The Zone

by Sergei Dovlatov

  Then Tarasyuk, manager of the bathhouse, juggled electric light bulbs. The number of them kept increasing. For the finale, Tarasyuk tossed them all up in the air at once, then stretched out his elastic waistband, and all the light bulbs fell into his loose satin pants.

  Then Lieutenant Rodichev read a poem by Mayakovsky.* He stood with his feet wide apart and tried to speak in a bass voice.

  He was succeeded by the recidivist Kuptsov, who performed a tap dance called ‘The Little Gypsy Girl’ with no accompaniment. As he was being applauded, he exclaimed, “Too bad – without patent-leather boots you don’t get the full effect.”

  Then they announced a zek foreman, Loginov, “accompanied by a guitar.” Loginov walked out, bowed, touched the strings, and sang:“A gypsy reads my cards, her eyes cast down,

  An ancient necklace and a string of beads.

  I wanted to try Fate for a queen of diamonds

  But once again it was the ace of spades.

  Why is it, my unhappy fate,

  Again you lead me on a road of tears?

  The barbed wire’s rusty, the iron bars close,

  A railway prison car, the noise of wheels…”

  They applauded Loginov for a long time and called for him to sing an encore. However, Khuriyev was against it. He walked out and said, “As they say, the good in little doses.”

  Then he adjusted his chest strap, waited for silence, and shouted out, “The revolutionary play Kremlin Stars. The roles will be played by inmates of the Ust-Vym camp complex. Vladimir Ilych Lenin – prisoner Gurin. Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky – prisoner Tsurikov. Red Army soldier Timofei – prisoner Chmykhalov. The merchant’s daughter Polina – Economic Administration worker Lebedyeva, Tamara Yevgenyevna… And so, Moscow, the year 1918.”

  Khuriyev backed off the stage. A chair and a blue plywood stool were carried onto the proscenium. Then Tsurikov climbed up onstage wearing the khaki tunic. He scratched his leg, sat down and fell into deep thought. Then he remembered that he was sick, and began to force a cough. He coughed so hard that the tunic came up out of his belt.

  Meanwhile, there was still no sign of Lenin. From the wings, a stagehand belatedly brought out a telephone without a cord. Tsurikov stopped coughing, picked up the receiver, and fell into even deeper thought.

  A few emboldened prisoners in the audience started yelling, “Come on, Stilts, don’t drag it out!”

  At that moment, Lenin appeared, carrying an enormous yellow suitcase. “Greetings, Felix Edmundovich.”

  “Hello there,” Dzerzhinsky answered without getting up.

  Gurin set down the suitcase, squinted cunningly, and asked, “Do you know, Felix Edmundovich, what I have here in my hand?”

  “A suitcase, Vladimir Ilych.”

  “And just what it’s for – can you guess?”

  “Haven’t the slightest idea.” Tsurikov even turned away slightly, showing complete indifference.

  From the audience, some shouted again, “Get up, Stilts! That’s no way to talk to the boss!”

  “Sha!” Tsurikov answered. “We’ll sort it out… Too many of you here are overeducated.” Reluctantly, he rose slightly.

  Gurin waited for silence and continued. “The suitcase is for you, Felix Edmundovich. So that you, dear fellow, can go off and take a rest at once.”

  “I can’t, Vladimir Ilych. There’s counter-revolution all around us. The Mensheviks, the Social Revolutionaries” – Tsurikov glanced angrily at the audience – “bourgeois… what do you call them?”

  “Scouts?” Gurin prompted.

  “’At’s it, ’at’s it…”

  “Your health, Felix Edmundovich, belongs to the Revolution. The comrades and I have discussed it and decided: you must take a rest. I say this to you as a member of the ruling body.”

  Tsurikov was silent.

  “Do you understand me, Felix Edmundovich?”

  “I understand,” Tsurikov replied, and grinned stupidly. It was blatantly obvious that he had forgotten his lines.

  Khuriyev came near the stage and whispered loudly, “Do what you want…”

  “And what can I want to do,” Tsurikov said in the same loud whisper, “if my memory’s gone full of holes?”

