Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Krist worked very hard in the hospital, sparing neither his time nor his strength. Several times, following Moscow’s repeated orders, the authorities at the top had ruled that men like Krist were to be dismissed and sent off to do manual labor. But the hospital chief was an old Kolyma hand and he knew how valuable the energy of such men was. The chief understood very well that Krist would put, and was already putting, a very great deal into his work, while Krist knew the chief understood that.

  And now his term of imprisonment was slowly coming to an end, just like the thawing of the winter ice in a country where there are no spring rains to transform life, where there is only the slow destructive work of a sun that shines now cold, now hot. His sentence was thawing, receding like the ice. Its end was near.

  Something frightening was getting closer to Krist. His whole future would be poisoned by that crucial certificate of his criminal record, with the article 58 and the letters KRTD. Those letters would block his path in any future life, would block it for life in any place in the land, in any job. That T would not only deprive him of identity papers but would for all eternity stop him from finding work, from leaving Kolyma. Krist had followed with careful attention the release of the very few who, like himself, had lived long enough to be freed, despite having a T in their Moscow sentence, in their camp identity documents, and in their personal file.

  Krist tried to imagine the extent of this inert force that controlled people. He tried to assess it objectively.

  At the very best, he would be left doing the same job in the same place when he was released. He wouldn’t be allowed out of Kolyma. He would be left alone until the first signal, the first blast of the hunting horn.

  What was he to do? Perhaps the simplest way out was the rope. . . . That was how many people settled this same question. No! Krist would fight to the end. Fight, like a wild animal, fight as he had been taught to in those many years in which the state had persecuted the human being.

  Krist spent countless sleepless nights thinking about his imminent, irrevocable release. He wasn’t cursing it, he wasn’t afraid of it. He was seeking something.

  Light dawned, as always, suddenly. Suddenly, but after a terrible period of tension, not mental tension, nor emotional, but a tension of his whole being. It dawned in the same way as the best verses or the best lines of a story emerge. You think about them day and night without any response, and then light dawns, like the joy of the right word, the joy of a decision. Not the joy of hope—there had been too many disappointments, mistakes, stabs in the back in Krist’s path through life.

  But light had dawned. Lida. . . .

  Krist had been working for a long time in this hospital. His un-swerving devotion to the interests of the hospital, his energy, his constant interventions in hospital matters—always in the hospital’s favor—had created a special position for him. Paramedic Krist was not the manager of the admissions room, for that was a post for a free hired employee. Nobody knew who the manager was; personnel questions were riddles that were solved every month by two persons: the hospital chief and the head bookkeeper.

  All his conscious life Krist had liked actual power, rather than surface prestige. Even when he was a writer, Krist had, as a young man at the time, not been attracted by glory or fame; he was attracted by an awareness of his own strength and ability to write, to do something new, personal, which nobody else could do.

  From a legal point of view, the doctors were in charge of the admissions room, but there were thirty of them on duty, so the priorities of orders, of the current camp “policies,” and other laws of the prisoners’ and guards’ world were held only in Krist’s memory. These questions were subtle and not everyone could cope with them. But they demanded attention and action, as the duty doctors understood only too well. In practice, the decision whether to admit any patient to the hospital was left up to Krist. The doctors knew this, and even had direct orders to this effect (oral, of course) from the hospital chief.

  About two years previously a duty doctor, himself a prisoner, had taken Krist aside.

  “There’s a girl here.”

  “No girls.”

  “Wait. I don’t know her myself. But this is what it’s all about.”

  The doctor whispered in Krist’s ear some coarse and ugly words. Essentially, the boss of the camp institution in the camp department was harassing his secretary, a nonpolitical prisoner, naturally. This convicted girl’s camp husband had long been worked to death at a punishment mine on the boss’s orders. But the girl refused to live with her boss. And now they were both passing through, escorting a party of prisoners, and the girl was trying to get into the hospital so as to escape harassment. When patients recovered, they were never sent back from the central hospital to where they had come from, they were sent somewhere else. Perhaps somewhere the boss’s hands couldn’t reach.

