Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  ‘Schneider!’

  ‘So what do you want? You’ll wake up Senechka.’

  But already the edge of the blanket had been lifted, and the light revealed a pale, unhealthy face.

  ‘Ah, captain,’ came Senechka’s tenor voice with a languid tone. ‘I can’t fall asleep without you…’

  ‘Right away, I’m coming,’ Schneider said hurriedly.

  He climbed up on the shelf, folded back the edge of the blanket, sat down, and put his hand under the blanket to scratch Senechka’s heels.

  Andreev walked slowly to his place. He had no desire to go on living. Even though this was a trivial event by comparison with that which he had seen and was still destined to witness, he never forgot Captain Schneider.

  The number of people kept decreasing. The transit prison was being emptied. Andreev came face to face with the assignment man.

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Andreev, however, had prepared himself for such an occurrence.

  ‘Gurov,’ he replied meekly.

  ‘Wait!’

  The assignment man leafed through the onion-sheet lists.

  ‘No, it’s not here.’

  ‘Can I go?’

  ‘Go ahead, you animal!’ the scheduling officer roared.

  Once he was assigned to wash dishes and clean up the cafeteria for people who had served their sentences and who were about to be released. His partner was one of those goners who were so emaciated they were known as ‘wicks’. The man had just been released from prison, and it was difficult to determine his age. It was the first time this goner had worked. He kept asking what they should do, would they be fed, was it all right to ask for something to eat before they began work.

  The man said he was a professor of neuropathology, and Andreev recognized his name.

  Andreev knew from experience that camp cooks (and not only camp cooks) did not like these ‘Ivan Ivanoviches’, as the intellectuals were contemptuously nicknamed. He advised the professor not to ask for anything in advance and gloomily thought that he himself would have to do most of the work, since the professor was too weak. This was only just, and there was no reason to be offended; Andreev himself had been a bad, weak ‘partner’ any number of times, and no one had ever said a word to him. Where were they all now? Where were Scheinin, Riutin, Khvostov? They had all died, and he alone, Andreev, had been resurrected. Of course, his resurrection was yet to come, but he would return to life.

  Andreev’s suspicions were confirmed: the professor was a weak, albeit fussy partner.

  When the work was finished, the cook sat them down and placed an enormous tub of thick fish soup and a large plate of kasha before them. The professor threw up his hands in delight, but Andreev had seen men at the mines eat twenty meals, each consisting of three dishes and bread. He cast a suspicious glance at the proffered refreshments.

  ‘No bread?’ Andreev asked gloomily.

  ‘Of course there’s bread – a little.’ And the cook took two pieces of bread from a cupboard.

  They quickly polished off the food. On such ‘visits’ the prudent Andreev always saved his bread in his pocket. The professor, on the contrary, gulped the soup, broke off pieces of bread, and chewed it while large drops of dirty sweat formed on his shaven gray head.

  ‘Here’s a ruble for each of you,’ the cook said. ‘I don’t have any more bread today.’

  This was magnificent payment. There was a commissary at the transit prison, where the civilians could buy bread. Andreev told the professor about this.

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ the professor said. ‘But I saw that they also sold sweet kvas there. Or was it lemonade? I really want some lemonade, anything sweet.’

  ‘It’s up to you, professor, but if I were you, I’d buy bread.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you’re right,’ the professor repeated, ‘but I really want some sweet lemonade. Why don’t you get some too?’

  Andreev rejected that suggestion out of hand.

  Ultimately Andreev managed to get himself assigned to washing floors alone at the bookkeeping office. Every evening he would meet the orderly, whose duties included keeping the office clean. These were two tiny rooms crowded with desks, each of which occupied more than four square yards. The work took only about ten minutes, and at first Andreev could not understand why the orderly ‘hired’ someone to do the job. The orderly had to carry water through the entire camp himself, and clean rags were always prepared in advance when Andreev came. The payment was generous – cheap tobacco, soup, kasha, bread, and sugar. The orderly even promised to give Andreev a light jacket, but Andreev’s stay came to an end before he managed to do that.

