Kolyma Tales (21 page)

Not understanding anything, they donned quilted vests, pea jackets, and old, patched felt boots. Jumping over the puddles, they returned to the barracks room, from which they had come to the storehouse.

Everyone was extremely nervous and silent. Only Frisorger kept muttering something in German.

‘He’s praying, damn him…’ Filipovsky whispered to Andreev.

‘Does anyone understand what’s happening?’ Andreev asked.

The gray-haired stove-builder who looked like a professor was enumerating all the ‘near sites’: the port, a mine four kilometers from Magadan, one seventeen kilometers from Magadan, another twenty-three kilometers from the city, and still another forty-seven kilometers away… Then he started on road construction sites – places that were only slightly better than gold-mines.

The assignment man came running.

‘Come on out! March to the gate.’

Everyone left the building and went to the gates of the transit prison. Beyond the gates stood a large truck, the bed of which was covered with a green tarpaulin.

‘Guards, assume command and take your prisoners.’

The guard did a head count. Andreev felt his legs and back grow cold…

‘Get in the truck!’

The guard threw back the edge of the large tarpaulin; the truck was filled with people dressed in winter clothing.

‘Get in!’

All five climbed in together. All were silent. The guard got in the cab, the motor roared up, and the truck moved down the road leading to the main highway.

‘They’re taking us to the mine four kilometers from Magadan,’ the stove-builder said.

Posts marking kilometers floated past. All five put their heads together near a crack in the canvas. They could not believe their eyes…

‘Seventeen…’

‘Twenty-three…’ Filipovsky said.

‘A local mine, the bastards!’ the stove-builder hissed in a rage.

For a long time the truck wound down the twisted highway between the crags. The mountains resembled barge haulers with bent backs.

‘Forty-seven,’ the fidgety Esperantist squealed in despair.

The truck rushed on.

‘Where are we going?’ Andreev asked, gripping someone’s shoulder.

‘We’ll spend the night at Atka, 208 kilometers from Magadan.’

‘And after that?’

‘I don’t know… Give me a smoke.’

Puffing heavily, the truck climbed a pass in the Yablonovy Range.

On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship
Kim
entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo. Winter was coming on and navigation would soon be impossible, so this was the last ship that year. Magadan met its guests with forty-below weather. These, however, were no guests but convicts, the true masters of this land.

The whole city administration had come down to the port. Every truck in town was there to meet the boat. Soldiers – conscripts and regulars – surrounded the pier, and the process of unloading began.

Responding to the summons of the telegraph, every truck not needed in the mines within a radius of 500 kilometers had arrived empty in Magadan.

The dead were tossed on to the shore to be hauled away to the cemetery and buried in mass graves without so much as identification tags. A directive was made up ordering that the bodies be exhumed at some later date.

Patients who were moderately ill were taken to the central Prison Hospital on the left bank of the Kolyma River. The hospital had just been moved there – 500 kilometers away. If the
Kim
had arrived a year earlier, no one would have had to make the long trip to the new hospital.

The head of surgery, Kubantsev, had just been transferred from an army post. He had been in the front lines, but even so he was shaken by the sight of these people, by their terrible wounds. Every truck arriving from Magadan carried the corpses of people who had died on the way to the hospital. The surgeon understood that these were the transportable, ‘minor’ cases, and that the more seriously ill had been left in the port.

The surgeon kept repeating the words of General Radischev, which he had read somewhere just after the war: ‘Experience on the front cannot prepare a man for the sight of death in the camps.’

Kubantsev was losing his composure. He didn’t know what sort of orders to give, where to begin. But something had to be done. The orderlies were removing patients from the trucks and carrying them on stretchers to the surgical ward. Stretchers with patients were crammed into the corridors. Smells cling to memory as if they were poems or human faces. That festering camp stench remained for ever in Kubantsev’s memory. He would never forget that smell. One might think that the smell of pus and death is the same everywhere. That’s not true. Ever since that day it always seemed to Kubantsev that he could smell his first Kolyma patients. Kubantsev smoked constantly, feeling he was losing control of himself, that he didn’t know what instructions to give to the orderlies, the paramedics, the doctors.

