But how?
Convict tradition demands that in such instances, a prisoner first of all approach a doctor. There was a first-aid station at Kadychkan run by a former student of the Moscow Medical Institute who hadn’t finished his course of study. At least, that was the rumor in our tent.
It required enormous will-power to find the strength to go to the first-aid station. I didn’t have to get dressed or put on my boots, of course, since I wore them constantly from one bathhouse day to the next. But I just didn’t have the strength. Why should I waste my rest period on this ‘visit’ to the doctor, when it might result only in mockery or even a beating. (Such things happened.) But the main consideration was the hopelessness, the slimness of the chance of success. Nevertheless, I couldn’t afford to lose even the slightest chance in the search for luck – this judgement came from my body and its exhausted muscles, not from experience or intelligence.
As in beasts, the will was subordinate to instinct.
On the other side of the road from our tent was a small hut used by geologists, exploring parties, secret police, and military patrols. The geologists had left long ago, and the hut had been converted into an outpatient medical facility with a cot, a cupboard with medications, and a curtain made from an old blanket. The blanket concealed the area where the ‘doctor’ lived.
Right down the middle of the road was a line of people queueing up in the bitter cold to be examined.
I squeezed my way into the hut, and the heavy door, closing behind me, pushed me right in. The doctor had blue eyes, a large forehead with two bald spots, and hair. He had to have hair; hair was an existential statement. Hair in camp is a testimony to importance. Almost everyone was shaved bald, so that anyone who had hair was the object of general envy. Combed hair was a peculiar form of protest against life in the camps.
‘From Moscow?’ the doctor asked me.
‘From Moscow.’
‘Let’s get acquainted.’
I gave him my name and shook his outstretched hand. It was cold and somewhat moist.
‘Lunin.’
‘That’s a proud name,’ I said with a smile.
‘I’m his great-grandson. In our family the oldest son is always called either Mixail or Sergei. We alternate. Pushkin’s Lunin was Mixail Sergeevich.’
‘I know.’ Somehow this, our first discussion, didn’t smack at all of the camps. I forgot about my request, since I didn’t want to introduce an inappropriate note into our conversation.
‘Have a smoke!’
I began to roll a cigarette with my rosy, frostbitten fingers.
‘Take more, don’t be bashful.’
‘Back at home I have a whole library of books about my great-grandfather. I’m a medical student. But I was arrested and didn’t graduate. Everyone in our family was in the military except me. I became a doctor. And I don’t regret it.’
‘So much for Mars. A friend of Aesculapius, Bacchus, and Venus.’
‘I don’t know about the Venus part, but it certainly is true about Aesculapius – except I don’t have a diploma. If I did, I’d really show them.’
‘How about Bacchus?’
‘Well, of course, I do have grain alcohol here. But all I need is one shot-glass. I get drunk easily. But you know how things are – I take care of the civilian village as well. Come back again sometime.’
On the point of leaving, I opened the door slightly with my shoulder.
‘You know,’ Lunin said, ‘Muscovites like to talk about their town – the streets, the skating-rinks, the houses, the Moscow River – more than Kievans or Leningraders do… You people like to talk about the city even more, and they remember it better…’
I dropped by several times in the evening when Lunin had finished attending to patients. I’d smoke a home-made cigarette but never got up the nerve to ask for bread.
Sergei Mixailovich, like everyone who either through luck or profession had an easy time of it in camp, didn’t think much about others and couldn’t really understand hungry people. His sector – Arkagala – was getting enough to eat, and the mine catastrophes had bypassed the town.
‘If you like, I’ll operate on you – remove that cyst from your finger.’
‘All right.’
‘Just don’t ask me to release you from work. You know yourself it’s not really convenient for me to do that.’
‘But how can I work with my finger all cut up?’
‘You’ll manage.’
I agreed, and Lunin did a good job of removing the cyst and gave it to me as a ‘keepsake’. Many years later my wife and I were to meet, and in the first minute of our meeting she squeezed my fingers, feeling in amazement for that cyst.
I realized that Sergei Mixailovich was simply very young, that he needed an educated person to talk to, that his views of the camps and his idea of fate were no different from those of any civilian supervisor, that he was even capable of admiring the camp thugs, and that the brunt of the storm of ’38 had passed over him.
I treasured every day, every hour of rest; exhausted from life in the gold-mines, my muscles demanded a respite. I treasured every piece of bread, every bowl of soup; my stomach demanded food, and my will was not strong enough to keep my eyes from wandering over the shelves in search of bread. But I forced myself to remember Moscow’s Chinatown (which has no Chinese) and the Nikitsky gates where the writer Andrei Sobol shot himself and where Stern shot at the German ambassador’s car. It is that part of Moscow’s street history which will never be written down.
‘Yes, Moscow, Moscow. Tell me, how many women have you had?’
It was senseless for a half-starved man to keep up this conversation, but the young surgeon listened only to himself and wasn’t offended by my silence.
‘Sergei Mixailovich, our fates are a crime – the greatest crime of the age.’
‘I’m not sure of that,’ Sergei Mixailovich said with an expression of displeasure. ‘It’s just the kikes muddying the water.’
I shrugged my shoulders.
Soon Sergei Mixailovich got his transfer to Arkagala, and I thought – without any sadness or feeling of injustice – that one more person had left my life for ever and that parting was, in reality, an easy thing. But matters worked out differently.
The supervisor of the sector where we worked, harnessed to an Egyptian yoke like slaves, was Pavel Ivanovich Kiselyov. A middle-aged engineer, he was not a Party member. He beat his prisoners daily. Whenever the supervisor set foot in the sector, there were beatings, blows, and shouting.
Was it because he had no fear of being punished? Was there a blood-lust lurking in the depths of his soul? Or perhaps a desire to distinguish himself in the eyes of the senior supervisors? Power is a terrible thing.
Zelfugarov, a counterfeiter from my work gang, lay in the snow, spitting out his broken teeth.
‘All my relatives were shot for counterfeiting, but I was a minor, so I got off with only fifteen years’ hard labor. My father offered the prosecutor half a million rubles – real ones, in cash – but he wouldn’t go for it.’
There were four of us working the shift, harnessed to the horse collar and walking around the post. We stopped near Zelfugarov. There was Korneev, a Siberian peasant; Lyonya Semyonov, a thief; the engineer Vronsky; and myself. Semyonov said:
‘It’s only in camp that you learn to work with machinery. Try your hand at any kind of work – what do you care if you break a crane or a winch?’ This point of view was popular even among many of the young surgeons in Kolyma.
Vronsky and Korneev were my acquaintances. We were not friends, but we had known each other since we had been together at Black Lake – an assignment where I returned to life. Without getting up, Zelfugarov turned his bloodied face with its swollen, dirty lips to us.