Kolyma Tales (6 page)

We followed the tractor prints as if we were hunting some enormous prehistoric beast, but the tractor road came to an end and we continued along an old, barely distinguishable footpath. We reached a small log cabin with two windows and a door hanging on a hinge that was cut from an automobile tire and nailed to the doorway. The small door had an enormous handle that looked like the handles on restaurant doors in big towns. Inside were cots made of slender logs. On the earthen floor lay a smoky black tin can. All around the small moss-covered cabin lay other rusty yellow cans of the same sort. The hut belonged to the geological prospecting group; more than a year had passed since anyone had lived in it. We were to live here and cut a road through the forest. We had brought saws and axes with us.

It was the first time we had received our food ration in advance. I was carrying a small cherished bag containing grain, sugar, fish, and some lard. The bag was tied in several places with bits of twine like a sausage. Savelev had a similar sack, but Ivan Ivanovich had two of them sewn with large masculine stitches. The fourth, Fedya Shapov, had poured his grain frivolously into the pockets of his jacket and used a knotted foot rag that served us instead of socks to hold his sugar. He’d ripped out the inner pocket of the pea jacket for a tobacco pouch in which he carefully stored any cigarette butts he happened to come across.

The very thought that this tiny ten-day ration had to be divided into thirty parts was frightening. Of course, we had the choice of eating twice a day instead of three times. We’d taken bread for only two days, since the foreman would be bringing it to us. Even such a small group was unthinkable without a foreman. We were totally unconcerned with who he might be. We’d been told that we had to prepare our quarters before he arrived.

We were all tired of barracks food. Each time they brought in the soup in large zinc tubs suspended on poles, it made us all want to cry. We were ready to cry for fear that the soup would be thin. And when a miracle occurred and the soup was thick, we couldn’t believe it and ate it as slowly as possible. But even with thick soup in a warm stomach there remained a sucking pain; we’d been hungry for too long. All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man, compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted from our bodies during their long fasts.

Savelev and I decided to eat separately. The preparation of food is a special joy for a convict. To prepare food with one’s own hands and then eat it was an incomparable pleasure, even if the skilled hands of a cook might have done it better. Our culinary skills were insignificant, and we didn’t know how to prepare even a simple soup or kasha. Nevertheless, Savelev and I gathered up the cans, washed them, burned them on the campfire, cooked, fussed, and learned from each other.

Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya combined their food. Fedya emptied his pockets carefully, examining each stitch, cleaning out the individual grains with a grimy broken fingernail.

We, the four of us, were quite prepared for a trip into the future – either into the sky or into the earth. We were all well aware of the nature of scientifically determined food rations, of how certain types of food were brought in to replace others, and how a bucket of water was considered the equivalent in calories of a quarter-pound of butter. We’d all learned meekness and had forgotten how to be surprised. We had no pride, vanity, or ambition, and jealousy and passion seemed as alien to us as Mars, and trivial in addition. It was much more important to learn to button your pants in the frost. Grown men cried if they weren’t able to do that. We understood that death was no worse than life, and we feared neither. We were overwhelmed by indifference. We knew that it was in our power to end this life the very next day and now and again we made that decision, but each time life’s trivia would interfere with our plans. Today they would promise an extra kilo of bread as a reward for good work, and it would be simply foolish to commit suicide on such a day. The following time the orderly of the next barracks would promise a smoke to pay back an old debt.

We realized that life, even the worst life, consists of an alternation of joys and sorrows, successes and failures, and there was no need to fear the failures more than the successes.

We were disciplined and obedient to our superiors. We understood that truth and falsehood were sisters and that there were thousands of truths in the world … We considered ourselves virtual saints, since we had redeemed all our sins by our years in camp. We had learned to understand people, to foresee their actions and fathom them. We had learned – and this was the most important thing – that our knowledge of people did not provide us with anything useful in life. What did it matter if I understood, felt, foresaw the actions of another person? I was powerless to change my own attitude toward him, and I couldn’t denounce a fellow convict, no matter what he did. I refused to seek the job of foreman, which provided a chance to remain alive, for the worst thing in a camp was the forcing of one’s own or anyone else’s will on another person who was a convict just like oneself. I refused to seek ‘useful’ acquaintanceships, to give bribes. And what good did it do to know that Ivanov was a scoundrel, that Petrov was a spy, or that Zaslavsky had given false testimony?

