The Zone (7 page)

And that was when the recidivist Kuptsov made his appearance (Kuptsov aka Koval, Alyamov, Gak, Shalikov, Rozhin). He stepped out of the first column and spoke out in the silence that immediately fell as he lightly pushed aside the barrel of the sub-machine gun. “You get burnt up? I’ll put you out.” His fingers stood out white against the dark muzzle.

Fidel jerked the gun to himself, fired a blind burst above their heads, and kept stepping back, stepping back…

That was the first time I saw Kuptsov. His hand looked elegant. His padded jacket, on that freezing day, was wide open. His words took the place of the song that had died out: “I’ll put you out.”

He made me think of a man walking against the wind, as if the wind had chosen him as a permanent adversary, wherever he walked, whatever he did.

After that, I saw Kuptsov often, in the dark, damp isolation cell, by a campfire in the logging sector, pale from loss of blood. And the sensation of the wind now never left me.

Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. Snapping the canvas leash on his boot, he was saying something to the dog in Estonian. To the left, Lance Corporal Petrov guarded the column, which no one worried about, since everyone was aware of the threat of the modernized AK in the hands of a warrior like Fidel.

We crossed the cold, narrow stream, watched to see that no prisoners tried to hide under the planks, led the brigade to the railway crossing, breathed in the station’s odour of cinders and crossed the embankment. Then we headed for the logging sector.

That was the name for the part of the forest surrounded by a flimsy, symbolic fence. Plywood watchtowers poked into view at treetop level. A whole group of guards stood watch. At their head was Sergeant Shumeyko, who languished for days on end waiting for “a situation”.

We led the brigade into the guarded sector. After this, our duties changed. Pakhapil became the radio operator. He took an R-109 out of the checkpoint cabin’s safe, pulled out an antenna as pliant as a fishing rod and then sent tender, mysterious words out into the airwaves: “Hello, come in Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Do you copy? Do you copy?”

Making a revolting sound, Fidel tried the rusty latch pins in the transit corridor. He counted prisoner identification cards, took keys from the weapons room, checked the “Amber” and “Flytrap” escape alarms, felt the stove to see if it was hot. He became a management-zone controller.

The zeks built bonfires. The log-truck drivers stood in line for motor oil. The sentries in the watchtowers called out to one another. Sergeant Shumeyko, whose personality was appreciated fully only after the fight in Koyna, fell asleep quietly on the trestle bed, though it was supposed to be reserved for soldiers off duty.

The twelve guard positions over the forest were fully established. The working day had begun.

All around: the smoke of campfires, the hum of motors, the smell of fresh sawdust, the calls of the sentries. This life slowly dissolved into the pale September sky.

The pines fell with a reverberating crash. Tractors dragged them away, uprooting bushes. The sun reflected off the truck headlights in blinding spots, and words soundlessly rushed through the spacious air above the logging sector: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! The sentries are in the watchtowers! Alarms in order! Restricted zone in operation! Thieves at work! Over! Do you copy? Do you copy?”

The controller admitted me into the zone. I heard the unpleasant slide click of the bolts behind me. By the campfire, the cook, a trusty named Galimulin, was filling a
chifir
tub.* I walked past him, even though the use of
chifir
was strictly forbidden, since drinking it was equated with drug use in the regulations. But the whole camp population drank
chifir
, and we knew it.

Galimulin winked at me. Then I knew for certain that my liberalism had gone too far. All I could do was threaten him with solitary, at which point Galimulin made me a present of his Asiatic smile. His front teeth were missing.

I walked past a newly cut tree trunk, admiring its yellow cross section, and made way for a tractor, which was noisily breaking branches. Shielding my face from spiderwebs, I cut through the forest to the machine shop.

Prisoners were rolling out logs, lopping off branches. The broad-shouldered, tattooed foreman was deftly handling a hook. “Step lively, you cons,” he yelled, shading his eyes with his palm. “Those lagging behind won’t make it into Communism. They’ll have to finish out their days under this regime.”

