Kolyma Tales (8 page)

When I slipped off the slick pole-ladder in the test pit and sprained my ankle, the director realized I would be limping for quite a while. Since the rules wouldn’t allow me just to sit around, I was sent as an assistant to Adam Frisorger, our carpenter. We were both quite pleased.

In his ‘first life’ Frisorger had been a pastor in some German village near Marxstadt on the Volga.
*
We had met in one of the enormous transit prisons during the typhoid quarantine and had arrived together at this coal-prospecting area. Like me, Frisorger had spent time in the taiga, had been on the brink of death, and had been sent half insane from a mine to the transit prison. We were sent to the coal-prospecting group as invalids, as ‘help’. All the working members of the prospecting group were civilians working on contract. True, they were yesterday’s convicts, but they had served their sentences. In camp the attitude toward them was condescending, even contemptuous. On one occasion, while we were still on the road, the forty of them hardly managed to scrape up two rubles to buy some home-grown tobacco. Even so, they were already different from us. We all understood that in two or three months they would be able to buy clothing, get something to drink, be issued internal travel passports. Perhaps they would even go home in a year. These hopes gleamed all the brighter when Paramonov, the man in charge of the group, promised them enormous salaries and polar rations. ‘You’ll all go home in top hats,’ he kept saying. As for us convicts, there were no promises of top hats and polar rations.

On the other hand, Paramonov was not rude to us. No one would give him any convicts to work as prospectors, so all he managed to wheedle out of the higher-ups was the five of us as helpers.

None of us knew one another, but when we were presented to Paramonov’s bright, piercing gaze, he had reason to be pleased with his crew. One of us, the gray-mustached Izgibin, was a stove-builder. He was the joker in the crowd, and his wit had not abandoned him even in camp. Thanks to his skill, he was not as emaciated as the rest of us. The second was a one-eyed giant from Kamenets-Podolsk. He presented himself to Paramonov as a ‘steamboat stoker’.

‘So, you must be something of a mechanic,’ Paramonov said.

‘That’s right, I am,’ the stoker responded eagerly.

He had quickly calculated the advantages of working in a civilian prospecting group.

The third was the agronomist, Riazanov. Paramonov was ecstatic over this find. As for the agronomist’s appearance, no importance was attached to the torn rags in which he was clothed. In camp, a man’s worth was never appraised according to his clothing, and Paramonov knew the camp well enough.

I was the fourth. I was neither stove-builder nor handyman nor agronomist, but Paramonov found my great height reassuring, and he decided not to make a fuss by altering the list over one man. He nodded.

The fifth man, however, was acting very strangely. He muttered prayers, covered his face with his hands, and couldn’t hear Paramonov. But this was nothing new for our boss, and he turned to the detail assignment officer standing next to him with a stack of yellow folders containing our ‘cases’.

‘He’s a carpenter,’ the detail assignment officer said, guessing at Paramonov’s question. The reception was over, and we were led away to prospect.

Later Frisorger told me that he had been terrified by his case inspector back at the mine, because when they called for him, he thought he was going to be shot. We lived nearly a year in the same barracks, and we never quarreled – something unusual among convicts both in camp and in prison. Quarrels arise over trivia, and verbal abuse becomes so heated that the only possible sequel appears to be a knife – or at best a poker. But I quickly learned not to pay any attention to these elaborate oaths. Intense feelings would simmer down, and those involved would continue lazily to curse each other, but this was done for appearances – to save face.

Frisorger and I, however, never once quarreled. I think this was his achievement, for there was no one more gentle than he. He offended no one and spoke little. He had a creaky old man’s voice – the kind of voice that a young actor assumes when playing the role of an old man. In the camps, many attempt (often quite successfully) to appear older and physically weaker than they actually are. This is not the result of a conscious effort on their part but somehow occurs instinctively. It was one of life’s ironies that the majority of those attempting to add on years and subtract strength were actually in worse shape than they tried to depict. But there was nothing false in Frisorger’s voice.