‘Aleksei Alekseevich.’ Kubantsev heard someone say his name. It was Braude, the surgeon who had formerly been in charge of this ward but who had been removed from his position by the higher-ups simply because he was an ex-convict and had a German name to boot.

‘Let me take over. I’m familiar with all this. I’ve been here for ten years.’

Upset, Kubantsev relinquished his position of authority, and the work began. Three surgeons began their operations simultaneously. The orderlies scrubbed down to assist. Other orderlies gave injections and poured out medicine for the patients.

‘Amputations, only amputations,’ Braude muttered. He loved surgery and even admitted to suffering when a day in his life went by without an operation, without a single incision.

‘We won’t be bored this time,’ Braude thought happily. ‘Kubantsev isn’t a bad sort, but he was overwhelmed by all of this. A surgeon from the front! They’ve got all their instructions, plans, orders, but this is life itself. Kolyma!’

In spite of all this, Braude was not a vicious person. Demoted for no reason, he did not hate his successor or try to trip him up. On the contrary, Braude could see Kubantsev’s confusion and sense his deep gratitude. After all, the man had a family, a wife, a boy in school. The officers all got special rations, lofty positions, hardship pay. As for Braude, he had only a ten-year sentence behind him and a very dubious future. Braude was from Saratov, a former student of the famous Krause, and had shown much promise at one time. But the year 1937 shattered Braude’s life. Why should he attempt to take revenge on Kubantsev for his own failures…?

And Braude commanded, cut, swore. Braude lived, forgetting himself, and even though he hated this forgetfulness in moments of contemplation, he couldn’t change.

He had decided today to leave the hospital, to go to the mainland. The fairy tale seemed to be over, but we don’t know even the beginning.

On the fifth of December 1947, the steamship
Kim
entered the port of Nagaevo with a human cargo – three thousand convicts. During the trip the convicts had mutinied, and the ship authorities had decided to hose down all the holds. This was done when the temperature was forty degrees below zero. Kubantsev had come to Kolyma to speed up his pension, and on the first day of his Kolyma service he learned what third-and fourth-degree frostbite were.

All this had to be forgotten, and Kubantsev, being a disciplined man with a strong will, did precisely that. He forced himself to forget.

Seventeen years later, Kubantsev remembered the names of each of the convict orderlies, he remembered all the camp romances and which of the convicts ‘lived’ with whom. He remembered the rank of every heartless administrator. There was only one thing that Kubantsev didn’t remember – the steamship
Kim
with its three thousand prisoners.

Anatole France has a story, ‘The Procurator of Judea’. In it, after seventeen years, Pontius Pilate cannot remember Christ.

Immediately after the war a drama was played out at the hospital. Or, to be more precise, it was the conclusion of a drama.

The war had dragged out into the light of day whole strata of life that always and everywhere remain at the bottom. The actors were not criminals or underground political groups.

In the course of military actions the leprosaria had been destroyed, and the patients had merged with the rest of the population. Was this a secret war or an open one? Was it chemical or bacteriological?

People ill with leprosy easily passed themselves off as wounded or maimed in war. Lepers mixed with those fleeing to the east and returned to a real, albeit terrible life where they were accepted as victims or even heroes of the war.

These individuals lived and worked. The war had to end in order for the doctors to remember about them and for the terrible card catalogues of the leprosaria to fill up again.

Lepers lived among ordinary people, sharing the retreat and the advance, the joy and the bitterness of victory. They worked in factories and on farms. They got jobs and even became supervisors. But they never became soldiers – the stubs of the fingers that appeared to have been damaged in the war prevented them from assuming this last occupation. Lepers passed themselves off as war invalids and were lost in the throng.

