The Gulag Archipelago (80 page)

In 1949 he was chief of staff of a parachute regiment in Po- lotsk. Major Koverchenko was very much disliked by the Political Branch of the division because he had
failed
the political indoc- trination course. He had once asked them to recommend him for admission to the Military Academy, but when they gave him the recommendation, he took one look at it and threw it back across the table at them: "With that kind of recommendation the place for me to go is not the Academy but to the
Banderovtsy
[the Ukrainian nationalist rebels]." (Was he arrested for that? He might very well have gotten a
tenner
for it, but he got away with it.) At that point, on top of all the rest, it turned out that he had given one of his men an unwarranted leave. And then he himself drove a truck at breakneck speed while drunk and wrecked it. And so they gave him ten—ten days in the guardhouse. How- ever, his own men, who loved him with absolute devotion, were the guards, and they let him out of the guardhouse to go and have fun in the village. So he could have been patient through that guardhouse stretch too. But the Political Branch began to threaten him with a trial! Now that threat shocked and insulted Kover- chenko; it meant: for burying bombs—Ivan, we need you; but for a lousy one-and-a-half-ton truck—off to prison with you? He crawled out the window at night, went over to the Dvina River, where a friend's motorboat was hidden, and off he went in it.

And it turned out that he wasn't just one more drunk with a short memory: he wanted to avenge himself for everything the Political Branch had done to him; and in Lithuania he left his boat and went to the Lithuanians, saying: "Brothers, take me to your partisans! Accept me and you won't be sorry; we'll twist their tails." But the Lithuanians decided he was being planted on them.

Ivan had a letter of credit sewn in his clothes. He got a ticket to the Kuban. However, en route to Moscow he got very drunk in a restaurant. Consequently, he squinched up his eyes at Moscow as they were leaving the station, and told the taxi driver: "Take me to an embassy!" "Which one?" "Who the hell cares? Any one." And the driver took him to one: "Which one is that?" "The French." "All right."

Perhaps his thoughts got mixed up, and his original intentions in going to an embassy had changed into something else, but his cleverness and his strength had in no wise lapsed: without alerting the policemen at the embassy entrance, he went quietly down a side street and climbed to the top of a smooth wall double a man's height. In the embassy yard it was easier: no one discovered him or detained him, and he went on inside, walked through one room, then another, and he saw a table set. There were many things on the table, but what astonished him most was the pears. He felt a yen for them, and he stuffed all the pockets in his field jacket and trousers with them. At that moment, the members of the household came in to dine. Koverchenko began to attack them and shout at them before they could begin on him: "You Frenchmen!" According to him, France hadn't done anything good for the last century. "Why don't you start a revolution? Why are you trying to get de Gaulle into power? And you want us to send our Kuban wheat to you? It's no go." "Who are you? Where did you come from?" The French were astounded. Im- mediately adopting the right approach, Koverchenko kept his wits about him: "A major of the MGB." The French were frightened. "But even so, you are not supposed to burst in here. What is your business here?" "—— you in the mouth!" Koverchenko bel- lowed at them straight from the heart. And, after playing the hoodlum for them a while longer, he noticed that in the next room they were already telephoning about him. He was still sober enough to begin his retreat, but the pears started to fall out of his pockets—and he was pursued by mocking laughter.

And in actual fact, he had enough strength left not only to leave the embassy safe and sound but to move on. The next morn- ing he woke up in Kiev Station (was he not planning to go on to the West Ukraine?), and they soon picked him up there.

During his interrogation he was beaten by Abakumov person- ally. And the scars on his back swelled up to a hand's breadth.

The Minister beat him, of course, not because of the pears and not because of his valid rebuke to the French, but to find out by whom and when he had been recruited. And, of course, the prison term they handed him was twenty-five years.

There are many such stories, but like every railroad car, the Stolypin falls silent at night. At night there won't be any fish, nor water, nor going to the toilet.

And the car is filled then with the steady noise of the wheels, which doesn't in the least break the silence. And if, in addition, the convoy guard has left the corridor, one can talk quietly from the third compartment for men with the fourth, or women's, com- partment.

A conversation with a woman in prison is quite special. There is something noble about it, even if one talks only about articles of the Code and prison terms.

