I could have climbed a tree if there had been trees or swum in a river if there had been a river.
Instead I walked to Zheldor Poselok to see Victor. He congratulated me warmly on my pass. I asked him if he could leave work for a while and go for a walk but he was involved in something complicated and would not leave it.
So I decided to go and see the town of Zheldor itself, which is almost attached to Zheldor Poselok, just a short walk. Zheldor is not what you would call a tourist attraction, just a few drab buildings for the free workers, a few drab shops, a bit of a marketplace. But the idea of walking in a street where I could go into a shop, any shop, however drab, and buy a pack of machine-made cigarettes, or even just look at them without buying, was a seduction I could not resist.
I had hardly walked into the little town before I was accosted by a former patient, a young man who had been treated for hepatitis; he had completed a ten-year sentence and was now working out his five years of exile as a free worker. He hailed me in a very friendly way, assuming I had been freed. When I told him, no, I just had a pass, he thought that was just about as good, considering that he couldn’t leave the area either till his five years were up, and in any case it called for a celebration, didn’t it? I was in no mood to refuse. We went to his apartment building. There were several other people living there but they were away at work.
My friend somehow found two bottles of vodka. We drank the first bottle very quickly, thinking up toasts to every conceivable meritorious person: toasts to Adarich and Kask, toasts to the late Shargai, toasts to Victor, toasts to my host’s friends, and so on. When we ran out of good guys to toast we toasted the bad guys ironically, wishing them all kinds of miserable accidents. We toasted the kum and the camp commandant. We toasted the MVD and the MGB—or KGB, as it was now known. And pretty soon the bottle was empty and I was feeling indomitable. Nothing bad could ever happen to me again, I told my friend. This was the beginning of a new era. I was at the silly stage. I told my friend that the future would have been impossible without him and so on and so on. And soon we were started on the second bottle.
The inside of that apartment was all I saw of Zheldor, and before long I was having trouble seeing that. Somehow I became aware that the time was approaching when the convoys would be leaving the work sites and heading back to camp. I had a sudden feeling of panic. I had forgotten completely how I came to be where I was, and how to find my way home. My friend was not in much better shape, although he had been getting into condition for a few months or a year; I had not had a serious drink for more than five years. I persuaded him to take me to the beginning of the road back to camp and point the way. Neither one of us could walk straight.
Somehow he got me onto the road and pointed off in the right general direction and embraced me and gave me a push to get me started. I fell flat in a snowbank. He helped me up again. I embraced him and told him he was truly one of the world’s great men. Then I started to walk back into Zheldor and he went off toward camp. He realized before I did what was happening. He ran back and spun me around and started me off again. I cursed myself fiercely under my breath and set to work to keep my eyes ahead and try to see only one set of telegraph poles instead of two, since I was sure there only was one, and started to trudge stoutly back to camp. The trouble was, no matter how determinedly I set one foot before another I kept weaving back and forth across the road in a sinusoid pattern, and what would have been a trip of three kilometers must have ended up as more like five or six. It took a long time. I passed or was passed by many columns of prisoners marching back to our camp and other camp They laughed and hooted to see a drunk passing along, caroming from snowbank to snowbank. Sometimes I was recognized and then the hoots really got derisive!
“Working on the hospital supplies, eh, Doc?”
“I thought you’d lost that barrel, Doc!”
Long before I got to the gates I realized that there was a little knot of men waiting under the lights and I was afraid they were waiting for me. It took a terribly long time to go the last quarter mile. I kept stumbling, and each time I fell down it was harder to get up. I just wanted to drift off to sleep in the comfortable snowbanks. As I got closer I realized that the welcoming party consisted of Voloshin, the godfather who had caught me goofing off in the boiler room, and Belyakov, the camp commandant. There were a couple of guards standing with them.
I finally made it to the gates in front of a cheering column of two or three hundred prisoners who were standing for the search and count. I slowed down to the most dignified pace I could manage and drew myself up very tall in front of Belyakov and Voloshin. I gave them each a snappy military salute. Then I fell down in the snow again.— A guard drew me roughly to my feet. Voloshin spoke to me like a Dutch uncle.
“Prisoner Doldzhin! Aren’t you ashamed of yourself! An educated man like yourself! A man of qualities! An engineer and an intellectual! To bring yourself to such a swinish, brutish state. What a terrible loss of dignity!” He was very stern, very earnest. But his words were almost drowned out by Belyakov, who began to scream at me.
“Death to you, you bastard! You’ll rot in jail for this! You whore and son of a whore and father of whores! I will personally see that you are ruined!”
He told three soldiers to take me immediately to the hard punishment cell in the third camp. I do not remember how we got there. I only remember waking up with a violent headache and the shivers. The cell was unheated. Fortunately they had left me all my clothes, including my padded jacket. Once I had drunk some water and walked up and down a bit I began to feel better. Then I wanted a smoke, but when I felt in my pockets I found that they had taken everything out of them. When the guard brought my breakfast, just a lump of sour black bread and some hot water, I asked him to bring my cigarettes back because I had to have a smoke.
