After all, the second category was the maximum that Krist could have. The first category was for record-breakers who fulfilled the plan by 120 percent or more. There were no record-breakers in Kostochkin’s brigade. The brigade did have third category men who fulfilled the norm, and fourth category men who failed to fulfill the norm, but managed just 70–80 percent. But these were not the obvious bone-idle who deserved the punishment rations of the fifth category: in Kostochkin’s brigade there were no such men.
The days passed. Krist was getting weaker and weaker; the submissive peace and quiet in the barracks appealed to him less and less. One evening, however, Oska, the history teacher, took Krist to one side and told him quietly, “The cashier is coming today. The foreman’s ordered some money for you, so. . . .” Krist’s heart was pounding. Kostochkin had appreciated his efforts, his skill. That Harbin foreman who knew who Einstein was did have a conscience, after all.
In the brigades Krist had worked in earlier, he was never issued any money. In every brigade there were inevitably men who were more deserving, or actually physically stronger and better workers, or else friends of the foreman: Krist had never gone in for such futile reflections, he just considered every dinner voucher—the categories changed every ten days, when the percentage of the norm achieved was calculated—to be the finger of fate, good luck or bad, success or failure, which would pass, would change, and could not last forever.
The news about the money Krist was to receive that evening filled his body and soul with a burning, uncontrollable joy. So he did have enough strength to feel joy. How much might he be paid . . . ? It could be as much as five or six rubles, which meant five or six kilos of bread. Krist was prepared to worship Kostochkin as a saint; it was all he could do to wait for the working day to end.
The cashier came. He was the most ordinary of men, but he was a free contract worker wearing a good-quality leather jacket. He was accompanied by a guard who either had a revolver or pistol concealed on his body, or else had left his gun at the guardhouse. The cashier sat down at a table, opened his briefcase a few inches: the briefcase was stuffed with well-worn banknotes of different colors, looking like washed rags. The cashier pulled out a document that was covered with closely packed lines and bore all sorts of signatures from people who were pleased or disappointed at the money allocated to them. The cashier summoned Krist and showed him a line marked by a tick.
Krist looked closely and sensed there was something special about this payment, this disbursement. Nobody but him had come up to the cashier. There was no queue. Perhaps the men in the brigade had been trained to stand back by their solicitous foreman. Well, no point thinking about it! The money had been ordered, the cashier was paying. So Krist was in luck.
The foreman wasn’t in the barracks at the time. He hadn’t yet left the office, and the deputy foreman, Oska the history teacher, stood in as a guarantor of Krist’s identity. Oska’s index finger showed Krist where to sign.
“And . . . how much?” Krist rasped, as he gasped for breath.
“Fifty rubles. Are you satisfied?”
Krist’s heart sang as it pounded. This really was luck. He hurriedly signed the document, tearing the paper with the sharp nib and nearly overturning the non-spill inkwell.
“Lucky lad!” said Oska, approvingly.
The cashier slammed his briefcase shut.
“Nobody else in your brigade?”
“No.”
Krist still couldn’t understand what had happened.
“How about the money? The money?”
“I handed Kostochkin the money,” said the cashier. “Earlier today.” Oska was short, but his iron hand, which had more strength than that of any pit-face getter in the brigade, tore Krist away from the table and flung him into the darkness.
Nobody in the brigade said a word. Not a single man gave Krist any support or asked any questions. Krist wasn’t even sworn at for being a fool. . . . That horrified Krist more than the beast Oska and the grip of his iron hand. It was more terrifying than foreman Kostochkin’s childlike chubby lips.
The barracks door was flung wide open and Kostochkin strode in, with quick and light steps, to the table and the light. The rough boards of the barracks floor barely bent under his light, elastic footsteps.
“Here’s the foreman, have a talk with him,” said Oska, stepping back. Oska then explained to Kostochkin, pointing to Krist: “He wants the money!”
