Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov

  The quiet, considerate Moscow guards had been replaced by a band of shouting, suntanned young men under the command of the blue-eyed Sherbakov, and we spent the night in the basement of the Solikamsk Police Station which was located in a former monastery. Yesterday, when they poured us into the cold basement, all we could see was ice and snow around the church. There was always a slight thaw in the day and in the evening it would freeze over again. Blue-gray drifts blanketed the entire yard, and to find the essence of the snow, its whiteness, one had to break the hard, brittle crust of ice, dig a hole, and only then scoop out the flaky snow that melted joyously on the tongue and cooled dry mouths, burning them with its freshness.

  I was one of the first to enter the basement and was thus able to pick a warmer spot. The enormous icy chambers frightened me, and I searched with all the inexperience of youth for something that would at least resemble a stove. But my chance comrade, a stunted thief by the name of Gusev, shoved me right up against the wall next to the only window, which was barred and had a double frame. Semicircular and about a yard high, the window began down at the floor and looked like a loophole. I wanted to find a warmer spot, but the crowd kept flowing through the narrow door and there was no opportunity to return. Very calmly, without saying a word to me, Gusev kicked the glass with the tip of his boot, breaking first one pane and then the second. Cold air rushed through the new opening, burning like boiling water. Caught in this icy draft and already terribly chilled after a long wait and head count in the courtyard, I began to shiver. Immediately, however, I understood the wisdom of Gusev’s action. Of the two hundred convicts, we two were the only ones that night who breathed fresh air. People were so packed into the cellar that it was impossible to lie down or even to sit. We had to remain standing.

  The upper half of the room was hidden by a white fog of breath – unclean and stuffy. The ceiling was invisible, and we had no idea if it was high or low. People began to faint. Choking for breath, men tried to push their way to the door, where there was a crack and a peep-hole. They tried to breathe through it but every now and again the sentry outside the door would shove his bayonet through this peep-hole, and the men didn’t try again after that. Naturally, no medical assistance was rendered to those who fainted. Only the wise Gusev and I were able to breathe easily at the broken window. Muster took a long time…

  We were the last to leave and, when the fog in the cellar had cleared, we saw within arm’s reach a vaulted ceiling, the firmament of our church-prison. In the basement of the Solikamsk Police Station I found huge letters drawn with a lump of coal, stretching right across the vaulted ceiling: ‘Comrades! We were in this grave three days and thought we would die, but we survived. Comrades, be strong!’

  Accompanied by the shouts of the guards, our column crawled past the outskirts of Solikamsk and made its way toward a low area. The sky was blue, very blue – like the eyes of the guard commander. As the wind cooled our faces the sun burned them so that by nightfall of the first day they became brown. Accommodation, prepared in advance, was always the same. Two peasant huts were rented to put up the convicts for the night. One would be fairly clean, and the other rather dingy – something like a barn. Sometimes it was a barn. The trick was to end up in the ‘cleaner’ one, but that was not for the convicts to choose. Every evening at twilight the commander of the guards would have the men file past him. With a wave of his hand he would indicate where the man standing before him should spend the night. At the time Sherbakov seemed to me to be infinitely wise because he didn’t dig around in papers or lists to select ‘more distinguished criminals’, but simply picked out the necessary convicts with a wave of his hand. Later I decided that Sherbakov must be unusually observant; each selection, made by some unfathomable method, turned out to be the correct one. The political prisoners were all in one group, and the common criminals in the other. A year or two later I realized that Sherbakov’s wisdom did not depend on miracles. Anyone can learn to assess others by outward appearance. In our group, belongings and suitcases might have served as secondary signs, but our things were being hauled separately, on the carts and peasant sleighs.

  On the first night something happened. That event is the subject of this story. Two hundred men stood waiting for the commander of the guards when, off to the left, a disturbance was heard. There was an uproar of shouting, puffing, and swearing, and finally a clear cry of ‘Dragons! Dragons!’ A man was flung out on to the snow in front of the file of convicts. His face was bloodied, and someone had jammed a tall fur hat on his head, but it could not cover the narrow oozing wound. The man, who was probably Ukrainian, was dressed in homespun. I knew him. He was Peter Zayats, the religious sectarian, and he had been brought from Moscow in the same railroad car with me. He prayed constantly.

