Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  Thanks to his physical advantages, such a person was transformed into a moral force in the resolution of the numerous everyday questions of camp life. Of course, he remained a moral force only as long as he remained a physical force.

  When Ivan Ivanovich was first brought to camp he was an excellent ‘worker’. Now that he had become weak from hunger, he was unable to understand why everyone beat him in passing. He wasn’t beaten severely, but he was beaten: by the orderly, the barber, the contractor, the group leader, the work-gang leader, the guard. Aside from these camp officials, he was also beaten by the camp criminals. Ivan Ivanovich was happy that he had been included in our group.

  Fedya Shapov, a teenager from the Altai region, became physically exhausted before the others did because his half-grown body was still not very strong. He was the only son of a widow, and he was convicted of illegal livestock slaughter. He had slaughtered a sheep – an act punishable by a ten-year sentence. Accustomed as he was to farm work, he found the frantic labor of the camp particularly difficult. Fedya admired the free life of the criminal element in camp, but there was something in his nature that kept him from becoming close to the thieves. His healthy peasant upbringing and love – rather than revulsion – for work helped him a little. The youngest among us, he immediately became attached to our oldest and most decent member – Ivan Ivanovich.

  Savelev had been a student in the Moscow Telegraph Institute and later was my fellow inmate in Butyr Prison. As a loyal member of the Young Communist League, he was shaken by all he had seen and he had written a letter to the party ‘leader’, since he was convinced that someone must be keeping such information from the leader. His own case was so trivial (writing letters to his fiancée) that the only proof of agitation (Article 58, Point 10) consisted of their correspondence. His ‘organization’ (Point 11 of the same article) consisted of two persons. All this was noted down in dead seriousness on the interrogation forms. Nevertheless, even in view of the then prevalent scale of offenses, no one believed he would be condemned to anything more than exile.

  Soon after sending the letter on one of the days officially designated for petitions, Savelev was called out into the corridor and given a notice to sign. The supreme prosecutor informed him that he would personally examine his case. After that Savelev was summoned on only one other occasion, to be handed the sentence of the ‘Special Council’ – ten years in the camps.

  In camp Savelev was rapidly reduced to a shade of his former self, but even then he could not comprehend the sinister punishment meted out to him. The two of us couldn’t have been called friends; we simply loved to remember Moscow together – her streets and monuments, the Moscow River with its thin layer of oil that glistened like mother-of-pearl. Neither Leningrad, Kiev, nor Odessa could boast of such passionate devotees. The two of us could talk endlessly of Moscow…

  We set up the iron stove that we had brought with us in the cabin and, although it was summer, lit a fire. The warm dry air was wonderfully aromatic. We were all accustomed to breathing the sour smells of old clothing and sweat. It was a good thing that tears have no odor.

  On the advice of Ivan Ivanovich, we took off our underwear and buried it in the ground overnight. Each undershirt and pair of shorts was buried separately with only a small piece protruding above the ground. This was a folk remedy against lice. Back at the mine we had been helpless against them. In the morning we discovered that the lice really had gathered on the protruding bits of shirt. Although the land here lay under the permafrost, it nevertheless thawed sufficiently in the summer for us to bury the articles of underwear. Of course, the soil in this area contained more stones than dirt. But even from this soil of ice and stone there grew up dense pine forests with tree trunks so wide that it took three men with outstretched arms to span them. Such was the life-force of the trees – a magnificent lesson given to us by nature.

  We burned the lice, holding the shirts up to the burning logs of the fire. Unfortunately this clever method did not destroy the parasites and on the very same day we boiled our underwear furiously in large tin cans. This time the method of disinfection was a reliable one.

  It was later, in hunting mice, crows, seagulls, and squirrels, that we learned the magic qualities of the earth. The flesh of any animal loses its particular odor if it is first buried in the ground.

  We took every precaution to keep our fire from going out, since we had only a few matches that were kept by Ivan Ivanovich. He wrapped the precious matches in a piece of canvas and then in rags as carefully as possible.

  Each evening we would lay two logs on the fire, and they would smoulder till morning without either flaming up or going out. Three logs would have burned up. Savelev and I had learned that truth at our school desks, but Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya had learned it as children at home. In the morning we would separate the logs. They would flare up with a yellow flame, and we would throw a heavy log on top.

  I divided the grain into ten parts, but that was too alarming an operation. It was probably easier to feed ten thousand people with five loaves than for a convict to divide his ten-day ration into thirty parts. Ration cards were always based on a ten-day period. The ten-day system had long since died out on the ‘mainland’, but here it was maintained on a permanent basis. No one here saw any need for Sunday holidays or for the convicts to have ‘rest days’.

  Unable to bear this torment, I mixed all the grain together and asked Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya to let me come in with them. I turned all my food into the common pot, and Savelev followed my example.

  The four of us made a wise decision – to cook just twice a day. There simply weren’t enough provisions for three meals.

