The old KTR camp next to us, Camp Number One, which had been sealed off, was opened up again. A whole trainload of Komsomol kids were brought in and established there. We heard they were volunteers of Khrushchev’s new campaign to develop new areas of virgin soil. They were coming to build the new city of Nikolsky. Which we had built. We could hear their voices singing drunkenly every night. They would yell and carry on till the small hours of the morning. Soon in, Dzhezkazgan Pravda, the local newspaper, there were glowing stories about how special, dedicated Komsomol brigades were building the new city of Dzhezkazgan, building it from the “virgin soil” where nothing had stood before, and so on. We laughed bitterly at that.
Pavel could not laugh. He had begun to believe that the commission had been lying to him, putting him off with a story, when they told him his case would be reviewed again. As the weeks went by with no word of any kind, even the warm letters from Yulya were not enough to keep the chill from his heart. He lost his appetite and got very thin and weak. He seldom spoke to me. I tried as hard as I could to get him to discuss the future. He and Yulya had decided to live in Tashkent, and once in a while I could strike a bit of a spark by asking him to tell me more about the kind of life they were planning there. But usually he was morose and silent.
One day I came back from work and found him standing in the middle of the Zone looking very strange. I was afraid he had suddenly gone mad. He was shaking his head and waving at me and opening and closing his mouth, apparently trying to make words, but nothing would come out.
I ran to him as quickly as I could. “What’s the matter, Pavel? Are you sick? Do you need some medicine? Shall we go to the clinic?”
He just shook his head and tried to say a word. Finally, although there was no voice, not even a whisper, I detected the word cable forming drily in his mouth. I said, “What cable?”
He managed to croak an answer this time. “Cable from Moscow.”
“What did it say?”
“It’s a cable from Moscow!” He looked quite disoriented. I peered at his pupils. They were a little dilated but not much. He shook his head in amazement and fell against me and embraced me so violently I could hardly breathe. Then he found his voice again. It was very husky. He said, “Oh, Alex, it is so marvelous I don’t know what to say to you. I’ve been completely rehabilitated. No record, no nothing. I’m a free man. A free man! The decision was made even before the commission came here. There was a screwup in the bureaucracy somewhere. I’ve been a free man for three months only nobody remembered to tell me!” We stared at each other. I felt my mouth stretched in a grin. Suddenly we began to laugh. Pavel Voronkin laughed and skipped about like a child. His thin face was red and shining, after weeks of deathly pallor. We ran to the barracks. I helped him pack his stuff. “Yulya is somewhere in Dzhezkazgan!” he said. “I’ll be with her tonight, Alex! Do you know what that means?”
I nodded. I was trying not to show what it meant to me that my last friend in camp was going. But Pavel saw my thoughts. “You’ll be next, Alex! You’ll see. You’ll be next, and then we’ll all be free. They can’t keep you much longer.”
Pavel Voronkin skipped out the gates of Dzhezkazgan and I went slowly back to a dwindling barracks community that now contained not one human being that I knew well or really cared about.
Soon the sixty or seventy of us left in the old camp were loaded into trucks and taken across the hill to another camp.
When I climbed down off the back of the truck Lavrenov was waiting for me. He looked well, but there was alcohol on his breath and it was only ten o’clock in the morning. Lavrenov told me he was now working in another camp near Dzhezkazgan, Krestyovy. He said that I was the only medically trained person left in this area, and that he wanted me to accept the assignment as chief of the hospital. I was too gloomy in those days to be, in any real sense, delighted with the assignment. But I knew that it was just what I needed to help me survive however much longer it was going to be in this lonely existence. The new camp was full of the leftovers from all the other Dzhezkazgan camps. At first there were nearly twelve thousand in the camp, but they were being freed in large numbers, and my work was not very heavy after a week or two.
One day a man whom I recognized from Nikolsky but hardly knew came into the hospital to see me. I did not have many beds occupied. The camp had shrunk again to a few hundred. I was just sitting there looking disgustedly over the littered and empty yard. The man seemed nervous but not sick. I said, “What do you need?” He was embarrassed. He looked at the ground for a while.
Finally he said, “They asked me to come and see you.” I said, “Who asked?”
“At the women’s enclosure. Nikolsky. They said you’re a close friend of Gertrude’s, maybe her only close friend.”
I felt an instantaneous cold panic. I wanted to throw the man out and shout at him, “I don’t want to hear what you came to tell me!” Instead I just stared at him.
He licked his lips a while before speaking. He said finally, “She was very depressed, you know. She drove herself hard at work. Well...” I think I pleaded with my eyes to have it finished. He said, “Well, yesterday she was up on the high-tension line, connecting the main service. She just took off the gloves. They saw her—she very calmly and deliberately reached inside the box and took hold of the two terminals.”
I just stared. My eyes were dry. My life was dry.
He said, “It was six thousand volts, you know. It was over right away. She wouldn’t have felt anything.”
He waited for a while. I think he must have been a very decent man. When he saw I could not possibly speak he got up quietly and went to the door. He said, “I’m sorry, Doctor.”
