Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  ‘I want to eat,’ he said, smiling and blushing. ‘I really want to eat. Bring me something to eat.’

  Frits David went mad and was taken away.

  The nightshirt and the photograph were stolen on the very first night. When I told people about him later, I always experienced a feeling of indignation and could not understand why anyone would want a photograph of a stranger.

  ‘You don’t know everything,’ a certain clever acquaintance once explained to me. ‘It’s not hard to figure out. The photograph was stolen by the camp thugs for what they call a “showing”. For masturbation, my naïve friend…’

  Seryozha Klivansky died. He and I had been freshmen together at the university, and we met twenty years later in a cell for transit prisoners in Butyr Prison. He had been expelled from the Young Communist League in 1927 for a report on the Chinese revolution that he gave to the Current Politics Club. He managed to graduate from the university, and he worked as an economist in Government Planning until the situation changed and he had to leave. He won a competition to join the orchestra of the Stanislavsky Theater, where he played second violin until his arrest in 1937. He was a sanguine type, sharp of wit and full of irony. He never lost his interest in life and its events.

  It was so hot in the transit cell that everyone walked around nearly naked, pouring water on themselves and sleeping on the floor. Only heroes could bear to sleep on the bunks.

  Klivansky maintained his sense of humor: ‘This is torture by steaming. Next they’ll torture by northern frost.’ This was a realistic prediction, not the whining of a coward.

  At the mine, Seryozha was cheerful and talkative. Enthusiastically, he studied the camp thugs’ vocabulary and took a childlike delight in pronouncing phrases from the criminal world with the proper intonation.

  He loved poetry and recited verse by heart while in prison. He stopped doing that in camp.

  He would have shared his last morsel, or, rather, he was still at that stage… That is, he never reached the point where no one had a last morsel and no one shared anything with anyone.

  The work-gang leader, Diukov, died. I don’t know and never knew his first name. He had been convicted of a petty crime that had nothing to do with Article 58, under which the political prisoners had been sentenced. In camps back on the mainland he had played the part of ‘club president’, and if his attitude toward life in the camps was not romanticized, he at least intended to ‘play the role’. He had arrived in the winter and had made an amazing speech at the very first meeting. The petty criminals and thieves with repeated offenses were considered friends of the people and were to be re-educated and not punished (in contrast to enemies of the people convicted under Article 58). Later, when repeating offenders were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 for ‘sabotage’ (refusing to work), all of Paragraph 14 was removed from Article 58, and such offenders were saved from a variety of punitive measures that could last for years. Repeating offenders were always considered ‘friends of the people’ right up to Beria’s famous amnesty of 1953. Hundreds of thousands of unhappy people were sacrificed to theory, the infamous concept of re-education, and Krylenko’s* sentences, which could be stretched out to any number of years.

  At that first meeting Diukov offered to lead a work gang consisting exclusively of men convicted under Article 58. Usually the work-gang leader of the ‘politicals’ was one of them. Diukov was not a bad sort. He knew that peasants worked hard in the camps and remembered that there were a lot of peasants among those convicted under Article 58. This last circumstance was due to a certain wisdom in Yezhov and Beria, who understood that the intelligentsia’s value in terms of physical labor was not very high and that they might not be able to cope with camp production goals, as opposed to camp political goals. But Diukov did not concern himself with such lofty deliberations. Indeed, he never thought of anything other than his men’s capacity to work. He selected a work gang exclusively of peasants and started to work. That was in the spring of 1938. Diukov’s peasants survived the hungry winter of 1937–8. If he had ever seen his men naked in the bathhouse, he would immediately have realized what the problem was.

  They worked badly and needed to be fed. But the camp authorities turned Diukov down flat on this point. The starving work gang exhausted itself heroically to fulfill its quotas. At that point everyone started to cheat Diukov: the men who measured production levels, the bookkeepers, the overseers, the foremen. He complained, protested more and more harshly, but the production of the work gang continued to fall, and the food ration got smaller and smaller. Diukov attempted to take his case to higher authorities, but these higher authorities simply advised the proper persons to include Diukov’s gang together with their leader in certain lists. This was done, and they were all shot at the famous Serpentine Mine.

