Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  “What fools those surgeons are,” he thought, as he lit a cigarette after Merzliakov had left. “They don’t know topographical anatomy, or they’ve forgotten it, and they never have known what reflexes are. X-rays are their only answer. If they haven’t got an X-ray, they can’t be sure even about a simple fracture. Yet they’re so conceited.” Piotr Ivanovich, naturally, had no doubt that Merzliakov was a malingerer. “All right, he can stay in bed for a week. That week will give us time to do all the analyses, so we jump through all the hoops. We’ll stick all the right bits of paper in his notes.” Piotr Ivanovich smiled as he anticipated the theatrical effect of this, his next unmasking.

  A week later the hospital would be getting a party of patients ready to be shipped home to the mainland. The papers were being drawn up in the ward and the chairman of the medical commission had come from the administration building to examine personally the patients whom the hospital had prepared for dispatch. The chairman’s job was limited to examining the documentation, checking that the proper formulas had been used—actual examination of a patient took only thirty seconds.

  “I have in my lists a certain Merzliakov. The guards broke his back a year ago. I’d like to send him off. He’s recently been transferred to the neurology section. Here are his documents, all ready for dispatch.” The chairman of the commission turned to face the neurologist.

  “Bring Merzliakov,” said Piotr Ivanovich. They brought in the patient, bent nearly double. The chairman gave him a cursory glance.

  “What a gorilla,” he said. “Yes, of course, there’s no point keeping men like that.” Picking up his pen, he reached for the lists.

  “Personally, I’m not signing for him,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a clear, loud voice. “He’s a malingerer, and tomorrow I shall have the privilege of showing him up to you and to the surgeon.”

  “Right, then we’ll leave him out,” said the chairman indifferently, and put his pen down. “Anyway, it’s time we stopped, it’s getting late.”

  “He’s a malingerer, Seriozha,” Piotr Ivanovich said as he took the surgeon by the arm, when they were leaving the ward.

  The surgeon freed his arm.

  “He may be,” he said, frowning with distaste. “Good luck with exposing him. You’ll get an enormous amount of pleasure.”

  The next day, at a meeting with the head of the hospital, Piotr Ivanovich reported in detail on Merzliakov’s case.

  “I think,” he concluded, “that we can expose Merzliakov in two stages. First comes Rausch anesthesia, which you, Seriozha, have forgotten about,” he said triumphantly, turning to face the surgeon. “That should have been done straightaway. Then if Rausch anesthesia doesn’t work,” Piotr Ivanovich spread his arms, “it’s shock therapy. That’s a very intriguing procedure, I assure you.”

  “Not too intriguing?” asked Aleksandra Sergeyevna, the manager of the biggest section in the hospital, the tuberculosis section. She was a stout, heavily built woman who had only recently arrived from European Russia.

  “Well,” said the hospital chief, “for a bastard like that. . . .” The presence of ladies didn’t inhibit him much.

  “Let’s see what the Rausch anesthesia does,” said Piotr Ivanovich in a conciliatory tone.

  Rausch is short-term anesthesia administered by an overwhelming dose of ether. The patient goes to sleep for fifteen or twenty minutes, enough time for a surgeon to manipulate a dislocation, amputate a finger, or lance an infected boil.

  The hospital chiefs, dressed in white gowns, surrounded an operating table on which a submissive, half-bent Merzliakov had been put. Male nurses picked up the linen straps that usually tie patients down on the operating table.

  “No need, no need,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich, as he ran forward. “Straps are the last thing we need.”

  Merzliakov’s face was turned upward. The surgeon placed an anesthesia mask over it and picked up a bottle of ether.

  “Start, Seriozha!”

  The ether began dripping.

  “Breathe in deeper, deeper, Merzliakov! Count aloud!”

  “Twenty-six, twenty-seven,” Merzliakov counted in a lazy voice; then, suddenly stopping counting, he started saying broken phrases, making no sense at first, some of them obscene curses.

  Piotr Ivanovich was holding Merzliakov’s left hand. After a few minutes, that hand relaxed and Piotr Ivanovich let go of it. The hand fell gently, like a dead object, onto the edge of the table. Piotr Ivanovich slowly and solemnly unbent Merzliakov’s body. Everyone gasped with amazement.

