Novikov didn’t ask anyone’s advice: he signed.
I didn’t go to see Tsapko and report that the handover document had been signed. I went straight to the accounts office. The accountant took a look at my papers with all the certificates and other documents.
“All right, then,” he said. “You can have your back pay. But there’s one drawback. We had a telegram by phone from Magadan yesterday: all releases are to be stopped until spring, until the shipping season opens.”
“What do I care about the shipping season! I’m going by plane.”
“The order applies to everyone, as you well know. You weren’t born yesterday.”
I sat on the office floor and smoked and smoked. Tsapko passed by.
“Haven’t you gone yet?”
“No, not yet.”
“Well, stay then. . . .”
I wasn’t, for some reason, all that disappointed. I was used to such stabs in the back. But it was essential now that nothing go wrong. My entire body and all my willpower were still active, striving, fighting. It was just that not everything had been thought through. Fate had made a mistake in its cold calculations, in the game it was playing with me. I now found the mistake. I went to see Colonel Kondakov’s secretary: the boss himself was again away traveling.
“Was there a telegram yesterday about releases being stopped?”
“There was.”
“But I was. . . .” I felt my throat dry up and I could barely get the words out, “. . . but I was released a month ago, on order number sixty-five. So yesterday’s telegram can’t apply to me. I’ve already been released. A month ago. I’m on my way, I’m in transit. . . .”
“Yes, that seems to be right,” the lieutenant agreed. “Let’s go and see the accountant.”
The accountant agreed with us, but said, “Let’s wait for Kondakov to get back. Let him decide.”
“Well,” said the lieutenant, “I wouldn’t advise that. It was Kondakov who signed the order. It was his decision. Nobody tricked him into signing. He’ll flay you alive for not obeying.”
“Fine,” said the accountant, giving me a sidelong glance. “Only,” he said, “you’re paying for the journey out of your own pocket.”
A plane and train ticket to Moscow cost three and a half thousand rubles, and I was entitled to have it paid for by Far East Construction, which had been my employer for fourteen years when I was imprisoned and three years when I was a free man, or rather a freely contracted worker.
Judging by the accountant’s tone, I realized that he wasn’t going to make me the slightest concession.
My pay book, that of a former prisoner, had no long-service bonuses, but over three years it had accumulated six thousand rubles.
The hares I had caught, stewed or roasted, and eaten, the fish I had caught, stewed or roasted, and eaten had helped me save up this amazing sum of money.
I paid the money at the till, got a credit note for three thousand, the necessary papers, and a pass to the Oymiakon airport. I started to look for a truck heading in that direction. I soon found one. It was two hundred rubles for two hundred kilometers. I sold my blanket and pillow—what would I want them for in a plane? I sold my medical books to Tsapko at the official price. He could then sell the textbooks and encyclopedias for ten times as much. But I didn’t have time to think of that.
There was something worse. I’d lost my talisman, a homemade knife that I’d had for many years.
I had been sleeping on sacks of flour and it had apparently fallen out of my pocket. If I was going to find it, I would have to unload the truck.
We arrived at Oymiakon early in the morning. I’d been working at Tumor, near the Oymiakon airport, a year before, in a nice little post office, where I sent and received so many letters. I got off the truck at the airport hotel.
“Listen,” said the truck driver. “Have you lost anything?”
“I lost my knife lying on all that flour.”
“Here it is. I pulled up a board at the back and a knife fell onto the road. It’s a nice little blade.”
“Have it. As a souvenir. I don’t need a lucky charm any more.”
But my joy was premature. There were no regular flights at Oymiakon airport, and about ten truckloads of passengers had been waiting since autumn. There were lists, each of fourteen passengers, and a daily roll call. Like life in a transit camp.
“When was the last plane?”
“A week ago.”
So I would be stuck here until spring. I shouldn’t have given my talisman to the truck driver.
I went to see Suprun, the clerk of works at the camp where I had been a paramedic a year before.