  “So that’s it,” said Krist. “All right, bring the girl in.”

  “She’s here. Come in, Lida.”

  A short blond woman stood before Krist; she boldly met his eyes.

  How many people had passed before Krist’s eyes in his lifetime. How many thousands of eyes had he understood and deciphered. Krist seldom made mistakes, very seldom.

  “Good,” said Krist. “Admit her.”

  The boss who had brought Lida rushed into the hospital to protest. But he was a second lieutenant, too low a rank to frighten hospital supervisors. He wasn’t allowed in. The lieutenant didn’t even manage to see a colonel, the hospital chief; he only got as far as a major, the chief doctor. The chief doctor asked the lieutenant not to tell hospital doctors who was ill and who wasn’t. And in any case, why was the lieutenant so interested in what happened to his secretary? He could ask for another girl from the local camp, and they’d let him have one. In short, the chief doctor had no time: “Next!”

  The lieutenant went off, cursing, and vanished forever from Lida’s life.

  Eventually, Lida remained in the hospital, with a job in the office, taking part in the amateur dramatics. Krist never found out what she had been convicted of—he had never been interested in his fellow camp prisoners’ convictions.

  It was a big hospital. An enormous three-story building. Twice every twenty-four hours the guards supervised a change of shift in the staff from the camp zone, whether they were doctors, nurses, paramedics, or male nurses; the staff soundlessly took off their coats in the cloakroom and just as soundlessly spread out over all the hospital departments. Only when they got to their workplaces were they transformed into Vasili Fiodorovich, Anna Nikolayevna, Katia or Petia, Vaska or Zhenka, “the tall girl,” or “the pockmarked woman,” depending on their rank, whether they were doctors, nurses, attendants, or “outside” workers.

  Krist never went into the camp during his round-the-clock work. Sometimes he and Lida saw each other and exchanged smiles. All that had happened two years previously. The bosses of every “part” of the hospital had been changed twice by then. Nobody even remembered how Lida came to be admitted to the hospital. Only Krist remembered. He needed to find out if Lida also remembered.

  The decision was made, and Krist approached Lida when the staff was gathered.

  The camp is no place for sentimentality, for protracted and unnecessary preliminaries or explanations, or any “beating around the bush.”

  Both Lida and Krist were old Kolyma hands.

  “Listen, Lida. You work in the records department, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you type out the release documents?”

  “Yes,” she said. “The boss types them himself, too. But he does it badly and spoils the forms. So I always type those documents.”

  “You’ll soon be typing my documents.”

  “Congratulations.” Lida brushed an invisible speck of dust off Krist’s overalls.

  “You will be typing out old convictions, there’s a section for that, isn’t there?”

  “There is.”

  “When you type K
RTD leave out the letter T.”

  “I’ve got it,” said Lida.

  “If the boss notices when he signs it, just smile and say you made a mistake. That you spoiled the form—”

  “I know what to say.”

  The staff was already lining up to leave the building.

  Two weeks passed. Krist was summoned and handed a certificate of release with the letter T missing.

  Two engineers he knew and a doctor went with Krist to the passport department to see what sort of identity papers Krist would be given. Or would be refused as a. . . . He handed his documents through a window; the answer would come in four hours. Krist had lunch with a doctor he knew; he wasn’t worried. In any situation like this you had to know how to make yourself have lunch, dinner, breakfast.

  Four hours later the window threw out a mauve-colored piece of paper, a one-year identity card.

  “Just one year?” Krist asked. He was at a loss and his question was loaded with his own special meaning.

  A shaved military face showed itself in the window.

  “One year. We don’t have any blank five-year identity papers at the moment. Which you’re entitled to. Do you want to stay until tomorrow? They’ll bring the papers and we’ll redo yours. Or will you change this one-year one in a year’s time?”

  “I’d rather keep this one and change it in a year.”

