Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  “I don’t like cats. Now, dogs,” said Filatov, grabbing hold of a shaggy gray puppy and patting its neck, “are quite a different matter. A pedigree sheepdog. Go on, bite it, Kazbek, bite it,” said the geologist, setting the puppy on the kitten. But the puppy’s nose already had two fresh scratches inflicted by a cat’s claws, and Kazbek stayed where he was, merely growling.

  The kitten had a hard time living with us. Five men took it out on the kitten. They were bored with having nothing to do: the river had flooded, so we couldn’t leave; for more than a week Yuzhnikov and Kochubei, the carpenters, had been gambling their future pay in a card game of sixty-six. Sometimes one won, sometimes the other. The cook opened the door and shouted, “Bears!” Everyone rushed headlong to the door.

  There were, as I said, five of us, and we had one rifle, the geologist’s. We didn’t have an ax for everybody, so the cook grabbed his razor-sharp kitchen knife.

  The bears, a male and a female, were walking along the mountain slope the other side of the stream. They were shaking the young larches, breaking them, pulling them out by the roots, throwing them into the stream. On that May day in the taiga they were the only moving objects, and we humans got very close to them, about two hundred paces, from the leeward side. The male bear was dark brown with a reddish tinge, twice the size of the female. He was old, for you could see his big yellow canines.

  Filatov was the best shot among us. He sat down, laying his rifle on the trunk of a fallen larch so as to be sure of hitting the target. He moved the barrel about as he sought a path for the bullet through the bushes. The leaves were beginning to turn yellow.

  “Fire,” growled the cook, whose face was white with excitement. “Fire!”

  The bears heard the rustling. Their reaction was instantaneous, like that of players in a football match. The female bear rushed uphill and crossed the pass. The old male bear didn’t run: he turned his face toward the source of danger, bared his canines, and slowly went along the slope toward a copse of low dwarf-pine bushes. Clearly, he was taking the risk on himself; as a male, he was sacrificing his own life so as to save the life of his mate; he was drawing death away from her and covering her escape.

  Filatov fired. As I said, he was a good shot. The bear collapsed and rolled down the slope into the ravine, until a larch tree it had playfully broken stopped the heavy body in its tracks. The female bear had long vanished.

  Everything—sky, rocks—was so enormous that the bear seemed to be a toy. It had been killed outright. We tied its feet together, pushed a pole under them and, staggering under the weight of the gigantic carcass, we descended to the bottom of the ravine, onto the slippery two-meter-deep ice that hadn’t yet thawed. We then dragged the bear along the ground to the threshold of our hut.

  The two-month-old puppy had never seen a bear in its short life; crazed with fear, it hid under a bed. The kitten behaved quite differently. It threw itself as if enraged on the bear’s carcass when the five of us were skinning it. The kitten tore off pieces of warm meat, snatched clots of blood, and danced on the animal’s magnificent knotted muscles. . . .

  The skin measured four square meters.

  “That will be about two hundred kilos of meat,” the cook told each one of us separately.

  This was a lot of booty, but as it was impossible to take it anywhere and sell it, we split it equally there and then. The geologist Filatov’s pots and pans were sizzling and simmering day and night, until he had a bellyache. Yuzhnikov and Kochubei found that bear meat was an unsuitable currency for calculating winnings and losses at cards, so they each salted their share in pits they made from stones: every day they checked to see that the meat was still intact. Nobody knew where the cook hid his meat: he had a secret method of salting it but wouldn’t tell anyone what it was. I just fed the kitten and the puppy, so we three had more success dealing with our bear meat than the others. The memories of this successful game hunt lasted for two days. We didn’t start quarreling until the evening of the third day.

