Kolyma Tales (37 page)

Chris thought about the turnip. There are more vitamins in the skin than in the meat. Chris, and not the investigator, had gotten the vitamins. Chris wanted to hold up his end of the conversation and tell how he had sucked and chewed the turnip rind that the investigator had cast aside, but he was afraid of seeming overly casual.

‘Do you understand me or not? I need to take a look at your handwriting.’

Chris understood nothing.

‘Write,’ the investigator commanded: ‘ “To the chief of the mine from Convict Chris. Year of birth, crime, sentence. Application. I request to be transferred to an easier job.” That’s enough.’

The investigator took Chris’s unfinished application, tore it up, and threw it into the fire… The light from the stove burned brighter for a moment.

‘Sit down at the desk. At the corner.’

Chris had the calligraphic handwriting of a professional scribe. He himself drew pleasure from his handwriting, but all his friends laughed at it, saying it was not the handwriting of a professor and doctor of science. It was the handwriting of a quartermaster, and not that of a scholar, a writer, a poet. His friends joked and said he could have made a career for himself as a scribe for the czar in the story by Kuprin.

These jokes did not bother Chris, however, and he continued to recopy his manuscripts before giving them to the typists. The typists were pleased, but they too secretly laughed at this aberration.

His fingers, which had become accustomed to the handles of a pick and shovel, struggled to pick up the pen.

‘Everything is chaos and disorder here,’ the investigator said. ‘I understand that, but you’ll help me straighten things out.’

‘Of course, of course,’ Chris said. The stove was already hot, and the room had warmed up.

‘If I could only have a smoke…’

‘I don’t smoke,’ the investigator said rudely. ‘I don’t have any bread either. You won’t go to work tomorrow. I’ll tell the assignment man.’

In this way, for several months, Chris would come once a week to the unheated, inhospitable house of the camp investigator, recopy papers, and file them.

The snowless winter of 1937–8 had already entered the barracks in death-dealing winds. Each night assignment men would run to the barracks, search for people on their lists, and wake them up to be shipped off. Even before, no one had ever returned from these journeys, but now no one even gave a thought to these nocturnal affairs. If they were preparing a group, there was nothing to be done. The work was too hard to leave a thought for anything else.

Work hours increased and guards were added, but the week passed, and Chris could barely drag himself to the investigator’s familiar office to continue the endless job of filing papers. Chris stopped washing himself and shaving, but the investigator didn’t seem to notice his fleshless cheeks and inflamed eyes. In spite of his hunger, Chris continued to copy and file, but the quantity of papers and folders kept growing and growing to the point where it was impossible to get them in order. Chris copied out endless lists containing only surnames. The top edge of each list was folded over, but Chris never made any attempt to learn the secret of these operations, even though he had only to lift the bent-back edge. Sometimes the investigator would take a stack of ‘cases’ of mysterious origin and hurriedly dictate them to Chris to copy down.

The dictation would end at midnight, and Chris would return to his barracks and sleep and sleep. The next day’s work assignments did not concern him. Week followed week, and Chris continued to lose weight and to write for this investigator, who was young enough to be his son.

Once the investigator picked up the latest file to read the name of the latest victim and bit his lip. He looked at Chris and asked:

‘What’s your full name?’

When Chris told him, the investigator’s face grew whiter than snow. His quick fingers leafed through the thin papers included in the file; there were no more and no less than in any of the other files lying on the floor. The investigator flung open the stove door, and the room became so bright that it seemed that a soul had been bared to reveal something very important and human at its core. The investigator ripped the folder into shreds, which he shoved into the stove. The room became even brighter. Chris understood nothing. Without looking at Chris, the investigator said: ‘You’d think they were using a stencil. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t care.’ And he stared at Chris with resolute eyes.

‘Let’s continue. Are you ready?’

‘I’m ready,’ Chris said. Only many years later did he realize that the burned file had been his own.

Many of Chris’s friends were shot. The investigator was also shot. But Chris was still alive, and at least once every few years he would remember the burning folder and the investigator’s decisive fingers as he tore up his ‘case’ – a present to the doomed from the giver of doom.

Chris had a life-saving, calligraphic handwriting.

