In Siberia (6 page)

But Vasil was having none of them. When hunting, he yelled,
he wore protective netting, and he didn't plan to get eaten alive in some dump of a mine. So I scrambled alone among foundations of disintegrating wood, charred posts, and a litter of rusted buckets and chains. A spider's web of fences, trickling into the undergrowth, ended at the vestige of a gateway. An iron-bound window had been tossed into the bushes all of a piece. And in barracks still balanced delicately above the earth, the light was pouring through roofs on to those atrocious aisles where the plank beds of men stacked up like battery hens had dropped to the ground, and powder and coal-dust leaked out of the walls.

Opposite the mine I reached the cemeteries. You stumble over these everywhere round Vorkuta, but they hold only a fraction of those fallen. In winter the corpses were piled in open-sided shacks until there were enough to be worth burying, then an NKVD officer smashed their skulls with a pick and they were tipped into a trench pre-dug in summer. But here, beyond memorials to the German and Latvian dead, hundreds of bleached crosses rose from the undergrowth. All were nameless. Their cross-pieces carried numbers–‘A-41…A-87'–and many had rotted off or vanished. (People stole them as souvenirs, Vasil said.) A sledge-hearse, a pick and a single rubber boot lay under a bush, abandoned by the last burial party forty years before.

Mine 29 bears a peculiar tragedy. A few months after Stalin's death in 1953, strikes broke out in labour camps all across Siberia, and this pit was in the vanguard. Its inmates made demands in the name of the whole Gulag: for the release of the very old and the too-young, and for the repatriation of foreigners. They asked for a ban on random shooting by watch-tower guards. They wanted a reduction of working hours. They wanted humanity. One by one the other Vorkuta camps succumbed to threats or lies from Moscow; but Mine 29 held out. Meanwhile, it was surrounded by two divisions of NKVD troops, with tanks. The main gate had vanished among indecipherable foundations under my feet. But as it was battered down, the troops saw the prisoners standing behind it in a solid phalanx, their arms linked, and singing. There were three or four volleys of small-arms, then the heavy machine-guns opened up. For a minute the miners remained massed and
erect, the dead held up by the living, then they started to litter the ground.

The fallen were thrown into a common grave–a ‘brothers' grave', as the Russians say. In Khrushchev's day somebody raised a cross like a telegraph pole over the slag-heaps where they lay. It has gone; but in the studio of Vorkuta's chief architect hang designs for other monuments. Nobody knows who will pay for them–the government offers nothing–but the architect's dreams continue. Above the Vorkuta river an immense cross will be carved from the earth, he hopes, its marble sides engraved with the names of the dead. Another hill will open on a crowd of carved faces gazing from the ground, struggling to rise. And above the brothers' grave in Mine 29 will stand a granite figure of Mother Russia, with chunks missing from her face, her shoulders, and her heart.

 

She is an old woman now. In the street she paddles her bulk along with rhythmic scoops of her arms, and her cheeks flush with the labour. But inside her apartment, her eyes clear. She sits upright, distracted by the Mexican television drama which has been running every day for a year. She says it's rubbish, but she watches. Her face is oddly delicate on its thick neck, and her eyes cornflower blue. Even now, at eighty-seven, she intermittently looks pretty, and in her youth her looks were a dangerous blessing.

She worked in the Russian embassy in Berlin, she says, and joined some fragile movement accused of opposing Stalin. She was arrested early in 1938 and taken from Moscow to Vorkuta: a guileless Communist who seems to have believed in legal process. This belief has never been cancelled. She works now where I met her, at Memorial, an organisation devoted to the memory of the vanished millions, the dead she will not forget.

‘We lived half underground at first, then in tent-huts until we built barracks. It wasn't the temperature which hurt, but the winds. The winds tore through you.' Her arms wrap her body. ‘At first I worked in the mines, then we were thrown into road-building. Then when the road was finished, I was put back in the mines.' Her talk is sometimes sabotaged by laughter, as if she is
still incredulous; then her blue eyes seem detached from it all, born survivors.