  1956

  PRINCESS GAGARINA’S NECKLACE

  TIME SPENT under interrogation in pretrial prison slips from your memory, leaving no noticeable sharp traces. For anyone who is detained there, the prison and its encounters and people are not the main thing. The main thing is what all your mental, spiritual, and nervous energy is spent on in prison—that is, the battle with your interrogator. What happens in the offices of the interrogation block stays in your memory better than prison life itself. No book you read in such a prison is memorable; the prisons where sentences are served are universities that produce astronomers, novelists, and memoirists. Books read in a pretrial prison are not remembered. For Krist it wasn’t the duel with his interrogator that was uppermost in his mind. Krist knew he was doomed, that arrest meant condemnation and slaughter. So Krist was calm. He kept his ability to observe, his capacity to act, despite the lulling effect of the rhythm of prison routine. Krist had several times encountered the fatal human habit of telling someone the most important thing about oneself, of letting your neighbor, your cellmate, the man in the next hospital bed or in the same train compartment know everything about you. Such secrets, kept at the bottom of a human heart, could sometimes be dumbfounding, improbable.

  Krist’s neighbor on the right, an engineer from a factory in Volokolamsk, when asked to recall the most memorable event, the best event in his life, confided, utterly radiant from the memory he was reexperiencing, that in 1933 he used his ration cards to get twenty cans of tinned vegetables that, when he got home and opened them, turned out to be tinned meat. The engineer took an ax and cut each can into two, after locking himself away from his neighbors. Every can had meat in it, not one had vegetables. In prison nobody laughs at such memories. The neighbor on the left, the general secretary of the society of prerevolutionary political prisoners, Aleksandr Georgievich Andreyev, frowned, so that his silvery eyebrows met over his nose and his black eyes shone.

  “Yes, there was a day like that in my life: March 12, 1917. I got a life sentence of hard labor under the tsar. Fate would have it that I should mark the twentieth anniversary of that sentence here in prison with you.”

  A well-built and chubby man climbed off the bunk opposite us.

  “Allow me to join in your game. I’m Dr. Miroliubov, Valeri Andreyevich,” said the doctor, smiling plaintively.

  “Take a seat,” said Krist, making room for him, which was very easy, since he had only to bend his legs back, there being no other way to make room. Miroliubov immediately got onto the bunk. The doctor was wearing house slippers. Krist’s eyebrows rose in amazement.

  “No, I didn’t come here straight from home, I came from Taganka prison, where I spent two months. The rules are more relaxed there.”

  “But Taganka’s a prison for common criminals, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, of course it is,” Dr. Miroliubov agreed offhandedly. “Since you came to this cell,” Miroliubov said, lifting his eyes to face Krist, “life has changed. The games we play make more sense. Instead of that horrible game, beetle, everyone was so crazy about. People even waited for latrine breaks so that they’d be free for a game of beetle in the washrooms. I expect, you’ve experienced that. . . .”

  “I have,” said Krist in a firm but melancholic voice.

  Miroliubov’s kind, prominent, myopic eyes looked into Krist’s. “The gangsters took away my glasses. In Taganka.”

  As usual, questions, presumptions, guesses flashed quickly through Krist’s brain. . . .The doctor was after some advice. He didn’t know why he’d been arrested. In any case. . . .

  “Why were you moved here from Taganka?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t been interrogated once in the last two months. But in Taganka I was summoned as a witness in a burglary case. A neighbor in our apartment had a coat stolen. I was interrogated and issued an arrest warrant. Abracadabra. Not a word, and it’s been three months. And now they’ve moved me to Butyrki.”

  “Well then,” sa
id Krist, “be as patient as you can. Get ready for some surprises. There’s no abracadabra about it. It’s organized chaos, as the critic Iuda Grossman-Roshchin [2] put it. You remember Grossman? A comrade-in-arms of Makhno.”[3]

  “No, I don’t,” said the doctor. His hopes that Krist knew everything had faded, and his eyes became lackluster again.

  The artistic patterns in the script of the interrogation process were extremely varied. Krist was only too aware of this fact. Someone being called in for a burglary, if only as a witness, reminded him of the famous “amalgams”[4] cases. There was no doubt that Dr. Miroliubov’s adventures in Taganka were a camouflage arranged by the interrogators and required for God knows what reasons by the poets of the NKVD.

  “Valeri, let’s talk about something else: about the best day in our lives. About the event you remember best in your life.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard what you’ve been saying to each other. There was an event that completely transformed my whole life. Only what happened to me isn’t at all like what we’ve heard from Aleksandr Georgievich”—Miroliubov bent to the left where the general secretary of the society of prerevolutionary political prisoners was sitting—“or from this comrade.” Miroliubov bent to the right, where the Volokolamsk engineer was sitting. “In 1901, I was a first-year medical student at Moscow University. I was young. Lots of high-minded ideas. I was stupid.”

