Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Andrei Mikhailovich was getting worse and worse, and he was at death’s door when he managed to persuade Cherpakov to have him sent to the Western Region, the nearest place where there were doctors capable of performing a pneumothorax.

  Now Andrei Mikhailovich was somewhat better. He’d had several successful insufflations and had begun to work as a registrar in the surgical department.

  After I got some of my strength back, I worked as a nurse for Andrei Mikhailovich. On his insistent recommendation, I left to take a paramedical course, graduated, and worked as a paramedic before returning to the mainland. It is to Andrei Mikhailovich that I owe my life. He died long ago: tuberculosis and Major Cherpakov did their job.

  In the hospital where we worked together, we lived in harmony. Our sentences ended in the same year, and that somehow linked our fates and brought us closer to each other.

  Once, when we’d finished the evening chores, the male nurses sat in a corner to play dominoes and the tiles were slammed down.

  “A stupid game,” said Andrei Mikhailovich, his eyes directed at the nurses, and he frowned every time the tiles were banged down.

  “I’ve only ever played dominoes once,” I said. “With you, at your invitation. I even won.”

  “Any fool can win,” said Andrei Mikhailovich. “That was the first time for me, too. I wanted to give you some pleasure.”

  1959

  HERCULES

  THE LAST guest to arrive for the silver wedding anniversary of Sudarin, the head of the hospital, was late. It was the doctor, Andrei Ivanovich Dudar. He had in his hand a willow basket wrapped in muslin and decorated with paper flowers. Glasses clinked and festive drunken voices roared out as Andrei Ivanovich offered the basket to his host, the hero of the celebration: Sudarin took the basket and weighed it up.

  “What is it?”

  “Look and you’ll see.”

  The muslin was removed. Inside the basket was a large red-feathered cockerel. It calmly turned its head as it inspected the flushed faces of the noisy, drunken guests.

  “Oh, Andrei, what a good idea!” twittered Sudarin’s wife, as she stroked the cockerel.

  “A wonderful present,” babbled the women doctors. “And how handsome he is. That’s your favorite pet, Andrei Ivanovich, isn’t it?”

  Sudarin was moved; he squeezed Dudar’s arm.

  “Show me, show me,” a thin hoarse voice suddenly said.

  At the place of honor, at the head of the table, on his host’s right, sat a distinguished guest from far away. This guest was Cherpakov, the head of the medical administration, an old friend of Sudarin’s; he had driven that morning in his personal Pobeda from the provincial capital, some six hundred kilometers away, just to come to his friend’s silver anniversary.

  The guest from far away was shown the cockerel in its basket. He looked at it with his lackluster eyes.

  “Yes, a nice little cockerel. Yours, is he?” the honored guest’s finger pointed at Andrei Ivanovich.

  “It’s mine now,” announced Sudarin with a smile.

  The guest of honor was noticeably younger than the bald, gray-haired neurologists, surgeons, general practitioners, and tuberculosis doctors around him. He was about forty. He had an unhealthy, yellow, swollen face and tiny gray eyes, and he wore an immaculate tunic with the silver epaulettes of a colonel in the medical services. The tunic was clearly too small for the colonel and had obviously been made when his belly had not yet become prominent and his neck did not hang over his stiff collar. The guest of honor’s face had a bored expression, but each glass of pure spirit (being a Russian and, what’s more, a northerner, the guest of honor touched no other inebriating liquid) made his face livelier, and he looked more and more frequently at the medical ladies around him and intervened more and more often in the conversations, which invariably died down whenever his cracked tenor voice made itself heard.

  When the party had reached the appropriate level, the guest of honor arose from the table, jolting as he did so a lady doctor who hadn’t moved back in time; then he rolled up his sleeves and started lifting the heavy larch-wood chairs, grabbing a front leg with one hand, alternating left and right, showing off his harmonious physical development.

  None of the delighted guests could lift chairs as many times as the guest of honor did. After the chairs, he moved to the armchairs and was equally successful. While other guests were lifting chairs, the guest of honor’s mighty hand was taking hold of the young lady doctors. They were pink-cheeked with happiness as he made them feel his flexing biceps, a task the lady doctors carried out with obvious delight.

