Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  Umansky had studied in Brussels. After the revolution, back in Russia, he had worked as a doctor and treated people. Umansky had gotten to the essence of 1937. He understood that his residence abroad for so long, his knowledge of languages, his freethinking were sufficient cause for repressions, so the old man had tried to outwit fate. He had made a bold move by getting a post with Far East Construction, by being recruited for Kolyma, for the Far North, as a doctor, and he had arrived in Magadan as a free contract worker. He treated people and lived. Unfortunately, Umansky didn’t take into account the universal nature of the instructions that applied: Kolyma could not save him any more than the North Pole could. He was arrested and tried by a tribunal, and got a sentence of ten years. His daughter renounced this enemy of the people and vanished from his life; all he had left was the photograph on his desk that had survived by chance. The ten-year sentence was now coming to an end. Umansky was regularly credited with his working days, credits he was very interested in.

  Finally the day came when Andreyev was again invited to have tea with Professor Umansky.

  A scratched enamel mug of hot tea was waiting for Andreyev. Next to the mug was the host’s glass, made of real glass, greenish, clouded and unbelievably dirty, even to Andreyev’s practiced eye. Umansky never washed his glass. That, too, was a revelation, Umansky’s contribution to the science of hygiene, a principle that Umansky applied to life with all his firmness, insistence, and pedagogical impatience.

  “In our circumstances an unwashed glass is cleaner and more sterile than a washed one. This is the best, perhaps the only hygiene. . . . Do you understand?”

  Umansky clicked his fingers.

  “There’s more infection in a towel than in the air. Ergo: glasses shouldn’t be washed. I have an old believer’s personal glass. And it shouldn’t be rinsed. There’s less infection in the air than in the water. The ABC of sanitary practice and of hygiene. Do you understand?” Umansky screwed up his eyes. “That’s a discovery that goes further than the morgue.”

  After this tea drinking and more linguistic spell casting, Umansky, almost gasping, whispered in Andreyev’s ear, “The main thing is to outlive Stalin. Everyone who outlives Stalin will survive. Do you understand? It isn’t possible for the curses of millions of people not to materialize and strike him. Do you understand? He is bound to die of this universal hatred. He’ll get cancer or something! Do you understand? We’ll survive.”

  Andreyev said nothing.

  “I understand your caution and I approve of it,” Umansky said, no longer whispering. “You think I’m some sort of provocateur. But I am seventy years old.”

  Andreyev said nothing.

  “You’re right to say nothing,” said Umansky. “Even seventy-year-old men can be provocateurs. Everything can happen. . . .”

  Andreyev said nothing. He was delighted by Umansky, he was unable to overcome himself and respond. This silence, instinctive and all-powerful, was part of the behavior that Andreyev had grown accustomed to during his life in the camps where there were so many accusations, investigations, and interrogations. These were inner rules it was not so easy to break or set aside. Andreyev shook Umansky’s hand, a small, dry, hot old man’s hand with hot, clutching fingers.

  When the professor’s sentence was over he was forbidden to leave Magadan for the rest of his life. He died on March 4, 1953, carrying on to the very last minute his linguistic work, which was not to be continued by anyone or bequeathed to anyone. So the professor never found out that the electron microscope had been invented and that experiments had confirmed chromosome theory.

  1964

  TO THE HOSPITAL

  KRIST was a tall man. The paramedic was even taller, and broad-shouldered, fat-faced.

  For a long time, for many years, all bosses had seemed fat-faced to Krist. Making Krist stand in the corner, the paramedic looked at his quarry with undisguised approval.

  “So you say you were a hospital porter?”

  “I was.”

  “That’s good. I need a hospital porter. A real one. To keep things in order.” With a wave of his arm the paramedic indicated the enormous outpatient clinic, which looked more like a stable.

  “I’m sick,” said Krist. “I need to go to the hospital.”

  “Everyone’s sick. There’ll be time. First let’s get things shipshape. Make use of this cupboard here,” the paramedic knocked on the door of an enormous empty cupboard. “Well, it’s getting late. Wash the floors, and then go to bed. You can wake me up at reveille.”