Our inability to use certain types of ‘weapons’ weakened us in comparison with certain of our neighbors who shared berths with us. We learned to be satisfied with little things and rejoice at small successes.

We learned one other amazing thing: in the eyes of the state and its representatives a physically strong person was better – yes, better – more moral, more valuable than a weak person who couldn’t shovel twenty cubic meters of dirt out of a trench in a day. The former was more moral than the latter. He fulfilled his ‘quota’, that is, carried out his chief duty to the state and society and was therefore respected by all. His advice was asked and his desires were taken into consideration, he was invited to meetings whose topics were far removed from shovelling heavy slippery dirt from wet and slimy ditches.

Thanks to his physical advantages, such a person was transformed into a moral force in the resolution of the numerous everyday questions of camp life. Of course, he remained a moral force only as long as he remained a physical force.

When Ivan Ivanovich was first brought to camp he was an excellent ‘worker’. Now that he had become weak from hunger, he was unable to understand why everyone beat him in passing. He wasn’t beaten severely, but he was beaten: by the orderly, the barber, the contractor, the group leader, the work-gang leader, the guard. Aside from these camp officials, he was also beaten by the camp criminals. Ivan Ivanovich was happy that he had been included in our group.

Fedya Shapov, a teenager from the Altai region, became physically exhausted before the others did because his half-grown body was still not very strong. He was the only son of a widow, and he was convicted of illegal livestock slaughter. He had slaughtered a sheep – an act punishable by a ten-year sentence. Accustomed as he was to farm work, he found the frantic labor of the camp particularly difficult. Fedya admired the free life of the criminal element in camp, but there was something in his nature that kept him from becoming close to the thieves. His healthy peasant upbringing and love – rather than revulsion – for work helped him a little. The youngest among us, he immediately became attached to our oldest and most decent member – Ivan Ivanovich.

Savelev had been a student in the Moscow Telegraph Institute and later was my fellow inmate in Butyr Prison. As a loyal member of the Young Communist League, he was shaken by all he had seen and he had written a letter to the party ‘leader’, since he was convinced that someone must be keeping such information from the leader. His own case was so trivial (writing letters to his fiancée) that the only proof of agitation (Article 58, Point 10) consisted of their correspondence. His ‘organization’ (Point 11 of the same article) consisted of two persons. All this was noted down in dead seriousness on the interrogation forms. Nevertheless, even in view of the then prevalent scale of offenses, no one believed he would be condemned to anything more than exile.

Soon after sending the letter on one of the days officially designated for petitions, Savelev was called out into the corridor and given a notice to sign. The supreme prosecutor informed him that he would personally examine his case. After that Savelev was summoned on only one other occasion, to be handed the sentence of the ‘Special Council’ – ten years in the camps.

In camp Savelev was rapidly reduced to a shade of his former self, but even then he could not comprehend the sinister punishment meted out to him. The two of us couldn’t have been called friends; we simply loved to remember Moscow together – her streets and monuments, the Moscow River with its thin layer of oil that glistened like mother-of-pearl. Neither Leningrad, Kiev, nor Odessa could boast of such passionate devotees. The two of us could talk endlessly of Moscow…

We set up the iron stove that we had brought with us in the cabin and, although it was summer, lit a fire. The warm dry air was wonderfully aromatic. We were all accustomed to breathing the sour smells of old clothing and sweat. It was a good thing that tears have no odor.

