Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  We spent the night in a cabin belonging to the man’s eldest son, Andrei. Andrei Bugreyev was about forty.

  “Why haven’t you joined me as a shaft digger?” asked Vilemson.

  “My father disapproves,” said Andrei Bugreyev.

  “You could earn yourself some money!”

  “We’ve got all the money we need. There are lots of wild animals here. And timber to be felled and chopped, too. And a lot of work around the house. Granddad makes a plan for each one of us. A three-year plan,” said Andrei, smiling.

  “Here, have a newspaper.”

  “I mustn’t. My father will find out. And anyway I’ve almost forgotten how to read.”

  “How about your son? He’s getting on fifteen, isn’t he?”

  “Vania can’t read or write at all. Talk to my father, there’s no point talking to me.” Andrei started furiously tugging off his boots. “But is it true that they’re going to build a school here?”

  “It’s true. It’ll be opened in a year’s time. But here you are, refusing to work with the prospectors. I need every man I can get.”

  “Where are all your men, then?” asked Andrei, tactfully changing the subject.

  “At Krasny spring. We’re poking around in the old prospecting shafts. But Ivan Stepanovich has a map, doesn’t he, Andrei?”

  “He hasn’t got any map. That’s all idle talk. Rubbish.”

  Suddenly an alarmed and angry face appeared. It was Maria, Andrei’s wife.

  “No, there is a map. There is, there is!”

  “Maria!”

  “There is! There is! I saw it myself ten years ago.”

  “Maria!”

  “Why the hell do we keep that damned map? Why can’t Vania read or write? We live like wild animals. We’ll be covered in grass, next thing.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Vilemson. “There’ll be a settlement. Then a town. There’ll be an ore-processing plant. There’ll be life. There may not be any singers from Vienna, but there will be schools, theaters. And your Vania will be an engineer.”

  “He won’t, he won’t,” said Maria, weeping. “Now it’s time for him to get married. But what girl would marry a man who can’t read or write?”

  “What’s all this noise about?” Ivan was standing on the threshold. “Maria, go back to your place, it’s time you were asleep. As for you, my good fellows, don’t bring quarrels into my family. I do have a map, and I’m not going to give it to you. We can live without any of that.”

  “We can manage without your map,” said Vilemson. “A year’s work and we’ll draw up our own map. The natural wealth is for everyone. Tomorrow Vasilchikov is bringing the plans. We’re going to fell the forest to build a settlement.”

  Ivan Stepanovich slammed the door as he left. Everyone went to bed as quickly as they could.

  I was woken up by the presence of a lot of people. Dawn was cautiously making its way into the room. Vilemson was sitting on the floor by the wall, his dirty bare feet stretched out in front of him, while the whole Bugreyev family was noisily breathing around him: all eight sons, all eight daughters-in-law, twenty grandsons, and fifteen granddaughters. Actually, the grandchildren were breathing somewhere on the porch. The only person missing was Ivan Stepanovich and his elderly wife, the beak-nosed Serafima Ivanovna.

  “Is that how it is to be?” Andrei’s breathless voice was asking.

  “Yes.”

  “How about him, then?” And all the Bugreyevs sighed deeply, then fell silent.

  “What about him?” Vilemson asked firmly.

  “Granddad will die,” Andrei pronounced in a sorrowful voice, and all the Bugreyevs sighed again.

  “Perhaps he won’t,” Vilemson ventured to say.

  “And Granny will die, too.” The daughters-in-law burst into tears.

  “Your mother is certainly not going to die,” Vilemson assured them, adding, “though she is getting on.”

  Suddenly everyone began to move about noisily. The younger grandchildren dove into the bushes, the daughters-in-law dashed back to their cabins. Grandfather Ivan Stepanovich was slowly approaching us from his cabin; he was clutching with both hands an enormous, dirty bundle of papers that smelled of earth.

