Garanin shot several, a dozen, or sometimes several dozen people a day. Murdering, he laughed or sang cheerful ditties. Beria ordered him shot suddenly and for obscure reasons, ostensibly for being a Japanese spy. But it is after all quite likely that this burly, muscle-bound hulk, son of a Belorussian peasant, a blacksmith by profession, semiliterate, did not even know that such a country as Japan exists.
ARRIVING IN MAGADAN, I had three telephone numbers with me. I dialed the first — a young male voice answered and informed me that the woman I was calling was no longer alive. The second — endless ringing, no one picked up. I dialed the third number: 23343. A deep, good-humored voice answered. I introduced myself and heard such a friendly, even joyful, response as if the one on the other end of the line (I did not know him personally) had been waiting years for my visit. We arranged to meet. He would try to borrow a four-wheel-drive car somewhere, so that we could go around a bit, see something.
IN THE MORNING a green GAZ van pulled up. The driver was a woman who said that she was forty-seven years old. It’s strange, but I do not remember her name (perhaps she didn’t give it), only her age. “Forty-seven Years” was a massive, robust woman in whom everything was pushed forward, bulging, popping, most of all her eyes and breasts. She had powerful, strong shoulders, and I couldn’t imagine the dimensions of the man next to whom she might have felt a shy, weak, small thing. Nothing (and, I also think, no one) could possibly resist her.
Next to the driver sat the man I had spoken to yesterday, Albert Miltahutdinov, a writer, who had spent his entire adult life — more than thirty years — in Kolyma, writing and also studying the geography of this part of Siberia. (Because formerly one could reach Kolyma only by sea, it became customary to speak of it as an island, which further underscored its isolation from the rest of the world. Anyone leaving Kolyma said: “I’m going to the continent.”)
“Pojechali! (Let’s go!),” said Forty-seven Years in a tone that was at once a question and an order. We had barely set off when she started to go into ecstasies over Romanians. “Molodcy Rumyni! (Brave young Romanians!),” she exclaimed. “They cut off Ceauşescu’s head!” Although this happened already some time ago, it had clearly made an impression on her. “When will we cut off the heads of those in the Kremlin?”
I thought: I am in Kolyma. I was terrified not so much by her words as by the fact that, while holding the steering wheel with one hand, she was demonstrating with the other how heads should be properly cut off; and we were driving along a street with such terrible ditches, potholes, and chasms that I felt like an astronaut in a vacuum chamber — I was riding not knowing where my head was, where my legs were. The vehicle would at one moment rear up vertically, as though to take off for the sky, and in the next, plunge as though into a bottomless abyss.
But Forty-seven Years took no notice of the road — she had a more important problem. “Oh, what fools they made of us!” she would say with rage. “What fools they made of us!”
Her energy, her fury, all the guns of her hatred, were aimed at the Kremlin. There resided those who for forty-seven years had made an idiot out of her, promulgating preposterous things, which they ordered her to believe.
“But we will get them!” She was getting drunk on her blinding, angry vision.
WE REACHED the Bay of Nogayev and stopped at the water’s edge, near some abandoned, rusting cutters. This is a place-symbol, a place-document, with a symbolic weight similar to that of the gate to Auschwitz or the railway ramp in Treblinka. This bay, the gate, and the ramp are three different stage designs for the same scene: the descent into hell.
Of the millions of people who were disgorged upon this rocky shore covered with gravel, on which we are now standing, three million never came back. The bay looks like a large lake with a calm, gray-brown surface. The entrance to it, from the Sea of Okhotsk, which separates it from Japan, is so narrow that even in stormy weather there are no large waves here. In all directions one can see dark gray, almost black hills with gentle slopes, bare, without a trace of greenery, like so many heaps of coal or slag long ago abandoned. A dreary, monotonous, lifeless world. Without trees, without birds. One can see no movement; one can hear no sounds. Low clouds, crawling along the ground, always seemed to be drawing in our direction, straight at us.
This environment provokes extreme behavior, one can fall into a delirium here, into madness, or succumb to the most crushing depression; the most difficult thing is to preserve a sense of normalcy and the faith that nature can be friendly, that it does not want to rid itself of us. In a place like Kolyma, nature pals it up with the executioner, helps him in the destruction of the defenseless and innocent victim, serves the criminals, grovels before them, always slipping them new instruments of torture — biting cold, icy winds, banks of snow a story high, enormous, impassable cold deserts.
To this bay came the ships carrying in their hatches prisoners jammed together, half-dead from hunger and suffocation. Those who were still moving walked down the gangplanks to the shore. It was then that they saw the bay for the first time. The first impression, noted in dozens of memoirs: From here I will not return. They were ordered into columns. Then the counting of the prisoners began. Many of the guards were illiterates, and counting large numbers caused them great difficulties. The roll call lasted for hours. The half-naked deportees stood motionless in a blizzard, lashed by the gales. Finally, the escorts delivered their routine admonition: A step to the left or a step to the right is considered an escape attempt — we shoot without warning! This identical formula was uniformly applied throughout the entire territory of the USSR. The whole nation, two hundred million strong, had to march in tight formation in a dictated direction. Any deviation to the left or to the right meant death.
From the bay they were now marched along the main street of Magadan, on which today stands my hotel. It was the first street in the town. Berzin built it and gave it his name — the chiefs of the NKVD gave their names to cities, squares, factories, schools, until a veritable NKVD-land had come into being. In 1935 Berzin opened in Magadan a park of culture, giving it the name of his superior, the chief of the NKVD, Yagoda. Three years later Berzin and Yagoda were shot. Berzin Street was renamed Stalin Street, and Yagoda Park was renamed after the new chief of the NKVD, Yezov. A year later they shot Yezov, and the park received the name of Stalin. In 1956 Stalin Street was changed into Marx Street, and Stalin Park was renamed Lenin Park. For how long — no one knows. Eventually, the town council hit on a good idea, and is now giving streets apolitical names. So there is Gazetnaya, Pochtovoya, Garaznaya, Nabierzhaya. After all, newspapers, post offices, garages, and shorelines will always be around.