“A PARTY of prisoners from Zolotistoye!”
“Which mine?”
“Suchi (the Bitches’) mine.”
“Call for soldiers to search them. They’ll be too much for you.”
“They’ll miss things. They’re just regulars.”
“No, they won’t. I’ll be there in the doorway.”
“All right, if you think so.”
The prisoners, covered in dirt and dust, were unloaded. This was a group of “special cases”: there were too many broad-shouldered men, too many bandages, and the percentage of surgical patients was far too high for a party from the mines.
Klavdia Ivanovna, the duty doctor, a free worker, came in.
“Shall we begin?”
“Let’s wait until the soldiers come and search them.”
“Are those the new rules?”
“Yes. New rules. You’ll see what it’s all about in a moment, Klavdia.”
“Hey you, with the crutches, move to the middle of the room. Your papers!”
The man, a foreman, handed over the papers: a referral to the hospital. The foreman held back his personal files.
“Take off your bandage. Grisha, hand me some bandages. Our own ones. Klavdia, please examine his fracture.”
Like a white snake, the old bandage slithered onto the floor. The paramedic kicked it aside. The splint turned out to have something bandaged to it: not a knife but a dagger, made from a big nail, the most portable war weapon for the Bitches. As it fell to the floor, the dagger clanged, and Klavdia turned pale.
The soldiers picked up the dagger.
“Take off all the bandages.”
“How about the plaster casts?”
“Break all the plaster casts. New ones can be put on tomorrow.”
The paramedic didn’t even look as he listened to the usual sounds of bits of metal falling to the stone floor. There was a weapon under every single plaster cast. They had been tucked away before being plastered over.
“You realize what this means, Klavdia.”
“I do.”
“So do I. We won’t be writing a report to the authorities, we’ll just tell the head of the mine’s health service by word of mouth. Is that all right, Klavdia?”
“Twenty knives. Warden, tell the doctor, that’s from a party of fifteen prisoners.”
“You call those knives? They’re more like daggers.”
“Now, Klavdia, send back all those who aren’t sick. And then go and see the end of the film. You realize, Klavdia, that this mine has an incompetent doctor: when a patient fell off a truck and broke his bones, he wrote a trauma diagnosis of prolapsus ex machina as if it were prolapsus recti, a rectal prolapse. But he has learned how to plaster up a weapon.”
A despairing and angry pair of eyes was staring at the paramedic.
“Right, anyone sick will be given a hospital bed,” said Klavdia. “Come and see me, one by one.”
The surgical patients, who expected to be sent back, swore foully: they had nothing to lose. Lost hope had loosened their tongues. The gangsters showered the duty doctor, the paramedic, the guards, the male nurses with obscene curses.
“And I’ll cut your eyes out,” one patient even ventured to say.
“There’s nothing you can do to me, you piece of shit. All you could do is cut a sleeping man’s throat. You and your sticks in the mines beat quite a lot of the 1937 politicals to death. Have you forgotten all those old men and four-eyed intellectuals?”
But it wasn’t just the “surgical” criminals who had to be closely watched. It was a far more painful business to expose men trying to get to the TB section: a patient would bring a bacteria-infected gob of spit wrapped in a rag, and it was obvious that a TB patient was being manufactured for the doctor to examine. The doctor would say, “Cough it up into this jar.” This was an on-the-spot test for the presence of Koch bacillus. Before he was examined by the doctor the patient would put the infected gob of spit in his mouth and would, of course, infect himself with TB. But this would mean getting to the hospital, saving himself from what was most terrible of all—pit-face work in a gold mine. It might only be for an hour, a day, or a month.
It was even more painful to expose those who brought some blood in a vial or scratched a finger to add blood to their urine and enter the hospital on those grounds, if only to get a day or even a week in bed. Afterward, come what may.
There were quite a few of that kind: they were the more sophisticated ones, and wouldn’t have put a TB-infected gob of spit in their mouths just to be kept in the hospital. Such men had heard what protein was and why urine was tested, and what the patient could get out of it. Months spent in hospital beds had taught them a lot. There were patients suffering from muscle contracture, which was simulated, so their knees and elbows could be bent straight under anesthetic, Rausch anesthesia. On a couple of occasions, however, the contracture and fusion turned out to be genuine, so that the doctor who was trying to expose them, a man of considerable strength, tore apart living tissue when he tried to straighten a knee: he’d been too eager and had underestimated his own strength.
Most of the newcomers had homemade sores: trophic ulcers made with a needle lubricated with kerosene to cause subcutaneous inflammation. Such patients might or might not be accepted. There were no reliable criteria.
Women sore-makers were particularly common in Elgen state farm; later, when the special Debna women’s mine was opened, giving women their own wheelbarrows, spades, and pickaxes, the number of sore-makers at that mine increased sharply. This mine was where the female nurses hacked a female doctor to death with an ax. She was a fine doctor, Shitsel by name, a gray-haired woman from the Crimea. Previously, she had worked at the hospital, but because of her record she was transferred to the mine and doomed to die.
