Apart from the punishment, pretrial, and convoy rations, there were three other levels of rations in the camp: the prisoners’ full pot, the Stakhanovite or shock workers’ ration, and the normal production. These rations differed in the quantity of bread and the quality of the dishes. In the pit face next to ours the mining supervisor measured out a distance for each worker—his set task—and fixed a roll-your-own cigarette there. If you could barrow out the earth and rock as far as his mark, then the cigarette was yours and you were a Stakhanovite.
“So that’s how things stand,” I said. “I think that’s monstrous.”
“And then you said that Bunin was a great Russian writer.”
“He really is a great Russian writer. Can you give me a prison sentence for saying that?”
“I can. He’s an émigré. An embittered émigré.”
The “case” was progressing nicely. Fiodorov was cheerful and lively.
“Well, look how well we’re treating you. Not a single rough word. Pay attention: nobody’s hitting you as they did in 1938. No pressure.”
“How about the three hundred grams of bread a day?”
“Orders, dear man, orders. There’s nothing I can do. Orders. Pretrial rations.”
“And a cell with no window? I’ll go blind, and there’s no air to breathe.”
“Really, no window? That can’t be. Light must get in from somewhere.”
“From the gap at the bottom of the door.”
“Well, then, you see.”
“In winter that would be covered in freezing fog.”
“But it’s not winter now.”
“True. It’s not winter anymore.”
•
“Listen,” I said. “I’m sick. I’ve got no strength left. I’ve been to the medical center many times, but they’ve never let me off work.”
“Write a statement. That will have an impact on the court and the investigation.”
I reached out for the nearest fountain pen; there were many of all sizes and brands lying on the table.
“No, no, an ordinary pen, please.”
“All right.”
I wrote that I had been to the outpatient clinics in the zone many times, almost every day. It was very hard to write, I hadn’t had much practice in that area.
Fiodorov smoothed out the piece of paper.
“Don’t worry. Everything will be done according to the law.”
That same evening my cell’s locks clanged and the door opened. A Kolyma lamp—a kerosene lamp made from a tin can, with four outlets—was burning on the duty guard’s table in the corner. A man wearing a fur jacket and a hat with earflaps was sitting at the table.
“Come here.”
I went over to him. He got up. It was Dr. Mokhnach, an old Kolyma hand, a victim of 1937. He had done manual labor in Kolyma, then he was allowed to practice as a doctor. He had been trained to fear authority. I had been to his surgery at the zone’s outpatient clinics many times.
“Hello, doctor.”
“Hello. Undress. Breathe. Don’t breathe. Turn around. Bend over. You can put your clothes on.”
Dr. Mokhnach sat down at the table and wrote in the light of the flickering lamp: “Prisoner Shalamov V. T. is to all intents and purposes healthy. During his time in the zone he has not sought treatment in the outpatient clinic. Head of Outpatients, Dr. Mokhnach.”
That text was read out to me a month later at my trial.
•
The investigation was coming to an end, but I could not, try as I might, work out what I was being accused of. My hungry body ached but rejoiced that it didn’t have to work. But suppose they suddenly let me out to go back to the pit face? I suppressed these alarming thoughts.
•
A Kolyma summer begins suddenly, hastily. During one of my interrogations I saw a burning sun and a blue sky, and smelled the subtle scent of the larch. Dirty ice still lay in the gullies, but summer couldn’t wait for the dirty ice to thaw.
The interrogation had dragged on, we were trying to pin something down, so the guard had not yet taken me away, when another man was brought up to Fiodorov’s cabin. He was my foreman Nesterenko. He took a step toward me and said in a muffled voice, “I was forced to, you understand, forced,” before disappearing through the door to Fiodorov’s cabin.
