And zeks are also moved from island to island of the Archipelago simply in solitary skiffs. This is called special convoy. It is the most unconstrained mode of transport. It can hardly be distinguished from free travel. Only a few prisoners are delivered in this way. I, in my own career as a prisoner, made three such journeys.
The special convoy is assigned on orders from high officials. It should not be confused with the special requisition, which is also signed by someone high up. A special-requisition prisoner usually travels on the general prisoner transports, though he, too, meets up with some amazing interludes on his trip (which are all the more extraordinary in consequence). For example, Ans Bern-shtein was traveling on a special requisition from the North to the lower Volga, to join an agricultural mission. He was exposed to all the overcrowded conditions and humiliations I have described, snarled at by dogs, surrounded by bayonets, threatened with “One step out of line…” And then suddenly he was unloaded at the small station at Zenzevatka and met by one single, calm, unarmed jailer. The jailer yawned: “All right, you’ll spend the night at my house, and you can go out on the town as you like till morning. Tomorrow I’ll take you to the camp.” And Ans did go out. Can you understand what going out on the town means to a person whose term is ten years, who has already said good-bye to life countless times, who was in a Stolypin car that very morning and will be in camp the next day? And he immediately went out to watch the chickens scratching around in the station master’s garden and the peasant women getting ready to leave the station with their unsold butter and melons. He moved three, four, five steps to the side and no one shouted “Halt!” at him. With unbelieving fingers he touched the leaves of the acacias and almost wept.
And the special convoy is precisely that sort of miracle from beginning to end. You won’t see the common prisoner transports this time. You don’t have to keep your hands behind your back. You don’t have to undress down to your skin, nor sit on the earth on your rear end, and there won’t be any search at all. Your convoy guards approach you in a friendly way and even address you politely. They warn you, as a general precaution, that in case of any attempt to escape—We do, as usual, shoot. Our pistols are loaded and we have them in our pockets. However, let’s go simply. Act natural. Don’t let everyone see that you’re a prisoner. (And I urge you to note how here, too, as always, the interests of the individual and the interests of the state coincide completely.)
My camp life was totally transformed the day I went out to line up forlornly in the carpenters’ brigade, my fingers cramped (they had gotten stiff holding onto tools and wouldn’t straighten out), and the work-assignment supervisor took me aside and with unexpected respect said to me: “Do you know that on orders of the Minister of Internal Affairs… ?”
I was stupefied. The line-up dispersed and the trusties in the camp compound surrounded me. Some of them said: “They are going to hang a new stretch on you.” And others said: “To be released.” But everyone agreed on one thing—that there was no escaping Minister of Internal Affairs Kruglov. And I, too, swayed between a new term and being released. I had quite forgotten that half a year before, some character had come to our camp and distributed Gulag registration cards. (After the war they had begun this registration in all the nearby camps, but it seems unlikely that it was ever completed.) The most important question on it was: “Trade or Profession.” And the zeks would fill in the most precious Gulag trades to enhance their own value: “barber,” “tailor,” “storekeeper,” “baker.” As for me, I had frowned and filled in “nuclear physicist.” I had never been a nuclear physicist in my life, and what I knew of the field I had heard in the university before the war—just a little bit, the names of the atomic particles and their parameters. And I had decided to write down “nuclear physicist.” This was in 1946. The atom bomb was desperately needed. But I didn’t assign any importance to that Gulag registration card and, in fact, forgot about it.
There was a vague, unverified legend, unconfirmed by anybody, that you might nevertheless hear in camp: that somewhere in this Archipelago were tiny paradise islands. No one had seen them. No one had been there. Whoever had, kept silent about them and never let on. On those islands, they said, flowed rivers of milk and honey, and eggs and sour cream were the least of what they fed you; tilings were neat and clean, they said, and it was always warm, and the only work was mental work—and all of it super-supersecret.
And so it was that I got to those paradise islands myself (in convict lingo they are called “sharashkas”) and spent half my sentence on them. It’s to them I owe my survival, for I would never have lived out my whole term in the camps. And it’s to them I owe the fact that I am writing this investigation, even though I have not allowed them any place in this book. (I have already written a novel about them.) And it was from one to another of those islands, from the first to the second, and from the second to the third, that I was transported on a special-convoy basis: two jailers and I.
If the souls of those who have died sometimes hover among us, see us, easily read in us our trivial concerns, and we fail to see them or guess at their incorporeal presence, then that is what a special-convoy trip is like.
You are submerged in the mass of freedom, and you push and shove with the others in the station waiting room. You absent-mindedly examine announcements posted there, even though they can hardly have any relevance for you. You sit on the ancient passenger benches, and you hear strange and insignificant conversations: about some husband who beats up his wife or has left her; and some mother-in-law who, for some reason, does not get along with her daughter-in-law; how neighbors in communal apartments make personal use of the electric outlets in the corridor and don’t wipe their feet; and how someone is in someone else’s way at the office; and how someone has been offered a good job but can’t make up his mind to move—how can he move bag and baggage, is that so easy? You listen to all this, and the goose pimples of rejection run up and down your spine: to you the true measure of things in the Universe is so clear! The measure of all weaknesses and all passions! And these sinners aren’t fated to perceive it. The only one there who is alive, truly alive, is incorporeal you, and all these others are simply mistaken in thinking themselves alive.
And an unbridgeable chasm divides you! You cannot cry out to them, nor weep over them, nor shake them by the shoulder: after all, you are a disembodied spirit, you are a ghost, and they are material bodies.
And how can you bring it home to them? By an inspiration? By a vision? A dream? Brothers! People! Why has life been given you? In the deep, deaf stillness of midnight, the doors of the death cells are being swung open—and great-souled people are being dragged out to be shot. On all the railroads of the country this very minute, right now, people who have just been fed salt herring are licking their dry lips with bitter tongues. They dream of the happiness of stretching out one’s legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy. So what’s this about unwiped feet? And what’s this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I’ll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don’t be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don’t claw at your insides. If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, and if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it might be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!