Kolyma Tales (46 page)

The finger with the nail disappeared.

‘OK, clear out,’ the thief said in an unhappy tone. ‘We’ll think about it.’

I was lucky that I didn’t have to spend the night at the station. The train was leaving for Moscow in the evening.

In the morning the light from the electric bulbs seemed heavy. The bulbs were murky and didn’t want to go out. Through the opening and closing doors could be seen the Irkutsk day – cold and bright. Swarms of people packed the corridors and filled up every square centimeter of space on the cement floor and the dirty benches as soon as anyone moved, stood up, left. There was an endless standing in line before the ticket windows. A ticket to Moscow, a ticket to Moscow, the rest can be worked out later… Not to Jambul, as the travel orders instructed. But who cared about travel orders in this heap of humanity, in this constant movement?

My turn at the window finally arrived, and I began to pull money from my pockets in jerky movements and to push the packet of gleaming bills through the opening where they would disappear as inevitably as my life had disappeared until that moment. But the miracle continued, and the window threw out some solid object. It was rough, hard, and thin, like a wafer of happiness – a ticket to Moscow. The cashier shouted something to the effect that reserved berths were mixed with non-reserved ones, that a truly reserved car would be available only tomorrow or the day after tomorrow. I understood nothing except the words tomorrow and today. Today, today. Clasping my ticket firmly and attempting to feel all its corners with the deadened senses of my frostbitten hand, I pulled myself free and made my way to an open spot. I had just come from the far north by plane and I had no extra things – just a small plywood suitcase – the same one I had unsuccessfully tried to sell back in Adygalakh to get the money together to leave for Moscow. My traveling expenses had not been paid, but that was a meaningless detail. The main thing was this firm cardboard rectangle of a railroad ticket.

I caught my breath somewhere in a corner of the train station (my spot under the light was, of course, occupied) and set out across town, to the departure area.

Boarding had already begun. On a low hill stood a toy train, unbelievably small – just a few dirty cardboard boxes placed together among hundreds of other cardboard boxes where railroad employees lived and hung out their frozen wash to splash under the blows of the wind.

My train was in no way distinguishable from these railroad cars that had been transformed into dormitories.

The train didn’t look like a train that was about to set out in a few hours for Moscow. Rather, it looked like a dormitory. People were coming down the stairs of the cars, moving back and forth, and carrying things over their heads – just as others were doing around the dormitories. I realized that the train lacked the most important thing – a locomotive. Neither did any of the dormitories have a locomotive, and my train looked like a dormitory. I wouldn’t have believed that these cars could carry me away to Moscow, but boarding was already taking place.

There was a battle, a terrible battle at the entrance to the car. It seemed that work had ended two hours early today and everyone had come running home, to the barracks, to the warm stove, and they were all trying to get in the door.

Inside, you could forget about finding a conductor… Each person sought out his own place, dug himself in and maintained his own position. Of course, my reserved middle berth was occupied by some drunken lieutenant who belched endlessly. I dragged the lieutenant down and showed him my ticket. ‘I have a ticket for this spot too,’ he explained in a peaceable fashion, hiccuped, slipped down to the floor, and immediately fell asleep.

The car kept filling up with people. Suitcases and enormous bales were lifted up and disappeared somewhere above. There was an acrid smell of sheepskin coats, human sweat, dirt, and carbolic acid.

‘A prison car, a prison car,’ I repeated lying on my back, jammed into the narrow space between the middle and upper berths. The lieutenant, his collar opened and his face red and wrinkled, crawled upward past me. He got a grip on something, pulled himself upward, and disappeared.

In the confusion, amid the shouts of this prison car, I missed the main thing that I needed to hear, that which I had dreamed of for seventeen years, that which had become for me a sort of symbol of the ‘mainland’, a symbol of life. I hadn’t given it a thought during the battle for the berth. I hadn’t heard the train whistle. But the cars shuddered and began to move and our car, our prison car, set out somewhere just as if I were beginning to fall asleep and the barracks was moving before my very eyes.

I forced myself to realize that I was headed for Moscow.