The branch-cutters lowered their axes, flung their jackets on a heap of branches. Again, iron flashed in the sun.

I walked along thinking, “Enthusiasm? Impulse? Nothing like that. The usual gymnastics. Willed courage. Strength that could just as easily become violence, given the chance.”

I traded a few words with the sentries and skirted the logging sector all the way down the restricted zone. I crossed the rusty swamp, stepping from dry patch to dry patch, and emerged into a clearing touched by the pale morning sun.

By a low campfire, his back to me, a man had stretched out comfortably. A thick book without a cover lay beside him. In his left hand, he held a tomato-paste sandwich.

“Ah, Kuptsov,” I said, “loafing again? Homesick for the clink?”

Sitting by the campfire, the work noise echoing around him, the zek looked like a pirate. There seemed to be a steering wheel in front of him, and his ship was moving straight into the wind.

 

Winter. The penal isolator. Long shadows under the pines. Windows sealed under snowdrifts.

Behind the wall, jangling his handcuffs, Kuptsov wandered from corner to corner. In the duty officer’s book, the word “Refusal”.

I took Boris Kuptsov’s record out of the file cabinet. Thirty words which look like explosions: WAPR (without a place of residence). WAO (without an occupation). A stamp: DR (dangerous recidivist). Thirty-two years in prison camps. The oldest “Code man”* in the Ust-Vym complex. Four trials. Nine escapes. Refuses to work on principle.

I asked him, “Why don’t you work?”

Handcuffs jingling, Kuptsov says:

“Remove the bracelets, Chief! This gold has no stamp.”

“Why don’t you work, you beast?”

“The Code doesn’t allow it.”

“How about feeding yourself? Does your Code allow that?”

“There’s no code that says I have to starve.”

“Your Code has outlived its time. All the ‘Code men’ have cracked. Antipov won’t stop singing. Mamay is the big man’s right hand. Sedov is on the needle. Topchil got snagged in Ropcha.”

“Topchil was a peasant and a chump, green as goose shit. You call him a thief? Lifting a suitcase off a granny – that’s his fortune. So he lost his crown…”

“Well, and you?”

“And I come from a long line of Russian thieves. I have stolen and will again.”

 

In front of me, a man sat at a low campfire. Next to him, on the grass, a book stood out white. In his left hand, he held a sandwich.

“Greetings,” Kuptsov said. “Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It’s written in this book – a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labour. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age… And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor.*”

“Listen,” I said, “you’re going to work, I swear it. Sooner or later, you’re going to be a driver, or a roper, or a carter. If the worst comes to the worst, a branch-cutter. You’re going to work, or you’ll perish in the isolator. You’re going to work, I give you my word. Otherwise you’ll croak.”

The zek looked at me as though I were a thing, a foreign car parked across from the Hermitage. He followed the line from the radiator to the exhaust pipe. Then he said distinctly, “I like to please myself.” And that instant: a mirage of a ship’s bridge above the waves.

I asked, “Will you work?”

“No. I was born to steal.”

“Go to the isolator!”

Kuptsov stood up. He was almost polite with me. A grimace of cheerful astonishment had frozen on his face.

Far off somewhere, pines fell, brushing the sky. A lumber truck rumbled by.

For a week, Kuptsov scraped by in the isolator, without cigarettes, without air, on half-rations. “You dish it out, Chief,” he said when I passed the embrasure of his cell.

Finally, the controller released him back into the zone. The same day, I saw him with canned goods, butter, white bread. That mysterious organization, the Con Council, had supplied him with everything he needed.

 

February. Narrow shadows lay between the pines. In the kennels, dogs were howling.

Khedoyan and I left the barracks and reached the zone. “Come on,” Rudolf said. “Walk down the free-fire zone, and I’ll meet you there.”

He walked through the garbage dump towards the isolator. By regulation, we were supposed to go together. Guards walked in pairs only. That was why Captain Prishchepa always said, “Two is more than YOU and ME. Two is WE.”

