Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  The first man was on crutches. He sat down on the bench next to the light, put his crutches on the floor, and started undressing. That revealed a steel corset.

  “Do I take it off?”

  “Of course.”

  The man started unlacing his corset, and Pesniakevich the interrogator bent down to help him.

  “Have you nailed me, old pal?” asked the man in gangster slang, giving the word “nailed” its inoffensive gangster sense.

  “I have, Pleve.”

  The man in a corset, Pleve, managed the tailor’s shop in the camp. This was an important post, for he had twenty skilled men under him. They took customers’ orders, even from free men, if the bosses permitted.

  The naked man curled up on the bench. The steel corset lay on the floor while it was recorded in the list of objects that had been removed.

  “How do I record this thing?” the solitary block’s store man asked Pleve, kicking the corset with the toe of his boot.

  “Steel prosthesis, corset,” replied the naked man.

  Pesniakevich moved aside somewhere. I asked Pleve, “Did you really know that cop before you were locked up?”

  “Of course I did,” he replied harshly. “His mother used to run a brothel in Minsk, and I used to go there. That was in Tsar Nicholas the Bloody’s time.”

  Pesniakevich emerged from the far end of the corridor with four guards. The guards took Pleve by the feet and hand and carried him into the cell. The lock clicked shut.

  The next man was Karavayev, manager of the horse stables. He had served under Marshal Budionny in the Red Cavalry, and in the Civil War he had lost an arm. Karavayev banged his iron arm on the duty warden’s desk: “You sons of bitches!”

  “Take off your bit of iron. Give us the arm.”

  Karavayev took off his arm and swung it in the air, but the guards flung themselves on the Red cavalryman and shoved him into a cell. We heard the sound of his elaborate curses.

  “Listen, Ruchkin,” the chief of the solitary block started speaking, “any noise and we take away your hot food.”

  “You can stuff your hot food.”

  The solitary chief took a piece of chalk from his pocket and marked Karavayev’s cell with a cross.

  “Well, who’s going to sign for his arm?”

  “Nobody is. Just put a tick or something,” ordered Pesniakevich.

  It was now the turn of the doctor, our Dr. Zhitkov. He was a deaf old man, and he handed over his ear trumpet. Then came Colonel Panin, who managed the carpentry workshop. The colonel’s leg had been torn off by a shell somewhere in East Prussia during World War I. He was a superb carpenter and told me that the gentry always had their children taught a craft, some manual craft. Old Panin unbuttoned his artificial leg and hopped on one leg into his cell.

  Only two of us were left: Shor, Grisha Shor, the senior foreman, and I.

  “Look at the way he moves: neat!” said Grisha, who had been overcome by the merriment that comes with arrest. “He gave his leg, the other man gave his arm. So I’ll hand in my eye.” And Grisha deftly removed his right eye, which was made of porcelain, and showed it to me when it was in his hand.

  “I didn’t know you had an artificial eye,” I said with amazement. “I’d never noticed.”

  “You’re no good at noticing things. But it was a good choice of eye, very successful.”

  While they were recording Grisha’s eye, the chief of the solitary block suddenly became merry and couldn’t stop giggling.

  “So one man gives me an arm, another a leg, another an ear, another his back, and this one his eye. We’ll collect a complete body. And how about you?” He carefully looked over my naked body. “What are you going to hand over? Your soul?”

  “No,” I said, “I won’t let you have my soul.”

  1965

  CHASING THE LOCOMOTIVE’S SMOKE

  YES, THAT used to be my dream: to hear the whistle of a locomotive, to see its white smoke spreading down the slope of the railway embankment.

  I used to wait for the white smoke, the living steam engine.

