When the guards decided it was time to eat, they opened a hatch in the ceiling and threw down pieces of bread or salted fish. The prisoners clawed in the darkness. Even worse were the moments when they lowered buckets of water, water to quench our thirst; and we stood, gulping breath, following the slow bob of the bucket. I prayed that I would be able to tear through the others, to lap for a moment at whatever the guards had sent us.
Sometimes the urki would turn off the lights. They would descend with fists and knives. They spoke in slang, like nursery rhymes, like characters from folklore. I remember a man with gold in his mouth, the most unkind eyes. I watched him bribe a guard, who allowed a strand of men to pass through one hatch and into another. They raped three women. I knew it was three, because the women called to us, pleading for help, from the other side of the grille.
The boat bucked in the typhoons of the Okhotsk Sea. In seething effluent our bodies knocked against steel and bone, screaming, dying. I was seasick, violently seasick, clutching my ribs and holding a handful of rags to my face, my mouth crowded with bile.
It took eight days to reach a place called Kolyma, in the northeast of the country where I was born. On the journey I remembered you. I remembered Lenin. I remembered every meal I had ever eaten, every kind word or touch. There are no friends on those boats. There is no hope. I knew we were going somewhere, to some unimaginable camp, and I imagined that misery itself could drag our ship through the night. Kolyma, like a magnet, or like Einstein’s black hole, a place that draws every sadness toward it. Part of me is surprised that any sorrow can exist away from the camps. Manhattan is 136 longitudes from Kolyma and still we had the folly, there, to cry.
NAGAYEVO is A WIDE beautiful bay surrounded by an unfinished circle of cliffs. The water is still and silver-blue. It is like a resting coin, a new dime, that reflects the sky.
We came into Nagayevo harbour and they stacked the dead on the pebble beach.
All of us walked away from the corpses. We climbed the hill, blinking in the daylight. The road was made of dirt and then there was a road made of rocks. We looked back at the bay and the Tovarishch Stalin sat so smally, so quietly, secreting smoke. It was just one ship in a vast harbour; it was just one ship in a vast harbour. You could found a city there, a little paradise on the sea. Guards pointed the way with rifle barrels. We came up over the rise and the country lay before us, limitless. We were marching at its edge. Are there deer here? I wondered. Wolves? Later, I learned that there are deer; there are wolves.
We marched until we reached the village of Magadan. It was a young place, tainted by its visitors. They divided us into groups. An officer gazed down at us from a plywood stage. It felt as though we were at the end of our lives, some in-between that follows death. A place of mud and scrub and clouding breath. “This is Kolyma,” he said. His voice scraped.
“You are here to work. You are here for crimes against the Soviet state and you will repay your debt with minutes, hours, years. You will repay us with blood and sweat. If you work hard, you will eat. If you do not, you will die. There are no tricks. We need the metal that is buried in the earth; it is your task to extract this metal. If you do not meet your quota, you are a traitor and a saboteur.
“The law is the taiga and the prosecutor is the bear. You will remain here until you leave here. No one escapes.”
The man looked us over once more. The sky behind him was endlessly blue. “That is all,” he said.
WE WALKED TO OUR CAMP. This was a walk of two weeks. Every day they gave us a fish: a single cooked trout, like a thing from a surrealist painting. Some of us ate the fish at once and some of us ate it little by little, to last the day. We walked and then we slept and the sun crossed the sky. Sometimes it rained.
I remember waking one morning with fog spread over the plateau; it wreathed the sleeping prisoners and the low lichened rocks, the stunted trees, everything except the mountains. The mountains were not hidden and in a way they felt like allies, friends. Only they could not help, could not move. They had withdrawn, our allies. A group of forty-two human beings lay in the day’s cold mist.
One afternoon we arrived at the camp. It was near the mouth of a river and you could hear the water whispering over rocks. Mountains surrounded us. A frayed banner hung across the gate: “Work in the USSR Is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valour and Heroism!” My clothing was caked black and puke from our time on the boat. The colours had faded in the sun.
We had not died.
They counted us. They counted us again. We stood in uncomprehending formations. I said to myself: I will remain here for eight years. It was so cold and our clothing was black and puke and faded. Then they took us to the baths. We stripped naked. With doughy nurses’ hands they held us in place and shaved the hair from our arms, legs, from between our legs; they shaved our heads and the beards from our faces. “Lice,” they said, but I did not have lice. There was a stove, but we shivered. Then they let us into the other room. We drew our bodies through tepid water. We were grateful even for this. I had never been so dirty. I had never been so deeply thirsty, or hungry. We dried ourselves on rough cloths and they led us to piles of clothes: long underwear, long tunics, quilted jackets and trousers, mittens, rubber boots, hats with ear flaps. These were dead men’s clothes. We searched for garments that fit. We looked like scarecrows, rag monsters. Then they took us back outside and they gave us warm broth.
In the day’s last light I saw another prisoner kneel. He had found tiny berries hidden in the dry white moss that crackled underfoot; they looked like coral. I had almost forgotten the name. Brusnika. Red berries on thin green stalks, with leaves like little tokens. They were everywhere. I lifted three berries to my mouth and they broke against my tongue, sweet and bitter and tasting very faintly of snow.
Winter would come. I knew this: it would come, and then it would go, and then it would come again. And again and again. We would all die in Kolyma, unless we did not. I did not know the trick to living. My hand was dotted with the berries’ thin juice and there were guard towers all around, pairs of hollowed eyes, bear turds and wolves’ howls, criss-crossed barbed wire. I could not be a block of wood or a slab of chalk, inert. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, come from Leningrad to New York to Kolyma, forty-three years old. The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.
I had nothing left to hold.
FIVE. THE VILLAGE
THE CAMP WAS A CLUTCH of buildings surrounded by fence. The fence was three metres high, wrapped in coils of barbed wire. I never saw anyone touch this fence. The ground was uneven, furrows and rises, as if they had wiped away a rapids and placed us there. The valley’s trees had been sheared to build the barracks, the work sheds, the hospital; to erect the administration bloc and the squat cultural-education building, which we rarely visited. The soft grass was littered with brittle shrubs, the sharp shoots of bushes. A misstep would often puncture the sole of your boot. Guard towers stood all around, on the mountaintops, beside the mine shafts’ timber adits. You could squint into the flint-coloured distance and see the guess of other towers, the maybe, along those ridges. As the sun crossed the sky the triangular silhouette of a mining tower ticked across the camp. It was an empty landmark: that vein had gone dry, goldless. Old timers called it the gallows tower.