Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  1959

  MAGIC

  SOMEONE was banging the window with a stick. I recognized the stick: it belonged to the section chief.

  “Coming right away,” I yelled through the window, then put on my trousers and buttoned up my tunic. At that very moment Mishka, the chief’s courier, appeared on the threshold of my room and shouted out the usual formula that began my every working day: “To the chief!”

  “His office?”

  “The guardhouse.”

  I was already on my way.

  Working for this boss was easy. He wasn’t cruel to the prisoners, he was clever, and even though he invariably brought down all lofty concepts to the level of his own coarse language, he did understand what was what.

  True, “rehabilitation” was then in fashion and in these unknown waters our boss simply wanted to keep his boat in a safe channel. That may be so. Maybe. At the time I didn’t think about it.

  I knew that my boss—Stukov was his name—had a lot of clashes with his superiors, and in the camp they were constantly devising cases to set him up, but I don’t know the details or the basis of these cases, which never came to anything, or of the investigations, which weren’t begun or which were terminated.

  Stukov liked me because I didn’t take bribes and didn’t favor drunks. For some reason Stukov hated drunks. He probably also liked my boldness.

  Stukov was a loner, and he was getting on in years. He was very fond of anything new in technology or science, and stories of the Brooklyn Bridge made him ecstatic. But I couldn’t tell him about anything like the Brooklyn Bridge.

  But Miller, Pavel Petrovich Miller, a mining engineer, told Stukov all about it.

  Miller was a favorite of Stukov’s, for Stukov eagerly listened to any sort of scientific news.

  I caught up with Stukov at the guardhouse.

  “You’re still asleep.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Do you know about the party of prisoners that’s arrived from Moscow? Via Perm. As I said, you’re asleep. Get your men and we’ll select some people.”

  Our section was at the very edge of the free world, at the railhead, after which parties of prisoners were faced with a journey of many days on foot through the taiga. Stukov had the right to hold back the people he felt he needed.

  This was astounding magic, tricks that probably belonged to the field of applied psychology. These tricks were performed by Stukov, a chief who had grown old working in prisons and camps. Stukov needed to have spectators, and I was perhaps the only person capable of appreciating his amazing talent, abilities that for a long time I considered to be supernatural, until the moment came when I felt that I myself possessed the same magical powers.

  The top bosses gave the section permission to hold back fifty carpenters. The party of prisoners lined up, facing the boss not in single file but in lines of three or four.

  Stukov slowly walked around the party, tapping his stick on his boots, which he hadn’t cleaned. From time to time he raised his arm.

  “You come out, you. And you. No, not you. Out—you!”

  “How many does that make?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Well then, another eight.”

  “You . . . you . . . you. . . .”

  We copied out the surnames and took their personal files.

  All fifty knew how to use an ax and a saw.

  “Thirty metalworkers!”

  Stukov walked up and down the ranks, frowning slightly.

  “You come out. . . . You . . . you. . . . But you go back. You’re one of the gangsters, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir, a gangster.”

  Thirty metalworkers had been chosen without a single mistake.

  Ten office clerks were needed.

  “Can you choose them by looking at them?”

  “No.”

  “Let’s go, then.

  “You come out . . . you . . . you. . . .”

  Six men stepped forward.

  “There are no more bookkeepers in this party,” Stukov said.

  I checked their files and he was right: there were no more. We selected office clerks from the next parties of prisoners.

  This was Stukov’s favorite game, and it left me dumbfounded. Stukov himself was as pleased as a child at his magical abilities, and he suffered agonies if he ever lost self-confidence. He never made mistakes, but he did lose self-confidence, and then we would stop selecting people.

  Every time I watched this game, which had nothing to do with cruelty or other people’s blood, I felt pleasure.

  I was struck by his insight into people. I was struck by this timeless connection between body and soul.

  I had seen these tricks, these demonstrations of my boss’s mysterious power, so many times. Their sole secret was his many years of experience working with prisoners. Prisoners’ clothes smooth out the differences between them, which only makes the task easier, the task of reading a man’s profession by his face and hands.

  “Who are we going to select today, sir?”

  “Twenty carpenters. I’ve just had a telegram from the administration: to pick out anyone who has previously worked in the secret police”—Stukov gave a laugh—“and has been convicted for nonpolitical crimes or crimes at work. That means they’re going to get jobs as interrogators again. What do you think about that?”

  “I don’t think about such things. Orders are orders.”

  “Did you work out how I selected the carpenters?”

  “Tell me. . . .”

  “I just pick out peasants, peasants. Every peasant is a carpenter. And when I want conscientious workers I also choose peasants. And I don’t get it wrong. As for knowing who worked in the secret police by looking at their eyes, I shan’t say. Do you think they can’t look you straight in the eye? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nor do I. Well, now I’m getting old, perhaps I’ll find out. Before I retire.”

  The new party was lined up, as always, along the railway cattle cars. Stukov made his usual speech about work, about crediting working days, then he stretched out a hand and walked up and down the railway cattle cars twice.

