The Zone

Now he lies under a wet tarpaulin. The soles of his feet are unnaturally splayed. The body takes up a little space next to the waste-bin platform.

He seems to have shrunk. His face is as inanimate as the limp mitten dropped a little to the side, or like the shaft of a shovel that is polished to a shine, or a tin of axle grease.

This death is stripped of any mystery. It evokes dull anguish. Above the blood-soaked tarpaulin, flies are making vibrating noises.

Butyrin had often seen death, escaped it dozens of times. He came from a long line of “jumpers” and was a drug addict, a loafer and a homosexual. On top of all this, he was a hysteric known for once gulping down a bottle of ink in an investigator’s office so he could spend a few days in a warm hospital.

He was covered with tattoos from head to foot. His teeth had grown black from drinking chifir. His body, punctured by morphine needles, had refused to react to pain.

He could have died long before this – for example, in Sormovo, when the Kanvinsky gang beat him up with bicycle chains. They threw him under a commuter train, but Butyrin had miraculously managed to crawl out. The zek had often recalled the roaring, fiery triangle, and how the sand squeaked against his teeth.

He could have croaked at Gori, when he said an obscene word to a crowd of southerners in a market. Or at Sindor, the time when the escort guards ordered a file to march into an icy stream, and the prisoners had started singing, they had walked in… but later pockmarked Lance Corporal Petrov had opened fire anyway.

He could have croaked in Ukhta, making a dash from the sawmill. Or in Koyna in the isolator, where zeks fought each other with boot knives.

And now he lies beneath a random tarpaulin. The security officer tries to make radio contact. He shouts, holding the transmitter diaphragm to his mouth: “This is Buttercup! This is Buttercup! Over! I can’t hear you! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”

He lights a cigarette, and then he starts shouting again, straining his voice: “This is Buttercup! Over! Prisoners excited! Situation tense! Send supplementary convoy and doctor!”

Soon the truck arrives. They lay the corpse in the van. One of us escorts it to the prison hospital. After all, dead zeks have to be guarded too.

And a month later, Political Instructor Khuriyev will write a letter to Inessa Vladimirovna Butyrina, the sole living relative of the deceased, his first cousin once removed. In it he will write: “Your son, Butyrin, Grigori Tikhonovich, was making sure strides towards rehabilitation. He died at his labour post…”

June 7, 1982. New York

Dear Igor,

You’ll recall my saying that a camp is a typical Soviet institution, and not only in its administrative-economic system, not only in its superimposed ideology, not only by force of the habitual formalities. A camp is a Soviet institution in spirit, in its inner essence.

The ordinary criminal, as a rule, is an entirely loyal Soviet citizen. Which is not to say, of course, that he isn’t discontented. The price of alcohol has gone up, and so on. But the basics are sacred, and Lenin is above any criticism.

In this sense, camp art is extremely significant. Here, without any pressure or constraints, the method of socialist realism triumphs.

Has it ever occurred to you, too, that socialist art aspires to be something like magic? That it is reminiscent of the ritual and cult painting of our ancient ancestors?

You draw a bison on a rock face, and that evening you get something hot to eat.

Bureaucrats of official art reason the same way. If you portray something that’s positive, then everyone will be all right. But if it’s something negative, the opposite result will occur. If you depict a Stakhanovite feat of labour,* it follows that everyone will work hard. And so on.

Think of the underground mosaics of our capital. Vegetables, fruits, domesticated birds… Georgians, Lithuanians, Armenians… Large- and small-horned cattle… They are all the same bison.

In camp it’s the same story. Take camp painting. If it’s a landscape, it will be done in incredible, tropical, Andalusian colours. If it’s a still life, then it will be full of calories.

Camp portraits are complimentary to an extreme. Out of prison, only powerful Party chiefs get painted that way.

And there is no modernism whatsoever. The closer the resemblance to a photograph, the better. Modigliani and Gauguin would have little success here.

Take camp songs. The most common story put to music goes like this: A lonely mother lives with her child. Papasha has abandoned them. The son becomes a thief (or if it’s a daughter, a prostitute). Sooner or later, there’s a trial. The prosecutor, with lowered eyes, asks for the maximum penalty. The defendant takes his own life. Beside his grave, the prosecutor sits and sobs for hour after hour. As you have already guessed, he is the unlucky father of the deceased.