  Krist had only begun pushing the icy water around all the corners of the cold, frosted outpatient’s clinic, when his new boss’s sleepy voice interrupted his work.

  Krist went into the next room, which was just as stable-like. A trestle bed had been squeezed into a corner. Covered with a pile of torn blankets, fur jackets, rags, the sleepy paramedic was calling for Krist.

  “Take my felt boots off, porter.”

  Krist pulled the stinking felt boots off the paramedic’s legs.

  “Put them up as high as you can by the stove. In the morning you can hand them to me when they’re nice and warm. I like nice warm boots.”

  Krist used a rag to wash the dirty icy water into a corner of the clinic; the water curdled and turned into the sludge you get when a river starts to freeze over. Krist wiped the floor clean, lay down on his trestle bed, and immediately found oblivion in the shallow sleep he always had here. It seemed only a moment later that he woke up. The paramedic was shaking his shoulder:“What are you up to? Reveille was sounded long ago.”

  “I don’t want to be a hospital porter. Admit me to the hospital.”

  “To the hospital? You have to earn that. So, you don’t want to work as a porter?”

  “No,” said Krist, making his usual gesture to ward off any blows to his face.

  “Get out of here and go to work!” The paramedic pushed Krist out of the clinic and strode with him through the fog to the guardhouse.

  “Here’s a shirker, a malingerer. Chase him out, chase him,” the paramedic yelled to the escort guards, who were leading the next party of prisoners through the barbed wire. The guards were very experienced. They poked Krist with their bayonets and butts, but didn’t hurt him.

  Flotsam was being carried into the camp; this was easy work. The flotsam had to be carried two kilometers from the spring oxbows of a mountain river that had frozen down to the riverbed. Once debarked, washed, dried by the wind, the trunks were hard to pull out of the oxbow, where they were held down by waterweeds, branches, and stones. There was a lot of flotsam. None of the trunks were too heavy to carry. Each prisoner chose one that he could lift. A two-kilometer journey took up nearly a whole working day. This was a job for invalids: it was a settlement and there wasn’t a lot of demand. It was a separate camp for vitamin collection. Long live vitamins! But Krist didn’t understand, refused to understand this terrible irony.

  Day after day passed, but still Krist was not admitted to the hospital. Others were, but not him. Every day the paramedic would come to the guardhouse and, pointing his glove at Krist, yell to the escort guards, “Chase him off, chase him off.”

  And it would all begin again.

  The long-desired hospital was just four kilometers from the settlement. But to get there you needed a prescription, a piece of paper. The paramedic knew that he was the one who decided whether Krist lived or died. So did Krist.

  From the barracks where Krist slept—they called it “lived”—to the guardhouse was just a hundred yards. The vitamin settlement was one of the most neglected, which made the paramedic seem taller, fatter, and more dreadful, while Krist seemed even more of a nonentity.

  On that hundred-yard journey Krist met somebody; he couldn’t remember whom. The man had already passed, vanishing in the mist. Krist’s weakened, starving memory couldn’t suggest anything. Yet. . . . Krist thought day and night, trying to overcome the subzero temperatures, hunger, and the pain of his frostbitten hands and fe
et: who was it? Whom had he met on the path? Or was he going mad? Krist knew that man who’d vanished into the mist: two years ago he had been a camp chief, but of a camp that was not a vitamin camp, but a gold mine, where Krist came face-to-face with the real Kolyma. He was a boss, the camp NKVD man, a “spook-sucker,” as the gangsters called them. He was a free contracted boss, and he’d been tried when Krist was there. After his trial he’d disappeared, and it was said he’d been shot. Yet here he was, meeting Krist on the path of a vitamin-collecting expedition. Krist found his former boss in the camp office. It wasn’t clear what job the boss had, but it was certainly clerical. The former boss had, of course, an article 58 conviction, but without any damning initial letter in his file, so he was allowed to work in an office.

  Naturally, Krist could have known and recognized the boss, but the boss wouldn’t be able to remember Krist. All the same. . . . Krist went up to the screen that cuts off clerks all over the world.

