The civilian clothes that filtered down to the mines took longer for the guards to catch up with. I remember being woken at night; there were searches in the barracks every day, and every day people were taken away. I would sit on the bunks and smoke. This was a new search for civilian clothes. I didn’t have any: I’d lost everything in the Magadan bathhouse. But my fellow prisoners did have civilian clothes. They were precious things, symbols of another life; they might be rotting to pieces, torn, patched—we didn’t have the time or the strength to mend things—but they were still close to our hearts.
Everyone was standing by their bunks, waiting. An interrogator was sitting near the lamp, writing documents, a certificate of search, of removal, as it was called in camp language.
I sat on the bunks, smoking, not anxious, not outraged. All I wanted was for the search to end as quickly as possible so that I could sleep. But I saw our orderly, a man called Praga, chopping up his suit with an ax, tearing sheets to bits, and crushing his boots to pieces.
“Only as foot bindings. I’ll let them have them only as foot bindings.”
“Take the ax off him,” yelled the interrogator.
Praga flung the ax on the ground. The search stopped. The things that Praga had torn, cut, and destroyed were his own possessions. There had been no time to list them in the certificate. When Praga saw that he wasn’t being grabbed by the arms, he turned all his civilian clothes into rags: I saw it with my own eyes. So did the interrogator.
That had happened a year earlier. And now it was happening again.
Everyone was upset, tense, and it took a long time to go to sleep.
“There’s no difference between the gangsters robbing us and the state,” I said. And everybody agreed with me.
Skoroseyev the night watchman was off to do his shift two hours earlier than us. Walking in pairs, which the taiga path allowed us to do, we got to the office: we were angry, we felt offended. A naïve feeling for fairness lies very deep, perhaps ineradicably deep, in men’s hearts. You might think: What was there to be offended by, or angry at, or outraged by? This damned search was something that happened thousands of times. Something was seething deep in our souls, and it was stronger than our willpower or experience. The prisoners’ faces were dark with wrath.
The boss himself, Viktor Nikolayevich Plutalov, was standing on the office porch. He too had a dark, wrathful face. Our tiny column of men stopped in front of the office, and I was now called in to see Plutalov.
“So you are saying,” Plutalov looked askance at me, biting his lips. He sat down with some difficulty and discomfort on the stool at his desk. “You say that the state is worse than the gangsters, do you?”
I remained silent. Skoroseyev! Mr. Plutalov was an impatient man and had failed to protect his snitch. He hadn’t even waited for a couple of hours! Or was something else going on?
“I don’t care about your talk. But if you are denounced to me, what do you think this is all about? Are they making trouble?”
“Making trouble, sir.”
“Perhaps they are ratting you out?”
“They’re ratting me out, sir.”
“Get back to work. You yourselves are your own worst enemies. Plotters. The universal language. Everyone understands everyone else. I am the boss, after all. I have to do something when I get denunciations.”
Plutalov was so furious that he spat.
A week later I left the prospecting team, the blessed prospecting team, with the next party of prisoners to go to a big mine. On my very first day there I did a horse’s or Egyptian slave’s job of turning the wooden beam of the winch, pressing my whole chest against the beam.
Skoroseyev stayed on with the prospectors.
There was a camp amateur show and, after the master of ceremonies announced the next item, a traveling actor ran into the performers’ room (one of the hospital wards) and gave a pep talk to the inexperienced participants. “The show’s going well! The show’s going really well!” he whispered in each participant’s ear. “The show’s going really well,” he announced at the top of his voice, wiping the sweat from his hot brow with a dirty rag as he walked the length and breadth of the room.
It was all just like a proper show, and the traveling actor had himself been a proper actor in the outside world. Someone whose voice sounded very familiar was onstage reciting Zoshchenko’s story “Lemonade.” The master of ceremonies bent down toward me.
“Give me a cigarette.”
“Have one.”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” the master of ceremonies suddenly said. “If you didn’t know who was reciting, you’d have thought it was that son of a bitch Skoroseyev.”
“Skoroseyev?” I realized whose intonations the voice onstage had reminded me of.
“Yes. I’m an Esperantist. Got it? The universal language. Not some ‘Basic English’ rubbish. And I got sentenced because of Esperanto. I’m a member of the Moscow Esperanto Society.”
“Under article fifty-eight, paragraph six? For spying?”
“Obviously.”
“Ten years?”
“Fifteen.”
“How about Skoroseyev?”
“Skoroseyev was the deputy chairman of the society’s committee. It was he who sold everybody else down the river, got them all criminal cases.”
“That little fellow?”
“Well, yes.”
“And where is he now?”
“I don’t know. I’d like to strangle him personally. I’m asking you as a friend”—the actor and I had known each other for no more than a couple of hours or so—“if you see him, if you come across him, just punch him in the face. A punch in the face and half your sins will be forgiven.”
“So just half my sins?”
