The Zone

LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER

February 4, 1982. New York

Dear Igor Markovich!*

I’ll take the risk of presenting you with a delicate proposition. It’s basically as follows.

For three years now I have been trying to publish my prison-camp book, and trying all this time to do it as quickly as possible.

More to the point, it was specifically The Zone that I should have had published before anything else. For it was with this book that my ill-fated writing career began.

It turns out that it’s extremely hard to find a publisher. I, for example, was rejected by several. And I wouldn’t want to hide this.

The reasons for rejection were almost boilerplate. These were the basic arguments, if it’s of any interest:

The prison-camp theme is exhausted. The reader is tired of endless prison memoirs. After Solzhenitsyn, the subject ought to be closed.

This idea does not stand up to critical examination. It goes without saying that I am not Solzhenitsyn. But does that deprive me of a right to exist?

Also, our books are completely different. Solzhenitsyn describes political prison camps. I – criminal ones. Solzhenitsyn was a prisoner. I – a prison guard. According to Solzhenitsyn, camp is hell. Whereas I think that hell is in us ourselves.

Please believe that I am not comparing degrees of talent. Solzhenitsyn is a great writer and a monumental figure. But enough about that.

The other argument for not publishing my book was much harder to refute. The fact is, my manuscript is not a finished work.

It is a diary of sorts, chaotic notes, a set of unorganized materials.

The publishers were confused by such disarray. They wanted a more standard form.

It seemed to me that a general artistic idea could be traced in this disorder. One poetic hero moves throughout it. A certain unity of time and place has been observed. In a way, a single banal idea is declared – the world is absurd…

Then I tried to foist The Zone on them as a collection of short stories. The publishers said that this would be unprofitable, that the reading public is hungry for novels and sagas.

The matter was complicated by the fact that The Zone had been arriving in parts. Before my departure from the Soviet Union I microfilmed the manuscript, and my executor gave out pieces of the film to a few courageous French women who were able to smuggle my work through customs borders. The original is still in the Soviet Union.

Over the last few years I’ve been receiving tiny packages from France. And I’ve been trying to compose a unified whole out of the separate pieces.

In some places the film is damaged. (Wherever my kind benefactresses may have hidden it I do not know.) A few fragments were lost entirely.

The reconstruction of a manuscript from microfilm is a laborious job. Even in America, for all its technological greatness, it is not easy. And, by the way, not inexpensive. I’ve restored about thirty per cent of it to date.

I’m enclosing a piece of the finished text with this letter. I’ll send off the next part in a few days. You’ll receive the rest of it in the next few weeks. Tomorrow I rent a photo-enlarger.

Perhaps we will be able to make a finished whole out of all of this. I’ll try to fill in bits here and there with my irresponsible comments.

The main thing is: be tolerant. And as the prisoner Khamrayev used to say, setting off on a wet job* – Godspeed!

OLD KALYU PAKHAPIL HATED the occupying forces. What he liked was chorus singing, also bitter home-brewed beer and plump little children.

“Only Estonians ought to live in these parts, and no one else,” Pakhapil used to say. “Foreigners have no business here.”

The peasants would listen to him, nodding their heads in approval.

Then the Germans came. They played harmonicas, sang, treated the children to chocolate. Old Kalyu didn’t like any of it. He was silent for a long time, then gathered his things and went into the forest.

It was a dark forest, and from a distance it gave the impression of being impassable. There Pakhapil hunted, clubbed fish, slept on pine branches. In brief – he lived there till the Russians ousted the occupiers. And when the Germans left, Pakhapil returned. He showed up in Rakvere, where a Soviet captain awarded him a medal. The medal was decorated with four incomprehensible words, a figure and an exclamation mark.

“What does an Estonian need a medal for?” Pakhapil wondered for a long time.

Yet all the same, he carefully pinned it to the lapel of his cheviot jacket. This jacket Pakhapil had worn only once: in Lansman’s store, when he bought it.

So he lived and worked as a glazier. But when the Russians announced general mobilization, Pakhapil once again disappeared.

“Estonians ought to live here,” he said, departing, “and as for Ivans, Fritzes and all these Greenlanders, there’s no place for them here!”

Pakhapil again went into the forest, which seemed impassable only from a distance. And again he hunted, thought and was silent. And everything was going well.

But the Russians organized a round-up. The forest resounded with cries. It became crowded, and Pakhapil was arrested. He was tried as a deserter, beaten and spat on in the face. The one who exerted himself the most in this was the captain who had awarded him the medal.

And then Pakhapil was sent to the south, where the Kazakhs live. There he soon died, most likely from hunger and the alien land.

His son Gustav graduated from the Merchant Marine Academy in Tallinn, on Luise Street, and received a diploma as a radio operator.

Evenings he would sit in the Mundi Bar and say to frivolous girls, “A true Estonian ought to live in Canada! In Canada, and nowhere else.”

In the summer he was drafted for guard duty. The training camp was in Yosser. Everything was done by command: sleep, meals, conversation. People talked about vodka, about bread, about horses, about miners’ salaries. All this Gustav hated, and he conversed only in his own tongue. Only in Estonian. Even with the guard dogs.

Besides this, he drank in solitude and, if anyone bothered him, got into fights. He also allowed “incidents of a female order” (to use Political Instructor Khuriyev’s expression).

“How egocentric you are, Pakhapil!” the political instructor reproached him cautiously.

Gustav, bashfully, asked for a pencil and a piece of paper and scrawled out clumsily: “Yesterday of this year I abused an alcoholic beverage. After which I dropped down in the mud a soldier’s dignity. Henceforward I promise. Private Pakhapil.”

After some hesitation, he always added: “Request not to refuse.”

Then came the money from his Aunt Reyet. Pakhapil would get a litre of Chartreuse in the store and go off to the cemetery. There, in the green twilight, the crosses shone white. Farther on, by the edge of a reservoir, was a neglected grave and beside it a plywood obelisk. Pakhapil would sit down heavily on the little knoll, have a drink and smoke.

“Estonians should live in Canada,” he would mutter softly beneath the rhythmical humming of mosquitoes.

For some reason they didn’t bite him.

Early one morning, a homely-looking officer appeared in the division. Judging by his glasses, an ideological worker. An assembly was announced.

“Go to the Lenin Room!” an orderly shouted to the soldiers smoking near the parallel bars.

“We can’t eat politics,” the soldiers grumbled. But they went inside and took seats.

“I was a slender string in the thunderous concert of the war,” Lieutenant Colonel Mar began.

“Poems,” Balodis the Latvian drawled in disappointment.

Outside the window, the quartermaster sergeant and the staff clerk had caught a pig. The friends had tied a belt around her legs and were trying to drag her up a ramp into the back of a transport van. The pig screamed wildly, and her piercing squeals made the back of one’s neck ache. She fell on her belly. Her hooves slipped on the manure-muddied ramp. The little eyes disappeared in folds of fat.

Sergeant Major Yevchenko walked across the yard. He kicked the pig with his foot. Then he picked up the shaft of a shovel that had been left lying on the grass.

“In sections of the Soviet Army, a noble tradition is developing,” Lieutenant Colonel Mar was saying. “Soldiers and officers take the graves of fallen soldiers under their patronage. They painstakingly reconstruct the story of their martial achievements. They establish contact with the relatives and dear ones of the heroes. It is the duty of one and all to develop and strengthen such a tradition in every way possible. Let spiteful critics in the world of ready cash trumpet the conflicts of fathers and sons. Let them fan the cooked-up legend of the antagonism between them. Our youth sacredly honour the burial of their fathers, affirming in this way the indissoluble bond between the generations.”

They dragged the pig up a roughly planed board. The edges of the van, painted a light green, shuddered with a metallic ring. The driver stuck his head out the window to watch what was going on.

Nearby, the Moldavian Dastyan, excused from duty because of illness, was turning on the horizontal bars. He was waiting for orders from the commanding officer of his section and went around without a belt, quietly singing to himself.

“Your company is stationed across from a cemetery,” the lieutenant colonel droned, “and this is deeply symbolic. Established by us is the fact that among others we have here the resting places of heroes of the Great Patriotic War. Including also medal-bearing ones. In this way, all the conditions are ripe for taking these fallen soldiers under our special patronage.”

They dragged the pig into the back of the van. She lay motionless, only twitching her pink ears. Soon she would be brought to the slaughterhouse, where a greasy fog hung in the air. With a practised gesture, the slaughterer would hitch her up to the ceiling by a tendon. Then he would stab her in the heart with a long white knife. After one cut, he would quickly rip off her hide, with its growth of dirty wool. And then all the servicemen would get sick from the smell of blood.

“Who here is Pakhapil?”

Gustav started. He got up and remembered what had just happened a moment before. How Lance Corporal Petrov had raised his hand and said, choking with laughter, “There is already one such soldier in our subdivision. He has taken a fallen hero under his patronage and tends his grave. It is Instructor Pakhapil!”

“Who here is Pakhapil?” Mar asked mistrustfully. “You’re Pakhapil, are you?”

“Affirmative,” Gustav answered, blushing.

“In the name of the company commander, I extend to you our gratitude. Your initiative will be popularized. HQ is planning a ceremonial meeting of exemplary officers in battle training. You will come with me and tell them about your accomplishments. On the way there we will sketch out a plan.”

“Basically, I’m an Estonian,” Pakhapil began to say.

“That’s even better,” the lieutenant colonel said, cutting him off, “from the point of view of brotherly internationalism.”

It was crowded at headquarters. Servicemen stood in groups beneath work schedules, artistically arranged exhibits and visual propaganda materials. Boots and wet hair glistened. The room smelt of tobacco and tar.

They walked up the stairs. Mar put his arm around Pakhapil. On the landing, people surrounded them.

“Get to know each other,” the lieutenant colonel said in a civilian tone of voice. “These are our camp beacons. Sergeant Tkhapsayev, Sergeant Gafiatulin, Sergeant Chichiashvili, Junior Sergeant Shakhmametyev, Lance Corporal Laury, Privates Kemoklidze and Ovsepyan…”

“What the devil,” Gustav thought. “Nothing but kikes!”

But just then, the bell rang. Everyone angled towards the cigarette urns. They tossed in their cigarettes and went inside the spacious hall.

And Pakhapil found himself on the platform. Below him, faces shone white. To his left were members of the presidium, a carafe and a red calico curtain, beyond which he could see a double bass propped up offstage.

Pakhapil glanced at the people, touched his metal dog tag, then stepped forwards.

“I am, basically, an Estonian,” he began.

It was quiet in the hall. Under the windows, jingling, a tramcar went by.

In the evening, Gustav Pakhapil was being jolted around in the back seat of a car from HQ. He was recalling his speech, and how he had poured water from the carafe, how the glass had tinkled and a general in the presidium had smiled. And how they had pinned a memorial badge on him. (Three incomprehensible words, a figure and a globe.) And then Mar had spoken, pointing out Private Pakhapil’s valuable initiative. Something about enterprise, growth and perseverance… And something else concerning patriotic education, something on the order of continuity and indissoluble ties, with the aim of patronage of the graves of fallen heroes. Although Pakhapil is Estonian, because of the brotherly friendship between the two nations…

Before him loomed the driver’s back. Trees with meagre crowns flew past them, sun-bleached hills, the wretched taiga green.

When the car bumped over the railroad crossing, Gustav said to the driver, “I’ll get out here.” The driver, without looking around, waved goodbye and made a U-turn.

Gustav Pakhapil marched alongside the lustreless rails, then climbed up the embankment. The plank road took him to the local village store.

There his pockets filled up heavily.

He cut through an abandoned stadium and stepped onto the little bridge over the cemetery ditch.

It was raw and quiet. The leaves twittered in the wind.

Gustav unbuttoned his dress jacket. Sat down on the little knoll. Laid the ham on his knee. The bottle he set in the grass.

After which he lit a cigarette, leaning against the red plywood monument.

February 17, 1982. New York

Unless I’m wrong, we met in 1964 – that is to say, soon after my demobilization from prison-camp guard duty. By then I was a fully formed person, endowed with all sorts of oppressive complexes.

Since you didn’t know me before the army, you can hardly imagine how much I had changed, for I had grown up a normal young man. I had a set of loving parents. True, they had separated early. But the divorce hardly damaged their relationship with me. More than that, the divorce hardly damaged their relationship with each other, in the sense that even before the divorce their relationship wasn’t so great.

I didn’t develop an orphan complex. If anything, just the opposite, since all my classmates’ fathers had died at the front.

Alone with my mother, I didn’t stand out. Having a living father might have given the impression of bourgeois excess. Thus I killed two birds with one stone (I have no idea if this expression is appropriate here), which is to say, I exploited all the advantages of an adored son while escaping the reputation of being a trouble-free boy.

My father was a sort of hidden treasure. He paid alimony, but not very regularly. This is natural. After all, only declared savings yield good interest.

I had normal, ordinary abilities, a commonplace appearance that had a slight, phoney Neapolitan shading, and commonplace expectations. All signs pointed to a typical Soviet biography.

I belonged to an amiable national minority, was blessed with excellent health. From childhood on, I had had no morbid preoccupations.

I didn’t collect stamps, didn’t operate on earthworms and didn’t build model aeroplanes. What’s more, I didn’t even particularly like to read. I liked going to the movies and loafing.

Three years at university had little effect on my personality. It seemed like a continuation of high school, maybe on a higher level, plus young ladies, sports and a pitiful minimum of political rebelliousness.

I didn’t know that it was just then that I reached the height of well-being. From then on, everything went downhill. Unhappy love, debts, marriage… And as a culmination of all this – guard duty in a prison camp.

Love stories often end with prison. I just got my doors mixed up, and instead of ending up in the prisoners’ barracks, I landed in the army ones.

What I saw there shocked me completely.

There’s a classic storyline that goes like this: a poor boy peeks through a chink in a wall on a nobleman’s estate. He sees the nobleman’s little boy riding a pony. From that moment on, his life is given over to one end – to get rich. He can no longer return to his former life. His existence is poisoned by having been initiated into a mystery.

I, too, looked through a chink. Only what I saw was not riches, but the truth.

I was shaken by the depth and variety of life. I saw how low a man could fall, and how high he was able to rise.

For the first time, I understood what freedom is, and cruelty and violence. I saw freedom behind bars, cruelty as senseless as poetry, violence as common as dampness.

I saw a man who had been completely reduced to an animal state. I saw what he could be gladdened by. And it seemed to me that my eyes opened.

The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.

In that world, I saw men with a gruesome past, a repulsive present and a tragic future.

I was friends with a man who had once upon a time pickled his wife and children in a barrel.

The world was horrible. But life continued. What is more, life’s usual proportions stayed the same. The ratio of good and evil, grief and happiness, remained unchanged.

That life had in it whatever you could name. Diligence, dignity, love, depravity, patriotism, wealth, poverty. There were lumpenproletariat and rich profiteers, careerists and profligates, conformists and rebels, functionaries and dissidents.

But the content of these concepts was radically changed. The usual hierarchy of values had been demolished. What had once seemed important receded into the background. Trivialities blocked the horizon.

A new scale of values for “the good things of life” arose. On this scale, people especially valued food, warmth, the chance to avoid work. The commonplace became precious. The precious – unreal.

A postcard from home precipitated an emotional upheaval. A bumblebee flying into the prisoners’ barracks could cause a sensation. A squabble with a guard was experienced as an intellectual triumph.

In maximum security I knew a man, a long-term recidivist, who dreamt of becoming a bread-cutter. This job carried with it enormous advantages. Once he got it, a zek* could be likened to a Rothschild. The heels of bread were comparable to diamond deposits.

Fantastic efforts were required to land such a position. You had consciously to sell out, lie, climb over corpses. You had to bribe, blackmail and use extortion – fight to win at all costs.

This kind of effort in the outside world would have opened the way to the sinecures of the Party, economic and bureaucratic leadership. The highest levels of government power are reached by the same means.

Once he became a bread-cutter, the zek fell apart psychologically. The struggle for power had exhausted his inner strength. He was a gloomy, suspicious, lonely man. He reminded me of a Party boss, tortured by oppressive complexes.

One episode comes to mind. Some prisoners were digging a trench outside of Yosser. Among them was a burglar named Yenin.

It was getting on towards lunchtime. Yenin shovelled one last clod, reduced it to fine sand, then leant over the pile of dirt.

He was surrounded by zeks who had fallen silent.

He lifted a tiny thing out of the dirt and rubbed it on his sleeve for a long time. It was a shard of a cup, the size of a three-copeck piece. It still had on it the fragment of a design – a girl in a blue dress. The only thing left intact was her little shoulder and a blue sleeve.

You could see tears in the zek’s eyes. He pressed the glass to his lips and said quietly, “Seance!”

In prison-camp jargon, “seance” signified any experience of an erotic nature, and even beyond that, any instance of positive sensual emotion. A woman in the zone was “seance”. A pornographic photograph – “seance”. But a piece of fish in the slops was “seance”, too.

“Seance!” Yenin said.

And the zeks who surrounded him confirmed in unison, “Seance!”

The world in which I found myself was horrible. Nevertheless, I smiled no less frequently than I do now, and was not sad more often.

When there is time, I’ll tell you about all this in more detail.

How did you like my first pages? I’m enclosing the fragment that follows.

PS: In our Russian émigré colony you come across wonderful advertisements. There’s one posted across from my apartment house: “Seamster Wanted!” A little to the left, on a telephone booth: “Translation from the Russian and back. Ask for Arik.”

AT ONE TIME MISHCHUK had worked in an aerial photography corps. He was a good pilot. Once he somehow even managed to land a plane in a snowdrift – with an unhinged valve in his cylinder and his left engine indisputably on fire.

So he should have known better than to start profiteering in fish, which he flew down from the far north, from Afrikanda. Mishchuk bartered for it from the Samoyed* natives there, and then would let a waiter friend of his have it for six roubles a kilo.

Mishchuk was lucky for a long time because he wasn’t greedy. Once, a radio operator from the control tower signalled to him in flight: “Ice storm ahead, do you read me, ice storm ahead…”

“Understood, understood,” Mishchuk answered. At which point he dumped nine sacks of pink kumzha* over the Yenisei River without a qualm.

But when Mishchuk stole a roll of parachute silk, they nabbed him. The friendly radio operator broadcast to his friends, to Afrikanda: “The runt got the burn, looks like three years…”

Mishchuk was sent to Corrective Labour Colony No. 5. He knew that with an effort he could get his sentence cut in half. Mishchuk became a model worker, an activist, a reader of the newspaper Towards an Early Release. And, most important, he signed up for the Section of Internal Structures, the SIS. Now he walked between barracks wearing a red armband.

“SIS,” the prisoners hissed. “Sell-out Ingrate Sonofabitch.”

Mishchuk didn’t care. A pickpocket friend taught him how to play the mandolin. And they gave him a prison-camp nickname – Boob.

“Some name you’ve got,” a zek named Leibovich said to him. “You ought to call yourself King. Or Bonaparte.”

At that point, a well-read “doll-maker” named Adam joined in. “Just what do you think a bonaparte is? Some kind of title?”

“Kind of,” Leibovich agreed amicably. “Like a prince.”

“It’s easy to say, bonaparte,” Mishchuk protested. “But what if I don’t look like one?”

A hundred metres from the camp was a wasteland. Chickens wandered among the daisies, broken glass and muck. A brigade on sanitation duty had been led out there to dig a trench.

Early in the morning, the sun appeared from behind the barracks, just like Guard Chekin. It moved along the sky, touching the treetops and sawmill chimneys. The air smelt of rubber and warmed grass.

Each morning, prisoners pounded the dry ground. Then they went to have a smoke. They smoked and chatted, sitting under a shade. Adam, the doll-maker, told the story of his first conviction.

His stories had something of the quality of this wasteland. Maybe it was the smell of dusty grass, or the crunch of broken glass underfoot. Or maybe it was the muttering of the chickens, or the monotony of the daisies – the dry field of a fruitless life.

“And what do you suppose the prosecutor does then?” Adam said.

“The prosecutor then makes conclusions,” Leibovich answered.

The guards napped by the fence. And this is how it was every day.

But one day a helicopter appeared. It looked like a dragonfly. It was flying in the direction of the airport.

