Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Our knowledge gradually increased, but, more importantly, our interests broadened, and we kept asking the doctors more and more questions—even if they were naïve, or stupid questions. But the doctors didn’t consider a single one of our questions to be naïve or stupid. Everything was answered, always with a sufficiently categorical response. Answers called forth new questions. We didn’t yet have the courage for medical arguments between ourselves. That would have been too arrogant.

  Yet . . . once I was summoned to correct a dislocated shoulder. The doctor gave Rausch anesthesia, and I put back the shoulder with my foot, using the Hippocratic method. Something clicked softly under my heel, and the shoulder bone went back where it should go. I was happy. Tatiana Ilyina, who was present during the manipulation of the dislocated shoulder, said, “See how well you’ve been taught,” and I couldn’t help agreeing with her.

  Naturally, I never once went to the cinema or to the amateur dramatics performances that were perfectly professional in Magadan and in the hospital, even though they were exceptionally inventive and in good taste, inasmuch as they could get through the censorship barriers of the Cultural and Educational Section. At that time the Magadan drama group was directed by L. V. Varpakhovsky, who later became the chief director of the Yermolova Theater in Moscow. I had no time, and anyway the secrets of medicine, as they were slowly revealed, interested me far more.

  Medical terminology stopped being hocus-pocus. I started reading medical articles and books. I had lost my old helplessness and fear.

  I was no longer an ordinary person. It was my duty to be able to provide first aid, to assess the condition of a seriously ill patient, if only in general terms. It was my duty to identify any danger that threatened people’s lives. This gave me both joy and anxiety. I was afraid of not being able to carry out my exalted duties.

  I knew how to carry out a siphon enema, how to use Bobrov’s apparatus for an intravenous injection, how to use a scalpel or a syringe. . . .

  I knew how to change a seriously ill patient’s bedding and could teach hospital porters the technique. I could explain to the same men the reasons for disinfection and cleaning up.

  I learned thousands of things I hadn’t known before, things that were necessary, vital, useful to humanity.

  The courses were over, and the new paramedics began to be dispatched, one by one, to new workplaces. A list would appear, a list held by the escort guard, and my surname would be on it. But I would be the last person to get into the truck. I was taking patients to the Left Bank hospital. The truck was packed tight, and I would sit right at the end, my back against the side. While I was settling down, my shirt became untucked and the wind blew through a gap in the side of the truck. I was holding a folding bag full of vials: valerian, tincture of lily of the valley, iodine, liquid ammonia. At my feet was a tightly packed bag containing exercise books with my paramedic’s course notes.

  For several years those exercise books were my best support, until the day I finally left, when a bear got into the taiga clinic and tore all my notes to shreds, after piercing all my jars and vials.

  1960

  THE FIRST SECRET POLICEMAN

  BLUE EYES tend to fade. Over the years a child’s cornflower-blue eyes become the cloudy, dirty, bluish-gray little eyes of the man in the street, or else they turn into the glassy tentacles of interrogators and janitors, or the “steely” eyes of soldiers. There are a lot of different shades. Only very rarely do eyes preserve the color they had in childhood. . . .

  A bundle of the sun’s red rays was split up by the grid of the prison bars into several smaller bundles. Somewhere in the middle of the cell they combined again into a constant red-gold flow. In this stream of light, specks of dust made a thick golden cloud. Flies that flew into the zone of light also became as golden as the sun. The rays of the setting sun struck the door, which was framed in shiny gray iron.

  The lock clanged: a sound that anyone in a prison cell, whether he is awake or asleep, will hear at any time. No conversation in the cell could blot out that sound. No sleep in the cell is deep enough to distract you from it. There is no thought in the cell that could—nobody can concentrate on anything so much that they would miss the sound or fail to hear it. Everyone’s spirit drops when they hear the sound of the lock, fate knocking at the door of the cell, knocking at souls, hearts, and minds. Everyone is alarmed by this sound. And there is no way it can be confused with any other sound.