  “Now tie him down,” Piotr Ivanovich told the nurses.

  Merzliakov opened his eyes and saw the hospital chief’s hairy fist.

  “How about that, you reptile?” the chief was rasping at him. “You’ll be charged and tried.”

  “Congratulations, Piotr Ivanovich, congratulations!” repeated the chairman of the commission, clapping the neurologist on the shoulder. “To think that only yesterday I was about to give that gorilla his freedom!”

  “Untie him!” ordered Piotr Ivanovich. “Get off the table.”

  Merzliakov hadn’t fully regained consciousness. His temples throbbed, and he could still taste the sickeningly sweet ether in his mouth. Even now he didn’t understand whether he was awake or dreaming, and it may be that he’d had dreams like this before.

  “To hell with the lot of you!” he suddenly yelled out, and bent himself double, as he had been.

  Broad-shouldered, bony, his thick long fingers almost touching the floor, his eyes clouded, and his hair disheveled, Merzliakov really did look like a gorilla. He left the bandaging room and Piotr Ivanovich was told that the patient Merzliakov was lying on his bed in his usual posture. The doctor ordered him to be brought to his office.

  “You’ve been exposed, Merzliakov,” said the neurologist. “But I’ve asked the chief, and you won’t be charged, you won’t be sent to a punishment mine. You’ll simply be discharged from hospital and go back to your mine to do what you were doing. You’re a hero, man. You’ve pulled the wool over our eyes for a whole year.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” said the gorilla, not lifting his eyes.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? We’ve only just straightened you out!”

  “Nobody straightened me out.”

  “Look, dear man,” said the neurologist. “There’s no need for all this. I wanted to do it the nice way. Otherwise, watch out, because in a week’s time you yourself will be asking to be discharged.”

  “What do I care what’s going to happen in a week’s time?” Merzliakov said quietly. How could he explain that just one extra week, an extra day, an extra hour spent somewhere that was not the mine was his idea of happiness. If the doctor couldn’t understand that, how could he explain it? Merzliakov said nothing and stared at the floor.

  Merzliakov was taken away; Piotr Ivanovich went to see the hospital chief.

  “Well, you could do it tomorrow, instead of in a week,” said his boss after he’d listened to Piotr Ivanovich’s proposal.

  “I promised him a week,” said Piotr Ivanovich. “It won’t bankrupt the hospital.”

  “All right,” said the chief. “In a week, then. But bring me along. Are you going to tie him down?”

  “You can’t tie him down,” said the neurologist. “He’d dislocate an arm or a leg. He’ll be held down.” Taking Merzliakov’s notes with him, Piotr Ivanovich wrote in the treatment column “shock therapy” and named a date.

  Shock therapy consists of intravenously injecting the patient with a quantity of camphor oil several times higher than the dose used subcutaneously for maintaining a seriously ill patient’s cardiac activity. The camphor oil acts by causing a sudden attack, like an attack of violent madness of epilepsy. A rush of camphor causes a sharp increase in all of the patient’s muscular activity and motor forces. Muscles are tensed as never before and the patient’s strength, although he has lost consciousness, is increased tenfold. The attack lasts several minut
es.

  Several days passed without Merzliakov thinking of unbending of his own free will. The morning named in his notes came and he was taken to see Piotr Ivanovich. Any entertainment is highly appreciated in the north, so the doctor’s office was crowded. Eight burly male nurses were lined up against the wall. A divan was placed in the middle of the office.

  “We’ll do it here,” said Piotr Ivanovich, getting up from his desk. “We shan’t bother the surgeons. Where’s Sergei Fiodorovich, by the way?”

  “He’s not coming,” said Anna Ivanovna, the sister on duty. “He said he was busy.”

  “Busy, busy,” repeated Piotr Ivanovich. “It would do him good to watch me doing his job for him.”

