There was something in Zuev’s eyes – sympathy, perhaps, for the thorny fate of humanity.
Power corrupts. The beast hidden in the soul of man and released from its chain lusts to satisfy its age-old natural instinct – to beat, to murder. I don’t know if it’s possible to receive satisfaction from signing a death sentence, but in this, too, there is doubtless some dark pleasure, some fantasy which seeks no justification.
I have seen people – many people – who had ordered the shooting of others and who were now themselves being killed. There was nothing but cowardice in them as they shouted: ‘I’m not the one who should be killed for the good of the state. I too am able to kill.’
I don’t know people who gave orders to kill. I only saw them from a distance. But I think that the order to shoot another man derives from that same spiritual strength, that same psychological foundation as the actual shooting itself, as murdering with one’s own hands.
Power is corruption. The intoxication of power over people, irresponsibility, the willingness to mock, to degrade, to encourage all these things when necessary – all these are the moral measure of a supervisor’s career.
But Zuev beat us less than the others did; we were lucky.
We had just arrived for work and were crowded together in a small area protected from the sharp wind by a cliff. Covering his face with his mittens, our foreman, Zuev, walked up, and sent the men off to the various mine shafts to work. I was left behind with nothing to do.
‘I want to ask a favor of you,’ Zuev said, choking with his own boldness. ‘A favor – not an order! I want you to write a letter for me to Kalinin. To wipe out my prison record. I’ll explain it all to you.’
We went to the foreman’s small shed where a stove crackled and where we were not normally allowed to enter. Any convict who dared open the door to breathe the hot breath of life even for a minute would immediately be driven out by fists and knees.
Animal instinct led us to this cherished door. Requests would be invented – what time is it? Or it might be a question – should the excavation go to the right or the left?
‘Can you give me a light?’
‘Is Zuev here? How about Dobriakov?’
But these requests deceived no one in the shed. People were literally kicked through the open doors into the frost. Even so, there had been a moment of warmth…
But no one threw me out; I was sitting right next to the stove.
‘Who’s that, the lawyer?’ someone hissed contemptuously.
‘That’s right, Pavel Ivanovich. He was recommended to me.’
‘All right.’ It was the senior foreman condescending to recognize the needs of his subordinate.
Zuev’s case (he’d served out his sentence the previous year) was the most ordinary village affair. It all began with support payments for his parents, who had him sent to prison. His sentence was almost up when the prison authorities managed to have him sent to Kolyma. Colonization of the area demanded a firm line in creating barriers to departure, government assistance, and unflagging attention to arrivals and human shipments to Kolyma. Transporting convicts there was the simplest way of rendering the difficult land livable.
Zuev wanted to quit Far Northern Construction, and he was asking to have his prison record wiped out or at least to be allowed to return to the mainland.
It was difficult for me to write, and not just because my hands were rough and my fingers so permanently bent around the handle of a pick and axe that unbending them was unbelievably difficult. I managed to wrap a thick rag around pen and pencil to give them the thickness of a pick or shovel handle.
When I realized I could do that, I was ready to form letters.
It was difficult to write because my brain had become as coarse as my hands; like my hands, it too was oozing blood. I had to call back to life – to resurrect – words that, as I then thought, had left my life for ever.
I wrote the letter, sweating and rejoicing. It was hot in the shed, and the lice immediately began to stir and crawl over my body. I couldn’t scratch for fear of being driven out into the cold. I was afraid of inspiring revulsion in my savior.
By evening I had written the complaint to Kalinin. Zuev thanked me and thrust a ration of bread into my hand. I had to eat the ration immediately; everything had to be devoured immediately and not laid aside until the next day. I had learned that lesson already.
The day was coming to an end – according to the foreman’s watches only, for the fog was identical in the morning, at midnight, and at noon. We were led home.
I slept and had my perpetual Kolyma dream – loaves of bread floating through the air, filling all the houses, all the streets, the entire planet.
In the morning I waited to meet Zuev; maybe he’d give me a smoke.
And Zuev came. Making no effort to conceal anything from the work gang or the guards, he dragged me out of the wind shelter and roared at me.
‘You cheated me, you bastard!’
He had read the letter that night. He didn’t like it. His neighbors, the other foremen, also read it and didn’t approve of it either. Too dry. Too few tears. It was useless to send that kind of letter. You couldn’t get any sympathy from Kalinin with that sort of rot.
The camp had dried up my brain, and I could not, I just could not squeeze another word from it. I was not up to the job – and not because the gap between my will and Kolyma was too great, not because my brain was weak and exhausted, but because in those folds of my brain where ecstatic adjectives were stored, there was nothing but hatred. Just think of poor Dostoevsky writing anguished, tearful, humiliating letters to his unmoved superiors throughout the ten years he spent as a soldier after leaving the House of the Dead. Dostoevsky even wrote poems to the czarina. There was no Kolyma in the House of the Dead.
Chief of Political Control
The machine wailed and wailed and wailed… The alarm was summoning the hospital director, but the guests were already coming up the stairs. They wore white hospital cloaks, and the shoulders of the cloaks swelled from the epaulettes beneath. The hospital garb was too tight for our military guests.
Two steps in front of them all was a tall, gray-haired man whose name was known to everyone in the hospital, but whom no one had ever seen.
It was Sunday for those hospital employees who were not prisoners, and the hospital director was shooting pool with the doctors. He was winning; everybody lost to the hospital director.
The director immediately recognized the howling siren, rubbed the chalk from his sweaty fingers, and sent a messenger to say that he was coming – right away.
But the guests didn’t wait.
‘We’ll start in the Surgical Block…’ In the Surgical Block lay about two hundred persons. Two of the wards held about eighty patients each. One had straight surgical cases: closed fractures, sprains, etc. The other had infected cases. There were also small post-surgery wards and a ward for terminal cases with infections: sepsis, gangrene.
‘Where’s the surgeon?’
‘He went to the village to see his son. The boy goes to school there.’
‘Where’s the surgeon on duty?’
‘He’ll be here right away.’ But the surgeon on duty, Nurder (whom everyone in the hospital called ‘Murder’), was drunk and didn’t appear.
The higher-ups were shown around the Surgical Block by the senior orderly, a convict.
‘No, we don’t need your explanations or case histories. We know how they’re written,’ the official said to the orderly as he walked into the large ward and closed the door behind him. ‘And don’t let the hospital director in for the time being.’
One of his aides, a major, took up guard duty at the door to the ward.