Table of Contents
Title Page
LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER
February 4, 1982. New York
February 17, 1982. New York
February 23, 1982. New York
March 11, 1982. New York
March 19, 1982. New York
April 4, 1982. Minneapolis
April 17, 1982. New York
May 3, 1982. Boston
May 17, 1982. Princeton
May 24, 1982. New York
May 30, 1982. New York
June 7, 1982. New York
June 11, 1982. Dartmouth
June 16, 1982. New York
June 21, 1982. New York
Notes
Copyright Page
The names, events and dates given here are all real. I invented only those details that were not essential.
Therefore, any resemblance between the characters in this book and living people is intentional and malicious. And all the fictionalizing was unexpected and accidental.
The Author
LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER
February 4, 1982. New York
Dear Igor Markovich!*
I’ll take the risk of presenting you with a delicate proposition. It’s basically as follows.
For three years now I have been trying to publish my prison-camp book, and trying all this time to do it as quickly as possible.
More to the point, it was specifically The Zone that I should have had published before anything else. For it was with this book that my ill-fated writing career began.
It turns out that it’s extremely hard to find a publisher. I, for example, was rejected by several. And I wouldn’t want to hide this.
The reasons for rejection were almost boilerplate. These were the basic arguments, if it’s of any interest:
The prison-camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the subject ought to be closed.
This idea does not stand up to critical examination. It goes without saying that I am not Solzhenitsyn. But does that deprive me of a right to exist?
Also, our books are completely different. Solzhenitsyn describes political prison camps. I – criminal ones. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I – a prison guard. According to Solzhenitsyn, camp is hell. Whereas I think that hell is in us ourselves.
Please believe that I am not comparing degrees of talent. Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and a monumental figure. But enough about that.
The other argument for not publishing my book was much harder to refute. The fact is, my manuscript is not a finished work.
It is a diary of sorts, chaotic notes, a set of unorganized materials.
The publishers were confused by such disarray. They wanted a more standard form.
It seemed to me that a general artistic idea could be traced in this disorder. One poetic hero moves throughout it. A certain unity of time and place has been observed. In a way, a single banal idea is declared – the world is absurd…
Then I tried to foist The Zone on them as a collection of short stories. The publishers said that this would be unprofitable, that the reading public is hungry for novels and sagas.
The matter was complicated by the fact that The Zone had been arriving in parts. Before my departure from the Soviet Union I microfilmed the manuscript, and my executor gave out pieces of the film to a few courageous French women who were able to smuggle my work through customs borders. The original is still in the Soviet Union.
Over the last few years I’ve been receiving tiny packages from France. And I’ve been trying to compose a unified whole out of the separate pieces.
In some places the film is damaged. (Wherever my kind benefactresses may have hidden it I do not know.) A few fragments were lost entirely.
The reconstruction of a manuscript from microfilm is a laborious job. Even in America, for all its technological greatness, it is not easy. And, by the way, not inexpensive. I’ve restored about thirty per cent of it to date.
I’m enclosing a piece of the finished text with this letter. I’ll send off the next part in a few days. You’ll receive the rest of it in the next few weeks. Tomorrow I rent a photo-enlarger.
Perhaps we will be able to make a finished whole out of all of this. I’ll try to fill in bits here and there with my irresponsible comments.
The main thing is: be tolerant. And as the prisoner Khamrayev used to say, setting off on a wet job* – Godspeed!
OLD KALYU PAKHAPIL HATED the occupying forces. What he liked was chorus singing, also bitter home-brewed beer and plump little children.
“Only Estonians ought to live in these parts, and no one else,” Pakhapil used to say. “Foreigners have no business here.”
The peasants would listen to him, nodding their heads in approval.
Then the Germans came. They played harmonicas, sang, treated the children to chocolate. Old Kalyu didn’t like any of it. He was silent for a long time, then gathered his things and went into the forest.
It was a dark forest, and from a distance it gave the impression of being impassable. There Pakhapil hunted, clubbed fish, slept on pine branches. In brief – he lived there till the Russians ousted the occupiers. And when the Germans left, Pakhapil returned. He showed up in Rakvere, where a Soviet captain awarded him a medal. The medal was decorated with four incomprehensible words, a figure and an exclamation mark.
“What does an Estonian need a medal for?” Pakhapil wondered for a long time.
Yet all the same, he carefully pinned it to the lapel of his cheviot jacket. This jacket Pakhapil had worn only once: in Lansman’s store, when he bought it.
So he lived and worked as a glazier. But when the Russians announced general mobilization, Pakhapil once again disappeared.
“Estonians ought to live here,” he said, departing, “and as for Ivans, Fritzes and all these Greenlanders, there’s no place for them here!”
Pakhapil again went into the forest, which seemed impassable only from a distance. And again he hunted, thought and was silent. And everything was going well.
But the Russians organized a round-up. The forest resounded with cries. It became crowded, and Pakhapil was arrested. He was tried as a deserter, beaten and spat on in the face. The one who exerted himself the most in this was the captain who had awarded him the medal.
And then Pakhapil was sent to the south, where the Kazakhs live. There he soon died, most likely from hunger and the alien land.
His son Gustav graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy in Tallinn, on Luise Street, and received a diploma as a radio operator.
Evenings he would sit in the Mundi Bar and say to frivolous girls, “A true Estonian ought to live in Canada! In Canada, and nowhere else.”
In the summer he was drafted for guard duty. The training camp was in Yosser. Everything was done by command: sleep, meals, conversation. People talked about vodka, about bread, about horses, about miners’ salaries. All this Gustav hated, and he conversed only in his own tongue. Only in Estonian. Even with the guard dogs.
Besides this, he drank in solitude and, if anyone bothered him, got into fights. He also allowed “incidents of a female order” (to use Political Instructor Khuriyev’s expression).
“How egocentric you are, Pakhapil!” the political instructor reproached him cautiously.
Gustav, bashfully, asked for a pencil and a piece of paper and scrawled out clumsily: “Yesterday of this year I abused an alcoholic beverage. After which I dropped down in the mud a soldier’s dignity. Henceforward I promise. Private Pakhapil.”