The Zone

by Sergei Dovlatov

  “Halt! Who goes there?” the sentry called out, cocking his rifle.

  I walked straight to the sentry in silence.

  “Vai, Boris!” said Rudolf Khedoyan. “I almost shoot you!”

  “OK,” I said. “Everything normal here?”

  “How normal?” Rudolf yelled. “Why normal? No enough people. Guard stand watchtower. Normal, you tell? No normal! Cold is normal? Eh?!”

  Southerners doing guard service suffered terribly from the cold. Some lit little campfires right up in the watchtowers. And there once was a time when officers looked at this through their fingers. Then Rezo Tskhovrebashvili burnt the fourth watchtower down to its foundations. After this, HQ issued a special directive forbidding so much as smoking in a watchtower. Rezo himself was taken to Lieutenant Colonel Grechnev. The colonel started to bawl him out, but Tskhovrebashvili stopped him with a gesture and said amicably, “Let’s settle this over cognac – on me!” Upon which Grechnev burst out laughing and threw the soldier out without a reprimand.

  “What a climate,” Rudolf said. “Worse than on the moon.”

  “Were you on the moon?” I asked.

  “I’ve never even been on leave,” Rudolf said.

  “OK,” I said. “Be patient another forty minutes or so.”

  I stood under the watchtower for a few minutes, then headed for Barracks Six. I walked by the uneven benches, past the warped display board with photographs of members of the Vanguard Force of Labour, past the water-pumping station with black snow by its door.

  Then I turned towards the fire-extinguisher stand in order to make sure that all the instruments were in place.

  If a fire were to begin, it was doubtful that the prisoners would put it out. For any incident, even natural disaster, introduced a pleasant variety to life. But an emergency stand was required by regulation, and the zeks made use of it. Whenever knife fights began in the barracks, the participants rushed out to the fire stand, where they could grab a shovel, iron tongs or an axe.

  The sound of muffled cries was coming from Barracks Six. For a moment I felt a sickening chill in my stomach. I remembered the hugeness of the space behind my back. And ahead – only Barracks Six, inside which shouts were ricocheting about. I thought to myself that it was better to leave, to leave and after a minute be safe inside the checkpoint cabin. But at that instant I had already thrown open the door of the barracks.

  I spotted Onuchin at once. He stood in the corner shielding himself with a stool. Its legs stuck out forwards in an ominous way.

  Onuchin was a notorious stoolie. Also, he was the only man in the zone who wore a beard. That was how he had been photographed when he was under investigation. Then the photograph migrated to his case file. After that, the beard became one of his distinguishing marks, like his boldly written tattoo: “I’ll not forget my mother and fathar [sic] in battle fallen!”

  Onuchin was all beaten up. His beard had become red, and the spots on his quilted jacket black. He waved the stool and kept repeating, “What are you murdering me for? You’re murdering me for no reason! As if I’m a louse, for no reason!”

  When I walked in… when I ran in, the prisoners turned and that same instant surrounded him again. Someone at the back, maybe Chaly, forced his way forwards carrying a knife. I saw the narrow white blade at once. All the light in the barracks fell on this slight piece of metal.

  “Back!” I shouted, grabbing Chaly by the sleeve.

  “Keep away from trouble, Chief,” he muttered in a choked voice.

  I grabbed Chaly by his jacket and pulled it down to his elbows. Then I kicked him in the belly with my boot. In a second I was next to Onuchin. I remember that I had undone the cuffs of my shirt.

  The prisoners, surrounding us, waited for a sign or at least for an abrupt movement. Something terrible and faceless moved in on me.

  With a tremendous boom, the door slammed open. Bortashevich stood in the doorway in his blindingly polished leather boots. He spotted me at once and announced in a low voice: “I’ll shoot every other one… on my word as a Communist… without a trial…”

  The monster that had threatened me fell back into ten dark figures. I led Onuchin by the shoulder. The three of us left the barracks.

  Behind our backs, the voice of the zek brigadier rang out, “Ech, you’re all a bunch of stinking punks! You can’t even pull off a simple wet job!”