  ‘We’ll gather fruits and mushrooms,’ said Ivan Ivanovich. ‘We can catch mice and birds. And one or two days in every ten we can live on bread alone.’

  ‘But if we’re to go hungry for one or two days every time we expect a food delivery,’ said Savelev, ‘then how will we be able to resist overeating when the stuff is actually brought?’

  We decided to make the food as watery as possible and to eat only twice a day – no matter what. After all, no one would steal from us. We had all received our supplies intact, and we had no drunken cooks, thieving quartermasters, greedy overseers, criminals to take the best pieces, or any of that endless horde of administrators who without fear or any trace of control or conscience were able to pick the convict clean.

  We had received all our ‘fats’ in the form of a lump of watery fat, some sugar – less than the amount of gold that I was able to pan – and sticky bread created by the inimitable experts of the heavy thumb who fed the administrators of the bakery. There were twenty different kinds of grain that we had never heard of in the entire course of our lives. It was all too mysterious. And frightening.

  The fish that was to take the place of meat according to the ‘replacement tables’ was half-spoiled herring intended to replenish our intensified expenditure of protein.

  Alas, even the full ration we had received could not feed us or fill our bellies. We required three times, four times as much, for our bodies had gone hungry for too long. We did not understand this simple truth. We believed in the ‘norms’, and we had never heard the well-known remark made by all cooks – that it is easier to cook for twenty persons than for four. We understood one thing clearly: that we would not have enough food. This did not so much frighten as surprise us. We had to begin work and start cutting a road through the undergrowth and fallen trees.

  Trees in the north die lying down – like people. Their enormous bared roots look like the claws of a monstrous predatory bird that has seized on to a rock. Downward from these gigantic claws to the permafrost stretch thousands of tiny tentacles, whitish shoots covered with warm brown bark. Each summer the permafrost retreats a little and each inch of thawed soil is immediately pierced by a root shoot that digs in with its fine tendrils. The first reach maturity in three hundred years, slowly hoisting their heavy, powerful bodies on these we
ak roots scattered flat over the stony soil. A strong wind easily topples these trees that stand on such frail feet. The trees fall on their backs, their heads pointed away from their feet, and die lying on a soft, thick layer of moss that is either bright green or crimson.

  Only the shorter twisted trees, tormented from following a constantly shifting sun and warmth, manage to stand firm and distant from each other. They have kept up such an intense struggle for existence for so long that their tortured, gnarled wood is worthless. The short knotty trunk entwined with terrible growths like splints on broken bones could not be used for construction even in the north, which was not fussy about materials. These twisted trees could not be used even as firewood; so well did they resist the axe, they would have exhausted any worker. Thus did they take vengeance for their broken northern lives.

  Our task was to clear a road, and we boldly set about our work. We sawed from sunrise to sundown, felled and stacked trees. Wanting to stay here as long as possible and fearing the gold-mines, we forgot about everything. The stacks grew slowly and by the end of the second difficult day it became evident that we had accomplished little, but were incapable of doing more. Ivan Ivanovich measured the distance from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his middle finger five times along a ten-year-old pine to make a one-meter measuring-stick.

  In the evening the foreman came to measure our work with his notched staff and shook his head. We had accomplished 10 percent of the norm!

  Ivan Ivanovich tried to make his point and justify our measurements, but the foreman was unyielding. He muttered something about ‘cubic meters’ and ‘density’. And although we were not familiar with the technical methods of measuring wood production, one thing was clear. We would be returned to the camp zone where we would again pass through the gates with their inscription: ‘Work is honorable, glorious, valiant, and heroic.’

  In the camp we learned to hate physical labor and work in general.

  But we were not afraid. More than that: the foreman’s assessment of our work and physical capacity as hopeless and worthless brought us a feeling of unheard-of relief and was not at all frightening.

  We realized we were at the end of our rope, and we simply let matters take their course. Nothing bothered us any more, and we breathed freely in the fist of another man’s will. We didn’t even concern ourselves with staying alive, and ate and slept on the same schedule as in camp. Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeon’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil. Our spiritual calm was always guarded by our subordination to another’s will.

  We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance.

  The foreman left and we remained to cut a road through the forest and erect new log stacks, but now we did so with greater peace of mind and indifference. We stopped quarrelling over who would take the heavy end when we stacked logs.

  We rested more and paid more attention to the sun, the forest, and the pale-blue tall sky. We loafed.

  In the morning Savelev and I somehow felled an enormous black pine that had miraculously survived both storm and forest fire. We tossed the saw into the grass. It rang out, striking a stone, and we sat down on the trunk of the fallen tree.

  ‘Just imagine,’ said Savelev. ‘We’ll survive, leave for the mainland, and quickly become sick old men. We’ll have heart pains and rheumatism, and all the sleepless nights, the hunger, and long hard work of our youth will leave their mark on us even if we remain alive. We’ll be sick without knowing why, groan and drag ourselves from one dispensary to another. This unbearable work will leave us with wounds that can’t be healed, and all our later years will lead to lives of physical and psychological pain. And that pain will be endless and assume many different forms. But even among those terrible future days there will be good ones when we’ll be almost healthy and we won’t think about our sufferings. And the number of those days will be exactly equal to the number of days each of us has been able to loaf in camp.’

