Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  “What I read first in a book are the footnotes, the commentaries. I’m a footnotes man, a commentary man.”

  “What about the text?”

  “Not always. If I have the time.”

  For Fleming and his colleagues, contact with culture could only happen, however sacrilegious this sounds, in their work as interrogators. Getting to know people whose lives lay in literature and the social sciences was, nevertheless, in some ways genuine, authentic knowledge, not concealed by thousands of masks, even though it was distorted.

  Likewise, the chief informant on the creative intelligentsia of those years, a regular, thoughtful, and qualified author of all sorts of memoranda and surveys of writers’ lives was—and the name is surprising only when you first hear it—Major General Ignatiev.[42] Fifty Years in the Ranks. Forty years in Soviet intelligence.

  “I read that book Fifty Years in the Ranks when I had already read the surveys and had been introduced to the author, or he was introduced to me,” Fleming said pensively. “It’s not a bad book, Fifty Years in the Ranks.”

  Fleming was not very fond of newspapers or the news they printed, or of radio broadcasts. International events didn’t interest him much. Internal events were quite a different matter. Fleming’s predominant feeling was one of grim resentment at the dark forces that had promised him as a schoolboy that he would attain the unattainable and that raised him to great heights before unashamedly dropping him without a trace into the abyss: I’ve never been able to remember properly how the song, so famous in my childhood, “The Moscow Fire Roared and Burned,” ended.[43]

  It was an odd way of communing with culture. Some short courses, a guided tour of the Hermitage. As the man grew, the result was an aesthete of an interrogator, shocked by the rough forces that had poured into the “organs” in the 1930s and then been swept aside and annihilated by the “new wave,” which believed only in rough physical strength and despised not just psychological subtleties but even the “conveyors” and “endurance tests.” The new wave simply didn’t have the patience for any scientific considerations or profound psychology. It turned out that it was simpler to get results by ordinary beatings. The aesthetes who took their time ended up themselves going to the next world. Fleming survived by mere chance. The new wave didn’t have the time to wait.

  The hungry glow in Fleming’s eyes died down, and the voice of the observant professional made itself heard again. . . .

  “Listen, I’ve been watching you during lectures. You’ve been thinking about something else.”

  “I just want to remember everything, remember it and write it down.”

  Pictures were moving about in Fleming’s brain, which had calmed down and was now resting.

  •

  In the neurological department where Fleming worked, there was a Latvian, a giant who was given, with full official permission, triple rations. Every time the giant started eating, Fleming, unable to conceal his delight at this gargantuan trencherman, sat opposite him.

  Fleming was never parted from his cooking pot, one that he had with him when he arrived in the north. It was a talisman, a Kolyma talisman.

  Gangsters in the neurological department caught, killed, and cooked a cat. They treated Fleming, since he was the paramedic on duty, to the traditional “paw,” a Kolyma bribe, a gift to your seniors. Fleming ate the meat and never mentioned the cat. It was the surgical department’s cat.

  The paramedic students were afraid of Fleming, but then they were afraid of everybody. By now Fleming was working as a paramedic in the hospital, he was an official “quack.” Everyone was hostile toward him, everyone feared him, sensing that he was not just someone who had worked in the secret police but that he possessed some unusually important and terrible secret.

  The hostility grew and the mystery thickened after Fleming made a surprise trip to see a young Spanish woman. She was a real Spaniard, the daughter of a member of the Spanish Republican government. She was an intelligence agent who was caught in a net of provocations, given a sentence, and abandoned in Kolyma to die. But Fleming, it turned out, was not forgotten by his old and now faraway friends, his former colleagues in the service. There was something he had to find out from the Spanish woman, something that needed confirming. She was sick and couldn’t wait. But the Spanish woman recovered and was sent with other prisoners to a women’s mine. Out of the blue, Fleming took a break from his hospital work and went to meet her, spending forty-eight hours driving down the thousand-kilometer truck highway, where there was a constant flow of vehicles and at every other kilometer a checkpoint staffed by special operations men. Fleming was in luck and came back from his trip safe and sound. This action would have seemed romantic, had it been done because of some camp love affair, but, alas, Fleming didn’t travel because of love and didn’t carry out heroic exploits for love. This was a question of something far greater than love, it was a higher passion, a force that would see Fleming through all the camp’s checkpoints unharmed.

