Kolyma Tales (7 page)

Only the shorter twisted trees, tormented from following a constantly shifting sun and warmth, manage to stand firm and distant from each other. They have kept up such an intense struggle for existence for so long that their tortured, gnarled wood is worthless. The short knotty trunk entwined with terrible growths like splints on broken bones could not be used for construction even in the north, which was not fussy about materials. These twisted trees could not be used even as firewood; so well did they resist the axe, they would have exhausted any worker. Thus did they take vengeance for their broken northern lives.

Our task was to clear a road, and we boldly set about our work. We sawed from sunrise to sundown, felled and stacked trees. Wanting to stay here as long as possible and fearing the gold-mines, we forgot about everything. The stacks grew slowly and by the end of the second difficult day it became evident that we had accomplished little, but were incapable of doing more. Ivan Ivanovich measured the distance from the tip of his thumb to the tip of his middle finger five times along a ten-year-old pine to make a one-meter measuring-stick.

In the evening the foreman came to measure our work with his notched staff and shook his head. We had accomplished 10 percent of the norm!

Ivan Ivanovich tried to make his point and justify our measurements, but the foreman was unyielding. He muttered something about ‘cubic meters’ and ‘density’. And although we were not familiar with the technical methods of measuring wood production, one thing was clear. We would be returned to the camp zone where we would again pass through the gates with their inscription: ‘Work is honorable, glorious, valiant, and heroic.’

In the camp we learned to hate physical labor and work in general.

But we were not afraid. More than that: the foreman’s assessment of our work and physical capacity as hopeless and worthless brought us a feeling of unheard-of relief and was not at all frightening.

We realized we were at the end of our rope, and we simply let matters take their course. Nothing bothered us any more, and we breathed freely in the fist of another man’s will. We didn’t even concern ourselves with staying alive, and ate and slept on the same schedule as in camp. Our spiritual calm, achieved by a dulling of the senses, was reminiscent of the ‘dungeon’s supreme freedom’ and Tolstoy’s non-resistance to evil. Our spiritual calm was always guarded by our subordination to another’s will.

We had long since given up planning our lives more than a day in advance.

The foreman left and we remained to cut a road through the forest and erect new log stacks, but now we did so with greater peace of mind and indifference. We stopped quarrelling over who would take the heavy end when we stacked logs.

We rested more and paid more attention to the sun, the forest, and the pale-blue tall sky. We loafed.

In the morning Savelev and I somehow felled an enormous black pine that had miraculously survived both storm and forest fire. We tossed the saw into the grass. It rang out, striking a stone, and we sat down on the trunk of the fallen tree.

‘Just imagine,’ said Savelev. ‘We’ll survive, leave for the mainland, and quickly become sick old men. We’ll have heart pains and rheumatism, and all the sleepless nights, the hunger, and long hard work of our youth will leave their mark on us even if we remain alive. We’ll be sick without knowing why, groan and drag ourselves from one dispensary to another. This unbearable work will leave us with wounds that can’t be healed, and all our later years will lead to lives of physical and psychological pain. And that pain will be endless and assume many different forms. But even among those terrible future days there will be good ones when we’ll be almost healthy and we won’t think about our sufferings. And the number of those days will be exactly equal to the number of days each of us has been able to loaf in camp.’

‘But how about honest work?’ I asked.

‘The only ones who call for honest work are the bastards who beat and maim us, eat our food, and force us living skeletons to work to our very deaths. It’s profitable for them, but they believe in “honest work” even less than we do.’

In the evening we sat around our precious stove, and Fedya Shapov listened attentively to Savelev’s hoarse voice:

‘Well, he refused to work. They made up a report, said he was dressed appropriately for the season…’

‘What does that mean – “appropriately for the season”?’ asked Fedya.

‘Well, they can’t list every piece of summer or winter clothing you have on. If it’s in the winter, they can’t write that you were sent to work without a coat or mittens. How often did you stay in camp because there were no mittens?’

‘Never,’ Fedya said timidly. ‘The boss made us stamp down the snow on the road. Or else they would have had to write that we stayed behind because we didn’t have anything to wear.’

‘There you have it.’

‘OK, tell me about the subway.’

And Savelev would tell Fedya about the Moscow subway. Ivan Ivanovich and I also liked to listen to Savelev, since he knew things that I had never guessed, although I had lived in Moscow.

‘Muslims, Fedya,’ said Savelev, delighted that he could still think clearly, ‘are called to worship by a muezzin from the minaret. Muhammed chose the human voice as a signal to prayer. Muhammed tried everything – trumpets, tambourines, signal fires; nothing pleased him… Fifteen hundred years later when they were choosing a signal to start the subway trains, it turned out that neither the whistle, nor the horn, nor the siren could be heard as easily by the train engineer’s ear – with the same precision – as the live voice of the dispatcher on duty shouting, “Ready!” ’

Fedya gasped with delight. He was better adapted than any of us to the forest, more experienced than any of us in spite of his youth. Fedya could do carpentry work, build a simple cabin in the taiga, fell a tree and use its branches to make a shelter. In addition, Fedya was a hunter; in his locality people were used to guns from childhood. But cold and hunger wiped out Fedya’s qualities, and the earth ignored his knowledge and abilities. Fedya did not envy city dwellers, but simply acknowledged their superiority and could listen endlessly to their stories of the wonders of science and the miracles of the city.

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of ‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends. Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits of one’s physical endurance and moral courage.

