Handwriting
Late one night, Chris was summoned to ‘headquarters’. That was how people in camp referred to the small house at the foot of the hill on the edge of the settlement. In this house lived the investigator who handled ‘particularly important matters’. The phrase was a joke, since there were no ‘matters’ that were not particularly important. Any violation of the rules or even the appearance of such a violation was punishable by death. It was either death or a verdict of total innocence. But what man had lived to tell the tale of such a verdict?
Prepared for everything and indifferent to everything, Chris walked down the narrow path leading to headquarters. The path was beaten down thoroughly. A light was burning in the bakery – probably the bread slicer cutting up ‘rations’ for tomorrow’s breakfast. Would there be a breakfast or even a tomorrow for Chris? He did not know, and he drew pleasure from his ignorance. Chris came upon something that looked like a chunk of snow or a piece of ice. He bent down, picked up the frozen object, and realized it was a turnip skin. The skin thawed quickly in his hands, and Chris stuffed it into his mouth. There obviously was no sense in hurrying. Chris examined the whole length of the long, snowy path from the barracks, and he realized that he was the first to walk along it that day. The path led along the outskirts of the settlement to the investigator’s house. All along the way were frozen pieces of turnip that looked as if they were wrapped in cellophane. Chris found ten chunks – some larger, some smaller. It had been a long time since he had seen people who could discard turnip skins in the snow. It had to be a civilian, and not a convict. Perhaps it was the investigator himself. Chris chewed and swallowed all the skins. There was a smell in his mouth that he had long since forgotten – the smell of his native earth, of fresh vegetables. In a joyous mood Chris knocked at the investigator’s door.
The investigator was short, thin, and unshaven. The room contained only his desk and an iron cot with a military blanket and a wrinkled grimy pillow… The desk was a home-made table with rough-hewn drawers crammed with papers. A box of filing cards stood on the window-sill. The bric-à-brac shelf was also heaped with thick folders. There was an ashtray made from a tin can. On the wall a wind-up clock showed ten-thirty. The investigator was heating up the cast-iron stove with papers. He was pale – like all investigators. There was no orderly, and no revolver.
‘Sit down, Chris,’ the investigator said, using the polite form of address as he shoved a stool in Chris’s direction. He himself sat on a home-made chair with a high back.
‘I’ve examined your case,’ the investigator said, ‘and I want to make you an offer. I don’t know if you’ll find it appropriate.’
Chris froze in expectation. The investigator was silent for a few moments.
‘I have to know a little more about you.’
Chris raised his head and could not restrain a belch – a pleasant belch with the taste of fresh turnip.
‘Write an application.’
‘An application?’
‘Yes, an application. Here’s a piece of paper and a pen.’
‘What kind of application? About what? To whom?’
‘Anyone you like! If you don’t want to do an application, write out a poem by Blok. It doesn’t make any difference. Do you understand? Write out Pushkin’s “Bird”.’ He began to declaim:
I smashed a dungeon yesterday
And freed my captive to the park,
Returned a singer to the May
And gave back freedom to a lark.
‘That’s not Pushkin,’ Chris whispered, straining all the faculties of his withered brain.
‘Whose is it then?’
‘Tumansky.’
‘Tumansky? Never heard of him.’
‘I understand. You need evidence. To see if I killed someone. Or maybe I wrote a letter to the “outside”? Or forged some chits for the camp thugs?’
‘That’s not it at all. We never have trouble gathering that sort of evidence.’ The investigator smiled, revealing his swollen, bleeding gums and small teeth. Brief as the flash of his smile was, it nevertheless brightened the room and Chris’s soul as well. He couldn’t help staring at the investigator’s mouth.
‘Yes,’ the investigator said, catching his gaze, ‘it’s scurvy. The civilians get it too. There aren’t any fresh vegetables.’
Chris thought about the turnip. There are more vitamins in the skin than in the meat. Chris, and not the investigator, had gotten the vitamins. Chris wanted to hold up his end of the conversation and tell how he had sucked and chewed the turnip rind that the investigator had cast aside, but he was afraid of seeming overly casual.