This is all nonsense, of course, completely implausible. A prosecutor cannot prosecute his own relative. It is forbidden by Soviet law, and the prisoners know this perfectly well, but they continue to exploit this inane theme every chance they get.

Or take camp myths. The most widespread among them is of a mass escape, as a rule across the White Sea – to the United States. You hear dozens of versions, each with the most minute factual details, with an elaborate description of the itinerary, with oaths of assurance that everything happened just that way.

And the organizer of the escape will invariably be a valiant Chekist, a former colonel in the GPU or the NKVD, condemned by Khrushchev as an associate of Beria and Yagoda.*

Well, one could ask, just what draws them to such scum? What draws them is the status of such men as familiar, traditional Soviet heroes, characters out of Yulian Semyonov or the brothers Vayner.*

They say that Yemelyan Pugachev drew support for his peasant uprising from escaped prisoners.* The prison inmates of today are not planning to revolt. Should some commotion occur, they would head for the nearest store that sells alcohol.

Alright. Now to business. Send me, if it’s no trouble, samples of your typeface and two catalogues.

If you come to New York, we’ll see each other then. Regards to your wife, mother and daughters. Our Katya is terribly angry all the time – the “in-between” age.

Tomorrow they’re opening a new Russian café near my house. As a local celebrity, I will stop by in the morning to congratulate the owner.

IN OCTOBER THEY DISQUALIFIED ME for bad conduct in the ring, and I was deprived of all the substantial privileges of an athlete. The result was that I found myself back in the guard battalion with the duties of a private. At night the smell of foot cloths wrapped around the tops of boots deprived me of sleep. As a finishing touch, Lance Corporal Blindyak screamed at me in front of the entire outfit: “I’ll ROT you, you carrion, I’ll ROT you!”

Given the situation, my appointment as company clerk was a piece of unheard-of luck. Apparently, the decisive factor had been my unfinished higher education. I had got through three years at Leningrad State University. I think I was the most educated man in the Komi Autonomous Republic.

Early in the morning, I used to sweep the porch at HQ. The snow-covered square would be criss-crossed with the mighty streamings of the guards. I would go out on the road and wait there for the captain.

Once I saw him, I would start walking faster, raise my palm sharply to my cap, and say in a feckless, mechanical voice, “Good health to you, sir!”

Then, letting my palm drop as if completely sapped by the effort, I would ask in a respectful-familiar tone, “How’d you sleep, Uncle Lyonya?” and then immediately stop speaking, as if embarrassed by the warm feeling that overcame me.

The life of Captain Tokar was made up of courage and drunkenness. Stumbling, he walked a narrow line between these two oceans.

Briefly, his life was unsuccessful. His wife lived in Moscow and danced on the stage under a different name. And his son was a jockey. Recently, he had sent a photograph: a horse, a bucket and some kinds of boards.

For the captain, the embodiment of courage had become tidiness, a sharp voice and the ability to keep drinking without having anything to eat.

Once he reached his office, Tokar took off his raincoat. On his neck, the thin line of his collar showed white, like a bad omen.

“Where’s Barkovets?” he asked. “Call him!”

Lance Corporal Barkovets appeared in the doorway. He did something funny with his leg, his shoulder, he rolled his eyes. To put it simply, he put on a show of feeling guilty that was crude and completely unconvincing.

Using his thumbs, Tokar tucked and smoothed his khaki officer’s tunic.

“Lance Corporal Barkovets, for shame!” he said. “Who addressed a four-letter word at Lieutenant Khuriyev yesterday?”

“Comrade Captain—”

“Silence!”

“If you had been there—”

“I order you to be quiet!”

“—you yourself would have agreed—”

“I’ll have you arrested, Barkovets!”

“—that I justly… called him to order.”

“Four days of arrest,” the captain said, “one for each letter.”

When the lance corporal had gone, Tokar said to me, “It seems that Muscovites are people with a sense of humour.”

“That’s true.”

“Were you ever in Moscow?”

“Twice, to box.”

“Did you ever go to the races?”

