Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  The sighs and groans of the new American beast could be heard for a long time in the frosty air. The bulldozer coughed angrily in the frost, puffed, and then suddenly roared and moved boldly forward, crushing the shrubbery and passing easily over the stumps; this then was the help from beyond the sea.

  Everywhere on the slope of the mountain were scattered construction-quality logs and firewood. Now we would not have the unbearable task of hauling and stacking the iron logs of Daurian larch by hand. To drag the logs over the shrubbery, down the narrow paths of the mountain slope, was an impossible job. Before 1938 they used to send horses for the job, but horses could not tolerate the north as well as people, were weaker than people, died under the strain of the hauling. Now the vertical knife of the foreign bulldozer had come to help us (us?).

  None of us ever imagined that we would be given some light work instead of the unendurable log-hauling that was hated by all. They would simply increase our norms and we would be forced to do something else – just as degrading and contemptible as any camp labor. Our frostbitten toes and fingers would not be cured by the American bulldozer. But there was the American machine grease! Ah yes, the machine grease! The barrel was immediately attacked by a crowd of starving men who knocked out the bottom right on the spot with a stone.

  In their hunger, they claimed the machine grease was butter sent by Lend-Lease and there remained less than half a barrel by the time a sentry was sent to guard it and the camp administration drove off the crowd of starving, exhausted men with rifle-shots. The fortunate ones gulped down this Lend-Lease butter, not believing it was simply machine grease. After all, the healing American bread was also tasteless and also had that same metallic flavor. And everyone who had been lucky enough to touch the grease licked his fingers hours later, gulping down the minutest amounts of the foreign joy that tasted like young stone. After all, a stone is not born a stone, but a soft oily creature. A creature, and not a thing. A stone becomes a thing in old age. Young wet limestone tuffs in the mountains enchanted the eyes of escaped convicts and workers from the geological surveys. A man had to exert his will to tear himself away from these honeyed shores, these milky rivers of flowing young stone. But that was a mountain, a valley, stone; and this was a delivery from Lend-Lease, the creation of human hands…

  Nothing terrible happened to those who had dipped their hands into the barrel. Trained in Kolyma, stomach and bowels proved themselves capable of coping with machine grease. A sentry was placed to guard the remainder, for this was food for machines – creatures infinitely more important to the state than people.

  And thus from beyond the ocean there had arrived one of those creatures as a symbol of victory, friendship, and something else.

  Three hundred men felt boundless envy toward the prisoner sitting at the wheel of the American tractor – Grinka Lebedev. There were better tractor operators than Lebedev among the convicts, but they had all been convicted according to Article 58 of the Criminal Code (political prisoners). Grinka Lebedev was a common criminal, a parricide to be precise. Each of the three hundred witnessed his earthly joy: to roar over to the logging area sitting at the wheel of a well-lubricated tractor.

  The logging area kept moving back. Felling the taller trees suitable for building materials in Kolyma takes place along the stream banks where deep ravines force the trees to reach upward from their wind-protected havens toward the sun. In windy spots, in bright light, on marshy mountain slopes stand dwarfs – broken, twisted, tormented from eternally turning after the sun, from their constant struggle for a piece of thawed ground. The trees on the mountain slopes don’t look like trees, but like monsters fit for a sideshow. Felling trees is similar to mining gold in those same streams in that it is just as rushed: the stream, the pan, the launder, the temporary barracks, the hurried predatory leap that leaves the stream and area without forest for three hundred years and without gold – for ever.

  Somewhere there exists the science of forestry, but what kind of forestry can there be in a three-hundred-year-old larch forest in Kolyma during the war when the response to Lend-Lease is a hurried plunge into gold fever, harnessed, to be sure, by the guard towers of the ‘zones’?

  Many tall trees and even prepared, sectioned fire-logs were abandoned. Many thick-ended logs disappeared into the snow, falling to the ground as soon as they had been hoisted on to the sharp, brittle shoulders of the prisoners. Weak prisoner hands, tens of hands cannot lift on to a shoulder (there exists no such shoulder!) a two-meter log, drag its iron weight for tens of meters over shrubs, potholes, and pits. Many logs had been abandoned because of the impossibility of the job, and the bulldozer was supposed to help us.

  But for its first trip in the land of Kolyma, on Russian land, it had been assigned a totally different job.

  We watched the chugging bulldozer turn to the left and begin to climb the terrace to where there was a projection of rock and where we had been taken to work hundreds of times along the old road that led past the camp cemetery.

  I hadn’t given any thought to why we were led to work for the last few weeks along a new road instead of the familiar path indented from the boot-heels of the guards and the thick rubber galoshes of the prisoners. The new road was twice as long as the old one. Everywhere there were hills and drop-offs, and we exhausted ourselves just getting to the job. But no one asked why we were being taken by a new path.

  That was the way it had to be; that was the order; and we crawled on all fours, grabbing at stones that ripped open the skin of the fingers till the blood ran.

  Only now did I see and understand the reason for all of this, and I thank God that He gave me the time and strength to witness it.

