Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  But how?

  Prisoners’ traditions demand that in such cases the first person you turn to is the doctor. There was a paramedic clinic at Kadykchan, where, so it was said in our tent, there was a “quack,” a doctor who had never graduated from his course at Moscow Medical Institute.

  It takes a great effort of willpower to summon enough strength after a working day to get up and go to the outpatient clinic. You don’t have to get dressed or put boots on, because you never take anything off between visits to the bathhouse, but you haven’t got the strength. You are reluctant to spend your rest period on a “visit” that may well end with abuse or even a beating (that did happen). The main thing was the hopelessness, the unlikeliness of any good outcome. But if you are seeking a way out, then you can’t overlook the smallest chance: that was what my body, my exhausted muscles, rather than my experience and reason, were telling me.

  Willpower listens only to instinct, as is the case with wild animals.

  The other side of the track from the tent was a cabin where prospectors and search groups, and sometimes “secret action squads,” the endless patrols in the taiga, took shelter.

  The geologists had left long ago, so the cabin had been turned into a clinic, a cabin with a trestle bed, a medicine cupboard, and an old blanket for a curtain. The blanket screened off the trestle bed where the “doctor” lived.

  The queue for patients was outside, in the freezing cold.

  I squeezed through into the cabin. The heavy door pressed on my innards. Blue eyes, a big forehead, a bald patch, and the inevitable haircut that marked your person. In the camp your hair testified to your situation. Everyone was shaved to the skin. Those whose heads weren’t shaved were envied by everyone. Hair was a peculiar protest against the camp regime.

  “From Moscow?” the doctor asked me.

  “Moscow.”

  “Let’s introduce ourselves.”

  I gave him my surname and shook the hand he offered. It was cold, slightly damp.

  “Lunin.”

  “A famous surname,” I said with a smile.

  “I’m a direct great-grandson. In our family the eldest son is called either Mikhail or Sergei, in turn. The one Pushkin knew was Mikhail Sergeyevich.”

  “We know.” This first conversation had something very untypical of the camps about it. I forgot what I had come to ask for, I was reluctant to alter the tone of this conversation with anything that would jar. But I was starving: I wanted bread and warmth. That hadn’t, however, occurred to the doctor yet.

  “Have a cigarette.”

  I rolled myself a cigarette with my pink frostbitten fingers.

  “Take more tobacco, don’t hesitate. I’ve got a whole library about my great-grandfather at home. I’m a student at the medical faculty, you know. But I haven’t finished. I was arrested. Everyone in our family is in the military, but here I am, a doctor. And I have no regrets.”

  “So Mars must have been set aside. ‘A friend of Aesculapius, of Bacchus, and of Venus.’ ”

  “Not much hope of Venus in these parts. But all you can take of Aesculapius. It’s just that I don’t have my diploma. If I had my diploma, I’d show them.”

  “How about Bacchus?”

  “We’ve got a bit of pure spirit, you know. But I only have to drink a glass and that’s me done. I get drunk quickly. I look after the free workers’ settlement too, you know. Come and see me.”

  I half opened the door with my shoulder and staggered out of the clinic.

  “You know,” the doctor continued, “Muscovites are people who more than any others, Kiev or Leningrad people, love to recall their city, its streets, skating rinks, houses, the Moscow River. . . .”

  “I’m not a Muscovite by birth.”

  “People like you recall even more, they remember even better.”

  I came for several evenings at the end of the reception time to smoke another roll-your-own: I was afraid to ask for bread.

  Sergei Mikhailovich, like anybody who had an easy life in the camp, whether by luck or because of his job, didn’t give much thought to others and had little understanding of the starving: his area, Arkagala, was at the time not yet starving. The miseries of the mines had passed Arkagala by.

  “If you want, I’ll operate on you. I’ll cut the cyst off your finger.”

  “All right, then.”

  “But, God forbid, I can’t let you off work. That would be awkward for me, you understand.”

  “How am I supposed to work with my finger operated on?”

  “Well, you’ll manage.”

