He had no taste for loftier pleasures. His culture and his advanced knowledge opened up big opportunities for him, not just for material prosperity but also for sating his needs and desires for lower and baser pleasures.
The reason Krivoshei learned all about art was to make himself more prestigious, to rank higher among connoisseurs and dilettantes, so as not to disgrace himself because of his other, purely sensual infatuation with someone, either female or male. Art in itself didn’t excite or interest him at all, but he considered himself obliged to have an opinion even about the square hall in the Louvre.
The same applied to literature, which he read mainly in French and English and predominantly to practice his languages. Literature in itself held little interest for him, and he could spend an eternity on one novel, reading a page a night before going to sleep. It was of course unthinkable that Krivoshei would ever find a book that he could read all night until dawn. He was very protective of his sleep, and no detective novel could have disturbed Krivoshei’s carefully measured regime.
As for music, Krivoshei was a complete ignoramus. He had no ear, and even Blok’s kind of understanding of music was beyond him. But he had realized a long time ago that lacking a musical ear was “a misfortune, not a vice,” and he had come to terms with it. In any case, he had enough patience to listen to a fugue or a sonata and thank the performer, preferably female.
His health was excellent, his body was endomorphic, with a certain tendency to stoutness, which, by the way, was no danger to him in the camps.
Krivoshei was born in 1900.
He always wore tortoiseshell or rimless glasses with round lenses. Slow-moving, inept, with a high, round, balding forehead, Krivoshei was an extremely imposing figure. There was something deliberate about this. His grave manners had an effect on the bosses, which must have made his fate in the camps easier.
Alien to art, to the artistic excitement of a creator or a consumer, Krivoshei found his métier in collecting, in antiques. He devoted himself to this activity with passion; it was both profitable and interesting, and it brought him new acquaintances. All in all, this hobby made the engineer’s desires less base and more noble.
An engineer’s salary, even the “special rates” of the times, became insufficient for living on the grand scale that Krivoshei, the amateur antiquarian, required.
He needed the means, means that the state possessed, and whatever you might say about Krivoshei, you couldn’t deny that he was determined.
He got a death sentence, commuted to ten years—a sentence that was very heavy for the mid-1930s. It meant his fraud had been in the millions. His property was confiscated and auctioned, but Krivoshei had, of course, already anticipated such an outcome. It would have been odd if he hadn’t managed to hide away a few hundred thousand. The risk was small, the advantages were obvious. Krivoshei was a non-political, he would serve his sentence as a “friend of the people.” After serving half his sentence or even less, he would be released on the basis of credited working days or an amnesty, and he could then live off the money he had hidden.
But Krivoshei wasn’t kept for long in a mainland camp; he was moved, as a long-term prisoner, to Kolyma. That complicated his plans. True, his reliance on his crime’s status in the Criminal Code and on his lordly manners proved to be fully justified, and he didn’t spend a single day at any mine’s pit face. He was soon assigned, as a specialist engineer, to the chemical laboratory in the Arkagala coal district.
This was the time when the famous Chai-Uryinsky gold had not yet been discovered and when old larch trees and six-hundred-year-old poplars were still standing where one day there would be dozens of settlements and thousands of inhabitants. This was the time when nobody thought that the supply of gold nuggets in the At-Uriakh valley would ever be exhausted or superseded. Life had not yet shifted toward the northwest, in the direction of what was then the Cold Pole, Oymiakon. Old mines were worked until they were exhausted and new ones were being opened. Life in the mines was always temporary.
The Arkagala coal, the future Arkagala basin, was an outpost for gold prospectors, and was the new source of fuel for the region. Around a small mine gallery where, if you stood on the rail, you could touch the roof, the gallery ceiling—it was a gallery dug out on the cheap, in the taiga style, as the bosses said—there were other galleries, dug by hand with pickax and spade, just like all the thousand-kilometer roads in Kolyma. Those roads and the early mines were hand-dug: the only mechanical aid was the “three-man special tribunal machine: two handles and a wheel.”
