Who's on First (5 page)

“Ah, Viktor,” Vadim now replied, “in your company, of what help can I be to you with statistics? Besides, are we not equipped to deal with measured competence with respect to the variables? It is not likelier ever to be colder than it was during Christmas week of 1948. They have not increased our rations since the day we arrived here. We have managed, between us, to steal an average of 280 ounces of bread per month. Your special relationship with our dear captain's wife, whose quarters you scrub, has netted us an average of twenty-four ounces of cod-liver oil per month. I don't know what I weigh, but I don't think I weigh one ounce less than I weighed one month after we got here. Looking at you, my dear Viktor, is a singularly unpleasant experience: Your skin is yellow, your lips are blue, your face is freckled with frostbite scars, your blond stubble is uneven—it is fortunate I don't have to look at your face except at night” (both men wore balaclavas the bottom part of which they moved up to nose level when they ate), “but you do not look worse than you did soon after we got here. We have put in our twelve hours a day seven days a week and neither of us has had dysentery in over a year. What have you got to say to that?”

Viktor pointed to the horizon on the left, where the wooden profile of Vorkuta's barracks could be seen and, one hundred meters to the right, a mound, taller than the tallest building, and stretching a kilometer off to the right like a huge ice dirigible beached in the snow.

“That,” said Viktor, pointing to the corpses of ten thousand men who had passed through Vorkuta, “is my answer.”

“Ah,” said Vadim, who felt today a strange elation, “but look at this, my doubting Thomas,” and he raised his hand. “That is not the hand of a corpse. That is the hand of Vadim Platov.” He lowered his hand. “And who decided that I should lower my arm? The Gulag Archipelago? Captain Popolov? The Great Shithead in the Kremlin? No, it is Vadim Platov who decided just now to lower his arm. And listen, listen carefully”—the nearest guard was nowhere within hearing distance, but Vadim lowered his voice theatrically—“listen: ‘Our Father, Who are in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.…' Nothing that they have done to us has kept me from remembering those words, and I know that they mean more than”—by instinct, he turned his head to one side—“than everything ever written by Marx and Lenin.”

Viktor's teeth flashed into a smile, and he ripped off his balaclava, and the lines of an old man's face were visible, corrugating the sunken cheeks, but the eyes were young. “Ah, Vadim, how would I have survived except for you! My beloved Vadim, you know nothing about fate, or historical necessity. You don't allow yourself to remember now, with a few ounces of bread in your stomach, that you will wake at midnight from the cold and from the awful pain from your parched stomach. They will call us out, as usual, sometime between twelve and two, for a roster-check, and you will experience, for the thousandth time, a little fire of indignation. And you will return to the bunk and spend half an hour trying to contrive your body and the rags we have collected over five years into a position so as to make sleep possible. And then both of us, I know, will play mentally with figures, and our theories of spaces, trying to think, think of something except that we have lived a lifetime, every night is a lifetime, every night we have no reason to expect that our lives, our bodies, can accept one more day of … this. But now you speak as if you were lying at a beach on the Black Sea wondering whether you would go to the smorgasbord before, or after, lying with your girl friend.… Vadim—”

The whistle blew. The conversation stopped in mid-sentence. All over the area men rose—220, in this detachment—and lifted their picks, their shovels, the ties, the wheelbarrows with the rock and gravel, and at that slow, deliberate pace from which no prisoner ever varied, they went back to the railroad bed to work a second six hours, during which no conversation was permitted except to ask questions of a supervisor. A cloud suddenly occluded the sun, which was not seen again on that day in July.

At five-thirty on that memorable morning the following March the great bell did not sound. By habit, most of the prisoners in Detachment D woke anyway. There were no watches, so that nobody could say with certainty that the hour was past when the guard would unlock the door and shout out to the men to move outside to relieve themselves in the open latrine before lining up in the dark to march out to the work area. But an hour went by, and through the crack in the door a prisoner announced that he could see traces of light, and the word spread through the barrack to the two hundred men who lay in their bunks dressed in exactly the same clothes they would wear marching out the door to work, the temperature inside the barrack being forty-five degrees. Something was up.