  I agreed, and Lunin cut out my cyst quite skillfully, leaving a scar as a souvenir. Many years later I met the woman who was to become my wife, and she was captivated for the first minute of our meeting, squeezing my fingers, looking for this “Lunin” cyst.

  I saw that Sergei Mikhailovich was simply very young, that he needed someone more sophisticated to talk to, that all his views of the camp and of “fate” were no different than those of any free man in authority, that he was inclined to find even the common criminals delightful, that the storm of 1937 had passed him by.

  For me, on the other hand, every hour of rest, every day of rest was precious: muscles, permanently worn out by the gold mine, ached and begged for a respite. Every piece of bread, every bowl of soup was precious to me; my stomach demanded food, and my eyes couldn’t help looking for bread on the shelves. But I forced myself to remember Moscow streets: Kitaigorod, Nikita Gates, where the writer Andrei Sobol shot himself, where Shtern fired at the German ambassador’s car—a history of Moscow streets nobody will ever write.

  “Yes, Moscow, Moscow. Now tell me, how many women have you had?”

  It was unthinkable for a half-starved man to carry on a conversation of this sort, but the young surgeon was listening only to himself, and he was not offended by my silence.

  “Listen, Sergei. What has happened to us is a crime, the greatest crime of the century.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that,” said Sergei with annoyance. “It’s the Jews who keep messing everything up.”

  I just shrugged.

  Soon Sergei Mikhailovich managed to get his transfer to the main area, to Arkagala, and I thought, without sadness or resentment, that yet another person had left my life forever, and what a simple matter, actually, parting and separation were. But things turned out rather differently.

  The man in charge of Kadykchan, where I was working on the Egyptian circular winch, was Pavel Ivanovich Kiseliov. He was an engineer, not a party member, and no longer young. Kiseliov used to beat prisoners every day. When the boss came out to the mine area this meant there would be beatings, punches, yelling.

  Was it impunity? Bloodthirstiness that slumbered somewhere deep in his soul? A desire to make his mark in the eyes of the top authorities? Power is a strange business.

  Zelfugarov, a boy who had been a counterfeiter, and who worked in my brigade, was lying in the snow, spitting out his teeth after a beating.

  “You know, all my relatives were executed for counterfeiting, but I was a minor, so I got fifteen years in the camps. My father said to the interrogator, ‘Take five hundred thousand in cash, real money, and stop the case. . . .’ But the interrogator wouldn’t.”

  The four of us doing our shift on the winch lingered around Zelfugarov. Korneyev was a Siberian peasant, there was the gangster Lionia Semionov, the engineer Vronsky, and me. Lionia the gangster said, “Only in the camp can you learn to work a machine, you can take on any job you like, you don’t have to answer for it if you break a winch or a crane. You gradually learn.” That was a way of thinking which was also typical of the young surgeons in Kolyma.

  Vronsky and Korneyev were more acquaintances than friends of mine, ever since Black Lake, a workplace where I had started coming back to life.

  Zelfugarov didn’t get up. He turned his bloodstained face and dirty swollen lips toward us.

  “I can’t get up, boys. He was hitting me in the bell
y. God, the boss, the boss.”

  “Go and see the paramedic.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll be worse. He’ll tell the boss.”

  “Listen,” I said, “there’ll be no end to this. There is a way out. When the head of Far East Construction Coal comes, or some other big boss, someone should step forward and punch Kiseliov in the face when the bosses are watching. The whole of Kolyma will know about it and he’ll be fired, he’ll definitely be transferred. The man who hits him will get a sentence. How many years would you get for hitting Kiseliov?”

  We went to work, turned the winch, went back to barracks, had supper, and got ready to go to bed. I was called out to the office.

  Kiseliov was sitting in the office, looking at the ground. He was no coward, and he didn’t like threats.

  “So that’s it,” he said cheerfully. “The whole of Kolyma will know about it, will it? Now I’m going to have you charged for an attempt on my life. Get out of here, you bastard!”

  Only Vronsky could have informed on me, but how? We’d been together all that time.