One such conversation went on all night long, and here are the circumstances in which it took place. It was in July, 1950. There were no passengers in the women's compartment except for one young girl, the daughter of a Moscow doctor, sentenced under Article 58-10. And there was a big to-do in the men's compart- ment. The convoy guards began to drive all the zeks out of three compartments into two (and don't even ask how many they piled up in there). And they brought in some offender who was not at all like a convict. In the first place, he hadn't had his head shaved and his wavy blond locks, real
curls
, lay seductively on his big, thoroughbred head. He was young, dignified, and dressed in a British military uniform. He was escorted through the corridor with an air of deference (the convoy itself had been a little awed by the instructions on the envelope containing his
case file
). And the girl had managed to catch a glimpse of the whole episode. But he himself had not seen her. (And how much he regretted that later!)

From the noise and the commotion she realized that the com- partment next to hers had been emptied for him. It was obvious that he was not supposed to communicate with anyone—all the more reason for her to want to talk with him. It wasn't possible in a Stolypin to see from one compartment into another, but when everything was still, you could hear between them. Late at night, when things had begun to quiet down, the girl sat on the edge of her bunk, right up against the grating, and called to him quietly. (And perhaps she first sang softly. The convoy guard was supposed to punish her for all this, but the guard itself had settled down for the night, and there was no one in the corridor.) The stranger heard her and, following her instructions, sat in the same position. They were now sitting with their backs to each other, braced against the same one-inch partition, and speaking quietly through the grating at the outer edge of the partition. Their heads were as close as if their lips were kissing, but they could neither touch one another nor see each other.

Erik Arvid Andersen understood Russian tolerably well by this time, made many mistakes when he spoke it, but, in the end, could succeed in communicating his thoughts. He told the girl his astonishing story (and we, too, will hear about it at the transit prison center). She, in turn, told him the simple story of a Moscow student who had gotten 58-10. But Arvid was fascinated. He asked her about Soviet youth and about Soviet life, and what he heard was not at all what he had learned earlier in leftist Western newspapers and from his own official visit here.

They talked all night long. And that night everything came together for Arvid: the strange prisoners' car in an alien country; the rhythmic nighttime clicking of the wheels, which always finds an echo in our hearts; and the girl's melodic voice, her whispers, her breath reaching his ear—his very ear, yet he couldn't even look at her. (And for a year and a half he hadn't heard a woman's voice.)

And for the first time, through that invisible (and probably, and, of course, necessarily beautiful) girl, he began to see the real Russia, and the voice of Russia told him the truth all night long. One can learn about a country for the first time this way too. (And in the morning he would glimpse Russia's dark straw-thatched roofs through the window—to the sad whispering of his hidden guide.)

Yes, indeed, all this is Russia: the prisoners on the tracks refusing to voice their complaints, the girl on the other side of the Stolypin partition, the convoy going off to sleep, pears falling out of pockets, buried bombs, and a horse climbing to the second floor.

"The gendarmes! The gendarmes!" the prisoners cried out hap- pily. They were happy that they would be escorted the rest of the way by the attentive gendarmes and not by the convoy.

Once again I have forgotten to insert quotation marks. That was Korolenko who was telling us this.13 We, it is true, were not happy to see the bluecaps. But anyone who ever got caught in what the prisoners christened the
pendulum
would have been glad to see even them.

An ordinary passenger might have a difficult time
boarding
a train at a small way station—but not getting off. Toss your things out and jump off. This was not the case with a prisoner, however. If the local prison guard or police didn't come for him or was late by even two minutes, toot-toot, the whistle would blow, and the train would get under way, and they would take the poor sinner of a prisoner all the way to the next transit point. And it was all right if it was actually a transit point that they took you to, because they would begin to feed you again there. But sometimes it was all the way to the end of the Stolypin's route, and then they would keep you for eighteen hours in an empty car and take you back with a whole new group of prisoners, and then once again, maybe, they wouldn't come for you—and once again you'd be in a blind alley, and once again you'd wait there and during all that time they
wouldn't feed you
. Your rations, after all, were issued only until your first stop, and the accounting office isn't to blame that the prison messed things up, for you are, after all, listed for Tulun. And the con- voy isn't responsible for feeding you out of its own rations. So they swing you back and forth
six times
(it has actually happened!): Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, Krasnoyarsk to Irkutsk, Irkutsk to Krasnoyarsk, etc., etc., etc., and when you do see a blue visor on the Tulun platform, you are ready to throw your arms around him: Thank you, beloved, for saving me.

