“First column – march!”
The officer is past fifty. He has worked in the guard section for twenty years. There are four little stars on his shoulder straps. He owns one imported civilian jacket; everything else is standard-issue green.
Soldiers in bulky sheepskin jackets go to their posts. They drag walkie-talkies behind them.
The soldier who has just come on duty stays in the checkpoint cabin. Soon he dreams of home, of Bronyuta Grobatavichus in a green sweater… He sees a river sparkling in the sun, his truck on a dusty road, an eagle above a little grove, a boat, soundlessly parting reeds.
Then his warm, cosy world is pierced by a shout that is intentionally coarse and as harsh as tin plate: “Relief shift, approach!”
And again – six hours in the wind. If you only knew what that means!
In the space of these hours, you recall your entire life. You forgive all offences, travel around the globe. You possess hundreds of women. Drink champagne from crystal glasses. Get into fights and ride home in a taxi.
And again – six hours in the wind.
At night, they broadcast from the zone: “A zek was flattened in the felling sector.”
It happened like this: The roper had moved a lever incorrectly. Above the men’s heads, the pulley jerked to one side. Its iron chain slipped. From the fall of an AG-430 two-axle steam generator… No, owing to a ton-and-a-half piece of metal… Anyway, what happened was that the zek Butyrin, who had been bending down to polish some seams, had his skull split open.
Now he lies under a wet tarpaulin. The soles of his feet are unnaturally splayed. The body takes up a little space next to the waste-bin platform.
He seems to have shrunk. His face is as inanimate as the limp mitten dropped a little to the side, or like the shaft of a shovel that is polished to a shine, or a tin of axle grease.
This death is stripped of any mystery. It evokes dull anguish. Above the blood-soaked tarpaulin, flies are making vibrating noises.
Butyrin had often seen death, escaped it dozens of times. He came from a long line of “jumpers” and was a drug addict, a loafer and a homosexual. On top of all this, he was a hysteric known for once gulping down a bottle of ink in an investigator’s office so he could spend a few days in a warm hospital.
He was covered with tattoos from head to foot. His teeth had grown black from drinking chifir. His body, punctured by morphine needles, had refused to react to pain.
He could have died long before this – for example, in Sormovo, when the Kanvinsky gang beat him up with bicycle chains. They threw him under a commuter train, but Butyrin had miraculously managed to crawl out. The zek had often recalled the roaring, fiery triangle, and how the sand squeaked against his teeth.
He could have croaked at Gori, when he said an obscene word to a crowd of southerners in a market. Or at Sindor, the time when the escort guards ordered a file to march into an icy stream, and the prisoners had started singing, they had walked in… but later pockmarked Lance Corporal Petrov had opened fire anyway.
He could have croaked in Ukhta, making a dash from the sawmill. Or in Koyna in the isolator, where zeks fought each other with boot knives.
And now he lies beneath a random tarpaulin. The security officer tries to make radio contact. He shouts, holding the transmitter diaphragm to his mouth: “This is Buttercup! This is Buttercup! Over! I can’t hear you! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”
He lights a cigarette, and then he starts shouting again, straining his voice: “This is Buttercup! Over! Prisoners excited! Situation tense! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”
Soon the truck arrives. They lay the corpse in the van. One of us escorts it to the prison hospital. After all, dead zeks have to be guarded too.
And a month later, Political Instructor Khuriyev will write a letter to Inessa Vladimirovna Butyrina, the sole living relative of the deceased, his first cousin once removed. In it he will write: “Your son, Butyrin, Grigori Tikhonovich, was making sure strides towards rehabilitation. He died at his labour post…”
June 7, 1982. New York
Dear Igor,
You’ll recall my saying that a camp is a typical Soviet institution, and not only in its administrative-economic system, not only in its superimposed ideology, not only by force of the habitual formalities. A camp is a Soviet institution in spirit, in its inner essence.
The ordinary criminal, as a rule, is an entirely loyal Soviet citizen. Which is not to say, of course, that he isn’t discontented. The price of alcohol has gone up, and so on. But the basics are sacred, and Lenin is above any criticism.
In this sense, camp art is extremely significant. Here, without any pressure or constraints, the method of socialist realism triumphs.
Has it ever occurred to you, too, that socialist art aspires to be something like magic? That it is reminiscent of the ritual and cult painting of our ancient ancestors?
You draw a bison on a rock face, and that evening you get something hot to eat.
Bureaucrats of official art reason the same way. If you portray something that’s positive, then everyone will be all right. But if it’s something negative, the opposite result will occur. If you depict a Stakhanovite feat of labour,* it follows that everyone will work hard. And so on.
Think of the underground mosaics of our capital. Vegetables, fruits, domesticated birds… Georgians, Lithuanians, Armenians… Large- and small-horned cattle… They are all the same bison.
In camp it’s the same story. Take camp painting. If it’s a landscape, it will be done in incredible, tropical, Andalusian colours. If it’s a still life, then it will be full of calories.
Camp portraits are complimentary to an extreme. Out of prison, only powerful Party chiefs get painted that way.
And there is no modernism whatsoever. The closer the resemblance to a photograph, the better. Modigliani and Gauguin would have little success here.
Take camp songs. The most common story put to music goes like this: A lonely mother lives with her child. Papasha has abandoned them. The son becomes a thief (or if it’s a daughter, a prostitute). Sooner or later, there’s a trial. The prosecutor, with lowered eyes, asks for the maximum penalty. The defendant takes his own life. Beside his grave, the prosecutor sits and sobs for hour after hour. As you have already guessed, he is the unlucky father of the deceased.
This is all nonsense, of course, completely implausible. A prosecutor cannot prosecute his own relative. It is forbidden by Soviet law, and the prisoners know this perfectly well, but they continue to exploit this inane theme every chance they get.
Or take camp myths. The most widespread among them is of a mass escape, as a rule across the White Sea – to the United States. You hear dozens of versions, each with the most minute factual details, with an elaborate description of the itinerary, with oaths of assurance that everything happened just that way.
And the organizer of the escape will invariably be a valiant Chekist, a former colonel in the GPU or the NKVD, condemned by Khrushchev as an associate of Beria and Yagoda.*
Well, one could ask, just what draws them to such scum? What draws them is the status of such men as familiar, traditional Soviet heroes, characters out of Yulian Semyonov or the brothers Vayner.*
They say that Yemelyan Pugachev drew support for his peasant uprising from escaped prisoners.* The prison inmates of today are not planning to revolt. Should some commotion occur, they would head for the nearest store that sells alcohol.
Alright. Now to business. Send me, if it’s no trouble, samples of your typeface and two catalogues.
If you come to New York, we’ll see each other then. Regards to your wife, mother and daughters. Our Katya is terribly angry all the time – the “in-between” age.
Tomorrow they’re opening a new Russian café near my house. As a local celebrity, I will stop by in the morning to congratulate the owner.