  Evidently the orderly viewed washing floors as shameful so long as he could hire some ‘hard worker’ to do it for him – even if it required only five minutes a day. Andreev had observed this characteristic in Russian people at the mines. If the head of the camp gave an orderly a handful of tobacco to clean the barracks, the orderly would dump half the tobacco into his pouch, and with the other half would hire a ‘political’ to do the job for him. The latter, in turn, would again divide up the tobacco and hire someone from his barracks for two hand-rolled cigarettes. This man, who had just finished a twelve- or fourteen-hour shift, would wash the floor at night for these two cigarettes and consider himself lucky; he could trade the cigarettes for bread.

  Currency questions represent the most complex area of camp economy. Standards of measurement are amazing. Tea, tobacco, and bread are the exchangeable, ‘hard’ currencies.

  On occasion the orderly would pay Andreev with coupons redeemable in the kitchen. These were rubber-stamped pieces of cardboard that worked rather like tokens – ten dinners, five main courses, and so on. When the orderly gave Andreev a token worth twenty portions of kasha, the twenty portions did not cover the bottom of a tin basin.

  Andreev watched the professional criminals shove bright yellow thirty-ruble notes through the window, folded to look like tokens. This tactic always produced results. A large bowl filled to the brim with kasha would inevitably emerge from the window in response to such a token.

  There were fewer and fewer people left in the transit prison. Finally the day arrived when the last truck was dispatched from the yard, and only two or three dozen men remained in camp.

  This time they were not dismissed to the barracks but were grouped in military formation and led through the entire camp.

  ‘Whatever they intend to do, they can’t be taking us to be shot,’ an enormous one-eyed man next to Andreev said.

  This was precisely what Andreev had been thinking: they couldn’t be taking them to be shot. All the remaining prisoners were brought to the assignment man in the bookkeeping office.

  ‘We’re going to take your fingerprints,’ the assignment man said as he came out on to the porch.

  ‘Well, if it’s come to that, you can have me without raising a finger,’ the one-eyed man said cheerfully. ‘My name is Filipovsky.’

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘Pavel Andreev.’

  The assignment man found their files.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you for a long time,’ he said without a trace of anger.

  Andreev knew that he had won his battle for life. It was simply impossible for the taiga not to have sated its hunger for people. Even if they were to be shipped off, it would be to some nearby, local site. It might even be in the town itself. That would be even better. Andreev had been classified only for ‘light physical labor’, but he knew how abruptly such a classification could be changed. It was not his classification that would save him, but the fact that the taiga’s orders had already been filled. Only local sites, where life was easier, simpler, less hungry, were still waiting for their final deliveries. There were no gold-mines in the area, and that meant there was hope for survival. This Andreev had learned during the two years he had spent at the mines and these three months in quarantine, spent under animal-like tension. Too much had been accomplished for his h
opes not to be realized.

  He had to wait only one night for an answer.

  After breakfast, the assignment man rushed into the barracks with a list – a small list, Andreev immediately noted with satisfaction. Lists for the mines inevitably contained twenty-five men assigned to a truck, and there were always several of such sheets – not just one.

  Andreev and Filipovsky were on the same list. There were other people as well – only a few, but more than just two or three.

  Those whose names were on the list were taken to the familiar door of the bookkeeping department. There were three other men standing there: a gray-haired, sedate old man of imposing appearance wearing a good sheepskin coat and felt boots; a fidgety, dirty man dressed in a quilted jacket and quilted pants with footcloths instead of socks protruding from the edges of his rubber galoshes; the third was wearing a fur jacket and a fur hat.

  ‘That’s the lot of them,’ the assignment man said. ‘Will they do?’

  The man in the fur jacket crooked his finger at the old man.

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Yury Izgibin. Convicted under Article Fifty-Eight of the criminal code. Sentence: twenty-five years,’ the old man reported vigorously.

  ‘No, no,’ the fur jacket frowned. ‘What’s your trade? I can learn your case history without your help…’

  ‘Stove-builder, sir.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘I’m a tinsmith as well.’

