Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  He felt another flow of strength starting, like an incoming sea tide. High tide for several hours, and then low tide. But the sea does not retreat from us forever. He could still recover.

  Suddenly he felt hungry, but he didn’t have the strength to move. Slowly and with difficulty he recalled that today he had given his soup to his neighbor, that a mug of boiled water was all the nourishment he had taken over the last twenty-four hours. Apart from bread, of course. But the bread had been issued a very, very long time ago. And yesterday’s bread had been stolen. Someone still had the strength to steal.

  So he lay, at ease and without thoughts, until morning came. The electric light became just a little more yellow; they brought bread on big plywood trays, as they did every day.

  But he was no longer anxious; he didn’t bother trying to spot a crusty piece, he didn’t weep if someone else got that crust, his quivering fingers didn’t stuff the makeweight piece of bread into his mouth, and it instantly melted away in his mouth and his whole being could sense the taste and the smell of fresh rye bread. That makeweight piece was no longer in his mouth, even though he hadn’t had time to swallow anything or even move his jaw. A piece of bread had melted away, vanished, and that was a miracle, one of many miracles here. No, he wasn’t anxious for now. But when they put his day’s ration into his hands, he clutched it with his bloodless fingers and pressed the bread to his mouth. He bit the bread with his scurvy-ridden teeth, his gums began to bleed and his teeth rocked. But he felt no pain. He pressed the bread to his mouth with all his strength, sucking, tearing, and gnawing it. . . .

  His neighbors tried to stop him.

  “Don’t eat it all, it’s better to eat it later, later. . . .”

  And the poet understood. He opened his eyes wide, his fingers not letting go of the bloodstained bread.

  “What do you mean, later?” he pronounced precisely and clearly. Then he closed his eyes.

  By evening he was dead.

  But they wrote him off two days later. His enterprising neighbors managed to get a dead man’s bread for two days; when it was distributed, the dead man’s hand rose up like a puppet’s. Therefore he died earlier than the date of his death, quite an important detail for his future biographers.

  1958

  CHILDREN’S PICTURES

  WE WERE forced to go to work without any lists being drawn up. They counted us in fives at the gates. They always lined us up in fives, since very few of the escort guards knew their multiplication tables well. Any mathematical operation carried out in below-zero temperatures on living beings is no joke. The cup of prisoners’ patience can suddenly run over, and the authorities took heed of this.

  This time we had easy work, the sort given to the gangsters: cutting up firewood with a circular saw. The saw revolved on its bench, banging gently. We heaved an enormous trunk onto the bench and slowly pushed it toward the saw blade.

  The saw would shriek and growl furiously. It liked work in the Far North no more than we did, but we kept moving the trunk on and on until it fell apart and gave us unexpectedly lightweight offcuts.

  Our third workmate chopped the firewood with a heavy, bluish chopping ax with a long yellow handle. He chopped the edges off the thick logs and split the thinner ones with one blow. He didn’t hit them very hard, our workmate was just as starved as we were, but frozen larch wood was easy to split. Nature in the north is not indifferent or unbiased; it is in league with the people who sent us here.

  We finished the job, stacked the firewood, and began to wait for our escort guard. We had a guard; he was warming himself in the institution for which we had been sawing firewood, but we were supposed to return home in proper formation, after splitting into small groups in the town.

  After work we didn’t go to warm ourselves. We had noticed earlier a big pile of rubbish by a fence, something that could not be ignored. Both of my workmates examined the heap with practiced skill, removing one frozen layer after the other. Their loot was pieces of frozen bread, a frozen clump of burgers, and torn men’s socks. The socks were the most precious item, and I was sorry they didn’t fall to me. Socks, scarves, gloves, shirts, civilian trousers—“civvies”—were highly valued by people who had worn only government-issue for decades. Socks could be darned or patched, and you could get tobacco or bread for them.

  My workmates’ success made me restless. I too used my hands and feet to break off the many-hued pieces of the rubbish heap. After removing a rag that looked like human guts, I saw, for the first time in many years, a schoolchild’s gray exercise book.

