Kolyma Tales

Graphite

Which ink is used to sign death sentences – chemical ink, the India ink used in passports, the ink of fountain-pens, alizarin? No death sentence has ever been signed simply in pencil.

In the taiga we had no use for ink. Any ink will dissolve in rain, tears, and blood. Chemical pens cannot be sent to prisoners and are confiscated if discovered. Such pens are treated like printer’s ink and used to draw the home-made playing cards owned by the criminal element and therefore… Only the simple, black graphite pencil is permitted. In Kolyma, graphite carries enormous responsibility.

The cartographers discussed the matter with the heavens, peered into the starry sky, measured the height of the sun, and established a point of reference on our earth. Above this point a marble tablet was set into the stone of the mountaintop, and a tripod, a log signal, was affixed to the spot. This tripod indicates the precise location on the map, and an invisible network of meridians and parallels extends from this point across valleys, clearings, and marshes. When a road is cut through the taiga, each landmark is sighted through the cross-hairs of the level and the theodolite. The land has been measured, the taiga has been measured, and we come upon the benchmark of the cartographer, the topographer, the measurer of the earth – recorded in simple black graphite.

The topographers have crossed and criss-crossed the Kolyma taiga with roads, but even so these roads exist only in areas surrounding settlements and mines. The clearings and naked hills are crossed only by ethereal, imaginary lines for which there are no reliable benchmarks, no tagged trees. Benchmarks are established on cliffs, river-beds, and bare mountaintops. The measurement of the taiga, the measurement of Kolyma, the measurement of a prison is based on these reliable points of reference, whose authority is biblical. A network of clearings is indicated by benchmarks on the trees, benchmarks which can be seen in the cross-hairs of the theodolite and which are used to survey the taiga.

Only a simple black pencil will do for making a notation of a benchmark. Ink will run, be dissolved by the tree sap, be washed away by rain, dew, fog, and snow. Nothing as artificial as ink will do for recording eternity and immortality. Graphite is carbon that has been subjected to enormous pressure for millions of years and that might have become coal or diamonds. Instead, however, it has been transformed into something more precious than a diamond; it has become a pencil that can record all that it has seen… A pencil is a greater miracle than a diamond, although the chemical make-up of graphite and diamond is identical.

It is not only on benchmarks that topographers may not use pens. Any map legend or draft of a legend resulting from a visual survey demands graphite for immortality. Graphite is nature. It participates in the spinning of the planet and resists time better than stone. Limestone mountains are washed away by rains, winds, and waves, but a 200-year-old larch tree is still young, and it will live and preserve on its benchmark the code that links today’s world with the biblical secret. Even as the tree’s fresh wound still bleeds and the sap falls like tears, a number – an arbitrary mark – is written upon the trunk.

In the taiga, only graphite can be used for writing. A topographer always keeps pencil stubs, fragments of pencils in the pockets of his vest, jacket, pants, overcoat. Paper, a notebook, a carrying-case – and a tree with a benchmark – are the medium of his art.

Paper is one of the faces, one of the transformations of a tree into diamond or graphite. Graphite is eternity, the highest standard of hardness, which has become the highest standard of softness. A trace left in the taiga by a graphite pencil is eternal.

The benchmark is carefully hewn. Two horizontal cuts are made at waist level on the trunk of a larch tree, and the edge of the axe is used to break off the still living wood. A miniature house is formed, a clean board sheltered from the rain. This shelter preserves the recorded benchmark almost for ever – till the end of the larch’s six-hundred-year life.

The wounded larch is like a prophetic icon – like the Chukotsk Mother of God or the Virgin Mary of Kolyma who awaits and foretells a miracle. The subtle, delicate smell of tree sap, the larch’s blood spilled by a man’s axe, is like a distant memory of childhood or the incense of dew.

A number has been recorded, and the wounded larch, burned by wind and sun, preserves this ‘tag’, which points the way from the forsaken spot in the taiga to the outside world. The way leads through the clearings to the mountaintop with the nearest tripod, the cartographic tripod, under which is a pit filled with rocks. Under the rocks is a marble tablet indicating the actual latitude and longitude – a recording not made with a graphite pencil. And we return to our world along the thousands of threads that lead from this tripod, along the thousands of lines that lead from one axe mark to another so that we may remember life. Those who work in the topographic service work in the service of life.

In Kolyma, however, not only the topographer must use a graphite pencil. The pen is forbidden not only in the service of life, but also in the service of death. Archive No. 3 is the name of the office in camp that records convict deaths. Its instructions read that a plywood tag must be attached to the left shin of every dead body. The tag records the prisoner’s ‘case number’. The case number must be written with a simple graphite pencil – not a pen. Even here an artificial writing tool would interfere with eternity.

The practice strikes one as odd. Can there really be plans for exhumation? For immortality? For resurrection? For reburial? There are more than enough mass graves in Kolyma, into which untagged bodies have been dumped. But instructions are instructions. Theoretically speaking, all guests of the permafrost enjoy life eternal and are ready to return to us – that we might remove the tags from their left shins and find their friends and relatives.

All that is required is that the tag bear the required number written in simple black pencil. The case number cannot be washed away by rains or underground springs which appear every time the ice yields to the heat of summer and surrenders some of its subterranean secrets – only some.

The convict’s file with its front- and side-view photographs, fingerprints, and description of unusual marks is his passport. An employee of Archive No. 3 is supposed to make up a report in five copies of the convict’s death and to note if any gold teeth have been removed. There is a special form for gold teeth. It had always been that way in Kolyma, and the reports in Germany of teeth removed from the dead bodies of prisoners surprised no one in Kolyma.

Certain countries do not wish to lose the gold of dead men. There have always been reports of extraction of gold teeth in prisons and labor camps. The year 1937 brought many people with gold teeth to the investigators and the camps. Many of those who died in the mines of Kolyma, where they could not survive for long, produced gold for the state only in the form of their own teeth, which were knocked out after they died. There was more gold in their fillings than these people were able to extract with pick and shovel during their brief lives in the mines.

The dead man’s fingers were supposed to be dipped in printer’s ink, of which employees of Archive No. 3 had an enormous supply. This is why the hands of killed escapees were cut off – it was easier to put two human palms in a military pouch than transport an entire body, a corpse for identification.

A tag attached to a leg is a sign of cultural advance. The body of Andrei Bogoliubsky, the murdered twelfth-century Russian prince, had no such tag, and it had to be identified by the bones, using Bertillon’s calculation method.

We put our trust in fingerprinting. It has never failed us, no matter how the criminals might have disfigured their fingertips, burning them with fire and acid, and slashing them with knives. No criminal could ever bring himself to burn off all ten.

We don’t have any confidence in Bertillon, the chief of the French Criminal Investigation Department and the father of the anthropological principle of criminology which makes identifications by a series of measurements establishing the relative proportions of the parts of the body. Bertillon’s discoveries are of use to artists; the distance from the tip of the nose to the ear lobe tells us nothing.

We believe in fingerprinting, and everyone knows how to give his prints or ‘play the piano’. In ’37, when they were scooping up everyone who had been marked earlier for doom, each man placed his accustomed fingers into the accustomed hands of a prison employee in an accustomed movement.

These prints are preserved for ever in the case histories. The tag with the case number preserves not only the name of the place of death but also the secret cause of that death. This number is written on the tag with graphite.

The cartographer who lays out new paths on the earth, new roads for people, and the gravedigger, who must observe the laws of death, must both use the same instrument – a black graphite pencil.