Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

I was woken up by an iron rail being struck. The same sound marked the end of the working day. After I’d eaten I lay down right away on the bunk, without undressing, of course, and fell asleep. I could only see the tent I slept and lived in through a mist: somewhere people moved about, loud obscene swearing broke out, fights started, there was an instant silence anticipating a dangerous blow. The fights soon died down—by themselves, for nobody restrained anybody or pulled people apart: it’s just that the fight’s engine stalled. Then the cold silence of the night would set in, with the pale high sky visible through the holes in the tarpaulin ceiling, with the snores, rasping, groans, coughs, and delirious swearing from the sleeping men.

  One night I sensed that I could hear these groans and rasping sounds. The sensation was as sudden as a revelation; it gave me no joy. Later, recalling that minute of astonishment, I realized that the need for sleep, oblivion, and unconsciousness had decreased; I’d slept my full, as Moisei Kuznetsov, our blacksmith, used to say. He was an exceptionally clever man.

  Real pain appeared in my muscles. I don’t know if what I then had could be called muscles, but they hurt; the pain annoyed me and wouldn’t allow me to think of anything but my body. Then something appeared other than malice or spite, but it coexisted with malice. What appeared was indifference and fearlessness. I realized that I didn’t care whether I was going to be hit or not, whether I was going to get my dinner and my bread ration or not. And although I wasn’t beaten while out prospecting, on a posting without guards (beatings only occurred at the mines), I remembered the mine and measured my courage by mine measures. This indifference and fearlessness formed a sort of bridge leading away from death. The awareness that I wouldn’t be, wasn’t being, or never would be beaten here gave rise to new strength and new feelings.

  Indifference was followed by fear, but not a very strong fear, a fear of being deprived of this lifesaving life, the lifesaving job of a boiler man, or of being deprived of the high cold sky and the throbbing pain in my worn-out muscles. I realized that I was afraid of leaving here and going back to the mine. I was afraid, that was all. All my life I had always been satisfied with whatever was tolerable. With every day, there was more and more flesh on my bones. Envy is the right word for the next feeling to come back to me. I envied my dead comrades, men who had perished in 1938. I also envied my living neighbors who were chewing something and had something to smoke. I didn’t envy the boss, the clerk of works, the foreman: theirs was another world.

  What didn’t come back to me was love. Oh, how distant love is from envy, fear, and malice. What little need people have of love. Love only comes when all other human feelings have returned. Love is the last to come, the last to return, if it can return at all. But indifference, envy, and fear were not the only proofs that I was coming back to life. Pity for animals came back before pity for humanity did.

  As the weakest man in this world of open shafts and prospecting ditches, I worked with the topographer, hauling his measuring rod and his theodolite for him. Sometimes, to speed up our journey, the topographer would strap the theodolite to his back, so that all I had to carry was the lightweight rod with its painted numbers. The topographer was a former prisoner. To keep up his courage—there were a lot of fugitives in the taiga that summer—he carried around a small-caliber rifle that he had asked his bosses to let him have. But the rifle only got in our way. And not just because it was yet another thing to be carried on our difficult travels. Once we sat down for a rest in a clearing; the topographer was playing with his small-caliber rifle and aimed at a red-breasted bullfinch that had flown near to take a closer look at the danger and to draw it away. If necessary, the bird would sacrifice its life: the female bullfinch was hatching eggs somewhere, that was the only explanation for the bird’s crazy boldness. The topographer raised his rifle, but I pushed the barrel aside.

  “Put the gun away!”

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you mad?”

  “Leave the bird alone, that’s all.”

  “I’ll report this to the boss.”

  “To hell with you and your boss.”

  However, the topographer didn’t want a quarrel; he said nothing to the boss. I realized that something important had come back to me.

  For several years I hadn’t seen a single newspaper or book, and I’d trained myself a long time ago not to regret the loss. All fifty of my neighbors in the tent, that torn tarpaulin tent, felt the same way; not a single newspaper or book had ever appeared in our barracks. Our superiors—the clerk of works, the chief of the prospecting team, the guard—had descended into our world without books.

