Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  “Then do so!”

  “I’d be only too willing,” Kunin said coldly, looking Kiseliov straight in the eyes. “But I have asked you to transfer one lousy prisoner to Arkagala, that goner Andreyev, and you refuse even to listen. All you did was laugh. . . .”

  Kiseliov stayed silent for a while.

  “You’re all scum,” he said. “Write that transfer order to the hospital.”

  “That’s the job of your area paramedic, on your instructions,” said Kunin.

  That same evening I was driven away to Arkagala, the main camp zone, with a diagnosis of “acute appendicitis.” I never saw Kiseliov again. But within six months I did hear about him.

  People were rustling a newspaper and laughing in the dark mining drifts. The paper had printed an announcement of Kiseliov’s sudden death. For the hundredth time, the story was told in all its details and people were choking with joyful laughter. One night a burglar got through a window into the engineer’s apartment. Kiseliov was no coward; he always had a loaded double-barreled shotgun hanging by his bed. When he heard the noise, Kiseliov leapt off his bed, cocked the triggers, and ran into the next room. When the burglar heard the owner’s footsteps, he rushed to the window, and was delayed for a short time as he tried to squeeze out of the narrow opening.

  Kiseliov struck the burglar from behind with the butt of his gun, as one does in defensive hand-to-hand battle—following all the rules that the free men had been taught during the war, when they were instructed in outdated methods of hand-to-hand combat. The double-barreled gun went off. The whole charge hit Kiseliov in the belly. Two hours later he was dead. The nearest surgeon was forty kilometers away, but Kunin, being a prisoner, was not authorized to perform an emergency operation.

  The day when news of Kiseliov’s death reached the mine shaft was a holiday for the prisoners. Apparently, the plan, too, was fulfilled that day.

  1965

  CAPTAIN TOLLY’S LOVE

  THE EASIEST job in a gold-mine pit-face brigade is the gangway maker’s: he’s the carpenter who extends the wooden ramp by nailing together boards over which the barrows full of “sand” are pushed to the sizing trommel, the ore-washing equipment. These wooden “whiskers” lead to each pit face from a central ramp. Seen from above, from the sizing trommel, it looks like a gigantic centipede that has been squashed, dried out, and nailed forever to the bottom of the gold-mine cross section.

  The gangway carpenter’s job—a “breeze”—is easy work compared to that of a getter or a barrow man. The gangway carpenter doesn’t have to hold barrow handles, or a spade, or a crowbar, or a pickax. An ax and a handful of nails is his equipment. The foreman usually gives each workman a turn to do this vital, necessary, and important work, thus letting them have at least a short break. Of course, fingers that have lost their feeling, after endlessly gripping a spade haft or a pickax handle, need more than a day of easy work to unbend. They need a year or more of rest. But there was a grain of fairness in this alternation of light and heavy labor. Work was not allocated just in turn: the weaker the worker, the better his chance of getting at least a day as a gangway carpenter. You didn’t need to be a joiner or a carpenter to hammer in nails and to hack boards into shape. People with university degrees could cope very well with the job.

  In our brigade this “breeze” wasn’t allocated by turn. The job of gangway carpenter in our brigade was always given to the same man, Isai Rabinovich, a former director of Soviet Union State Insurance. Rabinovich was sixty-eight years old, but he was a strong old man and hoped to survive his ten-year sentence in the camps. Work is what kills people in the camps, so anyone who praises camp labor is either a scoundrel or a fool. Twenty-year-olds and thirty-year-olds died one after the other—which was why they’d been brought to this special zone—but Rabinovich the gangway man went on living. He had some acquaintances among the camp bosses, secret connections, for Rabinovich would get a temporary job in the accounts department or as an office clerk. Rabinovich understood that every day and hour not spent at the pit face was a promise of life, of salvation for an old man, whereas the pit face meant only perdition and death. People of pensionable age were not supposed to be taken to special zones. The information in Rabinovich’s file was what had gotten him into the special zone, to die.

  Then Rabinovich dug his heels in and refused to die.