  The logging area was just ahead, the slope of the mountain had been laid bare, and the shallow snow had been blown away by the wind. The stumps had all been rooted out; a charge of ammonal was placed under the larger ones, and the stump would fly into the air. Smaller stumps were uprooted with long bars. The smallest were simply pulled out by hand like the shrubs of dwarf cedar…

  The mountain had been laid bare and transformed into a gigantic stage for a camp mystery play.

  A grave, a mass prisoner grave, a stone pit stuffed full with undecaying corpses from 1938 was sliding down the side of the hill, revealing the secret of Kolyma.

  In Kolyma, bodies are not given over to earth, but to stone. Stone keeps secrets and reveals them. The permafrost keeps and reveals secrets. All of our loved ones who died in Kolyma, all those who were shot, beaten to death, sucked dry by starvation, can still be recognized even after tens of years. There were no gas furnaces in Kolyma. The corpses wait in stone, in the permafrost.

  In 1938 entire work gangs dug such graves, constantly drilling, exploding, deepening the enormous gray, hard, cold stone pits. Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no ‘assignment’, no ‘norm’ calculated to kill a man with a fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand in rubber galoshes over bare feet in the icy waters where they mined gold – the ‘basic unit of production’, the ‘first of all metals’.

  These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.

  The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.

  These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. From a distance, from the other side of the creek, I had previously seen these moving objects that caught up against branches and stones; I had seen them through the few trees still left standing and I thought that they were logs th
at had not yet been hauled away.

  Now the mountain was laid bare, and its secret was revealed. The grave ‘opened’, and the dead men slid down the stony slope. Near the tractor road an enormous new common grave was dug. Who had dug it? No one was taken from the barracks for this work. It was enormous, and I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this new grave, this house-warming for dead men.

  The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam.

  With my exhausted, tormented mind I tried to understand: how did there come to be such an enormous grave in this area? I am an old resident of Kolyma, and there hadn’t been any gold-mine here as far as I knew. But then I realized that I knew only a fragment of that world surrounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the pages of tent-like Moscow architecture. Moscow’s taller buildings are guard towers keeping watch over the city’s prisoners. That’s what those buildings look like. And what served as models for Moscow architecture – the watchful towers of the Moscow Kremlin or the guard towers of the camps? The guard towers of the camp ‘zone’ represent the main concept advanced by their time and brilliantly expressed in the symbolism of architecture.

  I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a gold-mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountain.

  And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man – good or bad. And if I forget, the grass will forget. But the permafrost and stone will not forget.

  Grinka Lebedev, parricide, was a good tractor-driver, and he controlled the well-oiled foreign tractor with ease. Grinka Lebedev carefully carried out his job, scooping the corpses toward the grave with the gleaming bulldozer knife-shield, pushing them into the pit and returning to drag up more.

  The camp administration had decided that the first job for the bulldozer received from Lend-Lease should not be work in the forest, but something far more important.

  The work was finished. The bulldozer heaped a mound of stones and gravel on the new grave, and the corpses were hidden under stone. But they did not disappear.

  The bulldozer approached us. Grinka Lebedev, common criminal and parricide, did not look at us, prisoners of Article 58. Grinka had been entrusted with a task by the government, and he had fulfilled that task. On the stone face of Grinka Lebedev were hewn pride and a sense of having accomplished his duty.

  The bulldozer roared past us; on the mirror-like blade there was no scratch, not a single spot.

  Sententious

  Dedicated to Nadezhda Mandelshtam

  People materialized out of nowhere – one after another. A stranger would lie down next to me on my berth and nestle against my bony shoulder in the night, giving me his pitiful warmth and receiving my own in exchange. There were nights when no warmth at all penetrated the rags of my pea jacket and padded vest, and in the morning I would think my neighbor was dead and be surprised that he would rise in response to a shouted command, get dressed, and submissively obey the order. I had little warmth. Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for bitterness – the last human emotion; it was closer to the bone. The man who had appeared from nowhere would disappear for ever in the day, for there were many work areas for coal-prospecting. I didn’t know the people who slept at my side. I never asked them questions. There is an Arab saying: ‘He who asks no questions will be told no lies.’ That wasn’t the case here. I couldn’t have cared less if I was being told lies or the truth. The camp criminals have a cruel saying which is even more appropriate here – it expresses a deep contempt for the questioner: ‘If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.’ I neither asked questions nor listened to fairy tales.

  What remained with me till the very end? Bitterness. And I expected this bitterness to stay with me till death. But death, just recently so near, began to ease away little by little. Death was replaced not by life, but by semi-consciousness, an existence which had no formula and could not be called life. Each day, each sunrise brought with it the danger of some new lurch into death. But it never happened. I had the easiest of jobs, easier even than being a watchman – I chopped wood to boil water. They could have kicked me out, but where to? The taiga is a distant thing, and our little village was like an island in the world of the taiga. I could barely lift my feet, the two hundred yards from the tent to the work area seemed endless, and to cover it I had to rest more than once. Even now I clearly remember all the ruts and potholes on that path of death. And I remember the creek on whose bank I would lie on my stomach to lap up the cold, delicious water. The two-handed saw that I sometimes carried on my shoulder and sometimes dragged behind me seemed unbelievably heavy.