Prison labor is cheap.
The geological search parties were still choking in the gold of Susuman and the gold of At-Uriakh.
But Krivoshei was well aware that the geologists’ paths would extend to the surroundings of Arkagala and then move on toward Yakutsk. The geologists would be followed by carpenters, miners, guards. . . .
He had to make haste.
A few months passed and Krivoshei was visited by his wife, who’d come from Kharkov. She hadn’t come just to see him, no—she had followed her husband, repeating the heroic selfless acts of the wives of the Decembrists. Krivoshei’s wife was not the first or the last of these “Russian heroines.” The geologist Faina Rabinovich’s name is well-known in Kolyma. But Faina Rabinovich was a prominent geologist. Her fate was an exception.
Wives who followed their husbands were dooming themselves to the cold, to the ceaseless torments of following their husbands wherever the latter had gone, and husbands were constantly being transferred somewhere: the wife would then have to abandon her place of work, where she had had so much trouble finding a job, and travel to regions where it was dangerous for a woman to travel, where she might be the victim of rape, robbery and abuse. . . . Quite apart from the peregrinations, such martyrs could expect coarse advances and harassment from the bosses, from the very top man to the average escort guard who had already got into the swing of life in Kolyma. An invitation to share the company of drunken bachelors was the invariable fate of all women. While a female prisoner was just given the order, “Get undressed and lie down!” with no reference to Pushkin or Shakespeare or anything like that, after which she would be infected with syphilis, wives of prisoners were treated even more licentiously. If a man raped a female prisoner, he always risked being denounced by a friend or a rival, a subordinate or a boss, but “love” with prisoners’ wives, who were, legally speaking, independent persons, was not classified as a crime anywhere in the Code.
The main thing, however, was that this journey of thirteen thousand kilometers turned out to be utterly pointless. The poor woman was not allowed to have any meetings with her husband, and any promise to allow a meeting was turned into a weapon when the boss made his own advances.
Some wives brought permits from Moscow for monthly meetings, conditional on exemplary behavior and fulfilling the production norms. These meetings would not include a night together, naturally, and had to take place in the presence of the camp authorities.
Wives almost never succeeded in finding work in the same settlement as the one where their husbands were serving their sentences.
Even if, against all expectations, a wife managed to find a job near her husband, he would immediately be transferred elsewhere. This was not just a whim of the bosses, it was the fulfillment of official instructions: “orders are orders.” Moscow had already provided for such cases.
No wife ever succeeded in passing anything edible to her husband. There were orders to deal with this, too: norms, contingencies depending on the results of labor and behavior.
Could she pass her husband bread with the help of the guards? They’d be too afraid, they were forbidden to do that. Via one of the bosses? He might agree, but he would want payment in kind—her body. He didn’t need money, he was rolling in money, he’d been a “100-percenter” for a long time now, in other words he got a quadruple salary. In any case, women like her were unlikely to have the money for bribes, especially on the Kol
yma scale. So that was the hopeless position in which wives of prisoners found themselves. And if the wife was also the wife of an enemy of the people, then nobody would even give her the time of day: any abuse of her was considered the right thing to do, a good deed, and, in any case, would be regarded positively from a political point of view.
Many wives came on three-year contracts and, once caught in this trap, had to wait for a ship home. Those who were strong in spirit—and they needed more strength than even their imprisoned husbands—waited for their contracts to expire and then traveled home without ever having seen their husbands. Those who were weak in spirit remembered how they were persecuted on the mainland and were afraid to go back. They lived in an atmosphere of debauchery, fumes of alcohol and tobacco, drunkenness, big sums of money, and they got married again and again, had children, and washed their hands of their prisoner-husbands and of their own selves.
