The engineer laughed. He said, “I’ll show you how to do it right. You’ve got the basic idea but there’s still a lot to learn.”
He was a very sympathetic guy. Over the lunch break he showed me how to make a simple seam that would hold, and then he gave me some work to do and left me to it.
Actually I learned welding quickly and moderately well. Moving the sheets and rods and rails of steel was hard work and I was unsteady on my feet, so that I often weaved around like a drunk. But once I settled down in the welder’s crouch, I seemed to be all right. I had no overalls for some time; the dead man’s were too small for me. One day I failed to notice that sparks from the work had ignited the padding in my winter pants. Soon the whole crotch was smoldering and I still did not notice it because there was always smoke from the work. Suddenly I was jumping up and down and yelling because my crotch seemed to be on fire. I had to leap into a snowbank to put it out.
My job was to make components for a staircase in a basement somewhere, cross-gridded steel plates for the steps, and I-beams for the sides, and so on. We had a pattern. We would chalk it out on the material, cut it with the arc welder, and then start assembling. I staggered whenever I had to carry anything, but for some reason I was able to laugh at myself as if I were watching someone else. Although by the end of the day I was exhausted, I found the long march back to the Zone a cheerful time because it meant going home, to rest and food and friends. I would carry stolen boards and pieces of joists and studs home for the fire, and when my line was singled out by the guards for confiscation of the wood I was philosophical about it.. I had begun to understand, and accept that there were certain costs you had to pay for survival, and that you had better accept them and not fight them. Many others bitched and got sour stomachs when the guards took their wood. I marked those people down as less skillful survivors. Their bitching just used up energy.
When a guard was unnecessarily cruel and made someone take off his boots and his foot-cloths in the snow when it was ten below zero during the search, I got mad inside, but I never let it show. What was the use?
One afternoon I heard a few shots ring out. All the welders stopped and looked up and stared solemnly at each other and then went back to work. Later that afternoon I cut my hand on a piece of ragged-edged steel and went to the first aid post to get it bandaged. Inside the post was the young kid they had shot for getting too close to the fire zone. His jacket was on the floor and where the bullet had gone in there was a neat round hole and where it came out there was a sort of explosion of cotton padding and blood and fragments of flesh and bone. The arm was severed above the elbow. Only a tendon held it on. They kept him in the DOZ for several hours with a tourniquet on, and by the time he was taken back to Adarich there was no way to save the already morbid arm. This sort of thing gave me twinges of anger, but even such extremes of violence did not upset me profoundly. I knew that I was living in the midst of a totally inhumane society where survival was the first duty and where too much tenderness or sentiment or resentment or rage would only sap my strength and perhaps affect my judgment. Eternal vigilance, I told myself. Don’t let it get you down to the point where you forget to watch out for any advantage.
One day Arnold the blacksmith came into the yard and stood watching me work for some time. I just dimly saw a pair of legs through the mask and went on with my work. When I looked up, the wiry old man was smiling at me in a very friendly way and I was glad to see him. “Things are not the same in the forge anymore, Alexander my boy,” he said. “I have had the same chisel handle for three weeks now, and some of the spice has gone out of our life.”
We both laughed over this and I pulled out my tobacco and he got out some scraps of brown paper and we rolled ourselves a smoke and sat on a snowbank for a short break.
“I’ve been watching you work, Alexander,” Arnold said. “I am surprised at how well you are doing. Please don’t be offended.”
I laughed and said there was no offense.
Arnold said, “I have an idea for making some money to buy extra food. Do you think it would be difficult to set aside a few round bars and some angle irons from time to time?”
I said I thought not.
Arnold explained that he had been talking to some of the civilian drivers and some of the free workers who came into the DOZ. They were very disgruntled because the government had lured them to come and work in Dzhezkazgan by describing Krestovaya as a model town with all the latest in apartments, furnishings, recreational facilities, and so on. When they arrived they found cold, half-finished apartments, badly made (by slave labor of course), and no furniture and no recreational facilities at all. It was explained to them that these things had been planned but that “production shortages” had unfortunately delayed the development of the community. Etc., etc., etc.
What they bitched about more than anything else, many of them being young married couples, was the lack of beds. They hated sleeping on the floor. Arnold figured out that we could collaborate on making bootleg beds. I would weld together a rudimentary frame and he would make ornaments in the forge.
So we entered into a partnership. I had to give up lunch breaks and spoon-making for a while, but we could finish a bed in a week and we each got about two kilos of bread for on, or occasionally a piece of cooked meat or some oil or a couple of rubles to be hoarded against the need for something larger that might arise.
We never questioned the drivers as to how they got the beds out past the search, but I am pretty sure the guards searched only for escapees going out and contraband like guns or knives coming in. Bread and beds were not interesting to our guards.
One day a driver told me that they liked the bed a lot even if the springs (only interlaced wires) were a bit hard. He admired the workmanship, he said, and his wife wondered if I could also make her a flatiron?
Irons became the hot item. It took longer to make an iron than a bed because I had to use several different kinds of steel. I cut a boat shape from a thick slab. This had to be polished smooth on the bottom and sides and I could do it only by hand and that took days and days of stolen periods here and there, out of sight of the brigadier or roaming guards or stool pigeons.