We all understood that we could survive only through luck. Strangely enough, in my youth whenever I experienced failure I used to repeat the saying: ‘Well, at least we won’t die from hunger.’ It never crossed my mind to doubt the truth of this sentence. And at the age of thirty I found myself in a very real sense dying from hunger and literally fighting for a piece of bread. And this was a long time before the war.

When the four of us gathered at the spring ‘Duskania’, we all knew we had not gathered through friendship. We all knew that if we survived we would not want to meet again. It would be painful to remember the insane hunger, the unchecked gastronomic lies at the fire, our quarrels with each other and our identical dreams. All of us had the same dreams of loaves of rye bread that flew past us like meteors or angels.

A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good. There was nothing good at the spring ‘Duskania’, and nothing good was either expected in the future or remembered in the past by any of us. We had all been permanently poisoned by the north, and we knew it. Three of us stopped resisting fate, and only Ivan Ivanovich kept working with the same tragic diligence as before.

Savelev tried to reason with Ivan Ivanovich during one of the smoking breaks. For us it was just an ordinary rest period for non-smokers since we hadn’t had any home-made tobacco for a number of years. Still we held to the breaks. In the taiga, smokers would gather and dry blackcurrant leaves, and there were heated convict discussions as to whether cowberry leaves or currant leaves were better. Experts maintained that both were worthless, since the body demands the poison of nicotine, not smoke, and brain cells could not be tricked by such a simple method. But currant leaf served for our ‘smoking breaks’, since in camp the words ‘rest from work’ presented too glaring a contradiction with the basic principles of production ethics held in the far north. To rest every hour was both a challenge and a crime, and dried currant leaf was a natural camouflage.

‘Listen, Ivan,’ said Savelev. ‘I’ll tell you a story. In Bamlag, we were working on the side track and hauling sand in wheelbarrows. It was a long distance, and we had to put out twenty-five meters a day. If you didn’t fill your quota, your bread ration got cut to three hundred grams. Soup once a day. Whoever filled the quota got an extra kilo of bread and could buy a second kilo in the store if he had the cash. We worked in pairs. But the quotas were impossible. So here’s what we did: one day we’d work for you from your trench and fill the quota. We’d get two kilos of bread plus your three hundred grams. So we’d each get one kilo, one hundred and fifty grams. The next day we’d work for my quota. Then for yours. We did it for a month, and it wasn’t a bad life. Luckily for us the foreman was a decent sort, since he knew what was up. It worked out well even for him. His men kept up their strength and production didn’t drop. Then someone higher up figured things out, and our luck came to an end.’

‘How about trying it here?’ said Ivan Ivanovich.

‘I don’t want to, but we’ll help you out.’

‘How about you?’

‘We couldn’t care less, friend.’

‘I guess I don’t care either. Let’s just wait for the foreman to come.’

The foreman arrived in a few days, and our worst fears were realized.

‘OK, you’ve had your rest. Your time is up. Might as well give someone else a chance. This has been a bit like a sanatorium or maybe a health club for you,’ the foreman joked without cracking a smile.

‘I guess so,’ said Savelev:

We pretended to laugh, out of politeness.

‘When do we go back?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Ivan Ivanovich didn’t ask any more questions. He hanged himself that night ten paces from the cabin in the tree fork without even using a rope. I’d never seen that kind of suicide before. Savelev found him, saw him from the path and let out a yell. The foreman came running, ordered us not to take him down until the investigating group arrived, and hurried us off.

Fedya Shapov and I didn’t know what to do – Ivan Ivanovich had some good foot rags that weren’t torn. He also had some sacks, a calico shirt that he boiled to remove the lice, and some patched felt boots. His padded jacket lay on his bunk. We talked it over briefly and took the things for ourselves. Savelev didn’t take part in the division of the dead man’s clothing. He just kept walking around Ivan Ivanovich’s body. In the world of free men a body always and everywhere stimulates a vague interest, attracts like a magnet. This is not the case either in war or in the camps, where the everyday nature of death and the deadening of feeling kills any interest in a dead body. But Savelev was struck by Ivan Ivanovich’s death. It had stirred up and lit some dark corners of his soul, and forced him to make decisions of his own.

He walked into the cabin, took the axe from one corner, and stepped back over the threshold. The foreman, who had been sitting on a mound of earth piled around the cabin, jumped up and began to shout something. Fedya and I ran out into the yard.

Savelev walked up to the thick, short pine log on which we had always sawed wood. The surface was scarred by the axe, and the bark had all been chopped off. He put his left hand on the log, spread the fingers, and swung the axe.

The foreman squealed shrilly. Fedya ran toward Savelev, but the four fingers had already flown into the sawdust. At first we couldn’t even see them among the branches and fine chips. Crimson blood surged from the stump of Savelev’s hand. Fedya and I ripped up Ivan Ivanovich’s shirt, applied the tourniquet, and bound the wound.

The foreman took us back to camp. Savelev was sent to the first-aid point and from there to Investigations to be tried on a charge of self-mutilation. Fedya and I returned to that same tent which we had left two weeks before with such hopes and expectations of happiness.

The upper berths were already occupied by others, but we didn’t care, since it was summer and even better to be lower down. There would be a lot of changes by winter.

I fell asleep quickly, but woke up in the middle of the night. I walked up to the table of the orderly on duty where Fedya was sitting with a sheet of paper in his hand. Over his shoulder I could read:

‘Mama,’ Fedya wrote, ‘Mama, I’m all right. Mama, I’m dressed appropriately for the season…’

To: Comrade A. S. Korolyov,

Director of Mines