They soon heard about a loft which was occupied by five crimi-
One Final Account Z9Z
nals, though there was room for three times as many. L. and some of his comrades went to reconnoiter. The entrance was blocked by boards, but one of them was loose and L. wrenched it away to find himself face to face with the leader of the gang of criminals inside. He braced himself for a fight, but the man politely introduced himself: "Arkhangelski." They started to parley. It appeared that the camp commandant had personally assigned this loft to Arkhangelski and his friends. L. suggested they go and see the commandant together, to which Arkhangelski politely agreed. The commandant's attitude was rather surprising: he tried to reconcile the two parties. This was possibly due to an involuntary feeling of respect for L., who had not hesitated to challenge a gang of criminals; or perhaps he took L. for a criminal as well. At any rate, he suggested that Arkhangelski and his friends should make room because of the general "housing crisis," as he termed it. L. returned in triumph to his comrades in order to pick out a dozen or so of them to move into the loft, but they had all changed their minds—none of them wanted to live with criminals for fear of being robbed. L. pointed out that they had no possessions to lose, and that there would be twice as many of them, but they preferred to stay out in the open. The only result of it all was that L. had made a new friend—he and Arkhangelski henceforth greeted each other whenever they met, which was generally in the center of the camp, where the prisoners carried on a kind of barter trade among themselves.
Once Arkhangelski invited L. to come up to the loft and listen to some poetry. L. was not frightened of being robbed, since for months he had been sleeping in his clothes and his rags would not have tempted even a camp thief. All he had left was a hat, but in the camps this was of no value. Curious as to what sort of poetry it might be, he accepted Arkhangelski's invitation.
The loft was lit by a candle. In the middle stood a barrel on which there was an opened can of food and some white bread. For the starving camp this was an unheard-of luxury. People lived on thin soup of which there was never enough—what they got for their morning meal would not have filled a glass. . . .
Sitting with the criminals was a man with a gray stubble of beard, wearing a yellow leather coat. He was reciting verse which L. recognized. It was Mandelstam. The criminals offered him bread and the canned stuff, and he calmly helped himself and ate. Evidently he was only afraid to eat food given him by his jailers. He was listened to in complete silence and sometimes asked to repeat a poem.
After that evening L. always went up and spoke to M. if he saw him in the camp. L. easily got talking with him and soon noticed that M. was suffering from some kind of persecution mania or obsession. He was frightened not only of food, but also of being given "injections." Even before he was arrested, we had heard stories about mysterious injections or inoculations which were used in the Lubianka to break a person's will and make him say exactly what was required. There had been rumors of this kind ever since the mid-twenties, but whether there was anything in them, we did not, of course, know. Another thing L. noticed was that he was obsessed by the expression "socially dangerous" which always figured in the sentences pronounced by a Special Tribunal as grounds for exiling a prisoner. In his sick mind everything had got confused, and he imagined that they were going to give him an injection of rabies so that he really would be "dangerous" and have to be got rid of. He had forgotten that the "organs" didn't need to give people injections to do away with them.
L. knew nothing about psychiatry, but he very much wanted to help M. He didn't argue with him, but pretended he believed M. was deliberately spreading the story about being injected with rabies so that people would leave him alone. "But," L. said to him, "you don't want to frighten me away, do you?" The strategem worked and, to L.'s astonishment, there was no more talk about injections.
In the transit camp the prisoners were not taken out to work, but building materials were being unloaded nearby and stacked on a piece of land which had been assigned to the criminals. (According to the regulations, the "politicals," arrested under Article 58, were supposed to be kept apart from the rest, but because of the congestion in the camp the rule was not strictly observed.) Anybody who worked there got nothing out of it, not even a little extra bread, but even so there were some volunteers. These were people who were tired of being penned in with the milling crowd of their half-crazed fellow prisoners. They wanted to get out, if only into the less crowded territory next to the camp, where it was at least possible to walk around more freely. The younger prisoners particularly suffered from lack of exercise. Later on, in the regular camps, nobody would ever think of volunteering for any work—but here "in transit" it was different.
Among the volunteers was L., a man who never lost heart. The worse the conditions, the stronger his will to live. He went around the camp with clenched teeth, stubbornly repeating to himself: "I can see everything and know everything, but even this is not enough to kill me." He was singlemindedly bent on one thing: not to allow himself to be destroyed, but to survive despite all the odds. I know this feeling very well myself, because I too have lived like that for almost thirty years, with clenched teeth. For this reason I have enormous respect for L.—I know what it cost to survive in ordinary conditions, let alone in the forced-labor camps where he lived throughout all those terrible years. He returned in 1956 with ТВ and a hopelessly damaged heart, but at least he came back sound in mind, and with a better memory than most people left at liberty can boast of.
L. took M. to help him. This was possible because there were no "work norms" in the transit camp and L. had no intention of overexerting himself. They loaded a couple of rocks on a board with handles, carted them to a place a few hundred yards away, and sat down for a rest before going back for more. Once, resting by the pile of rocks, M. said: "My first book was Stone, and my last will be stone, too." This phrase had stuck in L.'s memory, though he did not know the names of M.'s books, and he interrupted his story at this point to ask me whether M.'s first book really had been called Stone. When I confirmed this to him, he was very pleased that the excellence of his memory was thus borne out once again.
Away from the crowd, in the comparative peace of this waste lot reserved for the criminals, both of them felt in better spirits. L.'s story explained the sentence in M.'s letter about going out to work. Everybody had assured me that people did not work in transit camps, and I had never been able to understand this part of M.'s letter until it was cleared up by L.
At the beginning of December there was an outbreak of spotted typhus, and L. lost track of M. The camp authorities responded energetically to the outbreak by locking all the prisoners in their barracks and not letting them out—there was more room now because all the suspected plague cases had already been taken to a special building where they were kept in quarantine. In the mornings the barracks were opened so that the slop buckets could be emptied and everybody have his temperature taken by orderlies from the camp hospital. These preventive measures were, needless to say, quite ineffectual, and the disease spread rapidly. All those who caught it were placed in quarantine, about which there were terrifying rumors —it was thought that nobody came out alive.