  Merzliakov’s sleeve was rolled up and the paramedic rubbed some iodine on his arm. Taking a syringe in his right hand, the paramedic pierced a vein near the patient’s elbow joint. Dark blood flowed through the needle into the syringe. With a gentle movement of his thumb the paramedic pressed the plunger and a yellow solution began entering the vein.

  “Get it in as fast as you can!” said Piotr Ivanovich. “And then stand aside quickly. As for you,” he told the male nurses, “hold him.”

  Merzliakov’s enormous body leapt up and writhed in the nurses’ hands. Eight men were holding him down. He rasped, he struggled, he kicked, but the nurses were holding tight and he started quieting down.

  “You can restrain a tiger like that, a tiger,” shouted Piotr Ivanovich in his delight. “On the other side of Lake Baikal that’s how they catch tigers by hand. Now watch closely,” he told the hospital chief, “see how Gogol exaggerated. Do you remember the end of Taras Bulba? ‘Almost thirty men were hanging on to his arms and legs.’ Well, this gorilla is rather bigger than Taras Bulba. And he only needs eight men.”

  “Yes, yes,” said the chief. He didn’t remember Gogol, but he did like the shock therapy enormously.

  The next morning Piotr Ivanovich did his rounds and stopped at Merzliakov’s bed.

  “Well, then,” he asked, “what’s your decision?”

  “You can discharge me,” said Merzliakov.

  1956

  THE DWARF PINE

  IN THE far north, where the taiga meets the treeless tundra, among the dwarf birches, the low-growing rowan bushes with their surprisingly large, bright yellow, juicy berries, and the six-hundred-year-old larches (they reach maturity at three hundred years), there is a special tree, the dwarf pine. It is a distant relative of the Siberian cedar or pine, an evergreen bush with a trunk that is thicker than a human arm and two or three meters long. It doesn’t mind where it grows; its roots will cling to cracks in the rocks on mountain slopes. It is manly and stubborn, like all northern trees. Its sensitivity is extraordinary.

  It’s late autumn and snow and winter are long overdue. For many days there have been low, bluish clouds moving along the edge of the white horizon: storm clouds that look as if they are covered in bruises. This morning the piercing autumn wind has turned ominously quiet. Is there a hint of snow? No. There won’t be any snow. The dwarf pine hasn’t lain down yet. Days pass, and still there’s no snow and the heavy clouds wander about somewhere behind the bare hills, while a small pale sun has risen in the high sky, and everything is as it should be in autumn.

  Then the dwarf pine bends. It bends lower and lower, as if under an immense, ever-increasing weight. Its crown scratches the rock and huddles against the ground as it stretches out its emerald paws. It is making its bed. It’s like an octopus dressed in green feathers. Once it has lain down, it waits a day or two, and now the white sky delivers a shower of snow, like powder, and the dwarf pine sinks into hibernation, like a bear. Enormous snowy blisters swell up on the white mountain: the dwarf pine bushes in their winter sleep.

  When winter ends, but a three-meter layer of snow still covers the ground and in the gullies the blizzards have compacted the snow so firmly that only an iron tool can shift it, people search nature in vain for any signs of spring. The calendar says that it’s high time spring came. But the days are the same as in winter. The air is rarefied and dry, just as it was in January. Fortunately, human senses are too crude and their perceptions too primitive. In any case humans have only their five senses, which are not enough to foretell or intuit anything.

  Nature’s feelings are more subtle. We already know that to some extent. Do you remember the salmon family of fish that come and spawn only in the river where the eggs they hatched from were spawned? Do you remember the mysterious routes taken by migratory birds? There are quite a few plants and flowers known to act as barometers.

  And so the dwarf pine rises amid the boundless white snowy wastes, amid this complete hopelessness. It shakes off the snow, straightens up to its full height, raises its green, ice-covered, slightly reddish needles toward the sky. It can sense what we can not: the call of spring. Trusting in spring, it rises before anyone else in the north. Winter is over.

  It might rise for other reasons: a bonfire. The dwarf pine is too trusting. It dislikes winter so much that it will trust the heat of a fire. If you light a fire in winter next to a bent, twisted, hibernating dwarf pine bush, it will rise up. When the fire goes out, the disillusioned pine, weeping with disappointment, bends again and lies down where it had been. And snow covers it again.

