The same psychic phenomenon was at work that forced a man to postpone a well-planned escape simply because there would be tobacco or commissary privileges that day. There are as many strange and illogical instances as there are camps. Human shame, for example. How does one measure it, what are its limits? People whose lives are ruined, whose past and future have been trampled on, suddenly find themselves in the grip of some trivial prejudice, some nonsense that they for some reason can neither ignore nor deny. And the sudden appearance of shame is the most subtle of human emotions, to be remembered for one’s entire life as something real and infinitely precious.
There was an incident in the hospital when an orderly, who was not yet an orderly and was simply helping out, was assigned to shave a newly arrived group of women. The administration was amusing itself by assigning men to shave women and women to shave men. But this man begged his superior to classify the affair as ‘sanitary treatment’. He just could not accept that his life was ruined, that these amusements of the camp authorities were nothing but a dirty foam in a terrible kettle where he himself was being boiled away.
This amusing, tender human streak reveals itself suddenly.
The hospital was in a panic. After all, Fedorenko had been working there for several months. Unfortunately, the ‘prodromal period’ of the illness, which precedes the appearance of any external symptoms, can last for several years. Those inclined to suspect the worst were doomed to retain this fear in their souls for ever, whether they were civilian employees or convicts.
The hospital was in a panic. The doctors searched their own bodies and those of their patients for white, insensitive spots. A needle joined the phonendoscope and small rubber hammer as standard equipment for any doctor conducting a preliminary examination.
The patient, Fedorenko, was brought before the orderlies and doctors and undressed. An overseer with a pistol stood near the patient. Doctor Krasinsky, armed with an enormous pointer, gave a lecture on leprosy, pointing his stick alternately at the leonine face of the former orderly, at the fingers that were on the verge of falling off, and at the shiny white spots on his back.
All residents, without exception, civilian and convict, were re-examined, and suddenly a white spot insensitive to pain was discovered on the back of Shura Leschinskaya, a nurse from the front lines on duty in the women’s ward. Leschinskaya, who had been in the hospital for only a few months, had no lion’s mask. Her conduct had been neither stricter nor looser than that of any ‘nurse’ recruited from among the former prisoners.
Leschinskaya was locked up in one of the rooms of the women’s ward, and a sample of her skin was sent to Magadan and from there to Moscow for analysis. The answer came: leprosy!
Disinfection after leprosy is quite difficult. Regulations require that the house in which a leper has lived be burned. That was what the textbooks said. But how could one of the wings of a gigantic two-storied hospital be burned? No one could make up his mind to do that. It was something like disinfecting expensive furs. To preserve the value of their furs, the owners are willing to risk leaving the infection in them. They sprinkle some chemical symbolically on the precious furs, because steaming would destroy not only the microbes but the fur as well. The administration would have remained silent even if it had been a matter of plague or cholera.
Someone assumed responsibility for not burning the wing, and even the room in which Fedorenko was kept under lock and key was not burned. They simply soaked everything with phenol and carbolic acid and sprayed repeatedly.
Downstairs, in the basement, two tiny rooms were constructed for the patients. Fedorenko and Leschinskaya were transferred there. Guards were stationed beside the heavy padlocked doors, and the couple was left there to await an order or a detachment of guards from the leprosarium.
Fedorenko and Leschinskaya spent one day in their cells, and when the guards were changed at the end of the day, the cells were found to be empty. Panic ensued in the hospital. Every window and door in the cells was intact. Krasinsky was the first to figure out how they had fled. They had escaped through the floor.
Fedorenko had used his enormous strength to pry the logs apart and had broken into the bread-slicing room and the operating-room of the surgical ward. They had gathered up all the grain alcohol, and the narcotics from the cupboards, and made off with their loot to an underground den.
They had selected a spot, barricaded it, and thrown blankets and mattresses on top to wall themselves off from the world, the guards, the hospital, and the leprosarium. They lived there as man and wife for several days – three days, I believe.
On the third day guards with dogs found the two lepers. I was a member of the group that searched the tall basement of the hospital. The foundation was very high at that spot. The guards removed the logs and exposed the two lepers lying naked. They didn’t get up. Fedorenko’s dark, mutilated hands were around Leschinskaya’s gleaming body. Both were drunk.
They were covered with blankets and carried away to one of the two cells, no longer separated.
Who covered them with a blanket, who touched their terrible bodies? A special janitor was found in the civilian hospital and, with the permission of higher authorities, given a credit of seven working days for each one spent with the lepers. That is more than they give people for working in the tungsten-mines, the lead-mines, or the uranium-mines. Seven days for one. The article of the penal code under which the man was sentenced was not taken into consideration. They found a soldier, arrested at the front and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labor and five years of exile, who naïvely assumed that his heroism would shorten his sentence and bring nearer the day of his liberation.
Convict Korolkov, a wartime lieutenant, stood guard at the cell round the clock. He even slept before the door. And when the guards arrived from the Island (on which the leprosarium was located), convict Korolkov was taken with the two lepers to tend to their needs. I never heard anything more of Korolkov, or of Fedorenko, or of Leschinskaya.
Descendant of a Decembrist*
Many books have been written about Mixail Lunin, the first hussar and a famous Decembrist. In the destroyed chapter of Eugene Onegin, Pushkin wrote:
Friend of Mars, Bacchus, and Venus…
He was a true knight, an intelligent, well-informed man who not only spoke up for his cause but worked actively toward it. It was indeed a great cause! In due course I will tell you everything I know about the second hussar, his descendant.
Hungry and exhausted, we leaned into a horse collar, raising blood blisters on our chests and pulling a stone-filled cart up the slanted mine floor. The collar was the same device used long ago by the ancient Egyptians. I saw it, experienced it myself. Throughout Kolyma the mine was notorious.
The cruel, snowless Kolyma winter of 1940–41 was approaching. Cold crushed the muscles and squeezed a man’s temples. Iron stoves were placed in the tarpaulin tents that served as our shelter in the summer months, but the tents, a mass of holes, could not retain the free air.
Our inventive bosses were preparing people for the winter. Inside each tent a second, smaller frame was constructed that was designed to trap a layer of air about four inches thick. This frame was covered, all but the ceiling, with roofing material. The resulting double tent was slightly warmer than the single canvas one.
The very first nights spent in these tents made it clear that this arrangement meant doom, and a quick doom at that. I had to get out of there – but how? Who would help? Five miles from us was a large camp, Arkagala, where miners worked. Our group was considered a part of that camp. I had to get transferred there, to Arkagala.