Kolyma Tales (18 page)

‘This way, this way.’

It was an ordinary office, somewhat larger than the one in which I had been two hours earlier. The glassy eyes of Captain Rebrov were fixed directly on me. On the corner of the table stood a glass of tea with lemon and a saucer with a chewed rind of cheese. There were phones, folders, portraits.

‘Name?’

‘Andreev.’

‘Crime, sentence?’

I told him.

‘Lawyer?’

‘Lawyer.’

Captain Rebrov leaned over the table, bringing his glassy eyes closer to mine, and asked:

‘Do you know Parfentiev?’

‘Yes, I know him.’

Parfentiev had once been my work gang leader back at the mine before I was transferred to Shmelyov’s group.

‘Yes, I know him. He was my work gang leader, Dmitri Parfentiev.’

‘Good, so you know Parfentiev?’

‘Yes, I know him.’

‘How about Vinogradov?’

‘I don’t know any Vinogradov.’

‘Vinogradov, the director of Far Eastern Ship Construction?’

‘I don’t know him.’

Captain Rebrov lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, and said, extinguishing the cigarette in the saucer:

‘So you know Vinogradov and don’t know Parfentiev?’

‘No, I don’t know Vinogradov…’

‘Oh, yes, you know Parfentiev and don’t know Vinogradov. I see.’

Captain Rebrov pushed a button, and the door behind me opened.

‘Take him to the stockade.’

The saucer with the cigarette and uneaten rind of cheese remained on the right-hand side of the desk next to the pitcher of water in Rebrov’s office.

The guard led me through the dark night along the streets of sleeping Magadan.

‘Get a move on.’

‘I have nowhere to hurry to.’

‘Why don’t you chat a little longer?’ The guard took out his pistol. ‘I could shoot you like a dog. It’s no problem to write someone off.’

‘You won’t do it,’ I said. ‘You’d have to answer to Captain Rebrov.’

‘Get moving, you louse!’

Magadan is a small town. Together we reached Vaskov’s House, the local prison. Vaskov was second in charge to Berzin when Magadan was being built. The wooden prison was one of the first in Magadan, and the prison kept the name of the man who built it. Magadan had long since acquired a stone prison built according to the latest word in penitentiary technology, but this new building was also called Vaskov’s House. After some brief negotiations at the entrance I was admitted into the yard of Vaskov’s House. I saw a low, stocky, long building made of smooth heavy planks. Across the yard were two wings of a wooden building.

‘The second one,’ a voice behind me said.

I seized a door handle, opened the door, and walked in.

There were double-width berths packed with people. But it wasn’t crowded, not shoulder to shoulder. The floor was earthen. A stove made from half a barrel stood on long metal legs. There was a smell of sweat, disinfectant, and dirty bodies. With difficulty I crawled on to an upper berth where it was warmer and found a free spot. My neighbor woke up.

‘Straight from the woods?’

‘Yes.’

‘With fleas?’

‘With fleas.’

‘Then lie down in the corner. The disinfection service is working here, and we don’t have fleas.’

‘Disinfection – that’s good,’ I thought. ‘And mainly, it’s warm.’

We were fed in the morning. There was bread and boiling water. I wasn’t yet due to get bread. I took off my quilted boots, put them under my head, lowered my padded trousers to keep my feet warm, fell asleep, and woke up twenty-four hours later. Bread was being passed out and I was already registered for meals in Vaskov’s House.

For dinner they gave broth and three spoons of wheat kasha. I slept till morning of the next day when the hysterical voice of the guard on duty awakened me.

I crawled down from the bunk.

‘Go outside – to that porch over there.’

The doors of the true House of Vaskov opened before me, and I entered a low, dimly lit corridor. The guard turned the lock, threw back the massive iron latch, and disclosed a tiny cell with a double berth. Two men sat bent over in the corner on the lower bunk.

I walked up to the window and sat down. Someone was shaking me by the shoulders. It was my gang leader, Dmitry Parfentiev, whom Rebrov had asked about.

‘Do you understand anything?’

‘Nothing.’

‘When were you brought in?’

‘Three days ago. Atlas had me brought in in a small truck.’

‘Atlas? He questioned me in the division office. About forty years old, balding, in civilian clothing.’