  My language, my coarse miner’s language, was as impoverished as the feelings that still survived around my bones. Reveille, lining up for work, dinner, end of work, time to sleep, please sir, may I speak, spade, shaft, yes sir, drill, pickax, it’s cold outside, rain, cold soup, hot soup, bread, ration, leave me a cigarette end: for some years I had made do with about two dozen words. Half of these words were swear words. When I was a young man, a child in fact, there used to be a story about a Russian getting by when he traveled abroad with just one word repeated in different intonations. The wealth of Russian swear words, their inexhaustible offensiveness was not revealed to me in my childhood or youth. Here, that story about the single swear word sounded like a girl from a nice boarding school talking. But I wasn’t searching for any other words. I was happy not to have to search for other words. I didn’t know if they even existed. That was a question I couldn’t answer.

  I was frightened, overwhelmed when my brain—right here, I clearly remember, under the right temple bone—gave birth to a word that was utterly unsuitable for the taiga, a word that neither I nor my comrades could understand. I got up on my bunk and yelled out this word to the heavens, to infinity: “Maxim! Maxim!”

  And then I burst into loud laughter.

  “Maxim!” I roared straight into the northern sky, the double dawn; I roared it without yet understanding the meaning of the word that had been born within me. If this was a word that had returned, that had been found again, so much the better, so much the better! A great joy filled all my being.

  “Maxim.”

  “Listen to that psycho!”

  “He really is a psycho! Are you a foreigner, or what?” Vronsky the mining engineer asked me sarcastically, the same “three flakes of tobacco” Vronsky.

  “Vronsky, give me something to smoke.”

  “No, I haven’t got any.”

  “Well, just three flakes of tobacco.”

  “Three flakes? All right.”

  His dirty fingernail extracted three flakes from a pouch that was full of tobacco.

  “A foreigner?” That question transferred our fate into the world of provocations and denunciations, interrogations and extra sentences.

  But I didn’t care about Vronsky’s provocative question. What I’d discovered was too enormous.

  “Maxim!”

  This really was a psycho talking.

  Malice is the last feeling a man takes with him into oblivion, into the world of the dead. Was it really a dead world? Even a stone, let alone grass, trees, a river, didn’t seem to me to be dead. A river was not just an incarnation or a symbol of life, it was life itself. Its constant movement, its never silent burbling, its form of conversation, its business of making water run down with the current against a contrary wind, smashing through rocks, cutting through plains and meadows. A river, which transformed a bare riverbed that the sun had dried out, and with a barely visible thread of water made its way over the stones, submitting to its age-old duty, a stream that has lost hope of any help from the sky, hope of any lifesaving rain. The first thunderstorm, the first downpour, and the water has transformed the banks, broken rocks, thrown trees up, and is rushing madly down along its same eternal path.

  Maxim! I couldn’t trust myself, I was afraid as I went to sleep that the world that had come back to me would vanish overnight. But the word did not vanish.

&
nbsp; Maxim. That could be a new name for the little river that ran by our settlement, our posting: the Rio Rita. In what way was that a better name than Maxim? The bad taste of the master of the earth, the topographer, had put the name Rio Rita on the maps of the world, and that couldn’t be changed.

  There is something Roman, firm, Latin about the word “maxim.” In my childhood, ancient Rome was a story of political struggles, of people’s struggles, while ancient Greece was the kingdom of art, even though there were politicians and murderers in ancient Greece too, and ancient Rome had its fair share of people of the arts. But my childhood years differentiated these two very different worlds sharply, simply, and narrowly. Maxim is a Roman word. It took me a week to understand what maxim meant. I whispered it, shouted it out, frightening and amusing my neighbors with it. I demanded a solution, an explanation, a translation from the world, from the heavens. . . . A week later I understood it, and quivered with fear and joy. With fear, because I was frightened of any return to a world I had no way of returning to. Joy, because I could see life returning to me against my will.

  Many days passed until I learned to summon more and more new words, one after the other, from the depths of my brain. Each word found it hard to come, each one arose suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words did not come back in a flow. Each one came back on its own, not escorted by other familiar words, and it came back to my tongue before it came back to my brain.

