Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  They cheerfully ran ahead of their escort, who was wearing a cavalry officer’s greatcoat, his boots slipping on the ice, losing his footing, leaping over puddles and then racing to catch up with them, all the time lifting the hem of his greatcoat. Soon they were approaching a small house. Its gate was shut and its fence was topped with barbed wire. Their escort knocked. A dog barked in the yard. The boss’s orderly unlocked the gate and without a word showed them into a shed, where he shut them in, releasing an enormous guard dog into the yard. He brought them a bucket of water. Until the prisoners had sawn and split all the firewood in the shed, the dog kept them locked up. Late in the evening they were taken back to the camp. The next day they were to be taken to the same place, but Andreyev hid under the bunks and that day he did not go out to work.

  The next morning, before the bread was handed out, a simple idea occurred to him. He acted on it immediately.

  He took off his cloth boots and put them on the edge of the bunks, soles facing out, one on top of the other, to look as if he himself were lying in his boots on the bunk. He lay facedown alongside them and rested his head on his elbow.

  The bread distributor quickly counted out the next ten rations and gave Andreyev ten portions of bread. Andreyev had two for himself. But this trick was a one-off and unreliable; Andreyev again began looking for work outside.

  Was he then thinking about his family? No. About freedom? No. Was he reciting poetry by heart? No. Was he remembering the past? No. He was kept alive by indifference and resentment. This was when he met Captain Schneider.

  The gangsters were occupying the area around the stove. Their bunks were covered with dirty quilted blankets and a large number of down pillows of various sizes. A quilted blanket was a successful thief’s inalienable possession; he took it with him from one prison or camp to another, and if he didn’t have one, he would steal it or take it off somebody else. A pillow, however, was not just something to lay your head on, it was also a card table for the endless dueling card games. That card table could take on any shape. And yet it remained a pillow. Gamblers would rather lose their trousers at cards than their pillow.

  The gang leaders, or rather those who were something like gang leaders at any one time, settled on the blankets and pillows. Higher up, on the third row of bunks, where it was dark, there were more blankets and pillows. This was where the thieves dragged up effeminate boy thieves—any boy would do, for almost every thief was a pederast.

  The thieves were surrounded by a crowd of serfs and lackeys—court storytellers, for the criminals considered it civilized to take an interest in “novels”; hairdressers with a little bottle of perfume existed even in these conditions; and there was a whole crowd of other eager servants prepared to do anything for a crust of bread or a spoonful of soup.

  “Quiet! Senia is talking. Quiet, Senia is going to bed.”

  A familiar scene at the mines.

  Suddenly Andreyev caught sight of a familiar face, familiar features in the crowd of mendicants, the criminals’ invariable court; he heard a familiar voice. There was no doubt: it was Captain Schneider, who had been Andreyev’s cellmate in Butyrki prison.

  Captain Schneider was a German communist, active in the Comintern, a connoisseur of Goethe, an educated Marxist theoretician. Andreyev still remembered conversations with him, “high pressure” conversations in the long prison nights. A cheerful extrovert by nature, the captain had been an oceangoing seaman and kept the prison cell’s fighting spirits up.

  Andreyev couldn’t believe his eyes. “Schneider!”

  “Yes? What do you want?” The captain turned around. Gazing with his lusterless blue eyes, he failed to recognize Andreyev.

  “Schneider!”

  “Well, what do you want? Quiet, or you’ll wake Senia.”

  But the edge of a blanket had been lifted and a pale, sick-looking face was poked out into the light.

  “Hey, Captain,” said Senia in a weary tenor voice. “I can’t get to sleep: I miss you.”

  “Coming, coming,” said the captain, flustered.

  He climbed up to the bunk, folded the blanket back, sat down, shoved his hand under the blanket, and started tickling Senia’s heels.

  Andreyev slowly returned to his place. He wished he were dead. And although this was a minor, harmless event—compared with what he had seen and what he was going to see—Captain Schneider was fixed in his memory forever.

