by James L. May
“Did she ever come back to working peat?” said Petrovich.
The woman shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked at Petrovich’s face, then back at me. “You really want to find her, don’t you?”
“It’s all routine,” he said. “We only need to ask her a few questions.”
“Who was the man?” I asked.
“Her man.” She looked at the ground, not meeting our eyes. “A lover. That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“Thank you,” I said.
The girl shrugged, then looked up at me. In the light from the fire her broad face looked especially flat. Her eyes were pale beads. “All right, then,” she said.
Petrovich watched her leave. “I said there would be another man in it somewhere, didn’t I? Not that that gets us much further, but it’s something. Good work.”
It was what I’d said about Father teaching me to cut peat that had made her come around, I thought—my lie. Impersonation, in the manner of Holmes, had been the right strategy after all.
Darkness did prove to make the planks bridging the ditches more treacherous. But Petrovich was still worried about reaching Nikolski before curfew; going around the way we had on our way out would have taken too much time. Twice his cane slipped on icy boards and I had to take hold of his coat to keep him from falling. The second time, only his weighing next to nothing kept us both from crashing into the mud below.
By the time we made it to Nikolski, the old man was panting, and my arm was bruised where he’d dug his fingers in supporting himself. The guards made a hostile show of checking our documents and the time—it seemed Petrovich had been right to be worried about what they’d do if we arrived late. But we’d beaten curfew by ten minutes. In the end they let us through without trouble. From the darkness outside, we passed once more into the whitewash and lamplight of the interior kremlin.
8
The barracks of Company Thirteen occupied the volume that had once been Nativity Cathedral. Space had been cleared for a large portrait of Lenin and a few painted slogans. “WORK STRENGTHENS A MAN’S BODY AND SOUL” and “WITHOUT EDUCATION AND CLEANLINESS THERE IS NO ROAD TO SOCIALISM,” they told us. Everywhere else, the bunks crawled up the walls like crazing on porcelain, rickety and out of square. Just above them, you could see the plaster discolored in a band, a high-tide marker for the sea of prisoners that sloshed inside the building. Wherever men had been able to reach, the walls were dirtier.
On the floor you threaded a cockeyed, irregular grid. Narrow pathways separated the beds, with partitions of wood rearing abruptly up to block one work platoon’s area off from another’s. Boots upon boots, coats upon coats, man after surly man after hungry man. Haze filled the air. In the evenings, before the command for lights out, the din of voices became a weight dragging you down by the ears.
It sounds like squalor. Well, it was. Yet at the same time, you never stopped being aware of grandeur in Nativity.
How so claustrophobic and so grand at once? It must have been the space above. Nothing interfered with the arched vault’s soaring. You traversed the stupid detail of the bunks, made your way from the back of the nave to a corner of the transept until, looking back over the beds around you, you found you had a clear view of the pillar you’d started under. Your tortuous route distilled itself into a straight line through the air. Sad-eyed saints, painted on the dome’s ceiling in an earlier time, showed beneath its whitewash, stepping perpetually out from some mist. Entering through the main doors that evening, I felt the true cathedral had merely been translated fifteen feet above our heads, hovering there while men swarmed beneath it.
I’d come to show the Chekist’s transfer order to Buteyko, leader of my now former platoon. That morning, I’d wondered whether I stood to gain or lose by being attached to the investigation. Now I was sure it would be a gain. After seeing how Petrovich and Antonov had lived, as well as taking stock of the dry ration I stood to inherit, I was anxious to make my membership in Company Ten official as soon as possible.
There was something else, as well. It was nearing seven o’clock. Surrounded by bunks, I couldn’t see across the sanctuary to tell whether the nightly scrum around the side door had started, but if it had, Buteyko would be there, positioning himself for the distribution of rations that would take place in the alley between Nativity and Transfiguration. If I postponed talking to him until after food had been handed round, I might manage to enjoy a meal here in Quarantine, then another back at Company Ten. The man was no fool. He would be drawing a portion for me whether I reported the transfer or not. The question was simply who would eat it?
Ivan Kalishevich Buteyko. A decent, practical fellow. Well liked because he did well for us in the soup and bread queues. The technique was to be as close as possible to first in line for bread, then as close to last for soup: any bread that had gone missing in transit from the bakery to us—that is, any that had been eaten by those in charge of transporting it—meant less for the last few sections to receive. The opposite situation obtained with the soup: getting yours later meant you had a better chance at a scoop of sediment from the bottom of the pot. Either way, Buteyko had the knack. He had been a lawyer before his imprisonment. I remember that about him, as well as his shortsighted squint.
I didn’t think he’d make trouble for me about the transfer. Whether I’d manage the extra meal was another question.
Our bunks were at the back. To reach them, you stepped onto a low, raised platform. Not far beyond the step, you could see marks where the iconostasis had been torn from the wall. We slept in the sanctuary, behind where the altar had stood. In the monks’ time, the place would have been forbidden to congregants.
Foma, who’d pushed me forward when my name had been called that morning, was first to see me. “Had us worried, you did, when they dragged you off during roll. Then we worried worse when you didn’t show up for grub at lunch.” He grinned, showing bad teeth. “Got back here all right, eh?”
