Kolyma Tales

by Varlam Shalamov

  Nobody paid any attention to Andreyev’s tricks. He was one of hundreds of thousands of Kolyma ghosts, goners whose minds had long become unbalanced.

  The porridge came by lend-lease—American oats with sugar. The bread, too, was lend-lease, from Canadian flour with the addition of bonemeal and rice. The bread when it was baked rose unusually well, and none of the bread servers would risk getting the bread ration ready the day before, for every two-hundred-gram piece would lose ten or fifteen grams of weight overnight, and even the most honest bread cutter might turn out to have unintentionally cheated. The white bread left virtually nothing to excrete; the human organism disposed of any surplus just once every few days.

  Soup, the first course, was also lend-lease. Everyone’s dinner bowls had the smell of tinned pork and meat fibers, which looked like tuberculosis bacilli under the microscope.

  There was said to be sausage, too, tinned sausage, but as far as Andreyev was concerned, it was mythical, like the Alpha condensed milk many remembered from their childhood, when it was sent by the American Relief Agency. The Alpha company still existed.

  Red leather boots with thick glued-on soles also came by lend-lease. These leather boots were issued only to the bosses, and not every mining engineer could get this imported footwear. The mine bosses got sets of clothes in boxes too—suits, jackets, shirts, and ties.

  Woolen items, collected by the American people, were also said to be available, but they never reached the prisoners. The wives of the bosses were experts when it came to quality material.

  But the prisoners did get a good supply of working tools. These too came by lend-lease: curved American spades with short, painted handles. The spades lifted a lot of earth; someone had thought hard about the shape. The painted hafts would be knocked out of the spade blades and new ones, straight and long, would be made to fit each man, since the end of the haft had to reach your chin.

  The blacksmiths straightened the spade edge very slightly and then sharpened them. The result was an excellent tool.

  The American axes were very bad. They were hatchets, not axes, like tomahawks from a Mayne Reid novel. They were no good for serious carpentry. Our carpenters were amazed by the lend-lease axes. Clearly, a thousand-year-old tool was dying out.

  The cross-saws were heavy, thick, and awkward to handle.

  But the solidol grease was splendid. It was as white as butter, and it had no smell. The gangsters attempted to sell it as butter, but there was nobody at the mine who could afford it.

  The Studebakers that came through lend-lease traveled up and down the steep Kolyma hills. They were the only trucks in the Far North that could easily cope with the gradients. The enormous Diamond trucks, which also came through lend-lease, could haul a load of ninety tons.

  Our medicines were lend-lease. The drugs were American, so we had our first sight of the early miracle drug, sulphidine. The laboratory glassware was also a gift from America. So were the X-ray machines, the hot water bottles, and the vials. . . .

  Last year, after the Kursk Salient battle, people were already saying that the white American bread would soon be stopped. But Andreyev didn’t listen to the news on the camp grapevine. Whatever would be, would be. Another winter passed. He, a man who never tried to guess the future, was still alive.

  Soon there’d be good old black bread, black bread. Our men were getting close to Berlin.

  “Black bread is better for you,” said the doctors.

  “The Americans must be idiots.”

  At this site that was going to be a working mine there wasn’t a single radio.

  “Infectious murders,” as Voronov used to say. Andreyev remembered the term. Murder was infectious. If a foreman was murdered somewhere, then immediately there’d be imitators, and the foremen would find people to stay on duty and guard them while they slept. But none of that helped. One foreman was hacked to death, another had his head smashed in with a crowbar, a third had his neck sawed through with a two-man saw.

  Only a month previously, Andreyev had been sitting by a bonfire. It was his turn to get warm. The shift was ending, the fire was going out, and it was the turn of four prisoners to sit around the fire, bending over it and stretching their hands to the dying flames, the departing warmth. Each man almost touched the glowing coals with his bare hands and frostbitten fingers that had lost their feeling. A white haze loomed behind them, their shoulders and backs shivered with cold, which made them want to press even closer to the fire. It was too frightening to straighten up and look around. They didn’t have the strength to get up and go to their places, each to his open pit, where they were drilling and drilling. . . . They didn’t have the strength to stand up and get away from the foreman who was now approaching.