  Fleming recalled 1935 very often: the sudden torrent of murders. The death of Savinkov’s family:[44] one son was executed, while the rest—Savinkov’s wife, two other children, and mother-in-law—refused to leave Leningrad. They all left letters, deathbed letters, for one another. They all killed themselves, and Fleming’s memory had preserved lines from a child’s note: “Granny, we’re going to die soon.”

  •

  In 1950 Fleming’s sentence for his part in the NKVD case ended, but he didn’t go back to Leningrad. He wasn’t given permission. His wife, who’d kept for many years the square meters of accommodation they were entitled to, left Leningrad for Magadan, but couldn’t settle there and went home. Just before the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in 1956, Fleming returned to Leningrad, back to the room he had lived in before catastrophe struck.

  Frantic applications. A pension of 1,400 rubles a month, reflecting his long service. But this connoisseur of pharmacology, now enhanced by a paramedical education, was not to go back to his old profession. Apparently all the old employees, all the veterans of these cases, all the aesthetes who had survived, had been compulsorily retired—right down to the most junior courier.

  Fleming found himself a job as a book buyer in a secondhand-book shop on Liteiny Avenue. Fleming considered himself to be a Russian intellectual by inheritance, even though he had such a peculiar relationship to and way of dealing with the intelligentsia. Fleming refused to draw a line between his fate and that of the Russian intelligentsia, perhaps feeling that only contact with books could preserve the necessary intellectual qualifications, provided that he succeed in living long enough for better times to dawn.

  In the times of Konstantin Leontiev,[45] a captain in the army engineers could end up in a monastery. But the world of books is both dangerous and exalted. Living to serve books has a touch of fanaticism about it, but, like any amateur’s love of books, it does contain a moral element of purification. After all, a man who once worshipped Gumiliov and was an expert annotator of Gumiliov’s verses and fate could not take a job as a janitor. Could he switch careers and become a paramedic, his new specialty? No, being a dealer of secondhand books was better.

  “I campaign all the time, I keep campaigning. Let’s have some rum!”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Oh, what a pity, how awkward that you don’t drink. Katia, he doesn’t drink! Can you believe it? I campaign all the time: I’ll get my old job back in the end.”

  “If you go back to your old job,” his wife, Katia, announced, her lips blue, “I’ll hang myself, I’ll drown myself the very next day.”

  “I’m joking. I’m always joking. I campaign, I’m always campaigning. I hand in various applications, I take legal action, I travel to Moscow. They’ve reinstated me in the party, after all. But not properly.”

  Fleming pulled out piles of crumpled sheets of paper from under his jacket.

  “Read. This is a reference from Drabkina.[46] She was with me on the Igarka.”[47
]

  I ran my eyes over an extensive reference from the author of Black Rusks.

  “As the chief of a camp area, he treated the prisoners well, for which he was arrested and convicted. . . .”

  I leafed through the dirty, sticky statements made by Drabkina. They had been perused many times by the authorities’ uncaring fingers. . . .

  Meanwhile Fleming bent over my ear and, his breath smelling of the rum he had drunk, explained to me in a hoarse voice that in the camp he at least had been a “decent human being,” as even Drabkina confirmed here.

  “Do you really need this?”

  “I do. This is how I fill my life. Just in case, you never know. Are we drinking?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Ah! For long service. Fourteen hundred rubles. But that’s not what I want—”

  “Shut up, or I’ll hang myself,” yelled his wife, Katia.

  “My wife’s got a bad heart,” explained Fleming.

  “Get a grip on yourself. Write. You have a way with words. And a story or a novel is as good as a power of attorney.”

  “No, I’m not a writer. I campaign. . . .”

