These graves, enormous stone pits, were filled to the brim with corpses. The bodies had not decayed; they were just bare skeletons over which stretched dirty, scratched skin bitten all over by lice.
The north resisted with all its strength this work of man, not accepting the corpses into its bowels. Defeated, humbled, retreating, stone promised to forget nothing, to wait and preserve its secret. The severe winters, the hot summers, the winds, the six years of rain had not wrenched the dead men from the stone. The earth opened, baring its subterranean storerooms, for they contained not only gold and lead, tungsten and uranium, but also undecaying human bodies.
These human bodies slid down the slope, perhaps attempting to arise. From a distance, from the other side of the creek, I had previously seen these moving objects that caught up against branches and stones; I had seen them through the few trees still left standing and I thought that they were logs that had not yet been hauled away.
Now the mountain was laid bare, and its secret was revealed. The grave ‘opened’, and the dead men slid down the stony slope. Near the tractor road an enormous new common grave was dug. Who had dug it? No one was taken from the barracks for this work. It was enormous, and I and my companions knew that if we were to freeze and die, place would be found for us in this new grave, this house-warming for dead men.
The bulldozer scraped up the frozen bodies, thousands of bodies of thousands of skeleton-like corpses. Nothing had decayed: the twisted fingers, the pus-filled toes which were reduced to mere stumps after frostbite, the dry skin scratched bloody and eyes burning with a hungry gleam.
With my exhausted, tormented mind I tried to understand: how did there come to be such an enormous grave in this area? I am an old resident of Kolyma, and there hadn’t been any gold-mine here as far as I knew. But then I realized that I knew only a fragment of that world surrounded by a barbed-wire zone and guard towers that reminded one of the pages of tent-like Moscow architecture. Moscow’s taller buildings are guard towers keeping watch over the city’s prisoners. That’s what those buildings look like. And what served as models for Moscow architecture – the watchful towers of the Moscow Kremlin or the guard towers of the camps? The guard towers of the camp ‘zone’ represent the main concept advanced by their time and brilliantly expressed in the symbolism of architecture.
I realized that I knew only a small bit of that world, a pitifully small part, that twenty kilometers away there might be a shack for geological explorers looking for uranium or a gold-mine with thirty thousand prisoners. Much can be hidden in the folds of the mountain.
And then I remembered the greedy blaze of the fireweed, the furious blossoming of the taiga in summer when it tried to hide in the grass and foliage any deed of man – good or bad. And if I forget, the grass will forget. But the permafrost and stone will not forget.
Grinka Lebedev, parricide, was a good tractor-driver, and he controlled the well-oiled foreign tractor with ease. Grinka Lebedev carefully carried out his job, scooping the corpses toward the grave with the gleaming bulldozer knife-shield, pushing them into the pit and returning to drag up more.
The camp administration had decided that the first job for the bulldozer received from Lend-Lease should not be work in the forest, but something far more important.
The work was finished. The bulldozer heaped a mound of stones and gravel on the new grave, and the corpses were hidden under stone. But they did not disappear.
The bulldozer approached us. Grinka Lebedev, common criminal and parricide, did not look at us, prisoners of Article 58. Grinka had been entrusted with a task by the government, and he had fulfilled that task. On the stone face of Grinka Lebedev were hewn pride and a sense of having accomplished his duty.
The bulldozer roared past us; on the mirror-like blade there was no scratch, not a single spot.
Sententious
Dedicated to Nadezhda Mandelshtam
People materialized out of nowhere – one after another. A stranger would lie down next to me on my berth and nestle against my bony shoulder in the night, giving me his pitiful warmth and receiving my own in exchange. There were nights when no warmth at all penetrated the rags of my pea jacket and padded vest, and in the morning I would think my neighbor was dead and be surprised that he would rise in response to a shouted command, get dressed, and submissively obey the order. I had little warmth. Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for bitterness – the last human emotion; it was closer to the bone. The man who had appeared from nowhere would disappear for ever in the day, for there were many work areas for coal-prospecting. I didn’t know the people who slept at my side. I never asked them questions. There is an Arab saying: ‘He who asks no questions will be told no lies.’ That wasn’t the case here. I couldn’t have cared less if I was being told lies or the truth. The camp criminals have a cruel saying which is even more appropriate here – it expresses a deep contempt for the questioner: ‘If you don’t believe it, take it as a fairy tale.’ I neither asked questions nor listened to fairy tales.
What remained with me till the very end? Bitterness. And I expected this bitterness to stay with me till death. But death, just recently so near, began to ease away little by little. Death was replaced not by life, but by semi-consciousness, an existence which had no formula and could not be called life. Each day, each sunrise brought with it the danger of some new lurch into death. But it never happened. I had the easiest of jobs, easier even than being a watchman – I chopped wood to boil water. They could have kicked me out, but where to? The taiga is a distant thing, and our little village was like an island in the world of the taiga. I could barely lift my feet, the two hundred yards from the tent to the work area seemed endless, and to cover it I had to rest more than once. Even now I clearly remember all the ruts and potholes on that path of death. And I remember the creek on whose bank I would lie on my stomach to lap up the cold, delicious water. The two-handed saw that I sometimes carried on my shoulder and sometimes dragged behind me seemed unbelievably heavy.
I never did manage to boil water in time for dinner. But none of the workers (all of them had been convicts just yesterday) ever noticed if the water was boiling or not. Kolyma had taught all of us to distinguish only hot water from cold, raw water.
We were totally indifferent about the dialectic leap of quantity into quality. We weren’t philosophers but workers, and our hot drinking-water betrayed none of the important qualities of this leap.
I ate, indifferently stuffing into my mouth anything that seemed edible – scraps, last year’s marsh berries.
There were two shotguns in our tent. Grouse were not afraid of people and at first they could be shot from the tent threshold itself. Game was either roasted whole in the ashes of the campfire or it was boiled. Down for pillows was a sure source of income for the free masters of guns and forest birds. Cleaned and plucked, the birds were boiled in three-quart tin cans suspended over the campfire. I never found any remnants of these magic birds. The hungry teeth of free men ground each bone to nothing. This was another miracle of the taiga.
I never tried a piece of grouse. Mine were the berries, the roots of the grass, the rations. And I didn’t die. With increasing indifference and without bitterness I began to watch the cold red sun, the bare mountaintops where the rocks, the turns of the river, the trees were all sharp and unfriendly. In the evenings a cold fog rose from the river, and there was no single hour in the taiga day when I felt warm.