  Pavel Mixailovich Xvostov died. It was the conduct of these hungry people that was most terrible. Although they might seem normal, they were half mad. Hungry men will always defend justice furiously (if they are not too hungry or too exhausted). They argue incessantly and fight desperately. Under normal circumstances only one quarrel in a thousand will end in a fight. Hungry people fight constantly. Quarrels flare up over the most trivial and unexpected matters: ‘What are you doing with my pick? Why did you take my place?’ The shorter of two men tries to trip his opponent to bring him down. The taller man attempts to knock his enemy down by using his own weight advantage – and then scratch, beat, bite… All this occurs in a helpless fashion; it is neither painful nor fatal. Too often it’s just to catch the attention of others. No one interferes with a fight.

  Xvostov was precisely that sort of person. He fought with someone every day – either in the barracks or in the deep side trench that our work gang was digging. He was my winter acquaintance; I never saw his hair. He had a cap with torn earflaps of white fur. As for his eyes, they were dark, gleaming, hungry. Sometimes I would recite poetry, and he would look at me as if I were half mad.

  Once, all of a sudden, he furiously began to attack the stone in the trench with his pick. The pick was heavy, but Xvostov kept swinging it hard and without interruption. This show of strength amazed me. We had been together for a long time and had been hungry for a long time. Then the pick fell to the earth with a ringing sound. I looked around. Xvostov stood with his legs apart, swaying. His knees began to crumple. He lurched and fell face down, his outstretched hands covered in those same mittens he mended every evening. His forearms were bared; both were tattooed. Pavel Mixailovich had been a sea captain.

  Roman Romanovich died before my very eyes. At one time he had been a sort of ‘regimental commander’. He distributed packages, was responsible for keeping the camp clean, and – in a word – enjoyed privileges that none of us ‘fifty-eighters’ could even dream of. The highest post we could hope to attain was work in the bathhouse laundry or patching clothes on the night shift. ‘Special instructions’ from Moscow permitted us to come into contact only with stone. That little piece of paper was in each of our folders. But Roman Romanovich had been allotted this unattainable post. And he quickly learned all its secrets: how to open a crate containing a package for a prisoner and do it in such a way as to dump the sugar on the floor, how to break a jar of preserves, how to kick toasted bread and dried fruits under the counter. Roman Romanovich learned all this quickly and did not seek our company. He was primly official and behaved as the polite representative of those higher camp authorities, with whom we could have no personal contact. He never gave us any advice on any matter. He only explained: one letter could be sent per month, packages were distributed between eight and ten p.m. in the commandant’s office, etc.

  Evidently some accidental acquaintanceship had played a role in his getting the job. But then he didn’t last long as regimental commander – only about two months. Either it was one of the usual personnel checks that took place from time to time and were obligatory at the end of the year, or someone turned him in – ‘blew’ on him, in the camp’s eloquent
phrase. In any case, Roman Romanovich disappeared. He had been gathering dwarf-cedar needles, which were used as a source of vitamin C for convicts. Only real ‘goners’ were used for needle-picking. These starving semi-invalids were the by-products of the gold-mines, which transformed healthy people into invalids in three weeks by hunger, lack of sleep, long hours of heavy work, beatings. New people were ‘transferred’ to the work gang, and Moloch chewed on…

  By the end of the season there was no one left in the work gang except its leader, Ivanov. The rest had been sent to the hospital to die or were used for needle-picking, where they were fed once a day and could not receive more than 600 grams of bread – a little more than a pound. Romanov and I worked together that fall picking needles. The needles were not only useless as a source of vitamin C but were even declared much later, in 1952, to be harmful to the kidneys.

