But secret telegraph lines carried a cable from Arkagala to the Magadan chief of criminal investigations. His office was situated on virtually the only street in town, close to the barracks where Krivoshei’s wife was staying and which had been partitioned up into living quarters ‘for families’. The cable was in code: ‘Escaped: Convict, Paul Krivoshei, born 1900, Article 168, sentence 10, case number…’
They thought that Krivoshei’s wife was hiding him. She was arrested, but they couldn’t get anything out of her. Yes, she had been to Arkagala, seen him, left, and was working in Magadan. A long search and observation produced no results. Departing ships and planes were checked with special thoroughness, but it was all in vain; there was no trace of Krivoshei.
Krivoshei set off toward Yakutsk, away from the sea. He took nothing with him but a canvas raincoat, a geologist’s hammer, a pouch with a small quantity of geological ‘samples’, a supply of matches, and some money.
He made his way openly and unhurriedly along deer runs and the paths of pack animals, staying close to settlements and camps, never going far into the taiga. He spent each night in a tent or a hut. At the first small Yakut village he hired workers and had them dig test pits. That is, he had them do the very same work that he himself had formerly done for real geologists. Krivoshei knew enough about geology to pass himself off as a collector. Arkagala, where he had previously worked, was a final base camp for geological prospecting groups, and Krivoshei had managed to pick up their habits. His methodical manners, horn-rimmed glasses, daily shave, and trimmed nails inspired endless confidence.
Krivoshei was in no hurry. He filled his log with mysterious signs similar to those he had seen in geological field books and slowly moved toward Yakutsk.
On occasion he would turn back, stray off in a different direction, permit himself to be detained. All this was essential for him to ‘study the basin of the Riaboi Spring’ and for verisimilitude – to cover his tracks. Krivoshei had iron nerves and a pleasant outgoing smile.
In a month he had crossed the Yablonovy mountain chain with two Yakut bearers who were sent along with him by a collective farm to carry his ‘sample’ pouches. When they reached Yakutsk, Krivoshei deposited his rocks at the baggage section on the wharf and set off to the local geological office to ask that several valuable packages be sent to the Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Krivoshei then went to the bathhouse and to the barber. He bought an expensive suit, several fashionable shirts, and some underwear. He then set off with a good-natured smile to visit the head of the local scientific society, where he was received in the most friendly fashion. His knowledge of foreign languages created a convincing impression.
Finding in Krivoshei an educated person (a rarity in Yakutsk), the directors of the local scientific society asked him to stay on a while longer. They countered his flustered protest that he had to hurry on to Moscow with a promise to pay his passage to Irkutsk at government expense. Krivoshei thanked them with dignity, but replied that he really had to be on his way. The society, however, had its own plans for Krivoshei.
‘Surely you won’t refuse, dear colleague, to give two or three lectures… on… any topic of your choice. For example, coal deposits in the Middle-Yakut Plateau?’
Krivoshei felt a knot form in the pit of his stomach.
‘Oh, of course, with pleasure. Within limits… you understand, without approval from Moscow…’ Krivoshei fell into profuse compliments of the scientific activity in the town of Yakutsk.
No criminal investigator could have put a more wily question to Krivoshei than had this Yakut professor, who was so favorably impressed by his scholarly guest, with his courteous bearing, and his horn-rimmed glasses. The professor, of course, merely intended to do a service to his home town.
The lecture took place and even gathered a considerable audience. Krivoshei smiled, quoted Shakespeare in English, sketched something on the blackboard and ran through dozens of foreign names.
‘These Muscovites don’t know much,’ the man who had been sitting next to the Yakut professor said during the break. ‘Any schoolboy knows about the geological side of his talk. As for those chemical analyses of coal, that has nothing to do with geology. The only thing bright about him is his glasses.’
‘You’re wrong,’ the professor frowned. ‘What he says is very useful; besides, our colleague from the capital has a gift for popularization. We should have him repeat his lecture for the students.’
‘Well, maybe for the freshmen,’ the man continued obstinately.
‘Stop it. After all, it’s a favor. You don’t look a gift horse…’
Krivoshei kindly agreed to repeat the lecture for the students, and it met with considerable success.
And so the scientific organizations of Yakutsk paid for their Moscow guest’s ticket to Irkutsk.
His collections – several crates packed with stones – had been shipped off earlier. In Irkutsk ‘the director of the geological expedition’ managed to have his rocks sent by post to Moscow, to the Academy of Sciences, where they were received and lay for years in the warehouse, an unresolved scientific mystery. It was assumed that this mysterious shipment must have been collected by some insane geologist who had forgotten his field and even his name in some unknown polar tragedy.
‘The amazing thing,’ Krivoshei later said, ‘was that no one anywhere asked to see my identification papers – not in the migrating village councils or in the highest scientific bodies. I had all the necessary papers, but no one ever asked for them.’
Naturally, Krivoshei never showed so much as his nose in Kharkov. He stopped at Mariupol, bought a house there, and used his false documents to get a job.
Exactly two years later, on the anniversary of his hike, Krivoshei was arrested, tried, again sentenced to ten years, and returned to Kolyma to serve out his time.
What was the mistake that canceled out this truly heroic feat, which had simultaneously demanded amazingly strong nerves, intelligence, and physical strength?
In the scrupulousness of its preparation, the depth of its concept and the psychological calculation that was its very cornerstone, this escape had no precedent.
An unusually small number of persons had taken part in its organization, but it was precisely this aspect that guaranteed its success. The escape was also remarkable because in this land of Yakuts where local residents were promised twenty pounds of flour for each captured escapee, a single person had challenged a whole state with its thousands of armed men. Twenty pounds of flour had been the tariff in czarist times, and this reward was officially accepted even now. Krivoshei had to look on everyone as informers and cowards, but he had struggled and won!
What error had destroyed the plan that he had so brilliantly conceived and carried out?
His wife was detained in the north and had not been permitted to return to the mainland. The same organization that was investigating her husband was also in charge of issuing travel papers.
This, however, they had foreseen, and she was prepared to wait. Month followed month, and her request was refused without explanation. She made an attempt to leave from the other end of Kolyma – by plane over the same taiga rivers and valleys through which her husband passed on foot. But, of course, she was refused there as well. She was locked up in an enormous stone prison one-eighth the size of the Soviet Union, and she could not find a way out.
She was a woman, and she became weary of this eternal struggle with a person whose face she couldn’t see, a person who was stronger than she – stronger and more wily.
She had spent the money she had brought with her, and life in the north was expensive. At the Magadan bazaar one apple costs a hundred rubles. So she got a job, but the salaries of persons hired locally, and not ‘recruited’ on the mainland, differed little from those in Kharkov.