Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  On command, soldiers dashed across the marsh toward the haystacks; shots rang out, the wounded groaned.

  The attack was beaten back. Several wounded men lay on the hummocks in the marsh.

  “Stretcher-bearer, crawl forward,” an officer ordered.

  The stretcher-bearer, a male nurse and prisoner, Yashka Kuchen, from western Ukraine, had been brought from the hospital as a precaution. Without saying a word, Kuchen crawled to a wounded man, waving his first-aid bag as he went. A bullet hit him in the shoulder and he stopped halfway.

  The guard squad officer leapt out, unafraid. He came from the squad that the escapees had disarmed. He yelled out, “Hey, Ivashchenko, Soldatov, Pugachiov, surrender, you’re surrounded. You can’t hide anywhere.”

  “Come and take my weapon,” shouted Ivashchenko from his haystack.

  Bobyliov, the guard squad officer, ran toward the haystacks, his boots squelching in the marsh.

  When he had run half the distance, Ivashchenko’s rifle crackled, and a bullet hit Bobyliov right in the forehead.

  “Attaboy!” Soldatov said in praise of his comrade. “The reason the officer’s so brave is that he doesn’t care. He’ll be shot, or he’ll get prison for letting us escape.”

  The fugitives were fired on from all sides. Machine guns were brought up; they rattled away.

  Soldatov felt both his legs burn, and then he felt Ivashchenko, who’d been killed, thrust his head into his shoulder.

  No sound came from the other haystack. About a dozen corpses lay in the marsh.

  Soldatov kept firing until something hit him in the head and he lost consciousness.

  Nikolai Sergeyevich Braude, the hospital’s senior surgeon, was sent orders by a telephoned telegram from Major General Artemiev, one of the four Kolyma generals and the head of the guards of all the Kolyma camps. Braude was told to go to the settlement of Lichan and bring, in the words of the telegram, “two paramedics, bandaging material, and instruments.”

  Braude made no attempt to guess what was afoot. He quickly got everything ready and the hospital’s decrepit little one-and-a-half-ton truck moved off in the required direction. The hospital truck, once on the highway, was constantly overtaken by powerful Studebakers laden with armed soldiers. The distance was only forty kilometers, but because of the frequent stops and the pileup of trucks ahead of it, because of the constant checks on papers, Braude took all of three hours to get there.

  Major General Artemiev was in the local camp chief’s apartment, waiting for the surgeon. Both Braude and Artemiev were old Kolyma hands, and this was not the first time that they were fated to meet.

  “What’s going on here? War?” Braude asked the general after they exchanged greetings.

  “Not exactly war, but twenty-eight men killed in the first battle. As for the wounded, see for yourself.”

  While Braude was washing his hands in a basin hung by the door, the general told him about the escape.

  “Why didn’t you call out aircraft?” asked Braude, lighting a cigarette. “Two or three squadrons, then you could bomb them and bomb them. Or just use one atom bomb.”

  “You think it’s all a joke,” said the major general. “I’m waiting for orders, and there’s no joking about it. I’ll be lucky if I’m just dismissed from command of the guards. I could be court-martialed. Anything could happen.”

  Yes, Braude knew that anything could happen. Some years previously three thousand men were sent on foot, in winter, to one of the ports, where the stores that lay on the shore had been destroyed by a storm. In the course of that journey, only three hundred men of the original three thousand survived. The deputy chief of administration who had signed the order for the party of prisoners to go was sacrificed; he was put on trial.

  Braude and his paramedics were extracting bullets, amputating limbs, and bandaging wounds until evening. The only wounded men were soldiers of the guard: there was not a single escaped prisoner among them.

  Toward evening on the next day more wounded men were brought in. Surrounded by officers of the guard, two soldiers carried in a stretcher, on which Braude saw his first and only escaped prisoner. The fugitive was wearing a military uniform and only his unshaven face differentiated him from the soldiers. He had gunshot fractures in both shins, a gunshot fracture of the left shoulder, and a head wound with damage to the skull. The fugitive was unconscious.