  ‘Very good.’

  ‘How about you?’ the officer shifted his gaze to Filipovsky.

  The one-eyed giant said that he had been a stoker on a steamboat based in Kamenets-Podolsk.

  ‘And how about you?’

  The dignified old man unexpectedly muttered a few words in German.

  ‘What’s that all about?’ the fur jacket asked with an air of curiosity.

  ‘That’s our carpenter. His name is Frisorger, and he does good work. He sort of lost his bearings, but he’ll be all right.’

  ‘Why does he speak German?’

  ‘He’s from the German Autonomous Republic of Saratov.’

  ‘Ah… And how about you?’ This last question was directed at Andreev.

  ‘He needs tradesmen and working people in general,’ Andreev thought. ‘I’ll be a leather-dresser.’

  ‘Tanner, sir.’

  ‘Good. How old are you?’

  ‘Thirty-one.’

  The officer shook his head. But since he was an experienced man and had seen people rise from the dead, he said nothing and shifted his gaze to the fifth man, who turned out to be a member of the Esperantist Society.

  ‘You see, I’m an agronomist. I even lectured on agronomy. But I was arrested as an Esperantist.’

  ‘What’s that – spying?’ the fur coat asked indifferently.

  ‘Something like that,’ the fidgety man responded.

  ‘What do you say?’ the assignment man asked.

  ‘I’ll take them,’ the officer said. ‘You can’t find better ones anyway. They’ve all been picked over.’

  All five were taken to a separate room in the barracks. But there were still two or three names left in the list. Andreev was sure of that. The scheduling officer arrived.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘To a local site, where do you think?’ the assignment man said. ‘Here’s your boss.’

  ‘We’ll send you off in an hour. You’ve had three months to “fatten up”, friends. It’s time to get on the road.’

  They were all summoned in an hour – not to a truck, but to the storeroom. ‘They probably want to change clothes,’ Andreev thought. ‘April is here, and it’ll soon be spring.’ They would issue summer clothing, and he would be able to turn in his hated winter mine clothing – just cast it aside and forget it. Instead of summer clothing, however, they were issued winter clothing. Could this be an error? No, ‘winter clothing’ was marked in red pencil oh the list.

  Not understanding anything, they donned quilted vests, pea jackets, and old, patched felt boots. Jumping over the puddles, they returned to the barracks room, from which they had come to the storehouse.

  Everyone was extremely nervous and silent. Only Frisorger kept muttering something in German.

  ‘He’s praying, damn him…’ Filipovsky whispered to Andreev.

  ‘Does anyone understand what’s happening?’ Andreev asked.

  The gray-haired stove-builder who looked like a professor was enumerating all the ‘near sites’: the port, a mine four kilometers from Magadan, one seventeen kilometers from Magadan, another twenty-three kilometers from the city, and still another forty-seven kilometers away… Then he started on road construction sites – places that were only slightly better than gold-mines.

  The assignment man came running.

  ‘Come on out! March to the gate.’

  Everyone left the building and went to the gates of the transit prison. Beyond the gates stood a large truck, the bed of which was covered with a green tarpaulin.

  ‘Guards, assume command and take your prisoners.’

  The guard did a head count. Andreev felt his legs and back grow cold…

  ‘Get in the truck!’

  The guard threw back the edge of the large tarpaulin; the truck was filled with people dressed in winter clothing.

  ‘Get in!’

  All five climbed in together. All were silent. The guard got in the cab, the motor roared up, and the truck moved down the road leading to the main highway.

  ‘They’re taking us to the mine four kilometers from Magadan,’ the stove-builder said.

  Posts marking kilometers floated past. All five put their heads together near a crack in the canvas. They could not believe their eyes…

  ‘Seventeen…’

  ‘Twenty-three…’ Filipovsky said.

  ‘A local mine, the bastards!’ the stove-builder hissed in a rage.

  For a long time the truck wound down the twisted highway between the crags. The mountains resembled barge haulers with bent backs.