Vadim whispered to Viktor. “Perhaps there is another hunger strike?” The reference was to the strike in 1949 in Detachment L. The spokesman for the men had announced, when the guard opened the door in the morning, that the detachment would not go out to work without receiving food. The demand was for five ounces of bread in the morning. The other detachments were kept locked throughout the day, eighty thousand prisoners ignorant of the ongoing drama.

It was not until that evening that the routine was resumed, and although the barracks' doors had opened only to admit the kitchen zeks with the great cans of gruel, and they—supervised, as ever, by two armed guards—said nothing, everyone suddenly knew; in the way that, in a prison, everyone knows when a prisoner has been executed.

The hunger strikers had been told in midafternoon that their request was granted. Joyfully they had filed out toward the work area, two kilometers distant, where they had been told the baker's truck awaited them. Exercising caution, the prisoner's spokesman specified that the ration would have to include the normal midday ration of twelve ounces
in addition to
the five ounces bargained for during the morning, and the commandant said that he understood the terms well. The men marched toward food, their spirits exuberant by this unheard-of victory. As they marched forward toward the railroad bed the guards, normally abreast of the detachment, began casually to fall behind until there were, in fact, only the two columns of prisoners. It was then, from hastily improvised foxholes in the snow, that the machine gunners went to work. There were of course no survivors, and the commandant had issued crisp orders that the corpses would remain where they had fallen, as monuments to the incivility of the criminal class and the expeditiousness of Soviet justice. That was four years ago, and although the population of Vorkuta was constantly refreshed, there were still enough old-timers to ensure the unlikelihood that another detachment would attempt a hunger strike. “It has got to be something else,” said Viktor.

It was noon before the guards opened the door and called out the men. Vadim squinted, the sight being unusual. It was dark when the men rose to go to work, dark when they returned—only during the summer was it still light. So it had been seven months since Vadim had seen the endless files of scruffy men, as far as the eye could see, in double ranks, shuffling their arms and feet to gain protection against the zero temperature. No noise was tolerated, not even the clapping of gloved hands—in order that the commands of the detachment captains might be heard clearly. But today they heard the rasp of the amplifiers, posted on high telephone poles at intervals of about fifty meters in all directions. These were infrequently used, but were the instrument by which the commandant occasionally addressed the entire population of this island of the Archipelago.

“Prisoners of the Soviet State! Hear this! Silence! Hear this! Yesterday, the great father of our beloved socialist republic passed away. I know that your grief will incapacitate you”

—“
that sadist is incapable of sarcasm,
” thought Vadim, his heart pounding with joy—

“so that in memory of our beloved Marshal Stalin, we shall suspend the work requirement for the balance of the day so that you can mourn his passing. You will all return to your barracks.”

And here—never mind that the noise would be overheard—there was no restraint. Men who had not smiled in years broke out with laughter that became nearly hysterical. Men who had not spoken to each other embraced. They shouted and they sang in uninhibited dissonance, each man yelling out whatever hymn of thanksgiving occurred to him. The jubilation would have gone on into the night except that the biological instinct so highly developed in survival circumstances—to husband one's energies—gradually asserted itself, and the men fell gradually into a kind of comatose silence. But Vadim and Viktor, sitting on the lower bunk, talked on excitedly. Vadim whispered that surely the death of the monster would affect their prison terms? Playfully he asked Viktor: “It is 2,928 days since I was sentenced. What percentage of my tenner have I done?” Viktor closed his eyes, grinned, and asked: “To how many decimal places do you want your answer?”

“Four!” Vadim answered coquettishly.

“80.0022 percent,” said Viktor.

“Well, don't you think our new masters might consider remitting the … 19.9978 we have left over?”

“No,” said Viktor. “Probably they have forgotten we exist.”

It was several months before the folkways of Archipelago began gradually to change. The first sign was the commandant's advising the men that they would each be permitted to write one letter, on not more than two sides of a sheet of paper, which, together with one pencil, would be issued the following day. The rations were increased by four ounces with very nearly miraculous physical effect, Viktor and Vadim agreed, most noticeably permitting sounder sleep. It required a huge act of will, but both men regularly husbanded one third of their noonday ration, and ate it the following morning. They noticed before many weeks had gone by that the ranks of Vorkuta were diminishing without any significant bloating of the ice dirigible. Still, in their own detachment, though six men had died in July and there were no replacements, no one was called to the processing center, the staging area for torture, execution—and release.