  We crawled until we were exhausted, reluctant to throw off our pea jackets and fur jackets: we had only fifteen kilometers to go before we got home, to the barracks. But we were afraid to leave our jackets lying on the road, or in the ditch, to run, walk, crawl, to get rid of the terrible weight of our clothing. We were afraid to drop our pea jackets: it took only a few minutes in a winter night for your clothes to turn into a frozen bunch of pine branches, into an icy stone. At night we would never find our clothes, they’d be lost in the winter taiga, just as a quilted jacket would be lost in summer in the dwarf pine bushes, if you didn’t tie it like a marker, a marker of life, to the very top of the bushes. We knew that without pea jackets and fur jackets we would be doomed. So we crawled on, our strength draining away. We had only to stop moving to feel the deadening cold creeping over our enfeebled bodies, which had lost their main function: to be a source of warmth, the simple warmth that arouses anger, if not hope.

  We crawled along together, free men and prisoners. The driver, who had run out of gas, had stayed behind to wait for the help we would summon. He stayed behind, making a bonfire out of the only dry timber that was available, the guideposts. By saving himself, the driver was perhaps threatening other truckers with death, since all the guideposts had now been collected, broken up, and put on the bonfire, which burned with a small, but lifesaving flame. The driver bent over the fire and the flames, every now and again shoving another stick, another splinter on it. He wasn’t even thinking of getting warm or warming himself. He was just trying to protect his life. . . . If the driver had abandoned his truck and crawled away with us over the sharp cold rocks of the mountain highway, he would have been sentenced to the camps. The driver was waiting, and we crawled on to get help.

  I crawled, trying not to think any unnecessary thoughts—thoughts were like movements, and energy was not to be spent on anything other than getting abrasions, rolling, and dragging one’s body further along the road on a winter night.

  And yet our breath in that minus-fifty cold seemed like the smoke from a locomotive. The taiga’s silver larches seemed like a burst of locomotive smoke. The white haze covering the sky and filling our night was also locomotive smoke, the smoke that I had dreamed of for so many years. In this white silence I could hear not the sound of the wind, but a musical celestial phrase, and a clear, melodious, resonant human voice sounded out in the frosty air over us. The musical phrase was a hallucination, a sound mirage, and it had something about it of the locomotive smoke that filled my valley. The human voice was just a continuation, a logical continuation of this winter musical mirage.

  I saw that I wasn’t the only one to hear that voice. All of us, as we made our way, could hear it. We were getting colder, but too weak to move. The celestial voice had something in it bigger than hope, bigger than our tortoise-like progress toward life. The celestial voice was repeating: “Here is a message from tass news agency: fifteen doctors. . . .” They’d suddenly been charged, they were entirely innocent, their confessions had been obtained by the use of impermissible torture and by interrogation methods that were strictly forbidden by Soviet law.

  The doctors had been released. That was spectacular! What about Lidia Timashuk’s [42] letters and medal? What about the journalist Yelena Kononenko, who glorified vigilance and was the heroine of vigilance, the personification of vigilance, as demonstrated before the whole world?

  Stalin’s death had not made the appropriate impression on us. We were too experienced.

  Celestial music had been playing for some time now, as we crawled on. Nobody said a word. Everyone digested the news as best he could.

  The lights of the settlement were now glimmering. The crawling men were greeted by their wives, subordinates, and bosses, who’d come out to meet them. Nobody came out to meet me: I had to crawl on my own to the barracks, to the room, the bunk, to light and stoke the iron stove. When I had gotten
warm and had drunk some hot water, heated in a mug placed on the burning wood in the stove, I stood up straight in front of the fire and felt the warm light run over my face. Not all the skin on my face had been frostbitten earlier: there were still intact patches, segments, and areas. I then made a decision.

  The next day I applied to be released from my job.

  “Release is in the hands of God,” the district chief said sarcastically. But he accepted the application, and it was dispatched by the next courier post.

  “I have been in Kolyma for seventeen years. I request to be released. As a former prisoner, I have no rights as a long-serving employee for additional payments. It will cost the state virtually nothing to release me. This is my request.” Two weeks later I received a refusal but no explanation whatsoever. I then immediately wrote in protest to the prosecutor, demanding his intervention, and so on.