But the foreman had understood the situation the moment he entered. Kostochkin immediately felt as if he were in a Harbin boxing ring. With a practiced, elegant boxer’s gesture, he stretched out his arm from the shoulder at Krist, and Krist fell stunned to the ground.
“Knockout, knockout,” croaked Oska, pretending to be a referee in the ring, and dancing around Krist who was only half-alive. “Eight . . . nine . . . Knockout.”
Krist didn’t get up off the floor.
“Money? Money for him?” asked Kostochkin, as he slowly lowered himself onto a chair at the table and took a spoon from Oska’s hand, so as to begin eating his bowl of peas.
“Now these Trotskyists,” Kostochkin said slowly, as if lecturing, “are destroying you and me, Oska.” Kostochkin raised his voice: “They’ve ruined the country. And they’re ruining you and me. So that spade artist wanted money, did he? Hey, you lot,” Kostochkin was shouting at his brigade. “You fascists! Listen! You’re not going to cut my throat. Oska, dance!”
Krist was still lying on the floor. The enormous figures of the foreman and the orderly blocked out the light. But suddenly Krist saw that Kostochkin was drunk, very drunk: that was the fifty rubles which had been ordered for Krist. . . . How much alcohol you could “redeem” for fifty rubles, alcohol which was meant for, and actually issued for the brigade. . . .
Oska, the foreman’s deputy, obeyed and started dancing, reciting as he danced:
“I bought two troughs, two liters,
And my other half Rochita’s. . . .
“That’s one of our Odessa songs, foreman. It’s called ‘From the Bridge to the Slaughterhouse.’ ” A history teacher in a metropolitan institute, the father of four children, Oska started dancing again.
“Stop, pour us a drink.”
Oska groped for a bottle under the bunks and poured something into a tin can. Kostochkin drank and washed down the last of his peas, peas that his fingers were picking out of the bowl.
“Where’s that spade artist?”
Oska lifted Krist off the floor and pushed him into the light.
“What, no strength left? You get the bread ration, don’t you? Who else gets category two? Isn’t that enough for you, you Trotskyist scum?”
Krist said nothing; the brigade said nothing.
“I’ll strangle the lot of you. Damned fascists,” Kostochkin raged.
“Get back to your place, spade artist, or the foreman will give you another one,” Oska advised, as if making peace. He put his arms around the drunken Kostochkin and maneuvered him into a corner, tipping him onto the foreman’s luxurious single trestle bed, the only one in the barracks, where all the bunks were double ones in two stories, like a second-class railway sleeper. Meanwhile Oska, the deputy foreman and orderly, who slept on a bunk at the end, was now taking on his third set of important and completely official duties as bodyguard and night watchman, ensuring that the foreman had sleep, peace, and a good life. Krist groped his way to his own bunk.
But neither Kostochkin nor Krist could get to sleep. The barracks door was opened, letting in a current of white mist, and someone came in. He was wearing a white hat with earflaps and a dark winter overcoat with a lamb’s fur collar. The overcoat was thoroughly crumpled. The lamb’s fur was badly worn, but it was still a genuine overcoat and genuine lamb’s fur.
The man walked the length of the barracks toward the light and Kostochkin’s trestle bed. Oska greeted him respectfully and started shaking the foreman awake.
“Minia the Greek wants to talk to you.” Krist kne
w the name. He was the foreman of a brigade of gangsters. “Minia the Greek wants to talk to you.” By now Kostochkin had woken up properly; he sat on the trestle bed, facing the light.
“You still on a bender, lion tamer?”
“Well, look . . . see for yourself what the bastards have driven me to. . . .”
Minia the Greek grunted in sympathy.
“One day you’ll be blown sky-high, lion tamer. Eh? They’ll put some ammonite under your bunk, light the fuse and that’s you gone. . . .” The Greek pointed to the sky. “Or you’ll get your head sawed off. You’ve got a thick neck, it’ll take a long time to saw through it.”