His name was ‘Ruchkin’; there were a lot of Ruchkins in camp.
Ruchka
means ‘hand’ in Russian, and so ‘Ruchkin’ became a common nickname. If they called you Ruchkin, that meant your hand was injured, not that your teeth were knocked out. But which Ruchkin? The Greek? Or the tall one from the seventh ward? This was Kolya Ruchkin, the businessman.

Kolya’s right hand had been torn off at the wrist by an explosion. It was a case of self-mutilation. In the camp records such incidents were all lumped together in the same column, whether it was a case of a person maiming himself with a gun, explosives, or a sharp tool. It was against the rules to put such persons in the hospital if they didn’t have a high, ‘septic’ temperature. Kolya Ruchkin had just that kind of temperature. For two months Kolya had sprinkled dirt on his wound to keep it infected. In the end, however, his youth had won out, and his days in the hospital were coming to an end. It was time to return to the mine. Kolya, however, was not afraid. What threat could the gold-mines hold for him, a one-handed man?

Camp authorities struggled with the problem as best they could. One-armed men were forced to spend the entire working day in deep, loose, crystal snow, tramping down a path for people and tractors at the timber-clearing sites. Then convicts began to blow off their feet by placing a nitroglycerin capsule in the boot and lighting a Bickford fuse protruding from their boot at the knee. So they stopped sending one-armed men to tramp down snow. As for panning for gold, how could a one-armed man even attempt it? At best, in the summer, they could be sent for a day or two. If it wasn’t raining.

Kolya’s mouth spread wide in a toothy grin; scurvy had not yet taken his teeth. Kolya Ruchkin had already learned to roll a cigarette with one hand. Well-rested from the hospital and only slightly hungry, Kolya smiled and smiled. He was a businessman, this Kolya Ruchkin. Incessantly bartering and trading, he smuggled forbidden herring to the diarrhea patients in exchange for bread. They too needed to extend their stay in the hospital. Kolya would trade soup for porridge or porridge for two portions of soup. He knew how to ‘divvy up’ a ration of bread entrusted to him to exchange for tobacco. He got the bread from the patients who were too ill to get out of their beds – people swollen with scurvy, people with serious fractures from the Traumatic Illnesses Ward. (Or, as Pavel Pavlovich, the orderly, used to say, never suspecting the irony of his error: ‘The Dramatic Illnesses Ward’.)

Kolya’s happiness began the day his hand was blown off. He was almost full, almost warm. As for the curses of the camp authorities and the threats of the doctors, Kolya considered them all trivial. And they were.

On several occasions during this blissful stay in the hospital, strange and frightening things had happened. Kolya’s non-existent hand ached just as before. He could feel every bit of it. His fingers were bent in the position they had acquired from grasping the handle of a pick and shovel – no more and no less. It was difficult to grasp a spoon with such a hand, but there was no need for a spoon back at the mine. Everything edible was slurped directly from the bowl: soup and porridge and the thin cranberry pudding and tea. It was possible to hold a ration of bread in those eternally clenched fingers. But Ruchkin had blown them off altogether. Why then did he still feel those fingers, clenched just as they had been back at the mine? After all, the fingers on his left hand had begun to unflex, to bend like rusty hinges that had received a drop of oil, and Ruchkin cried from joy. Already, if he lay face down with his left hand pressed under his stomach, he could unbend the hand – easily.

The pain in his missing hand usually came at night. Cold from fear, Ruchkin would wake up and cry, afraid to ask his neighbors for advice. Maybe this meant something? Maybe he was going mad?

The missing hand had begun to hurt less and less frequently, the world was returning to its normal state, and Ruchkin rejoiced in his happiness. And he smiled and smiled, thinking how well he’d pulled the whole thing off.

The orderly, Pavel Pavlovich, came out of the toilet stall holding an unlit home-made cigarette in his hand and sat down next to Ruchkin.

‘Can I get you a light, Pavel Pavlovich?’ Ruchkin groveled before the orderly. ‘Just one second!’

Ruchkin rushed to the stove, opened the door, and with his left hand scattered a few burning coals on the floor. Tossing up the smoldering coal with agility, Ruchkin rolled it back and forth in his palm. The coal blackened but kept on flaming, and Ruchkin blew on it to support the flame, holding it directly up to the face of the orderly who was bending forward slightly. Holding the cigarette in his mouth, the orderly sucked in as much air as he could through the cigarette and finally managed to light up. Shreds of blue smoke rose above the orderly’s head, and Ruchkin’s nostrils flared. In the wards, patients were awakened by that smell, and they tried vainly to inhale the smoke which was no smoke at all but a shade fleeing from smoke…

It was clear that Ruchkin would get the butt. He thought how he would take two drags himself and then take the butt to Surgical Ward to the ‘political’ with the broken back. That would get him a whole ration, which was no joke. And if Pavel Pavlovich left a bit more, that would produce a new cigarette that would be worth more than just a ration.

