Kolyma Tales (13 page)

‘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.’

‘It’s Thursday,’ I said. ‘The overseer said so this morning.’

‘There, you see? No, there is no way I can say mass. It’s just that it’s easier for me this way. And I forget I’m hungry.’ Zamiatin smiled.

I know that everyone has something that is most precious to him,
the last thing that he has left
, and it is that something which helps him to live, to hang on to the life of which we were being so insistently and stubbornly deprived. If for Zamiatin this was the liturgy of John the Baptist, then my
last thing
was verse – everything else had long since been forgotten, cast aside, driven from memory. Only poetry had not been crushed by exhaustion, frost, hunger, and endless humiliations.

The sun set and the sudden darkness of an early winter evening had already filled the space between the trees. I wandered off to our barracks – a long, low hut with small windows. It looked something like a miniature stable. I had already seized the heavy, icy door with both hands when I heard a rustle in the neighboring hut, which served as a tool-shed with saws, shovels, axes, crowbars, and picks. It was supposed to be locked on days off, but on that day the lock was missing. I stepped over the threshold of the tool-shed, and the heavy door almost crushed me. There were so many cracks in the walls that my eyes quickly became accustomed to the semi-darkness.

Two professional criminals were scratching a four-month-old German shepherd pup. The puppy lay on its back, squealing and waving its four paws in the air. The older man was holding it by the collar. Since we were from the same work gang, my arrival caused no consternation.

‘It’s you. Is there anyone else out there?’

‘No one,’ I answered.

‘All right, let’s get on with it,’ the older man said.

‘Let me warm up a little first,’ the younger man answered.

‘Look at him struggle.’ He felt the puppy’s warm side near the heart and tickled him.

The puppy squealed confidently and licked his hand.

‘So you like to lick… Well, you won’t be doing much of that any more. Semyon…’

Holding the pup by the collar with his left hand, Semyon pulled a hatchet from behind his back and struck the puppy on the head with a short quick swing. The puppy jerked, and blood spilled out on to the icy floor of the shed.

‘Hold him tight,’ Semyon shouted, raising the hatchet again.

‘What for? He’s not a rooster,’ the young man said.

‘Skin him while he’s still warm,’ Semyon said in the tone of a mentor. ‘And bury the hide in the snow.’

That evening no one in the barracks could sleep because of the smell of meat soup. The criminals would have eaten it all, but there weren’t enough of them in our barracks to eat an entire pup. There was still meat left in the pot.

Semyon crooked his finger in my direction.

‘Take it.’

‘I don’t want to,’ I said.

‘All right,’ Semyon said, and his eyes ran quickly over the rows of bunks. ‘In that case, we’ll give it to the preacher. Hey, Father! Have some mutton. Just wash out the pot when you’re done…’

Zamiatin came out of the darkness into the yellow light of the smoking kerosene lantern, took the pot, and disappeared. Five minutes later he returned with a washed pot.

‘So quick?’ Semyon asked with interest. ‘You gobbled things down quick as a seagull. That wasn’t mutton, preacher, but dog meat. Remember the dog “North” that used to visit you all the time?’

Zamiatin stared wordlessly at Semyon, turned around, and walked out. I followed him. Zamiatin was standing in the snow, just beyond the doors. He was vomiting. In the light of the moon his face seemed leaden. Sticky spittle was hanging from his blue lips. Zamiatin wiped his mouth with his sleeve and glared at me angrily.

‘They’re rotten,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Zamiatin replied. ‘But the meat was delicious – no worse than mutton.’

The orderlies lifted me off the scales, but their cold, powerful hands would not let me touch the ground.

‘How much?’ the doctor shouted, dipping his pen into the ink-well with a click.

‘One hundred and six pounds.’