Kolyma Tales (28 page)

Everything was confiscated without any reports or records. Confiscated, and that was that! Indignation was boundless. I recalled how, two years earlier, civilian clothing had been confiscated in Magadan; hundreds of thousands of fur coats from hundreds of convict gangs that had been shipped to the Far North of Misery. These were warm coats, sweaters, and suits that could have served as precious bribes to save a life in some decisive hour. But all roads back were cut off in the Magadan bathhouse. Mountains of civilian clothing rose in the yard. They were higher than the water tower, higher than the bathhouse roof. Mountains of clothing, mountains of tragedies, mountains of human fates suddenly snapped. All who left the bathhouse were doomed to death. How these people had fought to protect their goods from the camp criminal element, from the blatant piracy that raged in the barracks, the cattle cars, the transit points! All that had been saved, hidden from the thieves, was confiscated in the bathhouse by the state.

How simple it all was! Only two years had passed, and now everything was being repeated.

Civilian clothing that had reached the mines was confiscated later. I remember how I had been awakened in the middle of the night. There were searches in the barracks every day, and every day people were led away. I sat on my cot and smoked. I had no civilian clothing. It had all been left in the Magadan bathhouse. But some of my comrades had civilian clothing. These were precious things – symbols of a different life. They may have been rotting, torn, unmended, because no one had either the time or the strength to sew. Nevertheless they were treasured.

Each of us stood at his place and waited. The investigator sat next to the lamp and wrote up reports on confiscated items.

I sat on the bunk and smoked, neither upset nor indignant, but overwhelmed by one single desire – that the search be ended as quickly as possible so we could go back to sleep. But our orderly, whose name was Praga, began to hack away at his suit with an axe, tore the sheets into shreds, chopped up his shoes.

‘Just rags, all they’ll get is rags.’

‘Take that axe away from him,’ shouted the inspector.

Praga threw the axe on the floor. The search stopped. The items Praga had torn and cut were his own things. They had not yet managed to write up a report on them. When he realized they were not about to seize him, Praga shredded his civilian clothing before our very eyes. And before the eyes of the investigator.

That had been a year ago. And now it was happening again.

Everyone was excited, upset, and had difficulty falling asleep again.

‘There’s no difference between the criminals who rob us and the government that robs us,’ I said. And everyone agreed with me.

As watchman, Skoroseev started his shift about two hours before we did. Two abreast – all the taiga path would allow – we reached the office, angry and offended. Naïve longing for justice sits deep in man – perhaps even too deep to root out. After all, why be offended? Angry? Indignant? This damn search was just one instance of thousands. But at the bottom of each of our souls something stronger than freedom, stronger than life’s experience, was boiling. The faces of the convicts were dark with rage.

On the office porch stood the camp chief, Victor Nikolaevich Plutalov. The chief’s face was also dark with rage. Our tiny column stopped in front of the office, and Plutalov called me into the office.

‘So, you say the state is worse than the camp criminals?’ Plutalov stared at me from under lowered brows, biting his lips and sitting uncomfortably on a stool behind his desk.

I said nothing. Skoroseev! The impatient Mr Plutalov didn’t conceal his stoolie, didn’t wait for two hours! Or was something else the matter?

‘I don’t give a damn how you run off at the mouth. But what am I supposed to do if it’s reported to me? Or, in your language, someone squeals?’

‘Yes sir, it’s called squealing.’

‘All right, get back to work. You’d all eat each other alive if you had the chance. Politicians! A universal language. Everyone is going to understand one another. But I’m in charge here. I have to do something, if they squeal to me…’

Plutalov spat angrily.

A week passed, and I was shipped off with the latest group to leave the blessed prospecting group for the big mine. On the very first day I took the place of a horse in a wooden yoke, heaving with my chest against a wooden log.

Skoroseev remained in the prospecting group.

They were putting on an amateur performance in camp, and the wandering actor, who was also master of ceremonies, came running out to encourage the nervous performers offstage (one of the hospital wards). ‘The performance’s going great! It’s a great performance!’ he would whisper into the ear of each participant. ‘It’s a great performance!’ he announced loudly and strode back and forth, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a dirty rag.