On the advice of Ivan Ivanovich, we took off our underwear and buried it in the ground overnight. Each undershirt and pair of shorts was buried separately with only a small piece protruding above the ground. This was a folk remedy against lice. Back at the mine we had been helpless against them. In the morning we discovered that the lice really had gathered on the protruding bits of shirt. Although the land here lay under the permafrost, it nevertheless thawed sufficiently in the summer for us to bury the articles of underwear. Of course, the soil in this area contained more stones than dirt. But even from this soil of ice and stone there grew up dense pine forests with tree trunks so wide that it took three men with outstretched arms to span them. Such was the life-force of the trees – a magnificent lesson given to us by nature.

We burned the lice, holding the shirts up to the burning logs of the fire. Unfortunately this clever method did not destroy the parasites and on the very same day we boiled our underwear furiously in large tin cans. This time the method of disinfection was a reliable one.

It was later, in hunting mice, crows, seagulls, and squirrels, that we learned the magic qualities of the earth. The flesh of any animal loses its particular odor if it is first buried in the ground.

We took every precaution to keep our fire from going out, since we had only a few matches that were kept by Ivan Ivanovich. He wrapped the precious matches in a piece of canvas and then in rags as carefully as possible.

Each evening we would lay two logs on the fire, and they would smoulder till morning without either flaming up or going out. Three logs would have burned up. Savelev and I had learned that truth at our school desks, but Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya had learned it as children at home. In the morning we would separate the logs. They would flare up with a yellow flame, and we would throw a heavy log on top.

I divided the grain into ten parts, but that was too alarming an operation. It was probably easier to feed ten thousand people with five loaves than for a convict to divide his ten-day ration into thirty parts. Ration cards were always based on a ten-day period. The ten-day system had long since died out on the ‘mainland’, but here it was maintained on a permanent basis. No one here saw any need for Sunday holidays or for the convicts to have ‘rest days’.

Unable to bear this torment, I mixed all the grain together and asked Ivan Ivanovich and Fedya to let me come in with them. I turned all my food into the common pot, and Savelev followed my example.

The four of us made a wise decision – to cook just twice a day. There simply weren’t enough provisions for three meals.

‘We’ll gather fruits and mushrooms,’ said Ivan Ivanovich. ‘We can catch mice and birds. And one or two days in every ten we can live on bread alone.’

‘But if we’re to go hungry for one or two days every time we expect a food delivery,’ said Savelev, ‘then how will we be able to resist overeating when the stuff is actually brought?’

We decided to make the food as watery as possible and to eat only twice a day – no matter what. After all, no one would steal from us. We had all received our supplies intact, and we had no drunken cooks, thieving quartermasters, greedy overseers, criminals to take the best pieces, or any of that endless horde of administrators who without fear or any trace of control or conscience were able to pick the convict clean.

We had received all our ‘fats’ in the form of a lump of watery fat, some sugar – less than the amount of gold that I was able to pan – and sticky bread created by the inimitable experts of the heavy thumb who fed the administrators of the bakery. There were twenty different kinds of grain that we had never heard of in the entire course of our lives. It was all too mysterious. And frightening.

The fish that was to take the place of meat according to the ‘replacement tables’ was half-spoiled herring intended to replenish our intensified expenditure of protein.

Alas, even the full ration we had received could not feed us or fill our bellies. We required three times, four times as much, for our bodies had gone hungry for too long. We did not understand this simple truth. We believed in the ‘norms’, and we had never heard the well-known remark made by all cooks – that it is easier to cook for twenty persons than for four. We understood one thing clearly: that we would not have enough food. This did not so much frighten as surprise us. We had to begin work and start cutting a road through the undergrowth and fallen trees.

Trees in the north die lying down – like people. Their enormous bared roots look like the claws of a monstrous predatory bird that has seized on to a rock. Downward from these gigantic claws to the permafrost stretch thousands of tiny tentacles, whitish shoots covered with warm brown bark. Each summer the permafrost retreats a little and each inch of thawed soil is immediately pierced by a root shoot that digs in with its fine tendrils. The first reach maturity in three hundred years, slowly hoisting their heavy, powerful bodies on these weak roots scattered flat over the stony soil. A strong wind easily topples these trees that stand on such frail feet. The trees fall on their backs, their heads pointed away from their feet, and die lying on a soft, thick layer of moss that is either bright green or crimson.