Klavdia Ivanovna went off to see the end of the showing put on by the camp Culture Brigade; the paramedic went to bed. But an hour later he was awoken: “A party of women prisoners from Elgen.”
This was a group that would have a lot of possessions: a job for the guards. It was a small party, and Klavdia volunteered to admit them on her own. The paramedic thanked her, but no sooner had he fallen asleep than he was awoken by Klavdia jostling him and weeping, weeping bitter tears. What could have happened there?
“I can’t stay here any longer. I can’t stand it. I refuse to be a duty doctor.”
The paramedic threw a handful of cold tap water over his face, dried himself on his sleeve, and went out to the reception room.
Everyone was howling with laughter: the patients, the guards that brought them, the camp guards. A pretty, very pretty girl was tossing and turning on the couch: this wasn’t her first visit to the hospital.
“How are you, Valia Gromova.”
“Well, at last, at last I can see a human being.”
“What’s all the noise about?”
“They won’t admit me to the hospital.”
“Why aren’t we admitting her? She’s got a bad case of TB.”
“Because she’s a dyke,” the foreman retorted crudely. “There’s been an order about her. She’s not to be admitted. After all, she’s been having sex without me. Or without any man—”
“They’re all lying,” Valia Gromova yelled, quite unabashed. “You can see what my fingers are like, the state of the pads. . . .”
The paramedic spat on the floor and went to the next room. Klavdia Ivanovna had an attack of hysterics.
1965
THE GEOLOGISTS
KRIST was woken up one night; the warden on duty took him down endless dark corridors to the office of the chief of the hospital. The chief, a lieutenant colonel in the medical service, was still up. Lvov, a Ministry of the Interior secret police officer, was sitting at the chief’s desk, doodling pictures of bored-looking birds on a sheet of paper.
“Reception-room paramedic Krist has come as you asked, sir.”
The lieutenant colonel waved a hand and the duty warden who’d brou
ght Krist vanished.
“Listen, Krist,” said the boss, “you’re going to have visitors.”
“A prison party is coming,” said the secret policeman.
Krist said nothing, but waited to see what would happen next.
“You’ll clean them up. Disinfection and so on.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Nobody is to know about these people. No communication.”
“We are relying on you,” explained the secret policeman, who then burst out coughing.
“I can’t operate the disinfection chamber on my own, sir,” said Krist. “The controls are a long way from the mixer tap. The steam and the water come in different pipes.”
“So. . . .”
“I need another hospital worker, sir.”
The two officers exchanged looks.
“All right, you can have a male nurse,” said the secret policeman.
“You’ve got it, haven’t you? Not a word to anyone.”
“I’ve got it, sir.”
Krist and the secret policeman left the room. The chief medical officer got up, turned off the ceiling light, and started to put on his greatcoat.
“Where is this group from?” Krist quietly asked the secret policeman as they passed through the big lobby—civilian or military, it didn’t matter which, all the bosses’ offices adhered to the Moscow design.
“Where from?” The secret policeman burst out in loud laughter. “Krist, Krist, I never thought you would ask me a question like that. . . .” Then he enounced in cold tones, “From Moscow, by air.”
“So they don’t know what the camps are like. Prison, interrogation, and all the rest. Anyone who doesn’t know the camps thinks this is the crack that gives them their first breath of free air. From Moscow by air. . . .”
The next night the noisy, spacious vestibule was full of newcomers: officers, officers, and more officers. Majors, lieutenant colonels, full colonels. There was even a general, a young, short, black-eyed man. There wasn’t a single private in the group.
The chief of the hospital, a tall, skinny old man, had trouble bending down to report to the little general: “Everything’s ready for the reception.”
“Excellent, excellent.”
“Bathhouse!”
The chief waved to Krist, and the doors of the reception room opened.
The crowd of officers in greatcoats parted. The starry gold of their epaulets faded into the background, as all the attention of the newcomers and the reception committee was focused on a little group of filthy people wearing torn and crumpled rags. The rags weren’t government issue, they were their civilian clothes, worn during interrogation and ravaged by whatever covered the floors of the cells the prisoners had been lying on.
Twelve men and one woman.
“After you, Anna,” said one prisoner, letting the woman go first.
“Certainly not, you go and have a good wash. I’ll sit here and rest for now.”
The door of the reception room was closed.
Everyone was standing around me, eagerly staring into my eyes, trying to work something out but not yet daring to ask.
“Have you been in Kolyma long?” the boldest man asked, once he saw I was one of those “intellectuals.”
“Since ’37.”
“In ’37 we were all still—”
“Shut up,” another man, who was older, interrupted.
Our guard came in. It was Khabibulin, the secretary of the party organization, the special confidant of the hospital chief. Khabibulin was keeping an eye on the newcomers and on me.
“How about shaving them?”
“The barber’s been called,” said Khabibulin. “He’s a Persian gangster, Yurka.”
The Persian gangster Yurka and his razor soon appeared. He had been given his instructions at the guardhouse, and all he did was grunt.
The newcomers again switched their attention to Krist.
“We won’t get you into trouble, will we?”
“How can you get me into trouble? You must be engineers, aren’t you?”
“Geologists.”