“Are you trying to get to the mainland?”
“Yes. Help me to get away.”
“Let’s go and see Veltman tomorrow.”
“Is Captain Veltman still in charge of the airport?”
“Yes, except he’s a major now, not a captain. He’s just got his new stripes.”
The next morning the clerk of works and I went to Veltman’s office and said hello.
“Look, our guy is trying to get away.”
“Then why didn’t he just come and see me? He knows me just as well as he does you, the clerk.”
“Just to make sure, sir.”
“All right. Where are your things?”
“I’ve got everything with me,” I pointed to my little plywood suitcase.
“Excellent. Go to the hotel and wait.”
“But I. . . .”
“Shut up! Do as you’re told. Clerk, you’re to take out a bulldozer tomorrow and clear the airfield, or . . . if there’s no bulldozer. . . .”
“I’ll do it, I will,” said Suprun with a smile.
I said goodbye to both Veltman and the clerk of works, entered the hotel corridor and, stepping over people’s legs and bodies, found myself a space by the window. It was a little bit colder there, but later, after a few planes and a few more queues, I moved to the stove, the actual stove.
An hour or so passed, and people who were lying down leapt to their feet, listening eagerly to a roar in the sky.
“A plane!”
“A Douglas cargo plane.”
“It’s not a cargo plane, it’s a passenger one.”
The duty officer of the airport was dashing up and down the airport in his hat with earflaps and a cockade. He had a list in his hand, the list of fourteen persons he had learned by heart several months before.
“Everyone whose name I call, quickly buy your tickets. The pilot’s having dinner, and then you’ll be off.”
“Semionov!”
“Here.”
“Galitsky!”
“Here.”
“Why has my name been crossed off?” raged the fourteenth man. “I’ve been waiting in line now for over two months.”
“Don’t talk to me about it. It’s the airport chief who’s crossed you off. Veltman himself, personally. Is that enough for you? If you want to argue, there’s Veltman’s office. He’s there, and he’ll explain why.”
But the fourteenth man was reluctant to have it out. You never know what might happen next. Veltman might not like his face. And then he’d not only not catch the next plane, he’d be removed from all the lists. Things like that had happened before.
“Who’s been written in?”
“I can’t make it out,” said the duty officer with the cockade as he stared at the new surname and suddenly shouted out my name.
“Here I am.”
“Go to the ticket office, quickly.”
I decided I wouldn’t play the gentleman, I wouldn’t refuse, I’d get away, away. I had seventeen years of Kolyma behind me. I rushed to the ticket office. I was the last man. I pulled out my papers, which were in disarray. I crumpled up my money and dropped things on the floor.
“Run quickly,” said the cashier. “Your pilot’s had his dinner, and the weather reports are bad. He’s got to get ahead of the weather and reach Yakutsk.”
&
nbsp; I barely breathed as I listened to this unearthly conversation.
When he’d landed, the pilot had steered the plane as near as he could to the cafeteria door. Boarding had finished some time ago. I took my plywood suitcase and ran to the plane. I hadn’t put on my gloves, I was clutching my ticket, covered in hoarfrost, in my freezing fingers, and I was out of breath from running.
The airport office checked my ticket, and pushed me through the plane’s hatch. The pilot shut the hatch and went to the cabin.
“Air!”
I reached my seat. I was too weak to think of anything, or to understand anything.
My heart pounded for all seven hours of our flight, until the plane suddenly landed. It was Yakutsk.
My new companion, the man sitting next to me in the plane, and I hugged one other as we slept at Yakutsk airport. I had to work out the cheapest way of traveling to Moscow. Even though my travel documents were only valid as far as Jambul in Kazakhstan, I realized that Kolyma laws probably did not apply in the mainland. It was probably possible to find a job and have a life somewhere other than Jambul. I still had time to think about that.