“Never.”

“It would be interesting to know – what kind of people are jockeys?”

“I really have no idea.”

“Athletic types?”

“Something like that.”

Tokar reached home. A black cocker spaniel threw itself at his feet, sitting in delight.

“Brooch, little Broochie,” Tokar whispered, dropping slices of “Doctor”-brand sausage onto the snow.

At home: warm vodka, the latest news. In the table drawer, a pistol.

“Brooch, Broochie, my only friend… Anikin’s getting his demobilization… All the rest of them are climbing up in the world. That idiot Pantaleyev is at General Headquarters… Reismann is a professor, he’s got his own apartment… Of course, Reismann would probably have got his own apartment in Maydanek… Well, Brooch, so what about us two? Valentina, the bitch, doesn’t write. Mitya sends a horse…”

Outside the window, cold and gloom. Snowdrifts had surrounded the cabin. Not a sound, not a rustle; take a drink and wait. And how long you have to wait you never know. If only the dogs would begin to bark, or the lamp go out, you could fill your glass again.

And that was how he always fell asleep, with his shoulder belt and khaki tunic and boots on. The lamp would burn till morning.

And in the morning I would again walk past the defiled square towards the gates, snap my palm smartly to my cap, then drop it limply and say in a voice that quavered with affection, “How was the night, Uncle Lenya?”

At one time I had been a promising army heavyweight and the sports instructor at section headquarters. Before working at headquarters, I’d done guard service in the production zone. And preceding all of the above, there had been an interview long ago with an official in the regional war office.

“You’re an educated fellow,” the commissar had said. “You could train to be a sergeant, or get into the rocket units… But the ones who go into the guard section are the kind who have nothing to lose.”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t have anything to lose.”

The commissar looked at me distrustfully. “In what sense?”

“I’ve been expelled from the university, divorced by my wife…”

I felt like being frank and natural. My arguments did not convince the commissar. He said, “Maybe you, you know… took something you shouldn’t have? And now you’re trying to get out of it?”

“Right,” I said. “A beggar’s tin cup with some copper coins.”

“I didn’t understand that,” the commissar said, starting.

“That was supposed to be a joke.”

“What was funny about it?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Sorry.”

“Listen, young man, I am telling you as I would a friend – guard duty is hell!”

Then I answered that hell is in us ourselves. Only we didn’t notice it.

“And in my opinion,” the commissar said, “you’re trying to be a little too clever.”

Disappointed at not figuring me out, the commissar began to fill out my documents.

In a month’s time, I was at the supervisor-training school near Ropcha. And after another month, the inspector of hand-to-hand combat, Toroptsev, said to us in parting: “Remember, it is possible to save yourself from the knife. You can block an axe. You can take away a pistol. You can do anything! But if you can run away – run! Run, son, and don’t look back.”

In my pocket I carried written instructions. The fourth item read: “If a guard finds himself in a hopeless situation, he gives this command to the sentry: ‘DIRECT YOUR FIRE AT ME.’”

The penal isolator, night. Behind the wall, rattling his handcuffs, Anagi wandered from corner to corner. Security Officer Bortashevich said to me, “Of course, anything can happen. People are nervous, egocentric to the limit. For example? Once in the logging sector they wanted to saw off my head with a “Friendship”-brand power saw.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Well, what do you think happened? I took away the power saw and smashed the guy’s face in.”

“That explains that.”

“Then there was the business with an axe in a transit station.”

“So? How did it end?”

“I took away the axe, gave this fellow one in the jaw…”

“I see.”

“Once a zek high on chifir came at me with a knife.”

“So you took away the knife and punched him in the face?” Bortashevich looked at me closely, then unbuttoned his fatigue shirt. I saw a small, white, soul-chilling scar.

At night I hurried from headquarters to the barracks. The shortest way was through the zone. I marched past the identical barracks, past yellow light bulbs in wire casings. I hurried, feeling the kinship of silence and frost.

From time to time, barracks doors were thrown open. A zek jumped out of one heated dwelling in a cloud of white steam. He urinated, lit a cigarette, yelled to the sentry in the watchtower, “Allo, Chief! Which one of us is in prison? You or me?”