  One day we were locked up together, “isolated,” on May 1, as happened every year.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a long time,” said Rabinovich, “and I found it extraordinarily pleasant to know that someone was keeping an eye on me, studying me, and not someone whose job it is to keep an eye open.” I smiled my crooked smile, ripping open my injured lips, and tearing up my scurvied gums. “I’m sure you’re a good person. You never talk foully about women.”

  “I’ve never kept an eye on myself, Isai Davydovich. Anyway, who talks about women here?”

  “I’m told you’re the only one who doesn’t join in that sort of conversation.”

  “To tell you the truth, Isai Davydovich, I consider women to be better than men. I understand the unity of a couple, of husband and wife, and so on. All the same, motherhood is labor. So women work better than men.”

  “That’s utterly true,” said Rabinovich’s neighbor, Beznozhenko the bookkeeper. “Whenever you have a day of shock work or a working Saturday, you’d better not work next to a woman. She’ll drive you mad and chase you away. If you want a cigarette she gets angry.”

  “Yes, there’s that, too,” said Rabinovich, not paying attention. “Probably, probably.”

  “Take Kolyma. A great number of women follow their husbands here—a horrible fate, you have the bosses making passes at you, all those louts who are infected with syphilis. You know that just as well as I do. Yet not a single man has ever come here to be with a wife who’s been deported and condemned.”

  “I was a manager in State Insurance for a very short time,” said Rabinovich. “But long enough to ‘get a tenner.’ For many years I was in charge of the external agents of State Insurance. Do you understand what this means?”

  “I do,” I said without thinking, for I didn’t understand.

  “Apart from State Insurance work abroad—” at this point Rabinovich suddenly looked me in the eyes, sensing that none of it interested me, at least until I’d had dinner.

  After a spoonful of soup, we went on with the conversation.

  “If you like, I’ll tell you about myself. I’ve spent a lot of my life abroad, and now, in the hospitals I’ve been in, or the barracks I’ve lived in, I keep getting asked about just one thing. What I ate, where, and how. Gastronomical subjects. Gastronomical nightmares, fantasies, and dreams. Do you want to hear this sort of story?”

  “Yes, I do, too,” I said.

  “Right. I’m an insurance agent from Odessa. I worked for the Russia, which was an insurance company at the time. I was young, I tried to do things for the boss as conscientiously and as well as I could. I studied languages. I was sent abroad. I married the boss’s daughter. I lived abroad right until the revolution. My boss wasn’t particularly frightened by the revolution—like Savva Morozov,[8] he was betting on the Bolsheviks.

  “During the revolution I was abroad with my wife and daughter. My father-in-law died unexpectedly, not because of the revolution. I knew a lot of people, but none of them had any use for the October 1917 revolution. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “Soviet power was only just getting to its feet then. People came to see me. Russia, the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic, was making its first purchases abroad. They needed credit. But promissory notes from the State Bank were not enough to get credit. A note and a recommendation from me, however, was. So I put Kreuger, the match king, in touch with the RSFSR. After a few more operations of that sort I was allowed to go back home, where I was busy with certain sensitive deals. Have you heard anything about the sale of Spitsbergen and the way payment was made
after that sale?”

  “I’ve heard a little.”

  “Well then: I was reloading Norwegian gold in the North Sea onto our schooner. So, apart from our external agents, I had a number of missions like that. Soviet power was my new boss. I worked just as I had in the insurance company: conscientiously.”

  Rabinovich’s intelligent, calm eyes were looking at me.

  “I’m going to die. I’m an old man now. I’ve seen life. I’m sorry for my wife. And for my daughter in Moscow. They haven’t yet been swept away in the roundup of members of the family. . . . Clearly, I’ll never see them again. They write to me often. They send parcels. Do you get any parcels? Do your people send any?”

  “No. I wrote and told them not to. If I survive, then it will be without any outside help. I shall be obliged only to myself.”

  “There’s something chivalrous about that. My wife and daughter wouldn’t understand.”