“A turboprop Mi-6,” Boob observed, standing up. “He-ey,” he yelled lazily. Then crossed his arms over his head. Then stretched them out as if they were wings. Then crouched down. And finally repeated all this over and over again.

“Oh-h-h…” Boob shouted.

And that was when the miracle occurred. It was acknowledged by everyone. Everyone including Chaly the pickpocket, Murashka, who came from an old line of “jumpers”, Leibovich, the embezzler of government property, Adam the doll-maker, and even the black-marketeer Beluga. And they were hard people to surprise.

The helicopter hovered and then began to descend.

“Incredible,” Adam was the first to confirm.

“May I live so long!” Leibovich said.

“I’d give a tooth,” Chaly swore.

“Seance,” Murashka said.

“Phenomenal,” Beluga said, and then, in English, “It’s wonderful!”

“Not supposed to be happening,” said Corporal Dzavashvili, the guard, getting nervous.

“He’s weathervaning the propeller!” Mishchuk bawled at the top of his lungs. “He’s slowing the rotations! Oh f-f-f—”

The chickens ran to all sides. The daisies bent down to the ground. The helicopter gave a little jump and then stopped. The cabin door opened, and down the gangplank ladder came Marconi. This was Dima Marconi, a self-assured and brawny fellow, philosopher, wit and man of obscure origins. Mishchuk rushed at him.

“You’re too scrawny!” Marconi said.

Then for an hour they pretended to slug each other.

“And how’s Vadya doing?” Mishchuk asked. “How’s Zhora?”

“Vadya’s hitting the bottle. Zhora’s training to fly passenger Tupolevs. He’s sick of layovers in the sticks.”

“Well, and you, old dog?”

“I got married,” Marconi said in a tragic tone, and hung his head.

“Do I know her?”

“No. I hardly know her myself. You’re not missing much.”

“Hey, do you remember that flight of woodcock over Lake Ladoga?”

“Of course I remember. And do you remember that outdoor party at Sozva when I sank the ship’s rifle?”

“Are we going to get juiced when I get back? In one year, five months and sixteen days?”

“Oh and how! It’ll be great! It’ll be greater than Goethe’s Faust.”

“I’ll go to Pokryshev himself, I’ll get down on my knees before him…”

“I’ll drop in on Pokryshev, don’t worry. You’ll fly again. But first you’ll work for a while as a mechanic.”

“Naturally,” Mishchuk agreed. He was silent for a moment, then added, “I should have known better than to pinch that silk.”

“There are different opinions on that subject,” Marconi said tactfully.

“What do I care?” Corporal Dzavashvili said. “Regulations make no provisions—”

“Right,” Marconi said. “I know Caucasian hospitality when I see it. Shall I leave money?”

“Having money is not allowed,” Mishchuk said.

“Right,” Marconi said. “Looks like you’ve already achieved true Communism. In that case, take my scarf, watch and lighter.”

“Merci,” said the former pilot.

“Should I leave my shoes? I have a reserve pair on board.”

“Forbidden,” Mishchuk said. “We have to wear standard issue.”

“So do we,” Marconi said. “Right. Well, I’ve got to be going.” He turned to Dzavashvili. “Take three roubles, Corporal. To each according to his abilities.”*

“Forbidden,” the escort guard said. “We’re on an allowance.”

“Goodbye.” Marconi put out his hand to him. And then climbed up the gangway.

Mishchuk smiled. “We’ll fly again,” he yelled. “We’ll pull a corkscrew out of some bottles yet. We’ll spit on hats from up there yet!”

“For real,” Murashka said.

“I’d give a tooth,” Chaly repeated.

“The heavy shackles will fall!” Beluga shouted.

“Life continues, even when in essence it doesn’t exist,” Adam observed philosophically.

“You may laugh at this,” Leibovich said shyly, “but I’ll say it anyway. It seems to me that not everything is lost yet.”

The helicopter rose above the ground. Its shadow became more and more transparent. And we watched it go until it disappeared behind the barracks.

Mishchuk was released after three years, having served the full term. By that time, Pokryshev had died. The newspapers wrote about his death. Mishchuk was not permitted to work in an airport. His conviction prevented it.

He worked as a mechanic at the Science Research Institute, married, and forgot prison slang. Played the mandolin, drank, grew old, and rarely thought about the future.

And Dima Marconi crashed over Uglegorsk. Among the fragments of his plane they found a forty-pound canister of Beluga caviar.

February 23, 1982. New York

Dear I.M.,

Thank you for your letter of the 18th. I’m glad that you seem well disposed towards my notes. I’ve prepared a few more pages here. Write and tell me your impressions.

To answer your questions:

A “doll-maker” is camp slang for a con man. A “doll” is a swindle of some kind.

A “jumper” means a burglar. A “jump” is a burglary. Well, it seems that’s it. Last time I stopped at the horrors of camp life. What happens around us is not important. What’s important is how we experience ourselves in the face of it. In so far as any of us really are what we sense ourselves to be.

I felt better than could have been expected. I began to have a divided personality. Life was transformed into literary material.

I remember very well how this happened. My consciousness emerged from its habitual cover. I began to think of myself in the third person.

When I was beaten up near the Ropcha sawmill, my consciousness functioned almost imperturbably: “A man is being struck by boots. He shields his face and stomach. He is passive and tries not to arouse the mob’s savagery… But what revolting faces! You can see the lead fillings in that Tartar’s mouth.”

Awful things happened around me. People reverted to an animal state. We lost our human aspect – being hungry, humiliated, tortured by fear.

My physical constitution became weak. But my consciousness remained undisturbed. This was evidently a defence mechanism. Otherwise I would have died of fright.

When a camp thief was strangled before my eyes outside of Ropcha, my consciousness did not fail to record every detail.

Of course, there is a large measure of immorality in all this. The same goes for any activity that has a defence mechanism at its base.

When I was beginning to freeze, my consciousness registered the fact. What’s more, in artistic form: “Birds froze in flight…”

However much I suffered, however much I cursed that life, my consciousness functioned without fail.

If I faced a cruel ordeal, my consciousness quietly rejoiced. New material would now be at its disposal.

Flesh and spirit existed apart. The more dispirited the flesh, the more insolently the spirit romped.

Even when I suffered physically, I felt fine. Hunger, pain, anguish – everything became material for my tireless consciousness.

In fact, I was already writing. My writing became a complement to life. A complement without which life would have been completely obscene.

What was left to do was to transfer all this to paper. I tried to find the words.

THE SIXTH CAMP SUBDIVISION was located far from the railway line, so getting to that cheerless place was not easy. You had to wait for a long time to hitch a ride from a passing log-carrier, then jolt over potholes while sitting inside an iron cabin, then walk for two hours on a narrow path that was always disappearing into the bushes. In short, you had to proceed as if there were a pleasant surprise awaiting you just over the horizon. All this, in order finally to reach the prison gates, to see the grey plank gangway, the fence, the plywood guard booths and the orderly’s gloomy mug.

In this labour colony, Alikhanov was a guard in the penal isolator, where zeks who had committed offences were kept.

These were peculiar people. In order to land in the penal isolator of a maximum-security camp, you had to commit some incredibly evil deed. Strange as it may seem, many managed to do so. What operated here was some principle contrary to natural selection. Conflicts arose between the horrible and the even more monstrous. The ones who landed in the isolator were considered thugs even among the most hardened criminals.

Alikhanov’s job was a truly wretched one. Nevertheless, Boris Alikhanov carried out his duties conscientiously. The fact that he stayed alive can be taken as a qualitative indicator.

One could not say that he was brave or cool-headed. But he did have a talent for switching off in moments of danger. Obviously, that was what saved him.

As a result, he was regarded as cool-headed and brave. But a stranger. He was a stranger to everyone: zeks, soldiers, officers and civilian workers. Even the guard dogs considered him a stranger.

A smile both absent-minded and anxious played constantly over his face. An intellectual can always be recognized by that smile, even in the taiga.

This was the expression he maintained in all circumstances: when the cold made fences split and sparrows freeze in flight; when the vodka, on the eve of a scheduled demobilization, overflowed from the soldiers’ borscht tub; and even when prisoners broke his rib by the sawmill.

Alikhanov had been born into an intellectual family which looked down upon poorly dressed people. Now he dealt with prisoners in striped jackets, with soldiers who used poisonous hair tonic that smelt like shoe polish, and with civilian workers at the camp who gambled away their civilian rags before they reached Kotlas, the regional centre.

Alikhanov was a good guard, and that, at any rate, was better than being a bad guard. The only ones worse than bad guards were the zeks in the penal isolator.

The dark army barracks stood a hundred metres away from the isolator. An over-laundered pale-pink flag hung above the attic window. Behind the barracks, in the kennel, German shepherds could always be heard, their barking deep and resonant. The German shepherds were trained by Volikov and Pakhapil. For months on end they taught the dogs to hate people wearing striped jackets. However, the hungry dogs also snarled at soldiers in green padded vests, and at re-enlistees in officers’ overcoats, and at the officers themselves. And even at Volikov and Pakhapil. To walk between the mesh cages of the kennel was not without its dangers.

At night Alikhanov monitored the isolator, and then he was off for the next twenty-four hours. He could smoke, sitting on the parallel bars of the outdoor gym, play dominoes beneath the wheezing of the loudspeaker or, as a last resort, familiarize himself with the company library, where writings of Ukrainian authors predominated.

In the army barracks he was respected, even if considered a stranger, and perhaps that was precisely why he was respected. Maybe it bespoke the old Russian deference to foreigners. Deference with no special liking.

In order to command authority in the army barracks, it was enough to ignore the camp administration. It was easy for Alikhanov to ignore the company command, because he was serving as a guard. He had nothing to lose.

One time Captain Prishchepa summoned Alikhanov. This happened at the end of December.

The captain held out cigarettes to him to indicate that the conversation was unofficial. He said, “The New Year is approaching. Unfortunately, this is unavoidable. It means there will be a drinking binge in the barracks. And a binge is a wreck waiting to happen. If you could make an effort, bring your influence to bear, as they say… Have a little chat with Balodis, Volikov… and of course with Petrov. Your thesis should be: drink, but within limits. Not drinking at all – that would be overkill. That would be an anti-Marxist utopia, as they say. But know your limits. The zone is right next door, personal weapons, you get what I mean.”

On the very same day, near the latrines, Boris spotted Lance Corporal Petrov, who was called Fidel by the other soldiers. The lance corporal had got this nickname a year earlier, during one of Lieutenant Khuriyev’s political lessons. Khuriyev had asked for someone to name the members of the Politburo, and Petrov had immediately raised his hand and said confidently, “Fidel Castro.”

Alikhanov went over to talk with him, skilfully imitating Prishchepa’s Ukrainian accent: “Soon it will be the New Year. To eliminate or even to postpone this bourgeois phenomenon is beyond the Party’s power. So it means a drinking binge will take place. And that is a wreck waiting to happen. All in all… drink, Fidel, but know your limits.”

“I know my limits,” Fidel said, pulling up his pants. “A litre to stick your snout in, and that’s it! I’ll live it up before the line goes dead. But your Prishchepa is a douche and a halfwit. He thinks – a holiday, so we’re going to get plastered. But we, goddamit, have our own calendar. If we got dough – we booze it up. But without dough, what kind of a holiday is it? Though in general, it’s time to put on the brakes. We haven’t dried out since Constitution Day. Wouldn’t want to give up the ghost by accident. Hurry up, I’ll wait for you. What lousy weather! The shit freezes, you have to break it off with your hand.”

Alikhanov headed for the rickety stall. The snow near it was covered with golden monograms. Among them, the calligraphic flourish of Potap Yakimovich from Belorussia stood out especially.

A minute later, they were walking side by side down the icy footpath.

“When my demob finally comes,” said Fidel dreamily, “I’ll go back to my native Zaporozhe. Go to a normal human toilet. Spread a newspaper with a crossword puzzle at my feet. Open a half bottle. And I’ll be as merry as the King of Siam…”

The New Year arrived. In the morning, the soldiers sawed firewood by the barracks. Just the day before, the snow had shone underfoot. Now it was covered with yellow sawdust.

Around three o’clock, the guard shift returned from duty. The shift commander, Meleshko, was drunk. His hat sat backwards on his head.

“About-face!” Sergeant Major Yevchenko, also tipsy, yelled to him. “About-face! Sergeant Meleshko – abou-u-ut-face! Headgear, in place!”

The weapons room was closed. The soldier guarding it had locked it and fallen asleep. Guards wandered around the yard with their guns.

In the kitchen they were already drinking vodka. They scooped it up in aluminium mugs straight from the borscht tub. Lyonka Matytsyn started singing the old army-guard hymn:

“Do the recruits want war?

The sergeant has the answer ready,

He who’s drunk up all he could

From his shoulder belt to his boots.

The answer’s ready from the soldiers

Who lie about dead drunk,

And you yourself should understand

If the recruits want war…”

Political Instructor Khuriyev was the officer on duty. As a precaution, he had brought a pistol from home. The right pocket of his jodhpurs bulged visibly.

Tipsy soldiers in unbuttoned fatigue shirts wandered aimlessly through the corridor. At dark, mute energy was building in the army barracks.

Political Instructor Khuriyev gave an order for everyone to assemble in the Lenin Room. Ordered everyone to line up by the wall. However, the drunken guards could not stand. Then he permitted them to sit on the floor. A few immediately lay down.

“It is still six hours till the New Year,” the PI observed, “but you’re already drunk as swine.”

“Life, Comrade Lieutenant, races ahead of the ideal,” Fidel said.

The political instructor had a proud, handsome face and broad shoulders. In the army barracks he wasn’t much liked.

“Comrades,” Khuriyev said, “a great honour has befallen us. In these days, we guard the peace of Soviet citizens. For example, you there, Lopatin—”

“And why Lopatin? Why Lopatin? Always Lopatin, Lopatin. All right, so I’m Lopatin,” Andrei Lopatin said in a bass voice.

“What is the reason that you, Lopatin, stand at your post? So that the kolkhoz* workers in your native village, Bezhany, may sleep peacefully.”

“Political work ought to be concrete.” This had been explained to Khuriyev during courses in Syktyvkar.

“Did you understand, Lopatin?”

Lopatin thought a moment and said loudly, “I’d like to burn down that native village and the kolkhoz with it.”

Alikhanov did not join in the drinking. He went to the soldiers’ quarters, crowded with bunks. Then he pulled off his felt snow boots and climbed onto a top bunk.

In the neighbouring bunk, wrapped in a blanket, lay Fidel. Suddenly he sat up in bed and started talking. “Know what I was just doing? Praying to God. I thought up the prayer myself. Wanna hear?”

“Well, go on.”

Fidel lifted his eyes and began, “Dear Lord! You see this whorehouse, I hope? You understand what guard duty means, I hope? If so, let it be that I get transferred to aviation. Or else, if worse comes to worst, to a construction battalion. And also, see to it that I don’t drink myself to death. For as it is, the trusties have vats of moonshine, and everything goes against the Moral Codex for Building Communism.

“Dear Lord! What do You hate me for? Even though I’m a no-good shit, I’m clean before the law. After all, I’ve never stolen anything. I just drink. And even that not every day.

“Dear Lord! Do You have a conscience, or not? If You’re not a phoney, let it be that Captain Prishchepa kicks the bucket as soon as possible. But the main thing, get rid of this melancholy… What do you think, is there a God?”

“Unlikely,” Alikhanov said.

“And I think that while everything is okay, maybe He really doesn’t exist. But when your back’s against the wall, maybe He does exist. So maybe it’s better to establish contact with Him ahead of time.”

Fidel leant over to Alikhanov and said softly, “I would like to get into paradise. Since Constitution Day I’ve set that goal for myself.”

“You’ll get in,” Alikhanov assured him. “You don’t have much competition in the guard section.”

“That’s just what I think,” Fidel agreed. “Our crowd here is hard to beat. Thieves and thugs. No paradise for them. They couldn’t get into a disciplinary battalion. So maybe with them for a backdrop I could just squeeze in, as a non-Party member.”

Towards ten o’clock, the whole company was completely drunk. The next guard shift was chosen from among those who could still walk. Sergeant Major Yevchenko assured them that the cold would sober them.

Security men wandered through the barracks, dragging machine guns and guitars behind them.

Two soldiers had already been tied up with telephone wire. They were carried to the drying room and set down on a pile of sheepskin jackets.

The guards in the Lenin Room were playing a game called “The tiger’s coming”. Everyone sat down at the table. Drank down a glass of vodka. Then Lance Corporal Kunin would say, “The tiger’s coming!”

The players slid under the table.

“As you were!” Kunin commanded.

Then the players would crawl out from under the table. Again drink vodka. After which Lance Corporal Kunin said, “The tiger’s coming!” And everyone again crawled under the table.

“As you were!” Kunin commanded.

This time, someone stayed under the table. Then a second and a third. Then Kunin himself keeled over. He could no longer say, “The tiger’s coming!” He dozed, resting his head on the red calico tablecloth.

Around twelve, Instructor Volikov ran in, shouting, “Guard section, to your weapons!”

Soldiers gathered around him.

“There’s a drunken female somewhere in the kennels,” the instructor explained. “Maybe she wandered in from the deportee settlement.”

The settlement of Chir was located a few kilometres away from the Sixth Camp Subdivision. Deported “social parasites” lived there, mainly prostitutes and black-marketeers. In exile they continued not to work. Many of them were convinced they were political prisoners.

The boys crowded around the instructor.

“Dzavashvili has a condom,” Matytsyn said. “I saw.”

“One?” Fidel asked.

“Oh look, a scholar!” Volikov said, getting angry. “This one needs his own private condom! You’ll wait your turn.”

“A lowly condom won’t help,” Matytsyn assured them. “I know these floozies. They’ve got as many gonococci down there as dogs. Now, if it were made of stainless steel…”

Alikhanov lay there thinking how vile were the faces of his fellow servicemen. “God, where have I landed?” he thought.

“Brothers, follow me!” Volikov yelled.

“Are you men or animals?” Alikhanov said. He had jumped down from his bunk. “You’re rushing out in one platoon to some dirty broad?”

“We don’t lap up politics!” Fidel said, stopping him. He had managed to change into a khaki fatigue shirt.

“I thought you wanted to get into Paradise.”

“Hell is all right with me too,” Fidel said.

Alikhanov stood in the doorway. “We stand guard over every sort of carrion. And you’re all worse than the zeks! What, it’s not true?”

“Don’t start,” said Fidel, “Why all the noise? Just remember, people call me courageous.”

“Quit jabbering,” said the towering Gerasimchuk. And he walked out, bumping against Alikhanov with his shoulder. The remaining soldiers followed him.

Alikhanov cursed, crawled under the blanket, and opened a book by Miroshnichenko called Clouds over Bryansk.

Balodis the Latvian was sitting on an overturned cooking pot taking off his shoes. He monotonously tugged at his leg. And each time he did this, he hit his head on the corner of the iron bed.

Balodis served as cook. His chief concern was the larder. Fat, jam and flour were stored in it. Balodis carried the keys on him all day, and when he went to sleep he tied them with a string to his genitals. This did not help. The night shift had twice managed to untie the keys and raid the larder. Even the flour had been eaten up.

“But I, I did not go,” Balodis said proudly.

“Why not?” Alikhanov slammed the book shut.

“I have a sweetheart near Riga. You don’t believe me? Her name is Anelle. She’s crazy about me something awful.”

“And you?”

“And I respect her.”

“What do you respect her for?” Alikhanov asked.

“What do you mean?”

“What attracts you to her? I mean, what made you fall in love with her specifically, this Anelle?”

Balodis thought awhile and said, “I could hardly love every broad near Riga…”

Reading was out of the question for Alikhanov. He didn’t manage to fall asleep. He thought about the soldiers who had gone to the kennel, imagined the vile details of their bacchanalia, and couldn’t fall asleep.

Twelve o’clock struck, people were already asleep in the barracks. This was how the New Year began.

Alikhanov got up and switched off the loudspeaker.

The soldiers returned one by one. Alikhanov was sure they would start sharing their impressions, but they each went silently to bed.

