These wives of enemies of the people stumble, hurry forward, fall to the ground. They quickly gather up their little bundles, which have scattered over the snow, but they are afraid to cry.
Masha looks around: behind her is the station shed, and a string of freight wagons that look like red beads against snow-white skin; in front of her slowly uncoils a long column of female prisoners, like a dark snake; all around are stacks of timber, powdered with snow. And there are the guards in their marvelously warm sheepskin coats—and the constantly barking guard dogs in their own warm, thick fur. The air, after two months in the transport, is intoxicatingly clean, but it feels sharper than a razor blade. The wind gets up; a dry, snowy cloud billows over the open ground, and the head of the column is lost in a white blur. The cold whips faces and legs. Masha’s head whirls.
And all of a sudden, through her exhaustion, through the fear of getting frostbite and gangrene, through dreams of finding herself somewhere warm, of being taken to a bathhouse to wash, through her confusion at the sight of a portly old woman in pince-nez glasses lying on the snow with a strange, stupidly capricious look on her face—through all of this, and through the snowy mist, twenty-six-year-old Masha glimpsed her camp future. Far behind her, thousands of miles away, she could see her Moscow past, in a building on Spasopeskovsky Lane, a life now closed up and sealed. But here, emerging out of the mist were watchtowers, guards in full-length sheepskin overcoats, wide-open gates. At this moment Masha saw both of her lives with equal clarity: a fate that had gone, and a fate that had come.
She runs, stumbles, blows on her icy fingers. She is still gripped by the madness of hope. Soon she’ll get to the camp—and they’ll tell her about her release. She runs fast; she gets out of breath.
How hard she had to work. How her stomach hurt, how the small of her back ached from the incredible weight—far beyond what was acceptable for a woman—of the great chunks of lime. Even when they were empty, the handbarrows felt as if they were made of cast iron. Everything was heavy: the spades, the crowbars, the boards, the logs, the vats of dirty water, the latrine barrels full of excrement, the piles of dirty laundry that weighed tens of kilos.
How hard it was to walk to work in the darkness before dawn. How hard it was to endure the inspections, standing in the slush or in freezing cold. How she longed for the nauseating maize swill with a scrap of tripe or with fish scales that stick to the roof of your mouth. How pitilessly the thieves stole. What sordid conversations she heard at night on the bedboards. What horrible fumblings, whisperings, and rustlings. How eternally she longed for the stale, slightly graying black bread.
Sixteen-year-old Lena Rudolf, Masha’s neighbor on the bedboards, began sleeping with Mukha, the criminal who looked after the boiler room. Lena caught syphilis from him. She lost her hair and her fingernails and was then transferred to a camp for the disabled. Lena’s mother, the kind, obliging, blue-eyed Susanna Karlovna, somehow still remained as elegant as ever. Even though her hair was now gray, she still went on working, doing exercises every morning before dawn, and rubbing herself down with snow.
Masha worked every day until dark, like a mare, like a she-donkey or a she-camel. It was a strict-regime camp, and she did not have the right to send or receive letters. She did not know whether her husband was still alive or whether he had been executed. She knew nothing about her little Yulia. Had she ended up in an orphanage, or had she simply got lost like some small animal with no name? Perhaps her mother had, after all, managed to find Yulia? But was her mother still alive? Was her brother Volodya still alive? She seemed to have got used to knowing nothing about her nearest and dearest. She seemed to have stopped dreaming about receiving a letter. All she wanted, it seemed, was easier work, a job in the hospital or the kitchen—anything so as not to have to go out into the taiga, amid the terrible cold or the clouds of mosquitoes.
But her longing for her husband and daughter was as strong as ever, and her hope had not died; it only seemed to have died. Hope was sleeping. And to Masha her hope was like a little child asleep in her arms; when hope awakened, her heart filled with happiness, light, and grief.
