I couldn’t ask for bread, but I could ask for an empty tin can. They gave me a smudged, dented pot in which I scooped up some water and boiled one of the giant mushrooms.
The head mower unwrapped a dirty rag and silently handed me a piece of salt, and soon the water in the pot began to leap and squeak as it whitened with foam and heat. I ate the tasteless monster mushroom, washed it down with boiling water, and warmed up a little.
As I drowsed by the fire, dawn came slowly and silently, and I set off for the river-bank without thanking the mowers for their hospitality. I could see my two baskets a half-mile away. The water-level was already dropping. I made my way through the forest, clutching at those trees that had survived. Their branches were broken, and their bark was ripped off. I picked my way along the stones, occasionally stepping on heaps of mountain sand. I approached the shore; yes, it was a shore – a new shore defined by the wavering line of the flood waters. Still heavy from the rains, the river rushed past, but it was obvious that the water level was dropping.
Far away, very far away – on the other shore, which seemed like the other shore of life – I could see figures waving their arms. I saw the boat and began to wave my arms as well. They understood me. The boat was carried upstream on poles about a mile from the spot where I was standing. Safonov and Verigin brought it in much farther downstream than the spot where I stood. Safonov handed me my bread ration of 600 grams – a little more than a pound – but I had no appetite.
I dragged out my baskets with the miracle mushrooms. What with the rain and my having hauled them through the forest at night and bumping them against the trees in the dark, there were only pieces left in the basket – pieces of mushroom.
‘Maybe we should throw them away?’ Verigin said.
‘No, what for…’
‘We threw ours away yesterday. Barely managed to get the boat across. We thought of you,’ Safonov said firmly, ‘but we decided we’d really get it in the neck if we lost the boat. No one would give a damn about you.’
‘No one gives a damn about me,’ I said.
‘That’s right. Neither we, nor the chief would get in trouble over you, but the boat… Did I do the right thing?’
‘Yes, you did the right thing,’ I said.
‘Get in,’ Safonov said, ‘and take those damn baskets.’
We pushed off from shore and began our journey back – a tiny boat in the still heaving and stormy river.
Back at the hospital we were met without cursing or joy. Safonov was right to give first priority to the boat.
I had dinner, supper, and breakfast. Then I had dinner and supper. When I had eaten my entire two-day ration, I began to feel sleepy. I got warm. But for perfect bliss I needed tea – just boiling water, of course. Only the camp administrators drank real tea.
I sat down next to the barracks stove and put a pot of water on the fire – tame water on a tame fire. Soon the water began to leap furiously in the pot. But I was already asleep.
Graphite
Which ink is used to sign death sentences – chemical ink, the India ink used in passports, the ink of fountain-pens, alizarin? No death sentence has ever been signed simply in pencil.
In the taiga we had no use for ink. Any ink will dissolve in rain, tears, and blood. Chemical pens cannot be sent to prisoners and are confiscated if discovered. Such pens are treated like printer’s ink and used to draw the home-made playing cards owned by the criminal element and therefore… Only the simple, black graphite pencil is permitted. In Kolyma, graphite carries enormous responsibility.
The cartographers discussed the matter with the heavens, peered into the starry sky, measured the height of the sun, and established a point of reference on our earth. Above this point a marble tablet was set into the stone of the mountaintop, and a tripod, a log signal, was affixed to the spot. This tripod indicates the precise location on the map, and an invisible network of meridians and parallels extends from this point across valleys, clearings, and marshes. When a road is cut through the taiga, each landmark is sighted through the cross-hairs of the level and the theodolite. The land has been measured, the taiga has been measured, and we come upon the benchmark of the cartographer, the topographer, the measurer of the earth – recorded in simple black graphite.
The topographers have crossed and criss-crossed the Kolyma taiga with roads, but even so these roads exist only in areas surrounding settlements and mines. The clearings and naked hills are crossed only by ethereal, imaginary lines for which there are no reliable benchmarks, no tagged trees. Benchmarks are established on cliffs, river-beds, and bare mountaintops. The measurement of the taiga, the measurement of Kolyma, the measurement of a prison is based on these reliable points of reference, whose authority is biblical. A network of clearings is indicated by benchmarks on the trees, benchmarks which can be seen in the cross-hairs of the theodolite and which are used to survey the taiga.
Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.
It is not only on benchmarks that topographers may not use pens. Any map legend or draft of a legend resulting from a visual survey demands graphite for immortality. Graphite is nature. It participates in the spinning of the planet and resists time better than stone. Limestone mountains are washed away by rains, winds, and waves, but a 200-year-old larch tree is still young, and it will live and preserve on its benchmark the code that links today’s world with the biblical secret. Even as the tree’s fresh wound still bleeds and the sap falls like tears, a number – an arbitrary mark – is written upon the trunk.
In the taiga, only graphite can be used for writing. A topographer always keeps pencil stubs, fragments of pencils in the pockets of his vest, jacket, pants, overcoat. Paper, a notebook, a carrying-case – and a tree with a benchmark – are the medium of his art.
Paper is one of the faces, one of the transformations of a tree into diamond or graphite. Graphite is eternity, the highest standard of hardness, which has become the highest standard of softness. A trace left in the taiga by a graphite pencil is eternal.
The benchmark is carefully hewn. Two horizontal cuts are made at waist level on the trunk of a larch tree, and the edge of the axe is used to break off the still living wood. A miniature house is formed, a clean board sheltered from the rain. This shelter preserves the recorded benchmark almost for ever – till the end of the larch’s six-hundred-year life.
The wounded larch is like a prophetic icon – like the Chukotsk Mother of God or the Virgin Mary of Kolyma who awaits and foretells a miracle. The subtle, delicate smell of tree sap, the larch’s blood spilled by a man’s axe, is like a distant memory of childhood or the incense of dew.
A number has been recorded, and the wounded larch, burned by wind and sun, preserves this ‘tag’, which points the way from the forsaken spot in the taiga to the outside world. The way leads through the clearings to the mountaintop with the nearest tripod, the cartographic tripod, under which is a pit filled with rocks. Under the rocks is a marble tablet indicating the actual latitude and longitude – a recording not made with a graphite pencil. And we return to our world along the thousands of threads that lead from this tripod, along the thousands of lines that lead from one axe mark to another so that we may remember life. Those who work in the topographic service work in the service of life.