‘Because I was considered–how to say this?–a dangerous criminal, I didn't sleep in ordinary barracks. I was kept separate, in a hut with four others, and two guards. We slept on two shelves. But the worst thing was to receive no letters. My husband was an army doctor, but he repudiated me to protect our children. In any case, what could I have written to him? “I'm fine”! But he repudiated me, and I didn't write. And of course the censor read everything….'

I ask: ‘You were never ill?'

‘No, never.' Then, almost in afterthought, she says: ‘Ah, yes, just once. In 1941 I caught typhus.' I stare at her. A lice-borne typhus killed thousands in the Vorkuta camps. ‘I expected these eruptions all over my body, but they didn't come. Instead my temperature soared. Then my hair fell out and they realised I had enteric fever. I was taken into isolation. I was there a long time, a long time.' She seems to be trying to remember something. It flickers away. ‘That was all right. I was alone.'

I feel like a voyeur, ashamed, but I ask: ‘What was it like, the work?' I think: perhaps, day to day, it was not quite as people have written it, perhaps only the worst was recalled, the uncommon.

She starts to rock a little on the sofa, backwards and forwards, heavily. Her head turns to the television, where the soap opera is proceeding among yachts and tuxedoes. ‘It was hardest when we built the roads. So many died! The trouble was exhaustion, especially for the men. Somehow women seemed immune, stronger. Those who came first–scientists and administrators–they weren't used to physical work, and they died easily. But the worst time came in the war. Up to 1941 there was something to eat, if only dried potatoes. But in 1941 there was famine all over Russia, and the labour and hunger killed very many.' Her voice has levelled into calm. ‘There were embankments along the road, and when a person died we used to dig a hole and cover his head with his pea-jacket, and heap the gravel over him.' She leans forward, and smooths her hands above the carpet, tenderly. She is laughing, as if from a great distance. ‘And later we laid rails
over them, and soon the trains were running over their graves. That's where the trains still run, over their graves.' She touches my hand, as if it is I who need comforting. ‘Often the ground was harder than stone, so we had to wait until summer. Then a work-team dug a long trench and threw the bodies in, and that was it. After executions too, they'd dig a brothers' grave.' Her body starts to rock again. ‘We knew the war might be coming to an end when we got proper funerals, and coffins. And after 1945 whole echelons of Ukrainians, Belorussians and Germans poured in. Then we knew it must be over.'

She is breathing faster on the sofa beside me, and I wonder if I have asked too much of her. I say: ‘I'm sorry for asking.'

‘Many suffered more than I did. Of course there were all sorts of people there,
blatnye
too, and different things happened….'

It is impossible to guess what she is remembering. The women suffered peculiarly. The female politicals, the ‘roses', were tormented by the criminal ‘violets', some of whom were slightly insane; and faced by men they were all powerless. Once two brigades of convalescent women were mass-raped by
blatnye
.

But she says: ‘I just worked hard, and I kept quiet and nobody was very cruel to me, not very.' When she grows animated I glimpse the girl in her, and wonder if she received protection at a cost, as other young women did, from an official or a soldier. And were the guards cruel, I ask, or only callous?

‘They just did what they were told,' she says. ‘After all, if we escaped, they would end up like us.'

I don't like this easy understanding. I want her to be angry. ‘Did they think you guilty?'

‘Yes, yes, they supposed us all guilty.' She stares down at her hands. Her thinning hair silvers her neck in lank curls. ‘Well, maybe in their souls they doubted it. Or perhaps later they began to think that so many couldn't be guilty. But they kept their distance from us.'

How fraught, I wondered, was that distance? Was it imposed by a fear of contamination, of some treason spreading like the camp typhus? Or by the complex danger of feeling sympathy? A guard's fraternisation would condemn him. And the great terror,
of course, was suppressed, unthinkable: that these people were all innocent.

‘Maybe they pitied us a little,' she says, then adds stubbornly, defending them, somehow defending herself: ‘But work is work. You do what you have to.'

I balk and say nothing.