We parted by the basketball court. In the winter midnight, the backboards looked like gallows. As soon as I disappeared behind the garbage dump vats, Rudolf would turn back. He
would light a cigarette and head for the checkpoint cabin, where a wind-up clock ticked. I too could have turned back. We would have understood everything, and even laughed about it. But I was too cautious to do that. If it happened once, I would sit it out in the checkpoint every time.

I pulled up my Vorkuta hood and threw open the door of the nearest barracks. An enamel tea kettle, tied to the doorknob, made an unbearable racket. This meant no one was asleep in the barracks. The bunks were empty. The table was piled with money and cards. About twenty men were sitting around it in their underwear. They looked at me and continued their game.

“Keep your shirt on, mate,” Chaly the pickpocket said. “I’ll clean everyone out.”

“Greed sinks the square,” Beluga the black-marketeer said.

“With a little left over,” Adam said, showing his cards.

“Read ’em and weep,” Kuptsov said quietly.

I could have left, put the tea kettle in its place and slammed the door. Clusters of steam would have poured from the well-heated house. I could have walked across the zone, guiding myself by the searchlight beside the checkpoint cabin where the wind-up clock ticked. I would stop, smoke a cigarette beneath a basketball hoop, then stand there for three minutes watching the stub glow red in the snow. And then in the checkpoint cabin I would listen to Fidel talk about love. I’d even shout over the general laughter, “Hey, Fidel, tell them about the time you were so drunk you tried to make it with Sergeant Major Yevchenko.”

But I wasn’t sufficiently brave to do all that. If I did it once, there would be no more visiting the barracks for me.

I said from the threshold, “When an officer enters, you’re supposed to stand up.”

The zeks covered their cards.

“Don’t strut,” Kuptsov said. “Now is not the time.”

“That’s the gallows, Chief,” Adam said.

The others became quiet. I stretched out my hand, raked up the supple, crumpled bank notes, shoved them into my side and breast pockets. Chaly grabbed me by the elbow.

“Hands!” Kuptsov ordered him. And then, addressing me, “Chief, cool off!”

The door slammed behind my back, the enamel tea kettle clanked. I walked towards the gates. Careful, as if it were a puppy, I carried the money inside my jacket. I felt the weight of all the hands that had ever touched those crumpled notes upon my shoulders, the bitterness of all the tears, the ill will…

I didn’t notice how they came after me from behind. It got crowded around me. Shadows that weren’t my own rushed under my feet. The light bulb blinked in its wire netting, and I fell, not hearing my own cry.

I spent about a week and a half in the hospital. A loudspeaker hung over my head, a smooth plywood box inhabited by peaceful news. Chess pieces stood side by side with vials of medicine on the night table. Outside the window, the frozen days unfolded. A landscape in a window frame.

Dry, clean bed linen. Soft slippers, a warm, washed-out bathrobe. Cheerful music from the loudspeaker. Clinical directness and a frank manner of contact. All this blocked out the isolator, the yellow lights above the sawmill, the sentries freezing to their sub-machine guns. And still, I thought of Kuptsov quite often. I might not have been surprised if he had come walking in on me in his prison jacket, with a book in his hand, no less.

I didn’t know who had struck me beside the fire extinguisher. And yet I could sense that, not far from the white blade, Kuptsov’s smile had flashed, had dropped, like a shadow, on his face.

I crossed the snowy yard in slippers and a bathrobe. Once I got to the dark annexe, I pulled on my boots. Then a log-carrier gave me a lift to headquarters. I appeared before Lieutenant Colonel Grechnev. On his desk, a wrought-iron warrior lifted a lance. The officer’s tone was administrative-casual: “They tell me there was an attempt on your life.”

“They just stuck a shiv in my behind.”

“And what’s so good about that?”

“Well,” I said, “nothing.”

“How did it happen?”

“They were playing cards. I took away their money.”

“When you were found, there was no money.”

“Naturally.”

“Why do you go looking for trouble?”

“Because those games usually end in slaughter.”

“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel…”

“In slaughter, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”

“That might be in our interest.”