Even so there wasn’t enough time to hand out this modest amount.
The supervisor led Andreyev to the bunks and pointed to the second story: “That’s your place.”
There were protests from people already up there, but the supervisor swore at them. Andreyev grabbed the edge of the bunks with both hands and tried without success to swing his right leg onto the bunk. The supervisor’s powerful arm flung him up and he flopped down heavily amid the naked bodies. Nobody paid any attention to him. This was the end of “registration” and “induction.”
Andreyev slept. He awoke only when food was being handed out; after food he carefully, neatly licked his hands clean, and slept again, but not too deeply, for the lice wouldn’t let him sleep properly.
Nobody asked him any questions, even though there were a lot of people from the taiga in this transit prison, and everybody else was destined to end up in there. And they understood that. Because they understood, they did not want to know anything about the inevitable taiga. Quite rightly, Andreyev considered: they wouldn’t want to know any of what he had seen. Nothing could be avoided, and nothing could be foreseen. What was the point of unnecessary fear? While they were here they were still human, and Andreyev was a representative of the dead. His knowledge, that of a dead man, would be of no use to them while they were still alive.
After two days or so it was bathhouse day. They were all fed up with disinfection and the baths, so they assembled reluctantly, but Andreyev was anxious to get rid of his lice. He now had all the time in the world. Several times a day he examined all the seams in his whitened tunic. But only the disinfection chamber could result in complete success, so he was happy to go and, although he wasn’t given any fresh linen and had to put his wet tunic back on his naked body, he no longer felt the usual louse bites.
In the bathhouse they were given their ration of water—one bowl of hot and one bowl of cold—but Andreyev tricked the bathhouse man and got an extra bowlful.
They were issued a tiny piece of soap, but you could collect the scraps of soap off the floor, so Andreyev tried to wash properly. This was his best bath for the whole of that year. He didn’t mind the blood and pus flowing from the scurvy sores on his calves, or people staggering to get away from him in the bathhouse. They could, for all he cared, back away in disgust from his louse-ridden clothes.
Clothes were given back after they had been in the disinfection chamber. Ognev, Andreyev’s neighbor, got doll’s stockings back instead of his sheepskin stockings—the leather had shrunk. Ognev burst into tears. Fur stockings had been his salvation in the north. Andreyev gave him a malevolent look. He’d seen so many men weeping for the most varied reasons. Some were cunning pretenders, some neurotics, some had lost their clothing, some were just embittered, some wept because of the cold. Andreyev hadn’t seen anyone weep out of hunger.
They returned through the silent, dark town. The aluminum-colored puddles were frozen, but the air was fresh and springlike. After this bath Andreyev slept especially well, “slept his fill,” as his neighbor Ognev put it now that he had forgotten what had happened to him in the bathhouse.
Nobody was being allowed out. But there still was one job in the “section” that allowed you to go beyond the barbed wire. True, this didn’t amount to passing the outer barbed wire around the settlement, which consisted of three fences each with ten strands of wire, and a forbidden zone, marked by a wire stretched just above the ground. Nobody even dreamed of getting that far. It was a matter of passing beyond the wire around the courtyard: the refectory, the kitchens, the stores, and the hospital were all there—another life forbidden to Andreyev. The only man who passed beyond the wire was the sanitation man. And when he died suddenly (life is full of merciful chances), Ognev, Andreyev’s neighbor, demonstrated prodigious energy and initiative. He stopped eating his bread for two days, then he swapped his bread for a big fiber suitcase.
“We’ll see Baron Mandel, Andreyev!”
Baron Mandel! A descendant of Pushkin! Over there, that was Mandel. The baron was a lanky, narrow-shouldered man with a tiny bald skull, and you could see him from afar. But Andreyev was not to make his acquaintance.
Ognev had hung on to the tweed jacket he had worn before he was arrested; he had only been a few months in quarantine.
