Alongside “prison” literature, we have had “police” literature, which is also rich in significant figures, from Chesterton to Agatha Christie.
These are different literatures. More exactly, they’re opposites, with opposing moral orientations.
In this way, two moral bills of fare exist, two ideological points of view.
According to the first, the inmate appears as the suffering, tragic figure, deserving of admiration and pity. The guard, correspondingly, is a monster and villain, the incarnation of cruelty and oppression.
According to the second point of view, the inmate appears as the monster, the fiend, while it follows that the policeman is a hero, a moralist, a vivid artistic personality.
When I became a guard, I was ready to see the prisoner as the victim, and myself as the punisher and oppressor. That is to say, I was inclined towards the first, more humane point of view, the one more characteristic of Russian literature which had nurtured me and, of course, the more convincing one. (After all, Simenon* is no Dostoevsky.)
After a week, it was all over with these fantasies. The first point of view turned out to be completely false. The second, even more so.
Following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse* (whom, naturally, I haven’t read), I detected a third alternative.
I detected a striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards, between the burglar recidivists and the controllers of the production zones, between the zek foremen and the camp administration officials. One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.
We spoke the same criminal slang, sang exactly the same sentimental songs, endured exactly the same privations.
We even looked alike. We all had crew cuts. Our weather-beaten faces were coloured with purple blotches. Our boots gave off the smell of a stable. And from a distance the prison uniforms seemed indistinguishable from the worn soldiers’ jackets.
We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable. Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term.
I repeat – this is the main aspect of prison life. Everything else is peripheral.
All of my stories are written about this.
Apropos of this, recently a package arrived from Dartmouth. Two pieces of microfilm and four pages of text on cigarette paper.
Some part or other, I heard, appeared in the Blue Lagoon Anthology (in Texas). It would be too bad if something really good got lost.
On my way back from Minneapolis, I’ll stop in Detroit. If you can pick me up – good. If not, I’ll find your place on my own.
Repairing the roof in my honour is not required.
BEFORE YOU REACHED the logging sector, you had to go through the famous Osokin swamp, then cross the railroad embankment, then go down a hill around the dreary buildings of the generator. By then you had only got to Chebyu, a settlement in which half the population consisted of seasonal workers who had once been prisoners. They were people whose feuds and friendships didn’t look much different.
They had waited out their prison terms for years. Then one day they changed into civilian clothes that had lain in a storeroom for twenty years. They walked out of the gates, hearing the cold clank of the bolts behind their backs, and then it became clear that the freedom they had longed for was no more than the familiar refrain of a song. They had dreamt of freedom, sung and swore. But they left prison camp – and the taiga stretched to the horizon.
Evidently, they had been destroyed by the endless monotony of prison days. They didn’t want to change their habits or re-establish lost ties. They settled down between camp zones within the sentries’ fields of vision, maintaining, if one can put it that way, our country’s ideological balance, which has spread to both sides of the prison fences.
They married God knows whom, and crippled their children by drilling them in camp wisdom: “Only the tiny fish gets caught in the net.” As a result, the settlement lived by the prison code of law. Inhabitants paraded their criminal conduct. And even the third generation of any given family shot up morphine. And, for good measure, they smoked junk and maintained their hatred of the guards.
It was not advisable for a drunk serviceman to show his face here. Storm clouds quickly gathered above the red cap band, doors slammed. It was best for the fellow not to walk alone.
About a year ago, three woodcutters escorted a pale serviceman out of a beer joint. Flannel epaulettes bristled on his shoulders. He begged, resisted and even commanded. But they hit him so hard that his cap rolled underneath a porch, and then they did the “see-saw” – they put a board on his chest and stamped on him in steel-reinforced boots.
The next morning, storehouse workers found the corpse. At first they thought: drunk, but then they suddenly noticed the narrow trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and going underneath his head.
Then a military investigator arrived. He spoke of the dangers of alcohol before showing a film called The Elusive Avengers. In answer to the questions: “So how is Corporal Dymza? Checked out, did he? And that’s that?” he answered, “The investigation, comrades, is on the only true path!”
As for the woodcutters, they got away with it, though every dog in Chebyu knew who they were.
To reach the logging sector, you had to cross railroad tracks, and before that, shaky planks over water that looked white in the sun, and before that, the Chebyu settlement, filled with fear and torpor.
Here is a portrait, or something more like a photograph. Alabaster lyres above the boarded door of the local club. A poor excuse for a store, crammed with gingerbread and horse collars. Artistically lettered signs in its windows promising meat, eggs, wool and other goods that intimate the good life. A poster of Leonid Kostritsa, the singer. A dead man or a drunk lying by the side of the road.
And over all this, the barking of dogs and the deafening roar of the power saw.
Instructor Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. He held a canvas dog leash in his hand. Lighting a cigarette and breaking the matches, he was saying something in Estonian.
Gustav taught Estonian to all the dogs in the kennel. The dog handlers were unhappy about this. They complained to Sergeant Major Yevchenko, “You order her to ‘Heel!’ and the bitch responds: ‘Nicht verstehen.*’”
The instructor spoke little in general. If he did speak, it was in Estonian and not, for the most part, with his countrymen, but with Harun. The dog always accompanied him.