  It was an ordinary school exercise book, a child’s book for drawing in. Every page was covered in colored paintings, done carefully and lovingly. I turned the paper, made fragile by the sub-zero temperatures, and the frost-covered cold, bright, naïve sheets. I used to paint, but that was a long time ago, when I settled down at the dining table on which was a kerosene lamp with a half-inch wick. Just a touch of the magic brushes brought to life a dead fairy-tale hero, as if he’d been sprinkled with magic, life-giving water. My watercolors, which looked like women’s buttons, were kept in a white tin box. Prince Ivan would gallop on his gray wolf through the fir forest. The firs were smaller than the gray wolf. Prince Ivan rode the wolf the way the Evenki ride their reindeer, their heels almost touching the mossy ground. Smoke would spiral up to the sky, and birds, like upside-down ticks, could be seen in the blue star-studded sky.

  The more strongly I reimagined my childhood, the more clearly I understood that my childhood would not be repeated, that I wouldn’t find even a shadow of it in someone else’s childhood exercise book.

  It was a terrible exercise book.

  The northern town was built of wood; the house walls and fences were painted bright ocher, and the young artist’s brush had faithfully reproduced the yellow color wherever the boy had wanted to speak of street buildings and things made by human hands.

  There were many, very many fences in the book. People and houses in almost every painting were fenced in with even yellow fences, topped by black lines of barbed wire. Steel was strung out in the official pattern over all the fences in the child’s exercise book.

  People stood by the fence. In this book people were not peasants, nor workmen, nor hunters; they were soldiers, escort guards, and sentries with rifles. The “mushroom” rain shelters around which the young artist had grouped his guards and sentries stood at the foot of enormous guard towers. On the towers there were soldiers, walking about with shiny rifle barrels.

  The exercise book was quite small, but the boy had managed to paint every season of the year in his hometown.

  Brightly colored earth, a monotonous green, as in an early Matisse painting, and a perfectly bright blue sky, fresh, pure, and clear. The sunsets and sunrises were solid red, and that was not due to a child’s inability to find a halftone or intermediate colors or to discover the secrets of chiaroscuro.

  The color combinations in this schoolbook were true representations of the Far North sky, whose colors are extraordinarily pure and clear and have no halftones.

  I recalled the old northern legend about a god who created the taiga when he was still a child. He didn’t have many colors, and they were childlike in their purity, and the paintings were simple and clear, and their subjects were elementary.

  Afterward, when the god grew up and reached adulthood, he learned to carve the strange patterns of leaves, he invented a lot of many-colored birds. This god was bored with the childish world and covered his taiga creation with snow, leaving it forever to go south. So went the legend.

  Even in his winter paintings, the child had kept to the truth. Green vanished. Trees were black and bare. They were Dahurian larches, not the pines and firs of my childhood.

  A northern hunt was in full swing. A German shepherd, its big teeth bared, was tugging at a leash held by Prince Ivan, who was wearing a military-style hat with earflaps, a white sheepskin jacket, felt boots, and long gauntlets, kragi as they are called in
the Far North. He had an automatic gun over his shoulder. Bare triangular trees poked here and there out of the snow.

  The child had seen and remembered nothing but yellow houses, barbed wire, towers, sheepdogs, guards with automatics, and the dark, dark blue sky.

  My workmate took a look at the exercise book and felt the pages.

  “It’d be better to find some newspaper to make cigarettes,” he said, snatching the exercise book from my hands, crumpling it, and throwing it back on the rubbish heap. The book started to frost over.

  1959

  CONDENSED MILK

  HUNGER made our envy as dull and feeble as all our other feelings. We had no strength left for feelings, to search for easier work, to walk, to ask, to beg. We envied only those we knew, with whom we had come into this world, if they had managed to get work in the office, the hospital, or the stables, where there were no long hours of heavy physical work, which was glorified on the arches over all the gates as a matter for valor and heroism. In a word, we envied only Shestakov.

  Only something external was capable of taking us out of our indifference, of distracting us from the death that was slowly getting nearer. An external, not an internal force. Internally, everything was burned out, devastated; we didn’t care, and we made plans only as far as the next day.

  Now, for instance, I wanted to get away to the barracks, lie down on the bunks, but I was still standing by the doors of the food shop. The only people allowed to buy things in the shop were those convicted of nonpolitical crimes, including recidivist thieves who were classified as “friends of the people.” There was no point in our being there, but we couldn’t take our eyes off the chocolate-colored loaves of bread; the heavy, sweet smell of fresh bread teased our nostrils and even made our heads spin. So I stood there looking at the bread, not knowing when I would find the strength to go back to the barracks. That was when Shestakov called me over.

