Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag (20 page)

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Authors: Orlando Figes

BOOK: Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag
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Determined to see Lev but not wanting to risk arrest by entering the camp illegally, Sveta went to the headquarters of the Gulag administration, the large, white classical building she had passed by with Lev Izrailevich on her way to the wood-combine the previous year, to apply for official permission to visit Lev. It was a courageous thing to do, since the MVD administrators almost certainly knew about her illegal entry into the camp in 1947 and may now have ordered her arrest. She climbed the stairs to the second floor, where she found the door to the offices of A. I. Borovitsky, the boss of the labour camp, at the end of a broad corridor with wooden floors and large windows from which she could see the chimney of the power station in the wood-combine. In the large main room of Borovitsky’s offices there were plaster bas-reliefs made by prisoners, depicting northern forest scenes, building sites and railways. Borovitsky was not there when she arrived. She waited for him to turn up. She was exhausted after her long journey from Moscow. ‘I waited the whole day for the head of the administration to come and was still waiting for him late at night,’ she recalled.
Like all the other Gulag bosses, Borovitsky worked at night, as Stalin did. The clocks in every office were set to Moscow time. No boss could afford to be asleep if the MVD in the capital called. Eventually Borovitsky came and received Sveta in his office, where he sat between his desk and a large safe. Polite and courteous, Borovitsky immediately agreed to Sveta’s request and signed an order, which he put into her hand as he showed her out. ‘I thanked him enthusiastically, ’ recalled Sveta. But once out on the street, she looked more closely at what was in her hand. ‘There was a bright street-lamp there or perhaps a searchlight, and in its light I read the document: “Allow a meeting of 20 minutes in the presence of a military guard.” ’
The meeting took place the next day in the small guard-house at the entrance to the barracks block for the prisoners of the 2nd Colony. The guard on duty turned out to be kinder than his boss. He allowed Lev and Sveta to meet on their own in a private recess off
the main room, where there was a table and a bench. The recess had a door that was kept open but the guard did not come in. On the table was the register in which the guard was meant to keep a log of visitors. Sveta had been given twenty minutes, but the guard did not record the time of her arrival. If anybody asked, he would say that she had just arrived and he had not yet made a note of it in his register. In this way Lev and Sveta were able to be together for several hours that day. Before his shift ended, the guard told them to return the following day at noon, when he would have another shift. Sveta came back at the appointed time. Lev then appeared, and they spent the whole of the afternoon together sitting on the bench in the recess. All that time, just out of view behind the door, prisoners and guards were passing in and out of the guard-house. The time was both more than they could have expected and hopelessly inadequate.
Sveta left Pechora on 30 August. She was taken to the station by Lev’s loyal friend Stanislav Yakhovich, who helped her get a ticket and put her on the Moscow train. ‘My darling Lev,’ she wrote on her way to Kotlas, ‘a second day without you has already come and gone.’
My wagon is a combination one (sleeping at the top, sitting at the bottom), which means people come and go more often [than in a sleeping car]. But everyone in my compartment is travelling all the way to Kotlas, where the train is scheduled to stop for 5 hours. Kotlas is a dreadful place – there is nowhere else as filthy along the whole route. I will sleep. It’s a cold night but I’ve got a woollen camisole with me. And I’ve wrapped myself in a blanket and won’t freeze … The forests are already not so marshy but beautiful in that autumnal way … Below me on the lower berth are some children – a 10-year-old girl, a girl and a boy of 5, and another girl of 3. They belong to three sisters whose husbands have all been killed – and who now live together as a family. The children are lovely. Well, Levi, that’s everything for now. Look after yourself and greetings to everyone.
