Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

The man looked us over once more. The sky behind him was endlessly blue. “That is all,” he said.

  WE WALKED TO OUR CAMP. This was a walk of two weeks. Every day they gave us a fish: a single cooked trout, like a thing from a surrealist painting. Some of us ate the fish at once and some of us ate it little by little, to last the day. We walked and then we slept and the sun crossed the sky. Sometimes it rained.

  I remember waking one morning with fog spread over the plateau; it wreathed the sleeping prisoners and the low lichened rocks, the stunted trees, everything except the mountains. The mountains were not hidden and in a way they felt like allies, friends. Only they could not help, could not move. They had withdrawn, our allies. A group of forty-two human beings lay in the day’s cold mist.

  One afternoon we arrived at the camp. It was near the mouth of a river and you could hear the water whispering over rocks. Mountains surrounded us. A frayed banner hung across the gate: “Work in the USSR Is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valour and Heroism!” My clothing was caked black and puke from our time on the boat. The colours had faded in the sun.

  We had not died.

  They counted us. They counted us again. We stood in uncomprehending formations. I said to myself: I will remain here for eight years. It was so cold and our clothing was black and puke and faded. Then they took us to the baths. We stripped naked. With doughy nurses’ hands they held us in place and shaved the hair from our arms, legs, from between our legs; they shaved our heads and the beards from our faces. “Lice,” they said, but I did not have lice. There was a stove, but we shivered. Then they let us into the other room. We drew our bodies through tepid water. We were grateful even for this. I had never been so dirty. I had never been so deeply thirsty, or hungry. We dried ourselves on rough cloths and they led us to piles of clothes: long underwear, long tunics, quilted jackets and trousers, mittens, rubber boots, hats with ear flaps. These were dead men’s clothes. We searched for garments that fit. We looked like scarecrows, rag monsters. Then they took us back outside and they gave us warm broth.

  In the day’s last light I saw another prisoner kneel. He had found tiny berries hidden in the dry white moss that crackled underfoot; they looked like coral. I had almost forgotten the name. Brusnika. Red berries on thin green stalks, with leaves like little tokens. They were everywhere. I lifted three berries to my mouth and they broke against my tongue, sweet and bitter and tasting very faintly of snow.

  Winter would come. I knew this: it would come, and then it would go, and then it would come again. And again and again. We would all die in Kolyma, unless we did not. I did not know the trick to living. My hand was dotted with the berries’ thin juice and there were guard towers all around, pairs of hollowed eyes, bear turds and wolves’ howls, criss-crossed barbed wire. I could not be a block of wood or a slab of chalk, inert. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, come from Leningrad to New York to Kolyma, forty-three years old. The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.

  I had nothing left to hold.

  FIVE

  THE VILLAGE

  THE CAMP WAS A CLUTCH of buildings surrounded by fence. The fence was three metres high, wrapped in coils of barbed wire. I never saw anyone touch this fence. The ground was uneven, furrows and rises, as if they had wiped away a rapids and placed us there. The valley’s trees had been sheared to build the barracks, the work sheds, the hospital; to erect the administration bloc and the squat cultural-education building, which we rarely visited. The soft grass was littered with brittle shrubs, the sharp shoots of bushes. A misstep would often puncture the sole of your boot. Guard towers stood all around, on the mountaintops, beside the mine shafts’ timber adits. You could squint into the flint-coloured distance and see the guess of other towers, the maybe, along those ridges. As the sun crossed the sky the triangular silhouette of a mining tower ticked across the camp. It was an empty landmark: that vein had gone dry, goldless. Old timers called it the gallows tower.

