Kolyma Stories

by Varlam Shalamov

  But there’s much more. The most terrible thing is the disinfection chamber, which is officially compulsory every time prisoners wash.

  Underwear in the camps can be “individual” or “general.” These are bureaucratic, officially accepted expressions, together with such linguistic pearls as “bedbugization” and “lousification,” etc. Individual underwear is if anything a bit new, a bit above average, reserved for the camp staff, prisoners who are foremen, and similarly privileged persons. This underwear is not assigned to any particular single prisoner, but it is washed separately and more carefully, and is replaced more often by new underwear. But “general” underwear is general. It is issued right there in the bathhouse after washing, in exchange for the dirty clothes that have been collected and counted, a job that is done earlier and separately. There’s no question of choosing your washed underwear according to your size. Clean underwear is just a lottery, and I found it odd and so painful that I was moved to tears when I saw adults weeping with resentment when they received something clean, but in tatters, in exchange for something dirty, but intact. Nothing can give you distance from the unpleasant things that make up life: neither the clear realization that you only have to wear this until the next bath day, or that, in the final analysis, your whole life has been ruined, so why bother about a set of underwear, since, after all, any intact underwear you received was a matter of luck. Yet people argue and weep. Of course, that is a phenomenon of the same order as those psychological shifts away from the norm that are typical of almost every action of a prisoner: the same dementia that one neurologist called a universal disease.

  In his mental sufferings, a prisoner is reduced to such a state that getting his underwear returned to him through the dark window that leads to the mysterious depths of the bathhouse buildings is a nerve-wracking event. Long before their underwear is reissued, the freshly washed prisoners crowd around that window. They argue and make a fuss about what underwear was issued the last time, what was issued five years ago in the Baikal-Amur railway camp, and as soon as the board that covers the window from inside is removed, they all rush toward it, pushing each other with their slippery, dirty, stinking bodies.

  The washed underwear is not always dry when it is issued. Far too often it is given out still wet, for there was no time to dry it, or there wasn’t enough firewood. Putting on wet, damp underwear after a bath is something few would find pleasant.

  Curses rain down on the heads of the bath attendants, who are used to anything. Those who put on wet underwear begin to freeze irrevocably, but they have to wait for their outer clothing to be disinfected.

  What is a disinfection chamber? It’s a pit in the ground, covered with a boarded roof, and lined with clay. It is heated with an iron stove, which is stoked in the lobby. Here the pea jackets, quilted jackets, and trousers are hung on sticks, the door is shut tight, and the disinfector starts to “put on the heat.” There are no thermometers, no bags of sulphur to determine the right temperature. Success depends on luck, or on a conscientious disinfection worker.

  At the very best, the things that hang close to the stove will be nicely warmed up. The rest, protected from the heat by the first, will only get more damp, while whatever is hung in the far corner will come out still cold. This chamber kills no lice. It is merely a formality and a means of creating additional torments for the prisoner.

  The doctors are well aware of this, but the camp can’t be left without a disinfection chamber. So, after waiting for an hour in the big “changing room,” the attendants begin to pull out armfuls of things, completely identical sets: they are thrown onto the floor, and everyone is supposed to use his own strength to find his clothes. Steaming pea jackets, still wet, quilted jackets, and trousers are pulled on by a cursing prisoner. That night, depriving himself of the little sleep he has left, he will dry his quilted jacket and trousers on the barracks stove.

  No wonder nobody likes bathhouse day.

  1955

  DIAMOND SPRING

  THE TRUCK stopped by the river ferry, and people started getting out, slowly and awkwardly throwing their stiffened legs over the side of the Studebaker. The left bank of the river was flat, the right was rocky, as they should have been according to the theory of the academician Behr.[27] We left the road headed straight for the bed of a mountain river and walked about two hundred paces over the polished dry stones, which rattled under our feet. A dark stream of water, which had seemed so narrow from the banks, turned out to be a wide and fast-running mountain river. A flat-bottomed boat was waiting for us, and the ferryman, holding a pole instead of oars, punted the boat, taking just three passengers at a time to the opposite bank, and then coming back alone. The crossing took until evening. Once on the other bank, we clambered for a long time up a narrow stony path, helping one another, like mountain climbers. The narrow path, barely noticeable in the yellowing, flattened grass, led to a ravine, where the mountain peaks closed in from the right and the left. The stream in this ravine was called Diamond Spring.

