Kolyma Tales (14 page)

They put me on the stretcher. My height was six feet, and my normal weight was 177 pounds. Bones constitute forty-two percent of a man’s total weight, seventy-four pounds in my case. On that icy evening I had only thirty-two pounds of skin, organs, and brain. I was unable to make this calculation at the time, but I vaguely realized that the doctor peering at me from under his eyebrows was doing precisely that.

He unlocked the desk drawer, carefully pulled out a thermometer, leaned over me, and gently placed it under my left armpit. Immediately one of the orderlies pressed my arm to my chest, and the other grasped my left wrist with both hands. Later I came to understand these carefully planned movements; there was only one thermometer in the hospital of a hundred beds. The value of this piece of glass was measured on a totally new scale; it was treasured as if it were a rare jewel. Only the very seriously ill and new patients could have their temperature taken with this instrument. The temperature of recovering patients was recorded ‘according to their pulse’, and only in instances of doubt was the desk drawer unlocked.

The wind-up clock on the wall chimed ten o’clock, and the doctor carefully extracted the thermometer. The orderlies’ hands relaxed.

‘93.7 degrees,’ the doctor said. ‘Can you answer?’

I indicated with my eyes that I could. I was saving my strength. I could only pronounce words slowly and with difficulty, as if translating from a foreign language. I had forgotten everything. I didn’t even remember what it was like to remember. They finished recording the history of my disease, and the orderlies easily lifted the stretcher on which I lay face up.

‘Take him to the sixth ward,’ the doctor said, ‘close to the stove.’

They put me next to the stove, on a wooden cot supported by saw-horses. The mattresses were stuffed with branches of dwarf cedar, the needles had fallen off, dried up, and the naked branches protruded menacingly from under the dirty, striped material. Straw dust seeped from the grimy, tightly packed pillow. A thin, washed-out cotton blanket with the word ‘feet’ sewn in gray letters covered me from the entire world. The twine-like muscles of my arms and legs ached, and my frostbitten fingers and toes itched. But fatigue was stronger than pain. I curled up on my side, seized my legs with my hands, leaned my chin against the coarse, crocodile-like skin of my knees, and fell asleep.

I awoke many hours later. My breakfasts, dinners, and suppers were on the floor next to the cot. Stretching out my hand, I grabbed the nearest tin bowl and began to eat everything in the order in which the bowls lay. From time to time I would nibble some of the bread ration. Other patients on similar wooden cots supported by saw-horses watched me swallow the food. They did not ask who I was or where I came from; my crocodile skin spoke for itself. They didn’t want to stare at me, but they couldn’t help it. I knew myself how impossible it was to tear your eyes from the sight of a man eating.

I ate all the food that had been left for me. Then there came warmth, an ecstatic weight in my belly, and again sleep, but not for long this time, since an orderly had come for me. I threw over my shoulders the only gown in the ward. Filthy, burned by cigarette butts, and heavy with the absorbed sweat of hundreds of people, it was also used as a coat. I stuck my feet into enormous slippers and shuffled behind the orderly to the treatment room. I had to go slowly, since I was afraid of falling. The same young doctor stood by the window and stared out at the street through frosty panes shaggy from the ice that had formed on them. A rag hung from the corner of the sill, and water dripped from it, drop by drop, into a tin dinner bowl. The cast-iron stove hummed. I stopped, clinging with both hands to the orderly.

‘Let’s continue,’ the doctor said.

‘It’s cold,’ I answered quietly. The food I had eaten had ceased to warm me.

‘Sit down next to the stove. Where did you work before prison?’

I spread my lips and moved my jaw – my intention was to produce a smile. The doctor understood and smiled in reply.

‘My name is Andrei Mihailovich,’ he said. ‘You don’t need any treatment.’

I felt a sucking sensation in the pit of my stomach.

‘That’s right,’ he repeated in a loud voice. ‘You don’t need any treatment. You need to be fed and washed. You have to lie still and eat. I know our mattresses aren’t feather-beds, but they’re better than nothing. Just don’t lie in one position for too long, and you won’t get bedsores. You’ll be in the hospital about two months. And then spring will be here.’

The doctor smiled. I was, of course, elated. An entire two months! But I was too weak to express this joy. I gripped the stool with both hands and said nothing. The doctor wrote something into my case history.

