Shalamov - Pain

 This is a strange story, so strange that anyone who hasn’t been in a camp, who doesn’t know the dark depths of the criminal world, the realm of gangsters, cannot even understand it. The camps are the very bottom of life. The criminal world isn’t the bottom of the bottom. It’s an utterly, utterly different and inhuman world.

There is a banal saying that history repeats itself twice: the first time as a tragedy, the second time as a farce.

No. There is also a third reflection of the same events, the same plot, a reflection in the underworld’s distorting mirror. The plot is unimaginable but nevertheless real: it genuinely exists and is there alongside us.

The utterly real gallows “courts” and “courts of honor” that the criminals hold at the mines are reflected in the distorting mirror of feelings and actions. Here war games are played, scenes of war are reenacted, and real blood is shed.

There is a world of higher forces, a world of Homeric gods who come down to our world to reveal themselves and to improve the human race by their example. True, the gods tend to be late. Homer praised the Achaeans, but we are enthused by Hector: the moral climate has changed a little. Sometimes the gods would invite human beings to heaven to observe their “lofty spectacles.” All this is a mystery that the poet solved a long time ago. There is a world and an underground hell from which people sometimes return, where they do not disappear forever. Why do they return? These people have hearts filled with an undying anxiety, an eternal horror of the dark world, and that is not the world beyond the grave.

This world is more real than Homer’s heavens.

*

Shelgunov “got stuck” in the Vladivostok transit camp: he was a ragged, dirty, hungry, badly but not yet fatally beaten objector to work. People had an urge to live, but the ships and their prisoners, one party after the other, were constantly being transported across the sea, on ship after ship, like the train cars feeding the Auschwitz gas ovens. On the other side of a sea from which nobody ever returned, Shelgunov had been in the valley of death on which the hospital stood, and he was lucky enough to be sent back to the mainland: Shelgunov’s bones were not good enough for the gold mines.

At this moment danger was again coming close; the lack of certainty that affected all of a prisoner’s life was becoming more and more palpable to Shelgunov. And there was no escape from that uncertainty, from the fragility of hope.

The transit camp was an enormous settlement, divided in various directions into zones, which were precise squares, and entangled with barbed wire; it lay in the line of fire of a hundred or so guard towers, and it was lit, flooded with light by a thousand searchlights that blinded the prisoners’ weak eyes.

The bunks at this enormous transit camp were the gates to Kolyma: they could suddenly empty and then fill up again with exhausted dirty people, new parties of prisoners from the outside world.

The steamships came back, the transit camp belched out a new portion of men, was emptied and then filled again.

In the zone, the largest in the transit camp, where Shelgunov was staying, all the barracks had been cleaned out, except for the ninth. The ninth was where the gangsters lived. That was where the King, the godfather, held sway. Wardens didn’t show their faces there; the camp staff would go every day to the porch and collect the bodies of those who’d pushed their luck too far with the King.

The cooks carted off to this barracks the kitchen’s best dishes and best items—the clothes brought by all the parties of prisoners always ended up as stakes in the gambling games of the ninth barracks, the King’s.

Shelgunov, a direct descendant of the Shelgunovs of the People’s Will,19 had a father who was an academician and a mother who was a professor in civilian life; since childhood, he had lived on books and for books; a bibliophile and a bookworm, he sucked in Russian culture with his mother’s milk. Shelgunov was shaped by the nineteenth century, the golden age of humanity.

Share your knowledge! Trust people, love people! That was what Russian literature taught, and Shelgunov had some time ago felt enough strength to give back to society what he had inherited. Self-sacrifice was for everyone. To rise up against lies, however petty, especially if they were close by.

Prison and exile were the state’s first response to Shelgunov’s attempts to live as books had taught him to live, as the nineteenth century had taught him.

Shelgunov was struck by the vileness of the people surrounding him. There were no heroes in the camps. Shelgunov refused to believe that the nineteenth century had deceived him. A deep disillusionment in people, acquired during his interrogations, during his journey as a prisoner and in the transit camp, was suddenly replaced by his old cheerfulness, his old exaltation. Shelgunov found what he wanted, what he had been seeking and dreaming of: living examples. He met a force about which he had read a great deal, and which inspired a belief that was absorbed by his blood. This was the world of gangsters and criminals.

The bosses trampled down and despised Shelgunov’s neighbors and friends, as well as Shelgunov himself, but they feared and revered the professional criminals.

Here was a world that boldly set itself against the state, a world that could help Shelgunov in his blind, romantic thirst for good and for vengeance.

“You wouldn’t have a novelist here, would you?”

Someone had put a foot on the bunk to change his footwear. Judging by the necktie and the socks, in a world where only foot wrappings had existed for many years, Shelgunov quite rightly classified the man as someone from the ninth barracks.

“We have one. Hey, writer!”

“You’ve got a writer here!”

Shelgunov twisted himself around into the light.

“Let’s go and see the King. You can ‘print’ us something.”

“I’m not coming.”