Pakhapil was a closed person. Earlier that autumn, a telegram arrived addressed to him, signed by the division commander and the secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Narva: “URGENT FLY REGISTER MARRIAGE CITIZEN HILDA COX BEING NINTH MONTH PREGNANCY.”
There’s an Estonian for you, I thought. Comes here from his Kurlandia, says nothing for half a year like Turgenev’s Gerasim,* teaches all the dogs to bark in a foreign tongue, and then flies off to marry some citizen with the fabulous name of Hilda Cox.
That very day, Gustav hitched a ride out with a log-carrier. For a whole month faithful Harun whimpered in the dog kennel. Finally Pakhapil returned.
He offered the orderly some good Tallinn cigarettes. Then he came over to the parallel bars, knocking down dandelions with his new suitcase, and held out his hand to each of us.
“Married?” Fidel asked him.
“Ya,” Gustav answered, blushing.
“Become a daddy?”
“Ya.”
“What did you name it?” I asked. I was interested to know what the child had been called in view of the mama’s name.
That’s an Estonian for you, I thought. A whole year he lives at the edge of the world. Ruins all the guard dogs. Then climbs into a log-carrier and leaves. He leaves so that he may kiss the unimaginable Hilda Braun, or rather Cox, to the cheering of wedding guests.
“So what did you name it?”
Gustav gave me a look and put out the cigarette on the heel of his boot.
“The devil only knows.” And he went off to the pound to chat with his four-legged adjutant.
And once again, they appeared together. The dog seemed the more talkative of the two.
One time I saw Pakhapil with a book. He was reading in the well-heated drying room, sitting at a table yellow from gun oil, under the hooks for the sheepskin jackets. Harun was asleep at his feet.
I walked up on tiptoe, looked over his shoulder. It was a Russian book. I saw the title: Magic Tricks for the Club Stage.
Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. In his hand was the canvas leash, which he kept whipping against the top of his boot. An empty holster dangled on his belt. His TT was in his pocket.
Lance Corporal Petrov blocked the road from the forest. Small and clumsy, Fidel stumbled along the side of the road. He would often cock his weapon when there was no need. Fidel looked as though he had been forcibly tied to his sub-machine gun.
The zeks despised him, and in the event of some “incident”, they would have had no mercy on him.
A year before, near Sindor, Fidel had detained a group of prisoners for some offence. He got approval and then, swinging out his weapon, forced a column of men into an icy stream. The zeks stood there, silent, knowing full well the danger of a sixty-round sub-machine gun in the hands of a neurotic and a coward.
For about forty minutes, Fidel trained his gun on them, getting more and more worked up. Then someone far back in line cursed him, hesitantly. The column shuddered. The men in front started singing, and the sound carried above the river:“And it all happened long ago,
Ech, near Rostov-on-Don,
With my girl, with my girl…
What a queer one I was then,
I put on a stolen jacket
And pants, and pants…”
Fidel began moving backwards. He was small and clumsy in his sturdy sheepskin jacket. His eyes white with terror, he yelled, “Step forward, bitch, and I’ll lay you to waste!”
And that was when the recidivist Kuptsov made his appearance (Kuptsov aka Koval, Alyamov, Gak, Shalikov, Rozhin). He stepped out of the first column and spoke out in the silence that immediately fell as he lightly pushed aside the barrel of the sub-machine gun. “You get burnt up? I’ll put you out.” His fingers stood out white against the dark muzzle.
Fidel jerked the gun to himself, fired a blind burst above their heads, and kept stepping back, stepping back…
That was the first time I saw Kuptsov. His hand looked elegant. His padded jacket, on that freezing day, was wide open. His words took the place of the song that had died out: “I’ll put you out.”
He made me think of a man walking against the wind, as if the wind had chosen him as a permanent adversary, wherever he walked, whatever he did.
After that, I saw Kuptsov often, in the dark, damp isolation cell, by a campfire in the logging sector, pale from loss of blood. And the sensation of the wind now never left me.
Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. Snapping the canvas leash on his boot, he was saying something to the dog in Estonian. To the left, Lance Corporal Petrov guarded the column, which no one worried about, since everyone was aware of the threat of the modernized AK in the hands of a warrior like Fidel.
We crossed the cold, narrow stream, watched to see that no prisoners tried to hide under the planks, led the brigade to the railway crossing, breathed in the station’s odour of cinders and crossed the embankment. Then we headed for the logging sector.
That was the name for the part of the forest surrounded by a flimsy, symbolic fence. Plywood watchtowers poked into view at treetop level. A whole group of guards stood watch. At their head was Sergeant Shumeyko, who languished for days on end waiting for “a situation”.
We led the brigade into the guarded sector. After this, our duties changed. Pakhapil became the radio operator. He took an R-109 out of the checkpoint cabin’s safe, pulled out an antenna as pliant as a fishing rod and then sent tender, mysterious words out into the airwaves: “Hello, come in Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Do you copy? Do you copy?”