One day she would see Yulia and her husband again. Not today, of course, and not tomorrow. The years would pass, but she would see them again. “Your hair’s turned gray, Andrey...How sad your eyes look...” And Yulenka, dear little Yulenka. This pale, thin young woman was her daughter. But then came worrying thoughts: Would Yulia recognize her? Would she remember her, her camp mother? Or would she turn away from her?
Semisotov, one of the senior guards, forced her to sleep with him. He knocked out two of her teeth and struck her on the temple. This was during her first autumn in the camp. She tried to hang herself but failed; the rope was too weak. Some of the women, however, even felt envious. Then came a kind of pained indifference. Twice a week she dragged herself along, behind Semisotov, to a storeroom where there were bedboards covered with sheepskins. Semisotov was always sullen and silent and she would be out of her mind with fear. When he was drunk and furious, she would feel sick with terror. But once he gave her five candies and she thought, “If only I could send them to Yulia in her orphanage.” Instead of eating them, she hid them in her little straw mattress. They were stolen. Once Semisotov said to her, “You’re filthy, you slut. No peasant woman would ever let herself get so dirty.” Surprisingly, he always addressed her as Vy, even when he was dead drunk. Semisotov’s disgust gladdened her, but at the same time she thought, “If he ditches me, it’ll be back to carrying loads of quicklime.”
One evening Semisotov left the barrack and never appeared again. She learned later that he had been transferred to another camp. And she was glad to be able to sit on the bedboards in the evening—glad not to have to follow him, hanging her head, to the storeroom. But then she was thrown out of the office building where, in the days of Semisotov, she had cleaned floors and kept the stoves going. She had nothing to offer by way of a bribe, and so her place was taken by the thief who had stolen her woolen cardigan in the transport. Masha was glad that Semisotov had gone, but she also felt hurt. He had not said even a word of goodbye to her; he had treated her worse than a dog. And she was a woman who had once had a Moscow residence permit. She and her husband and Yulia had had a room of their own. She had washed in a bathroom; she had eaten from a plate.
And her work was very hard during the winter months. And it was hard in summer, and in spring, and it was hard in autumn, and now she no longer remembered the Arbat or Andrey but only how, in the days of Semisotov, she had cleaned floors in the office building. Had she really been blessed with such good fortune?
Nevertheless, hope was still there, living its secret life inside her: they would all see each other again. By then, of course, she would be an old woman. Her hair would be quite gray, and Yulia would have children of her own—but they would see each other again. They simply couldn’t not.
There were so many worries, so many things that needed attending to: a torn shirt; an outbreak of boils; a pain in her stomach—and she was refused permission to go to the doctor. One day the skin on her heels started tearing, and then she was limping, and her footcloths were black with blood. Then one of her felt boots was falling apart. Then she was desperate to wash herself and her things; she simply had to go to the bathhouse at once, even if it were only for a few minutes, without waiting for the day when it would be her turn. Then she had to find a way of drying her padded jacket, which had got soaked in the rains...And it was a struggle to get hold of every smallest thing: a tin of hot water; a length of darning thread; a needle she could rent; a spoon with an intact handle; a scrap of material to use as a patch. And how could she escape from the gnats? How could she protect her face and hands from the cold—a cold that was as vicious as the camp guards?
The prisoners’ cursing and swearing, their fights and quarrels were no easier to bear than the work.
Life in the barrack went on.
Auntie Tanya, who had once lived in Oryol and worked as a cleaner,
used to whisper, “Grief to those who live on this earth!” She had a coarse face, more like that of a man; it looked cruel and frenzied. But there was not the least hint of cruelty or frenzy in Auntie Tanya, nothing but kindness. Why had this saint been sent to the camp? With an incomprehensible meekness, she was always ready to help out, to take someone else’s place washing floors or doing some other routine task in the barrack.