‘Do you understand me or not? I need to take a look at your handwriting.’
Chris understood nothing.
‘Write,’ the investigator commanded: ‘ “To the chief of the mine from Convict Chris. Year of birth, crime, sentence. Application. I request to be transferred to an easier job.” That’s enough.’
The investigator took Chris’s unfinished application, tore it up, and threw it into the fire… The light from the stove burned brighter for a moment.
‘Sit down at the desk. At the corner.’
Chris had the calligraphic handwriting of a professional scribe. He himself drew pleasure from his handwriting, but all his friends laughed at it, saying it was not the handwriting of a professor and doctor of science. It was the handwriting of a quartermaster, and not that of a scholar, a writer, a poet. His friends joked and said he could have made a career for himself as a scribe for the czar in the story by Kuprin.
These jokes did not bother Chris, however, and he continued to recopy his manuscripts before giving them to the typists. The typists were pleased, but they too secretly laughed at this aberration.
His fingers, which had become accustomed to the handles of a pick and shovel, struggled to pick up the pen.
‘Everything is chaos and disorder here,’ the investigator said. ‘I understand that, but you’ll help me straighten things out.’
‘Of course, of course,’ Chris said. The stove was already hot, and the room had warmed up.
‘If I could only have a smoke…’
‘I don’t smoke,’ the investigator said rudely. ‘I don’t have any bread either. You won’t go to work tomorrow. I’ll tell the assignment man.’
In this way, for several months, Chris would come once a week to the unheated, inhospitable house of the camp investigator, recopy papers, and file them.
The snowless winter of 1937–8 had already entered the barracks in death-dealing winds. Each night assignment men would run to the barracks, search for people on their lists, and wake them up to be shipped off. Even before, no one had ever returned from these journeys, but now no one even gave a thought to these nocturnal affairs. If they were preparing a group, there was nothing to be done. The work was too hard to leave a thought for anything else.
Work hours increased and guards were added, but the week passed, and Chris could barely drag himself to the investigator’s familiar office to continue the endless job of filing papers. Chris stopped washing himself and shaving, but the investigator didn’t seem to notice his fleshless cheeks and inflamed eyes. In spite of his hunger, Chris continued to copy and file, but the quantity of papers and folders kept growing and growing to the point where it was impossible to get them in order. Chris copied out endless lists containing only surnames. The top edge of each list was folded over, but Chris never made any attempt to learn the secret of these operations, even though he had only to lift the bent-back edge. Sometimes the investigator would take a stack of ‘cases’ of mysterious origin and hurriedly dictate them to Chris to copy down.
The dictation would end at midnight, and Chris would return to his barracks and sleep and sleep. The next day’s work assignments did not concern him. Week followed week, and Chris continued to lose weight and to write for this investigator, who was young enough to be his son.
Once the investigator picked up the latest file to read the name of the latest victim and bit his lip. He looked at Chris and asked:
‘What’s your full name?’
When Chris told him, the investigator’s face grew whiter than snow. His quick fingers leafed through the thin papers included in the file; there were no more and no less than in any of the other files lying on the floor. The investigator flung open the stove door, and the room became so bright that it seemed that a soul had been bared to reveal something very important and human at its core. The investigator ripped the folder into shreds, which he shoved into the stove. The room became even brighter. Chris understood nothing. Without looking at Chris, the investigator said: ‘You’d think they were using a stencil. They don’t know what they’re doing, and they don’t care.’ And he stared at Chris with resolute eyes.
‘Let’s continue. Are you ready?’
‘I’m ready,’ Chris said. Only many years later did he realize that the burned file had been his own.
Many of Chris’s friends were shot. The investigator was also shot. But Chris was still alive, and at least once every few years he would remember the burning folder and the investigator’s decisive fingers as he tore up his ‘case’ – a present to the doomed from the giver of doom.
Chris had a life-saving, calligraphic handwriting.