  “Of course.” The window was slammed shut.

  Krist’s friends were amazed. One engineer said it was Krist’s good luck; the other saw this as a sign of a long-awaited relaxation of the regime, the first swallow that definitely, definitely heralded spring. The doctor saw it as God’s will.

  •

  Krist never said a word of thanks to Lida. She didn’t expect thanks, either. For a favor like that you don’t get thanked. Gratitude is not the right word.

  1965

  AORTIC ANEURYSM

  GENNADI Petrovich Zaitsev began his shift at nine in the morning; at half past ten a party of sick prisoners, all women, had arrived. Among them was a patient that Podshivalov had warned Gennadi about. Her name was Yekaterina Glovatskaya. She had dark eyes and a full figure and Gennadi took a liking to her, a great liking.

  “Pretty?” asked the paramedic when the patients had been taken away to wash.

  “Pretty. . . .”

  “It’s. . . .” The paramedic whispered something into Dr. Zaitsev’s ear.

  “So what, if she belongs to Senia?” the doctor responded in a loud voice. “Senia or Venia: nothing ventured, nothing gained.”

  “I wish you the best of luck. I really do!”

  At the end of the day Gennadi set off to do his hospital rounds. The duty paramedics knew the doctor’s habits, so they poured some unusual mixtures of tincture of absinthe and tincture of valerian into measuring glasses, as well as a liqueur they called “Blue Night,” which was just methylated spirits. Dr. Zaitsev’s face became redder and redder, his cropped gray hair not concealing his scarlet bald patch. Zaitsev got to the women’s wards at eleven in the evening. The women’s section had been closed off with iron bolts to prevent any raids by rapists among the gangsters in the men’s section. There was a prison-type spy hole, a judas window, in the door and a button, which, when pressed, would ring a bell in the house where the hospital guards lived.

  Dr. Zaitsev knocked, an eye blinked in the spy hole, and the bolts were drawn with a clang. The nurse on night duty unlocked the door. She was familiar enough with the doctor’s weaknesses and her attitude to them had all the indulgence that one prisoner has for another prisoner.

  The doctor went into the treatment room; the nurse gave him a measuring glass of Blue Night. He drank it.

  “Bring me one of today’s new patients, Glovatskaya.”

  “But you do know. . . .” The nurse shook her head reproachfully.

  “None of your business. Call her in.”

  •

  Katia Glovatskaya knocked on the door and came in. The duty doctor bolted the door shut. Katia sat on the edge of the couch. Dr. Zaitsev unbuttoned her gown, pulled the collar aside and whispered, “I have to examine you . . . your heart. . . . Your chief asked me to . . . I’ll do it the French way, without a stethoscope. . . .”

  Dr. Zaitsev pressed his hairy ear to Katia’s warm breast. Everything proceeded as it had dozens of previous times with other women. The doctor’s face turned bright red and all he could hear was the sound of his own heart beating. Then he embraced Katia. Suddenly he heard a strange but very familiar sound. It was as if a cat was purring or a mountain stream was burbling nearby. He was too much a doctor; after all, he had once been an assistant to the great Dr. Pletniov.[29]

  His own heart was beating more and more quietly and evenly. He wiped his sweaty brow with a waffle towel and began to listen anew to Katia’s heart. He asked her to take her clothes off, and she did so. She was alarmed by the change in his tone and the anxiety in his voice and eyes.

  Gennadi Zaitsev listened again and again. The catlike purr was still there.

  He paced the room, clicking his fingers, then undid the bolt. The night-duty nurse, with a conspiratorial smile, came in.

  “Give me this patient’s notes,” said Dr. Zaitsev. “Take her away. Please forgive me, Katia.”

  He took the folder with Glovatskaya’s medical notes and sat down at his desk.

  •

  “You see, Vasili Kalinych,” the hospital chief was telling a new party organizer the next morning, “you’re new to Kolyma, you’re young, you don’t know all the underhanded tricks these convicts can get up to. Here you are, read what the duty doctor has just concocted. This is Zaitsev’s report.”