  ‘He won’t stand up for roll-call!’ the guard reported, excited and puffing.

  ‘Stand him up!’ ordered the commander.

  Two enormous guards supported Zayats, one on each side. Zayats, however, was heavier, and a head taller than either of them.

  ‘You don’t want to stand up? You don’t want to?’

  Sherbakov struck Zayats in the face with his fist. Zayats spat into the snow.

  All at once I felt a burning sensation in my chest and I realized that the meaning of my whole life was about to be decided. If I didn’t do something – what exactly, I didn’t know – it would mean that my arrival with this group of convicts was in vain, that twenty years of my life had been pointless.

  The burning flush of shame over my cowardliness fled from my cheeks. I felt them cool down and my body lighten.

  I stepped out of line and said in a trembling voice:

  ‘How dare you beat that man!’

  Sherbakov looked me over in sheer amazement.

  ‘Get back in line.’

  I returned to the line. Sherbakov gave the command, and heading for the two huts as indicated by his fingers, the group melted away in the darkness. His finger directed me to the poorer hut.

  We lay down to sleep on wet, rotting year-old straw which was strewn on bare smooth earth. We lay in each other’s embrace because it was warmer that way, and only the criminal element in the group played its eternal card-games beneath a lantern hanging from a ceiling beam. Soon even they fell asleep and so, mulling over my act, did I. I had no older friend, no one to set an example. My sleep was interrupted by someone shining a light in my face. One of my comrades, a thief, kept repeating in a confident, ingratiating voice:

  ‘He’s the one, he’s the one.’

  The lantern was held by a guard.

  ‘Come on outside.’

  ‘I’ll get dressed right away.’

  ‘Come as you are.’

  I walked outside shivering nervously and not knowing what was going to happen.

  Flanked by two guards, I walked up on to the porch.

  ‘Take your underwear off!’

  I undressed.

  ‘Go stand in the snow.’

  I went out into the snow, looked back at the porch, and saw two rifle barrels aimed directly at me. How much time I spent there that night in the Urals, my first night in the Urals, I don’t remember.

  I heard a command:

  ‘Get dressed.’

  As I pulled on my underwear, a blow on the ear knocked me into the snow. A heavy boot struck me directly in the teeth, and my mouth filled with warm blood and began to swell.

  ‘Go back to the barracks!’

  I went back to the hut and found my spot, but it was already occupied by another man. Everyone was asleep or pretending to be asleep. The salty taste of blood wouldn’t go away. There was some object in my mouth, something superfluous, and I gripped this superfluous thing and tore it forcibly from my mouth. It was a knocked-out tooth. I threw it on to the decaying straw on the earthen floor.

  With both arms I embraced the dirty, stinking bodies of my comrades and fell asleep. I fell asleep and didn’t even catch cold.

  In the morning the gro
up got underway, and Sherbakov’s blue imperturbable eyes ranged calmly over the convict columns. Peter Zayats stood in line. No one beat him, and he wasn’t shouting about dragons. The common criminals in the group peered at me in a hostile, anxious fashion. In the camps every man learns to answer for himself.

  Two days later we reached ‘headquarters’ – a new log house on the river-bank.

  The commandant, Nestorov, came out to take over the group. He was a hairy-fisted man, and many of the criminals in the group knew him and praised him highly:

  ‘Whenever they brought in escapees, Nestorov would come out and say: ‘So you boys decided to come back! OK, take your pick – either a licking or solitary confinement.” Solitary had an iron floor, and no one could survive more than three months there, not to mention the investigation and the extra sentence. “A licking, sir.”

  ‘He’d wind up and knock the man off his feet! Then he’d knock him down again! He was a real expert. “Now go back to the barracks.” And that was all. No investigations. A good supervisor.’

