Red Love (17 page)

They stood around tables, waiting for someone to leave some food behind. When someone stood up to leave, they lunged at the plate. As they fought each other, the soup would spill. On hands and knees, they fought for the liquid and food dribbling away on the floor.

The nonpoliticals, the thieves, amused themselves with the
dokhodyagas.
They pushed their plates away. As
dokhodyagas
leaped toward them, the thieves took the plates and hurled them at the faces of the
dokhodyagas.

Each day now a member of his brigade died.

The frozen mist hung over them. There was a burning sensation in his nose when he breathed. His urine froze instantly in the snow when he relieved himself. His fingers were constantly freezing. He jumped up and down and did the Lindy Hop, the dance that was popular in Moscow during the months before he was arrested.

The
dokhodyagas
were drawn to the spell of the bonfire. They placed a log close to it and sat. The heat burned their faces and their backs froze. They sat in their burnt clothing and frostbitten faces. The sparks often flew on their clothes. They would doze off and be awakened by the smell of burning cotton.

It was hard to pull away from the fire. When it began to die out, they bent closer. Their backs freezing, they held their hands above the coals. The trickle from their noses fell and hissed on the embers.

Antonio became friendly with a young prisoner, a doctor from Leningrad named Boris. He had a gouged eye from his interrogations. Antonio had become so thin that the winds would constantly knock him down and he would fall into the snow. Boris would unwrap the scarf that was protecting his own head, tie it around Antonio’s waist, and walk forward so that Antonio could be kept upright.

Boris suddenly got a prized job: dishwasher. Antonio saw him in the kitchen, grinning and weeping, his mouth full of food.

When he came to bed, Boris brought two packages of burnt buckwheat mush crusts, wrapped in rags, and kept them beneath his boots. During the night, Boris got up five times and went to the outhouse. Each time he returned, he ate more crusts and lay down again.

In the morning, the buckwheat crusts were gone. Boris was sick. He couldn’t breathe.

He was found lying in the snow, buckwheat mush seeping out of his mouth and nose.

In the spring, Antonio felt a numb sensation in his leg. He lowered his trousers. One leg was purple and swollen to twice the size of the other. There were blotches all over it. In two days they turned into huge boils. Blood and pus trickled from them. The entire brigade had scurvy.

One day Lev, one of the
blatinye,
the thieves, asked him, “What did you do before your arrest?”

“In America, I drew a lot. I was a painter.” He did not mention that he drew signs and posters for the Party. The thieves hated the Communists.

“No kidding? Maybe you can draw me?”

Lev took him to his barracks, where a circle of the thieves gathered around Antonio. They were curious about the American.

“Did you ever see Al Capone?” someone asked him

“No—”

“Tell us, tell us about him!”

He told them about the St. Valentine’s Day massacre. Their faces were rapt with interest.

Lev handed him paper and pencil. “Here, you’ll do a drawing of my exceptionally handsome face.”

When Antonio finished, he handed it to Lev. Lev slapped him on the back and showed it to the others. He took bread, butter and sugar out of a cloth bag and gave them to Antonio. They watched him eat, and then they gave him gruel and a can of hot tea.

They told him, “You’ll come back tomorrow and tell us more about Capone.”

“How did you hear of him?” he asked.

“There isn’t a thief in all of Russia who doesn’t know of Capone, “Lev said.

On his way out, Lev called to him. “I have a piece of advice that is more important than the food, Antonio. Whatever happens, remember the saying: ‘Be lower than the grass and quieter than the water.’“ He patted Antonio on the shoulder and closed the door.

They liked his stories of America, his drawings and tattoos. One man asked for a tattoo of a nude woman surrounded by a bottle of vodka, a dagger, the ace of spades, and the words, “Our Undoing.” They asked for “I’ll Never Forget Old Mom” and drawings of nudes and mermaids.

They sat around him in the hut. They asked: “How come they don’t arrest Capone? Are there really moving sidewalks in America? What’s a skyscraper like?”

He told them about John Dillinger and sang popular American songs to them.

His face filled out with the food. He no longer looked like a
dokhodyaga.