Alikhanov’s eyes got accustomed to the dark. The surrounding world was familiar and disgusting. The dark, hanging blankets. The rows of boots wound with foot cloths. Slogans and posters on the walls.

Suddenly Alikhanov understood that he was thinking about the exiled woman. More exactly, that he was trying not to think about that woman.

Without asking himself questions, Boris got dressed. He pulled on some pants and a fatigue shirt. Grabbed a sheepskin jacket from the drying room. Then, lighting a cigarette by the sentry, he went out onto the porch.

The night had come down heavily, right down to the ground. In the cold gloom, one could barely make out the road and the outlines of the forest that narrowed to the horizon.

Alikhanov crossed the snowy parade ground. Beyond it, the kennel compound began. The hoarse barking of dogs on chains came from behind the fence.

Boris cut across an abandoned railroad branch line and headed for the commissary. The store was closed, but the saleswoman, Tonechka, lived next door with her husband, an electrician. There was also a daughter, who came to visit only during holidays.

Alikhanov walked towards the light of a window half-covered by snowdrifts.

Then he knocked, and the door opened. From the drunken haze of the narrow room, the sounds of an old-fashioned tango could be heard. Squinting from the light, Alikhanov walked in. In the corner was a Christmas tree, leaning to one side and decorated with tangerines and food labels.

“Drink!” said the electrician.

He pushed a wine glass and a plate of wobbling aspic across the table to him.

“Drink, marauder! Eat, you son of a bitch!”

The electrician then put his head down on the oilcloth, obviously completely exhausted.

“Much obliged,” Alikhanov said.

Five minutes later, Tonechka handed him a bottle of wine wrapped in a poster from the local social club.

He left. The door crashed behind his back. Instantly, his long, awkward shadow disappeared from the fence. And again darkness fell under his feet.

He put the bottle in his pocket. The poster he crumpled up and threw away. He could hear it turning over and opening.

When Boris got back to the wire fences of the kennel, the dogs again began snarling.

The kennel grounds housed a lot of people. The dog-trainers lived in the first room, which was hung with diagrams, work rosters, lesson plans, a shortwave radio band decorated with a sketch of the Kremlin tower. Beside these, photographs of film stars from Soviet Screen had been tacked up. The film stars smiled, their lips slightly parted.

Boris stopped on the threshold of the second room. There, on a pile of dog-trainers’ uniforms, lay a woman. Her violet dress was entirely buttoned up. For all that, the dress had been yanked up to her ribs, while her stockings had fallen around her knees. Her hair, recently bleached with peroxide, was dark at the roots. Alikhanov came closer, bent down.

“Miss,” he said.

A bottle of Pinot Gris stuck out of his pocket.

“Ugh, just you go away,” the woman said, tossing uneasily in a half-sleep.

“Right away, right away, everything will be all right,” Alikhanov whispered, “everything will be okay.”

Boris covered the table lamp with a sheet of official instructions. He remembered that both instructors were away. One was spending the night in the barracks. The second had gone on skis to the railway crossing to visit a telephone-operator girl he knew.

With trembling hands, he pulled out the red stopper and started to drink right from the bottle. Then turned suddenly – the wine was spilling down the front of his shirt. The woman was lying with her eyes open. Her face expressed extraordinary concentration. For a few seconds both were silent.

“What’s that?” the woman asked. There were coquettish notes in her voice, garbled by drunken drowsiness.

“Pinot Gris,” Alikhanov said.

“Come again?” the woman said, startled.

“Pinot Gris, rosé, strong,” he answered conscientiously, reading the label.

“One of them here said, ‘I’ll bring some grub…’”

“I don’t have anything with me,” Alikhanov said, flustered. “But I’ll find something. What may I call you?”

“Whatever. My mama called me Lyalya.”

The woman pulled down her dress. “My stockings are always getting unDONE. I DO them up and they keep getting unDONE… Hey, what’s the matter with you?”

Alikhanov had taken a step forward, bent down, and shuddered from the smell of wet rags, vodka and hair tonic.

“Everything’s fine,” he said.

An enormous amber brooch scratched his face.

“Oh, you swine!” was the last thing he heard.

He sat in the office without turning on the lamp. Then he straightened up, his arms hanging limp. The buttons of his shirt cuffs clicked.

“Lord, where have I landed?” Alikhanov murmured. “Where have I landed? And how will it all end?”

Indistinct, fleeting memories came to him.

…A square in winter, tall rectangular buildings. A few schoolboys surround Vova Mashbits, the class telltale. Vova’s expression is frightened, he wears a foolish hat, woollen drawers… Koka Dementiyev tears a grey sack out of his hand. Shakes a pair of galoshes out onto the snow. After which, faint with laughter, he urinates into the sack. The schoolboys grab Vova, hold him by the shoulders, shove his head into the darkened sack. The boy stops trying to break loose. It’s not actually painful…

The schoolboys roar with laughter. Among the others is Borya Alikhanov, Pioneer* section leader and straight-A student.

The galoshes lie there on the snow, black and shiny. But now he also sees the multicoloured tents of a sports camp on the outskirts of Koktebel. Blue jeans hanging out to dry on a clothesline. A few couples dancing in the twilight. A small and shiny transistor radio standing on the sand.

Boris draws Galya Vodyanitskaya close. The girl is wearing a wet bathing suit. Her skin is hot and a little rough from sunburn. Galya’s husband, a graduate student, sits on the edge of the volleyball court, in the judging stand. In his hand, a rolled-up newspaper shows white.

Galya is a university student in the Indonesian Department. She speaks words in a whisper that Alikhanov doesn’t understand. He repeats after her, also in a whisper, “Kerom dash akhnan… kerom lanav…”

Galya presses even closer.

“Can you not ask any questions?” Alikhanov says. “Give me your hand!”

They almost run downhill, then disappear into the bushes. Above them, the formless silhouette of Vodyanitsky, the graduate student. Then his perplexed cry: “Hey – hey?”

Alikhanov’s memories became less and less distinct. Finally, some spots fluttered past him, vivid points in time became clear: silver coins stolen from his father… trampled glasses after a fight on the corner of Liteyny Prospect and Kirochnaya… And a brooch, the blindingly yellow brooch in its crude, anodized setting.

Then Alikhanov once again saw the volleyball court, white against the grass. Now, though, he was not only himself, but the woman in the wet bathing suit, or any outsider, even the gloomy graduate student with the newspaper in his hand.

Something unclear was happening to Alikhanov. He was no longer able to discern reality. Everything familiar and essential, what seemed to be the work of his hands, now was remote, obscure and insignificant. The world dwindled to the dimensions of a television screen in someone else’s apartment.

Alikhanov ceased to feel either indignation or gladness. He felt convinced that the change was in the world and not within him.

His sense of alarm passed. Without thinking, he pulled open the desk drawer. He found in it bread crusts, a roll of insulating tape, a packet of vanilla biscuits, then a crumpled epaulette with a hole where an emblem used to be, two broken Christmas-tree toys, a flimsy notebook with a paper cover and half its pages torn out. Finally, a pencil.

And here Alikhanov suddenly smelt the sea, wind and fish, heard the pre-war tango and the scratchy sounds of Indonesian interjections, made out the geometrical outlines of tents in the dark, remembered the feel of hot skin pulled by wet, taut straps.

Alikhanov lit a cigarette, held it in his outstretched hand. Then in a large script he wrote on a page in the notebook: “In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love. Warm green twilights wander under branches. They transform each word into a mysterious, vague sign.”

Outside the window, a blizzard had begun. The white flakes hit the glass at a slant, coming out of the darkness.

“In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love,” he whispered.

A lance corporal, still half asleep, shuffled down the corridor, brushing against the wallpaper with a rustle.

“In the summer, it is so easy to think you’re in love.” Alikhanov felt quiet pleasure. He lovingly changed a word and wrote: “In the summer it is not easy to think you’re in love.”

Life had become malleable. It could be changed with the movement of a pencil with cold, hard facets and a relief inscription “Orion”.

“In the summer it is not easy to think you’re in love,” Alikhanov repeated again and again.

At ten o’clock in the morning, he was awakened by the guard he was to relieve, who came in red-nosed and angry from the cold.

“I’ve been running around the zone all night like an errand boy,” he said. “A real sideshow. Boozing, a knife fight, the isolator stuffed with punks…”

Alikhanov got out a cigarette and smoothed back his hair. He would spend the whole day in the isolator. Behind the wall, the recidivist Anagi would walk from corner to corner, jangling his handcuffs.

“The tactical situation is tense,” the one coming off shift said, getting undressed. “My advice to you is, take Harun. He’s on the third chain post. It’s always safer when there’s a dog there beside you.”

“Why would I take him?” Alikhanov asked.

“What do you mean, why? Maybe you’re not frightened of Anagi?”

“Of course I am,” Alikhanov said, “very frightened. But Harun is worse.”

He put on a padded vest and went to the mess hall. The cook, Balodis, dished him out a plate of bluish oatmeal. On its edge was a yellow spot of melting butter.

The guard looked around. Faded wallpaper, linoleum, wet tables…

He picked up an aluminium spoon with a twisted stem, sat down facing a window and began to eat without enthusiasm. Just then he remembered the previous night and thought about what lay ahead of him, and a peaceful, solemn smile transformed his face.

The world had become alive and safe as in a painting. It looked back at him closely without anger or reproach.

And, it seemed, the world expected something from him.

March 11, 1982. New York

Dear I.M.,

Please excuse the delay in getting you the next chapter. Lack of time has become the bane of my life. I write only early in the morning, from six to eight. After that, there’s work at the newspaper, and at Radio Liberty. It takes so much just to keep up with correspondence. Then there’s the baby, and so on.

My only diversion is cigarettes. I’ve learnt how to smoke in the shower.

But let’s get back to the manuscript. I was telling you how my unlucky career as a writer began.

In relation to this, I just want to stop here and say something about the nature of literary activity. (I can imagine your ironic smile. Do you remember you once said, “Sergei is not interested in thought”? It seems that rumours of my intellectual impotence persist in a suspiciously stubborn way. Nevertheless, a few words.)

As is well known, the world is imperfect. The foundations of society rest on self-interest, fear and venality. The conflict between dream and reality has persisted through the millennia. Instead of the harmony desired on earth, chaos and disorder reign.

What is more, we discover something similar within ourselves. We thirst for perfection, while vulgarity triumphs throughout.

How does the activist, the revolutionary, choose to act in this situation? A revolutionary makes attempts to establish world harmony. He starts to transform life, sometimes achieving curious results, similar to Michurin’s. Let’s suppose he breeds a carrot which is absolutely indistinguishable from a potato. Basically, he tries to create a new human species. It’s well known how all of this ends.

What does the moralist try to do in this situation? He also tries to achieve harmony, but not in life, just in his own soul, by way of self-perfection. In this case, it’s very important not to confuse harmony with indifference.

The artist takes a different path. He creates an artificial life and uses it to supplement vulgar reality. He creates an artificial world in which nobility, honesty and compassion appear to be the norm.

The results of this kind of activity are known a priori to be tragic. The more fruitful the efforts of the artist, the more deeply tangible the rift between dream and reality will be. Everyone knows that women who overuse cosmetics begin looking old earlier.

I understand that all my arguments are trivial. It was no accident that Vail and Genis* dubbed me “the troubadour of honed banality”. I am not offended. For truisms are in unusually short supply these days.

My conscious life was a road to the summits of banality. At the price of enormous sacrifices, I came to understand what people had tried to instil in me since childhood. But by now these truisms have become part of my personal experience.

A thousand times I heard: “The main thing in marriage is to share spiritual interests.”

A thousand times I answered: “Depravity is the path to virtue.”

I needed twenty years in order to master the banality instilled in me, in order to make the step from paradox to truism.

I came to understand a great deal in prison camp. I understood that greatness of spirit does not necessarily accompany physical power. It is usually just the opposite. Spiritual strength is most often contained in a frail, awkward covering, while physical prowess often comes with inner impotence.

The ancients used to say, “Sound of body, sound of mind.” In my opinion, this isn’t so. It seems to me that it is precisely the physically healthy who are most often spiritually blind, most often in the healthy body that moral apathy reigns.

While doing guard service, I knew a man who had not been frightened when he came face to face with a bear. Nevertheless, all a superior had to do was shout at him to disturb his equilibrium.

I myself was a very healthy person, and don’t I know about spiritual weakness!

The second truth I mastered is even more banal. I came to the conclusion that it is stupid to divide people into good and evil. And also into Communists and non-Party members, into villains and righteous, and even into men and women.

A person changes unrecognizably under the pressure of his environment, and in a prison camp especially so.

People in prominent leadership positions dissolve without a trace among the camp riff-raff. Lecturers from the Knowledge Society* fill the ranks of stoolies. Physical education instructors become incorrigible drug addicts. Embezzlers of government property write poetry. Heavyweight boxers become transformed into camp “Marys” and walk around wearing lipstick.

In critical conditions, people change. They change for the good and for the bad. From better to worse, and the other way round.

Since the time of Aristotle, the human brain has not changed. What is more, human consciousness has not changed.

And this means there is no progress. There is only movement, unsteady at its foundation. All this brings to mind the idea of the transmigration of souls, except that I would say transmigration not in time but space, the space of changing conditions of life.

As the song goes, “Once Yakir was a hero, then he became an enemy of the people…”*

Furthermore, a prison camp is a pretty accurate representation of a country in miniature, the Soviet state in particular. Within a camp, you have a dictatorship of the proletariat (which is to say, the camp administration), the people (prisoners), the police (guards). Within it, you can find the Party apparatus, culture, industry in operation. It has everything that makes up a state.

For a long time now, Soviet power has not been a form of government open to change. Soviet power is the way of life of our people.

The very same thing happens in camp. In this sense, the camp-guard system is a typical Soviet institution.

As you can see, this has grown into a whole treatise. Maybe I’ve been writing all this for nothing? Perhaps, if it’s not contained in the stories, then the rest is useless?

I’m sending you the part that comes next. If you have a moment, let me know what you think.

Everything here is the same with us. In the supermarket, my mother reverts to speaking Georgian out of helplessness. My daughter despises me for not being able to drive a car.

Morgulis* just called, wanted me to tell him what Lermontov’s initials were.

Lena sends her regards.

OUR COMPANY WAS STATIONED between two large cemeteries. One was Russian, the other Jewish. The origin of the Jewish cemetery was a riddle, inasmuch as there were no living Jews in the Komi Republic.

Sometimes during the day the sounds of a funeral march came from the Jewish cemetery. Sometimes poorly dressed people with children walked towards the gates. But most often the place was deserted and damp.

The cemetery served as a subject for jokes and gave rise to gloomy associations. The soldiers preferred drinking on the Russian graves.

I begin with the cemetery because I am telling a love story.

Nurse Raisa was the only girl in our army compound. She was attractive to many, as any girl in her situation would be. Of the hundred men in our compound, ninety-six languished with lust. The rest were in the hospital in Koyna.

Despite the best intentions, it was hard to call Raisa pretty. She had thick ankles, tiny discoloured teeth and damp skin.

But she was kind and affable, and she was certainly better than the sullen girls from the peat-processing plant. Those girls would shuffle along the fence in the morning, ignoring our soldierly jokes. Besides that, their eyes always seemed to be turned inwards.

One summer, a new instructor appeared in the barracks – Pakhapil. He found a fellow countryman, Khanniste, gave him a good drink of Chartreuse, and said, “So, and are there any young ladies here?”

“Quite a few,” Khanniste assured him, paring his nails with the bayonet of his sub-machine gun.

“How’s that?” the instructor asked.

“Solokha, Raya and eight Marys…”

“Suurepäraselt!”* Gustav exclaimed. “You can really live here!”

Solokha was the name of the horse we used for carrying in provisions. Marys were what camp homosexuals were called. Raya was Raisa the nurse.

It was cool in the infirmary even in summer. White gauze curtains swayed in the windows. An odour of medicine always hung in the air, unpleasant for anyone sick.

The instructor was absolutely healthy, but he was often seen by those who walked past the infirmary windows. The soldiers liked to peek through the window in the hope of seeing Raya changing her clothes. When they saw the back of Pakhapil’s neck, they cursed hard.

Pakhapil would touch the cold tweezers and talk about Estonia. More exactly, about Tallinn, about the toy city, about the Mundi Bar. He talked about Tallinn pigeons who very reluctantly moved aside for cars.

Sometimes Pakhapil would add, “A true Estonian ought to live in Canada.”

Then one time his face became downcast and even drawn. He said, “Quiet!” and threw Raya down on a bunk.

It smelt like a hospital in the infirmary, and that simplified many things. Pakhapil lay on a bunk upholstered in cold vinyl. He felt cold and pulled up his pants.

The instructor thought about his girlfriend Hilda. He saw Hilda walking past the City Hall.

Beside him lay the nurse, as flat as a plank in a fence. Pakhapil said, “You’ve broken my heart.”

At night he came back again. When he knocked, everything went too quiet behind the door. Then Gustav broke the latch.

On the bunk sat Lance Corporal Petrov, disgracefully unbuttoned. The instructor did not see Raya right away.

“At ease, Instructor,” Fidel said, yanking up his pants. “At ease, I say.”

“Kurat!”* Gustav exclaimed. “Bastard!”

“Holy Mother!” Raya said, and then added, “There’s no need for bad language.”

“Ah, you non-Russian,” Fidel said.

“Bitch!” the instructor said to Raya.

“And what if I felt sorry for both of you?” Raya said. “What then?”

“May you all croak!” the instructor said.

In the corridor an orderly began singing loudly:

“Forty yards of crêpe de Chine,

Powder, eye shadow, eau de Cologne…”

“Your wife could come here,” Raya said. “She’s such an interesting lady. I saw a snapshot.”

“Now’s the time to break your jaw,” the instructor shouted.

Fidel wore sideburns. On his bare shoulder was a tattoo of a naked woman with the words: “Milady, I will be with you tomorrow!”

“Just limp it out of here,” Fidel said.

Pakhapil knew how to fight. He could reach Fidel from any position. He had been taught boxing by Voldemar Hansovich Ney himself.

Fidel took a scalpel out of an enamel tray. His eyes whitened.

“He comes here,” Raya said, exasperated, “and stands there like an interloper. You should behave a little more modestly. Your nation is worse than the Jews. At least Jews don’t drink.”

“About-face!” Fidel said.

“You could have waited till tomorrow,” Raya said.

Pakhapil gave a laugh and left to finish watching a television programme.

“She doesn’t live far,” Raya said. “Why can’t she visit? Who does she think she is, a general’s wife?”

“In one word – Germans,” Fidel said, and he shook his head.

March 19, 1982. New York

Dear I.M.,

Our telephone conversation was short and hurried. And I didn’t say everything I wanted to. So let’s return to pen and paper.

Not long ago, I read a book called Azef.* It’s a biography, the story of Azef’s dizzying double game as both a revolutionary and a tsarist agent provocateur.

As a revolutionary, he organized a few successful terrorist acts. As a police agent, he betrayed many of his friends. Azef did all of this for several decades. The situation seems improbable. How was he able to avoid being exposed? How was he able to make fools of Gershuni and Savinkov, or wrap Rachkovsky and Lopukhin* around his little finger, and use a mask for so long?

I know why it was possible. The solution of the riddle is that there was no mask. Both of his faces were genuine. Azef was a revolutionary and a police agent at the same time.

The police and the revolutionaries acted by the same methods, and in the name of one goal: the good of the people. They resembled each other, even if they hated each other. That’s why Azef didn’t stand out among the revolutionaries and among the police. The police and the revolutionaries spoke the same language.

And here I’d like to speak about what’s most important, about what gets at the essence of prison-camp life. About the thing that had the most impact on the former prison-camp guard. About the suspicious similarity of characteristics between guards and prisoners or, speaking in the broadest terms, between “prison” and “freedom”.

It seems to me this was the main thing I learnt.

It’s too bad that literature is written to no end. Otherwise, I would have said that my book was written for the sake of this truth.

“Prison” literature has existed for several centuries. Even early in Russian belles-lettres, the theme was represented by great works, beginning with The House of the Dead and ending with The Gulag Archipelago. Plus – Chekhov, Shalamov, Sinyavsky.*

Alongside “prison” literature, we have had “police” literature, which is also rich in significant figures, from Chesterton to Agatha Christie.

