Ordinarily, I would have rejected such an offer out of hand. I had no intention of selling out my comrades and securing an easy time of it for myself by working as Boris' assistant. And if turning him down meant that he would have me killed, that would have suited me fine. But the moment he presented his offer, I found a plan forming in my mind.
What kind of work do you want me to do? I asked.
What Boris had in mind for me was not a simple task. The number of chores waiting to be taken care of was huge, the single biggest job being the management of Boris' personal assets. Boris had been helping himself to a good forty percent of the foodstuffs, clothing, and medical supplies being sent to the camp by Moscow and the International Red Cross, stashing them in secret storehouses, and selling them to various takers. He had also been sending off whole trainloads of coal through the black market. There was a chronic shortage of fuel, the demand for it endless. He would bribe railroad workers and the stationmaster, moving trains almost at will for his own profit. Food and money could make the soldiers guarding the trains shut their eyes to what he was doing. Thanks to such business methods, Boris had amassed an amazing fortune. He explained to me that it was ultimately intended as operating capital for the secret police. Our activity, as he called it, required huge sums off the public record, and he was now engaged in procuring those secret funds. But this was a lie. Some of the money may have been finding its way to Moscow, but I was certain that well over half was being transformed into Boris' own personal fortune. As far as I could tell, he was sending the money to foreign bank accounts and buying gold.
For some inexplicable reason, he appeared to have complete faith in me. It seems not to have occurred to him that I might leak his secrets to the outside, which I now find very strange. He always treated his fellow Russians and other white men with the utmost suspicion, but toward Mongolians or Japanese he seemed to feel only the most openhanded trust. Perhaps he figured that I could do him no harm even if I chose to reveal his secrets. First of all, whom could I reveal them to? Everyone around me was his collaborator or his underling, each with his own tiny share in Boris' huge illegal profits. And the only ones who suffered and died because Boris was diverting their food, clothing, and medicine for his own personal gain were the powerless inmates of the camp. Besides, all mail was censored, and all contact with outsiders was prohibited.
And so I became Boris' energetic and faithful private sery. I completely made over his chaotic books and stock records, systematizing and clarifying the flow of goods and money. I created categorized ledgers that showed at a glance the amount and location of any one item and how its price was fluctuating. I compiled a long list of bribe takers and calculated the necessary expenses for each. I worked hard for Boris, from morning to night, as a result of which I lost what few friends I had. People thought of me (probably could not help but think of me) as a despicable human being, a man who had sold out to become Boris' faithful bootlicker. And sadly enough, they probably still think of me that way. Nikolai would no longer speak to me. The two or three other Japanese prisoners of war I had been close to would now turn aside when they saw me coming. Conversely, there were some who tried to approach me when they saw that I had become a favorite of Boris, but I would have nothing to do with them. Thus I became an increasingly isolated figure in the camp. Only the support of Boris kept me from being killed. No one could have gotten away with murdering one of his most prized possessions. People knew how cruel Boris could be; his fame as the manskinner had reached legendary proportions even here.
The more isolated I became, the more Boris came to trust me. He was happy with my efficient, systematic work habits, and he was not stinting in his praise.
You are a very impressive man, Lieutenant Mamiya. Japan will be sure to recover from her postwar chaos as long as there are many Japanese like you. My own country is hopeless. It was almost better under the czars. At least the czar didn't have to strain his empty head over a lot of theory. Lenin took whatever he could understand of Marx's theory and used it to his own advantage, and Stalin took whatever he could understand of Lenin's theory (which wasn't much) and used it to his own advantage. The narrower a mans intellectual grasp, the more power he is able to grab in this country. I tell you, Lieutenant, there is only one way to survive here. And that is not to imagine anything. A Russian who uses his imagination is done for. I certainly never use mine. My job is to make others use their imaginations. That's my bread and butter. Make sure you keep that in mind. As long as you are in here, at least, picture my face if you ever start to imagine something, and say to yourself, No, don't do that. Imagining things can be fatal. These are my golden words of advice to you. Leave the imagining to someone else.
Half a year slipped by like this. Now the autumn of 1947 was drawing to a close, and I had become indispensable to Boris. I was in charge of the business side of his activities, while The Tartar was in charge of the violent side. The secret police had yet to summon Boris back to Moscow, but by then he no longer seemed to want to go back. He had more or less transformed the camp and the mine into his own unimpeachable territory, and there he lived in comfort, steadily amassing a huge fortune, protected by his own private army. Perhaps, too, rather than bring him back to the center, the Moscow elite preferred to keep him there, firming up their foothold in Siberia. A continual exchange of letters passed between Boris and Moscow-not using the post office, of course: they would arrive on the train, in the hands of secret messengers. These were always tall men with ice-cold eyes. The temperature in a room seemed to drop whenever one of them walked in.
Meanwhile, the prisoners working the mine continued to die in large numbers, their corpses thrown into mine shafts as before. Boris did a thoroughgoing assessment of each prisoners potential, driving the physically weak ones hard and reducing their food rations at the outset so as to kill them off and reduce the number of mouths he had to feed. The food diverted from the weak went to the strong in order to raise productivity. Efficiency was everything in the camp: it was the law of the jungle, the survival of the fittest. And whenever the work force began to dwindle, freight cars would arrive packed with new convicts, like trainloads of cattle. Sometimes as much as twenty percent of the shipment would die on the way, but that was of no concern to anyone. Most of the new convicts were Russians and Eastern Europeans brought in from the West. Fortunately for Boris, Stalins politics of violence continued to function there.
My plan was to kill Boris. I knew, of course, that getting rid of this one man was no guarantee that our situation would improve in any way. It would continue to be one form of hell or another. But I simply could not allow the man to go on living in this world. As Nikolai had said, he was like a poisonous snake. Someone would have to cut his head off.
I was not afraid to die. If anything, I would have liked Boris to kill me as I killed him. But there could be no room for error. I had to wait for the one exact moment when I could have absolute confidence that I would kill him without fail, when I could end his life with a single shot. I continued to act the part of his loyal sery as I waited for the chance to spring on my prey. But as I said earlier, Boris was an extremely cautious man. He kept The Tartar by his side day and night. And even if he should give me a chance at him alone sometime, how was I to kill him, with my one hand and no weapon? Still I kept my vigil, waiting for the right mo- ment. If there was a god anywhere in this world, I believed, the chance would come my way.
Early in 1948, a rumor spread through camp that the Japanese prisoners of war were finally going to be allowed to go home, that a ship would be sent to repatriate us in the spring. I asked Boris about it.