There was another committee, which the professor called the propaganda team. I am not sure I really understood what they were up to, but I’ll describe it in case the reader of this account understands it better than me. The committee, made up entirely of city women that were members of the Party, asked all the ladies to contribute scraps of nylon or lace undergarments. (One lady still dressed in the ball gown she was wearing the night of her arrest donated an entire pettiskirt.) And when our train passed through big cities or even middle-sized towns, which was always at night, the committee members stuffed the scraps through the joints between the planking in the side of the car so that they were flying in the current of air caused by the motion of the train. And when we were past the city or town, the scraps of undergarment were pulled back and hidden until we came to the next population center.
The professor’s children committee kept the kids distracted with games of buttons and fairy tales. But the adults, notwithstanding what I call the first-class conditions in our cattle car, were all down in the mouth. All except your servitor, Fikrit Shotman. I can honestly say I looked forward to paying my debt to society, wiping clean my slate of deceit and treachery the comrade interrogator had skillfully exposed to the world. The way I saw it, the sooner I reached the transit camp, the sooner I would be packed off to a gulag (a word I picked up from fellow prisoners) to purge my crimes against the Soviet state. Four years was not forever. I was alive and in good health and physically fit and would return to Agrippina and the circus and pick up my life wiser in the ways of the world, but not all that much older. It was important to see the trip east in a positive light. All of my heroes, starting with Vladimir Lenin and including Comrade Stalin, had spent years in exile and returned stronger because of the experience. Don’t get me wrong. I am not comparing myself with Lenin or Stalin. I’m just saying that, having conducted myself with dignity at my trial, I was determined to conduct myself with dignity in my present situation. In a word, I was determined to put the past where it belonged, which was behind me.
Our excitement grew as we approached Magadanskaya on the professor’s chalk map. The streams we washed in felt colder even though yellow dandelions were pushing up their heads and summer was near enough to smell. The landscape turned rougher, the underbrush near the tracks became tangled with wild berries, the wild goats that came down to drink from a stream we were washing in had long curling claws that hadn’t been cut in years, not as many villages were visible from the train and there was more distance between them, you could go for half a day without seeing a plowed field or a break in the forest. The emptiness reminded me of the Kara Kum Desert near Khiva in Turkmenistan, except here there was no sand, only permafrost and mountains with snow still on top of them in June. Pulling through the Magadanskaya marshaling yards, I kept my eye glued to one of the spaces between the planks. I saw wooden houses with small vegetable gardens. I saw cows or goats tethered to brightly painted fences. I saw a lumber cooperative with a hammer over the door and a tractor repair station with a sickle over the hangar. I saw delivery wagons drawn by oxen. In short, I saw what looked like civilization thriving in this Soviet Socialist Republic.
When the train came to a stop at a siding, we were kept waiting in the stifling cattle car for hours. Tempers flared. Two men almost came to blows. Happily the professor found the words to sooth everyone’s nerves. We could hear officials dealing with the prisoners in the cars ahead of us. Finally the door to our car was slid open by armed guards wearing gray belted uniform blouses and peaked Budyonny caps. Some of them were holding snarling dogs on short leashes. Two men, one in army fatigues, the other in a rumpled civilian suit, sat at a table on the wooden quay facing our door. The one in civilian clothing called out the professor’s name. “Kaganovich, Alter.” The professor bid us farewell with a jaunty wave of his hand. Some of the woman turned their heads away to hide their tears. I turned my head away so nobody would see I wasn’t crying. (Where I come from, which is the mountains of Azerbaidzhan, men do not cry.) The civilian at the table read from a paper in a voice loud enough for all of us to hear. “Violation of Article 58 of the Penal Code, sentenced to twenty years without the right of correspondence.” From the cattle car, we could see the professor hand over his identity card to the man in civilian clothing, then pin what looked like a number on the front of his shirt and join the other convicts already crouching in the back of an open truck parked nearby.
I took heart from the fact he was on his way to construct Communism in Siberia.
