Jason Overstreet - Beneath the Darkest Sky

“I have been put in charge of structural and mechanical development for Magadan,” he said. “Prisoners will continue to flow in from Vladivostok, and this port location will need to keep expanding. Shipments of gold, tin, etcetera, will be trucked in from the mines and shipped out more rapidly with each passing year. We do not have the adequate infrastructure to handle the quick pace at which the Dalstroi is growing. We need to meet the demands of our great Stalin. Understand?”

“Da!” we said.

“Most of the engineers, doctors, nurses, dentists, and paramedics are what we call ‘freely hired’ men and women. But others in these disciplines are zeks like you. If you were to be working alongside a freely hired man, you must listen to him, for he has authority over you. Raise your hand if you know how to build an engine from scratch?”

Only four of us raised our hands.

“Raise your hand if you can do land excavation.”

Only five of us raised our hands.

“Raise your hand if you can do all of the following: load fuel and oil tanks, design irrigation and pipe systems, operate heavy machinery, design and assemble buildings from ground to roof with the proper installations, and with zero supervision. Before you answer… just know that a lie could cost you your life. I don’t say that to threaten you, I say it because it’s the truth. Raise your hands.”

Only one of us raised his hand. Me.

“Very good,” he said. “What is your name?”

“Prescott Sweet, sir!”

“Comrade Sweet, I would like for you to stay here and complete a written examination. The rest of you sign your name on the paper beside the door and then go back to the lines. I will have an officer retrieve you when it’s time to assign jobs.”

After they exited, the officer stood at the lectern studying some documents. I sat in the front row with my back straight, hands resting on my knees. I was nervous.

“Comrade Sweet,” he finally said, looking up, “can I see your passport? Bring it here.”

I immediately stood and walked up. Handing it to him, I stood there waiting while he read.

“You can go back and sit now,” he said, still reading while I quickly sat down. “I am certain you will do well on the examination, as it simply consists of math and physics, but it is important for you to know something. For the past six months since I arrived here, every time a new shipment of men comes in, only a few are chosen to lead a construction team. It is a fortunate assignment because it’s a way for you to avoid the dreaded Kolyma highway and the frozen mines near the river. Yes?”

“Yes, sir!” I said.

“Men like you are too valuable to send out there to die within weeks. Eighty percent of the men who leave here don’t survive. Our great Stalin can always bring us new labor, but he also understands the importance of getting value out of uniquely skilled zeks . Why waste you, correct?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Call me Commander Koskinen. I am talking to you as though I already know that you can do the jobs you’ve so claimed you can do. That’s because you will be shot if you can’t. You are so lucky to be an engineer. Of course, there are other good jobs a zek can be given to do. Some are cooks and clerks. But most are simple hands, waiting to die. They have no useful skills. They are all intellectuals or simple kulaks who’ve known nothing but tilling soil and milking cows. I have one piece of advice for you, as I’m not the head of the Dalstroi or the Sevvostlag camps by any means. Work hard!”

“Yes, Commander Koskinen!”

“It certainly isn’t customary for a commander or anyone else in the Dalstroi to speak to a zek with such decency. It’s a good thing you were educated as an engineer. It might keep you alive. Of course the examination is only part of your being put in this position. I will be looking into your background to confirm your profession. Do you have any questions before the exam?”

“I have a son. He is fifteen. He is very good at science and math. Might he be able to work alongside me?”

“If your work is pleasing to me and the other Dalstroi heads, maybe we can make arrangements for that in a couple of weeks. It will certainly keep him here for as long as you are, if you can learn to be trusted.”

A month passed and I’d already impressed Koskinen enough to make him assign James to my team of one hundred. I’d scored a perfect score on his examination and had since been able to turn a set of Koskinen’s architectural drawings into a rectangular, sixty-by-thirty, one-story shell. This after having leveled the site, put up wooden forms, dug the holes and trenches, installed footings, poured concrete, and allowed it to cure. The shell would soon serve as an office building for some Dalstroi heads.

With limited winter sunlight, it was still grueling, sixteen-hour-a-day work, as the camp lights were turned on when the sun disappeared around four p.m. I’d been given the same daily rations as the others—herring head or animal lung soup with bits of cabbage for breakfast, tasteless gruel for lunch, and hot water for dinner. But there was one difference. Obviously the cooks had been told something, because my morning soup had more fish or lung in it than the others.

I’d actually been skipping my breakfast every other day and saving it for James to eat at night. I was making sure he’d been getting a bit more protein. Why they made us have the soup for breakfast and the gruel for lunch puzzled me at first, but then I realized they wanted the protein in us first thing.

The only difference between me and the other zeks was that I was in charge of a work crew. But I still had to do the same labor. There were a few other zeks like me who’d come here recently and were highly skilled engineers. I could hear them barking orders to their men, too, across the frozen alleys at the other worksites, NKVD men patrolling the maze of barracks. But most of the engineers were free hires.

Even though I was still just a zek , there was something encouraging about Koskinen taking a bit of a liking to me. Of course, I assumed it was all because I was making him look good. I was still trying to gather up the courage to ask about my wife and daughter. Based on what the old man had said, I still figured they were in a camp all the way across the country.

Barracks five of our lagpunkt is where they’d quartered sixty of us off back on that first November day, after we’d been quarantined, Boris having been placed in nine. The only word I can use to describe my situation was lucky . It had all come down to good old-fashioned, pure luck—my being assigned to possibly remain in Magadan with my son whenever the rest of Lagpunkt Seventy-Nine headed for the mines.

The temperature here hovered around five below zero, a far cry from the horror that awaited the others inland. It was on Christmas day that we were allowed to remain in our barracks and not work, only because the officers wanted the day off. We’d been given our normal ration of gruel for lunch, but with this unforeseen rest, it tasted like ham, stuffing, and sweet potato pie.

I lay there on my middle bunk with no mattress, James above me, Yury below. All of our appearances had changed dramatically with the extreme weight loss. And besides James, we’d all grown heavy beards. My normal weight of 200 had dipped to maybe 180. But we were surviving, and if this were to be our lot for the next several years, we would live. It was the minus forty-degree Road of Bones that we all feared, including me, as one mistake would cost me.

“This doska is too hard to sleep on with no mattress,” said Yury.