‘Put away the gun!’
‘What’s the matter with you? Are you crazy?’
‘Leave the bird alone.’
‘I’ll report this to the chief.’
‘The hell with your chief.’
But the topographer didn’t want to quarrel and didn’t report the incident. I realized that something important had returned to me.
I hadn’t seen newspapers or books for years, and I had long since trained myself not to regret the loss. All fifty-five of my neighbors in the torn tarpaulin tent felt the same way. There was no book or newspaper in our barracks. The camp authorities – the foreman, the chief of prospecting, the superintendent – had descended into our world without books.
My language was the crude language of the mines and it was as impoverished as the emotions that lived near the bones. Get up, go to work, dinner, end of work, rest, citizen chief, may I speak, shovel, trench, yes sir, drill, pick, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, ration, leave me the butt – these few dozen words were all I had needed for years. Half of them were obscenities. The wealth of Russian profanity, its inexhaustible offensiveness, was not revealed to me either in my childhood or in my youth. But I did not seek other words. I was happy that I did not have to search for other words. I didn’t even know if they existed. I couldn’t have answered that question.
I was frightened, shaken when there appeared in my brain (I clearly remember that it was in the back of the skull) a word totally inappropriate for the taiga, a word which I didn’t myself understand, not to mention my comrades. I shouted out the word:
‘Sententious! Sententious!’
I roared with laughter.
‘Sententious!’ I shouted directly into the northern sky, into the double dawn, still not understanding the meaning of the word that had been born within me. And if the word had returned, then all the better! A great joy filled me.
‘Sententious!’
‘Idiot!’
‘He really is! What are you, a foreigner or something?’ The question was asked ironically by Vronsky. The very same Vronsky, the mountain engineer. Three shreds.
‘Vronsky, give me a smoke.’
‘Can’t, haven’t got anything.’
‘Just three shreds of tobacco.’
‘Three shreds? OK.’
From a tobacco-pouch stuffed with home-made tobacco a dirty fingernail extracted three shreds of tobacco.
‘A foreigner?’ The question shifted our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, investigations and lengthened sentences.
But I couldn’t care less about Vronsky’s question. The find was enormous.
Bitterness was the last feeling with which man departed into non-being, into the world of the dead. But was it dead? Even a stone didn’t seem dead to me, not to mention the grass, the trees, the river. The river was not only the incarnation of life, not just a symbol of life, but life itself. It possessed eternal movement, calm, a silent and secret language of its own, its business that forced it to run downhill against the wind, beating its way through the rocks, crossing the steppes, the meadows. The river changed its bed, leaving it dried by the sun, and in a barely visible watery thread made its way along the rocks, faithful to its eternal duty. It was a stream that had lost hope for help from heaven – a saving rain, but with the first rain, the water changed its shores, broke rocks, cast huge trees in the air and rushed madly down that same eternal road…
Sententious! I couldn’t believe myself and was afraid when I went to sleep that I would forget the word that had newly returned to me. But the word didn’t disappear.
For a week I didn’t understand what the word meant. I whispered it, amused and frightened my neighbors with it. I wanted an explanation, a definition, a translation…
Many days passed before I learned to call forth from the depth of memory new words, one after the other. Each came with difficulty; each appeared suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words didn’t return in streams. Each returned alone, unaccompanied by the watchful guards of familiar words. Each appeared first on the tongue and only later in the mind.
And then came the day when everyone, all fifty workers, dropped their work and ran to the village, to the river, climbing out of their ditches, abandoning half-sawn-through trees and the uncooked soup in the pot. They all ran quicker than me, but I hobbled up in time, aiding myself in this downhill run with my hands.
The chief had arrived from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On an enormous fir stump stood a record-player. Overcoming the hiss of the needle, it was playing symphonic music.
And everyone stood around – murderers and horse-thieves, common criminals and political prisoners, foremen and workers. And the chief stood there too. And the expression on his face was such that he seemed to have written the music for us, for our desolate sojourn in the taiga. The shellacked record spun and hissed, and the stump itself, wound up in three hundred circles over the past three hundred years, spun like a taut spring…
The Virtuoso Shovelman
The Seizure
The wall lurched, and nausea welled up in my throat, sickeningly sweet. For the thousandth time a burned-out match floated past me. I stretched out my hand to grab the annoying match, and it disappeared. Sight had left me. But the world had not yet abandoned me – I could still hear the far-off, insistent voice of the nurse somewhere out on the street. Then hospital gowns, the corner of a building, and the starry sky flashed by… An enormous gray turtle with a cold gleam in its eyes rose up before me. Someone had broken a hole through its ribs, and I crawled into the hole, clutching and pulling myself up with my hands. I trusted only my hands.
I remembered someone’s insistent fingers skillfully easing my head and shoulders on to the bed. Everything fell quiet, and I was alone with someone as enormous as Gulliver. Insect-like, I lay on a board, and someone examined me intently through a magnifying glass. I squirmed, but the terrible glass followed all my movements. Only when the orderlies had transferred me to a hospital cot and the blissful calm of solitude had followed did I realize that Gulliver’s magnifying glass had not been a nightmare – I had been looking at the on-duty doctor’s glasses. This pleased me.
