‘This is for the road. A sort of dry rations.’
I said nothing.
‘Have the guards been sent for?’
‘They’ve been sent for,’ the officer on duty answered.
‘Have whoever’s in charge come upstairs.’
And Romanov disappeared up the stairs. Two guards arrived – one an older man with pock-marks on his face and wearing a tall fur hat of the sort worn in the Caucasian Mountains. The other was a rosy-cheeked youth about twenty years old wearing a Red Army helmet.
‘This one,’ said the officer on duty, pointing at me.
Both – the young one and the pock-marked one – looked me over carefully from head to toe.
‘Where’s the chief?’ the pock-marked one asked.
‘He’s upstairs. The package is there too.’
The pock-marked man went upstairs and soon returned with Romanov.
They talked quietly, and the pock-marked man gestured in my direction.
‘Fine,’ Romanov said finally. ‘We’ll give you a note.’
We walked out on to the street. Next to the porch, on the same spot where the truck from the Partisan Mine had stood the previous night, was a comfortable ‘raven’ – a prison bus with barred windows. I got in, the barred doors closed, the guards occupied their spots in back, and we set off. For a while the ‘raven’ followed the central highway that slices all of Kolyma in half, but then we turned off to the side. The road twisted through the hills, the motor roared on the slopes, and the sheer, pine-forested cliffs with frosty-branched willow shrubs towered above us. Finally, having wound around several hills, the truck followed a riverbed to a small clearing. The trees were cut down, and the edges of the clearing were ringed with guard towers. In the middle, about three hundred yards away, were other slanted towers and the dark mass of the barracks surrounded with barbed wire.
The door of the small guardhouse on the road opened, and a sentry with a revolver strapped to his waist came out. The bus stopped. Leaving the motor running, the driver jumped out and walked past my window.
‘That really twisted us around. It really is a serpent.’
I was familiar with the name, and if anything, my reaction was even stronger than to Smertin’s name. This was ‘Serpentine’, the infamous pre-trial prison where so many people had perished the previous year. Their bodies had not yet decayed. But, then, they never would in the permafrost.
The senior guard went up the path to the prison, and I sat at the window thinking that now my hour, my turn had come. It was just as difficult to think about death as about anything else. I didn’t draw myself any picture of my own execution; I just sat and waited.
The winter twilight had already set in. The door of the ‘raven’ opened, and the older guard tossed me some felt boots.
‘Put these on.’
I took off my quilted boots, but the felt boots were too small.
‘You’ll never make it in those cloth boots,’ said the pock-marked man.
‘I’ll make it.’
He tossed the felt boots into the corner of the bus.
‘Let’s go.’
The ‘raven’ turned around and rushed away from ‘Serpentine’. From the vehicles flashing past us I soon realized we were back on the main highway. The bus slowed down, and all around I could see the lights of a large village. The bus stopped at the porch of a brightly lit house, and I entered a lighted corridor very similar to the one in Smertin’s building. Behind a wooden barrier next to a wall phone sat a guard with a pistol on his belt. This was the village of Yagodny, named after the head of the secret police. On the first day of our trip we had covered only seventeen kilometers. Where would we go from here?
The guard took me to a far room with a wooden cot, a bucket of water, and a pail that served as a toilet. The door had a hole for observation by the guard.
I lived there two days. I even managed to dry and rewind the bandages on my legs that were festering with scurvy sores.
There was a sort of rural quiet in the regional office of the secret police. I listened intently from my tiny cell, but even in the day it was rare to hear steps in the corridor. Occasionally an outside door would open, and keys could be heard turning in door locks. And there was always the guard – the same guard, unshaven, wearing an old quilted jacket and a pistol in a shoulder holster. It all seemed rather rustic in comparison with gleaming Khatynakh where Comrade Smertin conducted affairs of state. Very, very rarely the telephone would ring.
‘Yes, they’re gassing up. Yes. I don’t know, comrade chief. OK, I’ll tell them.’
Whom were they referring to? My guards? Once a day, toward evening, the door to my cell would open and the guard would bring in a pot of soup, a piece of bread, and a spoon. The main course was dumped into the soup and served together. I would take the kettle, eat everything, and lick the pot clean. Camp habits were strong.
On the third day the pock-marked soldier stepped over the cell threshold. He wore a long leather coat over a shorter one.
‘Rested up? Let’s get on the road.’
I stood on the porch of the regional office, thinking we would again have a closed prison bus, but the ‘raven’ was nowhere to be seen. An ordinary three-ton truck stood before the porch.
‘Get in.’
Obediently I climbed over the side of the bed.
The young soldier squeezed into the cab, and the pock-marked one sat next to me. The truck started up and in a few minutes we were back on the main highway. Where was I being taken? North or south? East or west? There was no sense asking and, besides, the guards weren’t supposed to say. Was I being transferred to a different district? Which one? The truck lurched along for many hours and stopped abruptly.
‘We’ll have dinner here. Get down.’
I got down.
We had come to a cafeteria.
The highway was the aorta and main nerve of Kolyma. Unguarded equipment was constantly being shunted back and forth. Food supplies were always guarded because of the danger of escaped convicts. The guards also provided protection (unreliable, to be sure) from theft by the driver and supply agent.
At the cafeteria one encountered geologists, mine explorers going on vacation with the money they’d earned, and black-market dealers in tobacco and chifir – the semi-narcotic drink made of strong tea in the far north. These were the heroes and the scoundrels of the north. All the cafeterias sold vodka. People would meet, quarrel, fight, exchange news, and hurry on. Truck motors would be left running while the drivers took a two- or three-hour nap in the cab. One also encountered convicts in the cafeteria. On their way up into the taiga they appeared as clean, neat groups. Coming back, the dirty broken bodies of these half-dead, no longer human creatures were the refuse of the mines. In the cafeteria were detectives whose job it was to capture escapees. The escapees themselves were often in military uniform. Past these cafeterias drove the black limousines of the lords of life and death – the lives and deaths of both convicts and civilians.
A playwright ought to depict the north in precisely such a roadside cafeteria; that would be an ideal setting. I used the idea later in a story, of course.
I stood in the cafeteria trying to elbow my way through to the enormous red-hot barrel of a stove. The guards weren’t overly concerned that I would attempt to escape, since it was obvious I was too weak for that. It was clear to everyone that such a goner had nowhere to run to in sixty degrees below zero weather.
‘Sit down over there and eat.’
The guard brought me a bowl of hot soup and gave me some bread.
‘We’ll be on our way now,’ said the young one. ‘We’ll leave as soon as the sergeant comes.’
But the pock-marked man didn’t come alone. He was with an older ‘warrior’ (they didn’t call them soldiers back then) in a short coat and carrying a rifle. He looked at me, then at the pock-marked man.