Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Mishka Timoshenko was thinking as he walked, “I’ll apply to go to the front. They won’t actually send me, but it’ll do me some good. Otherwise, you can beat people up here, but you don’t earn anything by a sentence.” The next morning he went to see the camp boss Kosarenko, who was not a bad type. Mishka did all the right things.

  “Here’s an application to go to the front, sir.”

  “There’s a surprise. . . . All right, let’s have it. You’ll be the first. . . . Only, they won’t take you. . . .”

  “Because of what I was sentenced for, sir?”

  “Of course.”

  “What am I supposed to do about it?” asked Mishka.

  “You’ll be all right. You’re artful enough,” Kosarenko rasped. “Tell Andreyev to come and see me.”

  Andreyev was amazed to be summoned. He’d never been asked to appear before the actual camp boss in person. But his usual indifference, fearlessness, and lack of interest prevailed. He knocked at the plywood door to the office.

  “I’ve come as you ordered. Prisoner Andreyev.”

  “Are you Andreyev?” asked Kosarenko, examining the newcomer with curiosity.

  “Andreyev, sir.”

  Kosarenko raked through the papers on his desk, found something, and began reading it quietly. Andreyev waited.

  “I have a job for you.”

  “I’m working as a barrow man on the third site. . . .”

  “In whose brigade?”

  “In Koriagin’s.”

  “Tomorrow you’ll stay behind. You’ll be working in the camp. Koriagin doesn’t need a barrow man that badly.”

  Kosarenko stood up, shaking the piece of paper, and rasped, “You’ll be taking down the zone. Rolling up barbed wire. Your zone.”

  Andreev realized that Kosarenko was talking about a zone for article 58ers. Unlike many camps, the barracks where the “enemies of the people” lived was surrounded by barbed wire within the actual camp zone.

  “On my own?”

  “With Maslakov.”

  “It’s the war,” thought Andreyev. “Must be the mobilization plan.”

  “May I go, sir?”

  “Yes. I have two reports about you.”

  “I work just as well as anybody else, sir—”

  “Go, will you. . . .”

  They straightened rusty nails and removed barbed wire, rolling it up on a stick. Ten rows, ten iron threads, and diagonal threads as well, at intervals. It was a whole day’s work for Andreyev and Maslakov. This job was in no way better than any other job. Kosarenko was wrong: prisoners’ feelings had become coarser.

  At dinner Andreyev found out something else that was new: the bread ration was reduced from a kilogram to five hundred grams, and that was dreadful news, for the cooked food made no difference in the camp. Bread was what decided things.

  The next day Andreyev went back to the mine.

  It was, as usual, cold and dark in the mine. Andreyev went down the miners’ approach to the lower drift. No empty barrows had yet been sent down from the surface, and Kuznetsov, the second barrow man on this shift, was sitting in the light not far from the lower turn-table, waiting for the wagons.

  Andreyev sat down next to him. Kuznetsov was a nonpolitical, a rural murderer.

  “Listen,” said Kuznetsov. “I’ve been summoned.”

  “Where to?”

  “Over there. The other side of the bridge.”

  “So?”

  “I’ve been ordered to write a statement about you.”

  “About me?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I’ve done it. What else could I do?”

  True, thought Andreyev, what can you do?

  “So what did you write in it?”

  “Well, I wrote what they told me to. That you praised Hitler. . . .”

  He’s not a bastard, really, thought Andreyev. He’s just a wretch.

  “So what are they going to do to me?” asked Andreyev.

  “I don’t know. The NKVD man said it was just a formality.”

  “Of course,” said Andreyev. “Of course, just a formality. After all, my sentence ends this year. They’ll manage to stitch on a new one.”

  The little wagons came thundering down the slope.

  “Hey you!” yelled the man in charge of the turntable. “Dreamers! Take the empty wagon!”

  “If you don’t mind, I’ll refuse to work with you,” said Kuznetsov. “After all, I’ll be summoned again, and I’ll say ‘I don’t know, I don’t work with him.’ That’s what—”

  “That’s the best thing to do,” Andreyev agreed.

