Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

We came into Nagayevo harbour and they stacked the dead on the pebble beach.

All of us walked away from the corpses. We climbed the hill, blinking in the daylight. The road was made of dirt and then there was a road made of rocks. We looked back at the bay and the Tovarishch Stalin sat so smally, so quietly, secreting smoke. It was just one ship in a vast harbour; it was just one ship in a vast harbour. You could found a city there, a little paradise on the sea. Guards pointed the way with rifle barrels. We came up over the rise and the country lay before us, limitless. We were marching at its edge. Are there deer here? I wondered. Wolves? Later, I learned that there are deer; there are wolves.

We marched until we reached the village of Magadan. It was a young place, tainted by its visitors. They divided us into groups. An officer gazed down at us from a plywood stage. It felt as though we were at the end of our lives, some in-between that follows death. A place of mud and scrub and clouding breath. “This is Kolyma,” he said. His voice scraped.

“You are here to work. You are here for crimes against the Soviet state and you will repay your debt with minutes, hours, years. You will repay us with blood and sweat. If you work hard, you will eat. If you do not, you will die. There are no tricks. We need the metal that is buried in the earth; it is your task to extract this metal. If you do not meet your quota, you are a traitor and a saboteur.

“The law is the taiga and the prosecutor is the bear. You will remain here until you leave here. No one escapes.”

The man looked us over once more. The sky behind him was endlessly blue. “That is all,” he said.

WE WALKED TO OUR CAMP. This was a walk of two weeks. Every day they gave us a fish: a single cooked trout, like a thing from a surrealist painting. Some of us ate the fish at once and some of us ate it little by little, to last the day. We walked and then we slept and the sun crossed the sky. Sometimes it rained.

I remember waking one morning with fog spread over the plateau; it wreathed the sleeping prisoners and the low lichened rocks, the stunted trees, everything except the mountains. The mountains were not hidden and in a way they felt like allies, friends. Only they could not help, could not move. They had withdrawn, our allies. A group of forty-two human beings lay in the day’s cold mist.

One afternoon we arrived at the camp. It was near the mouth of a river and you could hear the water whispering over rocks. Mountains surrounded us. A frayed banner hung across the gate: “Work in the USSR Is a Matter of Honesty, Glory, Valour and Heroism!” My clothing was caked black and puke from our time on the boat. The colours had faded in the sun.

We had not died.

They counted us. They counted us again. We stood in uncomprehending formations. I said to myself: I will remain here for eight years . It was so cold and our clothing was black and puke and faded. Then they took us to the baths. We stripped naked. With doughy nurses’ hands they held us in place and shaved the hair from our arms, legs, from between our legs; they shaved our heads and the beards from our faces. “Lice,” they said, but I did not have lice. There was a stove, but we shivered. Then they let us into the other room. We drew our bodies through tepid water. We were grateful even for this. I had never been so dirty. I had never been so deeply thirsty, or hungry. We dried ourselves on rough cloths and they led us to piles of clothes: long underwear, long tunics, quilted jackets and trousers, mittens, rubber boots, hats with ear flaps. These were dead men’s clothes. We searched for garments that fit. We looked like scarecrows, rag monsters. Then they took us back outside and they gave us warm broth.

In the day’s last light I saw another prisoner kneel. He had found tiny berries hidden in the dry white moss that crackled underfoot; they looked like coral. I had almost forgotten the name. Brusnika . Red berries on thin green stalks, with leaves like little tokens. They were everywhere. I lifted three berries to my mouth and they broke against my tongue, sweet and bitter and tasting very faintly of snow.

Winter would come. I knew this: it would come, and then it would go, and then it would come again. And again and again. We would all die in Kolyma, unless we did not. I did not know the trick to living. My hand was dotted with the berries’ thin juice and there were guard towers all around, pairs of hollowed eyes, bear turds and wolves’ howls, criss-crossed barbed wire. I could not be a block of wood or a slab of chalk, inert. Lev Sergeyvich Termen, come from Leningrad to New York to Kolyma, forty-three years old. The sum of all those years draining away, meaningless, before the empty fact of the present.

I had nothing left to hold.

THE CAMP WAS A CLUTCH of buildings surrounded by fence. The fence was three metres high, wrapped in coils of barbed wire. I never saw anyone touch this fence. The ground was uneven, furrows and rises, as if they had wiped away a rapids and placed us there. The valley’s trees had been sheared to build the barracks, the work sheds, the hospital; to erect the administration bloc and the squat cultural-education building, which we rarely visited. The soft grass was littered with brittle shrubs, the sharp shoots of bushes. A misstep would often puncture the sole of your boot. Guard towers stood all around, on the mountaintops, beside the mine shafts’ timber adits. You could squint into the flint-coloured distance and see the guess of other towers, the maybe, along those ridges. As the sun crossed the sky the triangular silhouette of a mining tower ticked across the camp. It was an empty landmark: that vein had gone dry, goldless. Old timers called it the gallows tower.

Our camp was like a village. When we were not working we gathered on steps. We wandered in pairs between buildings of rough grey plywood. This aspect was convivial. No other aspects were convivial. The other aspects were inhuman. We slept on exposed bunks, crammed together, shivering. When it was wet the ground was muddy; when it was dry we lay and listened to hunched men carving dead skin from their heels. At night the barracks filled up with groans, as though the sleeping zeks’ souls were being sucked from their jaws. The wind howled like an abandoned child. We strained to hear the cinders in the hearth, a kind of lullaby. We closed our eyes and insects crawled over our faces, moving like scraps of lace. We were awoken before dawn. We rose. We wrapped our rags closer, for warmth, trying to add months to our lives. We went into the frozen morning and lined up for food. Different people were permitted to stand in different lines: the strongest workers, Stakhanovites, who exceeded their daily quotas, received one large ladle of broth, bread, a piece of herring. Those who just met their quotas received one ladle of broth and a piece of bread. And the rest, the ones who fell short of their quotas: they received a little bread, half a ladle of soup. Political prisoners, 58s, were automatically assigned to the poorest category. I held my bowl in trembling hands.

Sometimes the urki would take our food, and sometimes our friends would take our food, and sometimes dying men, mad with hunger, would attempt to take our food; and we would shove them into the snow, fiercely, carefully, because we could not bear to spill a single drop from the brim of the small tin cup.

After we tasted our food we worked for seven hours.

Then we were allowed a portion of cabbage stew.

And we worked for seven more hours.

I was assigned to road duty. This was considered lucky. Most of the men and women of our camp worked in the mines, swallowing dust in darkness, skating toward death. I write this so lightly now, skating toward death . During those first weeks, my horror was close to grief. I watched zeks draining away out the camp’s high gates. They came back even less alive: thinner, scarcer. As if another year had been shaved from their bones. Huddling in the dinner queue, the prisoners’ eyes still reflected the underground. I thought that if I met their gaze I would tumble into it. I could not believe that human beings were being treated in this way. This thought raked over me. As I dragged my cart along the road my face would suddenly contort and I would be crying — not for myself but for this place.