And when he was gone I sat and stared at the empty copper sky. It got darker and I still stared. There was no one in the room, no one in the camp, no one outside the camp, no one in the Soviet Union, no one in the whole world. I knew the feeling of being utterly, totally alone. And in the morning I saw the dawn come up and I knew that nothing had grown or been born in that night.
Chapter 28
It was July but I was scarcely aware of the heat. I have little recollection of the days as days. They were not defined by contact with people. They were empty and forgettable days. I was disgusted. I knew now I would never be released. I knew that somehow some day I would pull myself together and work out a way of living out the remaining years in camp, but for now I was prepared to wallow in disgust and self-pity.
I slept most of my free time. I heard that the commission was back again.
Every day there were fewer and fewer prisoners around. One morning I was roughly shaken awake by a guard and I only knew a little. He said, very angrily, “Are you Doldzhin, you son of a bitch?”
“Yeah,” I said, in a very sour voice, “I’m Dole-gin. What the hell do you want?”
“I’ll want your balls if you don’t smarten up. You’re still a prisoner, don’t forget that. Get up!”
I was about to tell him I certainly had not forgotten I was a prisoner, but he was still talking.
“We’ve been trying to find you for three days. Don’t you ever look at the bulletin board, you son of a bitch? Things are so screwed up here nobody knows where anybody is. They’ve been calling for you at the commission. Get dressed and get the hell over there on the double!”
I did not rush. I knew the kind of delay after delay that they were going to throw at me. I washed and went to the toilet and had some breakfast and went out to see for sure that my name was on the board. It was. I heard a voice call out, “Say, Doc!” It was Vasya Kargin. I had assumed he was freed long ago. But he had a special committee sentence like me, though I had not known that. He was not optimistic but he looked in better shape than I.
I asked him where he was living.
“Right here in this Zone, Doc. How about you?”
I had been moping so much I had not even known there was one of the old gang around I could have spent some time with.
T
here were about a hundred men waiting outside the administration building.
Everyone agreed that there was an absolutely regular pattern to these reviews. The interview lasted about five minutes .11 they were going to free you, they said so directly at the end of the interview. If not, they told you to please step outside while they considered, and then they would send a guard out a few minutes later to tell you that you had not yet been released. I guess they were not so hard-boiled, this commission, and could not stand anymore the terrible picture of desolation when they had to tell a person face to face that they were not going to issue a release.
I was appropriately cynical and sour. I knew the bastards still considered me an American spy despite the total lack of evidence and the completely fabricated protocols that Chichurin had concocted. There had been no evidence of any attempt by my own government to get me out. I had been completely abandoned and knew that I would be so for the rest of my life.
When they finally called me in, my face was set in the grim look I think of as my prison mask. I said my prayer in a tired way. I scarcely looked up. A voice said, “Do you consider yourself guilty of the charges of espionage and anti-Soviet propaganda that have been made against you?”
I snapped my head up and curled my lips back. I was really angry at this charade. I snapped out, “For Christ’s sake, would you believe a prisoner and a well-known enemy of the people before you’d believe the MGB who wrote out the protocols? What are you asking me for? Of course I am guilty!”
It was patently a crazy way to behave and I was in a real sense crazy, although I certainly had my faculties even if I did not have my wits.
They saw that I was agitated. Somebody said, not unkindly, “Doldzhin, you go outside and have a cigarette and calm down.”
“Sure, sure,” I said sourly. It was just what I had anticipated. They can’t stand telling it to your face. No guts. I just walked out without a word and nodded to the guard who had brought me over from the camp. “Come on, kid, let’s go,” I said.
The old prison hand, going back to his only real home. Hard. Cynical. Tired. But he’ll make it, somehow. Even get away with calling a guard “kid.” They know an Old Con when they see one. Don’t fool around with an Old Con. I’ll soon be the Hermit of Dzhezkazgan. Everyone gone but me.
We had walked about two hundred meters when I heard someone calling my name. I looked around. The vice-chairman of that commission was limping across toward me waving and calling. He had a wooden leg and was pretty slow, but he was hopping as fast as he could and waving in a very agitated way.
“Come back, come back!” the man shouted.
I shrugged at the guard. “What kind of crap are they going to pull now?” I asked him. The guard shrugged back.
The vice-chairman said, “We told you to have a smoke and come back. Have you calmed down a bit now?”
I stared at him suspiciously. There was a moment when I felt my heart begin to beat a bit hard and I knew some hope was sneaking in. I suppressed it. I said in my Old Con voice, “Yeah, yeah, I’m calmed down.”
I went in front of the commission, very stiff.
The chairman said, “Tell me, where would you like to go?”— I was quite puzzled. I said, “What do you mean, where would I like to go? What are you people talking about?”
He said easily, “I mean where would you like to live? Do you have any relatives?”
I said, still not allowing myself to believe what was happening, “Well, my mother lives in Moscow.”
“Would you like to go to Moscow?”
I just looked at them for a long time. Then I said in a choked way, “Would you let me go to Moscow?” I felt quite subdued and very cooperative all of a sudden. The Old Con voice was forgotten.
