We went by taxi to the Apollo Club. My heart was whirring in my chest. Silver subway cars poured through the tunnels under Broadway, New York crackled and shone, cranes hoisted whole buildings into the sky.
I remember how we arrived just in time for the first number and how for the whole first half, the horns used mutes. We moved to the strings and brass but Duke’s players had hands cupped over their trumpets, plungers over trombones, until at a certain pre-arranged moment everything changed. By chance I had spun you out on your toes. Our arms were at their longest span. At that instant the mutes came off and the brass section bloomed and it was like the clouds had parted, only we hadn’t known there were clouds. The room rang gold with it. You were spinning back toward me, hot and amber, and when our bodies touched you murmured, “Hi, Leon.” And I thought, It will be like this.
Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page, like eyelashes.
IN KOLYMA THE GUARDS followed us everywhere, rifles swinging at their sides. They had good boots and good gloves and mostly serious dispositions. Some of them were former prisoners who lived in the village now. Between shifts you could see them come into the work zone, walking freely past the guardhouse, and in their faces there was still something uncomprehending.
Just like their wards, guards were compensated according to production. If a team of zeks exceeded its quota, the escorts took home more rubles. The abuse the guards doled out was functional, pragmatic: walk faster, walk faster, take more stone in your wheelbarrow.
Conversely, the soldiers were punished if one of their prisoners escaped. They could even be accused of counter-revolutionary collusion, get sent to the other side of the perimeter. And so the guards learned to kill the zeks who strayed. In the late day, when our muscles were failing, we had to be especially alert. Anyone who staggered off the road might then stagger into the snow or cedars, sprawling, a bullet between his shoulders. There was a man whose name I don’t remember, with red hair, who told me he was going to kill himself. And then he did, almost gracefully, turning his wheelbarrow off the curve of the road and drowsily advancing, toward freedom; Vanya yelled and raised his gun and after two hesitations he pulled the trigger. The redheaded man whose name I do not remember completed the motion he had begun that morning, lifting himself off his knotted plank bunk. He fell forward, into the tundra.
I think I believed I would kill myself, eventually, when the correct moment finally arrived.
The winter came quickly, in place of fall. I lived only barely, by coincidence. At the end of every workday, wrecked, ruined, we trudged back into the camp. We queued for our evening meaclass="underline" a morsel of herring, a spoonful of pea soup, bread. Someone might steal the soup or fish, but never the scrap of limp brown bread. The prisoners had made this rule themselves. This is humanity, at the end of the world: the refusal to tear away a piece of bread. Once I saw a man try. He was dying of hunger. The whole camp seemed to turn on him, a wolf rising from a pile of leaves. This you do not do, they said, kicking the wretched starving man at the places where the skin met his ribs.
My friendship with Bigfoot dawned gradually. We found each other sitting together, one mealtime. We sat in respectful silence. The second time it happened I said, “My name is Lev.”
He said, “My name is Maksim. Or Bigfoot.”
I said I was a scientist. Once, he said, he had wanted to be an engineer.
We began to walk together, sometimes. Together we observed the camp.
His trust was like a gift.
Bigfoot’s feet were not so large, but he had come to Kolyma in enormous fur boots. “My brother made them,” he explained. They were brown and white bearskin, as high as his knees. You could hear them, like machines, crunching through the ice to a clearing in the woods. Bigfoot was not on road duty: he and his brigade stripped the felled trees, heaved them into the river. Their mouths gusted steam. At night Bigfoot rolled his boots into a coarse parcel and lay them beneath his head, like a pillow.
Bigfoot’s boots did not go unnoticed. He tried to ignore the looks. There was a hard glint to his gaze, something unflinching in his bearing. He had come to Russia from Lvov, in Ukraine, hoping to fight with the Marxists. Instead he was arrested as a spy. I remember joking with him one day, when we had become friends enough that we could joke: “At last, here, you are one of us.”
Bigfoot had fought off a few petty thieves but it was different when Nikola came up to him one night, an apparition on the dark field. “Do you play cards?” Nikola murmured.
“No,” Bigfoot said.
Nikola had a rough black beard. He kept his hands concealed in a heavy coat. His eyes were hidden under his thick black hair. In some ways Nikola seemed like a serious man. He could have been a professor of Russian literature, a young chess teacher. But there was a certain cheapness to him, a shabby quality to his gestures, that made him frightening. It was not just the 58s who gave Nikola a wide berth: the other urki were vigilant around him, watching him in a room, tracking his movements in their peripheral vision. They let him pass; they did not interrupt him. They rarely saw his eyes.
When Nikola said to Bigfoot, “Come play cards with me,” and began to walk toward his barrack, Bigfoot lowered his head and took a slow breath and then followed him.
They played cards. Sitting among Nikola’s friends, on other men’s bunks. The cards were made with thin scraps of paper, bread-and-water glue.
“What is your stake?” Nikola asked quietly.
“I don’t know,” Bigfoot said. “Some bread.”
“Your boots are your stake,” Nikola told him.
Bigfoot won the first two games. He won a half-litre enamel bowl, which meant that at mealtimes he could take his soup first, with those who have their own bowls. Then he won a set of coloured pencils. In the brown of Nikola’s eyes you could see he was very angry. His friends were no longer slouched, joking; Bigfoot said he felt them turning their sharpest edges toward him.
Bigfoot lost the next game.
“Did you mean to lose?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
They took Bigfoot’s fur boots. Later, he traded the pencils for a pair of leather boots, and he tore strips of cloth from the lining of his jacket, and he wrapped his feet with these. Now Nikola crunched through the ice in Bigfoot’s boots, when we walked to the quarry, speaking to no one.
“Do you hate him?” I asked Bigfoot, one early morning.
“Yes,” he said.
Being on road crew was easier than working in the mines, or in the trees with Bigfoot, but we were still starving. Our rations were based on our work and we could lift only so many pounds of stone. The most important factor was the number of trips we were capable of making in a day, to and from the quarry. No matter how high we filled our wheelbarrows, it was always more worthwhile to have time for another transit. On a good day we made four journeys. On a snowy day we might make two. And so on the next day we ate about half as much. The slower we worked, the more quickly we would vanish from everyone’s memory.