  This was an amazing expedition, to the very Diamond Spring we had for so long tried, in vain, to reach from the gold-mine pit faces. We had heard so many unbelievable things about it. They said that there were no escort guards here, no constant roll calls, no barbed wire, no dogs.

  We were used to the clicking of rifle bolts, we had learned by heart the guard’s warning: “A step to the left, a step to the right, I consider an escape attempt: march!” And we marched, and there would be some clown—there always were in any setting, even the worst, for irony is the weapon of the disarmed—who would repeat the familiar camp joke, “A leap in the air I consider agitation.” This malicious joke was spoken so that the guard couldn’t hear it. It brought a certain amount of cheer, gave a second’s tiny relief. We received the warning four times a day: in the morning, when we went off to work; in the middle of the day, when we went to lunch; and then after lunch; and in the evening, as a farewell before we returned to barracks. And every time after the familiar formula someone would utter the remark about a leap, and nobody got bored or irritated by it. On the contrary, we were prepared to listen to that joke a thousand times.

  And now our dreams had come true. We were at Diamond Spring and without an escort guard. All we had was a young man with a black beard, which he had obviously grown to look more serious, who was armed with an Izhevsk rifle, watching over our river crossing. We had already had it explained to us that he was in charge of the forest region, that he was our boss, a free contract foreman.

  At Diamond Spring pylons were being made for a high-voltage power line.

  There are not many places in Kolyma where trees grow tall. We were going to carry out selective clearing, the best sort of work for people like us.

  A gold-mine pit face is a murderous place to work, and it kills men quickly. The rations there are bigger, but bigger rations, not smaller ones, are what kill you in the camps. The truth of this camp saying was something we had long ago been able to convince ourselves of. No amount of chocolate could save a pit-face getter who had become a goner.

  Selective forest clearing was better than complete clearing, for the forest was thin and low, the trees grew in marshes and there were no giants. Skidding—hauling the timber into stacks on your own shoulders over the porous snow—was agonizing. But twelve-meter pillars for a power line couldn’t be skidded manually; they required a horse or a tractor. So life was bearable. And the fact that this expedition was without escort guards meant that there would be no solitary confinement, no beatings. The area boss was a free contract worker, an engineer or technician. So we were undoubtedly in luck.

  We spent the night on the riverbank and in the morning we went up the path to our barracks. The sun had not yet set when we reached a low, long taiga log cabin with a roof plugged with moss and covered with stones. Fifty-two men lived in the barracks, and we new arrivals were twenty. The bunks of unplaned boards reached high up, and the ceiling was low, so that you could only stand up st
raight in the passage between the bunks.

  The boss was an energetic, agile man. He surveyed the ranks of his new workmen with young eyes, but an experienced gaze. He was immediately interested in my scarf. It was, naturally, cotton, not woolen, but it was still a scarf, the sort worn by free men. I had been given it the year before by a hospital paramedic, and since then I hadn’t taken it off my neck, winter or summer. I washed it as best I could in the bathhouse, but I never ever handed it over to be deloused. The hot disinfection chamber wouldn’t have killed the lice, of which there were a lot in the scarf, and the scarf would immediately have been stolen. My neighbors, whether in the barracks, outside, or at work, were hunting, following the rules, for my scarf. There were those who hunted for it against the rules: anyone who happened to pass by, for who would refuse to earn money to buy tobacco or bread? And any free man would buy this scarf, for it would be easy to steam out the lice. Only a prisoner finds it hard to get rid of lice. But I heroically kept the scarf knotted around my neck when I went to sleep, although I suffered from the lice, which are as impossible to get used to as the cold.