  Our camp was like a village. When we were not working we gathered on steps. We wandered in pairs between buildings of rough grey plywood. This aspect was convivial. No other aspects were convivial. The other aspects were inhuman. We slept on exposed bunks, crammed together, shivering. When it was wet the ground was muddy; when it was dry we lay and listened to hunched men carving dead skin from their heels. At night the barracks filled up with groans, as though the sleeping zeks’ souls were being sucked from their jaws. The wind howled like an abandoned child. We strained to hear the cinders in the hearth, a kind of lullaby. We closed our eyes and insects crawled over our faces, moving like scraps of lace. We were awoken before dawn. We rose. We wrapped our rags closer, for warmth, trying to add months to our lives. We went into the frozen morning and lined up for food. Different people were permitted to stand in different lines: the strongest workers, Stakhanovites, who exceeded their daily quotas, received one large ladle of broth, bread, a piece of herring. Those who just met their quotas received one ladle of broth and a piece of bread. And the rest, the ones who fell short of their quotas: they received a little bread, half a ladle of soup. Political prisoners, 58s, were automatically assigned to the poorest category. I held my bowl in trembling hands.

  Sometimes the urki would take our food, and sometimes our friends would take our food, and sometimes dying men, mad with hunger, would attempt to take our food; and we would shove them into the snow, fiercely, carefully, because we could not bear to spill a single drop from the brim of the small tin cup.

  After we tasted our food we worked for seven hours.

  Then we were allowed a portion of cabbage stew.

  And we worked for seven more hours.

  I was assigned to road duty. This was considered lucky. Most of the men and women of our camp worked in the mines, swallowing dust in darkness, skating toward death. I write this so lightly now, skating toward death. During those first weeks, my horror was close to grief. I watched zeks draining away out the camp’s high gates. They came back even less alive: thinner, scarcer. As if another year had been shaved from their bones. Huddling in the dinner queue, the prisoners’ eyes still reflected the underground. I thought that if I met their gaze I would tumble into it. I could not believe that human beings were being treated in this way. This thought raked over me. As I dragged my cart along the road my face would suddenly contort and I would be crying—not for myself but for this place.

  On road duty we died more slowly. The officers watched our dying very closely. Once I had died a certain amount, they would assign me to the mines. I learned this from others as we gathered on the steps, as I wandered past the hospital and the guardhouse.

  On road duty the task was this: Drag an empty wheelbarrow for ten kilometres over a ravaged road. The wheelbarrow clanged and caught. We were allowed to talk but we had to remain in single file, flanked by guards. Men would yell conversations until their voices failed. I spoke little. I studied the trees along the road, the way their roots hid in the earth.

  The woods parted as we approached the quarry. The road led across a plain to the base of a barren hill. There was a mining tower, two rips in the earth, a giant mountain of dull stone. These rocks and gravel were the detritus of the mine, the wasted part of the diggers’ lives. We took cold spades from a pile. Each of us cautiously propped up his wheelbarrow and filled it, lifting stone. Dust rose up like smoke. The more we carried, the more we would eat tomorrow. On the best days, my wheelbarrow held two hundred pounds of flinty rock and dust. When the wheelbarrows were piled heavy, as heavy as we could possibly push, we replaced the spades where we had found them. Sometimes we lay them down and sometimes we threw them. We returned to our barrows and wiped our foreheads on our sleeves and watched the circling brown birds, and we pushed our precarious loads up the slope to the road. At this time we were each permitted to smoke one cigarette.

  Our weighted wheelbarrows sank into the road. They tipped and leaned and sometimes they toppled, spilling across the ground. The wheelbarr
ow’s owner would curse, cry, grope with freezing hands to pile the rocks back into the cart. If it was an urka, like Nikola or the Boxer, we would all set down our own wheelbarrows, to go and help. It was not that we would win a favour, but perhaps they would pass us over during a moment of cruelty; their friends might rob someone else. There was a hierarchy among zeks and an even stricter hierarchy among urki. At Kolyma, you could not afford kindness. We helped only the worst men.

  After two or three hours we arrived back at base camp. We dumped our stone. It would be used to build the new roads, carrying gold and timber to the harbour.

  There were always guards. They always carried rifles. They stood on guardtowers, with crashing spotlights, scanning the grounds and the perimeter. If you went near the fence, the guards would shout and then shoot. If you brawled with another prisoner, not just a swung punch but tooth and claw, they would also sometimes shoot. Sometimes they would not. It depended which zeks were fighting, or if bribes had been paid. Some of the criminals moved around like cats, entitled to milk. You heard stories: a girl crosses the grounds after dark, hurrying to the women’s barrack. Men appear around her, like a conjured circle. After a while, the guards yell down: “Come on boys, have some discretion!” They drag her from the cold snow into the shadow of stacked firewood. Later, they take her to the hospital. The urki make sure she is cared for. When she emerges, rested, she goes back to these men. She becomes a sort of prison wife. She is safeguarded. She has found a way to stay alive.