These are different literatures. More exactly, they’re opposites, with opposing moral orientations.

In this way, two moral bills of fare exist, two ideological points of view.

According to the first, the inmate appears as the suffering, tragic figure, deserving of admiration and pity. The guard, correspondingly, is a monster and villain, the incarnation of cruelty and oppression.

According to the second point of view, the inmate appears as the monster, the fiend, while it follows that the policeman is a hero, a moralist, a vivid artistic personality.

When I became a guard, I was ready to see the prisoner as the victim, and myself as the punisher and oppressor. That is to say, I was inclined towards the first, more humane point of view, the one more characteristic of Russian literature which had nurtured me and, of course, the more convincing one. (After all, Simenon* is no Dostoevsky.)

After a week, it was all over with these fantasies. The first point of view turned out to be completely false. The second, even more so.

Following in the footsteps of Herbert Marcuse* (whom, naturally, I haven’t read), I detected a third alternative.

I detected a striking similarity between the camp and the outside, between the prisoners and the guards, between the burglar recidivists and the controllers of the production zones, between the zek foremen and the camp administration officials. One single, soulless world extended on either side of the restricted areas.

We spoke the same criminal slang, sang exactly the same sentimental songs, endured exactly the same privations.

We even looked alike. We all had crew cuts. Our weather-beaten faces were coloured with purple blotches. Our boots gave off the smell of a stable. And from a distance the prison uniforms seemed indistinguishable from the worn soldiers’ jackets.

We were very similar to each other, and even interchangeable. Almost any prisoner would have been suited to the role of a guard. Almost any guard deserved a prison term.

I repeat – this is the main aspect of prison life. Everything else is peripheral.

All of my stories are written about this.

Apropos of this, recently a package arrived from Dartmouth. Two pieces of microfilm and four pages of text on cigarette paper.

Some part or other, I heard, appeared in the Blue Lagoon Anthology (in Texas). It would be too bad if something really good got lost.

On my way back from Minneapolis, I’ll stop in Detroit. If you can pick me up – good. If not, I’ll find your place on my own.

Repairing the roof in my honour is not required.

BEFORE YOU REACHED the logging sector, you had to go through the famous Osokin swamp, then cross the railroad embankment, then go down a hill around the dreary buildings of the generator. By then you had only got to Chebyu, a settlement in which half the population consisted of seasonal workers who had once been prisoners. They were people whose feuds and friendships didn’t look much different.

They had waited out their prison terms for years. Then one day they changed into civilian clothes that had lain in a storeroom for twenty years. They walked out of the gates, hearing the cold clank of the bolts behind their backs, and then it became clear that the freedom they had longed for was no more than the familiar refrain of a song. They had dreamt of freedom, sung and swore. But they left prison camp – and the taiga stretched to the horizon.

Evidently, they had been destroyed by the endless monotony of prison days. They didn’t want to change their habits or re-establish lost ties. They settled down between camp zones within the sentries’ fields of vision, maintaining, if one can put it that way, our country’s ideological balance, which has spread to both sides of the prison fences.

They married God knows whom, and crippled their children by drilling them in camp wisdom: “Only the tiny fish gets caught in the net.” As a result, the settlement lived by the prison code of law. Inhabitants paraded their criminal conduct. And even the third generation of any given family shot up morphine. And, for good measure, they smoked junk and maintained their hatred of the guards.

It was not advisable for a drunk serviceman to show his face here. Storm clouds quickly gathered above the red cap band, doors slammed. It was best for the fellow not to walk alone.

About a year ago, three woodcutters escorted a pale serviceman out of a beer joint. Flannel epaulettes bristled on his shoulders. He begged, resisted and even commanded. But they hit him so hard that his cap rolled underneath a porch, and then they did the “see-saw” – they put a board on his chest and stamped on him in steel-reinforced boots.

The next morning, storehouse workers found the corpse. At first they thought: drunk, but then they suddenly noticed the narrow trickle of blood coming out of his mouth and going underneath his head.

Then a military investigator arrived. He spoke of the dangers of alcohol before showing a film called The Elusive Avengers. In answer to the questions: “So how is Corporal Dymza? Checked out, did he? And that’s that?” he answered, “The investigation, comrades, is on the only true path!”

As for the woodcutters, they got away with it, though every dog in Chebyu knew who they were.

To reach the logging sector, you had to cross railroad tracks, and before that, shaky planks over water that looked white in the sun, and before that, the Chebyu settlement, filled with fear and torpor.

Here is a portrait, or something more like a photograph. Alabaster lyres above the boarded door of the local club. A poor excuse for a store, crammed with gingerbread and horse collars. Artistically lettered signs in its windows promising meat, eggs, wool and other goods that intimate the good life. A poster of Leonid Kostritsa, the singer. A dead man or a drunk lying by the side of the road.

And over all this, the barking of dogs and the deafening roar of the power saw.

Instructor Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. He held a canvas dog leash in his hand. Lighting a cigarette and breaking the matches, he was saying something in Estonian.

Gustav taught Estonian to all the dogs in the kennel. The dog handlers were unhappy about this. They complained to Sergeant Major Yevchenko, “You order her to ‘Heel!’ and the bitch responds: ‘Nicht verstehen.*’”

The instructor spoke little in general. If he did speak, it was in Estonian and not, for the most part, with his countrymen, but with Harun. The dog always accompanied him.

Pakhapil was a closed person. Earlier that autumn, a telegram arrived addressed to him, signed by the division commander and the secretary of the Municipal Party Committee of Narva: “URGENT FLY REGISTER MARRIAGE CITIZEN HILDA COX BEING NINTH MONTH PREGNANCY.”

There’s an Estonian for you, I thought. Comes here from his Kurlandia, says nothing for half a year like Turgenev’s Gerasim,* teaches all the dogs to bark in a foreign tongue, and then flies off to marry some citizen with the fabulous name of Hilda Cox.

That very day, Gustav hitched a ride out with a log-carrier. For a whole month faithful Harun whimpered in the dog kennel. Finally Pakhapil returned.

He offered the orderly some good Tallinn cigarettes. Then he came over to the parallel bars, knocking down dandelions with his new suitcase, and held out his hand to each of us.

“Married?” Fidel asked him.

“Ya,” Gustav answered, blushing.

“Become a daddy?”

“Ya.”

“What did you name it?” I asked. I was interested to know what the child had been called in view of the mama’s name.

That’s an Estonian for you, I thought. A whole year he lives at the edge of the world. Ruins all the guard dogs. Then climbs into a log-carrier and leaves. He leaves so that he may kiss the unimaginable Hilda Braun, or rather Cox, to the cheering of wedding guests.

“So what did you name it?”

Gustav gave me a look and put out the cigarette on the heel of his boot. “The devil only knows.” And he went off to the pound to chat with his four-legged adjutant.

And once again, they appeared together. The dog seemed the more talkative of the two.

One time I saw Pakhapil with a book. He was reading in the well-heated drying room, sitting at a table yellow from gun oil, under the hooks for the sheepskin jackets. Harun was asleep at his feet.

I walked up on tiptoe, looked over his shoulder. It was a Russian book. I saw the title: Magic Tricks for the Club Stage.

Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. In his hand was the canvas leash, which he kept whipping against the top of his boot. An empty holster dangled on his belt. His TT was in his pocket.

Lance Corporal Petrov blocked the road from the forest. Small and clumsy, Fidel stumbled along the side of the road. He would often cock his weapon when there was no need. Fidel looked as though he had been forcibly tied to his sub-machine gun.

The zeks despised him, and in the event of some “incident”, they would have had no mercy on him.

A year before, near Sindor, Fidel had detained a group of prisoners for some offence. He got approval and then, swinging out his weapon, forced a column of men into an icy stream. The zeks stood there, silent, knowing full well the danger of a sixty-round sub-machine gun in the hands of a neurotic and a coward.

For about forty minutes, Fidel trained his gun on them, getting more and more worked up. Then someone far back in line cursed him, hesitantly. The column shuddered. The men in front started singing, and the sound carried above the river:

“And it all happened long ago,

Ech, near Rostov-on-Don,

With my girl, with my girl…

What a queer one I was then,

I put on a stolen jacket

And pants, and pants…”

Fidel began moving backwards. He was small and clumsy in his sturdy sheepskin jacket. His eyes white with terror, he yelled, “Step forward, bitch, and I’ll lay you to waste!”

And that was when the recidivist Kuptsov made his appearance (Kuptsov aka Koval, Alyamov, Gak, Shalikov, Rozhin). He stepped out of the first column and spoke out in the silence that immediately fell as he lightly pushed aside the barrel of the sub-machine gun. “You get burnt up? I’ll put you out.” His fingers stood out white against the dark muzzle.

Fidel jerked the gun to himself, fired a blind burst above their heads, and kept stepping back, stepping back…

That was the first time I saw Kuptsov. His hand looked elegant. His padded jacket, on that freezing day, was wide open. His words took the place of the song that had died out: “I’ll put you out.”

He made me think of a man walking against the wind, as if the wind had chosen him as a permanent adversary, wherever he walked, whatever he did.

After that, I saw Kuptsov often, in the dark, damp isolation cell, by a campfire in the logging sector, pale from loss of blood. And the sensation of the wind now never left me.

Pakhapil walked in front with Harun. Snapping the canvas leash on his boot, he was saying something to the dog in Estonian. To the left, Lance Corporal Petrov guarded the column, which no one worried about, since everyone was aware of the threat of the modernized AK in the hands of a warrior like Fidel.

We crossed the cold, narrow stream, watched to see that no prisoners tried to hide under the planks, led the brigade to the railway crossing, breathed in the station’s odour of cinders and crossed the embankment. Then we headed for the logging sector.

That was the name for the part of the forest surrounded by a flimsy, symbolic fence. Plywood watchtowers poked into view at treetop level. A whole group of guards stood watch. At their head was Sergeant Shumeyko, who languished for days on end waiting for “a situation”.

We led the brigade into the guarded sector. After this, our duties changed. Pakhapil became the radio operator. He took an R-109 out of the checkpoint cabin’s safe, pulled out an antenna as pliant as a fishing rod and then sent tender, mysterious words out into the airwaves: “Hello, come in Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Do you copy? Do you copy?”

Making a revolting sound, Fidel tried the rusty latch pins in the transit corridor. He counted prisoner identification cards, took keys from the weapons room, checked the “Amber” and “Flytrap” escape alarms, felt the stove to see if it was hot. He became a management-zone controller.

The zeks built bonfires. The log-truck drivers stood in line for motor oil. The sentries in the watchtowers called out to one another. Sergeant Shumeyko, whose personality was appreciated fully only after the fight in Koyna, fell asleep quietly on the trestle bed, though it was supposed to be reserved for soldiers off duty.

The twelve guard positions over the forest were fully established. The working day had begun.

All around: the smoke of campfires, the hum of motors, the smell of fresh sawdust, the calls of the sentries. This life slowly dissolved into the pale September sky.

The pines fell with a reverberating crash. Tractors dragged them away, uprooting bushes. The sun reflected off the truck headlights in blinding spots, and words soundlessly rushed through the spacious air above the logging sector: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! The sentries are in the watchtowers! Alarms in order! Restricted zone in operation! Thieves at work! Over! Do you copy? Do you copy?”

The controller admitted me into the zone. I heard the unpleasant slide click of the bolts behind me. By the campfire, the cook, a trusty named Galimulin, was filling a chifir tub.* I walked past him, even though the use of chifir was strictly forbidden, since drinking it was equated with drug use in the regulations. But the whole camp population drank chifir, and we knew it.

Galimulin winked at me. Then I knew for certain that my liberalism had gone too far. All I could do was threaten him with solitary, at which point Galimulin made me a present of his Asiatic smile. His front teeth were missing.

I walked past a newly cut tree trunk, admiring its yellow cross section, and made way for a tractor, which was noisily breaking branches. Shielding my face from spiderwebs, I cut through the forest to the machine shop.

Prisoners were rolling out logs, lopping off branches. The broad-shouldered, tattooed foreman was deftly handling a hook. “Step lively, you cons,” he yelled, shading his eyes with his palm. “Those lagging behind won’t make it into Communism. They’ll have to finish out their days under this regime.”

The branch-cutters lowered their axes, flung their jackets on a heap of branches. Again, iron flashed in the sun.

I walked along thinking, “Enthusiasm? Impulse? Nothing like that. The usual gymnastics. Willed courage. Strength that could just as easily become violence, given the chance.”

I traded a few words with the sentries and skirted the logging sector all the way down the restricted zone. I crossed the rusty swamp, stepping from dry patch to dry patch, and emerged into a clearing touched by the pale morning sun.

By a low campfire, his back to me, a man had stretched out comfortably. A thick book without a cover lay beside him. In his left hand, he held a tomato-paste sandwich.

“Ah, Kuptsov,” I said, “loafing again? Homesick for the clink?”

Sitting by the campfire, the work noise echoing around him, the zek looked like a pirate. There seemed to be a steering wheel in front of him, and his ship was moving straight into the wind.

Winter. The penal isolator. Long shadows under the pines. Windows sealed under snowdrifts.

Behind the wall, jangling his handcuffs, Kuptsov wandered from corner to corner. In the duty officer’s book, the word “Refusal”.

I took Boris Kuptsov’s record out of the file cabinet. Thirty words which look like explosions: WAPR (without a place of residence). WAO (without an occupation). A stamp: DR (dangerous recidivist). Thirty-two years in prison camps. The oldest “Code man”* in the Ust-Vym complex. Four trials. Nine escapes. Refuses to work on principle.

I asked him, “Why don’t you work?”

Handcuffs jingling, Kuptsov says:

“Remove the bracelets, Chief! This gold has no stamp.”

“Why don’t you work, you beast?”

“The Code doesn’t allow it.”

“How about feeding yourself? Does your Code allow that?”

“There’s no code that says I have to starve.”

“Your Code has outlived its time. All the ‘Code men’ have cracked. Antipov won’t stop singing. Mamay is the big man’s right hand. Sedov is on the needle. Topchil got snagged in Ropcha.”

“Topchil was a peasant and a chump, green as goose shit. You call him a thief? Lifting a suitcase off a granny – that’s his fortune. So he lost his crown…”

“Well, and you?”

“And I come from a long line of Russian thieves. I have stolen and will again.”

In front of me, a man sat at a low campfire. Next to him, on the grass, a book stood out white. In his left hand, he held a sandwich.

“Greetings,” Kuptsov said. “Here, make sense out of this one, Chief. It’s written in this book – a fellow killed an old woman for her money. Tormented himself so much about it that he gave himself up for hard labour. While I, if you can imagine, knew one client in Turkistan who had about thirty wet jobs behind him and not a single conviction. He lived to about seventy. Children, grandchildren, taught music in his old age… And history shows you can get away with much more. Like putting ten million in their graves, or however much it was, and then smoking a Herzegovina Flor.*”

“Listen,” I said, “you’re going to work, I swear it. Sooner or later, you’re going to be a driver, or a roper, or a carter. If the worst comes to the worst, a branch-cutter. You’re going to work, or you’ll perish in the isolator. You’re going to work, I give you my word. Otherwise you’ll croak.”

The zek looked at me as though I were a thing, a foreign car parked across from the Hermitage. He followed the line from the radiator to the exhaust pipe. Then he said distinctly, “I like to please myself.” And that instant: a mirage of a ship’s bridge above the waves.

I asked, “Will you work?”

“No. I was born to steal.”

“Go to the isolator!”

Kuptsov stood up. He was almost polite with me. A grimace of cheerful astonishment had frozen on his face.

Far off somewhere, pines fell, brushing the sky. A lumber truck rumbled by.

For a week, Kuptsov scraped by in the isolator, without cigarettes, without air, on half-rations. “You dish it out, Chief,” he said when I passed the embrasure of his cell.

Finally, the controller released him back into the zone. The same day, I saw him with canned goods, butter, white bread. That mysterious organization, the Con Council, had supplied him with everything he needed.

February. Narrow shadows lay between the pines. In the kennels, dogs were howling.

Khedoyan and I left the barracks and reached the zone. “Come on,” Rudolf said. “Walk down the free-fire zone, and I’ll meet you there.”

He walked through the garbage dump towards the isolator. By regulation, we were supposed to go together. Guards walked in pairs only. That was why Captain Prishchepa always said, “Two is more than YOU and ME. Two is WE.”

We parted by the basketball court. In the winter midnight, the backboards looked like gallows. As soon as I disappeared behind the garbage dump vats, Rudolf would turn back. He would light a cigarette and head for the checkpoint cabin, where a wind-up clock ticked. I too could have turned back. We would have understood everything, and even laughed about it. But I was too cautious to do that. If it happened once, I would sit it out in the checkpoint every time.

I pulled up my Vorkuta hood and threw open the door of the nearest barracks. An enamel tea kettle, tied to the doorknob, made an unbearable racket. This meant no one was asleep in the barracks. The bunks were empty. The table was piled with money and cards. About twenty men were sitting around it in their underwear. They looked at me and continued their game.

“Keep your shirt on, mate,” Chaly the pickpocket said. “I’ll clean everyone out.”

“Greed sinks the square,” Beluga the black-marketeer said.

“With a little left over,” Adam said, showing his cards.

“Read ’em and weep,” Kuptsov said quietly.

I could have left, put the tea kettle in its place and slammed the door. Clusters of steam would have poured from the well-heated house. I could have walked across the zone, guiding myself by the searchlight beside the checkpoint cabin where the wind-up clock ticked. I would stop, smoke a cigarette beneath a basketball hoop, then stand there for three minutes watching the stub glow red in the snow. And then in the checkpoint cabin I would listen to Fidel talk about love. I’d even shout over the general laughter, “Hey, Fidel, tell them about the time you were so drunk you tried to make it with Sergeant Major Yevchenko.”

But I wasn’t sufficiently brave to do all that. If I did it once, there would be no more visiting the barracks for me.

I said from the threshold, “When an officer enters, you’re supposed to stand up.”

The zeks covered their cards.

“Don’t strut,” Kuptsov said. “Now is not the time.”

“That’s the gallows, Chief,” Adam said.

The others became quiet. I stretched out my hand, raked up the supple, crumpled bank notes, shoved them into my side and breast pockets. Chaly grabbed me by the elbow.

“Hands!” Kuptsov ordered him. And then, addressing me, “Chief, cool off!”

The door slammed behind my back, the enamel tea kettle clanked. I walked towards the gates. Careful, as if it were a puppy, I carried the money inside my jacket. I felt the weight of all the hands that had ever touched those crumpled notes upon my shoulders, the bitterness of all the tears, the ill will…

I didn’t notice how they came after me from behind. It got crowded around me. Shadows that weren’t my own rushed under my feet. The light bulb blinked in its wire netting, and I fell, not hearing my own cry.

I spent about a week and a half in the hospital. A loudspeaker hung over my head, a smooth plywood box inhabited by peaceful news. Chess pieces stood side by side with vials of medicine on the night table. Outside the window, the frozen days unfolded. A landscape in a window frame.

Dry, clean bed linen. Soft slippers, a warm, washed-out bathrobe. Cheerful music from the loudspeaker. Clinical directness and a frank manner of contact. All this blocked out the isolator, the yellow lights above the sawmill, the sentries freezing to their sub-machine guns. And still, I thought of Kuptsov quite often. I might not have been surprised if he had come walking in on me in his prison jacket, with a book in his hand, no less.

I didn’t know who had struck me beside the fire extinguisher. And yet I could sense that, not far from the white blade, Kuptsov’s smile had flashed, had dropped, like a shadow, on his face.

I crossed the snowy yard in slippers and a bathrobe. Once I got to the dark annexe, I pulled on my boots. Then a log-carrier gave me a lift to headquarters. I appeared before Lieutenant Colonel Grechnev. On his desk, a wrought-iron warrior lifted a lance. The officer’s tone was administrative-casual: “They tell me there was an attempt on your life.”

“They just stuck a shiv in my behind.”

“And what’s so good about that?”

“Well,” I said, “nothing.”

“How did it happen?”

“They were playing cards. I took away their money.”

“When you were found, there was no money.”

“Naturally.”

