Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  The new arrivals asked those “aborigines” who were still alive, “Why do you eat your soup and porridge in the refectory, but take the bread back to the barracks? Why not eat the bread with your soup, like normal people?”

  Smiling with the cracks of their blue mouths, so as to show how scurvy had removed all their teeth, the local inhabitants replied to the novices, “In two weeks every one of you will understand why, and will do the same.”

  How could you tell them that they had never yet in their lives known real hunger, hunger that goes on for many years, that saps your will, so that you can’t fight the passionate, obsessive desire to prolong the process of eating for as long as you can, to finish eating, sucking your bread ration in the uttermost bliss in the barracks, with a mug of tasteless water made from “heated” snow.

  But not all the new arrivals shook their heads in contempt before moving away.

  Major Pugachiov understood quite a few things. He had no doubt that they had all been brought here to die, to replace these living corpses. They’d been brought here in autumn, with a view to winter, when there was no prospect of running away; whereas in summer, even if you couldn’t get away for good, at least you would die a free man.

  So there would be all winter to weave the net of this plot, the only one in twenty years.

  Pugachiov realized that the only people capable of surviving the winter and then escaping would be those who didn’t do manual labor at the pit face. After just a few weeks working in a brigade, nobody would be able to run away to anywhere.

  Slowly, one by one, the plotters infiltrated the support jobs: Soldatov became a cook, Pugachiov became the culture organizer; there were a paramedic and two foremen, while Ivashchenko, who had been a mechanic, was repairing weapons in the guards’ section.

  But none of them was allowed “outside the wire” without a guard escorting them.

  The dazzling Kolyma spring had begun: not a drop of rain, no cracks in the ice, no birds singing. The snow disappeared little by little, as it was burned up by the sun. Wherever the sun’s rays could not reach, the snow still lay in the gullies and ravines, like silver ingots, until the following year.

  The appointed day dawned.

  There was a knock at the door of the tiny guardhouse by the camp gates: the guardhouse had doors leading both into and out of the camp, and the rules stated that two men always had to be on guard there. The duty guard yawned and looked at the pendulum clock. It was five in the morning. “Only five,” he thought.

  The duty guard lifted the hook and let in whoever was knocking. It was a prisoner, the camp cook Soldatov, who had come to get the keys to the pantry. The keys were kept in the guardhouse. Soldatov came three times a day to fetch them, and he would then bring them back.

  The duty guard had to open the kitchen cupboard himself, but he knew that there was absolutely no point checking up on the cook, that no locks would stop a cook who intended to steal something. So he entrusted the cook with the keys, especially as it was five in the morning.

  The duty guard had worked more than a dozen years in Kolyma; he had been getting double pay for a long time, and he had put the keys in the cook’s hand thousands of times.

  “Take them,” he said, as he picked up a ruler and bent down to draw lines on his morning report.

  Soldatov went behind the guard’s back, took the key off the nail, put it in his pocket, and then seized the guard by the throat. That instant the door opened and Ivashchenko the mechanic came into the guardhouse from the camp side. Ivashchenko helped Soldatov strangle the guard and drag his corpse behind a cupboard. Ivashchenko stuffed the guard’s revolver in his pocket. Looking out through the window, they could see that the other duty guard was coming back down the path. Ivashchenko hurriedly put on the murdered man’s greatcoat and cap, buckled up his belt and sat at the desk, as if he were the guard. The second guard opened the door and strode into the dark, kennel-like guardhouse. Instantly he was seized, strangled, and thrown behind the cupboard.

  Soldatov put on the second guard’s clothes. The two plotters now had weapons and military uniforms. Everything was going exactly according to Major Pugachiov’s plan. Suddenly the wife of the second guard turned up at the guardhouse. She had also come for the keys, keys her husband had accidentally taken with him.

  “We shan’t strangle the woman,” said Soldatov. She was tied up, her mouth was stuffed with a towel, and she was placed in a corner.