  •

  There were fewer and fewer people. The transit camp was emptying. Andreyev came face-to-face with the supervisor.

  “What’s your surname?”

  Andreyev had long been ready for this question.

  “Gurov,” he meekly responded.

  “Wait.”

  The supervisor flicked through several sheets of the list, on paper as thin as cigarette paper.

  “No, no such name.”

  “Can I go?”

  “Clear off, pig,” the supervisor roared.

  •

  Once he got the job of cleaning and dishwashing in the transit camp refectory for prisoners who had been freed after finishing their sentence and were now leaving. His partner was a walking skeleton, a goner of indeterminate age, who had just been released from the local prison. This was the first time the goner had been out to work. He kept asking what they would be doing, whether they would be fed, and if it would be convenient to ask for something to eat just before they began work. The goner said that he had been a professor of neurology, and Andreyev remembered his name.

  Experience had taught Andreyev that camp cooks, and not just the cooks, disliked the “Ivan Ivanoviches,” as they called intellectuals. He advised the professor not to ask for anything in advance; he was depressed by the thought that most of the dishwashing and cleaning would fall to him, for the professor was too weak. That was as it should be, and there was no reason to take offense. How many times in the mines had Andreyev himself been a bad, weak workmate for his comrades, and nobody had ever said a word. Where were they all now? Where were Sheinin, Riutin, Khvostov? They’d all died, but he, Andreyev, had come back to life. Actually, he hadn’t yet come back to life and probably wouldn’t. But he was going to fight for life.

  Andreyev’s guesses were right after all. The professor did turn out to be a weak, if overeager, helper.

  When work was finished, the cook gave them a seat in the kitchen and placed an enormous cauldron of thick fish soup and a big metal plate of porridge before them. The professor clapped his hands with joy, but Andreyev, who at the mine had seen a man eat twenty portions of a three-course dinner, with bread, looked askance and disapprovingly at this offering.

  “What, no bread?” he asked, frowning.

  “Of course, there’s bread: I’ll give you a bit each.” And the cook took two lumps of bread out of the cupboard.

  The free meal didn’t take long to eat. When he was a “guest,” as in this case, Andreyev had the foresight not to eat the bread. He now put it in his pocket. But the professor broke off chunks of bread, chewing it as he swallowed the soup, and big drops of dirty sweat appeared on his close-shaven gray head.

  “Here’s a ruble each for you as well,” said the cook. “I haven’t got any more bread at the moment.”

  That was excellent pay for the job.

  The transit camp had a shop, a stall where you could buy free workers’ bread. Andreyev told the professor about it.

  “Yes, yes, you’re right,” said the professor. “But I saw they sell sweet kvass there, too. Or is it lemonade? I’d love to have some lemonade, or anything sweet.”

  “It’s up to you, Professor. But if I were in your shoes, I’d rather buy bread.”

  “Yes, yes, you’re right,” repeated the professor. “But I’m desperate for something sweet. You have something to drink, too.”

  But Andreyev refused outright to have any kvass.

  In the end, he got what he wanted: a job on his own. He began washing floors in the transit-camp administration office. Ev
ery evening the orderly who was responsible for keeping the office clean would come to fetch him. The office consisted of two tiny rooms filled with desks, each about four meters square. The floors were painted. The job took a mere ten minutes to do, and Andreyev could not at first understand why the orderly took on a workman to do something like this. After all, the orderly even crossed the entire camp to bring the water in person, and clean rags were always waiting and ready. Yet it was generously paid: tobacco, soup and porridge, bread, and sugar. The orderly promised to give Andreyev a summer jacket, but there wasn’t time.

  Clearly, the orderly thought it beneath him to wash floors, even if it would only take five minutes a day, when he had the power to hire someone to do the dirty work. This attitude was something typical of Russians, which Andreyev had observed in the mines as well. If the boss gave the orderly a handful of tobacco to clean the barracks, the orderly would put half in his own pouch and hire another orderly from the barracks where the political prisoners were housed. This second orderly would then divide his share in half and hire a workman from his barracks to do the job for two cigarettes. So a laborer who’d already done a shift of twelve to fourteen hours would wash the floors at night for those two cigarettes, and what’s more, consider it a piece of luck, for he could swap the tobacco for bread.