  “Do what you want,” the PI repeated louder, “but I’m not leaving service.”

  “Everything’s clear,” Tsurikov said. “I’m not leaving—”

  Lenin interrupted him. “The main asset of the Revolution is people. To care for them is our arch-important task. So get your things together, and to the Crimea, dear fellow, to the Crimea!”

  “It’s still early, Vladimir Ilych, it’s still early. Let us first finish with the Mensheviks, decapitate the bourgeois cobra—”

  “Not cobra, but hydra,” Khuriyev said.

  “Same bugger,” Dzerzhinsky said, and waved his hand.

  Beyond that, everything went more or less smoothly. Lenin reasoned, Dzerzhinsky wouldn’t give in. A few times, Tsurikov raised his voice shrilly.

  Then Timofei came out onstage. Lieutenant Rodichev’s leather jacket did remind one of the double-breasted Chekist coat. Polina asked him to go to the ends of the earth with her.

  “To join General Wrangel and the White Army, is that it?” Timofei asked, and grabbed his imaginary Mauser.

  From the audience, zeks yelled, “Play your hearts, Cleanup! Drag her to your berth! Show us something’s still clucking in your pants!”

  Lebedyeva stamped her foot wrathfully, straightened her velvet dress, and again drew near Timofei. “You’ve ruined the best years of my life! You’ve left me, I’m all alone now, like a mountain ash in a meadow.”

  But the sympathy of the audience was with Timofei. Their cries carried from the hall: “Look how she’s laying it on, the hussy! You can see her candle’s burning out!”

  Others yelled back, “Don’t frighten the actress, you morons! Let the seance gather steam!”

  Then the barn door flew open and Security Officer Bortashevich cried, “Legal convoy, report for duty! Lopatin, Gusev, Koralis – get your weapons! Sergeant Lakhno, get the documents, on the double!”

  Four of the guards headed for the door. “Excuse me,” Bortashevich said.

  “Continue,” Khuriyev said, and waved his hand.

  The performance moved to the final scene. The suitcase was stored away for better times. Felix Dzerzhinsky stayed at his battle post. The merchant’s daughter Polina forgot her personal claims…

  Khuriyev sought me out with his eyes and nodded with satisfaction. In the first row, Major Amosov squinted contentedly.

  Finally, Vladimir Ilych stepped up to the microphone. For a few seconds he was silent. Then his face lit up with the light of historical prescience. “Who is this?” Gurin exclaimed. “Who is this?”

  Out of the darkness, thin pale faces focused on the leader.

  “Who is this? Whose are these happy, young faces? Whose are these cheerful, sparkling eyes? Can this really be the youth of the Seventies?”

  Romantic notes sounded in the voice of the actor. His speech was coloured with unfeigned excitement. He gesticulated. His powerful palm, covered with tattoos, swept upwards. “Can it really be the splendid grandchildren of the Revolution?”

  At first, there were a few uncertain laughs from the front row. After a few seconds, everyone was laughing hard. You could hear Major Amosov’s bass in the general chorus. Lebedyeva yelped in a reedy voice. Chmykhalov held his sides. Onstage, Tsurikov took off his beard and shyly laid it beside the telephone.

  Vladimir Ilych tried to speak. “I envy you, messengers of the future! It was for you that we lit the first lights of the new-builds. It was for your sake… Hear me out, you dogs! There’s just a sparrow’s beak of this junk left!”

  The hall answered Gurin with a terrible, irrepressible yell: “Be still, Lisper, before the rule of lawlessness!”

  “Hey, whoever’s closest, give that Maupassant a good tickle!”

  “Beat it, uncle, your pretzels are burning!�
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  Khuriyev pushed through to the stage and tugged at the leader’s pants. “Sing!”

  “Already?” Gurin asked. “There are literally two lines left. About the bourgeoisie and the stars.”

  “Dismiss the bourgeoisie. Go on to the stars. And start the ‘Internationale’ right away.”

  “Whatever you say.” Straining his voice to the utmost, Gurin yelled, “Stop this racket!” Then he added, in a vengeful tone, “So then let your way be lighted, children of the future, by our Kremlin stars!”

