‘Well?’
‘I wake up in the morning, get my ration, and stick it inside my shirt. We get two rations per day. I go to Mishka, the powderman. “How’s about it?” I say.
‘ “All right,” he says.
‘I give him the whole eight-hundred gram ration for a capsule and a section of fuse. Then I go back to my “countrymen” in my barracks. We weren’t really from the same area, we just called each other that. One’s name was Fedya, and the other was Petro, I think.
‘ “Ready?” I ask.
‘ “Ready,” they say. “Let’s have it,” I say. They give me their two rations; I put them under my shirt, and we push off for work. When we get there, while the work gang is being issued tools, we take a burning log from the fire and go behind a heap of mined rock. We stand shoulder to shoulder, and all three of us hold the capsule – each with his right hand. We light the fuse and – Zap! – fingers fly everywhere. Our gang leader starts shouting: “What the hell are you doing?” The senior guard marches us off to camp, to the first-aid station.
‘They bandaged us up there. Later my countrymen got sent away somewhere, but I had a temperature and ended up in the hospital.’
Pavel Pavlovich had almost finished his cigarette, but Ruchkin was so engrossed in telling his story that he nearly forgot about the butt.
‘But what about the rations? You had two left. Did you eat them?’
‘Damn right! I ate them right after I got bandaged up. The other two wanted me to break a piece off for them. I told them to go to hell. Business is business.’
Captain Tolly’s Love
In the gold-mine work gang, the easiest job was that of carpenter. He would nail boards together to make a walkway for wheelbarrows loaded with earth for the washer. These wooden ‘whiskers’ stretched out in all directions from the central walkway. From above, that is from the gold-washer, the walkway looked like a monstrous centipede, flattened, dried, and nailed for ever to the gold-mine’s open workings.
The carpenter had a ‘pushover’ job compared with that of the miner or the wheelbarrow man. The carpenter’s hands knew neither the handle of the wheelbarrow, the shovel, the feel of a crowbar, nor the pick. An axe and a handful of nails were his only tools. Normally the gang boss would rotate men on this crucial job to give everyone at least a slight chance to rest up. Of course, fingers clutched in a death grip around a shovel or pick handle cannot be straightened out by one day of easy work. A man needs to be idle for at least a year for that to happen. But there is, nevertheless, some measure of justice in this alternation of easy and hard labor. The rotation was not rigid: a weaker person had a better chance of working a day as a carpenter. One didn’t have to be a cabinet-maker or carpenter to hew boards and drive nails. People with a university education coped with the job quite well.
In our work gang this pushover job wasn’t evenly distributed. The job of carpenter was always filled by one and the same person – Isaiah Davidovich Rabinovich, former director of Soviet Government Insurance. Rabinovich was sixty-eight years old, but the old man was in good health and hoped to survive his ten-year sentence. In camp it is the work that kills, and anyone who praises it is either a scoundrel or a fool. Twenty-year-olds, thirty-year-olds died one after another, and that was why they were brought to this ‘special zone’, but Rabinovich, the carpenter, lived on. He evidently knew someone among the camp higher-ups, had some mysterious pull. He even got office jobs. Isaiah Rabinovich understood that every day and every hour spent some place other than the mine promised him life and salvation, whereas the mine offered him only death. There was no reason to bring pensioners to the special zone. Rabinovich’s nationality had brought him here to die.
But Rabinovich was stubborn and did not want to die.
Once we were locked up together, ‘isolated’ for the first of May. It happened every year.
‘I’ve been observing you for a long time,’ Rabinovich said, ‘and I was pleased to know that someone was watching me, studying me, and that it was not someone who was doing it as part of his job.’
I smiled at Rabinovich with a crooked smile that ripped open my wounded lips and tore my gums, which were already bloody from scurvy.
He said, ‘You’re probably a good person. You don’t speak degradingly of women.’
‘I hadn’t noticed, Isaiah Davidovich. Can it be that they really talk about women here?’
‘They do, but you don’t take part.’
‘To tell the truth, Isaiah Davidovich, I consider women to be better than men. I understand the dual unity of man and woman, of husband and wife, etc. And then there’s motherhood and labor. Women even work better than men.’
‘That’s true,’ said Beznozhenko, a bookkeeper who was sitting next to Rabinovich. ‘Every Saturday when they make you work without pay you’re better off not being next to a woman. She’ll work you to death. And every time you want to take time out for a smoke, she’ll get mad.’
‘That too,’ Rabinovich said distractedly, ‘probably, probably… Well, here we are in Kolyma, and a lot of women have come to find their husbands. Theirs is a terrible lot, what with all those syphilitic higher-ups exploiting them. You know that just as well as I do. But no man has ever come out here to follow a convicted, exiled wife. I wasn’t director of Government Insurance for long, but it was enough to get ten years. For many years I was in charge of the overseas division of Government Insurance. Do you know what that means?’
‘I understand,’ I said without thinking, for I had no idea what that meant.
Rabinovich smiled very properly and very politely.
‘Aside from my work for Government Insurance abroad…’
And glancing suddenly into my eyes, Rabinovich sensed that I was not interested in anything. At least not until dinner.
The conversation was renewed after a mouthful of soup.
‘If you like, I’ll tell you about myself. I lived abroad a lot, and everywhere I’ve been – in the hospital or the barracks – they always ask me to describe one thing: how, where, and what I ate over there. A sort of culinary motivation. Gastronomic dreams and nightmares. Would you like that kind of story?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Good. I was an insurance agent in Odessa. I worked for the Russia, an insurance agency. I was young and tried to work well and honestly for the owner. I learned languages. He sent me abroad. I married the owner’s daughter. I lived abroad right up to the revolution. The owner was like Savva Morozov;* he was laying his bets on the Bolsheviks. I was abroad during the revolution with my wife and daughter. My father-in-law died an accidental death; it had nothing to do with the revolution. I knew a lot of people, but none of them had any influence after the October Revolution. Do you understand me?’
‘Yes.’
‘The Soviet government was just getting on its feet. People came to see me. Russia, the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic, was making its first purchases abroad and needed credit. But the word of the State Bank wasn’t sufficient collateral for a loan. A note from me, however, my recommendation, was enough. So I fixed up Kreiger, the match king, with the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic. After a few deals like that they let me come home. And I had some delicate problems to work on here at home as well. Have you heard anything about Spitzbergen and how the deal was paid for?’
‘A little.’
‘Well, I was the one who loaded the Norwegian gold on to our schooner in the North Sea. So aside from handling foreign accounts, I had a number of assignments of that sort. The Soviet government was my new boss, and I served it just as I had the insurance agency – honestly.’