  Braude carried out first aid and, at Artemiev’s orders, admitted the wounded man, along with his escort guards, to the big hospital where Braude worked and where he had the right facilities for a serious operation.

  Everything was over. A military truck, covered with a tarpaulin, was parked nearby, and in it the bodies of the escaped prisoners were stacked. Next to it was another truck with the bodies of the dead soldiers.

  The army could have been demobilized after this victory, but for many more days truckloads of soldiers drove up and down all sections of the two-thousand-kilometer highway.

  The twelfth escapee, Major Pugachiov, was missing.

  Soldatov’s treatment took some time, until he was well enough to be shot. Actually, his was the only death penalty out of the sixty cases—the number of the fugitives’ friends and acquaintances—that were tried by a tribunal. The chief of the local camp was given ten years. The head of the health service, Dr. Potanina, was acquitted by the court, and as soon as the trial was over she found herself a new job somewhere else. Major General Artemiev seemed to have been clairvoyant: he was removed, dismissed from his post in the guard service.

  •

  Pugachiov managed with some difficulty to crawl down through the narrow opening of a cave; it was a bear’s den, its winter quarters, but the bear had long since left it and was wandering about the taiga. There was bear fur here and there on the cave walls and on the stones on the ground.

  “How very quickly it all ended,” thought Pugachiov. “They’ll bring dogs and find me. And capture me.”

  Lying in the cave, he recalled his life, a hard life, a man’s life, which was coming to an end now on a bear’s track in the taiga. He recalled people, everyone he had respected and loved, beginning with his mother. He remembered Maria Ivanovna, his schoolteacher, who wore a quilted jacket covered with black velvet that had faded to a rust color. He recalled many, many other people whom he had been destined to come across.

  But best of all, finest of all were his eleven dead comrades. None of the other people in his life had endured so many disappointments, so much deceit, so many lies. Even in this northern hell they had found enough inner strength to believe in him, Pugachiov, and to reach out for freedom. And to die in battle. Yes, those were the best people in his life.

  Pugachiov tore off a bunch of lingonberries: a clump of bushes grew on a rock right by the cave entrance. Last year’s blue, wrinkled berries burst when his fingers touched them, and he licked his fingers. The overripe fruit had no more taste than melted snow. The skin of the berries stuck to his dried-out tongue.

  Yes, they had been the best people. And he now knew Ashot’s surname: Khachaturian.

  Major Pugachiov remembered them all, one after the other, and smiled at each one of them. Then he put the barrel of his pistol in his mouth and, for the last time in his life, he fired.

  1959

  THE HOSPITAL CHIEF

  “JUST you wait. You’ll trip up one day and get it in the neck,” the hospital chief threatened me, using gangster language. The chief was Dr. Doctor,[33] one of the most menacing characters in Kolyma. “Stand up straight, properly.”

  I was standing “properly,” but I was calm. A trained paramedic with a diploma is not to be thrown to the wolves, or abandoned to the mercy of Dr. Doctor. It was 1947 now, not 1937, and I, who had seen things Dr. Doctor could not even have imagined, was calm, waiting for just one thing: for the chief to go away. I was the senior paramedic in the surgical department.

  This persecution had begun only recently, after Dr. Doctor discovered from my personal file that I ha
d been sentenced under the acronym of KRTD, Counterrevolutionary Trotskyist Activity. Dr. Doctor was a member of the secret police, a specialist in political cases who had sent quite a few KRTDs to their deaths. And now he had in his hands, in his hospital, a paramedic who had graduated from one of his courses and who was meant to have been liquidated.

  Dr. Doctor tried to get help from the local NKVD officer. But the NKVD officer was Baklanov, a young military man who’d served at the front. He wasn’t interested in Dr. Doctor’s dirty little tricks. Baklanov had special fishermen bringing him fish, he had hunters killing game for him—at that time the bosses were looking after themselves as never before. So Dr. Doctor found Baklanov quite unsympathetic.

  “But he’s just graduated from your courses. You’re the one who took him on.”

  “That was a blunder by personnel. There’s been a cover-up.”