  Starting with the very next shift Andreyev had a new partner, Chudakov, also a nonpolitical. Unlike Kuznetsov, who was so talkative, Chudakov was silent. Either he was born silent or he had been warned by “the other side of the bridge.”

  After a few shifts, Andreyev and Chudakov were set to work at the top turntable in the ventilation drift, where they had to send empty wagons thirty meters downhill and haul up the loaded ones. They turned the wagon around on the turntable, set its wheels onto the rails that went down the slope, fixed a steel hawser to the wagon, and, coupling it by its shaft to the winch hawser, sent the wagon rolling down. They took turns attaching the wagons. It was now Chudakov’s turn. The wagons kept coming and coming, one after the other, and the working day was at its busiest when suddenly Chudakov made a mistake and sent a wagon down before he had attached it to the hawser. “Watch out!” A mine accident! They heard the far-off noise like thunder, then the screech of steel and the sound of props cracking, while clouds of white dust filled the sloping tunnel.

  Chudakov was arrested there and then, but Andreyev went back to barracks. That evening he was summoned to see Kosarenko, the boss.

  Kosarenko was nervously pacing his office.

  “What have you done? What have you done, I’m asking you? Saboteur!”

  “You’re off your head, sir,” said Andreyev. “It was Chudakov who accidentally—”

  “You told him to, you reptile! Saboteur! You’ve stopped the mine!”

  “What have I got to do with it? Nobody has stopped the mine. The mine’s working. . . . Why are you yelling at me?”

  “He doesn’t know! Look at what Koriagin’s written. . . . He’s a party member.”

  An extensive report in Koriagin’s tiny handwriting was actually lying on the boss’s desk.

  “You’ll answer for this!”

  “That’s up to you.”

  “Get out, reptile.”

  Andreyev left. There was a noisy conversation going on in the barracks, in the foremen’s hut. It stopped the moment Andreyev arrived.

  “Who do you want to see?”

  “You, Nikolai Antonovich,” said Andreyev, turning to the senior foreman. “Where am I supposed to go to work tomorrow?”

  “See if you survive until tomorrow,” said Mishka Timoshenko.

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “It’s thanks to eggheads like him that I’ve been sentenced, honestly, Nikolai,” said Misha. “All because of these four-eyes.”

  “Well, you can join Mishka,” said Nikolai Antonovich. “That’s what Koriagin has ordered. If you’re not arrested. Mishka will give you something to whine about.”

  “You should realize where you are,” said Timoshenko severely. “You bloody fascist.”

  “You’re the fascist, fool,” said Andreyev and went off to give a few things to his workmates—spare foot wrappings, and an old, but still wearable cotton scarf, so that if he was arrested he wouldn’t have anything he didn’t need.

  The man on the bunk next to Andreyev’s was Tikhomirov, who had once been the dean of a mining faculty. He worked at the mine as the timberman. The chief engineer was trying to get this professor promoted, if only to foreman, but Svishchev, the boss of the mining district, refused outright and gave his deputy a nasty look.

  “If you appoint Tikhomirov,” Svishchev t
old the chief engineer, “then there’s no reason for you to work at the mine. Got it? And I don’t want to hear that kind of talk again.”

  Tikhomirov was waiting for Andreyev.

  “Well, what’s up?”

  “It’ll all go away,” said Andreyev. “There’s a war going on.”

  Andreyev wasn’t arrested. It turned out that Chudakov refused to lie. He was kept for a month on solitary rations: a mug of water and three hundred grams of bread, but they couldn’t make him write any statements. Chudakov had been in prison before and he knew what all this really amounted to.

  “Why are you telling me what to do?” he told the interrogator. “Andreyev hasn’t done anything wrong. I know how things are done. You can’t see any point in putting me on trial. You want to put Andreyev away. Well, as long as I’m alive, you won’t, we didn’t arrive in the camps yesterday.”

  “Right,” Koriagin told Mishka Timoshenko. “We’re relying on you now. You can deal with this.”

  “Of course I can,” said Timoshenko. “First we’ll get him through the belly, we’ll cut his rations. And if he blabs—”

  “Fool,” said Koriagin. “What’s blabbing got to do with it? Were you born yesterday, or something?”