“They’ll be forgiven, they will.”
But the man who had recited Zoshchenko’s “Lemonade” was now climbing off the stage. He was not Skoroseyev; he was a thin, lanky man, like a grand duke from the Romanov family: a baron, Baron Mandel, Pushkin’s descendant. After a closer look at Pushkin’s descendant, I felt disillusioned. The master of ceremonies was by now bringing his next victim onto the stage. “Over the gray plains of the sea, the wind gathers storm clouds. . . .”
“Listen,” whispered the baron, bending down to me, “call that a poem? ‘The wind howls, the thunder rumbles’? There are much better lines than that. It’s terrible to think that this was written at the same time that Blok wrote ‘A Spell by Fire and Darkness’ and Bely wrote ‘Gold in Azure’. . . .”
I envied the baron his lucky gift: being able to distance himself, escape, hide, conceal himself in poetry. I was unable to do that.
•
Nothing was forgotten. Many years passed. After I had been released I arrived in Magadan. I was trying to free myself properly to sail across that terrible sea over which they had brought me to Kolyma twenty years earlier. And although I knew how hard life would be in my endless wanderings from place to place, I didn’t want to stay of my own free will for even an hour on that accursed Kolyma ground.
I was desperately short of money. A truck that was going my way, for a ruble a kilometer, got me to Magadan in the evening. The town was wrapped in white darkness. I did have people I knew there. I must have. But in Kolyma you look for your friends in the daytime, not at night. At night nobody will open a door, even if they recognize the voice. I needed a roof, a bunk, sleep.
I stood at the bus station, looking at the floor, which was completely covered by bodies, possessions, bags, boxes. As a last resort. . . . Only it was just as cold here as outside, about minus fifty. The iron stove was stone-cold, and the door was constantly being banged open.
“I think we know each other, don’t we?”
I was glad to see even Skoroseyev in that ferocious freezing cold. We shook each other’s hands through our gloves.
“Come and spend the night at my place, I’ve got a house here. I was released a long time ago. I built it on credit. I’ve even gotten
married.” Skoroseyev burst out laughing. “Let’s have some tea. . . .”
It was so cold that I agreed. We spent a long time clambering up the hills and over the gullies of nighttime Magadan, which was wrapped in cold, murky white mist.
“Yes, I built myself a house,” Skoroseyev was saying as I paused to smoke. “Credit. State credit. I thought I’d make myself a nest. A northern nest.”
I drank plenty of tea. I went to bed and fell asleep. But I slept badly, despite the long journey. There had been something bad about that day.
“Well, I’m off. I’ve got someone I know here.”
“Why don’t you leave your suitcase? You’ll find your friends and then come back for it.”
“No, it’s not worth climbing the hill twice.”
“You could stay with me. We’re old friends, in a way.”
“Yes,” I said. “Goodbye.” I buttoned my fur jacket, picked up my suitcase, and grabbed the door handle. “Goodbye.”
“How about the money?” said Skoroseyev.
“What money?”
“For the bed, for the overnight stay. It doesn’t come free, you know.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think.” I put down my suitcase, undid my jacket, groped in my pocket for the money, paid him, and walked out into the whitish-yellow mist of the day.
1965
SPECIAL ORDER
AFTER 1938 Pavlov received a medal and a new post as the minister of internal affairs for the Tatar Republic. It was clear how things were shaping up: whole brigades were employed to dig graves. Pellagra and gangsters, escort guards and dystrophy from malnutrition contributed all they could. Belated medical intervention saved whomever it could, or rather whatever it could, for the people saved had ceased forever to be human. At that time at the Jelgala mine, of the three thousand men who were listed as working there, only ninety-eight actually lasted; the others were let off work, or sent to the countless convalescent centers or convalescent teams, or were temporarily exempted.
In the big hospitals they introduced improved nutrition, and Traut’s words “patients have to be fed and kept clean if their treatment is to be successful” enjoyed great popularity. Special diets were also concocted in the big hospitals; these consisted of a number of different menus. True, the ingredients didn’t vary much and one menu often was no different from any other, but all the same. . . .
Then there was the special order, which the hospital administration was authorized to provide for seriously ill patients. These special orders were distinct from the hospital menus and limited: only one or two could be authorized for a three-hundred-bed hospital.
There was just one drawback: any patient who was prescribed a special order—pancakes, meat rissoles, or something else equally fabulous—would already be in such poor condition that he couldn’t eat anything and would turn his head away in a moribund state of exhaustion after the merest lick of a spoon from one of these dishes.
The tradition then dictated that these regal leftovers would go to the person in the next bed or to one of the patients who had volunteered to help the male duty nurse and care for the seriously ill.
To have a special order served when the patient was no longer strong enough to eat anything was a paradox, the antithesis of the dialectical triad. The only possible principle behind the introduction of the special order idea was that it should go to the most emaciated and most seriously ill.