  After these exercises the guest of honor, inexhaustibly inventive, decided to show off a national Russian specialty: arm wrestling. He bent his arm at the elbow, put it on the table, and made his opponent do the same. The gray-haired, bald neurologists and general practitioners were unable to put up any serious resistance; only the chief surgeon managed to hold out a little longer than the others.

  The guest of honor kept looking for new tests of his Russian might. Apologizing to the ladies, he took off his tunic, which his hostess immediately picked up and hung over the back of a chair. The sudden animation on the guest of honor’s face made it obvious that he’d had an idea.

  “I can take a sheep, a sheep, you realize, and pull its head back. Crack, and it’s dead,” said the guest of honor, literally buttonholing Andrei Ivanovich. “As for that . . . present of yours, I can tear the creature’s head off,” he said, relishing the impression he had made. “Where’s the cockerel?”

  The cockerel was extracted from the household chicken run where the prudent mistress of the house had already released it. In the north all the bosses kept (in winter, of course) a few dozen chickens at home; whether the boss was a bachelor or married, chickens were always an extremely profitable item.

  The guest of honor stepped into the middle of the room with the cockerel in his hands. Andrei Ivanovich’s pet lay there just as calmly, both legs folded, and its head hanging to one side. In his lonely apartment Andrei Ivanovich had carried it around like this for two years or so.

  Mighty fingers grabbed the cockerel by the neck. The dirty thick skin of the guest of honor’s face flushed red. Using the movement that blacksmiths use to straighten a horseshoe, the guest of honor ripped the head off the cockerel. The cockerel’s blood splashed his neatly ironed trousers and his silk shirt.

  The ladies took out their perfumed handkerchiefs and competed in a rush to wipe the guest of honor’s trousers.

  “Some eau de cologne.”

  “Spirits of ammonia.”

  “Rinse it in cold water.”

  “What strength, what strength! That really is Russian. Crack, and it’s dead,” said Sudarin, the host.

  The guest of honor was hauled off to the bathroom to clean himself up.

  “We’ll have dancing in the hall,” said the host, as he fussed about. “Well, a real Hercules.”

  They wound the phonograph. The needle started hissing.

  When Andrei Ivanovich got up from the table to take part in the dancing (the guest of honor liked to see everyone dance), his foot hit something soft. He bent down and saw the dead cockerel’s body, the headless corpse of his pet.

  Andrei Ivanovich straightened up, looked around, and kicked the dead bird farther under the table. Then he hurriedly left the room. The guest of honor didn’t like people being late for dancing.

  1956

  SHOCK THERAPY

  EVEN IN that distant blissful period when Merzliakov worked as a stableman and was able, by using a homemade grinder cobbled together from an old tin can with holes in the bottom to make a sieve, to make flaked grain fit for human consumption from the oats that were provided for the horses, and thus cook porridge, a bitter hot gruel that suppressed and reduced his hunger, he was pondering one simple question. The big draft horses brought in from the mainland were given a government oats ration every day which was twice what the squat, shaggy Yakut ponies got, al
though the draft horses pulled no more than the ponies. Thunder, the monstrous Percheron, had as much oats poured into his trough as five Yakut ponies could eat. This was justifiable, it was done everywhere, and that was not what tormented Merzliakov. He couldn’t understand why the human rations in the camp, the mysterious prescription of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories destined to be swallowed by prisoners and called the “pot sheet,” were drawn up with absolutely no consideration of people’s live weight. If they were to be treated as beasts of burden, then questions of rations should be dealt with more logically, instead of observing some terrible mathematical average or bureaucratic whim. At best this terrible average would benefit only the lightweights, and in fact those who weighed less took longer than the others to become goners. Merzliakov had a constitution like that of Thunder, the Percheron, and that pathetic breakfast of three spoonfuls of porridge only increased the nagging pain in his stomach. Yet a workman in a brigade could get almost nothing in addition to his ration. The most precious items—butter, sugar, and meat—were never added to the pot in the quantity prescribed by the pot sheet. There were other things that Merzliakov had seen: tall people were the first to die. Being inured to heavy labor made absolutely no difference. An intellectual weakling still held out longer than a giant from Kaluga, where tilling the earth was in the blood, if they received the same food, in accordance with camp rations. There was not much advantage in increasing your ration by exceeding the production norm by a percentage either, because the basic prescription was unchanged and still did not match the needs of tall men. If you wanted to eat better, you had to work better; but if you wanted to work better, you had to eat better. Everywhere, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians were the first to die. They were the first to become goners, which always led the doctors to remark that the Baltic peoples were weaker than the Russians. True, the living standards of the Latvians and Estonians were far higher than those of the camps, or even of the Russian peasant, so they found things harder. But the main cause lay elsewhere: they weren’t less tough, they were just taller.

