Kolyma Tales (51 page)

As usual, we encircled the stove. But today there was no one to sing any hymns. And I guess I was even happy that it was finally quiet.

We were so exhausted that we collapsed in the snow beside the road before going home.

Instead of yesterday’s forty degrees below zero, today was only thirteen below and the day seemed summery.

Grishka Logun, the foreman of the work area next to ours, walked past in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat. He was carrying a pick handle in his hand. Grishka was young, hot-tempered, and had an amazingly red face. Very low on the camp’s administrative ladder, he was often unable to resist the temptation to put his own shoulder to a snowbound truck, to help pick up a log, or to break loose a box of earth frozen into the snow. All these were acts clearly beneath the dignity of a foreman, but he kept forgetting the loftiness of his position.

Vinogradov’s work gang was coming down the road toward us. They were no better a lot than we were: the same former mayors and party leaders, university professors, middle-rank military officers…

People crowded timidly to the edge of the road; they were returning from work and were letting Grishka Logun pass. But he stopped too. The gang had been working in his sector. Vinogradov, a talkative man who had been the director of a mechanized tractor station in the Ukraine, stepped forward.

Logun and Vinogradov were too far from where we were sitting for us to be able to hear what they were saying, but we could understand everything without the words. Vinogradov, waving his hands, was explaining something to Logun. Then Logun poked the pick handle into Vinogradov’s chest, and Vinogradov fell backward… Vinogradov didn’t get up, and Logun jumped on him and began to kick him, brandishing his pick handle all the while. None of the twenty men in his work gang made the slightest move to defend their leader. Logun picked up his hat, which had fallen in the snow, and walked on. Vinogradov got up as if nothing had happened. The rest of the group (the work gang was passing us) didn’t express the slightest sympathy or indignation. When he reached us, Vinogradov twisted his broken bleeding lips into a wry smile: ‘That Logun’s got a real thermometer,’ he said. ‘The thieves call kicking a man that way “dancing”,’ Vavilov said. ‘It’s a sort of Russian folk-dance.’

Vavilov was an acquaintance of mine. We had arrived together at the mine from the same Butyr Prison. ‘What do you think of that?’ I said. ‘We have to make some decision. No one beat us yesterday, but they might tomorrow. What would you do if Logun did to you what he just did to Vinogradov?’

‘I guess I’d take it,’ Vavilov answered quietly. And I understood that he had been contemplating the inevitability of a beating for a long time.

Later I realized that it was all a matter of physical superiority when gang leaders, overseers, orderlies, or any unarmed persons were concerned. As long as I was strong, no one struck me. As soon as I weakened, everyone would. I would be beaten by the orderly, the worker in the bathhouse, the barber, the cook, the foreman, the work-gang foreman, and even the weakest criminal. The guard’s strength was in his rifle.

The strength of the superior beating me was in the law, in the court, the tribunal, the guards, the troops. It was not hard for him to be stronger than I. The strength of the criminal element was in their numbers, the fact that they stuck together, that they could cut a man’s throat over a couple of words. (I saw that happen more than once.) But I was still strong. I could be beaten by the director, the guard, the thief, but the orderly, the foreman, and the barber still couldn’t beat me.

Poliansky, an erstwhile physical education teacher who now received a lot of food packages and never shared any of them with anyone, said to me in a tone of reproach that he simply could not comprehend how people could allow themselves to be reduced to such a condition. He was even indignant when I didn’t agree with him. Before the year was up, however, I again met Poliansky – already a real ‘goner’ picking up cigarette butts and eager to scratch the heels of any important thief in camp (a common ritual of servility that was thought to encourage relaxation).

Poliansky was honest. His secret torments were strong enough to break through ice, through death, through indifference and beatings, through hunger, sleeplessness, and fear.