  Nestorov walked up and down the ranks, carefully examining the faces.

  ‘Any complaints against the guards?’

  ‘No, no,’ a ragged chorus of voices answered.

  ‘How about you?’ The hairy finger touched my chest. ‘How come you’re answering as if you had cotton wool in your mouth? And your voice is hoarse.’

  ‘No,’ I answered, trying to force my damaged mouth to enunciate the words as firmly as possible. ‘I have no complaints about the guards.’

  ‘That’s not a bad story,’ I said to Sazonov. ‘It’s even got a certain amount of literary sophistication. But you’ll never get it published. Besides, the ending is sort of amorphous.’

  ‘I have a different ending,’ Sazonov said. ‘A year later they made me a bigwig in camp. That was when there was all that talk about rehabilitation and the new society “reforging” men. Sherbakov was supposed to get the job of second-in-command of the section I worked in. A lot depended on me, and Sherbakov was afraid I still hadn’t forgotten about the tooth I’d lost. Sherbakov hadn’t forgotten it either. He had a large family, and it was a good job, right on top. He was a simple, direct man and came to see me to find out if I would object to his candidacy. He brought a bottle of vodka with him to make peace Russian-style, but I wouldn’t drink with him. I did tell him I wouldn’t interfere with his appointment.

  ‘Sherbakov was overjoyed, kept saying he was sorry, shifting from one foot to the other at my door, catching the rug with his heel and not able to bring the conversation to an end.

  ‘ “We were on the road, you understand. We had escaped prisoners with us.” ’

  ‘That’s not really a good ending either,’ I said to Sazonov.

  ‘I have a different one then.

  ‘Before I was appointed to the section where I met Sherbakov again, I saw Peter Zayats on the street. He was an orderly in the village. There was no trace of the former young, black-haired, black-browed giant. Instead he was a limping, gray-haired old man coughing up blood. He didn’t even recognize me, and when I took him by the arm and addressed him by name, he jerked back and went his own way. I could see from his eyes that Zayats was thinking his own thoughts, thoughts that I could not guess at. My appearance was either unnecessary or offensive to the master of such thoughts, who was conversing with less earthly personages.’

  ‘I don’t like that variation either,’ I said.

  ‘Then I’ll leave it as I originally had it.’

  Even if you can’t get something published, it’s easier to bear a thing if you write it down. Once you’ve done that, you can forget…

  Prosthetic Appliances

  The camp’s solitary confinement block was old, old. It seemed that all you had to do was to kick one of the wooden walls and its logs would collapse, disintegrate. But the block did not collapse and all seven cells did faithful service. Of course, any loudly spoken word could be heard by one’s neighbors, but the inmates of the block were afraid of punishment. If the guard on duty marked the cell with a chalk X, the cell was deprived of hot food. Two Xs meant no bread as well. The block was used for camp offenses; anyone suspected of something more dangerous was taken away to Central Control.

  For the first time all the prisoners entrusted with administrative work had suddenly been arrested. Some major affair, some camp trial was being put together. By someone’s command.

  Now all six of us were standing in the narrow corridor, surrounded by guards, feeling and understanding only one thing: that we had been caught by the teeth of that same machine as several years before and that we would learn the reason only tomorrow, no earlier.

  We were all made to undress to our underwear and were led into a separate cell. The storekeeper recorded things taken for storage, stuffed them into sacks, attached tags, wrote. I knew the name of the investigator supervising the ‘operation’ – Pesniakevich.

  The first man was on crutches. He sat down on a bench next to the lamp, put the crutches on the floor, and began to undress. He was wearing a steel corset.

  ‘Should I take it off?’

  ‘Of course.’

  The man began to unlace the cords of the corset and the investigator Pesniakevich bent down to help him.

  ‘Do you recognize me, old friend?’ The question was asked in thieves’ slang, in a confidential manner.

  ‘I recognize you, Pleve.’

  The man in the corset was Pleve, supervisor of the camp tailor shop. It was an important job involving twenty tailors who, with the permission of the administration, filled individual orders even from outside the camp.