Nesterenko was writing a statement against me. The witnesses were Zaslavsky and Krivitsky. But I doubt whether Nesterenko had ever heard of Bunin. And if Zaslavsky and Krivitsky were bastards, it was Nesterenko who saved me from dying of starvation by taking me into his brigade. I was no worse, but no better than any other worker there. I had no grudge against Nesterenko. I had heard that this was his third term in the camp, that he used to be a Solovetsky Islands [31] prisoner. He was a very experienced foreman and he understood not just the work but hungry people, too; he didn’t sympathize, he understood. Very few foremen have that gift. In every brigade seconds—a ladle of thin soup from whatever was left—were given out after supper. Usually foremen gave these ladlefuls to whoever had worked the best that day, which was the procedure officially recommended by the camp authorities. This issue of seconds was made a public, almost a ceremonial affair. Seconds were also used with a view to increasing production and educating the prisoners. The person who had worked most was not always the one who had worked best. And it wasn’t always the best worker who wanted to eat more dumpling soup.
In Nesterenko’s brigade seconds were given to the hungriest, in accordance with the foreman’s orders, of course.
•
Once, in a prospecting shaft, I hammered out an enormous rock. It was obvious that I didn’t have the strength to pull this rock out of the shaft. Nesterenko saw that, and without a word jumped down into the shaft, got his pickax under the rock, and jolted it up. . . .
I didn’t want to believe that Nesterenko had written a statement against me. But all the same. . . .
•
It was said that a year earlier two people had been removed from that brigade and put on trial by a tribunal: Yozhikov and, three months later, Isayev, the former secretary of a Siberian provincial committee. The witnesses had been the same Krivitsky and Zaslavsky. I hadn’t paid any attention to this talk.
•
“And now sign here. And here, too.”
I didn’t have long to wait. On June 20 the doors were flung open and I was led out onto the hot brown earth, into the blinding, burning sunlight.
“Here are your things: shoes, cap. You’re off to Yagodnoye.”
“You mean on foot?”
Two soldiers carefully looked me over.
“He won’t make it,” one said. “We won’t take him.”
“What do you mean you won’t take him?” said Fiodorov. “I’m telephoning the special squad.”
These soldiers weren’t real escort guards, who would have been ordered and equipped beforehand. These two special operations men were going back to Yagodnoye—eighteen kilometers through the taiga—and were supposed to take me with them to the Yagodnoye prison.
“Well, what do you think?” said one of the operations men. “Will you make it?”
“I don’t know.” I was perfectly calm. I had no reason to hurry. The sun was too hot—it burned my cheeks, which were unused to bright light and fresh air. I sat against a tree. It was pleasant to sit outside for a while, breathing in the remarkable spring air, the scent of blossoming briars. My head started spinning.
“Right, let’s go.”
We went into the bright green forest.
“Can’t you walk any faster?”
“No.”
We went a countless number of steps. The willow branches were lashing my face. Stumbling over the tree roots, I somehow got through to a clearing.
“Listen,” said the older operations man, “we need to get to the Yagodnoye cinema. It starts at eight. In the club. It’s two now. This is our first day off this summer. It’s the first time we’ll be in a cinema in six months.”
The soldiers had a quick discussion.
“You take a break,” said the younger one. He unbuttoned his bag. “Here’s white bread for you. A kilo. Eat, have a rest, then we’ll go. If it weren’t for the cinema, we wouldn’t give a damn. But it is cinema night.”
I ate the bread, licked the crumbs off my hand, lay down by a stream, and cautiously drank my fill of delicious, cold stream water. And I lost the last ounce of my strength. It was hot, I just wanted to sleep.
“Right? You can walk?”
I said nothing.
Then they started beating me. They stamped on me, I yelled and covered my head with my hands. But they didn’t hit my face, these were experienced men.
They beat me for a long time, and they took trouble over it. The more they beat me, the clearer it became that there was no way of speeding up our progress toward the prison.
For hours and hours we wandered through the forest and it was twilight when we came out onto the highway that stretched the length of Kolyma, a highway that ran across rocks and marshes, a road two thousand kilometers long, all built on “barrows and pickaxes,” with no machinery at all.
•
I had almost lost consciousness and could barely move when I was delivered to the Yagodnoye detention center. The cell door was flung open and the duty guard’s experienced hands squeezed me inside. All you could hear was people’s rapid breathing. After about ten minutes I made an attempt to lower myself to the floor and lay against a pillar under the bunks. A short time after that thieves who were in the cell crawled over to search me and steal something, but their hopes to get something out of me were dashed. Apart from lice, I had nothing. I fell asleep to the irritated growls of the disappointed common criminals.
