Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  “Forty-seventh,” squeaked the fidgety Esperanto man in despair.

  The truck flew past.

  “Where are we going?” asked Andreyev, grabbing someone’s shoulder.

  “We’ll spend the night at Atka, at kilometer two hundred and eight.”

  “And after that?”

  “I don’t know. . . . Got anything to smoke?”

  The truck puffed heavily as it climbed the pass over the Yablonovy Mountains.

  1959

  BOOK TWO

  The Left Bank

  To Ira, my endless recollection, brought to a halt in The Left Bank

  THE PROCURATOR OF JUDEA

  ON DECEMBER 5, 1947, the steamship KIM entered Nagayevo Bay with a cargo of human beings. This was the last voyage, the end of the shipping season. Magadan met its visitors with temperatures of forty below zero. Not that these were visitors; they were prisoners, the real masters of this region.

  All the town’s bosses, military and civilian, were at the port. All available trucks came to meet the KIM when it arrived at Nagayevo port. Soldiers and special troops surrounded the pier; unloading began.

  As far as five hundred kilometers from the bay every vehicle the mines could spare, summoned by the labor selector, set off empty to Magadan.

  The dead were thrown onto the shore and then taken to the cemetery to be laid in mass graves; no tags were attached to the bodies, but a document was drawn up stating that exhumation would be needed at some time in the future.

  Those who were most seriously ill, but still alive, were distributed among the prison hospitals of Magadan, Ola, Arman, and Dukcha.

  Moderately ill prisoners were taken to the central prison hospital on the left bank of the Kolyma River. This hospital had only recently been moved from the center of Magadan to the twenty-third kilometer out of town. If the KIM had arrived a year earlier, there would have been no need to travel another five hundred kilometers.

  The head of the surgical department was Kubantsev, who had only just come from the army, from the front, and was shattered by the sight of the prisoners and their terrible injuries, such as he had never witnessed or dreamed of in his life. Every truck that arrived from Magadan had bodies of those who had died on the journey. The surgeon realized that these were the less-seriously sick, who were transportable, and that the worst cases had been left in Magadan.

  The surgeon recited the words of General Ridgway, which he had happened to read just after the war: “A soldier’s experience at the front cannot prepare him for the spectacle of death in the camps.”

  Kubantsev had lost his sangfroid. He didn’t know what orders to give, where to begin. Kolyma had overwhelmed the surgeon with too great a burden. But something had to be done. The male nurses took the sick from the trucks, carrying them on stretchers into the surgical department, every corridor of which was tightly stacked with stretchers. Smells are as memorable as lines of poetry or human faces. The smell of that first wave of camp pus left a permanent mark on Kubantsev’s olfactory memory. He remembered that smell for the rest of his life. You might think that pus smells the same anywhere, and that death too is the same. But that isn’t true. All his life Kubantsev felt that he could smell the wounds of his first Kolyma patients.

  Kubantsev smoked and, as he smoked, he felt he was losing his self-control, that he didn’t know what orders to give the nurses, the paramedics, or the doctors.

  “Aleksei Alekseyevich,” Kubantsev heard someone next to him say. It was Braude, an ex-prisoner and a surgeon, who used to be in charge of the department and had only just been dismissed on the orders of the authorities, simply because Braude was a former prisoner and, what’s more, had a German surname. “Let me give the orders. I know how things are done. I’ve been here for ten years.”

  Worried and perturbed, Kubantsev deferred his authority and everything sprang into action. Three surgeons began operating simultaneously. Paramedics acted as their assistants and scrubbed the surgeon’s hands. Other paramedics did injections and administered heart medicines by drip.

  “Amputations, nothing but amputations,” mumbled Braude. He loved surgery and, as he himself said, suffered if he had to endure a day without an operation or an incision. “We’re not going to be bored now,” said Braude joyfully. “Kubantsev may be a good man, but he’s out of his depth. Front-line surgeon! All they know is instructions, plans, orders, but here we’ve got real life, Kolyma!”