‘You can go now.’

I returned to the ward, slept and ate. In a week I was already walking shakily around the ward, the corridor, and the other wards. I looked for people who were chewing, swallowing. I stared at their mouths, for the more I rested, the more I wanted to eat.

In the hospital, as in camp, no spoons were issued. We had learned to get along without knives and forks while we were still in prison under investigation, and we had long since learned to slurp up our food without a spoon; neither the soup nor the porridge was ever thick enough to require a spoon. A finger, a crust of bread, and one’s own tongue were enough to clean the bottom of a pot or bowl.

I searched out mouths in the process of chewing. It was an insistent demand of my body, and Andrei Mihailovich was familiar with the feeling.

One night the orderly woke me up. The ward was filled with the usual nocturnal hospital sounds: snoring, wheezing, groans, someone talking in his sleep, coughing. It all blended into a single peculiar symphony of sound – if a symphony can be composed of such sounds. Take me to such a place, blindfolded, and I will always recognize a camp hospital.

On the window-sill was a lamp – a tin saucer with some sort of oil (but not fish oil this time!) and a smoking wick twisted from cotton wool. It couldn’t have been very late. Lights went out at nine o’clock, and somehow we would fall asleep right away – just as soon as our hands and feet warmed up.

‘Andrei Mihailovich wants you,’ the orderly said. ‘Kozlik will show you the way.’

The patient called Kozlik was standing in front of me.

I walked up to the tin basin, washed my hands and face, and returned to the ward to dry them on the pillowcase. There was a single towel for the entire ward, an enormous thing made from an old striped mattress, and it was available only in the mornings. Andrei Mihailovich lived in the hospital, in one of the small far rooms normally reserved for post-operative patients. I knocked at the door and went in.

A heap of books was pushed to the side on the table. The books were alien, hostile, superfluous. Next to the books stood a teapot, two tin mugs, a bowl full of some sort of kasha…

‘Feel like playing dominoes?’ Andrei Mihailovich asked, peering at me in a friendly fashion. ‘If you have the time…’

I hate dominoes. Of all games, it is the most stupid, senseless, and boring. Even a card game like lotto is more interesting. For that matter, any card game is better. Best of all would have been checkers or chess. I squinted at the cupboard to see if there wasn’t a chessboard there, but there wasn’t. I just couldn’t offend Andrei Mihailovich with a refusal. I had to amuse him, to pay back good with good. I had never played dominoes in my life, but I was convinced that no great wisdom was required to learn this art.

‘Let’s have some tea,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Here’s the sugar. Don’t be embarrassed; take as much as you like. Help yourself to the kasha and tell me about anything you like. But then I guess you can’t do both things at the same time.’

I ate the kasha and the bread and drank three mugs of tea with sugar. I had not seen sugar for several years. I felt warm.

Andrei Mihailovich mixed the dominoes. I knew that the one who had the double six began the game. Andrei Mihailovich had it. Then, in turns, the players had to attach pieces with the matching number of dots. That was all there was to it, and I began to play without hesitation, sweating and constantly hiccuping from fullness.

We played on Andrei Mihailovich’s bed, and I got pleasure from looking at the blindingly white pillowcase on the down pillow. It was a physical pleasure to look at the clean pillow, to see another man rumple it with his hand.

‘Our game,’ I said, ‘is lacking its main appeal. Domino players are supposed to smack their pieces down on the table when they play.’ I was not joking. It was this particular aspect of the game that struck me as the most crucial.

‘Let’s switch to the table,’ Andrei Mihailovich said affably.

‘No, that’s all right. I’m just recalling all the various pleasures of the game.’

The game continued slowly. We were more concerned with telling each other our life histories. As a doctor, Andrei Mihailovich had never been in the general work gang at the mines and had only seen the mines as they were reflected in their human waste, cast out from the hospital or the morgue. I too was a by-product of the mine.

‘So you won,’ Andrei Mihailovich said. ‘Congratulations! For a prize I present you with – this.’ He took from the night table a plastic cigarette case. ‘You probably haven’t smoked for a long time?’

