Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  But the feeling of self-preservation, clinging onto life, a literally physical clinging that subordinates his mind, is what saves a man. He lives by the same principle as a stone, a tree, a bird, a dog. But he clings more tightly to life than they do. And he can endure more than any animal.

  All that was what Platonov was thinking about as he stood by the entrance gates, a log on his shoulders, waiting for the next roll call. The wood had been brought and stacked; people crowded as, hurrying and cursing, they entered the dark log barracks.

  When his eyes got used to the darkness, Platonov saw that by no means had all the workmen been to work. In the far right-hand corner seven or eight men were sitting on the upper bunks; they had taken over the only lamp, a smoking kerosene lamp with no glass, and were surrounding two other men, who sat with their legs tucked under them, like Tatars, with a greasy pillow between them, playing cards. The light of the fuming lamp shuddered, the fire swayed the shadows and made them seem longer.

  Platonov sat down on the edge of the bunk. His shoulders and knees ached, his muscles were quivering. Platonov had been brought to Jankhara that same morning and this was his first day at work. There were no free places on the bunks.

  “As soon as they all move away,” Platonov thought, “I’ll lie down.” And he dozed off.

  The game above him ended. A dark-haired man with a little mustache and a long fingernail on the little finger of his left hand rolled over to the edge of the bunk.

  “Hey, call that Ivan Ivanovich over,” he said.

  Platonov was woken by someone jerking his back.

  “You . . . you’re wanted.”

  “Well, where is this Ivan Ivanovich?” came a call from the upper bunk.

  “I’m not Ivan Ivanovich,” said Platonov, screwing up his eyes.

  “He won’t come, Fedia.”

  “What do you mean he won’t?”

  Platonov was pushed into the light.

  “Do you want to stay alive?” Fedia asked him quietly, revolving his little finger with its dirty overgrown nail near Platonov’s eyes.

  “I do,” Platonov replied.

  He was knocked to the ground by a powerful punch in the face. Platonov got up and wiped the blood with his sleeve.

  “That’s no way to answer,” Fedia explained gently. “Ivan Ivanovich, was that how you were brought up in your boarding school?”

  Platonov stayed silent.

  “Clear off, you piece of shit,” said Fedia. “Go and lie down next to the piss pot. That’s your place. And if you make a noise, we’ll choke you.”

  That was no empty threat. Platonov had twice witnessed men being choked to death with a towel to settle some thief’s sense of justice. Platonov lay down on the stinking wet boards.

  “I’m bored, mates,” said Fedia with a yawn. “Why doesn’t someone tickle my heels, then?”

  “Mashka, hey Mashka, come and tickle Fedia’s heels.”

  Mashka, a pale, good-looking boy-thief of eighteen, suddenly dived into the lamp’s light, carefully removed Fedia’s dirty, torn socks, and, smiling, started tickling his feet. The tickling made Fedia giggle and shake.

  “Get out of here,” Fedia suddenly said. “You can’t tickle me. You don’t know how.”

  “Fedia, I was only—”

  “Get out, I told you. Scraping and scratching: you’ve got no tenderness.”

  The men around Fedia nodded their heads in sympathy.

  “You remember that Jew I had at Kosoye? He could tickle. Mates, he really tickled. He was an engineer.”

  And Fedia plunged into his memories of the Jew who had tickled his heels.

  “Fedia, Fedia, how about this new man. . . . Do you want to try him?”

  “To hell with him,” said Fedia. “People like him can’t tickle. Anyway, get him up.”

  Platonov was brought out into the light.

  “Hey, you, Ivan Ivanovich, adjust the lamp,” Fedia ordered. “And you’re going to put more wood in the stove at night. In the morning you take the piss pot out. The orderly will show you where to empty it. . . .”

  Platonov submissively said nothing.

  “And for that,” Fedia explained, “you’ll get a bowl of soup. I don’t eat dumpling soup anyway. Go and sleep.”

  Platonov went back to his old place. Almost all the workmen were asleep, curling up in pairs or in threes for the warmth.

  “God, I’m bored. The nights are long,” said Fedia. “Why doesn’t someone ‘churn out a novel’? When I was at Kosoye, I had—”

  “Fedia, Fedia, how about this new man. Why not try him?”

  “Right.” Fedia came to life. “Get him up.”

  They roused Platonov.

  “Listen,” said Fedia, smiling almost ingratiatingly. “Sorry I got a bit overexcited.”

  “That’s all right,” said Platonov, gritting his teeth.

  “Listen, can you ‘churn out novels’?”

  Platonov’s dull eyes briefly blazed. Of course he could. The whole cell in the pretrial prison was captivated by his retelling of Dracula. But those prisoners had been human. Whereas here? Was he to be the clown at the court of the Duke of Milan, to be fed for a good joke and beaten for a bad one? There was after all another side to this business: he would be exposing them to real literature. He would be an educator, he would awaken their interest in literature; here, in the lower depths of life, he would be doing his job, his duty. Old habits blinded Platonov to the fact that he would only be fed, would get an extra soup for a job that was different, more dignified than carrying out the piss pot. But was it dignified at all? It was more like tickling the thief’s dirty heels than giving him an education. But the hunger, the cold, the beatings. . . .