  Not that Braude was a spiteful man. Removed quite unjustifiably from his post, he felt no dislike for his successor and didn’t put wrenches in the works. Quite the opposite: Braude saw that Kubantsev was at a loss and responded to his gratitude. All the same, Kubantsev had a family, a wife, a school-age son, an officer’s Polar Circle rations, a high salary, the ruble bonus. And what did Braude have? A ten-year sentence behind him and a very uncertain future. Braude came from Saratov, he was a student of the famous Krause and had been very promising. But 1937 had smashed his career to smithereens. So he was hardly going to take revenge on Kubantsev for his own misfortunes.

  Thus Braude gave the orders, did the cutting and the cursing. Braude lived by forgetting about himself and, although at moments of reflection he often cursed himself for this despicable forgetfulness, he couldn’t change.

  Today he had decided, “I’ll leave the hospital. I’ll go to the mainland.”

  On December 5, 1947, the steamship KIM entered Nagayevo Bay with a cargo of human beings—three thousand prisoners. During the voyage the prisoners mutinied and those in charge decided to flood all the holds with water. This was done when the temperature was minus forty. Third- or fourth-degree frostbite (Kubantsev called it “cold-weather injuries”) was something Kubantsev was fated to become familiar with, as a reward for his years of service, on his first day of work in Kolyma.

  All this had to be forgotten, and Kubantsev, a disciplined man of willpower, forgot it. He made himself forget.

  Seventeen years later Kubantsev could remember the name and patronymic of every paramedic-prisoner, of every female nurse; he could remember the camp “love affairs”—which prisoner “lived with” which prisoner. He recalled the exact rank of every one of the more despicable bosses. The only thing that Kubantsev couldn’t remember was the steamship KIM and its three thousand frostbitten prisoners.

  Anatole France wrote the story “The Procurator of Judea,” in which Pontius Pilate fails after seventeen years to remember Jesus Christ.

  1965

  LEPERS

  JUST AFTER the war I witnessed another drama, or rather the fifth act of a drama, being played out in the hospital.

  The war brought from the lower depths of life into the light layers and pieces of life that had always, everywhere been concealed from bright sunlight. I don’t mean criminal or underworld circles: this was something quite different.

  In areas where the war was going on the leprosy hospices were demolished and the lepers mingled with the ordinary population. Was this a secret or an open aspect of war? Was it chemical or bacteriological warfare?

  People suffering from leprosy had no trouble pretending to be war wounded or war cripples. Lepers mingled with those fleeing eastward, thus returning to real life, however terrifying, where they would be assumed to be victims of war, even heroes.

  Lepers lived and worked. Not until the war ended would the doctors remember about the lepers, and the terrible card-index lists of the leprosariums began to fill up again.

  Lepers were living among people, sharing retreats, attacks, the joys and miseries of victory. Lepers were working in factories and on the land. They were becoming bosses and subordinates. The one thing they could never be was soldiers, even though the stumps of their fingers and toes were almost indistinguishable from war wounds. In fact, lepers claimed to be war wounded, a small number among the millions of real ones.

  Sergei Fedorenko was a stores manager. As a war invalid, he was very clever at managing with his awkward finger stumps and did his job well. He could
expect a career, a party ticket, but once there was money he could lay hands on, he began drinking and taking time off work, so that he was arrested, convicted, and arrived at Magadan on one of the Kolyma ship voyages as a prisoner sentenced to ten years for nonpolitical crimes.

  Once in Kolyma, Fedorenko changed his diagnosis. There were plenty of cripples here, self-mutilated ones for example. But it was better, more fashionable, and less noticeable to merge with the mass of frostbite victims.

  That’s how I came across him in the hospital: symptoms of third- or fourth-degree frostbite, sores that would not heal, a stump of a foot, stumps of fingers on both hands.

  Fedorenko had treatment: it didn’t work. But every patient fought his treatment in any way he could. After many months of trophic ulcers, Fedorenko discharged himself and, wanting to stay in the hospital, became a male nurse, ending up as a senior nurse in a surgical department of some three hundred beds. This was the central hospital, with a thousand beds just for prisoners. On one of the floors there was an annex, a hospital for free contracted workers.