  I FIRST MET BIGFOOT beside a grave. Bodies lay in a pit, which we were covering with earth. It was a windless yard. I watched the soil slide from my spade, imagining my own death. The falling earth made only the slightest sound. I did not want to waste my strength. Five of us lifted dry earth and dropped it onto shrouded bodies, proceeding from minute to minute, going on. One man began to pick up the pace. We were shovelling feebly, the rest of us, and this one man picked up his pace, quickened, until soon the clearing’s loudest sounds were his inhalations. Fast, clear inhalations, through the nose. His eyes were lowered. He had a thick head of straw-coloured hair, matted at the brow, and a dense beard.

  “Did you know these men?” I murmured, after a little while, indicating the grave.

  “No,” Bigfoot said at once. He lifted his eyes to where I was slowly lowering a clod of earth. “Did you?”

  NOW, SEASONS LATER, it feels faintly impossible to be recalling these scenes. I was there; today I am here. Twice a week I come up into this attic, kneel by my machines, listen, type. I transcribe recordings for my masters and I also compose these pages, a little at a time. Sometimes it is hard to imagine I was ever in the taiga; sometimes it feels as if I did not leave. Sometimes I am writing you a letter, Clara, and other times I am just writing, pushing type into paper, making something of my years. There is cruelty to the way a person, a place, can sometimes feel so close, and then the next day far away. You were wearing amber the night we first saw Duke Ellington. Today this memory is beside me. I waited with your sister in the front room of your parents’ house and you appeared in a doorway, glowing, in your pale amber slip and with amber around your neck and dark amber curls atop your head. I stood. I kissed your hand. You said, “Hi, Leon.”

  We went by taxi to the Apollo Club. My heart was whirring in my chest. Silver subway cars poured through the tunnels under Broadway, New York crackled and shone, cranes hoisted whole buildings into the sky.

  I remember how we arrived just in time for the first number and how for the whole first half, the horns used mutes. We moved to the strings and brass but Duke’s players had hands cupped over their trumpets, plungers over trombones, until at a certain pre-arranged moment everything changed. By chance I had spun you out on your toes. Our arms were at their longest span. At that instant the mutes came off and the brass section bloomed and it was like the clouds had parted, only we hadn’t known there were clouds. The room rang gold with it. You were spinning back toward me, hot and amber, and when our bodies touched you murmured, “Hi, Leon.” And I thought, It will be like this.

  Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page,,,, like eyelashes.

  IN KOLYMA THE GUARDS followed us everywhere, rifles swinging at their sides. They had good boots and good gloves and mostly serious dispositions. Some of them were former prisoners who lived in the village now. Between shifts you could see them come into the work zone, walking freely past the guardhouse, and in their faces there was still something uncomprehending.

  Just like their wards, guards were compensated according to production. If a team of zeks exceeded its quota, the escorts took home more rubles. The abuse the guards doled out was functional, pragmatic: walk faster, walk faster, take more stone in your wheelbarrow.

  Conversely, the soldiers were punished if one of their prisoners escaped. They could even be accused of counter-revolutionary collusion, get sent to the other side of the perimeter. And so the guards learned to kill the zeks who strayed. In the late day, when our muscles were failing, we had to be especially alert. Anyone who staggered off the road might then stagger into the snow or cedars, sprawling, a bullet between his shoulders. There was a man whose name I don’t remember, with red hair, who told me he was going to kill himself. And then he did, almost gracefully, turning his wheelbarrow off the curve of the road and drowsily advancing, toward freedom; Vanya yelled and raised his gun and after two hesitations he pulled the trigger. The redheaded man whose name I do not remember completed the motion he had begun that morning, lifting himself off his knotted plank bunk. He fell forward, into the tundra.

  I think I believed I would kill myself, eventually, when the correct moment finally arrived.

