It was yet seven days before Christmas when the old high-stacked steam engine pulling its line of rickety freight cars struggled toward the dawn rising behind the railhead town of Krasibirsk. Huddled in the last car, with forty other women, Zoya Densky awoke fighting fear. It had been the same ever since her arrest.
Even when the interrogation was over and the beatings which, to be honest, in my case were not that severe, I would awake each morning with a paralyzing dread of what the day would bring. An old man I had met in the Lubyanka, who had been arrested under Stalin and again under Brezhnev and had spent over fifty years of his life as a zek, warned me that these fears had to be combated. He suggested a few lines of Pushkin’s poetry recited immediately on waking, or best of all, he said, the Lord’s Prayer if I knew it, but anything to break the paralysis of fear. He knew a thing or two, that old man. He said for instance that only a zek bent on suicide would even think about the injustice of his sentence. In the camps he said that (a strange phrase when I think of it) man could learn that he did not live by bread alone. And learning that, he could live forever.
I suppose, of course, he was a Christian, though it meant little to me then, except that as I interpreted our talk, he meant that you could, as a zek, sink or swim. I intended to swim.
They unbolted the freight-car doors at a little desolate rail-stop called Krasibirsk that morning and we all stumbled out of the fetid warmth of what had been home for the last week. The soldiers, dressed in green uniform trousers, fur boots and quilted green jackets, ear-muffed fur caps and thick gloves, were a mixture of Russians and Asiatics. One or two carried submachine guns, but most carried long, roughly cut batons which they seemed to get a lot of pleasure from wielding across our bottoms. Of course most of us, at that stage, were still looking more or less like women.
We formed up in a long sullen column. “Hands behind your backs,” the soldiers ordered, the first time I received that dreaded command, and we marched through the town. Few people gave us even the recognition of a hostile stare. The men, loading lorries or repairing roofs, continued work. The women in the long queues outside the shops, women like ourselves, turned away to talk to a neighbor. The first tremors of the zeks’ hatred of all those who are free passed through me that morning.
We left the miserable township and marched through brown-stained snow to the lorry depot. It was cold but not really painfully so. In the gray dawn as we left Krasibirsk and stumbled toward the line of trucks behind the concrete slab walls of the depot, most of the women were crying.
We were ordered onto the trucks, the batons flashing across our bottoms. “Don’t you dare,” I said to the young soldier, as I clambered aboard. He didn’t.
Until nightfall we bumped and slithered along the narrow road north, turning off only once to slide down an iced forest track and onto a frozen river. One of the women said this was the River Ob which flows north through this part of Siberia into the Arctic. At least in summer it flows. Now it seemed a solid block of ice over which the line of trucks in our convoy made good progress, their lights blazing between the riverbanks, for fifteen miles or more.
At some point in the twilit afternoon we drove off the river again and up the bank to a forest encampment where fires were burning under huge pots of soup. Every woman was issued a tin mug and spoon and pushed into line to get her issue from prisoners serving from the soup pots. It was the first time I had seen a real zek and it was a shock. They were mostly women, desperately thin and from the strands of their hair that hung from their fur caps, almost all gray. Yet, they were certainly not all that old. The number of teeth missing, too, was noticeable as they snarled at us to hurry along when we paused for a moment in the warmth of the fire. But of course the biggest shock was the contempt, even hatred, that seemed to radiate from their thin bodies. The fear welled up in me. I stepped forward, reciting to myself my lines from Pushkin. My old friend in the Lubyanka had warned me of this, too.
Oh God the first sight of Panaka! Enclosed by snow forests, it was a world alone, the long bleak huts, the mesh-covered lights along the fencing, the wisps of steam rising from urine-soaked sacking as women squatted sobbing in the latrine.
At roll call on the square between the huts I was aware for the first time of other prisoners. Shadowed bearded faces crowded at the windows of the huts. I was mortally afraid.
I became a zek at dawn the next day. After a night when I thought I should barely survive the cold on a wooden bunk wrapped in two cotton blankets, we were paraded outside the administration hut of Panaka One. I should explain that the well-known term “Gulag,” General Prisons’ Administration is supplanted in district administrations by a term based on the name of the oblast. We were therefore prisoners of the Kraslag, the Krasibirsk Prisons’ Administration, and our numbers were issued accordingly. Thus it was that on that morning I became Kra 97927. I also, by a supreme piece of good fortune, became assistant medical orderly on the slender basis of my year of medical studies.
The “doctor” was a woman of about fifty who had, many years before, completed three years of medical studies, but she was brisk and confident. Every medical emergency up to and including appendectomy was handled within the camp. Other problems, and they were rare, she claimed, were sent to Krasibirsk where she believed a clinic existed. Unwilling to talk about the reasons for her imprisonment, never discussing her family or hometown, she buried her thoughts in the long day’s tasks, cutting, sewing, setting, prescribing, coolly and mostly efficiently. I learned, months later, that she had been given twenty-five years, and that underneath her coldness was a heart too kind to expose to this grim place. Would I, I wondered, tread the same path before my fifteen years were up?
Even with the exceptional privileges of assistant medical orderly I was pitched into camp life without ceremony. In our hut we divided immediately between newcomers and old zeks. It is true that among these latter some of the politicals retained shreds of old-time decency. But the hut was run by a gaggle of ex-thieves and prostitutes who were just as violent as some of the men. I remember that first day we were allocated to hut 17. Two dozen of us were lined up by a gang of knife-carrying women under the direction of a small scrawny woman whose pale skull showed through her balding dark hair. Each one of our group was stripped of her new issue of camp clothes and handed in exchange a filthy bundle from one of the thieves — torn trousers and oily quilted jackets. Then a grotesque fashion parade took place as the thieves and harlots preened themselves and complimented each other on their new outfits.
I was the only newcomer allowed to retain my clothes. Karka, the thieves’ leader, had stood in front of me for a good minute before turning to her friends. “This one we leave alone. That’s my orders. It’s bad policy to fall foul of a medical assistant — you never know when you might need her.” And she hopped around holding her belly with both hands in an obscene parody of being pregnant.
It was a relief at the time, of course, to be able to keep my clothes, but Karka’s words were even more useful to me later when I faced the test that any reasonably young woman inevitably had to face in a mixed camp.
Somehow our first week passed. The work for the women wasn’t really hard. While the men cut and dragged and sawed the wood the women collected all the off-cuts and sorted and graded them for despatch to toymaking factories at Perm some hundreds of miles to the southwest. But it meant, of course, that the women often worked in the same shops as the men.