  “Won’t you sell it?” asked the black-bearded boss.

  “No,” I answered.

  “It’s up to you. You don’t need a scarf.”

  I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. The other bad thing was that we were fed only once a day, after work. In the morning all we got was hot water and bread. But I had put up with that before. The bosses paid little attention to feeding the prisoners. Every one of them tried to make things as easy as they could for themselves.

  All the food supplies were kept by the free foreman. He and his Izhevsk rifle lived in a tiny log cabin ten yards from the barracks. Keeping food like this was also something new, as food was usually kept with the prisoners, not with the people in charge of production. Things were apparently better ordered at Diamond Spring. It was dangerous and risky to let hungry prisoners keep the food supplies, and everybody knew of the risk.

  We had a long way—about four kilometers—to get to work, and it was clear that with each day the selective clearance of trees would recede further and further into the depths of the ravine.

  A long walk, even under armed escort, is more a good thing than a bad thing for a prisoner: the more time spent walking, the less spent on work, whatever the norm-setters and foremen calculate.

  The work was no worse and no better than any prisoners’ work in the forest. We felled the trees that the foreman had marked with his ax, we debarked them, we cleared off the side branches and collected them into a pile. The heaviest job was felling the tree, so that the bottom end fell on the stump and thus didn’t fall into the snow, but the foreman knew that hauling it out was urgent, that tractors would arrive. He knew that in early winter the snow would not be deep enough to cover the trees we had felled, and he didn’t always insist that we lift the trunk onto the stump.

  Something astounding was awaiting me in the evening.

  Supper at Diamond Spring was breakfast, lunch, and dinner in one: it didn’t look any richer or more satisfying that any lunch or supper at the mine. My stomach kept insisting that the total calories and nutritional value were less than at the mine, where we got less than half the rations we were supposed to get, since all the rest was diverted to the bowls of the bosses, the support staff, and the gangsters. But I didn’t believe my stomach, which had been so badly starved in Kolyma. Its reactions were exaggerations or underestimates; it wanted too much, it demanded too insistently, it was far too biased.

  After supper, for some reason, nobody went to bed. They were all waiting for something. For a roll call? No, there were no roll calls here. Finally the door opened and in came the inexhaustible black-bearded foreman, holding a piece of paper. The orderly took the kerosene lamp from the upper bunks and put it on the table, dug into the middle of the barracks. He sat down by the light.

  “What’s this going to be?” I asked the man next to me.

  “Percentages for today,” he replied. In his tone of voice I detected something very frightening: I’d heard that tone in extremely serious circumstances, when the victims of 1938 had their work at the goldmine pit face measured every day by an “individual allocation.” I could not possibly be mistaken. There was something here that even I didn’t know about, some dangerous innovation.

  The foreman didn’t look at anyone. In an even, bored voice he read out to each worker a surname and the percentage of the norm that had been fulfilled, then he carefully folded the piece of paper and left. There was silence in the barracks. All we could hear was the heavy breathing of several scores of men in the dark.

  “Anyone with less than 100 percent,” explained the man next to me, who had cheered up, “will get no bread tomorrow.”

  “None at all?”

  “None at all.”

  I’d really never ever come across anything like that before.

  In the mines your ration was determined by the brigade’s production over ten days. At the very worst, you got punishment rations: three hundred grams, but you weren’t wholly deprived of bread.

  I thought very hard. Bread was our basic food here. We got half our calories from bread. The cooked food was something hard to define, its nutritional value depended on thousands of different things, on the honesty of the cook, on his hard work, for an idle cook gets help from “workmen” to whom he gives extra food. It depended on energetic and vigilant supervision, on the honesty of the bosses and the degree to which the escort guards were well-fed and decent. It depended on the absence or presence of gangsters. Finally, and this was a matter entirely of chance, it depended on the ladle used by the server, who might ladle out one dumpling and thus reduce the nutritional value of a soup to virtually zero.

