“To Magadan. To be shot. We’ve got death sentences.”
We lay on the back of the three-tonner, huddled, our faces between our knees, our backs against each other’s. The three-tonner had good springs, the highway was in an excellent state, so we were hardly thrown about at all, and we began to freeze to death.
We yelled, we groaned, but the guards showed no mercy. We had to reach Sporny before it got dark.
One of those sentenced to death begged to be allowed to “warm up,” if only for five minutes.
The truck sped to Sporny, where the lights were already on. The pockmarked guard approached.
“You’ll be put in the camp’s special prison for the night; we’ll move on in the morning.”
I was frozen to the marrow of my bones. I could not speak for the freezing cold. I used my last strength to stamp the soles of my cloth boots in the snow. I couldn’t get warm. The soldiers were still looking for the camp bosses. Finally, an hour later, we were taken to the frozen, unheated camp prison. Hoarfrost covered all the walls, and the earth floor was covered in ice. Someone brought in a bucket of water. The lock clanged. How about firewood or a stove?
It was that night in Sporny that all my fingers and toes were frostbitten again, as I tried in vain to get to sleep, if only for a minute.
In the morning we were brought out and put in the truck. The bare hills flashed past; trucks coming the opposite way screeched as they passed. The truck was coming down from the pass and we felt such warmth that we no longer wanted to go anywhere, we wanted to wait, to walk just for a while along this wonderful earth.
The temperature rose by at least ten degrees, and the wind was somehow warm, almost springlike.
“Guard! We need to relieve ourselves.”
How else could we tell the soldiers that we were glad of the warmth, the southern wind, of being rescued from the taiga that had covered our souls in ice.
“All right, get out.”
The guards also enjoyed relaxing, having a smoke. My seeker of justice was now going up to a guard.
“Can we smoke, citizen soldier?”
“We’ll have a smoke. Go back to your place.”
One of the new men refused to get out of the truck. But when he saw the relief stop was being extended, he moved to the edge of the truck and gestured to me.
“Help me get down.”
I stretched out my arms and, although I was a weak goner, I suddenly felt the extraordinary lightness of his body, a deadly lightness. I moved back. Holding the side of the truck, the man took a few steps.
“How warm it is!” But his eyes were dim and utterly without expression.
“All right, let’s go, let’s go. It’s minus thirty.”
Every hour was warmer.
At the refectory in the Palata settlement our guards took their final dinner. The pockmarked one bought me a kilo of bread.
“Here’s some white bread for you. We’ll be there by evening.”
Fine snow was falling when we saw far below us the lights of Magadan. It was about ten degrees below zero. There was no wind. The snow was falling almost perpendicularly, in tiny flakes.
The truck stopped by the district headquarters of the NKVD. The guards entered the building.
A bareheaded man in civilian clothes came out. He was holding an envelope that had been opened.
He called out somebody’s surname in the usual ringing tones. The man with the lightweight body did as he gestured and crawled to one side.
“To the prison.”
The man in civilian clothes vanished inside the building and reappeared a moment later.
He had a different package in his hand.
“Ivanov!”
“Konstantin Ivanovich,” came the reply.
“To the prison.”
“Ugritsky!”
“Sergei Fiodorovich.”
“To the prison.”
“Simonov!”
“Evgeni Petrovich.”
“To the prison.”
I didn’t say goodbye to the guards nor to the men who had come with me to Magadan. Farewells were not customary here.
I and my guards were the only ones left standing by the district headquarters porch.
The man in civilian clothes reappeared on the porch; he had a package in his hand.
“Andreyev. Into the headquarters. I’ll give you a receipt in a minute,” he told my guards.
I entered the building. My first thought was to locate the stove. There it was: a central-heating radiator. A duty officer behind a wooden barrier. A telephone. Not so luxurious as Comrade Smertin’s place at Khattinakh. Perhaps it seemed that way because Smertin’s was the first study of that kind that I had seen during my time at Kolyma.
A steep staircase led from the corridor to the second story.
