Jason Overstreet - Beneath the Darkest Sky

“Thank you, Commander,” I said with a lump in my throat.

“I found out where your wife and daughter are,” he said, picking up a sheet of paper and reading. “They are near a town called Kirovsk. It is all the way across the country, up near Finland. They’re at the MR4 Labor Camp. I know the director of that camp, a pig named Colonel Ivan Zorin. Now he , for one, is certainly a devout Stalinist!”

“If I might ask, what type of labor do you think he has my wife and daughter doing?”

“They mine apatite at MR4. Apatite is a pale-green mineral used to make fertilizer. So they are probably doing very difficult hauling and cleaning of the freshly mined stones… even if they are pregnant. As you already know, based on this camp alone, many women get pregnant in the camps. And again, this Colonel Zorin is a real pig.”

“Do you know anything else about him?” I said, halfheartedly. He began rattling off all sorts of details about Colonel Zorin, and I was listening astutely, but his previous comment—“even if they are pregnant”—was echoing loudly in my head.

Koskinen finished talking. He then held the thick cigar near his lips and turned it several times before taking a big drag and exhaling directly at me, as if he knew I was enjoying it. “What was something pleasing you did in our beautiful Moscow with your family, Comrade Sweet?”

I took a second to think back, still trying to ignore the image I had in my mind of my sweet wife and daughter being violated. I wanted to jump up and grab him and demand him to do something immediately. I was enraged inside, perhaps even twitching on the outside. Maybe the smoke was keeping him from seeing the impulse bubbling up in me to want to vomit all over his well-organized, wooden desk. But I breathed in deeply and focused.

“There were so many,” I said, my Russian words trembling, a tear forming in my eye. “But the most enjoyable thing we did in Moscow was go to the Theater of People’s Art and listen to the Anglo-American Chorus. It was comprised of forty-five Americans, men and women. They sang Negro protest songs to a largely Russian audience. Their applause was so grand and heartfelt at the conclusion of ‘Dis Cotton Want a Picking.’ So grand! So heartfelt!”

I looked at Koskinen and thought about the part of this story that I wouldn’t be telling him. It involved how Loretta and I had actually felt that night. We had looked down at our twins as the applause had continued. We realized that our children had never known America. But part of us was glad they had never known that ugly bird called Jim Crow. Still, as the next Negro protest songs had continued from the stage, Loretta and I hadn’t been able to help but feel the souls of our American ancestors. We hadn’t been able to help but miss some of what our children would never know—the unexplainable, ever hopeful, good essence of the United States of America. I missed it.

“Where your wife and daughter are located doesn’t get very cold,” said Koskinen. “Nothing like Magadan, and certainly not like Kolyma’s frozen road. Men who know about what it feels like to work in forty below temperatures will do anything to avoid it, it seems. I can tell you such things. One zek , when I first arrived here, refused to join the lines and leave for the mines. He nailed his own testicles to a wood bench in the washtub barracks. It didn’t work, however. The NKVD guards yanked him up, sent him to the medic, and a week later he was sent to the mines.”

“He truly wanted to stay here,” I said, trying not to grimace.

“I think… after that visit to the medic… you should be saying ‘she’ truly wanted to stay here, Comrade Sweet.”

“Yes, Commander.”

“A few more items. Did you know the zek in your barracks who killed himself the other night?”

“No,” I said.

He was referring to the man who’d bitten the veins on his wrist under his tattered, thin blanket. It had been a disgusting, blackish-red mess-of-an-image to wake up to.

“Such suicides are common throughout the system. But, I must say, every camp across the Soviet Union is its own universe. Every camp has its own culture. Some have… they have… I am searching my mind for a Western phrase. Some have minimally compassionate bosses, a good term, yes?”

“Yes.”

“But others have bosses who are sadists. My boss is a sadist. And then there’s Stalin. He still doesn’t understand that all of us officials are still just humans. Guards throughout the system are corrupt and rape women zeks . Camp bosses steal money and gold. Moscow officials could never know what goes on thousands of miles away. They come to inspect, and camp administrators make the camp appear perfect. But as soon as they leave, things return to reality. Can you tell I was educated in Norway?”

“I was going to ask you where—”

“I like talking to you because you’re a Negro. Maybe I’m ignorantly convincing myself that I’m getting to know my sister’s Negro husband better by imagining that you’re him. They have four children who I don’t know. I am an uncle. Maybe I see your boy as one of my unfamiliar nephews. Such impulses to consider such things are not under our control as humans.”

“You sound like an extremely educated man,” I bravely decided to say. “You sound well-read.”

He stood and approached the bookshelf to my right. “I shall give you this one to read by Bolesław Prus called Pharaoh .” He took it from the top shelf, then handed it to me before sitting back down. “Now you have something to read.”

“Thank you, Commander.”

“It is Stalin’s favorite. You should learn as much as you can about the preferences of Stalin. And it will make you look good when the commanders and guards see you carrying it. When you’re finished, have your boy read it.”

“I will.”

“I prefer philosophy books, a broad range of them. As such, maybe I am too philosophical for Stalin’s Soviet Union, too nostalgic for the Lenin days that saw the proletariat as actual human beings who mattered. Maybe I read the Communist Manifesto too often. Have you read it?”

“Yes,” I lied, hoping he wouldn’t quiz me, and, at the same time, realizing I’d spent my entire adult life writing my own manifesto.

“A few years back,” he said, “ zeks in Kolyma were actually fed and clothed better, and even worked shorter hours. There was a belief that such would make the zek more productive. But then the numbers got too big, so many arrests. Stalin realized that Kolyma zeks were like river fish that could simply die and be replaced with fresh fish from a hatchery.”

I watched him sit there and smoke for a moment. He was an introspective man, lost in what he perceived to be an ever-growing, unprincipled land. He appeared to be my age, which would have put him in his early twenties back during the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution. He hadn’t been able to shed those Lenin and Trotsky principles that were polar to Stalin’s wholly authoritarian edicts.

“I want you to replace the floor in the northwest chamber of punishment isolator number three,” he finally said. “The slats of wood and joists are rotting from all of the blood and urine. That last chamber on the right is where we’ve kept the worst of the worst for the past year. Fifty shipped-in, murderous zeks have probably died in that single chamber over that period. I won’t go into details about the vicious beatings they endured. No?”

“No,” I said.

“I need the slats replaced by noon tomorrow. It is already four o’clock. You can work until late tonight. Then finish tomorrow. Have your boy help you remove the slats this evening. Then use Dima Avdeyev and Roma Galkin to help you two replace them in the morning. Those two work the fastest. You can go now.”