‘He’s the one, he’s the one.’
The lantern was held by a guard.
‘Come on outside.’
‘I’ll get dressed right away.’
‘Come as you are.’
I walked outside shivering nervously and not knowing what was going to happen.
Flanked by two guards, I walked up on to the porch.
‘Take your underwear off!’
I undressed.
‘Go stand in the snow.’
I went out into the snow, looked back at the porch, and saw two rifle barrels aimed directly at me. How much time I spent there that night in the Urals, my first night in the Urals, I don’t remember.
I heard a command:
‘Get dressed.’
As I pulled on my underwear, a blow on the ear knocked me into the snow. A heavy boot struck me directly in the teeth, and my mouth filled with warm blood and began to swell.
‘Go back to the barracks!’
I went back to the hut and found my spot, but it was already occupied by another man. Everyone was asleep or pretending to be asleep. The salty taste of blood wouldn’t go away. There was some object in my mouth, something superfluous, and I gripped this superfluous thing and tore it forcibly from my mouth. It was a knocked-out tooth. I threw it on to the decaying straw on the earthen floor.
With both arms I embraced the dirty, stinking bodies of my comrades and fell asleep. I fell asleep and didn’t even catch cold.
In the morning the group got underway, and Sherbakov’s blue imperturbable eyes ranged calmly over the convict columns. Peter Zayats stood in line. No one beat him, and he wasn’t shouting about dragons. The common criminals in the group peered at me in a hostile, anxious fashion. In the camps every man learns to answer for himself.
Two days later we reached ‘headquarters’ – a new log house on the river-bank.
The commandant, Nestorov, came out to take over the group. He was a hairy-fisted man, and many of the criminals in the group knew him and praised him highly:
‘Whenever they brought in escapees, Nestorov would come out and say: ‘So you boys decided to come back! OK, take your pick – either a licking or solitary confinement.” Solitary had an iron floor, and no one could survive more than three months there, not to mention the investigation and the extra sentence. “A licking, sir.”
‘He’d wind up and knock the man off his feet! Then he’d knock him down again! He was a real expert. “Now go back to the barracks.” And that was all. No investigations. A good supervisor.’
Nestorov walked up and down the ranks, carefully examining the faces.
‘Any complaints against the guards?’
‘No, no,’ a ragged chorus of voices answered.
‘How about you?’ The hairy finger touched my chest. ‘How come you’re answering as if you had cotton wool in your mouth? And your voice is hoarse.’
‘No,’ I answered, trying to force my damaged mouth to enunciate the words as firmly as possible. ‘I have no complaints about the guards.’
‘That’s not a bad story,’ I said to Sazonov. ‘It’s even got a certain amount of literary sophistication. But you’ll never get it published. Besides, the ending is sort of amorphous.’
‘I have a different ending,’ Sazonov said. ‘A year later they made me a bigwig in camp. That was when there was all that talk about rehabilitation and the new society “reforging” men. Sherbakov was supposed to get the job of second-in-command of the section I worked in. A lot depended on me, and Sherbakov was afraid I still hadn’t forgotten about the tooth I’d lost. Sherbakov hadn’t forgotten it either. He had a large family, and it was a good job, right on top. He was a simple, direct man and came to see me to find out if I would object to his candidacy. He brought a bottle of vodka with him to make peace Russian-style, but I wouldn’t drink with him. I did tell him I wouldn’t interfere with his appointment.
‘Sherbakov was overjoyed, kept saying he was sorry, shifting from one foot to the other at my door, catching the rug with his heel and not able to bring the conversation to an end.
‘ “We were on the road, you understand. We had escaped prisoners with us.” ’
‘That’s not really a good ending either,’ I said to Sazonov.
‘I have a different one then.
‘Before I was appointed to the section where I met Sherbakov again, I saw Peter Zayats on the street. He was an orderly in the village. There was no trace of the former young, black-haired, black-browed giant. Instead he was a limping, gray-haired old man coughing up blood. He didn’t even recognize me, and when I took him by the arm and addressed him by name, he jerked back and went his own way. I could see from his eyes that Zayats was thinking his own thoughts, thoughts that I could not guess at. My appearance was either unnecessary or offensive to the master of such thoughts, who was conversing with less earthly personages.’
‘I don’t like that variation either,’ I said.
‘Then I’ll leave it as I originally had it.’
Even if you can’t get something published, it’s easier to bear a thing if you write it down. Once you’ve done that, you can forget…
Prosthetic Appliances
The camp’s solitary confinement block was old, old. It seemed that all you had to do was to kick one of the wooden walls and its logs would collapse, disintegrate. But the block did not collapse and all seven cells did faithful service. Of course, any loudly spoken word could be heard by one’s neighbors, but the inmates of the block were afraid of punishment. If the guard on duty marked the cell with a chalk X, the cell was deprived of hot food. Two Xs meant no bread as well. The block was used for camp offenses; anyone suspected of something more dangerous was taken away to Central Control.
For the first time all the prisoners entrusted with administrative work had suddenly been arrested. Some major affair, some camp trial was being put together. By someone’s command.
Now all six of us were standing in the narrow corridor, surrounded by guards, feeling and understanding only one thing: that we had been caught by the teeth of that same machine as several years before and that we would learn the reason only tomorrow, no earlier.
We were all made to undress to our underwear and were led into a separate cell. The storekeeper recorded things taken for storage, stuffed them into sacks, attached tags, wrote. I knew the name of the investigator supervising the ‘operation’ – Pesniakevich.
The first man was on crutches. He sat down on a bench next to the lamp, put the crutches on the floor, and began to undress. He was wearing a steel corset.
‘Should I take it off?’
‘Of course.’
The man began to unlace the cords of the corset and the investigator Pesniakevich bent down to help him.
‘Do you recognize me, old friend?’ The question was asked in thieves’ slang, in a confidential manner.
‘I recognize you, Pleve.’
The man in the corset was Pleve, supervisor of the camp tailor shop. It was an important job involving twenty tailors who, with the permission of the administration, filled individual orders even from outside the camp.
The naked man turned over on the bench. On the floor lay the steel corset as the report of confiscated items was composed.
‘What’s this thing called?’ asked the block storekeeper, touching the corset with the toe of his boot.
‘A steel prosthetic corset,’ answered the naked man.
Pesniakevich went off to the side and I asked Pleve how he knew him.