The Studebakers and Diamonds went through a lot of gasoline. But the gasoline also came through lend-lease: it was light-colored aviation fuel. Our Russian trucks, GAZs, had been converted to run on charcoal gas; they had two tubular stoves placed near the engine, which were fueled by offcuts of wood. The word “woodburner” came into use, and there were several plants to produce the raw fuel; these plants were run by contracted party members. The technological management of these wood plants was the responsibility of the chief engineer, an ordinary engineer, a quantity surveyor, a planner, and several bookkeepers. I don’t remember how many manual laborers there were, perhaps two or three, it might have been three, per shift per wood plant. We had lend-lease machinery; we got a tractor and it brought into our language a new word: “bulldozer.”
This prehistoric animal was unleashed, let loose on its caterpillar tracks: an American bulldozer with a broad blade, a suspended metal shield that shone like a mirror. It was a mirror that reflected the sky, the trees, and the stars, as well as the prisoners’ dirty faces. An escort guard even approached this overseas miracle and said he could use the iron mirror to shave with. But we didn’t need to shave, and such a thing would never have occurred to us.
The sighs and groans of the new American beast could long be heard in the frosty air. In sub-zero temperatures the bulldozer coughed and lost its temper. It would start panting, grumbling, and then boldly move forward, crushing the hummocks and easily passing over tree stumps: our help from overseas.
We no longer had to skid trunks of Dahurian larch, as heavy as lead: construction timber and firewood was scattered all over the forest on the hill slope. Dragging trees by hand up onto stacks—which is what the merry word “skidding” means—is unbearable work in Kolyma, too much for human beings. Skidding manually over hummocks, along narrow winding paths on a slope is more than anyone can put up with. In the distant past, before 1938, they used horses, but the horses are even worse than human beings at enduring the north, they turned out to be weaker, and, unable to cope with the skidding, they died. Now we had the blade of an overseas bulldozer to come to our aid (was it ours?).
None of us found it believable that we would be given light work instead of the hard, backbreaking skidding that we all hated. We would just get a higher lumberjacking norm, we would in any case be made to do something else just as demeaning, just as despicable as any form of camp labor. The American bulldozer wasn’t going to heal our frostbitten fingers. But American solidol might! Oh, solidol, solidol. The barrel that solidol came in was immediately besieged by a crowd of goners, who instantly used a rock to smash the bottom of the barrel.
Hungry men were told that solidol was lend-lease butter, and there was less than half a barrel left when a sentry was put over it and the authorities used gunshots to chase the crowd of goners away from the solidol barrel. The lucky ones were swallowing this lend-lease “butter,” not believing that it was just solidol: after all, the American bread that was so good for them was also bland and had a strange aftertaste of iron. Everyone who managed to get hold of solidol spent several hours licking their fingers, swallowing the tiniest drops of this overseas manna from heaven that tasted like fresh stones. After all, a stone doesn’t start off as a stone but as a soft butter-like substance. Substance, rather than material. Stone becomes a material when it is old. The sight of young liquid tufa in limestone strata used to bewitch escapees and geological prospectors. It required an effort of will to tear oneself away from these blancmange-like shores, these milky rivers of young fluid stone. But tufa was found among mountains, rocks, landslides, whereas here we had a lend-lease delivery, something manufactured.
Nothing bad happened to those who’d dipped their hands in the barrel. A Kolyma-trained stomach and gut could cope with solidol. But a sentry was assigned to guard what was left, since solidol was food for trucks, creatures infinitely more important to the state than people.
And now one of these creatures had come to us from the other side of the ocean: a symbol of victory, friendship, and something else.
Three hundred men couldn’t stop envying Grinka Lebedev, the prisoner who took the wheel of the American tractor. There were prisoners who were better tractor drivers than Lebedev, but they were all politicals, article 58 with the initials for anti-Soviet or counterrevolutionary on their files, while Grinka Lebedev was a nonpolitical, or to be precise, just a man who had murdered his father. Every one of the three hundred could see his earthly bliss: chirring away, sitting at the wheel of a well-lubricated tractor, to rumble off and fell timber.