I didn’t have to wait long. The same man in civilian clothes who’d met us outside came downstairs.
“Come up here,” he said politely.
We went up the narrow stairs to the second floor and reached a door with an inscription: “Y. Atlas, Senior Officer.”
“Sit down.”
I sat down. Most of the tiny office was taken up by the desk. Papers, files, lists of some kind.
Atlas was between thirty-eight and forty. He was a fairly stout, sporty-looking man with black hair and the beginnings of a bald patch.
“Surname?”
“Andreyev.”
“Name, patronymic, article of Criminal Code, sentence?”
I replied.
“Lawyer?”
“Lawyer.”
Atlas leapt to his feet and came to my side of the desk.
“Excellent. Captain Rebrov is going to have a talk with you.”
“And who is Captain Rebrov?”
“The chief of the Combined Law-Enforcement Organs. Go downstairs.”
I went back to my place by the radiator. I pondered all this new information and decided, before it was too late, to eat the kilo of white bread that the guards had given me. There was a cistern of water and a mug attached to it with a chain. The pendulum clock on the wall regularly ticked away the time. Half asleep, I could hear someone stepping quickly as he passed and went upstairs; then the duty officer woke me up.
“You’re to see Captain Rebrov.”
I was taken to the second floor. The door was opened to a small office, and I heard a brusque voice: “Over here!”
“Surname?”
“Andreyev.”
“Name, patronymic? Article of Criminal Code? Sentence? Lawyer?”
“Lawyer.”
Captain Rebrov bent over his desk, bringing his glazed eyes close to mine and asked, “Do you know Parfentiev?”
“Yes, I do.”
Parfentiev had been my foreman in the brigade working at the mine pit face before I ended up in Shmeliov’s brigade. I was transferred from Parfentiev’s to Poturayev’s, and only then to Shmeliov’s. I spent several months working under Parfentiev.
“Yes. I know him. He was my foreman, Dmitri Timofeyevich Parfentiev.”
“Right. Good. So you know Parfentiev?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Do you know Vinogradov?”
“I don’t know Vinogradov.”
“Vinogradov, the chairman of the Far East Court?”
“I don’t know him.”
Captain Rebrov lit a cigarette, took a deep draft, and went on looking at me while thinking about something else.
“So you know Vinogradov, but don’t know Parfentiev?”
“No, I don’t know Vinogradov. . . .”
“Ah, yes. You know Parfentiev, and you don’t know Vinogradov. Never mind!”
Captain Rebrov pressed a button and a bell rang. The door behind me opened.
“To the prison.”
A saucer with a cigarette stub and an uneaten crust of cheese were left in the office of the head of the Combined Law-Enforcement Organs, next to a decanter of water.
The guard led me throug
h Magadan, which was asleep in the dead of night.
“Get a move on!”
“I’m in no hurry.”
“Another word from you,” and the soldier took out his pistol, “and I’ll shoot you like a dog. I can easily write you off.”
“You can’t write me off,” I said. “You’ll have Captain Rebrov to answer to.”
“Move, you bastard.”
Magadan is not a big town. We soon reached the Vaskov Building, as the local prison is called. Vaskov had been the deputy of Berzin [14] when Magadan was being built. The wooden prison was one of the first buildings in Magadan, and the prison kept the name of the man who had built it. Since then, some time ago, a stone prison was built in Magadan, but even this new “modern” building, constructed to the latest penitentiary specifications, is called the Vaskov Building.
After a short exchange of words at the guardhouse I was let into the courtyard of the Vaskov Building. The long, low-built, squat block of the prison was made of heavy planed larch beams. At the other end of the courtyard were two stalls, both wooden buildings.
“The second one,” a voice behind me ordered.
I grabbed the door handle, opened the door, and went in.
There were double bunks, packed with people. But they weren’t packed tight, and there was room. The floor was just earth. A half-barrel stove stood on long iron legs. There was a smell of sweat, Lysol, and dirty bodies.