“Geologists, then.”
“Where are we, actually?”
“At Kolyma: five hundred kilometers from Magadan.”
“Ah well, goodbye. A bathhouse, that’s good.”
Every one of the geologists had come back from working abroad; they’d gotten sentences from fifteen to twenty-five years. And their fate was in the hands of a special authority that had all those officers and generals and so few common soldiers.
The “business” run by these generals did not come under the Kolyma or the Far East Construction administration. All that Kolyma gave them was mountain air through the barred windows, bigger rations, three visits to the bathhouse per month, bedding and linen with no lice, and a roof. There was no mention so far of being allowed to go out or to the cinema. Moscow had chosen a polar dacha for the geologists.
The geologists had offered to carry out a major job requiring their professional skills, yet another variation on the theme of Ramzin’s straight-flow boiler.[1]
What became generally known after the “reforging” of prisoners and many a White Sea canal project is that a spark of creative fire can be struck by using an ordinary stick. A moving scale of encouragement and punishment by increased or diminished food rations, crediting working days against a sentence, and hope are enough to turn slave labor into blessed labor.
The little general came a month later. The geologists had said they wanted to go to the cinema, which was available to prisoners and free workers. The balcony, or upper circle, where the bosses used to sit was screened off and reinforced with prison bars. The geologists were given seats next to the bosses at film showings.
The geologists were not allowed to have books from the libraries, except for technical literature.
The party organization secretary, Khabibulin, a sick old Far East Construction man, acting for the first time in his life as a guard, personally carried bundles of the geologists’ washing to the laundry. This was for Khabibulin the most degrading of all his jobs.
The little general came back a month later; the geologists asked if they could have curtains over the windows.
“Curtains,” said Khabibulin miserably, “they have to have curtains.”
The little general was pleased. The geologists’ work was going well. Every ten days the doors of the reception room were opened at night and the geologists could have a bath in the bathhouse.
Krist rarely talked to them. In any case, what could prospecting geologists tell Krist that he hadn’t already learned in the camps?
Then the geologists turned their attention to the Persian barber.
“Don’t talk to them much, Yurka,” Krist said in passing.
“I don’t need some freier to tell me what to do.” The Persian then swore obscenely.
Another bath day passed; the Persian turned up, clearly drunk, or perhaps he had overdone the chifir or was on codeine. Whatever it was, he was too full of energy and in a hurry to get home. He jumped straight out of the guardhouse into the street without waiting for his escort to the camp. Through the open window Krist heard the dry crack of a revolver. The Persian was killed by a guard, a guard he had just shaved, and his curled-up body lay by the porch. The doctor on duty took his pulse and wrote out a certificate. Ashot, another barber, came: Ashot was an Armenian terrorist, from the Armenian Socialist Revolutionary fighters who in 1926 killed three Turkish ministers, the chief victim being Talaat Pasha, who was responsible for the massacre in 1915, when a million Armenians were exterminated. The interrogation service checked Ashot’s personal file, and he was banned from shaving geologists. Instead, they found a barber among the gangsters, and a new principle was introduced: on each occasion it was a new barber who did the shaving. That practice was considered safer, because no friendly relations would be started up. This was the system applied to sentries in Butyrki prison: a sliding posting system.
The geolog
ists never found out anything about the Persian or about Ashot. Their work was going well, and the little general, when he next came, allowed the geologists to have half an hour of exercise. This too was sheer humiliation for the old warden Khabibulin. A guard in a camp of submissive, cowed men with no rights is a big boss. But in this case, serving purely as a guard was something Khabibulin disliked.
His eyes became more and more melancholy, his nose ever redder: Khabibulin had definitely taken to drink. On one occasion he fell headfirst off a bridge into the Kolyma River, but he was saved and could continue his important work as a guard. He meekly carried the parcels of linen to the laundry, meekly swept the room and changed the window curtains.
“Well, how’s life?” Krist would ask Khabibulin. After all, they had been on duty together for more than a year.
“Bad.” Khabibulin sighed.
The little general arrived. The geologists were doing excellent work. Smiling joyfully, the general walked around the geologists’ prison. He was getting a bonus for their work.
Khabibulin stood on the threshold at attention, ramrod straight, as he saw the general off.
“Well, good, good. I can see I was right to rely on them,” the little general said cheerfully. “As for you,” the general turned to look at the guards standing at the threshold, “you should be more polite to them. Or else I’ll have you sons of bitches nailed into your coffins.”
Then the general left.
Khabibulin staggered as far as the reception room, got a double dose of valerian from Krist and drank it, then wrote a request for an immediate transfer to any other job. He showed his request to Krist, hoping for sympathy. Krist tried to explain to him that the general considered those geologists more important than a hundred Khabibulins, but the senior guard’s feelings were so badly hurt that he refused to accept this simple truth.
One night the geologists disappeared.
1965
BEARS
THE KITTEN came out from under the trestle bed and only just managed to jump back when the geologist Filatov flung a boot at it.
“What’s gotten into you?” I asked, putting aside a grease-stained volume of The Count of Monte Cristo.
Kolyma Stories Page 26