“Why do you go looking for trouble?”

“Because those games usually end in slaughter.”

“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel…”

“In slaughter, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”

“That might be in our interest.”

“I think the law should be observed.”

“Fine, forget I said that. You’re from Leningrad?”

“Yes, from Okhta.”

“There’s a joke they tell at HQ: Major Berezhnoy arrives at Ropcha. The orderly won’t admit him. Berezhnoy shouts, ‘I’m from top command!’ The orderly replies, ‘And I’m from the Ligovka.’ Are you familiar with judo techniques?”

“More or less.”

“As the saying goes, ‘There’s no way to sidestep the crowbar and hatchet.’ We’ll send you to another command.”

“I’m not afraid.”

“That’s stupid. We’ll send you to Sindor.”

“And there are no zeks at Sindor? The same sons of bitches and total lawlessness.”

“You planning to stand on your rights?”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“Comrade Lieutenant Colonel…”

“I wasn’t going to, Comrade Lieutenant Colonel.”

“Wonderful,” he said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t last long. Your physical dimensions are respectable, you make an easy target.”

The truck from HQ took me to the crossing. I walked along the smooth, graded road, then along the plank road, dirtied with horse droppings. I took a shortcut across a small frozen brook and farther on, down a stretch where sparrows yammered alongside bluish snowdrifts and barbed wire.

To the barking of guard dogs, I entered the zone. I saw the washed-out pink flag above the attic window of the barracks, the rickety plywood booth and the orderly with a dagger in his belt, a soldier I didn’t know by the well, clean pieces of firewood stacked under an awning. And suddenly I realized how much I had missed this difficult male life, the cheap tobacco and bad language, the accordions, sheepskin jackets, machine guns, photographs, rusty razor blades and cheap cologne.

I dropped off my rations card with the sergeant, then headed for the drying room. There, around a platform piled with rusty barbell disks, the soldiers sat peeling potatoes. No one asked me anything. Only Lukonin, a company clerk, grinned and said, “We just about entered your name for all time on the Honour Roll.”

Later I learnt that HQ had sent a military investigator. He had given a lecture entitled “The Degeneration of Bourgeois Art”. Afterwards, he had been asked, “How’s our musclehead doing?”

The speaker answered, “The investigation is on the only true path, comrades.”

I saw Kuptsov in the zone. This happened just before the changing of the convoy brigades. He walked over and asked without smiling, “How’s your health, Chief?”

“All right,” I said. “And you, as before, still refusing to work?”

“As long as the law feeds me.”

“That means you’re not working?”

“I’m abstaining.”

“And you won’t?”

Prisoners were walking past us to the clanging of the signal rail. They walked alone or in pairs towards the gates. Inmate guards were out hunting for recusants around the zone. And here Kuptsov stood, in full view of everyone.

“You won’t work?”

“Nicht,” he said. “The green prosecutor is coming – spring! Under every tree, a refuge.”

“You thinking of escaping?”

“Aha, a little jogging. They say it’s good for you.”

“Take into consideration that in the forest I’ll finish you without warning.”

“Consideration taken,” Kuptsov said, and he winked.

I grabbed him by the breast of his quilted jacket. “Listen, you’re all alone! Your Code doesn’t exist. You’re alone.”

“Exactly.” Kuptsov grinned. “A soloist. I sing without chorus.”

“Well, you’ll croak. You’re one man against everyone. Which means you’re wrong.”

Kuptsov said slowly, distinctly and severely, “One is always right.”

And suddenly I understood that this zek who wanted to kill me made me glad, that I was constantly thinking of him, that I couldn’t live without Kuptsov.

It was so unexpected, silly, disgusting… I decided to think everything out, so as not to lie to myself.

I let him go and walked on. I began to guess at something, more exactly to sense that this last upholder of the Code in the Ust-Vym complex was my double, that the recidivist Kuptsov (aka Shalikov, Rozhin, Alyamov) was dear and necessary to me, that he was dearer to me than the camaraderie of the soldiers which had swallowed the last pitiful crumbs of my idealism, that we were one. Because the only person you could hate that much was yourself.

And I also felt how tired he was.

I remember that winter, February, vertical smoke above the barracks. When a prison goes to sleep, it becomes very still. Only from time to time a wolfhound chained to a post raises its head, rattling its long tether.

There were three of us in the Command Patrol Station. Fidel was warming his hands by the stove grating. The peak of his cap was broken and it looked like a bird’s beak. Beside him sat a woman in felt boots dark with melted snow.

“Our name be Kuptsov,” she was saying, unknotting her scarf.

“A meeting is not authorized.”

“But I’ve come so far.”

“Not authorized,” Fidel repeated.

“Boys…”

Fidel was silent, then he leant over to the woman and whispered something. He said something insolent and shameful to her.

They brought in Kuptsov. He strutted, stooping and hiding his fists in his sleeves, as he would on the outside. And again I got the feeling of a storm above his head. The zek stopped in the transit corridor, looked into the cabin, recognized, and stared, stared… didn’t tire of staring. Only his fingers whitened on the steel grating.

“Borya,” the woman whispered. “You’re all green.”

“Like a young pickle.” He grinned.

“This meeting isn’t authorized,” Fidel said.

“They suggested,” the woman said, looking at her husband with anguish, “they suggested… I’m ashamed to repeat it…”

“I’ll find you,” Kuptsov said quietly, to himself, “I’ll find you, boys… And when you get it, there’ll be no discount given.”

“You punk!” Fidel said threateningly. “There’s no shortage of cells in the isolator.” And then, to the escort guard: “Take him away!”

The woman cried out, wept. Kuptsov stood there, nestling his cheek against the grating.

“Agree, Tamara,” he said suddenly, distinctly. “Agree to what the chiefs proposed.”

The escort guard took him by the elbow.

“Agree, Tomka,” he said.

The guard dragged him away, practically tearing his jacket. His thin, powerful collarbones and the blue eagle on his chest could be seen.

“Agree,” Kuptsov kept on repeating and pleading.

I threw open the door and went out onto the road. I was blinded by the headlights of a log-carrier rumbling by. In the pitch darkness that immediately followed, I could barely see the road. I stumbled, fell in the snow, saw the sky white with stars, saw the trembling lights above the sawmill.

Everything blurred, slipped away from me. I remembered the sea, dunes, colour-drained sand and a girl who was always right, and how we sat side by side on the bottom of an overturned row boat, and then how I caught a little perch, threw it back into the sea, and then tried to convince the girl that the fish had shouted “Merci!”

Then I stopped feeling cold and guessed I was beginning to freeze, at which point I stood up and started walking, though I knew I was going to stumble and fall again.

In a few minutes, the smell of unseasoned birch reached me. I saw white smoke above the guard cabin.

The window glass of the Command Patrol Station dropped trembling yellow patches of light onto the plank road, which was hard and shiny from the tractors.

When I entered, Fidel was raking embers and frowning from the blaze. An instructor, back from his rounds, was drinking tea. The woman was no longer there.

“That Nyurka is such a vixen,” Fidel was saying. “You walk into her place, there’s vodkaroo, meat in aspic, mambo italiano, as much as you want. You throw down a few, have a bite after, and your soul ascends to heaven. But the main thing is spiritual, on the order of ‘Vanya, don’t you want some pickle brine?’”

“So can’t it be arranged,” the instructor asked gloomily, “that she wash my foot cloths?”

And spring came around again. The last black snow took away with it the special winter warmth. The days dragged on slowly along the sopping plank road.

Kuptsov spent that whole month in the isolator. He just barely made it. His collarbones stuck out under his quilted jacket. The zek behaved very quietly, but one time he threw himself on Fidel, and we dragged them apart with difficulty.

I wasn’t surprised. A wolf hates dogs and people, but he hates dogs more.

Three times I released him back into the zone. Three times the zek foreman received a short note: “Refusal”.

The head of the convoy, in his green raincoat, shone his flashlight onto his list. “Logging brigade, move out!” he ordered.

We took over a brigade by the gates of the prisoner barracks zone. Pakhapil, restraining Harun, walked in front. I, maintaining a distance, took the rear.

The settlement of Chebyu met us with the barking of dogs, the smell of wet logs, the sullen indifference of its inhabitants.

We headed in the direction of the hospital, past yards filled with trash, then made a turn towards the river, which was free of ice and unexpectedly clean and brilliant. We walked over the little crudely made bridges, crossed the railroad line with its colourless grass between the ties, made our way past huge cisterns, a water tower and the pompous structure of the station latrine. Only then did we come out onto the muddy plank road.

“When I was a kid, I loved to tramp in the mud,” Fidel said to me. “Did you too? The number of galoshes I left in the muck – it’s terrible to think of!”

Near the logging sector, we met a group of sentries with dogs. The men were in short jackets, and they carried telephone receivers and cartridge pouches of ammunition in their arms.

Pakhapil made the zeks halt, touched his cap, and started to make a report.

“As you were!” Shumeyko, the shift commander, interrupted him.

Enormous and pockmarked, he looked sleepy even when he was starting off for beer. Sergeant Shumeyko’s variegated personality came to life only in the course of extreme situations, and apart from extreme situations, he had long since lost interest in everything else.

Shumeyko took a head count of the prisoners. Shuffling their identification cards, he directed one file of men after another into the pre-entry yard. Then he waved a go-ahead sign to the sentries.

We went into the checkpoint cabin. Fidel threw his gun onto the pile of rifles and lay down on the trestle bed. I checked the alarms and began to heat up the stove.

Pakhapil took the shortwave radio out of the strong box, pulled out the pliant metal antenna, and began to fill the heavenly spheres with his incantations: “Come in, Rose! Come in, Rose! This is Peony! This is Peony! Alarms in order. Restricted area open. Cons at work. Do you read me? Do you read me? Do you read me?…”

I stopped by the agricultural sector, headed for the machine shop. There, by a barrel of gasoline, stood a long, dejected line of men. Someone lit a cigarette but immediately threw it away. Chaly the pickpocket spotted me and started singing in a deliberately loud voice:

“At the station, at the station,

Ech, at my little station,

I’ll grab a little suitcase

And say thanks to the dark night…”

Some people spoke to me, I answered. Then, bending over, I walked through the forest towards a clearing. A man was squatting there beside a campfire.

“Not working, you brute?”

“Abstaining. Greetings, Chief.”

“This means you’re refusing?”

“Same as ever.”

“Will you work?”

“The Code does not allow it.”

“Two weeks in the isolator!”

“Chief…”

“Will you work?”

“Chief…”

“As a roper, a truck driver, branch-cutter…”

I walked up and kicked out the campfire.

“Will you work?”

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“Branch cutter or truck driver?”

“Yes. Let’s go.”

“Walk ahead.”

He walked and held the branches. Stepping in the swamp, not looking.

Under a watchtower, near a felled tree, prisoners sat smoking. I said to the zek foreman, “An axe.”

The foreman grinned.

“An axe!” I shouted.

The foreman handed Kuptsov an axe.

“Will you go to Letyaga’s brigade?”

“Yes.”

He grasped the axe handle clumsily. The dark shaft, shiny from use, set off his elegant wrist.

How I wanted him to raise his axe against me! I would have shielded myself from the blow. I would have shaken off twenty centuries of civilization. I would have remembered everything they ever taught me at Ropcha. I would have snatched the axe out of his hands without giving him a second to collect himself…

“Well,” I commanded, standing two steps away. Feeling every blade of grass under my boots. “Well!” I said.

Kuptsov stepped to the side. Then he slowly got down on his knees beside a tree stump, set his left hand on the rough, gleaming yellow cut wood, then raised the axe and let it fall in one swift blow.

“At last,” he said, the blood pouring profusely. “There now – good.”

“What are you standing there for, you dickwad?” the foreman, who had run over, shouted at me. “You win – call the medic!”

April 4, 1982. Minneapolis

Dear I.M.,

I’ll make this short, since I’ll see you in three days.

Minneapolis is an enormous, quiet city. There are almost no people to be seen. Few cars too.

The most interesting thing here is the Mississippi River, the very one. Its breadth in these parts is about two hundred metres. In short, in full view of a crowd of American Slavists, I swam across this river.

I swam across the Mississippi. And that’s just what I’ll write to Leningrad. In my opinion, it was worth leaving for this alone.

Did you know that in March I was interviewed by Roy Stillman, and that he asked me, “What did you find most striking about America?” I answered, “The fact that it exists. That it is a reality.”

For us, America was like Carthage or Troy. And suddenly it turned out that Broadway is a reality, Tiffany’s is a reality, the Flatiron Building is a reality, and the Mississippi is a reality.

Once I was walking in lower Manhattan. I stopped by a bar called Johnny’s. I went inside, ordered an Irish coffee, and found a seat by the window.

I sensed that there was someone under the table. I bent down – it was a bum, drunk. A black guy, completely drunk, wearing a red shirt. (Incidentally, I saw exactly the same shirt once on Yevtushenko.*)

And suddenly I nearly cried with happiness. Could this really be me, drinking Irish coffee in a bar called Johnny’s, with a black bum under the table?

Of course, there is no such thing as happiness, as Pushkin says. But there is also no peace, and beyond that, I’m weak of will, so I have to differ with him.

And of course, all this is tinsel, paper streamers – the bar, the drunk black guy, the Irish coffee. But it means that, in the end, there is something to paper streamers. How many times in the last decades have fashions in women’s hats changed? And paper streamers remain paper streamers for a thousand years.

Let’s assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kinds of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?

I’m staying in the Curtis Hotel, with a multitude of various amusements. There’s a bar. There’s a swimming pool. There’s a suspicious-looking Havana Room. There’s a souvenir shop, where I acquired swimming trunks for the Mississippi. (On the front, a design of a sausage and two hard-boiled eggs.)

There are clean sheets, hot water, a television set, writing paper. There is a terrific neighbour, Ernst Neizvestny. (He just convincingly demonstrated to Harrison Salisbury:* “The vertical is God. The horizontal is Life. In the point of intersection, there is me, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Kafka.”)

There is you, to whom I’m sending this idiotic letter.

I’m in the hotel. I’m taking part in some incomprehensible symposium. I have on me close to a hundred dollars.

Early in the morning, I walk out of the hotel. It is cool and raw. A man, looking down and out, stops me and asks, “Do you have a match?” I answer, “Hold on.” And I hand him a lighter. And the man has trouble lighting up in the wind. Then I add, “Inhale, inhale.” And it’s unlikely that he’ll stare after me. Because these are the few words I can say without an accent.

He says, “Cool today.” And I answer, in English, “Sure.” And we go off our separate ways, two absolutely free people – a participant in a puzzling symposium and a down-and-out fellow in a sweater that Yevtushenko would be envious of.

Last night we played bingo. Neizvestny played and lost four times. That means he’ll win some other, unknown game.

Hugs to you all. We’ll see each other soon. I’m bringing a small excerpt and the end of a prison novella. It was sent to me through Levin, from Texas. The beginning is missing. It began, I remember, like this: “In the north, it generally gets dark early. And in the zone especially.”

I’ll put that sentence in somewhere.

Well, till we meet.

AS SOON AS THE ROAR of the motors stopped, the pine trees rustled high above the heads of the men. The prisoners quit work, pulled spoons out of the tops of their boots and walked to the barn.

The “slopper” dipped his ladle deep in a dark and viscous liquid. The men ate silently, then got out tobacco pouches and lit up from the embers.

The smoke of the campfire disappeared upwards, becoming pale October sky. It was quiet. The pines rustled in the space above the logging sector that had become empty without the motors rumbling.

“Shall we talk of those marvellous creatures?” Zek Brigadier Agoshin said, pulling his torn zek three-flap cap down over his eyes.

“Forget it,” Beluga said. “After your conversations no one can sleep.”

“No one can sleep? Then you just better give up and break your thing over your knee. You’ll grow a bigger and better one when you get out.”

The zeks laughed in spite of themselves. The autumn air was saturated with the smell of motor oil. The trees rocked in the pale sky. The sun fell unevenly on the rough yellowish logs.

There were two who sat smoking a little apart from the others, a short-legged fellow in a worn quilted vest named Yerokhin, and a former foreman, a native of the Chernigov district, a lean man named Zamarayev.

“You’re a shallow person, Yerokha,” Zamarayev was saying, “shallow and not serious. Your kind belongs in the grave or the zoo.”

“Lay off,” Yerokhin said. “He barges in like this was a snack bar. I’m not getting rusty, you know. I can still stick you.”

“I’m terrified… You just blather on and on, while life is going by.”

Yerokhin got angry. “Tell your story walking. Your crap won’t fly here. And anyway, what’s the use of talking to you? You’re completely dense. Just the other day you went running at a radio with a pitchfork. In a word, a peasant.”

“In our village there is a radio receiver in every cabin,” Zamarayev said. He lifted his eyes dreamily and continued, “I had a five-wall myself… a barn with a slate roof… a log cow shed… outside the windows, honeysuckle… I lived by my conscience. It would happen that a kum came by, to have a meal after a fast—”

“Kum?” Yerokhin said uneasily. “An agent, or what?”

“An agent… It’s you who’s the agent. A kum, I say… A kinsman. He’d come over. Bring a bottle of port grape wine. My kum was a serious man, an invalid—”

“A Party member, or what?” Yerokhin interrupted again.

“A non-Party Communist,” Zamarayev rapped out crisply. “Lost a leg in the Yezhov times.”*

“Meaning he’s an enemy of the people?”

“Not an enemy, but a lieutenant in the OGPU.* Guarded the likes of us jackals. Deprived of his leg, froze it on his battle post. They discharged him from the ranks, but they did give him a pension.”

“They should have known better,” Yerokhin said.

Zamarayev did not hear him. A happy smile flickered on his face. He continued, “And my kum likes to joke. Sometimes he’d say from the doorway, ‘Go and get us a little one!’ I’m getting into my galoshes when he laughs. ‘As you were, I’ve got it here.’ And pulls out a bottle of red. In our village they had the rouble-forty wine, but it tasted like the rouble-seventy-two kind. We’d pour our glasses, so it used to be. God’s bounty, harmony at home. I lived in good conscience.”

“In good conscience. So what did they get you for?”

Zamarayev, silent, hit a twig against the top of his boot.

“For what, I said, were you arrested?” Yerokhin said, not letting up.

“Well, for linseed oil.”

“You stole, is that it?”

“What, that linseed oil?”

“Well.”

“That linseed oil, yes.”

“In good conscience. And then what’d you do with it? Take it off to market?”

“No, drank it instead of lemonade.”

“Right.” Yerokhin grinned. “So how much linseed oil did you move?”

“Ech, that was a time,” Zamarayev said, “that was a time. That linseed oil? Two tons or so.”

“How much does that come to? Half a grand?”

“In the legal suit, forty thousand. Old roubles, of course.”

“Oho! And if you translate that into booze?”

“You’re a shallow person,” Zamarayev said angrily. “You’ve got one thing in your head. You should join the circus instead of the kangaroo. You ever hear of the kangaroo? The one with the purse on its belly.”

“Get off my dick,” Yerokhin said, “cut your crap. Or you get one in the smacker.”

“Fine,” Zamarayev stopped him, “whatever. But I’m doing time because some people are envious of others’ millions. With money I was a total boss. Money is power.”

“When Communism arrives,” Yerokhin said with malice, “you’ll be without money, and worse than dirt. Under Communism they will abolish money.”

“Not likely,” Zamarayev said. “Without money all will be looted. So they won’t abolish it. And with money even Communism doesn’t frighten me.”

“What do you need money for, you blockhead? To light your gas ring with? Have you ever even put on a pair of ordinary shoes? An imported shoe? Even a Chinese one?” Yerokhin said, raising his voice and looking in wonder at his beat-up prisoner’s boots.

“My boots were of real leather,” Zamarayev said in response, “sewn by my brother-in-law.”

“Stolen by who?” Yerokhin did not understand.

“You’re a savage, you don’t even understand Russian.”

