Kolyma Tales (35 page)

‘Listen, old man,’ the toolman said. They called all of us ‘old men’ back then; we didn’t have to wait twenty years for that title. ‘Can you sharpen a saw?’

‘Of course,’ Orlov said quickly. ‘Do you have a tooth setter?’

‘You can use an axe,’ the toolman said, having come to the conclusion that we were intelligent people – not like all those eggheads.

The economist Semyon Alekseevich Sheinin died. He was my partner and a good person. For a long time he could not grasp what they were doing to us, but he finally came to understand the situation and quietly began to wait for death. He did not lack courage. Once I received a package. The fact that the package had arrived was a rare event. There was nothing in it but an aviator’s felt boots. That was it. How little our families knew of the conditions in which we lived! I was perfectly aware that the boots would be stolen on the very first night. So, without leaving the commandant’s office, I sold them for a hundred rubles to Andrei Boiko. The boots were worth 700, but it was a profitable sale anyway. After all, I could buy more than 200 pounds of bread for that amount, or maybe some butter and sugar. I had not eaten butter and sugar since I had arrived in prison. I bought more than two pounds of butter at the commissary. I remember how nutritious it was. That butter cost me forty-one rubles. I bought it during the day (I worked at night) and ran for Sheinin, who lived in a different barracks, to celebrate the arrival of the package. I bought bread too…

Semyon Alekseevich was flustered and happy.

‘But why me? What right do I have?’ he kept repeating in a state of nervous excitement. ‘No, no, I can’t…’ But I persuaded him, and he ran joyfully for boiling water.

And I was immediately knocked to the ground by a terrible blow on the head.

When I regained consciousness, the bag with the bread and butter was gone. The larch log that had been used to strike me lay next to the cot, and everyone was laughing. Sheinin came running with the boiling water. For many years after that I could not remember the theft without getting terribly upset. As for Semyon Alekseevich, he died.

Ivan Yakovlevich Fediaxin died. He and I had arrived in Kolyma by the same train and boat. We ended up in the same mine, in the same work gang. A peasant from Volokolamsk and a philosopher, he had organized the first collective farm in Russia. The collective farms, as is well known, were first organized by the Socialist Revolutionaries in the twenties. The Chayanov-Kondratiev group represented their interests in the government. Ivan Yakovlevich was a Socialist Revolutionary – one of the million who voted for the party of 1917. He was sentenced to five years for organizing the first kolkhoz.

Once in the early Kolyma fall of 1937 he and I were filling a cart on the famous mine conveyor. There were two carts which could be unhitched alternately while the horse-driver was hauling the other to the washer. Two men could barely manage to keep up with the job. There was no time to smoke, and anyway it wasn’t permitted by the overseers. But our horse-driver smoked – an enormous cigar rolled from almost a half-package of home-grown tobacco (there was still tobacco back then), and he would leave it on the edge of the mine for us to smoke as well.

The horse-driver was Mishka Vavilov, former vice-president of the ‘Industrial Imports Trust’.

We talked to each other as we tossed earth casually into the cart. I told Fediaxin about the amount of earth demanded from exiled Decembrists in Nerchinsk as told in
The Notes of Maria Volkonskaya
. They used an old Russian unit of measure back then, the
pood
, which was thirty-six pounds. Each man had to produce three
pood
per day. ‘So how much does our quota come to?’ Fediaxin asked.

I calculated – approximately eight hundred
poods
.

‘So that’s how much quotas have increased…’

Later, in the winter, when we were constantly hungry, I would get tobacco, begging, saving, and buying it, and trade it for bread. Fediaxin disapproved of my ‘business’.

‘That’s not worthy of you; you shouldn’t do that.’

I saw him for the last time in the cafeteria. It was winter. I gave him six dinner coupons that I had earned that night for copying some office documents out by hand. Good handwriting helped me out sometimes. The coupons would have been worthless the next day, since dates were stamped on them. Fediaxin picked up the dinners, sat down at the table, and poured the watery soup (which contained not a single grease spot) from one bowl into another. All six portions of the pearl-barley kasha weren’t enough to fill one bowl. Fediaxin had no spoon, so he licked up the kasha with his tongue. And he cried.

