Smashed in the USSR: Fear, Loathing and Vodka on the Steppes (18 page)

“That’s not cynicism, Pashka. Someone who criticises a cannibal for not washing his hands before eating would be a cynic. There are simply no words to describe what that man did.”

There is nothing special about cannibalism. People have been driven to it often enough, even in our century, during famines and the siege of Leningrad. But those were extreme situations. I’m curious to know how one human being could deliberately prepare another for the slaughter. I begin to chat to Cannibal after work, gradually broaching the subject that interests me.

Cannibal has spent most of his life in prison and is already in his sixth year at Ashkhabad. He doesn’t look like a typical zek. He still has the physique of a sturdy peasant – which is what he was before he received his first sentence for stealing wheat. Physical strength enabled him to survive the camp mincing machine, but the experience taught him to believe in nothing but the principle, ‘You die today and I tomorrow.’ A morose man, Cannibal goes about his business in silence and never initiates a conversation. He subscribes to many papers and journals but it’s useless to ask him to lend you something to read after work.

I never discover what I want to know. Cannibal tells me his only regret is ending up in jail; everything else he did was justified. To all my sly questioning he simply replies: “You’d have done the same in my place.”

Cannibal has been behind barbed wire for so long he has forgotten what the outside world looks like. When a modern streamlined bus drives into the zone he breaks his usual silence: “Fuck me! Would you look at that – a train without rails!”

Like Cannibal, there are many zeks who have been in camps for so long they have grown used to their loss of freedom. They feel at home behind barbed wire. Several times I see a prisoner reach the end of his sentence only to be driven through the gates by force. One epileptic Kalmyk has no one waiting for him on the outside. He faces a choice between an asylum or life on a
miserable pension. After his release he went into town and threw stones at shop windows until he was arrested and sent back to the camp.

The Uzbeks say that beautiful dreams are half our wealth. Poor is the man who has lost his dreams or has never had any in the first place; the camps are full of such people. Many Soviet citizens, especially peasants, live in such terrible conditions that they could swap places with a zek without noticing any difference in their standard of living. Both prisoners and free people eat the same disgusting food; the pitiful rags they wear are identical.

People on the other side of the fence often commit petty theft while shrugging off the consequences. ‘They can’t send me anywhere worse than prison; they can’t give me less than a pound of bread,’ goes the eternal refrain. When a person reaches that stage he is past caring what stupid crime he commits. Judges label as ‘malicious’ crimes that are committed out of simple despair, by people without beautiful dreams.

Every camp inmate develops a shell around himself but few are as hardened as Cannibal. At the other end of the scale are those who could discard their shells quite easily if only they were given the chance to live as a human being. One such zek is my friend Igor Alexandrovich. With his long thin head covered in prickly stubble, Igor looks like some kind of exotic cactus. We call Igor Alexandrovich by his full name and patronymic instead of the customary nickname. He earned this exaggerated respect by his singular behaviour. Years in prison have hardly affected his speech. He rarely swears and usually blushes when he does. He calls everyone by the formal ‘you,’ and speaks in the
old-fashioned
language of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Igor Alexandrovich claims his father was an admiral who went over
to the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Like all camp stories this is probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Igor Alexandrovich comes from a refined background. What he knows about literature, music and theatre you don’t pick up in camp libraries. He studied medicine in Leningrad but on graduating was arrested and sentenced to be shot under article 58. The sentence was later transmuted to ten years.

Igor Alexandrovich is ashamed of his record and will only say that he was imprisoned for practising illegal abortions. He has been in Kolyma and Norilsk. Because of his medical training he was put to work in camp hospitals. Thanks to that he survived.

Igor Alexandrovich was released after the 20th Party Congress but as a former zek his degree was no use. He went down to Central Asia where he found work in a Tashkent mortuary. After he lost his job through drinking he became a tramp and beggar.

Everyone likes to listen to Igor Alexandrovich’s stories and it seems that he has come to believe his own inventions. He tells us he always carried at least two guns of foreign make, and that he has lost horses, women and dachas at cards. Famous actresses were in love with him and he hired whole restaurants for his week-long parties.

