Us Conductors

by Sean Michaels

  One night I was walking with Bigfoot through the camp. We visited the southeast corner, where white flowers were growing in a pattern behind the latrines. The flowers were illuminated by the floodlights. We walked past the guardhouse, where men were smoking. Above us, towers creaked. The wind in Kolyma did not feel like the wind in other places: it was as if someone had taken her two hands and carefully separated our clothes, parting the fabric, to allow the cold inside. Very few zeks were out at this hour. It was so bitter and dark; and lights-out would come soon. Most would already be sleeping, or staring at the knotted wood above their head, at the thin insects that lay there like pencil marks.

  A line of night-blind prisoners staggered across the road. Their blindness was brought on by a vitamin deficiency. All would be normal until the late afternoon: Go faster, someone would plead. Let’s get back to camp. As dusk set in, they were diminished. They became silent and fumbling. After sundown the night-blind were more like ghosts than like men: faltering in their steps, hands fluttering. They searched for their neighbours, for familiar walls, for the world that they remembered. They travelled in flocks, clutching. One zek would stumble and they would all trip after him, like some cruel Buster Keaton routine, collapsing in a skinny pile.

  Bigfoot and I stood in the muddy square between the barracks and watched the shambling blind men. We watched zeks carrying water on straining yokes. They drew black water from the well. It was easy to imagine a cavern, a secret reservoir, that yawned beneath the camp, full of smooth black water.

  A hundred spruce planks lay stacked in the dirt.

  After a moment I said, “I have an idea for the wheelbarrows.”

  “An idea?”

  “To make the work easier.”

  Bigfoot had a long, plain face, all that straw-coloured hair.

  He delivered his jokes without smiling.

  “Tea with lemon?” he said.

  “A track.”

  “Too much work.”

  “No.” I pointed to the planks. “Nothing elaborate. Slats like those.”

  “Hmm,” he said.

  I waited. I wanted Bigfoot to say something more.

  He squinted at the guardtower’s shifting silhouettes.

  “We should get in,” he said.

  We headed back toward our barracks. The sound of the snow was like pepper crushed in a mortar.

  “How far is your walk every day?” he asked me. “Eight kilometres?”

  “Each way?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think almost ten.”

  Bigfoot scrunched up his face. It was a strange expression on a bearded face like his. “How many planks of wood does that take?”

  He caught me with this question. We arrived at my door in silence. “Four thousand,” I said finally.

  He raised his eyebrows just a little. “Four thousand,” he repeated.

  That was that. I tried to imagine four thousand spruce planks in a mountain behind the hospital. I lowered my eyes. We went inside, to where it smelled like smoke and rot.

  In the morning I learned our brigade had finished below quota for the fifth straight day. We were ordered to work an extra two hours. I saw the Boxer exchange a look with Sergey. Both urki seemed to be losing their night vision. Or perhaps I had imagined it. They shook their heads and slumped up the path. It was one of those mornings when you notice the size of the sky, the strange quiet, the endless roll of the land past the wire. You remember that you are at the very edge of things.

  I worked all day and for two more hours, pushing my tripping wheelbarrow through the frost. All day, carrying stone.

  The group completed only three trips.

  That evening I lay in my bunk, on my side, trying to tune out the conversations around me. I was tired and so hungry. I was thinking.

  Finally, I rolled off the boards and went searching for Nikola.

  THE MAJOR AGREED TO see us before the midday meal.

  Vanya, our guard, found me in line.

  “Now?” I said.

  “Now.”

  I gazed at the queue ahead of me. I discovered I was ready to give the whole scheme up. None of my grand ideas were worth as much as that ladle of pea soup.

  “Did you hear me?” Vanya said.

  Bigfoot was watching us from the next queue over.

  “Forget it,” I said.

  “Forget it?” Vanya was short-tempered but not so bad. He always slouched in his uniform, as if the epaulets forced him to lean forward. He stared at me, and the line, gradually comprehending. “You can eat after,” he said.