Ognev offered his jacket and the fiber suitcase to the supervisor and got the job of the deceased sanitation man. About two weeks later, criminal convicts tried to strangle Ognev in the dark—fortunately, they didn’t kill him—and took about three thousand rubles off him.
Andreyev seldom met Ognev when the latter’s commercial career was at its height. After being badly beaten and tormented, Ognev, returning to his former place, made his confession one night to Andreyev.
Andreyev could have told him about a few things he had seen at the mines, but Ognev had no regrets and no complaints.
“They got me today, I’ll get them tomorrow. I’ll beat them . . . at cards . . . I’ll fleece them in a game of shtoss, bezique, thirty-one. I’ll get it all back!”
Ognev never helped Andreyev out with bread or money, but such help in these circumstances would have contradicted camp ethics, so that was quite normal.
There was one day when Andreyev was amazed to still be alive. It was so difficult to raise himself up on his bunk, but he somehow managed. Above all, he was lying down, not working, and as little as half a kilo of rye bread, three spoonfuls of porridge, and a bowl of thin gruel were enough to resurrect a man: as long as he didn’t have to work.
It was at this point that he realized that he felt no fear and that life had no value for him. He also realized that he had undergone a great ordeal and had come out of it alive, that he had been fated to apply the terrible experience of the mines to his own benefit. He realized that, however wretched were the prisoner’s possible choices of free will, they still existed. These possibilities were real and could, when necessary, save your life. And Andreyev was ready for the great battle, when he would have to oppose the beast with his own bestial cunning. He had been deceived, and he would deceive them. He wouldn’t die, and he didn’t intend to.
He would carry out his body’s desires, what his body had told him in the gold mine. He had lost a battle in the mines, but that battle was not the last one. He was slag, mine refuse. And he would be that slag. He had seen that the purple stamp made by Lidiya Ivanovna on a piece of paper consisted of three letters: LPL—light physical labor. Andreyev knew that the mine took no heed of these annotations, but here in the center he intended to milk them for all they were worth.
But the possibilities were limited. He could have told the supervisor: “Here’s me, Andreyev, lying down, refusing to go anywhere. If I’m sent to the mine, then at the first pass the truck reaches, I’ll jump down, and the guard can shoot me if he wants, in any case I’m not going gold mining.”
The possibilities were limited. But he was going to be cleverer here and trust his body more. And his body would not let him down. He had been let down by his family and by his country. Love, energy, abilities had all been trampled underfoot and smashed. All the justifications his brain tried to find were false, they were lies, and Andreyev realized this. Only the animal instinct aroused by the mines could and did suggest a way out.
It was here on these cyclopean bunks that Andreyev understood that he had some worth, that he could respect himself. Here he was, still alive, without betraying or selling anybody either under interrogation or in the camp. He had often managed to speak the truth, had managed to suppress his own fear. He had, of course, been afraid, but the moral barriers had become clearer, better defined than previously, everything had become simpler and clearer. For instance, it was clear that Andreyev couldn’t survive. His former good health was lost forever, it had been irreparably broken. Irreparably? When Andreyev was brought to this town he thought that he had two or three weeks left to live. If he was to regain his former strength then he needed complete rest for many months in clean air, in spa
conditions with milk and chocolate. And as it was perfectly obvious that Andreyev would never see such a spa, he was doomed to die. And yet that didn’t frighten him. Many of his comrades had died. But something stronger than death was preventing him from dying. Love? Resentment? No. Man lives by the strength of the same primary causes that keep a tree, a stone, or a dog alive. This is what he had understood, and not just understood but felt deeply, here, in a town transit camp during a typhus quarantine.