  The party organizer moved to the window, drew back a corner of the curtain to let in some light, which was refracted by the thick layer of ice on the windowpane, onto the paper of the report.

  “Well?”

  “This seems to be very dangerous. . . .”

  The chief laughed out loud.

  “I,” he said gravely, “am not going to let Mr. Podshivalov pull the wool over my eyes.”

  Podshivalov was a prisoner who ran an amateur dramatics circle, a “serf theater,” as the chief liked to joke.

  “But what has he got to do with it?”

  “I’ll tell you, my dear Vasili. That girl, Glovatskaya, was in the Culture Brigade. Performers, as you know, enjoy a certain amount of freedom. She’s Podshivalov’s bit of skirt.”

  “So that’s why—”

  “Naturally, as soon as we found that out, we had her slung out of the brigade and sent to the women’s punishment mine. In cases like hers, Vasili, we break the lovers up. The more useful and important one we keep, the other one goes to a punishment mine.”

  “That’s not very fair. Both of them ought to be—”

  “Quite wrong. The point is to keep them apart. The hospital keeps the useful one. So we have our cake and eat it.”

  “I see, I see. . . .”

  “Now listen to what comes next. Glovatskaya went off to the punishment mine, and a month later she’s brought back pale and ill. They know all the tricks there, so they swallow henbane or something, and she gets admitted to the hospital. I found out in the morning and ordered her to be discharged, to hell with her. She gets taken away. Three days later she’s brought in again. Then I’m told she’s an expert seamstress—all those western Ukrainian women are fine seamstresses—so my wife asked me to let her stay a week in the hospital, my wife’s having a surprise present made for my birthday, something embroidered, I suppose, I don’t know.

  “Anyway, I call in Podshivalov and tell him: ‘If you give me your word not to try to see Glovatskaya, I’ll admit her for a week.’ Podshivalov bows and thanks me.”

  “What happened? Did they meet?”

  “No, they didn’t. But Podshivalov is using other people as pawns. Take Zaitsev: he’s not a bad doctor, there’s no disputing that. He even used to be famous in his time. And now he’s insisting, his report says: ‘Glovatskay
a has an aortic aneurysm.’ Other doctors kept on diagnosing neurosis of the heart, stenocardia. They sent her here from the punishment mine on the grounds of a heart defect. It was a phony certificate, and our doctors saw through it right away. Now you see, Zaitsev is writing that ‘any careless movement by Glovatskaya can have a lethal outcome.’ They really have wound him up!”

  “Ye-e-es,” said the party organizer. “But we’ve got general practitioners, we could get others to look at her.”

  The hospital chief had already had Glovatskaya looked at by other doctors, before he received Zaitsev’s report. These doctors had all examined her and pronounced her healthy, so the chief had ordered her to be discharged.

  There was a knock at the chief’s door. Zaitsev came in.

  “You should at least comb your hair before you come to see your superiors.”

  “Fine,” replied Zaitsev, running his fingers through his hair. “I’ve come to see you, sir, about something important. Glovatskaya is being sent away. She has an aortic aneurysm, a serious one. Any movement—”

  “Get out of here!” yelled the chief. “These bastards will stop at nothing. They come into your office. . . .”

  •

  Katia gathered her possessions after the traditional leisurely search, put them in a bag, and joined the ranks of the prisoners being led away. The guard called out her surname, she took a few steps, and the enormous hospital door pushed her outside. A truck, its platform covered with canvas, was parked by the hospital porch. The rear cover was folded back. A nurse sitting in the cab stretched out a hand to help Katia. Podshivalov emerged from the thick freezing fog. He waved his glove at Katia. She smiled back calmly and cheerfully, held out her hand to the nurse, and jumped into the truck.

  That same moment Katia felt a burning sensation in her chest; as she lost consciousness, she saw for the last time Podshivalov’s face, distorted by fear, and the hospital windows, covered in ice.