The issue of a special order was therefore a dreaded omen, a symbol of the approach of death. Patients would have been afraid of special orders, were it not that their minds were so clouded by then that they were not the ones who were horrified; instead it was those who were receiving the first menu on the dietetic scale, those who still could reason and feel, who were horrified.
Every day the person in charge of a hospital department was faced with an unpleasant question—who should have a special order today?—to which all answers seemed equally dishonest.
In the bed next to mine was a young man of twenty, who was dying of dystrophy from malnutrition (in those days it was called polyavitaminosis).
The special order was turning into the final meal a man sentenced to death might request on the day of his execution, a last wish the prison administration had to carry out.
The young man was refusing food—oatmeal soup, pearl-barley soup, oat porridge, pearl-barley porridge. When he refused semolina, he was marked for a special order.
“They’ll cook you anything you like, Misha, anything. Understand?” The doctor was sitting on the patient’s bed.
Misha smiled faintly and happily.
“Well, what do you want? Meat soup?”
“No-o-o.” Misha tossed his head from side to side.
“Meat rissoles? Meat pies? Pancakes with jam?”
Misha tossed his head from side to side.
“Well, tell us, tell us. . . .”
Misha rasped something.
“What? What did you say?”
“Dumplings.”
“Dumplings?”
Misha nodded to show agreement; smiling, he lay back on the pillow. Bits of hay and dust fell out of the pillow.
The next day they made dumplings.
Misha came to life, took the spoon, fished a dumpling out of the steaming bowl, and licked it.
“No, I don’t want it, it doesn’t taste nice.”
By evening he had died.
The second patient on special orders was Viktorov, who was suspected of having stomach cancer. For a whole month he was given special orders, and other patients were angry at him for not dying, for then he could have given his precious rations to someone else. Viktorov didn’t eat anything and finally he died. It turned out he didn’t have cancer; it was just the usual emaciation, dystrophy from malnutrition.
When Demidov, an engineer who’d had an operation for mastoiditis, was given a special order, he refused. “There are people sicker than me in this ward.” He refused outright, not because the special order was something frightening. No, Demidov considered that he had no right to take a ration that might have benefited other patients. The doctors had wanted to do something good for Demidov, using the official method.
That’s what a special order was.
date unknown
MAJOR PUGACHIOV’S LAST BATTLE
A LOT OF time must have passed between the beginning and end of these events, for months in the Far North can be counted as years, so great is the experience, the human experience, that is to be had there. Even the state recognizes this fact, since it raises the salaries and increases the privileges of those who work there. In this country of hope, but inevitably also of rumors, guesses, conjectures, and hypotheses, every event takes on a legendary quality even before some courier manages to swiftly deliver a local chief’s report about that event to some “higher sphere.”
There was talk that when a visiting top boss deplored the fact that cultural work in the camp was in bad shape, the cultural organizer, Major Pugachiov, told the visitor, “Don’t worry, sir, we’re rehearsing a show that will be the talk of all Kolyma.”
The story could begin with a denunciation from the surgeon Braude, who had been posted from the central hospital to a district of military action.
It could also begin with a letter written by Yashka Kuchen, a prisoner and male nurse who was a patient in the hospital. He had written the letter with his left hand, since he had been shot in the right shoulder and the bullet had gone right through him.
Or we could start with Dr. Potanina’s story: she hadn’t seen a thing or heard a thing, and she’d been away on a trip when the unexpected events happened. It was this trip that the interrogator called a “false alibi,” criminal inertia, or whatever the term is in the language of the law.
In the 1930s arrests happened to people by chance. They were victims of a terrible and false theory that the class struggle would intensify as socialism became established. The professors, party workers, military officers, engineers, peasa
nts, and workers who filled the overcrowded prisons had no particular virtues except, perhaps, personal honesty or perhaps naïvety—in short, qualities that made the punitive work of the “justice system” at the time easier rather than harder. The absence of any single idea that might unite them fatally weakened the moral defenses of the prisoners. They were neither enemies of the authorities nor state criminals, and when they died, they still didn’t understand why they had to die. Their self-respect or their resentment had nothing to focus on. Alienated from one another, they died in Kolyma’s white desert—from hunger, from cold, from many hours of labor, from beatings, and from diseases. They immediately learned not to intercede for one another. This was what the authorities were striving to achieve. The souls of those who remained alive were subjected to complete defilement, while their bodies lacked the qualities needed for physical labor.
After the war these people were replaced by one shipload after another of repatriated Soviet citizens—from Italy, France, Germany—who were sent straight to the Far Northeast.
Among them were many men with different mind-sets, with habits picked up during the war—boldness, the ability to take risks, a belief in armed strength alone. They were commanders and soldiers, pilots and reconnaissance men.
The camp administration was used to the angelic patience and servile meekness of the Trotskyists, so they weren’t in the least worried and they didn’t expect anything new.
Kolyma Tales Page 42