  The winter came quickly, in place of fall. I lived only barely, by coincidence. At the end of every workday, wrecked, ruined, we trudged back into the camp. We queued for our evening meal: a morsel of herring, a spoonful of pea soup, bread. Someone might steal the soup or fish, but never the scrap of limp brown bread. The prisoners had made this rule themselves. This is humanity, at the end of the world: the refusal to tear away a piece of bread. Once I saw a man try. He was dying of hunger. The whole camp seemed to turn on him, a wolf rising from a pile of leaves. This you do not do, they said, kicking the wretched starving man at the places where the skin met his ribs.

  My friendship with Bigfoot dawned gradually. We found each other sitting together, one mealtime. We sat in respectful silence. The second time it happened I said, “My name is Lev.”

  He said, “My name is Maksim. Or Bigfoot.”

  I said I was a scientist. Once, he said, he had wanted to be an engineer.

  We began to walk together, sometimes. Together we observed the camp.

  His trust was like a gift.

  Bigfoot’s feet were not so large, but he had come to Kolyma in enormous fur boots. “My brother made them,” he explained. They were brown and white bearskin, as high as his knees. You could hear them, like machines, crunching through the ice to a clearing in the woods. Bigfoot was not on road duty: he and his brigade stripped the felled trees, heaved them into the river. Their mouths gusted steam. At night Bigfoot rolled his boots into a coarse parcel and lay them beneath his head, like a pillow.

  Bigfoot’s boots did not go unnoticed. He tried to ignore the looks. There was a hard glint to his gaze, something unflinching in his bearing. He had come to Russia from Lvov, in Ukraine, hoping to fight with the Marxists. Instead he was arrested as a spy. I remember joking with him one day, when we had become friends enough that we could joke: “At last, here, you are one of us.”

  Bigfoot had fought off a few petty thieves but it was different when Nikola came up to him one night, an apparition on the dark field. “Do you play cards?” Nikola murmured.

  “No,” Bigfoot said.

  Nikola had a rough black beard. He kept his hands concealed in a heavy coat. His eyes were hidden under his thick black hair. In some ways Nikola seemed like a serious man. He could have been a professor of Russian
literature, a young chess teacher. But there was a certain cheapness to him, a shabby quality to his gestures, that made him frightening. It was not just the 58s who gave Nikola a wide berth: the other urki were vigilant around him, watching him in a room, tracking his movements in their peripheral vision. They let him pass; they did not interrupt him. They rarely saw his eyes.

  When Nikola said to Bigfoot, “Come play cards with me,” and began to walk toward his barrack, Bigfoot lowered his head and took a slow breath and then followed him.

  They played cards. Sitting among Nikola’s friends, on other men’s bunks. The cards were made with thin scraps of paper, bread-and-water glue.

  “What is your stake?” Nikola asked quietly.

  “I don’t know,” Bigfoot said. “Some bread.”

  “Your boots are your stake,” Nikola told him.

  Bigfoot won the first two games. He won a half-litre enamel bowl, which meant that at mealtimes he could take his soup first, with those who have their own bowls. Then he won a set of coloured pencils. In the brown of Nikola’s eyes you could see he was very angry. His friends were no longer slouched, joking; Bigfoot said he felt them turning their sharpest edges toward him.

  Bigfoot lost the next game.

  “Did you mean to lose?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  They took Bigfoot’s fur boots. Later, he traded the pencils for a pair of leather boots, and he tore strips of cloth from the lining of his jacket, and he wrapped his feet with these. Now Nikola crunched through the ice in Bigfoot’s boots, when we walked to the quarry, speaking to no one.

  “Do you hate him?” I asked Bigfoot, one early morning.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Being on road crew was easier than working in the mines, or in the trees with Bigfoot, but we were still starving. Our rations were based on our work and we could lift only so many pounds of stone. The most important factor was the number of trips we were capable of making in a day, to and from the quarry. No matter how high we filled our wheelbarrows, it was always more worthwhile to have time for another transit. On a good day we made four journeys. On a snowy day we might make two. And so on the next day we ate about half as much. The slower we worked, the more quickly we would vanish from everyone’s memory.