  Questions of exchange rates are the most complex theoretical area of economics. In the camps, too, these questions were complex, and the benchmark currencies were strange: tea, tobacco, and bread were the currencies subject to an exchange rate.

  The administration orderly sometimes paid Andreyev with kitchen vouchers. These were stamped pieces of cardboard, something like tokens, giving you ten dinners, five second courses, etc. The orderly gave Andreyev a token for twenty portions of porridge, but these twenty portions weren’t enough to cover the bottom of his tin bowl.

  Andreyev saw the gangsters pushing bright orange thirty-ruble notes instead of tokens through the window. These banknotes worked without fail. The bowl would be filled with porridge that gushed through the window in response to such a “token.”

  There were now fewer and fewer people in the transit camp. Finally the day came when the last truck left the camp and there were only about thirty men left in the yard.

  This time they were not allowed to go back to the barracks; instead, they were lined up and led across the entire camp.

  “All the same, they’re not taking us off to be shot,” said an enormous, big-handed, one-eyed man, striding along next to Andreyev.

  “That’s for certain, we’re not going to be shot,” Andreyev also thought. They were all brought to see the supervisor in the accounting section.

  “We’re going to take your fingerprints,” said the supervisor, coming out onto the porch.

  “Well, if it’s a matter of fingers, you don’t need fingers for that,” the one-eyed man said cheerfully.

  “My surname is Filippovsky. Georgi Adamovich.”

  “And yours?”

  “Andreyev, Pavel Ivanovich.”

  The supervisor picked out their personal files.

  “We’ve been looking for you for some time,” he said, without resentment. “Go back to the barracks, and I’ll tell you later where we’re sending you.”

  Andreyev knew that he had won the battle for his life. It simply was not possible that the taiga still had an appetite for human beings. If there were any departures, they would be for work that was nearby, local. Or even in the town—that was better still. They couldn’t send him far, and not only because Andreyev was now assigned “light physical labor.” He knew the way that sudden reassignments worked. They couldn’t send him far because the taiga recruitment was now completed. Only nearby work trips—where life would be easier, simpler, where he would be better fed, where there were no gold-mine pit faces, and where there was consequently a chance of salvation—were still waiting for their final turn. This was something Andreyev had learned by blood and sweat during his two years of labor in the mines, and by his wild animal’s tension during these months of quarantine. Too much had been done. Hopes had to be realized, come what may.

  He had only to wait for one more night.

  After breakfast the supervisor came rushing into the barracks with a list, a short list, as Andreyev immediately noticed with relief. Lists from the mines had twenty-five names of men to be loaded into a truck, and that always meant a lot of paperwork.

  Andreyev’s and Filippovsky’s names were called out from that list; the list had more people on it, not many, but more than two or three surnames.

  Those called out were taken to the familiar door of the accounts section. Three more people were already there: a grave, gray-haired, relaxed old man wearing a good sheepskin jacket and felt boots; a dirty, fidgety man wearing a quilted waistcoat and trousers and rubber boots with foot bindings; the third a dignified old man, looking down at his feet. A man in a military Asiatic coat and a flat fur cossack hat was standing some distance away.

  “This is the lot,” said the supervisor. “Are they what you want?”

  The man in the Asiatic coat gestured to the gray-haired old man with his finger. “Who are you?”

  “Izgibin, Yuri Ivanovich, article fifty-eight. Sentence, twenty-five years,” the old man reported in a spirited voice.

  “No, no.” The man in the Asiatic coat frowned. “I meant what is your profession? I can find your standard details on my own.”

  “Stove builder, sir.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I can do metalwork.”

  “Very good. You?” The officer turned his gaze to Filippovsky.