The next day, at three o’clock, I was summoned to my trial.
It was very stuffy; there was no air to breathe. For six years I had spent every day and night in the open air, and I found the tiny room of the military tribunal unbearably hot. The larger half of the twelve-square-meter room was set aside for a tribunal that sat behind a wooden barrier. The smaller half was for the accused, the guard, and the witnesses. I saw Zaslavsky, Krivitsky, and Nesterenko. There were rough unpainted benches along the walls and two windows with lots of small panes in the Kolyma fashion, like the windows in Menshikov’s Beriozovo hut in Surikov’s painting.[32] Panes like these could be made from broken glass: that was the architect’s idea, taking into consideration the difficulty of transporting glass, its fragility, and a lot of other factors, for instance the use of preserve jars that could be sawed in half lengthwise. All this, of course, was relevant only for the windows in the bosses’ apartments and in official buildings. Prisoners’ barracks didn’t have any glass panes.
The light such windows gave was refracted and murky. The tribunal chairman’s table had an unshaded electric lamp for illumination.
The trial was very short. The chairman read out a short charge, point by point. He questioned the witnesses, asking whether they affirmed their statements during the preliminary investigation. I was surprised by the fact that there were four witnesses, instead of three—a certain Shailevich had expressed the wish to take part in my trial. I had never met this witness and never spoken to him in my life; he worked in a different brigade. This didn’t stop Shailevich from quickly rattling through his set speech: Hitler, Bunin. . . . I realized that Fiodorov had taken on Shailevich just in case I unexpectedly challenged Zaslavsky and Krivitsky. But Fiodorov needn’t have worried.
“Do you have anything to ask the tribunal?”
“Yes. Why is this the third accusation to come from Jelgala mine under article fifty-eight, and yet the witnesses are the same?”
“Your question is irrelevant to the case.”
I was sure the sentence would be a harsh one; killing people was a tradition in those years. And furthermore this trial was on June 22, the anniversary of the beginning of the war. The court deliberated for about three minutes, and the tribunal—there were three members—delivered a sentence of “ten years plus five years’ deprivation of civic rights.”
“Next!”
There was a commotion in the corridor. Boots stomped. The next day I was moved to the transit camp. The procedure of compiling a new personal file, one that I had experienced several times before, began again: endless fingerprinting, forms to fill in, photographing. I was now called “fill in name,” article 58, paragraph 10, sentence ten plus five deprivation. I was no longer an acronym prisoner with the terrible T for Trotskyist in my file. That had important consequences and may well have saved my life.
•
I don’t know what happened to Nesterenko, or Krivitsky. There were rumors that Krivitsky died. Zaslavsky, however, returned to Moscow and became a member of the Union of Writers, although he’d never written anything in his life except denunciations. I saw him from a distance. But the Zaslavskys and Krivitskys are not the point. Immediately after being sentenced I could have murdered informers and false witnesses. I would certainly have murdered them if I had returned to Jelgala after my trial. But camp procedures took care to see that men given new sentences never returned to the camp from which they had been brought to court.
1960
ESPERANTO
A TRAVELING actor, a prisoner-actor, reminded me of this story. After a show by the camp Culture Brigade, the main actor (who was also the director and set-builder) mentioned the name of Skoroseyev.
It was as if my brain had been burned: I recalled a transit camp in 1939, typhus quarantine, and the five of us who endured and came through all the many transfers, the various parties of prisoners, the hours spent standing in sub-zero temperatures, and who were caught in the net of camps and cast out into the boundless taiga.
The five of us learned nothing, knew nothing, and didn’t want to know anything about one another until our party had reached the place where we were to work and live. In our party the news struck us in differing ways. One of us went mad, thinking that he was being taken off to be shot, when he was being taken off to live. Another tried to outwit his fate and almost succeeded. The third—that was me!—was a man who’d been “on the gold,” a miner, who’d become a skeleton who didn’t care. The fourth was a jack-of-all-trades, well over seventy. The fifth was—“Skoroseyev,” he said, rising up on tiptoe to look each of us in the eye. “Score . . . save . . . get it?”
