The Stalin Epigram (30 page)

“Nine days by train? Nine days by boat? Nine days by truck?”

The soldier, who was chewing on a root, grinned. “Nine days by foot,” he said. “You’ll walk in. If you’re still alive at the end of your stretch, which is not
something you want to put money on, chances are you’ll walk out.”

Nine days turned out to be the time it would take if the sun was shining and the trail north was bone dry. Which sorry to say wasn’t the situation. No sooner had we hit the road than the
heavens opened and it rained more rain than you’d think the sky could hold. The five soldiers who were supposed to be guarding our twenty-four Kolma-bound gold miners kept us trudging through
the mud, each step sucking at the soles of our boots as if there was a monster in the ground trying to eat us alive. There were military posts along the way—one convict who was working on his
second fiver told me the whole of Siberia was a giant prison camp, but of course I didn’t believe him—where we found shelter from the rain for the night, if you can call a cannon cover
stretched over tent poles shelter, along with a kind of mutton soup where the soldiers naturally got the chunks of meat and we considered ourselves lucky to wind up with the marrow in the bones.
But it was more than we got to eat on the nineteen-day trip to Siberia, and so it seemed like a feast. The rain let up the day we hit the Kolma River, twelve days out of Magadanskaya. We splashed
in the fast-flowing water like kids at a Komsomol picnic, then stretched naked on the bank to let our clothes dry in the sun. We had a stroke of luck on the thirteenth day. A shallow-bottomed motor
barge went past going upstream to the Kolma settlement to bring victuals to the miners and carry the gold and tin and lumber back down. Our five soldiers, fed up with hiking, got the captain to
take us upstream on condition we bailed out his bilge, which we did by making a chain and passing buckets up and back. The barge had a lady cook cooking for the crew. Being an ex-prisoner herself,
she snuck portions of rice and vegetables to us after the others had their fill. And on the sixteenth day, with the bilges almost dry, we caught sight of the Kolma settlement upslope from the
wooden pilings on the shoreline. The arrival of the barge was greeted with the whine of a hand-cranked siren and we could see from afar people waving at us excitedly from the crest of a hill. A
midget of an army officer, holding a leash attached to a silvertip bear standing on its hind legs, came duck-walking downhill. He was wearing exercise pants and the dirtiest uniform tunic I ever
seen, open at the neck with discolored silver colonel bars on the collar. Making his way to the dock, he took possession of the vodka that came upriver with the victuals, scratching his initials on
each carton as it was loaded onto wooden barrows for transport back uphill. The colonel turned out to be the Kolma commandant. He ordered the five soldiers to line up the new prisoners, then with
his bear in tow he strutted past us like a Soviet general inspecting an honor guard. It was then that I caught sight of more ladies than you could shake a stick at, half a hundred maybe, maybe
more, spilling downhill toward us as if gravity had lost its influence on their ankles. Pretty soon you could hear them coming as well as see them coming, until the commandant, distracted from
inspecting the new consignment of prisoners, screamed, Silence, ladies! Their babbling stopped as if the phonograph needle had been lifted off a record. The females fell into a rough line facing us
from twenty meters off. The colonel turned back to us prisoners. “Listen up,” he shouted. “I’m going to tell you how things function in the Kolma settlement. Here there are
no prisons, no barracks, only log cabins hacked out of the taiga by the first convicts to reach the Kolma mountains ten years back. The sixty-two ladies lined up before you are widows, as the
expression goes in the Kolma, which means the man they shared their cabin and bed with has either kicked the bucket or served out his prison term and headed back to European Russia. Each of the
ladies could do with a man to cut firewood and skin reindeer or hogs and keep her warm in bed, if you get my drift. As there are more ladies looking for husbands than prisoners available, you get
to choose. Look them over, pick one of them that fancies you out of the pack and move in with her. Report to work at the entrance to the mine, on the mountain side of the Kolma settlement, half an
hour after sunrise tomorrow. Any questions?”

A prisoner at the end of the line raised a hand. “Can we switch after we move in with one of them ladies?”

The colonel laughed. “No. To avoid the women stealing each other’s men, your first choice is your only choice. You can always move out, but then you’ll have nowhere to live and
no female body available to get you through the ten winter months when minus thirty is considered a hot day.”

I spotted Magda the second she spotted me. She was a head bigger than all the ladies around her, which made her only a head smaller than me. Our eyes locked. I could see she was smiling at me.
The prisoners were starting to drift across the no-man’s-land between us and the ladies. One of them wandered near to her but she raised an arm and brushed him away with the back of her
wrist. I walked straight across to her.

