Kolyma Tales (56 page)

A gray snow was falling, the sky was gray, the ground was gray, and climbing from one snowy hill to another, the chain of people stretched along the entire horizon. We had to wait for a long time while the work-gang leader got his group into formation – as if some general were hidden beyond the hill.

The work gang lined up in pairs, and turned off the path – the shortest way home to the barracks – on to another road that had not yet been beaten down by convict feet. A tractor had passed this way recently, and the snow had not yet covered its tracks, which looked like the spoor of some prehistoric beast. The going was harder here than on the path, and everyone was hurrying. Every so often someone would stumble, fall behind, pull his snow-filled felt boots out of a drift, and rush to catch up with his comrades. Suddenly, as we came around an enormous snowdrift, there appeared the dark figure of a man in an enormous white sheepskin coat. Only when we came closer did I realize that the snowdrift was a low stack of flour sacks. A truck must have gotten stuck here, unloaded, and been towed away empty by the tractor.

The work gang walked rapidly past the stack of flour sacks toward the guard. Then they slowed down and the men broke ranks. Retreating in darkness, the men finally reached the glare of a large electric light-bulb hanging above the camp gates.

Complaining of cold and exhaustion, the work gang hurriedly got into an uneven formation before the gates. The overseer came out, unlocked the gates, and admitted the people to the camp ‘zone’. Even after we had entered the camp, people remained in formation right up to the barracks. I still understood nothing.

Only toward morning, when they started to divide up the flour, using a pot to scoop it up instead of a measuring cup, did I realize that for the first time in my life I had participated in a theft.

I did not find this particularly upsetting. Indeed, there was not even time to think about what had happened. We each had to cook our share by any means available – either as pancakes or as dumplings.

The half-drunk radio operator yanked open my door. ‘There’s a message for you from headquarters; come over and pick it up.’ He disappeared into the snow and the darkness. I’d brought some frozen rabbits home from my last trip, and I was thawing them out in front of the stove. They had been given to me as a present, but ten carcasses were nothing unusual. It was a good season for rabbits, and a man barely had time to set his traps before they were full. They had to be thawed before they could be eaten, but I immediately lost all interest in rabbits.

A message from headquarters: a telegram, a radiogram, a phone call for me. It was my first telegram in fifteen years. I was startled, anxious. Here, as in any village, a telegram means a tragedy; it deals with death. It couldn’t be an announcement of my release, because I had long since been released. I set off for the radio operator’s fortified castle with its loopholes and three high fences. Each fence had a gate fitted with a latch that had to be opened for me by the radio operator’s wife. I squeezed through all the doors on my way to the landlord’s abode. When the last door had shut behind me, I strode into a bedlam of wings, into the stench of poultry droppings and made my way through a flock of fluttering chickens and crowing cocks. Guarding my face, I crossed over one more threshold, but the radio operator wasn’t there either. There were only pigs: three clean, well-cared-for smallish boars and a somewhat larger sow. This was the last barrier.

The radio operator sat surrounded by crates of pickle brine and green onions. He truly intended to become a millionaire. There are different roads to wealth in Kolyma. One is hardship pay and special rations. The sale of cheap tobacco and tea is another. Raising chickens and hogs is a third.

Crowded to the very edge of the table by all his flora and fauna, the radio operator handed me a sheaf of telegrams. They all looked the same, and I felt like a parrot picking a card at random.

I sorted through the cables, but couldn’t make head or tail of them. Condescendingly, the radio operator picked out my telegram with the tips of his fingers.

It read: ‘Come letter,’ that is, ‘Come for your letter.’ The postal service economized on content, but the receiver, of course, understood what was meant.

I went to the area chief and showed him the telegram.

‘How far is it?’ he asked.

‘Five hundred kilometers.’

‘Well, I guess so…’

‘I’ll be back in five days.’

‘Good. But don’t drag things out. No sense waiting to hitch a ride. The local Yakut tribesmen will take you by dogsled to Baragon. From there you’ll have to go by reindeer. If you’re not stingy, the postal service will take you. The main thing is to get to the highway.’