  “There’s nothing chivalrous about it. You and I are not just beyond good and evil, we’re beyond everything human. After what I’ve seen, I don’t want to be in anyone’s debt, even to my own wife.”

  “That’s confusing. I just write and ask for things. Parcels mean getting work for a month in the accounts department. I handed over my best suit to get that job. I expect you think the boss felt sorry for an old man. . . .”

  “I thought you had some special relationship with the camp bosses.”

  “Do you think I’m a grass? Well, who needs a seventy-year-old grass? No, I simply gave a bribe, a big one. And I’m still alive. I’ve never shared the result of that bribe with anyone, not even with you. I get something, I write and I ask.”

  After our May Day imprisonment we came back to the barracks together and chose neighboring bunks. The bunks were on the railway sleeping car system. It’s not that we’d become friends; it’s impossible to make friends in the camp. It’s just that we respected each other. I had a lot of experience of the camps, while old Rabinovich had a young man’s curiosity about life. He saw that there was no way of suppressing my anger, and he began treating me with respect, but no more than respect. Perhaps it was just an old man’s nostalgia for the sleeping car habit of telling the first person you meet all about yourself. A life you wanted to leave behind on earth.

  Lice didn’t frighten us. At the same time I got to know Isai Rabinovich, my scarf was stolen: it was cotton, of course, but still, it was a real knitted scarf.

  We were going out together to line up for work, a lineup “minus the last man,” as such lineups are called, so colorfully and frighteningly, in the camps. A lineup “minus the last man.” The bosses would grab hold of men, the escort guard would jostle them with his rifle butt, beating and herding the crowd of ragged men off the ice-covered mountain, sending them downhill: anyone who lagged behind or was late was led to what was called a lineup “minus the last man,” because this man would be grabbed by the arms and legs, swung to and fro and then hurled down the icy mountain. Rabinovich and I did our best to leap now as fast as we could, then line up and reach the clear space where the guard was now waiting and lining men up for work, punching them in the mouth. Mostly, we managed to roll down safely and reach the pit face alive, to confront whatever was waiting for us there.

  The last man, who had been late and was thrown off the mountain, would be tied by the feet to the horse-drawn drays and dragged along to the pit face where he worked. Rabinovich and I were both lucky enough to escape this lethal ride.

  The camp zone was sited where it was for a special reason: we had to return uphill from work, clambering over steps, grabbing the remains of the bare, broken bushes as we crawled up. After a working day at a gold-mine pit face, you’d have thought that a man wouldn’t find the strength to climb. And yet we did. It may have taken half an hour, but we reached the guardhouse gates, the zone, the barracks, our living quarters. There was the usual inscription over the pediment of the gates: “Labor is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor and heroism.” We went to the refectory, downed something from the bowls, went to the barracks, and lay down to sleep. In the morning it all began again.

  Not everyone starved here—but why they didn’t, I never found out. When it got warmer, as spring approached, the white nights began, and so did terrible games of “catch alive.” A bread ration was laid on a table, then men hid in the corner, waiting for a hungry victim, some goner, to come up, bewitched by the bread, and touch and grab the bread ration. Then everyone would rush out from their dark ambush in the corner, and a thief or a living skeleton would start to get a fatal beating. This was a new sport I only ever saw at Jelgala. The organizer of these amusements was Dr. Krivitsky, an old revolutionary, the former deputy People’s Commissar of the Defense Industry. Together with Zaslavsky, the journalist from Izvestiya, Krivitsky was the main organizer of these bloody “manhunts,” these terrible lures.

  I had a scarf, cotton, of course, but knitted, a real scarf. The hospital paramedic had given it to me as a present, when I was being discharged. When our party of prisoners was unloaded at Jelgala, an unsmiling gray face with a northerner’s deep-cut wrinkles and the marks of old frostbite scars loomed up toward me.

  “Let’s swap!”

  “No.”

  “Sell it.”

  “No.”

  All the local men—and about twenty of them had run up to our truck—looked at me with amazement, astonished by my impetuousness, stupidity and pride.

  “He’s the elder, the camp elder,” someone informed me, but I shook my head.