  I tried to gauge his honesty.

  “Where’s Nikola?” I said.

  “He’s meeting us at the officers’ building.”

  From his place in line, Bigfoot looked worried. I gestured that it was all right.

  I still had not left the queue.

  “Termen?”

  “All right,” I snapped. I came away from the line. It was as if I were extruding a sword from my side.

  We walked in silence. The grass was stamped down, speckled with snow. Nikola was waiting for us on the steps, hands in pockets. “Hello,” I said. He didn’t answer.

  Vanya rolled his eyes at this little performance. “All right, then?” he said.

  Nikola sniffed. He muttered yes.

  I nodded.

  We followed Vanya inside the building. I had never been through this door. The entranceway was bare and whitewashed. The walls kept the wind out. A bouquet of pale blue blossoms rested in a vase and for a moment we watched them as we walked, Nikola and I, the prisoners.

  We came to a door with the major’s name. Vanya knocked.

  The major said, “Come in.”

  We huddled into his little office. There were no windows. There was a painting of Red Square and a painting of Stalin and a painting of a peasant woman with a cow. There were pinned-up charts and many typed lists. The major was a young man with a roman nose, long hair pulled back in a tie. He was not thin but he was quite handsome, with a straight clear look. I assumed his long hair was a violation of the military dress code. Like his age, like his assignment, it suggested the major was either very good or very bad at his work.

  Vanya saluted.

  The major nodded wearily. “All right, junior lieutenant. Proceed.”

  Vanya hesitated. “If it’s all right, sir, I’ll let the prisoners speak for themselves.”

  “Fine. What are your names?” The major took a short breath.

  “Lev Sergeyvich Termen.”

  “Nikola Zharykhin,” Nikola said.

  “You’re both on Junior Lieutenant Bragin’s roads team?”

  I had become nervous. The major was writing our names on the pad in front of him. This seemed like a record, already; like evidence, liability, a reason somehow to give us each five more years.

  I said nothing. Nikola eyed me, disquieted. The major was still waiting for a response. He cleared his throat. “Yes?”

  “Yes.” I tried to shake off my anxiety. “Wheelbarrows.”

  The major offered an even smile. “Wheelbarrows.” He crossed his arms. “Well, what’s this idea?”

  Another silence.

  I realized no one was going to speak if I did not.

  “To improve efficiency,” I murmured.

  “I’m not going to give you any more food, Termen.”

  I had noticed the radio on the major’s desk, the dish with a piece of sausage, the photograph of two children.

  “No,” I said. “No, let me explain.”

  “Yes?”

  “Comrade Zharykhin and I were discussing our work and we had a realization. So we consulted with Lieutenant, er, Bragin, and he was very helpful as we—er, distilled this concept into, well—”

  “Cut to it.”

  I swallowed. “The main detriment to our team’s production total is the rate at which we travel with our loads between sites.”

  “The wheelbarrows,” the major said drily.

  �
�Yes. Or, really, the roads. In most conditions the transit is very slow.”

  “I cannot give you new roads, Termen. New roads are what we are trying to build.”

  “Yes sir, but the thought is this: tracks for the wheelbarrows. Runners.”

  “Made of what?”

  “Wood. Simple planks. Perhaps with a groove down the centre.”

  “Hm.” The major tapped his pad. Vanya, hunching in his uniform, exhaled.

  “These planks would just sit on the road and you would push your wheelbarrows along them?”

  “That’s right. By my rough estimate, the use of tracks would accelerate each transit by as much as four hundred percent.”

  The major narrowed his eyes. “By four times?”

  I hesitated. “Less in the summer.”

  The major’s lips twitched. “Hm,” he said again. But then he realized the obvious thing and he straightened, skeptical. “How far do you travel with these wheelbarrows?”

  “About ten kilometres,” I said. “I will save you the arithmetic: it would take several thousand runners to line the whole route.”