Timber to be felled was getting farther and farther away. Harvesting construction timber in Kolyma is done in streambeds where, if the gully is deep enough, the trees stretch out toward the sun, are sheltered from the wind, and can grow tall. If they are in the wind, in the light, or on the marshy hill slopes, the trees are dwarfs, broken and twisted, exhausted by constantly revolving to catch the sun, by their endless struggle for a bit of thawed soil. The trees on the slopes are more like monsters fit for a chamber of horrors than trees. Only in the dark ravines where the mountain streams flow do trees grow and strengthen. Extracting timber is like extracting gold and is done on the same gold-mining rivers with the same urgency and haste: a stream, a box, a gold-washing pan, temporary barracks, a fast-moving, predatory market that leaves the stream and the whole area treeless for three hundred years and without gold for all eternity.
Somewhere there was supposed to be a forestry nursery, but what hope was there of a nursery in wartime Kolyma, where larches took three hundred years to mature, and when the only answer to lend-lease was a violent outburst of gold fever, bridled, however, by the guard towers of the prisoner zones.
A lot of construction timber as well as ready-chopped firewood lay scattered wherever trees had been felled. A lot of butt ends that had fallen on the ground had been buried in the snow, being too big for the fragile bony shoulders of the prisoners to lift. The prisoners’ weak arms, even dozens of them, couldn’t lift a two-meter piece of trunk onto someone’s shoulder (and there wasn’t a shoulder strong enough), so as to drag this beam, as heavy as cast iron, several dozen meters over the hummocks, ruts, and potholes. A lot of timber was abandoned because it was far too heavy to skid, and we needed the help of the bulldozer.
We saw the chirring bulldozer turn to the left and begin climbing onto a terrace, a piece of jutting rock where an old road ran past the camp cemetery, a road that we had been made to walk along to work hundreds of times.
I had shown no curiosity as to why for the last few weeks we had been taken to work by another route, instead of being sent up the familiar path, trodden smooth by the guards’ boot heels and the prisoners’ rubber boots. The new route was twice as long as the old one. There were constant climbs and descents. We were growing tired just getting to our workplace. But nobody asked why we were being taken by this other route.
We just had to, those were the orders, so we clambered on all fours, grabbing hold of stones, which made our fingers bleed.
Only now did I see and realize what the reason was. And I thanked God for giving me the time and strength to see it all.
Timber-felling was going ahead. The hill slope was laid bare; the wind had blown away the snow, which was not yet deep. Every single tree stump had been pulled out: the big ones had a charge of ammonal explosive put under them, so that the stump flew up in the air. Smaller stumps were twisted out, using big levers. The smallest were just torn out by hand, like bushes of dwarf pine.
The hill had been laid bare and turned into a gigantic stage for a spectacle, a camp mystery play.
A grave, a prisoners’ common grave, a stone pit packed to the top as long ago as 1938 with still-undecomposed corpses, had now spilled over. Corpses were crawling across the hillside, exposing a Kolyma secret.
In Kolyma bodies are consigned not to the earth but to the stones. Stone preserves and reveals secrets. Stones are more reliable than earth. Permafrost preserves and reveal
s secrets. Every one of those close to us who perished in Kolyma, everyone who was shot, beaten to death, exsanguinated by starvation, can still be identified, even after decades. There were no gas ovens in Kolyma. The corpses wait in the stones, in the permafrost.
In 1938 in the gold mines there were whole brigades standing by to dig such graves. They were constantly drilling, exploding, and deepening enormous gray, hard, cold stone pits. Digging graves in 1938 was easy work; there was no minimum amount, no norm set for each dead person and each fourteen-hour working day. It was easier to dig graves than to stand with rubber boots on your bare feet in the icy waters of the gold-mine pit face, doing “basic production” of “metal number one.”