I built a fire box on top, with a little grid and ventilation holes to put charcoal in to heat the iron. I knew that they would have to look pretty to satisfy women who cared enough about appearances to want to iron clothes in Dzhezkazgan, so I took a lot of care in finishing them. They became very much in demand and for a while I could get three kilos of bread for one iron. That made me feel like a rich man, so well-off in fact that I was able to be generous to my friends, especially to Zyuzin, who had protected me so carefully, and so things went along very well for a while. Although I was never strong, I was surprisingly healthy despite mild bouts of scurvy and the occasional round of diarrhea and mild fever.
I lived every day surrounded by the coarsest forms of inhumanity. To the men who guarded me I was a number, CM265, and they used the number to control and to humiliate. There was always a guard with a piece of plywood and a pencil to write down your number if you were late out of bed, if you failed to take off your cap when passing in the street, if you stepped out of line in any way. You were nameless: just a numbered object to be thrown in the cooler if you failed to conform and thrown in the death wagon with your number wired to your big toe if you failed to survive.
The death rate in that camp was at least two or three per day, or nearly one in a thousand. It may have been much higher.
Cursing and brutality and insensitivity were blatant and normal. Many prisoners became as brutal and dehumanized as the guards. I shunned such people. Often in their desperation to survive they turned stool pigeon. Even the knowledge of what had happened to other stool pigeons did not seem to deter them. But once they were discovered they usually were killed or, if they were harmless, ignored to the point where they became useless to the MGB who employed them.
The food was scarce unless you were ingenious, and even then it la
cked vitamins. Vitamin-deficiency diseases like scurvy and pellagra were common and sometimes fatal. In the winter the cold was intense and the hard, drifting snow was painful as we marched to the work site and back with our hands behind our backs. In the summer and fall the heat cracked our lips and our skin. If we worked outside without gloves we could get blisters from handling the roasted stones or sheets of steel. Heat prostration knocked down a lot of prisoners and few of them ever got up again. The dust was everywhere and blew all day and almost every day. The bedbugs were part of the environment and I never got used to them psychologically, although my body developed an immunity and the swellings around each bite stopped forming.
Men went crazy all around me and for my own survival I had to learn not to care.
There was never enough time to sleep.
And yet my morale was good. I had maneuvered myself up to a plateau on which I knew I could survive. I liked my work. The buzz and clang and general clamor of the welding yard, the blue electric flashes all around, the company of competent people, the smell of ozone: these were pleasant to me, I suppose because I was becoming genuinely skilled and came very close to reaching the real norms set for me. I also learned to handle my own tufta. lithe job called for steel five millimeters thick I would use three-millimeter stock because I found that no one checked and I could cut faster with the lighter steel.
I would make plain single seams, which were fast and easy, and then write up figure eights or doubles because I was “paid” for the total length of seam applied in a day, paid in points toward fulfilling my norm, and yet the only check that was made was on the total number of units turned out: stoves, staircase sections, safes, and so on.
I could claim overproduction and get extra rations, but I still found the carrying too much for me. I still staggered under a sheet of steel as though the wind were blowing me around. So I persuaded Zyuzin that I could increase the real output by quite a lot if he got me an assistant, and to my delight he somehow got my friend from quarantine, Edik L., assigned him personally to me, and moved him into our barracks and onto the bunk next to mine.
So now, although the evenings were lonely and sad when the work was not filling all my time, I had Edik to talk with, and Zyuzin’s guitar to listen to, and I began to think of studying the guitar seriously myself because I could see how absorbing it was, and I believed that it would help me survive even though it might be hard on my neighbors because I was clearly not a born musician.
Despite my competence at welding I still had a talent for blunders. My blunders always had a certain class to them, like sending the chisel out through the same hole in the blacksmith’s window every time. My time in the welding yard was no exception. Shortly after Edik joined me we finished up the staircase assignment and were given a pattern for big office safes made out of quite thick material. We had to cut the sides and top and bottom and the door, make the hinges, weld the hinges to the door, and then the hinges to the frame. I had to drill for the look fittings. The locks came from somewhere else.
Edik and I got the patterns and had a good look at them before chalking them out on the sheet metal. The constructions were simple enough but the norm was impossible because of the cutting required: three finished safes every two days. We decided that if we cheated on the thickness of the stock and just put a few spots on the inside corners instead of the full seam called for, we could make up the norm and maybe even beat it. We got started. Both of us cut, one with the new acetylene equipment, which had just arrived and was very fast, and the other with the arc welder, which was very slow. Edik, who was in good physical shape, did all the heavy lifting. He held the sheets in place while I welded them together. The first one was a bit awkward and we had to cut apart one seam and reweld it because it was crooked, but by the time we got the doorframe in place and the hinges welded onto the door, we were getting the hang of the job and moving at high speed. Too high, as it turned out. Edik stood inside to hold the door in position while I welded the hinges to the doorframe. He had to hold it very precisely so that it would swing without binding after it was welded in place, and he braced his back against the back of the safe and put his fingers through the cutouts for the lock fittings and his toes on the bottom, and told me to hurry because it took all his strength to maintain the position.