Kostochkin took some time to come to his senses. He waited to hear what the Greek had to say.
“Why don’t I pour you a little drink? Just say the word, and we’ll rustle some up in a second.”
“No. Our brigade’s got lots of that alcohol, and you know it. I’ve got something more important to discuss.”
“Happy to be of service.”
“ ‘Happy to be of service,’ ” Minia the Greek laughed. “So that’s how you were taught to speak to people in Harbin.”
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Kostochkin hurriedly replied. “It’s just that I still don’t know what you want.”
“It’s this. . . .” The Greek said something very quickly, and Kostochkin nodded in agreement. The Greek drew some diagram on the table, and Kostochkin nodded to show he understood. Oska was following the conversation with some interest. “I’ve been to see the norm-setter,” Minia the Greek was saying, in a voice that was neither sullen nor animated, but couldn’t have been more ordinary. “The norm-setter said ‘It’s Kostochkin’s turn.’ ”
“But I had cubic meters taken off me last week, too.”
“What can I do about it. . . .” The Greek’s voice was getting more cheerful. “Where else are our lot going to get their cubic meters? I told the norm-setter, and he said it was Kostochkin’s turn.”
“But, look. . . .”
“What’s the point? You know our situation. . . .”
“All right then,” said Kostochkin. “You go to the office and count it up, and tell them to take the meters off us.”
“Keep your hair on, freier,” said Minia the Greek, clapping Kostochkin on the shoulder. “You’ve helped me out today, tomorrow it’ll be my turn. You can rely on me. Today you help me, tomorrow I help you.”
“Tomorrow we’ll both be kissing each other,” Oska said, breaking into a dance. He was so pleased by the decision that had finally been reached, and he was afraid that the foreman’s hesitation could only ruin things.
“Well, so long, lion tamer,” said Minia the Greek as he rose from the bench. “The norm-setter says, ‘Just go and have it out with Kostochkin, the lion tamer. There’s a touch of the crook about him.’ Don’t be afraid, don’t lose your nerve. Your boys will be all right. You’ve got those spade artists. . . .”
1964
RUR
BUT WE weren’t robots, were we? Robots from Čapek’s play R.U.R. (“Rossum’s Universal Robots”)? Nor did it mean we were miners from the Ruhr coal basin. Our RUR could be deciphered as Regiment under Ultra-strict Rules, a prison within a prison, a camp within a camp. No, we weren’t robots. There was something human about the metallic insensitivity of robots.
In any case, who among us in 1938 gave a thought to Čapek or to the Ruhr coal district? Only twenty or thirty years later did we find the strength to make comparisons, to attempt to resurrect time, and time’s colors and feelings.
Back then all we experienced was a vague, aching joy in our bodies, in muscles that had been desiccated by starvation, which would get relief from the gold-mine pit face, from the accursed work and the hateful toil, at least for a moment, for an hour, for a day. Toil and death were synonyms, and not just for prisoners, for the doomed “enemies of the people.” Toil and death were synonyms for the camp bosses, as well, and for Moscow. Otherwise they would not have written in their “special instructions,” in those Moscow warrants for a journey to death: “to be used only for heavy physical labor.”
We were put into the RUR as skivers, as idlers, for not fulfilling the norm. But not for refusing to work. Refusing to work in the camp was a crime punishable by death. You were shot if you refused to work, or failed to appear three times. Three recorded offenses. When we left the camp zone, we would crawl to our workplace. There was no more strength for work. But we weren’t objectors.
We were led off to the guardhouse. The guard on duty poked his arm at my chest; I swayed and could barely stay on my feet; a blow from a revolver butt on my chest had broken a rib. For years the pain gave me no peace. Actually, it wasn’t a fracture, as specialists later explained to me, just a tear of the periosteum.