“Nye polozhna.”
But I was prepared. Somewhere along the line of development from a scared innocent, bewildered and sure that my arrest was just a mistake from which I would soon be rescued, to my present status as a sophisticated and competent prison survivor, I had learned always to substitute a bit of tobacco for the rolled cotton pads in the padded jacket, in case of exactly this sort of eventuality. You reached a finger into the little slit above your tobacco and got out enough for one cigarette.. You had a few slips of newspaper, or you kept the brown paper squares they issued you in prison, because they were certainly no good for toilet paper unless you were so dried up you were producing nothing but goat droppings. You rolled your crude cigarette. I had also learned how to make fire from the padding of that same jacket. It works best if you have soaked some of the padding first in potassium permanganate and let it dry out before stuffing it back in the jacket. Then you pull out a small wad of your chemically impregnated cotton. Plain cotton will do, but it is slower. You roll up a very tight stick of cotton, about two inches long and perhaps an eighth or a quarter of an inch thick. Then just before it is closed, you slip the edge of another flake of cotton under the last edge of the rolled-up stick and begin to roll it the other way. Soon you have a tight, hard stick of cotton, the core of which is rolled one way and the outside the opposite way.
Now you need something hard and smooth to use as a roller. The sole of a hard leather boot will do. I used the lid of my bucket. You press it down on the cotton stick on the concrete floor and roll back and forth very fast. It takes a good deal of energy. You have practiced before, so you have an idea of how long it takes. About one minute or perhaps two. Then you quickly unroll the outer layer of your cotton stick and you will find that where the two layers meet it is black and hot, and if you blow gently you can start a spark that will spread—quite quickly if you have the chemical cotton—and you can light your cigarette.
I played a marvelous game with the guard. He knew I had been searched and relieved, of my tobacco. I would smoke a whole cigarette quickly between visits, and then when he came and looked in the peephole the cell would be full of smoke.
“How could I smoke!” I gave him a broad shrug of the shoulders. “You took away all my tobacco! I’m dying for a smoke. How could I smoke!”
The guard was baffled. He went away. I knew he would peek frequently for a few minutes. I would wait until the frequency of peeking died down and then repeat the performance. Once again he would burst in and the smoke would be thicker than ever.
“I don’t know where it’s coming from,” I would say plaintively. “I wish I could get my hands on some of that tobacco. Must be something wrong with the ventilation system!”
He never found out. I ran out of tobacco on the fifth or sixth day. But until I did, playing that game on the guards helped a lot to get through the time.
They kept me there ten days. I was expecting three months, which I knew would be hard. I had started a calendar, begun lecturing myself again, repeating a number of procedures I had used in Lefortovo and Sukhanovka. I sang at the top of my voice and they never bothered me. I knew I could get through three months of solitary, even though it would be terribly lonely. When they let me out at the end of ten days it seemed like nothing, although I was terribly hungry and weak from the minimum rations.
Fortunately I still had my soft job with Victor, although of course they took away my pass and told me I would never get another. So although I had starved and shivered for ten days, I was not long getting back into shape. Now, with the gates unlocked between the amps, I was able to wander back and forth in the evenings, and I visited Adarich and Kask regularly, and they bootlegged a few cc. of glucose into me when I came back from hard punishment, to help me back into A-one condition.
Physically, then, I was fine. But I was never really cut out for a useless life. I had no interest in getting myself stuck with mining or even arc welding again, but the almost complete pointlessness of my tufta in the blueprint shop was beginning to get me down.
I heard that there were plans for the construction of a new village. It was to be built from scratch, new streets, new apartments, new shops, new everything, and the parasha said that there would be jobs for technical specialists like electricians and bricklayers and so on, that these jobs would be filled from the prisoner population, and that if you were lucky enough to get such a job you would have a permanent pass and would live at the project virtually as a free man. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I went to the naryadchik and put my name down for the project. He told me it was called Nikolsky Project, and that the work of clearing the site had already begun. He gave me a form on which to register my specialties. I put down arc welder, of course, and then plumber, although I had never touched a pipe. I thought that the pleasures of living in freedom were well worth the physical effort of a welding job or a plumbing job. But all the time I knew that, because of my behavior over the first pass, the chances of getting a second one were next to zero, so I was not cheerful about the prospects.
I usually kept my worries and my pessimism to myself. But one night I let down my guard and complained to Adarich. “I really don’t know what to do, Yevgeni Petrovich,” I said. “I’m healthier than I ever was since I came here. I have a soft job in an office with a good friend. But I’m bored all the time.”
Adarich looked at me with a mischievous twinkle in his eyes. “Remember Shargai’s prophecy?” he said.
“Sure, sure,” I said testily. “Things were going to get better for everyone. All right, things have got better. I’m glad they pulled the gates down between the camps. I’m glad they got rid of the numbers and a! that; I’m glad the guards don’t harass us all the time the way they used to. That’s great, but I look at my. self at the end of each day and I ask, Are you any farther ahead than you were when you got up this morning? Have you learned anything? Is the world any better on account of you? And all the answers come back, No.”