Every morning and evening Frisorger would pray silently, turning away from the others and staring at the floor. He would take part in the conversation only if it had to do with religion, and that was very seldom, since convicts do not favor religious topics. With all his charm and obscene wit, Izgibin tried futilely to poke fun at Frisorger, who turned aside all Izgibin’s witticisms with the most peaceful of smiles. The entire prospecting group liked Frisorger – even Paramonov, for whom Frisorger spent half a year making a writing-desk.

Our cots were next to each other, and we frequently engaged in conversations. Frisorger would wave his arms in childlike amazement whenever he encountered in me a familiarity with any of the popular Gospel tales that he, in his simplicity, thought were known only to a narrow circle of religious believers. Giggling delightedly whenever I revealed any such knowledge, he would grow excited and begin to tell me Gospel stories that I either vaguely remembered or had never known at all. He very much enjoyed these discussions.

Once, while reciting the names of the twelve apostles, Frisorger made a mistake. He called the Apostle Paul the true founder of the Christian religion, its most important theoretician. I knew a little of the biography of this apostle and could not pass up the opportunity to correct Frisorger.

‘No, no,’ Frisorger said, laughing. ‘You just don’t know.’ And he began to count on his fingers: ‘Petrus, Paulus, Markus…’

I told him everything I knew about the Apostle Paul. He listened to me closely without speaking. It was already late and time to sleep. I woke up that night in the flickering smoky light of the kerosene lantern and saw that Frisorger’s eyes were open. He was whispering: ‘God, help me! Petrus, Paulus, Markus…’ He did not sleep until dawn. He left early that morning for work and returned late, when I was already asleep. I was awakened by quiet sobbing – like that of an old man. Frisorger was praying on his knees.

‘Is something the matter?’ I asked when he had finished praying.

Frisorger found my hand and squeezed it.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Paul wasn’t one of the twelve apostles. I forgot about Bartholomew.’ I said nothing.

‘Do my tears surprise you?’ he asked. ‘Those are tears of shame. How could I forget such things? I, Adam Frisorger, need a stranger to point out my unforgivable mistake. No, no, you’re not to blame. It’s my sin, mine. But it’s good that you corrected me. Everything will be all right.’

I barely managed to calm him down, and after that (just before I sprained my ankle), we became even closer friends.

Once when there was no one in the workshop, Frisorger took a soiled cloth wallet from his pocket and gestured to me to come over to the window.

‘Here,’ he said, handing me a tiny, rumpled photograph of a young woman with the inconsequential expression that one often sees in snapshots. The yellow, cracked photograph was lovingly framed with a piece of colored paper.

‘That’s my daughter,’ Frisorger said proudly. ‘My only daughter. My wife died a long time ago. My daughter doesn’t write to me; I guess she doesn’t know my address. I write to her a lot. Only to her. I never show this photograph to anyone. I took it from home. I took it from the chest of drawers six years ago.’

Paramonov had walked silently into the workshop.

‘Your daughter?’ he asked, glancing at the photograph.

‘Yes, sir, it’s my daughter,’ Frisorger answered with a smile.

‘Does she write?’

‘No.’

‘How could she forget her old man? Write up a request for an address search, and I’ll forward it. How’s your leg?’

‘I’m still limping, sir,’ I answered.

‘OK. Keep at it.’ Paramonov left.

From then on, making no further attempt to conceal it from me, Frisorger would lie down on his cot after the evening prayer, take out his daughter’s photograph, and stroke the colored border.

We had lived about a half-year together when one day the mail came. Paramonov was off on a trip, and the mail was being handled by his secretary, the convict Riazanov. Riazanov had turned out to be not an agronomist but an Esperantist, but that didn’t hinder him from expertly skinning dead horses, bending thick iron pipes and filling them with hot sand heated in the campfire, and carrying on the bookkeeping duties of the supervisor’s office.

‘Look at this,’ he said. ‘Look what came for Frisorger.’

In the package was an official document with a request to show convict Frisorger (crime, sentence) his daughter’s declaration. A copy of the declaration was enclosed. In it she wrote briefly and simply that she was convinced her father was an enemy of the people and that she renounced him and requested that her relationship to him be regarded as non-existent.

Riazanov twirled the paper in his hands. ‘Disgusting,’ he said. ‘Why did she have to go and do a thing like that? Maybe she wants to become a party member?’