  About eighteen months earlier, after an attack of scurvy, which quickly knocked out anyone new to the camps, Merzliakov was given a job as a temporary nurse in the tiny local hospital. He saw there that medicines were dispensed in doses according to the patient’s weight. New medicines were tested on rabbits, mice, or guinea pigs, and human doses were determined by calculating body weight. Children’s doses were less than adult doses.

  But the camp rations were not calculated according to the weight of the human body. This was, then, the wrong answer to the question that astonished and worried Merzliakov. But before he became hopelessly weak, he managed by some miracle to get a stableman’s job, where he could steal the horses’ oats and stuff his own stomach with them. Merzliakov was already thinking he could get through the winter and then face whatever was coming. But things worked out differently. The stable manager was dismissed for drunkenness, and a senior stableman was promoted. He was one of the men who had shown Merzliakov how to use a tin can to make porridge oats. The senior stableman had himself been something of an oats thief and knew perfectly well how it was done. He now felt the need to ingratiate himself with his bosses, and he no longer needed any oat flakes. He therefore personally sought out and destroyed all the homemade grinders. People started roasting, boiling, and eating oats, husk and all, treating their stomachs as if they were horses. The new manager wrote a report to the authorities. Several stablemen, including Merzliakov, were put in solitary confinement for stealing oats and then sent from the stables back to where they had come from: ordinary manual labor.

  •

  Doing manual labor, Merzliakov soon realized that death was imminent. He staggered under the weight of the beams he had to drag around. The foreman took a dislike to the idle bruiser (“bruiser” is what they called anyone tall in the camp) and always put Merzliakov “under the butt,” that is, made him carry the heavy butt end of the beam. Once Merzliakov fell down and could not at first get up from the snow-covered ground; he suddenly decided to refuse to carry this damned beam. It was late, dark, and the guards were in a hurry to get to their indoctrination class, while the workmen wanted to reach the barracks and food as fast as they could; that evening the foreman was late for a card-game duel. Merzliakov was blamed for all the delay. So he was punished. First, he was beaten up by his workmates, then by the foreman and the guards. The beam lay abandoned in the snow and, instead of the beam, it was Merzliakov that was carried to the camp. He was let off work and lay on the bunk. The small of his back hurt. The paramedic rubbed him down with tallow—the medical center hadn’t had any proper ointments for ages. Merzliakov lay there, bent half double, all the time complaining of pain in the small of his back. The pain had gone long ago, his broken rib had quickly mended, but Merzliakov was determined, using any lie he could, to put off being declared fit for work. They didn’t declare him fit. One day they put his outdoor clothes on, laid him on a stretcher, and loaded him into the cab of a truck to take him, with other patients, to the district hospital. There was no X-ray machine there. Some serious thinking had to be done about everything, and Merzliakov thought. He stayed there for some months, still bent half double; he was then transferred to the central hospital where, of course, there was an X-ray machine, and where Merzliakov was put in the surgical section, in the ward for traumatic illnesses (the patients, unaware of the irony in the pun, called these illnesses “dramatic”).

  •

  “And this man, too,” said the surgeon, pointing to Merzliakov’s notes, “we’ll hand over to you, Piotr Ivanovich. He doesn’t need treatment in the surgical section.”

