To this day I do not know the name of the commandant of our camp. I do not know whether Oblinsky was ever able to present our petition in full. I don’t know if he sat in a warm office discussing our concerns over a bottle of vodka or if he was forced to speak standing in the snow on some office steps.
I only know, as we all know, the result. On the morning after Oblinsky had left the Gulag committees with their commission to discover the truth about our position, his body was found, as dawn broke, hanging from the wooden bar of the main gate.
Ralph Merton of the London Times returned home that week (expelled for writing consistent anti-Soviet propaganda) and wrote the following piece for the December 14 issue.
The General Amnesty, a concession to the Party Chairmen in the autonomous republics of the Soviet Union, must now be seen as a disaster. Nobody (except the KGB and presumably the Army) knows the full numbers of penals involved, but reports from towns to the north and east of Moscow are that one, perhaps two hundred thousand men are being held in camps outside the capital while improvised arrangements are being made to return them to their homes. These homes, in almost every case, are in the national republics of Transcaucasia and Soviet Central Asia.
Those penals already seen in the areas of the Moscow stations in no sense appear to be possessed with patience and their unruliness, at best, and riotous indiscipline at other times is barely controllable by the Moscow militia.
The atmosphere in Moscow is beginning to be one of a town under siege. During the morning a large student Rodinist mob from the University fought a pitched battle with returning penals at the Pavelets Station. Shots were fired and there were large numbers of casualties on both sides.
The mobilization crisis in the republics (which everybody in Moscow now seems to know about) has created an even more intense bitterness among Russians toward what they call the “Asiatics.”
Queues are everywhere in the capital and power failures, unannounced and often lengthy, add to the tense edginess which pervades the atmosphere.
But behind all this, another crisis is looming. Sources in the Soviet Army claim they are expecting another purge of Stalinist proportions. Semyon Kuba is undoubtedly unhappy about what is believed to be the Army’s virtual refusal to accept an internal security role, i.e., to back the Party all the way. But the Army is not yet convinced that Semyon Kuba is the leader of the future. Still the question of Natalya Roginova remains unresolved. It is certain that Kuba has engaged in intense bargaining within the Party and the Politburo itself to get himself named Party Chairman and President. It is equally certain that until he achieves this he lacks the authority to force the Army to perform as he wishes. But until the question of Natalya Roginova is disposed of, perhaps by a massive show trial, the Army remains on the fence. And why Roginova’s trial has not yet taken place is still anybody’s guess.
Chapter Forty-Two
“Out here,” the old trapper said, “we build a fire, a big, blazing fire.”
Laryssa shook her head in horror.
I put my arm around her, Zoya’s account continues. “The ground’s frozen hard,” I said, “we could not get over a foot down.”
Still she shook her head. The old man shrugged, raising his eyes toward me.
I could find no other way to persuade her. “The wolves, Laryssa,” I said urgently, “she has to be protected from the wolves.”
Perhaps I’d said too much, or just said what we all three knew. Laryssa went outside and I could hear her being sick in the snow. When she came back she looked from the old trapper to myself and nodded, bursting into tears.
That afternoon we built the pyre. The old man lifted Anna’s body onto it while Laryssa sat in the hut, her hands over her ears to keep out the crackling of the fire. I sat with my arm around her, trying in vain to stifle my imagination.
As the smoke from the fire drifted down the chimney or through the cracks around the door, Laryssa fell to her knees and began to pray.
I, sad heathen, sat watching her and listening to the trapper’s boots in the snow as he came to the wood stack for more wood.
We knew him as Zityakin. He never offered us another name, and it soon became easy enough to call him that. He was a true Siberian born far east of here in a town he described as if it were a capital city with streetlights and concrete buildings. I still can’t remember the name.
He had been a zek. He had no need to admit that. His vocabulary and his kindness to us were admission enough.
He had thought when we first knocked on his door after the night of the purga that we were escapees from one of the many camps in the area of Pechora, which, he told us, was the town about 30 miles away. Had we been from one of the local camps he claimed he would have turned us away to protect himself from the inevitable searches. But I didn’t believe him even so.
He was one of the most gentle men I have met in my life. I even include Anton. Although he trapped and shot wild animals for his living, Zityakin could spend the whole day gaining the confidence of a bird with a broken wing. Hypocrisy? It never seemed so in Zityakin.
He was, I suppose, in his sixties, a small grizzled man who had lived all his free life in this climate, and probably his life as a zek, too. Over dinner which was the same meal, twice a day, a great boiling pot of vegetable and meat soup and a few hard biscuits, we would ask him about his life. He was openly astonished by most of our questions.
“Tell me, Zityakin,” I said one night, emboldened by a bottle of his berry vodka, “do you never miss women in your life out here?”
“Of course,” he leaned his elbows on the table and clutched his large jug-ears. “But in the spring,” he said, “When I take my furs to the collective…!”
Laryssa broke into peals of laughter. Perhaps she suspected the truth more quickly than I did. But I was still, I suppose in some ways, ignorant of the ways of the world. What happened each year apparently was this: All the hunters and trappers in the area took their furs into the collective at the little town of Velinsky just outside Pechora. It appears Velinsky is a true Siberian town, although we were just east of the Ural Mountains. From Zityakin’s account it is one long main street through which the branchline railway runs with clapboard houses on either side. Behind the houses are a few other streets, a Lenin Square and a blue-and-gold domed church of St. Gregory-by-the-Bridge. There is no bridge but the church is full each morning.
Somewhere behind Lenin Square is the building of the Hunters’ and Trappers’ Collective. There every spring men like Zityakin drive by sleigh two weeks before the snow melts (it seems they can tell without difficulty) and exchange their furs for money and food.
In his description of the town Zityakin had failed to mention the marketplace, and if a grizzled old man can blush, he did when we, mostly Laryssa, pressed him about his spring outing. In the market you could buy, any morning in spring, a live suckling pig or a plump chicken. But you could also buy, with your pocketful of rubles, any of the market women standing behind the stalls.
It had been a way of life since long before the coming of the railway, Zityakin insisted. In the old days perhaps the menfolk were away doing serf-service for the landowner, but now the railway employed almost every able-bodied man in the little community, and whether the men arranged it themselves or the spring schedule demanded it, there were precious few married men in Velinsky when the hunters came to town.
You bought, it appeared, a woman (how he complained at the rising prices) for a week. She took you to her izba, cooked and cleaned for you, and you both shared the bed over the stove at night, children in the room as well, like as not. If you stayed two weeks, it was acceptable to take another woman after the first Sunday. If not, your first choice should be stood by, or the good woman of Velinsky would lose face before her neighbors.