  ‘But how about honest work?’ I asked.

  ‘The only ones who call for honest work are the bastards who beat and maim us, eat our food, and force us living skeletons to work to our very deaths. It’s profitable for them, but they believe in “honest work” even less than we do.’

  In the evening we sat around our precious stove, and Fedya Shapov listened attentively to Savelev’s hoarse voice:

  ‘Well, he refused to work. They made up a report, said he was dressed appropriately for the season…’

  ‘What does that mean – “appropriately for the season”?’ asked Fedya.

  ‘Well, they can’t list every piece of summer or winter clothing you have on. If it’s in the winter, they can’t write that you were sent to work without a coat or mittens. How often did you stay in camp because there were no mittens?’

  ‘Never,’ Fedya said timidly. ‘The boss made us stamp down the snow on the road. Or else they would have had to write that we stayed behind because we didn’t have anything to wear.’

  ‘There you have it.’

  ‘OK, tell me about the subway.’

  And Savelev would tell Fedya about the Moscow subway. Ivan Ivanovich and I also liked to listen to Savelev, since he knew things that I had never guessed, although I had lived in Moscow.

  ‘Muslims, Fedya,’ said Savelev, delighted that he could still think clearly, ‘are called to worship by a muezzin from the minaret. Muhammed chose the human voice as a signal to prayer. Muhammed tried everything – trumpets, tambourines, signal fires; nothing pleased him… Fifteen hundred years later when they were choosing a signal to start the subway trains, it turned out that neither the whistle, nor the horn, nor the siren could be heard as easily by the train engineer’s ear – with the same precision – as the live voice of the dispatcher on duty shouting, “Ready!” ’

  Fedya gasped with delight. He was better adapted than any of us to the forest, more experienced than any of us in spite of his youth. Fedya could do carpentry work, build a simple cabin in the taiga, fell a tree and use its branches to make a shelter. In addition, Fedya was a hunter; in his locality people were used to guns from childhood. But cold and hunger wiped out Fedya’s qualities, and the earth ignored his knowledge and abilities. Fedya did not envy city dwellers, but simply acknowledged their superiority and could listen endlessly to their stories of the wonders of science and the miracles of the city.

  Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends. Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits of one’s physical endurance and moral courage.

  We all understood that we could survive only through luck. Strangely enough, in my youth whenever I experienced failure I used to repeat the saying: ‘Well, at least we won’t die from hunger.’ It never crossed my mind to doubt the truth of this sentence. And at the age of thirty I found myself in a very real sense dying from hunger and literally fighting for a piece of bread. And this was a long time before the war.

  When the four of us gathered at the spring ‘Duskania’, we all knew we had not gathered through friendship. We all knew that if we survived we would not want to meet again. It would be painful to remember the insane hunger, the unchecked gastronomic lies at the fire, our quarrels with each other and our identical dreams. All of us had the same dreams of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels.

  A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. There was nothing good at the spring ‘Duskania’, and nothing good was either expected in the future or remembered in the past by any of us. We had al
l been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it. Three of us stopped resisting fate, and only Ivan Ivanovich kept working with the same tragic diligence as before.

  Savelev tried to reason with Ivan Ivanovich during one of the smoking breaks. For us it was just an ordinary rest period for non-smokers since we hadn’t had any home-made tobacco for a number of years. Still we held to the breaks. In the taiga, smokers would gather and dry blackcurrant leaves, and there were heated convict discussions as to whether cowberry leaves or currant leaves were better. Experts maintained that both were worthless, since the body demands the poison of nicotine, not smoke, and brain cells could not be tricked by such a simple method. But currant leaf served for our ‘smoking breaks’, since in camp the words ‘rest from work’ presented too glaring a contradiction with the basic principles of production ethics held in the far north. To rest every hour was both a challenge and a crime, and dried currant leaf was a natural camouflage.

  ‘Listen, Ivan,’ said Savelev. ‘I’ll tell you a story. In Bamlag, we were working on the side track and hauling sand in wheelbarrows. It was a long distance, and we had to put out twenty-five meters a day. If you didn’t fill your quota, your bread ration got cut to three hundred grams. Soup once a day. Whoever filled the quota got an extra kilo of bread and could buy a second kilo in the store if he had the cash. We worked in pairs. But the quotas were impossible. So here’s what we did: one day we’d work for you from your trench and fill the quota. We’d get two kilos of bread plus your three hundred grams. So we’d each get one kilo, one hundred and fifty grams. The next day we’d work for my quota. Then for yours. We did it for a month, and it wasn’t a bad life. Luckily for us the foreman was a decent sort, since he knew what was up. It worked out well even for him. His men kept up their strength and production didn’t drop. Then someone higher up figured things out, and our luck came to an end.’