Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  “What bastards,” I said.

  “Of course they are,” said Zamiatin. “But the meat tasted good. As good as mutton.”

  1959

  DOMINOES

  THE MALE nurses lifted me off the platform of the metrical scales. Their powerful, cold hands wouldn’t let me touch the floor.

  “How much,” shouted the doctor, dipping his pen with a bang into his non-spill inkwell.

  “Forty-eight.”

  I was put on a stretcher. I was a hundred and eighty centimeters tall (almost six feet), my normal weight was eighty kilos. My bones, 42 percent of my gross weight, weighed thirty-two kilos. On that icy evening all I had left—skin, flesh, guts, brains—was sixteen kilos, the same as a bushel of wheat. At the time I couldn’t work all that out, but I vaguely understood that it was being calculated by the doctor who was frowning at me.

  The doctor unlocked his desk drawer, took out a box, from which he removed a thermometer, and then bent over me and cautiously put the thermometer under my left armpit. Then one of the male nurses pressed my left arm to my chest, while the other one grabbed my right wrist with both hands. It was later that I understood the reasons for these practiced, well-rehearsed movements: there was only one thermometer for a hospital of about a hundred beds. The glass tube had wholly new value and importance; it was looked after like a precious heirloom. Only the seriously ill or wholly new patients were allowed to have their temperature taken with this thermometer. Those who were recuperating had their temperatures recorded according to their pulse; only in doubtful cases was the desk drawer unlocked.

  The pendulum clock ticked off ten minutes; the doctor carefully removed the thermometer, and the hospital workers relaxed their grip.

  “Thirty-four point three,” said the doctor. “Can you answer questions?”

  I signaled with my eyes that I could. I was saving my strength. My words came out slowly and with difficulty, as if I were translating from a foreign language. I’d forgotten everything. I had gotten out of the habit of remembering. They finished recording the history of the disease; the nurses had no trouble lifting the stretcher on which I lay supine.

  “Ward six,” said the doctor. “As close as you can to the stove.”

  I was put on a trestle bed by the stove. The mattresses were stuffed with dwarf pine branches, and the pine needles had dried up and fallen off, so that the curling bare twigs under the dirty striped fabric had something menacing about them. Hay dust puffed out of the tightly stuffed dirty pillow. The thin, worn-out cloth blanket, with the word “feet” stitched in gray at one end, hid me from the rest of the world. My arm and leg muscles, which looked like pieces of rope, ached, and my frostbitten fingers and toes throbbed. But the fatigue was greater than the pain. I rolled up in a ball, grabbed my feet with my hands, and pressed my filthy knees, whose skin was as coarsely grained as crocodile hide, against my chin—then I fell asleep.

  Many hours later I woke up. My breakfasts, lunches, and dinners were on the floor next to my bed. I stretched out a hand, grabbed the nearest tin bowl, and started eating nonstop, taking a bite from time to time of my bread ration, which was also lying there. The patients on the other trestle beds looked at me as I swallowed my food. They didn’t ask who I was or where I was from; my crocodile hide told them all they needed to know. They would not have even looked at me had it not been for the fact—which I knew from my own experience—that you can’t take your eyes off someone else who is eating.

  I devoured all the food that had been left. The warmth, the delightful heaviness in my stomach, and more sleep—but not much, because a male nurse had come to fetch me. I threw the ward’s only “walking” gown—it was filthy, covered in cigarette burns, heavy with the sweat it had absorbed from many hundreds of patients—over my shoulders, shoved my feet into enormous slippers, and, moving my legs slowly to keep the slippers from falling off, staggered after the nurse into the treatment room.

  The same young doctor was standing by the window, looking at the street through the glass, which a buildup of ice had made lacy and shaggy. A rag hung from the corner of the windowsill; water was dripping off it, each drip falling into a tin dinner bowl that had been placed beneath it. The iron stove was humming. I stopped, holding on to the nurse with both hands.

  “Let’s get on with it,” said the doctor.

  “I’m cold,” I replied quietly. The food I had just eaten was no longer warming me.

  “Sit down by the stove. Where did you work before you were in prison?”