The sentry, bundled up in a sheepskin jacket, cursed at him lazily.

A shout rang out from the southernmost barracks. I ran there, unbuttoning my cuffs as I went. There on the plank walkway lay the recidivist Kuptsov, howling and pointing at something. A cockroach moved on the wall, black and shiny as a racing car.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“Oy, I’m afraid, Chief! Who knows what that cockroach has in mind!”

“You’re a joker,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“In winter Victor, and in autumn Adam.”

“What are you in for?”

“Jaywalking… with somebody else’s suitcase.”

“Excuse him, Chief,” Zek Brigadier Agoshin said amicably, “that’s our kind of humour. A little harmless ribbing among friends, as they say. Better come inside and have some supper.”

“I’ll eat something with them,” I thought. “After all, they’re people too. And man by nature… And so on…”

We ate meat roasted in the barracks on the camp stove. Then we smoked. Someone picked up a guitar and softly sang in a sentimental voice:

“Keep your chin up, darling, I will never cease waiting,

My conscience is clean, though my clothes are all dusty;

Above me the scorching tent of Kazakhstan,

The endless steppe shining like gold in the distance…”

“Nice people, basically,” I thought, “even if they are bandits, of course.”

“Hey, Chief,” Brigadier Agoshin said, “do you know who you just ate?”

Everybody burst out laughing. I stood up.

“Do you know what those cutlets you just ate were made from?”

The feeling in my stomach was of a bomb going off.

“From the captain’s pooch, that’s what. Such a smart doggie, you know the one…”

“…Above me the scorching tent of Kazakhstan,

The endless steppe shining like gold in the distance,

And wherever I go, I fail to find you,

The feather grass refuses to talk to me of you.”

“So just go and tell him,” Fidel said.

“The captain won’t survive this. The old man has no one, no friends except for that dog. I can’t do it, I swear to God.”

“Look, you’re a boxer. You have strong nerves.”

“I swear to God, I can’t.”

“No matter what, he has to be told.”

“It would be easier for you to do it. You don’t have to deal with the captain.”

“What have I got to do with it? Let the one who ate tell him.”

“Why do you have to keep reminding me! As it is, the whole business is tearing me inside out every second.”

“He carries a pistol in his pocket. How do you know he won’t – you know, do it. Once he finds out about everything.”

“What’s the use of talking? The old man’s on the brink. His wife doesn’t write, his son is some kind of bum… Brooch was his only friend.”

“What about sending a telegram?”

“That won’t work.”

“In any case, he has to be told. And you’re an educated person. You know how to talk to people.”

“What do you mean?”

“They don’t keep you at headquarters for nothing. You can find a common language with everyone.”

“What do you mean to say by that?”

“Half the officers address you formally, with respect.”

“Well, so what?”

“So that’s why some people say you’re a composer.”

“A what?”

“Nothing. A composer. You write operas. Meaning you write up the operational workers; you know, security guys, your friends…”

I leant across the table and hit Fidel with a metal ruler. A crimson mark stayed on his cheek. Fidel jumped off his chair and yelled, “Ooh, headquarters’ bitch! Officers’ lackey!”

Then I felt the onrush of a wave of fury which put an end to all thought. Fidel moved slowly, like a swimmer. I hit him with a left, then again. Saw not more than a step away a round, distinctly formed chin. That was exactly where I drove my grievances, bitterness, pain… A stool flew out from under Fidel’s legs. After that, blood on the pages of a rationing report. And the hoarse voice of Captain Tokar, who had appeared in the doorway: “As you were! I order both of you – as you were!”

Lowering my eyes, I told Captain Tokar everything. He heard me out, straightened his shirt, and suddenly began talking in a rapid, senile whisper: “I’ll make them pay. See if I don’t. I gave thirty roubles for Brooch in Kotlas.”

That evening Captain Tokar got drunk. He started a brawl in the settlement beer hall. Tore up the photograph of the horse. Cursed his wife with the very dirtiest words, the kind of words that lost their meaning long ago. And at night he walked off somewhere by the hydroelectric generator, and tried, breaking match after match, to light a cigarette in the wind.