“Magda,” she said.

“Fikrit.”

“Kazak,” she said.

“Azerbaijani.”

“I pulled a tenner,” she said. “Counterrevolution, agent of some fellow I never heard of named Litzky or Trotzky or some such. Nine years still to go to the tail end of my
sentence.”

“I caught four years. Article 58. Wrecking. Key member of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center.”

“Were you guilty?”

“They said I was so I must be.”

“Are you strong as you look?” she asked.

“Stronger.”

“Why’s your head turned to the side like that?”

“I am deaf in my left ear.”

She accepted this with a nod. “Being deaf in one ear don’t affect how you screw?”

“Haven’t been with a woman since I went deaf, but I don’t expect any problem in that department.”

Magda laughed. As I had my good ear turned toward her I could hear she had a fine laugh.

“Aside from my height, what made you pick me?” she asked.

I ought to explain that Magda had an enormous head of wild matted hair. She was wearing man’s work pants pulled high on her waist with a rope for a belt and a sleeveless shirt that exposed
the sides of her large breasts and left her arms bare. “The tattoo,” I said. “I saw it right off. I like tattoos on ladies.”

She raised her forearm so I could get a better look. “It’s lost most of its color. That’s what my husband looked like before his arrest.”

“What happened to him?”

Magda shrugged. “I caught a glimpse of him in the exercise yard of the Ayagoz prison. He was walking round and round, his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front of him. After that I
lost track. He could be at another settlement on the Kolma for all I know.” She looked at me, her head slanted, her eyes squinting. “You got a wife back in civilization?”

I said as how I did. I said her name was Agrippina. I said she was the tattooed lady in the same circus as me.

“That explains why you like tattoos.”

“How come you’re a Kolma widow?” I asked.

“Man I was sharing a cabin with went out of his mind. He was on the front end of a twenty-year sentence when I turned up here a year ago. Two, three months back—what month are we
now?”

“June.”

“It was in February, which makes it four months back. Time goes slow here when you look ahead, it flies by when you look back. In February, like I said, he broke the
ice on the river with a pickaxe and took off his clothing and waded into the water. He didn’t last half a minute. By the time they was able to find a boat hook and haul him out, he was stiff
as a board and blue as the sky.”

“So will you take me in his place?” I asked.

“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said. And tucking an arm through mine, she started to haul me up the hill.

Which is how I came to start a new chapter in my life. I know some will point the finger at me for two-timing Agrippina, but the old saying
Out of sight, out of mind
is as truthful a
description as any of what happens to someone in my situation. In my defense, I was on the front end of a four-year stretch, I needed a roof over my head and body heat in my bed at night to survive
the winters in this Arctic backwater. I am not trying to let myself off the hook when I say that given how things turned out, I believe Agrippina would have followed my advice.
In Azerbaidzhan,
when a man for one reason or another disappears, his woman waits a decent interval and then finds another to take his place
. Agrippina was a good wife to me and would make a good wife to one of
the bachelor tent men who live in communal apartments. It would strike me as an example of nature taking its course if she threaded her needle and took in my trousers and shirts and jackets (the
tent men are big, but not as big as me) and passed along my clothing to this new husband, which, while I’m on the subject, is what Magda did for me, only in her case she had to let out the
waistbands and cuffs of the padded trousers and jackets and shirts of her suicided husband for them to fit me. She was even able to cobble new toes in his cork-soled boots so I could squeeze my
feet into them.

And so life flows on. And who is Fitrit Shotman to second-guess what’s right and what’s wrong at any given bend of the river?

Surviving justifies a lot of what might otherwise pass for wrong.