  “ ‘A sucker,’ as the gangsters would put it,” suggested Krist.

  “No, not a sucker. After Taganka I know what some of these gangster terms mean. How do you know them?”

  “I had a teach-yourself book,” said Krist.

  “No, what we called ourselves was gaudeamus.[5] Get it? That’s what it was.”

  “Get to the point, Valeri,” said the Volokolamsk engineer.

  “I’m getting to it. We get so little spare time here. . . . I was reading the papers. There was a big advertisement. Princess Gagarina had lost her diamond necklace. A family heirloom. Five thousand rubles for anyone who found it. I read the paper, crumpled it up, threw it into the trash. Then I went and thought, now I ought to find that necklace. I’d send half the reward to my mother. I’d spend the other half traveling abroad. I’d buy a good overcoat. And a season ticket to the Maly Theater. There was no Art Theater then.[6] Anyway, I was walking down the boards of the wooden sidewalk instead of the boulevard: there was still a nail poking out there you might tread on. So I stepped down onto the earth to avoid the nail and when I look, there it was in the ditch. . . . Anyway, I found the necklace. I sat on the boulevard dreaming away, thinking of how happy I was going to be. I didn’t go to the university but to the trash to get my newspaper; I opened it and found the address.

  “I rang the bell, I kept ringing. A servant. ‘I’ve come about the necklace.’ The prince appears in person. His wife comes running out. I was twenty then. Just twenty. It was a big test of character. A test of everything I’d been brought up to believe or that I’d learned to do. . . . I had to make up my mind on the spot whether I was a decent man or not. ‘I’ll bring the money right away,’ the prince said. ‘Or would you prefer a check? Please sit down.’ The princess was right there, just two steps from me. I stayed standing, and said I was a student, that I’d hadn’t brought the necklace just to get a reward. ‘Ah, so that’s how it is,’ the prince said. ‘Please forgive us. Won’t you come and have breakfast with us?’ And his wife, Irina Sergeyevna, kissed me.”

  “Five thousand,” the Volokolamsk engineer enounced. He was spellbound.

  “A real test of character,” said the general secretary of the society of prerevolutionary political prisoners. “Just like when I threw my first bomb in the Crimea.”

  “Then I started visiting the prince almost every day. I fell in love with his wife. I went abroad with them every year for three years—by then I was a doctor. So I never got married. Thanks to that necklace I’ve been a bachelor all my life. . . . Then came the revolution. And the civil war. During the civil war I got to know Putna well, Vitovt Putna.[7] I was his personal doctor. Putna was a good man, but of course he was no Prince Gagarin. There was something missing. And he didn’t have a wife like Gagarin’s.”

  “The fact is you were twenty years older, twenty years older than a gaudeamus.”

  “Maybe . . .”

  “Where’s Putna now?”

  “He’s the military attaché in England.”

  Aleksandr Georgievich, the doctor’s neighbor on his left, smiled. “I think you should be looking for the explanation for your troubles, as Musset liked to put it, in Putna and all that group. Eh?”

  “How can that be?”

  “That’s something your interrogators know. Take an old man’s advice: prepare for battle under Putna’s flag.”

  “Old man? You’re younger than I am.”

  “That doesn’t matter, it’s just I’ve got less gaudeamus in me, and more bombs,” said Andreyev smiling. “Let’s not quarrel.”

  “And what’s your opinion?”

  “I agree with Aleksandr,” said Krist.

  Miroliubov’s face went red, but he restrained himself. In prison, quarrels break out like fires in a dry forest. Krist and Andreyev both knew this. Miroliubov had yet to learn about it.

  A day came when Miroliubov underwent such an interrogation that he lay facedown for forty-eight hours and didn’t go out for his walk.

  On the third day Valeri Andreyevich stood and went up to Krist, his fingers touching the reddened eyelids of his blue eyes, and said, “You were right.”

