Kolyma Tales (30 page)

He ran through the roadless taiga until his strength failed.

Above the forest meadow the sun rose, and the people hiding in haystacks could easily make out figures of men in military uniforms on all sides of the meadow.

‘I guess this is the end?’ Ivashenko said, and nudged Khachaturian with his elbow.

‘Why the end?’ Ashot said as he aimed. The rifle shot rang out, and a soldier fell on the path.

At a command the soldiers rushed the swamp and haystacks. Shots cracked and groans were heard.

The attack was repulsed. Several wounded men lay among the clumps of marsh grass.

‘Medic, crawl over there,’ an officer ordered. They’d shown foresight and brought along Yasha Kushen, a former resident of West Byelorussia, now a convict paramedic. Without saying a word, convict Kushen crawled over to the wounded man, waving his first-aid bag. The bullet that struck Kushen in the shoulder stopped him halfway.

The head of the guard detail that the escapees had just disarmed jumped up without any sign of fear and shouted:

‘Hey, Ivashenko, Soldatov, Pugachov. Give up, you’re surrounded. There’s no way out!’

‘OK, come and get the weapons,’ shouted Ivashenko from behind the haystack.

And Bobylyov, head of the guards, ran splashing through the marsh toward the haystacks.

He had covered half the way when Ivashenko’s shot cracked out. The bullet caught Bobylyov directly in the forehead.

‘Good boy,’ Soldatov praised his comrade. ‘The chief was so brave because they would have either shot him for our escape or given him a sentence in the camps. Hold your ground!’

They were shooting from all directions. Machine-guns began to crackle.

Soldatov felt a burning sensation in both legs, and the head of the dead Ivashenko fell on his shoulder.

Another haystack fell silent. A dozen bodies lay in the marsh.

Soldatov kept on shooting until something struck him in the head and he lost consciousness.

Nikolay Braude, chief surgeon of the main hospital, was summoned by Major General Artemyev, one of four Kolyma generals and chief of the whole Kolyma camp. Braude was sent to the village of Lichan together with ‘two paramedics, bandages, and surgical instruments’. That was how the order read.

Braude didn’t try to guess what might have happened and quickly set out as directed in a beat-up one-and-a-half-ton hospital truck. Powerful Studebakers loaded with armed soldiers streamed past the hospital truck on the highway. It was only about twenty miles, but because of frequent stops caused by heavy traffic and roadblocks to check documents, it took Braude three hours to reach the area.

Major General Artemyev was waiting for the surgeon in the apartment of the local camp head. Both Braude and Artemyev were long-term residents of Kolyma and fate had brought them together a number of times in the past.

‘What’s up, a war?’ Braude asked the general when they met.

‘I don’t know if you’d call it a war, but there were twenty-eight dead in the first battle. You’ll see the wounded yourself.’

While Braude washed his hands in a basin hanging on the door, the general told him of the escape.

‘And you called for planes, I suppose? A couple of squadrons, a few bombs here and there… Or maybe you opted for an atom bomb?’

‘That’s right, make a joke of it,’ said the general. ‘I tell you I’m not joking when I say that I’m waiting for my orders. I’ll be lucky if I just lose my job. They could even try me. Things like that have happened before.’

Yes, Braude knew that things like that had happened before. Several years earlier three thousand people were sent on foot in winter to one of the ports, but supplies stored on shore were destroyed by a storm while the group was underway. Of three thousand, only three hundred people remained alive. The second-in-command in the camp administration who had signed the orders to send the group was made a scapegoat and tried.

Braude and his paramedics worked until evening, removing bullets, amputating, bandaging. Only soldiers of the guard were among the wounded; there were no escapees.

The next day toward evening more wounded were brought in. Surrounded by officers of the guard, two soldiers carried in the first and only escapee whom Braude was to see. The escapee was in military uniform and differed from the soldiers only in that he was unshaven. Both shin-bones and his left shoulder were broken by bullets, and there was a head wound with damage to the parietal bone. The man was unconscious.

Braude rendered him first aid and, as Artemyev had ordered, the wounded man and his guards were taken to the central hospital where there were the necessary facilities for a serious operation.

