Kolyma Tales (20 page)

He had come to the conclusion that the taiga had been depopulated during the quarantine; cold, hunger, exhausting workdays, and sleeplessness must have deprived the taiga of people. That meant that trucks with prisoners would be sent to the mines from quarantine. (Official telegrams read: ‘Send 200 trees.’) Only when all the mines had been filled again would they begin sending people to other places – and not to dig gold in the taiga. Andreev did not care where he was sent. Just as long as it wasn’t to mine gold.

Andreev did not say a word about this to anyone. He did not consult with Ognyov or Parfentyev, his comrade from the mines, or with any of the thousand people who lay with him on those warehouse shelves. He knew that, if he were to tell them of his plan, any one of them would rush to tell the camp authorities – for praise, for a cigarette butt, for no reason at all… He knew what a heavy burden it was to keep a secret, but he could do it. Only if he told no one would he be free of fear. It was two, three, four times easier for him to slip alone through the teeth of this machine. The game was his alone; that was something he had learned at the mine.

Andreev ‘did not respond’ for many days. As soon as the quarantine was up, convicts were again used for work assignments, and the trick was not to be included in the large groups, since they were usually sent to do earth-moving with picks, axes, and shovels. In smaller groups of two or three persons it was easier to earn an extra piece of bread or even some sugar; Andreev had not seen sugar for more than a year and a half. His strategy was simple and accurate. All these jobs were, of course, a violation of regulations in the transit prison, but there were many people who wanted to take advantage of free labor. People assigned to earth-moving details hoped to be able to beg for some tobacco or bread. And they succeeded – even from passers-by. Andreev would go to the vegetable storage areas, where he could .eat his fill of beets and carrots and bring ‘home’ a few raw potatoes, which he would cook in the ashes of the stove and eat half-raw. Conditions demanded that all nutritional ‘functions’ be performed quickly; there were too many hungry people around.

Andreev’s days were filled with activity and began to acquire a certain meaning. He had to stand in the cold every morning for two hours, listening to the scheduling officer call out names. And when the daily sacrifice had been made to Moloch, everyone would tramp back into the barracks, from where they would be taken to work.

Andreev worked at the bakery, carried garbage at the women’s transit prison, and washed floors in the guards’ quarters, where he would gather up the sticky, delicious meat leftovers from the officers’ tables. When work was over, mountains of bread and large basins of starchy fruit pudding would be brought to the kitchen, and everyone would sit down, eat, and stuff their pockets with bread.

Most of all Andreev preferred to be sent alone, but that happened rarely. His small-group strategy failed him only once. One day the assignment man, who remembered Andreev’s face (but knew him as Muravyov), said to him:

‘I found you a job you’ll never forget – chopping wood for the camp director. There’ll be two of you.’

Joyously the two men ran ahead of the guard, who was wearing a cavalry overcoat. The guard slipped, stumbled, jumped over puddles, holding the tails of his coat with both hands. They soon reached a small house with a locked gate and barbed wire strung along the top of the fence. The camp director’s orderly opened the gate, took them without a word to the woodshed, closed the door, and loosed an enormous German shepherd into the yard. The dog kept them locked up until they had cut and split all the wood in the shed. Later that evening they were taken back to camp. They were to be sent back to do the same job the next day, but Andreev hid under his bunk and did no work at all that day.

The next morning, before bread was distributed, a simple idea occurred to Andreev, and he immediately acted upon it. He took off his boots and put them on the edge of the shelf, soles outward, so that it looked as though he himself was lying on the bunk with his boots on. Then he lay down next to them, propping his head on his forearms.

The man distributing bread quickly counted off ten persons and gave Andreev an extra portion of bread. Nevertheless, this method was not reliable, and Andreev again began to seek work outside the barracks.

Did he think of his family? No. Of freedom? No. Did he recite poetry from memory? No. Did he recall the past? No. He lived in a distracted bitterness, and nothing more.

It was then that Andreev came upon Captain Schneider.

The professional criminals had occupied a place close to the stove. Their bunks were spread with dirty quilts and pillows of various sizes. A quilt is the inevitable companion of any successful thief, the only object that he carries with him from prison to prison. If a thief does not own a quilt, he will steal one or take it away from another prisoner. As for the pillow, it is not only a rest for his head, but it can be quickly converted into a table for endless card battles. Such a table can be given any form. But it is still a pillow. Card-players will lose their pants before they will part with their pillows.