We were led off to the RUR, but there was no RUR there. I saw a living piece of ground, black stony earth, covered with the charred roots of trees, the roots of bushes polished by human bodies. I saw a black rectangle of burned earth: the rectangle stood out, whether it was among the luscious green of the short, passionate Kolyma summer, or in the dead and white infinity of the winter. A black pit made by fires, a trace of warmth, a trace of human life.
The pit was alive. People were turning over beams, rushing around, swearing, and I saw a rejuvenated RUR arise before my eyes: the walls of the punishment barracks. It was then explained to us: the day before, a drunken storekeeper, a nonpolitical criminal, had been put in the RUR communal cell. Naturally, he had dismantled the RUR, the whole prison, log by log. The sentry had failed to shoot him. He had been in a frenzy, but the sentries had a thorough understanding of the legal code, of camp policies, and even of the whims of the bosses. The sentry had failed to shoot. The storekeeper was taken away and put in solitary with a squad of guards over him. But even the storekeeper, the “non-political,” obviously a hero, had lacked the courage to leave this black pit. He had merely dismantled the walls. And now a hundred men with article 58 convictions, who had been packed in the RUR, were carefully and hurriedly reconstructing their prison, putting up walls, terrified of crossing the edge of the pit or carelessly stepping onto white snow, not yet stained by human beings.
The article 58 men were in a hurry to restore their prison. There was no need to urge them on or to threaten them.
A hundred men huddled on bunks, on the frames of broken bunks. There were no intact bunks: all the boards, all the bunks’ joists were put together without nails. In Kolyma nails cost money, and the gangsters, when put in the RUR, had burned the bunks. The 58ers wouldn’t have dared to break off even a fragment of their bunks to warm their frozen bodies, or their withered muscles, which looked like pieces of rope.
Not far from the RUR was the guards’ building, just as burned and sooty. The guards’ barracks did not look any different from the prisoners’ accommodation; even inside there wasn’t much difference. Dirty smoke, sacking instead of glass in the windows. All the same, it was the guards’ barracks.
Those assigned to RUR would go out to work, not to the gold-mine pit face, but to cut and fetch firewood, to dig ditches, to trample roads smooth. Everyone in the RUR got the same food, which was another source of joy. The RUR working day finished earlier than the pit face. How many times, lifting our eyes from our barrows, from the pit face, from our pickaxes and spades, we enviously watched the ragged columns of RUR prisoners moving off for their night’s rest. Our horses would neigh when they saw the RUR men. The horses demanded that work should stop. Perhaps they knew the time rather better than people did, and they didn’t need to see the RUR for that. . . .
Now I myself was breaking into a trot, trying, sometimes managing, to march in time with the others, at the same pace, sometimes moving ahead, sometimes lagging behind. . . .
I wanted just one thing: for the RUR never to end. I didn’t know for how many days I had been “imported” into the RUR—ten, twenty, thirty.
“Imported” was a prison term I was very familiar with. Appa
rently the verb “import” was used only in places of detention, while the opposite “deport” took on a broad career in diplomacy, “to deport beyond the frontiers,” et cetera. The intention was to give the verb a subtext of threat and mockery, but life changes the scales and “to import” sounded to us almost the same as “to rescue.”
Every day after work the RUR prisoners were “herded out” to gather firewood “for themselves,” as the bosses put it. In fact, the pit-face brigades were also herded out. There were trips by sled, when the harness straps were adapted for human beings, with wire loops into which you stuck your head and shoulders, and then adjusted the harness, and then you pulled and pulled. The sled had to be hauled uphill for about four kilometers to the stack of dwarf pine that had been piled up in summer. The wood was black, crooked, and lightweight. The sleds were loaded up and then released downhill. The gangsters—those who still had the strength—used to ride the sleds and roar with laughter as they sped downhill. We, however, just crawled down; we didn’t have the strength to run. But we slid down quickly, grabbing hold of frozen, broken branches of willow or alder when we needed to brake. It was a happy time because the day was ending.
Kolyma Tales Page 54