Many days passed before I learned to call forth from the depth of memory new words, one after the other. Each came with difficulty; each appeared suddenly and separately. Thoughts and words didn’t return in streams. Each returned alone, unaccompanied by the watchful guards of familiar words. Each appeared first on the tongue and only later in the mind.
And then came the day when everyone, all fifty workers, dropped their work and ran to the village, to the river, climbing out of their ditches, abandoning half-sawn-through trees and the uncooked soup in the pot. They all ran quicker than me, but I hobbled up in time, aiding myself in this downhill run with my hands.
The chief had arrived from Magadan. The day was clear, hot, dry. On an enormous fir stump stood a record-player. Overcoming the hiss of the needle, it was playing symphonic music.
And everyone stood around – murderers and horse-thieves, common criminals and political prisoners, foremen and workers. And the chief stood there too. And the expression on his face was such that he seemed to have written the music for us, for our desolate sojourn in the taiga. The shellacked record spun and hissed, and the stump itself, wound up in three hundred circles over the past three hundred years, spun like a taut spring…
The Virtuoso Shovelman
The Seizure
The wall lurched, and nausea welled up in my throat, sickeningly sweet. For the thousandth time a burned-out match floated past me. I stretched out my hand to grab the annoying match, and it disappeared. Sight had left me. But the world had not yet abandoned me – I could still hear the far-off, insistent voice of the nurse somewhere out on the street. Then hospital gowns, the corner of a building, and the starry sky flashed by… An enormous gray turtle with a cold gleam in its eyes rose up before me. Someone had broken a hole through its ribs, and I crawled into the hole, clutching and pulling myself up with my hands. I trusted only my hands.
I remembered someone’s insistent fingers skillfully easing my head and shoulders on to the bed. Everything fell quiet, and I was alone with someone as enormous as Gulliver. Insect-like, I lay on a board, and someone examined me intently through a magnifying glass. I squirmed, but the terrible glass followed all my movements. Only when the orderlies had transferred me to a hospital cot and the blissful calm of solitude had followed did I realize that Gulliver’s magnifying glass had not been a nightmare – I had been looking at the on-duty doctor’s glasses. This pleased me.
My head ached and whirled at the slightest movement, and it was impossible to think. I could only remember, and remote frightening pictures began to appear in black and white like scenes from a silent movie. The cloying nausea so similar to the effect of ether would not go away. I had experienced that sensation before… I recalled how, many years before, in the far north, a day off had been declared for the first time in six months. Everybody wanted to lie down, simply to lie prone, not to mend clothing, not to move… But everyone was awakened early in the morning and sent for firewood. Five miles from the village was a forest-cutting area, and we were each to select a log commensurate with our strength and drag it home to the barracks. I decided to go off in a different direction to a place a little more than a mile away where there were some old log stacks and where I could find a log I could handle. Climbing the mountain was exhausting, and when I reached the stack, I couldn’t find a light log. Higher up I could see collapsed stacks of black logs, and I started to make my way up to them. There was only one log there that was slender enough for me to carry, but one end of it was pinned under the stack, and I didn’t have the strength to pull it free.
After several attempts I became totally exhausted. Since it was impossible to return empty-handed, however, I gathered my strength and crawled still higher to a stack covered with snow. It took me a long time to clear away the loose, squeaky snow with my hands and feet. I finally managed to yank a log free, but it was too heavy.
I wore a dirty towel around my neck that served as a scarf. I unwound it, tied it to the tip of the log, and started dragging the log away. The log slid downhill, banging against trees, bumps, and my legs, sometimes even getting away from me. Octopus-like, the dwarf cedar grasped at the log, but it would tear itself free from the tree’s black tentacles, gather speed, and then get stuck in the snow. I would crawl down to it and again force it to move. While I was still high up on the mountain, it became dark, and I realized that many hours had passed, and the road back to the village and the camp area was still far away. I yanked at the scarf, and the log again hurtled downward in jerks. I dragged the log out on to the road. The forest lurched before my eyes, and a sickening sweet nausea welled up from my throat. I came to in the crane-operator’s shed; he was rubbing my face and hands with stinging snow.
All this I saw projected once again on the hospital wall.
But instead of the crane-operator, a doctor was holding my hand.
‘Where am I?’
‘In the Neurological Institute.’
The doctor asked me something, and I answered with difficulty. I was not afraid of memories.
An Epitaph
They all died…
My friend, Nicholas Kazimirovich Barbe, who helped me drag a large stone from a narrow test pit, was shot for not fulfilling the plan in the sector assigned to this work gang. He was the foreman listed in the report of the young communist Arm, who received a medal in 1938 and later became mine chief and then director of mines. Arm made a splendid career for himself. Nicholas Barbe possessed one treasured object, a camel-hair scarf – a long, warm, blue scarf of real wool. Thieves stole it in the bathhouse. Barbe was looking the other way, and they simply took it. And that was that. The next day Barbe’s cheeks were frostbitten, severely frostbitten – so much so that the sores didn’t have time to heal before his death…
Ioska Riutin died. He was my partner. None of the hard workers wanted to work with me, but Ioska did. He was stronger and more agile than I, but he understood perfectly why we had been brought here. And he wasn’t offended at me for being a bad worker. Ultimately the ‘senior inspector’ (a czarist term still in use in 1937) ordered that I be given individual assignments. So Ioska worked with someone else, but our bunks in the barracks were side by side. One night I was awakened by the awkward movement of someone dressed in leather and smelling of sheep. Standing in the narrow passageway between the bunks, the man was waking my neighbor.
‘Riutin! Get up.’
Hurriedly, Ioska began to dress, while the man who smelled of sheep searched his few belongings. Among them was a chess set, and the leather-clad man set it aside.
‘That’s mine,’ Riutin said. ‘That’s my property. I paid money for it.’
‘So what?’ the sheepskin coat said.
‘Put it back.’
The sheepskin coat burst out laughing. And when he tired of laughing, he wiped his face with his leather sleeve and said:
‘You won’t be needing it any more…’
Dmitri Nikolaevich Orlov, a former adviser of Kirov,* died. He and I sawed wood together during the night shift at the mine. The possessors of a saw, we worked at the bakery during the day. I remember perfectly the toolman’s critical gaze as he issued us the saw – an ordinary cross-cut saw.
‘Listen, old man,’ the toolman said. They called all of us ‘old men’ back then; we didn’t have to wait twenty years for that title. ‘Can you sharpen a saw?’
‘Of course,’ Orlov said quickly. ‘Do you have a tooth setter?’
‘You can use an axe,’ the toolman said, having come to the conclusion that we were intelligent people – not like all those eggheads.