When I walked out of the area chief’s office, I realized I’d never make it to the damn highway. I wouldn’t even make it to Baragon, because I didn’t have a coat. I, a resident of Kolyma, didn’t have a coat! Sergey Korotkov had given me an almost new white sheepskin coat. He gave me a big pillow too, but when I wanted to quit my job at the prison hospital and leave for the mainland, I sold the coat and the pillow. I didn’t want to have any superfluous belongings that would just be stolen or taken away outright by the criminal element. I sold my coat and pillow, but the personnel office and the Magadan Ministry of Internal Affairs refused me permission to leave. So when my money ran out, I had to go back again for a job in Far Northern Construction. And I went to a place where there were flying chickens and a radio operator, but I didn’t manage to buy a coat. You couldn’t ask someone to loan you one for five days; that kind of request would simply be laughed at in Kolyma. So somehow I had to buy a coat in the village.

I found both a coat and someone willing to sell it. It was black with a luxurious sheepskin collar, but it was more like a jacket than a coat. It had no pockets and the bottom half was cut away. Only the collar and the broad sleeves remained.

‘You mean you cut the bottom off?’ I asked Ivanov, the camp overseer who sold me the coat. Ivanov lived alone; he was a gloomy type. He’d cut off the bottom half of the coat to make mittens. They were in great demand, and he made five pairs, each worth the price of a complete sheepskin coat. The pitiful part that was left could hardly be called a coat.

‘What difference does it make? I’m selling a coat. For 500 rubles. You’re buying it. Whether or not I cut off the bottom half has nothing to do with our deal.’

He was right. It was an irrelevant question, and I paid him quickly and took the coat home, where I tried it on and began to wait for night.

I remember the sharp, black eyes of the Yakut who drove the dogsled, my own numb fingers gripping the sled, a river, ice, bushes painfully lashing my face. But I had tied everything on firmly. At a postal station an old friend of mine got me a ride on a reindeer-sleigh. I would run beside it, but mainly I tried to ride. I would hold on tight, fall off, and run alongside again. By evening we reached the lights of the highway and could hear the roar of the trucks hurtling through the darkness.

I paid the Yakut and walked up to the dispatcher’s warming shed. But it wasn’t heated; there wasn’t any firewood. Still it was a roof and walls. A line had already formed of people headed for town, for Magadan. It was a small line – one man. A truck honked and the man ran out into the darkness. The truck honked again and the man was gone. Now it was my turn to run out into the frost.

The five-ton truck shuddered and barely stopped for me. There was a lot of room in the cab, which was a good thing, because it would have been impossible to travel so far in the back, given such bitter cold.

‘Where to?’

‘To the Left Bank.’

‘Can’t take you. I’m taking coal to Magadan, and it isn’t worth taking you if you’re headed for the Left Bank.’

‘I’ll pay you all the way to Magadan.’

‘That changes things. Get in. You know the rate?’

‘Right. A ruble a kilometer.’

‘Money in advance.’

I took the money out of my pocket and paid him. The truck dove into the white darkness and slowed down. The fog made it impossible to go any farther.

‘Let’s sleep on it.’ We curled up in the cab and left the motor running. When dawn came, the white winter fog didn’t seem as terrible as it had the night before.

‘We’ll make some strong tea and get moving.’

The driver boiled a whole package of tea in a tin can, cooled it in the snow, and drank it. He boiled a second canful of tea, drank it, and put the can away.

‘Let’s get on the road.’

‘Where are you from?’

I told him.

‘I was in those parts. I even worked there as a driver. You’ve got a real bastard there. His name is Ivanov, he’s a supervisor. He stole my sheepskin coat. Said he needed it to get home. It was really cold last year. I never saw it again. Not a trace. He wouldn’t give it back. I had some friends ask him for it, but he claimed he never took it. I intend to make a trip out there and get it back. It was a black coat, really nice. What does he need a sheepskin coat for? Maybe he cut it up for mittens and sold them. Everybody wants them nowadays. I could have cut it up myself for mittens. Now there’s no coat, no mittens, no Ivanov.’

I turned away, hunching beneath the collar of my coat.

‘It was a black one, just like yours. The bastard. Well, we’ve had our sleep, we’ve got to get moving.’

The truck lurched forward with a roar. Wide-awake from the incredibly strong tea, the driver honked on the bends.