  The lock clanged, the door opened, and the current of rays escaped from the cell. Once the door was open the rays could be seen to cut across the corridor and rush for the window, before flying across the prison yard and breaking up against the window panes of another prison block. All sixty inhabitants of the cell managed to take this in during the short time that the door was open. The door slammed shut with a melodious ringing sound, like that of an ancient trunk when the lid is banged shut. All the prisoners who had eagerly watched the spurt of light, the movement of the beam, as though it were a living creature, their brother and comrade, immediately understood that the sun had once more been locked up with them.

  Only then did everyone see that a man, his eyes screwed up in the penetrating light, was standing by the door, letting his broad, black chest absorb the flow of the sunset’s golden rays.

  The man was middle-aged, tall and broad-shouldered, with a thick, full head of fair hair. Only a closer look could tell you that this straw-colored hair had for some time been mixed with gray. His wrinkled face, which looked like a relief map, was covered with a great number of pockmarks, like lunar craters.

  He was dressed in a black fabric tunic; he had no belt, and the tunic was unbuttoned; he wore black cloth riding breeches and boots. His hands were crumpling a black, very worn greatcoat. His clothes only hung on him: all the buttons had been ripped off.

  “Alekseyev,” he said quietly, raising his large, hairy hand and putting it to his chest. “How do you do.”

  People were already going up to him, trying to encourage him with their tense, abrupt prisoner’s laughter, clapping him on the shoulder, shaking his hand. The cell elder, the elected authority, was now approaching to show the newcomer his place. “Gavriil Alekseyev,” the bearlike man repeated. Then he said, “Gavriil Timofeyevich Alekseyev.” The man in black moved to the side, and the ray of sunlight now revealed his eyes to be large, children’s eyes, the color of cornflowers.

  The cell soon learned the details of Alekseyev’s life: he was the chief of the fire brigade in a Naro-Fominsk factory, which is why he wore the black official suit. Yes, he had been a party member since 1917. Yes, he had been an artillery man and took part in the October battles in Moscow. Yes, he had been expelled from the party in 1927. He had been readmitted. And expelled again, a week ago.

  Prisoners behave differently when they are first arrested. It is a very difficult business to break down the mistrust of some. By degrees, day by day, they get used to their fate and begin to understand things.

  Alekseyev was different. He seemed to have stayed silent for many years, and then came arrest, and the prison cell gave him back his gift for speech. Here he found an opportunity to understand the crucial thing, to sense the movement of time, of his own fate, and to understand why. To find an answer to the enormous, gigantic “why” that loomed over all his life and fate, and not only his, but over the lives and fates of hundreds of thousands of others.

  Alekseyev told his story without trying to absolve himself, without asking questions. He was just trying to understand, to compare, to solve the mystery.

  This enormous, bearlike man, in an unbelted black tunic, would from morning to evening pace up and down the cell. He would put his enormous paw around somebody’s shoulders and ask, ask. . . . Or he would tell his story.

  “Why were you expelled, Gavriil?”

  “Well, you understand. There was a class for our political circle. The topic was October in Moscow. After all, I was a soldier in Muralov’s [26] artillery and was wound
ed twice. I personally aimed the cannon at the tsarist cadets at the Nikita Gates. My instructor at the political circle asks me, ‘Who was in command of the Soviet troops in Moscow during the revolution?’ I say, ‘Muralov, Nikolai Ivanovich.’ I knew him well, personally. What else could I say? What could I say?”

  “That question was a provocation, Gavriil. After all, you know that Muralov has been declared an enemy of the people, don’t you?”

  “But what else can you say? It’s something I know from life, not political instruction. That same night I was arrested.”

  “How did you end up in Naro-Fominsk? In a fire brigade?”

  “I was a heavy drinker. I was demobilized from the Secret Police as far back as 1918. Muralov had gotten me a job there, as an especially reliable man. . . . And that’s where my illness started.”

  “What illness, Gavriil? You’re a great healthy bear of a man.”