  “Let’s go!” Khuriyev ordered, and then, lifting a rifle-cleaning rod, he began to conduct.

  The hall became a little quieter. Gurin broke into song in an unexpectedly beautiful, pure and ringing tenor:

  “Arise, you prisoners of starvation…”

  And further, in the silence that had fallen:

  “Arise, you wretched of the earth…”

  Suddenly he became strangely transformed. Now he was a country peasant, mysterious and cunning, like his recent ancestors. His face seemed aloof and coarse. His eyes were half closed.

  All of a sudden, someone began to sing with him. At first, one uncertain voice, then a second and a third. And then a whole dissonant, unorganized chorus of voices:“For justice thunders condemnation –

  A better world’s in birth.

  ’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place…”

  The multitude of faces joined into one trembling spot. The actors onstage froze. Lebedyeva pressed her hands to her temples. Khuriyev waved his cleaning rod. A strange, dreamy smile had set on the lips of the leader of the Revolution.“No more shall chains of violence bind us,

  Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall,

  The earth shall rise on new foundations…”

  Suddenly, my throat contracted painfully. For the first time, I was part of my unique, unprecedented country. I was entirely made of cruelty, hunger, memory, malice… Because of my tears, I couldn’t see for a moment. I don’t think anyone noticed.

  And then the singing died down. The last stanza was finished out by a few isolated, embarrassed voices.

  “The performance is over!” Khuriyev said.

  Overturning the benches, the prisoners headed for the door.

  June 16, 1982. New York

  Dear Igor,

  I guess our work is drawing to a close. The only thing left is a chunk of about twenty pages. There is something else, but I’ve decided not to include it.

  I decided to reject the wildest, bloodiest, most monstrous episodes of camp life. It seemed to me they would have come out looking purely sensational. The effect would have come from the material itself rather than the texture of the writing.

  I am not in the business of writing physiological sketches. Anyhow, I don’t write about prison and zeks. What I wanted to write about was life and people. I’m not inviting my readers into a freak museum.

  Needless to say, I could have come up with God knows what. I knew a man who had the words “Slave of the MVD”* tattooed on his forehead. After which he was “naturally” scalped by two prison doctors. I saw mass orgies of lesbians on the roof of a barracks. I saw a man sodomizing a sheep. (For the sake of convenience, the recidivist Murashko shoved its back legs into canvas boots.) I attended the wedding of two camp homosexuals and even shouted, “Kiss!”

  I say once again that I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters.

  And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov). It’s enough that I worked as a guide on the Pushkin estate.

  Not long ago, mordant Genis said to me, “You’re always afraid your work will be compared to Shalamov’s. You should stop worrying. It won’t.”

  I know that this is just mild, friendly irony. Still, what would be the use of paraphrasing Shalamov? Or even Tolstoy together with Pushkin, Lermontov? What is the point of rehashing Alexander Dumas, like Fitzgerald did? The Great Gatsby is a wonderful book, yet I still prefer The Count of Monte Cristo.

  I always dreamt of being a disciple of my own ideas. Maybe I’ll still get there in my declining years.

  So I have omitted, as they say, the most heart-rending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a mirror.

  There was also another extreme that had to be avoided, namely, submerging oneself in aesthetics to the point of oblivion, losing sight of the fact that prison camp is revolting, and painting it in the ornamental tradition of the south-western school.

  So there were two extremes to stay away from. I could have told the story about the man who sewed his eye shut, or the one about the man who nursed and raised a baby goldfinch in the logging sector, or the one about an embezzler named Yakovlev who nailed his scrotum to his bunk, or the one about Burkov the pickpocket who sobbed at the burial of a May beetle.

  In a word, if it seems to you that there isn’t enough vileness, we can put some in. And if the opposite is true, well, that can also be easily remedied.

  AFTER THEY HAD TIED ME UP with telephone wire, I calmed down. My head lay under a steam-heat radiator, and my feet, in badly made cheap leather army boots, were under the chandelier in the middle of the Lenin Room, where the New Year’s tree had stood a week earlier.