  “Here’s the map.” Ivan Stepanovich held on to the sheets of parchment. His fingers were trembling. Serafima Ivanovna was looking over his mighty back. “Here, I’m handing it over. It’s been twenty years. Serafima, forgive me; Andrei, Piotr, Nikolai, all my flesh and blood, forgive me.” Bugreyev burst out weeping.

  “Come on, come on, Ivan Stepanovich,” said Vilemson. “Don’t be upset. You should be pleased, not distressed.” He then told me to keep close to Bugreyev. The old man had no intention of dying. He quickly calmed down; he seemed to shake off old age and chatted from morning to evening, grabbing me, Vilemson, Vasilchikov by the shoulder, constantly telling us stories about the Belgians, what had happened, what used to be there, the profit the owners made. The old man’s memory was very good.

  The bundle of parchment that smelled of earth contained a geological map of the district, compiled by the Belgians. There were ores: gold, iron. . . . There were precious stones: topaz, turquoise, beryl. . . .

  There were semiprecious gems: agate, jasper, amethyst, malachite. . . . The only things missing were the stones that had brought Vilemson here.

  Ivan Stepanovich had not handed over the map for diamonds. Only thirty years later were diamonds found on the Vishera.

  1959

  UNCONVERTED

  I LOVINGLY hang on to my old portable stethoscope. It was a graduation present from Nina Semionovna, who ran the practicals for the internal diseases courses.

  This stethoscope is a symbol marking my return to life, a promise of freedom, of liberty, a promise that was kept. Mind you, freedom and liberty are different things. I was never free, I was merely at liberty during my whole adult life. But all that came later, much later than the day when I accepted that gift with a hint of concealed pain, a hint of concealed sadness, as if the stethoscope, the symbol marking my main victory, my main success in the Far North, where the line runs between death and life, should have been presented to somebody else, but not to me. I felt this all acutely—I don’t know whether I understood it, but I definitely felt it as I put the stethoscope away next to my body under the well-worn camp blanket: the blanket had been a soldier’s blanket and was now serving its second or third term, issued to those taking the courses. My frostbitten fingers stroked the stethoscope, unable to work out whether it was made of wood or iron. Once, when I was taking things out of a bag, my own bag, without looking, I pulled out the stethoscope instead of a spoon. That was a very significant mistake.

  Former prisoners who have been lucky enough to have an easy camp life—if anyone’s life in the camps could ever be easy—consider that the hardest time in their life was the time after their release when they had no rights, when they wandered from one place to another, when it was impossible to find any permanence in life, the permanence that helped them survive in the camps. Such people somehow adapted to the camp, as the camp adapted to them, giving them food, a roof, and work. Now they were suddenly forced to change their habits. People saw their hopes, however modest, crushed. Dr. Kalembet, who had served five years of his camp sentence, couldn’t cope with freedom after the camps. A year later, he killed himself, leaving a note: “The fools won’t let me live.” But the fools weren’t the problem. Another doctor, Dr. Miller, spent an extraordinary amount of energy throughout the war trying to prove that he was a Jew, not a German: he shouted it from the rooftops and underlined it in every form he filled out. Dr. Miller knew that fate doesn’t like to joke. He succeeded in proving that he wasn’t a German. He was released when he had served his term. But after a year of life in freedom Dr. Miller was charged with being a cosmopolitan. Actually, Dr. Miller was not charged at first. A sophisticated boss, who read the newspapers and kept up with new fiction, invited Dr. Miller for a preliminary chat. Orders are orders
, but guessing what the “party line” will be before the order comes gives sophisticated bosses great satisfaction. Whatever had begun in the center was bound eventually to reach Chukotka, Indigirka, Yana, and finally Kolyma. Dr. Miller understood all this very well. In the village of Arkagala, where he was working as a doctor, a piglet had drowned in a pit full of sewage. The piglet suffocated in excrement but was dragged out, and this led to one of the most bitter disputes, whose resolution was a matter for all the social organizations to take part in. The free settlement, about a hundred bosses and engineers with their families, demanded that the piglet be handed over to the refectory for free employees: this would be a rare find—pork chops, hundreds of them. The bosses were salivating. But Kucherenko, the camp chief, insisted on the piglet being sold to the camp. The whole camp, everyone behind the wire, spent several days discussing the fate of the piglet. Everything else was forgotten. There were meetings in the settlement: the party organization, the trade union organization, the soldiers in the guards detachment.