You get so worn down, so choked, so shattered in a Stolypin, even in two days' time, that before you get to a big city you yourself don't know whether you would rather keep going in torment just to get there sooner, or whether you'd rather be put in a transit prison to recover a little.

But the convoy guards begin to hustle and bustle. They come out with their overcoats on and knock their gunstocks on the floor. That means they are going to unload the whole car.

First the convoy forms up in a circle at the car steps, and no sooner have you dropped, fallen, tumbled down them, than the guards shout at you deafeningly in unison from all sides (as they have been taught): "Sit down, sit down, sit down!" This is very effective when several voices are shouting it at once and they don't let you raise your eyes. It's like being under shellfire, and involuntarily you squirm, hurry (and where is there for you to hurry to?), crouch close to the ground, and sit down, having caught up with those who disembarked earlier.

"Sit down!" is a very clear command, but if you are a new prisoner, you don't yet understand it. When I heard this com- mand on the switching tracks in Ivanovo, I ran, clutching my suitcase in my arms (if a suitcase has been manufactured out in freedom and not in camp, its handle always breaks off and al- ways at a difficult moment), and set it down on end on the ground and without looking around to see how the first prisoners were sitting, sat down on the suitcase. After all, to sit down right on the ties, on the dark oily sand, in my officer's coat, which was not yet so very dirty and which still had uncut flaps! The chief of the convoy—a ruddy mug, a good Russian face—broke into a run, and I hadn't managed to grasp what he wanted and why until I saw that he meant, clearly, to plant his sacred boot in my cursed back but something restrained him. However, he didn't spare his polished toe and kicked the suitcase and smashed in the top. "Sit down!" he gritted by way of explanation. Only at that point did it dawn on me that I towered over the surround- ing zeks, and without even having the chance to ask: "How am I supposed to sit down?" I already understood how, and sat down in my precious coat, like everybody else, just as dogs sit at gates and cats at doors.

(I still have that suitcase, and even now when I chance to come upon it, I run my fingers around the hole torn in it. It is a wound which cannot heal as wounds heal on bodies or on hearts. Things have longer memories than people.)

And forcing prisoners to sit down was also a calculated maneuver. If you are sitting on your rear end on the ground, so that your knees tower in front of you, then your center of gravity is well back of your legs, and it is difficult to get up and im- possible to jump up. And more than that, they would make us sit as tightly massed together as possible so that we'd be in each other's way. And if all of us wanted to attack the convoy to- gether, they would have mowed us down before we got moving.

They had us sitting there to wait for the Black Maria (it trans- ports the prisoners in batches, you couldn't get them all in at once), or else to be herded off on foot. They would try to sit us down someplace hidden so that fewer free people would see us, but at times they did make the prisoners sit right there awkwardly on the platform or in an open square. (That is how it was in Kuibyshev.) And it is a difficult experience for the free people: we stare at them quite freely and openly with a totally sincere gaze, but how are they supposed to look at us? With hatred? Their consciences don't permit it. (After all, only the Yermilovs believe that people were imprisoned "for cause.") With sym- pathy? With pity? Be careful, someone will take down your name and they'll set you up for a prison term too; it's that simple. And our proud free citizens (as in Mayakovsky: "Read it, envy me, I am a citizen") drop their guilty heads and try not to see us at all, as if the place were empty. The old women are bolder than the rest. You couldn't turn them bad. They believe in God. And they would break off a piece of bread from their meager loaf and throw it to us. And old camp hands—nonpolitical offenders, of course—weren't afraid either. All camp veterans knew the say- ing: "Whoever hasn't been there yet will get there, and whoever was there won't forget it." And look, they'd toss over a pack of cigarettes, hoping that someone might do the same for them during their next term. And the old woman's bread wouldn't quite carry far enough, what with her weak arm, and it would fall short, whereas the pack of cigarettes would arch through the air right into our midst, and the convoy guards would im- mediately work the bolts of their rifles—pointing them at the old woman, at kindness, at the bread: "Come on, old woman, run along."