Magda’s cabin was the opposite of Magda. She had a wild beautifulness that some who should have known better took for ugliness. Which is to say, where she herself was untamed, with a fiery
temper and uncombable hair shooting off in all directions, her cabin, made of cut logs, round side out with mud and straw in the joints, was clean as a new kopek and ordered. Every tin cup or tin
plate or wooden spoon had its place, and heaven help the husband who didn’t put it back in its place. Each length of wood I split with the axe was carefully stacked in a corner next to the
chimney, the pieces fitted into each other like a jigsaw puzzle so that the pile took up less room in the room. The outhouse behind the cabin had a four-legged stool with a hole cut in the middle,
a luxury I had not experienced since I went to the toilet in the Kremlin the time I shook Comrade Stalin’s hand. Even the gold-mining work—fourteen hours a day, six days a
week—filled me with satisfaction because, like Professor Kaganovich from our cattle car, I knew I was contributing to the construction of Communism. I worked at the bitter end of a
kilometer-long shaft that burrowed into the side of the mountain, chipping away at the veins of white quartz rock with a pickaxe, shoveling the lode into the narrow ore carts that we pushed down
the tracks to the entrance of the mine when they were full. The air in the shaft was foul, forcing us to wear gas masks from the Great War most of the time. Even without the gas mask, you could
barely talk to the miner next to you because of the racket from the pumps pumping water from the shaft. Magda was on the team at the mine’s entrance that emptied the ore carts into bins, then
worked what they called
stamps,
heavy iron crushers which rose and fell on the quartz rock, smashing it to smithereens, which the older prisoners sifted through. The nuggets of gold were
thrown into an acid bath, which reduced the gold to a sludge that was smelted into brick-sized ingots. When the two hundred or so prisoners working in the mine produced ten or more ingots a day, we
got to draw double rations for supper that night, which was a cause for jubilation because single rations left your stomach rumbling with hunger. On the one day we didn’t work in the mine,
the prisoners were expected to turn up after midday meal in the common building next to the commandant’s office to listen to pages of Stalin’s books read aloud by the flabby officer in
charge of political education. The officer lisped. Anyone nodding off risked having to scrub the commandant’s latrine with a toothbrush, and then scrubbing his teeth with the same
toothbrush.

If there was a downside to life in the Kolma settlement, it had to do with time taking its sweet time. Prisoners with long sentences would tick them off by months. Short-timers would count the
weeks or days left. But whether you counted by months or weeks or days, the hours dragged. Here is what I thought—if we owned a clock, like one of the big ones in train stations, the second
hand would be turning round the Roman numbers in slow motion. Between Magda and me, we didn’t have a wristwatch or a clock. Magda owned a pretty little sand glass that emptied in three
minutes, but we only used it to soft-boil eggs when we had eggs, which was on national holidays like the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution or Stalin’s birthday. Every day at Kolma began
with the off-key scream of a bugle when the first spark of sunlight broke through the hills around the settlement. You could hear the men coughing and cursing in the cabins around us. Half an hour
later we were all lined up on the flat in front of the shaft entrance and counted off, and the workday began. There was a ten-minute break for lunch, cold goulash ladled out from a wooden bucket
into the tin plates we carried in a pouch when we went into the shaft. Since none of the prisoners owned wristwatches (the few that had them traded them off to the guards for cigarettes soon after
arriving), and since we were a thousand meters inside the mountainside and the only light came from flickering miner’s lamps, you could only guess at how many hours were left in the workday.
And as time crawled, everyone, me included, guessed short. But two weeks into living with Magda, I found out she knew how to make time fly. I am not inventing this. There were other prisoners in
the settlement who used Magda’s trick. If the commandant knew about it, he turned a blind eye. The secret was
tea
. Ordinary kitchen tea with Chinese writing on the cloth satchel.
Here’s how it worked. Every prisoner had a ration of two grams of tea per day, which meant Magda and me had four grams a day, which added up to twenty-something grams a week not counting what
we could buy with the fifteen-ruble-a-month pocket money we each got. Magda would save up our tea until we had a hundred grams. When the officer with the lisp got tired of reading from
Stalin’s books, we would make our way back to Magda’s cabin and I’d get a roaring fire going (wood was there for the taking) under a big pot filled with well water so that the
room soon became hot and clammy like one of those Turkish bathhouses in Moscow, and then we’d strip naked and sit on the floor with our backs to the wall rubbing our sweating bodies with
straw. While I nibbled on a marinated eel I caught with my bare hands in a shallow reach of the Kolma River, Magda boiled our stash of tea in so little water you’d get no more than two or
three small cups. Prisoners had a name for the boiled-down tea, which was loaded with something Magda called tannin. They called it
chaifir
. If you sipped it slow you’d become high, if
you drank two cups you’d go into a trance and time would whiz past your ear at the speed of sunlight stabbing between the Kolma mountains in the morning. High on
chaifir,
the second
hand on the railway station clock in my head would spin so fast it made me dizzy and a four-year sentence’d seem, for the time the high lasted, like it would be behind you when you came back
down to earth.