It took his being sentenced to isolation for some trivial infraction of the rules before he found the privacy to read the letter and take stock of his fortune. The isolation cell was a miniature stone dungeon in which one could neither fully stand nor lie down, but its narrow grille admitted the light of a summer during which the night seemed never to fall. The sunlight illuminated a wall emblazoned with religious graffiti painted by inmates with powdered feldspar and beryl from the mine, so that the cell, despite its constriction, had the air of a shrine. By this brightness the prisoner was able to read the letter’s greeting, in its homey Yiddish script, from one Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America: “Honored Nephew, please find enclosed the means by you I’m sending to come …” But the body of the letter made no more sense to him than did its opening salutation. He read it again, until the language began to stir in his entrails the beginnings of what felt like a symphonic episode. The jarring music, however, communicated not one jot of meaning to his sluggish brain. Moreover, he ached in every joint and fiber from hunkering in such cramped quarters, and his fingers, stiff as claws from the years of wielding the shovel and pick, could barely count the rubles in their envelopes. Once more he read the letter: “… the means by you I’m sending …,” until it struck him that “you” was he, Prisoner 71640, né Muni Pinsker. Then the music, converted at length into words, woke up his fears from what he’d hoped was their perpetual slumber.
Escape? Who escaped? There was Shishkov the sharper, found frozen in a fetal attitude not half a kilometer from the camp; and the patricide Alyosha, who was torn apart by sled dogs in sight of the watchtower, his agony backlit by the setting sun. There was Osip Katzenelenbogen, a political, who made it as far as the bank of the swollen Lena, where he was caught and returned to the camp to run a gauntlet of his fellow convicts. Their anger was stoked by the starvation rations they’d received as a collective punishment during the time following the zhid’s attempted flight. In the end his already decalcified bones were shattered and Osip was left to drag his broken body between the barracks and the mineral sluice for the brief balance of his days. But the fact remained that Pinchas Pin of North Main Street, America, had sent a parcel to his nephew Muni, a human being. Tahkeh, how could you tell? — when he was harnessed by day to a horse collar that rubbed blood blisters on his scrawny chest as he hauled a cartload of ore up a slanted shaft. He breathed air that was either so cold that it crackled like paper or scorched your sinuses with its reek of excrement and carbonic acid. He never cared whether he was eating bugs or pearl barley in the soup they called “shrapnel,” and his teeth were as loose in his gums as headstones in mud. His body was so inured to filth that scrubbing himself in the bathhouse drew blood. Once he’d helped a fellow hide a convict who’d dropped dead of heart failure, so they could share in the extra rations for the three days it took the putrefying corpse to betray them. But on the other hand, he was light-headedly surprised, this Muni Pinsker, to find himself still alive in another summer, when the snow had retreated far enough to reveal the arsenic green moss underneath.
Almost involuntarily he began to collect the tiny pots of salt from the log canteen, squirreling them away among the fir branches his mattress was stuffed with. Other items he secreted in that lumpy mattress were bought, no questions asked, with hard currency: the mess kit, the tinderbox, a wire noose for snaring game. With gradually increasing histrionics he started to demonstrate the symptoms of derangement that overtook the mine workers as a prelude to total collapse. He spoke aloud to himself in a nonsensical hybrid of Russian and Yiddish, and pretended to read fortunes in the globules of fat he scooped from his gruel on a good day. More than once, though he could barely stand at the end of the working day, he coaxed his toothpick legs into a kind of spontaneous scarecrow gavotte. No one paid him much attention, so accustomed were the other prisoners to the extravagant behavior of convicts on their way out; though Ilya Popov, former editor of the leftist Proletarii, himself stricken with silicosis, saw the method in Muni’s antics and slipped his fellow traveler a clamshell compass with a sundial before he died.
Then it was nearing autumn and the soft ground was hard again; the rivulets from the melted snows that had mired the transport sledges and made the taiga impassable were dried up. That’s when Muni swallowed all the salt he’d been hoarding. The insult to his system brought on a hectic fever that got him transferred to the infirmary, an aboveground facility outside the camp “zone.” Its wards — each guarded by a single sentry seated with a shotgun beside an iron stove — featured every species of real and imaginary affliction. No disease was quarantined: convicts suffering from typhoid lay next to those turned yolk-yellow from jaundice; pneumonia victims rattled their last beside imposters who worried superficial wounds into life-threatening infections. There was little actual treatment, few instruments, and no anesthesia for surgery, and small medication beyond the bottles of alcohol drunk up by the orderlies mustered from among the patients. Nor was there any barbed wire surrounding the infirmary grounds, since who, having gained a berth without shackles in the sick bay, would (even given the strength) want to leave?
Muni lay gibbering on his cot, despite his broken fever, in a self-scripted delirium, raising himself on occasion to perform his St. Vitus rigor. The strategy was intended to get him judged dokhodyag by the skeleton staff: a lost cause convict in the throes of his final agony; and it appeared to work. The stranger his behavior, the more it seemed he was ignored by the population of that raving pesthouse. Moreover, so drowsy was the round-faced sentry that Muni could almost believe that what was left of his topcoat, notwithstanding its clanking from the provisions he’d sewn inside it, served as a cloak of invisibility. Thus emboldened, he contrived, after a week of conspicuous malingering, to sidle by breathless degrees out of the ward, slip along a corridor, and pad down the stairs into the chill October night. He plunged into a stand of larches and paused with a stampeding heart beside a patch of black ice that had survived the previous winter. Though he’d tied the earflaps of his flannel cap tightly under his chin, the cold had already penetrated the several layers of his clothing; his eyes watered, his nostril hairs become bristle-stiff, and frost invaded his lungs. He took the compass from the folds of his coat and tapped its glass face, but the needle would not come unstuck. Neither was he assisted by the stars that glinted metallically through the branches above him, resembling nothing so much as the vaulted ceiling of the mica mine. But there was a pale lavender light in a corner of the sky: that would be the east, and it was away from the light that the fugitive’s steps must tend.
He slept by day, shivering in burrows dug into clay embankments with a sliver of spruce. He ate from his little store of rubbery fish preserved in the stinking oil he’d pilfered along with a bolus of congealed fat; he smeared the fat on the hardtack he rationed himself over the numberless days. He chewed wrinkled berries hard as goat turds sprinkled over a salad of thistles and mushrooms tough as rawhide. Through nights that grew ever longer, he stumbled across the bone-brown steppe and up through sparse timberland, blundering into treacherous ravines. His garments, ragged to begin with, hung from him in shreds, his footcloths working their way out of his galoshes, his hair and beard matted with twigs. He wasted hours building fires, chipping away at the flint from his tinderbox until the sparks ignited the kindling and moss. Often the vicinity of nightfall would threaten to turn the fire into a beacon, and Muni would have to abort his progress; but without the periodic warmth and drying out the fire afforded there would be no progress at all. Shivering in holes lined with ash branches and willow shrubs, he poked his head out to see now a foraging bear, now a party of forced-marching convicts or a patrol perhaps looking for him. Some patrols passed practically under his nose and Muni wondered that they hadn’t sniffed him out in his blind; but the sled dogs were not retrievers and his marginal subsistence left only the slightest of trails.