  Koriagin took Andreyev off work underground. In winter it gets no colder than minus twenty deep down in the mine shaft, when outside it can be minus sixty. Andreyev spent the night shift on the high slag heap, where the ore was piled up. Wagons full of ore came up there from time to time, and Andreyev had to unload them. There weren’t a lot of wagons, but the cold was terrible and even the slightest wind turned the night into a living hell. For the first time since he had come to Kolyma, Andreyev burst into tears. This had never happened to him before, except in his youth, when he received letters from his mother and he was unable to read them or recall them without tears in his eyes. But that had been a long time ago. But why was he weeping here? Helplessness, loneliness, cold—he had gotten used to that and trained himself in the camp to remember verses, to whisper something, to repeat something under his breath, but thinking in subzero temperatures was impossible. The human brain cannot operate below zero.

  After a few icy shifts, Andreyev was back in the mine, rolling wagons, with Kuznetsov as his workmate.

  “I’m glad you’re here!” said Andreyev joyfully. “I’ve been taken back into the mine. What happened with Koriagin?”

  “Well, they say they’ve already got evidence against you. Enough.” said Kuznetsov. “They don’t need any more. So I was allowed back. It’s good to work with you. And Chudakov’s been let out, too. They put him in solitary. He’s like a skeleton. He’ll be working in the bathhouse for the time being. He won’t be working in the mine again.”

  This was important news.

  The prisoner-foremen went back to camp after their shift without an escort guard, once they had produced the reports required of them. Mishka Timoshenko decided to do as he always did, pay a visit to the bathhouse before the workers came from the camp.

  An unfamiliar attendant, all skin and bones, undid the hook and opened the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m Timoshenko.”

  “I can see that.”

  “Less of your lip,” said the foreman. “You haven’t had a taste of my ‘thermometer’ yet: you’ll get one. Go and get some steam up.” Pushing the bath attendant aside, Timoshenko went into the bathhouse. A moist black darkness filled the miners’ bathhouse. Black, soot-stained ceilings, black tubs, black benches along the walls, black windows. The bathhouse was dark and dry, like the mine, and a miner’s Wolf Safety lamp with cracked glass hung there from a hook on a pillar in the middle of the bathhouse, just as it hung from a shaft pillar.

  Mishka quickly got undressed, chose a half-full barrel of cold water and put the steam pipe into it. The bathhouse had its own boiler, and the water was heated by hot steam.

  The skeletal attendant stood on the threshold looking at Timoshenko’s pink, chubby body. He said nothing.

  “The way I like it,” said Timoshenko, “is for the steam to keep on coming. You can warm up the water a bit, I’ll get into the barrel, and then you let the steam in gradually. When it’s right, I’ll knock on the pipe, and then you switch off the steam. The old attendant, the one-eyed one, knew just how I liked it. Where is he?”

  “I don’t know,” replied the skeletal attendant. The attendant’s collarbones could be seen through his tunic.

  “Where are you from?”

  “I’ve been in solitary.”

  “Are you Chudakov, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t recognize you. Lucky you.” The foreman gave a laugh.

  “It’s the solitary that’s made me look like a goner, that’s why you don’t recognize me. Listen, Mishka,” said Chudakov, “but I’ve seen you. . . .”

  “Where?”

  “The other side of the bridge. I heard you’d been singing to the NKVD man.”

  “It’s every man for himself,” said Timoshenko. “The law of the taiga. There’s a war on. And you’re a fool. You’re a fool, Chudakov. You’re a fool, and you’re wet behind the ears. You brought all that on yourself just for that devil Andreyev.”

  “Well, that’s my business,” said the attendant as he left. The steam gushed forth and made the barrel seethe, and the water warmed up. Mishka knocked, and Chudakov switched the steam off.

  Mishka climbed onto a bench and then flopped into the tall, narrow barrel. . . . There were lower barrels and wider ones, but the foreman liked to take a sauna in this particular one. The water came up to Mishka’s neck. Screwing up his eyes with pleasure, the foreman knocked on the pipe. The steam immediately made the water seethe. It grew warmer. Mishka gave the attendant the signal, but the hot steam went on spurting into the pipe. The steam was burning his body, and Timoshenko felt scared: he knocked again, he tried to clamber out, to jump out of the barrel, but it was too narrow, and the iron pipe stopped him climbing out. The white, spurting, thickening steam made it impossible to see anything in the bathhouse. Mishka cried out in a wild voice.

