Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  “Chuck that singer out on his neck, I can’t stand listening to the swine,” he raged, sitting in his personal box.

  And the singer vanished forever from Magadan.

  But this was Ivan Fiodorovich’s last victory. He was well aware that Lutsenko was somewhere writing something, but he didn’t have the strength to ward off the coming blow.

  “Time I retired,” he thought. “All I need is the jewelry box. . . .”

  “You’ll get a big pension,” his wife said, to comfort him. “Then we’ll go. We’ll forget it all. All the Lutsenkos and Varpakhovskys. We’ll buy a nice little house near Moscow, with a garden. You’ll be the chairman of the Civil Defense and a leading figure on the district council, eh? It’s high time.”

  “How revolting,” said Ivan Fiodorovich. “Chairman of Civil Defense? Ugh! And what about you?” he suddenly asked.

  “I’ll be with you.”

  Ivan Fiodorovich understood that his wife would wait two or three years for him to die.

  “Lutsenko! Was he after my job, then?” he thought. “Sly bastard! We work differently, do we? He calls it ‘smash and grab.’ It’s hard graft. Hard graft, my dear comrade Lutsenko, coming from the war, with government orders to increase gold production. As for the broken limbs, beatings, and deaths, there have always been lots and there always will be. This is the Far North, not Moscow. The law is like the taiga, the convicts say. A whole lot of supplies fell into the sea at the coast and three thousand men died. Ivan Fiodorovich Nikishev had Vyshnevetsky, the deputy in charge of camps, put on trial, and he got a prison sentence. How else could it have been dealt with? Is Lutsenko going to show us?”

  “Get me my car!”

  Ivan Fiodorovich’s black ZIM limousine sped away from Magadan where plots and traps were being set up. Ivan Fiodorovich didn’t have the strength to fight them.

  He stopped for the night in the director’s house. This was an institution he had created. In Berzin’s day or in Pavlov’s day there had been no such thing in Kolyma. “But,” Ivan Fiodorovich reasoned, “once I’m entitled to have them, let’s have them.” Every five hundred kilometers on the enormous highway a building was erected, which had pictures, carpets, mirrors, bronze sculptures, an excellent buffet, a cook, a butler, and guards, where Ivan Fiodorovich, the director of Far East Construction could spend the night in suitable conditions. Once a year he actually did spend the night in one of his houses.

  The black limousine was now speeding with Ivan Fiodorovich to Debin, the central hospital, where the nearest director’s house was. They had already been telephoned, the head of the hospital had been woken up, and the whole hospital had been put on “combat alert.” Everything was being washed, cleaned, scrubbed.

  Suppose Ivan Fiodorovich visited the central hospital for prisoners and found dirt or dust? That would be the end of the chief. The chief would, however, accuse careless paramedics and doctors for underhanded sabotage; he’d say they neglected the cleaning in the hope that Ivan Fiodorovich would see this and dismiss the chief from his job. He’d say that was in the mind of every prisoner who was a doctor or a paramedic when they overlooked a bit of dust on a desk.

  Everything in the hospital was trembling as Ivan Fiodorovich’s black limousine sped along the Kolyma highway.

  The director’s house had no connection with the hospital; it happened to be built next to it, about five hundred meters away. But being so close was enough to cause all sorts of anxiety.

  In the nine years he had been in Kolyma, Ivan Fiodorovich had never visited the central hospital for prisoners, a hospital of a thousand beds. Not once. But everyone was on alert while he had breakfast, lunch, and supper in the director’s house. Only when the black limousine drove out onto the highway was the all clear given.

  This time, the all clear was not timely. “He’s there! He’s drinking! Visitors have arrived!” That was the news from the director’s house. Three days later, Ivan Fiodorovich’s limousine approached the settlement for free hired workers; this was where the hospital’s free doctors, paramedics, and support staff lived.

  Everything was hushed. The hospital chief, panting as he went, clambered across the stream that separated the settlement from the hospital.

  Ivan Fiodorovich got out of his limousine. His face was puffy and stale. He eagerly lit a cigarette.