  After that, life got easier for me at the workplace. Kiseliov didn’t even come near the winch. When he did come to work, he was carrying a small-caliber rifle, but he never went down the mine gallery, which had now been cut deep into the slope.

  Someone came into the barracks.

  “Go and see the doctor.”

  The “doctor” who had replaced Lunin was called Kolesnikov. He too was a medical student who hadn’t finished his course, a tall young man and a prisoner.

  Lunin, wearing a fur jacket, was sitting at the desk in the clinic.

  “Get your things, we’re going right now to Arkagala. Kolesnikov, write us a travel order.”

  Kolesnikov folded a sheet of paper several times and tore off a tiny piece, hardly bigger than a postage stamp. In the tiniest handwriting he wrote, “To the health center in Arkagala camp.”

  Lunin took the piece of paper. “I’ll go and get Kiseliov to stamp it,” and he ran off.

  He came back crestfallen. “He won’t let you, you know. He says you promised to punch him in the face. There’s no way he’ll agree.”

  I told him the whole story.

  Lunin tore up the “travel order.”

  “It’s your own fault,” he told me. “What do you care about Zelfugarov and all those. . . . You weren’t the one who got beaten up.”

  “I’ve been beaten before.”

  “Well, goodbye. I’ve got a truck waiting. We’ll think of something.” Lunin got into the truck cabin.

  Several days passed before Lunin reappeared.

  “I’m off now to see Kiseliov. About you.”

  Half an hour later he came back.

  “Everything’s fine. He agreed.”

  “How come?”

  “I have a way of taming shrewish hearts.”

  Sergei Mikhailovich replayed his conversation with Kiseliov.

  “What brings you here, Sergei Mikhailovich? Do sit down. Have a cigarette.”

  “No, I won’t. I don’t have the time. Pavel Ivanovich, I’ve brought you the statements about beatings. The special-action people have passed them on for my signature. Well, before I sign them, I thought I ought to ask you whether all this is true or not.”

  “It’s not true, Sergei Mikhailovich. My enemies are ready—”

  “That’s what I thought. I won’t sign these documents. All the same, Pavel Ivanovich, things can’t be put right, if you knock someone’s teeth out, they can’t be put back.”

  “True, Sergei Mikhailovich. Why don’t you come to our house, my wife has made a very nice liqueur. I’ve been keeping it for the New Year, but for an occasion like this—”

  “No, no, Pavel Ivanovich. One favor deserves another. Let Andreyev go to Arkagala.”

  “That’s something I definitely can’t do. Andreyev is someone I’d call—”

  “Your personal enemy?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Well, he’s my personal friend. I thought you would give my request a bit more consideration. Take this and look at the statements about beatings.”

  Kiseliov fell silent.

  “All right, he can go.”

  “Write him a reference.”

  “He can come personally for it.”

  I strode into the office. Kiseliov was staring at the ground.

  “You’re going to Arkagala. Take this reference.”

  I said nothing. The office clerk wrote out the reference and I went back to the clinic.

  Lunin had gone by then, but Kolesnikov was waiting for me.

  “You’ll go this evening, about nine. Acute appendicitis.” And he proffered me a paper.

  I never saw Kiseliov or Kolesnikov again. Before long, Kiseliov was transferred somewhere else, to Elgen, where he was killed after a few months, accidentally. One night a thief got into the apartment, a small building, where he was living. Kiseliov heard footsteps, snatched his loaded double-barreled gun off the wall, cocked the trigger, and rushed at the thief. The thief dived through the window; Kiseliov struck the thief’s back with the gun’s butt, and the charges in both barrels exploded, hitting Kiseliov in the belly.

  All the prisoners in all the coal-mining districts of Kolyma were overjoyed at this death. The newspaper carrying the announcement of Kiseliov’s funeral was passed from hand to hand. In the coal mine, when work was apace, this crumpled piece of newspaper was lit up by a mining lamp attached to a battery. People read it, rejoiced, and shouted, “Hurrah! Kiseliov’s dead! There is a God after all!”

  And it was Sergei Mikhailovich who saved me from Kiseliov.