At some switch point close to Irkutsk the car lurched and the figure of the lieutenant gripping his berth leaned out and hung down. He belched and vomited on my berth and that of my neighbor, who was wearing not a quilted coat or a pea jacket but a real overcoat with a fur collar. The man swore mightily and began to clean off the vomit.

My neighbor had with him an infinite number of plaited wicker baskets, some sewn up with burlap and some without burlap. From time to time women wearing country kerchiefs would appear from the depths of the car with similar wicker baskets on their shoulders. The women would shout something to my neighbor and he would wave back to them in a friendly fashion.

‘My sister-in-law! She’s going to visit relatives in Tashkent,’ he explained to me although I had asked for no explanations.

My neighbor was eager to open his nearest basket and show its contents. Aside from a wrinkled suit and a few small items it was empty. But it did contain a number of photographs, family and individual pictures in enormous mounts. Some of them were daguerreotypes. The larger photographs were removed from the basket, and my neighbor eagerly explained in detail who was standing where, who was killed in the war, who received a medal, who was studying to be an engineer. ‘And here I am,’ he would inevitably say, pointing somewhere in the middle of the photograph, at which juncture everyone to whom he showed the photograph would meekly, politely, and sympathetically nod his head.

On the third day of our life in this rattling car my neighbor, having sized me up in detail, no doubt very correctly despite the fact that I had said nothing of myself, waited until the attention of our other neighbors was distracted and said quickly to me:

‘I have to make a transfer in Moscow. Can you help me carry one basket across the scales?’

‘I’m being met in Moscow.’

‘Oh, yes. I forgot you’re being met.’

‘What do you have in the baskets?’

‘What? Sunflower seeds. We’ll take galoshes back from Moscow. That sort of “private enterprise” is illegal, of course, but…’

I did not get out at any of the stations. I had food with me, and I was afraid the train would leave without me, would surely leave without me. I was convinced something bad would happen; happiness cannot continue endlessly.

Opposite me on the middle berth lay a man in a fur coat. He was infinitely drunk and had no cap or mittens. His drunken friends had put him on the train and entrusted his ticket to the conductor. The next day he got out at some station, returned with a bottle of some sort of dark wine, drank it all straight from the bottle, and threw the bottle on the floor. The bottle could be turned in for the deposit and the woman conductor agilely caught it and carried it off to her conductor’s lair, which was filled with blankets that no one in the mixed car rented and sheets that no one needed. Behind the same barrier of blankets in the conductor’s compartment a prostitute had set up shop on the upper berth. She was returning from Kolyma, and perhaps she wasn’t a prostitute but had simply been transformed into a prostitute by Kolyma… This lady sat not far from me on the lower berth, and the light from the swinging lamp fell on her utterly exhausted face with lips reddened by some substitute for lipstick. People would approach her and then they would disappear with her into the conductors’ compartment. ‘Fifty rubles,’ said the lieutenant who had sobered up and turned out to be a very pleasant young man.

He and I played a fascinating game. Whenever a new passenger entered the car, he and I would try to guess the new arrival’s age and profession. We would exchange observations and he would strike up a conversation with the passenger and come back to me with the answer.

Thus the lady who had painted lips but whose nails lacked any trace of polish was determined by us to be a member of the medical profession. The obviously fake leopard coat she wore testified that its wearer was probably a nurse or orderly, but not a doctor. A doctor wouldn’t have worn an artificial fur coat. Back then nylon and synthetic fabrics were unheard of. Our conclusion turned out to be correct.