  “Well,” said the NKVD officer, “if there are any infringements or wrong actions, we’ll remove him, obviously. We’ll help.”

  Dr. Doctor complained that things were going to the dogs, and he began to wait patiently. Bosses too can patiently wait for their subordinates to trip up.

  The central hospital was big; it had a thousand beds. There were prisoner-doctors of every specialty. The bosses, who were free men, not prisoners, asked for and were granted permission to open two emergency postoperative wards—one for men, the other for women—for non-prisoner patients in the surgical department. My ward had a female patient who was brought in with appendicitis; she was not operated on but was given conservative treatment. She was a cheerful, active girl. I believe she was the secretary of the Komsomol in the mine administration. When she was admitted, the surgeon Braude, a ladies’ man, showed the new patient around the surgical department, chatting to her about . . . fractures and cases of spondylitis, and then showed her around one department after another. It was minus sixty outside and there were no stoves in the blood transfusion station; frost had obscured all the windows, and you couldn’t touch metal with your bare hands. But the gallant surgeon flung open the doors of the transfusion station, and everybody staggered back into the corridor.

  “This is where we usually receive women.”

  “Without much success, I expect,” said the girl, warming her hands with her breath.

  The surgeon was taken aback.

  It was this enterprising girl who began coming to see me in my ward office. We had some frozen lingonberries, a whole bowlful, and we talked late into the night. But once, about midnight, the ward office doors burst open and in came Dr. Doctor, wearing a leather jacket, not a white gown.

  “Everything in the department is in order.”

  “So I see. And who are you?” Dr. Doctor addressed the girl.

  “I’m a patient. In the women’s ward here. I’ve come for a thermometer.”

  “You’ll be gone tomorrow. I’m putting an end to this disgraceful mess.”

  “Disgraceful mess? Who is he?” the girl asked.

  “It’s the hospital chief.”

  “Ah, so that’s Dr. Doctor. I’ve heard of him. Will you get into trouble because of me? Because of the lingonberries?”

  “There won’t be any trouble.”

  “Well, just in case, I’ll go and see him tomorrow. I’ll give him a talking-to and take him down a notch. And if they touch you, I promise you—”

  “Nothing will happen to me.”

  The girl was not discharged; she had her meeting with the hospital chief and everything died down until the first general meeting, at which Dr. Doctor delivered a report on the collapse of discipline.

  “For example, in the surgical department the paramedic was sitting in the operating theater with a woman”—Dr. Doctor had confused the ward office with the operating theater—“eating lingonberries.”

  “Who was she?” people in the audience started whispering.

  “Who with?” one of the free workers shouted out.

  But Dr. Doctor gave no names.

  Lightning had struck, but I didn’t understand anything. A senior paramedic is responsible for food; the hospital chief had decided to strike the simplest blow.

  The kisel jelly was weighed and ten grams were found to be missing. With great difficulty I managed to prove that it was served with a small ladle, but shaken out onto a big plate, so that it was inevitable that ten grams of whatever “stuck to the bottom” would go missing.

  The lightning was a warning to me, even though there was no thunder.

  The next day there was thunder without lightning.

  One of the ward doctors asked me to save a spoonful of something nice for a patient of his who was dying. I promised I would and I ordered the server to leave a half or quarter of a bowl of soup from the special diet menu. This was against the rules, but it was always done everywhere, in every department. At dinnertime a crowd of the top bosses, headed by Dr. Doctor, burst into the department.

  “Who’s that for?” Half a bowl of special diet soup was being kept warm on the stove.

  “Dr. Gusegov asked for one of his patients to have it.”

  “The patient whom Dr. Gusegov is treating is not entitled to a special diet.”

  “Call in Dr. Gusegov.”

  Dr. Gusegov, a prisoner whose file listed him as article 58, paragraph 1a, as a traitor to the motherland, turned white with fear when he faced the chief’s bright eyes. He had only recently been taken on by the hospital after many years of applications and requests. And now he had taken this unfortunate measure.

  “I never gave such an instruction, sir.”