  I had gotten to know Shestakov on the mainland, in Moscow’s Butyrki prison. We were in the same cell. We were acquaintances then, not friends. When we were in the camps, Shestakov did not work at the mine pit face. He was a geological engineer, so he was taken on to work as a prospecting geologist, presumably in the office. The lucky man barely acknowledged his Moscow acquaintances. We didn’t take offense—God knows what orders he might have had on that account. Charity begins at home, etc.

  “Have a smoke,” Shestakov said as he offered me a piece of newspaper, tipped some tobacco into it, and lit a match, a real match.

  I lit up.

  “I need to have a word with you,” said Shestakov.

  “With me?”

  “Yes.”

  We moved behind the barracks and sat on the edge of an old pit face. My legs immediately felt heavy, while Shestakov cheerfully swung his nice new government boots—they had a faint whiff of cod-liver oil. His trousers were rolled up, showing chessboard-patterned socks. I surveyed Shestakov’s legs with genuine delight and even a certain amount of pride. At least one man from our cell was not wearing foot bindings instead of socks. The ground beneath us was shaking from muffled explosions as the earth was being prepared for the night shift. Small pebbles were falling with a rustling sound by our feet; they were as gray and inconspicuous as birds.

  “Let’s move a bit farther,” said Shestakov.

  “It won’t kill you, no need to be afraid. Your socks won’t be damaged.”

  “I’m not thinking about my socks,” said Shestakov, pointing his index finger along the line of the horizon. “What’s your view about all this?”

  “We’ll probably die,” I said. That was the last thing I wanted to think about.

  “No, I’m not willing to die.”

  “Well?”

  “I have a map,” Shestakov said in a wan voice. “I’m going to take some workmen—I’ll take you—and we’ll go to Black Springs, fifteen kilometers from here. I’ll have a pass. And we can get to the sea. Are you willing?” He explained this plan in a hurry, showing no emotion.

  “And when we reach the sea? Are we sailing somewhere?”

  “That doesn’t matter. The important thing is to make a start. I can’t go on living like this. ‘Better to die on one’s feet than live on one’s knees,’ ” Shestakov pronounced solemnly. “Who said that?”

  Very true. The phrase was familiar. But I couldn’t find the strength to recall who said it and when. I’d forgotten everything in books. I didn’t believe in bookish things. I rolled up my trousers and showed him my red sores from scurvy.

  “Well, being in the forest will cure that,” said Shestakov, “what with the berries and the vitamins. I’ll get you out, I know the way. I have a map.”

  I shut my eyes and thought. There were three ways of getting from here to the sea, and they all involved a journey of five hundred kilometers, at least. I wouldn’t make it, nor would Shestakov. He wasn’t taking me as food for the journey, was he? Of course not. But why was he lying? He knew that just as well as I did. Suddenly I was frightened of Shestakov, the only one of us who’d managed to get a job that matched his qualifications. Who fixed him up here, and what had it cost? Anything like that had to be paid for. With someone else’s blood, someone else’s life.

  “I’m willing,” I said, opening my eyes. “Only I’ve got to feed myself up first.”

  “That’s fine, fine. I’ll see you get more food. I’ll bring you some . . . tinned food. We’ve got lots. . . .”

  There are lots of different tinned foods—meat, fish, fruit, vegetables—but the best of all is milk, condensed milk. Condensed milk doesn’t have to be mixed with boiling water. You eat it with a spoon, or spread it on bread, or swallow it drop by drop from the tin, eating it slowly, watching the bright liquid mass turn yellow with starry little drops of sugar forming on the can. . . .

  “Tomorrow,” I said, gasping with joy, “tinned milk.”

  “Fine, fine. Milk.” And Shestakov went off.

  I returned to the barracks, lay down, and shut my eyes. It was hard to think. Thinking was a physical process. For the first time I saw the full extent of the material nature of our psyche, and I felt its palpability. Thinking hurt. But thinking had to be done. He was going to get us to make a run for it and then hand us in: that much was completely obvious. He would pay for his office job with our blood, my blood. We’d either be killed at Black Springs, or we’d be brought back alive and given a new sentence: another fifteen years or so. He must be aware that getting out of here was impossible. But milk, condensed milk. . . .