  We walked along the fence under the protection of the sentries. When we had made it to the checkpoint, Bortashevich said to Onuchin, “Go to the isolator. Wait there till they transfer you to another camp.”

  Onuchin touched my sleeve. His mouth twisted mournfully. “There’s no justice in this life,” he said.

  “Go,” I said.

  Early in the morning, I knocked on the doctor’s door. His office was spacious and cool.

  “What seems to be ailing you?” he said, lifting his nearsighted eyes.

  Then he quickly got up and came over to me. “Well, why are you crying? Wait, at least let me shut the door.”

  May 30, 1982. New York

  Dear Igor,

  I remember something that happened near Yosser.

  There was a country school located two miles from the camp. A woman taught at the school, a lean woman with metal teeth and a cataract in one eye.

  The roof of the school was visible from the zone. In it, a lifer named Makeyev was confined. He was a sixty-year-old man who had been dragged from one place to another.

  To make a long story short, the zek fell in love with the schoolteacher. He was unable to make out her features. More than that, he did not even know her age. All that was certain was that she was a woman, and that was it. Someone in an old-fashioned dress.

  Her name was Isolda Shchukina, though Makeyev did not know that either.

  Strictly speaking, he had not even seen her. He knew this was a woman and distinguished the colour of her dresses. She had two – one green and one brown.

  Early in the morning, Makeyev would crawl onto the roof of the barracks. After some time, there would be a thunderous announcement: “Brown!” This meant that Isolda had gone out to visit the toilet facilities.

  I do not remember the prisoners laughing at Makeyev. On the contrary, his feelings evoked deep interest.

  Makeyev drew a daisy on the wall of the barracks. It was the size of an engine wheel. Each evening, Makeyev would erase one of the petals with a rag.

  Whether Isolda Shchukina ever guessed what was going on was never known. Most likely she did guess. She would stand on the porch for long stretches of time, and visited the toilet facilities often.

  They met only once. Makeyev worked in the production zone, and once his column was marched out to an exterior work site. Isolda was walking through the settlement. Their paths crossed near the water tower.

  The whole column slowed their steps. The escort guards started getting nervous, but a few of the zeks explained what was happening.

  Isolda walked alongside the hushed column of men. Her metal teeth shone. Her felt overshoes sank in the mud.

  From the rows, Makeyev threw a small package to her. Isolda picked it up and unwrapped it. Inside was a handmade plastic cigarette holder.

  The woman walked straight to the head of the convoy. She took off a short knitted scarf and held it out to Lance Corporal Boyko. He handed it to one of the zeks. The fiery-coloured strip moved down the rows of men, vivid against the background of worn prison rags, till Makeyev wrapped it around his lean neck.

  The prisoners walked on. Someone in back started up a song:“…So where are you now, you tart,

  Deep in some new love affair,

  And who are you sharing cigarettes with?”

  But the others cut him off. The moment demanded silence.

  Makeyev turned around and waved the scarf all the way back to the zone. He still had fourteen years left to serve.

  A THREE-METRE FENCE surrounds the prisoners’ housing units, which loom up at you out of the darkness. All along
the passage corridor, there are snares made of the finest wire mesh. A little further on, an “Amber”-type tripwire alarm system is installed.

  Four watchtowers rise up at the corners, forming an imaginary closed rectangle. Four searchlights illuminate the duty detail path. The sentries can see the rotting fence boards and the free-fire zone between the living and administration zones.

  Towards six in the evening, a prisoner transport vehicle with bars on its windows drives up. The head of the convoy removes its padlocks. The prisoners, in grey jackets and noisy boots, walk without speaking down the ramp.

  An officer appears in a green rain poncho with a hood. His voice sounds like an alarm mechanism: “The brigade is now under the convoy’s direction. One step out of line constitutes escape. Convoy will shoot to kill!”

  Cold and dust. In some places, the earth is whitened with frost. The dry, rusted grass presses against little knolls.

  Talking quietly, the zeks fall into columns. Guards hold back dogs straining on their leashes.