But the day came. Viktor and Vadim had not dared to give voice to that which both feared most: that one should be released while the other stayed. The prospect of one day in the Archipelago without each other was a thought neither could permit himself to express. They were both, in fact, summoned from their work area one Wednesday in August and led by a guard to the processing center, where they were directed to a cubicle in one of the administrative buildings. Pictures on the wall were of Khrushchev and Bulganin, and the bulletin board was thick with communications from that huge spectral building in Moscow, the ganglion of the Archipelago. Viktor was called in first and told to sit down on the stool opposite the clerk, who was dressed in a shapeless brown corduroy and wore a heavy vest and rimless glasses and a trim moustache. He studied the papers on the unpainted table.

“Kapitsa. Yes, anti-Soviet agitation … protested deportation of traitors on eastern front in a letter to the rector of the University of Kharkov. Hm. Well, Kapitsa, the Soviet State, exercising its customary mercy, has granted you an amnesty. Moreover, the Moscow Military Air Academy has … requested … that you report for duty there. Within thirty days. You are to go to General Bolknovitinov. Do you agree? Sign here.” Viktor Kapitsa, his hand shaking, took the pen and signed his name on the form without bothering to read it. He was given a release order, a train pass to Kharkov, and ten rubles. Vadim Platov was dealt with similarly, and told to report to an institute in Kiev whose name he did not recognize. He was emboldened to ask what it was that was needed of him. “The state requires the services of all its trained scientists.” When could they leave? The clerk looked at his watch. It was eleven. “There is a train at one o'clock. You change at Ust for Moscow.”

One o'clock! The station was a mere one-kilometer distant. Clutching his release papers, Vadim left the cubicle for the anteroom, where Viktor was waiting for him. They did not speak, could not speak, but walked silently to their empty barrack. To put together their belongings was the work of five minutes. They must not misgauge the time, but the bell at noon summoning the camp personnel to lunch would give them exactly one hour's advance notice of the train's departure. Feverishly they set about writing, with the stubby pencils they now possessed, notes of farewell to their companions, having agreed to write joint notes so as to cover as many as possible. They reckoned what they supposed must be half an hour after the bell. They had written a total of forty notes, which they distributed on the frayed canvas bunks of the addressees. They picked up their satchels and went out the door at the usual pace and turned, this time not east toward the endless railroad line but west toward the building from which smoke always rose, in the direction of their youth. They could see the outlines of a dozen railroad cars. Simultaneously both men began to walk at a brisk pace unexperienced in years. Their bearing was now erect. Viktor with his topcoat of sorts, sewn together from three separate remnants of jacket material, and the shawl wound about his head and ears, Vadim with the heavy jacket, a coarse piece of string girding it tightly about his fleshless waist, patched trousers, heavy shoes much dilapidated. Suddenly Viktor paused, laid down his satchel, and ceremoniously removed his balaclava; Vadim did the same. Cautiously they inserted these life-saving face masks in their satchels, and resumed their march. At the gate, so ferociously guarded with high turrets, machine guns, and dogs, their documents were accepted routinely and, giddy with the sensation, they walked out of the Gulag and climbed the staircase to the station level unsurveilled, for the first time in eight years, by armed guards. Inside, a sergeant at the ticket window inspected their travel passes and issued them a stub for the journey to Ust. Was the train leaving on time? Vadim asked, as if he were a boulevardier asking a routine question at the Gare du Nord. The clerk stared at him incredulously, uttered a profanity, and returned to his chair by the stove. Vadim looked at Viktor, who said, “There's the train. Why not board it?” Intoxicated by their authority over their own movements, they moved up the steps of the car, half expecting that at any moment they would be recalled. Timidly Vadim opened the carriage door and was overcome by the heat within. He had not experienced such comfort since leaving the courthouse where he was sentenced. Two dozen men, half of them prison personnel on leave, half of them liberated prisoners from other detachments, were sitting on the wooden slatted benches
with backrests
. Vadim and Viktor sat opposite each other, lowering themselves carefully onto the unaccustomed chairs. A guard approached them. He bore a large heavy covered tray at waist level, strapped behind his neck.