An American in the Gulag

by Alexander Dolgun

  A triangle is just that: if you are too poor for envelopes and stamps you fold your letter into a triangle and the Soviet post will carry it anyway. This started during the war as a way for soldiers to send mail when they had no envelopes or money, and it was still accepted in the fifties. I wrote not really believing it would go through despite Valentin’s assurances. I told my mother that I was fine, that I was going to be in Central Asia at Dzhezkazgan (I had seen that number too on my transport file and thought correctly that it was a postal address, but incorrectly, as it turned out, that it was complete). I asked her whether the embassy had given her my personal belongings, because I thought she could sell them to help eke out some kind of meager subsistence. And I asked her to get in touch with Mary and say that I was fine and that she should not feel compelled by her promise to wait for me. That made me very sad, but even with thoughts of escape in my head, I knew it would be many years before 1 would see her again, and I did not want her to be imprisoned by a promise I had extracted as a joke. It seemed a poor joke now.

  Valentin took the letter and gave it to Sashka, who went immediately to the cell door, where I saw him slip it through the slot to a guard. I said, “In truth, Valka, all I want to do is get out of the Soviet Union as fast as I can, and if that means coming with you for a while, as a first step, then I’m for it.”

  “But why would you want to leave the Soviet Union?” he said. He was really surprised.

  That night I began my longest tale. It was serialized over many nights. In the daytime, between lots of sleep and lots of food, I would talk crime in the U. S. A., but at night it was time for real craft, and I embarked on Victor Hugo’s gigantic Les Misérables. I do not recall now how long it took to tell. Several nights. I know that I often lost my way in it and had, to go back and pick up threads here and there. It did not matter. The younger ones particularly, but I think all these men, who had lived outside the law all their lives, were caught up in and moved at the story of Jean Valjean and his relentless pursuer. It was no difficulty for them to see themselves rowing in the galleys. The story was utterly real to them. I think each could see himself as the beleaguered central figure, battered by the injustice of a society that would not let him live his life the way he wanted to live it.

  My diarrhea never completely disappeared, and after a while I began to worry about getting up enough strength to go with Valentin and Sashka. From time to time I was slightly feverish. My appetite stayed good. I ate well and put on quite a lot of weight. I was strong enough to do some exercises and to walk easily. My muscles were growing again and taking on some tone. But I could not imagine pole vaulting from that latrine-shed roof, and the prospect of a long run at top speed afterward, assuming I did not break a leg or get shot, was quite impossible. I confided this to Valentin one day. He looked terribly disappointed, and I believe he really was. I said, “If I can’t go, and you’re ready to go, I want you to have my hat and my tie.” I had shown him the tie I was arrested in. It had been crushed in my bundle but we “ironed” it under my “mattress” and Valentin wore it alternately with his own much flashier one. He was pleased. He knew that hat would help him, and he thought the tie would look more respectable than his own if he wanted to pass as an official. But he insisted on holding out a little longer.

  It was no use. My fever began to rise daily: I had recurring bouts of diarrhea and began to be a bit dehydrated. Then news came in the morning that put an end to speculation. There was to be a continuation of the etap to Dzhezkazgan. I was to be on it, of course, and so was one, of the urki, a young man named Vasya.

  “I’m not going there!” he said. He then began a very strange procedure. He got a needle from someone, and a piece of fine thread. He ran the thread between his filthy teeth several times until it was well coated with plaque. Then he rolled up his trousers and ran the thread under the skin on the top of his thigh, just into the fatty tissue, not deep enough to draw more than a tiny drop of blood, and drew it out again. I asked Valentin about it. He said, “By tonight you’ll see. He’ll be really sick. And you’d better be, too, because you’re in no shape for etap.”

  I said, “I don’t have to fake it. I’m sure my fever is pretty high. In fact, I haven’t been letting on, because I didn’t want you to worry, and besides I wanted to go with you, you know.”

  He looked me hard in the eye. He said, “It’s too bad, my brother. We could have had a good life.”