I didn’t care. I’d lost forever any taste I had for puns. But the jack-of-all-trades kept the conversation going.
“What was your job?”
“Agronomist in the Ministry of Agriculture.”
The chief of coal prospecting flicked through Skoroseyev’s file when he took over our party.
“Sir, I can also—”
“I’ll make you night watchman.”
Skoroseyev was a very diligent night watchman for the prospecting team. He never left his post for a minute, fearing that a fellow prisoner might take advantage of any blunder he made to denounce him or sell him out, or to attract the boss’s attention. It was better not to take risks.
Once a blizzard raged all night. Skoroseyev alternated shifts with a Galician called Narynsky, a somewhat fair-haired man who’d been a prisoner of war during World War I, and who had been sentenced for starting a conspiracy to restore the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was just a tiny bit proud of having such a rare, unprecedented case file among the swarms of “Trotskyists” and “saboteurs.” When Narynsky took over from Skoroseyev, he would laugh and point out that even when a blizzard was blowing Skoroseyev would not move from his post. Such devotion was noticed. Skoroseyev was securing his position.
A horse collapsed in the camp. That was not such a great loss; horses didn’t do well in the Far North. But the meat! Meat! The horse had to be flayed, but the corpse had frozen in the snow. Nobody had the skills or the desire to do anything. Skoroseyev offered to take the job on. The boss was amazed and pleased: a skin and meat. The skin would have to be acco
unted for, but the meat would go into the pot. The whole barracks, the whole settlement was talking about Skoroseyev. Meat, meat! The horse’s carcass was dragged into the bathhouse, and Skoroseyev thawed it out, flayed it, and gutted it. The skin was stiffened in the freezing air and then taken to the stores. But we were fated not to eat the meat: at the last minute the boss changed his mind—there was no veterinary surgeon about, and so no signature on a certificate. The horse’s carcass was cut up with an ax, a statement was drawn up, and the carcass was burned on a bonfire in the presence of the boss and the works overseer.
The coal that our prospecting team was looking for was not there. Little by little, parties of men, five or ten at a time, began to be escorted away from the camp. These people climbed the mountain along a taiga path to disappear forever from my life.
It was still a prospectors’ camp, not a mine, where we were living, and each one of us understood that. Each of us tried hard to hang on here as long as we could. Each “put on the brakes” in his own way. One began working with extraordinary diligence. Another began praying longer than usual. Anxiety had now crept into our lives.
Escort guards appeared. They had come from the other side of the mountains. To fetch people? No, the guards didn’t take away a single person.
That night there was a search in the barracks. We had no books, we had no knives, we had no indelible pencils, newspapers, or paper. What was there to look for?
They took away our civilian clothes; many of us still had civilian clothes, since there were free workers in this prospecting team and the team was working without guards. Was this to prevent escape attempts? Was it just carrying out orders? Had there been a change in the regime?
Everything was taken away without any statements or record. It was taken, and that was all. There was no end to the outrage. I remembered the civilian clothes being taken from hundreds of parties, from hundreds of thousands of men, two years previously in Magadan. Tens of thousands of fur coats, which the wretched prisoners had brought with them when they went north, to the Far North, along with warm overcoats, sweaters, expensive suits (expensive, because somebody had to be bribed), in order to save their lives at a crucial moment. But this lifesaving way out was cut short in the Magadan bathhouse. Mountains of civilian clothing were stacked in the courtyard of the Magadan bathhouse. The mountains were higher than the water tower, higher than the roof of the bathhouse. Mountains of warm clothing, mountains of tragedies, mountains of human fate, suddenly and abruptly interrupted, thus dooming everyone who came out of the bathhouse to death. How hard all these people had fought to protect their possessions from the gangsters, from the open robbery that went on in the barracks, the railcars and transit camps. Everything that had been saved or hidden from the gangsters had now been taken by the state in the bathhouse. How simple! That had happened two years ago. And now it happened again.
Kolyma Tales Page 41