  “I need carpenters. Twenty of them. But I’ll do the choosing. Don’t move. You, come out . . . you . . . you. . . . That’s all. Take their files.”

  The boss’s fingers groped for a piece of paper in his service jacket.

  “Stay in line. There’s one more question.”

  Stukov raised the hand holding the piece of paper.

  “Is there anyone here who has worked in the secret police?”

  Two thousand prisoners stayed silent.

  “I’m asking you, is there anyone among you who used to work in the secret police? In the Ministry of the Interior?!”

  In one of the back rows, a lanky man, whose eyes really did avoid meeting anyone else’s, used his fingers to fight his way to the front.

  “I used to work as an informer, sir.”

  “Clear off!” said Stukov with contempt and satisfaction.

  1964

  LIDA

  KRIST’S sentence, his last sentence in the camps, was coming to an end. The dead winter ice was being undermined by time’s spring rivulets. Krist had trained himself to pay no attention to the working days he had credited against his sentence: these were a means of destroying a man’s willpower, they were a treacherous phantom hope that did nothing but rot prisoners’ souls. But time was passing more and more quickly, as it always does toward the end of a sentence. Blessed are those who are released suddenly, before the end of their sentence.

  Krist tried not to think about the possibility of freedom, about what in his world was called freedom.

  Being freed is very difficult. Krist knew this from experience. He knew how one is forced to relearn the rules of life, how hard it is to enter a life where the scales, the moral measures are different, how hard it is to revive concepts that used to be alive in a man’s soul before he was arrested. Those c
oncepts were no illusions, they were the laws of another, earlier world.

  It was difficult to be freed, but it was also a time of joy, for forces appeared and arose in the soul, making Krist confident in his behavior, bold in his actions, and he was able to face the dawn of a new day with a firm gaze.

  Krist was not afraid of life, but he knew that it was no joke, that life was a serious business.

  Krist knew something else: that once free, he would become forever a “marked” man, forever “branded,” forever a quarry for the hounds that at any moment might be set loose by the masters of life.

  But Krist was not afraid of the hunt and the chase. He still had a lot of strength, even more moral strength, if a little less physical strength than before.

  The hunt of 1937 had driven Krist into prison, to a new lengthened term, and when he had served that sentence, he was given another one, even longer. But there were still several steps between that and execution by shooting, several steps on the dreaded living escalator that connected the human being and the state.

  Being freed was dangerous. A proper hunt was out for any prisoner whose sentence was ending or was in its last year. This hunt may well have been prescribed and arranged on orders from Moscow, for “not a hair falls,” etc. The hunt consisted of provocations, denunciations, interrogations. The sounds of the terrible camp jazz band, a group of eight players where “seven blow and one man beats the drum,”[28] echoed in the ears of those awaiting release more loudly and more unmistakably every day. The tone became more and more ominous, and very few people could—by good luck—safely leap over this fish trap, this funnel, these lines of nets, and swim out into the open sea where there were no buoys to guide the newly released prisoner, no safe channels, no safe days or nights.

  Krist knew this and understood it very well; he had long known it and taken all the precautions he could. But you couldn’t guarantee your safety.

  His third sentence, a ten-year one, was now ending, but the number of arrests, of charges brought, of attempts to hand out a new sentence from which Krist had in the end emerged unharmed—these were his victories and his good luck—were too many to count. Krist hadn’t even tried to count them. In the camps counting brought bad luck.

  A long time ago, when he was nineteen years old, Krist had received his first sentence. Selflessness to the point of self-sacrifice, a desire not to give orders but to do everything with his own hands, entered Krist’s soul irrevocably and coexisted with a passionate feeling of insubordination to others’ orders, others’ opinions, others’ will. In the depth of his soul Krist always preserved a desire to measure his strength against whoever was sitting at the interrogator’s desk. This desire had been nurtured by his childhood, his reading, by the people he had seen in his youth and whom he had heard about. There were a lot of such people in Russia, at least in literary Russia, in the dangerous world of books.

  Krist was linked to the “movement” in all the card indexes of the Soviet Union. When the signal came for yet another witch hunt, he left for Kolyma bearing the fatal brand KRTD (Counterrevolutionary Trotskyist Activity). This acronym made him a “letter man,” someone with the most dangerous letter T, a Trotskyist. There was a thin piece of cigarette paper stuck in Krist’s personal file. This thin transparent paper was a “special note” from Moscow, a very blurred text poorly printed off a duplicator, or possibly it was the tenth or so carbon copy of a typewritten document. Krist happened once to hold in his own hand this deadly piece of paper, where the surname was inserted in firm handwriting, the imperturbably clear hand of an office clerk, who apparently didn’t need to read the text but wrote blindly, inserting the surname without looking, and underlining the necessary line in ink: “During imprisonment to be deprived of telegraph and postal communications, to be used only for heavy physical labor, behavior to be reported once a quarter.”

  The special note was an order to kill, not to release alive. Krist understood that. But he had no time to think about it. And he didn’t want to.