  The major said, “So we will cut down a forest? To save you some work?”

  “There is another solution.”

  Nikola shifted beside me.

  “It requires just six pieces of wood.”

  “Is there a section of the route that is particularly precarious?” the major asked.

  “No,” I said quietly. “We could take three pieces of wood, tied end to end, with a rope handle at the front. One member of the team does not push a wheelbarrow—he lays down this section of track. When all the carts have passed over it, he hauls the track ahead of them.”

  “One section of rail, advancing with the group.”

  “Yes. But we do not want to waste time waiting for the track to advance. So we could use two men, each with three lengths of track.”

  “When the wheelbarrows have passed over the first stretch, that man runs to the front.”

  “Precisely.”

  “But it would also remove two men from the work crew.” The major picked up his pencil. “So total production would only …”

  “Six men working at triple capacity still more than doubles the production of eight men.”

  The major squinted. “If we expand the team from eight men to ten—keeping two for the rails …”

  I considered for a moment. “Comparing like with like, it improves production by a minimum of 2.4.”

  The major clicked his tongue. He lifted his eyes to look at Vanya. The junior lieutenant seemed to freeze.

  “Very good, Bragin.”

  Vanya all but melted into the floor.

  “And you too, Zharykhin.”

  Nikola inclined his head.

  “And you, Termen, what are you?”

  “Sir?”

  “An engineer?”

  Standing in that sunless room, for the first time in many months, I felt a thing called pride.

  “I’m a scientist,” I said.

  “Termen the scientist.” The major made a note on his pad. “Our own little expert.”

  FOUR DAYS LATER, the Expert began his first experiment. Two men—Volkov and Jansons—were reassigned from another team: they spent a late afternoon assembling two tracks of rails, tying them together, embedding sturdy rope handles. I came back to the camp that night and looked over their handiwork; I was tired, hungry, crumbling. I gazed at this mess of dirty pine and brown cord and understood that it could be another sentence. There would be consequences if my experiment disappointed.

  In the morning we learned that Volkov had died during the night, of starvation.

  I do not believe in omens.

  We went out into the day. Bigfoot was named as Volkov’s replacement. I wondered whether I had saved him or doomed him. Bigfoot and Jansons grasped the rope handles and hiked forward into the snow. The wind swept ice crystals over our faces. Unsure, skeptical, we pushed our wheelbarrows onto the planks. There was a trick to keeping them on the track, but it wasn’t a difficult trick. Before long we were moving quickly. Jansons would wait for us to leave his track and then scamper ahead of Bigfoot; then Bigfoot would wait for us to leave his track and stride ahead of Jansons. They were the only ones who talked: “All right,” they would say, when their boards were level in the snow.

  We arrived at the quarry, filled our barrows with stone. The stone was as heavy as ever.

  Now, with filled barrows, came the delicate moment. Nikola took a few steps and his wagon almost immediately skidded off the plank, spilling grit. We all stopped, ran over, pulled stones from the snow. Our eyes met, Nikola’s and mine. I tried to smile. I was not sure if I should be smiling.

  We righted his wheelbarrow and the group moved on. We pushed our wheelbarrows at a steady pace, and Jansons and Bigfoot dashed ahead with their trailing boards, like tails. Nikola’s wheelbarrow tipped again, and the Boxer’s once, but we pressed on. We arrived at the worksite. We dumped our loads. “What time is it?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Vanya said. His mouth was covered with a scarf, as if he were a bandit. “Keep moving.”

  We raised our wheelbarrows and returned to the quarry. We had almost arrived when the sun broke through the cloud and I realized where it was, how low in the sky, that this plan was working. “What time is it?” I yelled to Vanya.

  “Keep moving,” he replied, sternly.

  We did: to the quarry, and back; to the quarry, and back; to the quarry, and back.