  I parted my lips and moved my jaw. It was supposed to be a smile. The doctor understood and responded with a smile.

  “My name’s Andrei Mikhailovich,” he said. “You don’t need any treatment.”

  I had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.

  “Really,” the doctor repeated loudly, “you don’t need any treatment. You need to be fed and washed. You need to stay in bed, stay in bed and eat. True, we don’t have any feather mattresses. Well, you can still manage. Keep turning over and you won’t get any bedsores. Stay in bed for two months or so. And then it will be spring.”

  The doctor laughed. I felt joyful, of course. What more could I want! Two whole months! But I didn’t have the strength to express my joy. I held on to the stool and said nothing. The doctor wrote down something in my notes.

  “Off you go.”

  I went back to the ward. I slept and ate. After a week I could walk unsteadily around the ward, down the corridor, and to other wards. I sought out people who were chewing and swallowing: I looked them in the mouth, for the more I rested, the more acutely hungry I became.

  Like in the camp, no one in the hospital was allowed to have spoons. From the start, in the pretrial prison, we had gotten used to doing without knives and forks. We had long ago learned the trick of eating “over the edge,” without a spoon—the soup and the porridge were never so thick that you needed a spoon. A finger, a crust of bread would clean the bottom of the pot or bowl, however deep it was.

  So I went around searching for people who were chewing. This was an urge that could not be resisted, and Andrei the doctor knew all about it.

  At night a male nurse would wake me up. The ward echoed with the usual hospital night noises: rasping, snoring, groans, delirium, coughing—all merged into a peculiar symphony of sounds, if such sounds can be composed into a symphony. But you can take me blindfolded into anywhere that sounds like that, and I’ll recognize the camp hospital.

  There was a lamp on the windowsill: a tin saucerful of some oil, but not cod-liver oil, with a smoky wick made from a twist of cotton wool. It probably wasn’t very late. Our nights began with the end of the work siren, at nine in the evening, and we managed to get to sleep straightaway, once our feet began to warm up.

  “Andrei Mikhailovich wants to see you,” said the male nurse. “Kozlik here will take you.”

  The patient called Kozlik was standing in front of me.

  I went to the tin sink, washed, returned to the ward, and dried my hands and face on the pillowcase. There was one enormous towel made of a mattress cover, which served a ward of thirty men and was issued only in the morning. Andrei Mikhailovich lived on the premises of the very small wards, the sort that patients were put in after operations. I knocked on the door and entered.

  On the desk there were books moved to one side, books that I hadn’t held in my hands for so many years. Books were alien, hostile, superfluous. Next to the books was a teapot, two tin mugs, and a bowl full of some sort of porridge.

  “Would you like a game of dominoes?” asked Andrei Mikhailovich, giving me a friendly look. “If you have the time. . . .”

  I hate dominoes. This is the stupidest, most nonsensical, and boring game there is. Even bingo is more interesting, not to mention cards, any card game. The best would be a game of chess, or at least checkers: I cast a sidelong glance at the cupboard to see if there might be a chessboard, but there wasn’t. But I couldn’t offend Andrei Mikhailovich by refus
ing. I had to entertain him, to repay one good deed with another. Never in my life had I played dominoes, but I was sure that it didn’t require much intelligence to master the game.

  In any case, there were two mugs of tea and a bowl of porridge on the table. And it was warm.

  “Let’s drink the tea,” said Andrei Mikhailovich. “Here’s the sugar. Make yourself at home. Eat this porridge and talk about whatever you want to talk about. Not that you can do both things at the same time.”

  I ate the porridge and the bread, and drank three mugfuls of tea with sugar. I hadn’t seen sugar for several years. I warmed myself up, and Andrei Mikhailovich shuffled the domino tiles.

  I knew that whoever had a double six began the game: Andrei Mikhailovich threw a double six. After that the players take turns placing tiles according to the number of spots. That was all there was to it, and I boldly got into the spirit of the game, sweating all the time, and burping from all that I had eaten and drunk.

  We were playing on Andrei Mikhailovich’s bed. It was a pleasure to look at the feather pillow in its dazzling white pillowcase, to see someone else squeezing it with his hand.