  There was a pause. Then Valentin said, “You’d better start putting on a show. The etap goes tomorrow.” We talked a bit longer. He helped me with the scenario. I gave him my beloved hat and my tie. We shook hands. Then I wrapped up my bundle and went over and lay in the wet around the barrel and began to moan and clutch my stomach. Every once in a while a guard looked in. We waited until this performance had been seen several times. Then Valentin pounded on the door and told a guard to get a doctor, there was a sick man in here. He was right. I really felt terrible by now. Valentin had warned me that it would be an all-day matter. By late afternoon I did not have to pretend at all. My stomach was cramping heavily, and I was covered with cold sweat and shivering. By early evening the doctor still had not come, and I was good and sick. From time to time Valentin would come and stand where I could see him and give me an encouraging wave. Around suppertime he brought Vasya with him and indicated that Vasya should come over to me. He came and squatted down uncomfortably beside me. His face was flushed and his eyes were very bright. He peeled back his trousers, “Look,” was all he said. I looked and almost vomited. His thigh had swollen till the skin was tight. It was terribly discolored. The infection was raging but there was absolutely no sign of the wound that induced it. He took my hand and put it to the skin of his thigh. I was burning with fever and he was much hotter. “Did you ever see such a mastyrka?” he asked me proudly. I had never seen a mastyrka of any kind but I had heard those terrible tales about what prisoners did to themselves to avoid transportation, so I guessed at the meaning of the word. “Congratulations,” I said feebly.

  The doctor came. Vasya had a fever of 41º by then and was incoherent. I was at 39º and had vomited twice. They brought stretchers. They took us to another building, where there was a small hospital. Just after dark the second night in the hospital I heard a terrific fusillade of shots echo among the buildings. Later that night I was shaken gently awake by one of the prisoner orderlies. “Wake up and hear what I have to say, chelovek,” he whispered. I forced myself awake.

  “The pakhan and Sashka and a guy called the Tiger made their try tonight. You probably heard something?” I nodded weakly, fearfully. “The Tiger is dead. Sashka got it in the leg, but he made it over the wall. The pakhan made it, too. Good night, chelovek.”

  I slept.

  Chapter 15

  The man in the next bed was “semicolored.”

  That means that he was a political prisoner who had picked up some of the ways of the urki. He introduced himself to me in a flowery way as Baron Laszlo something (I don’t recall his last name), and for all I know he may have been a baron. By instinct he was an operator who bought low and sold high to whoever was paying. Because of his behavior in prison, although he was really a political, the authorities treated him like one of the urki. He had a kind of slippery, oily quality and an elaborate courtesy that I found a bit suspect.

  The Baron had been in prison since the end of the war, he told me. He had peddled information during the war to whoever would pay for it. He worked for the British, the Swiss, the Germans, double-crossing all of them all the way whenever he could make more money. Toward the end of the war, armed with secrets from all the others, he began to sell information to the Soviets.

  When the Red Army was marching into Budapest, the Baron’s friends urged him to flee westward. “Why should I?” he had replied. “After all, my employers will soon be here!”

  Sure enough, the Russians came and he identified himself to the Soviet commandant of Budapest. The commandant told him that the Sov
iet Army highly appreciated his intelligence reports and that he was to be rewarded in Moscow for his cooperation. He was flown to Moscow, given a tour of the city, and then taken to MGB headquarters. There a general said to him, “My dear Baron, that you worked for the British, German, and our intelligence we know. For whom else did you work?”

  They gave him ten years. He was astonished. He had thought he was among friends. But he was smart enough to accept a situation when he saw it. He confessed everything without reserve and had an easy time over a year and a half of interrogation—largely bragging about his exploits, I imagined. He confided in me. He said he had heard he was about to be sent in an etap to the dreaded Kolyma camps. He had asked one of his urki friends what to do about this. On the advice he received, he had peeled a clove of garlic, bribed from a guard, and inserted it in his anus. “A sure way to send up your fever, my friend! I commend it to you. It never fails. They brought me in here with thirty-nine degrees this afternoon!”