  The gist of it was that, if there was any hope, all the legal shackles had to be removed or smashed, so that the formalities and the papers would not be held up. Very probably, all my correspondence was a waste of time. But you never knew. . . .

  The portraits of Beria were torn down in the club, but I kept on writing and writing. Beria’s arrest didn’t make me more hopeful. Events seemed to be unfolding of their own accord, and any secret connection with my fate was intangible. I had to think about something other than Beria.

  The prosecutor replied two weeks later. This prosecutor once held important positions in the neighboring administration. He had been removed from his post and transferred to somewhere in the backwoods. His wife had been trading in sewing machines, selling them at ten times the original price, and an article about this had even gotten into the newspapers. The prosecutor tried to defend himself, using the most predictable weapon: he denounced the administration boss’s orderly, Azbukin, for selling prisoners tobacco at ten rubles per roll-up. Parcels of tobacco came from the mainland by air, virtually by diplomatic post in the special baggage allowances, with higher limits or no limits at all, for the top bosses. The boss of the administration had twenty people to lunch every day, so that no polar bonuses, no seniority pay increases could cover the expense of the wine and fruit. The administration boss was a loving family man, the father of two children. He covered all his expenses by selling tobacco at ten rubles per homemade cigarette. Eight matchboxes full of tobacco made sixty cigarettes from a two-ounce packet. At six hundred rubles for two ounces, the game was worth the candle.

  For daring to attack this method of getting rich, the prosecutor was immediately dismissed and moved to our backwoods. He made sure the law was being observed, and he answered letters quickly, for he was inspired by hatred of his superiors and fired by his battle with them.

  I wrote a second application: “I was refused a release. Now, sending you a certificate from the prosecutor. . . .”

  Two weeks later I received a refusal. There were no explanations. It was as if I’d asked for a foreign passport, something for which a refusal is given without explanations.

  I wrote to the prosecutor of the province, of Magadan province, and had a reply: I was entitled to be released and allowed to leave. This battle of higher powers was reaching a new stage. Every turn of the wheel was leaving traces in the form of numerous orders, clarifications, and decisions. One could vaguely sense some sort of connecting logic in them. My applications were getting, as the criminals put it, “in line.” In line with the times?

  Two weeks later I received a refusal, again with no explanations. And although I repeatedly wrote pleading letters to my boss, the head of the health department of the administration, Tsapko, a paramedic, I never had a reply from him.

  It was three hundred kilometers from my sector to the administration, where the nearest medical sector was.

  I realized that I needed to meet Tsapko in person. And he arrived in the company of the new head of the camps, promising me a lot of things, everything, even release.

  “I’ll take it up as soon as we get back. Just stay on here for the winter. You can go in spring.”

  “No. Even if I don’t get a release, I’ll certainly leave your administration.”

  We parted. August turned into September. The fish stopped returning down the rivers. But I wasn’t interested in trapping or dynamiting them, a practice which resulted in the various types of salmon and other fish bobbing about, their white bellies up, on the waves of the mountain streams, and then being swept away into the backwaters and rotting until they were unfit to eat.

  Something had to happen. And it did. Our district was visited by an engineer, Colonel Kondakov, head of the roads administration. He spent the night in the district chief’s cabin. I was in a hurry to catch Kondakov before he went to sleep, so I knocked on the door.

  “Come in.”

  Kondakov was sitting at the desk, his tunic unbuttoned, rubbing a red mark left by the collar all round his white, round neck.

  “District paramedic. May I discuss a personal matter with you?”

  “I never talk to anyone when I’m traveling.”

  “I foresaw that,” I said coldly and calmly. “I’ve written an application for you. Here’s the envelope: it explains everything. Please will you read it whenever you think the time is right.”

  Kondakov felt embarrassed and stopped fiddling with his tunic collar. Whatever else he was, Kondakov was an engineer, a man with a university degree, albeit a technical one.

  “Sit down and tell me what it’s about.”

  I sat down and told him.

  “If it’s all as you say, then I promise to have you released as soon as I get back to headquarters. In about ten days’ time.”