  “Our game,” I said, “is missing its most enchanting side. Dominoes players should bang their tiles on to the table with a wave of the arm.” I really wasn’t joking. That was what seemed to me to be the key element in a game of dominoes.

  “Let’s move to the desk,” said Andrei Mikhailovich obligingly.

  “No, there’s no need, I was just recalling all the nuances of this game.”

  The game took some time. We were telling each other our life stories. Andrei Mikhailovich was a doctor and did not work with the gangs at the mine pit face. He only saw the consequences of that work, in the human refuse, remains, rejects, which the mine dumped in the hospital and the morgue. I too was human slag from the mines.

  “Well, so you’ve won,” said Andrei Mikhailovich. “Congratulations, and here is your prize.” He took a plastic cigarette case from a bedside table. “When did you last have a cigarette?”

  I tore off a piece of newspaper and rolled myself a cigarette. There’s nothing better for homegrown tobacco than newsprint. The traces of printer’s ink don’t spoil the aromas of the tobacco, in fact they enhance it superbly. I lit up the strip of paper from the smoldering embers in the stove, greedily inhaling the nauseously sweet fumes as I smoked the cigarette.

  Tobacco was in very short supply for us, and I should have given up smoking long ago, since the conditions were ideal, but I have never given up. It was a frightening thought that I might of my own free will deprive myself of this, the prisoner’s sole major pleasure.

  “Good night,” said Andrei Mikhailovich with a smile. “I was getting ready for bed, but I wanted a game so badly. Thank you.”

  I left his room for the dark corridor. Someone was by the wall, blocking my path. I recognized Kozlik by his silhouette.

  “What’s up? Why are you here?”

  “For a smoke. I’d like a smoke. Did he give you any?”

  I felt ashamed of my greed, ashamed that I hadn’t thought of Kozlik or anyone else in the ward, and hadn’t brought them a cigarette stub, a crust of bread, or a handful of porridge.

  And Kozlik had been waiting for several hours in the dark corridor.

  A few more years passed, the war ended, General Vlasov’s men [11] replaced us in the gold mines, and I got sent to the Lesser Zone in the transit barracks of the Western Administration. Enormous barracks with multistory bunks housed five to six hundred men each. People were sent from here to the western mines.

  There was no sleep at night in this zone. New trainloads arrived, and in the “Lenin corner” of the zone, which was carpeted with the gangsters’ dirty quilted blankets, there were concerts every night. What concerts! There were famous singers and storytellers, not just from the camp propaganda brigades but from higher up. There was a baritone from Harbin, who imitated Leshchenko and Vertinsky; there was Vadim Kozin, who imitated himself; and a great number of others who sang nonstop for the gangsters, performing the best of their repertoire. Next to me slept a tank regiment lieutenant, Svechnikov, a tender, rosy-cheeked youth who had been condemned by a military tribunal for offenses committed as a serving officer. Here he was also being investigated: while working in the mine, he was caught eating human flesh from the morgue, after hacking it off (“not the fatty bits, of course,” as he explained perfectly calmly).

  In a transit barracks you can’t choose your neighbors, and no doubt there are worse crimes than dining on a human corpse.

  Very, very rarely did a paramedic enter the Lesser Zone to examine those who were running a temperature. The paramedic refused even to look at the carbuncles that were all over my body. My neighbor Svechnikov knew the paramedic from the hospital morgue and talked to him as if they were good friends. Suddenly the paramedic mentioned Andrei Mikhailovich.

  I begged the paramedic to take a note to Andrei Mikhailovich; the hospital where he was working was about a kilometer from the Lesser Zone.

  My plans changed. Now I had to stay in the zone until I had an answer from Andrei Mikhailovich.

  The works manager had already made a note of me and listed me for each party of prisoners leaving the transit barracks. But the mine representatives who took on these parties were just as insistent on crossing my name off the lists. They suspected something amiss, and my appearance was enough for that.

  “Why don’t you want to go?”

  “I’m sick. I need to go to the hospital.”