It was not until the evening of 4 September that she arrived home, to find her parents worried sick (they had not received any of
the telegrams she had sent, as promised, to let them know she was all right). Sveta wrote to Lev that evening:
My dear, dear Levi, I’m home at last. I had wanted to send you one more letter from Gorky but I didn’t have time. I wrote to you twice while travelling – once from some station or other and then from Kirov. The rain made all the side streets in Kirov impassable, but it was just clay-mud, not bogs as in Kotlas. The train from Kirov to Gorky was like something out of the Ark, but my berth was fine and the people were nice, so I arrived in good spirits. On the berth below were a mother and grandmother with a 3-year-old boy who’s not yet walking and talking. The doctors say there’s no need for treatment and that with peace and quiet, nursing and care he’ll be fine by the age of 6. The boy is beautiful to look at – enormous eyes with long, thick, curly eyelashes – and he’s so affectionate … There was one other woman travelling with me, a Muscovite as well, who had waited ten years for her husband [to return from a labour camp], moved to Kirov to be with him, only to discover he had married someone else. For her, the world became an empty place.
We got into Moscow almost three hours late. I was home by 8 and Mama met me on the stairs … Now it’s 9 o’clock and pitch dark outside. Well, my darling, I’ll say goodbye for now. Remember everything. I hope your soul will be at peace and your heart will not be disturbed by thinking too much. But just in case something foul does get into your head, write to me about it at once and I’ll try to find a remedy. All the best and greetings to everyone.
Sveta was always drawn to people who had lost someone, but this was the first time she had met a woman who had lost her husband to another woman in the labour camps. The Muscovite’s story was not unusual. Many couples were torn apart by ten-year sentences: wives who renounced or could not wait for husbands in the Gulag, or who thought they were dead, so they started a new life with someone else; husbands who encouraged a divorce to save their wives and children from discrimination as ‘relatives of an enemy of
the people’ or gave up on their wives and married women from the camps who might better understand what they had gone through.
This time, Sveta was lifted by the trip to Pechora. ‘I looked at myself in the mirror today,’ she wrote to Lev the day after her return. ‘I look much better than I did after coming back from Pereslavl’[-Zalessky].’ Three days later, she was feeling ‘blissfully happy and kind towards everyone.’ Even three weeks later she still felt the effects of her trip. ‘I am full of happiness,’ she wrote. ‘Not only am I not crying any more, but the other day I even caught myself smiling on the tram.’
Lev, meanwhile, could think of nothing but Sveta. ‘My darling, lovely Sveta,’ he wrote on 4 September, when he was still waiting to hear if she had returned home safely. ‘I don’t know how to describe my condition. “Longing” is not right – there’s worry too. All I think about and see is you, not the whole of you, I see only your eyes, your eyebrows, and your grey dress.’ Five days later, still not having heard from Sveta, he wrote to wish her a happy birthday on the 10th, but his mood was sad:
My darling Sveta, tomorrow is your birthday. It’s so difficult for me to wish you anything, my darling – there is such an enormous contrast between what I want for you and what is possible now and in the future. So everything I wish for must sound like a madman’s ravings, which no one believes. If this letter could get to you by tomorrow I wouldn’t write it. I don’t want to upset you on this day with pointless reminders of our situation. Sveta, Sveta, if only fate had been more generous, if only it would smile on us … I don’t know what will happen in the future, how it will be, but I want to believe that we’ll have one. Is it really too much to believe? … Look after yourself, Svet. Be healthy, Svetinka.
On 22 September, three weeks after Sveta’s departure, there was still no word. Other prisoners were receiving letters sent from Moscow only a few days before, but nothing came for Lev. He was beside himself with worry:
My darling Svetinka, no letter has come from you. God knows what I’m thinking about as I write to you now. I’m not embarrassed to be a 32-year-old simpleton who sounds like both a ludicrously sentimental 16-year-old and an anxious old mama, only afraid that I’m pestering you and you’ll be annoyed by my lamentations if everything is all right and it’s just something to do with the post. Is that the reason?
At last a letter came, on the 23rd.
I was imagining the wildest things and was in the most unbearable state, when suddenly a man arrived whom I don’t even really know and handed me a letter, and as soon as I saw your handwriting I forgot to thank him. Svetik, you are mine, my darling, glorious Svetlaninka. The only trouble is that I can’t picture you when I read your letters. There are two Svetas – one seen with the eyes, the other who appears in your letters. If I want this other Sveta, I remember phrases you’ve written, but they come to me without a voice and they aren’t associated with your appearance. If I want to see you, then it’s easier for me without your letters. Mind you, it doesn’t follow from this that life without your letters is easier for me, Sveta, my darling.