From time to time a two-year-old child, dirty, ragged, and blue-eyed, would run past our compartment from somewhere in the depths of the railroad car. His pale cheeks were covered with scabs of some kind. In a minute or two the young father, who had heavy, strong working hands, would come after him with firm confident strides. He would catch the boy, and the child would laugh and smile at his father who would smile back at him and return him to his place in joyous bliss. I learned their story, a common story in Kolyma. The father had just served a criminal sentence and was returning to the mainland. The child’s mother chose not to return, and the father was taking his son with him, having firmly resolved to tear the child (and perhaps himself) free from the vise-like clutches of Kolyma. Why didn’t the mother leave? Perhaps it was the usual story: she’d found another man, liked the free life of Kolyma, and didn’t want to be in the situation of a second-rate citizen on the mainland… Or perhaps her youth had faded? Or maybe her love, her Kolyma love, had ended? Who knows? The mother had served a sentence under Article 58 of the Criminal Code, an article classifying political prisoners. Thus her crime had been of the most common and everyday sort. She knew what a return to the mainland would mean – a new sentence, new torments. There were no guarantees against a new sentence in Kolyma either, but at least she wouldn’t be hunted as all were hunted over there.

I neither learned nor wanted to learn anything. The nobility, the goodness, the love for his child was all I saw in this father who himself must previously have seen very little of his son. The boy had been in a nursery.

His clumsy hands unbuttoned the child’s pants with their enormous unmatched buttons sewn on by rough, inept, but good hands. Both the boy and the father exuded happiness. The two-year-old child didn’t know the word ‘mama’. He shouted, ‘Papa, papa!’ He and this dark-skinned mechanic played with each other among the throng of card-sharks and wheeler-dealers with their bales and baskets. These two people were, of course, happy.

But there was no more sleep for the passenger who had slept for two days from the moment we had left Irkutsk and who had awakened only to drink another bottle of vodka or cognac or whatever it was. The train lurched. The sleeping passenger crashed to the floor and groaned – over and over again. The conductors sent for an ambulance and it was discovered that he had a broken shoulder. He was carried away on a stretcher, and disappeared from my life.

Suddenly there appeared in the car the figure of my savior. Perhaps ‘savior’ is too lofty a word since, after all, nothing important or bloody had occurred. My acquaintance sat, not recognizing me and as if not wanting to recognize me. Nevertheless we exchanged glances and I approached him. ‘I just want to go home and see my family.’ These were the last words I heard from this criminal.

And that is all: the glaring light of the bulb at the Irkutsk train station, the ‘businessman’ hauling around random pictures for camouflage, vomit avalanching down on to my berth from the throat of the young lieutenant, the sad prostitute on the upper berth in the conductor’s compartment, the dirty two-year-old boy blissfully shouting, ‘Papa! Papa!’ This is all I remember as my first happiness, the unending happiness of ‘freedom’. The roar of Moscow’s Yaroslav Train Station met me like an urban surf; I had arrived at the city I loved above all other cities on earth. The train came to a halt and I could see the dear face of my wife who met me just as she had met me so many times before after each of my numerous trips. This trip, however, had been a long one – almost seventeen years. Most important, I was not returning from a business trip. I was returning from hell.

Life in camp is so arranged that only medical personnel can give the convict any real help. The protection of labor depends on the protection of health, and the protection of health means the protection of life. The camp director and the overseers who work under him, the head of the guard and the guards themselves, the head of the Divisional Office of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and all his staff of investigators, the chief of culture and education with all his inspectors – these are only some of the numerous varieties of camp authority. Regulation of life in the camps consists of carrying out the will – good or bad – of these people. In the eyes of the convict they are all symbols of oppression and compulsion. All these people force the convict to work, guard him day and night to keep him from escaping, check to see that he doesn’t eat or drink too much. Daily, hourly, all these people repeat to the convict: ‘Work! Work more!’

Only one person in the camp does not say these terrible, hated words to the convict. That is the doctor. The doctor uses other words: ‘Rest,’ ‘You’re tired,’ ‘Don’t work tomorrow,’ ‘You’re sick.’ Only the doctor has the authority to save the convict from going out into the white winter fog to the icy stone face of the mine for many hours every day. The doctor is the convict’s official defender from the arbitrary decisions of the camp authorities, from excessive zeal on the part of the more veteran guards.

At one time, large printed notices hung on the walls of the camp barracks: ‘The Rights and Obligations of the Convict’. Obligations were many and rights few. There was the right to make a written request to the head of the camp – as long as it was not a collective request… there was the right to send letters to one’s relatives through the camp censors… and the right to medical aid.