But it is easy to misjudge those times–to forget how isolated people became in a world infested by informers, and how all the organs of state control, all authority, reproduced Stalin's paranoia: the obsession with conspiracy, the mass delusion of sabotage–until ascertainable truth became a dangerous rarity. The questioning or torture of each suspect, of course, produced a scream of new names. Often the charges were ludicrous. People were accused of plotting to blow up non-existent bridges, of spying for countries of which they'd scarcely heard. The very illogic of the accusations said:
You have no rights, no mind. Logic is ours.
And each confession, however absurd, subtly exculpated the inquisitor, secured him in some perverted illusion of rightness. It seemed to sanction the suffering of a whole people.

‘And you,' I pursue, ‘did you ever imagine yourself guilty?'

‘No, absolutely not. Nor did the others with me. But I should have been released in 1948, and it didn't happen. I spent another two years in the camps. After my release, when I wrote to the Public Prosecutor, they answered that I couldn't have been freed earlier because I'd been against Soviet Power. And it's true I was against Soviet Power because it was against the people. Then they told me that
I
was against the people. But I was a Party member, and the Party was for the people, and the Power…'

I lose her down a great labyrinth. I can't disentangle her shadows. But at last she says: ‘The Party was not guilty, absolutely not. I accuse…certain people…certain people….' She goes vague. In some misty hierarchy, she has selected a scapegoat. She has displaced blame upward, until it all but fades away. She will not indict the whole system. No. Only somewhere, she knew, something had gone terribly wrong. A tragic fluke, it seemed. She sighs harshly. Were it not for this accident, all would have been well. Instead, paradise slipped away….

She tries to explain, thumps the sofa in frustration. I notice her thick, working wrists. The hands on them are like delicate afterthoughts, just as her facial features look petite on the barrel of her neck. It is as if years of labour had bulked out a woman once frailer, more high-strung, and almost subsumed her.

I say at last: ‘You didn't return to the Party?'

She says stoutly: ‘I never left the Party.'

No, not in her heart. And on rehabilitation her membership was reaffirmed. In the absence of her anger, I find it rankling inside myself. ‘They should be asking
you
to rehabilitate
them
.'

But she stares at me blankly. Perhaps she thinks she has misheard. In the oval of her mouth only three or four teeth remain, one hanging by a wisp of root. Then she looks back at the television, where a Mexican socialite pouts and tinkles a cocktail stick. ‘That Dulcinea,' she says, ‘she's going to the dogs…and her Jose can't act, he just gazes….' She cackles lightly. Then she says: ‘Why can't people ever record the good things, the everyday things? If there were ordinary accounts of the camps people would understand how we couldn't always weep, how we came up out of the mines into the wash-house, singing. You're a writer, aren't you, so why don't you write that? How we smiled a little, danced and sang a little. Because people must live in hope….'

Her voice had sweetened into a rhythmic patter, until the rhythm seemed to choose the words. ‘Once I got an illegal parcel–three kilos of sugar!–and I was secretly fermenting beer when an officer came into the dormitory and oh! it exploded all over him. I was terrified I'd be taken to the isolator, but instead, whenever we came to identity parade, he would name me as the drink-exploder, and everybody would laugh. So write this too. That it wasn't all tears. Write this too.'

‘I will.'

But something is plaguing me. I can't bear her acquiescence. I say cruelly: ‘But what was the purpose in the end? To so much suffering…'

She looks back at me, and suddenly her eyes begin to water. She glances away again. For the first time she seems unable to answer. She repeats: ‘Purpose?'

And perhaps this is the hardest to bear, the idea that all that suffering and labour, those deaths, were for nothing. Suffering had once had meaning. ‘Purpose?' The word seems to torment her. Her eyes are brimming, so that I feel ashamed of what I have asked. Her hand alights on mine. ‘I feel bitter for all my life's waste. We hoped for so much better. Look at what a city was founded here!–and now it's destroyed. Schools have been demolished, libraries closed down, workers have gone months and years without pay. Can you trust a government which allows that? Now people just want to make money. They've lost all belief…. To think that it's come to this!'

‘But this isn't where it ends.'

I feel she hardly hears me. ‘It's never possible to forget those years. Never. It's like an illness. I have not told you everything that happened, but you can imagine….'