  One of the prisoner brigades was on its way back from work. This had been anticipated. As soon as their guard entered the guardhouse he was disarmed and tied up by the two “guardhouse” men. The fugitives now had his rifle. From then on Major Pugachiov took over command.

  The area in front of the gates was a field of fire for two guard towers at each corner manned by sentries. The sentries didn’t notice anything peculiar.

  Slightly earlier than expected, another brigade lined up to go to work, but who can say in the north what is early and what is late? It seemed a little earlier but may have been a little later than expected.

  The brigade of ten men moved off in twos down the road to the pit faces. As the rules dictated, the escort guards in their greatcoats, one of them holding a rifle, strode six meters ahead of and behind the prisoners.

  The sentry in the guard tower saw the brigade turn off the road down a path that passed by the guards’ section building. This was where the soldiers of the guard service lived; the squad consisted of sixty men.

  The guards’ sleeping quarters were at the back of the building, while the squad’s duty guard’s quarters and a pyramid of weapons were right by the front door. The duty guard was half asleep at his desk and dimly noticed an escort guard leading a brigade of prisoners down the path past the guards’ house windows.

  “It must be Chernenko,” he thought, not recognizing the escort guard. “I’ll definitely report him.” The duty guard was an expert at causing trouble and would not miss a chance to do something nasty to somebody, as long as it conformed to regulations.

  That was his last thought. The door was flung open and three soldiers ran into the barracks. Two of them rushed to the dormitory doors, while the third shot the duty guard point-blank. Prisoners came running in after the soldiers and all of them went for the pyramid: they now had rifles and automatic weapons. Major Pugachiov violently flung the barracks dormitory door open. The soldiers, barefoot and still in their underwear, tried to rush to the door, but they were stopped by two rounds of automatic fire aimed at the ceiling.

  “Lie down,” ordered Pugachiov; the soldiers crawled under their bunks. A man with an automatic guarded the threshold.

  The “brigade” began without hurry to change into military uniform, to stack up groceries, and to supply themselves with weapons and ammunition.

  Pugachiov ordered his men not to take any food except for biscuits and chocolate, but as much weaponry and ammunition as possible.

  The paramedic slung a first-aid bag over his shoulder.

  Those escaping now felt they were soldiers again.

  The taiga lay ahead, but was that any more terrible than the Stokhod marshes in western Ukraine?

  They walked out onto the highway, where Pugachiov raised an arm and stopped a truck.

  “Get out,” he said, opening the cab door.

  “But I—”

  “I told you to get out.”

  The driver got out. Georgadze, a tank regiment lieutenant, took the wheel, and Pugachiov got in next to him. The escaping soldiers climbed into the back of the truck and it sped off.

  “There’s supposed to be a turn here.”

  The truck turned onto one of. . . .

  “We’re out of gas!”

  Pugachiov swore.

  They went into the taiga like ducks diving into water and vanished in the enormous silent forest. Using a map, they kept to the fateful path to freedom, striding straight on, through the amazing Kolyma morass of fallen timber.

  Kolyma trees die lying down,
like human beings. Their mighty roots resembled the giant talons of a predatory bird, caught in a rock. Thousands of fine, tentacle-like offshoots descended from these gigantic talons into the permafrost. Every summer the permafrost retreated a little, and a brown tentacle root would immediately find its way down and fix itself in each inch of newly thawed earth.

  Trees here did not reach maturity until they were three hundred years old; they lifted their mighty, heavy bodies slowly on such weak roots.

  Pushed over by storms, the trees fell on their backs, their crowns all facing the same way, and they died lying on a thick layer of moss, bright pink or green in color.

  The men began to pitch camp for the night. They were practiced and quick.

  Only Ashot and Malinin were unable to calm down.

  “What are you up to?” asked Pugachiov.

  “Ashot is trying to persuade me that Adam was expelled from paradise to Ceylon.”

  “What do you mean, Ceylon?”

  “That’s what the Muslims say,” said Ashot.

  “Are you a Tatar then?”

  “I’m not, but my wife is.”