One by one the comrade prisoners jumped to the quay when their names were called and presented themselves to the men sitting behind the table. (The two who almost came to blows carried the paralyzed man when his turn came. The army officer seemed puzzled to find himself dealing with someone who was tagged with a tenner for wrecking but couldn’t walk. The civilian tossed his head toward something I couldn’t see. The army officer agreed and the paralyzed man was carted off in a wheelbarrow in that direction, never to be seen again, at least by me.) And then I heard my name. Shotman, Fikrit. “Present and eager to begin serving my sentence,” I shouted back, which drew a nervous giggle from the prisoners still in my cattle car. I leaped to the ground and stood to attention before the table.
“Zek Sh744239, where are your belongings?”
“Except for a spare pair of socks, I got none, Your Honors.”
“What skills do you have?”
“I used to be able to dead lift two hundred and eighty-five kilograms—even with my bad knee I can probably still do two hundred kilograms.”
“What does that mean, dead lift?”
“There are three kinds of weight lifts, Your Honors—there’s the squat lift, there’s the bench press and there’s the dead lift,” I began.
The army officer cut me short impatiently. “Forget I asked.” He said something to the civilian next to him, who nodded in agreement. “What do you know about gold, Shotman?” the army officer asked.
“The best I could do was silver, Your Honors.”
The two men behind the table exchanged looks. “You mined silver?” the civilian demanded.
“I won silver, Your Honors. In Vienna, Austria. In 1932. That’s what I was trying to tell you. I won silver for the dead lift, coming in ten kilograms behind the American Bob Hoffman, who took gold. Stalin himself shook my hand in the Kremlin when I brought the silver medal back to Moscow.”
“I’ll repeat my question,” the army officer said. “What do you know about gold mining?”
I scratched my head. “What I know about gold mining you could fit into a sewing thimble,” I said, thinking I would get credit for honesty.
The civilian scribbled something at the bottom of a sheet of paper and handed me a number to pin on my shirt front. “You’ll learn what you need to know about gold mining at the Kolma settlement,” he said. Motioning me to join the men sitting on a rise behind the quay, he called the next name.
“So you’re off to the Kolma River,” the soldier guarding the group said as I settled down on the ground with the others.
“Where is the Kolma River?” I asked.
“It’s nine days north of here,” one of the prisoners, a city man judging from his lace-up shoes, said. He didn’t sound enthusiastic.
“Nine days by train? Nine days by boat? Nine days by truck?”
The soldier, who was chewing on a root, grinned. “Nine days by foot,” he said. “You’ll walk in. If you’re still alive at the end of your stretch, which is not something you want to put money on, chances are you’ll walk out.”
Nine days turned out to be the time it would take if the sun was shining and the trail north was bone dry. Which sorry to say wasn’t the situation. No sooner had we hit the road than the heavens opened and it rained more rain than you’d think the sky could hold. The five soldiers who were supposed to be guarding our twenty-four Kolma-bound gold miners kept us trudging through the mud, each step sucking at the soles of our boots as if there was a mo
nster in the ground trying to eat us alive. There were military posts along the way—one convict who was working on his second fiver told me the whole of Siberia was a giant prison camp, but of course I didn’t believe him—where we found shelter from the rain for the night, if you can call a cannon cover stretched over tent poles shelter, along with a kind of mutton soup where the soldiers naturally got the chunks of meat and we considered ourselves lucky to wind up with the marrow in the bones. But it was more than we got to eat on the nineteen-day trip to Siberia, and so it seemed like a feast. The rain let up the day we hit the Kolma River, twelve days out of Magadanskaya. We splashed in the fast-flowing water like kids at a Komsomol picnic, then stretched naked on the bank to let our clothes dry in the sun. We had a stroke of luck on the thirteenth day. A shallow-bottomed motor barge went past going upstream to the Kolma settlement to bring victuals to the miners and carry the gold and tin and lumber back down. Our five soldiers, fed up with hiking, got the captain to take us upstream on condition we bailed out his bilge, which we did by making a chain and passing buckets up and back. The barge had a lady cook cooking for the crew. Being an ex-prisoner herself, she snuck portions of rice and vegetables to us after the others had their fill. And on the sixteenth day, with the bilges almost dry, we caught sight of the Kolma settlement upslope from the wooden pilings on the shoreline. The arrival of the