“What do you mean, you’re not coming? You’ll be dead before nightfall, you stupid fool.”

The fiction he’d read was a good preparation for Shelgunov when he met the criminal world. Shelgunov crossed the threshold of the ninth barracks in a spirit of reverence. All his nerves, all his gravitation toward the good were tensed, as resonant as taut strings. Shelgunov had to have success, had to gain attention, trust, love from his noble listener, the barracks boss, the King. And Shelgunov did have success. All his miseries stopped the moment that the King’s dry lips parted in a smile.

God knows what Shelgunov “printed”! Shelgunov absolutely refused to begin by playing an ace, The Count of Monte Cristo. No. He resurrected before the King’s very eyes Stendhal’s chronicles, Cellini’s autobiography, the bloodthirsty legends of medieval Italy.

“Great stuff, great stuff!” rasped the King. “Those cultures really knew how to fill their bellies.”

After that evening there was no question whatsoever of Shelgunov doing any work in the camp. He was brought a dinner and tobacco, and the next day he was moved to live permanently in the ninth barracks, officially, if that could be done officially in a camp.

Shelgunov became the court novelist.

“What’s making you so miserable, novelist?”

“I’m thinking about home, about my wife . . .”

“Well . . .”

“You know, the interrogations, the train journey, the transit camp. I’m not allowed to write until I’m taken to the gold mines.”

“You really are dumb. What are we here for? Write to your little beauty, and we’ll send the letters . . . We don’t use the post, we have our own railway. Okay, novelist?”

So once a week Shelgunov sent letters to Moscow.

Shelgunov’s wife was a performer, a Muscovite performer and the daughter of a general.

Some time ago, at the time of his arrest, they had embraced.

“I don’t mind if I don’t get any letters for a year or two. I’ll wait, I’ll always be with you.”

“The letters will come before that.” Shelgunov confidently calmed his wife as husbands do. “I’ll find my own channels. And you’ll get my letters through those channels.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!”

“Shall I get the novelist? Or are you bored with him?” Karzubyi, concerned, asked his boss, the King. “Shouldn’t I bring you a nancy from the new party? You can have one of our lot, or one of the politicals, the article fifty-eighters.”

“Nancy” was the criminal’s word for a homosexual.

“No, call the novelist. Mind you, we’ve stuffed ourselves enough on that literature. It’s nothing but novels and theory. There’s another game we can play with that freier. We’ve got all the time in the world.”

•

“My dream, novelist,” said the King, when all the ceremonies of going to sleep had been observed: he’d had his heels tickled, a cross hung around his neck, and prison “hot cupping”—tweaks with the fingernail—on his back. “My dream, novelist, is for a woman like yours to write to me from the outside. She’s a looker!” The King turned in his hands a crumpled, faded photograph of Shelgunov’s wife, Marina, which he’d managed to hang on to despite thousands of searches, disinfections, and thefts. “A real looker! Just right for a séance. A general’s daughter! A performer! You freiers really are lucky, all our lot get are the poxy ones. And we don’t even notice the clap. All right, time for bed. I’m already dreaming.”

The next evening the novelist printed no novels.

“There’s something I like about you, freier. You may be a dummy, but there’s a drop of crook’s blood in you. Write a letter to the wife of my pal, a real man, to put it in a nutshell. You’re a writer. Make it really tender and clever: you know all those novels. I’ll bet no woman can resist a letter from you. What are we? Just ignorant. Write. The man will copy it and send it. You even have the same name: Aleksandr. That’s a laugh. Mind you, he’s only Aleksandr for the job he’s in here for. But he’s still Aleksandr, Shura for short, or Shurochka.”

“I’ve never written that sort of letter,” said Shelgunov. “But I can have a go.”

For each letter the King told him the overall gist, and Shelgunov-Cyrano20 turned the King’s ideas into reality.

Shelgunov wrote fifty of those letters.

One said, “I’ve confessed to everything; I’m asking Soviet power to forgive me.”

“Do convicts, I mean gangsters,” asked Shelgunov, unable to go on with the letter, “really ask for forgiveness?”

“Of course they do,” said the King. “This bit of writing is a dummy, a hoax, a spoof. Military tactics.”

Shelgunov asked no more questions; he just meekly wrote whatever the King dictated.

Shelgunov would read his letters out loud, polish the style, proud of his still-flamboyant brain. The King gave his approval, his lips barely parting in his royal smile.

Everything comes to an end. So did writing letters for the King. But there may have been an important reason: there was a rumor through the camp grapevine that the King was eventually going to be sent with a party of prisoners to Kolyma, where he had sent, by murder and deceit, so many others. He was going to be grabbed while he was asleep, it was said, his arms and legs bound, and then put on board the steamship. It was time to stop the correspondence; after all, Shelgunov had been speaking words of love to Roxane in Christian’s voice for nearly a year now. But the game had to end the criminal way, with real live bloodshed . . . 

Blood was congealing on the temple of a corpse lying before the King’s eyes.

Shelgunov tried to cover the corpse’s face, the reproachful look in its eyes.

