Us Conductors (39 page)

In the day’s last light I saw another prisoner kneel. He had found tiny berries hidden in the dry white moss that crackled underfoot; they looked like coral. I had almost forgotten the name.
Brusnika
. Red berries on thin green stalks, with leaves like little tokens. They were everywhere. I lifted three berries to my mouth and they broke against my tongue, sweet and bitter and tasting very faintly of snow.

Winter would come. I knew this: it would come, and then it would go, and then it would come again. And again and again. We would all die in Kolyma, unless we did not. I did not know the trick to living. My hand was dotted with the berries’ thin juice and there were guard towers all around, pairs of hollowed eyes, bear turds and wolves’ howls, criss-crossed barbed wire. I could not be a block of wood or a slab of chalk, inert. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, come from Leningrad to New York to Kolyma, forty-three years old. The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.

I had nothing left to hold.

THE CAMP WAS A CLUTCH
of buildings surrounded by fence. The fence was three metres high, wrapped in coils of barbed wire. I never saw anyone touch this fence. The ground was uneven, furrows and rises, as if they had wiped away a rapids and placed us there. The valley’s trees had been sheared to build the barracks, the work sheds, the hospital; to erect the administration bloc and the squat cultural-education building, which we rarely visited. The soft grass was littered with brittle shrubs, the sharp shoots of bushes. A misstep would often puncture the sole of your boot. Guard towers stood all around, on the mountaintops, beside the mine shafts’ timber adits. You could squint into the flint-coloured distance and see the guess of other towers, the maybe, along those ridges. As the sun crossed the sky the triangular silhouette of a mining tower ticked across the camp. It was an empty landmark: that vein had gone dry, goldless. Old timers called it the gallows tower.

Our camp was like a village. When we were not working we
gathered on steps. We wandered in pairs between buildings of rough grey plywood. This aspect was convivial. No other aspects were convivial. The other aspects were inhuman. We slept on exposed bunks, crammed together, shivering. When it was wet the ground was muddy; when it was dry we lay and listened to hunched men carving dead skin from their heels. At night the barracks filled up with groans, as though the sleeping zeks’ souls were being sucked from their jaws. The wind howled like an abandoned child. We strained to hear the cinders in the hearth, a kind of lullaby. We closed our eyes and insects crawled over our faces, moving like scraps of lace. We were awoken before dawn. We rose. We wrapped our rags closer, for warmth, trying to add months to our lives. We went into the frozen morning and lined up for food. Different people were permitted to stand in different lines: the strongest workers, Stakhanovites, who exceeded their daily quotas, received one large ladle of broth, bread, a piece of herring. Those who just met their quotas received one ladle of broth and a piece of bread. And the rest, the ones who fell short of their quotas: they received a little bread, half a ladle of soup. Political prisoners, 58s, were automatically assigned to the poorest category. I held my bowl in trembling hands.

Sometimes the urki would take our food, and sometimes our friends would take our food, and sometimes dying men, mad with hunger, would attempt to take our food; and we would shove them into the snow, fiercely, carefully, because we could not bear to spill a single drop from the brim of the small tin cup.

After we tasted our food we worked for seven hours.

Then we were allowed a portion of cabbage stew.

And we worked for seven more hours.

I was assigned to road duty. This was considered lucky. Most of the men and women of our camp worked in the mines, swallowing dust in darkness, skating toward death. I write this so
lightly now,
skating toward death
. During those first weeks, my horror was close to grief. I watched zeks draining away out the camp’s high gates. They came back even less alive: thinner, scarcer. As if another year had been shaved from their bones. Huddling in the dinner queue, the prisoners’ eyes still reflected the underground. I thought that if I met their gaze I would tumble into it. I could not believe that human beings were being treated in this way. This thought raked over me. As I dragged my cart along the road my face would suddenly contort and I would be crying—not for myself but for this place.

On road duty we died more slowly. The officers watched our dying very closely. Once I had died a certain amount, they would assign me to the mines. I learned this from others as we gathered on the steps, as I wandered past the hospital and the guardhouse.

On road duty the task was this: Drag an empty wheelbarrow for ten kilometres over a ravaged road. The wheelbarrow clanged and caught. We were allowed to talk but we had to remain in single file, flanked by guards. Men would yell conversations until their voices failed. I spoke little. I studied the trees along the road, the way their roots hid in the earth.

