It was he who volunteered to lead his young friends out of confinement.
‘I told them America was closer and that we should head in that direction, but they wanted to make it to the mainland, so I gave in. We had to reach the Chukchi Eskimos, the migrating ones who were here before the Russians came. We didn’t make it.’
They were gone for only four days. They had left in the middle of September, in boots and summer clothing, certain they would have no difficulty in reaching the Chukchi camps, where Kotelnikov had assured them they would find friendship and assistance. But it snowed – a thick, early snow. Kotelnikov entered an Evenk village to buy deerskin boots. He bought the boots, and by evening a patrol caught up with them.
‘The Tungus are traitors, enemies,’ Kotelnikov fumed.
The old reindeer-driver had offered to lead Karev and Vasiliev out of the taiga without expecting any payment whatsoever. He was not particularly grieved by his new three-year ‘add-on’.
‘They’ll send me to the mines as soon as spring comes. I’ll just take off again.’
To shorten the time, he taught Karev and Vasiliev the Chukotsk language of the Kamchatka Peninsula. It was Karev, of course, who had initiated the whole affair. He cut a theatrical figure – even in this prison setting – and his modulated, velvet-toned voice betrayed his frivolousness. It couldn’t even have been called adventurousness. With each passing day he understood better the futility of the attempt, became moody, and weakened.
Vasiliev was simply a good soul ready to share his friend’s fate. Their escape attempt had taken place during the first year of their imprisonment, while they still had illusions… and physical strength.
Twelve cans of meat disappeared on a ‘white’ summer night from the tent-kitchen of a geological prospecting group. The loss was highly mysterious, since all forty employees and technologists were civilians with good salaries who had little need to steal cans of meat. Even if these cans had been worth some fantastic sum, there was no one to buy them in this remote, endless forest. The ‘bear’ explanation was immediately rejected, since nothing else in the kitchen had been touched. It was suggested that someone might have been trying to get even with the cook, who was in charge of the food. But the cook was a genial sort who denied that he had a secret enemy among the forty men. To check the matter out, the foreman, Kasaev, armed two of the stronger men with knives and set out with them to examine the area. He himself took with him the only weapon in camp – a small-caliber rifle. The surrounding area consisted of gray-brown ravines devoid of the slightest trace of greenery. They led to a limestone plateau. The geologist’s camp was located in a sort of pit on the green shore of a creek.
It did not take long to find out what had happened. In about two hours the party leisurely climbed a plateau, and a worker with particularly good eyesight stretched out his hand: a moving point could be made out on the horizon. The search party went along the ridge of slippery tuff, young stone that had not yet completely formed. This young tuff is similar to white butter and has a repulsive, salty taste. A man’s foot will sink into it as if into a swamp, and when a boot is dipped in this semi-liquid, buttery stone, it is covered by a white paint-like substance.
It was easy to walk along the ridge, and they caught up with the man in about an hour and a half. He was dressed in the shreds of an old pea jacket and quilted pants with the knees missing. Both pant legs had been cut off to make footwear, which had already worn to shreds. The man had also cut off the sleeves of the pea jacket to wrap around his feet. His leather or rubber boots had evidently been long since worn through on the stones and branches and had been abandoned.
The man had a shaggy beard and was pale from unendurable suffering. He had diarrhea, terrible diarrhea. Eleven untouched cans of meat lay next to him on the rocks. One can had been broken open and eaten the day before.
He had been trying to make his way to Magadan for a month and was circling in the forest like a man rowing a boat in a deep lake-fog. He had lost all sense of direction and was walking at random when, totally exhausted, he came upon the camp. He had been catching field mice and eating grass. He had managed to hold out until the previous day when he noticed the smoke of our fire. He waited for night, took the cans, and crawled up on to the plateau by morning. He also took matches from the kitchen, but there was no need for them. He ate the meat, and his dry mouth and terrible thirst forced him to descend the ravine to the creek. There he drank and drank the cold, delicious water. The next day his face was all puffed up, and a gastric cramp robbed him of his last strength. He was glad that his journey was over – no matter in what fashion.
Captured at that very same camp was another escapee, an important person of some kind. One of a group who had escaped from a neighboring mine, robbing and killing the mine director himself, this man was the last of the ten to be captured. Two were killed, seven caught, and this last member of the group was captured on the twenty-first day. He had no shoes, and the soles of his feet were cracked and bleeding. He said that he had eaten a tiny fish a week earlier. He had caught the fish in a dried-up stream, but it had taken him several hours, and he was debilitated by hunger. His face was swollen and drained of blood. The guards took considerable care with his diet and treatment. They even mobilized the camp medic and gave him strict orders to take special care of the prisoner. The man spent three days in camp, where he washed, ate his fill, got his hair cut, and shaved. Then he was taken away by a patrol for questioning, after which he was undoubtedly shot. The man knew this would happen, but he had seen a lot in the camps, and his indifference had long since reached the stage where a man becomes a fatalist and swims with the current. The guards were with him the entire time and would not permit anyone to talk to him. Each evening he would sit on the porch of the bathhouse and watch the enormous cherry-red sunset. The light of the evening sun was reflected in his eyes and they seemed to be on fire – a beautiful sight.
Orotukan is a settlement in Kolyma with a monument to Tatyana Malandin, and the Orotukan Club bears her name. Tatyana Malandin was a civilian employee, a member of the Komsomol, who fell into the clutches of escaped professional criminals. She was robbed and raped ‘in chorus’ – in the loathsome expression of the criminal world. And she was murdered in the taiga, a few hundred yards from the village. This occurred in 1938, and the authorities vainly spread rumors that she had been murdered by ‘Trotskyites’. The absurdity of such a slander, however, was too obvious, and it enraged even Lieutenant Malandin, the uncle of the murdered girl. A camp employee, Malandin henceforth reversed his attitude to the criminals and the politicals in camp. From that time on he hated the former and did favors for the latter.
Both the men described above were recaptured when their strength was virtually exhausted. Another man conducted himself quite differently when he was detained by a group of workers on a path near the test pits. A heavy rain had been falling for three days, and several workers put on their raincoats and pants to check the small tent, which served as a kitchen; it contained food and cooking utensils. There was also a portable smithy with an anvil, a furnace, and a supply of drilling tools. The smithy and kitchen stood in the bed of a mountain creek, in a ravine about a mile and a half from the sleeping tents.