  The doctor who came to examine us was also a prisoner, and an old hand. He finished with me, prescribed drugs for the diarrhea and the fever, and a heart stimulant, and turned to the Baron. He examined him very thoroughly. Then he waved away the feldsher who was accompanying him, and spoke very quietly to the Baron. I was just able to catch what he said, but I pretended to have drifted back to sleep. The doctor said, “Baron, I respect you very much. I am going to keep you here until the etap is over, but remember, there is always another etap, and you can’t get out of all of them. By the way, you could have confided in me and saved me a lot of trouble; you could have told me you had a piece of garlic up your ass. I would have kept you here anyway.” Then he chuckled and patted the Baron on the arm and went on his way. I gathered from this experience that a prison doctor would collaborate with some kinds of prisoners as long as he had some medical evidence he could show the authorities that would justify hospitalization. I filed that away as information that might become useful later on.

  Parasha, the prison telegraph, confirmed the escape of the pakhan and Sashka, and the death of the Tiger. There was also a report that there had been a mistake somewhere along the line and that three chestnyagi had gotten into a cell full of suki, who had promptly hanged the three unconverted. Parasha is also the name for the urine barrel—gossip exchange center.

  The Hungarian Baron left the hospital, presumably with a garlic-free rectum, as soon as the transport he wanted to avoid had gone off, and I never saw him again.

  The doctor kept me on, sympathetically, for three or four days after my fever had subsided, and did his best to feed me up and restore by strength, but when the next transport was formed, the next etap for Dzhezkazgan, there was no avoiding it. We were lined up in the yard. It took some time to assemble the forty or fifty prisoners, and while we stood there I saw a man going up and down the lines with a letter, asking people their names. Someone pointed to me. The man came over. He said, “You Doldzhin?” I nodded, amazed. He handed me the letter. “It’s been here a couple of days,” he said. “I guess you almost missed it.”

  I could not believe it. It was from Moscow, from my mother. I was so excited I tore the letter getting the envelope open. There was not much news. She was very noncommittal, said that she’d got my triangle and was glad to know I was all right, and that she would try to get a food parcel sent to me. The weather is fine, she wrote, and that was about all.

  And yet it was like nourishment, like a warm bath, like a drink of wine. I felt immensely stronger. A new wave of hope swept over me. All the way to the train I grinned as we marched through the streets of Kuibyshev. I think I was still grinning when they jammed me like a piece of meat into the Stolypin car. There was now a chance that someone could start working on my behalf; they now knew where I was.

  What a vain hope that was! And yet it kept me buoyant as the train worked its way still east and further east into the Urals and then across them.

  There was a handsome military man in our group, a former Hero of the Soviet Union, with his shoulder boards ripped off now and his spirit destroyed. And there was a former minister of state from Armenia who had been incredibly fat and had lost it all during his interrogation. Now he was flowing with rolls of loose skin. He could have walked naked through the streets with modesty because his belly folds hung down halfway to his knees. This man confided to me that he had hidden a roll of money in his crotch, and that it had never been found because the folds were so deep that by just squeezing the muscles a little he could conceal it perfectly. His name was Khachaturian; I remember it because I was interested in the work of the composer with the same name.

  Going through the Urals, whenever the guards opened the windows, we had been able to see the hillsides covered with spring green. It took slightly more than a day to reach the next transfer prison, in a small city called Chelyabinsk, and the memory of my first hour inside that prison will never leave my mind.

  There were eight political prisoners in my group, including, of course, the Hero of the Soviet Union and the Armenian minister of state with his scrotal money pouch. We were lined up, as usual, and segregated from the professional criminals, who had been the largest group on the train.

  A couple of guards came out of the building and said to the men who had searched us, “Where to for these?” Someone said, “India.”

  I fell down on the ground clutching my stomach. I rolled around and moaned and said, “I’ve got a terrible fever; I think I’m dying.”