The two old nuns, Varvara and Ksenya, would exchange quick whispers the moment any sinner began to come near them. Then they would fall silent. They lived in a world apart. To sign any document was a sin; to utter their worldly name was a sin; to drink from the same mug as a woman of the world was a sin; to put on a camp jacket was a sin. They would die rather than do any of these things—so stubbornly did they cling to their holiness. Their holiness was visible in their clothes, in their white kerchiefs, in their pursed lips, but in their eyes there was only cold indifference—and contempt for the sins and sufferings of the camps. Their celibate souls were repelled by womanly passions and troubles, by the sufferings of mothers and wives; to them, all such things seemed unclean. What mattered was to preserve the cleanliness of your kerchief, of your cup, to purse your lips and keep your distance from the sinful life of the camp. The thieves hated them, and the “wives” disliked and avoided them too.
Wives, wives, wives, from Moscow and from Leningrad, from Kiev, Kharkov, and Rostov; sad women, down-to-earth women, and unworldly women; sinful, weak, meek, and spiteful women; women who laughed a lot; Russian and non-Russian women—and all of them wearing their camp jackets. The wives of doctors and engineers, of artists and agronomists; the wives of marshals of the Soviet Union and the wives of chemists; the wives of public prosecutors and of dispossessed small farmers; the wives of peasants who grew grain in Russia, the Ukraine, and Belorussia. All of them had been led by their husbands into the Scythian dark of the burial mounds known as camp barracks.
The more famous the “enemy of the people” who had perished, the wider the circle of women he dragged down: his wife, his ex-wife, his very first wife, his sisters, a secretary, a daughter, a close friend of his wife, a daughter from his first marriage.
Of some it was said, “She’s surprisingly modest and unassuming.” Of others: “Oh, she’s quite unbearable. So high and mighty—anyone would think she was still in possession of all her Kremlin privileges!” The latter had their toadies and dependents even here. Over them hung an aura of power and doom. People repeated in a whisper, “No, you can be sure they won’t get out of here alive.”
There were old women with calm, tired eyes who had first been imprisoned way back in Lenin’s day and who had served whole decades in the prisons and camps. Members of The People’s Will, Social Democrats, and Socialist Revolutionaries. These women were treated with respect by the guards, and even by the thieves. They did not get up from the bedboards even if the camp superintendent himself came into the barrack. People said that one of them, Olga Nikolaevna, a little old woman with gray hair, had been an anarchist before the Revolution; she had thrown a bomb at the carriage of the governor of Warsaw and had fired a shot at a police general. And now here she was—sitting on the bedboards, reading a book, and drinking a mug of hot water. One night Masha had come back from a visit to the storeroom with Semisotov and this old woman had come up to her, stroked her on the head, and said, “My poor girl!” How Masha had cried.
Susanna Karlovna Rudolf’s place on the bedboards was not far from Masha’s. She was still doing her exercises, still taking care always to breathe through her nose. Her Christian Socialist husband, a German American, had come to Soviet Russia with his family and taken Soviet citizenship. Professor Rudolf had been sentenced to “ten years without right of correspondence,” that is, he had been shot in the basement of the Lubyanka. Susanna Karlovna and her three daughters—Agnessa, Louisa, and Lena—had been sent to strict-regime labor camps. She knew nothing at all about her elder daughters, and it was now some time since Lena, the youngest, had been sent to the camp for the disabled. Susanna Karlovna no longer exchanged greetings with Olga Nikolaevna—not since Olga Nikolaevna had called Stalin a Fascist and Lenin the assassin of Russian freedom. Susanna Karlovna said that through her work she was helping to construct a new world and that this gave her the strength to endure the separation from her husband and daughters. When she was living in London, she had known H. G. Wells, and in Washington she had met President Roosevelt, who had enjoyed talking to her husband. She accepted everything; she understood everything. There was only one thing she did not quite understand: the man who had come to arrest her husband had pocketed a large and very rare gold coin; it was almost the size of a child’s hand and it was worth a hundred dollars. On it was a silhouette of a Red Indian with feathered headgear. The officer must, she thought, have taken it for his little son, not even realizing it was gold...
All of them—the pure and the fallen, the most robust and the most exhausted—lived in a world of hope. Hope sometimes slept, sometimes awoke, but it never left them.
Masha too had hope. Hope tormented her; but even as it tormented her, hope made it possible for her to breathe.
