We were prospecting for coal, but without any luck. Little by little, in groups of five and ten, people were taken away from our camp. Making their way along the forest path up the mountain, these people left my life for ever. Each of us understood that ours was a prospecting group and not a mine group. Each strove to remain here, to ‘brake’, as long as possible. One would work with unusual diligence, another would pray longer than usual. Anxiety had entered our lives.
A new group of guards had arrived from behind the mountain. For us? But they took no one away, no one!
That night there was a search in the barracks. We had no books, no knives, no felt pens, no newspapers, no writing paper. What was there to search for?
They were confiscating civilian clothing. Many of the prisoners had acquired such clothing from civilians who worked in the prospecting group which itself was unguarded. Were they trying to prevent escapes? Fulfilling an order, maybe? Or was there some change of authority higher on up?
Everything was confiscated without any reports or records. Confiscated, and that was that! Indignation was boundless. I recalled how, two years earlier, civilian clothing had been confiscated in Magadan; hundreds of thousands of fur coats from hundreds of convict gangs that had been shipped to the Far North of Misery. These were warm coats, sweaters, and suits that could have served as precious bribes to save a life in some decisive hour. But all roads back were cut off in the Magadan bathhouse. Mountains of civilian clothing rose in the yard. They were higher than the water tower, higher than the bathhouse roof. Mountains of clothing, mountains of tragedies, mountains of human fates suddenly snapped. All who left the bathhouse were doomed to death. How these people had fought to protect their goods from the camp criminal element, from the blatant piracy that raged in the barracks, the cattle cars, the transit points! All that had been saved, hidden from the thieves, was confiscated in the bathhouse by the state.
How simple it all was! Only two years had passed, and now everything was being repeated.
Civilian clothing that had reached the mines was confiscated later. I remember how I had been awakened in the middle of the night. There were searches in the barracks every day, and every day people were led away. I sat on my cot and smoked. I had no civilian clothing. It had all been left in the Magadan bathhouse. But some of my comrades had civilian clothing. These were precious things – symbols of a different life. They may have been rotting, torn, unmended, because no one had either the time or the strength to sew. Nevertheless they were treasured.
Each of us stood at his place and waited. The investigator sat next to the lamp and wrote up reports on confiscated items.
I sat on the bunk and smoked, neither upset nor indignant, but overwhelmed by one single desire – that the search be ended as quickly as possible so we could go back to sleep. But our orderly, whose name was Praga, began to hack away at his suit with an axe, tore the sheets into shreds, chopped up his shoes.
‘Just rags, all they’ll get is rags.’
‘Take that axe away from him,’ shouted the inspector.
Praga threw the axe on the floor. The search stopped. The items Praga had torn and cut were his own things. They had not yet managed to write up a report on them. When he realized they were not about to seize him, Praga shredded his civilian clothing before our very eyes. And before the eyes of the investigator.
That had been a year ago. And now it was happening again.
Everyone was excited, upset, and had difficulty falling asleep again.
‘There’s no difference between the criminals who rob us and the government that robs us,’ I said. And everyone agreed with me.
As watchman, Skoroseev started his shift about two hours before we did. Two abreast – all the taiga path would allow – we reached the office, angry and offended. Naïve longing for justice sits deep in man – perhaps even too deep to root out. After all, why be offended? Angry? Indignant? This damn search was just one instance of thousands. But at the bottom of each of our souls something stronger than freedom, stronger than life’s experience, was boiling. The faces of the convicts were dark with rage.
On the office porch stood the camp chief, Victor Nikolaevich Plutalov. The chief’s face was also dark with rage. Our tiny column stopped in front of the office, and Plutalov called me into the office.
‘So, you say the state is worse than the camp criminals?’ Plutalov stared at me from under lowered brows, biting his lips and sitting uncomfortably on a stool behind his desk.
I said nothing. Skoroseev! The impatient Mr Plutalov didn’t conceal his stoolie, didn’t wait for two hours! Or was something else the matter?
‘I don’t give a damn how you run off at the mouth. But what am I supposed to do if it’s reported to me? Or, in your language, someone squeals?’
‘Yes sir, it’s called squealing.’
‘All right, get back to work. You’d all eat each other alive if you had the chance. Politicians! A universal language. Everyone is going to understand one another. But I’m in charge here. I have to do something, if they squeal to me…’
Plutalov spat angrily.
A week passed, and I was shipped off with the latest group to leave the blessed prospecting group for the big mine. On the very first day I took the place of a horse in a wooden yoke, heaving with my chest against a wooden log.
Skoroseev remained in the prospecting group.
They were putting on an amateur performance in camp, and the wandering actor, who was also master of ceremonies, came running out to encourage the nervous performers offstage (one of the hospital wards). ‘The performance’s going great! It’s a great performance!’ he would whisper into the ear of each participant. ‘It’s a great performance!’ he announced loudly and strode back and forth, wiping the sweat from his forehead with a dirty rag.
Everything was very professional; the wandering actor had himself once been a star. Someone on stage was reading aloud a story of Zoschenko, ‘Lemonade’. The master of ceremonies leaned over to me:
‘Give me a smoke!’
‘Sure.’
‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ the master of ceremonies said suddenly, ‘but if I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was that bitch Skoroseev.’
‘Skoroseev?’ Now I knew whose intonations the voice on stage had reminded me of.
‘I’m an Esperantist. Do you understand? It’s a universal language. No “basic English” for me. That’s what I got my sentence for. I’m a member of the Moscow Society of Esperantists.’
‘Oh, you mean Article 5, Paragraph 6? A spy?’
‘Obviously.’
‘Ten years?’
‘Fifteen.’
‘But where does Skoroseev fit in?’
‘Skoroseev was the vice-chairman of the society. He’s the one who sold us all out, testified against everyone.’
‘Kind of short?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where’s he now?’
‘I don’t know, but I’d strangle him with my bare hands. I ask you as a friend [I had known the actor for about two hours – no more]: hit him in the face if you meet him. Right in the mug, and half your sins will be forgiven you.’
‘Half, for sure?’
‘For sure.’
But the reader of Zoschenko’s ‘Lemonade’ was already walking offstage. It wasn’t Skoroseev, but tall, lanky Baron Mendel. He looked like a prince from the Romanov dynasty and counted Pushkin among his ancestors. I was somewhat disappointed as I looked Pushkin’s descendant over, and the master of ceremonies was already leading his next victim on to the stage. He declaimed Gorky’s ‘Wind gathers the clouds over the sea’s gray plain’.