  Finally the day came when everyone, all fifty workmen, abandoned their work and ran off to the settlement, toward the river. They clambered out of their open shafts, their ditches, they abandoned trees they were sawing and soup half cooked in its pot. They were running faster than me, but I managed to hobble there in time by using my hands to run down the mountain.

  A boss had arrived from Magadan. It was a clear, hot, dry day. There was a phonograph on the enormous larch stump by the entrance to the tent. It was playing something symphonic, the music drowning out the hiss of the needle.

  Everyone, murderers and horse thieves, gangsters and freiers, foremen and manual laborers, stood around the phonograph. The boss was standing next to us. His facial expression suggested that he had composed this music for us, for our remote posting in the backwoods of the taiga. The shellac disc revolved and hissed, even the stump was revolving, wound up for three hundred revolutions, like a taut spring wound up for three hundred years. . . .

  1965

  BOOK THREE

  The Spade Artist

  A HEART ATTACK

  THE WALL rocked, and a familiar sweet sense of nausea swept through my throat. There was a burned match on the floor; for the thousandth time it flashed past my eyes. I stretched out a hand to grab this tiresome match. It disappeared and I couldn’t see anything. The world hadn’t entirely abandoned me; on the boulevard outside there was still a voice, the nurse’s distant, insistent voice. Then I had glimpses of medical gowns, a corner of a building, a star-studded sky. An enormous gray tortoise loomed into being, its eyes shining with indifference. Someone pulled a rib out of the tortoise, and I crawled into a hole, clinging to whatever I could and pulling myself along with my hands, trusting only my hands.

  I recalled other people’s insistent fingers, skillfully bending my head and shoulders toward a bed. Everything went quiet; I was alone with someone as gigantic as Gulliver. I was lying on a board, like an insect, and someone was examining me carefully under a magnifying glass. When I turned over, this terrible magnifying glass followed my movements. I writhed under its monstrous lens. Only when the male nurses moved me onto a hospital bed and I felt the blissful peace of solitude did I understand that Gulliver’s magnifying glass was no nightmare; it was the duty doctor’s glasses. That gave me more joy than I could express.

  My head ached and the slightest movement made me dizzy. I couldn’t think, I could only remember, and frightening images from the distant past began to appear as black-and-white figures, like frames from a silent film. The sweet nausea, like anesthesia under ether, wasn’t going away. Now I’d solved the mystery of that familiar feeling. I remembered the first time that a day off work was announced, many years ago, in the north, after six months without a break. Everyone wanted to stay lying down, just lying down, without mending their clothes, without moving. . . . But we were all forced to get up in the morning and sent out to fetch firewood. Eight kilometers from the settlement there was a wood mill, and we had to choose as big a log as we could carry and bring it back. I decided to make a detour; about two kilometers further there were some old wood piles where you might find a suitable log. The climb was hard work and when I reached the pile, the only logs there were heavy ones. Further up, I could see the dark shapes of a once neat stack of wood that had fallen apart, so I started making my way there. Here the logs were not so thick, but the ends were trapped in the stack and I wasn’t strong enough to pull one out. I tried several times, but only exhausted myself completely. Going back without any firewood, however, was out of the question, so I gathered my last reserves of strength and clambered even higher up the stack, which was lightly covered with snow. I spent a long time scraping away the porous squeaky snow with my feet and hands. Finally, I pulled out one of the logs. But it was too heavy for me. I unwrapped the dirty towel that served me as a neck scarf, tied it to the top of the log, and dragged it down. It bounced and hit my legs. Or it may have freed itself and was running downhill faster than me. The log kept getting stuck in dwarf pine bushes or jamming itself in the snow. I had to crawl up to it and make it move again. I was still high up on the hill when I saw that darkness had fallen. I realized that many hours had passed, and the path to the settlement and the zone was still a long way away. I gave my scarf a tug and the log again started bouncing and rushing downhill. I dragged it onto the path. When I looked at the forest it was swaying to and fro, and a sweet nausea swept through my throat. I came to my senses in the winch operator’s cabin. He was rubbing down my face and hands with snow, and it stung.

  I now visualized all this on the hospital wall.

  But it wasn’t the winch operator who was holding my hand, it was the doctor. There was a Riva-Rocci blood-pressure manometer nearby. I realized with joy that I wasn’t in the north.