It was all over. Nearby stood an army truck covered with a tarpaulin. It contained the bodies of the dead escapees. Next to it was a second truck with the bodies of the dead soldiers.

But Major Pugachov was crawling down the edge of the ravine.

They could have sent the army home after this victory, but trucks with soldiers continued to travel along the thousand-mile highway for many days.

They couldn’t find the twelfth man – Major Pugachov.

Soldatov took a long time to recover – to be shot. But then that was the only death sentence out of sixty. Such was the number of friends and acquaintances who were sent before the military tribunal. The head of the local camp was sentenced to ten years. The head of the medical section, Dr Potalina, was acquitted, and she changed her place of employment almost as soon as the trial was over. Major General Artemyev’s words were prophetic: he was removed from his position in the guard.

Pugachov dragged himself into the narrow throat of the cave. It was a bear’s den, the beast’s winter quarters, and the animal had long since left to wander the taiga. Bear hairs could still be seen on the cave walls and stone floor.

‘How quickly it’s all ended,’ thought Pugachov. ‘They’ll bring dogs and find me.’

Lying in the cave, he remembered his difficult male life, a life that was to end on a bear path in the taiga. He remembered people – all of whom he had respected and loved, beginning with his mother. He remembered his schoolteacher, Maria Ivanovna, and her quilted jacket of threadbare black velvet that was turning red. There were many, many others with whom fate had thrown him together.

But better than all, more noble than all were his eleven dead comrades. None of the other people in his life had endured such disappointments, deceit, lies. And in this northern hell they had found within themselves the strength to believe in him, Pugachov, and to stretch out their hands to freedom. These men who had died in battle were the best men he had known in his life.

Pugachov picked a blueberry from a shrub that grew at the entrance to the cave. Last year’s wrinkled fruit burst in his fingers, and he licked them clean. The overripe fruit was as tasteless as snow water. The skin of the berry stuck to his dry tongue.

Yes, they were the best. He remembered Ashot’s surname now; it was Khachaturian.

Major Pugachov remembered each of them, one after the other, and smiled at each. Then he put the muzzle of the pistol in his mouth and for the last time in his life fired a shot.

It all began some time before my release from Kolyma. I had been transferred from night into day – clearly a promotion, a confirmation, a success along the dangerous path to salvation of an orderly recruited from among the patients. I never noticed who took my place, for in those days I lacked the strength necessary for curiosity and I hoarded my movements – spiritual and physical. I’d accomplished resurrections before, and I knew how dearly one paid for unnecessary curiosity.

In a nocturnal half-sleep and out of the corner of my eye, however, I saw a pale dirty face grown over with reddish bristles, cavernous eyes – eyes whose color I couldn’t remember – and hooked frostbitten fingers clutching the handle of the smoky kettle. The barracks’ hospital night was so dark and thick that the flame of the kerosene lantern, wavering and flickering as if in the wind, was not enough to light up the corridor, the ceiling, the wall, the door, the floor. The light ripped from the darkness only a piece of the night: a corner of the bedside table and the pale face bent over it. The new man on duty was dressed in the same gown that I used to wear. It was a dirty, torn gown – an ordinary gown intended for the patients. During the day this filthy garment hung in the hospital ward and at night was donned over the quilted jacket of the orderly on duty, who was always chosen from among the patients. The flannel was so extraordinarily thin it was transparent, but nevertheless it didn’t tear. Perhaps the patients made no abrupt movements for fear that the gown would disintegrate. Or perhaps they were unable to.

The semicircle of light swayed back and forth, wavered, reached out in sudden movements. It seemed that the cold and not the wind swung the light above the night table of the orderly on duty. It was not the wind, but the cold itself that moved the light. Within the circle of light swung a face twisted with hunger, and hooked fingers searched the kettle’s bottom for something no spoon could catch. Even frostbitten, the fingers were more reliable than a spoon; at once I understood the essence of the movement, the language of gesture.

There was no reason for me to know all this; I was only the day orderly.

But a few days later, fate was unexpectedly prodded by a sudden and hurried departure in the back of a jolting truck. The vehicle crawled south toward Magadan along the bed of a nameless river that served as a winter road through the taiga. In the back of the truck two human beings were repeatedly tossed upward and dropped back on to the floor with a wooden thud as if they were logs. The guard was sitting in the cab, and I couldn’t tell if I was being struck by a piece of wood or a man. At one of the feeding stops my neighbor’s greedy chomping struck me as familiar, and I recognized the hooked fingers and the pale dirty face.