The Siberian winter, itself almost as long as a term in camp, was followed by a pale spring. Masha and two other women were sent to clear the road to the “socialist settlement” where the camp bosses and the free employees lived in log cottages.
What she saw from a distance was the silhouette of a rubber plant and her own Arbat curtains on the high windows. She saw a little girl with a school satchel climb up onto the porch and enter the house belonging to the officer in charge of the administration of the strict-regime labor camps.
Their guard said, “What d’you think you’re here for—to watch a movie?”
And on their way back in the last of the evening light, as they passed the timber store, they suddenly heard the sound of Radio Magadan.
Masha and the two other women dragging themselves along through the spring mud put their spades down and stopped.
Silhouetted against the pale sky were the camp watchtowers. The guards in their black coats were like huge motionless flies. As for the squat barracks, it was as if they had just come out of the earth and were now thinking better of it, wondering if they should sink down into it again.
It was not sad music but merry; it was dance music. Listening to it, Masha wept as she seemed never to have wept in all her life. And the two other women—one of them a kulak who had been deported during total collectivization, the other an elderly woman from Leningrad, wearing glasses with cracked lenses—wept beside her. Somehow it looked as if the cracks in the Leningrad woman’s glasses had been made by her tears.
The guard did not know what to do. It was only very rarely that the zeks wept; their hearts were like the tundra—gripped by permanent frost.
The guard kept prodding the women in the back and begging, “All right now, that’s enough now, you shits...I’m asking you politely, you whores...”
He kept looking around for something. It never entered his head that the women might be weeping because of the music.
Nor did Masha herself understand why her heart was suddenly overflowing with anguish and despair. It was as if everything that had ever happened had become one: her mother’s love; beautiful poems; the check woolen dress that so suited her; Andryusha; the grubby face of the interrogator; dawn over the suddenly gleaming light-blue sea at Kelasuri, not far from Sukhumi; little Yulenka’s chatter; Semisotov; the old nuns; the furious quarrels of the bull dykes; her anguish because her brigade leader had begun looking very intently at her, narrowing her eyes, just as Semisotov had done. Why had this merry dance music made Masha sense so acutely her filthy undershirt, the sour smell of her jacket, her damp boots that were as heavy as irons? Why, all of a sudden, this question that had cut like a razor blade through her heart: Why, why had all this happened to her? Why this terrible cold, this moral degradation, this new submissiveness to her camp fate?
And hope, wh
ich until then had always oppressed her heart with its living weight, now died.
As she listened to this merry dance music, Masha’s hope of seeing Yulia died. Yulia was lost forever in the great network of children’s centers and orphanages; she was lost in the vastness of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics. In student hostels and clubs young people were dancing to merry music like this...And Masha understood that her husband was no more; he had been shot, and she would never see him again.
And she was left without hope, entirely alone...Never would she see Yulia—neither today, nor in the future, when she was an old woman with gray hair.
Lord, Lord, have pity on her. Pity her, Lord. Have mercy upon her.
A year later Masha left the camp. Before returning to freedom, she lay for a while on some pine planks in a freezing hut. No one tried to hurry her out to work, and no one abused her. The medical orderlies placed Masha Lyubimova in a rectangular box made from boards that the timber inspectors had rejected for any other use. This was the last time anyone looked at her face. On it was a sweet, childish expression of delight and confusion, the same look as when she had stood by the timber store and listened to the merry music, first with joy and then with the realization that all hope had gone.
And Ivan Grigoryevich thought that in the camps, in the labor camps of Kolyma, men were not equal to women. Men, really, had had it easier.
14
In a dream Ivan Grigoryevich saw his mother. She was walking down a road, keeping to one side, out of the way of a long line of tractors and dump trucks. She did not see her son. He was shouting, “Mama, Mama, Mama,” but the heavy roar of the tractors drowned out his voice.
He had no doubt that she would recognize him. For all the chaos on the road, she would see that this old graybeard from the camps was her son—if only she could hear him, if only she would look around. But she did not hear him; she did not look around.