Once we had a holiday; on holidays we were all placed under lock and key, and this was called ‘holiday isolation’. And there were people who met old friends, made new acquaintances, and confided in each other during this ‘isolation’. No matter how terrible or how degrading isolation was, it was, nevertheless, easier than work for political prisoners convicted under Article 58 of the criminal code. Isolation was, after all, an opportunity to relax – even for a minute, and who could say how much time it would take for us to return to our former bodies – a minute, a day, a year, or a century? No one could hope to return to his former soul. And, of course, no one did.

But to get back to Poliansky, my bunk neighbor on that ‘isolation day’, he was honest.

‘I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time.’

‘What about?’

‘I used to watch you a few months ago – the way you walk, how you can’t step over a log any dog would jump over, how you drag your feet on the stones, and how the slightest bump on your path seems an impossible barrier and causes palpitations, heavy breathing, and requires long rest. I watched you and thought: what a bum, a loafer, an experienced bastard, an imposter.’

‘And now? Have you understood anything?’

‘I understood later. I did – when I got weak myself. When everyone began to push me and beat me. Man knows no sensation more pleasant than to realize that someone else is still weaker, still worse off than he.’

‘Why are “heroes of communist labor” always invited to production meetings? Why is physical strength a moral measure? “Physically stronger” means “better than me, morally superior to me”. How could it be otherwise? One man picks up a 400-pound boulder, and I’m bent over with a twenty-pound stone.’

‘I’ve realized all that now – I wanted to tell you.’

‘Thanks even for that.’

Not long after that Poliansky died. He fell in one of the test pits. The foreman struck him in the face with his fist. The foreman was not Grishka Logun, but one of us – Firsov, a military man convicted under Article 58.

I remember very well how I was struck the first time. It was the first of hundreds of blows that I experienced daily, nightly.

It’s impossible to remember all the blows one experiences, but I remember the first very well. I was even prepared for it by Grishka Logun’s behavior and Vavilov’s meekness.

In the cold, in the hunger of the fourteen-hour workday, of the frosty white cloud of the rocky gold-mine, happiness abruptly flitted my way, and an act of charity was thrust into my hand by a passer-by. This charity did not take the form of bread or medicine; it was in the form of time, an unscheduled relaxation.

The overseer of the ten men working in our sector was Zuev, then a free man, but he had once been a convict and knew what it was like to be in a convict’s hide.

There was something in Zuev’s eyes – sympathy, perhaps, for the thorny fate of humanity.

Power corrupts. The beast hidden in the soul of man and released from its chain lusts to satisfy its age-old natural instinct – to beat, to murder. I don’t know if it’s possible to receive satisfaction from signing a death sentence, but in this, too, there is doubtless some dark pleasure, some fantasy which seeks no justification.

I have seen people – many people – who had ordered the shooting of others and who were now themselves being killed. There was nothing but cowardice in them as they shouted: ‘I’m not the one who should be killed for the good of the state. I too am able to kill.’

I don’t know people who gave orders to kill. I only saw them from a distance. But I think that the order to shoot another man derives from that same spiritual strength, that same psychological foundation as the actual shooting itself, as murdering with one’s own hands.

Power is corruption. The intoxication of power over people, irresponsibility, the willingness to mock, to degrade, to encourage all these things when necessary – all these are the moral measure of a supervisor’s career.

But Zuev beat us less than the others did; we were lucky.

We had just arrived for work and were crowded together in a small area protected from the sharp wind by a cliff. Covering his face with his mittens, our foreman, Zuev, walked up, and sent the men off to the various mine shafts to work. I was left behind with nothing to do.

‘I want to ask a favor of you,’ Zuev said, choking with his own boldness. ‘A favor – not an order! I want you to write a letter for me to Kalinin. To wipe out my prison record. I’ll explain it all to you.’

We went to the foreman’s small shed where a stove crackled and where we were not normally allowed to enter. Any convict who dared open the door to breathe the hot breath of life even for a minute would immediately be driven out by fists and knees.

Animal instinct led us to this cherished door. Requests would be invented – what time is it? Or it might be a question – should the excavation go to the right or the left?

‘Can you give me a light?’

‘Is Zuev here? How about Dobriakov?’