Gradually, Lev settled back into a routine. Winter came again. The labour camp was not prepared. There were broken windows, holes in the roofs of many of the buildings and not enough heaters or electric lights for the barracks in the 2nd Colony. The administration talked about rewiring the whole wood-combine, but nothing was done. In November, once the river had frozen, the annual cleanup of the labour camp began, with huge bonfires of wood-waste products on the ice.
Lev was busy with repairs at the power plant. ‘The days are passing by very quickly,’ he wrote to Sveta, ‘and in the evenings I’m ready to sleep because I run around all day doing jobs at the station. Liubka and I together – thank God he hasn’t left yet – have finished the installation of one of the panels, and for the first time since the station opened the newly installed equipment is working without a hitch.’
Lev was worried about fresh rumours of a convoy to the northernmost ‘special regime’ camps. When the list of prisoners for that convoy was finally announced, his closest friend and bunk-mate, Liubka Terletsky, was on it. On 2 November, Terletsky was sent to Inta, one of harshest mining camps in the Gulag, 180 kilometres north of Pechora on the railway to Vorkuta. It was a catastrophe for Lev, who loved Liubka like a brother and worried about him because of his youth and physical frailty. ‘This evening they sent Liubka away after all. Scoundrels, they’re all scoundrels,’ he wrote despairingly to Sveta late that night. Lev was particularly disappointed that Arvanitopulo had done nothing to help Terletsky, who had worked hard for him at the power station, while the new head of the Electrical Group, Aleksandr Semenov, who hardly knew Terletsky, had ‘tried to do everything he could’ to save him. ‘If only he’d had a little more freedom of action,’ Lev wrote, ‘perhaps he could have worked something out. It all stinks to high heaven.’
Lev was afraid that his friend would not survive the convoy. ‘Liubka had become quite ill after all the strenuous work, he was overcome with nerves and had lost weight,’ Lev wrote to Sveta on 3 November. ‘A journey in the current frost is difficult enough, even for those who are stronger, but in his condition I fear the worst … I didn’t think I could ever feel so close to somebody. Do you think he will hold out for the next 11 months?’
34
Survival in the Gulag was heavily dependent on the support of friends, and Lev thought of Liubka as his only truly close friend in the labour camp, as he explained to Sveta on 9 November:
I was never able to cry on anybody’s shoulder, unless it was yours, but with Liubka here I found it easier to bear difficult moments. I never told him anything if the cause of my misery was private, and generally our friendship didn’t involve any kind of sentimentality. But even having an argument with him brought some relief, or just talking about random things, trivial things … Liubka, Liubka, if
only I knew you were still alive, if only you can hold out until the day of your release. Sveta, I told him your address to memorize –you don’t mind, do you? Just in case it turns out to be the only contact he has, although he might not even try to write – that would be very much like him.
On 3 December, Lev sat down to write a letter to Liubka:
Well, my friend, don’t be angry that I’m writing to you. I don’t even know if or when this letter will be sent. It’s wretched egoism on my part, of course – I can’t overcome the desire to say a couple of words to a living soul, if only by correspondence, since there is no living soul around here. Perhaps it would be better for you not to get letters – I know you – but if you can bear it, then this letter won’t cause you any harm.
Liubka, no matter how bad it is there, just think of one thing: it’s simply foolishness to hold out for 8
1/2
years just to give up in the 9th, whether things will be better for you after the 9th or not.
Lev wrote in detail about everything that had happened at the power station in the month since Liubka left. The news took up twelve pages. He then signed off:
Liubka, I didn’t want to say this to you at all, but really there’s no sense in not saying it – namely, that you are missed. S. writes that she would like to shake your hand. Consider this handshake done, together with mine, and remember her address: 8, 17, SAI, Kazarm, M. – keep it in your memory in case of any parcels. And don’t be afraid should there be a parcel – I only requested vitamins to help your scurvy, and they cost next to nothing. Well, anyway, stay alive, my man.

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