The Ashkhabad Godfather needs neither the SVP nor stool-pigeons. When he wants information he puts two or three of the more powerful addicts in the isolator and keeps strict watch to make sure no drugs get in. In two days he knows everything. As long as the Godfather knows who’s dealing no one is touched. The authorities get their bribes and everything is under control. As soon as anyone steps out of line they are punished. This happens, for example, when someone tries to do a bit of dealing on the quiet and doesn’t give a percentage to the guards.
“I want nothing more to do with drug addicts,” I tell Death Number Two. “I’ve seen enough of them in here.”
The addicts act as though they’ve discovered some divine secret beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, as though drugs have opened their eyes and shown everything in its true light. Yet in fact they are even more degraded than us alcoholics. They are capable of any treachery to get hold of their ball of opium.
I am not trying to justify alcoholism. I know men who have drunk away their families, their homes and their jobs. I see one of them in the mirror every time I shave. But a drug addict would sell his mother and introduce his sister to the needle so that she has to prostitute herself to buy drugs. The difference between us is that an alkie who sells his last shirt for a bottle wouldn’t hesitate to give a glass to a friend; a drug addict would never do the same. Alkies can leave a bottle in someone’s care for a while, knowing it won’t be touched. No addict would let even his best friend look after his drugs. They hide their stuff away and begrudge their friends even a tiny piece. In the camp they grow their nails long, hoping to get an extra scraping themselves, all the while eyeing their friends’ nails with suspicion. No, there can be no comradeship among addicts, whereas an alcoholic will always find someone at the beer-stall to tie his belt to his glass for him, to steady his hand, or tip the glass to his trembling lips.
If I’m honest I have to admit my first prison sentence was due to my pill habit, but I don’t consider myself a drug addict. My passion for alcohol is enough. I would have to take up crime to be able to afford drugs and I’m not capable of that. Vodka, on the other hand, is always around, it’s cheap, and if the worst comes to the worst I can go without it.
Many alcoholic zeks drink ‘chimirgess’ which is distilled in the joinery shop from enamel paint. They mix it with water and then strain it to obtain a clear liquid. Anyone who drinks it goes completely off his head but if he’s taken to hospital and breathalysed there’ll be no reaction at all. In fact there’s not a drop of alcohol in chimirgess, and so I’m not attracted to it.
There’s a Gypsy in our work brigade called Pashka Ogli. He’s so skinny we call him ‘Death Number One.’ Pashka is not like the other Gypsies who are proud and keep to themselves. Everyone laughs at Pashka for his strange ways. Hearing that once upon a time aristocrats used to drink champagne from ladies’ slippers, he fills one of his stinking boots with chimirgess and drinks it down. “As pure as tears,” he sighs and collapses in a corner.
Pashka stands by my machine, turning gloves inside out so I can sew them more quickly. He never meets his own quota but I pay him for helping me.
“Vanya,” he remarks one day. “You know they watch us all the time in here. They even check the books we borrow from the library.”
“Don’t be stupid. Maybe in some political prisons but not in ours. They’re not interested.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He shows me volume 18 of Lenin’s Collected Works, which he has tucked into his waistband. When an officer comes into view Pashka opens his Lenin. Taking a pencil from behind his ear he starts to underline and make exclamation marks in the margins. He buttonholes the officer and plies him with idiotic questions on Marxist-Leninism. Soon even the camp’s political instructor is giving Death Number One a wide berth. Everyone thinks Pashka an idiot, but I am not so sure.
“See him over there?” Death Number One points to a bull-necked man working in the next row from ours, muscles bulging as he pushes gloves through his machine. “He’s known as ‘Cannibal.’ He escaped from a Kolyma camp in the 1950s. He and his mate took a fatted calf with them. They fed up the young lad before their escape and then killed him when their supplies ran out. Can you imagine them, patting him on the shoulder in encouragement in order to feel the extra flesh on him. How can a man be so cynical?”
“That’s not cynicism, Pashka. Someone who criticises a cannibal for not washing his hands before eating would be a cynic. There are simply no words to describe what that man did.”
There is nothing special about cannibalism. People have been driven to it often enough, even in our century, during famines and the siege of Leningrad. But those were extreme situations. I’m curious to know how one human being could deliberately prepare another for the slaughter. I begin to chat to Cannibal after work, gradually broaching the subject that interests me.
Cannibal has spent most of his life in prison and is already in his sixth year at Ashkhabad. He doesn’t look like a typical zek. He still has the physique of a sturdy peasant — which is what he was before he received his first sentence for stealing wheat. Physical strength enabled him to survive the camp mincing machine, but the experience taught him to believe in nothing but the principle, ‘You die today and I tomorrow.’ A morose man, Cannibal goes about his business in silence and never initiates a conversation. He subscribes to many papers and journals but it’s useless to ask him to lend you something to read after work.
I never discover what I want to know. Cannibal tells me his only regret is ending up in jail; everything else he did was justified. To all my sly questioning he simply replies: “You’d have done the same in my place.”
Cannibal has been behind barbed wire for so long he has forgotten what the outside world looks like. When a modern streamlined bus drives into the zone he breaks his usual silence: “Fuck me! Would you look at that — a train without rails!”
Like Cannibal, there are many zeks who have been in camps for so long they have grown used to their loss of freedom. They feel at home behind barbed wire. Several times I see a prisoner reach the end of his sentence only to be driven through the gates by force. One epileptic Kalmyk has no one waiting for him on the outside. He faces a choice between an asylum or life on a miserable pension. After his release he went into town and threw stones at shop windows until he was arrested and sent back to the camp.
The Uzbeks say that beautiful dreams are half our wealth. Poor is the man who has lost his dreams or has never had any in the first place; the camps are full of such people. Many Soviet citizens, especially peasants, live in such terrible conditions that they could swap places with a zek without noticing any difference in their standard of living. Both prisoners and free people eat the same disgusting food; the pitiful rags they wear are identical.
People on the other side of the fence often commit petty theft while shrugging off the consequences. ‘They can’t send me anywhere worse than prison; they can’t give me less than a pound of bread,’ goes the eternal refrain. When a person reaches that stage he is past caring what stupid crime he commits. Judges label as ‘malicious’ crimes that are committed out of simple despair, by people without beautiful dreams.
Every camp inmate develops a shell around himself but few are as hardened as Cannibal. At the other end of the scale are those who could discard their shells quite easily if only they were given the chance to live as a human being. One such zek is my friend Igor Alexandrovich. With his long thin head covered in prickly stubble, Igor looks like some kind of exotic cactus. We call Igor Alexandrovich by his full name and patronymic instead of the customary nickname. He earned this exaggerated respect by his singular behaviour. Years in prison have hardly affected his speech. He rarely swears and usually blushes when he does. He calls everyone by the formal ‘you,’ and speaks in the old-fashioned language of the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia. Igor Alexandrovich claims his father was an admiral who went over to the Bolsheviks after the revolution. Like all camp stories this is probably an exaggeration, but there is no doubt that Igor Alexandrovich comes from a refined background. What he knows about literature, music and theatre you don’t pick up in camp libraries. He studied medicine in Leningrad but on graduating was arrested and sentenced to be shot under article 58. The sentence was later transmuted to ten years.