Meanwhile, the cheapest way was to take a plane to Irkutsk, and a train to Moscow. That would be five days and nights. Or I could fly as far as Novosibirsk and reach Moscow from there by rail. Whichever plane was the first to leave. . . . I bought a ticket to Irkutsk.
The plane wasn’t going to leave for a few hours, and that gave me time to walk to Yakutsk and look at the frozen Lena River and the silent, single-storied city, which looked like a big village. No, Yakutsk wasn’t a city, it wasn’t the mainland. It had no locomotive smoke.
1964
THE TRAIN
AT IRKUTSK station I lay down under the sharp, bright light of an electric lamp. Just in case, I’d sewn all my money in my belt, a linen belt that had been made for me in the tailor’s shop two years before and which now, finally, would have to do its job. Carefully stepping over people’s legs, choosing a path through filthy, stinking, bedraggled bodies, a policeman was patrolling the station. Even better, there was a military patrol with red armbands and automatic weapons. No policeman, naturally, could cope with the gangs of thieves, and that had probably been ascertained long before I turned up at the station. It wasn’t that I was afraid of having my money stolen; I hadn’t been afraid of anything for a long time. It was just that having money was better than not having money. The light got in my eyes, but I’d had the light get into my eyes a thousand times before, and I’d learned to sleep very well with the light on. I turned up the collar of my pea jacket, which the official documents called a short overcoat, shoved my hands as deep as I could up my sleeves, loosened my felt boots a little. My toes felt free, and I went to sleep. I wasn’t afraid of drafts. Everything was what I was used to: locomotives whistling, carriages moving, the station, the policeman, the market outside the station—it was like having a recurring dream, and then I woke up. I was frightened, and cold sweat broke out on my skin. I was frightened by that terrible human strength, the desire and ability to forget. I saw I was ready to forget everything, to erase twenty years from my life. And what years they were! When I realized this, I mastered myself. I knew that I wouldn’t let my memory wipe out all that I had seen. And I calmed down and went back to sleep.
I woke up, redid my foot wrappings so the dry side was against my skin, and washed in the snow, as black water splashed off me in all directions. Then I set off into town. This was the first proper city I had seen in eighteen years. Yakutsk had been just a big village. The Lena River had receded a long way from the town, but the inhabitants were afraid of it coming back and overflowing. Its sandy bed was an empty field, filled with nothing but a raging blizzard. Here in Irkutsk there were big buildings, people running around, shops.
I bought a set of knitted underwear, something I hadn’t worn for eighteen years. It gave me indescribable pleasure to stand in line, to pay, to hand over the receipt. “Size?” I forgot my size. “The biggest.” The sales girl shook her head disapprovingly. “Fifty-five?”—“That’s right.” She wrapped up my underwear, which I never got to wear, since my size was fifty-one, as I found out when I got to Moscow. All the shop assistants wore identical blue dresses. I also bought a small brush and a penknife. These wonderful objects were fabulously cheap. In the north things like that were homemade: small brushes and penknives.
I went in to a bookshop. In the secondhand section Soloviov’s Russian History was on sale for 850 rubles for the set. No, no, I wouldn’t buy books until I got to Moscow. But holding books, standing by the bookshop counter was as good as a good meat soup . . . as a glass of fresh running water.
In Irkutsk my path separated from my companions. Only the day before, we had walked around the town and bought our plane tickets together. The four of us waited in line together, because it never occurred to us to entrust our money to anyone. That wasn’t done in our society. I walked to the bridge and looked down at the seething, green Angara River, a mighty, clean river that was so clear you could see the riverbed. My freezing hand touched the cold dark-brown railings, I breathed in the smell of gas and the dust of the wintry city, I looked at the scurrying pedestrians, and I realized how much of a townsman I was. I realized that the most precious and important thing for a man is the time when his homeland becomes his homeland, before family feeling or love are born, and that time is childhood and early youth. And it touched my heart. I greeted Irkutsk with all my soul. Irkutsk was my Vologda, my Moscow.
