Vasiliev was simply a good comrade, ready to share any fate his friend suffered. They had all tried to escape in their first year of imprisonment, while they still had their illusions . . . and physical strength.
•
One white summer night twelve cans of meat disappeared from the kitchen tent of a geologists’ nomadic settlement. This loss was extremely mysterious. All forty workmen and technicians were free people, making decent money. They were unlikely to need such things as canned meat. Even if it had been fabulously valuable canned food, there was nowhere they could sell it in this remote, endless forest. The bear explanation was also immediately excluded, since nothing in the kitchen had been displaced. It might have been thought that someone had done this on purpose, to spite the cook who was in charge of kitchen supplies, although the cook, a very easygoing man, denied that there could be an enemy of his hiding among his forty comrades so as to taunt him. But if that assumption was wrong, only one explanation was left. To test that, the expedition’s clerk of works, Kasayev, took two of his most energetic workmen with him, arming them with knives, and grabbing for himself the only firearm: a small-caliber rifle. They set off to inspect their surroundings, which were grayish-brown ravines without a trace of greenery, leading up to an extensive limestone plateau. The geologists’ settlement seemed to be in a pit, on the green banks of a river.
It didn’t take long to solve the mystery. About two hours later, when they had slowly climbed up to the plateau, one of the more sharp-sighted workmen stretched out a hand: he had seen a moving point on the horizon. They moved along the edge of a patch of precarious young tufa, stone that was not yet fully petrified and was like white butter, tasting unpleasantly salty. Their feet got stuck in it, as if in a bog, and their boots, which had sunk into the semi-liquid, oleaginous stone, seemed to be covered in white paint. It was easy to go around the edge, and about an hour and a half later they caught up with a man. He was dressed in rags that were once a pea jacket and in torn quilted trousers with his knees showing through. Both trouser legs had been cut short to make footwear, which had now become torn and worn out. For the same reason he had at an earlier point cut off and worn out the sleeves of his pea jacket. Any leather shoes or rubber boots he had worn had long since been ruined by the stones and branches; he had apparently thrown them away.
He was bearded, hairy, pale after his unbearable suffering. He had a desperate form of diarrhea. There were eleven untouched cans of food lying there on the stones. One had been smashed open on the rocks and consumed the day before.
He had been walking for a month, heading for Magadan, circling in the forest like an oarsman on a lake in thick fog and, once astray, losing all sense of direction. He had been walking at random until he stumbled on the expedition, at a time when he had lost all his strength. He had been catching field mice and voles and eating grass. He had managed to keep going until the previous day. He had then noticed smoke, waited for night to fall and in the morning crawled onto the plateau. He had taken the matches from the kitchen, but he had no need for them. He ate the canned meat, and a terrible thirst and his dried-out mouth had forced him to come down another narrow valley to a stream. Once there, he drank and drank the delicious cold water. Twenty-four hours later his face swelled up and his intestines, now that they were upset, deprived him of his last ounce of strength.
He was glad of any end to his journey.
The other fugitive, whom special operations men dragged out from the taiga to the same outpost, was an important person. He had taken part in a group escape from a nearby mine after the mine boss had been robbed and murdered; he was the last of the ten who had escaped. Two had been killed, seven had been caught, and this last man was hunted down on the twenty-first day. He had no footwear, and his cracked soles were bleeding. In his words, he had eaten in the course of a week just one tiny fish from a dried-up stream, a fish that took him several hours to catch, as he was weak with hunger. His face was swollen and drained of blood. The guards took great care of him, his diet and his recovery: they called in the paramedic on the expedition and ordered him without fail to see that the fugitive was looked after. The fugitive lived in the expedition’s bathhouse for three whole days and finally, his hair cut, his face shaved, himself washed and well-fed, he was taken away by the operations squad for an interrogation that could only end with execution by shooting. The fugitive was aware of this, but he didn’t care, for he was an experienced prisoner who had long before crossed the boundary of life in the camps, after which everyone becomes a fatalist and just lives, following the current. He was accompanied all the time by escort guards, by soldiers, who wouldn’t let him talk to anyone. Every evening he sat on the bathhouse porch and watched the enormous cherry-colored sunset. The fire of the evening sun was reflected in his eyes, and his eyes seemed to be on fire: it was a very beautiful spectacle.