  Kondakov wrote my surname down in a tiny little notebook.

  Ten days later I had a telephone call from the administration: from friends there, if I had any. Or perhaps they were just curious bystanders, rather than spectators who could look on for many hours without stopping, over many years, at a fish tearing free from a hole in the fish trap, at a fox gnawing off its paw so as to escape from a snare. They look on and make no attempt to undo the snare and let the fox go. They just watch the struggle between wild animal and human being.

  A telephoned telegram was sent at my expense from my district to the administration. I had to beg the local boss for permission to send this telegram. . . . No reply.

  A Kolyma winter was setting in. Ice was covering the streams, and only at a few places in the rapids was the water still flowing and running, still alive, throwing up mist like locomotive smoke.

  I had to make haste, make haste.

  “I’m sending a seriously ill patient to the headquarters,” I reported to my boss. The patient had an inflamed stomach ulcer, due to malnutrition, avitaminosis; it was a stomach ulcer that was too easily confused with diphtheria. We had the right to send patients on in such cases: in fact, we were obliged to do so. It was an order, it was the law, it was a matter of conscience.

  “And who’s going to accompany him?”

  “I am.”

  “Yourself?”

  “Yes. We’ll shut the clinic down for a week.”

  This sort of thing had happened before, and my boss knew it.

  “I’ll draw up an inventory. So that nothing gets stolen. And the cupboard can be sealed with a police seal.”

  “That’s the right thing to do.” My boss was reassured.

  We left on a truck that was going our way. We froze and stopped every thirty kilometers to get warm. On the third day, when it was still light, we reached the administration building in the yellowish-white haze of a Kolyma day.

  The first man I saw was Tsapko the paramedic, the head of the health sector.

  “I’ve brought a seriously ill patient,” I reported. Tsapko, however, was not looking at the patient, but at my suitcases—I had suitcases, plywood, homemade ones for my books, my cheap cotton suit, my linen, cushion, and blanket. Tsapko understood everything.

  “I won’t authorize you to leave unless the boss does.
”

  We went to see his boss. He was a little man, compared to Colonel Kondakov the engineer. Judging by his wavering tone and his hesitant answers, I realized that some new orders, new clarifications had been received.

  “Don’t you want to stay the winter here?” It was the end of October, and winter was in full swing.

  “No.”

  “All right. If he doesn’t want to, don’t detain him. . . .”

  “Yes, sir!” Tsapko stood to attention in front of the camp chief, clicked his heels and we walked out into the filthy corridor.

  “Well then,” said Tsapko with satisfaction. “You’ve got everything you wanted. We are releasing you. You’re free to go wherever you want. You can go to the mainland. Paramedic Novikov has been given your job. Like me, he was at the front, in the war. You can go back to your place with him and do the handover properly. Then you can come and get your final pay.”

  “What, three hundred kilometers? And then come back here. That will be a month spent traveling. At least.”

  “I can’t do any more for you. I’ve done everything.”

  I realized that my chat with the camp chief was a ruse that had been planned in advance.

  There was nobody in Kolyma to ask for advice. Prisoners and ex-prisoners don’t have friends. The first person you ask for advice will run off to a boss to tell him, to betray a comrade, to demonstrate their vigilance.

  Tsapko had gone some time ago. I was still sitting on the floor in the corridor, smoking and smoking.

  “And who’s this Novikov? A paramedic from the front?”

  I found Novikov. He was a man who had been crushed by Kolyma. His loneliness, sobriety, and timid look testified that for Novikov Kolyma had turned out to be quite different from what he expected when he started chasing after the extra ruble bonuses. Novikov was too much of a novice, too much a frontline soldier.

  “Listen,” I said. “You’re fresh from the front. I’ve been here for seventeen years. I’ve served two sentences. I’m being released now. I’ll be seeing my family. My paramedic clinic is all in order. Here’s the inventory. It’s all been sealed. Sign the receipt without having to inspect the inventory.”