Kolyma Tales (13 page)

The representative looks me over – my torn pea jacket, a filthy buttonless military shirt which reveals a dirty body scratched bloody from louse bites, rags around my fingers, other rags tied with string around my feet (in an area where the temperature drops to seventy-five degrees below zero), inflamed hungry eyes, and an incredibly emaciated condition. He has seen this sort of thing before, and he knows what it means. He takes a red pencil and crosses out my name with a firm hand.

‘Go on back, you son of a bitch,’ the assignment man says to me.

The door swings open, and I am again inside the minor zone. My place on the bunk has been taken, but I drag out the intruder. He growls from habit but soon calms down.

I fall asleep as if knocked unconscious but awake at the first rustle. I have learned to wake up like a wild man or a beast – without any intermediate drowsy stage.

When I open my eyes, I see a slippered foot hanging from the upper bunk. The slipper is totally worn out, but it is nevertheless a slipper, and not a regulation-issue shoe. A dirty boy, who has been consorting with the professional criminals in camp, appears before me and addresses someone above me in the effeminate voice cultivated by many of the homosexuals:

‘Tell Valyusha,’ he says to some unseen person on the upper berth, ‘that they brought in some performers…’

After a pause, a hoarse voice responds from above:

‘Valyusha wants to know who they are.’

‘They’re performers from the Cultural Division. A magician and two singers. One of the singers is from Harbin.’

The slipper stirs and disappears. The voice from above says:

‘Bring them here.’

From the edge of my bunk I see three men standing under the lamp – two in pea jackets and one in a fur-lined jacket. The faces of all three express reverence.

‘Which one is from Harbin?’ the voice asks.

‘I am,’ the man in the fur-lined jacket answers.

‘Valyusha says you should sing something.’

‘In Russian? French? Italian? English?’ the singer asks, stretching his neck.

‘Valyusha says it should be in Russian.’

‘What about the guards? Is it all right if I sing quietly?’

‘Don’t worry about them… Do it right – just like in Harbin.’

The singer steps back a few paces and sings ‘The Toreador’ couplets. His breath frosts each time he exhales.

The singing is followed by a deep growl, and the voice from above commands:

‘Valyusha says to sing a song.’

The singer grows pale and tries again:

‘Valyusha says that was good,’ the voice utters from above.

The singer sighs in relief. Wet from nervousness, his steaming forehead looks as if it were surrounded by a halo. The singer wipes his brow with his palm, and the halo disappears.

‘Now take off your jacket,’ the voice says. ‘Here’s a replacement.’ A padded coat is tossed down from above.

The singer silently takes off his jacket and puts on the padded coat.

‘You can go now,’ the voice says from above. ‘Valyusha wants to sleep.’

The Harbin singer and his companions disappear in the barracks’ fog.

I move back from the edge of the bunk, curl up, and fall asleep with my hands pushed up in the sleeves of my padded coat. In what seems like no more than a moment, however, I am awakened by a loud, emotional whispering:

‘My friend and I were walking down a street in Ulan-Bator. It was time to eat, and there was a Chinese cafeteria on the corner. We went in and saw they had Chinese meat pies on the menu. I’m from Siberia, and I know our Siberian meat pies – the kind they make in the Urals. But these were Chinese. We decided to order a hundred. The Chinese manager burst out laughing; said that would be a lot and grinned from ear to ear. Well, how about ten? He kept laughing; said that would be a lot. So we ordered two. He shrugged his shoulders, went off to the kitchen, and brought them out. Each one was the size of your hand and had hot grease poured all over it. The two of us ate half of one and left.’

‘Let me tell you what happened to me one time…’

It takes a considerable effort of the will to stop listening and fall asleep again.

The smell of smoke awakens me. Above me, in the criminal kingdom, they are smoking. Someone with a home-made cigar climbs down, and the pungent aroma wakes everyone below.

Again I hear a whispering: ‘You can’t imagine how many cigarette butts there were back at the Party Regional Office in Severnoye. My God, oh, my God! Aunt Polly, our cleaning lady, was constantly complaining that she couldn’t get everything swept up. And I didn’t even understand what a butt was back then…’

I fall asleep again.