Early in the morning, I was again shovelling the porch. Then I headed for the gates past the dirty piles of snow.

I walked beneath a moon as harsh and blunt as graffiti on a wall, and waited for the captain, who arrived upright, carefully shaven, unruffled. I snapped my hand to my temple, then let it fall as if completely sapped. And at last I asked in a courteous, challenging, amiable voice, “Well, how goes it, Uncle Lenya?”

Twenty years have passed. Captain Tokar is still alive. And so am I. But where is that world, full of hatred and fear? Did it go away? And what is the reason for my melancholy and shame?

June 11, 1982. Dartmouth

Dear Igor,

Just read your piece about American crime. And to be frank, I was a little surprised.

Theft, murder, rape – of course these are horrible crimes. They are committed in America; they are also committed in the USSR.

But I would like to raise another issue – the crimes that Soviet people don’t even notice, the ones that have become habitual and commonplace. The crimes that don’t even appear as such in the eyes of an average Soviet citizen.

Blatant rudeness – isn’t that a kind of crime? I suppose it is a matter of taste, but personally I would prefer to be robbed once in my life than to be humiliated every moment.

Think of the gloomy faces of Soviet salespersons, the sullen expressions of train conductors, the notes of perpetual irritation in the voices of countless administrators.

Do you agree? You have to agree that the average American policeman is three times as polite as the average Moscow waiter.

That is not all. Soviet rudeness often takes a legitimized form of injunction. I have read many announcements in my life that startled me, but I especially remember three. The first one I saw on the wall of a Leningrad food store. It read: “THE GUILTY WILL BE PUNISHED!” After that, not a word. A threat ominously addressed into space.

Apropos: In this same food store, a friend of mine saw a note lying on the cover of a zinc tub: “Zina, don’t water the sour cream. I already watered it.”

The second announcement was on a wall in the office of the head of the militia in the city of Zelenogorsk. It read: “DON’T ASK ANY QUESTIONS!” This order reeked of hopelessness.

But the most surprising announcement of all was one I saw in the admissions office of a country hospital. It consisted of two words – “NOT ALLOWED” – followed by three exclamation points.

But all of this is a digression. The real matter at hand is the following: I have wanted to write down a certain camp story for a long time. Somehow I never got around to it. But I came to visit Lev here at Dartmouth, sat around doing nothing, and then finally managed to put myself to work. The story is not part of the original version of The Zone. Think of it instead as a later stratification. I don’t think readers will notice the difference. Let there at least be one relatively whole section in the book. Something like a separate chapter.

THERE WERE THREE OF US sitting in the Command Patrol Station. Security Officer Bortashevich was shuffling creased, worn cards. Gusev, on watch, was trying to get some sleep without taking a lit cigarette out of his mouth. I was waiting for the kettle to boil and the dry bread propped against it to warm.

Bortashevich drawled limply, “Take broads as an example. Say you and she are getting on: movies, sugar wafers, polite conversations… You quote her Gogol with Belinsky…* Go hear some bloody opera… Then, naturally, it’s into the bunk. But Madame tells you: Marry me, you louse. First the registry office, then the baser instincts. The instincts, you see, don’t suit her. But if they’re holy to me, then what?”

“So again, it’s those kikes,” Gusev said.

“What do you mean, kikes?” Bortashevich said.

“They’re everywhere, I said, from Raikin to Karl Marx. And they breed like fungi. Take the VD clinic at Chebyu. The doctors are Jewish, the patients are Russian. Is that the Communist way?”

Just then the telephone from the main office rang. Bortashevich put the receiver to his ear, then said to me, “For you.”

I heard Captain Tokar’s voice. “Come over and see me, and right away.”

“Comrade Captain,” I said, “it’s already nine o’clock, by the way.”

“Oh?” the captain said. “You only serve your country till six?”

“Then why bother posting work schedules? I’m supposed to report out tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow morning you will be in Ropcha. There’s an assignment from the Chief of Staff – to bring one prisoner from the Ropcha transit camp. To make it short, I’m waiting.”

“Where are you off to?” Bortashevich asked me.

“Someone has to escort a zek here from Ropcha.”

“For retrial?”

“Don’t know.”

“By regulation there should be two of you.”