•
The louse bites on his skin healed far more quickly than Andreyev’s other wounds. The tortoise armor, which human skin turns into in the mines, was gradually vanishing; the bright pink frostbite scars on the tips of his fingers and toes had turned dark; the thin layer of skin covering them after the frostbite blister burst had become just a little bit tougher. And, above all, his left hand had unbent. Eighteen months of mine work had made both hands bend in a curve that was the same radius as the thickness of a spade or pickax handle; the hands had stuck in this position, Andreyev thought, forever. When he ate, he held the spoon handle, as did all his fellow inmates, like a pinch of salt, with his fingertips; he had forgotten that there was any other way of holding a spoon. His living hand was like an amputee’s hook, and it only carried out the movements of an amputee’s hook. The one other thing his hand could do was to make the sign of the cross, assuming that Andreyev prayed to God. But there was nothing except anger in his soul. The wounds to his soul were not so easy to heal, and they never would heal.
Yet Andreyev’s hand did unbend. Once, in the bathhouse, the fingers of his left hand also unbent. He was astounded. The same would happen to the right hand, too, which was still as bent as ever. At night Andreyev gently touched his right hand, trying to bend back the fingers, and it seemed to him that any time now the hand would uncurl. He bit his fingernails as carefully as he could, and now he was gnawing, bit by bit, at the dirty, thick skin that had become just a little softer. This hygienic operation was one of Andreyev’s very few amusements when he wasn’t eating or sleeping.
The bleeding cracks in the soles of his feet were no longer as painful as they had been. The scurvy ulcers on his legs had not yet healed and still needed bandaging, but there were fewer and fewer wounds, and they were giving way to bluish-black marks that looked like brands on cattle or those on Negro slaves made by slave owners or slave traders. His big toes were the only parts that would not heal; the frostbite had gotten to the marrow of the bone and made them ooze pus. Admittedly, there was now far less pus than before, when he was in the mines, where so much pus and blood poured into his rubber galoshes (the prisoner’s summer footwear) that his feet made a splashing noise with every step, as if he were walking through puddles.
Many years would pass before Andreyev’s big toes would heal, and for many years after they healed, whenever the weather turned cold, the throbbing pain they caused would remind him of the northern mines. But Andreyev wasn’t thinking about the future. Having learned at the mines not to make plans for his life further than the next day, he tried hard to fight for what was close, as does any man who is only a few feet away from death. At the moment he had only one wish: for the typhus quarantine to go on indefinitely. But that was impossible, and the day came when the quarantine was over.
•
On that particular morning all the inhabitants of the “section” were herded into the yard. The prisoners spent several hours crowded outside the barbed-wire fence, freezing. The supervisor stood on a barrel and called surnames in his hoarse, despairing voice. Those whose names were called came out through the gate, never to return. On the highway trucks were roaring, roaring so loudly in the frosty morning air that the supervisor couldn’t make himself heard.
“Don’t let them call me out, don’t let them call me out,” Andreyev begged fate, like a child repeating a magic formula. No, his luck wouldn’t hold. Even if he wasn’t called out today, he would be tomorrow. Again he’d go to the gold-mine pit face, to starvation, beatings, and death. His frostbitten fingers and toes started aching, so did his ears and cheeks. Andreyev kept shifting his feet, more and more frequently, hunching himself and forming his fingers into a tube and breathing into them, but his numb feet and sick hands were not so easy to get warm. Nothing was of any use. He was helpless in this struggle with a gigantic machine whose teeth were grinding up his entire body.
“Voronov! Voronov!” shouted the supervisor, straining his voice to the utmost. “Voronov! I know you’re here, you bastard!” And the supervisor angrily chucked the thin yellow file of the prisoner’s “case” on the barrel and crushed it with his foot.
It was then that Andreyev understood everything in one second. This was like a flash of lightning in a thunderstorm, showing you the way to salvation. Instantly, worked up to the maximum, he summoned his courage and stepped toward the supervisor, who was calling out surname after surname, while people were leaving the yard one after the other. But the crowd was still too thick. But now, now. . . .
“Andreyev,” yelled the supervisor.
Andreyev stayed silent, examining the supervisor’s shaven cheeks. After contemplating those cheeks, he switched his gaze to the files with prisoners’ “cases.” There were only a few left.
“The last truck,” Andreyev thought.
The supervisor held Andreyev’s file in his hand for a while, then, not repeating his summons, set it aside on the barrel.
