We were checked through the gate and stood wearily on the square while they went through the totally unnecessary ritual of roll call. No lights showed in our hut, but I could imagine the scene of the thief Vanya and his friends gathered round a lamp, shielded with blankets, playing an inevitable game of cards. Russians, they say, will drink anything and play for anything. That night I was to find out how true it was.
We entered the hut, Bubo, myself and perhaps ten others. Ravenous and exhausted, we made our way past the blanket fence shielding the kerosene lamp and the hunched figures holding their fistful of cards. I knew Vanya had food in his bunk. He controlled the distribution in our hut and made sure that there was always a little extra for him. Of course his thieves got more than their share, too, but we politicals, the majority, didn’t protest because Vanya never overdid it. He trod a careful line between the greed of his thieves and the desperation of the rest of us. And of course we valued our lives.
I rolled on my bunk, my stomach spasms outlawing any chance of sleep. I knew from a change of tone among the cardplayers’ whispered voices that the game had ended. I had no curiosity about who had won what. Vanya kept a tight hold on the gambling. The most a man could stake would be his day’s ration. In other huts, other camps, we knew the appalling levels the stakes reached.
The cardplayers were getting to their feet. They, the thieves, lived down at the far end of the hut, barricaded together in case of sudden attack. But one of them was moving toward our end of the hut. I lay tense, sliding my hand downward to where I kept the blade of a kitchen knife rammed between the bunk boards. Strictly illegal of course, because Vanya decreed that only thieves could carry knives.
The faintest of shadows fell across my face, then passed on. The man stopped at the three-tier bunk next to mine. Bubo the tailor occupied the top tier. I had no idea who the man was. But despite Vanya’s rules I knew, I thought I knew, what was happening. The thieves had gambled for a life. Except to stake their own lives which they sometimes did in the camps, there was no more desperate gamble. The loser was bound by the game’s rules to kill, that same night, the man whose life he had staked. The rules, and they were inflexible, required that the man to be killed should be a serious opponent. Bubo, tall and powerfully built, was a candidate.
The shadowed figure moved forward. As the lamplight gleamed on the knife-blade I kicked. The man went forward onto his face and I jumped from the bunk down onto his spine. The uproar was immediate. Men scrambled in terror across other bunks, shouting for mercy from the killer of their dreams. The forbidden electric light was switched on. In other huts the shouts were taken up; lights, equally forbidden, sprang on. The guards raced from the administration hut, fearful despite their weapons, and uncertain from where the uproar had emanated.
In the light I could see that the man on the floor was Kaufmann, a Volga German and Vanya’s number two. I kicked and kicked at his head, crashing it against the timber base of the tier of bunks. It seemed to flop from side to side as if on a rope.
Bubo was next to me, facing the thieves’ end, a spar of wood torn from the bunk in his hand. “It’s now or never,” he was shouting. “The politicals must run the huts!”
I got my knife-blade and followed him. Ten or more others were with us holding stools or broom handles or even swinging buckets above their heads.
We fell upon the thieves, smashing at their skulls with our rough weapons, tearing the knives from their hands. Outside the guards were firing in the air. From every hut came chanting and shouting. We fought until the last thief lay cowering or unconscious before us.
“From today, Anton and me rule this hut,” Bubo announced as the guards broke in. “And only politicals carry knives.”
Naturally there was an enquiry, and strange to say, I think for once we got more than our fair share of justice. Or perhaps we just got justice and I had lost the ability to see it when it was staring me in the face.
There were two men dead, the Volga German and another thief. Several were injured, all none too seriously. But before the enquiry opened Bubo made it clear that anyone who told the truth would be dead by midnight the same day. The story, therefore, was reduced by Bubo to its essentials. A fight had broken out in the hut. Most of the men were involved. The dead thief had killed the German and then collapsed himself from a knife wound the German had inflicted moments before.
Nobody of course believed a word of it. But in their wisdom the camp authorities decided not to pursue the matter. For the fight itself each man in our hut received a hundred hours extra labor. All but Vanya and the remaining thieves thought the price was cheap.
For Zoya, protected by her position of medical assistant, her first summer at Panaka passed learning the rudiments of medicine. The doctor remained as unapproachable as ever, absorbed in her daily tasks, fiercely proud of the work she did and prepared to defend any diagnosis and treatment she gave. She was not always right but without her the situation in the camp would have been more desperate than it was. The authorities recognized this, as did Zoya herself.
Yet there was one independent triumph which Zoya could claim. Each morning among the line of men waiting for medical treatment there would be one at least who complained of a burning rash on his arm or leg. Ointment and return to duties, the doctor’s treatment, proved useless. The rash would develop seeming to constrict the blood vessels, crippling the man, and too often causing the whole limb to decay from the body.
In these extreme cases the doctor would reluctantly send the zek to the hospital at Krasibirsk, but no report on the patient was ever received back at Panaka and the rash continued, believed by the zeks to be contagious and resulting in a man or woman being cruelly isolated in their hut, cut off from the few human contacts that sustained life.
It was Zoya’s triumph to diagnose the cause of the dreaded rash. And it was done on the basis of a play she remembered by the University Drama Club about working conditions in feudal Russia. One scene had referred to a medieval affliction called Saint Anthony’s fire, a burning rash which would blacken and rot the limb from the body. As an enthusiastic medical student she had taken an early opportunity to ask her lecturer about it and been told that it was now believed to be in some cases erysipelas and in others ergot poisoning caused by a fungus growth on winter-stored rye.
She had presented this possibility to the doctor and surprisingly it had been agreed that the storage conditions in the camp bakery would be examined with the authorities’ consent.
Apart from the rats and thousands of mice in the storage compound outside the camp they had found huge mounds of rye from the last summer and perhaps the summer before coated with a heavy gray-white fungus.
There was no facility to analyze the fungus and indeed no one skilled enough to do it. But the authorities agreed that the worst of the infected rye should be dispensed with and the rest used by the bakery detail in strict order of its arrival in the camp. Whatever the accuracy of Zoya’s diagnosis it is true that before long the incidence of the rash diminished and finally virtually disappeared.