Rabinovich slowly searched out a louse under his shirt, pulled it out, and crushed it on the bunk.
‘Your daughter wants your permission to get married?’
‘Yes.’
‘Your daughter’s fiancé, the naval attaché of the United States, Captain Tolly, wants permission to marry your daughter?’
‘Yes.’
‘So run to the camp director and request that a special delivery letter be sent.’
‘But I don’t want to give my permission for this marriage. That’s exactly what I wanted to ask your advice about.’
I was simply dumbfounded by these letters, these stories, this act.
‘If I agree to the marriage, I’ll never see her again. She’ll go away with Captain Tolly.’
‘Listen, Isaiah Davidovich, you’re going to be seventy soon. I consider you a reasonable person.’
‘Those are just my feelings, and I haven’t thought the matter out yet. I’ll send a letter tomorrow. It’s time to go to sleep.’
‘Let’s celebrate this event tomorrow. We’ll eat our kasha before the soup. And the soup – after the kasha. We can even roast some bread. Make toast. We’ll boil the bread in water. What do you say to that, Isaiah Davidovich?’
Even an earthquake could not have kept me from sleep, from the unconsciousness of dream. I closed my eyes and forgot about Captain Tolly.
The next day Rabinovich wrote the letter and dropped it in the mailbox near the guard post.
Not long after that I was taken away for trial. They tried me and returned me to the same camp. I didn’t have a scarf, but then the group leader was gone as well. I arrived just like any other emaciated prisoner. But Isaiah Rabinovich recognized me and brought me a piece of bread. He had nailed down his job in bookkeeping and had learned not to think about tomorrow. The mine had taught Rabinovich a lesson.
‘I believe you were here when my daughter was getting married?’
‘Of course… Let’s have it.’
‘Captain Tolly married my daughter. I believe that was where we stopped.’ Rabinovich resumed his tale. His eyes smiled. ‘Captain Tolly stayed for three months, and then he got a position on a battleship in the Pacific Ocean and left on his assignment. My daughter, Captain Tolly’s wife, wasn’t allowed to leave. Stalin viewed these marriages with foreigners as a personal insult, so the People’s Commissariat of Foreign Affairs whispered to Captain Tolly: “Go on alone, have a good time. What’s keeping you? Get married again.” In a word, the final answer was that my daughter was sent to work in Stockholm at the Swedish Embassy.’
‘As a spy? A secret assignment?’
Rabinovich looked at me in displeasure at my chatter.
‘I don’t know. I don’t know what sort of work. She was in the embassy. My daughter worked for a week there. Then a plane came from America, and she flew away to her husband. Now I’ll be expecting letters from places other than Moscow.’
‘And what about the local camp authorities?’
‘They’re afraid. They don’t dare to have an opinion on such matters. An investigator came from Moscow to question me. And he left.’
Isaiah Rabinovich’s happiness didn’t stop there. The greatest miracle was that his sentence ended when it was supposed to – to the day, without figuring in his workdays.
The body of the former insurance agent was strong enough for him to get a job as a financial inspector in Kolyma. They did not let Rabinovich go back to the mainland. He died about two years before the Twentieth Party Congress where Khrushchev gave his famous de-Stalinization speech.
In the Bathhouse
In those cutting jokes that are unique to the camps, the bathhouse sessions are often referred to as tyranny. A traditional ironic formula originating within the camp’s very observant criminal element runs: ‘Tyranny! The politicals are being herded into the bathhouse.’ This joking remark is fraught with bitter truth.
The bathhouse is a negative event, a burden in the convict’s life. This observation is a testimony of that ‘shift of values’ which is the main quality that the camp instills in its inmates.
How can that be? Avoidance of the bathhouse constantly perplexes both doctors and camp officials who view this absenteeism as a kind of protest, a violation of discipline, a sort of challenge to the camp regime. But fact is fact and the bathhouse ritual, practiced over the years, represents an event in the life of the camp. The guards are mobilized and instructed, and all the supervisors, not to mention the guards, take part personally in catching truants. Running the bathhouse and disinfecting clothes in the steam rooms is the direct and official responsibility of the Sanitation Squad. The entire lower administrative hierarchy consisting of convicts (group leaders, foremen) also abandons its normal affairs and devotes itself to the bathhouse. Ultimately even production supervisors are inevitably drawn into this great event. An entire gamut of production measures are applied on bathhouse days (three a month).
On these days everyone is on his feet from early morning to late at night.
How can this be? Is it possible that a human being, no matter what state of deprivation he might be reduced to, will refuse to wash himself in the bathhouse and free himself from the dirt and sweat that cover his body with its festering skin diseases? Can it be that anyone would refuse to feel cleaner, if only for an hour?
There is a Russian phrase: a person may be referred to as ‘happy as if he just came from the bathhouse’. Indeed, the phrase accurately reflects the physical bliss experienced by a person who has just washed himself.
Can it be that people have so lost their minds that they do not understand, do not want to understand, that life is better without lice than with them? There are a lot of lice in the crowded barracks and they can’t be eliminated without the disinfestation chamber.
Of course, infestation is a relative concept. A dozen or so lice in one’s clothing doesn’t count. Infestation begins to trouble both the doctors and one’s comrades when the lice can be brushed off one’s clothing, when a wool sweater stirs all by itself through flea-power.
Thus, can it be that a human being – no matter who – would not want to free himself from this torment that keeps him from sleeping and against which he struggles by scratching his own dirty body till it bleeds?
No, of course not. But the first ‘but’ arises over the lack of any work-release time for the bathhouse. Bathhouse sessions are arranged either before or after work. After many hours of work in the cold (and it’s no easier in the summer) when all thoughts and hopes are concentrated on the desire to reach one’s bunk and food so as to fall asleep as soon as possible, the bathhouse delay is almost unendurable. The bathhouse is always located an appreciable distance from living quarters, since it serves not only convicts but civilians from the village as well. Usually it is situated in the civilian village, and not in camp.
The bathhouse always takes up much more than the hour necessary to wash and delouse clothing. Many people have to wash themselves, one group after the other, and all late-comers have to wait their turn in the cold. They are brought to the bathhouse directly from work without any stopover in camp, since they would all scatter and find some way to evade going there. When it’s very cold the camp administration attempts to shorten the outside waiting period and admits the convicts directly to the dressing-rooms. The dressing-rooms are intended for ten to fifteen persons but the camp authorities pack in up to a hundred men in outer clothing. The dressing-rooms are either unheated or poorly heated. Everything and everyone is mixed together – naked men and men in coats. There is a constant shoving, swearing, and general hubbub. Profiting from the noise and the crush, both common criminals and political prisoners steal their neighbors’ belongings. Different work gangs who live separately have been brought together, and it’s never possible to recover anything. Furthermore, there’s nowhere to entrust anything for safe keeping.