These graves, enormous stone pits, were packed to the top with corpses. Undecomposed corpses, bare skeletons covered in dirty skin that had been scratched to pieces and bitten by lice.
Stone and the north resisted man’s handiwork with all their strength. They did not want to let corpses into their depths. Stone, once it had given way, had been defeated and degraded, promised that it would forget nothing, that it would wait and keep its secret. The harsh winters and hot summers, the winds and rain had in six years taken the corpses away from the stone. The earth had opened and shown its underground stores, for the Kolyma’s underground stores contain not just gold, not just lead, not just wolfram, not just uranium but undecomposed human bodies.
These human bodies were crawling down the slope, perhaps about to be resurrected. I had seen before, from a distance, on the other side of the stream, these moving objects that had gotten caught up by fallen branches or rocks; I’d seen them through a forest that had been thinned by loggers, and I had thought they were tree trunks that had not yet been skidded out.
Now the hillside was stripped bare and the mountain’s secret revealed. The grave had burst open, and the dead were crawling down the stony slope. Right by the tractor road an enormous new mass grave had been hammered or drilled out. By whom? Nobody from the barracks was taken out to do that sort of job. It was a very big grave. If I and my comrades should freeze and die, there’d be room for us in this new grave, there’d be a corpse’s housewarming.
The bulldozer was scraping out these stiffened corpses, thousands of them, thousands of skeletal dead men. Nothing had rotted: the twisted fingers, the toes with their infected sores, the stumps after frostbitten digits had been removed, the dry skin that had been scratched until it bled, and the eyes burning with the luster of starvation.
My tired, exhausted brain tried to understand the origins of such a gigantic grave in this region. There hadn’t, I thought, been a gold mine here: I was an old Kolyma hand. But then it occurred to me that I knew only a small piece of this world that was bounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the tented stages when Moscow’s cityscape was being built. Moscow’s tall buildings were the guard towers watching over Moscow’s prisoners, that is what those buildings looked like. And who had priority? The Kremlin guard towers, or the camp towers that served as the model for Moscow’s architecture? A camp zone tower was the main idea of the times, brilliantly expressed by the architectural symbolism.
It occurred to me that I knew only a small piece of this world, a negligible, tiny piece, that there might be only twenty kilometers away a cabin full of geological prospectors looking for uranium, or there might be a gold mine with thirty thousand prisoners. In the folds between the mountains a great deal could be hidden.
Later I remembered the eager fire of the willow herb, the furious flowering of the taiga in summer, when it tries to cover up any human activity, good or bad, in grass and foliage. I remembered that grass is even more oblivious than humanity. And if I forgot, so would the grass. But stone and permafrost wouldn’t.
Grinka Lebedev the parricide was a good tractor driver and was managing the well-lubricated overseas tractor well. Grinka Lebedev was doing his job very thoroughly. He was scraping corpses toward the grave with his shiny bulldozer blade, pushing them into the pit, and then coming back to do some skidding.
The authorities had decided that the lend-lease bulldozer’s first trip, its first job would not be forest work but a far more important task.
The job was done. The bulldozer had scraped up a pile of stones and rubble over the new grave, and the corpses had been covered by stone. But they had not vanished.
The bulldozer was coming toward us. Grinka Lebedev, the nonpolitical prisoner and parricide, didn’t look at us politicals, 58ers with letters signifying our crimes. Grinka Lebedev had been entrusted with an assignment on behalf of the state, and he had carried it out. His stony face was etched with pride, an awareness of duty done.
The bulldozer rumbled past us. There wasn’t a single scratch or stain on its mirrorlike blade.