Sergei Fedorenko was a warehouse manager. A war invalid, he was sufficiently able to command the disobedient stumps of his fingers to do his job well. He was forging a career for himself and expected to become a member of the Party, but when he got too close to money, he began to drink and run around with women and got arrested. He arrived in Magadan on one of the Kolyma ships as a common criminal with a sentence of ten years.

Here Fedorenko switched his diagnosis. Although there were more than enough persons maimed either by war or their own hand, it was more advantageous, more fashionable, and less noticeable to dissolve in the sea of frostbite cases.

That was how I met him in the hospital – with supposedly third- to fourth-degree frostbite, a wound that wouldn’t heal, one foot and the fingers on both hands reduced to stumps.

Fedorenko was undergoing treatment – without any results. But then every patient tried his utmost to resist treatment so as not to go back to the mines. After many months of trophic ulcers, Fedorenko was released from the hospital. Not wanting to leave, he became an orderly and was ultimately promoted to senior orderly in the surgical ward with three hundred beds. This was the central hospital with a thousand convict-prisoners. One floor of one wing was reserved for civilian employees.

Somehow it happened that the doctor who was normally in charge of Fedorenko’s case fell ill, and Doctor Krasinsky, an old military doctor and a lover of Jules Verne (why?), was handling his patients for him. Kolyma life had not yet beaten out of him the desire to chat, gossip, and discuss cases.

In examining Fedorenko, Krasinsky experienced a feeling of surprise, but he couldn’t put his finger on just what it was. He had known this feeling of anxiety from time to time ever since he was a student. No, this was not a trophic ulcer, not a stub left by an explosion or an axe. The flesh was slowly decomposing. Krasinsky’s heart began to beat. He called Fedorenko over to the window, to the light, and greedily peered into his face, unable to believe what he saw. It was leprosy! A line from a medical school text ran through Krasinsky’s mind –
The human face begins to resemble that of a lion
– and Fedorenko’s face was a lion’s mask! Feverishly Krasinsky leafed through his textbooks. He took a large needle and poked one of the numerous white spots on Fedorenko’s skin several times. There was no sensation of pain!

Sweating, Krasinsky wrote a report to his superiors. The patient, Fedorenko, was isolated in a separate room, and samples of his skin were sent for biopsies to Magadan, and from there to Moscow. The response came in about two weeks. Leprosy! It was as if Krasinsky were celebrating his birthday. The hospital authorities wrote to still higher authorities about sending Fedorenko to the Kolyma leprosarium, which was situated on an island with machine-guns trained on the crossing. There was a guard, there had to be a guard.

Fedorenko did not deny that he had been in a leprosarium and that the patients, left to their own devices, had fled to freedom. Just as in ordinary life, some followed the retreating army, and others went forward to meet the Germans. Fedorenko calmly began to wait to be sent off, but the hospital was in an uproar. People were shouting and cursing Fedorenko. Everyone feared leprosy, even those who had been beaten during questioning and whose souls had been ground into dust by a thousand interrogations, whose bodies were broken and tormented by unbearable labor, who had sentences of twenty-five years’ hard labor capped with five years’ exile – sentences they could never serve or survive…

The same psychic phenomenon was at work that forced a man to postpone a well-planned escape simply because there would be tobacco or commissary privileges that day. There are as many strange and illogical instances as there are camps. Human shame, for example. How does one measure it, what are its limits? People whose lives are ruined, whose past and future have been trampled on, suddenly find themselves in the grip of some trivial prejudice, some nonsense that they for some reason can neither ignore nor deny. And the sudden appearance of shame is the most subtle of human emotions, to be remembered for one’s entire life as something real and infinitely precious.

There was an incident in the hospital when an orderly, who was not yet an orderly and was simply helping out, was assigned to shave a newly arrived group of women. The administration was amusing itself by assigning men to shave women and women to shave men. But this man begged his superior to classify the affair as ‘sanitary treatment’. He just could not accept that his life was ruined, that these amusements of the camp authorities were nothing but a dirty foam in a terrible kettle where he himself was being boiled away.