As you might expect, Krivoshei’s wife couldn’t find work at Arkagala. After spending a short time there, she left for the local capital, the town of Magadan. When she got work there as an accountant—Angelina Grigorievna had no qualifications, she’d been a housewife all her adult life—she found somewhere to live and settled in Magadan, where life was at least less dismal than at Arkagala in the taiga.
From Arkagala, through secret channels, to the same Magadan, addressed to the head of the criminal investigation department, an institution that was on the same street (almost the only street) in the town, where there was a barracks partitioned by screens for people with families, a coded official communication came flying: “Prisoner Pavel Mikhailovich Krivoshei, born 1900, convicted under article 168, sentence ten years, number of personal file . . . has escaped.”
They thought he was being hidden by his wife in Magadan. They arrested her, but couldn’t get anything out of her. “Yes, I’ve been there, I’ve seen him, I left, I now work in Magadan.” Lengthy surveillance and observation produced no results. Checks on departing ships and aircraft were strengthened, but it was all in vain. There was no trace of Angelina’s husband.
Krivoshei had left not for the sea, but in the opposite direction, heading for Yakutsk. He was traveling light. Apart from a canvas cape, a geologist’s hammer, a bag with a small quantity of geological ore “samples,” and a supply of matches and of money, he had nothing.
He walked without hiding or hurrying along the packhorse roads, reindeer tracks, keeping to herders’ camps and workers’ settlements, never deviating deep into the taiga, always spending the night under the roof of a wooden cabin, a yurt, or a hut. . . . In the very first Yakut settlement he hired workmen who dug trial shafts, or ditches as he directed. In short, he did all the jobs that he had occasion to do for real geologists. Krivoshei had enough technical knowledge to pose as a collector. Arkagala, where he’d spent about a year, was the latest base camp for many geological expeditions, and Krivoshei had studied geologists’ manners and ways of doing things. His leisurely movements, his tortoiseshell glasses, his daily shave, his nicely filed fingernails all inspired limitless trust in people.
Krivoshei was in no hurry. He would fill his journal with mysterious signs that had some similarity to geologists’ field journals. Making haste slowly, he was moving relentlessly toward Yakutsk.
Sometimes he even backtracked, or made a detour, or stopped off: all that was necessary for “surveying the Pocked Spring basin,” to make his trip look genuine, to cover up his tracks. Krivoshei had nerves of steel, and he never stopped smiling a welcoming, extroverted smile.
After a month he crossed the Yablonovy range. Two Yakuts, assigned by a collective farm for important government work, were carrying his bags of “samples.”
They were getting closer to Yakutsk. Once in Yakutsk, Krivoshei left his stones in a luggage storage office at the steamship dock and set off for the local geological administration, with a request for help in sending some important packages to Moscow, to the Academy of Sciences. Krivoshei went to the bathhouse, the hairdresser’s, bought an expensive suit, a few colored shirts, underwear and, combing his thinning hair, presented himself to the top academic authorities, smiling amiably.
The top academic authorities received him benevolently. The knowledge of foreign languages that he demonstrated produced the effect required.
The academic authorities saw the new arrival as a major cultural force, something that Yakutsk then badly lacked, and they begged Krivoshei to stay as long as he could. When Krivoshei responded with embarrassed phrases that he had to hurry off to Moscow, they promised to arrange his travel at state expense as far as Vladivostok. Keeping up his dignity, Krivoshei thanked them calmly. But the academic authorities had their own plans for Krivoshei.
“Of course you won’t say no, dear colleague,” they said in a fawning tone, “to giving our scientists two or three lectures. . . . About . . . well, you’re free to choose, it’s up to you, of course. Something about the coal reserves in the Central Yakutia plateau, perhaps?”
Krivoshei had a sinking feeling.
“Oh, of course, with great pleasure. Within the limits, as it were, of what I’m allowed to say. . . . You’ll understand that this information, without Moscow’s say-so. . . .”
Krivoshei then showered the scientific resources of Yakutsk with compliments.
No interrogator could have posed a question more cunningly than did the Yakut professor, despite his liking for their learned visitor, for his bearing, his tortoiseshell glasses, and his desire to serve his homeland as best he could.