  We were also building a home for ourselves for the winter. In the summer we lived in ragged tents. We paced off the area, staked out the corners, and drove sticks into the ground at rather wide intervals to form a double-row fence. We packed the gaps with icy pieces of moss and peat. Inside were single-layer bunks made from poles. In the middle was a cast-iron stove. Each evening we received an empirically calculated portion of firewood. Nevertheless, we had neither saw nor axe, since these objects were guarded by the soldiers who lived in a separate plywood shack. The reason for this was that some of the criminals in the neighboring work gang had attacked the gang leader. The criminal element has an extraordinary attraction to drama and introduces it into its own life in a way that would be the envy even of Evreinov.* The criminals decided to kill the work-gang leader, and the proposal to saw off his head was received ecstatically. They beheaded him with an ordinary cross-cut saw. That was why convicts were not allowed axes or saws at night. Why at night? No one made any attempt to find logic in camp orders.

  How could logs be cut to fit the stove? The thin ones could be stamped on and broken, but the thicker ones had to be stuffed into the mouth of the stove – thin end first so they would gradually burn down. During the night there would always be someone to stuff them farther in. The light from the open stove door was the only light in our house. Drafts would sweep through the wall until the first snowfall, but then we shoveled snow all around the house and poured water over the snow, and our winter home was ready. The door opening was hung with a piece of tarpaulin.

  It was here in this shed that I found Roman Romanovich. He didn’t recognize me. The criminal camp has a very descriptive phrase to describe the way he was dressed – ‘like fire’. Shreds of cotton wool protruded from his quilted jacket, his pants, his hat. Evidently Roman Romanovich often had occasion to run for a ‘light’ for the cigarette of this or that criminal… There was a hungry gleam in his eyes, but his cheeks were as rosy as before, except that now they didn’t remind one of two balloons but clung rather tightly to his cheekbones. Roman Romanovich lay in the corner, wheezing loudly. His chin rose and fell.

  ‘He’s finished,’ said Denisov, his neighbor. ‘His foot rags are in good shape.’ Agilely, Denisov pulled the boots off the dying man’s feet and unwrapped the green footcloths that were still quite wearable. ‘That’s how it’s done,’ he said, peering at me in a threatening fashion. But I didn’t care.

  Romanov’s corpse was carried out while we were lining up to be sent to work. He didn’t have a hat either. The bottom of his coat dragged the ground.

  Volodya Dobrovoltsev, the pointman, died. What is that – a job or a nationality? It was a job that was the envy of every ‘fifty-eighter’ in the barracks. (Separate barracks for the ‘politicals’ in a camp for petty criminals and regular thugs were, of course, a legal mockery. Such arrangements protected no one from attacks or bloody settling of accounts by the criminals.)

  The ‘point’ was an iron pipe with hot steam which was used to heat the stone and coarse frozen gravel. From time to time a worker would shovel out the heated stone with a ten-foot-long shovel that had a blade the size of a man’s palm.

  This was considered a skilled job, since the pointman had to open and shut the valves which regulated hot steam that traveled along pipes from a primitive boiler in the shed. It was even better to be a pointman than a boilerman. Not every mechanical engineer could hope for that kind of work. And it wasn’t because any special skills were required. As far as Volodya was concerned, it was sheer chance that he got the job, but it transformed him totally. He no longer had to concern himself with the eternal preoccupation of how to keep warm. The icy cold did not penetrate his entire being, didn’t keep his mind from functioning. The hot pipe saved him. That was why everyone envied Dobrovoltsev.

  There was talk that he didn’t get the job of pointman for nothing, that it was sure proof that he was an informer, a spy… Of course, the criminals would maintain that anyone who had worked as a camp orderly had drunk the working man’s blood, but people knew just how much such gossip was worth; envy is a poor adviser. Somehow Volodya’s stature increased immeasurably in our eyes. It was as if a remarkable violinist had appeared among us. Dobrovoltsev would leave camp alone – the conditions required that. He would leave through the guard’s booth, opening the tiny window and shouting his number – ‘twenty-five’ – in a joyous, loud voice. It had been a long time since we had heard anything like that.