  I could hear the soldiers of the escort platoon being issued their weapons and Lieutenant Khuriyev giving them instructions. I knew they’d be going out in the freezing cold now, starting to walk along the black gangways by the zone, past the straining dogs, and each soldier would shine his flashlight on his face so the guard in the watchtower could recognize him.

  As the first order of business, I decided to declare a hunger strike and began waiting for supper in order to refuse it. But no one came.

  I could hear the off-duty shift coming down the corridor, dumping their two-magazine cartridge pouches and their sub-machine guns, which would be white with hoarfrost, on the weapons-room counter. Then I heard the sentries moving aluminium stools in the mess hall, where the cook Balodis would have saved them a few onions, a loaf of bread and a piece of lard, but must have forgotten some salt, to judge by the cursing.

  As I grew sober from the cold and pain, I began to recall everything as it happened.

  In the daytime we had been drinking with the trusties. They all tried to hug me and kept repeating, “Bob, you’re the only human being in the whole Ust-Vym camp.” Then we made our way all across the settlement to the commissary and met Stern, the logging unit’s medic, and Fidel walked up to him, pulled off his beaver hat, scooped some snow up in it, and put it back on his head. We walked on, while the dirty snow started to trickle down the doctor’s face.

  Then we went inside the commissary and asked Tonechka for some swill. She said there wasn’t any cheap drink, to which we shouted back that it didn’t matter since we were out of money anyway. She said, “Wash the floors in the storeroom, and I’ll give you each a little bottle of eau de Cologne.” Tonechka went out and came back in a few minutes with a bucket of steaming water. We took off our fatigue shirts and twisted them into plaits, dipped them into the bucket, and began to scrub the plank floor. Balodis and I worked hard, and Fidel was hardly in our way. Afterwards we drank the cologne, which trickled slowly into our mugs. The taste was awful and we snacked on hard candies, chewing them together with the bits of wrapping paper that were still stuck to them.

  Tonechka said, “To your health!”

  Balodis, the Latvian, pointed at her and asked Fidel, “Could you?”

  And Fidel answered, “For a million, and then only on a hangover.”

  When we left it was already dark. Lights were going on over the sawmill and in the settlement. We walked past the stables, where wagons without horses were standing, the wagon tongues resting on the ground. Fidel started playing ‘We’re on Our Way through Uruguay’, but Balodis grabbed the guitar from him and smashed it against a tree
. We threw the pieces in an ice hole.

  I looked up at the stars and my head began to spin.

  Just then Fidel climbed up a telegraph pole with a knife in his teeth. He was a competent technician and hoped to do some damage. He climbed higher and higher, and when his shadow on the snow had grown enormous he suddenly shrieked “Mama!” and fell from a height of ten metres. We rushed to him, but Fidel stood up, brushed off the snow, and said, “Getting down is the easy part.”

  We looked for the knife but couldn’t find it. “Obviously you swallowed it,” Balodis said. “That’s OK,” replied Fidel, “I have two of them.”

  Then we set off for the barracks, and when the bakery van came towards us around the turn, we kept walking ahead until the driver had to back up and run through somebody’s fence.

  When we got back the duty detail were cleaning their weapons. We went to the mess hall and ate some cold pickle soup. Fidel wanted to relieve himself in the water can that stood on a stool in the corner, but Balodis talked him out of it.

  Then we went into the Lenin Room and sat around a table covered with a red calico cloth. The walls were hung with bulletin boards, posters and printed slogans; the chandelier glittered, and a New Year’s edition of Lightning, the bulletin-board newspaper, lay rolled in a tube in the corner.

  “Will Communism be here soon?” Fidel asked. “Because my needs are piling up.”

  “And how about your abilities?” I asked.

  “No problem,” Fidel said. “I have plenty of abilities.”

  “For cursing,” Balodis said.

  “Not only that,” Fidel said.

  Fidel started setting up chess pieces. I rested my head on the tablecloth, and Balodis stood looking at photographs of the members of the Central Committee.

  “That’s some name,” he said. “Comrade Dentures.” Just then Sergeant Major Yevchenko looked into the Lenin Room. “You’d better go to bed, boys,” he said.