Discipline in the camps is maintained through fear: the fear of being deprived of warmth, food, rest, or the modicum of physical safety you enjoy.
Elkin arrived in the camp in August and realized straight away that if he was sent on to the islands to work at logging or peat cutting, he would never get out alive. There are no roads there and no horses, and all heavy loads are hauled on foot by prisoners who are said to be “temporarily carrying out the work of horses.”
On Solovki, a human life is valued no higher than the life of an insect. All the same, before they die of disease or exhaustion, all prisoners must do their bit for the Soviets and earn a few German marks or a couple of French francs with their own sweat and blood.
Elkin told me that several times he saw messages written in blood on logs right next to the official brand of “Timber for Export”: “They are killing us here.” Could there be anything more desperate than these communications scrawled in Russian and addressed to unknown sawmill workers in Germany or France? Who could ever decipher the impenetrable Cyrillic letters? And even if someone could understand them, what can the Germans or French do to help these modern-day Soviet slaves?
For breakfast, the prisoners are given hot water with bread, lunch consists of a broth of over-boiled vegetables, and supper is gruel. All the prisoners, without exception, are riddled with lice. Half are sick with anything from scurvy to complete mental derangement. The only hope is to get a job working in the office, the bathhouse, or the kitchen, but prisoners fight to the death for these positions. And of course, the political prisoners, the cultured men like Elkin, are never successful.
Every day, the camp supervisors do a little more to corrupt the prisoners and destroy their integrity. Snitch on your bunkmate, and you get an extra piece of bread. Volunteer to be an executioner, and you can avoid being sent out logging. Turn traitor, and you may even get yourself a pair of felt boots.
Without warm clothes, prisoners will fall victim to frostbite on their feet and hands as early as November. And that means death from gangrene because nobody in the camp can perform an amputation.
All prisoners, without exception, are beaten in the transit camp to show them what awaits them if they disobey orders. Many die from the beatings alone, from broken ribs or internal injury. Elkin was lucky that he only lost half his teeth.
Realizing that he needed to escape without delay before the winter cold set in, Elkin managed to persuade another prisoner—a young, strong fellow—to join him.
When they were sent out to the forest with a team to collect wood for brooms, they attacked the guard, tied him to a tree, and took his uniform and his gun.
Then they spent thirty days wandering about beside the railroad line. They couldn’t bring themselves to approach any settlements because they knew the peasants would not hesitate to hand them over to the authorities. The reward for capturing escapees was too tempting: they would receive a sackful of grain.
Before long, the cultured Elkin was forced, like it or not, to become a bandit. He and his companion had to eat, so they went into the first village they found and announced that they were going to carry out a search and confiscate any surplus grain. The chairman of the village Soviet brought them off with a bribe, a sack of food, and the fugitives ran back into the forest.
They did this several times until one day, they had the luck to rob an official carrying cash. They split the money and went their separate ways. Elkin set off for Moscow, and his companion decided to try to get to Finland.
A few days later, Elkin had read in the paper that his companion had been captured and shot.
Nina sewed the money to pay for the ship into Elkin’s coat, and the Belovs gave him a bundle of food for the journey.
Only Nina went to the railroad to see him off so as not to attract unwanted attention.
“I’m leaving tomorrow,” she told him, “and I’ll probably get to Berlin a few days before you since you still have to think how to get from Poland to Germany. From the sixth of November on, I’ll come to the station every day at midday and wait for you under the main departures board.”
Everything was going much better than Elkin could have hoped. Thanks to Nina, he had almost immediately got ahold of money and a train ticket to Minsk, but he sensed that everybody was glad to see him leave. The Belovs were afraid he might get them arrested, and Nina was anxious not to annoy Mr. Rogov.
Elkin had never felt so lonely before in his life.
Nina felt ashamed in his company and kept talking about the great future awaiting him in Germany.
“You’ll soon find your feet,” she said, “and then you can rebuild Mashka. A man with your talent will be worth his weight in gold in Europe.”
But Elkin did not feel like doing anything. Ever since that first robbery, when a small, bearded Finn had fallen at his feet with a plaintive cry, “Have mercy on us!” something inside him had been destroyed.
Nobody commits evil for the sake of evil, he thought, except for out-and-out psychopaths. People always had their reasons for wrongdoing. They committed crimes to survive both in the camps and outside. And everybody fell into the same trap, even Nina, who had got hold of an enormous sum of money from somewhere and now seemed to be in hiding from the police.
So, which of us is responsible for evil? Elkin wondered. Every one of us, I suppose, in our own small way.
He and Nina walked along past boarded-up dachas. Overhead, the sky was overcast. Alongside the fence, the grass was reddish brown, and at the bend in the road stood a rusty sign announcing, “Danger! Beware Trains!”
“Who’s helping you cross the border?” Nina asked, jumping over a huge puddle that covered the whole path. “Are they smugglers? Do you know them well?”
“We did business together once,” Elkin said. “I ordered them one or two things for Moscow Savannah, but they weren’t very happy about it. Books are heavy things and less profitable than powders and perfumes.”
The train only stopped at the platform for a couple of minutes.
“Goodbye and God bless,” said Nina. “Don’t give up! Everything will turn out all right for us, you’ll see.”
She really is an extraordinary woman, thought Elkin with affectionate sadness. No matter what fate threw at her, she always landed on her feet and expected others to do the same.
And that was the spirit of Russia itself. The country had an incredible capacity for survival, an ability to adapt to anything on earth.
Elkin gazed into Nina’s face, flushed with emotion as if for the last time, and held her hand, unable to release it from his hard, calloused palm.
The whistle blew, and the train began to move. A song carried from the open window:
“Goodbye,” said Elkin, and grabbing hold of the handle, he mounted the footboard.
Clattering over the rails, the train passed gloomy huts, sparse coppices, and endless fields.
There’s no need for regret, thought Elkin. Everything was as it had always been. Russia was a steppe. Once in several decades, it produced a layer of fertile soil, but then the whirlwinds descended, crushed it into dust, and carried it away to the four corners of the earth. That was the purpose of the steppe: to bring forth fresh winds and the seeds of new growth.
Elkin was struck by the sheer quantity of well-dressed people in the streets of Minsk. Here and there among the crowd, he could see colorful shawls, new fur coats, and sometimes even the odd fedora. It was clear that the border was close by and trade was brisk.