  “I’ve never heard of that,” said Pugachiov with a smile.

  “Quite, nor have I,” Malinin joined in.

  “Well, time to sleep!”

  It was cold. Major Pugachiov woke up. Soldatov was sitting with his automatic over his knees, fully alert. Pugachiov lay on his back trying to catch sight of the polestar, the walker’s favorite. In Kolyma the constellations had different positions from those of Europe, of mainland Russia; the map of the stars was slightly askew, and the Great Bear drifted off toward the horizon. The taiga was silent and severe. The enormous gnarled larches were widely spaced. The forest was full of a worrying silence, familiar to any hunter. But on this occasion Pugachiov was not a hunter but a wild animal being tracked down, which made the silence of the forest three times more worrying for him.

  This was Major Pugachiov’s first night of freedom, a first night of liberty after the long months and years of his terrible stations of the cross. As he lay there he recalled the beginning of the drama-packed film that was now being shown before his very eyes. It seemed as if Pugachiov had personally shot the film of all his twelve lives in such a way that events were flashing past with unbelievable speed instead of keeping to their slow daily unfolding. And now came the credits, the “end of film,” for they were free. And it was the beginning of battle, of a game, of life.

  Major Pugachiov remembered the German camp he had escaped from in 1944. The front was getting closer to the town. He worked as a sanitation truck driver inside the enormous camp. He remembered accelerating the truck to full speed and smashing through the single fence of barbed wire, ripping out the hastily erected support stakes. Shots fired by the sentries, shouts, furious driving through the town in various directions, abandoning the truck, making his way by night to the front line, and then the meeting: interrogation in the special department. Charges of spying, a sentence of twenty-five years imprisonment.

  Major Pugachiov recalled the visits by emissaries of General Vlasov and he recalled Vlasov’s “manifesto,” his visits to starving, exhausted, tormented Russian soldiers.

  “Your authorities abandoned you a long time ago. Every prisoner of war is a traitor in the eyes of your government,” said Vlasov’s men, who then showed them the orders and speeches in copies of the Moscow newspapers. The prisoners of war already knew about this. It was significant that Russian prisoners of war were the only ones not to be sent parcels. The French, American, English prisoners, like all the other nationalities, received parcels, letters, had their own compatriots’ clubs and made friends with one another. The Russians had nothing except for starvation and angry resentment of everything in the world. No wonder that many prisoners of war left the German camps to join the Russian Liberation Army.

  Major Pugachiov didn’t believe Vlasov’s officers until he himself reached the Red Army units. Everything Vlasov’s men had said was true. The state didn’t want him, the state was afraid of him.

  Then came the cattle cars with their bars and escort guards, a journey of many days to the Far East, the sea, the hold of a steamship, and the gold mines of the Far North. And a hungry winter.

  Pugachiov sat up. Soldatov waved an arm at him. It was Soldatov who took the credit for beginning this enterprise, although he was one of the last to be drawn into the plot. Soldatov hadn’t had cold feet, he hadn’t lost his head, he hadn’t sold them down the river. A fine man, Soldatov!

  Captain Khrustaliov lay at Pugachiov’s feet. Their fate was similar. His plane had been shot down by the Germans, he’d gone through captivity, starvation, an escape, a tribunal, and the camps. Khrustaliov now turned onto his side: one cheek was redder than the other, he’d been lying on it too long. Khrustaliov was the first man that Major Pugachiov had talked to, a few months earlier, about escaping. They’d agreed that death was better than a prisoner’s life, that it was better to die with a gun in your hands than to die of starvation or to die at work from the guard hitting you with a rifle butt or his boots.

  Both Khrustaliov and the major were men of action, and the negligible chance of success, for which the lives of twelve men were now being gambled, had been discussed in the greatest detail. The plan was to seize an airfield and an aircraft. There were several airfields here, and they were now heading through the taiga for the nearest one.

  Khrustaliov was also the foreman whom the escapees had sent for after attacking the guard squad; Pugachiov refused to leave without his closest friend. And now Khrustaliov was sleeping nearby, calmly and deeply.

