In the train everything is unfamiliar. You have yet to develop camp habits. Your body is not exhausted, your mind is not dazed by the many concerns of camp life. Your heart is raw and bleeding. Everything is strange and terrible: the half dark, the creaking, the rough boards, the hysterical twitching thieves, the quartzlike stare of the guards.
Ivan remembered a young boy being lifted up to the little window. He shouted out, “Grandad, Grandad, where are they taking us?”
And everyone in the freight wagon heard an old man reply in a cracked, drawn-out voice, “To Siberia, dear child, to forced labor.”
And Ivan Grigoryevich suddenly said to himself, “Did all this really happen to me? Has this been my journey, my fate? It was with those transports that my road began. And now it has reached its end.”
These camp memories kept coming back to him. There were no links between them, and this chaotic quality was painful and tormenting. But he felt, he knew that it was possible to make sense of this chaos, that this was not beyond him. His journey through the camps was now over and it was time to see clearly, time to discern the laws of this chaos of suffering where guilt was juxtaposed with holy innocence, where false confessions of crimes lived beside fanatical loyalty to the Party, where senseless absurdity—the murder of millions of innocent and loyal people—masqueraded as cast-iron logic.
12
Ivan Grigoryevich had said very little during the last few days. He had hardly spoken to Anna Sergeyevna. But he had thought a lot about her and about Alyosha when he was at work, and he was always looking at the small pendulum clock on the wall: How much longer till he could go home?
And for some reason, during these days that he spent quietly thinking about life in the camps, what he found himself constantly dwelling on was the fate of the camp women...Never, it seemed, had he thought so much about women.
It is not universities and works of sociology that have affirmed women’s equality with men. It is not only factory work, space flight, and the fire of revolution that have proved this equality. In the history of Russia this equality has been established now and always, forever and ever, by the suffering of serfdom, the suffering undergone in prisons and transports, the suffering in the camps.
Before the face of centuries of serfdom, before the face of Kolyma, Norilsk, and Vorkuta, woman has become the equal of man.
The camps also confirmed a second truth, a truth as simple as one of the commandments: the lives of men and women cannot be separated.
There is satanic power in a prohibition, in a dam. The water of streams and rivers, blocked by a dam, reveals a dark, secret power. This power can be concealed for a while by melodious splashes, by the play of sunlight on water, by swaying water lilies—but all of a sudden the implacable fury of water is crushing stone or driving the blades of a turbine with insane speed.
When a barrier separates human beings from their daily bread, the power of hunger becomes no less pitiless. The natural and benign need for food turns into something cruel and bestial, a force that destroys millions of lives and compels mothers to eat their own children.
The prohibition that separates men and women in the camps warps their bodies and warps their souls.
A woman’s tenderness, her readiness to care for others, her sexual passion, her maternal instincts—all this constitutes the bread of life, the water of life. All this comes to be in a woman because there are husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers in the world. And that the world contains wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters fulfills the life of a man.
But then a prohibition appears. And everything simple and good—the bread of life and the water of life—suddenly becomes dark and evil.
Like some act of sorcery, a prohibition imposed by force invariably transforms what is good within a human being into something evil.
Between the camps for male and female common criminals there always lay a strip of bare earth, known as the “shooting zone.” The moment anyone appeared in this no-man’s-land, machine guns would open fire. Nevertheless, the male criminals would try to creep across on their bellies, they would dig tunnels, they would try to slip under or over the barbed wire; and those who were unlucky were left lying on the ground with broken legs and bullet holes in their heads. It was like the frantic, tragic struggle of spawning fish to make their way up a river that has been blocked by dams.
In some strict-regime camps the women had not seen a man’s face or heard a man’s voice for many years. There were occasions when carpenters, metalworkers, and drivers were sent into these sinister places—and torn apart, tortured to death. Even the male criminals were terrified of these camps—camps where it was considered a joy merely to touch the shoulder of a dead man with one hand. The criminals were scared to go there even under armed guard.
Dark, somber misery twisted and mutilated human beings, until they ceased to be human.
Women forced other women into concubinage. The camps created a new, absurd breed of woman: bull dykes with hoarse voices, women with bold gestures and long male strides, women who wore trousers that they tucked into soldiers’ tarpaulin boots. And at their side were their lost, pathetic chicks.
The bull dykes drank chifir and smoked makhorka. When they were drunk, they would beat up their frivolous, cheating girlfriends, but they also used their fists and their knives to protect these girlfriends from insult or from anyone else’s advances. Such was the nature of love in a labor camp—tragic and monstrous. Even among the criminals and murderers these relationships did not inspire laughter or dirty jokes—only fear and horror.
The frenzy that was labor-camp love did not recognize the vast distances of the taiga ; it ignored the barbed wire, the stone walls of the guardhouse, the locks of the disciplinary barracks; it flung itself against wolfhounds, against knife blades, against the guards’ rifles. It did indeed recall salmon coming up from the ocean to spawn—their backbones broken, their eyes half out of their sockets, yet still hurling themselves against the rocks and boulders of mountain rapids and waterfalls.