A lecture took place and even attracted an audience of a respectable size. Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, drew a few things on the board, and listed dozens of foreign surnames.
“Those Muscovites don’t know all that much,” said a man sitting next to the Yakut professor, once they were in the buffet. “Everything that was geological in that lecture was really at the level of a secondary schoolboy, wasn’t it? As for the chemical analysis of coal, that’s nothing to do with geology, is it? The only thing brilliant about him is his glasses.”
“You mustn’t say that,” the professor said, frowning. “It’s all very useful, and our colleague from the capital certainly has a gift for popularization. We’ll have to ask him to repeat his lecture to our students.”
“Well, perhaps for first-year students,” the professor’s neighbor said, not backing down.
“Be quiet. Anyway, it’s a favor, it’s very good of him. You don’t look a gift horse. . . .”
Krivoshei very graciously repeated his lecture to the students, who responded with interest all around and completely positive approval.
At the expense of Yakutsk’s scientific organizations, their guest was dispatched to Irkutsk.
His collection—a few boxes packed with stones—had been sent off in advance. The “leader of the geological expedition” managed in Irkutsk to mail the stones to Moscow, addressing them to the Academy of Sciences, where they were received and where they lay for several years in the storage rooms, a scientific enigma whose nature nobody ever guessed at. It was assumed that this mysterious present, collected by some crazy geologist who had lost his knowledge and forgotten his own name, was the outcome of some as yet undiscovered tragedy in the polar regions.
“The most amazing thing,” Krivoshei used to say, “is that throughout my three months’ travels almost nobody anywhere—not in the nomads’ village councils, not at the top scientific institutions—ever asked me for my papers. I did have papers, but I never ever had to show them anywhere.”
Naturally, Krivoshei avoided Kharkov. He settled down in Mariupol, bought a house there, and used forged papers to get a job.
Exactly two years later, on the anniversary of his “crusade,” Krivoshei was arrested, tried, sentenced to another ten years, and sent back to Kolyma to serve his punishment.
Where had he made the blunder that completely nullified this truly heroic action, this exploit that had demanded so much self-control, so much ingenuity
, and physical strength—every human quality simultaneously?
This escape was unique in the care with which it was prepared, in the subtle and profound ideas behind it, in the psychological calculations that underlay the whole enterprise.
It was astounding in that almost nobody else was involved in organizing it, which was the main reason for its success.
The escape was also remarkable because a solitary man had personally taken on the whole state, with its thousands of men armed with rifles, in a region populated by the descendants of the first Russian settlers and by Yakuts, who had become accustomed to receiving ten kilos of white flour for every fugitive they caught (this was a tariff from tsarist times that was later incorporated into law). True, the man was forced, and rightly so, to see everyone he met as a possible informer or coward, but he had fought, he had done battle, and he had won!
So where and of what nature was the blunder that destroyed his brilliantly devised and splendidly realized task?
His wife was detained in the north. She was forbidden to leave for the mainland. The necessary papers for permission would have to be issued by the very same institution that dealt with her husband’s case. But all that had been anticipated; she settled down to wait. The months dragged on. As before, she was met with refusals, with no explanation as to why. She made an attempt to leave Kolyma from the opposite side, by plane over the same taiga rivers and side valleys that her husband had crossed on foot some months before. But this, too, ended with her being refused permission. She found herself locked up in an enormous stone prison one-eighth the size of the Soviet Union, and she couldn’t find a way out.
She was a woman, and she was tired of an endless struggle with someone whose face she couldn’t see, a struggle with someone far stronger than her, stronger and more cunning.
The money she’d brought with her ran out. Life in the north is expensive—one apple at the Magadan market costs a hundred rubles. Angelina found herself a job, but people who were hired locally and not recruited from the mainland were paid different salaries, which were much the same as those paid in Kharkov province.
Kolyma Tales Page 71