“Why don’t you ask those engineers to train you, teach you stresses and materials and mathematics and all the disciplines they know?”
“Because those guys are totally absorbed in tufta.
They don’t have to do tufta, because they get adequate pay, you know, and they practically set their own norms. But all they want out of life is to cheat the system. That’s vital when you’re in the mine. You know that. But it’s not enough to build your life around. Anyway, what are you grinning at?”
Adarich looked very coy. He said, “Now I am going to prophesy. I am not supposed to tell you anything about this, but by this time next week your life will have changed radically for the better because of a single drastic event in the Soviet Union.”
Shargai’s words. I was not ready for jokes and riddles. I said, “Stop it, Yevgeni Petrovich, I don’t know what you ...” And then I got it. I said, “You mean I’m coming back?”
He just grinned. “I never said anything about that,” he said, pretending to be indignant.
That was a Wednesday or a Thursday. On Monday morning I was told by a guard. “You are ordered to stay in the Zone today. Report to the naryadchik at nine o’clock.”
Different naryadchik. He doesn’t know me. Seems a decent guy. He has to fumble around a long time to find my file. Finally brings it out. I can hardly contain myself. “Oh, yeah. Here it is. There has been a request for you in Camp Number Two. You move over there today. Collect your stuff and meet the convoy—no, sorry, you can just go over yourself. Barracks number five. Brigadier Zyuzin.”
Zyuzin! My, spirits went right clown again. That meant back to the DOZ, probably, unless his floating brigade had been moved again. I said bleakly, “What is the work assignment?”
The naryadchik said, “Oh, you’re not working with Zyuzin. Just living there. Didn’t you know? You’ve been specially requested in the hospital as senior feldsher. I thought you knew all about it.”
Chapter 24
It was an uneasy thaw. Most of us were optimistic. I know I was. But even though there were plenty of indications of change for the better and some substantial changes had already been made, there was also a sense of lack of equilibrium, as if the changes could swing around and blow the other way. The camp personnel were manifestly anxious all the time and wiser heads among us, like Adarich, said that anxious men do not react well in critical situations and that, with so much change going on around us all the time, there could be a crisis, a totally unpredicted and unpredictable crisis, at any time. I argued against this point of view. I said that it was normal for people to feel anxiety in times of change. I said that the rumors of mutinies in some of the worst camps in Siberia had generated positive change for us, and that it was likely to keep on getting better. But Adarich, who was usually so optimistic and jolly, worried a lot about the instability of things.
Certainly things were much better in the hospital. Shkarin was gone, released, and Adarich was fully in charge. The mortality rate was way down as a result of reduced working, hours and increased rations, as well as a more humane attitude (real or created for the occasion) on the part of the guards. Hope had a lot to do with it.
Hopeful men do not die so easily and many with twenty-five-year sentences began to believe that they would never have to serve the whole time. I was one of them. I became sure that my innocence would be recognized eventually and that among other amnesties would be one for the innocent. Perhaps I was being romantic. If so, I was not alone. Where there had once been at least one death a week that could be attributed only to despair, to a complete loss of hope, now the few corpses that appeared in our morgue were there because old bodies had given out, old diseases had left their mark and robbed a man of life after years of malnutrition and exhaustion.
Virus fevers still took off the weak. Accidents at the work sites were less common but they still happened and men died of them. But where we used to have anywhere from eight to twelve corpses any normal day in the morgue, now it was two or three. The hideous ritual of axing skulls, if it still went on, was done out of sight of anyone, and perhaps
it had been discontinued, though the corpses were still loaded onto wagons naked with a tag tied to their toes.
The hospital was much better equipped and the supply of drugs was increased. There was plenty of penicillin now, and the incidents of fatal bronchial diseases was sharply down.
We had new X-ray equipment, and we had a physiotherapy unit with heat lamps and other equipment presided over by a skeletally thin scientist named Carl Riwe.
Riwe was a physicist. We called him Doctor, which he was, although he was not a physician. Kask and Adarich had taken a liking to him and pity on him when he was admitted in a state of emaciation and total exhaustion not long after I went to Mine 51. They decided to try to find a position for him in the hospital, and when the electronic equipment arrived unexpectedly, they were able to argue convincingly that Riwe was the only man around who could be trusted to handle the expensive machines with understanding.
Riwe was a German. He and his family had been kidnapped and Riwe himself put in a sharashka, a soft prison for technical experts. But he refused to do experiments or develop processes or equipment for his captors, even when he was told that his family would be arrested. He was given twenty-five years then, and sent to Dzhezkazgan, where he would have died if Kask and Adarich had not taken him over. He still had not heard the fate of his family.
Riwe was as bald as a bottle. Kask wanted him as a guinea pig. He had been working for years on a lotion to grow hair on bald people, and Riwe was the most spectacularly bald case he had ever come across. “What a challenge,” he used to say wistfully. But Riwe kept refusing. He said he had been bald since he was twenty-five (he was in his fifties now) so it was not likely to do any good, and besides he was used to being bald and would feel strange if he ever got hair.
An American in the Gulag Page 41
