The Body Outside the Kremlin

by James L. May

  That was how it was for me, from ’33 until the start of our Great Patriotic War. Work hard to get, and once gotten, inevitably temporary. At intervals I would appeal to the local NKVD (by then the acronym had changed from OGPU). With their intervention a zek might find a place for six or eight months. The formula was: “You must do something with me. If I cannot work, you must send me back to prison, where at least I will be fed.”

  It was a ritual, a piece of flattery. Everyone knew the camps were not places to go for food.

  In ’38 I was rearrested as a matter of course. Nor was I the only one: that year was a time for former zeks’ nightmares to rise out of our beds and walk about in daylight. To my surprise, I was neither returned to the camps nor killed but, after two weeks of imprisonment and interrogation, released. I moved on to a new city, different work.

  In January of ’42, those whose backgrounds made us unsuitable for the front (I almost wrote, “unsuitable for war,” but no, everything was suitable for war, everything was war, war was total.) were rounded up and transported to factories still further east. There we worked under guard, manufacturing first munitions, then the T-34 tanks Vasily Feodorovich speaks of so reverently.

  That plant kept me for a year after the Germans surrendered. Then another period of moving from place to place, chasing work, leading to a third arrest with no cause in ’49. That time I was imprisoned for fifty-one days, with only two interrogations. My hair turned gray. On release, transfer here.

  Vasily-the-tank-commander says that if I were pursuing rehabilitation, it would be easier for him to explain the time he spends in the basement to his wife. He laughs, but I can tell what is and is not a joke. The subject has come up before.

  Rehabilitation means they give you a certificate saying certain inferior agents of the State erred when they handed down your sentence on its behalf; really, in the eyes of the State, you are not so bad. Your minus is removed. To receive such a certificate you must appeal to the Procuracy, which ensures (ensures!) all types of Soviet legality are maintained. There follow applications, endless forms, letters from all quarters attesting to your character and behavior. Or, perhaps, smearing you anew. I have watched others attempt the process. It means disappointment, insult, striving. It means the bored, deadly attention of our police focused on you once more.

  Few are rehabilitated. Some are sent back to the camps.

  For me, perhaps, my successful rehabilitation would mean a better room, the chance of promotion at work. The question is: what might it mean for friend Vasily Feodorovich? Perhaps only that justice had been done. He seems to struggle with the idea that the best of all possible lives might not be one that includes Party membership. He considers himself a good Communist. “Only Russia could have defeated fascism,” he told me last week. “A free socialist people can endure anything, accomplish anything, in the cause of justice and humanity.”

  A comforting belief for those who can hold it. I remember a time, before I was arrested, when I, too, thought the Bolsheviks’ revolution was for the best, all things considered. My parents were appalled at what they called lawlessness, at the seizure of property. For myself, I was never a true believer in the cause, but I was young. Things were changing, they were exciting. After the bad times of the Civil War, it seemed to people my age that things might be good.

  Then came Solovetsky. And now a soft voice whispers to me: perhaps my neighbor worries about my rehabilitation because he anticipates our connection will need to be justified to someone in a dark room. Perhaps he has not been as upstanding a comrade as he believes. Perhaps, absent my rehabilitation certificate, I should be watchful that he does not feed me to the beast in his place. Vasily-the-tank-commander has voiced opinions before me that our local Party leadership might be interested to hear. As Petrovich said, a secret is a hammer.

  No. I do not think that Vasily would betray me, idiot that he is. What whispers is only the part of me still waiting to be taken from Company Ten out through the Holy Gates.

  At Nativity, it was some time before Buteyko could be found. The guards at the main door held me while someone went for him, and when he came he hadn’t heard anything about it and had to go off again to look into the matter.

  Here was another period of waiting.

  Even Nativity’s din had been settled a little by the executions. Things were hushed enough that you could hear the hum of separate conversations instead of one endless roar. The acoustics of the space meant that the noise, reduced, floated up to circulate somewhere far above your ears, just beneath the high ceilings. The screech of a shifted bunk would suddenly descend on you. Laughter caromed in from overhead angles.

  At last Buteyko came back. He’d talked to his superiors. A note reinstating me had come to them that afternoon. He showed it to the guards, who waved me on, bored.

  It was late, almost time for lights out. Buteyko had told me to take my old bunk, but when I came to it Foma was lying on it. “You’re back,” he said, not moving.

  Panko climbed down to shake my hand, and Genkin stuck his head over the edge of his pallet to see whether I’d been able to bring back any rubber for his galosh scheme, tsk-ing when I said I hadn’t.

  “The one underneath you can have, but this one’s mine now,” Foma said when I asked about the bunks. “There’s no one to hold your place for you if you leave.”

  Previously the order had been Genkin on top, then Panko, me, and Foma. Now I would be bottom man. There was not much to distinguish one level from another. Being at the bottom meant everyone’s lice and bedbugs fell down onto you, but we were all infested enough that that made little difference. Beyond that, the only reasons to prefer a higher spot were symbolic.

  “It doesn’t matter to me,” I said.

  “Good then.”

