“You must come sit with us and toast to Christmas Eve,” he said, smiling from ear to ear and taking my arm. “Come! You can sit behind the wheel and Anya can sit on my lap in the passenger’s seat. Come!”
He opened my door and I got in before he circled the front of the car and signaled for his wife to get out, which she did. Then he plopped himself right in her seat.
“We don’t need glasses!” he said, opening the box and taking out the bottle. “Get in, Anya. Sit on my legs.”
She got in and he began twisting the top off like a drunken sailor.
“In honor of our new American comrade, Anya, I’d like for him to take the first drink.” He held the open bottle up while his wife took a handkerchief from his suit pocket and began wiping the lipstick from his mouth. “Please, Comrade Sweet! Drink!”
“I need to run upstairs real quick,” I said, opening the door. “I’ll be right back.”
I headed upstairs and told Loretta, Dorene, and Bobby that there’d been a problem with the circuit breaker because of all the power usage during the party, and that I’d need to help Sergei fix it. I told them to carry on without me for however long it might take and they seemed to be just fine with that, all three engaged in conversation with various folks I’d never met before.
I returned to the garage to find Sergei still holding the bottle and waiting for my return. I opened the door and got in again.
“Please, Comrade Sweet,” said Sergei. “Drink!”
I grabbed the bottle and took a fake swig. My plan was to get the both of them very drunk, so drunk that I just might be able to steal the keys off of him. The key would be making sure they were the ones doing the majority of drinking. I’d need to creatively sip.
“Ah… that’s good whiskey,” I said, handing him the bottle.
Without saying a word or handing it to his wife first, he took a big drink.
“Delicious!” he said. “The Irish know how to make the best whiskey.”
He took another drink and handed the bottle to Anya, who still had a look of embarrassment, a blush, on her round, olive-skinned face. Based on the behavior of these two, I had a feeling they had downed more than their share of vodka, but this stuff was about to be much more potent.
I’d still had my bouts with sleep over the last decade and had received my last prescription of little white pills from Dorene’s doctor back in Nantucket. And as was the case during my Strivers’ Row days, they were coming in mighty handy. I just needed Sergei and Anya to enjoy the whiskey along with my crushed-up doozies. Of course, with no work for either of them to do tomorrow, I was betting they would fully partake and empty the bottle.
15
Magadan, Russia
January 1938
TIME DOES NOT PASS FAST WHEN ONE IS WORKING IN THE SOVIET prison camps. It had been exactly one week since Yury and Boris had left the camp here at Magadan and headed up the dreaded Road of Bones, but it had felt like two months. If they had managed to stay alive so far while navigating the frozen tundra, they would now be fighting against forty to fifty below temps.
My standing with my boss, Koskinen, had not deteriorated at all. In fact, I was on even better terms with him. The problem that existed in these ungodly camps was that a man like him couldn’t actually help me. He was beholden to a slew of individuals who outranked him, and many of them seemed to disappear and be replaced often. It was a revolving door of bureaucratic Stalin worshippers who made up the Dalstroi, many of them willing to cut one another’s necks in order to lay claim to the latest idea of where the newest gold mine might be.
The only thing keeping Koskinen around, it seemed, was his unprecedented knowledge of land and structural development. He was a brilliant engineer and architect, able to design the most comprehensive drawings, most of which were too advanced to use, as they required materials that were not yet being shipped up the coast. His knowledge of state-of-the-art sewage systems, electrical grids, etcetera, was not being completely put to use.
All of the engineers met with Koskinen on Sundays as a group, but it was my biweekly one-on-one meeting with him that kept alive my hopes of one day seeing my wife and daughter again. It was a Saturday in late January when I decided to press the issue further. But first I had to carry a toilet bucket to the big hole.
All of the barracks had five eighteen-inch-high buckets called parasha to use as toilets, all set aside in a small room where we were forced to relieve ourselves in front of one another. We used dried leaves from the taiga to wipe—poplar, aspen, or birch. Whichever zek topped a bucket off had to carry it to the big hole. Failing to do so would cause a fight. Guards typically let us carry them to the five-by-five, ten-foot-deep hole unaccompanied, but they made sure the bucket was full first.
The big hole was covered by a six-inch-high, square wooden lid, which looked like the roof of a small shed. The lid had handles on each side and a hinge in the middle, allowing one to open it on the right or left. There were many of these zek-dug holes within the camp containing waste and leaves. Once a hole was full, it was sealed by covering the lid with a mound of dirt. The hole was then left this way for one year, after which the contents would be used as manure at the nearby Dukcha State Farm, where they were still foolishly trying to grow vegetables in an impossible climate. They were also trying to acclimatize goats, sheep, cattle, rams, ducks, and chickens there, with very little success.
Finished with my toilet duty, I stood in front of the commander’s barracks and looked down at my concrete-covered felt boots and galoshes. Still had them, even though they’d already issued me clothing for the still-distant summer, including gray canvas shoes. For the summer they had also issued us long gray underwear, top and bottom, made of linen and old, frazzled, cotton military tunics.
I kicked the lower step of the commander’s deck until the almost-dry concrete began to flake off. I took a piece of torn-away sock from my pants pocket and wiped the sawdust and concrete splatters from my face. At least there were no mosquitos to flick away yet. I’d been told they loved the muddy roads and alleys throughout the camp when the summer came, or perhaps it was the filthy sewage holes, the dirty and sick bodies, or the smelly clothes of new arrivals who’d likely be issued garments recycled from the dead.
The small amount of cold water we were given to wash our clothes periodically had little effect. And clothes were never thrown away. They might as well have been gold, too, as far as the Dalstroi heads were concerned. Zeks would kill one another over them. We’d seen such things when men awoke to find their coats or shoes stolen.
Water was like gold, too. And it was served randomly in a bucket from which we dipped. We weren’t given bowls or cups. We’d been issued a piece of tin to make a pot, usually no more than twenty-four ounces’ worth. From this we drank and ate. We’d been given no utensils, as our hands would serve as such. Stalin had more important uses for tin.
If a zek’s pot was stolen, he’d have to find another willing to share, a rarity, as each man was only allowed to fill his pot with soup, gruel, or water one time per serving. A stolen or lost pot essentially meant having to cup your hands and have the cooks ladle the food into them. Such zeks quickly learned how to overlap their hands to keep liquid from seeping through the natural openings that most bony, knobby hands created. On the rare occasion when the soup or gruel was actually boiling hot, this meant not eating. It always meant not being able to have the nightly ration of hot water for dinner. I felt awful for these poor souls, for I hadn’t yet seen a zek lose a pot and be reissued another.