“Yes, he’s here.”
“Or at Lubyanka. Or in Lefortovo. But not in England. Tell me, Valeri, honestly, were any disparaging remarks made at all?” Krist twirled imaginary mustaches, as if he were Stalin. “Even if they were very vague?”
“Never.”
“Or say: ‘Never in my presence.’ You must know about these subtleties under interrogation.”
“No, never. Putna is an utterly loyal comrade. A military man. A bit of a rough diamond.”
“Just one last question. Psychologically, it’s the most important. But be honest.”
“I give the same answer no matter where I am.”
“Well, keep your temper, Marquis de Posa.”
“I have the feeling you’re laughing at me.”
“No, I’m not. Tell me frankly, what did Putna think of Voroshilov?”
“Putna loathed him,” Miroliubov said in one feverish breath.
“Well, there’s our solution, Valeri. This isn’t hypnosis, it’s not Ornaldo [9] at work, it’s not injections or drugs. It’s not even threats, it’s not even being interrogated nonstop without sleep. It’s a doomed man’s cold-blooded calculation. Putna’s last battle. You’re a pawn in this game, Valeri. Do you remember Pushkin’s Poltava? ‘To lose your life and your honor, too, / To take your enemies with you to the scaffold.’ ”
“ ‘To take your friends with you to the scaffold.’ ” Miroliubov corrected the quotation.
“No. ‘Friends’ is a reading that suits you and people like you. Valeri, my dear gaudeamus, you have to rely more on your enemies than on your friends. Take as many enemies with you as you can; your friends will be taken anyway.”
“But what am I myself to do?”
“Do you want some good advice, Valeri?”
“Good or bad, I don’t care. I don’t want to die.”
“It’s only good advice. Tell only the truth in your statements. If Putna decided to lie before he dies, that’s his business. Your only salvation is the truth, just the truth, nothing but the truth.”
“I have always said nothing but the truth.”
“And were your statements the truth? There are a lot of nuances. Lying to save someone, for instance. Or there’s the interests of society and the state. An individual’s class interests and personal morality. Formal logic and informal logic.”
“Just the truth!”
“All the better. So you have experience in making true statements. Keep it up.”
“Your advice doesn’t amount to much,” said Miroliubov, who was disappointed.
“Yours is a difficult case,” said Krist. “Let’s believe that where it matters they know perfectly well what’s what. If they need your death, you’ll die. If they don’t, you’ll be saved.”
“Wretched advice.”
“That’s all there is.”
•
Krist encountered Miroliubov on the steamship Kulu during its fifth voyage of the shipping season of 1937. The voyage was from Vladivostok to Magadan.
Prince Gagarin’s and Vitovt Putna’s personal doctor greeted Krist coldly: Krist had been a witness to his moral weakness at a dangerous hour of his life and, Miroliubov felt, had utterly failed to help him at a difficult, lethal moment.
Krist and Miroliubov exchanged handshakes.
“Glad to see you’re alive,” said Krist. “How many?”
“Five years. You’re making fun of me. I haven’t done anything wrong, after all. And then I get five years in the camps. Kolyma.”
“You were in a very dangerous position. It was a deadly position. Your luck held out,” said Krist.
“To hell with you, and to hell with my luck.”
It occurred to Krist that Miroliubov was right. That was so very much a Russian view of luck: being glad that an innocent man had been given five years—after all, he could have been given ten or even the death penalty.
Krist and Miroliubov didn’t meet in Kolyma. Kolyma is too big a place. But to judge from what Krist heard and from his inquiries, Dr. Miroliubov’s luck was good enough to last all five years of his time in the camps. He was released during the war and worked as a doctor at the mines. He grew old and died in 1965.
1965
IVAN FIODOROVICH
IVAN FIODOROVICH Nikishev, wearing civilian clothes, met Henry Wallace.[10] The guard towers in the nearby camp had been sawed down and the convicts had been blessed with a day off. All under-the-counter supplies in the settlement shop had been put onto the shelves, so that trade went on as if there were no war.
