Kolyma
07 October 2010
Last night I read at In Chapters, a Cardiff event curated by author John Williams and former Gorkys Zygotic Mynci member, Richard James. It's a night where local writers and musicians create new stories/poems/songs related to a particular theme. The theme this time round was Roads. My story was about the Road of Bones in Siberia, that Stalin's gulag prisoners carved in the 1930s.
I thought I'd post my story here. If you're bored in work, this could kill a few minutes!
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KOLYMA
The road stretches backwards and curls around a bluff. There is no road before us. The Devil stands against the truck and he’s smoking a cigarette. I watch from the corner of my eye because if he sees me looking he’ll put a bullet in me. There’s always a smirk on The Devil’s face.
I’ve come to the realisation that I’ll never see my family again and I’ve accepted it. It’s funny how the cold will tame the soul. And hunger? That’s even worse. Vaskov says he’s the furnace-man of the soul. He knows how to grow cabbage and out in this tundra growing anything you can eat is an alchemy. They keep him alive and feed him well because of his talent. And in return he feeds us hot cabbage soup and this, he says, preserves our souls for the future. The will to escape remains but it’s faded so much that it hardly feels real any more.
The Devil throws down his cigarette in the same indifferent way I’ve seen him stand on the roof of a truck and shoot down into the top of a man’s skull. He shoulders his machine-gun and pulls his collars around his scarf, blossoms of snow spinning around him.
‘Come on, you pigs. Dig, dig, dig. I want to go home tonight. What do you think this is? A holiday?’
Building this road is worse than mining. At least when I was mining I knew I’d get to sleep in a bed at the camp. And it’s always nice to find a piece of gold. One day I’ll go back to that mine and I’ll find my secret hiding place and recover my secret gold and become rich.
I got transferred to the road one day at the start of winter. I don’t know why but I know it must have had something to do with that bastard Chichvarkin. “Tax” he said, of the bread he forced me to give up. Tax? How can that man call himself a communist? ‘I know what you’re up to, Yevgeny,’ he’d say, the rat. ‘There’s a tax on secrets.’ Maybe he did know, maybe he didn’t. Maybe he said this to everybody. I couldn’t ask my friends because in the camps you never really know who’s on whose side. So I started eating faster, hoping I’d be done before Chichvarkin could get to me. And now I’m here, somewhere on the way to Magadan, carving this road.
I push my shovel into the earth and press my feet down and the metal clunks into the icy soil. I stand on the shovel but I’ve lost so much weight it hardly makes a difference.
‘Hey!’
The Devil has seen some fun. Iosif has fallen. Tiny crystals of snow waft across the world and dapple the mud. Iosif tries to stand but it’s too hard for him, his body is a clatter-bone latticework on all fours. The zest of energy left him days ago. A brutal kick up into his guts nearly lifts him off the ground. He rolls over and splats into a slushy puddle and the gasping breath comes out as a cloud of steam.
‘Get up you lazy shit or we’ll put you in the road. How’d you like to spend eternity with the rumble of Papa Stalin’s trucks chugging over your head?’
All Iosif can do is shake his head.
‘What’s that? I can’t hear you?’
The small frame of the Moskvich clutches his fingers into winter trees as if they could stop a bullet. The Devil grins down the barrel of his machine-gun.
‘Ha! Get up, you slug. I’m not going to shoot you.’ Then he pushes the muzzle further into Iosif’s face.
Everybody watches, nobody says anything.
‘I’m just kidding with you,’ the Devil laughs. He waves to the other guards. ‘Pathetic, isn’t it? He’s like a pig.’
The other guards smile but it’s clear that even they can’t stand him. He turns back to Iosif, flips the machine-gun round and slams him in the side of the head. I see the eyes roll back in his head as he falls onto his side. Iosif was a scientist before being collected by the shadows. I spoke to him once, a hushed, stilted discourse from which I learned he was a scientist, and for putting his faith in that church, he is now dead.
The Devil kicks him a few times, trying to rekindle the spark of life but it’s never going to come back because the spark deserted Iosif weeks ago and what remained was a ticking mechanical shutdown.
We turn away and carry on digging.
The sun, invisible behind a mass of cloud, sinks and with it goes the temperature. My hands seize, the moisture on the exposed parts of my face freezes, and it is all I can do to hold on to thoughts. I think of Leningrad and the Neva , of walking the banks of the river at midnight . My two boys and my wife – where are they now? The night I was taken flashes at the back of my mind; a bang in the dark, voices, lights swinging across walls, violence. And that was that, a wound cauterised without choice, an old life ending and a new one beginning, just like that.