My friend had grown up in Ukraine, with Proskurov the closest city to his village. But, he reported, he’d never been there. Indeed, before his arrest he’d never traveled more than a dozen versts from the front door of his family’s wattle-and-daub hut.
I could never quite follow Foma when he explained what he’d done to be sent to Solovki. Something about a disagreement with a local party activist, a night of drinking, and one of the new cooperatively owned farm machines found broken the next day. At any rate, he had been sent up as a wrecker, which earned him a three-year sentence, like mine.
Imprisonment, by shutting him up in cells with men from all walks of life and shuttling him from remand prison to remand prison about the country, gave Foma his first taste of the wider world. His principal reaction to this was a refusal to be impressed. In literature (before I met him, most of my exposure to the peasantry had been in the pages of books) you often see the figure of the country bumpkin who’s convinced any new way of doing things is a trick, which will leave him poorer and sadder if he’s fool enough to believe what the sharpers from town say about it. Foma was like that.
If his suspicion of new ideas could make him slow to understand politics—after several years of imprisonment, he remained convinced that a party called the Bolsheviks had started the glorious revolution in order to take land from the gentry and give it to the peasants, only to be displaced by another party, called the Communists, who stole the people’s grain and took their land away again to give it to the collectives—on the whole, his attitude served him well. The knack, so important to survival, of working when you were being watched and resting when you weren’t, came to him naturally. Whatever he was told to focus his attention on he quietly ignored, continuing to plan how to get a little more food, a little more sleep.
I’d learned to respect this single-mindedness. And perhaps even our sufferings as zeks were not sufficiently different from the ones he was used to for him to find
them very noteworthy. He’d referred more than once to “the hard times,” which I took to mean the famine everyone said had swept Ukraine in ’21, despite official reports denying it. He wouldn’t come out and say it, but I gleaned that he had watched several brothers and sisters die, as well as his grandmother. What the rest of the family had done to survive, I never knew. But it had prepared him for camp life.
“You think you were worried?” I said. “You weren’t the one they marched off. What happened to my kasha when I wasn’t at lunch?”
He was hunched on his pallet at the bottom of our set of bunks, arms draped over his knees. The freestanding bunks stood three high, but against the walls, where they could be secured with nails, they rose to four. Foma’s and mine were the bottom two in one of these teetering stacks—his the lowest, mine the one above that. “Half to Panko. Buteyko said he needed it—he’s got a cough. The other half I ate.”
“And do I get anything, for providing you with a side of kasha to go with your kasha?”
He sniffed the way he did when something was funny. “Said I’d trade you a piece of my bread for it if you showed up tonight. So, I guess you showed up. What was that about this morning, anyway? Why’d they call your name?”
“Someone died,” I said. “A man I knew. They wanted me to help identify the body.”
Foma had a round face, and a sharp, thin nose. His coarse hair stood up in cowlicks no matter what he did. Now he frowned up at me. “Better to steer clear of that. You identify a man, and then he turns out to be someone else, and dead—that’s trouble you’re in. My advice is, keep your mouth shut.”
I looked around. Our platoon leader was nowhere to be seen. “It’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Is Buteyko getting the food?”
“He went with Kulkov and Goosev.”
“I have an order to show him,” I said.
A quizzical note entered his voice. “What do you mean, an order?”
“A transfer. I’m not staying. I’ve been moved to Company Ten.” Like any good peasant, Foma could shut his face like a door when he wanted. It slammed on me now. I tried to explain. “It’s only temporary. This friend of mine, they think he was killed. There’s a detective here, a tsarist police officer. But he’s an old man. He needs someone to help him. I doubt it will be more than a week or two.”
No change in his face. “Investigation?” I nodded, and his lips tightened. “It was a friend of yours? The one who died?”
“A kind of friend,” I said.
We were silent for a moment, Foma thinking, me waiting to see what he’d decide. At last he said: “I still say, why do it? Buteyko could say we need you because of all the logging there is now. All have to do our part in the socialist work effort. These investigations are a distraction.”
“I don’t think that would work,” I said, picturing the Chekist. I didn’t want to explain that I was glad of the transfer.
Before either of us could add anything, a reedy voice from above interrupted. “What’s this? What’s this? Our boy leaving us in the lurch?”
The face that squinted over the edge of the top bunk was frankly ugly, with a wide mouth full of teeth that were straight but too large. Before he was a zek, Vitaly Genkin had been a NEPman, one of the private traders countenanced, if barely, by Lenin’s New Economic Plan. He’d been arrested for selling copper pipe purchased cheaply in Vladivostok at extortionate rates in Kiev. After Lenin’s death, this was termed “economic wrecking,” analogous to what Foma had done to his village’s machine, only carried out with trade rather than a crowbar.
“Getting away from here, are you? I’ll tell you what I think about that. I think it’s a good idea.” Genkin hopped down clumsily, taking my arm. He had the habit of gripping your biceps when he spoke, signifying either intense earnestness about what he was saying or unwillingness to let you go before you’d let him sell you something.“Now, if you’re wondering what my attitude towards this investigation is, I’m interested. Tell me, a detective probably needs to follow his clues everywhere, doesn’t he? You’re probably going to find yourself all sorts of places, inside the kremlin and out.”
