There was something profoundly unnatural about the glaring electric light, the general bustle and the thick tobacco smoke. Hundreds of square miles of taiga lay frozen in icy silence – but the camp was crowded with people, full of noise, movement and light.
Snow had fallen during the first half of the night. Drifts had blocked the doors of the huts and covered the track to the mines…
Sirens began to howl in the mines; somewhere in the taiga the wolves howled out an accompaniment. The dogs were barking on the main square, the guards were shouting at one another and you could hear the tractors clearing the tracks outside.
In the light of the searchlights the dry snow seemed innocent and tender. Roll-call began on the main square, to the accompaniment of incessant barking; the voices of the guards sounded hoarse and irritated. Then a swollen river of people flowed out towards the mines. The snow creaked under thousands of leather and felt boots. The watch-tower stared after them with its single eye.
Throughout the North, sirens continued to howl. The same orchestra struck up over Krasnoyarsk, over the Autonomous Republic of Komi, over Sovietskaya Gavan, over the snows of Kolyma, the Chukotsk tundra and the camps of Murmansk and Northern Kazakhstan…
To the accompaniment of the sirens or the blows of a crowbar against a metal rail, prisoners set off to mine the potassium of Solikamsk, the copper of Ridder and the shores of Lake Balkash, the nickel and lead of Kolyma and the coal of Kuznetsk and Sakhalin. They set off to build a railway line along the shore of the Arctic Ocean, to clear roads through the tundra of Kolyma, to fell trees in the forests of Siberia, Murmansk, Archangelsk and the Northern Urals…
Day began at the same hour of night, amid the same snow, in every one of the camps and sub-camps of the vast network of Dalstroy.[22]
40
During the night Abarchuk had a fit of despair. Not just the usual sullen despair of the camps, but something fierce and burning like malaria, something that made him scream out loud, fall off the bedboards and beat his fists against his skull.
In the morning, when the prisoners were reluctantly but hurriedly getting ready for work, Abarchuk's long-legged neighbour, Nyeumo-limov, a gas foreman who had commanded a cavalry brigade during the Civil War, asked: 'What were you tossing about like that for during the night? Did you dream of a woman?'
'Don't you ever think of anything else?'
'I thought you were crying in your sleep. I wanted to wake you up,' said Monidze, another of Abarchuk's neighbours, who had once been on the Presidium of the Communist Youth International.
Another friend of Abarchuk's, Abrasha Rubin, a medical orderly, hadn't noticed anything. All he said, as they went outside into the dark and frost, was: 'Guess what? I dreamed Nikolay Ivanovich Bukharin had come to visit us at the Institute of Red Professors. He was very bright and lively. Yenchman's theory created a tremendous stir.'
Abarchuk worked in the tool store. While his assistant, Barkhatov, a man who had once knifed a family of six during a robbery, was lighting the stove and stoking it with left-over cedar-logs, Abarchuk went through the tools in the drawers. The biting sharpness of the files and chisels, impregnated with the icy cold, seemed to embody the way he had felt during the night.
This day was exactly the same as every day that had gone before. The accountant had sent Abarchuk the requests from the distant sub-camps, already approved by the technical department. Now he had to get out the right tools and materials, pack them into boxes and draw up the accompanying documents. Some of the packages were incomplete; this necessitated the drawing up of special documents.
Barkhatov, as always, did nothing, and it was impossible to make him do anything. From the moment he arrived at the store, he concerned himself only with matters of nutrition; today he was boiling a small pot of cabbage and potato soup. A professor of Latin from the Kharkov Pharmaceutical Institute, now a messenger in the first section, rushed in for a moment to see him; with trembling red fingers he poured some dirty grains of millet onto the table. Barkhatov was evidently blackmailing him.
That afternoon Abarchuk was called to the accounts department; apparently his figures didn't tally. The deputy director shouted at him and threatened to report him to the director. Abarchuk felt sick. It was impossible for him to cope with the work by himself and he didn't dare complain about Barkhatov. He was tired, afraid of losing his job in the store, afraid of having to go out logging or being sent down the mines. His hair had already turned grey, he didn't have much strength left. Yes, that must be the reason for the despair he had felt during the night – his life had vanished beneath the ice of Siberia.
When he came back from the accounts department, he found Barkhatov asleep. His head was pillowed on a pair of felt boots he must have been given by one of the criminals. Beside it stood the empty cooking-pot; some of the millet was sticking to his cheek.
Abarchuk knew that Barkhatov sometimes stole tools from the store. He might, in fact, have bartered some for this very pair of felt boots. Once, Abarchuk had found three planes missing and had confronted his assistant.
'Stealing scarce metal during the War for the Fatherland! You should be ashamed of yourself!'
'Shut your mouth!' Barkhatov had retorted. 'Or else…'
Abarchuk did not dare wake Barkhatov directly; instead he coughed, banged the saws about and dropped a hammer on the floor. Barkhatov woke up. He gave Abarchuk a look of cool displeasure. After a while, he said very quietly: 'Someone from yesterday's transport told me that there are worse camps than these ones here in the lakes. The prisoners wear fetters and have their heads shaved. Surnames aren't used at alclass="underline" they just have numbers sewn on their chest and their knees, and an ace of diamonds on their back.'
'Nonsense,' said Abarchuk.
'That's where you Fascist politicals should be sent,' Barkhatov continued thoughtfully. 'You first of all, you swine – so you can't wake me up.'
'Forgive me, citizen Barkhatov, for having disturbed your rest.' Although he was very frightened of Barkhatov, sometimes Abarchuk was unable to control his anger.
At the end of the shift, Nyeumolimov came in, black with coal-dust.
'Well,' asked Abarchuk, 'how's the work going? Are people entering into the spirit of competition?'
'Little by little. The coal's a military necessity – at least everyone understands that. Today the Culture and Education Section received some posters: "Let us help the Motherland with our shock labour!" '
Abarchuk sighed. 'You know what, someone ought to write a treatise on despair in the camps. There's a despair that crushes you, another that attacks you suddenly, another that stifles you and won't let you breathe. And then there's a special kind that doesn't do any of these things but somehow tears you to pieces from within – like a deep-sea creature brought suddenly up to the surface.'
Nyeumolimov smiled sadly. His rotten teeth were almost the same colour as the coal-dust on his face.
Barkhatov came up to them. Abarchuk looked round and complained: 'You walk so quietly you make me jump. All of a sudden I find you right beside me.'
A man of few smiles, Barkhatov said very seriously: 'You don't mind if I go to the food store?'
He left.
'During the night I remembered the son I had by my first wife,' Abarchuk said to his friend. 'He's probably at the front now.'