Everything was very professional; the wandering actor had himself once been a star. Someone on stage was reading aloud a story of Zoschenko, ‘Lemonade’. The master of ceremonies leaned over to me:

‘Give me a smoke!’

‘Sure.’

‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ the master of ceremonies said suddenly, ‘but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was that bitch Skoroseev.’

‘Skoroseev?’ Now I knew whose intonations the voice on stage had reminded me of.

‘I’m an Esperantist. Do you understand? It’s a universal language. No “basic English” for me. That’s what I got my sentence for. I’m a member of the Moscow Society of Esperantists.’

‘Oh, you mean Article 5, Paragraph 6? A spy?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Ten years?’

‘Fifteen.’

‘But where does Skoroseev fit in?’

‘Skoroseev was the vice-chairman of the society. He’s the one who sold us all out, testified against everyone.’

‘Kind of short?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Where’s he now?’

‘I don’t know, but I’d strangle him with my bare hands. I ask you as a friend [I had known the actor for about two hours – no more]: hit him in the face if you meet him. Right in the mug, and half your sins will be forgiven you.’

‘Half, for sure?’

‘For sure.’

But the reader of Zoschenko’s ‘Lemonade’ was already walking offstage. It wasn’t Skoroseev, but tall, lanky Baron Mendel. He looked like a prince from the Romanov dynasty and counted Pushkin among his ancestors. I was somewhat disappointed as I looked Pushkin’s descendant over, and the master of ceremonies was already leading his next victim on to the stage. He declaimed Gorky’s ‘Wind gathers the clouds over the sea’s gray plain’.

‘Just listen,’ the baron leaned over to me. ‘What kind of poetry is that? That kind of howling wind and thunder isn’t poetry. Just imagine! In that same year, that same day and hour, Blok wrote his “Oath in Fire and Gloom”, and Bely wrote “Gold in Azure”…’

I envied the baron’s happiness. He could lose himself, flee into verse.

Many years had passed, and nothing was forgotten. I arrived in Magadan after being released from camp and was attempting to free myself in a true fashion, to cross that terrible sea over which I had once been brought to Kolyma. And although I realized how difficult it would be to exist during my eternal wanderings, I didn’t want to remain on the cursed Kolyma soil by choice.

I had little money, and a truck headed in my direction had brought me to Magadan for a ruble per kilometer. The town was shrouded by a white fog. I had acquaintances here. They had to be here. But one seeks out acquaintances here in the day, and not at night. At night, no one will open even for a familiar voice. I needed a roof over my head, a berth, sleep.

I stood in the bus station and gazed at the floor which was completely covered with bodies, objects, sacks, crates. If worse came to worst… It was as cold here as on the street, perhaps forty-five degrees below zero. The iron stove had no fire in it, and the station door was constantly opening.

‘Don’t I know you?’

In the savage frost I was glad to see even Skoroseev. We shook hands through our mittens.

‘You can stay at my place. My house is nearby. I was released quite a while back. Got a mortgage and built a house. Even got married.’ Skoroseev burst out laughing. ‘We’ll have some tea…’

It was so cold, I agreed. For a long time we made our way over the hills and ruts of night-time Magadan with its shroud of cold milky darkness.

‘Yes, I built a house,’ Skoroseev was saying as I smoked, resting up. ‘Got a government loan. Decided to build a nest. A northern nest.’

I drank some tea, lay down, and fell asleep. But I slept badly in spite of my distant journey. Somehow yesterday had been lived badly. When I woke up, washed, and had a smoke, I understood how I had lived yesterday badly.

‘Well, I’ll be going. I have a friend not far from here.’

‘Leave your suitcase. If you find your friends, you can come back for it.’

‘No, this is too far away.’

‘I really wish you’d stay. After all, we are old friends.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Goodbye.’

I buttoned my coat, picked up the suitcase and reached for the door handle. ‘Goodbye.’

‘What about the money?’ said Skoroseev.

‘What money?’

