Prisoners were rolling out logs, lopping off branches. The broad-shouldered, tattooed foreman was deftly handling a hook. “Step lively, you cons,” he yelled, shading his eyes with his palm. “Those lagging behind won’t make it into Communism. They’ll have to finish out their days under this regime.”
The branch-cutters lowered their axes, flung their jackets on a heap of branches. Again, iron flashed in the sun.
I walked along thinking, “Enthusiasm? Impulse? Nothing like that. The usual gymnastics. Willed courage. Strength that could just as easily become violence, given the chance.”
I traded a few words with the sentries and skirted the logging sector all the way down the restricted zone. I crossed the rusty swamp, stepping from dry patch to dry patch, and emerged into a clearing touched by the pale morning sun.
By a low campfire, his back to me, a man had stretched out comfortably. A thick book without a cover lay beside him. In his left hand, he held a tomato-paste sandwich.
“Ah, Kuptsov,” I said, “loafing again? Homesick for the clink?”
Sitting by the campfire, the work noise echoing around him, the zek looked like a pirate. There seemed to be a steering wheel in front of him, and his ship was moving straight into the wind.
Winter. The penal isolator. Long shadows under the pines. Windows sealed under snowdrifts.
Behind the wall, jangling his handcuffs, Kuptsov wandered from corner to corner. In the duty officer’s book, the word “Refusal”.
I took Boris Kuptsov’s record out of the file cabinet. Thirty words which look like explosions: WAPR (without a place of residence). WAO (without an occupation). A stamp: DR (dangerous recidivist). Thirty-two years in prison camps. The oldest “Code man”* in the Ust-Vym complex. Four trials. Nine escapes. Refuses to work on principle.
I asked him, “Why don’t you work?”
Handcuffs jingling, Kuptsov says:
“Remove the bracelets, Chief! This gold has no stamp.”
“Why don’t you work, you beast?”
“The Code doesn’t allow it.”
“How about feeding yourself? Does your Code allow that?”
“There’s no code that says I have to starve.”
“Your Code has outlived its time. All the ‘Code men’ have cracked. Antipov won’t stop singing. Mamay is the big man’s right hand. Sedov is on the needle. Topchil got snagged in Ropcha.”
“Topchil was a peasant and a chump, green as goose shit. You call him a thief? Lifting a suitcase off a granny – that’s his fortune. So he lost his crown…”
“Well, and you?”
“And I come from a long line of Russian thieves. I have stolen and will again.”
In front of me, a man sat at a low campfire. Next to him, on the grass, a book stood out white. In his left hand, he held a sandwich.
“Greetings,” Kuptsov said. “Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It’s written in this book – a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labour. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age… And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor.*”
“Listen,” I said, “you’re going to work, I swear it. Sooner or later, you’re going to be a driver, or a roper, or a carter. If the worst comes to the worst, a branch-cutter. You’re going to work, or you’ll perish in the isolator. You’re going to work, I give you my word. Otherwise you’ll croak.”
The zek looked at me as though I were a thing, a foreign car parked across from the Hermitage. He followed the line from the radiator to the exhaust pipe. Then he said distinctly, “I like to please myself.” And that instant: a mirage of a ship’s bridge above the waves.
I asked, “Will you work?”
“No. I was born to steal.”
“Go to the isolator!”
Kuptsov stood up. He was almost polite with me. A grimace of cheerful astonishment had frozen on his face.
Far off somewhere, pines fell, brushing the sky. A lumber truck rumbled by.
For a week, Kuptsov scraped by in the isolator, without cigarettes, without air, on half-rations. “You dish it out, Chief,” he said when I passed the embrasure of his cell.
Finally, the controller released him back into the zone. The same day, I saw him with canned goods, butter, white bread. That mysterious organization, the Con Council, had supplied him with everything he needed.
February. Narrow shadows lay between the pines. In the kennels, dogs were howling.
Khedoyan and I left the barracks and reached the zone. “Come on,” Rudolf said. “Walk down the free-fire zone, and I’ll meet you there.”
He walked through the garbage dump towards the isolator. By regulation, we were supposed to go together. Guards walked in pairs only. That was why Captain Prishchepa always said, “Two is more than YOU and ME. Two is WE.”
We parted by the basketball court. In the winter midnight, the backboards looked like gallows. As soon as I disappeared behind the garbage dump vats, Rudolf would turn back. He would light a cigarette and head for the checkpoint cabin, where a wind-up clock ticked. I too could have turned back. We would have understood everything, and even laughed about it. But I was too cautious to do that. If it happened once, I would sit it out in the checkpoint every time.
I pulled up my Vorkuta hood and threw open the door of the nearest barracks. An enamel tea kettle, tied to the doorknob, made an unbearable racket. This meant no one was asleep in the barracks. The bunks were empty. The table was piled with money and cards. About twenty men were sitting around it in their underwear. They looked at me and continued their game.
“Keep your shirt on, mate,” Chaly the pickpocket said. “I’ll clean everyone out.”
“Greed sinks the square,” Beluga the black-marketeer said.
“With a little left over,” Adam said, showing his cards.
“Read ’em and weep,” Kuptsov said quietly.
I could have left, put the tea kettle in its place and slammed the door. Clusters of steam would have poured from the well-heated house. I could have walked across the zone, guiding myself by the searchlight beside the checkpoint cabin where the wind-up clock ticked. I would stop, smoke a cigarette beneath a basketball hoop, then stand there for three minutes watching the stub glow red in the snow. And then in the checkpoint cabin I would listen to Fidel talk about love. I’d even shout over the general laughter, “Hey, Fidel, tell them about the time you were so drunk you tried to make it with Sergeant Major Yevchenko.”
But I wasn’t sufficiently brave to do all that. If I did it once, there would be no more visiting the barracks for me.
I said from the threshold, “When an officer enters, you’re supposed to stand up.”
The zeks covered their cards.
“Don’t strut,” Kuptsov said. “Now is not the time.”
“That’s the gallows, Chief,” Adam said.
The others became quiet. I stretched out my hand, raked up the supple, crumpled bank notes, shoved them into my side and breast pockets. Chaly grabbed me by the elbow.
“Hands!” Kuptsov ordered him. And then, addressing me, “Chief, cool off!”
The door slammed behind my back, the enamel tea kettle clanked. I walked towards the gates. Careful, as if it were a puppy, I carried the money inside my jacket. I felt the weight of all the hands that had ever touched those crumpled notes upon my shoulders, the bitterness of all the tears, the ill will…
I didn’t notice how they came after me from behind. It got crowded around me. Shadows that weren’t my own rushed under my feet. The light bulb blinked in its wire netting, and I fell, not hearing my own cry.