  “First column – march!”

  The officer is past fifty. He has worked in the guard section for twenty years. There are four little stars on his shoulder straps. He owns one imported civilian jacket; everything else is standard-issue green.

  Soldiers in bulky sheepskin jackets go to their posts. They drag walkie-talkies behind them.

  The soldier who has just come on duty stays in the checkpoint cabin. Soon he dreams of home, of Bronyuta Grobatavichus in a green sweater… He sees a river sparkling in the sun, his truck on a dusty road, an eagle above a little grove, a boat, soundlessly parting reeds.

  Then his warm, cosy world is pierced by a shout that is intentionally coarse and as harsh as tin plate: “Relief shift, approach!”

  And again – six hours in the wind. If you only knew what that means!

  In the space of these hours, you recall your entire life. You forgive all offences, travel around the globe. You possess hundreds of women. Drink champagne from crystal glasses. Get into fights and ride home in a taxi.

  And again – six hours in the wind.

  At night, they broadcast from the zone: “A zek was flattened in the felling sector.”

  It happened like this: The roper had moved a lever incorrectly. Above the men’s heads, the pulley jerked to one side. Its iron chain slipped. From the fall of an AG-430 two-axle steam generator… No, owing to a ton-and-a-half piece of metal… Anyway, what happened was that the zek Butyrin, who had been bending down to polish some seams, had his skull split open.

  Now he lies under a wet tarpaulin. The soles of his feet are unnaturally splayed. The body takes up a little space next to the waste-bin platform.

  He seems to have shrunk. His face is as inanimate as the limp mitten dropped a little to the side, or like the shaft of a shovel that is polished to a shine, or a tin of axle grease.

  This death is stripped of any mystery. It evokes dull anguish. Above the blood-soaked tarpaulin, flies are making vibrating noises.

  Butyrin had often seen death, escaped it dozens of times. He came from a long line of “jumpers” and was a drug addict, a loafer and a homosexual. On top of all this, he was a hysteric known for once gulping down a bottle of ink in an investigator’s office so he could spend a few days in a warm hospital.

  He was covered with tattoos from head to foot. His teeth had grown black from drinking chifir. His body, punctured by morphine needles, had refused to react to pain.

  He could have died long before this – for example, in Sormovo, when the Kanvinsky gang beat him up with bicycle chains. They threw him under a commuter train, but Butyrin had miraculously managed to crawl out. The zek had often recalled the roaring, fiery triangle, and how the sand squeaked against his teeth.

  He could have croaked at Gori, when he said an obscene word to a crowd of southerners in a market. Or at Sindor, the time when the escort guards ordered a file to march into an icy stream, and the prisoners had started singing, they had walked in… but later pockmarked Lance Corporal Petrov had opened fire anyway.

  He could have croaked in Ukhta, making a dash from the sawmill. Or in Koyna in the isolator, where zeks fought each other with boot knives.

  And now he lies beneath a random tarpaulin. The security officer tries to make radio contact. He shouts, holding the transmitter diaphragm to his mouth: “This is Buttercup! This is Buttercup! Over! I can’t hear you! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”

  He lights a cigarette, and then he starts shouting again, straining his voice: “This is Buttercup! Over! Prisoners excited! Situation tense! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”

  Soon the truck arrives. They lay the corpse in the van. One of us escorts it to the prison hospital. After all, dead zeks have to be guarded too.

  And a month later, Political Instructor Khuriyev will write a letter to Inessa Vladimirovna Butyrina, the sole living relative of the deceased, his first cousin once removed. In it he will write: “Your son, Butyrin, Grigori Tikhonovich, was making sure strides towards rehabilitation. He died at his labour post…”

  June 7, 1982. New York

  Dear Igor,

  You’ll recall my saying that a camp is a typical Soviet institution, and not only in its administrative-economic system, not only in its superimposed ideology, not only by force of the habitual formalities. A camp is a Soviet institution in spirit, in its inner essence.

