Sean Michaels - Us Conductors

On road duty we died more slowly. The officers watched our dying very closely. Once I had died a certain amount, they would assign me to the mines. I learned this from others as we gathered on the steps, as I wandered past the hospital and the guardhouse.

On road duty the task was this: Drag an empty wheelbarrow for ten kilometres over a ravaged road. The wheelbarrow clanged and caught. We were allowed to talk but we had to remain in single file, flanked by guards. Men would yell conversations until their voices failed. I spoke little. I studied the trees along the road, the way their roots hid in the earth.

The woods parted as we approached the quarry. The road led across a plain to the base of a barren hill. There was a mining tower, two rips in the earth, a giant mountain of dull stone. These rocks and gravel were the detritus of the mine, the wasted part of the diggers’ lives. We took cold spades from a pile. Each of us cautiously propped up his wheelbarrow and filled it, lifting stone. Dust rose up like smoke. The more we carried, the more we would eat tomorrow. On the best days, my wheelbarrow held two hundred pounds of flinty rock and dust. When the wheelbarrows were piled heavy, as heavy as we could possibly push, we replaced the spades where we had found them. Sometimes we lay them down and sometimes we threw them. We returned to our barrows and wiped our foreheads on our sleeves and watched the circling brown birds, and we pushed our precarious loads up the slope to the road. At this time we were each permitted to smoke one cigarette.

Our weighted wheelbarrows sank into the road. They tipped and leaned and sometimes they toppled, spilling across the ground. The wheelbarrow’s owner would curse, cry, grope with freezing hands to pile the rocks back into the cart. If it was an urka, like Nikola or the Boxer, we would all set down our own wheelbarrows, to go and help. It was not that we would win a favour, but perhaps they would pass us over during a moment of cruelty; their friends might rob someone else. There was a hierarchy among zeks and an even stricter hierarchy among urki. At Kolyma, you could not afford kindness. We helped only the worst men.

After two or three hours we arrived back at base camp. We dumped our stone. It would be used to build the new roads, carrying gold and timber to the harbour.

There were always guards. They always carried rifles. They stood on guardtowers, with crashing spotlights, scanning the grounds and the perimeter. If you went near the fence, the guards would shout and then shoot. If you brawled with another prisoner, not just a swung punch but tooth and claw, they would also sometimes shoot. Sometimes they would not. It depended which zeks were fighting, or if bribes had been paid. Some of the criminals moved around like cats, entitled to milk. You heard stories: a girl crosses the grounds after dark, hurrying to the women’s barrack. Men appear around her, like a conjured circle. After a while, the guards yell down: “Come on boys, have some discretion!” They drag her from the cold snow into the shadow of stacked firewood. Later, they take her to the hospital. The urki make sure she is cared for. When she emerges, rested, she goes back to these men. She becomes a sort of prison wife. She is safeguarded. She has found a way to stay alive.

I FIRST MET BIGFOOT beside a grave. Bodies lay in a pit, which we were covering with earth. It was a windless yard. I watched the soil slide from my spade, imagining my own death. The falling earth made only the slightest sound. I did not want to waste my strength. Five of us lifted dry earth and dropped it onto shrouded bodies, proceeding from minute to minute, going on. One man began to pick up the pace. We were shovelling feebly, the rest of us, and this one man picked up his pace, quickened, until soon the clearing’s loudest sounds were his inhalations. Fast, clear inhalations, through the nose. His eyes were lowered. He had a thick head of straw-coloured hair, matted at the brow, and a dense beard.

“Did you know these men?” I murmured, after a little while, indicating the grave.

“No,” Bigfoot said at once. He lifted his eyes to where I was slowly lowering a clod of earth. “Did you?”

NOW, SEASONS LATER, it feels faintly impossible to be recalling these scenes. I was there; today I am here. Twice a week I come up into this attic, kneel by my machines, listen, type. I transcribe recordings for my masters and I also compose these pages, a little at a time. Sometimes it is hard to imagine I was ever in the taiga; sometimes it feels as if I did not leave. Sometimes I am writing you a letter, Clara, and other times I am just writing, pushing type into paper, making something of my years. There is cruelty to the way a person, a place, can sometimes feel so close, and then the next day far away. You were wearing amber the night we first saw Duke Ellington. Today this memory is beside me. I waited with your sister in the front room of your parents’ house and you appeared in a doorway, glowing, in your pale amber slip and with amber around your neck and dark amber curls atop your head. I stood. I kissed your hand. You said, “Hi, Leon.”

We went by taxi to the Apollo Club. My heart was whirring in my chest. Silver subway cars poured through the tunnels under Broadway, New York crackled and shone, cranes hoisted whole buildings into the sky.

I remember how we arrived just in time for the first number and how for the whole first half, the horns used mutes. We moved to the strings and brass but Duke’s players had hands cupped over their trumpets, plungers over trombones, until at a certain pre-arranged moment everything changed. By chance I had spun you out on your toes. Our arms were at their longest span. At that instant the mutes came off and the brass section bloomed and it was like the clouds had parted, only we hadn’t known there were clouds. The room rang gold with it. You were spinning back toward me, hot and amber, and when our bodies touched you murmured, “Hi, Leon.” And I thought, It will be like this .

Now, in a bare room across the world, I leave commas on the page, like eyelashes.

IN KOLYMA THE GUARDS followed us everywhere, rifles swinging at their sides. They had good boots and good gloves and mostly serious dispositions. Some of them were former prisoners who lived in the village now. Between shifts you could see them come into the work zone, walking freely past the guardhouse, and in their faces there was still something uncomprehending.

Just like their wards, guards were compensated according to production. If a team of zeks exceeded its quota, the escorts took home more rubles. The abuse the guards doled out was functional, pragmatic: walk faster, walk faster, take more stone in your wheelbarrow.

Conversely, the soldiers were punished if one of their prisoners escaped. They could even be accused of counter-revolutionary collusion, get sent to the other side of the perimeter. And so the guards learned to kill the zeks who strayed. In the late day, when our muscles were failing, we had to be especially alert. Anyone who staggered off the road might then stagger into the snow or cedars, sprawling, a bullet between his shoulders. There was a man whose name I don’t remember, with red hair, who told me he was going to kill himself. And then he did, almost gracefully, turning his wheelbarrow off the curve of the road and drowsily advancing, toward freedom; Vanya yelled and raised his gun and after two hesitations he pulled the trigger. The redheaded man whose name I do not remember completed the motion he had begun that morning, lifting himself off his knotted plank bunk. He fell forward, into the tundra.