And at the same time men cherished the love of their wives and their mothers. And camp “correspondence brides,” who had never seen and never would see the camp “grooms” they had chosen, were prepared to undergo any suffering in order to remain faithful to their dispossessed chosen one, to remain faithful to illusions they had dreamed up.
A lot can be forgiven anyone who, in the filth and stench of camp violence, remains a human being.
13
Dear, quiet little Mashenka...She is no longer wearing her fine stockings and her blue woolen cardigan. It’s hard to keep neat and tidy in a freight wagon. She keeps listening intently to the strange language—it hardly even seems like Russian—of the women thieves who are her neighbors on the bedboards. She looks with horror at the transport tsaritsa, the pale-lipped hysterical mistress of a famous Rostov thief.
Masha washes her handkerchief in a mug. Then she uses the last drops of water to clean her feet, spreads the kerchief out on her knees to dry, and peers out into the half dark.
The last few months are a blurred fog: little Yulia’s tears after eating too much on her third birthday; the faces of the men carrying out the search; clothes, technical drawings, dolls, and dishes strewn about the floor; the rubber plant, a wedding present from her mother, torn out of its pot; her husband’s smile as he stood in the doorway for the last time, a pathetic, pleading smile, imploring her to remain loyal, a smile she could not remember without crying out and clasping her head in her hands; then mad weeks when everything went on just the same, little Yulia’s saucepan of porridge coexisting with the glacial horror of the Lubyanka; the queues at the reception office of the internal prison, and a voice from the little window saying, “Your parcel is refused”; the scurrying around to see various relatives; learning their addresses by heart; the hurried, clumsy sale of a wardrobe with a mirror and a set of the fine volumes published by Academia; the pain she had felt when a bosom friend had stopped phoning her; more night
time guests and a search that had gone on until dawn; saying goodbye to little Yulia, whom they had almost certainly taken to an orphanage rather than allowing her grandmother to take charge of her; a cell in the Butyrka where everyone spoke in whispers, and where matches and fish bones picked out of the gruel served as needles for doing one’s mending; the colorful sight of dozens of handkerchiefs, knickers, and bras all being waved in the air to dry; a nighttime interrogation during which, for the first time in her life, a man shook his fist at her, addressing her as Ty and calling her a whore and a prostitute. She was charged with failing to denounce her husband, who, for his part, had been sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence” for failing to denounce “terrorists.”
Masha did not understand why she, and dozens like her, had been expected to denounce their husbands, why Andrey, and hundreds like him, had been expected to denounce their work colleagues and childhood friends. She was questioned by the investigator only once. This was followed by eight months of prison: day and night, night and day. Despair would give way to a dazed waiting for fate; now and again, as if by an ocean wave, she would be swept up by hope, by a certainty that she would soon see her husband and daughter.
Finally, the jailer handed her a thin slip of cigarette paper on which she read, “58–6–12.”
Even after this she kept hoping. Her sentence would be repealed—yes, her husband had been acquitted, Yulia was already back at home, and soon they would meet, never to be separated again. The thought of this meeting made her turn hot and cold with joy.
She was woken in the middle of the night: “Lyubimova, with your belongings—quick!” She was taken in a Black Maria not to the Krasnopresenskaya transit prison but straight to the freight terminus for the Yaroslavl line, to be put on a prisoners’ transport...
She remembered the morning after her husband’s arrest with particular clarity, as if that morning were still continuing. The main door to the building had slammed shut; there had been the sound of a car driving away, then silence. Terror had entered her soul. The telephone was ringing in the corridor; the lift was suddenly stopping on their floor; a neighbor was shuffling out of the kitchen, and then her shuffling unexpectedly stopped.
She wiped the books scattered about the floor with a cloth and put them back on their shelves. She tied the linen lying on the floor into a bundle. Really she would have liked to boil it—everything in the room seemed to have been fouled. She put the rubber plant back into its pot and stroked one of its leathery leaves. Andryusha had made fun of this plant, saying it was a symbol of philistinism, and deep down she had agreed with him. Nevertheless, she had always defended it and never allowed her husband to move it out into the kitchen. She did not want to hurt her poor mother who, already an old woman, had carried it all the way across Moscow and had even had to drag it up to the fourth floor, since the lift had been under repair at the time.
Everything was silent. But their neighbors were not asleep. They pitied her, they were afraid of her, and they were overjoyed that no one had come to their room with search and arrest warrants...Little Yulenka was asleep, and she was tidying the room. Ordinarily she did not worry so much about tidiness. By and large she was indifferent to things; she had never cared about chandeliers or beautiful china. Some people saw her as slovenly, a bad housewife. But Andrey liked Masha’s indifference to objects and the general disorder of their room. Now, though, she felt that if things regained their proper places, she would feel calmer and less oppressed.
She glanced in the mirror and looked around the room she had tidied. Gulliver’s Travels was back where it had been yesterday, before the search. The rubber plant was back on its little table. And Yulia, who had been weeping and clinging to her mother until four in the morning, was asleep. It was quiet in the corridor; their neighbors were not yet making a noise in the kitchen.