  ‘Forty-seven,’ the fidgety Esperantist squealed in despair.

  The truck rushed on.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Andreev asked, gripping someone’s shoulder.

  ‘We’ll spend the night at Atka, 208 kilometers from Magadan.’

  ‘And after that?’

  ‘I don’t know… Give me a smoke.’

  Puffing heavily, the truck climbed a pass in the Yablonovy Range.

  The Left Bank

  The Procurator of Judea

  On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship Kim entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo. Winter was coming on and navigation would soon be impossible, so this was the last ship that year. Magadan met its guests with forty-below weather. These, however, were no guests but convicts, the true masters of this land.

  The whole city administration had come down to the port. Every truck in town was there to meet the boat. Soldiers – conscripts and regulars – surrounded the pier, and the process of unloading began.

  Responding to the summons of the telegraph, every truck not needed in the mines within a radius of 500 kilometers had arrived empty in Magadan.

  The dead were tossed on to the shore to be hauled away to the cemetery and buried in mass graves without so much as identification tags. A directive was made up ordering that the bodies be exhumed at some later date.

  Patients who were moderately ill were taken to the central Prison Hospital on the left bank of the Kolyma River. The hospital had just been moved there – 500 kilometers away. If the Kim had arrived a year earlier, no one would have had to make the long trip to the new hospital.

  The head of surgery, Kubantsev, had just been transferred from an army post. He had been in the front lines, but even so he was shaken by the sight of these people, by their terrible wounds. Every truck arriving from Magadan carried the corpses of people who had died on the way to the hospital. The surgeon understood that these were the transportable, ‘minor’ cases, an
d that the more seriously ill had been left in the port.

  The surgeon kept repeating the words of General Radischev, which he had read somewhere just after the war: ‘Experience on the front cannot prepare a man for the sight of death in the camps.’

  Kubantsev was losing his composure. He didn’t know what sort of orders to give, where to begin. But something had to be done. The orderlies were removing patients from the trucks and carrying them on stretchers to the surgical ward. Stretchers with patients were crammed into the corridors. Smells cling to memory as if they were poems or human faces. That festering camp stench remained for ever in Kubantsev’s memory. He would never forget that smell. One might think that the smell of pus and death is the same everywhere. That’s not true. Ever since that day it always seemed to Kubantsev that he could smell his first Kolyma patients. Kubantsev smoked constantly, feeling he was losing control of himself, that he didn’t know what instructions to give to the orderlies, the paramedics, the doctors.

  ‘Aleksei Alekseevich.’ Kubantsev heard someone say his name. It was Braude, the surgeon who had formerly been in charge of this ward but who had been removed from his position by the higher-ups simply because he was an ex-convict and had a German name to boot.

  ‘Let me take over. I’m familiar with all this. I’ve been here for ten years.’

  Upset, Kubantsev relinquished his position of authority, and the work began. Three surgeons began their operations simultaneously. The orderlies scrubbed down to assist. Other orderlies gave injections and poured out medicine for the patients.

  ‘Amputations, only amputations,’ Braude muttered. He loved surgery and even admitted to suffering when a day in his life went by without an operation, without a single incision.

  ‘We won’t be bored this time,’ Braude thought happily. ‘Kubantsev isn’t a bad sort, but he was overwhelmed by all of this. A surgeon from the front! They’ve got all their instructions, plans, orders, but this is life itself. Kolyma!’

  In spite of all this, Braude was not a vicious person. Demoted for no reason, he did not hate his successor or try to trip him up. On the contrary, Braude could see Kubantsev’s confusion and sense his deep gratitude. After all, the man had a family, a wife, a boy in school. The officers all got special rations, lofty positions, hardship pay. As for Braude, he had only a ten-year sentence behind him and a very dubious future. Braude was from Saratov, a former student of the famous Krause, and had shown much promise at one time. But the year 1937 shattered Braude’s life. Why should he attempt to take revenge on Kubantsev for his own failures…?