Derfelle died. He was a French communist who had served time in the stone quarries of Cayenne. Aside from hunger and cold, he was morally exhausted. He could not believe that he, a member of the Comintern, could end up at hard labor here in the Soviet Union. His horror would have been lessened if he could have seen that there were others here like him. Everyone with whom he had arrived, with whom he lived, with whom he died was like that. He was a small, weak person, and beatings were just becoming popular… Once the work-gang leader struck him, simply struck him with his fist – to keep him in line, so to speak – but Derfelle collapsed and did not get up. He was one of the first, the lucky ones to die. In Moscow he had worked as an editor at Tass. He had a good command of Russian. ‘Back in Cayenne it was bad, too,’ he told me once, ‘but here it’s very bad.’

Frits David died. He was a Dutch communist, an employee of the Comintern who was accused of espionage. He had beautiful wavy hair, deep-set blue eyes, and a childish line to his mouth. He knew almost no Russian. I met him in the barracks, which were so crowded that one could fall asleep standing up. We stood side by side. Frits smiled at me and closed his eyes.

The space beneath the bunks was so packed with people that we had to wait to sit down, to simply crouch and lean against another body, a post – and – fall asleep. I waited, covering my eyes. Suddenly something next to me collapsed. My neighbor, Frits David, had fallen. Embarrassed, he got up.

‘I fell asleep,’ he said in a frightened voice.

This Frits David was the first in our contingent to receive a package. His wife sent it to him from Moscow. In the package was a velvet suit, a nightshirt, and a large photograph of a beautiful woman. He was wearing this velvet suit as he crouched next to me on the floor.

‘I want to eat,’ he said, smiling and blushing. ‘I really want to eat. Bring me something to eat.’

Frits David went mad and was taken away.

The nightshirt and the photograph were stolen on the very first night. When I told people about him later, I always experienced a feeling of indignation and could not understand why anyone would want a photograph of a stranger.

‘You don’t know everything,’ a certain clever acquaintance once explained to me. ‘It’s not hard to figure out. The photograph was stolen by the camp thugs for what they call a “showing”. For masturbation, my naïve friend…’

Seryozha Klivansky died. He and I had been freshmen together at the university, and we met twenty years later in a cell for transit prisoners in Butyr Prison. He had been expelled from the Young Communist League in 1927 for a report on the Chinese revolution that he gave to the Current Politics Club. He managed to graduate from the university, and he worked as an economist in Government Planning until the situation changed and he had to leave. He won a competition to join the orchestra of the Stanislavsky Theater, where he played second violin until his arrest in 1937. He was a sanguine type, sharp of wit and full of irony. He never lost his interest in life and its events.

It was so hot in the transit cell that everyone walked around nearly naked, pouring water on themselves and sleeping on the floor. Only heroes could bear to sleep on the bunks.

Klivansky maintained his sense of humor: ‘This is torture by steaming. Next they’ll torture by northern frost.’ This was a realistic prediction, not the whining of a coward.

At the mine, Seryozha was cheerful and talkative. Enthusiastically, he studied the camp thugs’ vocabulary and took a childlike delight in pronouncing phrases from the criminal world with the proper intonation.

He loved poetry and recited verse by heart while in prison. He stopped doing that in camp.

He would have shared his last morsel, or, rather, he was still at that stage… That is, he never reached the point where no one had a last morsel and no one shared anything with anyone.

The work-gang leader, Diukov, died. I don’t know and never knew his first name. He had been convicted of a petty crime that had nothing to do with Article 58, under which the political prisoners had been sentenced. In camps back on the mainland he had played the part of ‘club president’, and if his attitude toward life in the camps was not romanticized, he at least intended to ‘play the role’. He had arrived in the winter and had made an amazing speech at the very first meeting. The petty criminals and thieves with repeated offenses were considered friends of the people and were to be re-educated and not punished (in contrast to enemies of the people convicted under Article 58). Later, when repeating offenders were tried under Point 14 of Article 58 for ‘sabotage’ (refusing to work), all of Paragraph 14 was removed from Article 58, and such offenders were saved from a variety of punitive measures that could last for years. Repeating offenders were always considered ‘friends of the people’ right up to Beria’s famous amnesty of 1953. Hundreds of thousands of unhappy people were sacrificed to theory, the infamous concept of re-education, and Krylenko’s
^*
sentences, which could be stretched out to any number of years.