But these requests deceived no one in the shed. People were literally kicked through the open doors into the frost. Even so, there had been a moment of warmth…

But no one threw me out; I was sitting right next to the stove.

‘Who’s that, the lawyer?’ someone hissed contemptuously.

‘That’s right, Pavel Ivanovich. He was recommended to me.’

‘All right.’ It was the senior foreman condescending to recognize the needs of his subordinate.

Zuev’s case (he’d served out his sentence the previous year) was the most ordinary village affair. It all began with support payments for his parents, who had him sent to prison. His sentence was almost up when the prison authorities managed to have him sent to Kolyma. Colonization of the area demanded a firm line in creating barriers to departure, government assistance, and unflagging attention to arrivals and human shipments to Kolyma. Transporting convicts there was the simplest way of rendering the difficult land livable.

Zuev wanted to quit Far Northern Construction, and he was asking to have his prison record wiped out or at least to be allowed to return to the mainland.

It was difficult for me to write, and not just because my hands were rough and my fingers so permanently bent around the handle of a pick and axe that unbending them was unbelievably difficult. I managed to wrap a thick rag around pen and pencil to give them the thickness of a pick or shovel handle.

When I realized I could do that, I was ready to form letters.

It was difficult to write because my brain had become as coarse as my hands; like my hands, it too was oozing blood. I had to call back to life – to resurrect – words that, as I then thought, had left my life for ever.

I wrote the letter, sweating and rejoicing. It was hot in the shed, and the lice immediately began to stir and crawl over my body. I couldn’t scratch for fear of being driven out into the cold. I was afraid of inspiring revulsion in my savior.

By evening I had written the complaint to Kalinin. Zuev thanked me and thrust a ration of bread into my hand. I had to eat the ration immediately; everything had to be devoured immediately and not laid aside until the next day. I had learned that lesson already.

The day was coming to an end – according to the foreman’s watches only, for the fog was identical in the morning, at midnight, and at noon. We were led home.

I slept and had my perpetual Kolyma dream – loaves of bread floating through the air, filling all the houses, all the streets, the entire planet.

In the morning I waited to meet Zuev; maybe he’d give me a smoke.

And Zuev came. Making no effort to conceal anything from the work gang or the guards, he dragged me out of the wind shelter and roared at me.

‘You cheated me, you bastard!’

He had read the letter that night. He didn’t like it. His neighbors, the other foremen, also read it and didn’t approve of it either. Too dry. Too few tears. It was useless to send that kind of letter. You couldn’t get any sympathy from Kalinin with that sort of rot.

The camp had dried up my brain, and I could not, I just could not squeeze another word from it. I was not up to the job – and not because the gap between my will and Kolyma was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because in those folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives were stored, there was nothing but hatred. Just think of poor Dostoevsky writing anguished, tearful, humiliating letters to his unmoved superiors throughout the ten years he spent as a soldier after leaving the House of the Dead. Dostoevsky even wrote poems to the czarina. There was no Kolyma in the House of the Dead.

The machine wailed and wailed and wailed… The alarm was summoning the hospital director, but the guests were already coming up the stairs. They wore white hospital cloaks, and the shoulders of the cloaks swelled from the epaulettes beneath. The hospital garb was too tight for our military guests.

Two steps in front of them all was a tall, gray-haired man whose name was known to everyone in the hospital, but whom no one had ever seen.

It was Sunday for those hospital employees who were not prisoners, and the hospital director was shooting pool with the doctors. He was winning; everybody lost to the hospital director.

The director immediately recognized the howling siren, rubbed the chalk from his sweaty fingers, and sent a messenger to say that he was coming – right away.

But the guests didn’t wait.

‘We’ll start in the Surgical Block…’ In the Surgical Block lay about two hundred persons. Two of the wards held about eighty patients each. One had straight surgical cases: closed fractures, sprains, etc. The other had infected cases. There were also small post-surgery wards and a ward for terminal cases with infections: sepsis, gangrene.