As I was approaching the railway station, someone clapped me on the shoulder.
“Somebody wants a chat with you,” said a fair-haired boy in a quilted jacket. He led me aside into a dark place. Immediately, a short man loomed out of the murk and looked at me intensely.
I could tell by the way he was looking at me whom I was facing. Cowardly and brazen, ingratiating and full of hatred as they were, I didn’t have to know their identity: they would appear in their own time with knives, nails, stabbing instruments in their hands. For the time being I was facing just one person, with pale, earthy skin and swollen eyelids, with tiny lips that seemed to be glued onto his twisted shaven chin.
“Who are you?” He stretched out a filthy hand with long fingernails. An answer was required. No military patrol or policeman could have come to my help here. “You’re from Kolyma!”
“Yes, from Kolyma.”
“What did you do there?”
“I was a paramedic for prospectors.”
“A paramedic? A quack? So you were sucking the blood of people like us. We need to talk.”
I had the new penknife I’d just bought in my pocket: I clutched it and said nothing. All I could hope for was a chance, a chance of some sort. Patience and luck, the two whales on which the prisoner’s world stands, were what used to save us, and still would. And a chance turned up.
The darkness parted.
“I know him,” A new figure, a complete stranger to me, appeared. I had a very good memory for faces, but I had never seen this man.
“You do?” a finger with the long fingernail described a semicircle.
“Yes, he worked at Kudyma,” said the stranger. “They said he was all right. He helped our people. They had nothing but good to say about him.”
The finger and its fingernail vanished.
“All right, go,” said the thief angrily. “We’ll think about it.”
I was in luck. I didn’t have to spend the night at the station. The Moscow train was departing that evening.
In the morning the light of the electric lamps was oppressive: it was a cloudy light that refused to switch off. Whenever the doors banged, you could see Irkutsk’s cold and bright daylight. Thick crowds of people blocked all the passages and filled every square centimeter of the concrete floors, and the grease-stained benches, too, if anyone stood up, moved, or left. There was an endless line at the ticket counter: a ticket to Moscow, to Moscow, and we’ll take it from there. . . . Not to Jambul, the destina
tion indicated in my papers. At last it was my turn at the window. I made convulsive movements to get my money and push a pile of shiny banknotes through to the till, where they would vanish, vanish irretrievably, as had my life until this minute. But the miracle continued working, and the window threw out a rough-surfaced, hard and thin object, like a lump of happiness: a ticket to Moscow. The woman behind the counter yelled out something to the effect that it was a mixed train, that the reservation for a hard seat was for a mixed train, that there would be a proper passenger train only the next day or the day after that. But I didn’t understand any of that, except the words “today” and “tomorrow.” Today, today. Clutching my ticket tightly, trying to feel all its edges with my unfeeling frostbitten skin, I pushed my way through and found a free space. I’d come by plane and I had the minimum of luggage: just a small plywood suitcase. I was from the Far North, I had the minimum of luggage, only the small plywood suitcase that I had tried and failed to sell in Adygalakh when I was getting the money together to go to Moscow. They hadn’t paid my travel costs, but that wasn’t important. The main thing was the hard piece of cardboard: a train ticket.
I got my breath back in a corner of the station. My place under the bright lamp had, of course, been taken. I walked across the city and returned to the station.
Boarding had started. A toy train stood on a raised track. It was unbelievably small, as if a few cardboard boxes had been lined up among the hundreds of others where the track maintenance workers and railway employees lived, their frozen washing hung out to dry and flapping in the gusts of wind.
My train was just like those lines of carriages that had been turned into hostels.
The train was not like the sort of train that leaves at such-and-such a time for Moscow. It was more like a hostel. Like a hostel, it had people coming down the steps from the carriages, while here and there things were being passed through the air over the heads of people moving around. I realized that this train lacked the essential thing: life, a promise of movement—there was no locomotive. And in fact, none of the hostels had a locomotive.
Kolyma Tales Page 79