My head ached and whirled at the slightest movement, and it was impossible to think. I could only remember, and remote frightening pictures began to appear in black and white like scenes from a silent movie. The cloying nausea so similar to the effect of ether would not go away. I had experienced that sensation before… I recalled how, many years before, in the far north, a day off had been declared for the first time in six months. Everybody wanted to lie down, simply to lie prone, not to mend clothing, not to move… But everyone was awakened early in the morning and sent for firewood. Five miles from the village was a forest-cutting area, and we were each to select a log commensurate with our strength and drag it home to the barracks. I decided to go off in a different direction to a place a little more than a mile away where there were some old log stacks and where I could find a log I could handle. Climbing the mountain was exhausting, and when I reached the stack, I couldn’t find a light log. Higher up I could see collapsed stacks of black logs, and I started to make my way up to them. There was only one log there that was slender enough for me to carry, but one end of it was pinned under the stack, and I didn’t have the strength to pull it free.
After several attempts I became totally exhausted. Since it was impossible to return empty-handed, however, I gathered my strength and crawled still higher to a stack covered with snow. It took me a long time to clear away the loose, squeaky snow with my hands and feet. I finally managed to yank a log free, but it was too heavy.
I wore a dirty towel around my neck that served as a scarf. I unwound it, tied it to the tip of the log, and started dragging the log away. The log slid downhill, banging against trees, bumps, and my legs, sometimes even getting away from me. Octopus-like, the dwarf cedar grasped at the log, but it would tear itself free from the tree’s black t
entacles, gather speed, and then get stuck in the snow. I would crawl down to it and again force it to move. While I was still high up on the mountain, it became dark, and I realized that many hours had passed, and the road back to the village and the camp area was still far away. I yanked at the scarf, and the log again hurtled downward in jerks. I dragged the log out on to the road. The forest lurched before my eyes, and a sickening sweet nausea welled up from my throat. I came to in the crane-operator’s shed; he was rubbing my face and hands with stinging snow.
All this I saw projected once again on the hospital wall.
But instead of the crane-operator, a doctor was holding my hand.
‘Where am I?’
‘In the Neurological Institute.’
The doctor asked me something, and I answered with difficulty. I was not afraid of memories.
An Epitaph
They all died…
My friend, Nicholas Kazimirovich Barbe, who helped me drag a large stone from a narrow test pit, was shot for not fulfilling the plan in the sector assigned to this work gang. He was the foreman listed in the report of the young communist Arm, who received a medal in 1938 and later became mine chief and then director of mines. Arm made a splendid career for himself. Nicholas Barbe possessed one treasured object, a camel-hair scarf – a long, warm, blue scarf of real wool. Thieves stole it in the bathhouse. Barbe was looking the other way, and they simply took it. And that was that. The next day Barbe’s cheeks were frostbitten, severely frostbitten – so much so that the sores didn’t have time to heal before his death…
Ioska Riutin died. He was my partner. None of the hard workers wanted to work with me, but Ioska did. He was stronger and more agile than I, but he understood perfectly why we had been brought here. And he wasn’t offended at me for being a bad worker. Ultimately the ‘senior inspector’ (a czarist term still in use in 1937) ordered that I be given individual assignments. So Ioska worked with someone else, but our bunks in the barracks were side by side. One night I was awakened by the awkward movement of someone dressed in leather and smelling of sheep. Standing in the narrow passageway between the bunks, the man was waking my neighbor.
‘Riutin! Get up.’
Hurriedly, Ioska began to dress, while the man who smelled of sheep searched his few belongings. Among them was a chess set, and the leather-clad man set it aside.
‘That’s mine,’ Riutin said. ‘That’s my property. I paid money for it.’
‘So what?’ the sheepskin coat said.
‘Put it back.’
The sheepskin coat burst out laughing. And when he tired of laughing, he wiped his face with his leather sleeve and said:
‘You won’t be needing it any more…’
Dmitri Nikolaevich Orlov, a former adviser of Kirov,* died. He and I sawed wood together during the night shift at the mine. The possessors of a saw, we worked at the bakery during the day. I remember perfectly the toolman’s critical gaze as he issued us the saw – an ordinary cross-cut saw.
‘Listen, old man,’ the toolman said. They called all of us ‘old men’ back then; we didn’t have to wait twenty years for that title. ‘Can you sharpen a saw?’
‘Of course,’ Orlov said quickly. ‘Do you have a tooth setter?’
‘You can use an axe,’ the toolman said, having come to the conclusion that we were intelligent people – not like all those eggheads.