  Our versatile foreman was, of course, making up the percentages as he went along. And I promised myself that if I had my bread ration stopped as a way of affecting production, then I wouldn’t hang around.

  A week passed, during which I realized why the food was kept under the foreman’s bunk. He hadn’t forgotten about the scarf.

  “Listen, Andreyev, sell me your scarf.”

  “It was a present, sir.”

  “Don’t try and be funny.”

  But I refused outright. That evening I was on the list of those who had failed to reach the norm. I wasn’t prepared to argue about it. In the morning I unwound my scarf and took it to our cobbler.

  “Just make sure you steam it properly.”

  “We know, we weren’t born yesterday,” the cobbler replied merrily, pleased by his unexpected acquisition.

  The cobbler gave me a five-hundred-gram bread ration. I broke off a piece and hid the rest under my shirt. I drank my fill of hot water and went to work with the rest of the workers, but I lagged further and further behind, before turning off the road into the forest. I made a wide detour around our settlement, then followed the same way I had come a month before. I walked about half a kilometer away from the path. Snow had fallen, but not enough to make walking difficult. The black-bearded foreman had no bloodhounds. Only later did I learn that he had managed to ski down to the ferryman’s booth, for the mountain river takes a long time to freeze here, and had sent a message with a guard who was going that way to say I had escaped.

  I sat down on the snow and stuffed some rags down my soft boots, below the knee. This sort of footwear was a boot only in name. It was a local model, an economical product for wartime. Hundred of thousands of soft boots were made from old, worn-out quilted trousers. The soles were made of the same material, stitched in several layers and equipped with ties. Flannel foot wrappings were issued with these boots, and that was the footwear for workmen hacking gold in temperatures of minus fifty or sixty. These boots fell apart after a few hours’ work in the forest—they tore on branches and twigs—as well as after work at the gold-mine pit face. Holes in boots were repaired in nighttime cobblers’ workshops, and were crudely stitched. By the morning the repair would be finished.
Layer after layer was stitched onto the soles, until the boots finally became utterly shapeless, more like the banks of a mountain river, laid bare after a landslide.

  Wearing these boots, stick in hand, I headed for the river, a few kilometers above the ferry crossing. I clambered down steep stony slopes, and the ice crackled under my feet. A long patch of unfrozen water blocked my path, and I could see no end to it. The ice had broken in places, and I easily strode into the pearly steaming water, and my quilted soles could feel the stones that poked up from the bottom. I lifted one leg as high as I could: my iced-over boots shone, and I strode in even deeper, above the knee, and using the stick, managed to get to the other side. Once there, I carefully beat my boots with the stick and scraped off the ice from my boots and trousers: my feet were dry. I felt for the piece of bread under my shirt and moved off along the riverbank. After about two hours I came out onto the highway. It was pleasant walking without my louse-infected scarf: my throat and neck seemed to be resting, now that they were covered with an old towel, a “change” which the cobbler had given me for my scarf.

  I was traveling light. It is very important for long journeys, both in winter and in summer, to have your hands free. Your hands take part in your movements and warm up as you walk, just like your feet. The main thing is not to carry anything in your hands. Even a pencil will seem an unthinkable burden after twenty or thirty kilometers. I had known that well for a long time. I knew a few other things: if a man is capable of carrying a burden in one hand for several paces, then he can do so indefinitely, because he will get a second, a third, a tenth wind. I, a goner, could get to wherever I wanted. Along an even road. Walking in winter is easier than in summer, if the freezing temperatures are not too low. I didn’t think about anything, and anyway, thought is impossible below zero: low temperatures take away your thoughts, and quickly and easily turn you into a wild animal. I walked without any purpose other than a desire to get out of the damned expedition with no guards. About thirty kilometers from the camp, on the highway, some lumberjacks lived in a hut, and I was counting on warming myself up there and, if I was lucky, spending the night.