  Andreyev idly considered what the foreman would hit him with, if he decided to use violence. Probably a piece of burning wood or a stone . . . the burning wood was more likely. . . .

  The foreman was now only ten meters from the bonfire. Suddenly a man carrying a crowbar appeared from the open pit, near the path the foreman was taking. The man caught up with the foreman, and waved the crowbar at him. The foreman fell down, face forward. The man threw the crowbar down on the snow and walked past the bonfire where Andreyev and the three other workmen were sitting. He went on to the big bonfire where the escort guards were warming themselves.

  During the murder Andreyev didn’t move a muscle. None of the four men got up. They didn’t have the strength to move away from the fire and the vanishing warmth. Each man wanted to sit there until the end, until the minute when they were chased off. But there was nobody to chase them off, because the foreman had been murdered. Andreyev was happy, as were his comrades that day.

  With a final effort from his poor, starving brain, his desiccated brain, Andreyev realized that he had to find a way out of this. He didn’t want to share the fate of the one-armed gold panners. He had once sworn never to be a foreman, not to try and save himself by taking on dangerous camp jobs. His path was a different one: no thieving, no beating up his workmates, no reporting on them. Andreyev waited patiently.

  This morning the new foreman had sent Andreyev to fetch ammonite, a yellow powder the blasters poured into paper packets. Women prisoners worked at the big ammonite plant where the shipping and packing of explosives from the mainland was done. The work was considered easy. The ammonite plant left its mark on its workers: their hair became golden, as if they’d used hydrogen peroxide.

  The little iron stove in the blasters’ hut was fueled with yellow pieces of ammonite.

  Andreyev showed his warden’s note, unbuttoned his pea jacket, and unwound his ragged scarf.

  “I need new foot wrappings, men,” he said. “Give me a sack.”

  “Our sacks won’t do,” a young blaster began to say, but his elbow was jolted by an older man, and he fell silent.

  “We’ll give you a sack,” said the older blaster. “Here you are.”

  Andreyev took off his scarf and gave it to the blaster. Then he ripped up the sack to make foot wrappings and wrapped them around his legs, in the peasant way, for there are three ways of “turning” foot wrappings: peasant, army, and city.

  Andreyev wrapped them the peasant way, throwing the wrapping onto the foot from above. It was hard to press his feet into his soft boots, but he did and got up, took the box of ammonite, and left. His feet were hot, his throat was cold. He knew that neither feeling would last for long. He handed the ammonite to the warden and went back to the bonfire. He had to wait for the warden to reappear.

  Finally, the warden came up to the bonfire.

  “Let’s have a smoke,” several voices quickly said.

  “Some of you will, some of you won’t,” said the warden, hitching up the heavy hem of his fur jacket and taking out a tin of tobacco.

  Only now did Andreyev unwrap the rags that kept his boots on, and take his boots off.

  “Good foot wrappings,” said someone, who was wrapped in rags. as he pointed to Andreyev
’s feet, which were wrapped with pieces of solid, shiny sackcloth. The remark was without envy.

  Andreyev made himself as comfortable as he could, moved his legs, and yelled out. A yellow flame flared up. His foot wrappings, soaked in ammonite, were burning slowly, but brightly. His trousers and quilted jacket had caught fire and were smoldering. His neighbors dashed to one side. The warden rolled Andreyev onto his back and piled snow over him.

  “How did you do that, you reptile?”

  “Send for a horse. And fill in an accident form.”

  “It’ll be dinner soon, perhaps you can hang on. . . .”

  “No, I can’t,” Andreyev lied, shutting his eyes.