  “But you’ve written a diagnosis of ankylosis due to spinal trauma. Why should I have him?”

  “Well, of course there is ankylosis. What else can I put down? Worse than that can happen after a beating. I had a case at the Gray mine, where the foreman beat up a good worker—”

  “Seriozha, I haven’t got time to listen to your cases. I’m asking why you’re transferring him.”

  “But I’ve written ‘To be examined with a view to documentation.’ Poke him with needles, let’s document him and get him on a ship. Then he can be a free man.”

  “But you’ve taken X-rays, haven’t you? We shouldn’t need needles to detect any abnormalities.”

  “I have. Have a look, if you’d care to,” and the surgeon placed a dark film negative on the muslin screen. “This picture makes no sense at all. Until we get proper lighting, proper voltage, our X-ray photographers will go on giving us this fuzz.”

  “It really is fuzzy,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “All right, so be it.” And he signed his name on the notes, agreeing to accept Merzliakov’s transfer.

  The surgical section was noisy, chaotic, overcrowded with cases of frostbite, dislocated limbs, fractures, burns—the northern mines were no joke—and some of the patients lay on the ward and corridor floors; just one young, infinitely tired surgeon and four paramedics worked there, none of them sleeping for more than three or four hours a night. Nobody had the time to give Merzliakov proper attention. In the neurology section, however, where Merzliakov had been so suddenly transferred, he realized that a really close examination would begin.

  All his desperate prisoner’s willpower had long been focused on one thing: to not unbend. And he didn’t. His body so very much wanted to straighten out, if only for a second. But he recalled the mine, the piercing breath of the cold air, the slippery frozen stones of the goldmine pit face, which shone from the sub-zero temperatures; the little bowl of soup, his dinner, which he devoured in one gulp, not needing any spoon; the rifle butts of the guards and the boots of the foremen—then he found the strength to stay doubled up. In any case, it was now easier than it had been in the first weeks. He didn’t sleep much, since he was afraid of unbending while he slept. He knew that the duty nurses had long ago been ordered to watch him and catch him faking. And if he was caught—Merzliakov knew this, too—he w
ould immediately be send to the punishment mines, and what would a punishment mine be like, if the ordinary one left Merzliakov with such terrible memories?

  The day after he was transferred, Merzliakov was taken to see the doctor. The chief of the section asked him briefly about the early stages of the illness and nodded in sympathy. The doctor told him, as if by the way, that even healthy muscles could get used to being in an unnatural position after many months, and that a man can turn himself into an invalid. Then Piotr Ivanovich started examining his patient. As the doctor inserted needles, tapped away with a rubber mallet, and pressed certain points, Merzliakov gave random answers to his questions.

  Piotr Ivanovich devoted more than half of his working hours to exposing malingerers. Of course, he understood the reasons that induced prisoners to fake their symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich had been a prisoner not so long ago, and he wasn’t surprised by the childish stubbornness of malingerers, nor by the primitive and frivolous nature of their faked symptoms. Piotr Ivanovich, formerly a lecturer at a Siberian medical institute, had made his professional career in the same snowy world as the one where his patients tried to save their lives by trying to deceive him. One cannot deny that he felt sorry for people. But he was more a doctor than a human being and he was, above all, a specialist. He was proud of the fact that a year of manual labor in the camps had not destroyed the specialist doctor in him. He looked at the problem of exposing malingerers not from a lofty, statesmanlike point of view, and not morally. He saw this problem as a proper use of his knowledge, of his psychological skill in setting traps for hungry, half-insane, wretched people to fall into, to the greater glory of science. In this battle between doctor and malingerer, everything favored the doctor: thousands of subtle medicines, hundreds of textbooks, a wide array of equipment, the help of the guards, and the enormous experience of a specialist, while all the patient had on his side was his horror of the world that he had left for the hospital and was afraid of being returned to. It was this horror that gave the prisoner the strength to battle on. Exposing yet another malingerer gave Piotr Ivanovich deep satisfaction. Once more he had proof from real life that he was a good doctor, that instead of losing his skills, he had enhanced them, perfected them—in other words, that he still could. . . .