  “What, trying to nail me, are you?” the former camp boss said, talking like a gangster, as he turned to face Krist.

  “Yes. I’ve come from the mine, you see,” said Krist.

  “Glad to see someone from there.” Understanding Krist perfectly, the former boss said. “Come and see me in the evening. I’ll get you a herring.”

  Neither knew the other’s name or surname. But the brief and insignificant link that had once united them had suddenly become a force strong enough to change a man’s life. The boss, by giving up his herring to Krist who had been at the gold mine with him, rather than to his starving comrades on the vitamin expedition, knew that gold and vitamin collection were different things. But neither of them mentioned this. They both understood and sensed something: Krist—his subterranean rights; the former boss—his duty.

  Every evening the former boss would bring Krist a herring. Every evening it was a bigger herring. The camp cook wasn’t amazed by the clerk’s sudden whim, even though the clerk had never ever taken his share of herring before. Krist ate the herrings in the way he ate at the mine: skin, head, bones and all. Sometimes the former boss brought a half-eaten piece of bread, already bitten into. It occurred to Krist that it was dangerous to go on eating this tasty herring. They might decide not to admit him to the hospital, his body might lose the condition needed for hospitalization. His skin wouldn’t be dry enough, his sacrum wouldn’t be angular enough. Krist told his former boss that he was going to be admitted to the hospital, but that the paramedic was using his authority to keep him out, so. . . .

  “Yes, the paramedic here is a real son of a bitch. I’ve been here more than a year, and nobody has had a good word to say about that quack. But we’ll pull the wool over his eyes. People get sent to the hospital here every day. And I draw up the lists.” The former boss smiled.

  That evening Krist was summoned to the guardhouse. Two prisoners were already standing there, each of them holding a small plywood suitcase.

  “There’s no guard to escort you,” said the duty officer coming out onto the porch. “We’ll send you off tomorrow.”

  For Krist that was lethal—the next day everything would be discovered. The paramedic would have Krist herded off to some hell. Krist didn’t know the name of the hell where he might end up, or that it would be worse than what he’d already seen. But he had no doubt that there were places where things were even worse. Now he could only wait and stay silent.

  The duty officer came out again.

  “Go to the barracks. There’s not going to be a guard.”

  Then a prisoner holding a suitcase stepped forward.

  “Give me an authorization on paper, sir. I’ll take everyone there. I’m better than any soldier. You know me, don’t you? This is something that’s been done before. I don’t need an escort, I’m a trustee, and as for the others—where would they run off to? It’s night, it’s below zero. . . .”

  The officer went into the guardhouse and came straight back, giving the man with the suitcase an envelope made from a sheet of newspaper.

  “Have you got your things?”

  “What things. . . .”

  “All right, off you go.”

  The iron bolt was drawn and three prisoners were released into the white frosty haze.

  The trustee walked ahead. He was running, in Krist’s opinion. Here and there the mist parted, letting through the yellow light of the electric streetlamps.

  What seemed an age passed. Drops of hot sweat were streaming down Krist’s shrunken belly and his bony back. His heart was pounding and pounding. But Krist kept running and running after his fellow prisoners, who were slipping off into the mist. At the corner of the settlement was the main highway.

  “Do we have to wait for you?”

  Krist was frightened of being abandoned and left behind.

  “Listen, you,” said the trustee. “Do you know where the hospital is?”

  “I do.”

  “We’ll go ahead, and we’ll wait for you there.”

  The prisoners vanished in the darkness, and Krist, once he had his breath back, staggered along a drainage ditch, stopping every minute, before rushing ahead again. He had lost his gloves, but didn’t notice the snow, ice, and stone scratching his bare hands. He growled and sniveled as he scraped the earth. He couldn’t see anything ahead of him apart from white haze. Through the white haze, sounding their horns furiously, enormous trucks loomed up before vanishing immediately in the mist. But Krist didn’t stop to let the trucks pass before he staggered on to the hospital. He was clutching at the drainage ditch, at its sidewalls—it seemed to be an enormous cable stretched across an icy abyss—as he crawled, crawled and crawled toward warmth and salvation.