  I fell asleep and in my spasmodic hungry sleep I dreamed of Shestakov’s can of condensed milk: a monstrous tin can with a sky-blue label. Enormous, blue as the night sky, the can had thousands of holes in it and milk was oozing out and flowing in a broad stream like the Milky Way. And I had no trouble reaching up to the sky to eat the thick, sweet, starry milk.

  I don’t remember what I did that day or how I worked. I was waiting and waiting for the sun to sink in the west, for the horses to start neighing, for they were better than people at sensing that the working day was ending.

  The siren rang out hoarsely; I went to the barracks where Shestakov lived. He was waiting for me on the porch. The pockets of his quilted jacket were bulging.

  We sat at a big, scrubbed table in the barracks, and Shestakov pulled two cans of condensed milk out of a pocket.

  I used the corner of an ax to pierce a hole in one can. A thick white stream flowed onto the lid and onto my hand.

  “You should have made two holes. To let the air in,” said Shestakov.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said, licking my sweet dirty fingers.

  “Give us a spoon,” Shestakov asked, turning to the workmen who were standing around us. Ten shiny, well-licked spoons were stretched over the table. They were all standing to watch me eat. That wasn’t for lack of tact or out of any hidden desire to help themselves. None of them even hoped that I would share this milk with them. That would have been unprecedented; any interest in what someon
e else was eating was selfless. I also knew that it was impossible not to look at food disappearing into someone else’s mouth. I made myself as comfortable as I could and consumed the milk without bread, just washing it down occasionally with cold water. I finished the two cans. The spectators moved away; the show was over. Shestakov looked at me with sympathy.

  “You know what,” I said, carefully licking the spoon. “I’ve changed my mind. You can leave without me.”

  Shestakov understood me and walked out without saying a thing.

  This was, of course, a petty revenge, as weak as my feelings. But what else could I have done? I couldn’t warn the others: I didn’t know them. But I should have warned them: Shestakov had managed to persuade five others. A week later they ran off; two were killed not far from Black Springs, three were tried a month later. Shestakov’s own case was set aside in the process, and he was soon moved away somewhere. I met him at another mine six months later. He didn’t get an additional sentence for escaping. The authorities had used him but had kept to the rules. Things might have been different.

  He was working as a geological prospector, he was clean-shaven and well-fed, and his chess-pattern socks were still intact. He didn’t greet me when he saw me, which was a pity. Two tins of condensed milk was not really worth making a fuss about, after all.

  1956

  BREAD

  THE ENORMOUS double door opened, and the delivery man entered the transit prisoners’ barracks. He stood out in the broad band of morning light reflected by the blue snow. Two thousand eyes looked from all directions at him: from below, under the bunks; at his level; from the side and from above; from the height of the four-story bunks where those who still had the strength had clambered up a ladder. Today was herring day, and an enormous plywood tray, bending under the weight of a mountain of herrings split in two, was brought in behind the delivery man. The tray was followed by the duty supervisor, wearing a white tanned sheepskin jacket that shone like the sun. Herrings were issued in the mornings, half a herring per person every other day. Whatever calculations were made about the protein and calories in them, nobody knew, and nobody cared about such academic concerns. Hundreds of people were whispering the same thing: “Tails.” A wise camp chief had taken into account the prisoners’ psychology when he ordered either herring heads or herring tails to be issued at any one time. There were frequent discussions about the merits of one or the other: the tail apparently contained more fish oil, but the head was more satisfying. The process of swallowing the food was prolonged by having to suck the gills and extract the brain. The herrings that were issued had not been gutted, which everyone preferred; they ate it with all the bones and the skin. Any nostalgia for the fish heads was a short-lived thing; the tails were a fact to be contended with. In any case, the tray was coming nearer and the most anxious minute was approaching. How big a piece would you get, since you couldn’t swap, let alone protest, and everything depended on your luck, your card in this game with hunger. The man who was careless about cutting up the herrings into portions didn’t always understand (or had simply forgotten) that ten grams more or ten grams less—ten grams that looked like ten grams—could lead to a dramatic conflict, possibly to bloodshed. We needn’t mention tears, for tears were frequent; they were understood by everyone, and nobody laughed at those who wept.