In 1944, Henry Wallace, vice-president of the United States, Owen Lattimore, professor at Johns Hopkins University, and a group of others visited Kolyma.

The wooden watchtowers and barbed wire were razed in one night in honor of the Americans’ visit. Prisoners were kept inside for the entire three days of their stay and treated to movies from morning to night. They were warned of instant execution for one false move or word.

Lovely and elegant girls and boys took the place of the prisoners, who were inside watching the movies. They were put to work on the model pig farm. Wallace asked them some questions about pigs and couldn’t get a straight answer, but he thought they were shy.

Wallace would later write that “the Kolyma gold miners are big, husky young men.” He noted that the political police “were treated … with great respect.”

Wallace and Lattimore were moved by the chief of Kolyma, General Nikshisov. Lattimore wrote that “Mr. Nikshisov … had just been decorated with the Order of Hero of the Soviet Union for his extraordinary achievements. Both he and his wife have a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility.” Wallace wrote that Nikshisov “gamboled about, enjoying the wonderful air immensely.”

Lattimore loved the “first-class orchestra and good light-opera company” and wrote: “High-grade entertainment just naturally seems to go with gold, and so does high-powered executive ability.”

General Nikshisov and his wife, Major Gridassova, commandant of the camps, took off their uniforms for the visit and put on civilian clothes. Gridassova was introduced to Mr. Wallace as a grammar school principal.

A choir was organized in a hurry for the Americans’ visit. Prisoners rehearsed all night. Before they sang their opening number, they saluted the visitors in English by shouting: “Okay—America! Okay—Soviet Union!” After the performance the prisoners were loaded into trucks and shipped back to camp.

A box was reserved for the general and his wife at the Gorky Theater. Ordinarily, at the start of performances, at intermissions, and at the finale, the performers, who were all prisoners, would bow endlessly to the haughty couple on their cushioned seats. For fun, the drunken general would shout “cocksuckers” and “assholes” at the bowing actors and actresses on the stage with such zest that the spray from his spittle was visible. He would clap his wife on the back to make sure she was enjoying it. On this occasion, the general was moved to tears by the performance.

Among the members of the American party was Clara Gale, a young progressive New York lawyer who represented a Soviet travel agency in Manhattan. An obese woman with a truck driver’s voice and large floppy hats, she prided herself on her belches and her knack for grabbing men publicly by their private parts. But the visit to Kolyma brought out her femininity, her vision of the future. “So much sharing!” she told her associates. “So much caring! We Americans have so much to learn from them: I’m so ashamed of our emphasis on superficial values, on
things,
on getting ahead and competing with the next guy. It makes me want to vomit all over again!”

One day Clara chanced upon a surprising scene. The U.S.-USSR Friendship Society from New York City had sent over tuxedos and silk gowns for the workers to share on their days off from their productive labors. The clothes were kept in the sewing room. When the wives of the prison officials got wind of their whereabouts, they hurled themselves toward the room, broke down the door, and grabbed for the goods. They rolled on the floor, scratching and biting each other for the gowns. Clara didn’t know what caused the scene, but she loved it.

On many occasions there were tears of joy in the eyes of many in the delegation.

Two years later Antonio was moved to Chai-Urya in Kolyma. It was known as the valley of death.

In the red cattle car, a man beside him named Levin, whose gray face was covered with white stubble, asked him, “Is your father also in Russia?” Levin was a “former person,” an intellectual who had written several works of philosophy.

“Yes,” Antonio said. “But I don’t know what happened to him.”

“There was an Italian in my cell in 1937. His last name was Carelli. He was deported from the United States and arrested in Moscow. Could it be this was your father?”

Antonio could not speak.

A kaleidoscope of childhood scenes flashed before his eyes, his father in all of them. His first flubbed revolutionary speech—”Give me liberty or give me death”—and the jump off the soapbox into his father’s outstretched arms.

He grasped Levin’s hand. “Do you know when my father was arrested?”

“The autumn of 1937. He wore white pants and sneakers. They picked him up on the street. That’s all I know, my boy.”