“I suppose,” I said reluctantly.
“You’d have to, wouldn’t you? Without knowing the details, it seems to me you’d have to. Now, listen, while you’re out there, see if you can get me some rubber. Just a few scraps, you understand. I don’t need much. I know a man who’ll teach me to cut the stuff for galoshes. Rubber galoshes, just like that. Wouldn’t that be nice? Keep your boots dry? Everyone would want them. Only he says I have to bring a supply before he’ll teach me.”
In 1926 there was not yet a revolutionary Penal Code in Russia: magistrates simply knew crimes when they saw them. But when the code did come into force the following year, we learned that, under Article 58-7 of it, men like Genkin were guilty of undermining, in the interests of former owners of capitalist organizations, state production, transport, trade, monetary relations, or the credit system. Genkin would have said that he undertook his schemes only in his own interests, but that was not a distinction the Code was written to acknowledge. There was always reason to be a little cautious around Genkin.
Foma hadn’t moved from his crouch on the bunk. He looked up at us from between his knees. “Think it’s easy to get something like that? They don’t go around cutting up stacks of tires all day in the other companies.”
“Easier for you to find some out there than for me to do it in here. Only keep your eyes open, and if you bring me some, once I’ve learned how, I’ll make a pair of galoshes for you. How does that sound? To me it sounds fair.”
“I’ll see,” I said. “I don’t know how easy it will be to lay my hands on rubber.”
“Still say you ought to stay,” said Foma. “Never know what will happen.”
Genkin had released my arm when I agreed to watch for the rubber. Now he gave me a sly look. “You said Company Ten, didn’t you? What I’m told about that is, it’s a good place to end up. A place a boy could begin making connections. They get a dry ration, don’t they? Get to be in charge of your own meals. You could see if you can’t make a few trades, if it’s to your benefit.”
“That right?” said Foma. “You get a better ration there?”
For a moment my friend had emerged a little from whatever unreadable place he went when he shut the door of his face. Now he’d retreated back to it. “Yes,” I admitted. “A little better.”
A long moment passed. “Told you,” he said at last. “Buteyko’s in line for food. No call to wait. You might as well find him now and go.”
It put me in an awkward situation. As I saw it, my plan didn’t amount to taking food from their bowls; they’d get exactly the same as they would have if I hadn’t been transferred. But it was far from clear they’d share my view. “I thought I’d mention it to him after dinner.”
Foma had clearly been thinking along these lines already. “Less for us if you stay,” he said immediately. “Maybe you don’t need it like we do, now you’ve got a good place.”
“He’ll be drawing a ration for me anyway. I don’t see why you have a better right to split it up than I do to claim it for myself.”
“Means two meals for you, doesn’t it?”
As though he’d been appealed to for arbitration, Genkin raised his hands, palms out. “Now, I’ll tell you what I think about all of this. What I think is, every man has a right to watch out for himself in this camp, when it comes to food. None of us can tell another he isn’t hungry.” He made a froglike face, pulling the corners of his mouth even wider. “But, you know, Anatoly, you’re getting a whole dry ration. For us it’s only an extra little mouthful of soup each.”
The embarrassment I’d felt a moment before dissolved in a wash of anger. Foma was a miserable serf, Genkin a despicable swindler. I’d have smashed the teeth out of both their faces, if I could. The experience wa
s new to my life in Quarantine, and strange: without circumstances under which it can be expressed, the zek’s anger dies even more quickly than his sympathy. Hunger operates as a functional substitute for so many emotions.
But I did feel angry. Perhaps the privileges I’d begun to enjoy with Petrovich were changing my attitudes already. In hindsight, it’s clear I should have tried to reach some accommodation with Foma and Genkin. That would have been the rational course, the course of survival. For them, soup and bread split three ways would have been better than a mouthful each; for me, it would have been better than nothing.
I was not rational. Anger, and perhaps even that forgotten luxury, pride, made me say what I did instead.
“All right. All right, damn it. I’ll go to him now.”
Out in the alley, the only illumination came from the little kerosene lanterns brought along from the refectory by the cooks. The arc lamps attached to poles above our heads were dark. I wandered between the soup and bread lines for some time without finding Buteyko. The men waiting for their platoons’ shares of the meal all looked the same: black silhouettes of coats breathing fog into the frigid air, one after another. Only the cooks in their pool of light, handing out the half-pound loaves and ladling slop into pails, did more than hint at human features.
Around the margins of the scene shambled even less definite figures. Like walking corpses, or shades haunting a certain stretch of ground, they moved aimlessly without ever seeming able to escape the orbit of the food. While I watched, one stumbled towards the soup pot, hands fluttering in front of his face.
“Have pity,” he said. “Have pity. I can’t see. A little soup. A little something. I can’t see.”
The two big men who’d carried the pot from the kitchen moved to intercept him. But the man actually ladling out the portions only laughed. Beckoning him over, he dipped out a tiny amount of watery soup from the surface of the pot, then threw it in the man’s face.