Wallace took part in “volunteer” work harvesting potatoes on a Sunday. When he was taken to the vegetable garden, Wallace was pleased by being given a curved American spade, recently supplied by lend-lease. Ivan Fiodorovich was equipped with the same sort of spade, except that his had a long Russian handle. Pointing at this spade, Wallace asked a question; a man in civilian clothes standing next to Ivan Fiodorovich said something, then Ivan Fiodorovich said something, and the interpreter kindly translated for Wallace what he had said: that in America, a country with such advanced technology, they had even given thought to the shape of spades, and then he touched the spade that Wallace was holding. It was a very good spade, but the handle didn’t suit Russians because it was too short, not much of a clod-lifter. The interpreter had trouble with translating the term “clod-lifter.” But he said that the Russians, who had made metal shoes for a flea (Wallace had read something about this when he was preparing for his trip to Russia), had made an improvement to the American tool: they’d put the spade blade onto a different handle, a long one. The best length for the spade handle and the spade itself is from the ground to the bridge of the digger’s nose. The man in civilian clothes standing next to Ivan Fiodorovich demonstrated. Now it was time to start the shock work, harvesting potatoes, which grew rather well in the Far North.
Everything interested Wallace. How did cabbages or potatoes grow here? How were they planted? Were they transplanted? Like cabbages? Amazing. What was the yield per hectare?
From time to time Wallace would look at the men next to him. Young, rosy-cheeked, happy men were digging all around the bosses. They dug merrily and enthusiastically. Wallace took the opportunity of glancing at their hands, which were white, and their fingers, which had never touched a spade before; he laughed, since he realized that they were guards in disguise.
Wallace had seen it all: the towers, whether sawed down or not, and the clusters of prisoners’ barracks surrounded by wire. He knew just as much about this country as Ivan Fiodorovich did.
They dug merrily. Ivan Fiodorovich soon wearied. He was a pudgy, heavily built man, but he wanted to keep up with the American vice president. Wallace was as lightweight as a boy, even though he was rather older in years than Ivan Fiodorovich.
“I’m used to this sort of work on my farm,” Wallace said cheerfully.
Ivan Fiodorovich smiled; he was taking more and more frequent rest breaks.
“When I get back to the camp,” Ivan Fiodorovich was thinking, “I’ll definitely have a glucose injection.” Ivan Fiodorovich was very fond of glucose. Glucose was excellent for maintaining the heart. He would have to take a risk, though, since he hadn’t brought his personal doctor on this trip.
The shock Sunday was over: Ivan Fiodorovich had the health chief summoned. When the health chief came, he was pale, fearing the worst. Had there been denunciations about that damned fishing trip when the patients caught fish for the head of the sanatorium? After all, that was a tradition consecrated by the passage of time.
When he saw the doctor, Ivan Fiodorovich forced himself to smile as gracefully as he could.
“I need to have a glucose injection. I’ve got ampoules of glucose. My own.”
“You? Glucose?”
“Why should that astound you?” said Ivan Fiodorovich, looking suspiciously at the chief of the medical service, who had become so jocular. “Well, give me an injection.”
“Me? You?”
“You. Me.”
“Glucose?”
“Glucose.”
“I’ll tell Piotr Petrovich, our surgeon. He’ll do it better than me.”
“What? Don’t tell me you don’t know how to!” said Ivan Fiodorovich.
“I know how to, sir. But Piotr Petrovich is even better at it. I’ll give you my own personal syringe.”
“I have my own syringe, too.”
The surgeon was sent for.
“Reporting, sir. Krasnitsky, Piotr Petrovich, hospital surgeon.”
“You’re a surgeon?”
“Yes, sir.”
“A former convict?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Can you give me an injection?”
“No, sir. I don’t know how to.”
“You don’t know how to do injections?”
“Sir,” the head of the medical service interrupted, “we’ll send you a paramedic straightaway. A convict. He’ll do it so you won’t feel a thing. Let me have your syringe. I’ll boil it in your presence. Piotr Petrovich and I will keep an eye out in case there’s any sabotage or terrorism. We’ll keep the tourniquet tight. We’ll roll up your sleeve.”
The convict-paramedic came, washed Ivan Fiodorovich’s hands, wiped them with alcohol and did the injection.