The economist Semyon Alekseevich Sheinin died. He was my partner and a good person. For a long time he could not grasp what they were doing to us, but he finally came to understand the situation and quietly began to wait for death. He did not lack courage. Once I received a package. The fact that the package had arrived was a rare event. There was nothing in it but an aviator’s felt boots. That was it. How little our families knew of the conditions in which we lived! I was perfectly aware that the boots would be stolen on the very first night. So, without leaving the commandant’s office, I sold them for a hundred rubles to Andrei Boiko. The boots were worth 700, but it was a profitable sale anyway. After all, I could buy more than 200 pounds of bread for that amount, or maybe some butter and sugar. I had not eaten butter and sugar since I had arrived in prison. I bought more than two pounds of butter at the commissary. I remember how nutritious it was. That butter cost me forty-one rubles. I bought it during the day (I worked at night) and ran for Sheinin, who lived in a different barracks, to celebrate the arrival of the package. I bought bread too…
Semyon Alekseevich was flustered and happy.
‘But why me? What right do I have?’ he kept repeating in a state of nervous excitement. ‘No, no, I can’t…’ But I persuaded him, and he ran joyfully for boiling water.
And I was immediately knocked to the ground by a terrible blow on the head.
When I regained consciousness, the bag with the bread and butter was gone. The larch log that had been used to strike me lay next to the cot, and everyone was laughing. Sheinin came running with the boiling water. For many years after that I could not remember the theft without getting terribly upset. As for Semyon Alekseevich, he died.
Ivan Yakovlevich Fediaxin died. He and I had arrived in Kolyma by the same train and boat. We ended up in the same mine, in the same work gang. A peasant from Volokolamsk and a philosopher, he had organized the first collective farm in Russia. The collective farms, as is well known, were first organized by the Socialist Revolutionaries in the twenties. The Chayanov-Kondratiev group represented their interests in the government. Ivan Yakovlevich was a Socialist Revolutionary – one of the million who voted for the party of 1917. He was sentenced to five years for organizing the first kolkhoz.
Once in the early Kolyma fall of 1937 he and I were filling a cart on the famous mine conveyor. There were two carts which could be unhitched alternately while the horse-driver was hauling the other to the washer. Two men could barely manage to keep up with the job. There was no time to smoke, and anyway it wasn’t permitted by the overseers. But our horse-driver smoked – an enormous cigar rolled from almost a half-package of home-grown tobacco (there was still tobacco back then), and he would leave it on the edge of the mine for us to smoke as well.
The horse-driver was Mishka Vavilov, former vice-president of the ‘Industrial Imports Trust’.
We talked to each other as we tossed earth casually into the cart. I told Fediaxin about the amount of earth demanded from exiled Decembrists in Nerchinsk as told in The Notes of Maria Volkonskaya. They used an old Russian unit of measure back then, the pood, which was thirty-six pounds. Each man had to produce three pood per day. ‘So how much does our quota come to?’ Fediaxin asked.
I calculated – approximately eight hundred poods.
‘So that’s how much quotas have increased…’
Later, in the winter, when we were constantly hungry, I would get tobacco, begging, saving, and buying it, and trade it for bread. Fediaxin disapproved of my ‘business’.
‘That’s not worthy of you; you shouldn’t do that.’
I saw him for the last time in the cafeteria. It was winter. I gave him six dinner coupons that I had earned that night for copying some office documents out by hand. Good handwriting helped me out sometimes. The coupons would have been worthless the next day, since dates were stamped on them. Fediaxin picked up the dinners, sat down at the table, and poured the watery soup (which contained not a single grease spot) from one bowl into another. All six portions of the pearl-barley kasha weren’t enough to fill one bowl. Fediaxin had no spoon, so he licked up the kasha with his tongue. And he cried.
Derfelle died. He was a French communist who had served time in the stone quarries of Cayenne. Aside from hunger and cold, he was morally exhausted. He could not believe that he, a member of the Comintern, could end up at hard labor here in the Soviet Union. His horror would have been lessened if he could have seen that there were others here like him. Everyone with whom he had arrived, with whom he lived, with whom he died was like that. He was a small, weak person, and beatings were just becomin
g popular… Once the work-gang leader struck him, simply struck him with his fist – to keep him in line, so to speak – but Derfelle collapsed and did not get up. He was one of the first, the lucky ones to die. In Moscow he had worked as an editor at Tass. He had a good command of Russian. ‘Back in Cayenne it was bad, too,’ he told me once, ‘but here it’s very bad.’
Frits David died. He was a Dutch communist, an employee of the Comintern who was accused of espionage. He had beautiful wavy hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a childish line to his mouth. He knew almost no Russian. I met him in the barracks, which were so crowded that one could fall asleep standing up. We stood side by side. Frits smiled at me and closed his eyes.
The space beneath the bunks was so packed with people that we had to wait to sit down, to simply crouch and lean against another body, a post – and – fall asleep. I waited, covering my eyes. Suddenly something next to me collapsed. My neighbor, Frits David, had fallen. Embarrassed, he got up.
‘I fell asleep,’ he said in a frightened voice.
This Frits David was the first in our contingent to receive a package. His wife sent it to him from Moscow. In the package was a velvet suit, a nightshirt, and a large photograph of a beautiful woman. He was wearing this velvet suit as he crouched next to me on the floor.
Kolyma Tales Page 27