Kolyma Tales (22 page)

This amusing, tender human streak reveals itself suddenly.

The hospital was in a panic. After all, Fedorenko had been working there for several months. Unfortunately, the ‘prodromal period’ of the illness, which precedes the appearance of any external symptoms, can last for several years. Those inclined to suspect the worst were doomed to retain this fear in their souls for ever, whether they were civilian employees or convicts.

The hospital was in a panic. The doctors searched their own bodies and those of their patients for white, insensitive spots. A needle joined the phonendoscope and small rubber hammer as standard equipment for any doctor conducting a preliminary examination.

The patient, Fedorenko, was brought before the orderlies and doctors and undressed. An overseer with a pistol stood near the patient. Doctor Krasinsky, armed with an enormous pointer, gave a lecture on leprosy, pointing his stick alternately at the leonine face of the former orderly, at the fingers that were on the verge of falling off, and at the shiny white spots on his back.

All residents, without exception, civilian and convict, were re-examined, and suddenly a white spot insensitive to pain was discovered on the back of Shura Leschinskaya, a nurse from the front lines on duty in the women’s ward. Leschinskaya, who had been in the hospital for only a few months, had no lion’s mask. Her conduct had been neither stricter nor looser than that of any ‘nurse’ recruited from among the former prisoners.

Leschinskaya was locked up in one of the rooms of the women’s ward, and a sample of her skin was sent to Magadan and from there to Moscow for analysis. The answer came: leprosy!

Disinfection after leprosy is quite difficult. Regulations require that the house in which a leper has lived be burned. That was what the textbooks said. But how could one of the wings of a gigantic two-storied hospital be burned? No one could make up his mind to do that. It was something like disinfecting expensive furs. To preserve the value of their furs, the owners are willing to risk leaving the infection in them. They sprinkle some chemical symbolically on the precious furs, because steaming would destroy not only the microbes but the fur as well. The administration would have remained silent even if it had been a matter of plague or cholera.

Someone assumed responsibility for not burning the wing, and even the room in which Fedorenko was kept under lock and key was not burned. They simply soaked everything with phenol and carbolic acid and sprayed repeatedly.

Downstairs, in the basement, two tiny rooms were constructed for the patients. Fedorenko and Leschinskaya were transferred there. Guards were stationed beside the heavy padlocked doors, and the couple was left there to await an order or a detachment of guards from the leprosarium.

Fedorenko and Leschinskaya spent one day in their cells, and when the guards were changed at the end of the day, the cells were found to be empty. Panic ensued in the hospital. Every window and door in the cells was intact. Krasinsky was the first to figure out how they had fled. They had escaped through the floor.

Fedorenko had used his enormous strength to pry the logs apart and had broken into the bread-slicing room and the operating-room of the surgical ward. They had gathered up all the grain alcohol, and the narcotics from the cupboards, and made off with their loot to an underground den.

They had selected a spot, barricaded it, and thrown blankets and mattresses on top to wall themselves off from the world, the guards, the hospital, and the leprosarium. They lived there as man and wife for several days – three days, I believe.

On the third day guards with dogs found the two lepers. I was a member of the group that searched the tall basement of the hospital. The foundation was very high at that spot. The guards removed the logs and exposed the two lepers lying naked. They didn’t get up. Fedorenko’s dark, mutilated hands were around Leschinskaya’s gleaming body. Both were drunk.

They were covered with blankets and carried away to one of the two cells, no longer separated.

Who covered them with a blanket, who touched their terrible bodies? A special janitor was found in the civilian hospital and, with the permission of higher authorities, given a credit of seven working days for each one spent with the lepers. That is more than they give people for working in the tungsten-mines, the lead-mines, or the uranium-mines. Seven days for one. The article of the penal code under which the man was sentenced was not taken into consideration. They found a soldier, arrested at the front and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor and five years of exile, who naïvely assumed that his heroism would shorten his sentence and bring nearer the day of his liberation.