“You see who it is? It’s the man with your name, Aleksandr, Shura, the man you wrote the letters for. The special action squad finished him off today, cut his head off with an ax. He seems to have been walking around with his face covered by a scarf. Write: ‘It’s a friend of your Shura writing! Shura was executed today, and I am writing as fast as I can to let you know his last words . . .’ Have you written that?” asked the King. “We’ll copy it, and then we’re quits. No need to write any more letters. I could have written that letter on my own.” The King smiled. “We value education, writer. We’re an ignorant lot.”

Shelgunov wrote the funereal letter.

The King must have been clairvoyant: he was seized that night and sent overseas.

Shelgunov couldn’t get in touch with home, and despaired. He struggled on, all alone, for a year, for two, for three, moving from hospital to work, outraged with his wife for having turned out to be a bitch or a coward, not using the “safe channels” to get in touch, forgetting him, Shelgunov, and trampling on every memory she had of him.

But it so happened that the hell of the camps ended and Shelgunov was released. He came back to Moscow.

His mother told him that she knew nothing about Marina. His father had died. Shelgunov found the address of a girlfriend of Marina’s who worked in the same theater and he went to her apartment.

The girlfriend cried out.

“What’s happened?” asked Shelgunov.

“Didn’t you die, Shura?”

“What do you mean, die? I’m standing here, aren’t I?”

“You’ll live forever.” A man emerged from the next room. “That’s the belief.”

“Marina is dead. After you were executed, she threw herself under a train. Not where Anna Karenina did it but in Rastorguyevo. She put her head under the wheels. The head was cut off clean and even. After all, you’d confessed to everything, but Marina refused to hear of it, she believed in you.”

“I confessed?”

“You wrote so yourself. But a friend of yours wrote about your being executed. Look, that’s her chest.”

The chest contained all fifty letters that Shelgunov had written to Marina through his Vladivostok channels. The channels had worked perfectly, but not for freiers.

Shelgunov burned his letters. But where were Marina’s letters with her photograph, that she had sent to Vladivostok? Shelgunov imagined the King reading his love letters. He imagined the King using the photograph “for a session.” And Shelgunov burst into tears. After that, he wept every day for the rest of his life.

Shelgunov rushed to see his mother, to find at least something, at least a line in Marina’s hand. It didn’t have to be to him. There were such letters, two faded letters, and Shelgunov learned them by heart.

The general’s daughter, the performer, was writing letters to a gangster. Gangster slang has a word “blagging,” meaning “bragging.” The word, khlestat’sia in Russian, came into gangster jargon from the boastful hero of a major literary work, Gogol’s Government Inspector’s Khlestakov. The King certainly had something to “blag” about: that freier of a novelist. Good for a laugh. That nice Shura. But the proper way to write letters is “You disgusting bitch, you can’t put two words together . . .” The King was reading phrases from his own affair with the prostitute Zoya Talitova.

“I haven’t had an education.”

“There’s no such thing. You sluts should learn how to live.”

Shelgunov, standing under a dark Moscow arch, could see all that easily. It was the scene with Cyrano, Christian, and Roxane, but acted in the ninth circle of hell, almost on the ice of the Far North. Shelgunov had trusted gangsters, and they had made him kill his wife with his own bare hands.

The two letters had become moldy, but the ink hadn’t faded and the paper had not turned to dust.

Shelgunov read these letters every day. How could he keep them forever? What glue would repair the crevices, the cracks in these dark sheets of writing paper that once were white. Certainly not liquid glass: that would burn and annihilate them.

All the same, letters can be restored so that they last forever. Every archivist knows how to do this, especially one who works in a literary museum. All you have to do is make the letters speak.

The lovely woman’s face was fixed to the glass next to a twelfth-century Russian icon, just above an icon of the Three-Handed Virgin. A female face, Marina’s photograph was perfectly apt here: it was superior to the icon . . . In what way was Marina less of a Virgin, a saint? In what way? Why are there so many women who are saints, apostolic martyrs, while Marina was only an actress, an actress who put her head under a train? Or does the Orthodox religion not accept suicides as angels? The photograph was tucked away among the icons and was itself an icon.

Sometimes Shelgunov would wake up in the night and, without turning on the lamp, search the table with his hands for Marina’s photograph. His fingers, frostbitten in the camp, could not distinguish an icon from a photograph, or wood from cardboard.

But perhaps Shelgunov was merely drunk. He drank every day. Of course vodka is bad for you, alcohol is hell, while disulfiram, the cure for alcoholism, is good. But what can you do if Marina’s icon is on the table?

•

“Do you remember that freier, that novelist, the writer, Genka? Eh? Or did you forget him ages ago?” asked the King, when the time came to get to sleep after all the ceremonies had been carried out.

“Why should I forget him? I remember him. He was that jerk, that ass!” And Genka waved his stretched-out fingers over his raised ear.

1967

SKETCHES OF THE CRIMINAL WORLD

Further Kolyma Stories

VARLAM SHALAMOV