Us Conductors (40 page)

IN KOLYMA THE GUARDS
followed us everywhere, rifles swinging at their sides. They had good boots and good gloves and
mostly serious dispositions. Some of them were former prisoners who lived in the village now. Between shifts you could see them come into the work zone, walking freely past the guardhouse, and in their faces there was still something uncomprehending.

Just like their wards, guards were compensated according to production. If a team of zeks exceeded its quota, the escorts took home more rubles. The abuse the guards doled out was functional, pragmatic: walk faster, walk faster, take more stone in your wheelbarrow.

Conversely, the soldiers were punished if one of their prisoners escaped. They could even be accused of counter-revolutionary collusion, get sent to the other side of the perimeter. And so the guards learned to kill the zeks who strayed. In the late day, when our muscles were failing, we had to be especially alert. Anyone who staggered off the road might then stagger into the snow or cedars, sprawling, a bullet between his shoulders. There was a man whose name I don’t remember, with red hair, who told me he was going to kill himself. And then he did, almost gracefully, turning his wheelbarrow off the curve of the road and drowsily advancing, toward freedom; Vanya yelled and raised his gun and after two hesitations he pulled the trigger. The redheaded man whose name I do not remember completed the motion he had begun that morning, lifting himself off his knotted plank bunk. He fell forward, into the tundra.

I think I believed I would kill myself, eventually, when the correct moment finally arrived.

The winter came quickly, in place of fall. I lived only barely, by coincidence. At the end of every workday, wrecked, ruined, we trudged back into the camp. We queued for our evening meal: a morsel of herring, a spoonful of pea soup, bread. Someone might steal the soup or fish, but never the scrap of limp brown bread. The prisoners had made this rule themselves. This is
humanity, at the end of the world: the refusal to tear away a piece of bread. Once I saw a man try. He was dying of hunger. The whole camp seemed to turn on him, a wolf rising from a pile of leaves.
This you do not do
, they said, kicking the wretched starving man at the places where the skin met his ribs.

My friendship with Bigfoot dawned gradually. We found each other sitting together, one mealtime. We sat in respectful silence. The second time it happened I said, “My name is Lev.”

He said, “My name is Maksim. Or Bigfoot.”

I said I was a scientist. Once, he said, he had wanted to be an engineer.

We began to walk together, sometimes. Together we observed the camp.

His trust was like a gift.

Bigfoot’s feet were not so large, but he had come to Kolyma in enormous fur boots. “My brother made them,” he explained. They were brown and white bearskin, as high as his knees. You could hear them, like machines, crunching through the ice to a clearing in the woods. Bigfoot was not on road duty: he and his brigade stripped the felled trees, heaved them into the river. Their mouths gusted steam. At night Bigfoot rolled his boots into a coarse parcel and lay them beneath his head, like a pillow.

Bigfoot’s boots did not go unnoticed. He tried to ignore the looks. There was a hard glint to his gaze, something unflinching in his bearing. He had come to Russia from Lvov, in Ukraine, hoping to fight with the Marxists. Instead he was arrested as a spy. I remember joking with him one day, when we had become friends enough that we could joke: “At last, here, you are one of us.”

Bigfoot had fought off a few petty thieves but it was different when Nikola came up to him one night, an apparition on the dark field. “Do you play cards?” Nikola murmured.

“No,” Bigfoot said.

Nikola had a rough black beard. He kept his hands concealed in a heavy coat. His eyes were hidden under his thick black hair. In some ways Nikola seemed like a serious man. He could have been a professor of Russian literature, a young chess teacher. But there was a certain cheapness to him, a shabby quality to his gestures, that made him frightening. It was not just the 58s who gave Nikola a wide berth: the other urki were vigilant around him, watching him in a room, tracking his movements in their peripheral vision. They let him pass; they did not interrupt him. They rarely saw his eyes.

When Nikola said to Bigfoot, “Come play cards with me,” and began to walk toward his barrack, Bigfoot lowered his head and took a slow breath and then followed him.

They played cards. Sitting among Nikola’s friends, on other men’s bunks. The cards were made with thin scraps of paper, bread-and-water glue.

“What is your stake?” Nikola asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Bigfoot said. “Some bread.”

“Your boots are your stake,” Nikola told him.

Bigfoot won the first two games. He won a half-litre enamel bowl, which meant that at mealtimes he could take his soup first, with those who have their own bowls. Then he won a set of coloured pencils. In the brown of Nikola’s eyes you could see he was very angry. His friends were no longer slouched, joking; Bigfoot said he felt them turning their sharpest edges toward him.

Bigfoot lost the next game.

“Did you mean to lose?” I asked.

He didn’t answer.

They took Bigfoot’s fur boots. Later, he traded the pencils for a pair of leather boots, and he tore strips of cloth from the lining
of his jacket, and he wrapped his feet with these. Now Nikola crunched through the ice in Bigfoot’s boots, when we walked to the quarry, speaking to no one.

“Do you hate him?” I asked Bigfoot, one early morning.

“Yes,” he said.

Being on road crew was easier than working in the mines, or in the trees with Bigfoot, but we were still starving. Our rations were based on our work and we could lift only so many pounds of stone. The most important factor was the number of trips we were capable of making in a day, to and from the quarry. No matter how high we filled our wheelbarrows, it was always more worthwhile to have time for another transit. On a good day we made four journeys. On a snowy day we might make two. And so on the next day we ate about half as much. The slower we worked, the more quickly we would vanish from everyone’s memory.