  It was noon. We had made four trips. We did not usually complete four trips in an entire day. Everyone was smiling. Even Nikola was smiling, squatting beside Sergey. They laughed and tossed hunks of snow. Vanya pulled his scarf from over his mouth and he was smiling. Bigfoot was standing with me and smiling and he said, “It works.”

  “We’ll see. We’ll see,” I said. “It’s only been half a day.” But Jansons called over from where he was talking to two other men. “We’ve almost reached quota?!” he shouted. “They say we’ve almost reached our daily quota!” He looked around, incredulous.

  “Let’s go,” Vanya said.

  “Let’s go where?”

  “Lunch.”

  There was a moose standing right there, off the road, on the other side of the ditch. He held his crowned head high. His expression was steady and abiding. We walked right past him, our roads crew, away from this great breathing animal and into the camp, where they gave us each a portion of broth.

  AT KOLYMA, THE EXPERT lived a better life than Termen had. For eight weeks, we surpassed our daily quota. Even as the major revised and increased our production targets, we pushed across our wooden rails, exceeding expectations. Because we surpassed these quotas, each of us was classed as a Stakhanovite. We were the first to receive our rations. We received the largest portions. Eventually, other teams adopted the Expert’s runners system. I was rewarded with new clothes and an extra allotment of bread. So was Nikola, who the major accepted as co-originator of the scheme.

  Junior Lieutenant Vanya Bragin received a promotion, although he remained our patrol guard.

  By sharing credit with Nikola, I had won the protection of the urki. The thief knew that there had been no need to include him when I went to see the major. He interpreted my move as a gesture of respect, of deference. Like an offering. I let Bigfoot believe that it had been more desperate. Really the decision was a calculation, nothing more. An arithmetic of risk and reward, made from my hard plywood bed. Finally, in the gulag, I had learned pragmatism. Perhaps it was a gift, perhaps a taking-away.

  Because of Nikola I won friends among the urki. Because of Vanya I won friends among the guards. Because so many other workers were improved by my scheme, I won friends in almost every barrack. I had friends everywhere, so many friends. “Expert!” they exclaimed, a good-natured joke, one of the rare good-natured jokes, because in Kolyma the good-natured jokes do not seem safe from the wind.

  I had so many friends and these frien
ds could not keep me warm as I pushed my wheelbarrow through the frost. They could not make me younger or stronger. I was happier for a short time but popularity was a hollow solace. You pass a man and exchange a smile, and it is worthless the moment you have stepped away, along the ice-packed path, into the next mud-smudged footprint. I lay in my bunk and watched the bugs squirming in the spruce. My friends had not banished my nightmares. “Expert!” they exclaimed, a greeting said and heard, and then their voices fell away. When you are quickly dying—which we still were, despite the extra herring—it is not thin friends, shambling, night-blind, that give you a reason to live.

  Across miles of taiga, so much green and golden country, an ocean, I wondered if you were raising your arms in the air.

  THE MAJOR SUMMONED ME one morning, after the prisoners had been counted. His emissary, a Cossack, sent another man to take my place. I resisted: “No, this is my brigade—this is my brigade!” So quickly I became hysterical. I did not want to be sent to the mines. I did not want to be sent to the woods. I did not want to lose my place on this lucky work crew, blessed by technology. “This is my team!” Finally, Vanya exchanged looks with the Cossack, and the Cossack nudged my replacement, and he warned him, “This is only temporary.”

  I went to see the major in the office with the radio, the piece of sausage, the photograph of a little boy and his older sister.

  He told me to sit down. He congratulated me on my scheme. I did not thank him but I said I was proud to have contributed to the Soviet effort in Kolyma.

  At first it seemed that the major simply wanted to fine-tune the use of runners. Was an eight-man team, with two rail haulers, the best configuration? Would ten be more efficient? Twelve? Would twelve men require three sets of rails?

  He asked me to review some calculations. His maths were all right. “Ten men,” I agreed, “and two haulers.”