barge was greeted with the whine of a hand-cranked siren and we could see from afar people waving at us excitedly from the crest of a hill. A midget of an army officer, holding a leash attached to a silvertip bear standing on its hind legs, came duck-walking downhill. He was wearing exercise pants and the dirtiest uniform tunic I ever seen, open at the neck with discolored silver colonel bars on the collar. Making his way to the dock, he took possession of the vodka that came upriver with the victuals, scratching his initials on each carton as it was loaded onto wooden barrows for transport back uphill. The colonel turned out to be the Kolma commandant. He ordered the five soldiers to line up the new prisoners, then with his bear in tow he strutted past us like a Soviet general inspecting an honor guard. It was then that I caught sight of more ladies than you could shake a stick at, half a hundred maybe, maybe more, spilling downhill toward us as if gravity had lost its influence on their ankles. Pretty soon you could hear them coming as well as see them coming, until the commandant, distracted from inspecting the new consignment of prisoners, screamed, Silence, ladies! Their babbling stopped as if the phonograph needle had been lifted off a record. The females fell into a rough line facing us from twenty meters off. The colonel turned back to us prisoners. “Listen up,” he shouted. “I’m going to tell you how things function in the Kolma settlement. Here there are no prisons, no barracks, only log cabins hacked out of the taiga by the first convicts to reach the Kolma mountains ten years back. The sixty-two ladies lined up before you are widows, as the expression goes in the Kolma, which means the man they shared their cabin and bed with has either kicked the bucket or served out his prison term and headed back to European Russia. Each of the ladies could do with a man to cut firewood and skin reindeer or hogs and keep her warm in bed, if you get my drift. As there are more ladies looking for husbands than prisoners available, you get to choose. Look them over, pick one of them that fancies you out of the pack and move in with her. Report to work at the entrance to the mine, on the mountain side of the Kolma settlement, half an hour after sunrise tomorrow. Any questions?”
A prisoner at the end of the line raised a hand. “Can we switch after we move in with one of them ladies?”
The colonel laughed. “No. To avoid the women stealing each other’s men, your first choice is your only choice. You can always move out, but then you’ll have nowhere to live and no female body available to get you through the ten winter months when minus thirty is considered a hot day.”
I spotted Magda the second she spotted me. She was a head bigger than all the ladies around her, which made her only a head smaller than me. Our eyes locked. I could see she was smiling at me. The prisoners were starting to drift across the no-man’s-land between us and the ladies. One of them wandered near to her but she raised an arm and brushed him away with the back of her wrist. I walked straight across to her.
“Magda,” she said.
“Fikrit.”
“Kazak,” she said.
“Azerbaijani.”
“I pulled a tenner,” she said. “Counterrevolution, agent of some fellow I never heard of named Litzky or Trotzky or some such. Nine years still to go to the tail end of my sentence.”
“I caught four years. Article 58. Wrecking. Key member of the backup Trotskyist Paris-based anti-Bolshevik Center.”
“Were you guilty?”
“They said I was so I must be.”
“Are you strong as you look?” she asked.
“Stronger.”
“Why’s your head turned to the side like that?”
“I am deaf in my left ear.”
She accepted this with a nod. “Being deaf in one ear don’t affect how you screw?”
“Haven’t been with a woman since I went deaf, but I don’t expect any problem in that department.”
Magda laughed. As I had my good ear turned toward her I could hear she had a fine laugh.
“Aside from my height, what made you pick me?” she asked.
I ought to explain that Magda had an enormous head of wild matted hair. She was wearing man’s work pants pulled high on her waist with a rope for a belt and a sleeveless shirt that exposed the sides of her large breasts and left her arms bare. “The tattoo,” I said. “I saw it right off. I like tattoos on ladies.”
She raised her forearm so I could get a better look. “It’s lost most of its color. That’s what my husband looked like before his arrest.”
“What happened to him?”
Magda shrugged. “I caught a glimpse of him in the exercise yard of the Ayagoz prison. He was walking round and round, his hand on the shoulder of the prisoner in front of him. After that I lost track. He could be at another settlement on the Kolma for all I know.” She looked at me, her head slanted, her eyes squinting. “You got a wife back in civilization?”
I said as how I did. I said her name was Agrippina. I said she was the tattooed lady in the same circus as me.