Someone jerks my foot. It is the assignment man. His inflamed eyes are furious. At his command, I come out into the yellow strip of light by the door.

‘All right,’ he says, ‘so you don’t want to go to the mine.’

I am silent.

‘How about a warm collective farm, damn you! I’d go myself.’

‘No.’

‘How about a road gang? To tie brooms. Think about it.’

‘I know your brooms,’ I say. ‘Today I tie brooms, and tomorrow they bring me a wheelbarrow.’

‘Just what do you want?’

‘To go to the hospital. I’m sick.’

The assignment man writes something in his notebook and goes away. Three days later a medic comes to the minor zone and calls for me. He measures my temperature, looks at the ulcers on my back, and rubs in some sort of ointment.

He had to borrow a pea jacket from a friend for this evening’s journey. Vaska’s own pea jacket was too dirty and torn for him to take two steps through the civilian village. Anyone might stop him.

People like Vaska could pass through the village only two by two, with a guard. Neither the local military types nor the civilian non-convicts liked to see his kind walk alone on the village streets. His kind didn’t cause suspicion only when carrying firewood.

A small log was buried in the snow near the garage – next to the sixth telegraph pole from the corner, in the ditch. That had been done yesterday after work.

The driver slowed the truck, and, leaning over the edge of the bed, Vaska slid to the ground. He at once found the place where he had buried the log. The bluish snow was darker there and slightly packed down; you could see that in the early twilight. Vaska jumped into the ditch and kicked the snow aside. The log appeared – gray and flat like a large frozen fish. Vaska dragged the log out on to the road, stood it upright, tapped it to knock off the snow, and bent down to put his shoulder under it as he lifted it with his hands. He strode off to the village, changing shoulders from time to time. He was weak and exhausted, and he warmed up from the exercise right away, but the warmth didn’t last long. In spite of the weight of the log, Vaska could not stay warm. Twilight thickened into a white fog, and the village lit all its yellow electric lights. Vaska smiled, pleased with his calculation; in the white fog he would easily reach his goal unnoticed. There was the enormous broken larch tree and the stump, silver in the fog. That meant it was the next house.

Vaska threw the log down by the porch, brushed the snow from his felt boots with his mittens, and knocked at the door, which opened to admit him. An elderly bare-headed woman in an unbuttoned sheepskin coat stared at him anxiously as if awaiting an explanation.

‘I brought you some wood,’ Vaska said, struggling to spread the frozen skin of his face into the creases of a smile. ‘Could I speak to Ivan Petrovich?’

But Ivan Petrovich was already on the way out, holding the curtain up with his hand.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

‘Outside,’ Vaska said.

‘Wait and we’ll saw it up. Let me get dressed.’ Ivan Petrovich took a long time hunting for his mittens. The two men went out on to the porch and cut the log in half without any saw-horses, holding it between their legs and raising it with their hands when necessary. The saw was dull and badly set.

‘You can come by some other time,’ Ivan Petrovich said, ‘and set the teeth. Here’s a splitting axe. Bring it right into the apartment when you’re done. Don’t leave it in the corridor.’

Vaska’s head was spinning from hunger, but he split the log into smaller pieces and carried them all into the house.

‘Well, that’s all,’ the woman said, coming out from behind the curtain. ‘That’s all.’

Vaska would not leave but stood shifting from one foot to the other. Ivan Petrovich appeared again.

‘Listen,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any bread just now. We gave all the soup to the pigs, so I don’t have anything to give you. You can drop by next week…’

Vaska remained silent but would not leave.

Ivan Petrovich searched through his wallet.

‘Here’s three rubles for you. Just for you, for such good wood. As for tobacco, you know it’s really expensive nowadays.’

Vaska stuck the wrinkled three-ruble note inside his shirt and left. Three rubles wouldn’t buy even a pinch of tobacco.