  “You’ll see in time. Even I don’t know what sort of illness I’ve got. . . . I can’t remember its name. I don’t remember what happens to me. But something does happen. . . . I get worked up, I turn angry, and then It comes. . . .”

  “Is it the vodka?”

  “No, it’s not the vodka. It’s life. Vodka’s a separate thing.”

  “You could have gone back to school. . . . All the doors were open.”

  “How could I? Some people can go to school, others have to defend their schooling. Am I putting it simply enough, pal? Anyway, it’s been years. I can’t go to workers’ evening classes. All I’m left with is that damned military site guarding. And the vodka. And It.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  “A daughter by my first wife. She left me. Now I’m living with a weaving worker. Well, she’ll be half-dead with fright, if not dead, now that I’ve been arrested. But I find being arrested a relief. You don’t need to think about anything. Everything will be decided by someone else. Other people will do the thinking. About what Gavriil Alekseyev’s future is going to be.”

  A few days, only a few, passed. It came.

  Alekseyev gave a pathetic yell, swung out his arms, and fell supine on the bunk. His face had turned gray, bubbling foam was coming out of his blue mouth and flaccid lips. Warm sweat broke out on his gray cheeks and hairy chest. His neighbors grabbed him by the arms and piled onto his legs. His body shook with violent convulsions.

  “Look out for his head, take care of his head,” said someone, shoving the black greatcoat under Alekseyev’s sweating head and disheveled hair.

  It had come. The epileptic fit was very prolonged, the powerful lumps of his muscles kept swelling, his fists were striking at someone, and his neighbors’ awkward fingers tried to unclench these mighty fists. His legs were trying to run, but the weight of several men piled onto him held him down on the bunk.

  His muscles all gradually relaxed, his fingers unclenched. Alekseyev was asleep.

  All this time the cell orderlies were knocking at the door, furiously calling for a doctor. There had to be a doctor somewhere in Butyrki prison. Some version of Fiodor Petrovich Gaaz. Or just a military doctor in charge of any rank, a lieutenant in the medical service.

  It turned out to be difficult to get hold of a doctor, but one did come. He came wearing white overalls over his officer’s uniform, accompanied by two hefty assistants who seemed to be paramedics. The doctor climbed up onto the bunks and examined Alekseyev. By now the attack had receded and Alekseyev was asleep. Without saying a word or answering any of the questions that the prisoners surrounding him fired, the doctor left, followed by his silent assistants. The lock clanged, calling forth an explosion of outrage. When the first wave had died down, the food flap in the prison door opened and the duty warden bent down to take a look. He said, “The doctor’s said there’s no need to do anything. It’s epilepsy. Just see he doesn’t swallow his tongue. . . . If there’s another attack, don’t call for him. There’s no treatment for it.”

  So the cell stopped asking for a doctor for Alekseyev. But he had many more epileptic attacks.

  Alekseyev, complaining of headaches, would sleep off his attacks. After a day or two the enormous bearlike figure in its black cloth tunic and black cloth riding breeches would crawl out again and stride up and down the cell’s cement floor. Once again his blue eyes would sparkle. After two prison disinfections, or “roastings,” Alekseyev’s black clothes had turned brown and no longer seemed black.

  But he kept on pacing and pacing, naïvely telling us about his past life, before his illness. He was in a hurry to set out for whomever he was now talking to in order to tell them what he hadn’t yet said in this cell.

  “. . . They say that nowadays there are special executioners. But do you know how things were done under Dzerzhinsky?”

  “How?”

  “If the Secret Police Collegium gave out a death sentence, then the sentence had to be carried out by the interrogator who had been dealing with the case. . . . By the man who had been advocating and demanding capital punishment. You demand a death sentence for this man? You’re convinced of his guilt, you’re sure that he’s an enemy and should get death? Kill him with your own hand. There’s a very big difference between signing a piece of paper to confirm a sentence and killing the man yourself.”

  “A big one.”