‘For the night. It’s not free.’

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t realize that.’

I put down the suitcase, unbuttoned my coat, groped for the money in my pockets and paid. The fog was milky yellow in the day.

A lot of time must have passed between the beginning and end of these events, for the human experience acquired in the far north is so great that months are considered equivalent to years. Even the state recognizes this by increasing salaries and fringe benefits to workers of the north. It is a land of hopes and therefore of rumors, guesses, suppositions, and hypothesizing. In the north any event is encrusted with rumor more quickly than a local official’s emergency report about it can reach the ‘higher spheres’.

It was rumored that when a party boss on an inspection tour described the camp’s cultural activities as lame on both feet, the ‘activities director’, Major Pugachov, said to the guest:

‘Don’t let that bother you, sir, we’re preparing a concert that all Kolyma will talk about.’

We could begin the story straightaway with the report of Braude, a surgeon sent by the central hospital to the region of military activities. We could begin with the letter of Yashka Kuchen, a convict orderly who was a patient in the hospital. Kuchen wrote the letter with his left hand, since his right shoulder had been shot clean through by a rifle-bullet.

Or we could begin with the story of Dr Potalina who saw nothing, heard nothing, and was gone when all the unusual eve-nts took place. It was precisely her absence that the prosecutor classified as a ‘false alibi’, criminal inaction, or whatever the term may be in legal jargon.

The arrests of the thirties were arrests of random victims on the false and terrifying theory of a heightened class struggle accompanying the strengthening of socialism. The professors, union officials, soldiers, and workers who filled the prisons to overflowing at that period had nothing to defend themselves with except, perhaps, personal honesty and naïveté – precisely those qualities that lightened rather than hindered the punitive work of ‘justice’ of the day. The absence of any unifying idea undermined the moral resistance of the prisoners to an unusual degree. They were neither enemies of the government nor state criminals, and they died, not even understanding why they had to die. Their self-esteem and bitterness had no point of support. Separated, they perished in the white Kolyma desert from hunger, cold, work, beatings, and diseases. They immediately learned not to defend or support each other. This was precisely the goal of the authorities. The souls of those who remained alive were utterly corrupted, and their bodies did not possess the qualities necessary for physical labor.

After the war, ship after ship delivered their replacements – former Soviet citizens who were ‘repatriated’ directly to the far north-east.

Among them were many people with different experiences and habits acquired during the war, courageous people who knew how to take chances and who believed only in the gun. There were officers and soldiers, fliers and scouts…

Accustomed to the angelic patience and slavish submissiveness of the ‘Trotskyites’, the camp administration was not in the least concerned and expected nothing new.

New arrivals asked the surviving ‘aborigines’:

‘Why do you eat your soup and kasha in the dining-hall, but take your bread with you back to the barracks? Why can’t you eat the bread with your soup the way the rest of the world does?’

Smiling with the cracks of their blue mouths and showing their gums, toothless from scurvy, the local residents would answer the naïve newcomers:

‘In two weeks each of you will understand, and each of you will do the same.’

How could they be told that they had never in their lives known true hunger, hunger that lasts for years and breaks the will? How could anyone explain the passionate, all-engulfing desire to prolong the process of eating, the supreme bliss of washing down one’s bread ration with a mug of tasteless, but hot melted snow in the barracks?

But not all of the newcomers shook their heads in contempt and walked away.

Major Pugachov clearly realized that they had been delivered to their deaths – to replace these living corpses. They had been brought in the fall. With winter coming on, there was no place to run to, but in the summer a man could at least die free even if he couldn’t hope to escape completely.

It was virtually the only conspiracy in twenty years, and its web was spun all winter.

Pugachov realized that only those who did not work in the mine’s general work gang could survive the winter and still be capable of an escape attempt. After a few weeks in the work gang no one would run anywhere.

Slowly, one by one, the participants of the conspiracy became trusties. Soldatov became a cook, and Pugachov himself was appointed activities director. There were two work gang leaders, a paramedic and Ivashenko, who had formerly been a mechanic and now repaired weapons for the guards.