I was occupied with something else. Why would anyone forward this sort of declaration to a convict father? Was it some unusual variety of sadism as when relatives were informed of non-existent deaths? Or was it the simple desire to do everything ‘according to the law’? Or perhaps something else?

‘Listen, Ivan,’ I said to Riazanov. ‘Did you register the mail?’

‘No, it just came.’

‘Give me the package.’ I explained the matter to Riazanov.

‘But how about the letter?’ he said hesitatingly. ‘She’s sure to write a letter.’

‘You can detain the letter as well.’

‘OK, take it.’

I crumpled the declaration in my hand and tossed it into the open door of the heated stove.

A month later the letter came – just as short as the declaration – and we burned it in the same stove.

Not long after that I was taken away, and Frisorger stayed behind. I don’t know what happened to him. I often thought of him while I still had the strength to remember. I could hear his creaky, excited whisper: ‘Petrus, Paulus, Markus…’

Fadeev said: ‘Wait, let me talk to him.’ He walked over to me and put his rifle butt up against my head. I lay in the snow, clutching the log that had fallen from my shoulder, for I could not pick it up again to join the column of people descending the mountain. Each man carried a log on his shoulder, some larger and some smaller, and all were in a hurry to get home. Both the guards and the prisoners wanted to eat and sleep; they were all tired of this long winter day. But I was lying in the snow.

Fadeev always used the formal form of address in speaking to the prisoners.

‘Listen, old man,’ he said. ‘Anyone as big as you can carry a log like that. It’s not even a log – just a stick. You’re faking, you fascist. At a time like this, when our country is fighting the enemy, you’re jamming sticks in her spokes.’

‘It’s not me who’s a fascist,’ I said. ‘It’s you. You look in the papers and read how the fascists kill old men. How do you think you’re going to tell your bride about what you did in Kolyma?’

I had reached the stage of absolute indifference. I could not tolerate rosy-cheeked, healthy, well-dressed, full people. I curled up to protect my stomach, but even this was a primordial, instinctive movement; I was not at all afraid of blows to the stomach. Fadeev’s booted foot kicked me in the back, but a sudden warm feeling came over me, and I experienced no pain at all. If I were to die, it would be all the better.

‘Listen,’ Fadeev said when he had turned me face upward with the tips of his boots. ‘You’re not the first one I’ve worked with, and I know your kind.’

Seroshapka, another guard, walked up.

‘Let me have a look at you, so I’ll remember you. What a mean one you are…’

The beating began. When it ended, Seroshapka said: ‘Now do you understand?’

‘I understand,’ I said as I got up and spat out salty, bloody saliva. I dragged the log to the accompaniment of chortles, shouting, and swearing from my fellow prisoners. The cold had gotten to them while I was being beaten.

The next morning Seroshapka led us out to a site where the trees had been cut down the previous winter, to gather anything that could be burned in our cast-iron stoves. The stumps were tall, and we ripped them out of the earth, using long poles as levers. Then we sawed them into pieces and stacked them.

Seroshapka hung ‘markers’ in the few branches still remaining in the area where we were working. Made from braided dry yellow and gray grass, the markers indicated the area beyond which we were not permitted to set foot.

Our foreman built a fire on the hill for Seroshapka and brought him an extra supply of wood. Only the guards could have fires.

The fallen snow had long since been carried away by the winds, and the cold, frosty grass was slippery in our hands and changed color when we touched it. Hummocks of low mountain sweet-brier grew around the tree stumps, and the aroma of the frozen dark lilac berries was extraordinary. Even more delicious than the sweet-brier were the frozen, overripe blue cowberries. The blueberries hung on stubby straight branches, each berry bright blue and wrinkled like an empty leather purse, but containing a dark blue-black juice that was indescribably delicious. By that time of the year, the berries had been touched by frost, and they were not at all like the ripe berries, which are full of juice. The later berries have a much more subtle taste.

I was working with Rybakov, who was gathering berries in a tin can during the rest periods and whenever Seroshapka looked the other way. If Rybakov could manage to fill the can, the guards’ cook would give him some bread. Rybakov’s undertaking began to assume major dimensions.