  “Also, every interrogator had to find his own time and place for these jobs of his. . . . It varied. Some did it in their offices, others in the corridor, or in some basement. Under Dzerzhinsky the interrogator arranged it all himself. . . . You’d think it over a thousand times before asking for a man’s death. . . .”

  “Gavriil, have you seen executions?”

  “I’ve seen them. Who hasn’t?”

  “Is it true that when the man is shot he falls facedown?”

  “It’s true. When he’s looking at you.”

  “And if you shoot from behind?”

  “Then he falls backward, on his back.”

  “Have you ever had to. . . . You know. . . .”

  “No, I wasn’t an interrogator. I don’t have any education. I was just in the squad. I fought banditry, and so on. Then I got this thing and I was demobilized. As an epileptic. Anyway I started drinking. They say that isn’t treatable, either.”

  Prison doesn’t like devious people. Everyone in the cell spends twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of everyone else. Nobody has the strength to conceal his true character, or to pretend he is different from what he really is in a prison pretrial cell, in minutes, hours, days, weeks, months of tension and nervousness, when anything superfluous or false peels off people, like the peel off a fruit. All that’s left is the truth, which may not be created by the prison, but is proven and tested by it. Willpower is not yet broken or crushed, as it almost inevitably will be in the camps. But who was then thinking about the camps, about what they were? A few people may have known and been glad to talk about the camps and warn the newcomers. But people believe what they want to.

  Among the prisoners was the black-bearded Weber, a Silesian communist, a member of the Comintern, who’d been brought from Kolyma for “further investigation.” He knew what the camps were. Or take Aleksandr Georgievich Andreyev, the former general secretary of the society of tsarist political prisoners, a right-wing Social Revolutionary who had known penal servitude under the tsars and exile under the Soviets. Andreyev knew certain truths that the majority didn’t know. But such truths can’t be told. Not because they are a secret, but because they are beyond belief. That is why both Weber and Andreyev stayed silent. Prison is prison, and pretrial prison is pretrial prison. Everyone has their own case, their own battles, their own behavior, which can’t be dictated to them, their own duty, character, soul, reserve of moral strength, experience. Human qualities are tested not as much in a prison cell as they are outside the cell, in some interrogator’s cramped office. Fate depends on a chain of fortuitous events or, more often, not on anything fortuitous at all.

  Even a pretrial prison, and not just a short-
term prison, prefers people who are straightforward and frank. The cell had a benevolent attitude toward Alekseyev. Were they fond of him? Can you be fond of anyone in a pretrial cell? After all, this is for investigation, transit prior to deportation. The cell had a benevolent attitude toward Alekseyev.

  Weeks and months passed, yet Alekseyev still wasn’t being summoned to interrogation. And he just kept pacing and pacing.

  There are two schools of interrogation. The first school considers that an arrested man must immediately be dazed and stunned. This school’s success is based on a speedy psychological attack, on pressure, on suppressing the willpower of the prisoner under investigation, before the latter can come to his senses, take a good look at his surroundings, and gather his moral strength. Interrogators of this school begin their interrogations on the night of the arrest, and prolong them for many hours, using every possible threat. The second school considers that the prison cell will just exhaust and weaken the arrested person’s will to resist. The longer he stays in his pretrial cell before encountering his interrogator, the greater the advantage to the interrogator. The prisoner prepares for interrogation, the first interrogation in his life, by harnessing all his strength. But there is no interrogation. For a week, a month, two months, there’s nothing. All the work of suppressing the prisoner’s psyche is done on the interrogator’s behalf by the prison cell.

  I don’t know how such an effective tool as torture is applied by the first and second schools. This story is set at the beginning of 1937, but torture began only in the second half of that year.

  Gavriil Alekseyev’s interrogator adhered to the second school.

  By the end of the third month of Alekseyev’s pacing the cell, a girl wearing a military tunic came running up and summoned Alekseyev—“with his initial,” but without his things—which meant for interrogation. Alekseyev combed his fair curls with his five fingers and, adjusting his tunic, which was now brown, strode out of the cell.