‘What’s the difference if they’re a forgery or not? Either there was such a book or there wasn’t. Let’s have some rum. I’ve tried a lot of drinks in my time, but there’s nothing like rum. Rum. Jamaican rum.’
Fleming’s wife prepared dinner – mountains of greasy food that was almost instantly devoured by the voracious Fleming. An insatiable gluttony remained for ever a part of Fleming, just as thousands of other former convicts retained their psychic traumas for the rest of their lives.
The conversation somehow broke off in the early city twilight. I could hear next to me the familiar Kolyma chomping and slurping. I thought of life’s strength – hidden in a healthy stomach and bowels that were capable of digesting large quantities. That had been Fleming’s defensive reflex against Kolyma – an omnivorous greed. A lack of spiritual fastidiousness acquired behind the desk of a political investigator had also served to prepare him and cushion the shock of his Kolyma fall. As he fell, he perceived no abyss, for he had known all this even earlier and the knowledge saved him by weakening his moral torments, if such torments had even existed. Fleming experienced no additional spiritual traumas; he witnessed the worst and indifferently watched those next to him perish. Prepared to struggle only for his own life, he saved that life, but in his soul there remained a dark footprint that had to be obliterated, purged with penitence. His penitence was a slip of the tongue, a half-hint, a conversation aloud with himself – without regret or condemnation. ‘The cards just didn’t fall my way.’ Nevertheless Fleming’s story was an act of penitence.
‘You see this?’ he asked me.
‘Your party membership card?’
‘Right. It’s brand new! But it wasn’t simple, not at all simple. Six months ago the District Party Committee examined the question of taking me back into the party. They all sat around, read the materials. The secretary of the committee, a Chuvash, announced the decision in a flat way, almost rudely:
‘ “Well, it’s a clear situation. Write up a resolution: reinstatement with an interruption in membership.”
‘It was as if they threw hot coals on me: “with an interruption in membership.” My first thought was that if I didn’t immediately declare I was in disagreement with the resolution, they’d always ask afterward why I was silent when my case was being examined. I mean, that’s why you’re called in, so you can speak your piece in time, tell them… I raised my hand.
‘ “Whad’ya want?” That same rudeness.
‘I said: “I disagree with the resolution. I won’t be able to get a job anywhere without being asked to explain the interruption.”
‘ “You’re a quick one,” the first secretary of the Party District Committee said. “You’re so pushy because you’re not hurting for money. How much is your pension?”
‘He was right, but I interrupted him and said that I asked for total reinstatement with no interruption in membership.
‘And he said: “Why are you pushing and getting all worked up? You’re in blood up to your elbows!”
‘There was a roaring in my head. “How about you,” I said. “Aren’t your hands in blood?”
‘The first secretary said: “This meeting is cancelled.”
‘ “And back then, in ’37,” I said, “didn’t you bloody your hands then?”
‘The first secretary said: “Enough of this running off at the mouth. We can vote again. Get out of here.”
‘I went out into the corridor and they brought me the resolution: “reinstatement in the party denied.”
‘I ran around Moscow like a crazy man, filling out forms, writing letters. The resolution was cancelled. But the original formulation stayed: “reinstatement with interruption of membership.”
‘The person who reported my situation at the Party Control Commission said I should have kept my mouth shut at the District Committee Meeting. I’m still working at it, filling out forms, going to Moscow, filing legal suits. Have a drink.’
‘I don’t drink,’ I replied.
‘This isn’t rum, it’s cognac. Five-star cognac! For you.’
‘Take the bottle away.’
‘I’ll do just that, carry it away, take it with me. You won’t be offended?’
‘Not in the least.’
A year after this Leningrad supper I received a last letter from the used-book dealer: ‘My wife died suddenly while I was away from Leningrad. I arrived six months later and saw her grave and a snapshot of her in the coffin. Don’t condemn me for my weakness; I have all my wits about me, but I can’t get anything done. I live as if in a dream and have lost all interest in life. I know this will pass, but I need time. What did she see in her life? Dragged herself from one prison to another with packages and legal certificates. Social contempt, the trip to be with me in Magadan, a life of poverty, and now this – the end. Forgive me, I’ll write more later. Yes, I’m in good health, but is the society I live in healthy? All the best.’
Lend-Lease
The fresh tractor prints in the marsh were tracks of some prehistoric beast that bore little resemblance to an article of American technology delivered under the terms of Lend-Lease.
We convicts had heard of these gifts from beyond the sea and the emotional confusion they had introduced into the minds of the camp bigwigs. Worn knit suits and second-hand pullovers collected for the convicts of Kolyma were snapped up in near-fistfights by the wives of the Magadan generals.
As for the magical jars of sausage sent by Lend-Lease, we saw them only at a distance. What we knew and knew well were the chubby tins of Spam. Counted, measured by a very complex table of replacement, stolen by the greedy hands of the camp authorities, counted again and measured a second time before introduction to the kettle, boiled there till transformed into mysterious fibers that smelled like anything in the world except meat – this Spam excited the eye, but not the taste buds. Once tossed in the pot, Spam from Lend-Lease had no taste at all. Convict stomachs preferred something domestic such as old, rotten venison that couldn’t be boiled down even in seven camp kettles. Venison doesn’t disappear, doesn’t become ephemeral like Spam.
Oatmeal from Lend-Lease we relished, but we never got more than two tablespoons per portion.
But the fruits of technology also came from Lend-Lease – fruits that could not be eaten: clumsy tomahawk-like hatchets, handy shovels with un-Russian work-saving handles. The shovel blades were instantaneously affixed to long Russian handles and flattened to make them more capacious.
Barrels of glycerin! Glycerin! The guard dipped out a bucketful with a kitchen pot on the very first night and got rich selling it to the convicts as ‘American honey’.
From Lend-Lease also came enormous black fifty-ton Diamond trucks with trailers and iron sides and five-ton Studebakers that could easily manage any hill. There were no better trucks in all of Kolyma. Day and night, Studebakers and Diamonds hauled American wheat along the thousand-mile road. The wheat was in pretty white linen sacks stamped with the American eagle, and chubby, tasteless bread rations were baked from this flour. Bread from Lend-Lease flour possessed an amazing quality: anyone who ate it stopped visiting the toilet; once in five days a bowel movement would be produced that wasn’t even worth the name. The stomach and intestines of the convict absorbed without remainder this magnificent white bread with its mixture of corn, bone-meal, and something else in addition – perhaps hope. And the time has not yet come to count the lives saved by this wheat from beyond the sea.
The Studebakers and Diamonds ate a lot of gas, but the gas also came from Lend-Lease, a light aviation gas. Russian trucks were adapted to be heated with wood: two stoves set near the motor were heated with split logs. There arose several wood supply centers headed by party members working on contract. Technical leadership at these wood supply centers was provided by a chief engineer, a plain engineer, a rate setter, a planner, and bookkeepers. I don’t remember whether two or three laborers ran the circular saw at the wood-processing plant. There may have been as many as three. The equipment was from Lend-Lease, and when a tractor came to the camp, a new word appeared in our language: ‘bulldozer’.