Because of his short sight, Igor Alexandrovich finds sewing difficult and so he never meets his work quota. This means he can’t buy tobacco in the camp shop, and it leaves him squirming. Yet if I hold out my pack to him he declines with elaborate excuses. So I resort to a more devious method. Leaving a packet of
Prima
on my bench I go to the other end of the workshop. I return to find several crushed and broken cigarettes in my pack, where they have been too hastily replaced. From then on I resort to this method of giving Igor Alexandrovich a smoke.
Sometimes he’s so overcome by shame that he drops his precious cigarette and has to scrabble around for it amid the grease and slime of the floor.

Igor Alexandrovich enjoys dispensing medical advice. When I cut my thumb he delivers a lengthy discourse on haemophilia. “On your release,” he tells me, “you should go to take the waters at a spa. Preferably Karlsbad.”

“I shall certainly follow your advice,” I assure him.

A radio loudspeaker hangs over our heads in the workshop but it is hard to hear and anyway we aren’t interested in the nonsense spewed out by Moscow. But when I catch the strains of an old romance,
Grief is my star
, I switch off my machine to listen. The noise of the workshop bothers me and I glance around in annoyance. No one else has stopped except Igor Alexandrovich who is standing with his head stretched up towards the loudspeaker. Tears as large as a child’s roll down his stubbly cheeks. I don’t know where he is at this moment but he sure as hell is not in prison. I turn away so that he won’t notice me looking at him.

But later Igor Alexandrovich comes up to me. “Do you remember the song
Grief is my star
?”

“Of course, but I forgot the words.”

“You don’t need to remember them. Words only give a song its shape. When you love something or someone very much its form has no significance. All lovers know this.”

Igor Alexandrovich is released several months before me and the camp is a sadder place without him.

Finally my own release comes. I intend to hang around in the town waiting for Death Number Two who gets out tomorrow. We plan to head for the Kuban where Death has some relations
who might give us work. However the camp authorities have other ideas and they put me straight onto a train to Krasnovodsk, that most desolate of cities.

I have not been out of Ashkhabad for twenty-four hours before I’m robbed of my documents. In Krasnovodsk I meet an alkash with a cruel hangover and invite him for a drink. While we are seeing off our third half-litre he crowns me with a bottle. I wake up to find my pockets empty. At least I had the foresight to hide my money in a pouch under my collar. I’m not badly hurt but a few splinters of glass have embedded themselves in my scalp. ‘Well, old son,’ I tell myself, ‘they say you’re never too old to learn, but it seems you’ll remain a fool till you die. Choose your drinking partners more wisely in future.’

I think it better not to hang around any longer waiting for Death. Without my release papers any cop could stop me and send me back to camp. Besides, I want to get out of Krasnovodsk. It is winter and the town is scoured by a cruel, sand-laden wind. I take a ferry to Baku and then a train to Tblisi.

According to legend, Bogdan Khmelnitski of Ukraine once summoned all the vagabonds in his kingdom to Kiev. He ordered straw of the best quality to be spread for them on the city’s main square. When the tramps arrived they laid themselves down gratefully and went to sleep. Then Khmelnitski ordered the straw to be lit around the edges. As their bed blazed the tramps called out: “We’re burning! Save us!” but none lifted a finger to help themselves. When the flames began to lick his feet their chief shouted: “How lazy you are, brothers! Why don’t you cry out that I too am on fire?”

Soviet railway stations are like that square in Kiev. Their
warmth and 24-hour beer stands lure us vagrants like wasps to a jam jar, making it easy for the police to pick us up. We’re aware of the danger but it makes no difference. In Tblisi I spend a few days hanging around the station, drinking in the buffet and trying to snatch a few hours’ sleep in dark corners. Eventually my luck runs out. I am arrested and taken to the spets.

My cell is crammed with bare bunks. The small barred window lets in no sun so its light bulb burns around the clock. I’ve been drinking heavily for the past few days and fear the horrors will come on while I’m alone in the cell with no mental distractions.

“Hey, boss, give us a paper to read,” I ask the sergeant when he brings my dinner. As I was being led to my cell earlier I noticed a pile of newspapers on a shelf in the corridor.