  “Hey you, what’s your name?” Ivan Fiodorovich poked a digit into the hospital chief’s gown.

  “At your service, sir.”

  “Have you got children here?”

  “My children? They’re at school in Moscow, sir.”

  “Not yours. Children, you know, little ones. Have you got a nursery? Where’s the nursery?” Ivan Fiodorovich barked.

  “This building here, sir.”

  The limousine followed Ivan Fiodorovich to the nursery building. Nobody said a word.

  “Bring the children out,” Ivan Fiodorovich ordered.

  The duty caregiver leapt out. “They’re asleep.”

  “Shh. . . .” The hospital chief pulled the caregiver to one side. “Get them all out, wake them. Make sure their hands are washed.”

  The caregiver dashed inside the nursery.

  “I want to take the children for a ride in my limousine,” said Ivan Fiodorovich, lighting another cigarette.

  “A ride, sir. That’s really wonderful.” The children had by now come running down the steps to surround Ivan Fiodorovich.

  “Get into the car,” the hospital chief shouted. “Ivan Fiodorovich is going to take you for a ride. Don’t all push.”

  The children got into the limousine; Ivan Fiodorovich sat next to the driver. The limousine took three trips to give all the children a turn.

  “How about tomorrow, tomorrow? Will you come and get us tomorrow?”

  “I will, I will,” Ivan Fiodorovich assured them.

  “Mind you, that’s not bad,” he thought as he made himself comfortable on his snow-white sheet. “Home, children, nice uncle. Like Joseph Stalin with a child in his arms.”

  The next day he was summoned to Magadan. He had been promoted to the minister of precious metals, but this was not the real reason for his summons.

  The Magadan traveling theater brigade was making its way up and down the Kolyma highway, visiting one mine after another. It included Leonid Varpakhovsky. Dusia Zyskind, his camp wife, was left behind in Magadan, on the orders of Rydasova, who was the boss. A camp wife. But this was real love, real feelings. He was an actor, a professional at faking feelings, so he would know all about that. What could be done now, whom could they ask? Varpakhovsky felt a terrible weariness.

  In Yagodnoye he was surrounded by the local doctors, free men, and prisoners.

  In Yagodnoye. Two years earlier he was passing through Yagodnoye on his way to the special zone, and he had managed to “put on the brakes” in Yagodnoye and avoid ending up in the terrible Jelgala mines. The efforts that this had cost him. He had been forced to plumb the depths of his inventions, his skills, his ability to make the most of what little he had available to him in the north. So he mobilized all his resources; he would put on a musical show. Not Verdi’s Masked Ball, which he was to put on for the Kremlin theater fifteen years later, nor Zapolska’s The Morality of Mrs. Dulska, nor Lermontov in the Maly Theater, none of the director in chief’s work in the Yermolova Theater. He would put on an operetta, The Black Tulip. No piano? It would have an accordion accompanist. Varpakhovsky himself would arrange the score, and he’d play the accordion. And he’d produce it. And he’d be victorious, and get out of Jelgala.

  He is successful in getting a transfer from Magadan Theater, where he enjoys Rydasova’s patronage. He’s in the authorities’ good books. Varpakhovsky is preparing auditions of amateur acts, he is putting on one show after another in the Magadan Theater, each more interesting than the last. And then he meets Dusia Zyskind, the singer, then there’s love, Kozin’s denunciation, and long-distance traveling.

  Varpakhovsky knew many of the peopl
e standing around the truck that was transporting the Culture Brigade. There was Andreyev, with whom he had traveled from Neksikan to the Kolyma special zone. They met in the bathhouse, the winter bathhouse: darkness, filth, sweaty slippery bodies, tattoos, foul language, jostling, guards yelling at you, crowding. A smoking oil lamp on the wall, and underneath it the barber holding his razor, doing everyone in one session, wet underclothes, icy steam around your legs, one bowl of water to wash your body. Bundles of clothes fly into the air in complete darkness: “Whose is it, whose?”