  Sometimes he would work near our work site, and we would make use of our acquaintance and would alternate running to the pipe to get warm. The pipe was an inch and a half in diameter, and you could wrap your fingers around it, squeeze them into a fist and feel the heat flow from your hands to your body so that it was impossible to tear yourself away to return to the mine face and the frost…

  Volodya didn’t chase us away as the other pointmen did. He never said a word to us, although I know for a fact that pointmen were forbidden to let the likes of us warm up by the pipe. He stood, surrounded by clouds of thick white steam. His clothing became icy, and the nap of his coat gleamed like crystal needles. He never talked to us – the job was too valuable to risk just for that.

  On Christmas night that year we were all sitting around the stove. In honor of the holiday, its iron sides were redder than usual. We could sense the difference in temperature immediately. All of us sitting around the stove were in a sleepy, lyrical mood.

  ‘You know, fellows, it would be a good thing to go home. After all, miracles do happen…’ It was Glebov, the horse-driver, speaking. He used to be a professor of philosophy and was famous in our barracks for having forgotten his wife’s name a month earlier. ‘I guess I should knock on wood, but I really mean to go home.’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ I answered. ‘I’d rather go back to prison. I’m not joking. I wouldn’t want to go back to my family now. They wouldn’t understand me, they couldn’t. The things that seem important to them I know to be trivial. And the things that are important to me – the little that is left to me – would be incomprehensible to them. I would bring them a new fear, add one more fear to the thousands of fears that already fill their lives. No man should see or know the things that I have seen and known.

  ‘Prison is another matter altogether. Prison is freedom. It’s the only place I have ever known where people spoke their minds without being afraid. Their souls were at rest there. And their bodies rested too, because they didn’t have to work. There, every hour of our being had meaning.’

  ‘What a lot of rot,’ the former professor of philosophy said. ‘That’s only because they didn’t beat you during the investigation. Anyone who experienced that method would be of an entirely different opinion.’

  ‘How about you, Peter Ivanovich, what do you say to that?’ Peter Ivanovich Timofeev, the former director of Ural Trust, smiled and winked at Glebov.

  ‘I’d go home to my wife. I’d buy some rye bread – a whole loaf! I’d cook up a bucketful of kasha. And some soup with dumplings – a bucket of that too! And I’d eat it all. And
I’d be full for the first time in my life. And whatever was left over I’d make my wife eat.’

  ‘How about you?’ Glebov asked Zvonkov, the pickman in our work gang, who had been a peasant from either Yaroslavl or Kostroma in his earlier life.

  ‘I’d go home,’ Zvonkov answered seriously, without the slightest trace of a smile.

  ‘I think if I could go home, I’d never be more than a step away from my wife. Wherever she’d go, I’d be right on her heels. The only thing is that they’ve taught me how to hate work here. I’ve lost my love for the land. But I’d find something…’

  ‘And how about you?’ Glebov touched the knees of our orderly.

  ‘First thing I’d go to Party Headquarters. I’ll never forget all the cigarette butts they had on the floor there.’

  ‘Stop joking.’

  ‘I’m dead serious.’

  Suddenly I realized that there was only one person left who had not yet answered. And that person was Volodya Dobrovoltsev. He raised his head, not waiting for the question. From the open stove door the light of the glowing coals gleamed in his lively, deep-set eyes.

  ‘As for me,’ he said in a calm, unhurried voice, ‘I’d like to have my arms and legs cut off and become a human stump – no arms or legs. Then I’d be strong enough to spit in their faces for everything they’re doing to us…’

  Handwriting

  Late one night, Chris was summoned to ‘headquarters’. That was how people in camp referred to the small house at the foot of the hill on the edge of the settlement. In this house lived the investigator who handled ‘particularly important matters’. The phrase was a joke, since there were no ‘matters’ that were not particularly important. Any violation of the rules or even the appearance of such a violation was punishable by death. It was either death or a verdict of total innocence. But what man had lived to tell the tale of such a verdict?