Convict Korolkov, a wartime lieutenant, stood guard at the cell round the clock. He even slept before the door. And when the guards arrived from the Island (on which the leprosarium was located), convict Korolkov was taken with the two lepers to tend to their needs. I never heard anything more of Korolkov, or of Fedorenko, or of Leschinskaya.

Many books have been written about Mixail Lunin, the first hussar and a famous Decembrist. In the destroyed chapter of
Eugene Onegin
, Pushkin wrote:

He was a true knight, an intelligent, well-informed man who not only spoke up for his cause but worked actively toward it. It was indeed a great cause! In due course I will tell you everything I know about the second hussar, his descendant.

Hungry and exhausted, we leaned into a horse collar, raising blood blisters on our chests and pulling a stone-filled cart up the slanted mine floor. The collar was the same device used long ago by the ancient Egyptians. I saw it, experienced it myself. Throughout Kolyma the mine was notorious.

The cruel, snowless Kolyma winter of 1940–41 was approaching. Cold crushed the muscles and squeezed a man’s temples. Iron stoves were placed in the tarpaulin tents that served as our shelter in the summer months, but the tents, a mass of holes, could not retain the free air.

Our inventive bosses were preparing people for the winter. Inside each tent a second, smaller frame was constructed that was designed to trap a layer of air about four inches thick. This frame was covered, all but the ceiling, with roofing material. The resulting double tent was slightly warmer than the single canvas one.

The very first nights spent in these tents made it clear that this arrangement meant doom, and a quick doom at that. I had to get out of there – but how? Who would help? Five miles from us was a large camp, Arkagala, where miners worked. Our group was considered a part of that camp. I had to get transferred there, to Arkagala.

But how?

Convict tradition demands that in such instances, a prisoner first of all approach a doctor. There was a first-aid station at Kadychkan run by a former student of the Moscow Medical Institute who hadn’t finished his course of study. At least, that was the rumor in our tent.

It required enormous will-power to find the strength to go to the first-aid station. I didn’t have to get dressed or put on my boots, of course, since I wore them constantly from one bathhouse day to the next. But I just didn’t have the strength. Why should I waste my rest period on this ‘visit’ to the doctor, when it might result only in mockery or even a beating. (Such things happened.) But the main consideration was the hopelessness, the slimness of the chance of success. Nevertheless, I couldn’t afford to lose even the slightest chance in the search for luck – this judgement came from my body and its exhausted muscles, not from experience or intelligence.

As in beasts, the will was subordinate to instinct.

On the other side of the road from our tent was a small hut used by geologists, exploring parties, secret police, and military patrols. The geologists had left long ago, and the hut had been converted into an outpatient medical facility with a cot, a cupboard with medications, and a curtain made from an old blanket. The blanket concealed the area where the ‘doctor’ lived.

Right down the middle of the road was a line of people queueing up in the bitter cold to be examined.

I squeezed my way into the hut, and the heavy door, closing behind me, pushed me right in. The doctor had blue eyes, a large forehead with two bald spots, and hair. He had to have hair; hair was an existential statement. Hair in camp is a testimony to importance. Almost everyone was shaved bald, so that anyone who had hair was the object of general envy. Combed hair was a peculiar form of protest against life in the camps.

‘From Moscow?’ the doctor asked me.

‘From Moscow.’

‘Let’s get acquainted.’

I gave him my name and shook his outstretched hand. It was cold and somewhat moist.

‘Lunin.’

‘That’s a proud name,’ I said with a smile.

‘I’m his great-grandson. In our family the oldest son is always called either Mixail or Sergei. We alternate. Pushkin’s Lunin was Mixail Sergeevich.’

‘I know.’ Somehow this, our first discussion, didn’t smack at all of the camps. I forgot about my request, since I didn’t want to introduce an inappropriate note into our conversation.

‘Have a smoke!’

I began to roll a cigarette with my rosy, frostbitten fingers.

‘Take more, don’t be bashful.’

‘Back at home I have a whole library of books about my great-grandfather. I’m a medical student. But I was arrested and didn’t graduate. Everyone in our family was in the military except me. I became a doctor. And I don’t regret it.’

‘So much for Mars. A friend of Aesculapius, Bacchus, and Venus.’