“May I go now, sir?”
“Go,” said Ivan Fiodorovich. “Give him a packet of cigarettes from my briefcase.”
“It’s not worth it, sir.”
That’s how complicated a glucose injection turned out to be when traveling. For a long time Ivan Fiodorovich fancied he had a fever, that his head was spinning, that he had been poisoned by the convict-paramedic, but in the end he calmed down.
The next day, Ivan Fiodorovich saw Wallace off to Irkutsk; he was so pleased that he crossed himself. He ordered the guard towers to be put up again and the goods to be removed from the shop.
Recently Ivan Fiodorovich had felt he was a special friend of America, within the diplomatic boundaries of friendship, naturally. Just a few months ago the production of electric lightbulbs had been set up forty-seven kilometers from Magadan. You had to be a Kolyma inhabitant to realize the importance of that. Losing a lightbulb was a criminal offense; the loss of a lightbulb at the mines meant the loss of thousands of working hours. You couldn’t get enough imported light-bulbs. And suddenly a run of luck: we’d created our own. We’d freed ourselves of “foreign dependency.”
Moscow appreciated Ivan Fiodorovich’s achievements, and he was given a medal. The factory manager, the head of the workshop where the lights were made, the laboratory assistants got rather smaller medals. Everyone got a medal, except the man who had set up the production, the atomic physicist from Kharkov, the engineer Georgi Georgievich Demidov. He was an “acronymic,” a political prisoner sentenced by an NKVD troika for something like ASA, Anti-Soviet Agitation. Demidov thought he might at least be considered for early release, as the factory manager hinted, but Ivan Fiodorovich considered any application for such a reward to be a political mistake. You couldn’t offer a fascist early release! What would Moscow say? No, he could just be content that he was working in a warm factory, not doing hard manual labor: that was better than any early release. And Demidov could not have a medal, of course not: medals were for faithful servants of the state, not for fascists.
“Well you could let him have twenty-five rubles or so as a bonus. For tobacco, sugar. . . .”
“Demidov doesn’t smoke,” the factory manager said respectfully.
“If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. . . . He can swap it for bread or something else . . . if he doesn’t want tobacco, then he’ll need new clothes, not camp uniform, I mean, you know. . . . There are those boxes of American outfits we started to give you as bonuses. There’s a suit, a shirt, a tie. One of the white boxes. So you can give him that as a bonus.”
At a solemn session in the presence of Ivan Fiodorovich himself, each hero was presented with a box containing gifts from America. Each one bowed and said, “Thank you.” But when Demidov’s turn came, he approached the presiding committee’s table, put the box on the table, and said, “I’m not going to wear Americans’ hand-me-downs,” before turning around and leaving.
Ivan Fiodorovich considered this act first and foremost from a political view as a gesture by a fascist against the Soviet-American bloc of freedom-loving countries: that very evening he rang the district NKVD department. Demidov was tried, given eight years “extra,” removed from his job, and sent to do hard manual labor in a punishment mine.
It was now, after Wallace’s departure, that Ivan Fiodorovich recalled the Demidov incident with real pleasure. Ivan Fiodorovich was always noted for his political astuteness.
After his recent marriage to the twenty-year-old Komsomol member Rydasova, Ivan Fiodorovich was taking special care of his heart. He had made her his wife and at the same time put her in charge of a large section of the camps. She decided matters of life and death for many thousands of people. The romantic Komsomol leader was quickly transmogrified into a beast. She exiled people, fabricated cases, handed out sentences, “extras,” and was behind all kinds of plots that were as nasty as only a camp plot can be.
The theater gave Madame Rydasova a great deal of bother.
“We’ve had this denunciation from Kozin, who says that the director Varpakhovsky has been making plans for a May Day demonstration in Magadan with festive columns like processions of the cross, with banners and icons. And he says, of course, that this is subversive counterrevolutionary work.”
At a committee meeting Madame Rydasova didn’t think there was anything criminal about these plans. A demonstration: so what? Nothing worth commenting on. Then suddenly, church banners! Something had to be done; she consulted her husband. He, Ivan Fiodorovich, a man of experience, immediately took an extremely serious view of Kozin’s report.