  The eyebrows on his toothless face moved upward. The elder nodded to someone, pointing to me.

  But in this zone people hesitated to commit robbery. There was a much simpler way, and I knew what it would be. I knotted the scarf around my neck and never took it off again, not in the bathhouse, nor at night, never.

  It should have been easy to keep the scarf, but the lice made it hard. There were so many lice in the scarf that it moved when I took the scarf off for a minute, laid it out by the table lamp, and tried to shake them off.

  I fought for about two weeks with shadowy thieves, telling myself that they were shadows, not thieves. Just once in two weeks I hung the scarf on the bunks where I could see it, turned around to pour myself a mug of water, and the scarf, grabbed by an experienced thieving hand, instantly vanished. I was so tired of fighting to keep this scarf, and the prospect of this theft, which I knew, sensed, and almost saw, demanded so much intensive effort, that I was even glad I no longer had anything to hang onto. For the first time since my arrival at Jelgala I fell into a deep sleep and had a pleasant dream. That could be, of course, because thousands of lice had vanished and my body instantly felt relieved.

  It was with some sympathy that Isai Rabinovich observed my heroic struggle. Naturally, he didn’t help me to hang on to my lousy scarf—everyone looks after himself in the camps, and I didn’t expect any help.

  When Isai Rabinovich had a few days’ work in the bookkeeper’s office, however, he did slip me a dinner voucher, which consoled me for my loss. And I thanked him.

  After work everyone immediately went to bed, using their dirty work clothes as a mattress.

  Isai Rabinovich said, “I want your advice about something. Nothing to do with the camp.”

  “About General de Gaulle?”

  “No, there’s no need to laugh at me. I’ve received an important letter. At least, important to me.”

  I fought off the sleepiness that was overcoming me by tensing my whole body; I shook myself and began listening.

  “I told you earlier that my daughter and wife are in Moscow. They’ve been left alone. My daughter wants to get married. I’ve had a letter from her. And from her fiancé, too—here it is,” Rabinovich took a bundle of letters from under his pillow. It was a packet of beautiful sheets of paper, written in precise and quick handwriting. I took a closer look: the letters were Latin ones, not Russian.

  “Moscow has given permission for these let
ters to be sent on to me. Do you know English?”

  “Me? English? No.”

  “They’re in English. From her fiancé. He’s asking for my consent to marry my daughter. He writes, ‘My parents have already given their consent, all I now need is the consent of my future wife’s parents. I ask you, my dear father. . . .’ And here’s my daughter’s letter. ‘Daddy, my husband, the naval attaché of the United States of America, Captain Tolly, is asking for your consent to our marriage. Daddy, please reply as soon as you can.’ ”

  “What sort of madness is this?” I asked.

  “It’s not mad at all, it’s Captain Tolly’s letter to me. And my daughter’s letter. And my wife’s letter.”

  Rabinovich slowly groped for a louse under his shirt, pulled it out and squashed it against the bunk.

  “Your daughter is asking for consent to a marriage?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your daughter’s fiancé, the naval attaché of the United States, Captain Tolly, is asking for your consent to marrying your daughter?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, run and see the camp boss and make an application for permission to send an express letter.”

  “But I don’t want to give my consent to her marriage. That’s what I wanted your advice about.”

  I was simply stunned by these letters, these stories, this action.

  “If I agree to the marriage, I’ll never see her again. She’ll leave with Captain Tolly.”

  “Listen, Isai Davydovich. You’ll soon be seventy. I consider you to be a reasonable man.”

  “It’s just a feeling, I haven’t yet given it proper thought. I’ll send my reply tomorrow. It’s time we went to sleep.”

  “Let’s celebrate this event tomorrow. We’ll eat the porridge before we eat the soup. And the soup after the porridge. We can still toast some bread. We can dry some rusks. We can boil bread in water. How about it, Isai Davydovich?”

  Even an earthquake wouldn’t have stopped me sleeping, from seeking the oblivion of sleep. I shut my eyes and forgot about Captain Tolly.