I had trouble climbing up to a top bunk, where it was warmer, and crawling into a space.
My neighbor woke up. “From the taiga?”
“Yes.”
“Have you got lice?”
“Yes.”
“Then lie down in the corner. We haven’t got lice here. Here there’s disinfection.”
“Disinfection, that’s good,” I thought. “But the main thing is that it’s warm.”
They fed us in the morning: bread, hot water. I wasn’t yet on the list for bread. I took my cloth boots off and put them under my head, lowered my quilted trousers so as to warm my feet, and fell asleep. I woke up twenty-four hours later, when bread was being issued, and I was on the list for all the facilities in the Vaskov Building.
We had broth in which dumplings had been boiled and three spoonfuls of wheat porridge. I slept until the morning of the next day, right until the minute when the orderly’s savage voice woke me.
“Andreyev! Andreyev! Which one is Andreyev?”
I got off the bunks. “Here I am.”
“Go outside, to that porch over there.”
The doors of the original Vaskov Building opened before me and I entered a low, dimly lit corridor. The warden undid the lock, pushed aside a massive iron bolt, and opened a tiny cell with double bunks. Two men were sitting curled up in the corner of the lower bunks.
I went to the window and sat down.
Someone was shaking me from behind. It was my mining foreman, Dmitri Timofeyevich Parfentiev.
“Have you any idea what’s going on?”
“I can’t make head or tail of it. When were you brought here?”
“Three days ago. Atlas brought me in a car.”
“Atlas? He’s the one who interrogated me in the NKVD headquarters. About forty, going bald. Wears civilian clothes.”
“When he brought me here he was wearing a military uniform. What did Captain Rebrov ask you?”
“Whether I knew Vinogradov.”
“Well?”
“Why should I know him?”
“Vinogradov is the Far East Court chairman.”
“You may know that, but I don’t know who he is.”
“I was at college with him.”
I began to understand a few things. Before he was arrested, Parfentiev was the provincial prosecutor in Cheliabinsk, and then the prosecutor in Karelia. When Vinogradov was passing through Partisan he found out that his old university friend was at the pit face, gave him some money, and asked Anisimov, the chief of Partisan, to help Parfentiev. Parfentiev was transferred to work as a blacksmith at the forge. Anisimov informed Smertin in the NKVD of Vinogradov’s request, and Smertin informed Captain Rebrov in Magadan, so the head of the Combined Law-Enforcement Organs started an investigation of Vinogradov’s case. All the lawyers who were imprisoned in the mines of the north were arrested. The rest was up to the interrogator’s technique.
“Why are we here? I was in a wooden stall—”
“We’re being released, you idiot,” said Parfentiev.
“Released? Set free? No, I mean, sent to the transit camp.”
“Yes,” said another man, crawling out into the light and giving me a look of obvious scorn.
He had a well-stuffed fat mug. He was wearing a neat little double-sided fur coat and his fine-cotton shirt was unbuttoned.
“So you know each other? Captain Rebrov didn’t manage to wipe you out. He’s an enemy of the people.”
“And you’re a friend of the people, are you?”
“Not a political one, at least. He didn’t wear the NKVD diamond shoulder badges. He didn’t torment working people. It’s because of you, people like you, that we get put in prison.”
“You’re a gangster, are you?” I asked.
“A gangster to some, a stooge to others.”
“Come on, stop it, stop it,” Parfentiev intervened, trying to protect me.
“Bastard! I won’t stand for it.”
The doors clanged.
“Come out!”
There were about seven men jostling around the guardhouse. Parfentiev and I went up to them.
“You wouldn’t be lawyers, would you?” asked Parfentiev.
“Yes, yes.”
“What’s happened, then? Why are we being let out?”
“Captain Rebrov’s been arrested. There’s been an order to release everyone on his warrants,” some know-all said quietly.
1962
THE TYPHUS QUARANTINE
A MAN IN white overalls stretched out a hand, and Andreyev placed his fragile, salt-saturated tunic into the man’s wide-stretched, pink, scrubbed fingers with their manicured nails. The man waved it away with a shake of his hand.