But Yerokhin’s thoughts were elsewhere. “Now if I had that forty grand. Wouldn’t I show them all! According to you, life is – what? It’s a kaleidoscope! I could throw on a show when I was free. I’d come to a cocktail hall. Throw down three gold pieces. They bring me cognac, beef Stroganoff, fillet… And there’s music playing, girls everywhere. Would you permit, as they say, a turn of the waltz? In the sense of a tango… She dances, all dressed up, shining like a pike… Afterwards you drive her to her place. On the way, you see something from the newspaper, Sergei Yesenin,* flying saucers… How I put on a show! And if they suddenly refused, I had a method that could convince any girl in a nice way. The method was simple: I’d say, ‘Lie down, you bitch, or I’ll kill you!’ Yes, I knew how to move my horns. The ladies certainly screamed under me!”

“Why scream for no reason?” Zamarayev asked.

“Ooh, what a bumpkin! And sex?”

“What?” Zamarayev did not understand.

“Sex, I said.”

“Talk like a human being.”

“Well then, love, love… According to you, love is – what? Love is… Love is… a kaleidoscope. Kind of, one thing today, another – tomorrow.”

“Love,” Zamarayev said, “is in order to have harmony at home. In order to have respect. But with your kind of girls, it’s better not to show your face in the village. You would be ashamed before the people.”

“So you’ve gone through life on one mare. While I have a legal wife in every Department of Construction. Of course, I don’t say… It happens… You can catch something on your tip.”

“What?” Zamarayev did not understand.

“On your tip, I said… Well, that… Gonorrhoea.”

“What?”

“That’s a peasant for you, doesn’t know what gonorrhoea is! It’s the clap, the clap!”

“Ah-ah.” Zamarayev moved away slightly. “So how did you get here, anyway? Not for that, by any chance?”

“They nabbed me at a dance. I slipped a shank into this fellow’s rib cage.”

“And that was the end of him, was it?”

“No end at all. He pulled through, the snake. Shouts out in the courtroom, that son of a bitch, ‘I forgive Yerokhin!’ But the prosecutor shakes his head and says, ‘You maybe, yes, but society cannot forgive him.’ In the beginning I claimed total incapacity. I yell, ‘I got drunk, I forgot everything that happened!’ Well, in the end the cops broke me. I confessed. I yell, ‘Shoot me! Why don’t you shoot me, you pig? If Lenin only saw your reprobate puss.’ That’s what I said to the prosecutor. So he went and got me three years for nothing. There was an article about me in the newspaper. You don’t believe me? I swear to God! It was called ‘Fungus’.”

“That makes sense,” Zamarayev said.

“You want me to tell you a secret?” Yerokhin said suddenly. “If you want, I’ll tell you a secret that will make you turn green. Only – you can’t tell anyone.”

“I know your secrets. You’re digging a tunnel under the bread room.”

“A tunnel – that’s nothing… Well, you want me to tell you? But just to you as a friend. Here, listen: I’m an Epstein on my mother’s side.”

“Epstein,” Zamarayev said, frowning in disbelief. “We’ve seen Epsteins the likes of you. You’re a gentile like the rest of us. And if you’re an Epstein, why are you here for hooliganism? Why didn’t you go into the business end?”

“I take after my father,” Yerokhin explained briefly.

“Epstein,” Zamarayev repeated.

“Peasant,” the other muttered in reply.

The gonging of the signal rail slowly sank into the spacious October sky. Knocking sounds could be heard from the power-saw bench. Behind the trees, thundering, a log-carrier went by.

“I’m off to the grindstone,” Yerokhin said. He got up, brushed off some tobacco crumbs. Then, without looking back, he started on his way through the forest to the machine shop.

“What a peasant, doesn’t know what gonorrhoea is,” Yerokhin smirked.

“A shallow person, not serious,” Zamarayev said under his breath, watching him go.

“The types they get in here,” Yerokhin thought.

“Where do people like him come from?” Zamarayev wondered.

The forest filled with mist. A dog tethered to a chain post began barking. Security Officer Bortashevich appeared, wearing narrow box-calf boots.

The prisoners stood up reluctantly, put out the campfire, and went their ways.

In the watchtowers, the new shift came on. Out of boredom, someone turned on a searchlight.

April 17, 1982. New York

Dear Igor,

I keep thinking about our conversation. Maybe the problem is that evil is arbitrary, that it is determined by time and place, and to put it more broadly, by the general tendencies of the historical moment.

Evil is determined by the state of affairs, by demand, by the function of its carrier. Besides all this, there’s the factor of chance, the unlucky conjunction of circumstance, and even bad aesthetic taste.

We endlessly rail against Comrade Stalin – and, of course, with reason. All the same, I would like to ask – who wrote four million denunciations at the time of the Stalinist terror? (This number appeared in closed Party documents.) Dzerzhinsky? Yezhov? Abakumov and Yagoda?*

Nothing of the kind. They were written by simple Soviet people. Does this imply that Russians are a nation of informers? Not in the least. It’s simply that the tendencies of the historical moment were being manifested.

Of course, an inborn predisposition to good or evil does exist. What is more, there are angels and monsters in this world, saints and villains, but they are rare. Shakespeare’s Iago, as the embodiment of evil, and Myshkin, who personifies good, are unique. Otherwise Shakespeare would not have created Othello or Dostoevsky The Idiot.

In normal cases, though, I am sure now that good and evil are arbitrary.

The same people can display an equal ability for virtue or villainy. I could easily imagine almost any of the recidivists as war heroes, dissidents, defenders of the oppressed. The opposite is also true: a war hero could dissolve into the camp mass with astonishing ease.

Of course, evil cannot be proselytized as an ideological concept. The nature of good gravitates more towards trumpeted publicity. Still, arbitrary factors operate in both cases.

For this reason, any categorical moral position seems ridiculous to me. Man is good! Man is base! Man is to man – a friend, a comrade, a brother… Man is to man a wolf… And so on.

Man is to man – how shall I put it best? – a tabula rasa. To put it another way – anything you please, depending on the conjunction of circumstances.

For this reason, may God give us steadfastness and courage and, even better – circumstances of time and place that are disposed to the good.

FOR HIS TWELVE YEARS of service in labour camps, Yegorov had earned six Rocket-brand wristwatches. He kept them in an old tea tin. The stack of certificates of merit he kept in a table drawer.

Without being noticed, one more year slipped by. That year was dark with melting snow, noisy with the barking of guard dogs, bitter with coffee and old phonograph records.

Yegorov got ready to go on leave. Packing his things, he said to his friend, Security Officer Bortashevich, “I’ll go to Sochi. Buy a shirt with parrots on it. Find a lady tourist without prejudices.”

“You buy some prophylactics,” the security officer said, being practical.

“You’re no romantic, Zhenya,” Yegorov answered, taking several tiny packages out of a chest drawer. “These have been here since 1960.”

“And you mean – not once since then?” Bortashevich exclaimed.

“Not once in a human way. And what there was doesn’t count.”

“If you need money, wire me.”

“Money is not the problem,” the captain said.

He landed in Adler, bought raspberry-coloured shorts at the airport. Then he went on to Sochi by bus.

There he made the acquaintance of a graduate student named Katya Lugina. She wore her hair short, read Tsvetaeva’s prose,* and was not overly fond of Georgians.

In the evening, the captain and the young lady sat on the cooling sand. The sea smelt of fish and old plumbing. The piercing wails of a loudspeaker carried from a dance pavilion behind some bushes.

Yegorov looked around and yanked the girl over to him. She pulled away, feeling with outrage how hard his arms could be.

“Come on,” Yegorov said. “It’ll end with this anyway. No reason to play Madam Butterfly.”

Without raising her hand, Katya gave him a swift smack in the face.

“Stop,” the captain declared. “A blow with an open glove. In the ring, a referee would give you a warning.”

Katya did not smile. “Make an effort to curb your animal instincts.”

“I make no promise,” the captain said.

The girl gave Yegorov a peaceable look. “Let’s talk,” she said.

“About what, for example?” the captain asked flatly.

“Do you like Heine?”

“More or less.”

“And Schiller?”*

“And how.”

Next day they went boating. The girl sat in the stern. Yegorov rowed with wide strokes, deftly working the oars.

“You have to understand,” Katya would say, “Yesenin’s cynicism was just a mask. Bravado is characteristic of people who are extremely vulnerable.”

Or: “Last summer, I was going out with Yuri Shtokolov, the opera singer. Once we were visiting friends, and Yuri started singing, and his pitch shattered two wineglasses.”

“That’s happened to me too,” the captain said, “breaking dishes at a friend’s house. It’s normal. For that to happen you don’t even need a strong voice.”

Or: “It seems to me that reason is the intelligible manifestation of feelings. Do you agree?”

“I agree,” the captain said. “I’ve simply got out of the habit.”

It happened once that they met another boat at sea. The letters of her name were traced under the wheel – Esmeralda.

“Hey, ahoy there!” Yegorov yelled, sensing, with all his experience and also his skin, trouble ahead. He felt an unpleasant cold twinge in his stomach.

A man in a green skintight sports shirt was steering the Esmeralda. In the stern lay a carefully folded blue jacket.

The captain recognized this man at once.

“Ugh, how awkward,” he thought to himself. “Devilishly awkward in front of the young lady. It’ll turn out like some phoney detective story…”

Yegorov turned the boat around, and without looking back he headed for shore.

They were sitting in a little place up in the mountains that served grilled meat. Faces shone, the lamps flickered, a greasy haze filled the room.

Yegorov tolerantly drank Riesling while Katya was saying, “You’ve got to tear yourself out of that hell… out of that accursed taiga. You are energetic, ambitious, you could still do great things.”

“Each person has his own work,” the captain explained patiently, “his own occupation. Some people get into my line of work. Someone has to do the job, don’t they?”

“But why does it have to be you?”

“I have the right abilities. My nerves are good, I have few relatives…”

“But you have a law degree, don’t you?”

“To some extent, that makes the job easier.”

“If you only knew, Pavel Romanych,” Katya said, “if you only knew… Ach, how much better you are than all my Odessa friends! All those Mariks, Shuriks, Toliks, the various Stases there with their orange socks…”

“I’ve got orange socks too,” the captain said. “What’s the big deal? I got them on the black market.”

A man with a red nose came up to their table.

“I’ve figured out the recipe of your new cocktail,” Yegorov said. “Powerful stuff! One part Riesling and one part water.”

They walked to the door. By the window sat the man in the tight green shirt, peeling an orange. Yegorov wanted to walk past, but the man addressed him, saying, “You recognize me, Citizen Chief?”

An action film, Yegorov thought, a Western… “No,” he said.

“And the penal isolator, you remember that?”

“No, I just said.”

“And the transit camp at Vityu?”

“No transit camp whatever. I’m on leave.”

“How about the logging sector outside Sindor?” the former zek asked without letting up.

“Too many mosquitoes there,” Yegorov remembered.

The man stood up. A narrow white blade stuck out of his hand. The captain instantly felt big and soft, lost all sense of smell and colour. All the lights went out. The sensations of life, death, the end, collapse, tapered to their limit. They stationed themselves on his chest beneath his flimsy shirt and merged into the blindingly white stripe of the knife.

The man sat down and went back to peeling the orange.

“What did he want?” the girl asked. “Who was that?”

“A vestige of capitalism,” Yegorov replied, “but, to put it more bluntly, considerable scum. Forgive me…”

While he said this, the captain was thinking of many things. He wanted to take his PM out of his pocket, then raise his hand abruptly, then lower it to those hate-filled eyes, then curse hard and press the trigger…

None of this happened. The man sat motionless. It was the motionlessness of an anti-tank mine.

“You better pray I don’t meet you again,” Yegorov said distinctly, “or I’ll shoot you like a dog.”

The captain and the girl strolled down a tree-lined alley. Cypresses cast their shadows across it.

“A marvellous evening,” Katya said cautiously.

“Eighteen degrees centigrade,” clarified the captain.

An aeroplane flew low over their heads. Its round windows were lit up. Katya said, “In a moment it will be out of sight. And what do we know about the people inside it? The aeroplane will disappear. It will carry away tiny, invisible worlds. And we’ll feel sad, I don’t know why…”

“Yekaterina Sergeyevna,” the captain said solemnly, and he halted. “Hear me out. I’m a lonely man… I love you… This is foolish… I have no time, my leave is ending… I’ll try… Brush up on the classics… Well, and so forth… I beg you…”

Katya laughed.

“All the best,” the captain said. “Don’t be angry with me. Farewell.”

“Are you interested to know what I think? Do you want to hear me out?”

“I’m interested,” the captain said. “I want to.”

“I’m very grateful to you, Pavel Romanych. I’ll talk it over with someone… and go away with you.”

He took a step to her. The girl’s lips were warm and rough as a small leaf warmed by the sun.

“Can it really be that you like me?” Yegorov asked.

“For the first time in my life, I feel small and helpless. And that means you’re strong.”

“We do a little physical training,” the captain said.

“You’re so simple and nice to be with!”

“I have more valuable qualities than that,” the captain said. “I make a good living. Full benefits and so on. You should know better than to laugh. Under Socialism, it’s important. While Communism is still full of problems… In brief, if anything happens, you get a solid pension.”

“What do you mean, if anything happens?”

“Well, if the zeks nail me. Or a drunken army guard starts something funny. Anything can happen. Officers are hated by everyone, the soldiers and the zeks.”

“For what?”

“It’s the kind of work it is. Sometimes you have to pin a man down.”

“And that one in the green shirt? The one who showed the knife?”

“I don’t remember. Most likely I gave it to him in the logging sector.”

“How awful!”

They stood in the green shadow under the branches. Looking up at the brightly lit windows of her boarding house, Katya said, “I should go in. If my aunt finds out about this, she’ll explode.”

“I think,” the captain said, “that wouldn’t be the pleasantest spectacle.”

A few moments later, he was walking down the same alley, alone. He walked alongside dim white walls, past flickering lights, beneath the rustle of dark branches.

“What’s the time?” someone passing by asked him.

“Quite late,” the captain answered.

He walked on farther, whistling an old melody out of tune, a rumba or something trying to be one.

May 3, 1982. Boston

Dear Igor,

Not long ago I reread parts of your Metapolitics. In it you write very well about the costs of freedom, freedom as a constant goal but also as a heavy burden.

Consider what is going on here in the émigré community. The Brighton Beach NEP is working full blast.* It is teeming with gangsters. (Before this, I used to think that the average type of Jew was Professor Eikhenbaum.*) Not long ago, they opened a brothel there. Four young ladies are Russian and one is Filipino. We cheat the IRS, take cheap shots at our competitors, print God knows what in our newspapers. Former film cameramen sell guns. Former dissidents become something close to prosecutors. Former prosecutors become dissidents. Restaurant owners collect welfare and even receive food stamps. Driver’s licenses can be bought for a hundred dollars, a graduate degree for two hundred and fifty.

It is painful to think that all this vileness is born of freedom, for freedom is equally gracious to the bad and the good. Under its rays, both gladioli and marijuana flower with equal speed.

In this connection, I remember one incredible camp story. The prisoner Chichevanov, a robber and murderer, was serving out the last twenty-four hours of his sentence. He had a twenty-year term of hard labour behind him.

I was escorting him to a main settlement. We were travelling in a “con-mobile” with an iron van. Chichevanov, according to regulations, was placed in a tight metal compartment. It had a slit in its door that the prisoners used to call “I-see-him-he-can’t-see-me”.

I, according to the same regulations, sat in the back, to the side. On the way, it seemed absurd to me to guard Chichevanov so vigilantly, since he had only a few hours left before release.

I let him out of the compartment. That’s not all – I engaged him in friendly conversation.

Suddenly, the perfidious zek knocked me out with the butt of a pistol. (As you’ve probably guessed, it was my own pistol.) Then he jumped out of the moving transport van and started running.

Six hours later, Chichevanov was arrested in the settlement of Yosser. He had managed to break into a food stall and get wildly drunk. For the escape attempt and theft he got four additional years.

This incident literally stunned me. What had happened seemed incredible, unnatural, and even a transcendental phenomenon. But Captain Prishchepa, an old camp officer, explained everything to me. He said, “Chichevanov sat out twenty years. He got used to it. Prison reshaped his blood circulation, his breathing and vestibular apparatus. Outside the prison gates he would have had nothing to do. He was wildly afraid of freedom, he was gasping for breath like a fish.”

There’s something similar in what we Russian émigrés experience.

For decades we lived in conditions of total unfreedom, flattened, like flounder, by the heavy weight of oppression, when suddenly we were caught up in a lung-splitting hurricane of freedom. And we headed off to break into the food stall.

It seems to me I’ve got off the track.

The following two fragments have to do with the preceding episode. The main figure in both is Captain Yegorov – a mean and stupid animal. In my stories, he comes out rather pleasant. Here we witness the transforming power of art.

Earlier, this was something on the order of a novella, but Dreitzer sent me only odd pages. I’ve tried to fill them out and have created a film montage in the tradition of Mr Dos Passos.* Apropos, in one old review I was called his imitator.

KATYA SWITCHED ON THE LIGHTS; the windows went dark. It was very early. In the foyer, the wind-up clock ticked with a deep sound.

Katya pushed her feet into cold slippers and went to the kitchen. She returned, stood there a while, wrapping herself up in a blue flannelette bathrobe. Then she tore off a page from the day calendar and began to read it slowly with great attention. “Twenty-eighth of February. Thursday. Five hundred and sixty years ago, Abdul Rahman Jami* was born. The name of this outstanding contributor to Persian culture…”

“Yegorov, wake up,” Katya said. “The water’s frozen.”

The captain turned uneasily in his sleep.

“Pavel, there’s ice in the washbasin.”

“Normal,” the captain said. “Entirely normal… Under conditions of warming, ice arises. While under conditions of cooling – no, not like that. Under conditions of cooling, ice. And from heating, vapour… Newton’s third law. Of which I’m not entirely persuaded.”

“The snowdrifts have reached halfway up the window. Pavel, don’t go back to sleep.”

“Precipitation,” Yegorov responded. “Better let me tell you about the dream I just had. It seemed that Marshal Voroshilov* presented me with a sabre, and with this sabre I tickled Major Kovba.”

“Pavel, stop behaving like an idiot.”

The captain quickly got up, rolled a cold black barbell out of the corner. While doing this, he said, “You train for a century, but you still can’t outdrink a whale. And you’ll never be as strong as a gorilla.”

“Pavel!”

“What’s the matter? What happened?”

Yegorov moved to her and wanted to put his arms around her.

Katya pulled away and loudly burst into tears. She shuddered and her mouth twisted.

“But why cry?” Yegorov asked softly. “Crying is not required. Much less sobbing…”

Then Katya covered her face with her hands and spoke slowly – slowly, so the tears would not interfere. “I can’t go on.”

Now depressed himself, the captain took out a cigarette and lit it in silence.

Behind the window, a grey, frosty morning was spreading. Long bluish shadows lay on the snow.

Yegorov dressed slowly, put on a down jacket and picked up an axe. The snow squeaked under his ski boots.

“But there has to be another life somewhere,” Katya thought, “an entirely different life. Somewhere there are wild berries, campfires, singing… And a labyrinth of paths, crossed with pine-tree roots… And rivers, and people waiting to cross. Somewhere there are serious white books, the eternally elusive music of Bach, the swish of car wheels… While here, it’s the howling of dogs. The power saw buzzing from morning till night. And now, on top of everything else, ice in the washbasin.”

Katya breathed on the window pane. Yegorov set a log on its end. For some time he looked closely at the little branches. Then he gave the axe a short swing up and let it fall sharply, slanting it a little.

‘The Turkish March’ came over the radio. Katya imagined a platoon of Turkish soldiers. They trudged through deep snow in heavy turbans, fighting their way from the Division of Economic Administration to the machine shop. Their yataghans have frozen to their scabbards, the turbans gone white…

“My God,” Katya thought, “I’m losing my mind!”

Yegorov returned with an armful of firewood and dumped it by the stove. Then he pulled out of his pocket a prison knife with a locking pin, confiscated during a personal search, and began to chip off kindling.

“Once I used to love winter,” Katya thought, “but now I hate it. I hate frost in the morning and dark evenings. I hate dogs barking, fences, barbed wire. I hate boots, down vests… and ice in the washbasin.”

“Be quiet,” she said aloud. “I hate your always being right!”

“How’s that?” Yegorov did not understand. Then he said, “Well, if you’d like, I’ll go to Vozhayel and get apples and champagne, and we can invite Zhenya Bortashevich and Larissa.”