At that first meeting Diukov offered to lead a work gang consisting exclusively of men convicted under Article 58. Usually the work-gang leader of the ‘politicals’ was one of them. Diukov was not a bad sort. He knew that peasants worked hard in the camps and remembered that there were a lot of peasants among those convicted under Article 58. This last circumstance was due to a certain wisdom in Yezhov and Beria, who understood that the intelligentsia’s value in terms of physical labor was not very high and that they might not be able to cope with camp production goals, as opposed to camp political goals. But Diukov did not concern himself with such lofty deliberations. Indeed, he never thought of anything other than his men’s capacity to work. He selected a work gang exclusively of peasants and started to work. That was in the spring of 1938. Diukov’s peasants survived the hungry winter of 1937–8. If he had ever seen his men naked in the bathhouse, he would immediately have realized what the problem was.

They worked badly and needed to be fed. But the camp authorities turned Diukov down flat on this point. The starving work gang exhausted itself heroically to fulfill its quotas. At that point everyone started to cheat Diukov: the men who measured production levels, the bookkeepers, the overseers, the foremen. He complained, protested more and more harshly, but the production of the work gang continued to fall, and the food ration got smaller and smaller. Diukov attempted to take his case to higher authorities, but these higher authorities simply advised the proper persons to include Diukov’s gang together with their leader in certain lists. This was done, and they were all shot at the famous Serpentine Mine.

Pavel Mixailovich Xvostov died. It was the conduct of these hungry people that was most terrible. Although they might seem normal, they were half mad. Hungry men will always defend justice furiously (if they are not too hungry or too exhausted). They argue incessantly and fight desperately. Under normal circumstances only one quarrel in a thousand will end in a fight. Hungry people fight constantly. Quarrels flare up over the most trivial and unexpected matters: ‘What are you doing with my pick? Why did you take my place?’ The shorter of two men tries to trip his opponent to bring him down. The taller man attempts to knock his enemy down by using his own weight advantage – and then scratch, beat, bite… All this occurs in a helpless fashion; it is neither painful nor fatal. Too often it’s just to catch the attention of others. No one interferes with a fight.

Xvostov was precisely that sort of person. He fought with someone every day – either in the barracks or in the deep side trench that our work gang was digging. He was my
winter
acquaintance; I never saw his hair. He had a cap with torn earflaps of white fur. As for his eyes, they were dark, gleaming, hungry. Sometimes I would recite poetry, and he would look at me as if I were half mad.

Once, all of a sudden, he furiously began to attack the stone in the trench with his pick. The pick was heavy, but Xvostov kept swinging it hard and without interruption. This show of strength amazed me. We had been together for a long time and had been hungry for a long time. Then the pick fell to the earth with a ringing sound. I looked around. Xvostov stood with his legs apart, swaying. His knees began to crumple. He lurched and fell face down, his outstretched hands covered in those same mittens he mended every evening. His forearms were bared; both were tattooed. Pavel Mixailovich had been a sea captain.

Roman Romanovich died before my very eyes. At one time he had been a sort of ‘regimental commander’. He distributed packages, was responsible for keeping the camp clean, and – in a word – enjoyed privileges that none of us ‘fifty-eighters’ could even dream of. The highest post we could hope to attain was work in the bathhouse laundry or patching clothes on the night shift. ‘Special instructions’ from Moscow permitted us to come into contact only with stone. That little piece of paper was in each of our folders. But Roman Romanovich had been allotted this unattainable post. And he quickly learned all its secrets: how to open a crate containing a package for a prisoner and do it in such a way as to dump the sugar on the floor, how to break a jar of preserves, how to kick toasted bread and dried fruits under the counter. Roman Romanovich learned all this quickly and did not seek our company. He was primly official and behaved as the polite representative of those higher camp authorities, with whom we could have no personal contact. He never gave us any advice on any matter. He only explained: one letter could be sent per month, packages were distributed between eight and ten p.m. in the commandant’s office, etc.