krist would have to learn to do that. He went back to his place and took off his pea jacket. He stuck his feet into its sleeves, adjusted his hat, curled into a ball and fell asleep.
As he was falling asleep, he could still see someone come into the barracks and give orders. Kostochkin, not moving away from the lamp, swore, and went on reading his book. Oska jumped up to meet the man who had come in, and in a series of deft, quick movements grabbed him by the elbows and pushed him out of the barracks. In his previous life Oska had been a history teacher in some institute.
For many days that followed, Krist’s spade screeched, as the sand rustled. Kostochkin soon realized that the polished technique of Krist’s movements had long concealed a total lack of strength. However hard Krist tried, his barrows were always slightly less full than they should have been. This technique had nothing to do with his own will, it was dictated by some inner feeling that controlled Krist’s muscles—all of them, whether healthy or feeble, young or worn-out and exhausted. It always turned out that in the pit-face allocation where Krist was working, less was achieved than the foreman expected from the professionalism in the spade artist’s movements. But Kostochkin never picked on Krist; he swore at him no more than he swore at the others. Kostochkin never swore for the sake of swearing and never lectured anyone. Perhaps he realized that Krist was working to the maximum of his strength and holding back only what could not be squandered for the sake of any foreman in any camp in the world. Or Kostochkin sensed, if he didn’t understand, that our feelings are far richer than our thoughts, and a prisoner’s exsanguinated tongue reveals only some of his inner feelings. Feelings also become pallid and weak, but long after thoughts do, long after human speech does. Krist was, in fact, working harder than he had for a long time, and although what he achieved was not enough to get the “second category,” he still received it. For diligence, for effort. . . .
Kolyma Stories Page 53