“What in the guards is ever done by regulation? By regulation all they do is lock you up in the detention.”

Gusev raised his eyebrows. “And did you ever see a Jew in detention?”

“You’ve got Jews on the brain,” Bortashevich said. “We’re tired of it. You take a good look at Russians. One look and you turn to stone.”

“I won’t argue,” Gusev replied.

The tea kettle suddenly came to the boil. I moved it onto a roofing tile next to the strongbox. “All right, I’m off.”

Bortashevich pulled out a card, looked at it, and said, “Oho! The queen of spades awaits you.” Then he added, “Take handcuffs.”

I took a pair.

I walked through the zone, even though I could have gone around it on the patrol footpath. For a year now I’d been intentionally going through the zone at night. I kept hoping I’d get used to the feeling of terror. The problem of personal courage was posed to us here in a rather severe way. The champions in this category were generally acknowledged to be the Lithuanians and the Tartars.

I slowed down a little near the machine shop. At night this was where the chifir drinkers gathered. They would fill a soldier’s mug with water and empty a whole packet of loose tea into it. Then they would lower a razor blade attached to a long steel wire into the cup. The end of the wire was then thrown onto a high-voltage wire. The liquid in the cup boiled within two seconds. The brown beverage had an effect somewhat like alcohol. People began to gesticulate excitedly, to shout and laugh for no reason.

The chifir drinkers didn’t inspire serious alarm in anyone. Serious alarm was inspired by people who could cut your throat without drinking chifir.

Shadows moved in the darkness. I came closer. Prisoners were sitting on potato cartons around a small tub of chifir. Once they saw me, they went quiet.

“Have a seat, boss,” a voice said from the darkness. “The samovar’s ready.”

“Sitting it out,” I said, “is your department.”

“He’s literate,” the same voice commented.

“He’ll go far,” a second said.

“No farther than checkpoint,” a third said wryly.

Everything normal, I thought. The usual blend of friendliness and hate. Though to think of all the stuff I’d brought for them, the tea, margarine, cans of fish…

I lit a cigarette, rounded Barracks Six, and came out by the camp transport depot. The rosy window of the administration office swam out of the darkness.

I knocked. An orderly let me in. In his hand was an apple.

Tokar glanced out of his office and said, “Chewing on post again, Barkovets?”

“Nothing of the kind, Comrade Captain,” the orderly protested, turning away.

“Do you think I can’t see? Your ears are moving. The day before yesterday you fell asleep entirely.”

“I wasn’t sleeping, Comrade Captain. I was thinking. But it won’t happen again.”

“Too bad,” Tokar said, and then turned to me: “Come in.”

I entered, reported for duty according to regulation.

“Excellent,” the captain said, tightening his belt. “Here are the documents, you can depart at once. Convey here a zek by the name of Gurin. He’s serving eleven years. Fifth conviction. Code man. Be careful.”

“Just who,” I asked, “needs him in such a hurry? Don’t we have enough of our own recidivists here?”

“We’ve got enough,” Tokar agreed.

“So what’s this all about?”

“I don’t know. The orders are from top command.”

I unfolded the travel papers. Under the heading marked “Designation” was this order: “To convey to the Sixth Subdivision Gurin, Fyodor Yemelyanovich, in the capacity of performer of the role of Lenin.”

I asked, “What does this mean?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea. Better ask the Political Instructor. Most likely they’re staging a theatrical production for the sixtieth anniversary of Soviet power. So they’re inviting a guest actor. Maybe he’s got talent, or the appropriate mug… I don’t know. For now, deliver him here, and then we’ll find out what it’s all about. If anything happens, use your weapon. Godspeed.”

I took the papers, saluted, and withdrew.

We neared Ropcha close to midnight. The settlement seemed dead. The darkness muffled the dogs’ barking.

The logging-truck driver who had given me a ride asked, “Where did they send you in the middle of the night? You should have gone in the morning.”

I had to explain. “This way I’ll be returning in daylight. Otherwise I’d be coming back at night. What’s more, in the company of a dangerous recidivist.”

“Could be worse,” the driver said. “We’ve got dispatchers in logging who are scarier than the zeks.”