  And then the uproar and the noise suddenly stops for some reason. And Andreyev’s neighbor, waiting his turn to have his fine head of hair removed, says in a resonant, calm voice, very much an actor’s:

  “It’s rather different—a glass of rum,

  Sleep at night, tea in the morning,

  It’s rather different, pals, at home.”

  They introduced themselves and got talking: they were both from Moscow. But only Varpakhovsky had managed to detach himself from the prisoners’ group in Yagodnoye in the Far North’s administrative area. Andreyev was neither a director nor an actor. He served a sentence at Jelgala, then he spent a long time in a hospital, and he was still in the district hospital at Belichya, working as support staff, about six kilometers from Yagodnoye. He didn’t come to the theater brigade’s show, but he was glad to see Varpakhovsky.

  Varpakhovsky was left behind after the brigade moved on: he had been an emergency admission to the hospital. By the time the brigade had gone to Elgen, the women’s farm, and come back, he would have thought things out and made a decision.

  Andreyev and Varpakhovsky talked a lot and decided that Varpakhovsky should write a letter to Rydasova, explaining how serious his feelings were and appealing to Rydasova’s nobler self. They took several days to compose the letter, polishing every phrase. A reliable doctor served as courier and took the letter to Magadan, so they had only to wait. The answer came after Andreyev and Varpakhovsky had parted and the theater brigade was on its way back to Magadan: Varpakhovsky was to be dismissed from the theater brigade and sent to do hard manual work at a punishment mine. Zyskind, his wife, was also to be sent to manual labor at Elgen, the women’s farm.

  “This was heaven’s reply,” as one of Jasieński’s poems puts it.

  Andreyev and Varpakhovsky met in a Moscow street. Varpakhovsky was now the director in chief at the Yermolova Theater. Andreyev was working at a Moscow magazine.

  •

  Rydasova had taken Varpakhovsky’s letter from the mailbox of her Magadan apartment.

  She found it disagreeable, and Ivan Fiodorovich disliked it even more.

  “They really have gone beyond the pale. Any terrorist. . . .”

  The corridor concierge on duty was immediately dismissed and sent to the guardhouse. Ivan Fiodorovich decided not to put the case in the hands of the criminal investigators: he sensed that his powers were somehow too weak now.

  “My powers are weaker now,” he told his wife. “You see, people can now get right into our apartment.”

  Even before the letter was read, the fates of Varpakhovsky and Zyskind were sealed. All that had to be decided was the punishment: Ivan Fiodorovich was in favor of severity, Rydasova of something a bit milder. They ended up choosing Rydasova’s version.

  1962

  THE ACADEMICIAN

  IT TURNED out that it was very difficult to print a conversation with a member of the Academy of Sciences. Not because the academician talked a load of rubbish, no. The academician was renowned and had a lot of experience with all kinds of interviews, and he was talking about a topic with which he was very familiar. The journalist sent out to talk to him was sufficiently well qualified: he was good at his job, and twenty years ago he had been very good. The problem was the high speed of scientific progress. A journalist’s timelines, first proofs, printer’s proofs, publisher’s timetables have lagged hopelessly behind the speed of scientific progress. That autumn, on October 4, 1957, a satellite was launched. The academician knew a few things about the launch preparations; the journalist knew nothing. But after the satellite was launched the academician, the journalist, and the editor all saw clearly that not only did the boundaries of information have to be shifted but the tone of the article had to be changed. The first version of the article had to be imbued with expectations of great, unprecedented events. Now the events had happened. That was why a month after the interview the academician, who was in a sanatorium at Yalta, sent at his own expense some lengthy reply-paid telegrams to the editor. Skillfully lifting part of the veil covering his cybernetic secrets, the academician was trying his very best to be “on the level” and at the same time to avoid saying anything he shouldn’t. The editorial board had the same concerns about what was appropriate to the times and what was not, and until the very last moment they kept making corrections to the academician’s article.

  The proofs of the article were sent to Yalta by special air courier; they came back to the editor covered in the academician’s scrawled comments.