He tore off a piece of newspaper and rolled a cigarette. There’s nothing better than newspaper for home-grown tobacco. The traces of typographic ink not only don’t spoil the bouquet of the home-grown tobacco but even heighten it in the best fashion. I touched a piece of paper to the glowing coals in the stove and lit up, greedily inhaling the nauseatingly sweet smoke.

It was really tough to lay your hands on tobacco, and I should have quit smoking long ago. But even though conditions were what might be called ‘appropriate’, I never did quit. It was terrible even to imagine that I could lose this single great convict joy.

‘Good night,’ Andrei Mihailovich said, smiling. ‘I was going to go to bed, but I so wanted to play a game. I really appreciate it.’

I walked out of his room into the dark corridor and found someone standing in my path near the wall. I recognized Kozlik’s silhouette.

‘It’s you. What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted a smoke. Did he give you any?’

I was ashamed of my greed, ashamed that I had not thought of Kozlik or anyone else in the ward, that I had not brought them a butt, or a crust of bread, a little kasha.

Kozlik had waited several hours in the dark corridor.

During one blissful period in his life Merzlakov had worked as a stable-hand and used a home-made huller – a large tin can with a perforated bottom – to turn oats intended for the horses into human food. When boiled, the bitter mixture could satisfy hunger. Large workhorses from the mainland were given twice as much oats as the stocky, shaggy Yakut horses, although all the horses were worked an equally small amount of time. Enough oats were dumped in the trough of the monstrous Percheron, Thunder, to feed five Yakut horses. This was the practice everywhere, and it struck Merzlakov as being only fair. What he could not understand was the camp’s rationing system for people. The mysterious charts of proteins, fats, vitamins, and calories intended for the convicts’ table did not take a person’s weight into consideration. If human beings were to be equated with livestock, then one ought to be more consistent and not hold to some arithmetical average invented by the office. This terrible ‘mean’ benefited only the lightweight convicts who, in fact, survived longer than the others. The enormous Merzlakov – a sort of human analogue to the Percheron, Thunder – felt only a greater gnawing hunger from the three spoons of porridge given out for breakfast. A member of a work gang had no way of supplementing his food supply, and furthermore, all the most important foodstuffs – butter, sugar, meat – never made it to the camp kettle in the quantities provided for by the instructions.

Merzlakov watched the larger men die first – whether or not they were accustomed to heavy labor. A scrawny intellectual lasted longer than some country giant, even when the latter had formerly been a manual laborer, if the two were fed on an equal basis in accordance with the camp ration. Not calculated for large men, the basic nourishment could not be essentially improved even by food bonuses for heightened productivity. To eat better, one had to work better. But to work better one had to eat better. Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were always the first to die – a phenomenon that the doctors always explained away by claiming that peoples of the Baltic states were weaker than Russians. True, their normal way of life was more dissimilar to that of the camps than was the world of the Russian peasant, and it was more difficult for them. The primary reason, however, was quite different: it wasn’t that they possessed less endurance, but that they were physically bigger than the Russians.

About a year and a half earlier, Merzlakov had arrived as a newcomer at the camp. In a state of collapse from scurvy, he had been allowed to work as a stand-in orderly in the local clinic. There he learned that medical dosages were determined according to the patient’s weight. New medicines were tested on rabbits, mice, or guinea pigs, and human dosages were then calculated according to body weight. Children’s dosages were smaller than adult dosages.

The camp food ration, however, had no relation to the weight of the human body, and it was precisely this improperly resolved question that amazed and disturbed Merzlakov. But before he completely lost his strength, he miraculously managed to get a job as a stable-hand so he could steal oats from the horses to stuff his own stomach. Merzlakov was already counting on surviving the winter. Perhaps something new would turn up in the spring. But it didn’t work out that way. The stable manager was fired for drunkenness and the senior groom – one of those who had taught Merzlakov how to make a huller – took his place. The senior groom had himself stolen no small amount of oats in his day, and he knew exactly how it was done. Wanting to impress the administration and no longer in need of oatmeal for himself, he personally smashed all the hullers. The stable hands began to fry or boil oats and eat them unhulled, no longer making any distinction between their own stomachs and that of a horse. The new manager reported this, and several stable hands, including Merzlakov, were put in solitary for stealing oats. From there they were dismissed from the stable and returned to their former jobs – in the general work gang.