The bitterness he had felt at his father for doing this to him, for wrecking his life and that of his family, was gone. He felt only love and deep forgiveness for him.

The barracks of Chkalov Satellite Camp No. 7 of Chai-Urya were in darkness. There was no electricity.

Antonio worked the night shift. Layers of frozen empty soil were blown up beforehand. Then he climbed down with the other men into the smoldering excavation. Rocks, frozen lumps of clay, and large chunks of earth were piled all over. The men broke up the segments and piled them into wooden boxes on sledges. Two men harnessed themselves to either side of the sledge. The third man in the rear pushed with his hands, slipping and falling until they reached the foot of the dumping hill.

Antonio danced to keep his feet from freezing, shuffling to the memory of “The Darktown Strutters Ball.”

By mid-December, half of his group had died. By February almost all were dead.

Those who were not breathing each morning were stuffed under the floor planks for days. The living took their rags and bread portions.

The food suddenly improved. The soup had large chunks of fresh meat and bones in it. For two weeks they ate well.

Then the cooks were arrested. They had stolen the regular food and substituted the flesh of corpses.

The prisoners chopped off their own body parts to escape the work. They blew off their fingers with stolen detonators. It was better to lose a hand or foot than to die.

Shirkers were dragged from their hiding places, pleading and whimpering, and thrown at the feet of the guards. If they could not move from exhaustion, the wolfhounds were ordered to chew them up.

A brigade
of dokhodyagas,
the ideal Soviet men, carried naked, frozen corpses up the slope every day to the burial site. The bodies were piled like logs. Holes were bored and the blasting began. The corpses were thrown into the mass grave and covered.

He did not think he would make it. There was no flesh on his bones, only gray, scaly skin. His buttocks were almost gone.

Then the brigadier, Prokhorov, called him in. “The men tell me you’re an artist. The bread distributor has made us an offer. He’d like drawings of nude beauties. We can get notebooks and pencils. Can you do it? You’ll get all the bread you want, and you won’t have to go to work. You can draw in the barracks.”

Prokhorov paused, and the expression on his face was different from any Antonio had ever seen before. “You’ll make it. You can draw. It’s saved you before and it will now. I have nothing.”

Each day he drew a girl in different poses and hairdos, standing, reclining, sitting, smiling, pouting, flirting.

He began tattooing again as well. They gave him bread, sugar, gruel, and tobacco. His body began to take shape again. The frostbite crusts started to fall off his nose, cheeks, and chin. His right leg was still bloated from scurvy and full of boils.

In the spring, the prisoners picked berries and carried them in pailfuls back to camp for the officials and guards. They were not allowed to eat them. The bushes drooped under the weight of the fruit. The streams and rivers were full of fish. At night, eating their oatmeal gruel, they smelled the fish frying for the guards.

Antonio ran off with two other prisoners into the forest to eat the berries.

Shots crisscrossed around him, bouncing off the ground. He crawled on his hands and knees, his heart pounding.

He was led by the guards, hands behind his back to the isolator, a hole in the ground. His head protruded above the ground. The guards covered the hole with heavy logs and securely fastened them to stakes. He fell on his knees in the hole.

He had to keep moving to survive. He wrapped his arms around his body. He lifted one foot and kicked the wall, then the other foot. He moved his neck and banged his head against the logs.

To warm himself, he thought of his mother and father, his sister, his school days, thought of anything but time. His imagination bounded everywhere.

He thought of America. And that warmed him.

In the morning he managed to climb out of the hole.

A guard came up to him and, without saying a word, lifted his walking stick and beat him. Antonio fell on his hands and knees, covering his head with his arms. The stick broke on Antonio’s back. The guard was very fond of that stick; he thought it gave him a certain cachet. Enraged, he kicked Antonio, picked up the scythe and flayed him with it. Antonio rolled himself into a ball.

The months passed.

The first snows came.

In 1948 Antonio was released and issued a wolf’s passport—a Soviet internal passport “without the right to live in large cities.” He was thirty years old.

He had to see his mother and sister in Moscow. He sent a telegram telling them he was coming.