And in her now properly tidied little room Masha felt lacerated by despair. Her heart felt bright, glowing with love and tenderness for Andrey, but at the same time, in this domestic quiet, surrounded by familiar objects, she sensed as never before a merciless force that is capable of bending even the very axis of the earth. This force had attacked her; it had attacked Yulia and the little room about which she had said, “I don’t even want twenty square meters and a balcony, because I’m happy where I am.”
Yulia. Andryusha. She was being taken away from them. The clickety-clack of the wheels was drilling into her heart. She was moving ever farther from Yulia. Every hour was taking her closer to Siberia—to whatever had been given her in exchange for a life with those whom she loved.
Dear Mashenka was no longer wearing her check skirt. And the woman thief with the pale thin lips was combing her crackling, electric hair with Mashenka’s comb.
Only in the heart of a young woman can these two terrible torments live side by side: a mother’s desperate longing to save her helpless child—and a child’s helplessness before the fury of the State, a child’s wish to hide her face in her mother’s breast.
Her dirty, broken fingernails had once been manicured. Little Yulia had been intrigued by their color, and her father had once said to her, “Mummy’s fingernails are like the scales of a little fish.” There was no longer any trace of a wave in her hair. She had had her hair done a month before Andryusha’s arrest, when they were getting ready for the birthday party of the friend who no longer telephoned her.
Little Yulenka, dear shy, anxious little Yulenka—in an orphanage. Masha let out a quiet, plaintive groan and her eyes clouded over: How could she protect her little daughter from cruel orphanage attendants; from vicious children; from coarse, ragged orphanage clothing; from army blankets and prickly, straw-stuffed pillows? And the wagon kept creaking; there was no end to the clickety-clack of the wheels. Moscow and Yulia were ever farther away from her; Siberia was drawing closer and closer.
Good God, had her Moscow life ever really existed? But a moment later it was the present that seemed like a dream, like a nightmare: this stifling half dark, this aluminum bowl, the women thieves smoking their makhorka on the rough boards, her dirty underwear, her itching body, the anguish in her heart: “If only we stop soon—then at least the guards will protect us from the thieves!” And then, at each stop, the terror she felt as the guards cursed and waved the butts of their rifles about. All she could think was: “If only the train could get going again.” Even the thieves had said, “Those Vologda guards are worse than death.”
But Masha’s deepest pain had nothing to do with the creaking bedboards, or the frost that covered the walls the moment the stove went out, or even the brutality of the guards and the savagery of the thieves. Her deepest pain was that she was now emerging from the numbness that had cocooned her soul during her eight months in the prison cell.
This nine-thousand-kilometer descent into the deep grave of Siberia was something she sensed with her entire being.
There was no place in the transport for the senseless prison hope that the cell door would suddenly open and a guard would shout out, “Lyubimova, get your things! You’re free!” And that she would go out onto Novoslobodskaya Street, catch a bus home, and find Andrey and Yulia waiting for her there.
In a transport, there is neither the numbness of the prison cell nor the mindless exhaustion of the camps—only the ache of a battered heart.
And what if Yulia wet her knickers? Was she washing her hands? And her nose? Did it need blowing? And what about vegetables? She really needed her green vegetables. And she was always throwing off the bedclothes at night—often she ended up quite naked.
Mashenka was no longer wearing her own shoes; instead she had soldiers’ boots, one of which had a torn sole. Was this really her—Maria Konstantinovna, who used to read Blok, who had studied literature, who, without ever telling Andrey, had written poetry of her own? Masha, who used to rush to the Arbat to make an appointment with Ivan Afanasyevich, the hairdresser known as “Jean”? Masha, who had not only read books but who could also sew, make
borsch, bake torte napoleon, and who had breast-fed a child? Masha, who had always been so full of admiration for Andrey, for his modesty and the energy he put into his work? Masha, who had won everyone’s admiration for her devotion to her husband and daughter? Masha, who knew how to weep, and who knew how to be witty, and who was good at looking after the pennies?
And the train continued on its way, and now Masha had the first stages of typhus. Her head felt clouded, dark, heavy. But no, it was not typhus, she was all right. And once again hope found a path to her heart. They would reach the camps, and someone would call out her name: “Lyubimova, step forward. There’s a telegram for you. You’re released.” And so on and so forth—and she would go by passenger train to Moscow...The city suburbs...Sofrino...Pushkino...The Yaroslavl station...And Andrey, holding Yulia in his arms.
And hope brought heartache. If only they could get to their destination sooner, if only she could get that telegram sooner...Yulia’s thin little legs were moving so quickly. The coach was slowing down now, and Yulia was running alongside it.
At last, after the thieves have stolen every last thing of hers, Masha gets off the train. Around her head she is wearing a dirty, shaggy towel, and she is hiding her freezing fingers in the sleeves of a greasy padded jacket. And squeaking glassily over the snow are the shoes of hundreds of Moscow women, all of them sentenced to ten years of hard labor for failing to denounce their own husbands.
Their legs are still in silk stockings; their high-heeled shoes keep stumbling. These women are envious of Masha. She traveled in a wagon with thieves and not with other wives. Her own clothes have all gone, but she has a padded jacket instead—and boots she can stuff with paper and rags to keep her feet warm.