  “So, mister senior paramedic, that means you are lying. You are trying to mislead us,” raged Dr. Doctor. “You’ve gone too far, admit it. You’ve tripped up.”

  I was sorry for Dr. Gusegov, but I could understand him. I said nothing. All the other members of the commission—the chief doctor, the chief of the camp—were silent, too. Dr. Doctor was the only one ranting.

  “Take off your gown and go to the camp. Manual labor! I’ll see you rot in solitary!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I took off my gown and was immediately transformed into an ordinary prisoner to be shoved in the back, to be shouted at. It was some time since I’d lived in the camp. . . .

  “And where is the barracks for support staff?”

  “You’re not going there. Off you go to solitary!”

  “There hasn’t been a warrant for that!”

  “Lock him up, and get the warrant later.”

  “No, I won’t take him without a warrant. The camp chief has forbidden that.”

  “I reckon the hospital chief is senior to the camp chief.”

  “He may be, but my only superior is the camp chief.”

  I didn’t have to stay long in the support staff barracks. The warrant was quickly drawn up and I entered the camp solitary confinement block, a stinking cell, like dozens of other solitary cells I’d been in before.

  I lay down on the bunk and stayed lying down until the next morning. The supervisor came in the morning. We’d known each other earlier.

  “You’ve been given seventy-two hours solitary, with manual labor outside. Come on out, you’ll get gloves and you’ll be barrowing sand in the foundation pit for the new guards’ building. It’s been quite a drama. The head of Special Camp Centers was telling me about it. Dr. Doctor was demanding that you be sent to a punishment mine for life. . . . To move you to a numbered [34] camp. ‘All that for nothing much at all!’ the others said. ‘If you get a punishment or a numbered camp for such minor things, then everyone has to be sent there. And we’ve been deprived of a trained paramedic.’ ”

  The whole commission knew of Gusegov’s cowardice; so did Dr. Doctor, but he only became more rabid.

  “What are you on about? If we don’t have manual labor and the wheelbarrow, then we don’t have any punishment. If it’s only a matter of spending a night in solitary, then it’s a mere formality.”

  “All right, then: twenty-four hour
s with manual labor outside.”

  “Seventy-two.”

  “All right, fine.”

  So, after many years, I had my hands on wheelbarrow handles, on the three-man Special Tribunal [35] machine, which has two handles and one wheel.

  I was an old hand at barrowing in the Kolyma. I was trained in 1937 at the gold mines in all the finer points of wheelbarrowing. I knew how to press on the handles to let the shoulders take the strain, I knew how to wheel an empty barrow back, wheel in front, handles held high, to let the blood drain back. I knew how to tip the barrow in one movement, how to extract it from the pile and get it onto the gangway.

  I was a professor of wheelbarrowing. I was happy to push a barrow and show my stylish skills. I was happy to spin it around and to smooth the gangway with shingle. Nobody got any lessons. You just had the barrow, your punishment, and that was it. Work done by a man in solitary was not accountable to anyone. For several months I hadn’t left the central hospital building; I’d done without fresh air. I used to joke that I’d had all the fresh air I could take, twenty years’ worth at the mines, and that I wasn’t going to go outside. And now I was breathing fresh air, remembering my barrowing trade. I spent two nights and three days doing this job. On the evening of the third day I had a visit from the camp chief. In all his time working in the Kolyma camps he’d never come across such extreme punishment as Dr. Doctor had demanded for a minor infringement; the camp chief was trying to understand why.

  He stopped by the gangway.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Your hard labor ends today, you needn’t go back to solitary.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “But do a full day’s work today.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Just before the end of work, signaled by an iron rail being struck, Dr. Doctor turned up. He was accompanied by two of his adjutants: the hospital commandant Postel and the hospital orthodontist Grisha Kobeko.

  Postel used to work for the NKVD. He was a syphilitic who had infected two or three nurses who then had to be sent to the venereal isolation zone, where infected women, all syphilitics, worked outside in forestry. Grisha Kobeko, a handsome man, was the hospital snitch, informer, and fabricator. These were worthy companions to Dr. Doctor.