“I was going to ask you where—”
“I like talking to you because you’re a Negro. Maybe I’m ignorantly convincing myself that I’m getting to know my sister’s Negro husband better by imagining that you’re him. They have four children who I don’t know. I am an uncle. Maybe I see your boy as one of my unfamiliar nephews. Such impulses to consider such things are not under our control as humans.”
“You sound like an extremely educated man,” I bravely decided to say. “You sound well-read.”
He stood and approached the bookshelf to my right. “I shall give you this one to read by Bolesław Prus called Pharaoh.” He took it from the top shelf, then handed it to me before sitting back down. “Now you have something to read.”
“Thank you, Commander.”
“It is Stalin’s favorite. You should learn as much as you can about the preferences of Stalin. And it will make you look good when the commanders and guards see you carrying it. When you’re finished, have your boy read it.”
“I will.”
“I prefer philosophy books, a broad range of them. As such, maybe I am too philosophical for Stalin’s Soviet Union, too nostalgic for the Lenin days that saw the proletariat as actual human beings who mattered. Maybe I read the Communist Manifesto too often. Have you read it?”
“Yes,” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t quiz me, and, at the same time, realizing I’d spent my entire adult life writing my own manifesto.
“A few years back,” he said, “zeks in Kolyma were actually fed and clothed better, and even worked shorter hours. There was a belief that such would make the zek more productive. But then the numbers got too big, so many arrests. Stalin realized that Kolyma zeks were like river fish that could simply die and be replaced with fresh fish from a hatchery.”
I watched him sit there and smoke for a moment. He was an introspective man, lost in what he perceived to be an ever-growing, unprincipled land. He appeared to be my age, which would have put him in his early twenties back during the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution. He hadn’t been able to shed those Lenin and Trotsky principles that were polar to Stalin’s wholly authoritarian edicts.
“I want you to replace the floor in the northwest chamber of punishment isolator number three,” he finally said. “The slats of wood and joists are rotting from all of the blood and urine. That last chamber on the right is where we’ve kept the worst of the worst for the past year. Fifty shipped-in, murderous zeks have probably died in that single chamber over that period. I won’t go into details about the vicious beatings they endured. No?”
“No,” I said.
“I need the slats replaced by noon tomorrow. It is already four o’clock. You can work until late tonight. Then finish tomorrow. Have your boy help you remove the slats this evening. Then use Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin to help you two replace them in the morning. Those two work the fastest. You can go now.”
It was the best gift I’d been given in the five months I’d been imprisoned, my getting to work alone with James, at least for a day. With the claw ends of our hammers, the two of us stabbed at the bloodstained slats and began yanking the first two up. It was disgusting.
Punishment isolator number three was where they kept the worst of the worst zeks. It was a barracks some one hundred yards west of the entire camp, made of thick logs, rectangular like all the others, but it had a long hallway down the middle and a small guard’s room at the end. There were ten windowless, eight-by-eight chambers with heavy wooded doors in the isolator, five along each side of the hallway. We were working in the chamber at the back on the right. There was a crazy zek in each of the others.
“Make sure you don’t let that hammer slip and hit you in the eye, son,” I said, noticing the thick, dry blood that had settled on the sides of the slat I’d lifted. “Make sure the claw is dug in good before you pull. And the long nails on these boards are rusty and filthy. Don’t let ’em stick you.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“What’s the first thing you’re gonna do when we get back to Paris after we leave here soon? You should start working on your drawings again.”
I could see his emotionless mood lift a bit at my mere suggestion.
“I think I want to show Ginger how to play chess. She was always wanting to play with my friend Paul and me back in Moscow. We never let her.”
“She’ll like that.”
“Yeah.”
I placed the board aside and looked at the grayish dirt ground underneath the four-inch-high joists. I reached down and picked up a handful. It felt like brittle clay, breaking apart easily in my hands. Fluids had managed to seep through the tight cracks and stain portions of it. It smelled awful, hence the reason Koskinen had said before I’d exited, “Take some shovels and wheel barrels and remove the top foot of dirt underneath. Then replace it with fresh soil before replacing the slats.” He’d been more than correct to suggest such.
“Hey, son,” I said, “did Paul’s father ever tell him when they were going back to Seattle? I remember him constantly talking about his family planning to return soon.”
“They probably left in December.”
“Well, when we get to Paris I’ll track them down and we can plan to see them when we eventually move to Denver, Colorado.”
“Really,” he said, almost trying to crack a smile for the first time since August. “Are we really gonna move to the United States, Dad?”
“That’s my plan, son. As soon as Bobby gets us out of here and we rejoin your sister and mother in Paris, I’m going to contact some colleges there. Denver is a place I’ve always wanted to go.”
We could hear the door behind us opening.
“Bystreye!” said an isolator guard who’d obviously just arrived to replace the other guard who’d been outside in the cold guarding the front door to this point. “Work faster! I’m here now! It is my night shift now, zeks! You Negroes can’t be lazy anymore!”
I kept my head down and continued working, trying to ignore the tall, thin man dressed in his gray uniform and visor cap, a rifle hanging from his shoulder.
“You need to finish the entire job today!” he said, taking a wooden canteen from his coat pocket. “You need to finish tonight!”
“Commander Koskinen said that two zeks, Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin, would be joining us tomorrow morning to help finish,” I calmly said in nervous Russian.
He pulled the corked top off of his canteen and I could see the blood rushing to his white bony face. He took a big drink and wiped the moisture from his Stalin-like, dark mustache. He wasn’t drunk, but appeared as though he’d had a bit too much for an on-duty guard. He pressed the top back on his canteen and pocketed it.
“Commander Koskinen is not my commander!” he said. “He is in charge of building shit for the Dalstroi. The only commander we listen to at this camp is the big boss, Commander Drugov. He’s in charge of zeks! I spit on your bourgeois Koskinen! You are no different than a fucking suki!”
We kept working, our heads down, trying to ignore the word he’d used. It referred to a criminal zek who liked to collaborate with the Dalstroi officials.
“You want to go tell your Koskinen who the lazy zeks are so he will be nice to you,” he continued. “I can tell you’re that kind of filth. Look at me, you fucking suki!”