  All prisoners with special notes knew that this piece of cigarette paper compelled any future person in charge, from the escort guard to the chief of the camp administration, to keep an eye on them, to denounce them, to take measures, and if any lesser boss failed to take an active part in annihilating those who had a special note, he himself would be denounced by his own colleagues, his comrades in the service. A boss knew that he would meet with his superiors’ disapproval, that he had no prospects of a career in the camps, if he didn’t take an active part in carrying out Moscow’s orders.

  There were not many prisoners involved in prospecting for coal. The prospector’s bookkeeper, who was also the boss’s secretary, was a non-political convict named Ivan Bogdanov. Bogdanov had a few conversations with Krist. It was a good job, working as a night watchman. The previous night watchman, an elderly Estonian, had died of a weak heart. Krist dreamed of getting this job. And he failed to get it. So he swore. Ivan Bogdanov listened.

  “You’ve got a special note,” said Bogdanov.

  “I know.”

  “Do you know how that works?”

  “No.”

  “There are two copies of your personal file. One follows you around, like your ID papers; the other is kept in the camp administration. That one you can’t get hold of, of course, but nobody has ever been known to have been checked up on there. The important paper is the one that’s here, that goes wherever you go.”

  Soon after this conversation Bogdanov was to be transferred somewhere. He came straightaway to say goodbye at Krist’s workplace, the prospector’s mine shaft. A small smoky bonfire was lit to keep the mosquitoes away from the open shaft. Ivan Bogdanov sat on the edge of the shaft and extracted from under his shirt a piece of paper, very thin and completely faded.

  “I’m leaving tomorrow. Here are your special notes.”

  Krist read them and remembered them forever. Ivan Bogdanov took the piece of paper and burned it in the bonfire, not letting go of the paper until the last letter on it had been burned.

  “I wish you—”

  “Goodbye.”

  A new boss came—Krist had had a great many bosses in his life—and with him a new secretary.

  At the mine Krist began to seriously tire, and he knew what that meant. There was a vacancy for a winch man. Krist, however, had never had anything to do with machinery; even when he looked at a radio-phonograph he felt doubt and uncertainty. But Semionov, a gangster who was leaving the winch-man’s job for something better, reassured him: “You’re a freier, you’re such a sucker that you’re beyond help. All you freiers are the same. All of you. What are you afraid of? No prisoner should be afraid of any machine. You learn on the job. You’re not going to be held responsible. All you need is courage, that’s all. Grab the handles, don’t make me stay here, or I’ll lose my chance. . . .”

  Krist knew that a gangster was one thing, but a freier, especially one with the letters KRTD, was an utterly different thing when the word “responsible” was used. Nevertheless he was infected by Semionov’s confidence.

  The clerk of works was still the same man, and he slept close by, in a corner of the barracks. Krist went up to him.

  “You’ve got a special note.”

  “How would I know?”

  “The point is you wouldn’t. Anyway, let’s assume I haven’t seen your file. Let’s try.”

  So Krist became a winch man, switching the electric winch levers on and off, unwinding the steel cable, letting the wagons go down into the mine. He had something of a rest. He had a month’s rest. Then an engineer with a nonpolitical conviction turned up and Krist was sent back down into the mine, pushing wagons, filling them with coal, and reflecting that the nonpolitical engineer wouldn’t want to stay doing such petty work as a mine winch man, work with no prospect of making something on the side, and that a mine winch was paradise only for “letter men” like Krist, and that when the nonpolitical engineer left, Krist would again be moving those blessed
levers and turning on the winch’s knife switch.

  Not a single day of his time in the camps was erased from Krist’s memory. After the mine he was moved to the special zone, charged, and given a new sentence, which was now coming to an end.

  Krist had managed to complete his paramedic course; he was still alive and, more important, had won independence, an important asset of the medical profession in camps in the Far North. Krist now managed the admissions room in the enormous camp hospital.

  •

  But there was no escaping the inevitable. The letter T in Krist’s acronymic note was a mark, a brand, a stamp, a distinguishing feature that was used to hound him for many years, to keep him at the icy gold-mine pit faces in the minus sixty temperatures of Kolyma. They were killing him with hard labor, camp labor too heavy to be borne, labor glorified as a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism; killing him with the bosses’ beatings, the guards’ rifle butts, the foremen’s fists, the barbers’ rough handling, and his fellow prisoners’ elbows; killing him with starvation, with the camp’s “dumpling soup.”

  Krist knew, saw, and observed a countless number of times that no other article of the Criminal Code was as dangerous to the state as his, Krist’s, acronym with the letter T. Betrayal of the motherland, terror, that terrible bouquet of paragraphs in article 58 was less dangerous. Krist’s four-letter acronym was the mark of the beast that had to be killed, whose death was ordained.

  All the guards of the entire country in the past, the present, and the future were hunting down this letter. Not a single boss in the world would have wanted to show any weakness in exterminating such an “enemy of the people.”

  At the moment Krist was a paramedic in a big hospital and he was waging a major struggle against the gangsters, the underworld, which the state had called on for help in 1937, so as to annihilate Krist and men like him.