  There was no bath for the workmen that day.

  When the doors and windows were opened, the thick, turbid white mist dispersed. The camp doctor came. Timoshenko was no longer breathing: he had been boiled alive.

  Chudakov was transferred to a different job, and the one-eyed attendant came back—he hadn’t been taken off the job, it was just that he spent a day in group T, temporarily released from work because of illness. He had a temperature.

  1959

  MAY

  THE BOTTOM of a wooden barrel had been knocked out and replaced with a grid made from iron bars. Kazbek the dog lived in the barrel. Sotnikov fed him raw meat and asked anybody who passed by to poke a stick at the dog. Kazbek would growl and gnaw the stick into splinters. Sotnikov, a clerk of works, was training his future chained dog to be vicious.

  Throughout the war the gold had been panned. This was a method used to get gold out of difficult places, and formerly it had been forbidden. Before, only a panner who was working with the prospectors was allowed to wash gold. The daily plan before the war was set in cubic meters of ore, but during the war it was set in grams of metal.

  A one-armed panner deftly used a scraper to rake the earth into the pan, and, when he had rinsed it with water, he would carefully shake the pan over the stream to get rid of the stones that were left. At the bottom of the pan, once the water was gone, there would be a speck of gold. Putting the pan on the ground, the worker would use a fingernail to catch hold of the speck and place it on a piece of paper. The paper was then folded, as if it contained powders from the chemist. A whole brigade of one-armed men, who’d mutilated themselves, washed gold in winter and in summer. Then they handed over the specks of metal, the gold grains, to the mine’s till. That’s what the one-armed men were fed for.

  The interrogator Ivan Vasilievich Yefremov had caught a mysterious murderer. A week ago, in the ge
ology prospectors’ hut, about eight kilometers from the settlement, four dynamiters had been hacked to death. Bread and tobacco had been stolen, but no money had been found. One week later, a Tatar from Ruslanov’s carpentry brigade had been in the workmen’s refectory and had swapped a boiled fish for a pinch of tobacco. There had been no tobacco at the mine since the war began. Green “ammonal,” an incredibly strong wild herb, had been brought in, and an attempt to grow tobacco had been made. Only the free workers had tobacco. The Tatar was arrested. He confessed to everything and even showed where in the forest he had thrown the bloodstained ax into the snow. Yefremov was going to get a big bonus.

  It so happened that the Tatar slept on the bunk next to Andreyev’s. He was the most ordinary, starving lad, a living ghost. Andreyev was also arrested. After two weeks he was released. During that time a lot of new things had happened: Kolka Zhukov had hacked to death the hated foreman Koroliov. That foreman had beaten Andreyev every day in front of the whole brigade. The beatings were done in cold blood, slowly, and Andreyev was afraid of him.

  Andreyev felt in the pocket of his pea jacket for a piece of his ration of white American bread, left over from dinner. There were a thousand ways to prolong one’s enjoyment of it. You could lick the bread until it vanished from your palm, you could nibble crumbs off it, and move it around your mouth with your tongue. You could toast it on the stove, which was always lit, and eat the dark brown, slightly burned pieces of dry bread—not yet rusks, but no longer bread. You could cut the bread with a knife into very thin slices, and then dry them. You could put the bread in hot water then boil it and turn it into a hot soup, a floury mix. You could crumble up pieces in cold water and salt them, which made a sort of bread soup. Any of that had to be done in the quarter of an hour that was left of Andreyev’s lunch break. He had his own way of finishing his bread. In an old tin can he boiled water, fresh melted snow, which was dirty because of the tiny bits of coal or dwarf pine needles that got into the can. Into this white boiling water Andreev would put his bread and wait. The bread would swell up like a sponge, a white sponge. Andreyev used a stick or a splinter to break off hot pieces of this sponge and put them into his mouth, where the soaked bread vanished instantly.