  Next to him was Ivashchenko, a weapons expert who had been repairing the guards’ revolvers and rifles. Ivashchenko had found out everything they needed to know in order to succeed: where the weapons were kept; who of the guard squad was on duty and when; where the ammunition stores were. Ivashchenko had been a reconnaissance man.

  Levitsky and Ignatovich, two pilots, Khrustaliov’s comrades, were fast asleep, huddled against each other.

  Poliakov the tank driver had flung both arms over the backs of his neighbors, the giant Georgadze and the bald joker Ashot, whose surname the major had momentarily forgotten. Sasha Malinin, a camp paramedic, formerly an army paramedic, and now the Pugachiov group paramedic, was asleep, with his first-aid bag under his head.

  Pugachiov smiled. Each man probably had his own idea of what this escape entailed. But the fact that everything was going smoothly, that they all understood one another instantly, was, Pugachiov knew, not just down to the major. Each man knew that events were unfolding as they should. They had a commander and a goal. A confident commander and a difficult goal. They had weapons. They had freedom. They could sleep soundly, as soldiers should, even in this empty pale-lilac polar night with its strange sunless light where the trees cast no shadows.

  He had promised them freedom, and they had received it. He was leading them to their death, but they didn’t fear death.

  “And nobody betrayed us,” Pugachiov was thinking, “right to the final day.” Naturally, many people in the camp had known about the plan to escape. The selection of men had been going on for several months. Many people with whom Pugachiov had spoken frankly had refused, but nobody had run to the guardhouse with a denunciation. This was a circumstance that reconciled Pugachiov with life. “Fine men, fine men,” he whispered as he smiled.

  They ate biscuits and chocolate, then set off in silence. They were following a barely noticeable path.

  “A bear’s path,” said Selivanov, a Siberian hunter.

  Pugachiov and Khrustaliov climbed to a pass, to the mapmaker’s tripod, and began surveying the ground below them through binoculars: there were two gray stripes, a river and the highway. The river was just a river; the highway was full of trucks carrying people over a stretch of several dozen kilometers.

  “Prisoners, I expect,” Khrustaliov suggested.

  Pugachiov took a closer look.

  “No,
soldiers. They’re after us. We’ll have to split up,” said Pugachiov. “Eight men should spend the night in the haystacks, and the other four of us will follow that gully. We’ll be back by morning if everything is all right.”

  •

  Passing through the undergrowth, they came to a streambed. It was time to go back.

  “Take a look: there are too many of them, let’s go upstream.”

  Breathing heavily, they quickly climbed upstream, and stones flew down, rustling and rumbling, hitting the feet of the soldiers attacking them.

  Levitsky turned around, swore, and fell. A bullet had hit him right in the eye.

  Georgadze, stopped by a big rock, turned and fired an automatic round at the soldiers climbing the gully. It stopped them only for a short time. His automatic fell silent, and only his rifle was firing.

  Khrustaliov and Major Pugachiov managed to climb much higher, right to the pass.

  “Carry on alone,” the major told Khrustaliov. “I’ll shoot.”

  The major took his time, knocking out every soldier who showed his face. Khrustaliov came back, shouting, “They’re coming!” and then fell. People ran out from behind the big rock.

  Pugachiov dashed forward, fired at the soldiers running toward him; then he threw himself from the pass on the plateau into the narrow streambed. In midair he grabbed hold of a willow branch, clung on, and clambered to one side. The stones he had struck as he fell rumbled and crashed even before they hit the bottom.

  Pugachiov walked through the pathless taiga until he was exhausted.

  The sun rose over the forest clearing, and the men hiding in the haystacks could clearly see the figures in military uniform coming from all sides of the clearing.

  “Is this the end?” asked Ivashchenko, jostling Ashot Khachaturian with his elbow.

  “Why should it be?” replied Ashot, taking aim. A rifle shot rang out, and a soldier on the path fell.

  Gunfire aimed at the haystacks then opened up from all sides.