  One day the doctor who had Fedorenko’s file fell ill and a Dr. Krasinsky, an old military doctor, a lover of Jules Verne (why?), took over his case: Krasinsky, despite living in Kolyma, had not lost his desire to gossip, chatter, and discuss.

  Examining Fedorenko, Krasinsky was struck by something he himself couldn’t put a finger on. He had known this uncertain feeling ever since he was a student. No, this was not a trophic ulcer, not a stump resulting from an explosion or an ax blow. This was tissue slowly disintegrating. Krasinsky’s heart began to pound. He called in Fedorenko again and pulled him over to the window, to the light, where, looking hard at his face, he could not believe what he was seeing. This was leprosy! This was the lion’s mask: a human face more like a lion’s. Feverishly Krasinsky leafed through his textbooks. He picked up a big needle and pricked repeatedly one of the many white spots on Fedorenko’s skin. No pain at all! Pouring sweat, Krasinsky wrote a report to the authorities. The patient Fedorenko was isolated in a separate ward, flakes of skin were sent to the center, first to Magadan, then to Moscow, for a biopsy. A reply came in two weeks. Leprosy! Krasinsky walked about like the hero of the day. One group of authorities corresponded with another about establishing a special squad for a leprosarium in Kolyma. The leprosarium was set up on an island, and at the ferry-crossing points on either bank machine guns were set up. It needed a special squad.

  Fedorenko did not deny that he had been in a leprosarium and that the lepers, once abandoned, had fled to freedom. Some had tried to catch up with the retreat, others had gone to welcome Hitler’s troops. Just as in life elsewhere. Fedorenko calmly waited to be sent away, but the hospital was seething like an anthill. The whole hospital. Those who’d been badly beaten under interrogation and whose souls had been reduced to dust by a thousand interrogations, while their bodies were wrecked and exhausted by unbearably heavy work, prisoners with sentences of twenty-five years plus five years’ deprivation of rights, sentences that were unsurvivable, which you could not hope to come out of alive. . . . All these people were trembling, yelling, and cursing Fedorenko, because they were afraid of catching leprosy.

  This was the same psychological phenomenon that makes an escapee decide to put off a well-prepared escape attempt, just because on that particular day tobacco or parcels are being issued in camp. There are as many peculiar examples that contradict all logic as there are camps.

  Human shame, for example. What are its limits and range? People whose lives have been destroyed, whose future and past have been trampled into the ground, suddenly turn out to be in thrall to some trivial prejudice, something banal that for some reason can’t be surmounted or set aside. A sudden onset of shame, likewise, comes like the most refined of human feelings and is remembered for a lifetime as something authentic, infinitely precious. There was an incident in the hospital when a paramedic, who was not yet qualified but was just assisting, was given the job of shaving women, a whole newly arrived group of women prisoners. The bosses wanted a bit of amusement, so they ordered women to shave the men and men to shave the women. Everyone amuses themselves as best they can. But the male barber begged a woman he knew to perform this sanitary ceremony herself, and he refused even to think that their lives were in any case ruined, that all these amusements of the camp bosses were just some filthy foam in this terrible cauldron where personal lives were being boiled to death.

  The laughable, the tender, the human in human beings is revealed out of the blue.

  There was panic in the hospital. Fedorenko had been working for several months there. Unfortunately, in leprosy the dormant period of the infection, before any outward symptoms appear, lasts for several years. Those who were prone to worry were doomed to stay afraid forever, whether they were free or prisoners.

  There was panic in the hospital. The doctors feverishly looked for those white insensitive spots on the skin of the patients and the staff. Along with the stethoscope and the rubber mallet, a needle became part of the essential equipment for a doctor’s preliminary examination.

  The patient Fedorenko was brought and undressed in front of paramedics and doctors. A warder armed with a pistol stood some distance from the patient. Dr. Krasinsky, armed with an enormous pointer, lectured on leprosy, pointing with his stick at the former nurse’s lion face, or his missing digits, or the shiny white patches on his back.