  I slept fitfully. The plank was narrow and hard after Antonov’s straw mattress. At Company Ten, it had most commonly been Veronika who came into my head as I was drifting off, but now discomfort and fear kept her image at bay. It was hard to believe I would ever see her again. Every time I woke up, I seemed to have just been asked a question I didn’t know the answer to, or to have heard the crack of a gun.

  “You were tossing and turning last night,” Foma said as we were pulling on our boots the next morning.

  “I didn’t sleep well.”

  “You’ll be wanting to get back to your feather mattress in Company Ten. Back’s too soft now for an honest pallet.”

  Though no one seemed to have been listening to us, his talking about Company Ten didn’t help my anxiety. It had been Petrovich who recommended letting the world forget as soon as possible where I’d been for the past few days. With what I’d learned, I didn’t like taking the old man’s advice. But about this he was right: it would be safer for Foma not to mention it.

  Roll call in Quarantine Company had not changed. The count-off snaked through the ranks of zeks the way it always had, translating the mass of men into one straight line. The readdition, in me, of a single item to the series made no perceptible difference.

  It was dark, light still an hour away. While men called out their hoarse numbers between the two great churches, cold powder blew up the leg of my trousers at unpredictable intervals. I tried not to shiver, or to think about what I’d learned the day before. My eyes felt gritty and hot, even in the wind.

  Behind me, Panko groaned quietly. After him were several more men, and only then Foma. He’d always stood with me before.

  With the eastern horizon lightening, we were marched out through Nikolski to the trees, where they split us up into several work groups. The sea still hadn’t frozen, and so the mad push to maximize the year’s last shipments of wood continued. My platoon was assigned to a site a mile or so east of the kremlin, where logs had been cut and left the day before. Our first task was rolling these to the road, where they could be loaded onto sleds. To do this you used a cant hook, a kind
of blunt pike with a swinging, curved arm attached to it a foot or so from the end. Driving the spike at the end of the arm into the log, you could grasp it between the arm and the shaft, and drag or roll it that way. The long handle provided leverage. You were expected to move at a good clip, usually two to a log. Someone strong and experienced could manipulate a moderate-sized log fairly nimbly, but I was neither of those.

  Hooks had been left under a tarp for us, but their metal parts were stuck together with frost. Buteyko had to break them apart, and even the wooden handle of the one he gave me was so cold it was clumsy to hold, larger than its own dimensions.

  “All right,” he said. “One for each of you. Bogomolov, you work with Panko.” I was used to working with Foma, but while I was gone he seemed to have been partnered up with someone else, a man named Milyutin, whom I didn’t know well.

  In this part of the forest, the trees were tall, straight pines. Piles of amputated boughs from the ones that had been felled lay in green mounds. Their long needles were everywhere underfoot, spread over the snow and mud like cut hair on a barber’s floor. The scent of resin rose all around us.

  To roll the log, you bent over and pushed with your hook while walking along behind. The posture this required was torture. The hook’s length being what it was, you teetered constantly between stumbling forward to bash your face on the log and losing control of the thing altogether if you straightened up. Either of those positions would at least have put a body into equilibrium. The special suffering of rolling logs is that you must be continually adjusting back into instability.

  The ground was clear-cut, but it had been done carelessly. Stumps that should have been trimmed close to the ground stuck out of the snow, each at its own height. My arms and thighs shuddered already after an hour of work. That was before I hit the stump. The blow drove the handle of my hook into my breast, and I gasped. Panko got a shock, too. He groaned a little and slowly picked up his hook from where he’d dropped it.

  “Ought to watch Panko to see how he does it, Bogomolov.” It was Foma’s voice. He was with Milyutin, hooks over their shoulders, the two of them returning to the piles from the sledges to fetch a new log. “Maybe you won’t have to push logs when you get back to Company Ten, but as long as you’re here, it’s hard on the rest of us if you can’t use the hook.”

  “I know how to use it,” I said.

  Panko rubbed his chest and blew out a shallow breath. “You line up a position for yourself, while you were gone?”

  My arm was still deadened from the blow. The joints felt like loose glass. “No.”

  “No reason not to say, if you did,” said Panko.

  “I would, if I did. But it didn’t come to anything.”

  Foma kicked at the snow. “It’s connections,” he said to Panko. “What you have to do is make connections. Once you have connections, they’ll take care of you. Tolya knows how it works. But he still has something to learn from us about cutting trees.”

  “All I did was play attendant to an old man who couldn’t walk well. An old bastard who bossed me around. Nothing more to it than that.”

  “Not what you said before,” said Foma. “You said there was a killing.”

  “There was,” I said. “But all I was doing was trailing after the old man.”

  Milyutin, silent, wore a small and neatly trimmed mustache. He was my father’s age, his bearing dignified but athletic. He looked like someone it would be good to know. As he and Foma left us to wrangling our log, I thought I caught him looking at me askance.

  That was the morning. By midday we’d finished. Buteyko accepted back our hooks and placed them with the logs on the sledges, to be pulled back to whatever depot they’d come from. We made our way over to the mess area, where midday kasha simmered in huge iron pots over fires of newly cut branches. Cooking steam wafted through the stink of mud and pine, the smell of a few more hours reprieve from starvation. I found myself in a group Foma was part of as well. We ate standing, out of bowls handed to us. Most lifted the bowls directly to their mouths, or scooped kasha with two fingers. I held my own bowl in both hands while the others dug in, wondering whether it was a good idea to show off my newly acquired spoon so soon.