“They’re old papers,” says the sergeant.

“So what if they are. I’m bored to death,” I insist.

“Do you really want something to read?”

“Well I’m not going anywhere in a hurry.”

“Okay we’ll give you a paper,” there is a tinge of spite in his voice. An hour later the door opens and he throws in four newspapers. Eagerly I snatch them up and then drop them in disappointment. They are Georgian. I can make no sense of the tiny worm-like letters writhing over the pages.

As I pace around the cell I remember a Conan Doyle story called
The Little Dancing Men
, in which Sherlock Holmes deciphers a code made up of matchstick figures. Following his example, I resolve to make sense of those worms. However, unlike the great detective, I do not understand the language I am deciphering. The only Georgian word I know is ‘beer.’ Nevertheless, I remember that most surnames end in ‘shvili,’ so by looking for groups of five letters I’m able to work out the
characters for sh, v, i and l. The paper’s masthead ‘Communist’ is written in both Russian and Georgian, so that gives me 11 letters altogether. Pictures of Brezhnev and the cyclist Omar Pkhakadze add to my lexicon. Towards evening I am reading the paper aloud without understanding a single word. When the sergeant looks into my cell he can’t believe his ears. He throws in a packet of
Prima
.

Reading helps pull me through my hangover. The guards tell me the odd word of Georgian which I have to memorise immediately as I’m not allowed pen or paper. Unfortunately my solitude soon ends. My cell fills with tramps and their endless discussions about where they have drunk and how much, what the women were like and who beat the shit out of whom.

While exercising in the yard, I see an old man sitting by the wall. He looks vaguely familiar. I go over and – oh Lord – it’s Igor Alexandrovich. He has aged. Now he resembles a decrepit old lion whose shaggy black mane is grey at the roots where filth has not yet penetrated. Igor Alexandrovich screws up his eyes and studies me for a long time. Finally he mumbles: “Ivan Andreyevich! Is it you?”

“The very same.”

“Have you been here for a long time?”

“I’ll be out in a week.”

“Which cell are you in?”

“Six.”

“Would you be so kind as to take me in? Do you have enough room?”

“We’ll make some.”

Igor Alexandrovich jumps up and comes over to me. Bending his head close to mine he whispers: “Do you have lice in there?”

“Not until now,” I reply, catching sight of a huge louse on his coat lapel. I point to it. Despite his poor sight, Igor Alexandrovich catches his household pet with a deft pinch and for some reason drops it into his pocket. Our exercise period ends and we are locked up again.

A tramp in my cell says that for the last few months he has seen Igor Alexandrovich begging in the subway near the
Collective Farmer
cinema. “When he has enough money he runs to the chemists for eau de Cologne, which he drinks from the bottle right there in the shop. When he gets too cold and tired in the subway he goes to the
Collective Farmer
. The cashier usually lets him in without paying. He sleeps through the double bill of Indian films, warms up a bit and then returns to his pitch in the subway. At night he dosses in a basement in Chelyuskintsev Street.”

That evening the guards bring Igor Alexandrovich into our cell. They have sheared his mane and treated him to a
half-hearted
disinfection process. To keep him at a distance we put him to sleep on a separate bunk which we call the thieves’ bed. Igor Alexandrovich takes this as a mark of special respect.

That evening he entertains us with a monologue on Rasputin. Our cell mates listen open-mouthed. Believing Rasputin to have been the lover of Catherine the Great, they hope to hear some dirty stories. Encouraged by his audience, Igor Alexandrovich strides up and down the cell, gesticulating wildly. Suddenly he stops in the middle of a word and crashes to the floor with an demonic cry. White foam bubbles from the corners of his mouth. We rush to help him, trying to make sure he doesn’t bite his tongue. I have seen alcoholic epilepsy before in people who stop drinking too abruptly. We bang on the door, calling for a doctor,
but the nurse has already gone home and the guards can’t be bothered to ring for an ambulance.

Gradually Igor Alexandrovich’s trembling ceases and he falls asleep, snoring loudly through his nose. We lift him onto his bed. We’re all frightened. Perhaps every one of us is thinking to himself, ‘That’s my fate too.’