‘I don’t know about the Venus part, but it certainly is true about Aesculapius – except I don’t have a diploma. If I did, I’d really show them.’

‘How about Bacchus?’

‘Well, of course, I do have grain alcohol here. But all I need is one shot-glass. I get drunk easily. But you know how things are – I take care of the civilian village as well. Come back again sometime.’

On the point of leaving, I opened the door slightly with my shoulder.

‘You know,’ Lunin said, ‘Muscovites like to talk about their town – the streets, the skating-rinks, the houses, the Moscow River – more than Kievans or Leningraders do… You people like to talk about the city even more, and they remember it better…’

I dropped by several times in the evening when Lunin had finished attending to patients. I’d smoke a home-made cigarette but never got up the nerve to ask for bread.

Sergei Mixailovich, like everyone who either through luck or profession had an easy time of it in camp, didn’t think much about others and couldn’t really understand hungry people. His sector – Arkagala – was getting enough to eat, and the mine catastrophes had bypassed the town.

‘If you like, I’ll operate on you – remove that cyst from your finger.’

‘All right.’

‘Just don’t ask me to release you from work. You know yourself it’s not really convenient for me to do that.’

‘But how can I work with my finger all cut up?’

‘You’ll manage.’

I agreed, and Lunin did a good job of removing the cyst and gave it to me as a ‘keepsake’. Many years later my wife and I were to meet, and in the first minute of our meeting she squeezed my fingers, feeling in amazement for that cyst.

I realized that Sergei Mixailovich was simply very young, that he needed an educated person to talk to, that his views of the camps and his idea of fate were no different from those of any civilian supervisor, that he was even capable of admiring the camp thugs, and that the brunt of the storm of ’38 had passed over him.

I treasured every day, every hour of rest; exhausted from life in the gold-mines, my muscles demanded a respite. I treasured every piece of bread, every bowl of soup; my stomach demanded food, and my will was not strong enough to keep my eyes from wandering over the shelves in search of bread. But I forced myself to remember Moscow’s Chinatown (which has no Chinese) and the Nikitsky gates where the writer Andrei Sobol shot himself and where Stern shot at the German ambassador’s car. It is that part of Moscow’s street history which will never be written down.

‘Yes, Moscow, Moscow. Tell me, how many women have you had?’

It was senseless for a half-starved man to keep up this conversation, but the young surgeon listened only to himself and wasn’t offended by my silence.

‘Sergei Mixailovich, our fates are a crime – the greatest crime of the age.’

‘I’m not sure of that,’ Sergei Mixailovich said with an expression of displeasure. ‘It’s just the kikes muddying the water.’

I shrugged my shoulders.

Soon Sergei Mixailovich got his transfer to Arkagala, and I thought – without any sadness or feeling of injustice – that one more person had left my life for ever and that parting was, in reality, an easy thing. But matters worked out differently.

The supervisor of the sector where we worked, harnessed to an Egyptian yoke like slaves, was Pavel Ivanovich Kiselyov. A middle-aged engineer, he was not a Party member. He beat his prisoners daily. Whenever the supervisor set foot in the sector, there were beatings, blows, and shouting.

Was it because he had no fear of being punished? Was there a blood-lust lurking in the depths of his soul? Or perhaps a desire to distinguish himself in the eyes of the senior supervisors? Power is a terrible thing.

Zelfugarov, a counterfeiter from my work gang, lay in the snow, spitting out his broken teeth.

‘All my relatives were shot for counterfeiting, but I was a minor, so I got off with only fifteen years’ hard labor. My father offered the prosecutor half a million rubles – real ones, in cash – but he wouldn’t go for it.’

There were four of us working the shift, harnessed to the horse collar and walking around the post. We stopped near Zelfugarov. There was Korneev, a Siberian peasant; Lyonya Semyonov, a thief; the engineer Vronsky; and myself. Semyonov said:

‘It’s only in camp that you learn to work with machinery. Try your hand at any kind of work – what do you care if you break a crane or a winch?’ This point of view was popular even among many of the young surgeons in Kolyma.