We didn’t speak to each other; each feared he might frighten off his happiness, his convict joy. The truck hurried on into the next day, and the road came to an end.

We had both been selected by the camp to take paramedic courses. Magadan, the hospital, and the courses were cloaked in fog, a white Kolyma fog. Were there markers, road markers? Would they accept political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the Criminal Code? Only those who came under Point 10. And how about my neighbor in the rear of the truck? He too was ASA – anti-Soviet agitation. That was considered the same as Point 10.

There was an examination on the Russian language. A dictation. The grades were posted the same day. I got an ‘A’. After that came a written examination on mathematics, and I received another ‘A’. It was taken for granted that future students were not required to know the fine points of the Soviet Constitution… I lay on the bunk, dirty and still literally lousy. The job of orderly didn’t destroy lice. But perhaps it only seemed that way to me; lice infestation is one of the camp neuroses. I didn’t have lice any more, but I still couldn’t force myself to get used to the thought or, rather, to the feeling that the lice were gone. I had experienced that feeling two or three times. As for the ‘constitution’ or political economics, such things were no more intended for us than was the luxurious Astoria Hotel. In Butyr Prison the guard on duty in our cell block shouted at me: ‘Why do you keep asking about the Constitution? Your Constitution is the Criminal Code!’ And he was right. Yes, the Criminal Code was our constitution. That was a long time ago. A thousand years. The fourth subject was chemistry. My grade was ‘C’.

Oh, how those convict students strove for knowledge when the stakes of the game were life! How former professors of medicine strove to beat their life-saving knowledge into the heads of ignoramuses and idiots. From the storekeeper Silaikin down to the Tartar writer Min-Shabay, none of them had ever shown the slightest interest in medicine.

Twisting his thin lips in a sneer, the surgeon asked:

‘Who invented penicillin?’

‘Fleming!’ The answer was given not by me, but by my neighbor from the district hospital. His red bristles were shaven off, and there remained only an unhealthy pale puffiness in the cheeks. (He had gorged himself on soup, I immediately realized.)

I was amazed at the red-headed student’s knowledge. The surgeon sized up the triumphant ‘Fleming’. Who are you, night orderly? Who? Who were you before prison?

‘I’m a captain. A captain of the engineering troops. At the beginning of the war I was chief of the fortified area on Dicson Island. We had to put up fortifications in a hurry. In the fall of ’41 when the morning fog broke we saw the German raider
Graf Spee
in the bay. The raider shot up all our fortifications point-blank. And left. And I got ten years. “If you don’t believe it, consider it a fairy tale.” ’

All the students studied through the night, passionately soaking up knowledge with all the appetite of men condemned to death but suddenly given the chance of a reprieve.

After a meeting with the higher-ups, however, Fleming’s spirits lifted and he brought a novel to the barracks, where everyone else was studying. As he finished off some boiled fish, the remnants of someone else’s feast, he carelessly leafed through the book.

Catching my ironic smile, Fleming said:

‘What’s the difference? We’ve been studying for three months now, and anyone who’s lasted this long will finish and get his certificate. Why should I go crazy studying? You have to know how to look at things.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to learn to treat people. I want to learn a real skill.’

‘Knowing how to live is a real skill.’

It was then that I learned that Fleming’s claim to having been a captain was only a mask, another mask on that pale prison face. The rank of captain was real; the bit about the engineering troops was an invention. Fleming had been in the NKVD – the secret police – with the rank of captain. Information on his past had been accumulating drop by drop for several years. A drop was a measure of time, something like a water clock. This drop fell on the bare skull of a person being interrogated; such was the water clock of the Leningrad prisons of the thirties. Sand clocks measured the time allotted for exercise. Water clocks measured the time of confession, the period of investigation. Clocks of sand drained with fleeting speed; water clocks were tormentingly slow. Water clocks didn’t count or measure minutes; they measured the human soul, the will, destroying it drop by drop, eroding it just as water erodes a rock. This piece of folklore about investigations was very popular in the thirties and even in the twenties.