•
In Orotukan, a Kolyma settlement, there is a monument to Tatiana Malandina, and the Orotukan club also bears her name. She was a contract worker, a member of the Komsomol, who fell into the clutches of criminals on the run. They robbed and gang-raped her, in the revolting criminal expression “choir-raped” her, then murdered her in the taiga a few hundred meters from the settlement. This happened in 1938, and the authorities tried, but failed, to spread rumors that she had been murdered by Trotskyists. Slander of that kind was far too absurd. It outraged even the murdered girl’s uncle, Lieutenant Malandin, for whom the death of his niece completely altered his attitude to thieves and to other kinds of prisoners, so that he hated the former and made allowances for the latter.
•
Both these fugitives were caught when they were running out of strength. Another fugitive, detained by a group of workmen on a path near some trial mining pits, behaved differently. Heavy rain had been falling constantly for three days, and a group of workmen, protecting themselves with special tarpaulin clothing—jackets and trousers—set off to see if their little tent had been damaged by the rain. The tent housed a kitchen with their crockery and food, a portable forge with an anvil, a portable kiln, and a supply of drilling tools. The forge and kitchen were on the dried-up bed of a mountain stream in a ravine about three kilometers from their living quarters.
Mountain rivers swell up very violently after rain, and the rain could be expected to play some dirty tricks. But what the men saw took them utterly aback. There was nothing there. There was no forge where the tools—drills, drill bits, pickaxes, spades, blacksmith’s equipment—for a whole area had been kept. There was no kitchen and their supply of food for the whole summer was gone. There were no pots, no crockery, there was nothing. The ravine was quite changed: all the stones had been rearranged or brought down from somewhere by the furious waters. Everything that was there before had been swept away by the stream, and the workmen walked along the banks of the stream all the way to the river into which the stream fell—about six or seven kilometers, and didn’t find a single piece of iron. Much later, when the water level went down, they found an enamel bowl from the settlement refectory, which had been crushed and turned inside out, on the riverbank in the willows, which were half-buried in sand. That was the only thing left after the rainstorm and the high water.
On their way home the workmen came across a man in jersey-lined boots, wearing a cape that was soaking wet and carrying a big shoulder bag.
“Are you a fugitive?” Vaska Rybin, one of the prospectors’ ditch-diggers, asked.
“Yes,” the man asked, half affirmatively. “I’d like to get dry. . . .”
“All right, come to our place. We have a hot stove.” In summer the iron stoves were kept stoked all the time in the big tent where all forty workmen lived.
The fugitive took off his boots, hung his foot wrappings around the stove, took out a tin cigarette case, sprinkled some tobacco in a piece of newspaper, and lit up.
“Where are you going in rain like this?”
“Heading for Magadan.”
�
�Are you hungry?”
“What have you got?”
Soup and pearl-barley porridge didn’t tempt the fugitive. He undid his bag and took out a piece of sausage.
“Well, pal,” said Rybin. “You’re not a real escapee.”
An older workman, Vasili Kochetov, the deputy foreman, got up.
“Where are you off to?” Rybin asked him.
“To take a leak.” Then he stepped over the board that was the tent’s threshold.
Rybin laughed.
“I’ll tell you what, pal,” he said to the fugitive. “Get your things together now and go wherever you were going. He,” and he meant Kochetov, “has run off to tell the authorities. To see you get detained, in other words. Well, we haven’t got any armed guards, so don’t be afraid, just keep on going. Here’s some bread for you to take, and a packet of tobacco. The rain’s not so heavy now, luckily for you. Head straight for the big hill, you can’t go wrong.”