  Dr. Miller, a former prisoner and now the chief of the medical services in the settlement and the camp, was obliged to decide this thorny question. And he did so, in the camp’s favor. A document was drawn up, stating that the piglet had drowned in excrement but could be used for the camp cook pot. Such documents were quite common in Kolyma. Stewed fruit that stank of kerosene: “unfit for sale in the free workers’ shop but may be filtered and sold for the camp cook pot.”

  It was the day before his chat about cosmopolitanism that Miller signed this document about the piglet. This is just a matter of chronology, something that sticks in the memory as an important, notable incident in life.

  After his chat with the interrogator Miller didn’t go home: he went into the zone, put on his overalls, opened his office, went to his cupboard, took out a syringe, and gave himself an intravenous injection of morphine solution.

  What is the purpose of all this story about suicidal doctors, about a piglet that drowned in sewage, about the unbounded joy of the prisoners? Here is the purpose.

  For us, for me and hundreds of thousands of others who worked in the camps and were not doctors, our time after the camps was nothing but joy, joy every day and every hour. The hell we had put behind us was so dreadful that none of the tiresome ordeals as we trailed from one “special department” or “personnel department” to another, none of the peregrinations, none of the deprivation of rights that article 39 of the internal passport system imposed could take away from us this feeling of happiness and joy, when we compared it with what we had seen in our yesterdays and in the days before yesterday.

  •

  It was a great honor for those taking a paramedic course to find themselves doing their practice sessions in the third therapeutic section. The third section was run by Nina Semionovna, a former lecturer in the Department of Diagnostic Therapy at Kharkov Medical Institute.

  Only two people, two students out of thirty, could take a one-month practical course in the third therapeutic section.

  Practice consisted of live observation of patients—that was an infinite distance from books, from the “course.” You can’t become a medic, whether a doctor or a paramedic, by reading books.

  Just two male students, Bokis and I, were to pass into the third section.

  “A couple of men? Why?”

  Nina Semionovna was a hunched old woman with green eyes; she was gray-haired and wrinkled, and she was not kind.

  “Nina Semionovna hates women.”

  “She hates them?”

  “Well, she doesn’t like them. Anyway, two men. Lucky people.” The course monitor took me and Bokis to be inspected by Nina Semionovna’s green eyes.

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Since thirty-seven.”

  “Well, I’ve been here since thirty-eight. I was at Elgen first. I did thirty childbirths there; before Elgen I hadn’t done any. Then came the war. My husband died in Kiev. So did my two children. Boys. A bomb. More people have died around me than in any battle in war. They died when there was no war, before there was a war. All the same. Grief is like happiness: it comes in all forms.”

  Nina Semionovna sat on a patient’s bed and pulled back the blanket.

  “Right, let’s start. Pick up the stethoscope, put it on the patient’s chest and listen. . . . The French listen through a towel. But a stethoscope is the best, most reliable way. I don’t think much of the phonendoscope, it’s something the lordly doctors like to use because they can’t be bothered to bend down over the patient. The stethoscope. . . . What I’m showing you is something you won’t find in any textbook. So listen.”

  The skeleton upholstered in skin meekly obeyed Nina Semionovna’s command. It obeyed mine, too.

  “Listen to the boxy sound, the hint of muffling. Remember it for the rest of your life, as you remember the bones, dry skin, the shine in the eyes. You’ll remember?”

  “I will. For my whole life.”

  “Do you remember what it sounded like yesterday? Listen to the patient again. The sound has changed. Describe all this, write it down in his notes. Don’t be shy. Write firmly.”

  There were twenty patients in the ward.

