Khuriyev pushed through to the stage and tugged at the leader’s pants. “Sing!”
“Already?” Gurin asked. “There are literally two lines left. About the bourgeoisie and the stars.”
“Dismiss the bourgeoisie. Go on to the stars. And start the ‘Internationale’ right away.”
“Whatever you say.” Straining his voice to the utmost, Gurin yelled, “Stop this racket!” Then he added, in a vengeful tone, “So then let your way be lighted, children of the future, by our Kremlin stars!”
“Let’s go!” Khuriyev ordered, and then, lifting a rifle-cleaning rod, he began to conduct.
The hall became a little quieter. Gurin broke into song in an unexpectedly beautiful, pure and ringing tenor:
“Arise, you prisoners of starvation…”
And further, in the silence that had fallen:
“Arise, you wretched of the earth…”
Suddenly he became strangely transformed. Now he was a country peasant, mysterious and cunning, like his recent ancestors. His face seemed aloof and coarse. His eyes were half closed.
All of a sudden, someone began to sing with him. At first, one uncertain voice, then a second and a third. And then a whole dissonant, unorganized chorus of voices:
“For justice thunders condemnation –
A better world’s in birth.
’Tis the final conflict, let each stand in his place…”
The multitude of faces joined into one trembling spot. The actors onstage froze. Lebedyeva pressed her hands to her temples. Khuriyev waved his cleaning rod. A strange, dreamy smile had set on the lips of the leader of the Revolution.
“No more shall chains of violence bind us,
Arise, you slaves, no more in thrall,
The earth shall rise on new foundations…”
Suddenly, my throat contracted painfully. For the first time, I was part of my unique, unprecedented country. I was entirely made of cruelty, hunger, memory, malice… Because of my tears, I couldn’t see for a moment. I don’t think anyone noticed.
And then the singing died down. The last stanza was finished out by a few isolated, embarrassed voices.
“The performance is over!” Khuriyev said.
Overturning the benches, the prisoners headed for the door.
June 16, 1982. New York
Dear Igor,
I guess our work is drawing to a close. The only thing left is a chunk of about twenty pages. There is something else, but I’ve decided not to include it.
I decided to reject the wildest, bloodiest, most monstrous episodes of camp life. It seemed to me they would have come out looking purely sensational. The effect would have come from the material itself rather than the texture of the writing.
I am not in the business of writing physiological sketches. Anyhow, I don’t write about prison and zeks. What I wanted to write about was life and people. I’m not inviting my readers into a freak museum.
Needless to say, I could have come up with God knows what. I knew a man who had the words “Slave of the MVD”* tattooed on his forehead. After which he was “naturally” scalped by two prison doctors. I saw mass orgies of lesbians on the roof of a barracks. I saw a man sodomizing a sheep. (For the sake of convenience, the recidivist Murashko shoved its back legs into canvas boots.) I attended the wedding of two camp homosexuals and even shouted, “Kiss!”
I say once again that I am interested in life and not in prison, and in people, not monsters.
And I absolutely do not want to be known as the modern-day Virgil who leads Dante through Hell (however much I may love Shalamov). It’s enough that I worked as a guide on the Pushkin estate.
Not long ago, mordant Genis said to me, “You’re always afraid your work will be compared to Shalamov’s. You should stop worrying. It won’t.”
I know that this is just mild, friendly irony. Still, what would be the use of paraphrasing Shalamov? Or even Tolstoy together with Pushkin, Lermontov? What is the point of rehashing Alexander Dumas, like Fitzgerald did? The Great Gatsby is a wonderful book, yet I still prefer The Count of Monte Cristo.
I always dreamt of being a disciple of my own ideas. Maybe I’ll still get there in my declining years.
So I have omitted, as they say, the most heart-rending details of camp life. I did not lure my readers on with promises of thrills and strange sights. I would have preferred to lead them up to a mirror.
There was also another extreme that had to be avoided, namely, submerging oneself in aesthetics to the point of oblivion, losing sight of the fact that prison camp is revolting, and painting it in the ornamental tradition of the south-western school.
So there were two extremes to stay away from. I could have told the story about the man who sewed his eye shut, or the one about the man who nursed and raised a baby goldfinch in the logging sector, or the one about an embezzler named Yakovlev who nailed his scrotum to his bunk, or the one about Burkov the pickpocket who sobbed at the burial of a May beetle.
In a word, if it seems to you that there isn’t enough vileness, we can put some in. And if the opposite is true, well, that can also be easily remedied.
AFTER THEY HAD TIED ME UP with telephone wire, I calmed down. My head lay under a steam-heat radiator, and my feet, in badly made cheap leather army boots, were under the chandelier in the middle of the Lenin Room, where the New Year’s tree had stood a week earlier.
I could hear the soldiers of the escort platoon being issued their weapons and Lieutenant Khuriyev giving them instructions. I knew they’d be going out in the freezing cold now, starting to walk along the black gangways by the zone, past the straining dogs, and each soldier would shine his flashlight on his face so the guard in the watchtower could recognize him.
As the first order of business, I decided to declare a hunger strike and began waiting for supper in order to refuse it. But no one came.
I could hear the off-duty shift coming down the corridor, dumping their two-magazine cartridge pouches and their sub-machine guns, which would be white with hoarfrost, on the weapons-room counter. Then I heard the sentries moving aluminium stools in the mess hall, where the cook Balodis would have saved them a few onions, a loaf of bread and a piece of lard, but must have forgotten some salt, to judge by the cursing.
As I grew sober from the cold and pain, I began to recall everything as it happened.
In the daytime we had been drinking with the trusties. They all tried to hug me and kept repeating, “Bob, you’re the only human being in the whole Ust-Vym camp.” Then we made our way all across the settlement to the commissary and met Stern, the logging unit’s medic, and Fidel walked up to him, pulled off his beaver hat, scooped some snow up in it, and put it back on his head. We walked on, while the dirty snow started to trickle down the doctor’s face.
Then we went inside the commissary and asked Tonechka for some swill. She said there wasn’t any cheap drink, to which we shouted back that it didn’t matter since we were out of money anyway. She said, “Wash the floors in the storeroom, and I’ll give you each a little bottle of eau de Cologne.” Tonechka went out and came back in a few minutes with a bucket of steaming water. We took off our fatigue shirts and twisted them into plaits, dipped them into the bucket, and began to scrub the plank floor. Balodis and I worked hard, and Fidel was hardly in our way. Afterwards we drank the cologne, which trickled slowly into our mugs. The taste was awful and we snacked on hard candies, chewing them together with the bits of wrapping paper that were still stuck to them.
Tonechka said, “To your health!”
Balodis, the Latvian, pointed at her and asked Fidel, “Could you?”
And Fidel answered, “For a million, and then only on a hangover.”
When we left it was already dark. Lights were going on over the sawmill and in the settlement. We walked past the stables, where wagons without horses were standing, the wagon tongues resting on the ground. Fidel started playing ‘We’re on Our Way through Uruguay’, but Balodis grabbed the guitar from him and smashed it against a tree. We threw the pieces in an ice hole.