It is just before dark that the Devil commands us to dig a hole in the middle of the road. We work slowly and silently, just like always, and when it is done it takes five of us to carry Iosif’s corpse across to the hole where we deposit it without emotion. We cover him up and there he is, a part of the road forever, just like The Devil said. I lay my shovel down and sit in the wet mud. The line of the horizon shines a moment and I see, there on the top of the hill, the outline of a great bear. It paws a few steps and stops and its head turns to us. Nobody else notices.
When I first got transferred I calculated intricate escape plans. We were out in the wilds with hardly any guards. Having gained the trust of a few other men we would talk and laugh about how we could get away. Laugh because there was of course no escape. Even if we could get away from the guards where in hell would we go? We joked that we’d freeze ourselves in a pool until summer and then thaw out and return home bedecked in glory. Those men I laughed with died a while back now but my dreams of escape live on, just, however ludicrous. You have to keep hoping.
The winter deepens and men fall in their hundreds and their bodies end up in the same place as Iosif. Is this road really worth this? For months I survive and know not why – everybody who came here with me died months ago. We cut our way across Siberia at a snail’s pace. The road isn’t even surfaced with anything for the most part. Wide rivers, frozen in winter’s breath, are traversed and no thought is given to the summer, when the rivers will melt and become impassable. I guess there’s maybe some other sad gulag bastards coming behind us to build bridges. We’re told nothing.
The bear is following me. I see him from time to time. He always keeps a safe distance and I put this down to the fact that he can smell The Devil. The snow is so thick in parts that it takes half the morning to clear before we can even reach the frozen soil. Still, this road will service an empire one day. We’re cutting a new vein for Mother Russia.
We have arrived at a nomadic camp and the farmers have been obliged to give us food and drink. The Devil has discovered a secreted carafe of camel milk and is taking great pleasure in watching our reactions as we drink it but the joke is on him because I actually enjoy the taste. Whether by refinement or chance it tastes sweet and watery. It’s been warmed over the fire and when it falls into my belly I feel it extend down through the root system of my body. Of course I grimace, The Devil expects nothing less.
‘Old man.’ He’s talking to the tribal elder. ‘Tell us a story. That’s what you retards do to amuse yourselves isn’t it? It’s not as if you can pop along to the local whore house is it?’ And he snorts his repulsive, forever lonely laugh. An unreciprocated laugh is the loneliest of all things.
The elder lifts his head to the vast array of stars. His Russian is poor but serviceable. The Devil seems sated.
The nomad sitting next to me nudges my ribs. ‘Here,’ he whispers, and he hands me some wet green matter and gestures to his mouth to say, eat it. I bring the matter to my lips but he stops me.
‘Later,’ he says.
At the end of the night The Devil ensures our installation in the nomads’ yurts. The animal pelts soothe and warm me and I swallow the green matter. It tastes salty and its texture is moist. I close my eyes and fall asleep…
… and awake to the sound of the moon. She breathes so softly over the world that the only thing that can feel her are the tides. I steal from the yurt and look about me. There is a guard over by the dying fire but I can tell I’m invisible to him. They don’t worry too much about guarding us at night because if we run we’ll be frozen by morning. Or maybe not. I glide silently by the guard and strike out across the surface of the frozen snowfield. I have escaped and Mother Russia will shield me from the cold because she’s whispering promises to me as I go. I find a pine forest and navigate quickly and easily through. The forest guides me and I do not feel the cold. I clamber up a denuded rock face stubbled with brush and canter along the edge of an escarpment. The moonshine makes the tops of the pines look like one massive thing that bends and throbs with the heartbeat of the planet.
As the sun clears the curve of the earth and burns away the cloud into a deepness of indigo I feel sleepy and I lay down and am gone.
When I wake I remember my attempted escape. What the hell did that nomad give me? It doesn’t matter – whatever it was its effects have worn off and I now realise it’s going to do me in. I look down at my body and thank god I enshrined myself in one of the animal pelts from the yurt because apart from that I am wearing nothing. I’m going to lose my feet to frostbite and the rest of my body will follow not long after. I bet Chichvarkin will be laughing now. Well at least he’ll never find my gold. I clamber beneath the pelt and try to get my extremities inside.