Nauseous from hunger, he remained standing on the porch. The pigs had eaten Vaska’s bread and soup. Vaska took out the green three-ruble note and tore it into tiny shreds. For a long time shreds of paper, seized by the wind, blew along the shining, polished snow crust. And when the last fragments had disappeared in the white fog, Vaska stepped down from the porch. Swaying slightly from weakness, he walked – not home, but through the village. He kept walking and walking – past one-storied, two-storied, and three-storied palaces…

He walked up to the first porch and jerked the door handle. The door squeaked and gave way. Vaska walked into a dark corridor dimly lit by a dull electric bulb. He walked past the apartment doors. At the end of the corridor was a storage room, and Vaska leaned against the door, opened it, and stepped over the threshold. In the storeroom stood some sacks of onion, and perhaps salt. Vaska ripped open one of the sacks – barley. Angry and excited, he sank his shoulder into the sack and pushed it aside. Under the sack lay frozen hog carcasses. Vaska yelped with joy, but he was too weak to tear even a hunk from one of the carcasses. Farther back, under the sacks, lay frozen suckling pigs, and Vaska could see nothing else. He ripped free one of the frozen suckling pigs and, holding it in his arms like a baby, moved toward the door. But people were already coming out of the rooms, and white fog was filling the corridor. Someone shouted ‘Stop!’ and dived at his legs. Vaska jumped upward, clutching the piglet in his arms, and ran out into the street. The residents of the house ran after him. Someone shot at him, someone bellowed like a beast, but Vaska ran on, seeing nothing. In a few minutes he realized that his legs were taking him of their own accord to the only official building that he knew in the village – the headquarters for ‘vitamin’ expeditions, where Vaska had himself once worked as a gatherer of dwarf cedar, the needles of which were boiled for vitamin C.

The chase was close. Leaping up on to the porch, Vaska pushed the man on duty aside, and rushed down the corridor, the crowd hot on his heels. He ran to the office of the recreation officer and from there fled through a different door – to the lounge. There was no place else to run. Only then did Vaska realize that he had lost his hat. The frozen piglet was still in his hands. Vaska put the pig down, overturned the massive benches, and propped the door shut with them. Then he dragged the podium up against the doors as well. Someone shook the door handle, and silence ensued.

There and then Vaska sat down on the floor, took the raw piglet in both hands and started to gnaw.

When the guards arrived, the doors were opened, and the barricade was removed. Vaska had eaten half of the pig.

Two squirrels the color of the sky but with black faces and tails were totally absorbed by something going on beyond the silver larch trees. I walked nearly up to their tree before they noticed me. Their claws scratched at the bark, and their blue shadows scampered upward. Somewhere high above they fell silent, fragments of bark stopped falling on the snow, and I saw what they had been watching.

A man was praying in the forest clearing. His cloth hat lay at his feet, and the frost had already whitened his close-cropped head. There was an extraordinary expression on his face – the kind people have when they recollect something extremely precious, such as childhood. The man crossed himself with quick, broad gestures as if using his fingers to pull his head down. His expression so altered his features that I did not immediately recognize him. It was the convict Zamiatin, a priest who lived in the same barracks as I.

He had not yet seen me, and his lips, numb from the cold, were quietly and solemnly pronouncing the words that I had learned as a child. Zamiatin was saying mass in the silver forest.

Slowly he crossed himself, straightened up, and saw me. Solemnity and tranquility disappeared from his face, and the accustomed wrinkles returning to his forehead drew his eyebrows together. Zamiatin did not like mockery. He picked up his hat, shook it, and put it on.

‘You were saying the liturgy,’ I said.

‘No, no,’ Zamiatin said, smiling at my ignorance. ‘How could I say mass? I don’t have bread and wine or my stole. This is just a regulation-issue towel.’

He shifted the dirty ‘waffled’ rag that hung around his neck and really did create the impression of a priest’s stole. The cold had covered the towel with snowy crystals which glimmered joyously in the sun like the embroidery on a church vestment.

‘Besides, I’m ashamed. I don’t know which way is east. The sun rises for two hours and sets behind the same mountain where it rose in the morning. Where is the east?’

‘Is it all that important to know where the east is?’

‘No, of course not. Don’t leave. I tell you, I’m not saying mass, and I can’t say one. I’m simply repeating, remembering the Sunday service. I don’t even know if today is Sunday.’