‘With me he wore a military uniform.’

‘What did Captain Rebrov ask you?’

‘Do I know Vinogradov.’

‘Well?’

‘How am I supposed to know him?’

‘Vinogradov is the director of Far Eastern Ship Construction.’

‘You know that, but I don’t know who Vinogradov is.’

‘He and I were students at the same school.’

I began to put two and two together. Before his arrest Parfentiev had been a district prosecutor. Vinogradov, in passing through the area, learned that his university friend was in the mine and sent him some money. He also asked the head of the mine to help Parfentiev. The mine doctor had told Smertin and Smertin told Rebrov, who started an investigation of Vinogradov. All convicts in the northern mines who had formerly been lawyers were brought in. The rest was simply a matter of the usual investigative techniques.

‘But why are we here? I was in wing…’

‘We’re being released,’ said Parfentiev.

‘Released? Being let go, that is, not being let go but being sent to a transit prison?’

‘Yes,’ said a third man, crawling out into the light and looking me over with obvious contempt.

He had a fat repulsive pink face and was dressed in a black fur coat. His voile shirt was open at the chest.

‘So you know each other? Captain Rebrov didn’t have time to squash you. An enemy of the people…’

‘What are you, a friend of the people?’

‘At least I’m not a political prisoner. I was never in the secret police and I never did anything to the working people. But it’s because of your kind that we go to jail.’

‘What are you, a thief?’ I asked.

‘Maybe.’

‘OK, stop it, stop it,’ Parfentiev broke in.

The doors clanked open.

‘Come on out!’

There were about seven men standing at the entrance. Parfentiev and I walked up to them.

‘Are all of you lawyers?’ asked Parfentiev.

‘Yes! Yes!’

‘What happened? Why are we being released?’

Some all-knowing soul said quietly:

‘Captain Rebrov has been arrested. Everyone arrested under his instructions is being released.’

The man in the white gown held out his rosy, washed hand, and Andreev put his sweaty, stiff military shirt into the outstretched fingers. The man jerked back his hand and shook it.

‘I don’t have any underwear,’ Andreev said indifferently.

The orderly then took Andreev’s shirt in both hands, turned the sleeves inside out with an agile, practiced movement, and took one look…

‘He’s full of them, Lydia Ivanovna,’ he said and bellowed at Andreev: ‘How could you let yourself get so lousy?’

But the doctor, Lydia Ivanovna, interrupted him.

‘It’s not their fault,’ she said quietly in a tone of reproach, stressing the word ‘their’, and took a stethoscope from the table.

Andreev remembered this red-haired woman for the rest of his life, thanked her a thousand times, and thought about her with warmth and tenderness. Why? Because she had stressed the word ‘
their
’ in this, the only sentence that Andreev had ever heard from her. He thanked her for a kind word said at the right time. Did she ever learn of his thanks?

The examination was brief and did not require a stethoscope. Lydia Ivanovna breathed on a violet rubber stamp and pressed it to a printed form, leaning on it heavily with both hands. She wrote a few words on it, and Andreev was taken away.

The guard, who had been waiting in the entrance hall, did not take Andreev back to prison but to one of the warehouses in the center of the settlement. The area around the warehouse had a barbed-wire fence with the prescribed ten strands and a gate, next to which stood a sentry wearing a leather coat and holding a rifle. They entered the yard and approached the warehouse. A bright light shone through the crack in the door. The door was made for trucks, not people, and the guard opened it with great difficulty. The smell of dirty bodies, sour human sweat, and old clothing struck Andreev’s nostrils. A muffled hum of human voices filled the vast box. The walls were entirely covered with four-tiered bunks cut from whole larch trees. The bunks were built solidly, to last for ever – like Caesar’s bridges. More than a thousand people lay on the shelves of the huge warehouse. This was only one of twenty enormous warehouses packed with living goods. There was a typhoid quarantine in port, and there hadn’t been any ‘outgoing shipments’ for more than a month.