  In the hospital Andreyev’s legs were washed down with warm permanganate solution and, without any bandaging, he was put on a bunk. The blanket was stretched over a frame, so that it all looked like a tent. Andreyev was guaranteed a hospital bed for a long time.

  Toward evening the doctor came into the ward.

  “Listen, you convicts,” he said. “The war’s over. It ended a week ago. A second courier has come from the administration. They say the first courier was murdered by escaped prisoners.”

  But Andreyev wasn’t listening to the doctor. He was coming down with a fever.

  1959

  IN THE BATHHOUSE

  IN THE unkindly jokes that are unique to the camps, the bathhouse is often called “unfair.” “The freiers are yelling ‘Unfair’—the boss is making them go to the bathhouse” is the usual, traditional as it were, irony that stems from the gangsters, who don’t miss a thing. There is a bitter truth behind this jocular remark.

  For prisoners the bathhouse is always a negative event that makes their lives even harder. This observation is yet another proof of the distortion of values, a distortion that is the most important and basic quality the camp instills in anyone who ends up there to serve their punishment, or “term,” as Dostoevsky put it.

  You might wonder how this can be. Avoiding the bathhouse was a constant puzzle to doctors and all the authorities, who saw absenteeism from the bathhouse as a kind of protest, a disciplinary offense, a challenge to the camp regime. But facts are facts. For years, making people go to the bathhouse was an event in the camp. The escort guards were mobilized and given instructions. All the bosses, not to mention the doctors, took a personal part in catching those who tried to refuse. Seeing that men went to the bathhouse and disinfecting their underwear in the disinfection chamber were outright obligations in the sanitary department service. All the lower orders of the camp administration, prisoners such as the elders and labor supervisors, also abandoned all other things to devote their attention to the bathhouse. Lastly, the bosses in charge of production were inevitably involved in this major question. On bath days (there were three a month) a whole series of measures were taken affecting production.

  On such days everyone was on their feet from early morning to late at night.

  What was at stake? Surely anyone, no matter how destitute his state, would not refuse to wash in the bathhouse, to sluice off the dirt and sweat that covered his skin, a skin eroded by diseases, so as to feel cleaner, if only for an hour?

  There is a Russian saying: “Happy, as if straight from the bathhouse.” This saying is accurate, and it reflects exactly the physical bliss that a man with a clean, freshly washed body feels.

  Could people have lost their reason so completely that they don’t understand, or refuse to understand, that it’s better to be louse-free than lousy? And there were a lot of lice, and it was almost impossible to exterminate them without the disinfection chamber, especially for those living in tightly packed barracks.

  Of course, louse infection is a concept that needs defining. Just a dozen or so lice in your underwear is not considered something worth worrying about. Louse infection begins to worry your workmates and doctors when they can be shaken off your clothes, when a woolen sweater moves around by itself, as the lice nesting there shake it around.

  So would anyone, whoever he may be, not want to be rid of this agony, an agony that keeps you from sleep and, in trying to fight it, makes you scratch your filthy body until it bleeds?

  Of course not. But the first “but” is the fact that you do not get a day off work when you go to the bathhouse. You are taken there after work, or before work. After many hours working in subzero temperatures (not that it is any easier in summer), when all your thoughts and hopes are focused on the desire to get back somehow, as fast as you can, to your bunks, to your food, and to get to sleep, the delay in the bathhouse is almost unbearable. The bathhouse is always a considerable distance from your living quarters. That’s because it serves not just the prisoners but the free workers from the settlement, which is why it is in the free settlement, not the camp.