The distance fell away behind us, bridge followed bridge, gold-mine followed gold-mine. Trucks met and passed each other in the morning light. All of a sudden everything collapsed with a loud clang, and our truck nose-dived into a ditch.

‘Everything’s shot!’ The driver was livid with rage. ‘The coal’s scattered, the cab and the side of the truck are shot! Five tons of coal – gone!’

He was not even scratched, and at first I didn’t understand what had happened.

Our truck had been knocked from the road by a Czechoslovak Tatra. There wasn’t even a scratch on its iron side. The driver stopped the Tatra and climbed out.

‘Figure up quick what your loss is, including fixing the side and the coal,’ the driver of the Tatra shouted. ‘We’ll pay. But no report. You understand?’

‘All right,’ said my driver. ‘That’ll be…’

‘We’ll pay it.’

‘How about me?’ I asked.

‘I’ll get you on another truck going the same way. It’s only about forty kilometers. They’ll get you there. Be a friend.’

‘Forty kilometers is an hour’s ride,’ I protested, but finally agreed. I got into the cab of another truck and waved to Inspector Ivanov’s friend.

By the time our truck began to brake, I had virtually turned to ice. We had reached the Left Bank, and I got out, hoping to find a place to spend the night. They didn’t give out lodging along with letters.

I went to the hospital where I had once worked. It was against the rules to enter a camp hospital, but I went in for a minute to get warm. A civilian orderly whom I knew happened to be coming down the corridor, and I asked him to put me up for the night.

The next day I knocked and entered the office where the letter awaited me. I knew the handwriting well – swift, soaring, but at the same time precise and lucid.

It was a letter from Pasternak.

I’ve been tested by fire on more than one occasion. As a boy I once ran down the streets of a blazing wooden town, and the brilliantly illuminated streets etched themselves for ever into my memory. It was as if the town were dissatisfied with the sun and had itself demanded fire. Power surged from the spreading conflagration. Although there was no wind, the houses growled and shook their bodies, flinging burning boards on to the roofs of buildings on the other side of the street.

Inside the town it was clear, dry, warm, and bright, and I easily and fearlessly walked down those blazing streets that let me, a boy, pass, although they were about to be totally destroyed. Only the river saved the main area of town; everything up to the bank burned to the ground.

Another time, as an adult, I experienced the same sensation of calm during a fire. Childhood had long since slipped away, and I was a convict finishing a sentence in a geological prospecting group in the Urals. The expedition’s storehouse had caught fire, but there was no fire engine available, and no bucket brigade could have put out the growing conflagration, even though the river was near.

The storehouse contained a great deal of equipment, and the head of the expedition realized that punishment – probably with implications of sabotage – would be meted out for the fire. He begged people to help, but none of the convicts would go into the fire. He promised everything he could think of – freedom, a hundred working days taken off our sentence for every day, every hour of the fire. Even though I didn’t believe those empty promises, I went into the fire, because I wasn’t afraid of it. Some of the camp authorities, seeing that we weren’t perishing, themselves crossed the threshold of the burning storehouse’s open gates.

It was night-time, and the storehouse was dark. We could never have reached the leveling instruments and theodolites, could never have unpacked the numerous sacks of powder if it hadn’t been for the fire. The fire illuminated the walls of the storehouse like a stage. It became dry, warm, bright. We dragged almost everything to the river-bank. Only a heap of clothing in the corner was destroyed – work clothes, sheepskin coats, felt boots.

The head of the expedition was more angry than pleased, since he was left with all the same problems: someone would have to pay for the destroyed clothing. I never received a single day’s credit for my efforts. No one even thanked me for fighting the fire. But I felt again my childhood sensation of fearlessness near the fire.

I’ve seen a lot of fires in the taiga. I’ve walked across luxurious blue moss a yard thick with patterns etched into it as if it were a fabric. I’ve picked my way through larch forests felled by flame. The trees, roots and all, had been torn from the soil, not by the wind, but by fire. Fire was like a storm, creating its own wind, hurling trees on to their sides, and leaving a black path through the taiga for ever. And then collapsing helplessly on a river-bank. A bright yellow flame would scamper through the dry grass, which would shake and sway as if a snake were crawling through it. But there are no snakes in Kolyma.