1965
MAXIM
for Nadezhda Yakovlevna Mandelstam
PEOPLE were arising, one after the other, out of nonexistence. Someone I didn’t know was lying next to me on my bunk, slumping at night against my bony shoulder, passing on his warmth, or drops of it, and getting my warmth in return. There were nights when no warmth reached me through the fragments of our pea jacket and quilted body-warmer; in the morning I would look at my neighbor as if he were a corpse and be just a little amazed that the corpse was alive, got up when called, dressed itself, and meekly obeyed a command. I had little warmth of my own. Not a lot of flesh was left on my bones. This flesh sufficed only for malice, the last human feeling to go. Not indifference but malice was the last human feeling, it was the closest to the bone. The human being that had surfaced from nonexistence vanished in daytime—there were a lot of sites in the coal-prospecting area—and vanished forever. I didn’t know the people who slept next to me. I never asked them anything, and not because I was observing the Arab saying, “Ask no questions, hear no lies.” I didn’t care at all whether I would be lied to or not; I was beyond truth and lies. For such occasions the gangsters had a harsh, colorful, coarse saying, imbued with profound scorn for any questioner: “If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.” I didn’t question or listen to fairy tales.
What did I retain until the very end? Malice. By hanging on to this malice, I counted on dying. But death, which had very recently been so near, began to recede little by little. It wasn’t life that displaced death but a half-conscious state, an existence that couldn’t be formulated or even called life. Every day, every time the sun rose, there was a new danger of a fatal jolt. But the jolt never came. I was working as the boiler man, the easiest of all jobs, easier than being a night watchman, but I could never chop enough firewood to keep up with the Titan boiler—Titan was the name of the hot-water system. I could have been thrown off the job, but where to? The taiga was a long way away, our settlement, our “posting,” to use the Kolyma term, was like an island in the taiga world. I could barely drag one foot after the other, the two hundred meters from tent to workplace seemed endless to me and I had to sit down and rest several times. I can still remember all the gullies, the potholes, the ruts on that deadly path, the stream where I lay down on my belly to lap its cold, tasty, curative water; the two-man saw that I either lugged on my shoulder or dragged along the ground, holding it with one hand, seemed to me an unbelievably heavy load.
I could never get the water boiled in time or manage to have the Titan boiling by lunch.
But none of the workmen—they were all free men, only recently released from the camp—were bothered if the water wasn’t boiling. Kolyma had taught us all to identify drinking water only by temperature. We could tell hot and cold apart, but not boiled and unboiled.
We didn’t care about the dialectical leap between quantity and quality. We weren’t philosophers. We were manual laborers, and our hot drinking water didn’t have the important qualities needed for a dialectical leap.
I ate without any interest, trying to consume everything I caught sight of: trimmings, crumbs of food, last year’s berries in the marsh, yesterday’s or the day b
efore yesterday’s soup from the free workers’ cooking pot. In actual fact, our free men never left any of yesterday’s soup uneaten.
There were two guns, shotguns, in our tent. The ptarmigans weren’t afraid of people and in the early days the birds could be shot from the tent entrance. The game was baked whole in bonfire ash or it was boiled, in which case it was carefully plucked. The feathers and down went to make pillows: that was a form of commerce, good money that boosted the earnings of those who owned the guns and the taiga birds. Ptarmigans, once gutted and plucked, were boiled in three-liter cans suspended over campfires. I never found any remains of these mysterious birds. Hungry, free stomachs hacked up, ground down, and sucked dry all the bird bones, leaving nothing. That was another miracle of the taiga.
I never even tried a piece of these ptarmigans. What I got were berries, grass roots, and the bread ration. And I wasn’t dying. I began looking with less and less interest, without malice, at the cold red sun, the mountains, the bare stony heights where everything—rocks, the bends in the streams, the larches and poplars—was angular and hostile. In the evening a cold mist rose from the river and there was not an hour in the taiga day or night when I felt warm.
My frostbitten fingers and toes throbbed with pain. The bright pink skin on my fingers never lost its pink color and was easily damaged. My fingers were always wrapped in dirty rags, which protected my hands from further injury and from pain but not from infection. Pus oozed from both of my big toes, and there was no end to the pus.
Kolyma Stories Page 47