  The Arkagala camp provided a labor force for the mine. For every hundred people working as miners underground there were a thousand providing all sorts of support.

  Arkagala was being threatened with famine. And, naturally, the first to starve were the inhabitants of the barracks for people convicted under article 58.

  Sergei Mikhailovich was getting angry.

  “I’m not the sun: I can’t keep everybody warm. You got yourself a nice job as the orderly in the chemistry laboratory, you should have lived, you should have known how to live. On camp terms, you realize?” Sergei Mikhailovich clapped me on the shoulder. “Before you came, Dimka used to work there. He sold all the glycerin—there were two barrels of it—at twenty rubles for a half-liter can: good as honey, he used to say, ha-ha-ha! If you’re a prisoner, everything is good.”

  “That doesn’t suit me.”

  “So what does suit you?”

  An orderly’s job was not secure. I was quickly transferred—there were strict orders to that effect—to the mine. I kept getting hungrier and hungrier.

  Sergei Mikhailovich was rushing around the camp. He had a passion: any sort of authority just bewitched our doctor. Lunin was absurdly proud of having a friendship, or the shadow of a friendship, with the camp bosses and was always anxious to show how close he was to the bosses; he boasted of this phantom closeness and was capable of talking about it for hours on end.

  I was sitting in his reception room, hungry, afraid to ask for a piece of bread, and listening to his unending boasting.

  “What is authority? Authority, old man, is power. There is no power but of God: ha-ha-ha! You have to know how to give them what they need, and then everything will be fine.”

  “I would be very happy to give them a punch in their ugly faces.”

  “Well, so you see. Listen, let’s make a deal. You can come and visit me. I expect you get bored in the prisoners’ barracks, don’t you?”

  “Bored?!”

  “Yes. So come and see me. You can sit and smoke for a bit. They won’t let you smoke in the barracks, after all. I know that: everyone wants to get hold of your cigarette. But don’t ask me to get you off work. I can’t do that. Well, I can, but it’s awkward for me. It’s up to you. As for food, you realize, I can’t get any for you, that’s up to my male nurse. I don’t fetch bread personally. So if you should ever need
any bread, tell Nikolai, the nurse. But you’re an old lag, so surely you can lay your hands on bread, can’t you? Listen, this is what Olga Petrovna, my boss’s wife, was saying. They invited me over for a drink—”

  “I’m off, Sergei Mikhailovich.”

  A period of terrible starvation began. Once, unable to cope with the hunger, I somehow made my way to the clinic.

  Sergei Mikhailovich was sitting on a stool, using Liston shears to remove the necrotic nails from the frostbitten toes of a man who was covered in dirt and convulsing. The toenails clattered one after the other into an empty bowl. Sergei Mikhailovich noticed me.

  “Yesterday I filled half a bowl with toenails like these.”

  A woman’s face looked from behind the curtain. We rarely saw women, and then only at a distance, not face-to-face. I thought she looked beautiful. I bowed and greeted her.

  “How do you do?” she said in a wonderful low voice. “Sergei, is this your friend? The one you were telling me about?”

  “No,” said Sergei Mikhailovich, dropping the Liston shears into the bowl and retreating to the sink to wash his hands.

  “Nikolai,” he told the male nurse, who had just come in, “take the bowl and give him,” he nodded in my direction, “some bread.”

  I waited until I got the bread and then went back to the barracks. That was the camps for you. But that woman, whose tender and charming face I can still remember, even though I never saw her again, was Edit Abramovna, a free worker, a party member, who’d signed a contract to work at the Olchan mine as a nurse. She had fallen in love with Sergei Mikhailovich, was living with him, and managed to get him transferred to Olchan and, during the war, got him an early release. She had made the trip to Magadan to see Nikishev, the head of Far East Construction, and put in a word for Sergei Mikhailovich; when she was expelled from the party for a relationship with a prisoner (the usual punitive measure in such cases), she had the case reviewed in Moscow and managed to get Lunin’s conviction quashed, so that he could take his Moscow University examination and get his doctor’s diploma and restoration of all his civic rights. She then married him legally.