I didn’t develop an orphan complex. If anything, just the opposite, since all my classmates’ fathers had died at the front.
Alone with my mother, I didn’t stand out. Having a living father might have given the impression of bourgeois excess. Thus I killed two birds with one stone (I have no idea if this expression is appropriate here), which is to say, I exploited all the advantages of an adored son while escaping the reputation of being a trouble-free boy.
My father was a sort of hidden treasure. He paid alimony, but not very regularly. This is natural. After all, only declared savings yield good interest.
I had normal, ordinary abilities, a commonplace appearance that had a slight, phoney Neapolitan shading, and commonplace expectations. All signs pointed to a typical Soviet biography.
I belonged to an amiable national minority, was blessed with excellent health. From childhood on, I had had no morbid preoccupations.
I didn’t collect stamps, didn’t operate on earthworms and didn’t build model aeroplanes. What’s more, I didn’t even particularly like to read. I liked going to the movies and loafing.
Three years at university had little effect on my personality. It seemed like a continuation of high school, maybe on a higher level, plus young ladies, sports and a pitiful minimum of political rebelliousness.
I didn’t know that it was just then that I reached the height of well-being. From then on, everything went downhill. Unhappy love, debts, marriage… And as a culmination of all this – guard duty in a prison camp.
Love stories often end with prison. I just got my doors mixed up, and instead of ending up in the prisoners’ barracks, I landed in the army ones.
What I saw there shocked me completely.
There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end – to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His existence is poisoned by having been initiated into a mystery.
I, too, looked through a chink. Only what I saw was not riches, but the truth.
I was shaken by the depth and variety of life. I saw how low a man could fall, and how high he was able to rise.
For the first time, I understood what freedom is, and cruelty and violence. I saw freedom behind bars, cruelty as senseless as poetry, violence as common as dampness.
I saw a man who had been completely reduced to an animal state. I saw what he could be gladdened by. And it seemed to me that my eyes opened.
The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.
In that world, I saw men with a gruesome past, a repulsive present and a tragic future.
I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and children in a barrel.
The world was horrible. But life continued. What is more, life’s usual proportions stayed the same. The ratio of good and evil, grief and happiness, remained unchanged.
That life had in it whatever you could name. Diligence, dignity, love, depravity, patriotism, wealth, poverty. There were lumpenproletariat and rich profiteers, careerists and profligates, conformists and rebels, functionaries and dissidents.
But the content of these concepts was radically changed. The usual hierarchy of values had been demolished. What had once seemed important receded into the background. Trivialities blocked the horizon.
A new scale of values for “the good things of life” arose. On this scale, people especially valued food, warmth, the chance to avoid work. The commonplace became precious. The precious – unreal.
A postcard from home precipitated an emotional upheaval. A bumblebee flying into the prisoners’ barracks could cause a sensation. A squabble with a guard was experienced as an intellectual triumph.
In maximum security I knew a man, a long-term recidivist, who dreamt of becoming a bread-cutter. This job carried with it enormous advantages. Once he got it, a zek* could be likened to a Rothschild. The heels of bread were comparable to diamond deposits.
Fantastic efforts were required to land such a position. You had consciously to sell out, lie, climb over corpses. You had to bribe, blackmail and use extortion – fight to win at all costs.
This kind of effort in the outside world would have opened the way to the sinecures of the Party, economic and bureaucratic leadership. The highest levels of government power are reached by the same means.
Once he became a bread-cutter, the zek fell apart psychologically. The struggle for power had exhausted his inner strength. He was a gloomy, suspicious, lonely man. He reminded me of a Party boss, tortured by oppressive complexes.
One episode comes to mind. Some prisoners were digging a trench outside of Yosser. Among them was a burglar named Yenin.
It was getting on towards lunchtime. Yenin shovelled one last clod, reduced it to fine sand, then leant over the pile of dirt.
He was surrounded by zeks who had fallen silent.
He lifted a tiny thing out of the dirt and rubbed it on his sleeve for a long time. It was a shard of a cup, the size of a three-copeck piece. It still had on it the fragment of a design – a girl in a blue dress. The only thing left intact was her little shoulder and a blue sleeve.
You could see tears in the zek’s eyes. He pressed the glass to his lips and said quietly, “Seance!”
In prison-camp jargon, “seance” signified any experience of an erotic nature, and even beyond that, any instance of positive sensual emotion. A woman in the zone was “seance”. A pornographic photograph – “seance”. But a piece of fish in the slops was “seance”, too.
“Seance!” Yenin said.
And the zeks who surrounded him confirmed in unison, “Seance!”
The world in which I found myself was horrible. Nevertheless, I smiled no less frequently than I do now, and was not sad more often.
When there is time, I’ll tell you about all this in more detail.
How did you like my first pages? I’m enclosing the fragment that follows.
PS: In our Russian émigré colony you come across wonderful advertisements. There’s one posted across from my apartment house: “Seamster Wanted!” A little to the left, on a telephone booth: “Translation from the Russian and back. Ask for Arik.”
AT ONE TIME MISHCHUK had worked in an aerial photography corps. He was a good pilot. Once he somehow even managed to land a plane in a snowdrift – with an unhinged valve in his cylinder and his left engine indisputably on fire.
So he should have known better than to start profiteering in fish, which he flew down from the far north, from Afrikanda. Mishchuk bartered for it from the Samoyed* natives there, and then would let a waiter friend of his have it for six roubles a kilo.
Mishchuk was lucky for a long time because he wasn’t greedy. Once, a radio operator from the control tower signalled to him in flight: “Ice storm ahead, do you read me, ice storm ahead…”
“Understood, understood,” Mishchuk answered. At which point he dumped nine sacks of pink kumzha* over the Yenisei River without a qualm.
But when Mishchuk stole a roll of parachute silk, they nabbed him. The friendly radio operator broadcast to his friends, to Afrikanda: “The runt got the burn, looks like three years…”
Mishchuk was sent to Corrective Labour Colony No. 5. He knew that with an effort he could get his sentence cut in half. Mishchuk became a model worker, an activist, a reader of the newspaper Towards an Early Release. And, most important, he signed up for the Section of Internal Structures, the SIS. Now he walked between barracks wearing a red armband.
“SIS,” the prisoners hissed. “Sell-out Ingrate Sonofabitch.”
Mishchuk didn’t care. A pickpocket friend taught him how to play the mandolin. And they gave him a prison-camp nickname – Boob.