Mountain rivers easily burst their banks when it rains, and the weather was fully expected to pull its usual tricks. The sight that the men came upon, however, left them totally dumbfounded. Nothing remained. Where there had been a smithy with tools for the entire site – drills, bits, picks, shovels, blacksmith tools – there was nothing. Nor was there any kitchen with the summer’s food supply. There were no pots, no dishes – nothing. The appearance of the ravine had been totally changed by new stones brought down from somewhere by the raging water. Everything had been carried off downstream, and the workers followed the river-banks for several miles, but did not find so much as a piece of iron. Much later, when the water had receded, an enameled bowl was found in the rose willows growing on the shore near the mouth of the creek. This crushed and twisted bowl filled with sand was all that was left after the storm and the spring flood.
Returning home, the workers came upon a man in canvas boots, wearing a soaked-through raincoat and carrying a bag over his shoulder.
‘Are you an escapee?’ Vaska Rybin, one of the ditch diggers of the expedition, asked the man.
‘That’s right,’ the man answered in a sort of semi-confirming tone. ‘I need to get dry…’
‘Come with us to our tent; we have a fire in the stove.’ In the rainy summer weather the stove was always kept hot. All forty men lived in the tent.
The man took off his boots, hung his footcloths next to the stove, pulled out a tin cigarette case, shook some cheap tobacco on to a scrap of newspaper, and lit up.
‘Where are you going in such a rain?’
‘To Magadan.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’
‘What do you have?’
The soup and pearl-barley kasha didn’t tempt the man. He untied his sack and took out a piece of sausage.
‘You know how to escape in style,’ Rybin said.
Vasily Kochetov, an older worker who was second-in-charge of the work gang, stood up.
‘Where are you going?’ Rybin asked him.
‘To get some air,’ Kochetov responded and stepped over the threshold of the tent.
Rybin smirked.
‘Listen,’ he said to the escaped prisoner. ‘Pick up your stuff and get off to wherever you’re going. He just went for the boss – to arrest you. Don’t worry, we don’t have soldiers, but you had better get on your way. Here’s some bread, and take some tobacco. The rain seems to be letting up; you’re in luck. Just keep heading for the big hill, and you can’t go wrong.’
The escaped prisoner silently wrapped the dry ends of his wet footcloths around his feet, pulled on his boots, lifted his sack to his shoulder, and left.
About ten minutes later the piece of canvas that served as a door flung back, and the foreman, Kasaev, came in with a small-caliber rifle over his shoulder. With him were two other foremen, followed by Kochetov.
Kasaev stood silently while his eyes accustomed themselves to the darkness of the tent. He looked around, but no one paid any attention to the newcomers. Everyone was busy with his own affairs – some were asleep, others were mending their clothing, others were whittling some complicated erotic figures from a log, and still others were playing the game bura with home-made cards.
Rybin was setting his charred pot, made from a tin can, on the glowing coals.
‘Where is he?’ Kasaev shouted.
‘Gone,’ Rybin answered calmly. ‘Picked up his stuff and left. What did you want me to do – arrest him?’
‘He got undressed,’ Kochetov shouted. ‘He wanted to sleep.’
‘How about you? You went out to get some fresh air, and where did you scurry off to in the rain?’
‘Let’s go home,’ Kasaev said. ‘As for you, Rybin, you had better watch your step or things are going to go badly for you.’
‘What can you do to me?’ Rybin said, walking up to Kasaev. ‘Sprinkle salt on my head? Or maybe cut my throat while I’m sleeping? Is that it?’
The foreman left.
This is one small lyric episode in the monotonously gloomy tale of men fleeing Kolyma.
The camp supervisor was worried by the number of escapees dropping in – three of them in one month. He requested that a guard post of armed soldiers be sent, but he was turned down. Headquarters was not willing to take on such expenditures on behalf of civilian employees, and they told him to take care of the matter, using the resources he already had at his disposal. By that time Kasaev’s small-caliber rifle had been supplemented by two double-barreled, center-firing shotguns that were loaded with pieces of lead – as if for bear. Nevertheless, these guns were too unreliable to count on if the camp were attacked by a group of hungry and desperate escapees.
The camp director was an experienced man, and he came up with the idea of building two guard towers similar to those in real forced labor camps. It was clever camouflage. The false guard towers were intended to convince escaped convicts that there were armed guards at the site.
Evidently the camp director’s idea was successful; no escaped convicts appeared on the site after that, even though we were not much more than a hundred miles from Magadan.
The search for the ‘first of all metals’ – that is, for gold – shifted into the Chai-Urinsk Valley along the same path that Krivoshei had taken. When that happened, dozens fled into the forest. From there it was closer than ever to the mainland, but the authorities were well aware of this fact. The number of secret guard posts was dramatically increased, and the hunt for escaped convicts reached its peak. Squadrons of soldiers combed the taiga, rendering totally impossible ‘release by the green procurator’ – the popular phrase used to describe escapes. The ‘green procurator’ freed fewer and fewer prisoners, and finally stopped freeing anyone at all.
Recaptured prisoners were killed on the spot, and the morgue at Arkagala was packed with bodies being held for identification by the fingerprint service.
The Arkagala coalmine near the settlement of Kadykchan was famous for its coal deposits. The coal seams were as thick as eight, thirteen, or even twenty-one yards. About six miles from the mine was a military ‘outpost’. The soldiers slept, ate, and were generally based there in the forest.
In the summer of 1940 the outpost was commanded by Corporal Postnikov, a man who hungered for murder and performed his job with eagerness and passion. He personally captured five escaped convicts and was awarded some sort of medal and a sum of money, as was the custom in such cases. The reward for the dead was the same as for the living, so there was no sense in delivering captured prisoners in one piece.
One pale August morning Postnikov ambushed an escaped convict who had come down to the river to drink. Postnikov shot and killed the prisoner with his Mauser, and it was decided not to drag the body back to the village but to abandon it in the taiga. There were a lot of bear and lynx tracks in the vicinity.
Postnikov took an axe and chopped off both hands at the wrist so that Bookkeeping could take fingerprints. He put the hands into his pouch and set off home to write up the latest report on a successful hunt.
The report was dispatched on the same day; one of the soldiers took the package and Postnikov gave the rest of the men the day off in honor of his good fortune.
That night the dead man got up and with the bloody stumps of his forearms pressed to his chest somehow reached the tent in which the convict-laborers lived. His face pale and drained of blood, he stood at the doorway and peered in with unusually blue, crazed eyes. Bent double and leaning against the door frame, he glared from under lowered brows and groaned. He was shaking terribly. Black blood spotted his quilted jacket, his pants, and his rubber boots. He was given some hot soup, and his terrible wrists were wrapped in rags. Fellow prisoners started to take him to the first-aid station, but Corporal Postnikov himself, along with some soldiers, came running from the hut that served as the outpost.