One night I was walking with Bigfoot through the camp. We visited the southeast corner, where white flowers were growing in a pattern behind the latrines. The flowers were illuminated by the floodlights. We walked past the guardhouse, where men were smoking. Above us, towers creaked. The wind in Kolyma did not feel like the wind in other places: it was as if someone had taken her two hands and carefully separated our clothes, parting the fabric, to allow the cold inside. Very few zeks were out at this hour. It was so bitter and dark; and lights-out would come soon. Most would already be sleeping, or staring at the knotted wood above their head, at the thin insects that lay there like pencil marks.

A line of night-blind prisoners staggered across the road. Their blindness was brought on by a vitamin deficiency. All would be normal until the late afternoon:
Go faster
, someone would plead.
Let’s get back to camp
. As dusk set in, they were diminished. They became silent and fumbling. After sundown the night-blind were more like ghosts than like men: faltering in
their steps, hands fluttering. They searched for their neighbours, for familiar walls, for the world that they remembered. They travelled in flocks, clutching. One zek would stumble and they would all trip after him, like some cruel Buster Keaton routine, collapsing in a skinny pile.

Bigfoot and I stood in the muddy square between the barracks and watched the shambling blind men. We watched zeks carrying water on straining yokes. They drew black water from the well. It was easy to imagine a cavern, a secret reservoir, that yawned beneath the camp, full of smooth black water.

A hundred spruce planks lay stacked in the dirt.

After a moment I said, “I have an idea for the wheelbarrows.”

“An idea?”

“To make the work easier.”

Bigfoot had a long, plain face, all that straw-coloured hair.

He delivered his jokes without smiling.

“Tea with lemon?” he said.

“A track.”

“Too much work.”

“No.” I pointed to the planks. “Nothing elaborate. Slats like those.”

“Hmm,” he said.

I waited. I wanted Bigfoot to say something more.

He squinted at the guardtower’s shifting silhouettes.

“We should get in,” he said.

We headed back toward our barracks. The sound of the snow was like pepper crushed in a mortar.

“How far is your walk every day?” he asked me. “Eight kilometres?”

“Each way?”

“Yes.”

“I think almost ten.”

Bigfoot scrunched up his face. It was a strange expression on a bearded face like his. “How many planks of wood does that take?”

He caught me with this question. We arrived at my door in silence. “Four thousand,” I said finally.

He raised his eyebrows just a little. “Four thousand,” he repeated.

That was that. I tried to imagine four thousand spruce planks in a mountain behind the hospital. I lowered my eyes. We went inside, to where it smelled like smoke and rot.

In the morning I learned our brigade had finished below quota for the fifth straight day. We were ordered to work an extra two hours. I saw the Boxer exchange a look with Sergey. Both urki seemed to be losing their night vision. Or perhaps I had imagined it. They shook their heads and slumped up the path. It was one of those mornings when you notice the size of the sky, the strange quiet, the endless roll of the land past the wire. You remember that you are at the very edge of things.

I worked all day and for two more hours, pushing my tripping wheelbarrow through the frost. All day, carrying stone.

The group completed only three trips.

That evening I lay in my bunk, on my side, trying to tune out the conversations around me. I was tired and so hungry. I was thinking.

Finally, I rolled off the boards and went searching for Nikola.

THE MAJOR AGREED TO
see us before the midday meal.

Vanya, our guard, found me in line.

“Now?” I said.

“Now.”

I gazed at the queue ahead of me. I discovered I was ready to give the whole scheme up. None of my grand ideas were worth as much as that ladle of pea soup.

“Did you hear me?” Vanya said.

Bigfoot was watching us from the next queue over.

“Forget it,” I said.

“Forget it?” Vanya was short-tempered but not so bad. He always slouched in his uniform, as if the epaulets forced him to lean forward. He stared at me, and the line, gradually comprehending. “You can eat after,” he said.

I tried to gauge his honesty.

“Where’s Nikola?” I said.

“He’s meeting us at the officers’ building.”

From his place in line, Bigfoot looked worried. I gestured that it was all right.

I still had not left the queue.

“Termen?”

“All right,” I snapped. I came away from the line. It was as if I were extruding a sword from my side.

We walked in silence. The grass was stamped down, speckled with snow. Nikola was waiting for us on the steps, hands in pockets. “Hello,” I said. He didn’t answer.

Vanya rolled his eyes at this little performance. “All right, then?” he said.

Nikola sniffed. He muttered yes.

I nodded.

We followed Vanya inside the building. I had never been through this door. The entranceway was bare and whitewashed. The walls kept the wind out. A bouquet of pale blue blossoms rested in a vase and for a moment we watched them as we walked, Nikola and I, the prisoners.

We came to a door with the major’s name. Vanya knocked.

The major said, “Come in.”

We huddled into his little office. There were no windows. There was a painting of Red Square and a painting of Stalin and a painting of a peasant woman with a cow. There were pinned-up charts and many typed lists. The major was a young man with a roman nose, long hair pulled back in a tie. He was not thin but he was quite handsome, with a straight clear look. I assumed his long hair was a violation of the military dress code. Like his age, like his assignment, it suggested the major was either very good or very bad at his work.

Vanya saluted.

The major nodded wearily. “All right, junior lieutenant. Proceed.”

Vanya hesitated. “If it’s all right, sir, I’ll let the prisoners speak for themselves.”

“Fine. What are your names?” The major took a short breath.

“Lev Sergeyvich Termen.”

“Nikola Zharykhin,” Nikola said.

“You’re both on Junior Lieutenant Bragin’s roads team?”

I had become nervous. The major was writing our names on the pad in front of him. This seemed like a record, already; like evidence, liability, a reason somehow to give us each five more years.

I said nothing. Nikola eyed me, disquieted. The major was still waiting for a response. He cleared his throat. “Yes?”

“Yes.” I tried to shake off my anxiety. “Wheelbarrows.”

The major offered an even smile. “Wheelbarrows.” He crossed his arms. “Well, what’s this idea?”