  Fedia was smiling intently as he waited for an answer.

  “I c-c-can,” Platonov managed to say, and he smiled for the first time that difficult day. “I can ‘churn them out.’ ”

  “Oh my darling man!” Fedia suddenly became joyful. “Come and climb in here. Here’s a piece of bread for you. You’ll get something to eat tomorrow. Sit here on the blanket. Have a cigarette.”

  Platonov hadn’t smoked for a week and sucked at the cigarette stub with morbid enjoyment.

  “What’s your name, then?”

  “Andrei,” said Platonov.

  “Well, Andrei, I need something really long, really spicy. Like The Count of Monte Cristo. I don’t want stories about tractors.”

  “Les Misérables, perhaps?” Platonov suggested.

  “Is that the one about Jean Valjean? I had that ‘churned out’ for me at Kosoye.”

  “Then how about The Jack of Hearts Club [5] or The Vampire?”

  “That’s the thing. Give us the Jack. Shut up, you bastards.”

  Platonov cleared his throat. “In the city of Saint Petersburg in 1893 a mysterious crime was committed. . . .”

  Day was breaking by the time Platonov completely lost his strength.

  “Here ends the first part,” he said.

  “Well that was good,” said Fedia. “He did a good job. Lie down here with us. You won’t get much sleep, it’s dawn. You can get some sleep at work. Save your strength for the evening.”

  Platonov was already asleep.

  They were taken out to work. A tall peasant lad who had slept through the previous night’s Jack of Hearts gave Platonov a vicious shove in the doorway.

  “You swine, look where you’re going.”

  Someone immediately whispered something into the lad’s ear.

  They lined up in rows, and the tall lad came up to Platonov.

  “Don’t tell Fedia that I hit you, pal. I didn’t know that you were a novelist.”

  “I won’t tell him,” Platonov replied.

  1954

  THE TATAR MULLAH AND CLEAN AIR

  THE HEAT in the prison cell was so great that you didn’t see a single fly. The enormous iron-barred windows were open wide, but this brought no relief, for the yard’s almost molten asphalt sent up waves of h
ot air, and it was actually cooler in the cell than outside. Everyone had stripped, and a hundred naked bodies exuding a heavy, damp heat tossed and turned on the floor, pouring with sweat. It was too hot to lie on the bunks. When the superintendent carried out his roll call, the prisoners lined up in just their underpants, and when they went to relieve themselves, they hung about for an hour in the washrooms, pouring cold water from the sink all over themselves. But this was no help in the long run. Those who slept under the bunks suddenly found that they were in possession of the best places. They had to prepare themselves for the region of “distant camps,” and the typically grim prison joke was that after torture by steaming they could expect torture by freezing.

  A Tatar mullah, who was still being interrogated as part of the notorious Greater Tatary case, which we knew about long before the newspapers gave any hint of it, a strong, sanguine man of sixty, with a powerful chest covered in gray hair and animated dark round eyes, used to say as he endlessly rubbed his shiny bald skull with a damp rag: “As long as they don’t shoot me. That’s a frightening sentence only for someone who expects to die at forty. If they give me ten years, that’s nothing. I intend to live to eighty.”

  The mullah was never out of breath, even when he ran up to the fifth story after coming back from his exercise walk.

  “If they give me more than ten years,” he continued calculating, “I’ll live about another twenty in prison. But if it’s in a camp,” the mullah was silent for a while, “in clean air, it will be just ten.”

  Today, when I was reading Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the House of the Dead, I recalled that cheerful, intelligent mullah. The mullah knew what “clean air” was.

  Morozov and Figner each survived twenty years of the harshest regime in the Shlisselburg fortress and were perfectly fit for work when they came out. Figner found enough strength to take an active role in the revolution and then wrote ten volumes of memoirs about the horrors she had endured; Morozov wrote a series of well-known scholarly works and married a schoolgirl for love.

  In the camps, however, to turn a healthy young man, who had begun his career in the clean winter air of the gold mines, into a goner, all that was needed, at a conservative estimate, was a term of twenty to thirty days of sixteen hours of work per day, with no rest days, with systematic starvation, torn clothes, and nights spent in temperatures of minus sixty degrees in a canvas tent with holes in it, and being beaten by the foremen, the criminal gang masters, and the guards. The length of time required has been proven many times. Brigades that start the gold-mining season (the brigades are named after their foremen) have, by the end of the season, not a single man left alive from the start of the season, except for the foreman and one or two of the foreman’s personal friends. The rest of the brigade is replaced several times over the summer. A gold mine constantly discards its production refuse into the hospitals, the so-called convalescent teams, invalid settlements, and mass graves.

  The gold-mining season begins on the fifteenth of May and ends on the fifteenth of September: four months. There’s no need to talk about winter work. By the next summer the basic mining brigades are formed from new people who haven’t yet spent a winter here.