‘You’ll be checking out of here soon, Ruchkin,’ Pavel Pavlovich allowed in an unhurried fashion. ‘You really dragged it out, fattened yourself up. But that’s water under the bridge… Tell me, how’d you get your nerve up to do it? I want to tell my children. If I ever see them.’

‘Well, I don’t hide it, Pavel Pavlovich,’ Ruchkin said, hurriedly sizing up the situation. Evidently Pavel Pavlovich had not rolled the cigarette very tightly. You could just see the flame move along the paper when he inhaled. The orderly’s cigarette didn’t glow; it burned like a Bickford fuse. Just like a Bickford fuse. That meant he had to make it a short story.

‘Well?’

‘I wake up in the morning, get my ration, and stick it inside my shirt. We get two rations per day. I go to Mishka, the powderman. “How’s about it?” I say.

‘ “All right,” he says.

‘I give him the whole eight-hundred gram ration for a capsule and a section of fuse. Then I go back to my “countrymen” in my barracks. We weren’t really from the same area, we just called each other that. One’s name was Fedya, and the other was Petro, I think.

‘ “Ready?” I ask.

‘ “Ready,” they say. “Let’s have it,” I say. They give me their two rations; I put them under my shirt, and we push off for work. When we get there, while the work gang is being issued tools, we take a burning log from the fire and go behind a heap of mined rock. We stand shoulder to shoulder, and all three of us hold the capsule – each with his right hand. We light the fuse and – Zap! – fingers fly everywhere. Our gang leader starts shouting: “What the hell are you doing?” The senior guard marches us off to camp, to the first-aid station.

‘They bandaged us up there. Later my countrymen got sent away somewhere, but I had a temperature and ended up in the hospital.’

Pavel Pavlovich had almost finished his cigarette, but Ruchkin was so engrossed in telling his story that he nearly forgot about the butt.

‘But what about the rations? You had two left. Did you eat them?’

‘Damn right! I ate them right after I got bandaged up. The other two wanted me to break a piece off for them. I told them to go to hell. Business is business.’

In the gold-mine work gang, the easiest job was that of carpenter. He would nail boards together to make a walkway for wheelbarrows loaded with earth for the washer. These wooden ‘whiskers’ stretched out in all directions from the central walkway. From above, that is from the gold-washer, the walkway looked like a monstrous centipede, flattened, dried, and nailed for ever to the gold-mine’s open workings.

The carpenter had a ‘pushover’ job compared with that of the miner or the wheelbarrow man. The carpenter’s hands knew neither the handle of the wheelbarrow, the shovel, the feel of a crowbar, nor the pick. An axe and a handful of nails were his only tools. Normally the gang boss would rotate men on this crucial job to give everyone at least a slight chance to rest up. Of course, fingers clutched in a death grip around a shovel or pick handle cannot be straightened out by one day of easy work. A man needs to be idle for at least a year for that to happen. But there is, nevertheless, some measure of justice in this alternation of easy and hard labor. The rotation was not rigid: a weaker person had a better chance of working a day as a carpenter. One didn’t have to be a cabinet-maker or carpenter to hew boards and drive nails. People with a university education coped with the job quite well.

In our work gang this pushover job wasn’t evenly distributed. The job of carpenter was always filled by one and the same person – Isaiah Davidovich Rabinovich, former director of Soviet Government Insurance. Rabinovich was sixty-eight years old, but the old man was in good health and hoped to survive his ten-year sentence. In camp it is the work that kills, and anyone who praises it is either a scoundrel or a fool. Twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds died one after another, and that was why they were brought to this ‘special zone’, but Rabinovich, the carpenter, lived on. He evidently knew someone among the camp higher-ups, had some mysterious pull. He even got office jobs. Isaiah Rabinovich understood that every day and every hour spent some place other than the mine promised him life and salvation, whereas the mine offered him only death. There was no reason to bring pensioners to the special zone. Rabinovich’s nationality had brought him here to die.