“I don’t have any underwear,” Andreyev said in an indifferent voice.
Then the paramedic picked up Andreyev’s tunic in both hands, deftly turned the sleeves inside out, and took a close look.
“He’s got them, Lidiya,” he said, then roared at Andreyev: “How did you get so lousy, then?”
Lidiya Ivanovna, the doctor, stopped him in his tracks.
“It isn’t their fault, is it?” she said quietly and reproachfully, emphasizing the word “their”; then she picked up her stethoscope from the table.
Andreyev remembered that red-haired woman for the rest of his life; he blessed her a thousand times and always recalled her with tenderness and warmth. Why? Because in that phrase, the only phrase Andreyev heard her speak, she had emphasized the word “their.” Because of a kind word, said at the right time. Was she ever aware of those blessings he uttered?
It didn’t take long to examine him. And the examination didn’t need a stethoscope.
Lidiya breathed on her purple stamp and forcefully, using both hands, pressed it on a printed form; she added a few words in writing, and Andreyev was taken away.
The guard was waiting in the clinic lobby; instead of taking Andreyev back to the prison, he led him deep into the settlement, to one of the big warehouses. The door next to the warehouse was protected by ten standard layers of barbed wire with a gate patrolled by a sentry wearing a sheepskin coat and carrying a rifle. They entered the yard and approached the warehouse. Bright electric light beamed through the gap in the doorframe. The guard found it hard to open the door, which was enormous, being designed for trucks, not people; he then disappeared inside the warehouse. Andreyev was struck by the smell of dirty bodies, clothes that had been lain in, and sour human sweat. A dull hum of human voices filled this enormous boxlike space. The four-story bunks, made from hewn larch trunks,
were an everlasting structure, made to last for all eternity, like Caesar’s bridges. The enormous warehouse’s shelving had a thousand men lying on it. This was one of a couple of score of old stores packed to the rafters with new, live goods. There was a typhus quarantine in the port and for a whole month there had been no dispatch or, to use the prison term, “party.” The camp’s blood circulation, in which living human beings were the red blood cells, had been stopped. The trucks that transported people stood idle. The mines increased the working day for prisoners. In the town itself the bakeries couldn’t cope with the amount of bread needed; after all, each man had to have half a kilo per day, so they tried baking bread in private apartments. The authorities’ bad temper was made worse by the small groups of prisoner slag, discarded by the mines, which ended up in the town.
In the “section,” which was the fashionable name for the warehouse where Andreyev had been taken, there were more than a thousand men. But it wasn’t immediately obvious that there were so many. People on the top bunks lay naked because it was so hot; on the lower bunks and beneath them they wore pea jackets, quilted waistcoats, and hats. Most were lying on their backs or facedown (nobody could explain why prisoners almost never sleep on their sides). On the massive bunks, their bodies seemed like tumors, or lumps of wood, or bent planks.
People converged in tightly packed groups next to or around a “novelist”—that is, a storyteller—or around some incident, and inevitably there was a fresh incident every minute, given such a crowd of inmates. Some people had been here for more than a month, not going to work, visiting only the bathhouse to have their things disinfected. Twenty thousand working days lost each day, one hundred and sixty thousand working hours, or perhaps three hundred and twenty thousand working hours, since working days varied. Or you could say twenty thousand days of saved lives.
Twenty thousand days of life. There are various ways to interpret the figures; statistics is a devious science.
When food was being distributed, everyone was in their place (food was issued to ten men at a time). There were so many people that those who delivered the food barely had time to distribute breakfast before the time came to distribute lunch. And they had hardly finished distributing lunch before they began to distribute dinner. From morning to evening food was being distributed in the “section.” Yet in the morning all that was given was a day’s ration of bread and tea, which was warm boiled water, with half a herring every other day, while lunch was just soup and dinner just porridge.
Kolyma Stories Page 22