  No, it is not just a predictor of the weather. The dwarf pine is a tree of hope, the only evergreen tree in the Far North. Against the radiant white snow, its matt-green coniferous paws speak of the south, of warmth, of life. In summer it is modest and goes unnoticed. Everything around it is hurriedly blooming, trying to blossom during the short northern summer. Spring, summer, and autumn flowers race one another in a single furious stormy flowering season. But autumn is close, and the larch is stripped bare as it scatters its fine, yellow needles; the light-brown grass curls up and withers, the forest is emptied, and then you can see in the distance the enormous green torches of the dwarf pine burning in that forest amid the pale yellow grass and the gray moss.

  I always used to think of the dwarf pine as the most poetic Russian tree, rather better than the much vaunted weeping willow, the plane tree, or the cypress. And dwarf pine firewood burns hotter.

  1960

  THE RED CROSS

  CAMP LIFE is organized in such a way that only a medical worker can offer a prisoner any real, effective help. Protecting labor means protecting health, and that means protecting life. The camp authorities are numerous: the camp chief and the supervisors subordinate to him; the chief guard with his detachment of fighting men serving as escort guards; the chief of the district section of the Ministry of Internal Affairs with his organization for investigation and interrogation; the camp enlightenment organizer, who is the head of the culture and education section and has his own inspectorate. The maintenance of the regime is entrusted to the benevolence or malevolence of these people. As far as the prisoners are concerned, all of these people stand for oppression and compulsion. These people force prisoners to work, they guard them night and day in case prisoners try to escape, watch them in case they eat or drink more than they should. All these people repeat, every day and every hour, just one order: “Work! Move!”

  Only one person in the camp doesn’t address the prisoners with these words that the camp finds so terrible, loathsome, and hateful. This person is the doctor. The doctor uses different words: “Rest, you’re tired, don’t work tomorrow, you’re sick.” Only the doctor refrains from sending a prisoner into the white winter darkness, to the ice-covered rock pit face for many hours every day. The doctor is by profession the prisoner’s protector, shielding him from the bosses’ arbitrary orders, from the excessive enthusiasm of the old hands in the service of the camps.

  There were years when big printed announcements were hung up in camp barracks: “The Prisoner’s Rights and Obligations.” There were a lot of obligations and not many rights: the “right” to make a complaint to the boss was for individuals only; the “right” to write a letter to relatives was only t
hrough the camp censors; the “right” to medical assistance. . . .

  This last right was extremely important, even though the assistance was perfunctory. In many mine clinics dysentery was treated by potassium permanganate, which was the same solution that was used in a rather thicker form to anoint festering sores or frostbitten digits.

  A doctor could officially exempt a prisoner from manual labor by a note in a book; he could send him to a hospital bed, or find him a place in a sanatorium, or increase his ration. The main thing in a labor camp was that a doctor determined the “labor category,” the degree to which a man was capable of manual labor, which then determined the norm he had to fulfill. A doctor could even recommend release from prison on the grounds of an invalid state, according to the notorious 450th article of the Criminal Code. Nobody could force a man to do manual labor if he had been exempted from work for reasons of illness. The doctor had total discretion. Only senior medical officers could overrule him. As far as medicine was concerned, the doctor did not answer to anyone.

  It must also be remembered that control over what products went into the cooking pots was the job of the doctor, as was supervision of the quality of the food that was cooked.

  The prisoner’s only defender, his real defender, was the camp doctor. His power was very great, for none of the camp bosses was able to interfere with the actions of a specialist professional. If a doctor gave a wrong or misleading diagnosis, only a medical worker of superior or equal status—another professional—could be the judge. Almost all the camp chiefs were at war with their medics; the demands of their work pulled them in opposite directions. A boss would want group B (sick persons temporarily exempted from work) to be as few as possible, so that the camp could send the maximum number of people out on manual labor. But the doctor could see that the boundaries of good and evil were being transgressed, that people going out to work were sick, tired, emaciated and therefore had a right to be released from labor in far greater numbers than the authorities considered necessary.