  “Proofs corrected as Balzac would have done,” said the chief editor in dismay. Everything was sorted out, fitted in, proofread again. The gigantic juggernaut of publishing technology rolled out onto its wide tracks. But by the time the printers had set it, Laika the dog had flown off into the cosmos; the academician was now at a peace congress in Romania, and from there he sent more telegrams, pleading and demanding. The editorial board booked urgent international telephone calls to Bucharest.

  Finally the magazine appeared, and the editors lost all interest in the academician’s article.

  All that came later, however; at the moment Golubev, the journalist, was climbing a narrow marble staircase in an enormous building on the main street of the city where the academician lived. The building was the same age as the journalist: it had been put up during the building boom at the beginning of the twentieth century. These were apartments built for sale: they had baths, gas, telephones, sewerage, electricity.

  There was a concierge on duty in the entrance. The electric light was placed so as to illuminate the face of anyone coming in. Somehow, this reminded one of a pretrial prison.

  Golubev gave the academician’s name, the concierge telephoned him and got a reply, then told the journalist, “Please go ahead,” and flung open the elevator doors, which were decorated with a cast-bronze relief.

  “Like the pass office,” Golubev thought idly. Whatever else he’d seen, he’d certainly seen plenty of pass offices in his time.

  “The academician is on the sixth floor,” the concierge respectfully told him. His face expressed no surprise when Golubev walked past the open elevator doors and strode up the clean narrow marble stairs. After his illness, Golubev couldn’t stand elevators, whether they were going up or down, but especially down, when he experienced a treacherous weightlessness.

  Pausing to rest at each landing, Golubev reached the sixth floor. The hum in his ears quieted down a little, and his heartbeat became more regular and his breathing more even. He stood for a while outside the academician’s door, stretched out a hand, and cautiously made a few gymnastic movements with his head, as recommended by the doctors who were treating him.

  Golubev stopped turning his head, groped in his pocket for his handkerchief, fountain pen, and notebook, and then with firm pressure rang the doorbell.

  The popular academician answered the door himself. He was young and fidgety; he had darting black eyes and looked far younger and in better health than Golubev. Before the interview Golubev had consulted the encyclopedias in the library and also some biographies, official and scientific. He now knew that he and the academician were the same age. Leafing through articles relevant to his forthcoming interview, Golubev noted that the academician hurled thunderbolts and lightning from his scientific Olympus at cybernetics, which he declared to be “a very harmful idealistic pseudoscience.” “Pseudoscience on the warpath” is how the academician had put it about twenty years earlier.
The interview that Golubev had come for was also meant to deal with the significance of cybernetics today.

  The academician turned on the light, so that Golubev could take off his coat.

  Both of them—the academician in a black suit with a black tie, black hair, black eyes, smooth face, agile, and Golubev’s erect figure with a tired face and lots of wrinkles, more like deep scars—were reflected in the enormous, bronze-framed mirror. But Golubev’s blue eyes sparkled and were, in fact, younger than the academician’s lively shining eyes.

  Golubev took a hanger and hung up his stiff new imitation leather coat, which he’d recently bought. Hanging next to his host’s well-worn brown leather coat, lined with raccoon-dog fur, this coat looked quite respectable.

  “Please come in,” said the academician as he opened a door on his left. “And do excuse me. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  The journalist looked around. A series of rooms stretched out in two directions, straight ahead and to the right. The doors were made of glass with a lower half of mahogany; somewhere in the distance, despite the utter silence, shadows of people kept appearing. Golubev had never lived in apartments with suites of rooms, but he did remember Arbenin’s apartment in the film of Lermontov’s play Masquerade. The academician reappeared somewhere in the distance, then vanished again before reappearing and once again vanishing, just like Arbenin in the film.

  To the right of the big room, which was bright, thanks to the glass doors and the three picture windows, and which led to another suite of rooms, was an enormous grand piano. The piano lid was closed, and various porcelain figures were awkwardly crammed together on the lid. There were vases, big and small, statues, big and small, on magnificent pedestals. Plates and rugs were hanging on the walls. Two spacious armchairs were upholstered in white, to match the piano. Somewhere beyond the glass, human shadows were moving about.