  I never did manage to boil water in time for dinner. But none of the workers (all of them had been convicts just yesterday) ever noticed if the water was boiling or not. Kolyma had taught all of us to distinguish only hot water from cold, raw water.

  We were totally indifferent about the dialectic leap of quantity into quality. We weren’t philosophers but workers, and our hot drinking-water betrayed none of the important qualities of this leap.

  I ate, indifferently stuffing into my mouth anything that seemed edible – scraps, last year’s marsh berries.

  There were two shotguns in our tent. Grouse were not afraid of people and at first they could be shot from the tent threshold itself. Game was either roasted whole in the ashes of the campfire or it was boiled. Down for pillows was a sure source of income for the free masters of guns and forest birds. Cleaned and plucked, the birds were boiled in three-quart tin cans suspended over the campfire. I never found any remnants of these magic birds. The hungry teeth of free men ground each bone to nothing. This was another miracle of the taiga.

  I never tried a piece of grouse. Mine were the berries, the roots of the grass, the rations. And I didn’t die. With increasing indifference and without bitterness I began to watch the cold red sun, the bare mountaintops where the rocks, the turns of the river, the trees were all sharp and unfriendly. In the evenings a cold fog rose from the river, and there was no single hour in the taiga day when I felt warm.

  My frostbitten fingers and toes ached, hummed from the pain. The bright skin of the fingers remained rosy and sensitive. I kept my fingers wrapped in any kind of dirty rag to protect them from a new wound, from pain, but not from infection. Pus seeped endlessly from both my big toes.

  I was awakened by a hammer-blow on the rail, and a blow on the rails also marked the end of the day. After supper I would immediately lie down on my bunk without undressing and, naturally, fall asleep. I perceived the tent in which I lived as if through a fog; people moved back and forth, loud swearing could be heard, there were fights interrupted by sudden silence before a dangerous blow. Fights died down quickly of their own accord. No one held anyone back, no one separated anyone. The motor of aggression simply died out, and there ensued the cold silence of night with a pale tall sky peering through the holes of the canvas, and all around were groans, snoring, wheezing, coughing, and the mindless swearing of sleeping men.

  Once at night I suddenly realized that I heard groans and wheezing. The sensation was as sudden as the dawn and did not gladden me. Later, as I recollected this moment of amazement, I understood that the need for sleep, forgetfulness, unconsciousness had lessened. I’d ‘woken up’, as Moses Kuznetsov used to say. He was a blacksmith and a clever, intelligent man.

  There appeared an insistent pain in the muscles. I can’t imagine what sort of muscles I could have had, but they did ache and enrage me by not letting me forget about my b
ody. Then something else appeared – something different from resentment and bitterness. There appeared indifference and fearlessness. I realized I didn’t care if I was to be beaten or not, given dinner and the daily ration or not. The prospecting group was not guarded, so there was no one to beat me as in the mines. Nevertheless, I remembered the mine and measured my courage by its rule. This indifference and lack of fear cast a sort of bridge over to death. The realization that there would be no beatings here, that they didn’t beat you here, gave birth to new feelings, new strength.

  Later came fear, not a strong fear, but nevertheless a fear of losing the salvation of this life and work, of losing the tall cold sky and the aching pain in worn-out muscles. I realized I was afraid of leaving here for the mines. I was afraid and that was all there was to it. I had never striven to improve my life if I was content with it. The flesh on my bones grew every day. Envy was the name of the next feeling that returned to me. I envied my dead friends who had died in ’38. I envied those of my neighbors who had something to chew or smoke. I didn’t envy the camp chief, the foreman, the work brigade leader; that was a different world altogether.

  Love didn’t return to me. Oh, how distant is love from envy, from fear, from bitterness. How little people need love. Love comes only when all other human emotions have already returned. Love comes last, returns last. Or does it return? Indifference, envy, and fear, however, were not the only witnesses of my return to life. Pity for animals returned earlier than pity for people.

  As the weakest in this world of excavations and exploratory ditches, I worked with the topographer, dragging his rod and theodolite. Sometimes, to be able to move faster, the topographer would strap the theodolite to his own back and leave me with only the light rod painted all over with numbers. The topographer was a former convict himself. That summer there were a number of escaped convicts in the taiga, and the topographer asked for and received a small-caliber rifle from the camp authorities. But the rifle only interfered with our work. And not just because it was an extra thing to carry in our difficult travels. Once we sat down to rest, and the topographer took aim at a red-breasted bullfinch that had flown up to look us over and lure us away from the nest. If necessary, the bird was ready to sacrifice its life. The female must have been sitting on eggs somewhere near for him to have been so insanely bold. The topographer threw up the rifle, but I pushed the barrel away.