The fugitive said nothing. He wrapped the dry ends of his still-wet foot wrappings around his feet, pulled on his boots, flung the bag over his shoulder and left.
Ten minutes later the piece of tarpaulin that served as a door was flung back and people in authority pushed in. It was Kasayev, the clerk of works, with a small-caliber rifle over his shoulder, two guards, and Kochetov, who was the last to enter the tent.
Kasayev stood there silently until he had gotten used to the darkness in the tent, then he looked around. Nobody paid attention to the newcomers. Everyone got on with what they were doing: sleeping, mending clothes, carving strange figures—the usual erotic studies—out of dead branches with a knife—or playing snap with homemade cards. . . .
Rybin was putting a soot-stained pot made from a tin can onto the burning coals in the stove; it was something he had boiled up.
“Where’s the fugitive?” yelled Kasayev.
“He’s gone,” Rybin said calmly. “He took his things and left. What was I supposed to do—hold onto him?”
“But he didn’t have a coat,” shouted Kochetov. “He was thinking of going to sleep.”
“But you were going to take a leak, too, and where did you run off to in that rain?” replied Rybin.
“Go home,” said Kasayev. “And you, Rybin, watch out. This is going to end badly.”
“What can you do to me?” asked Rybin, moving closer to Kasayev. “Put a spell on me? Or cut my throat when I’m asleep? Is that it?”
The clerk of works and the guards left.
This was a short lyrical episode in a monotonously murky tale of Kolyma fugitives.
The head of an expedition, alarmed by constant visits by fugitives—three within a month—tried in vain to get the authorities to organize a post with armed soldiers for his expedition. The administration wouldn’t go to the expense of doing this for free workers, and they left the expedition chief to deal with any fugitives with whatever means he had at hand. Even though by now, apart from Kasayev’s small-caliber rifle, the settlement also had at its disposal two double-barrel breech-loading shotguns, with cartridges containing bullets made of lead, like those used to shoot bears, everyone nevertheless realized that if they were attacked by desperate, starving escaped prisoners, those bullets were not going to be much help.
The expedition chief was an experienced man. Suddenly two guard towers were built on his site, looking just like the towers placed at every corner of real camp zones.
This was clever camouflage. The fake guard towers were meant to convince escaped prisoners that the expedition had armed guards.
The chief’s assumptions were evidently right. No more fugitives visited this expedition, which was only two hundred kilometers from Magadan.
When mining of metal number one, gold, was moved to the Chai-Uryinsky valley along the path that Krivoshei had once taken, dozens of fugitives took this route. This was the shortest way to the “mainland,” but then the authorities knew that too. The number of “secret sites” and armed posts was increased sharply. The hunt for fugitives was in full flow. Flying squads combed the taiga and blocked every “release by the green Prosecutor” as escapes were called. The green Prosecutor was releasing fewer and fewer, until finally he was releasing nobody.
Fugitives, when caught, were usually killed on the spot, and quite a few corpses lay in the Arkagala morgue, waiting to be identified, which was done when the recordkeepers came to take the corpses’ fingerprints.
In a forest ten kilometers from the Arkagala coal mine, in the Kadykchan settlement, famous because of the mighty layers of coal—eight, thirteen, and twenty-one meters thick—that rose here almost to the surface, a special armed post was set up where soldiers slept and ate, a post that was in fact a base.
In summer 1940 the head of this flying squad was a young lance corporal, Postnikov, a man with a strong thirst for killing, who did his job with eagerness, enthusiasm, and passion. He personally captured five fugitives in one go and got a medal for it as well as the monetary award usual in such cases. The award was given whether the escaped prisoners were alive or dead, so that it made no sense at all to deliver a captive alive.
On a pale August morning Postnikov and his soldiers came across an escaped prisoner walking toward a stream where an ambush was waiting.
Postnikov fired his Mauser and killed the fugitive. It was decided not to drag him to the settlement, but to abandon him in the taiga: there were too many lynx and bear prints around.