  “Where am I?”

  “In the neurology institute.”

  The doctor was asking questions. I found it hard to respond. I wanted to be alone. I wasn’t afraid of my memories.

  1960

  A FUNERAL SPEECH

  THEY HAD all died.

  Nikolai Kazimirovich Barbé, one of the organizers of Communist Youth in Russia, a foreman and comrade who’d helped me drag a big rock out of a narrow open-pit mine, was shot for failing to fulfill the plan for the area his team was working on. Barbé had been reported on by the area boss, a young communist called Arm who got a medal in 1938, became a mining chief in charge of administration, and had a brilliant career. Nikolai Barbé had one thing he treasured: a camel-hair scarf, blue, long and warm, made of real wool. Thieves stole it in the bathhouse. They just took it when Barbé’s back was turned. The next day Barbé had frostbitten cheeks, so badly frostbitten that the sores hadn’t healed by the time he was shot.

  Ioska Riutin died. He was my work partner, and good workers didn’t want to have me as a partner. But Ioska did. He was far stronger and more nimble than I was. But he understood perfectly why we’d been brought here. And he didn’t resent the fact that I was bad at the job. Eventually, the senior warden (that was what officials in the mines were called in 1937, just as they were under the tsars) ordered a “personal allotment” for me. What that means will be explained later. Meanwhile, Ioska worked with a different partner. But we were still next to each other in the barracks. Once I was awoken by an awkward movement; it was someone wearing leather and smelling of sheep. This person had his back to me in the narrow gap between the bunks. He woke my neighbor: “Riutin? Get dressed.”

  Riutin hurriedly started dressing, while the man who smelled of sheep began searchi
ng his meager possessions. Among them were chess pieces, which the man in leather set to one side.

  “They’re mine,” Riutin said hastily. “My property. I’ve paid money for them.”

  “So what?” said the sheepskin.

  “Leave them alone.”

  The sheepskin burst out laughing. When it was tired of laughing it wiped its face with its leather sleeve and announced, “You won’t be needing them any more. . . .”

  Dmitri Nikolayevich Orlov, a former adviser to Sergei Kirov, died. He and I used to saw wood on the night shift at the mine and, still with our saws, we worked days in the bakery. I can remember well the tools store man giving us a critical look as he issued the saw, an ordinary two-handed cross-saw.

  “Listen, old man,” said the tools store man—in those days we were called “old men,” unlike twenty years later. “Can you sharpen a saw?”

  “Of course I can,” Orlov said hurriedly. “Have you got a setting tool?”

  “You can set it with your ax,” said the store man, who had concluded that we knew what we were doing, unlike the other intellectuals.

  Orlov went down the path, his back bent double, his hands stuffed up his sleeves. He was carrying the saw under his arm.

  “Listen, Dmitri,” I said bounding along to catch up with him. “I don’t know how to do this. I’ve never sharpened a saw before.”

  Orlov turned to face me, stuck the saw into the snow, and put on his glove.

  “I think,” he said in a pedantic tone, “that it is the duty of anyone who has been to university to know how to sharpen and set a saw.”

  I agreed with him.

  The economist Semion Alekseyevich Sheinin died. He was a kind man. It took him a long time to understand what was being done to us, but he understood in the end and began to wait calmly for death. He had the necessary courage. Once I received a parcel—it was very rare for a parcel to arrive—and all it contained was a pair of pilot’s felt boots. Our relatives really had no idea of the conditions we were living under. I was only too aware that the boots would be stolen. They’d be taken from me the very first night. So I sold them before I even left the commandant’s office; I got a hundred rubles for them from Andrei Boiko, the guard. The boots were worth seven hundred, but I’d gotten a good price. After all, I could now buy a hundred kilos of bread, or butter and sugar instead. The last time I had eaten butter and sugar was in the pretrial prison. So I bought a whole kilo of butter in the shop. I remembered how good it would be for me. That butter cost me forty-one rubles. I bought it in the daytime (we were working at night) and ran to see Sheinin—we were in different barracks—to celebrate the parcel’s arrival. I’d also bought some bread. . . .