  The haze thinned a little, and Krist saw the turning to the hospital and the tiny buildings of the hospital settlement. About three hundred yards, no more. Uttering another growl, Krist crawled further.

  “We’d begun to think you’d croaked,” said the trustee, who was standing on the porch of the hospital barracks. His voice was indifferent, but not spiteful. “They’re not admitting us now, not without you.”

  Krist wasn’t listening or responding. The most important and difficult part was coming: would they admit him, or not.

  The doctor came; he was a young, clean-looking man in an unbelievably white gown; he recorded all their names in a book.

  “Get undressed.”

  Krist’s skin was peeling, thin patches were dropping off his body, looking like the fingerprints in his case file.

  “That’s what we call pellagra,” said the man who needed no guard.

  “I had something like that,” said the third man. Those were the first words Krist had heard him speak. “They took the skin off both my hands like a glove, and sent it to Magadan for the museum.”

  “The museum?” said the trustee scornfully. “As if there weren’t enough hand skins in Magadan.”

  But the third prisoner wasn’t listening to the trustee.

  “You,” he said, jerking Krist’s hand. “Listen to this. With that illness you’ll be prescribed hot injections, for sure. I was prescribed them, and I swapped them with the gangsters for bread. That’s how I got better.”

  Forms for the patients’ notes were now taken out of the cupboard. Three forms. All of them would be admitted. A hospital porter came in.

  “Ward two for now.”

  A washdown with warm water, linen with no lice. A corridor where the wicks of the smoking lamps still burned on the orderly’s table. The lamps were fueled by cod-liver oil, dripped onto a saucer from an old food can. A door to an empty ward, from which came the smell of frost, the street, ice. The porter went to fetch firewood to stoke the iron stove, which had gone out.

  “I know what,” said the trustee. “Let’s all lie down together, or we’ll all end up in a coffin.”

  They all lay down on the same bunk, their arms around one another. Then the trustee slipped out from under three blankets, collected all the mattresses and blankets in the ward, made a great
pile on the bunk where the prisoners had lain down, and dove into Krist’s bony embrace. The patients went to sleep.

  1964

  JUNE

  ANDREYEV came out of the mine gallery and went to the lamp room to hand over his Wolf Safety lamp, which had gone out.

  “They’ll be pestering us again,” he thought idly about the security service. “The wire’s been torn.”

  Despite the prohibition, people were smoking in the mine. You could get a sentence for smoking, but nobody had been caught yet.

  Not far from the ore slag heap Andreyev met Stupnitsky, a professor from the artillery academy. Stupnitsky worked in the mine as a surface foreman, even though he had a conviction under article 58. He was an efficient, conscientious, agile serving man, despite his age. The mine bosses couldn’t have dreamed of a better foreman.

  “Listen,” said Stupnitsky. “The Germans have bombed Sebastopol, Kiev, and Odessa.”

  Andreyev listened politely. This information sounded like news of war in Paraguay or Bolivia. What did Andreyev care? Stupnitsky had plenty to eat, he was a foreman, so he could take an interest in things like war.

  Grisha the Greek, a thief, came up to them.

  “What are automatics?”

  “I don’t know. Something like machine guns, I expect.”

  “A knife is much more frightening than any bullet,” Grisha said in a didactic tone.

  “True,” said Boris Ivanovich, a prisoner, but a surgeon. “A knife in your belly is sure to start an infection, there’s always a danger of peritonitis. A firearm wound is better, it’s cleaner. . . .”

  “The best thing is a nail,” said Grisha the Greek.

  “Li-i-ine up!”

  They lined up and left the mine for the camp. The escort guard never went into the mine: the darkness underground protected people from his beatings. Free men who were foremen were also on their guard. God forbid a big lump of coal should fall on your head from the “stove.” However ready Nikolai Antonovich, the senior man, might be with his fists, even he had almost given up his old habits. The only one to hit prisoners was Mishka Timoshenko, a young warden who’d been a prisoner and was now on the make.