“He’s probably right,” said Ivan Fiodorovich. “And banners are not the only thing he’s writing about. Apparently, Varpakhovsky is having an affair with one of the actresses, a Jewish girl, and is giving her the key parts—she’s a singer. Anyway, who is Varpakhovsky?”
“He’s a fascist, he’s been moved here from the special zone. He’s a theater director, I’ve just remembered he used to work for Meyerhold. Here, I’ve got it written down.” Rydasova poked about in her card index, something that Ivan Fiodorovich had taught her to keep. “Some Lady of the Camellias. And he did The History of a Town, about Glupov, in the satirical theater. He’s been in Kolyma since 1937. So you see. Kozin, on the other hand, is reliable. He may be a pederast, but he’s not a fascist.”
“And what has Varpakhovsky staged?”
“The Abduction of Helen. We’ve seen it. You remember, you even laughed. You even signed a recommendation for the actor to get an early release.”
“Yes, yes, I think I remember. That Abduction of Helen wasn’t by a Soviet author.”
“Some Frenchman. I’ve got it on record here.”
“Don’t bother, don’t bother, it’s all straightforward. Send that Varpakhovsky off with a touring brigade, and as for his wife—what’s her name?”
“Zyskind.”
“The Jewess: keep her here. Theirs is a short-term love affair, not like ours.” Ivan Fiodorovich made his graceful little joke.
He had commissioned a big surprise for his young wife. Rydasova was very fond of baubles, of any precious mementos. For two years, not far from Magadan, a prisoner who was a famous ivory carver had been carving an elaborate jewelry box from a mammoth’s tusk: this was to be Ivan Fiodorovich’s present to his young wife. To begin with, the ivory carver had been registered as a hospital patient, and then he had been put on the staff of a workshop, so that he could earn credits to count against his sentence. The credit he earned was a three-day reduction for each day worked, which was on the same scale as someone who overfulfilled the norm in the Kolyma uranium mines, where the credits, because of the damage to health, were even higher than the “gold” or
“top metal” credits.
The carving of the box was nearly finished. Tomorrow that charade with Wallace would be over and Ivan Fiodorovich could get back to Magadan.
Rydasova gave the orders to have Varpakhovsky included in a traveling brigade, then passed the singer’s denunciation on to the district headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior. She then started thinking. She had a lot to think about: Ivan Fiodorovich had aged and taken to drink. A lot of new young bosses had come onto the scene. Ivan Fiodorovich feared and loathed them. A Lutsenko had appeared as one of the deputies, had toured all of Kolyma, taking notes in the hospitals about patients suffering from trauma as a result of beatings. There were, he found, quite a lot of such patients. Naturally, Ivan Fiodorovich’s informers told him about Lutsenko’s notes.
Lutsenko delivered a report to the management committee.
“If someone in authority in the administration uses foul language, then what do you expect of the mine boss? The works clerk? The guard? What will be going on at the pit face? I’m going to read out to you the figures I have from my inquiries in the hospitals—and these are clear underestimates—for broken limbs and beatings.”
Ivan Fiodorovich followed up Lutsenko’s report with a major speech.
“We’ve had a lot of new people coming here,” he said, “but they have all eventually realized that the conditions here are peculiar Kolyma conditions and that this has to be taken into account.” He hoped that the younger comrades would understand this and work along with the rest.
Lutsenko’s concluding remark was: “We have come here to work, and we shall: but we shan’t work according to Ivan Fiodorovich’s rules but according to the party’s.”
Everyone, the whole management committee and all Kolyma, realized that Ivan Fiodorovich’s days were numbered. Rydasova shared their opinion. But the old man knew how things worked better than any Lutsenko did: it would take more than some commissar to deal with Ivan Fiodorovich. He wrote a letter. And Lutsenko, who was his deputy, the head of the political department, a hero of the Great Patriotic War, vanished like the morning dew. He was given an emergency transfer to somewhere. To celebrate his victory Ivan Fiodorovich got drunk and then caused an uproar in the Magadan theater.
Kolyma Tales Page 28