  “The hospital’s no place for you. We’ll send you to do roadworks tomorrow. Are you willing to make brooms?”

  “I won’t go to roadworks. I won’t make brooms.”

  Day after day passed, and one party after another left. There wasn’t sight or sound of the paramedic or of Andrei Mikhailovich.

  Toward the end of the week I managed to get a medical examination at the outpatients’ clinic about a hundred yards from the Lesser Zone. My fist was clutching a second note for Andrei Mikhailovich. The clerk in the clinic took it from me and promised to give it to Andrei Mikhailovich the next morning.

  While I was being examined, I asked the chief of the clinic about Andrei Mikhailovich.

  “Yes, there is a doctor of that name among the prisoners. There’s no reason why you should see him.”

  “I know him personally.”

  “Lots of people do.”

  The paramedic who’d taken the note from me in the Lesser Zone was standing there. I quietly asked him, “Where’s the note?”

  “I’ve never even set eyes on any note.”

  If I didn’t find out anything about Andrei Mikhailovich by the day after tomorrow, I was going to leave . . . to do roadworks, or to a village collective, to a mine, to hell and beyond. . . .

  The evening of the following day, after the roll call, I was summoned to see the dentist. I went, thinking there had been some mistake, but in the corridor I saw Andrei Mikhailovich’s familiar black fur jacket. We hugged each other.

  Twenty-four hours later I was summoned again. Four patients were taken from the camp and driven to the hospital. Two were lying in an embrace on a low sled, two followed the sled on foot. Andrei Mikhailovich had not had time to tell me what my diagnosis was: I didn’t know what was the matter with me. My illness—dystrophy, pellagra, scurvy—hadn’t developed enough to make it necessary to admit me to the camp hospital. I knew I was going to a surgical ward. That was where Andrei Mikhailovich worked, but what illness could I present that required surgery? I didn’t have a hernia. Osteomyelitis of four fingers following frostbite was agonizing, but it wasn’t enough to be hospitalized. I was sure that Andrei Mikhailovich would find a way of telling me in advance, that we would meet somewhere.

  The horses were approaching the hospital, and the male nurses pulled out the stretcher patients, while I and my new partner sat on a bench, took our clothes off, and began washing. Each of us was given a large bowl of warm water.

/>   An elderly doctor in white overalls came into the washroom and looked over the top of his glasses at us.

  “What are you here for?” he asked my partner, putting a finger on his shoulder.

  The man turned around and, with a grimace, pointed to an enormous inguinal hernia.

  I waited to be asked the same and decided to complain of stomach pains.

  But the elderly doctor gave me an indifferent look and left.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “Nikolai Ivanovich, the main surgeon here. He’s in charge of the department.”

  A male nurse issued our linen.

  “Where do I put you?” That was addressed to me.

  “How the hell do I know!” I said, letting my feelings rip: I was no longer afraid.

  “Well, what is actually wrong with you, tell me!”

  “My belly aches.”

  “Appendicitis, I expect,” said the nurse, who was an old hand.

  I saw Andrei Mikhailovich only the next day. He had warned the chief surgeon that I was being hospitalized with semi-acute appendicitis. That evening Andrei Mikhailovich told me his sorry story.

  He had gone down with tuberculosis. The X-rays and the laboratory analyses were grim. The district hospital put in a request for the prisoner Andrei Mikhailovich to be transferred to the mainland for treatment. He was on the ship home when someone informed Cherpakov, the head of the medical department, that Andrei Mikhailovich’s illness was false, imaginary, “fake” to use the camp terminology.

  It may well be that nobody informed on him: Major Cherpakov was just a worthy son of his age of suspicions, mistrust, and vigilance.

  The major was furious and arranged to have Andrei Mikhailovich removed from the ship and sent to the remotest place possible, far from the area where we had met. Andrei Mikhailovich had already traveled a thousand kilometers in sub-zero temperatures. In the remote region, however, it turned out that there wasn’t a single doctor capable of performing an artificial pneumothorax. Andrei Mikhailovich had already had several insufflations, but the vicious major had declared pneumothorax to be a deceitful trick.