“It happens,” I said. We said goodbye.

I woke the orderly in the checkpoint cabin, showed him my papers and asked where I could spend the night. The orderly had to think about it.

“It’s noisy in the barracks. The convoy brigades get back in the middle of the night. If you take someone’s bunk, they might swing their belts. And in the kennels the dogs bark.”

“Dogs – that’s better.”

“You can stay here with me. All the comforts. You can cover yourself with a sheepskin jacket. The next shift comes in at seven.”

I lay down, put a tin can near the trestle bed, and lit a cigarette.

The main thing is not to think about home, to concentrate on some urgent daily problem. Here, for instance: I’m running out of cigarettes and the orderly, it seems, doesn’t smoke.

I asked, “You don’t smoke, or what?”

“If you offer me one, I’ll smoke.”

Still no better.

The orderly tried to start a conversation with me. “Is it true that your soldiers in the Sixth poke she-goats?”

“I don’t know. Doubtful. The zeks, now, they indulge.”

“In my opinion, it’s better in a fist.”

“Matter of taste.”

“Well, all right,” the orderly said, taking pity on me, “sleep. It’s quiet here.”

As for quiet, he was wrong. The checkpoint cabin adjoined the penal isolator. In the middle of the night, a zek woke up inside it. He jangled his handcuffs and sang loudly: “And I go, walking about Moscow…”

“Tomcat’s in the mood for Pussy,” the orderly grumbled. He looked into the peephole and yelled, “Agayev, blow one out and go to sleep! Or you’ll get my fist in your eye!”

In answer, we heard, “Chief, pull your horns in!”

The orderly responded with a torrent of ornate obscenity.

“Suck me till you’re good and full!” the zek retorted.

This concert lasted about two hours. On top of everything, I ran out of cigarettes.

I went up to the peephole and asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have any cigarettes or tobacco?”

“Who are you?” Agayev asked, astounded.

“I’m on assignment from the Sixth Camp Subdivision.”

“And I thought you were a student. Is everyone so cultured in the Sixth?”

“Yes,” I said, “when they’re out of cigarettes.”

“There’s a ton of tobacco here. I’ll push it under the door. You wouldn’t happen to be from Leningrad?”

“From Leningrad.”

“A fellow countryman. I thought so.”

The rest of the night was passed in conversation.

In the morning I went looking for Dolbenko, the officer in charge of operations. I presented my orders to him. He said, “Have breakfast and wait at the checkpoint. Do you have a weapon on you?… Good.”

In the mess hall, they gave me tea and rolls. They had run out of hot cereal. To make up for it, they gave me a piece of lard and an onion for the road, and an instructor I knew shook out ten cigarettes for me.

I sat in the checkpoint cabin till the convoy brigades moved out. The orderly was relieved close to eight. It was quiet in the penal isolator. The zek was slumbering after a sleepless night. Finally I heard, “Prisoner Gurin, with belongings!”

The bolts clicked in the transit corridor. A security officer entered the cabin with my ward.

“Sign out,” he said. “You have a weapon?”

I unbuckled my holster.

The zek was in handcuffs.

We walked out onto the porch. The winter sun blinded me. The dawn had come up quickly. As always.

On the gently sloping hill before us, cabins stood out black. The smoke above their roofs rose straight up.

I said to Gurin, “Well, let’s go.”

He was a man of medium height, well built. His hat was likely covering a bald spot. His soiled quilted jacket was shiny in the sun.

I decided not to wait for a ride with a log-carrier but to walk to the railroad crossing right away. If a truck or tractor going our way happened to come along, fine. If not, we could make it on foot in three hours.

I didn’t know that the road had been closed off near Koyna. Later I learnt that two zeks had stolen a grapple trailer the night before. By daylight, military police had set up roadblocks at every crossing. So Gurin and I had to travel all the way back to the zone on foot. We only stopped once, to eat. I gave Gurin some bread and the lard – no great sacrifice, since the lard had frozen and the bread was in crumbs.

Silent till then, the zek kept repeating, “What a fiesta – choice calories! Chief, let’s party it up!”

The handcuffs hampered him. He asked, “If you could lose my cuffs – or are you afraid I’ll give you the slip?”