The more prominent criminals, that is, those who were the most prominent at that moment, were sitting on the quilts and pillows. Higher up, on the third shelf, where it was dark, lay other pillows and quilts. It was there that the criminals maintained the young effeminate thieves and their various other companions. Almost all the thieves were homosexuals.

The hardened criminals were surrounded by a crowd of vassals and lackeys, for the criminals considered it fashionable to be interested in ‘novels’ narrated orally by prisoners of literary inclination. And even in these conditions there were court barbers with bottles of perfume and a throng of sycophants eager to perform any service in exchange for a piece of bread or a bowl of soup.

‘Shut up! Senechka is talking. Be quiet! Senechka wants to sleep…’

It had been a familiar scene back at the mine.

Suddenly, among the crowd of beggars and the retinue of criminals, Andreev saw a familiar face and recognized the man’s voice. There was no doubt about it – it was Captain Schneider, Andreev’s cellmate in Butyr Prison.

Captain Schneider was a German communist who had been active in the Comintern, spoke beautiful Russian, was an expert on Goethe and an educated Marxist theoretician. Andreev’s memory had preserved conversations with Schneider, intense conversations that took place during the long prison nights. A naturally cheerful person, this former sea captain kept the entire cell in good spirits.

Andreev could not believe his eyes.

‘Schneider!’

‘What do you want?’ the captain turned around. His dull blue eyes showed no recognition of Andreev.

‘Schneider!’

‘So what do you want? You’ll wake up Senechka.’

But already the edge of the blanket had been lifted, and the light revealed a pale, unhealthy face.

‘Ah, captain,’ came Senechka’s tenor voice with a languid tone. ‘I can’t fall asleep without you…’

‘Right away, I’m coming,’ Schneider said hurriedly.

He climbed up on the shelf, folded back the edge of the blanket, sat down, and put his hand under the blanket to scratch Senechka’s heels.

Andreev walked slowly to his place. He had no desire to go on living. Even though this was a trivial event by comparison with that which he had seen and was still destined to witness, he never forgot Captain Schneider.

The number of people kept decreasing. The transit prison was being emptied. Andreev came face to face with the assignment man.

‘What’s your name?’

Andreev, however, had prepared himself for such an occurrence.

‘Gurov,’ he replied meekly.

‘Wait!’

The assignment man leafed through the onion-sheet lists.

‘No, it’s not here.’

‘Can I go?’

‘Go ahead, you animal!’ the scheduling officer roared.

Once he was assigned to wash dishes and clean up the cafeteria for people who had served their sentences and who were about to be released. His partner was one of those goners who were so emaciated they were known as ‘wicks’. The man had just been released from prison, and it was difficult to determine his age. It was the first time this goner had worked. He kept asking what they should do, would they be fed, was it all right to ask for something to eat before they began work.

The man said he was a professor of neuropathology, and Andreev recognized his name.

Andreev knew from experience that camp cooks (and not only camp cooks) did not like these ‘Ivan Ivanoviches’, as the intellectuals were contemptuously nicknamed. He advised the professor not to ask for anything in advance and gloomily thought that he himself would have to do most of the work, since the professor was too weak. This was only just, and there was no reason to be offended; Andreev himself had been a bad, weak ‘partner’ any number of times, and no one had ever said a word to him. Where were they all now? Where were Scheinin, Riutin, Khvostov? They had all died, and he alone, Andreev, had been resurrected. Of course, his resurrection was yet to come, but he would return to life.

Andreev’s suspicions were confirmed: the professor was a weak, albeit fussy partner.

When the work was finished, the cook sat them down and placed an enormous tub of thick fish soup and a large plate of kasha before them. The professor threw up his hands in delight, but Andreev had seen men at the mines eat twenty meals, each consisting of three dishes and bread. He cast a suspicious glance at the proffered refreshments.

‘No bread?’ Andreev asked gloomily.

‘Of course there’s bread – a little.’ And the cook took two pieces of bread from a cupboard.