  Literally every single person in the hospital, free or imprisoned, was reexamined. Suddenly a small white patch, an insensitive white patch, was found on Shura Leshchinskaya’s back: she had been a nurse at the front and was now the duty nurse in the women’s section. She had only recently, a few months ago, come to the hospital. She did not have a lion face. Her manner was no more severe and no more obliging, her tone no louder and no gentler than any other hospital nurse who was also a prisoner.

  Leshchinskaya was locked up in one of the women’s wards, and a piece of her skin was sent to Magadan and then to Moscow for analysis. And the reply came: it was leprosy!

  Disinfection after leprosy is a difficult business. Any house inhabited by a leper is supposed to be burned, so say the textbooks. But burning down, reducing to cinders a ward in an enormous two-story building, a gigantic building, was something nobody would undertake. Similarly, people will take risks when it comes to disinfecting expensive furs, preferring to leave the microbes alone rather than lose their expensive possessions (for a high-temperature “baking” kills not just the microbes but the fabric they inhabit). The authorities would have kept just as silent if it had been a case even of plague or cholera.

  Somebody took the responsibility for not burning the building down. Even the ward in which Fedorenko was locked, while awaiting dispatch to a leprosarium, was not burned. They merely drowned everything by repeatedly spraying phenol and carbolic acid.

  Immediately a new and serious cause for alarm appeared. Both Fedorenko and Leshchinskaya were occupying wards big enough to take several beds. A response to this problem, like the special squad of two men to escort them, still had not materialized, despite all the reminders from the bosses in their daily, or rather nightly telegrams to Magadan.

  In the basement they set aside an area and built two cells for prisoners with leprosy. This was where they moved Fedorenko and Leshchinskaya. Behind heavy locks, with armed guards, the lepers were left to wait for orders and for the squad to escort them to the leprosarium.

  Fedorenko and Leshchinskaya spent twenty-four hours in their cells; the next shift of sentinels found the cells empty.

  Panic broke out in the hospital. Everything in those cells was as it should be—windows and doors.

  Krasinsky was the first to realize what had happened: they had escaped through the floor.

  Fedorenko, a very strong man, had taken the joists apart and gotten into the corridor, raided the bread-cutting room and the operation theater of the surgical department. After collecting all the alcohol and alcoholic extracts from the cupbo
ard, as well as all the codeines, he hauled off his loot to his underground den.

  The lepers marked off a place to sleep on which they threw blankets, mattresses; they made a barricade of joists to keep the world, the guards, the hospital, the leprosarium at bay. There they lived as man and wife for several days, three, I believe.

  On the third day the searchers and the guard’s search dogs found the lepers. I was one of the search party, having to bend only a little under the hospital’s tall cellar ceiling. The foundations were very deep. The joists had been taken apart. Down at the bottom, not bothering to get up, lay both lepers, naked. Fedorenko’s mutilated dark arms were embracing Leshchinskaya’s shining white body. They were both drunk.

  They were covered with blankets and taken up to one of the cells: they weren’t separated again.

  Who covered them with a blanket, who touched those terrible bodies? It was a special male nurse, whom they found in the hospital as one of the employed staff, and to whom they gave seven days off his sentence for every day worked (at the instigation of the top bosses). So he got better terms than he would in the tungsten, lead, or uranium mines. Seven days off for one day worked. His article of the Criminal Code was irrelevant in this case. They had found a front-line soldier who had been given twenty-five plus five years for betraying the motherland: he naïvely supposed that his heroism would reduce his sentence and that the day of his release would be brought nearer.

  Prisoner Korolkov, a lieutenant in the war, guarded the cell day and night. He even slept by the cell doors. But when an escort arrived from the island, prisoner Korolkov was taken along with the lepers, to look after them. That was the last I heard of Korolkov, of Fedorenko, or of Leshchinskaya.

  1963

  IN THE ADMISSIONS ROOM