  It was Andreyev, not Krist who’d been right, but this was a subtle way of admitting mistakes, a subtlety that both Krist and Andreyev recognized.

  “Putna?”

  “Putna. It’s all too horrible, too horrible.” Valeri Andreyevich burst into tears. He’d held out for forty-eight hours but couldn’t take any more. Neither Andreyev nor Krist liked to see a man cry.

  “Calm down.”

  At night Krist was woken up by Miroliubov’s feverish whispering. “I’ll tell you everything. I’m as good as dead. I don’t know what to do. I’m Putna’s personal doctor. Now they’re not interrogating me about a burglary but about something too terrible to contemplate: about planning an assassination of the government.”

  “Valeri,” said Krist, yawning as he tried to shake off his sleepiness, “you’re not the only one in this cell being accused of that. Over there is Lionka from Tuma district in Moscow Province: he can’t read or write. Lionka was unscrewing the bolts on the railway track to use as fishing weights, just like in Chekhov’s story ‘The Malefactor.’ You know your literature, you know all those gaudeamuses. Lionka is accused of sabotage and terrorism. And he’s not hysterical. Next to Lionka you can see a potbellied man, Voronkov: he’s the head chef in the Moscow Café, it used to be called the Pushkin, on Strastnaya Square. Have you been there? The café was decorated in brown. Voronkov was persuaded to move to the Prague Restaurant on Arbat Square, where the manager was Filippov. Well, in Voronkov’s file it’s all recorded by the interrogator, and every page is signed by Voronkov, that Filippov offered Voronkov a three-room apartment, trips abroad to get higher qualifications. There’s a dearth of chef’s skills at the moment, after all. . . . ‘The manager of the Prague Restaurant offered me all this if I agreed to a transfer, and when I refused he suggested that I should poison the government. And I agreed.’ Your case, Valeri, also belongs to the category of ‘techniques bordering on fantasy.’ ”

  “Is that your way of reassuring me? What do you know? I’ve been with Putna practically ever since the revolution. Ever since the civil war. I was with him on the Pacific coast and in the south. Only I wasn’t allowed to go to England. They refused me a visa.”

  “And is Putna in England?”

  “I told you, he was in England. He was. But now he’s not in England, he’s in here with us.”

  “So that’s how it is.”

  “A couple of days ago,” Miroliubov whispered, “I had two i
nterrogations. At the first one I was asked to write down everything I knew about Putna’s terrorist activities and his statements in that respect. And who visited him. What they talked about. I wrote it all down. In detail. I never heard any terrorist talk, none of the visitors. . . . Then there was a break. Dinner. I was given dinner, too. Two courses. Peas for the second course. Here in Butyrki we’re always given beans for pulses, but there you get peas. After dinner, they gave me a cigarette—I don’t usually smoke, but I’ve gotten into the habit in prison—and we got down to writing statements again. The interrogator said, ‘Now you, Dr. Miroliubov, are so devoted to defending and protecting Putna, your friend and employer for so many years. That’s to your credit, Dr. Miroliubov. Putna takes quite a different attitude to you, however. . . .’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, look. This is what Putna’s written. Read it.’ The interrogator gave me pages and pages of statements written in Putna’s hand.”

  “So that’s it. . . .”

  “Yes. I could feel my hair turning gray. Putna’s declaration said, ‘Yes, a terrorist assassination was planned in my apartment, a conspiracy was being drawn up against members of the government, against Stalin, Molotov. The closest, the most active role in all these conversations was that of Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov.’[8] And there is a final phrase, which is burned into my memory: ‘All this can be confirmed by my personal doctor, Dr. Miroliubov.’ ”

  Krist whistled. Death had moved too close to Miroliubov.

  “What am I to do? What? What can I say? It’s Putna’s genuine handwriting. I know his handwriting only too well. And his hands didn’t tremble, any more than Tsarevich Alexei after torture with the knout—you remember those historic criminal investigations, the interrogation statements from the times of Peter the Great.”

  “I really do envy you,” said Krist, “because your love of literature overcomes everything else. Or rather, love of history. But if you’ve got the moral strength to make these analogies, then you have enough to take a rational view of your case. One thing is clear: Putna’s been arrested.”