  Delays in the bathhouse are far more than the hour or so assigned for washing and disinfecting clothes. There are a lot of people using it, one group after another, and all those who arrive late (they are taken to the bathhouse straight from work, without stopping in the camp, where they would scatter and find some pretext or other to get out of bathing) have to wait their turn in the freezing cold. When the temperature is very low, the bosses try and reduce the time the prisoners spend outside, so they are allowed into the changing room, which has room for ten to fifteen men, and yet about a hundred men wearing their outer clothing are herded in there. The changing room is unheated, or heated very badly. Everything gets mixed up there: naked men and men wearing fur jackets, all jostling, cursing, and making an uproar. Thieves, and people who are not thieves, exploit the noise and packed conditions to steal their workmates’ things (after all, other brigades, which live separately, have arrived, so that it is never possible to retrieve anything stolen). There is nowhere safe to leave your things.

  The second, or rather the third, “but” is the fact that the staff is obliged, while a brigade is taking a bath, to carry out a cleanup in the barracks, under the supervision of the sanitary department. They have to sweep it, wash it, and throw out anything not needed. But in the camps every rag is precious, and you have to use up a lot of energy to get hold of spare gloves, spare foot wrappings, not to mention less portable things, and of course, food. All this disappears without a trace, and perfectly legally, while the bathhouse is in operation. It is pointless to take your spare things with you and then to the bathhouse: the gangsters’ sharp practiced eyes will quickly spot them. Any thief is desperate for a cigarette, which he can get in exchange for gloves or foot wrappings.

  It is human nature, whether a beggar’s or a Nobel laureate’s, rapidly to acquire small objects. Every time they move somewhere new (not necessarily prisons), everyone finds they have so many small objects that they are astounded how and from where they accumulated so much. These things get given away, sold, thrown out, until with great difficulty they are reduced to the point that the suitcase lid can be slammed shut. Prisoners accumulate things in the same way. They are, after all, workers. They need to have a needle, cloth for patching, and an old spare bowl, perhaps. All that would get thrown away, and after every visit to the bathhouse people had to start collecting their “household goods” again, unless they had managed first to bury it all somewhere deep under the snow, and then pull it out twenty-four hours later.

  In Dostoevsky’s times you were given just one tub of hot water (the freiers had to buy anything else), and this norm still applies today. A wooden tub of not very hot water and an unlimited amount of stinging pieces of ice, which are thrown into the barrel and which stick to your hand. Just the tub—you get no second full jug to mix with the water—that’s the complete ration of water with which a prisoner has to wash his head and his body. In summer, instead of ice, you are given cold water, but at least it’s water, not ice.

  You could say that a prisoner should know how to wash himself regardless of the amount of water, from a spoonful to a tankful. If he only gets a spoonful, then he will wash his eyes, which are stuck together with pus, and will consid
er he has completed his toilet. If he gets a whole tank, then he’ll splash the people around him and change the water every minute, so that he can somehow contrive to use his ration in the time allotted. There are also ways and unwritten technical instructions for using a jug, a ladle, or a basin full of water.

  All that shows the ingenuity with which such everyday questions as the bathhouse are dealt with. But, of course, that doesn’t solve the problem of keeping clean. The dream of washing yourself in the bathhouse is an unattainable dream.

  In the actual bathhouse, which is characterized by the same noise, smoke, shouts, and lack of space (“shouting as in the bathhouse” is a much-used expression), there’s never any spare water, and nobody can buy any extra. But not only water is in short supply. There’s a lack of warmth. The iron stoves are not always stoked to burn red-hot, and in the bath (in the overwhelming majority of cases) it’s just cold. This feeling of cold is made much worse by the thousands of drafts coming from the doors and the cracks in the walls. The buildings are, like any wooden structure, caulked with moss, which quickly turns dry and crumbly, so that holes to the outside appear. Every bath day brings the risk of catching a chill, and everyone (including, of course, the doctors) knows that. After each bath day the number of prisoners let off work because of illness, the number of really ill people, increases, and all the doctors know it.

  Let us not forget that the bathhouse firewood is brought the evening before, on the shoulders of the brigade that is going to the bathhouse, and that again delays any return to the barracks by a couple of hours and doesn’t lessen people’s dread of the bathhouse.