  The ordinary criminal, as a rule, is an entirely loyal Soviet citizen. Which is not to say, of course, that he isn’t discontented. The price of alcohol has gone up, and so on. But the basics are sacred, and Lenin is above any criticism.

  In this sense, camp art is extremely significant. Here, without any pressure or constraints, the method of socialist realism triumphs.

  Has it ever occurred to you, too, that socialist art aspires to be something like magic? That it is reminiscent of the ritual and cult painting of our ancient ancestors?

  You draw a bison on a rock face, and that evening you get something hot to eat.

  Bureaucrats of official art reason the same way. If you portray something that’s positive, then everyone will be all right. But if it’s something negative, the opposite result will occur. If you depict a Stakhanovite feat of labour,* it follows that everyone will work hard. And so on.

  Think of the underground mosaics of our capital. Vegetables, fruits, domesticated birds… Georgians, Lithuanians, Armenians… Large- and small-horned cattle… They are all the same bison.

  In camp it’s the same story. Take camp painting. If it’s a landscape, it will be done in incredible, tropical, Andalusian colours. If it’s a still life, then it will be full of calories.

  Camp portraits are complimentary to an extreme. Out of prison, only powerful Party chiefs get painted that way.

  And there is no modernism whatsoever. The closer the resemblance to a photograph, the better. Modigliani and Gauguin would have little success here.

  Take camp songs. The most common story put to music goes like this: A lonely mother lives with her child. Papasha has abandoned them. The son becomes a thief (or if it’s a daughter, a prostitute). Sooner or later, there’s a trial. The prosecutor, with lowered eyes, asks for the maximum penalty. The defendant takes his own life. Beside his grave, the prosecutor sits and sobs for hour after hour. As you have already guessed, he is the unlucky father of the deceased.

  This is all nonsense, of course, completely implausible. A prosecutor cannot prosecute his own relative. It is forbidden by Soviet law, and the prisoners know this perfectly well, but they continue to exploit this inane theme every chance they get.

  Or take camp myths. The most widespread among them is of a mass escape, as a rule across the White Sea – to the United States. You hear dozens of versions, each with the most minute factual details, with an elaborate description of the itinerary, with oaths of assurance that everything happened just that way.

  And the organizer of the escape will invariably be a valiant Chekist, a former colonel
in the GPU or the NKVD, condemned by Khrushchev as an associate of Beria and Yagoda.*

  Well, one could ask, just what draws them to such scum? What draws them is the status of such men as familiar, traditional Soviet heroes, characters out of Yulian Semyonov or the brothers Vayner.*

  They say that Yemelyan Pugachev drew support for his peasant uprising from escaped prisoners.* The prison inmates of today are not planning to revolt. Should some commotion occur, they would head for the nearest store that sells alcohol.

  Alright. Now to business. Send me, if it’s no trouble, samples of your typeface and two catalogues.

  If you come to New York, we’ll see each other then. Regards to your wife, mother and daughters. Our Katya is terribly angry all the time – the “in-between” age.

  Tomorrow they’re opening a new Russian café near my house. As a local celebrity, I will stop by in the morning to congratulate the owner.

  IN OCTOBER THEY DISQUALIFIED ME for bad conduct in the ring, and I was deprived of all the substantial privileges of an athlete. The result was that I found myself back in the guard battalion with the duties of a private. At night the smell of foot cloths wrapped around the tops of boots deprived me of sleep. As a finishing touch, Lance Corporal Blindyak screamed at me in front of the entire outfit: “I’ll ROT you, you carrion, I’ll ROT you!”

  Given the situation, my appointment as company clerk was a piece of unheard-of luck. Apparently, the decisive factor had been my unfinished higher education. I had got through three years at Leningrad State University. I think I was the most educated man in the Komi Autonomous Republic.

  Early in the morning, I used to sweep the porch at HQ. The snow-covered square would be criss-crossed with the mighty streamings of the guards. I would go out on the road and wait there for the captain.

  Once I saw him, I would start walking faster, raise my palm sharply to my cap, and say in a feckless, mechanical voice, “Good health to you, sir!”