  Spattering my ear with saliva, he whispered something quite absurd, as if there had been no Kolyma, as if in 1937 Fleming himself had spent seventeen days and nights on the interrogation “conveyor” and his mind had noticeably begun to crack.

  “A lot of memoirs are being published now. Reminiscences. For example, Yakubovich’s In the World of the Rejected.[48] And why not?”

  “Have you written your memoirs?”

  “No. There is a book I’d like to recommend for publication: you know which. I went to the Leningrad publishing house: they told me it was no business of mine.”

  “What book then?”

  “The Notes of Sanson,[49] the Paris executioner. That would be some memoir!”

  “The Paris executioner?”

  “Yes, I remember. Sanson cut off Charlotte Corday’s head and struck her cheeks, and the cheeks on the severed head blushed. And another thing, they used to have ‘victims’ balls.’[50] Do we have victims’ balls?”

  “The victim’s ball was to do with Thermidor, it wasn’t just about the time after the Terror. And Sanson’s Notes are a fake.”

  “Does it really matter if they were a fake, or not? The book existed. Let’s have some rum. I’ve tried a lot of drinks, and rum is the best. Rum. Jamaican rum.”

  His wife was getting dinner ready: great piles of some fatty dish that the glutton Fleming devoured virtually in an instant. Unrestrained greed had become a permanent feature, just like his psychological trauma, a lifelong affliction of thousands of other former prisoners, too.

  I thought about the power of life, concealed in a healthy stomach and gut, in a capacity to devour things: that had been a defensive reflex of Fleming’s life in Kolyma, too. Indiscriminate greed. The indiscriminate nature of his soul, which derived from his work as an interrogator, was also a preparation, a peculiar shock absorber for that fall into Kolyma, where Fleming never discovered any abyss, for he had known about it before, which is why he was saved and why his moral torments were assuaged, if he ever had any such torments! Fleming had never had any further mental traumas. He had seen the worst and he looked without caring at everybody around him perishing. He was prepared to fight only for his own life. Fleming’s life was saved, but his soul bore a heavy trace that needed to be erased and cleansed by repentance. Repentance in the form of a slip of the tongue, a half hint, talking to himself aloud, without regret and without condemnation. “Simply, I was unlucky.” And yet what Fleming told me was repentance.

  •

  “Do you see that booklet?”

  “Your party card?”

  “Aha. A nice new one. But it was all very complicated, very complicated. The provincial committee considered rehabilitating me in the party six months ago. The party secretary, some Chuvash, was offhand and rude: ‘All right, I see. Put down this decision: Reinstate, but with interrupted record.’

  “That really stung me: ‘with interrupted record.’ I thought that if I didn’t immediately declare that I wouldn’t accept the decision, then I’d always be asked in the future, ‘And why didn’t you say anything when your case was being considered? After all, the reason you’re summoned in person for the case to be investigated is so that you can declare things in good time and say—’ I raised my hand.

  “ ‘Well, what have you got to say?’ Offhand and rude.

  “I said, ‘I don’t accept the decision. Anywhere I go, any job I get, I’ll be told to explain the interruption.’

  “ ‘Well, you don’t hang about,’ says the first secretary of the provincial committee. ‘The reason you’re so full of yourself is that you’re well off. How much do you get for your long service?’

  “He was right, but I interrupt him and say, ‘I want complete rehabilitation without any interruption in my record.’

  “The secretary suddenly comes out with, ‘Why are you pushing so hard? Why are you getting so heated up about it? You were up to your neck in blood!’

  “I had a rush of blood to my head. I said, ‘And you weren’t?’

  “The secretary says, ‘We weren’t here then.’

  “I say, ‘And wherever you were in 1937, you weren’t up to your neck in blood?’

  “The first secretary says, ‘That’s enough of your lip. We can take another vote. Get out!’

  “I went out into the corridor and they came out and told me their decision: ‘Rehabilitation in the party refused.’

  “I spent six months in Moscow on the warpath. The decision was canceled. But they decided only on the first formula: ‘Reinstated with interrupted record.’