“Sychiov! Answer with your name and patronymic!”
“Vladimir Ivanovich,” an elderly prisoner answered, as the rules dictated, before pushing the crowd aside.
“Article of Criminal Code? Sentence? Out you go!”
Several more people responded to the summons and left. They were followed by the supervisor. The remaining prisoners were sent back to the “section.”
The coughing, foot-stamping, and yells became indistinguishable and merged into the polyphonic conversational voices of hundreds of people.
Andreyev wanted to live. He had set himself two simple aims and decided to attain them. It was extraordinarily clear that he had to hang on here as long as possible, to the last day. He had to be careful not to make mistakes, to control himself. . . . Gold meant death. Nobody in this transit camp knew that better than Andreyev. At all costs he had to avoid the taiga and the gold-mine pit face. How could the disenfranchised slave Andreyev manage that? This was how: during the quarantine the taiga had become depopulated—the cold, starvation, long hours of heavy work, and lack of sleep had deprived the taiga of human resources, which meant that as a matter of priority, trucks would be dispatching people to the “gold” administrations, and only when the mines’ human requirements (“Send two hundred trees,” they wrote in official telegrams) were met, would they start sending people anywhere other than the taiga or the gold mines. Where that might be didn’t matter to Andreyev, as long as it wasn’t gold mining.
Andreyev said not a word of this to anyone. He didn’t consult anyone, not Ognev, not Parfentiev, his fellow worker at the mine, not a single person of the thousand who shared the bunks with him. He didn’t, because he knew that anyone he told about his plan would betray him to the bosses—in exchange for praise, a cigarette stub, or for no reason in particular. . . .
He knew what a burden a secret was, and he could keep a secret, too. This was the one thing that did not frighten him. If you were on your own, it was two, three, four times as easy to pass through the teeth of the machine unharmed. His game was his alone, and that, too, was something the mines had taught him well.
For many days Andreyev refused to respond to the summons. As soon as the quarantine was over, the prisoners began to be forced to go out to work, and as you left, you had to use your ingenuity to avoid being put into large groups, which were usually taken to do earthworks with crowbars, pickaxes, and spades. The smaller groups of two or three men, however, always had a chance of earning an extra piece of bread or even sugar, and Andreyev hadn’t seen sugar for more than eighteen months. This was an ea
sy calculation to make, and it was quite right. None of these lesser jobs was legal, of course; these prisoners were listed as being in the big groups, and there were a lot of people who wanted to exploit unpaid labor. Those who ended up doing earthworks went to work with the hope of begging for some tobacco or bread. You could sometimes beg successfully, even from casual passersby. Andreyev went to work at the vegetable stores where he ate all the beetroot and carrots he could and from where he brought “home” a few raw potatoes that he roasted in the stove ashes, pulling them out and eating them when they were still half raw—life here forced you to consume any food as fast as you could, for there were too many starving people around you.
The start of the day now almost made sense, for it was full of activity. Every day began with standing around for two hours or so in the freezing cold, with the supervisor shouting out, “Hey, you, give me your name and patronymic.” But when this daily sacrifice to Moloch was over, everyone ran, stamping their feet, back to barracks, from where they were taken off to work. Andreyev also spent time at the bakery, took the rubbish out of the women’s transit camp, washed the floors in the guards’ barracks, where he collected the sticky, tasty leftover pieces of meat from the plates left behind in the ill-lit refectory. After work there, big bowls were carried to the kitchen. The bowls were full of the milky jelly known as kisel and piles of bread, and everyone sat around them, eating and stuffing their pockets.
Only once did Andreyev find he had miscalculated. His motto was, the smaller the group, the better, and being on your own was best of all. But a man on his own was rarely required. Once, the supervisor, who now knew Andreyev’s face (but thought his name was Muraviov), said, “I’ve found you a job you’ll never forget: sawing firewood for the top bosses. You can take somebody with you.”
Kolyma Tales Page 23