  Suddenly there was a terrific blow from a boot in my wizened buttocks. I leapt up yelling. The guard who had kicked me laughed coarsely and said I would have a long wait for a hospital bed when I could dance like that. I yelled that I had a terrible fever. I had, too. I had felt it coming back during the train ride; my lips were dry and my head and joints ached. I yelled at them to feel my head, get a doctor, take my temperature, they’d see! They just cuffed me into line and herded us along a corridor and down some stairs until we stood outside a cell marked 49.

  There was a terrific noise from inside, a constant chatter almost like a collection of animals. At the door they heard our prayers one by one and then shoved us inside. I was number five in the line. When the first man walked in there was. a pause and then a cheer went up. Then the second. A pause. A cheer. As the third man went through, I was able to peek inside the cell. It gave an impression of enormous confusion, of bodies milling about, and strangely I thought at first they must all be naked. But what struck me was that on the floor by the barrel, just at the edge of the spatterings of urine, there was a gleaming white handkerchief spread out, exactly in the path of anyone walking into the cell. The number three political walked in, daintily sidestepped the handkerchief, and then a cheer went up. The man in front of me gave his prayer. I was beginning to feel nauseated and unsteady, but I was fascinated with the handkerchief. I remembered Valentin’s riddle. I remembered him telling me that of course I would wipe my feet on it. Now I guessed why. I still wanted to get away from that cell, but if I was stuck with it I had at least one piece of information no one else seemed to know. Provided it was valid. Well, my pakhan had never let me down before. I stepped up and gave my prayer. I said, “Look, I’m burning up with fever, I—” but the guard just sent me flying with a hard shove. I thought, Well, okay, here goes.

  I carefully wiped my feet on the handkerchief. No cheer. Then I looked up.

  I can still see it, although at the time I could hardly believe it; it seemed as though the fever was distorting my vision.

  What I saw was exactly like an overcrowded monkey cage in a big zoo. What seemed like hundreds of bodies were hanging by an arm or upside down by two legs from the bunks or the bunk supports, scrambling up and down like young apes, lying in grotesque postures, eating with their fingers, chattering and gesticulating, and all of them naked except for underpants, and sweating in the hot cell, and all of those naked, sweating bodies tattooed, it seemed at first, from head to foot.

  Except for my consignment of po
liticals, there was not a fully dressed human being in the cell.

  Three or four dirty, ugly men immediately ran to me as I stepped away from the hanky. One took my bundle, very clearly not to steal it but to help: “Here, let me take this off your shoulders, brother, you look like a wreck.” They led me to a bunk. “Welcome, brother, sit down, we’ll get some tea and then you can tell us your story.”.

  I just wondered how long I could keep up the deception. I certainly was in no way a brother to these disgusting hoodlums. There was not a tattoo anywhere on my body. Maybe I could plead fever and stay dressed. God knew I was beginning to shiver quite a lot.

  Tattoos are a cultural mark of those members of Soviet society who pursue, as Valentine the Intelligent had said, “a different line of endeavor.” I had seen elaborate tattoos on hands and forearms in Kuibyshev. Here I saw a complete gallery of designs on exposed flesh. One guy had a cat on one buttock and a mouse on the other; when he walked the cat chased the mouse. Many were erotic. There was, of course, the common wreath or ribbon with a girl’s name and flowers and hearts. One man had his whole back covered with an elaborate floral design supporting the proud motto: I WOULD DIE FOR MY MOTHER. One had a different girl’s name on each of his ten fingers and on each of his ten toes. Several had tattoos on their penises that said SHALUN, which means “little rascal,” or “imp.” One had SLAVE OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY on his forehead. I wondered how loyal a Soviet citizen he was. Another had a completely black chest, peppered with irregular tattoo marks that seemed to obscure some vague shape. I could not resist asking him about it as I sat on the bunk collecting myself and getting my wind back and sipping the bitter chifir one of them brought. He said it had been his life’s pride, a full-sized portrait of the Leader, Stalin, which the bastards had filled in after he was arrested, saying it was disrespectful. “Disrespectful, my arse! I love the Leader! These bastards don’t know what respect means!” he told me.