All right, I thought. In daylight it’s not dangerous. Where’s he going to run to in the snow?

I took off the handcuffs, fastened them to my belt. Gurin immediately asked permission to go relieve himself. I said, “Go do it there.”

Then he crouched behind some bushes, and I trained my rifle on the black Vorkuta hat.

About ten minutes went by. My hand got tired. Suddenly, behind my back, a foot crunched in the snow. At that moment, a hoarse voice called out, “Let’s go, Chief.”

I jumped up. Before me stood Gurin, smiling. Evidently he had hung his hat on the bush. “Don’t shoot, fellow countryman.”

It would have been silly to bawl him out.

Gurin had acted straight with me. He had shown me that he didn’t want to run away, or maybe he wanted to but didn’t choose to.

We took the forest path and reached the zone without incident. On the way there, I asked, “So what kind of production will this be?”

The zek didn’t understand. I explained, “In the orders it says you’re the one who will play the role of Lenin.”

Gurin burst out laughing. “It’s an old story, Chief. Even before the war, I had the nickname ‘Actor’. In the sense of a man who was clever, who could, as they say, move his ears. So they wrote on my record: ‘actor’. I remember I was tied up in the Criminal Investigation Section, and the investigator wrote it down just as a joke. In the ‘profession before arrest’ column. As if I had a profession! From the cradle, I’m an inveterate thief. I never worked a day in my life. But the way they wrote it down, that’s how it stuck – ‘actor’. From one paper to another. All the political instructors sign me up for amateur productions: ‘After all, you’re an actor, an artist…’ Ech, if I could only meet one of those political instructors at a kolkhoz market, I’d show him what kind of artist I am.”

I asked, “So what are you going to do? You’re supposed to play Lenin himself.”

“What, read a piece of paper? Simple. I’ll polish my bald spot with wax, and it’s in the bag. I remember we hit a bank once in Kiev, and I got dressed up as a cop – and my own people didn’t recognize me. If it has to be Lenin, then let it be Lenin. As they say, a day off work is a month of life.”

We walked up to the checkpoint. I turned Gurin over to the sergeant major. The zek waved his hand. “Be seeing you, Chief. Merci for the fiesta.”

He said the last words softly, so the sergeant wouldn’t hear.

Since I’d been taken off work duty, I loafed for the next twenty-four hours. I drank wine with the weapon repairmen, lost four roubles to them at cards, wrote a letter to my parents and brother, even planned to see a young lady I knew in the settlement. But just then an orderly came looking for me and told me to report to Political Instructor Khuriyev.

I made my way to the Lenin Room. Khuriyev was sitting under an enormous map of the Ust-Vym camp. The escape points were marked with little flags.

“Have a seat,” said the PI. “We have something important to discuss. The October holidays are approaching. We are beginning rehearsal of a one-act play called Kremlin Stars. The author” – here Khuriyev glanced at some papers lying in front of him – “is Chichelnitsky, Yakov Chichelnitsky. The play is ideologically mature, recommended by the cultural section of the Department of Internal Affairs. The events take place at the beginning of the twenties. There are four characters: Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, a Chekist named Timofei and his fiancée, Polina. The young Chekist Timofei is yielding to the bourgeois manner of thinking. Polina, a merchant’s daughter, is dragging him down into the maelstrom of the petite bourgeoisie. Dzerzhinsky engages in educational work with them. He himself is incurably ill. Lenin insistently urges him to take care of his health. ‘Iron Felix’ refuses, which makes a strong impression on Timofei. In the end, Timofei throws off the bonds of revisionism. The merchant’s daughter, Polina, shyly follows after him. In the closing scene, Lenin addresses the public.” Here Khuriyev again rustled his papers. “‘Who is this? Whose are these happy, young faces? Whose are these cheerful, sparkling eyes? Can this really be the youth of the Seventies? I envy you, messengers of the future! It was for you that we lit the first lights of the new-builds! For your sake that we rooted out the dark forces of the bourgeoisie! So then let your way be lighted, children of the future, by our Kremlin stars.’ And so on. And then afterwards, everyone will sing the ‘Internationale’. On a single impulse, as the expression goes. What do you say to all this?”