Making a revolting sound, Fidel tried the rusty latch pins in the transit corridor. He counted prisoner identification cards, took keys from the weapons room, checked the “Amber” and “Flytrap” escape alarms, felt the stove to see if it was hot. He became a management-zone controller.
The zeks built bonfires. The log-truck drivers stood in line for motor oil. The sentries in the watchtowers called out to one another. Sergeant Shumeyko, whose personality was appreciated fully only after the fight in Koyna, fell asleep quietly on the trestle bed, though it was supposed to be reserved for soldiers off duty.
The twelve guard positions over the forest were fully established. The working day had begun.
All around: the smoke of campfires, the hum of motors, the smell of fresh sawdust, the calls of the sentries. This life slowly dissolved into the pale September sky.
The pines fell with a reverberating crash. Tractors dragged them away, uprooting bushes. The sun reflected off the truck headlights in blinding spots, and words soundlessly rushed through the spacious air above the logging sector: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! The sentries are in the watchtowers! Alarms in order! Restricted zone in operation! Thieves at work! Over! Do you copy? Do you copy?”
The controller admitted me into the zone. I heard the unpleasant slide click of the bolts behind me. By the campfire, the cook, a trusty named Galimulin, was filling a chifir tub.* I walked past him, even though the use of chifir was strictly forbidden, since drinking it was equated with drug use in the regulations. But the whole camp population drank chifir, and we knew it.
Galimulin winked at me. Then I knew for certain that my liberalism had gone too far. All I could do was threaten him with solitary, at which point Galimulin made me a present of his Asiatic smile. His front teeth were missing.
I walked past a newly cut tree trunk, admiring its yellow cross section, and made way for a tractor, which was noisily breaking branches. Shielding my face from spiderwebs, I cut through the forest to the machine shop.
Prisoners were rolling out logs, lopping off branches. The broad-shouldered, tattooed foreman was deftly handling a hook. “Step lively, you cons,” he yelled, shading his eyes with his palm. “Those lagging behind won’t make it into Communism. They’ll have to finish out their days under this regime.”
The branch-cutters lowered their axes, flung their jackets on a heap of branches. Again, iron flashed in the sun.
I walked along thinking, “Enthusiasm? Impulse? Nothing like that. The usual gymnastics. Willed courage. Strength that could just as easily become violence, given the chance.”
I traded a few words with the sentries and skirted the logging sector all the way down the restricted zone. I crossed the rusty swamp, stepping from dry patch to dry patch, and emerged into a clearing touched by the pale morning sun.
By a low campfire, his back to me, a man had stretched out comfortably. A thick book without a cover lay beside him. In his left hand, he held a tomato-paste sandwich.
“Ah, Kuptsov,” I said, “loafing again? Homesick for the clink?”
Sitting by the campfire, the work noise echoing around him, the zek looked like a pirate. There seemed to be a steering wheel in front of him, and his ship was moving straight into the wind.
Winter. The penal isolator. Long shadows under the pines. Windows sealed under snowdrifts.
Behind the wall, jangling his handcuffs, Kuptsov wandered from corner to corner. In the duty officer’s book, the word “Refusal”.
I took Boris Kuptsov’s record out of the file cabinet. Thirty words which look like explosions: WAPR (without a place of residence). WAO (without an occupation). A stamp: DR (dangerous recidivist). Thirty-two years in prison camps. The oldest “Code man”* in the Ust-Vym complex. Four trials. Nine escapes. Refuses to work on principle.
I asked him, “Why don’t you work?”
Handcuffs jingling, Kuptsov sa
ys:
“Remove the bracelets, Chief! This gold has no stamp.”
“Why don’t you work, you beast?”
“The Code doesn’t allow it.”
“How about feeding yourself? Does your Code allow that?”
“There’s no code that says I have to starve.”
“Your Code has outlived its time. All the ‘Code men’ have cracked. Antipov won’t stop singing. Mamay is the big man’s right hand. Sedov is on the needle. Topchil got snagged in Ropcha.”
“Topchil was a peasant and a chump, green as goose shit. You call him a thief? Lifting a suitcase off a granny – that’s his fortune. So he lost his crown…”
“Well, and you?”
“And I come from a long line of Russian thieves. I have stolen and will again.”
In front of me, a man sat at a low campfire. Next to him, on the grass, a book stood out white. In his left hand, he held a sandwich.
“Greetings,” Kuptsov said. “Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It’s written in this book – a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labour. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age… And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor.*”
“Listen,” I said, “you’re going to work, I swear it. Sooner or later, you’re going to be a driver, or a roper, or a carter. If the worst comes to the worst, a branch-cutter. You’re going to work, or you’ll perish in the isolator. You’re going to work, I give you my word. Otherwise you’ll croak.”
The zek looked at me as though I were a thing, a foreign car parked across from the Hermitage. He followed the line from the radiator to the exhaust pipe. Then he said distinctly, “I like to please myself.” And that instant: a mirage of a ship’s bridge above the waves.
The Zone Page 5