The woods parted as we approached the quarry. The road led across a plain to the base of a barren hill. There was a mining tower, two rips in the earth, a giant mountain of dull stone. These rocks and gravel were the detritus of the mine, the wasted part of the diggers’ lives. We took cold spades from a pile. Each of us cautiously propped up his wheelbarrow and filled it, lifting stone. Dust rose up like smoke. The more we carried, the more we would eat tomorrow. On the best days, my wheelbarrow held two hundred pounds of flinty rock and dust. When the wheelbarrows were piled heavy, as heavy as we could possibly push, we replaced the spades where we had found them. Sometimes we
lay them down and sometimes we threw them. We returned to our barrows and wiped our foreheads on our sleeves and watched the circling brown birds, and we pushed our precarious loads up the slope to the road. At this time we were each permitted to smoke one cigarette.

Our weighted wheelbarrows sank into the road. They tipped and leaned and sometimes they toppled, spilling across the ground. The wheelbarrow’s owner would curse, cry, grope with freezing hands to pile the rocks back into the cart. If it was an urka, like Nikola or the Boxer, we would all set down our own wheelbarrows, to go and help. It was not that we would win a favour, but perhaps they would pass us over during a moment of cruelty; their friends might rob someone else. There was a hierarchy among zeks and an even stricter hierarchy among urki. At Kolyma, you could not afford kindness. We helped only the worst men.

After two or three hours we arrived back at base camp. We dumped our stone. It would be used to build the new roads, carrying gold and timber to the harbour.

There were always guards. They always carried rifles. They stood on guardtowers, with crashing spotlights, scanning the grounds and the perimeter. If you went near the fence, the guards would shout and then shoot. If you brawled with another prisoner, not just a swung punch but tooth and claw, they would also sometimes shoot. Sometimes they would not. It depended which zeks were fighting, or if bribes had been paid. Some of the criminals moved around like cats, entitled to milk. You heard stories: a girl crosses the grounds after dark, hurrying to the women’s barrack. Men appear around her, like a conjured circle. After a while, the guards yell down: “Come on boys, have some discretion!” They drag her from the cold snow into the shadow of stacked firewood. Later, they take her to the hospital. The urki
make sure she is cared for. When she emerges, rested, she goes back to these men. She becomes a sort of prison wife. She is safeguarded. She has found a way to stay alive.

I FIRST MET BIGFOOT
beside a grave. Bodies lay in a pit, which we were covering with earth. It was a windless yard. I watched the soil slide from my spade, imagining my own death. The falling earth made only the slightest sound. I did not want to waste my strength. Five of us lifted dry earth and dropped it onto shrouded bodies, proceeding from minute to minute, going on. One man began to pick up the pace. We were shovelling feebly, the rest of us, and this one man picked up his pace, quickened, until soon the clearing’s loudest sounds were his inhalations. Fast, clear inhalations, through the nose. His eyes were lowered. He had a thick head of straw-coloured hair, matted at the brow, and a dense beard.

“Did you know these men?” I murmured, after a little while, indicating the grave.

“No,” Bigfoot said at once. He lifted his eyes to where I was slowly lowering a clod of earth. “Did you?”

NOW, SEASONS LATER
, it feels faintly impossible to be recalling these scenes. I was there; today I am here. Twice a week I come up into this attic, kneel by my machines, listen, type. I transcribe recordings for my masters and I also compose these pages, a little at a time. Sometimes it is hard to imagine I was ever in the taiga; sometimes it feels as if I did not leave. Sometimes I am writing you a letter, Clara, and other times I am just writing,
pushing type into paper, making something of my years. There is cruelty to the way a person, a place, can sometimes feel so close, and then the next day far away. You were wearing amber the night we first saw Duke Ellington. Today this memory is beside me. I waited with your sister in the front room of your parents’ house and you appeared in a doorway, glowing, in your pale amber slip and with amber around your neck and dark amber curls atop your head. I stood. I kissed your hand. You said, “Hi, Leon.”

We went by taxi to the Apollo Club. My heart was whirring in my chest. Silver subway cars poured through the tunnels under Broadway, New York crackled and shone, cranes hoisted whole buildings into the sky.

I remember how we arrived just in time for the first number and how for the whole first half, the horns used mutes. We moved to the strings and brass but Duke’s players had hands cupped over their trumpets, plungers over trombones, until at a certain pre-arranged moment everything changed. By chance I had spun you out on your toes. Our arms were at their longest span. At that instant the mutes came off and the brass section bloomed and it was like the clouds had parted, only we hadn’t known there were clouds. The room rang gold with it. You were spinning back toward me, hot and amber, and when our bodies touched you murmured, “Hi, Leon.” And I thought,
It will be like this
.

Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page,,,, like eyelashes.