“Your Bortashevich cuts his nails during supper.”

“Then Vakhtang Kekelidze. His father is a count.”

“Kekelidze is a vulgarian!”

“Meaning?”

“You don’t know.”

“Why do you think I don’t know?” the captain said. “I know. I know he plays up to you. That’s the way Georgians behave. The guy’s unmarried. It’s unpleasant, of course. Actually, he deserves a punch in the jaw.”

“A woman needs it.”

“What, exactly?”

“For a man to pay attention to her.”

“You need to have a baby,” the captain said.

The hoarse, vibrating baying from the kennel grew stronger. One swelling timbre stood out in particular among the other voices.

“Why is it I was never bothered by seagulls,” Katya said, “or wild ducks? I cannot, cannot, cannot endure that barking.”

“It’s Harun,” Yegorov said.

“What a horror.”

“You haven’t heard wolves yet. That’s a really terrible business.”

The firewood in the stove hissed as it flared up. And there was already a smell of wet snow.

“Pavel, don’t be angry.”

“What’s there to be angry about?”

“Bring some apples from Vozhayel.”

“By the way, the ice in the washbasin is melting.”

Katya came up behind him and put her arms around him.

“You’re big,” she said, “like a tree in a thunderstorm. I’m afraid for you.”

“Fine,” he said, “everything will be all right. Everything will be simply wonderful.”

“Is it really possible everything will be all right?”

“Everything will be wonderful. If we are good ourselves.”

“And is it true the ice is melting in the washbasin?”

“It’s true,” he said, “it’s normal. A law of nature.”

In the kennel, Harun began to howl again.

“Wait a second,” Yegorov said, pulling away from Katya. “I’ll be right back. This will just take a minute.”

Katya let her hands drop. She went into the kitchen and lifted the heavy cover of the washbasin. Inside, a small lump of ice was melting.

“It really is melting,” Katya said out loud.

She went back, sat down. Yegorov was still out.

Katya put on a scratchy phonograph record. She remembered some lines from a poem that had been dedicated to her by Lyonya Mak, a weightlifter and unacknowledged genius:

It’s plain I’ve come at an awkward moment,

The phonograph has long since stopped, it whispers,

Better let’s wait for a waltz, Katya,

It’s easier for me not to dance this one…

In the kennel, a shot rang out. The hoarse canine howl changed to a screech and then stopped.

After a few moments, the captain returned. He walked past the windows. He was carrying something wrapped in a tarpaulin.

Katya was afraid to lift her eyes.

“So, what do you think?” Yegorov said, grinning. “It’s a bit quieter now, isn’t it?”

Katya tried to ask, “What’s this? Now what?”

“It’s not a problem,” the captain assured her. “I’ll call over a flunky with a shovel.”

May 17, 1982. Princeton

Dear Igor,

As you know, Shalamov regards the camp experience as entirely negative.

I knew Varlam Tikhonovich slightly through Gena Aygi.* He was an astounding man. And all the same, I don’t agree with him.

Shalamov hated prison. I think that’s not enough. To have that feeling does not yet signify having a love of freedom, or even a hatred of tyranny.

Soviet prison is one of countless manifestations of tyranny, one of the forms of total, all-embracing violence.

But there is beauty even in prison life. And if you only use dark colours you won’t get it right.

In my opinion, one of its delightful adornments is language.

The laws of linguistics do not apply to prison-camp reality, inasmuch as camp speech is not a means of exchange. It is not functional, in fact is designed least of all for practical use. Camp life, which is nauseating in essence, endows language with a preference for particular expressiveness. It is a goal in itself and not a means.

Very little of camp speech is wasted on communication: “Duty officer wants to see you.” “Was looking for him myself.” You get the feeling that the zeks economize on everyday verbal material. In its essence, camp speech is a creative phenomenon, aesthetic through and through, and artfully purposeless. It is fanciful, picturesque and ornamented. It is close to the euphonic orchestration of the Remizov school.*

A camp monologue is an absorbing verbal adventure. It’s a kind of drama, with an intriguing beginning, a fascinating climax and a stormy finale – or else an oratorio, with deeply significant pauses, unexpected accelerations of tempo, rich tonal shading and heart-rending vocal fioriture. It is an accomplished theatrical spectacle, buffoonery, an exuberant, daring and free creative expression.

Speech for an experienced camp inmate takes the place of every usual civil adornment – specifically: haircuts, imported suits, shoes, ties and glasses and, beyond these, money, position in society, awards and regalia.

Well-turned speech is often the only weapon of a camp old-timer, his only lever of social influence, the unshakable and steadfast foundation of his reputation.

Top-notch speech evokes the respect a master gets. Work skills in camp do not count for much; usually, it’s the opposite. Achievements on the outside are forgotten. What remains is the word.

In camp, scrupulously chosen speech means having an advantage on the same order as physical strength. A good storyteller in the logging sector means much more than a good writer in Moscow.

It is possible to imitate Babel, Platonov, Zoshchenko* and Hemingway. Dozens of young writers do so, not without success. Camp speech is impossible to fake, inasmuch as its main condition is to be organic.

Allow me to reproduce here a not entirely proper entry from my army notebook.

They sent us a sergeant from Moscow. A highly intelligent young man, the son of a writer. Desiring to pass himself off as a veteran guard, he made constant use of obscenities.

Once he yelled at one zek, “What are you, fucked off?”

The zek responded with solidly grounded objections. “Citizen Sergeant, you are wrong. You can say that someone’s ‘fucking off’, ‘fucked up’, or ‘getting fucked’. But ‘fucked off’ – that doesn’t exist, pardon me, in the Russian language.”

The sergeant got a lesson on how to speak Russian.

A dupe pretending to be a confidence man is a funny and indecent spectacle. They say of such, “The prancing homo’s playing at Code man.”

The art of camp speech rests on traditions shaped long ago. Indestructible canons exist in it, stock expressions and innumerable regulations. It calls for the usual creative meticulousness. As with literature, the genuine artist leans on tradition while he develops the features of his own originality.

As surprising as it may be, there are very few obscenities in camp speech. A real criminal rarely condescends to use them. He spurns the unhygienic locution of obscenities. He prizes his speech and knows its value. He values quality and not decibels and prefers exactness to profusion.

The disgusted “You belong by the piss bucket” is worth more than ten choice swear words. The wrathful “What are you selling yourself for now, bitch?” kills on the spot. The condescending “That’s a real dope, can’t steal and can’t stand guard” discredits someone absolutely.

A form of verbal contest, brilliant conversational duelling, is still alive in camp. I observed such battles often, with their warm-up volleys, feigned apathy and sudden fireworks of murderous eloquence, with their sharpened formulations in the style of Krylov or La Fontaine:* “The wolf gobbles up the sick sheep too.”

In camp, people don’t swear on relatives and dear ones. You don’t hear oaths and verbose eastern protestations. Here they say, “I swear by freedom!”

The following excerpt is about the same Captain Yegorov. The piece in the middle got lost. There was a story with a horse in it – I’ll tell you sometime – and also one about a riot in Veslyana, when Yegorov was knocked out with a shovel.

All in all, about twenty pages were lost, all because our literature is equated with dynamite. This is a great honour for us, I think.

IT WAS CLEAN AND COOL in the men’s room. Yegorov sat smoking on the window sill. Outside the window, firemen were playing skittles. A bread van drove by, then heaved and braked by a bakery.

Yegorov stubbed out his cigarette and walked outside. Sunbeams lay across the hospital corridor. There were many windows here. Gauzy curtains quivered, lifted and fell.

A nurse was coming down the corridor. She looked like a nun and seemed pretty.

All the hospital nurses seemed pretty. And they really were pretty, in so far as they were young and healthy, and all around them so many transparent white curtains, so much cold light and not one superfluous thing.

“Well, how is she?” Yegorov asked.

“Condition satisfactory,” the nurse answered coldly. She had slanting eyes, neat bangs, and a bluish uniform that was tied at the waist.

The nurses in the wards and in the admitting office seemed to have no feelings. After all, they had to say things not everyone liked to hear.

“That’s clear,” the captain said. “Satisfactory means bad?”

“You are detaining me from my work,” she said in the tone of voice of a harassed postal worker.

“I’d like to stick your head in a meat-grinder,” the captain muttered under his breath.

Down the corridor, hurrying, came the surgeon with his four assistants. They were all taller than he was. The surgeon was saying something to them without turning around.

Yegorov stood in their way.

“Later, later,” the surgeon said, drawing away from him. “We physicians are superstitious.” He was almost jovial.

“If my wife,” the captain said, “if anything happens… everything afterwards will have no meaning.”

“Stop blaspheming,” the surgeon said. “Go have lunch. Drink some port. There’s a canteen around the corner.”

“How healthy you look,” the captain said.

“Who is this?” the surgeon said, bewildered. “And why? You know I asked not to be disturbed…”

As he left the hospital, Yegorov turned to the wall and burst into tears. He thought of Katya’s face, childlike and angry, remembered her fingers with their chewed nails, recalled everything that had come before.

Then he lit a cigarette and headed for the canteen. There were only a few people in it. Most of the aluminium stools were stacked in the corner.

The captain sat down by a window, ordered wine and schnitzel. The waitresses in the canteen seemed pretty and looked like nurses. They wore bright-coloured silk blouses and lace aprons. The woman at the cash register gazed into the hall with a discontented look. A thick, torn book lay in front of her.

As he ate, Yegorov watched two soldiers washing a truck.

He left the canteen, bought a newspaper, rolled it up and stuck it in his pocket. A woman with a broom was coming towards him. The woman scratched at the sidewalk, trying to sweep up flattened cigarette butts.

A railway worker rode by on a bicycle. The spokes made a light, flickering circle.

An hour later, Yegorov was back at the clinic. He stood in the corridor beneath a chandelier. A plant with hard green shoots rocked slightly by an open window. The flowers in the hospital looked artificial.

The surgeon was coming down the corridor. He carried his wet hands in front of him. The nurse handed him a towel and then turned to Yegorov.

Suddenly, she seemed ugly to him. She looked like an overly clever, serious boy. She was wearing a uniform with an ink spot on the collar and worn slippers.

“Your wife is better,” the captain heard her say. “Manevich performed a miracle.”

Yegorov looked around – the surgeon was gone. He had performed a miracle and left.

“What’s his name again?” Yegorov asked the nurse, but she had already gone too.

He walked down the stairs. The coat attendant handed him his jacket and peaked cap. The captain held out a rouble to him. The old man lifted his eyebrows respectfully.

The nurse in the admitting office was crooning:

“Give me a rock from the moon,

A talisman of your love…”

She seemed ugly to Yegorov too.

“Evidently, my wife is better,” the captain said. “She’s sleeping.” He was silent a moment, then added, “No matter what, the people in the know are the Jews. Maybe they’ve been persecuted all these centuries for nothing? Around 1960 they sent us one. Everyone said, ‘A Jew, a Jew.’ It turned out he was just a drunk.”

The nurse broke off her singing abruptly and busied herself with her paperwork in a displeased way.

The captain walked out onto the street. Coming towards him were people – in sandals, cloth caps, berets, bright shirts and dark glasses. They carried bags for their shopping and briefcases. Women in multicoloured blouses seemed pretty and looked like nurses.

But the main thing was, his wife was sleeping. Katya was safe. And, he was quite sure, she was frowning in her sleep.

May 24, 1982. New York

Dear Igor,

I have already said that the zone can be seen as a miniature replica of society. Sports, culture, ideology are all represented. There’s an equivalent of the Communist Party (the Section of Internal Order). The zone includes commanding officers and privates, academics and dunces, millionaires and beggars.

The zone has its equivalent of school, and of career-building and success. Here, life keeps the same proportions in human relations as on the outside.

Correspondence with relatives takes up an enormous part of camp life, even though only some prisoners have relatives. This is a particular problem for criminals serving long sentences. The years of camp and prison tell on them the most. Wives find themselves new admirers. Children become set against their fathers. Friends and acquaintances are either serving time themselves or have got lost in the huge world.

But those who do have relatives and dear ones treasure correspondence with them to an extraordinary extent.

A letter from home is a sacred thing in prison camp. God prevent you from laughing at those letters. They are read aloud. Insignificant details are offered up as veritable sensations.

For example, a wife informs her husband: “Little Leonid is so persistent. Got an F in chemistry.”

The happy father interrupts his reading. “What do you know, F in chemistry…” His face stretches into a contented smile. And the whole barracks repeats respectfully, “F in chemistry… Put that in your pipe and smoke it!”

Writing to “volunteer (lady) pen pals” is a completely different matter. There is a great deal of cynicism, affectation and posing in these letters, which are composed collectively. Prisoners portray themselves as victims of tragic circumstance. They indicate wherever possible their burning desire to return to constructive work, and lament their loneliness and human malice.

In a prison zone, you can always find a coryphaeus of the epistolary genre, a master at composing heart-rending texts. Here is a typical opening of a camp letter to a volunteer pen pal:

Greetings, unknown lady (or maybe young girl) Lyuda! Writing to you is a former incorrigible burglar, but today a qualified logging-truck driver, Grigori. I am holding the pencil in my left hand, for my right hand is festering from back-breaking labour…

Letters to these volunteers are phoney and mannered, yet they can also contain rather deep feeling. What is apparent is that the prisoner needs to have something that lies beyond his own foul existence, beyond the zone and his prison term, beyond even himself – something that allows him to forget about himself, to release, if only for a short time, the brake on his self-love. It has to be something hopelessly far away, almost mythical, some supplementary source of light, some object of disinterested love, not too sincere, silly or sham, but specifically – love.

Besides, the more hopeless the object, the deeper the emotion; hence the boundless attention that free women in camp attract.

As a rule, there are few of them in the zone. They work in the Division of Economic Administration, the accounting office and the infirmary. There are also the officers’ and re-enlisted men’s wives, who always seem to be stopping by the compound.

Every woman in the vicinity of the zone is followed by scores of ecstatic eyes, no matter how plain she is. This attention is disinterested and even chaste in its own way. A woman becomes something like a visual extravaganza, theatre, pure cinema. Her very unattainability ensures the purity of the men’s thoughts.

“You just take a look at her,” the zeks say. “What a woman! I’d subscribe to a martsifal like that!”

The emphasis is all on the noun. It is woman in general who is striking, not any one of the woman’s specific qualities; it is woman as fact that rules all minds. As such, woman is a miracle. She is martsifal, which is to say, something mysterious, lofty, and exotic. Marzipan and waterfall.

It is extremely rare for a zek even to try to approach a female camp employee. In the first place, it’s hopeless. The social chasm is too great. Besides, making a pass is of much less importance than the cult, the dream and the presence of the ideal.

As a result, imagined love affairs with the camp chief’s wife supply most of the dramatic conflicts in the local folklore. This theme wanders through prison mytho-creation, and though it is close to a science fiction fantasy, one can see in it an indisputable artistic logic at work. It presents a way to realize the dream of social retribution.

Something very similar happens outside of prison too. I knew a man in Tallinn named Aino Ripp who had managed to seduce the wife of the Estonian Minister of Culture. She was so cross-eyed that in restaurants people who didn’t know her would come over and ask, “Why are you staring at me like that?”

All the same, Ripp adored her. By possessing the wife of a Party functionary, he was somehow asserting himself. He experienced moments of social triumph when he tormented her. He used to say to me, “Through her I have hit back at the cursed Soviet regime.”

Let us return to the manuscript. There are four odd pieces left. To try to paraphrase the missing pages would be foolish. To restore them is impossible, inasmuch as the main thing has already been forgotten – what I was like myself.

TRY GOING TO DR YAVSHITZ carrying your severed head in your arms. He’ll look at you with his bleary, nearsighted eyes and ask indifferently, “What seems to be ailing you, Sergeant?”

To get medical leave from Yavshitz, you have to have survived a plane crash. And yet after a year I learnt how to simulate illnesses, from arthritis to nasal drip. I worked out my own method, which consisted of the following: I simply named some outlandish symptom, and then tried to substantiate it with wild stubbornness. Once I tried to dupe Yavshitz for a whole month by repeating, “I’ve got this strange feeling, Doctor, that oxygen is being pumped out of me. Besides that, my nails hurt and my spine itches.”

That time, however, my method didn’t work. My arthritis failed ingloriously. Yavshitz said to me, “You can go, Sergeant.” And demonstratively opened his volume of Simenon.

“Interesting,” I said, implying that the doctor would be responsible for the fatal progress of a disease.

“I won’t detain you,” the doctor said.

I had a drink of water from the zinc container, then stopped by the Lenin Room. There, all alone, sat Fidel. In front of him was a chair turned upside down. Like one of the old masters, Fidel was covering the underpart of the seat with an elegant wood carving. He was singing to himself as he did this.

“Hullo,” I said.

Fidel pushed the chair a little away from him, then looked with pride at his work. I read out a short, all-embracing obscenity.

“There it is,” he said, “a cry of the soul.” Then he asked, “Do you like Lollobrigida?* Only, be honest with me.”

“Naturally,” I said.

“Her face or her figure?”

“Yes.”

“And to think someone’s doing it to her,” Fidel mused.

“Not unlikely,” I said.

“In women, that’s not the main thing,” Fidel said. “The main thing is character. In the sense of her positive qualities. I had a broad in Syktyvkar, so I used to bring her flowers. Forget-me-nots, roses, all kinds of chrysanthemums—”

“You’re lying,” I said.

“I’m lying,” Fidel agreed, “only that’s not the point. The point is the principle… Are you on duty tonight?”

“What about it?”

“The zeks are up to something in Barracks Six. The security officer himself warned us.”

“What, specifically?”

“I don’t know, you ask him. They’re brewing something nasty. Or just marking time…”

“It would be good to find out.”

“Ask the security officer.”

We crossed the army barracks yard. The recruits were doing training exercises. The one in charge of them was Sergeant Meleshko. When he saw us, he quickly changed his tone.

“Hey, Paramonov,” he roared at one of the recruits, “your balls getting in the way?”

Paramonov’s father was a literary critic. His son did not know how to march. He called a fatigue shirt an undershirt, a sub-machine gun a rifle. Besides this, he wrote poetry. With each passing day his verses sounded more and more degraded.

We passed by the outside latrine with its door thrown open, then reached the kennel. The spacious enclosures were fenced off with wire mesh. There the guard dogs raged. Shaggy Alma, in a fury, was chewing her tail. Her coat had blood on it.

Pakhapil wasn’t around. Instructor Volikov was working on something on the table. A loudspeaker lay in front of him, its back section unscrewed. I smelt the sharp odour of resin.

Seeing us, the instructor switched off the soldering iron.

“You have it good here,” Fidel said. “The brass hardly ever look in.”

We looked around at the plank walls, the carelessly made bed, the colour photographs above the table, the chart of soccer championships, the guitar, the instructions for dog training…

“They’re gonna give me the boot,” Volikov said. “The dogs are literally out of their heads. I put Alma out on a chain post. A zek walks along the fence – she wags her tail. Then a soldier comes along – she throws herself on him. Gone completely wild. She doesn’t even know me. I have to feed her, the wretch, through a special embrasure.”

“If I were in her place,” Fidel said, “I’d chew on Captain Tokar’s throat. After all, she doesn’t have to worry about a court-martial.”

“If you want, I’ll show you the puppies,” Volikov said, pulling up his pants.

We had to stoop down to go into a special little closet. There, on her side, lay the rusty-coloured bitch Maw-Maw. She raised her head anxiously. Beside her, nestling into her belly, the puppies wriggled.

“Don’t you touch,” Volikov said to Fidel.

He began picking up the puppies and handing them to us. They had pink bellies, and their delicate paws trembled.

Fidel held one of them up to his face. The puppy licked him. Fidel laughed and turned red.

Maw-Maw watched us uneasily and swished her tail.

For a few seconds everyone stood silent. Then Fidel lifted his hands like the jazz singer Celentano on the Supraphon record jacket. Then he showered curses on the seven puppies, the bitch Maw-Maw, the company command, Captain Tokar personally, the local climate, the instruction of the surveillance staff, and the forthcoming traditional cross-country skiing race.