I hurried. I slapped the seams on one after the other. They had to be as specified because they were visible, so I could not leave anything out. Soon the last seam was going on and Edik was complaining about the heat inside the safe. I finished and said, “That’s it!” We had finished our first safe and it was still early afternoon, and I was sure that if we applied my locksmith shop mass-production techniques we could, with appropriate cheating, make a lot.. of extra rations on this job, so I immediately ran to the stockpile to start chalking out a large number of bottoms, sides, doors, and so on.
Amid all the clatter I became aware of Edik’s voice calling, with a hollow sound. He was still in the safe.
“Come on out! Let’s get going,” I yelled,. running to the safe. “I can’t!” he yelled back.
I had welded the door on backward! The hinges would only bend inward and the door was bigger than the inner lip of the doorframe; so Edik was welded inside like Montresor’s victim in “The Cask of Amontillado.” I ran for the torch. Edik screamed that he was roasting as I started to cut the hinges. There was no other way. I cut as fast as I could, but by the time I got him out he was unconscious from the smoke and the heat and it was some time before we got back on friendly terms.
I was not the only prospector in the DOZ. Tools, chunks of steel, aluminum wire, all kinds of things disappeared into prisoners’ padded jackets or hiding places, or went out with the civilian drivers during the day or with the MVD guards at the end of the day. I had already created a shortage of grounding cable. Other prospectors brought it down to the vanishing point. The common solution to the shortage was to clamp a short length of cable from the transformer to a piece of sheet steel or a rod on the ground, then lay the sheet or rod out in the general direction of your work, which might be ten meters or more away in the yard, then lay a piece of sheet steel on that, then a girder that happened to be lying around, and so on until you had made a rough connection to your own work. One day in the spring I failed to notice that some of these connections I had made from the transformer, which stood under an overhang near the enclosed part of the shop, were lying in pools where the snow had melted. I sent Edik to the supply shop for some electrodes and told him to turn on the machine on his way back. For a long time I had had to manufacture my own electrodes by coating thin steel rods with a glaze of some silicon nonconductor that controlled the burning rate. I was not patient enough for this and my electrodes were often quite inconsistent in quality. But now we had some decent machine-made ones which speeded up the work. I saw Edik come out of the building with a package of electrodes. I saw him turn on my welding machine. I saw him step into a pool of water.
I thought he had gone crazy. He began a strange dance, in slow rhythmic gyrations with bended knees, but with his arms and upper body flapping about as if he were in convulsions. I had no idea what was happening. I called, “Stop fooling around. We’ve got a norm to meet!” But he paid no attention. His legs bent more and more, and he slipped to the ground and lay there twitching.
Edik liked a practical joke, but I thought he might really have taken sick. I put my welding gun down on some gloves and started across the yard just as the door opened and three MVD officers, two colonels and a general, came into the yard. They were on an inspection tour, like the one that had interrupted my colonic irrigation.
The results were equally gratifying, although I still had not caught on. The three officers in their neat uniforms and long greatcoats went into a similar gyrating, stork-like dance, with their arms flapping and their heads jerking back and forth. Their mouths were open and their eyes were popping but no sound came out. I started to run. I must have stepped in a puddle. I felt the surging
voltage take over my whole body. I was terrified and yet I had a strange urge to laugh at the same time. I began to spin around, my arms flapping like wings and my head jerking. Before long we were all on the ground. Fortunately a welder came out through the door, understood what had happened, and turned off the transformer.
The officers were furious. The general’s coat was soaked and covered with filings and rust. They were sure it had been an assassination attempt. The whole DOZ came to a halt for the rest of the day as guards swarmed in and a commission of inquiry got under way right away. Edik and I were exonerated because we were victims as well. In the end they could pin it on nobody. Zyuzin and the other brigadiers did a good job of shouting and screaming at the officers for entering a danger area without an escort, and such is their response to authority, even the authority of prisoners who in this case seemed to know what they were talking about, that they finally accepted the incident as an accident.
But such was my reputation from the other camp as the Man Who Shit on the Organs, and as the American Spy (everyone in camp was sure that the incident with the bodyguards on Khrushchev’s estate was part of a mission I had been on), that a lot of people believed that I had arranged the whole thing, and my reputation went up another notch.
Chapter 20
It was the spring of 1952: soon I would be twenty-six years old. Memories of the freezing dungeon at Lefortovo and the horrors of Sukhanovka had somewhat faded, although my jaw still ached where Ryumin had broken it and I still had and have scars from Sidorov’s kicks and Ryumin’s rubber club.
Spring on the desert steppe is the only time when there seems to be any life on it. For a very brief period, measured in days, the melting snows leave behind enough of a water table for wild red tulips to blaze out across the otherwise dead land and wild garlic to grow in profusion. If we were on an outside job, or able to sit or lie on the ground outside the work site gates during the count, we picked the wild garlic and took it home for its vitamin C content.
An American in the Gulag Page 32
