There was no need to think; in front of us was food. They gave us bread – two hundred grams. ‘You get only one ration of bread,’ the brigade leader declared with a note of excited solemnity, ‘but you can eat your fill of the rest.’
And we ate ‘our fill’. Any soup consists of two parts: the thick part and the liquid. We got ‘our fill’ of the liquid. But of the kasha we got as much as we wanted. Dessert was lukewarm water with a light taste of starch and a trace of dissolved sugar. This was the cranberry pudding.
A convict’s stomach is not rendered insensitive by hunger and the coarse food. On the contrary, its sensitivity to taste is heightened. The qualitative reaction of a convict’s stomach is in no way inferior to that of the finest laboratory. No ‘free’ stomach could have discovered the presence of sugar in the pudding that we ate or, rather, drank that night in Kolyma at the ‘Partisan Mine’, but the pudding seemed sweet, exquisitely sweet. It seemed a miracle and everyone remembered that sugar still existed in the world and that it even ended up in the convict’s pot. What magician…?
The magician was not far away. We looked him over after the second dish of the second dinner.
‘Just one ration of bread,’ said the brigade leader. ‘Eat your fill of the rest.’ He looked at the magician.
‘Yes, of course,’ said the magician.
He was a small clean auburn-haired man whose face had not yet suffered from frostbite.
Our superiors, supervisors, overseers, camp administrators, guards had all been to Kolyma, and Siberia had signed its name on each of their faces, left its mark, cut extra wrinkles, and put the mark of frostbite as an indelible brand!
On the rosy face of the clean dark-haired little man there was still no spot, no brand. This was the new ‘senior educator’ of our camp, and he had just arrived from the continent. The ‘senior educator’ was conducting an experiment.
The educator insisted to the head of the camp that an ancient Kolyma custom be abolished: traditionally the remains of the soup and kasha had been carried daily from the kitchen to the criminal barracks when only the thick part was left on the bottom. This had always been given out to the best work gangs to support not the hungriest, but the least hungry work gangs, to encourage them to fulfill the ‘plan’ and turn everything into gold – even the souls and bodies of the administration, the guards, the convicts.
Those work gangs as well as the criminal element had become accustomed to these leftovers, but the new ‘educator’ was not in agreement with the custom and insisted that the leftovers be given to the weakest, the hungriest to ‘waken their conscience’.
‘They’re so hardened, they have no conscience,’ the foreman attempted to intervene, but the educator was firm and received permission to try the experiment.
Our brigade, the hungriest, was chosen for the experiment.
‘Now you’ll see. A man will eat and in gratitude work better for the state. How can you expect any work out of these “goners”? “Goners” is the right word, isn’t it? That’s the first word of local convict slang I learned here in Kolyma. Am I saying it right?’
‘Yeah,’ said the area chief, an old resident of Kolyma and not a convict. He’d ‘ploughed under’ thousands at this mine and had come especially to enjoy the experiment.
‘You could feed these loafers and fakers meat and chocolate for a month with no work, and even then they wouldn’t work. Something must have changed in their skulls. They’re culls, rejects. Production demands that we feed the ones that work and not these bums!’
Standing there beside the serving-window, they began to quarrel and shout. The educator was vehemently making some point. The area chief was listening with a displeased expression, and when the name Makarenko was mentioned, he threw up his hands and walked away.
We each prayed to our own god, the sectarian to his own. We prayed that the window would not be closed and that the educator would win out. The collective convict will of twenty men strained itself… and the educator had his way.
Not wanting to part with a miracle, we kept on eating.
The area chief took out his watch, but the horn was already sounding – a shrill camp siren calling us to work.
‘OK, you busy bees,’ said the new educator, uncertainly enunciating his unnecessary phrase. ‘I’ve done everything I could. I did it for you. Now it’s up to you to answer by working, and only by working.’
‘We’ll work, citizen chief,’ pronounced the former head of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR with dignity, tying his pea coat shut with a dirty towel and blowing warm air into his mittens.
The door opened and in a cloud of white steam we all came out into the frost to remember this success for the rest of our lives – that is, those who had lives left to live. The frost didn’t seem so bad to us – but only at first. It was too cold to be ignored.
We came to the mine, sat down in a circle to wait for the work gang leader at the very spot where we used to have a fire, breathe into the gold flame, where we singed our mittens, caps, pants, pea coats, jackets, vainly attempting to get warm and escape the cold. But the fire was a long time ago – the previous year, perhaps. This winter the workers were not permitted to warm themselves; only the guard had permission. He sat down, rearranged the burning logs, and the fire blazed higher. Then he buttoned his sheepskin coat, sat on a log, and stood his rifle beside him.
A white fog surrounded the mine, which was lit only by the fire of the guard. The sectarian, who was sitting next to me, stood up and walked past the guard into the fog, into the sky…
‘Halt! Halt!’
The guard wasn’t a bad sort, but he knew his rifle well.
‘Halt!’
A shot rang out, then the dry sound of a gun being cocked. The sectarian didn’t disappear into the fog, and there was a second shot…
‘See, sucker?’ said the area chief to the educator, taking his phrase from the criminal world. They had come to the mine, and the educator did not dare show surprise at the murder, and the area chief didn’t know how to.
‘There’s your experiment for you. These bastards are working worse than before. An extra dinner just gives them extra strength to fight the cold. Remember this: only the cold will squeeze work out of them. Not your dinner and not a punch in the ear from me – only the cold. They wave their hands to get warm. But we put picks and shovels into these hands. What’s the difference what they wave? We set wheelbarrows, boxes, sledges in front of them, and the mine fulfills the plan. Puts out gold…
‘Now they’re full and won’t work at all. Not until they get cold. Then they’ll start moving those shovels. But feeding them is useless. You sure made yourself look like an idiot civilian with that dinner. But we can forgive it the first time. We were all suckers like that at first.’
‘I had no idea they were such slime,’ said the educator.
‘Next time you’ll believe those of us who have experience. We shot one today. A loafer. Ate his government ration six months for nothing. Say it: “loafer”.’
‘Loafer,’ repeated the educator.
I was standing next to them but they saw no need to let that bother them. I had a legitimate reason for waiting: the work gang leader was supposed to bring me a new partner. He brought Lupilov, the former assistant to the Soviet Prosecutor-General. The two of us started tossing dynamited rock into large boxes. It was the same work that the sectarian and I used to do.