  “The man who reported on my case to the Committee of Party Control told me I shouldn’t have had a go at the provincial committee.

  “I’m still campaigning, taking legal advice, going to Moscow and trying to get something done. Drink up!”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “This is brandy, not rum. Five-star brandy. For you.”

  “Take the bottle away.”

  “I really will take it away, I’ll take it when I go. Don’t be offended.”

  “I shan’t be.”

  A year later I had my last letter from the secondhand book dealer: “My wife died suddenly when I was away from Leningrad. I came back six months later, saw the mound over her grave, a cross, and an amateur photo of her in her coffin. Don’t blame me for being weak, I’m mentally fine, but I can’t do anything. I seem to be living in a dream, I’ve lost all interest in life.

  “I know this will pass, but it will take time. What did she get out of life? Going around the prisons for information and with parcels? Contempt from society, a journey to see me in Magadan, a life of poverty, and now this ending. Forgive me, I’ll tell you more when I next write. I may be healthy, but is the society I live in healthy?

  “Greetings.”

  1956

  ON LEND-LEASE

  THE FRESH tractor marks in the marsh were like the tracks of some prehistoric animal, far less like the delivery of American technology on lend-lease.

  We prisoners had heard of these gifts from abroad, which disconcerted the camp authorities. The well-worn knitted suits, secondhand pullovers and sweaters that had been collected on the other side of the Pacific for the Kolyma prisoners were grabbed, if not fought over, by the wives of the Magadan generals. These woolen treasures were described in the bills of lading as “secondhand,” which is of course much more expressive than the adjective “worn” or any abbreviations like “p/u”—previously used—which sounded familiar only to the ear of someone in the camps. The word “secondhand” has a mysterious vagueness about it, as if it had been held in someone’s hand or kept in somebody’s wardrobe at home, so that a suit could become secondhand without losing any of its many qualities, qualities that would be out of the question if the word “worn” had entered into the documentation.

  L
end-lease sausages were not at all secondhand, but we saw those fabulous cans only from afar. Lend-lease canned pork in bulging cans was, however, a dish we knew well. Lend-lease canned pork, counted and measured out according to a complicated table for substitute foods, looted by the bosses’ greedy hands and then once more recounted and again measured out before being allowed into the cooking pot, was boiled down until it had turned into mysterious threads that smelled of anything but meat; only the sight, but not the taste, excited us. The canned pork that got as far as the camp cooking pot had no taste at all. Camp prisoners’ stomachs preferred something Russian, like rotting old venison, which even seven camp cooking pots couldn’t boil down. Venison didn’t disappear and become ephemeral the way canned pork did.

  Lend-lease porridge oats were something we approved of and ate, but all the same we never got more than two tablespoons of porridge as our portion.

  But inedible technology also came through lend-lease: tomahawks, which were hard to handle; spades, very easy to use with un-Russian short handles that did not take so much effort when loading the wagons. The spades were instantly converted to the Russian kind with long handles and the blade was flattened out to dig and hold as much soil and rock as possible.

  Barrels of glycerin! Glycerin! The very first night, the night watchman took a pot and ladled out a bucket of liquid glycerin to sell it that night to the camp’s prisoners as “American honey.” He made a fortune.

  Lend-lease also brought gigantic black fifty-ton Diamond M20 trucks and trailers with steel sides, also five-ton Studebaker trucks that could easily climb any hill. There was nothing to match these machines anywhere in Kolyma. Day and night, these Studebakers and Diamonds carried American wheat in handsome white canvas sacks up and down the thousand-kilometer highway. Our bread rations, plump loaves with no taste, were made from this flour. This lend-lease bread had one remarkable quality. Anyone who ate lend-lease bread stopped going to the lavatory: just once every five days the stomach produced something that could not even be called excrement. The camp prisoner’s stomach and gut absorbed this splendid white bread, with its admixture of maize, powdered bone, and something else—perhaps just human hope—absorbing it entirely. The time has not yet come to count up all the lives that were saved by this overseas wheat.