They quickly polished off the food. On such ‘visits’ the prudent Andreev always saved his bread in his pocket. The professor, on the contrary, gulped the soup, broke off pieces of bread, and chewed it while large drops of dirty sweat formed on his shaven gray head.

‘Here’s a ruble for each of you,’ the cook said. ‘I don’t have any more bread today.’

This was magnificent payment. There was a commissary at the transit prison, where the civilians could buy bread. Andreev told the professor about this.

‘Yes, you’re right,’ the professor said. ‘But I saw that they also sold sweet
kvas
there. Or was it lemonade? I really want some lemonade, anything sweet.’

‘It’s up to you, professor, but if I were you, I’d buy bread.’

‘Yes, I know, you’re right,’ the professor repeated, ‘but I really want some sweet lemonade. Why don’t you get some too?’

Andreev rejected that suggestion out of hand.

Ultimately Andreev managed to get himself assigned to washing floors alone at the bookkeeping office. Every evening he would meet the orderly, whose duties included keeping the office clean. These were two tiny rooms crowded with desks, each of which occupied more than four square yards. The work took only about ten minutes, and at first Andreev could not understand why the orderly ‘hired’ someone to do the job. The orderly had to carry water through the entire camp himself, and clean rags were always prepared in advance when Andreev came. The payment was generous – cheap tobacco, soup, kasha, bread, and sugar. The orderly even promised to give Andreev a light jacket, but Andreev’s stay came to an end before he managed to do that.

Evidently the orderly viewed washing floors as shameful so long as he could hire some ‘hard worker’ to do it for him – even if it required only five minutes a day. Andreev had observed this characteristic in Russian people at the mines. If the head of the camp gave an orderly a handful of tobacco to clean the barracks, the orderly would dump half the tobacco into his pouch, and with the other half would hire a ‘political’ to do the job for him. The latter, in turn, would again divide up the tobacco and hire someone from his barracks for two hand-rolled cigarettes. This man, who had just finished a twelve- or fourteen-hour shift, would wash the floor at night for these two cigarettes and consider himself lucky; he could trade the cigarettes for bread.

Currency questions represent the most complex area of camp economy. Standards of measurement are amazing. Tea, tobacco, and bread are the exchangeable, ‘hard’ currencies.

On occasion the orderly would pay Andreev with coupons redeemable in the kitchen. These were rubber-stamped pieces of cardboard that worked rather like tokens – ten dinners, five main courses, and so on. When the orderly gave Andreev a token worth twenty portions of kasha, the twenty portions did not cover the bottom of a tin basin.

Andreev watched the professional criminals shove bright yellow thirty-ruble notes through the window, folded to look like tokens. This tactic always produced results. A large bowl filled to the brim with kasha would inevitably emerge from the window in response to such a token.

There were fewer and fewer people left in the transit prison. Finally the day arrived when the last truck was dispatched from the yard, and only two or three dozen men remained in camp.

This time they were not dismissed to the barracks but were grouped in military formation and led through the entire camp.

‘Whatever they intend to do, they can’t be taking us to be shot,’ an enormous one-eyed man next to Andreev said.

This was precisely what Andreev had been thinking: they couldn’t be taking them to be shot. All the remaining prisoners were brought to the assignment man in the bookkeeping office.

‘We’re going to take your fingerprints,’ the assignment man said as he came out on to the porch.

‘Well, if it’s come to that, you can have me without raising a finger,’ the one-eyed man said cheerfully. ‘My name is Filipovsky.’

‘How about you?’

‘Pavel Andreev.’

The assignment man found their files.

‘We’ve been looking for you for a long time,’ he said without a trace of anger.

Andreev knew that he had won his battle for life. It was simply impossible for the taiga not to have sated its hunger for people. Even if they were to be shipped off, it would be to some nearby, local site. It might even be in the town itself. That would be even better. Andreev had been classified only for ‘light physical labor’, but he knew how abruptly such a classification could be changed. It was not his classification that would save him, but the fact that the taiga’s orders had already been filled. Only local sites, where life was easier, simpler, less hungry, were still waiting for their final deliveries. There were no gold-mines in the area, and that meant there was hope for survival. This Andreev had learned during the two years he had spent at the mines and these three months in quarantine, spent under animal-like tension. Too much had been accomplished for his hopes not to be realized.