“That explains why you like tattoos.”
“How come you’re a Kolma widow?” I asked.
“Man I was sharing a cabin with went out of his mind. He was on the front end of a twenty-year sentence when I turned up here a year ago. Two, three months back—what month are we now?”
“June.”
“It was in February, which makes it four months back. Time goes slow here when you look ahead, it flies by when you look back. In February, like I said, he broke the ice on the river with a pickaxe and took off his clothing and waded into the water. He didn’t last half a minute. By the time they was able to find a boat hook and haul him out, he was stiff as a board and blue as the sky.”
“So will you take me in his place?” I asked.
“Yes, I’ll take you,” she said. And tucking an arm through mine, she started to haul me up the hill.
Which is how I came to start a new chapter in my life. I know some will point the finger at me for two-timing Agrippina, but the old saying Out of sight, out of mind is as truthful a description as any of what happens to someone in my situation. In my defense, I was on the front end of a four-year stretch, I needed a roof over my head and body heat in my bed at night to survive the winters in this Arctic backwater. I am not trying to let myself off the hook when I say that given how things turned out, I believe Agrippina would have followed my advice. In Azerbaidzhan, when a man for one reason or another disappears, his woman waits a decent interval and then finds another to take his place. Agrippina was a good wife to me and would make a good wife to one of the bachelor tent men who live in communal apartments. It would strike me as an example of nature taking its course if she threaded her needle and took in my trousers and shirts
and jackets (the tent men are big, but not as big as me) and passed along my clothing to this new husband, which, while I’m on the subject, is what Magda did for me, only in her case she had to let out the waistbands and cuffs of the padded trousers and jackets and shirts of her suicided husband for them to fit me. She was even able to cobble new toes in his cork-soled boots so I could squeeze my feet into them.
And so life flows on. And who is Fitrit Shotman to second-guess what’s right and what’s wrong at any given bend of the river?
Surviving justifies a lot of what might otherwise pass for wrong.
Magda’s cabin was the opposite of Magda. She had a wild beautifulness that some who should have known better took for ugliness. Which is to say, where she herself was untamed, with a fiery temper and uncombable hair shooting off in all directions, her cabin, made of cut logs, round side out with mud and straw in the joints, was clean as a new kopek and ordered. Every tin cup or tin plate or wooden spoon had its place, and heaven help the husband who didn’t put it back in its place. Each length of wood I split with the axe was carefully stacked in a corner next to the chimney, the pieces fitted into each other like a jigsaw puzzle so that the pile took up less room in the room. The outhouse behind the cabin had a four-legged stool with a hole cut in the middle, a luxury I had not experienced since I went to the toilet in the Kremlin the time I shook Comrade Stalin’s hand. Even the gold-mining work—fourteen hours a day, six days a week—filled me with satisfaction because, like Professor Kaganovich from our cattle car, I knew I was contributing to the construction of Communism. I worked at the bitter end of a kilometer-long shaft that burrowed into the side of the mountain, chipping away at the veins of white quartz rock with a pickaxe, shoveling the lode into the narrow ore carts that we pushed down the tracks to the entrance of the mine when they were full. The air in the shaft was foul, forcing us to wear gas masks from the Great War most of the time. Even without the gas mask, you could barely talk to the miner next to you because of the racket from the pumps pumping water from the shaft. Magda was on the team at the mine’s entrance that emptied the ore carts into bins, then worked what they called stamps, heavy iron crushers which rose and fell on the quartz rock, smashing it to smithereens, which the older prisoners sifted through. The nuggets of gold were thrown into an acid bath, which reduced the gold to a sludge that was smelted into brick-sized ingots. When the two hundred or so prisoners working in the mine produced ten or more ingots a day, we got to draw double rations for supper that night, which was a cause for jubilation because single rations left your stomach rumbling with hunger. On the one day we didn’t work in the mine, the prisoners were expected to turn up after midday meal in the common building next to the commandant’s office to listen to pages of Stalin’s books read aloud by the flabby officer in charge of political education. The officer lisped. Anyone nodding off risked having to scrub the commandant’s latrine with a toothbrush, and then scrubbing his teeth with the same toothbrush.
The Stalin Epigram Page 23