  The one-eyed giant said that he was a locomotive stoker from Kamenets-Podolsk.

  “And you?”

  The dignified old man surprised everyone by mumbling a few words in German.

  “What’s that?” asked the man in the Asiatic coat. He was intrigued.

  “Don’t worry,” said the supervisor. “He’s a carpenter, a good carpenter, Frizorger. He’s not quite himself. But he’ll come around.”

  “Why is he speaking German?”

  “He’s from near Saratov, from the autonomous German republic—”

  “Ah. And you?” This was directed at Andreyev.

  “He needs skilled people and skilled workers,” thought Andreyev. “I’ll be a leatherworker.”

  “A tanner, sir.”

  “Very good. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-one.”

  The officer shook his head. As he was a man of experience and had seen resurrections from the dead before, he did not comment but switched his gaze to the fifth man.

  The fifth, the fidget, turned out to be no more or less than an activist in the Esperanto society.

  “You see, I’m supposed to be an agronomist, and that’s what I’ve studied, even lectured in, but my case is to do with the Esperanto speakers.”

  “Spying, is it?” the man in the Asiatic coat asked with no particular interest.

  “Yes, yes, something like that,” the fidget confirmed.

  “Well, what then?” asked the supervisor.

  “I’ll take them,” said the officer. “In any case, that’s the best I’ll get. There’s not much choice now.”

  All five of them were put in a separate cell, a room attached to the barracks. But there were two or three more surnames on the list, a fact that Andreyev had taken careful note of. The supervisor came.

  “Where are we going?”

  “You’ll be working somewhere local, what else?” said the supervisor. “And that officer will be your boss. We’ll send you off in an hour. You’ve been fattening yourselves up here for three months, my friends, it can’t go on forever.”

  An hour later they were called out, but to a storehouse, not a truck. “Presumably to get new work clothes,” Andreyev thought. “Any day now it will be spring. It’s April.” He’d be given summer clothes, and he’d hand in, throw away, and forget his hateful mining winter clothes. But instead of a su
mmer outfit they were issued more winter clothes. Was it a mistake? No, there was a red-pencil note on the list: “winter things.”

  Utterly puzzled, on that spring day they dressed in refurbished quilted waistcoats and pea jackets and old felt boots that had been repaired. Jumping as best they could over the puddles, they managed, full of anxiety, to get back to the barracks room that they had left for the storehouse.

  Everyone was extremely worried, and nobody spoke. Only Frizorger kept mumbling and mumbling in German.

  “He’s saying his prayers, the fucker,” Filippovsky whispered to Andreyev.

  “Well, does anyone here know anything?” asked Andreyev.

  The gray-haired stove builder, who looked like a professor, listed all the nearby workplaces: the port, the fourth kilometer, the seventeenth kilometer, the twenty-third, the forty-seventh. . . .

  After that there were a series of districts for roadworks, places only a little better than gold mines.

  “Out you come! Move to the gates!” They all came out and went to the camp gates. Outside the gates was a big truck, its platform covered with a green tarpaulin.

  “Guards, take over.”

  A guard did a roll call. Andreyev felt his legs and back going cold. . . .

  “Get in the truck!”

  The guard flung back the edge of the big tarpaulin covering the truck. The truck was full of people, sitting all around the edges.

  “Get in!”

  All five newcomers sat down together. Nobody spoke. The guard got into the truck, the engine rattled to life, and the truck moved off along the road, turning onto the main highway.

  “We’re being taken to the fourth kilometer,” said the stove maker. The milestones flashed past. All five moved their heads to look through a crack in the tarpaulin. They couldn’t believe their eyes. . . .

  “Seventeenth kilometer. . . .”

  “Twenty-third. . . .” Filippovsky was counting.

  “Take us to a local job, you bastards!” the stove maker rasped angrily. For some time now the truck had wended its way along a road that wound between the bare hills. The highway was like a cable pulling the sea toward the sky. The mountains were bending their backs to do the towing.