“Time to get a bottle,” Volikov said, as if he had seen the appropriate sign.

“I can’t,” I said. “I’m on duty tonight.”

“Some crap is brewing in Barracks Six, did you hear?”

“What, exactly?”

“I don’t know. The security officer apprised me.”

“You should go to Yavshitz,” Fidel said. “A heart attack, tell him… I’m coughing… I have terrible stomach cramps…”

“I went. He threw me out.”

“Yavshitz has gone completely wild,” Volikov said, patting Maw-Maw, “absolutely. I went there once. Swallowing, I say, hurts. And he up and says to me, ‘You should swallow less, Lance Corporal!’ Implying, the pig, that I drink. He probably guzzles schnapps himself there all alone.”

“Not likely,” I said. “The old man’s in excellent shape. He’s never been seen drunk.”

“He partakes, he partakes,” Fidel put in. “Doctors have oceans of pure alcohol. Why not take a swig of it?”

“That’s basically true,” I said.

“I heard that he was one of the doctors who did in Maxim Gorky back when he was an enemy of the people. Then in 1960 they pardoned him. They leha… rehali… rehalibitated him. But the doctor got insulted: ‘Where were you looking while I was doing my stretch?’ So he stayed in the north.”

“If you listen to them,” Volikov said angrily, “every one of them is doing time for nothing. I don’t generally care for spies. The same goes for enemies of the people.”

“You’ve seen some?” I asked.

“I came across a Jew, the head of a bathhouse, who was in here for molesting minors.”

“What kind of enemy of the people is that?”

“What do you call him, a friend?”

Volikov went off to relieve himself. After a minute, he returned and said, “Alma’s gone completely wild. Barks at me as if she didn’t know me. Once I couldn’t stand it and also started howling. Scared the hell out of her.”

“In her place,” Fidel said, “I’d tear open everyone’s throats, the wardens’ and the zeks’.”

“Ours too? For what?” Volikov asked.

“For everything,” Fidel answered.

We were silent. We could hear the puppies squealing in the closet.

“Fine,” Volikov said, “we might as well.” He took a bottle of vermouth with a green label out from under the mattress. “Here, I hid it even from myself. And found it right away.”

The vermouth was sealed with wax. Fidel didn’t feel like bothering with it and broke off the neck on the edge of the burner.

We drank out of the same mug. Volikov found some Bulgarian cigarettes.

“Oho,” Fidel said, “this is what it means to live far away from the boss. You’ve got it all, schnapps and smokes. And I heard that one instructor at Veslyana even managed to get the clap.”

Outside the window, Sergeant Meleshko was marching his platoon to the latrine. The command followed: “Relieve yourselves!”

They all stayed outside, spreading out around the planked stalls. After a minute, the snow was covered with spirals. Immediately an improvised distance contest began. As far as we could make out, the winner was Yakimovich from Gomel.

White smoke rose over the garrison roof. The over-laundered flag hung limply. The plank walls seemed especially motionless, the way a boat jetty beside a swiftly moving mountain river can be motionless, or a request-stop station at which an express train brakes slightly and then rushes on.

Orderlies in padded jackets were cleaning snow near the porch with broad plywood shovels. The wooden handles of the shovels shone in the sun. A green truck, the back of it covered with canvas, stopped by the door of the army kitchen.

“Bob, how do you feel about the zeks?” Fidel asked, drinking down the last of the vermouth.

“It depends,” I said.

“And I,” Volikov said, “just about come when I look at them.”

“And I,” Fidel said, “I’m all mixed up.”

“All right,” I said. “Time for me to go on duty.”

I stopped by the barracks, put on a sheepskin jacket, and went to find Lieutenant Khuriyev. He was supposed to give me instructions.

“Go,” Khuriyev said. “Be careful!”

The camp gates were thrown wide open. Con-mobiles were driving up from the logging sector. Prisoners sat on the floor in the bed of the truck. The soldiers were spread out behind the barriers by the checkpoint cabin. When the truck pulled to a stop, they quickly stepped down to the side, holding their sub-machine guns in a horizontal position. After this, the zeks jumped down and walked towards the gates.

“First column – march!” Tvauri commanded. In his right hand he was holding a small canvas bag with identification cards. A prisoner’s last name, distinguishing marks and length of term were given on each of them.

“Second column – march!”

The prisoners walked on, their quilted jackets open, not paying attention to the growling dogs.

The trucks turned around and lit up the gates with their headlights.

When the brigades had passed, I opened the doors of the checkpoint cabin. The controller, Belota, was sitting at the desk, wearing an unbuttoned fatigue shirt. He released the latch pin. I was now behind the bars in the narrow transit corridor.

“Got anything to smoke?” Belota asked.

I threw a few limp cigarettes into the sliding tray for documents. The latch returned to its former position. The controller admitted me into the zone.

In the north, it generally gets dark early. And in the zone especially.

I walked along the walls of the barracks, reached the gates, under which the narrow-gauge rails dimly shone, then stopped at the Command Patrol Station, where some re-enlistees were playing cards.

I greeted them – nobody said anything back. Only Ignatyev from Leningrad yelled out in excitement, “Bob, today I’m hanging in!”

The creased cards fell soundlessly on the table, which was shiny from elbows.

I finished my cigarette, put the butt in an empty can. Then, throwing open the door, I convinced myself that it had truly grown dark. I had to go.

Barracks Six was located to the right of the main avenue, under a watchtower. This was where the security reports said the zeks were planning something.

I could easily have not gone into the barracks. And yet I went. I wanted to get it all over with before the absolute silence set in.

Shadows were hiding in the corners of Barracks Six. A dim bulb lit the crudely made table and the bunks.

I looked over the barracks. Everything here was familiar to me: life with its covers torn off, a simple and monotonous sense of things, a latrine bucket by the entrance, pictures from a magazine pinned up on the sooty beams. None of this frightened me, only made me feel pity and revulsion.

Zek Brigadier Agoshin sat with his elbows propped wide apart. His face expressed nasty impatience.

The others spread out into the corners.

Everyone was looking at me. I felt uncomfortable and said to Agoshin, “Walk with me.”

He stood up, looked around, as if giving final instructions, then headed for the door. We stepped out on the porch.

“Zek Agoshin awaiting orders,” the brigadier said.

His manner was a mixture of respect and impudence, typical of prisoners in high security. Beneath the hypocritical “Chief” one could distinctly hear: “Blockhead!”

“At your service, Citizen Chief!”

“What are you cooking up in there, Brigadier?” I asked.

I should not have asked this question. By doing so I was violating the rules of the game. According to the rules, the guard figures everything out himself and, if he’s able to, takes measures.

“You wrong me, Chief,” the brigadier said.

“What, you think I don’t see?”

As he spoke, I remembered a red-faced waiter who worked in a modernized beer joint in the Ligovka part of town. Once I decided to catch him at his cheating and got out a ballpoint pen. While I checked his addition of the bill, the waiter looked me in the face, unperturbed, and even kept repeating in a familiar tone, “Go on, add up, add up… I’ll out-add you all the same.”

“If something happens, you’ll get kicked out of the zek brigadiers!”

“For what, Chief?” Agoshin said, feigning alarm.

I felt like punching him in the face. “Fine,” I said, and walked away.

The snow-covered, reddish windows of Barracks Six were left behind.

I decided to go see Security Officer Bortashevich. He was the only officer who addressed me familiarly. I found him in the penal isolator.

“Gud ivning,” Bortashevich said, “good thing you showed up. I’m wrestling with a philosophical question – why do people drink? Let’s suppose, as they said earlier, it’s a vestige of capitalism in the mind of the people, a shadow of the past… And, mainly – the influence of the West. Even though we really let ourselves go in the East. But that’s all well and good. Just explain this to me. Once I lived in the country. My neighbour had a goat, a lush the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Be it red wine, be it white – just pour it. And the West here had absolutely no influence. And a goat has no past, you would think. It’s not like he was an old Bolshevik… So I thought, maybe some mysterious power is locked in alcohol, something like the one that appears when the nucleus of the atom breaks up. So couldn’t we harness that power for peaceful aims? For example, to get me demobilized before my term is up.”

There were bars on the windows in the isolator. In the corner was a camp stove, and on it a boiling tea kettle ringed with dry bread rusks. Behind the wall were two solitary cells, called “tumblers”. Right now they were empty.

“Zhenya,” I said, “something seems to be brewing in Barracks Six. Is it true?”

“Yes, I was just meaning to warn you.”

“So why didn’t you?”

“My philosophical thoughts came rushing out. I got carried away. Pardon.”

“What’s going on there?”

“They want to rub out a stoolie. Onuchin, Ivan.”

“But that’s your favourite type.”

“Not any more. I’m in no position to use someone like that. He’s a regular psycho. Touched in the head with politics. Whatever you ask him he turns into politics. Such and such prisoner, he says, debased a great image. Another one has unhealthy tendencies. As if the only person fighting to preserve Soviet power is Citizen Onuchin. Ugh! The things nature comes up with.”

“What’s he in for?”

“Petty larceny, naturally. I tell you what. You just sit the night out at Command Patrol. Or else in my office. Don’t poke your nose in Barracks Six.”

“But then they’ll kill him. Each one will have a go so that everyone keeps quiet after.”

“You’re what, sorry for Onuchin? Then you should know he’s even squealed on you. For indulging the contingent.”

“Onuchin is not the point. We’ve got to follow the law.”

“In general, you fuss over the zeks too much.”

“It just seems to me that I’m the same as them. And so are you, Zhenya.”

“That’s a good one,” Bortashevich said, bending down to pick up a splinter of mirror, “that’s a good one! My kisser may look like it should be sued for damages, but before the law I am relatively clean.”

“I don’t know about you. But before doing guard service I drank, got into trouble, ran around with black-marketeers. Once I hit a girl on Perinnaya Lane. Her glasses got broken…”

“Fine, but what have I got to do with it?”

“Can you honestly say that inside you there isn’t a burglar or a con man? Can you say that in your mind you haven’t killed or robbed? Or, at the very least, raped?”

“And how, hundreds of times. And maybe thousands. In my mind – yes. But that doesn’t mean I give licence to my impulses.”

“And why not? Are you afraid?”

Bortashevich jumped up. “Am I afraid? I can say no to that! And you know it very well.”

“You’re afraid of yourself.”

“I am not a wolf. I live among people.”

“All right,” I said. “Calm down.”

The security officer walked over to the camp stove. “Look at this,” he said suddenly. “Does this ever happen to you? When a tea kettle comes to the boil, you get this terrible urge to plug this thing with your finger. Once I couldn’t resist. I almost lost a finger.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m going.”

“Don’t be in such a hurry. You want some beer? I’ve got beer. And a can of cod.”

“No. I’m going.”

“Look at him,” Bortashevich said, overwhelmed. “He’s gone completely uncivilized. He has no desire for beer.”

He stood in the doorway and yelled after me, “Alikhanov, don’t go looking for adventures!”

From the isolator I headed for the most dangerous corner of the camp zone, the place where an illuminated furrow ran between the barracks walls and the fence – the so-called free-fire zone.

When giving instructions to a detail, a guard commander always demanded that special attention be given this area. Precisely for this reason it was always peaceful here.

I walked alongside the barracks, shouting to the sentry from far off, “Hullo, Rudolf!”

I wanted to avoid the standard shout, “Who goes there?” which always ruined my mood.

“Halt! Who goes there?” the sentry called out, cocking his rifle.

I walked straight to the sentry in silence.

“Vai, Boris!” said Rudolf Khedoyan. “I almost shoot you!”

“OK,” I said. “Everything normal here?”

“How normal?” Rudolf yelled. “Why normal? No enough people. Guard stand watchtower. Normal, you tell? No normal! Cold is normal? Eh?!”

Southerners doing guard service suffered terribly from the cold. Some lit little campfires right up in the watchtowers. And there once was a time when officers looked at this through their fingers. Then Rezo Tskhovrebashvili burnt the fourth watchtower down to its foundations. After this, HQ issued a special directive forbidding so much as smoking in a watchtower. Rezo himself was taken to Lieutenant Colonel Grechnev. The colonel started to bawl him out, but Tskhovrebashvili stopped him with a gesture and said amicably, “Let’s settle this over cognac – on me!” Upon which Grechnev burst out laughing and threw the soldier out without a reprimand.

“What a climate,” Rudolf said. “Worse than on the moon.”

“Were you on the moon?” I asked.

“I’ve never even been on leave,” Rudolf said.

“OK,” I said. “Be patient another forty minutes or so.”

I stood under the watchtower for a few minutes, then headed for Barracks Six. I walked by the uneven benches, past the warped display board with photographs of members of the Vanguard Force of Labour, past the water-pumping station with black snow by its door.

Then I turned towards the fire-extinguisher stand in order to make sure that all the instruments were in place.

If a fire were to begin, it was doubtful that the prisoners would put it out. For any incident, even natural disaster, introduced a pleasant variety to life. But an emergency stand was required by regulation, and the zeks made use of it. Whenever knife fights began in the barracks, the participants rushed out to the fire stand, where they could grab a shovel, iron tongs or an axe.

The sound of muffled cries was coming from Barracks Six. For a moment I felt a sickening chill in my stomach. I remembered the hugeness of the space behind my back. And ahead – only Barracks Six, inside which shouts were ricocheting about. I thought to myself that it was better to leave, to leave and after a minute be safe inside the checkpoint cabin. But at that instant I had already thrown open the door of the barracks.

I spotted Onuchin at once. He stood in the corner shielding himself with a stool. Its legs stuck out forwards in an ominous way.

Onuchin was a notorious stoolie. Also, he was the only man in the zone who wore a beard. That was how he had been photographed when he was under investigation. Then the photograph migrated to his case file. After that, the beard became one of his distinguishing marks, like his boldly written tattoo: “I’ll not forget my mother and fathar [sic] in battle fallen!”

Onuchin was all beaten up. His beard had become red, and the spots on his quilted jacket black. He waved the stool and kept repeating, “What are you murdering me for? You’re murdering me for no reason! As if I’m a louse, for no reason!”

When I walked in… when I ran in, the prisoners turned and that same instant surrounded him again. Someone at the back, maybe Chaly, forced his way forwards carrying a knife. I saw the narrow white blade at once. All the light in the barracks fell on this slight piece of metal.

“Back!” I shouted, grabbing Chaly by the sleeve.

“Keep away from trouble, Chief,” he muttered in a choked voice.

I grabbed Chaly by his jacket and pulled it down to his elbows. Then I kicked him in the belly with my boot. In a second I was next to Onuchin. I remember that I had undone the cuffs of my shirt.

The prisoners, surrounding us, waited for a sign or at least for an abrupt movement. Something terrible and faceless moved in on me.

With a tremendous boom, the door slammed open. Bortashevich stood in the doorway in his blindingly polished leather boots. He spotted me at once and announced in a low voice: “I’ll shoot every other one… on my word as a Communist… without a trial…”

The monster that had threatened me fell back into ten dark figures. I led Onuchin by the shoulder. The three of us left the barracks.

Behind our backs, the voice of the zek brigadier rang out, “Ech, you’re all a bunch of stinking punks! You can’t even pull off a simple wet job!”

We walked along the fence under the protection of the sentries. When we had made it to the checkpoint, Bortashevich said to Onuchin, “Go to the isolator. Wait there till they transfer you to another camp.”

Onuchin touched my sleeve. His mouth twisted mournfully. “There’s no justice in this life,” he said.

“Go,” I said.

Early in the morning, I knocked on the doctor’s door. His office was spacious and cool.

“What seems to be ailing you?” he said, lifting his nearsighted eyes.

Then he quickly got up and came over to me. “Well, why are you crying? Wait, at least let me shut the door.”

May 30, 1982. New York

Dear Igor,

I remember something that happened near Yosser.

There was a country school located two miles from the camp. A woman taught at the school, a lean woman with metal teeth and a cataract in one eye.

The roof of the school was visible from the zone. In it, a lifer named Makeyev was confined. He was a sixty-year-old man who had been dragged from one place to another.

To make a long story short, the zek fell in love with the schoolteacher. He was unable to make out her features. More than that, he did not even know her age. All that was certain was that she was a woman, and that was it. Someone in an old-fashioned dress.

Her name was Isolda Shchukina, though Makeyev did not know that either.

Strictly speaking, he had not even seen her. He knew this was a woman and distinguished the colour of her dresses. She had two – one green and one brown.

Early in the morning, Makeyev would crawl onto the roof of the barracks. After some time, there would be a thunderous announcement: “Brown!” This meant that Isolda had gone out to visit the toilet facilities.

I do not remember the prisoners laughing at Makeyev. On the contrary, his feelings evoked deep interest.

Makeyev drew a daisy on the wall of the barracks. It was the size of an engine wheel. Each evening, Makeyev would erase one of the petals with a rag.

Whether Isolda Shchukina ever guessed what was going on was never known. Most likely she did guess. She would stand on the porch for long stretches of time, and visited the toilet facilities often.

They met only once. Makeyev worked in the production zone, and once his column was marched out to an exterior work site. Isolda was walking through the settlement. Their paths crossed near the water tower.

The whole column slowed their steps. The escort guards started getting nervous, but a few of the zeks explained what was happening.

Isolda walked alongside the hushed column of men. Her metal teeth shone. Her felt overshoes sank in the mud.

From the rows, Makeyev threw a small package to her. Isolda picked it up and unwrapped it. Inside was a handmade plastic cigarette holder.

The woman walked straight to the head of the convoy. She took off a short knitted scarf and held it out to Lance Corporal Boyko. He handed it to one of the zeks. The fiery-coloured strip moved down the rows of men, vivid against the background of worn prison rags, till Makeyev wrapped it around his lean neck.

The prisoners walked on. Someone in back started up a song:

“…So where are you now, you tart,

Deep in some new love affair,

And who are you sharing cigarettes with?”

But the others cut him off. The moment demanded silence.

Makeyev turned around and waved the scarf all the way back to the zone. He still had fourteen years left to serve.

A THREE-METRE FENCE surrounds the prisoners’ housing units, which loom up at you out of the darkness. All along the passage corridor, there are snares made of the finest wire mesh. A little further on, an “Amber”-type tripwire alarm system is installed.

Four watchtowers rise up at the corners, forming an imaginary closed rectangle. Four searchlights illuminate the duty detail path. The sentries can see the rotting fence boards and the free-fire zone between the living and administration zones.

Towards six in the evening, a prisoner transport vehicle with bars on its windows drives up. The head of the convoy removes its padlocks. The prisoners, in grey jackets and noisy boots, walk without speaking down the ramp.

An officer appears in a green rain poncho with a hood. His voice sounds like an alarm mechanism: “The brigade is now under the convoy’s direction. One step out of line constitutes escape. Convoy will shoot to kill!”

Cold and dust. In some places, the earth is whitened with frost. The dry, rusted grass presses against little knolls.

Talking quietly, the zeks fall into columns. Guards hold back dogs straining on their leashes.

“First column – march!”

The officer is past fifty. He has worked in the guard section for twenty years. There are four little stars on his shoulder straps. He owns one imported civilian jacket; everything else is standard-issue green.

Soldiers in bulky sheepskin jackets go to their posts. They drag walkie-talkies behind them.

The soldier who has just come on duty stays in the checkpoint cabin. Soon he dreams of home, of Bronyuta Grobatavichus in a green sweater… He sees a river sparkling in the sun, his truck on a dusty road, an eagle above a little grove, a boat, soundlessly parting reeds.

Then his warm, cosy world is pierced by a shout that is intentionally coarse and as harsh as tin plate: “Relief shift, approach!”

And again – six hours in the wind. If you only knew what that means!

In the space of these hours, you recall your entire life. You forgive all offences, travel around the globe. You possess hundreds of women. Drink champagne from crystal glasses. Get into fights and ride home in a taxi.

And again – six hours in the wind.

At night, they broadcast from the zone: “A zek was flattened in the felling sector.”

It happened like this: The roper had moved a lever incorrectly. Above the men’s heads, the pulley jerked to one side. Its iron chain slipped. From the fall of an AG-430 two-axle steam generator… No, owing to a ton-and-a-half piece of metal… Anyway, what happened was that the zek Butyrin, who had been bending down to polish some seams, had his skull split open.