  “Probably you got used to better meals,” Foma said, noticing my hesitation. “If yours doesn’t taste good, I’ll have it.”

  I should have treated it as good-natured abuse, laughed and made some joking answer. I’m sure turning away made it worse.

  The arrangement we’d reached on the train from Moscow—“We’ll stick together, and keep an eye out for each other,” Foma said—had abided until now. We had stuck together. We’d bunked next to each other during our stay at the transit camp in Kem and, after standing packed together in the hold of the Gleb Boky as they brought us to the island, had managed to be sorted into the same platoon.

  The opportunities to benefit from our partnership were few, but we took them. Once, Foma had smuggled a pine branch into the kremlin in the sleeve of his coat, and we used it to sweep up the worst of the filth from the area around and under our bunks. Unfortunately, once we’d pushed it into piles, we discovered there was nothing to do with the dirt and rotting detritus. Nothing could be dumped in the yard, Buteyko informed us, since we paraded there for roll and the bosses demanded public order. As for waiting for regular garbage pickup—well, there was no such thing. It was why Nativity was such a mess to start with; the nearest dump was outside the kremlin, a mile away. Instead, we waited until zeks began to leave for roll call next morning. Then I kept watch while Foma pushed the pile we’d accumulated under the beds of some unfortunates two rows over from us.

  Now, from his perspective, I’d split us. Never mind the fact I’d come back—I might do it again.

  I never understood why he’d chosen me. Because I was crushed in against him on that train, because I’d once had hard-boiled eggs to share and might get more in the future? (If the latter, he was disappointed; after those I spent during the train ride, I never received another ruble from my family during my sentence.) I suppose our friendship was an accident, like most are, no more purposeful or distinct than stubbing your toe. If we’d met in any setting other than the one we did, packed together with a dying old man on a train car trundling slowly north, he might have been—what? Too wary, too resentful, too suspicious to enjoy my company. I’d have expected him to feel whatever restrictive emotions a serf’s grandson does for the urban bourgeoisie. I would have had the feelings of my own social class.

  But he hadn’t, and I hadn’t, and now the prospect of my being assigned away from work he was able to do felt like betrayal to both of us. He’d grown up during a famine, after all, and worked in the fields since he was a boy. The hunger and hard labor we suffered—were they special punishments for him, or just intensifications of the Foma-ian condition, translated into a new location? Did he see that I was trying to save myself? Did he think of himself as needing saving, too? Or did he only see me taking advantage of a resource he would never be able to use?

  That resource was my connection to the murdered Antonov, of course. It had come to me to seem less like a resource than a catastrophe. Whatever Foma thought, I don’t believe he meant to endanger me. After Petrovich’s revelation, however, I didn’t need him reminding people I’d been involved in strange affairs.

  I told him no, the kasha was fine. There was a little chuckling. I decided to use the spoon after all. At least a few of them noticed, I could tell.

  In the afternoon we moved from hauling to felling and bucking. I was assigned to fell. To my relief, Foma was bucking.

  But still the work was hard. The difficulty was to hack out two notches in the tree, a deep one in the front and a shallower in back, leaving a thin hinge of wood that controlled the direction in which the tree toppled. Do it wrong and you might smash yourself or someone else. Or the trunk might kick back as it came down, breaking your leg with
its newly cut end. Maintaining the necessary attention was not easy after I’d swung the axe two or three hundred times and my shoulders had begun to quiver.

  Luckily we did not face the same pressure to work quickly that we had in the morning. It was easy for Buteyko’s superiors to track the progress of our hauling: if we did not move all the logs within a given radius, we did not get our six ounces of kasha at midday. Actually chopping down the trees was a different story. No one would be counting too carefully, and taking credit for a stack of logs cut by someone else earlier in the week was merely a matter of brushing the snow off of them. Buteyko let us take our time, as long as we looked busy when the guards came by.

  There was conversation while we worked, most of it about the executions. I tried to listen without making my interest obvious or participating

  “Finland is not so far from here,” ventured one zek.

  “It was not an escape,” said another. “They were caught stealing something, or failed to pay off the right man to turn a blind eye. Mark my words.”

  “Is there a boss on the island who really cares whether we steal? As long as it’s not from him?”

  “What I think is, you should try it, and see what happens. Mark my words, it was an escape.”

  That was Genkin, with a few others, talking in low voices as they sat on a log. Later, a group of us sheltered from a sudden squall under a pine.

  “I heard it wasn’t the guards. Just a few old Chekists with pistols. Men serving sentences like you and me.”

  “Did it right there in the graveyard, did they?”

  “That’s how it works.”

  “Had a pit dug. Shot them and dropped them right in. Bang and bang.”

  “Tell me, is that justice? Out in the world they brag about rehabilitation, but you wouldn’t shoot a dog that way.”

  And this I overheard among the trees as I returned to Panko after relieving myself in the woods: