He walked into the cabin, took the axe from one corner, and stepped back over the threshold. The foreman, who had been sitting on a mound of earth piled around the cabin, jumped up and began to shout something. Fedya and I ran out into the yard.
Savelev walked up to the thick, short pine log on which we had always sawed wood. The surface was scarred by the axe, and the bark had all been chopped off. He put his left hand on the log, spread the fingers, and swung the axe.
The foreman squealed shrilly. Fedya ran toward Savelev, but the four fingers had already flown into the sawdust. At first we couldn’t even see them among the branches and fine chips. Crimson blood surged from the stump of Savelev’s hand. Fedya and I ripped up Ivan Ivanovich’s shirt, applied the tourniquet, and bound the wound.
The foreman took us back to camp. Savelev was sent to the first-aid point and from there to Investigations to be tried on a charge of self-mutilation. Fedya and I returned to that same tent which we had left two weeks before with such hopes and expectations of happiness.
The upper berths were already occupied by others, but we didn’t care, since it was summer and even better to be lower down. There would be a lot of changes by winter.
I fell asleep quickly, but woke up in the middle of the night. I walked up to the table of the orderly on duty where Fedya was sitting with a sheet of paper in his hand. Over his shoulder I could read:
‘Mama,’ Fedya wrote, ‘Mama, I’m all right. Mama, I’m dressed appropriately for the season…’
The Injector
To: Comrade A. S. Korolyov,
Director of Mines
REPORT
In response to your order requesting an explanation of the six-hour period on the twelfth of November of the current year during which the convict work gang No. 4 under my supervision in the Golden Spring Mine stood idle, I report the following:
The air temperature in the morning was sixty degrees below zero. Our thermometer was broken by the on-duty overseer, as I reported to you earlier. Nevertheless, it was possible to determine the temperature, since spit froze in mid-air.
The work gang was brought to the site on time, but could not commence work, since the boiler injector serving our area and intended to thaw the frozen ground wouldn’t work.
I have already repeatedly brought the injector to the attention of the chief engineer. Nevertheless, no measures were taken, and the injector has now completely gone to pot. The chief engineer refuses to replace the injector just now. We have no place to warm up, and they won’t let us make a fire. Furthermore, the guards won’t permit the work gang to be sent back to the barracks.
I’ve written everywhere I could, but I can’t work with this injector any longer. The injector hardly works at all, and the plan for our area can’t be fulfilled. We can’t get anything done, but the chief engineer doesn’t pay any attention and just demands his cubic meters of soil.
Mine Engineer L. V. Kudinov,
Area Chief of the Golden Spring Mine
The following was written in neat longhand obliquely across the report:
1. For refusing to work for five days and thus interfering with the production schedule, Convict Injector is to be placed under arrest for three days without permission to return to work and is to be transferred to a work gang with a penal regimen.
2. I officially reprimand Chief Engineer Gorev for a lack of discipline in the production area. I suggest that Convict Injector be replaced with a civilian employee.
Alexander Korolyov,
Director of Mines
The Apostle Paul
When I slipped off the slick pole-ladder in the test pit and sprained my ankle, the director realized I would be limping for quite a while. Since the rules wouldn’t allow me just to sit around, I was sent as an assistant to Adam Frisorger, our carpenter. We were both quite pleased.
In his ‘first life’ Frisorger had been a pastor in some German village near Marxstadt on the Volga.* We had met in one of the enormous transit prisons during the typhoid quarantine and had arrived together at this coal-prospecting area. Like me, Frisorger had spent time in the taiga, had been on the brink of death, and had been sent half insane from a mine to the transit prison. We were sent to the coal-prospecting group as invalids, as ‘help’. All the working members of the prospecting group were civilians working on contract. True, they were yesterday’s convicts, but they had served their sentences. In camp the attitude toward them was condescending, even contemptuous. On one occasion, while we were still on the road, the forty of them hardly managed to scrape up two rubles to buy some home-grown tobacco. Even so, they were already different from us. We all understood that in two or three months they would be able to buy clothing, get something to drink, be issued internal travel passports. Perhaps they would even go home in a year. These hopes gleamed all the brighter when Paramonov, the man in charge of the group, promised them enormous salaries and polar rations. ‘You’ll all go home in top hats,’ he kept saying. As for us convicts, there were no promises of top hats and polar rations.
On the other hand, Paramonov was not rude to us. No one would give him any convicts to work as prospectors, so all he managed to wheedle out of the higher-ups was the five of us as helpers.
None of us knew one another, but when we were presented to Paramonov’s bright, piercing gaze, he had reason to be pleased with his crew. One of us, the gray-mustached Izgibin, was a stove-builder. He was the joker in the crowd, and his wit had not abandoned him even in camp. Thanks to his skill, he was not as emaciated as the rest of us. The second was a one-eyed giant from Kamenets-Podolsk. He presented himself to Paramonov as a ‘steamboat stoker’.
‘So, you must be something of a mechanic,’ Paramonov said.
‘That’s right, I am,’ the stoker responded eagerly.
He had quickly calculated the advantages of working in a civilian prospecting group.
The third was the agronomist, Riazanov. Paramonov was ecstatic over this find. As for the agronomist’s appearance, no importance was attached to the torn rags in which he was clothed. In camp, a man’s worth was never appraised according to his clothing, and Paramonov knew the camp well enough.
I was the fourth. I was neither stove-builder nor handyman nor agronomist, but Paramonov found my great height reassuring, and he decided not to make a fuss by altering the list over one man. He nodded.
The fifth man, however, was acting very strangely. He muttered prayers, covered his face with his hands, and couldn’t hear Paramonov. But this was nothing new for our boss, and he turned to the detail assignment officer standing next to him with a stack of yellow folders containing our ‘cases’.
‘He’s a carpenter,’ the detail assignment officer said, guessing at Paramonov’s question. The reception was over, and we were led away to prospect.
Later Frisorger told me that he had been terrified by his case inspector back at the mine, because when they called for him, he thought he was going to be shot. We lived nearly a year in the same barracks, and we never quarreled – something unusual among convicts both in camp and in prison. Quarrels arise over trivia, and verbal abuse becomes so heated that the only possible sequel appears to be a knife – or at best a poker. But I quickly learned not to pay any attention to these elaborate oaths. Intense feelings would simmer down, and those involved would continue lazily to curse each other, but this was done for appearances – to save face.