The chairman said, “Yes, we will release you to Moscow, but it is a conditional release. We are required to read you this document. And you must sign it.”
It was a fairly long statement. It declared that during my years in camp I had been naturalized (without consulting me, let it be clear!) as a Soviet citizen. That if I went to Moscow I must undertake never to try to contact the American Embassy. That if I did try to make that contact or try in any way to leave the Soviet Union I would immediately be put in a closed prison, not a camp, for life. No trial, no privilege of review. That I would be under constant surveillance by the KGB.
Was that fully understood?
I said yes, it was fully understood. I signed.
The chairman said, “Yes—well, you can go now.”
The vice-chairman limped outside and told the guard, I was free. That was it.
It was July 13, 1956. I had been kidnapped on December 13, 1948. The passport they gave me later was stamped July 12, so the whole hearing had been no more than a formality.
I was in shock. I stood waiting for the guard to take me back to camp. He said, “What do you want?”
I said, “To go back to camp and get my things.”
He said, “Go ahead, kid. I’m waiting here to see if there’s anyone they don’t let out.”
I stepped to the side of the building and sat down on the hot earth. No one paid any attention. They were used to it by now. My mind was racing crazily. I remember that I smoked cigarette after cigarette.
A voice brought me back. Vasya Kargin. “Say! Doc! I’m free! You, too?”
I nodded at him dumbly.
“Well, what the hell!” he said. “What the hell! Let’s...well, let’s just go then!” We went off arm in arm. By and by we began to giggle. We headed toward
Dzhezkazgan, toward the town. We began to sing different songs. I don’t know what Vasya sang. I bellowed out—
Give me land lots of land
Under starry skies above!
Don’t fence me in!
I translated it for Vasya.
We dug in our pockets for money and found that we each had a few rubles. “Let’s buy a bottle of vodka!”
“Let’s buy two bottles of vodka!”
Hard drinkers in camp used to boast about downing a whole bottle of vodka in one swig. We, dared each other to try it, and accepted the dares.
We bought two bottles. The only other thing they had in the shop was expensive sardines. We said to hell with that.
We found an isolated spot behind a construction site, picked up an old jar, washed it at a public faucet somewhere, and sat down with the vodka between us. We used the washed-out jar as a glass.
First Vasya poured and drank and poured and drank until his half liter was gone.
I did the same.
I felt nothing at all.
I said, “Let’s get another bottle.”
Vasya said, “Good. I don’t feel a thing yet.”
We went back to the shop and got another bottle and drank it down.
Vasya got up and said, “Well, Doe, that’s disappointing. I just feel that same sort of shocked, stunned feeling I had when they told me. How about you?”
“Same thing,” I said.
Later that night Vasya found himself suddenly drunk, climbed through the window of an unfinished building, fell through the uncovered floor into a trench, lay there all night, and had to be pulled out with a rope in the morning.
I went back to camp in a state of stupor, with no sensation of being drunk.
I stayed in camp for the week it took to arrange transportation. I slept most of the week. I was allowed to cable my mother the date of my arrival in Moscow. Finally I assembled my guitar and a huge medical kit of syringes and drugs and medical books. It was July 20. The train was ready.
The guy who supervised our truck ride to the station was the ether drinker, Zavyalov. Most of the guards had submachine guns, automatics. Now they seemed distant and unreal to me. I asked Zavyalov why the guns, and he said, “To keep you together so you won’t run into a truck and get killed. It’s terrible, Doc, how many we’ve had to draw up accidental death reports on. A real lousy job, you know. We don’t want any more of that stuff!”
“No heavier burden than a sense of responsibility, eh, Zavyalov?” I said. He took me quite seriously.
My prison release certificate showed that I had served from December 13, 1948, to July 13, 1956, at corrective labor. Released with no record, Ukase number so-and-so. On the back it said, Destination: Moscow.
We got on the train. I recognized all of former patients. Many of them had a fair amount of money to buy food. I had very little—14 rubles—but they shared the food with me. We rolled across the desert and looked out the windows at the red sun going down and then the stars coming out.
Nobody slept. The songs began soon. I got out my guitar. Someone had a balalaika, someone an accordion, someone else a crude homemade fiddle.
Dzhezkazgan, Dzhezkazgan,
Across your steppes that never end
No one rides with you as friend
But storms of dust and sand.
I watched the stars ride with us over the jagged horizon. I thought, A journey into the unknown. It seemed an important thought somehow. It stayed with me.
Winter blizzards blanket you with white
Wailing through your vastness day and night.
The train wheels clacked and hammered a rhythm ten times as fast as the song. I sang and played chords for the slow, sad melody but my mind raced. The song was corny and sentimental but I was deeply moved by it. Here I was on a train full of strangers whom I knew better perhaps than anyone on earth, with whom I had shared a nightmare experience that no one could ever know who had not spent years in an unreal camp like ours. If you share someone’s nightmare, you know that person well. We had all shared each other’s nightmares.
An American in the Gulag Page 47