  “There are no interesting patients at the moment. What you’ve been seeing is starvation, starvation, starvation. Sit down on the left. Over here, in my place. Take the patient by the shoulder with your left hand. Grip him, grip him. What can you hear?”

  I described what I heard.

  “Right, it’s lunchtime. Off you go, you’ll be fed in the serving room.”

  Shura, the kindly woman who did the serving, generously poured out our “doctor’s” dinner. The chief’s sister’s dark eyes were smiling at me, but more at herself, at something deep inside her.

  “Why are you like this, Olga Tomasovna?”

  “Oh, you noticed. I’m always thinking about something else. About yesterday. I try not to see today.”

  “Today isn’t so bad, it’s not so terrible.”

  “Shall I give you more soup?”

  “Yes, please.”

  I wasn’t interested in dark eyes. Nina Semionovna’s lesson, mastering the art of treatment, was more important than anything else in the world.

  Nina Semionovna lived in her section, in a room that was called a “cabin” in Kolyma. Nobody except her ever entered it. She herself kept it tidy and clean. I don’t know if she washed the floor herself. You could see, when the door was open, a hard hospital bed with minimal bedding, a hospital night table, a stool, whitewashed walls. There was a little office next to the “cabin,” but its door opened onto the ward, not the lobby. The little office had a sort of desk, two stools, and a couch.

  Everything was the same as in the other sections, but there was a difference: perhaps because there were no flowers here, not in the cabin, nor in the office, nor in the ward. Was this due to Nina Semionovna’s strictness, her unsmiling severity? Her eyes used to flash a dark green emerald fire at times and places that seemed inappropriate, uncalled-for. Her eyes flashed regardless of what was being said or done. But those eyes didn’t have an independent life; they cohabited with Nina Semionovna’s feelings and thoughts.

  There was no friendship in the section, not even the most superficial friendship of nurses and their assistants. Everyone came here to work, to do their job, their shift, and it was obvious that the real life of those who worked in the third section was in the women’s barracks, after their job was done, after work. Usually, real life in camp hospitals is stuck, is glued to the workplace and to working hours, and people are happy to go to their section so as to get away as fast as they can from the accursed barracks.

  There was no friendship in the third therapeutic section. The nurses and their assistants disliked Nina Semionovna. They merely respected her. They feared her. They were afraid of the terrible Elgen, the Kolyma farm where women prisoners worked in the forest and on the land.

  Everyone was afraid, except Shura in the serving room. />
  “It’s difficult bringing men in here,” Shura would say as she noisily flung the bowls she had washed into the cupboard. “But, thank God, I’m in my fifth month and I’ll soon be sent to Elgen. I’ll be free. New mothers get released every year: it’s the only chance for people like me.”

  “If you’re article fifty-eight, you don’t get released.”

  “I’m article ten. Article ten gets released, the Trotskyists don’t. Last year Katiushka was working here, where I am; Fedia, her husband, is living with me now. Katiushka and her baby were released, she came to say goodbye. Fedia said, ‘Remember it was me that got you released.’ She got out and not because she’d served her sentence, or been amnestied, or made a run for it in summer. She did it her own way, the most reliable way. And it worked, he got her released. And I think he’s gotten me released. . . .”

  Shura trustingly pointed to her belly.

  “I’m sure he’s gotten you your release.”

  “Quite right. I’ll get out of this bloody section.”

  “What’s going on here that I don’t know about, Shura?”

  “You’ll see. I know what: tomorrow’s Sunday, we’ll make a medical soup. Though Nina Semionovna doesn’t like these special dishes much. . . . But she’ll still let us. . . .”

  Medical soup was made of medicines, all sorts of roots, meat cubes dissolved in saline: you don’t need to add salt, as Shura told me with delight. . . . Blueberry and raspberry jellies, rosehips, pancakes.

  Everyone approved of the medical dinner. Nina Semionovna finished her portion and then got up.

  “Come and see me in my office.”

  I went in.