The cold pierces right down to the tiny networks of pain sensors, crystallising them into furry icicles. So this is how it all ends for old Yevgeny. There’s no way I can get back to safety without decent clothes and boots. And even if I had clothes and boots the odds are still a million to one against. Still, these past few years, I’ve resigned myself to things far worse than death.
In the dark of my animal pelt I think of when things were better. In that other life I remember walking along the river to the hospital where I cured people, and taking long lunches with Vladilien, talking about politics and literature and our burgeoning love affairs, he with Svetlana, me with Valentina. I wonder what’s become of him. I simply do not know.
I think of Lev and Nik, my boys – are they still alive? There’s no information and that lack of knowledge carves into my heart, digging out great scoops.
And Valentina. My last memory of her is a scream.
I don’t know how much longer I can keep myself awake. My throat stings. I’ve been under this pelt for how long? Minutes? Hours? Days? If only I had some clothes. Then I might stand a chance. What I’d give for that comfortable pair of boots and a warm hat. Time slips and flickers and I hear a scratching sound nearby. Holding my breath I try to listen through the heavy wash of the cold. Something is looking at me and I know instinctively that it is the bear. I lift the pelt and sit up, turning my head in the direction of the sound. But it’s not the bear.
‘You thought you could get away?’
The Devil smiles. He leans against a tree and smokes his cigarette.
I’m so cold I can’t answer.
‘What’s the matter? Don’t you like making roads? How else can we get to Magadan if not by road, huh? Aren’t you willing to put in a bit of effort for Mother Russia?’
‘P-p-please,’ I whisper.
‘Look at you grovelling. Call yourself a man? What were you thinking? You thought you could escape me? I’ve tracked a man from Paris to Berlin . I hunted a traitor in the towers of Leningrad when nobody else could find her. And you think you can get away from me in a place as open as Siberia ? The road to Kolyma might be long, but it’s not long enough for me to lose my sense of godliness.’
My teeth chatter madly in my mouth. My hands have lost feeling. I can sense my chest seizing. I want to freeze to death before he can shoot me. That at least will be something.
‘The ability to track people has always stood me in good stead. You see, the powerful spend a disproportionate amount of time simply looking for their enemies. I cut that time away like baked flesh off a bone.’ He stands upright from the tree. ‘In return they allow me certain cruelties, of which I know you have witnessed many.’ He smiles his smile again and I can see why people call him The Devil now. It’s more than just a name, there is something otherly about him. ‘I would have killed you in the end whatever. I know you used to be a doctor. You’re not some dummy and you’ve seen way too much. I’ve been a very naughty boy out on this road and I can’t have you telling tales, Yevgeny.’
My skull is being crushed by the cold. The Devil flicks his cigarette to the ground. The snow buzzes horizontal. The Devil exhales. Take me, cold. The Devil raises his machine-gun. The snow thickens. There is a dark blur of motion from the trees, the ground shakes, the air roars, the Devil turns and is thrown sideways by some great force, his whole body lifted from the ground and propelled into the trunk of a pine tree.
He tries to stand, bringing his gun back round to me; he’d rather kill me than protect himself. The bear reaches him in two strides. Its jaws open and clamp down on the Devil’s face and shakes him, shakes him so hard I think his head might fall off. The face comes away with a sucking slurp. A wheel of red sprays into the air. The Devil turns to me with his flayed face, one eyeball still in its socket, the other dangling free, and he smiles.
The bear and I gaze at one another for a series of moments. Then, disinterested, he turns and disappears back into the forest.
Using the very last inches of my life spark I crawl over to the Devil. Everything will be okay. My hope rises in a fizzing rush. I use the warmth of his body to warm my own, the life returns to me, and then I take his clothes. I pull his fur hat over my head and feel the cogs of my mind turn faster. I pull on his warm shirts and gloves and coats and boots that will keep me warm on my journey back to Leningrad . I could go back for my gold but that can wait. I need to find my family first. I take the Devil’s pack and find food and water and vodka and those cigarettes of his. The brand is nameless – there is just a picture of a green lizard with a red stripe running up its back. Then I pick my way through the pine forest, totally ignorant of the way home. I have no idea where I am or the direction in which I am travelling. In truth, I am lost.
That is until I find the road. I cross a gravel delta. Water braids its way towards the sea and beyond it the road I built appears as a shimmer. This is the first running water I’ve seen in months and this message, that spring is coming, kindles my spark. The road-workers are all east of me, digging towards Magadan. And I’m heading west. The road will show me the way.
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