  •

  Prisoners, once they were given their sentence, couldn’t get to the camps from the prisons fast enough. In the camps they would have work, healthy country air, early release, correspondence, parcels from relatives, the chance to earn money. People always believe in the best. Day and night passengers en route for the camps would crowd around the cracks in the doors of the cattle cars in which we were taken to the Far East, ecstatically breathing in the quiet cool evening air that was saturated with the scent of wildflowers activated by the passing of the train. This air was unlike the stale prison-cell air, which smelled of carbolic and human sweat; the cells had become such hateful places after many months of interrogation. Memories of reviled and trampled honor were left behind in those cells, memories that people wanted to lose.

  People are simpleminded enough to imagine that a pretrial prison is the cruelest experience to turn their lives upside down. Their actual arrest was for them the worst moral shock. Now, in their haste to leave the prison, they subconsciously want to believe in freedom, albeit relative freedom but a life free of the accursed bars and grids, of the humiliating, demeaning interrogations. A new life was beginning with none of the efforts of will constantly required to endure interrogation while the investigation is still going on. They felt a deep relief, knowing that everything was irrevocably settled, they had received their sentence, they needn’t think about how to answer the interrogator, they needn’t worry about their relatives, or make any future plans, or fight for a piece of bread. They were now subject to someone else’s will, nothing could be changed, there was no turning off this shiny railway journey that was slowly but relentlessly taking them to the north.

  The train was moving toward winter. Each night was colder than the previous one, and the thick green poplar leaves here already had a bright yellow tinge. The sun was no longer so hot or bright, as if the maple, poplar, birch, and aspen leaves had ingested and absorbed the heat. The sunlight now shone from the leaves themselves, while the pale, anemic sun, as it mostly hid behind warm gray clouds, which had yet to hint at snow, could not even warm the cattle car. But snow would soon come.

  Transit camp is yet another route to the north. The bay of the sea met them with a small blizzard. The snow hadn’t yet settled; the wind swept it off the frozen yellow cliffs into a pit full of dirty, turbid water. You could see through the blizzard. The snowfall was thin, like a fisherman’s net of white threads cast over the town. You couldn’t even see the snow over the sea; the dark green crested waves slowly lapped onto the slippery, weed-covered stones. A ship was anchored offshore; from above it looked like a toy, and even when they were taken by launch to board it and they climbed one by one onto the deck, only to separate and vanish immediately into the maw of the holds, the ship was surprisingly small, surrounded as it was by so much water.

  Five days later they disembarked on the harsh and gloomy shores of the taiga, and trucks distributed them to the places where they would be living and surviving.

  They had left their healthy country air on the other side of the sea. Here they were surrounded by thin air that was saturated with the exudations of the bogs. The bare hills were covered with marshy ground, and only the bald, unforested hills shone, thanks to the limestone, polished by storms and winds. Their legs sank in the marshy moss, and their feet were rarely dry on a summer’s day. In winter everything turned to ice. The mountains, the rivers, and the bogs seemed in winter to be one and the same being, ominous and hostile.

  For anyone with a weak heart the air was too heavy in summer and in winter just unbearable. When the temperature was really low, people breathed in short gasps. Nobody here moved at a run, except perhaps the very youngest, and they skipped along rather than ran.

  Your face was covered with clouds of mosquitoes, and you couldn’t take a step without a face net. The face net stifled you and kept you from breathing when you were working, yet you couldn’t lift it because of the mosquitoes.

  People then worked for sixteen hours a day, and the norms were set accordingly. If you took into consideration that reveille, breakfast, the assembly, and walk to work took a minimum of an hour and a half, while lunch was an hour and dinner, followed by getting ready for bed, took an hour and a half, then all you had left for sleep after heavy physical labor in the open air was four hours. As soon as he stopped moving, a man fell asleep; he learned to sleep walking or standing. Sleep deprivation took away more strength than did hunger. Failure to fulfill the norm was liable to get you punishment rations, three hundred grams of bread a day and no gruel.

  The first illusion was soon shed. This was the illusion about work, the labor about which an inscription, prescribed by the camp constitution, is placed over the gates of all sections of the camps: “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory,
a matter of valor and heroism.” The actual camp could only inspire a hatred and loathing of labor.

  Once a month the camp postman would take away the accumulated mail to be censored. Letters to and from the mainland took six months, if they arrived at all. Parcels were issued only to those who had fulfilled the norm; others had their parcels confiscated. None of this was arbitrary, not at all. Orders to these effects were read out, and in especially serious cases every single person was made to acknowledge them with a signature. This wasn’t the wild imaginings of a depraved camp boss; it was an order coming from the very top.

  But even if someone received a parcel—you could promise some protector half and still not get your half—then there was nowhere to take that parcel. The gangsters would already be waiting for you in the barracks, so as to snatch it from you in front of everyone and share it with their Vanias and Senias. You immediately had to either eat or sell what you’d been sent. There were all the buyers you could want: guards, bosses, doctors.

  There was in fact a third way out, the most widespread. Many people handed their parcels for safekeeping to people whom they knew in the camp or prison and who had some position or job where they could lock away and hide things. Or they handed them to the free hired workers. There was always a risk in both cases: nobody believed in the good faith of those above him. But this was the only way to save what you had received.