As the boat approached the landing, there occurred the difficulty, the delay that almost sent Granovsky and his weak heart to the grave. The difficulty was resolved by the experienced and efficient chief of the regional office, Ozols.
The boat was packed with passengers. These crafts did not run frequently, and there were so many people on board that all the decks, all the cabins, and even the engine room was full. There was no room on The Red Tataria for Mr Popp. Not only were all the cabin tickets sold, but each contained secretaries of regional committees, shop supervisors, and directors of important factories going to Perm for the holidays.
Granovsky felt that he was about to lose consciousness, but Ozols was more experienced in such matters. He went up to the top deck with four of his men, all armed and in uniform.
‘Everybody get off! Take your things with you!’
‘But we have tickets! To Perm!’
‘To hell with you and your tickets! Go down below, to the hold. You have three minutes to think it over.’
‘The guards will travel with you to Perm, I’ll explain along the way.’
Five minutes later, Mr Popp stepped on to the empty deck of The Red Tataria.
The Theft
A gray snow was falling, the sky was gray, the ground was gray, and climbing from one snowy hill to another, the chain of people stretched along the entire horizon. We had to wait for a long time while the work-gang leader got his group into formation – as if some general were hidden beyond the hill.
The work gang lined up in pairs, and turned off the path – the shortest way home to the barracks – on to another road that had not yet been beaten down by convict feet. A tractor had passed this way recently, and the snow had not yet covered its tracks, which looked like the spoor of some prehistoric beast. The going was harder here than on the path, and everyone was hurrying. Every so often someone would stumble, fall behind, pull his snow-filled felt boots out of a drift, and rush to catch up with his comrades. Suddenly, as we came around an enormous snowdrift, there appeared the dark figure of a man in an enormous white sheepskin coat. Only when we came closer did I realize that the snowdrift was a low stack of flour sacks. A truck must have gotten stuck here, unloaded, and been towed away empty by the tractor.
The work gang walked rapidly past the stack of flour sacks toward the guard. Then they slowed down and the men broke ranks. Retreating in darkness, the men finally reached the glare of a large electric light-bulb hanging above the camp gates.
Complaining of cold and exhaustion, the work gang hurriedly got into an uneven formation before the gates. The overseer came out, unlocked the gates, and admitted the people to the camp ‘zone’. Even after we had entered the camp, people remained in formation right up to the barracks. I still understood nothing.
Only toward morning, when they started to divide up the flour, using a pot to scoop it up instead of a measuring cup, did I realize that for the first time in my life I had participated in a theft.
I did not find this particularly upsetting. Indeed, there was not even time to think about what had happened. We each had to cook our share by any means available – either as pancakes or as dumplings.
The Letter
The half-drunk radio operator yanked open my door. ‘There’s a message for you from headquarters; come over and pick it up.’ He disappeared into the snow and the darkness. I’d brought some frozen rabbits home from my last trip, and I was thawing them out in front of the stove. They had been given to me as a present, but ten carcasses were nothing unusual. It was a good season for rabbits, and a man barely had time to set his traps before they were full. They had to be thawed before they could be eaten, but I immediately lost all interest in rabbits.
A message from headquarters: a telegram, a radiogram, a phone call for me. It was my first telegram in fifteen years. I was startled, anxious. Here, as in any village, a telegram means a tragedy; it deals with death. It couldn’t be an announcement of my release, because I had long since been released. I set off for the radio operator’s fortified castle with its loopholes and three high fences. Each fence had a gate fitted with a latch that had to be opened for me by the radio operator’s wife. I squeezed through all the doors on my way to the landlord’s abode. When the last door had shut behind me, I strode into a bedlam of wings, into the stench of poultry droppings and made my way through a flock of fluttering chickens and crowing cocks. Guarding my face, I crossed over one more threshold, but the radio operator wasn’t there either. There were only pigs: three clean, well-cared-for smallish boars and a somewhat larger sow. This was the last barrier.
The radio operator sat surrounded by crates of pickle brine and green onions. He truly intended to become a millionaire. There are different roads to wealth in Kolyma. One is hardship pay and special rations. The sale of cheap tobacco and tea is another. Raising chickens and hogs is a third.
Crowded to the very edge of the table by all his flora and fauna, the radio operator handed me a sheaf of telegrams. They all looked the same, and I felt like a parrot picking a card at random.
I sorted through the cables, but couldn’t make head or tail of them. Condescendingly, the radio operator picked out my telegram with the tips of his fingers.
It read: ‘Come letter,’ that is, ‘Come for your letter.’ The postal service economized on content, but the receiver, of course, understood what was meant.
I went to the area chief and showed him the telegram.
‘How far is it?’ he asked.
‘Five hundred kilometers.’
‘Well, I guess so…’
‘I’ll be back in five days.’
‘Good. But don’t drag things out. No sense waiting to hitch a ride. The local Yakut tribesmen will take you by dogsled to Baragon. From there you’ll have to go by reindeer. If you’re not stingy, the postal service will take you. The main thing is to get to the highway.’
When I walked out of the area chief’s office, I realized I’d never make it to the damn highway. I wouldn’t even make it to Baragon, because I didn’t have a coat. I, a resident of Kolyma, didn’t have a coat! Sergey Korotkov had given me an almost new white sheepskin coat. He gave me a big pillow too, but when I wanted to quit my job at the prison hospital and leave for the mainland, I sold the coat and the pillow. I didn’t want to have any superfluous belongings that would just be stolen or taken away outright by the criminal element. I sold my coat and pillow, but the personnel office and the Magadan Ministry of Internal Affairs refused me permission to leave. So when my money ran out, I had to go back again for a job in Far Northern Construction. And I went to a place where there were flying chickens and a radio operator, but I didn’t manage to buy a coat. You couldn’t ask someone to loan you one for five days; that kind of request would simply be laughed at in Kolyma. So somehow I had to buy a coat in the village.
I found both a coat and someone willing to sell it. It was black with a luxurious sheepskin collar, but it was more like a jacket than a coat. It had no pockets and the bottom half was cut away. Only the collar and the broad sleeves remained.
‘You mean you cut the bottom off?’ I asked Ivanov, the camp overseer who sold me the coat. Ivanov lived alone; he was a gloomy type. He’d cut off the bottom half of the coat to make mittens. They were in great demand, and he made five pairs, each worth the price of a complete sheepskin coat. The pitiful part that was left could hardly be called a coat.