  The naked man turned over on the bench. On the floor lay the steel corset as the report of confiscated items was composed.

  ‘What’s this thing called?’ asked the block storekeeper, touching the corset with the toe of his boot.

  ‘A steel prosthetic corset,’ answered the naked man.

  Pesniakevich went off to the side and I asked Pleve how he knew him.

  ‘His mother kept a whore-house in Minsk before the Revolution. I used to go there,’ Pleve answered coldly.

  Pesniakevich emerged from the depths of the corridor with four guards. They picked Pleve up by his arms and legs and carried him into the cell. The lock snapped shut.

  Next was Karavaev, manager of the stable. A former soldier of the famous Budyony Brigade, he had lost an arm in the Civil War.

  Karavaev banged on the officer of the guards’ table with the steel of his artificial limb.

  ‘You bastards.’

  ‘Drop the metal. Let’s have the arm.’

  Karavaev raised the untied limb, but the guards jumped the cavalryman and shoved him into the cell. There ensued a flood of elaborate obscenities.

  ‘Listen, Karavaev,’ said the chief guard of the block. ‘We’ll take away your hot food if you make a noise.’

  ‘To hell with your hot food.’

  The head guard took a piece of chalk out of his pocket and made an X on Karavaev’s cell.

  ‘Who’s going to sign for the arm?’

  ‘No one. Put a check mark,’ commanded Pesniakevich.

  Now it was the turn of our doctor, Zhitkov. A deaf old man, he wore a hearing-aid. After him was Colonel Panin, manager of the carpentry shop. A shell had taken off the colonel’s leg somewhere in East Prussia during the First World War. He was an excellent carpenter, and he explained to me that before the Revolution children of the nobility were often taught some hand trade. The old man unsnapped his prosthetic leg and hopped into his cell on one leg.

  There were only two of us left – Shor, Grisha Shor the senior brigade leader, and myself.

  ‘Look how cleverly things are going,’ Grisha said; the nervous mirth of the arrest was overtaking him. ‘One turns in a leg; another an arm; I’ll give an eye.’ Adroitly he plucked out his porcelain right eye and showed it to me in his palm.

  ‘You have an artificial eye?’ I said in amazement. ‘I never noticed.’<
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  ‘You are not very observant. But then the eye is a good match.’

  While Grisha’s eye was being recorded, the chief guard couldn’t control himself and started giggling.

  ‘That one gives us his arm; this one turns in his leg; another gives his back, and this one gives his eye. We’ll have all the parts of the body at this rate. How about you?’ He looked over my naked body carefully.

  ‘What will you give up? Your soul?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t have my soul.’

  The Train

  At the train station in Irkutsk I lay down in the clear, sharp light of an electric bulb. All my money was sewn into a cotton belt that had been made for me in the shop two years earlier; the time had finally come for it to render service. Carefully, stepping over legs, selecting a path among the dirty, stinking, ragged bodies, a policeman patrolled the train station. Better still, there was a military patrol with red armbands and automatic rifles. There was no way the policeman could have controlled the criminals in the crowd, and this fact had probably been established long before my arrival at the train station. It was not that I was afraid my money would be stolen. I had lost any sense of fear much earlier. It was just that things were easier with money than without.

  The light shone directly in my face, but lights had shone in my eyes thousands of times before and I had learned to sleep very well with the light on. I turned up the collar of my pea jacket, shoved my hands into the sleeves of the opposite arms, let my felt boots slip from my feet a little, and fell asleep. I wasn’t worried about drafts. Everything was familiar: the screech of the train whistle, the moving cars, the train station, the policeman, the bazaar next to the train station. It was as if I had just awakened from a dream that had lasted for years. And suddenly I was afraid and felt a cold sweat form on my body. I was frightened by the terrible strength of man, his desire and ability to forget. I realized I was ready to forget everything, to cross out twenty years of my life. And what years! And when I understood this, I conquered myself. I knew I would not permit my memory to forget everything that I had seen. And I regained my calm and fell asleep.