There had been a breakdown in the camp’s blood circulation system, whose erythrocytes were living people. Trucks stood idle, and the mines lengthened the prisoners’ workday. In the town itself the bakery was not able to keep up with orders. Every prisoner had to receive 500 grams (a little over a pound) of bread per day, and bread was even being baked in private apartments. The authorities were growing ever more bitter over the fact that the town was slowly filling up with convict ‘slag’ that had been thrown out by the mines in the taiga.

There were more than a thousand human beings in the warehouse to which Andreev had been brought and which bore the then-fashionable title of ‘section’. This multitude was not immediately noticeable. On the upper bunks people lay naked in the heat; the prisoners on and beneath the lower bunks wore padded coats, pea jackets and hats. No one will ever explain why a convict almost never sleeps on his side. Most of the men lay on their backs, and their bodies seemed like growths or bumps in the wood, like bent boards in the enormous shelves.

People were clustered in small groups either around storytellers – ‘novelists’ – or around incidents, and given such a concentration of people, incidents occurred nearly every minute. These men were being kept in the transit camp and had not been sent to work for more than a month. They were sent out only to the bathhouse to disinfect their clothing. Every day the camps lost twenty thousand workdays, one hundred and sixty thousand hours, perhaps even three hundred and twenty thousand hours; workdays vary. Or a thousand days of life were saved. Twenty thousand days of life. Statistics is a wily science, and figures can be read in different ways.

Everyone was in his place when food was handed out, distributed to ten prisoners at a time. There were so many people that no sooner had breakfast been distributed than it was time for lunch. As soon as lunch had been served, it was time for supper. Only bread and ‘tea’ (warm boiled water) and half a herring were distributed to each man in the morning. No more bread was issued for the rest of the day. Lunch consisted of soup, and only kasha was served for supper. Nevertheless, there was not sufficient time to serve even this quantity.

The assignment man showed Andreev his place and pointed to the second bunk. A grumble of protest came from the top bunk, but the assignment man cursed back at the grumblers. Andreev gripped the edge of the shelf with both hands and unsuccessfully attempted to bring up his right leg. The assignment man’s strong arm tossed him upward, and Andreev plunked down among the naked bodies. No one paid him any attention. The ‘registration’ and settlement procedure had been carried out.

Andreev slept. He awoke only when food was distributed, after which he would carefully and precisely lick his hands and fall asleep again. His sleep was not sound, however, since the lice refused to leave him in peace.

No one questioned him, even though there were many people here from the taiga, and the rest were destined to end up there. They all knew this, and for that very reason they wanted to know as little as possible about their inevitable fate. They were right, Andreev reasoned. They should not know everything that he had seen. Nothing could be avoided or foreseen. What use were extra fears? These were living people, and Andreev was a representative of the dead. His knowledge, a dead man’s knowledge, was of no use to them, the living.

Bathhouse time came two days later. Bathing and clothing disinfection were nothing but an annoyance, and all the prisoners prepared themselves reluctantly. Andreev, however, wanted to rid himself of lice. He had all the time in the world, and he examined the seams of his faded military shirt several times a day. But only the disinfection chamber held the promise of final victory. He went to the bathhouse willingly and, although they issued him no underwear and he had to pull his reddish military shirt over his naked body, he no longer felt the usual bites.

At the bathhouse, the usual portion of water was issued – one basin of hot water and one of cold – but Andreev managed to deceive the water man and get an extra basin. A tiny piece of soap was issued, but it was possible to gather discarded fragments from the floor and work up a good lather. This was his best bath in a year. So what if blood and pus seeped from the scurvy ulcers on his shins? So what if people in the bathhouse recoiled from him in horror? So what if they walked around him and his lousy clothing in disgust?

When clothing was returned from the disinfection chamber, the fur socks of Andreev’s neighbor Ognyov had shrunk so much that they looked like toys. Ognyov burst into tears, for the socks were his salvation in the north. Andreev, however, stared at him without sympathy. He had seen too many men cry for too many reasons. Some pretended, others were mentally disturbed, and still others had lost hope and were desperately bitter. Some cried from the cold. Andreev had never seen anyone cry from hunger.

When they returned through the silent city, the aluminum-hued puddles had cooled, and the fresh air had a smell of spring. After the session in the bathhouse, Andreev slept soundly. Ognyov, who had forgotten the incident in the bathhouse, said Andreev had ‘gotten his fill of sleep’.