Postnikov took an ax and cut off both of the fugitive’s hands, so that the recordkeepers could take the fingerprints, then he put the two severed hands in his bag and set off home to compose his usual report on a successful hunt.
This report was sent off the same day—one soldier took the package, while Postnikov gave the others the day off to celebrate his success. . . .
That night the corpse got up and, pressing the bloody stumps of his arms against his chest, followed their footprints out of the taiga and somehow got as far as the tent where the prisoner-workmen were staying. He stood by the door, his face white and bloodless, his blue eyes uncannily crazed, his body bent double, slumped against the doorframe. Looking sullen, he mumbled something. He was extremely feverish and trembling. His quilted jacket, his trousers, and rubber boots were stained black with blood. They gave him some hot soup, bandaged his horrible arms with rags, and led him off to the outpatients’ clinic. But by now soldiers were running from the checkpoint’s hut, and Lance Corporal Postnikov was running up too.
The soldiers led the fugitive off somewhere, but not to any hospital or clinic. Nobody heard any more about the escapee whose hands had been hacked off.
Postnikov and all his men operated until the first snow. After the first frosts, when there was less detective work needed in the taiga, the group was moved away from Arkagala.
Escaping is a great test of character, of self-control, of willpower, of physical and mental endurance. Conceivably, it’s easier to choose the right comrades for even a winter at the North Pole or any expedition, than for an escape attempt.
What’s worst is the hunger, the acute hunger, a constant menace to the fugitive. If you take into account that it is hunger that makes someone attempt to escape and that, therefore, he isn’t afraid of it, then there is another unspeakable danger that the escaped prisoner may have to face: he may be eaten by his own comrades. Cases of cannibalism among fugitives are, of course, rare. But they do occur and I suspect that there isn’t a single Kolyma old hand, if he’s been in the Far North for ten years or so, who hasn’t come across cannibals who have gotten a sentence for murdering their fellow escapees, for eating human flesh.
In the central hospital there was a patient called Soloviov, who stayed for a long period with chronic osteomyelitis of the hip. Osteomyelitis, an inflammation of the bone marrow, occurred after a bullet wound to the bone, a wound that Soloviov himself had artfully prevented from healing. Condemned for attempting to escape and for cannibalism, Soloviov was putting on the brakes to stay in the hospital. H
e was happy to tell people how he and a comrade, preparing to escape, deliberately invited a third man “in case we got hungry.”
The escapees were on the run for a long time, about a month. When the third man had been killed and partially eaten, partially “roasted for the road,” the two murderers went off in different directions, each afraid of being killed one night or another.
One also met other cannibals. They were the most ordinary of men. There is no mark of Cain on a cannibal and, until you know their biography in detail, everything looks fine. But even if you find out about the cannibalism, you are not put off, you don’t feel outrage. There just isn’t the physical strength for revulsion or indignation; there is just no room for such fine feelings to flourish. In any case, the story of normal polar expeditions in our times is not without similar actions. The mysterious death of the Swedish scientist Malmgren, who took part in Nobile’s expedition,[34] is still fresh in our memory.
All the escape attempts we have been describing are attempts to get back home, to the mainland, the goal being to break free of the taiga’s sticky paws and get to Russia. They all end the same way: nobody could get out of the Far North. The failure and hopelessness of such enterprises, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the irresistible nostalgia for freedom, the hatred and revulsion aroused by forced labor, forced manual labor—these are the only things that the camp can induce in a prisoner. On the gates of every camp zone was the mocking slogan: “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism,” together with the name of the author [35] of these words. The inscription was made according to special instructions and it was obligatory for every section of the camps.
It was this longing for freedom, this burning desire to find oneself in a forest where there was no barbed wire, no guard towers with rifle barrels shining in the sun, no beatings, no endless workdays without sleep or rest, that gave rise to a special kind of escape attempt.
Kolyma Stories Page 73